Deadly Trend in Chinese School Attacks
May 13, 2010 by admin
Filed under World News
It's a parent's worst nightmare. And it's becoming a nightmare for China.
An attacker with a cleaver hacked to death seven children and two adults at a kindergarten in northwest China on Wednesday, the latest in a string of savage assaults on the country's schools. Eleven other children were wounded.
This latest incident at a kindergarten in northwest China was the fifth major attack on children in a couple of months.
Each assault involved a lone male.
Wednesday's killer, 48-year-old Wu Huanming, returned home after the attack on the outskirts of the city of Hanzhong and committed suicide, the local government reported.
Sociologists suggest it could be caused by a lack of help for the mentally ill in the country and also in part caused by the rising stress levels caused by inequalities in Chinese society as some prosper and many struggle.
For someone who has visited China frequently over the past 20 years I have seen dramatic changes but it's nothing to what the people there must have felt.
Going from Maoist uniforms and bicycles to Gucci hand bags and Mercedes in a few short years would be a shock to anyone.
And it's probably an even bigger shock to the Chinese in comparison to other societies as its people have come out of a life that always prided itself during the Maoist years on equality and lack of materialism.
Of course as you travel in China it's easy to see the difference now between the upwardly mobile and those fighting to survive.
Amongst the glittering skyscrapers of Beijing or Shanghai there is sometimes a glimpse of the struggles many are facing.
Once I saw workers, all men, fighting their way to the front of a crowd to get a ticket off a foreman to get work for the day, perhaps at a building site.
There are also unbelievable pressures on Chinese men to be successful now.
China's one child policy has created a disproportionate number of males to females as Chinese families traditionally favor boys.
At a basic level the chinese male is now competing with a lot more males to be successful, get a bride and have a family.
It doesn't, of course, explain these series of attacks on children.
But it's not something that is unique to China.
Japan has had similar cases in the past.
The Chinese authorities seem to be trying to downplay the incidents in the media.
Their defense being that they don't want to start a wave of panic, and some experts in China say coverage could also inspire copycat attacks.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
South African White Supremacists: Murder Was ‘War’
April 5, 2010 by admin
Filed under World News
VENTERSDORP, South Africa (AP) — The mother of a 15-year-old murder suspect said Monday that her son struck a notorious white supremacist leader with an iron rod after the farmer refused to pay him, a slaying that heightens racial tensions as South Africa prepares to host the World Cup.
"My son admitted that they did the killing," the mother said in an exclusive interview with AP Television News conducted in the Tswana language from her two-room cement home in Tshing township on the outskirts of Ventersdorp town.
She said she spoke to the teenager at Ventersdorp police station on Saturday after he turned himself in along with his alleged accomplice, a 28-year-old farm worker, following the slaying of Eugene Terreblanche.
Police have refused to identify either of the suspects by name. Under South African law, a minor accused of any charge cannot be identified without permission from a judge. The two have been charged with murder and will appear in court Tuesday, police said.
Officials appear anxious to show they are swiftly handling the crime, which comes just 10 weeks before South Africa becomes the first African nation to host the World Cup soccer tournament.
Terreblanche's slaying also comes at a time of heightened racial tension in this country once ruled by a racist white regime that only gave way to democratic rule in 1994 after years of state-sponsored violence and urban guerrilla warfare waged by the now-governing African National Congress.
Members of Terreblanche's Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, have blamed African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema, saying he spread hate speech that led to Terreblanche's killing.
Malema incited controversy last month when he led college students in a song that includes the lyrics "kill the Boer." Boer means farmer in Afrikaans, the language of descendants of early Dutch settlers, but also is used as a derogatory term for whites.
The song sparked a legal battle in which the ruling ANC party challenged a high court that ruled the lyrics as unconstitutional. The ANC insists the song is a valuable part of its cultural heritage and that the lyrics — which also refer to the farmers as thieves and rapists — are not intended literally and are therefore not hate speech.
"The death of Terreblanche has got nothing to do with the song. We know who Terreblanche was, his character and how he related with his workers. So the police must investigate and look out for the person who killed him," Malema said Monday while on a visit to neighboring Zimbabwe.
Terreblanche had previously been convicted for a brutal attack on two black farm workers and was sentenced to six years in prison.
At the farm Monday, a big grader was being used to dig a hole for Terreblanche in the family graveyard, where he is to be buried after a church service in Ventersdorp on Friday.
"This was such an unnecessary thing," Terreblanche's brother, Andries, told the AP, as he sat on a gray marble grave. "We are not racists, we just believe in purity of race."
Masked AWB "storm troopers" in black or khaki uniforms terrorized blacks in the years leading up to majority rule. AWB's members still seek to create an all-white republic within mostly black South Africa. The group's red, white and black insignia resembles a Nazi swastika, but with three prongs instead of four.
The movement always has been on the fringes, estimated to have no more than 70,000 member at its height in the early 1990s out of a population of nearly 50 million.
The group's leaders have been using Terreblanche's killing as a rallying point for their cause, with Secretary-General Andre Visagie claiming Sunday that Terreblanche's brutal death was "a declaration of war" by blacks against whites. He also warned countries against sending their soccer teams without protection to "a land of murder."
The mother of the 15-year-old suspect, however, said Terreblanche was slain over a wage dispute. She said that when her son and his co-worker asked Terreblanche for their money, he told them first to bring in the cows. After they had brought in the cows they again asked for their money, which he then refused to give them.
"He said that the (laborer) man told him to wait while he went to the storeroom. He came back with an iron rod. He started hitting Terreblanche, with four blows to the head. Then my son says he took the iron rod and hit him with three blows," the mother said.
"My son was a person who doesn't like to be in trouble," she said softly, appearing a bit bewildered and scared.
Visagie said the 15-year-old suspect was a casual worker and that the 28-year-old man was a full-time employee who had been taking care of the garden of the family home in Ventersdorp. Terreblanche, 69, had been spending most of his time there since he had heart surgery a few weeks ago.
Police said Terreblanche was lying on his bed when he was attacked between 5 and 6 p.m. on Saturday.
The mother's account that there was only one murder weapon — an iron rod — did not fit police reports that a machete and a wooden staff with a rounded head were the murder instruments found at the scene.
Visagie said Terreblanche was bludgeoned so badly he was barely recognizable and described a gory murder scene indicative of great rage when he visited the farm on Sunday.
"There was blood all over the place, pools on the mattress, the pillow, the floor and splatters on the walls and ceiling," he said.
___
Faul reported from Johannesburg. Associated Press writers Carl Ndaba and Schalk van Zuydam in Ventersdorp, South Africa and Chengetai Zvauya in Harare, Zimbabwe contributed to this report.
U.S., Afghan Forces Poised to Seize Taliban Stronghold
February 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under World News
NEAR MARJAH, Afghanistan U.S. and Afghan forces pushed Tuesday to the edge of the southern Afghan town of Marjah, poised to seize the major Taliban supply and drug-smuggling stronghold in hopes of building public support by providing aid and services once the insurgents are gone.
Instead of keeping the offensive secret, Americans have been talking about it for weeks, expecting the Taliban would flee. But the militants appear to be digging in, apparently believing that even a losing fight would rally supporters and sabotage U.S. plans if the battle proves destructive.
No date for the main attack has been announced but all signs indicate it will come soon. It will be the first major offensive since President Barack Obama announced last December that he was sending 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan, and will serve as a significant test of the new U.S. strategy for turning back the Taliban.
About 400 U.S. troops from the Army's 5th Stryker Brigade and about 250 Afghan soldiers moved into positions northeast of Marjah before dawn Tuesday as U.S. Marines pushed to the outskirts of the town.
Automatic rifle fire rattled in the distance as the Marines dug in for the night with temperatures below freezing. The occasional thud of mortar shells and the sharp blast of rocket-propelled grenades fired by the Taliban pierced the air.
"They're trying to bait us, don't get sucked in," yelled a Marine sergeant, warning his troops not to venture closer to the town. In the distance, Marines could see farmers and nomads gathering their livestock at sunset, seemingly indifferent to the firing.
The U.S. goal is to take control quickly of the farming community, located in a vast, irrigated swath of land in Helmand province 380 miles southwest of Kabul. That would enable the Afghan government to re-establish a presence, bringing security, electricity, clean water and other public services to the estimated 80,000 inhabitants.
Over time, American commanders believe such services will undermine the appeal of the Taliban among their fellow Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in the country and the base of the insurgents' support.
"The military operation is phase one," Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal told reporters Tuesday in Kabul. "In addition to that, we will have development in place, justice, good governance, bringing job opportunities to the people."
Marjah will serve as the first trial for the new strategy implemented last year by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. He maintains that success in the eight-year conflict cannot be achieved by killing Taliban fighters, but rather by protecting civilians and winning over their support.
Many Afghan Pashtuns are believed to have turned to the Taliban, who were driven from power in the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, because of disgust over the ineffectual and corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai.
"The success of the operation will not be in the military phase," NATO's civilian chief in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, told reporters Tuesday. "It will be over the next weeks and months as the people ... feel the benefits of better governance, of economic opportunities and of operating under the legitimate authorities of Afghanistan."
To accomplish that, NATO needs to take the town without causing significant damage or civilian casualties. That would risk a public backlash among residents, many of whose sons and brothers are probably among the estimated 400 to 1,000 Taliban defenders. U.S. aircraft have been dropping leaflets over the town, urging militants not to resist and warning civilians to remain indoors.
Provincial officials believe about 164 families — or about 980 people — have left the town in recent weeks, although the real figure could be higher because many of them moved in with relatives and never registered with authorities.
Residents contacted by telephone in Marjah said the Taliban were preventing civilians from leaving, warning them they have placed bombs along the roads to stop the American attack. The militants may believe the Americans will restrain their fire if they know civilians are at risk.
Mohammad Hakim said he waited until the last minute to leave Marjah with his wife, nine sons, four daughters and grandchildren because he was worried about abandoning his cotton fields in a village on the edge of town. He decided to leave Tuesday, but Taliban fighters turned him back because they said the road was mined.
"All of the people are very scared," Hakim said by telephone. "Our village is like a ghost town. The people are staying in their homes."
Sedwill said NATO hopes that when Marjah has fallen, many Taliban militants could be persuaded to join a government-promoted reintegration process.
"The message to them is accept it," he said. "The message to the people of the area is, of course, keep your heads down, stay inside when the operation is going ahead."
Mangal, the governor, said authorities believe some local Taliban are ready to renounce Al Qaeda and give the government a chance.
"I'm confident that there are a number of Taliban members who will reconcile with us and who will be under the sovereignty of the Afghan government," he said.
Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister who lectures at the National Defense University in Washington, said the U.S. had little choice but to publicize the offensive so civilians could leave and minimize casualties. He said it would have been impossible to achieve complete surprise because "an operation of this scale cannot be kept secret."
But Jalali added that publicizing the operation may have encouraged hard-core Taliban to stand and fight to show their supporters and the international community that they will not be easily swayed by promises of amnesty and reintegration.
"Normally the Taliban would leave. They would not normally decisively engage in this kind of pitched battle. They would leave and come back because they have the time to come back," Jalali told The Associated Press.
"If there's stiff resistance in Marjah, this could increase the recruiting power of the Taliban or at least retain what they have in that area," he said. "It's become the symbol of Taliban resistance. So I would suspect it's possible there would be stiff rearguard resistance. If it becomes bloody, it would affect opinion in Europe and the U.S."
Jalali also said that success would depend on whether the Afghan government can make good on its promise of services once the battle is over.
"If the coalition can stabilize Marjah, rebuild it and install good governance, that can be an example for other places," he said. "If not, it would be another problem."
Echoing this theory, McChrystal told reporters at a defense conference in Turkey last weekend that it was necessary to tell Afghans that the attack on Marjah was coming so they would know "that when the government re-establishes security, they'll have choices."
