International issues

Afghan president Hamid Karzai, following his trilateral summit with Turkish president Abdullah Gül and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, confirmed in an announcement to the media that he will ask that the *”Taliban names”* be removed from the UN sanctions list during the summit on Afghanistan being held this week in London.

In my Reflection of January 14, two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote: “In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge.

Haiti is preparing for a massive relocation of survivors of last week’s earthquake out of the capital Port-au-Prince. Some 400,000 people will be moved to camps outside the city. The relief effort has now abandoned most efforts to find people trapped beneath the rubble to focus on keeping the survivors alive. The US is now leading the effort to repair Haiti’s main port.

Authorities in Haiti say as many as 200.000 have died in last week’s devastating earthquake. Another 1, 5 million and a half people have been left homeless. The death toll continues to rise as relief agencies struggle to distribute food and water to those in need. The World Food Programme said it fed about 100,000 people in Port-au-Prince on Monday.

Doctors Without Borders, international humanitarian organisation delivering medical care and awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1999, is carrying out effective action by assisting and helping voluntarily in the city of Port au Prince, recently devastated by an earthquake. The natural and human disaster stirred compassion in numerous organisations and governments around the world.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Laureate who won the 1990 general election in Burma and who has been under house arrest for 14 of the last 20 years, has her appeal against her house arrest heard by the Supreme Court in Myanmar. “From a purely legal point of view we should win,” said a member of her legal team.

Around 5am on January 18th 500 police were mobilized with three cranes to suppress protests against work on the new naval base which will be the home base for Aegis destroyers of the U.S. and South Korea naval forces. Protesters have been calling for the base to be shelved, claiming that nearby coral reefs will be destroyed in the process.

Today the Doomsday clock was moved back by 1 minute to 11:54pm today in a press conference of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In a move to align the environmental and anti-nuclear movements, speakers pointed out the need to tackle climate change as well as implement strategies for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

North Korea has called for talks on a treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War with the US before a resumption of six party talks on its nuclear programme. An armistice ended three years of fighting, but a peace agreement was never concluded and the two sides are still technically at war. Pyongyang says it wants an end to US sanctions before denuclearisation talks resume.

The UN opened the International Year of Biodiversity in Berlin today. The organisers say that human activity is leading to the increasing loss of an ever greater number of plants and animals. Eight years ago, agreements were made at a UN conference in Johannesburg on reducing the loss of biodiversity. It is clear that this year’s targets will not be met.