March 10, 2008
TRAVEL: May 05, AU Edition
RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT
Gary A. Warner says that if you look beyond the sleaze, Amsterdam is full of treasures
Forget the canals. Forget the coffeehouses. Forget the acres of Rembrandts and Van Goghs. Forget all that wooden shoes and tulips and silly Hans Brinker and his silver skates stuff you ever heard, read or saw.
Before you go to Amsterdam, get your brain around the other Amsterdam. The in-your-face Amsterdam.
The CBD shops that sell postcards of genitals painted to look like Santa Claus. Where delivery boys on pink bicycles deliver marijuana seeds. Where porn and prostitution flourish in the most picturesque red-light district in the world.
Get ready for it, all of it, because it is going to smack you right in the head whether you like it or not.
How you react will determine whether you see Amsterdam as the most liberal, liberating metropolis in Europe or a beautiful old jewel wrapped in an oily envelope of sleaze.
For the better part of two decades, I fell in the latter category. Four times Amsterdam was penciled in on my itinerary, and four times I found reason to get out the eraser.
But when I realized I’d been to nearly every major European city – I had been to Brussels twice – I decided it was time to give Amsterdam a shot.
I’ve always had a long list of reasons not to go. But I came away with more reasons potential visitors shouldn’t repeat my mistake of waiting so long to experience the Dutch metropolis.
Amsterdam has a great airport. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and Amsterdam gets off on the right foot.
With its one terminal that has just two levels, Schiphol is the easiest, most modern airport in Europe, a dream to navigate compared with the creaking facilities of London, Paris and Rome. A high-speed train leaves every 15 minutes for the 20-minute ride from the airport to the city center.
I don’t go to a city for its airport (if I did, I’d never go back to New York City). But Amsterdam’s is nonetheless a big plus.
The morning after I arrived in Amsterdam, I was fighting jet lag. I stepped out of my canal-side hotel and wandered the quays for hours.
The trees had lost their leaves, revealing glimpses through the bare branches of old houses that line the waterways. Homes were hung with Christmas lights and garlands – even many of the 2,500 houseboats along the canals were decked out in yuletide finery.
The heart of the city is the Grachtengordel, the three concentric canals that half-ring the city center. Viewing the mansions of the Herengracht, the bridges over the Keizergracht and the houseboats fronting the artists’ lofts of the Prisengracht is one of the most popular strolls for visitors.
In all, there are 47 miles of canals in Amsterdam, and each mile seemed to offer a postcard image: A woman carrying a cello on her back as she pedaled her bicycle toward the city center. A mother singing “Jingle Bells” to her kindergartner as they skipped by. Pre-teen boys bundled up against the cold playing soccer on a canal-side strip, making moves that would fool most Australian high school teams.
When you get thirsty, watch your language. Ask for a ‘coffee shop’, and you’ll get more than a caffeine buzz – it’s the popular term for places that legally sell marijuana and hashish. If you ask for a ‘café’, you’ll likely be sent to one of the 1,000-plus bars in the city. (Do go. Drinking is a wonderful pastime in Amsterdam. Try a light-tasting Hoegaarden or a dark De Koninck beer. Or better yet, a traditional jenever, a gin-like drink often infused with fruit or herbs.)
There are the grand cafés whose luxurious interiors will seem familiar to anyone who has walked into a fancy café in Paris, Vienna or Budapest.
I prefer the old, small taverns called “brown cafés” for their stained-wood interiors and dark, drapery-blocked doorways. Press past the curtain at Hoppe near the Spui Square, and you’ll go back three centuries in time. It’s a cramped but cozy place that’s especially good in the off-season, when the hordes of summer tourists aren’t trying to elbow in for a seat.
Another good choice is ‘t Doktertje, which means ‘the little doctor’, another timeworn spot where for less than $10 you can get a drink and sit for as long as you like. I brought along my journal and enjoyed wasting a couple of hours in the corner.
My favorite of all was In De Waag, a bistro and bar inside the last remaining gatehouse of the old city. This imposing brick pile was once the weighing house for goods, and later the site of the city’s executions. I had a bowl of spliter wtensoep, the traditional stick-to-your-gut pea soup with duck rillettes, washed down with two haze-reducing cappuccinos. Between bouts of reading the International Herald Tribune, I perused my e-mail and watched a Webcast of the surf at Pipeline in Hawaii from one of the café’s computers. The total of a bill is called a ‘rekening’. I smiled at the apocalyptic-sounding word for a tab so small.
Go ahead and make your pilgrimage to the Rijksmuseum to see Vermeer’s ‘The Kitchen Maid’. Take in ‘The Sunflowers’ and ‘Wheatfield With Crows’ at the Van Gogh Museum. Just save time for some of the smaller museums around town.
I enjoyed my visit to the Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie on a narrow street just off Dam Square. The collections change constantly at the modernist glass-and-steel show space. One day it may be large-format photos juxtaposing cuts of meat or raw animal parts with flowers. Another day it might feature military-installation still lifes from around Europe.
If there is a must-see museum in Amsterdam, it’s Anne Frank Huis, where the young Dutch Jewish girl wrote her famous diary while hiding from the Nazi occupiers during World War II. She and her family were turned in to the police and she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just two months before the war’s end. Her diary describing her hopes while hiding has become one of the most widely translated books in the world.
One of the great charms of Amsterdam – albeit a sometimes dangerous one – is the sea of bicyclists making their way around the city. People wheel wildly around the cobblestone and brick streets as if they are invincible. There’s no headgear, and even at night there are young men and women wearing black on bicycles without lights. Lights and reflectors are just one more thing to get ripped off – Amsterdam logs more than 100,000 stolen bicycles a year.
With bikes parked outside where they are pelted by inclement weather and preyed upon by thieves, there’s little incentive to ride a fancy 10-speed or gizmo-laden mountain bike. Most are your simple one-speed models that you brake by backpedaling – not very different from what most Amsterdamers’ ancestors would have ridden.
It’s possible to rent a bicycle and make your way around the city as locals do. Just be prepared for some kidney-jarring old streets and maniac wheelers – especially during the morning and evening rush hours – who will be more than happy to run you right off the road.
Until World War II, the Dutch ruled Indonesia, and one of the great treats of a trip to Amsterdam is to enjoy a rijsttafel – “rice table” – which is made up of up to two dozen small plates presented at the same time, including fried rice with pork called nasi goreng, and satay – skewers of chicken, pork and beef with peanut dipping sauce.
Beware the spicy sambal chili sauce. Two of the best places to experience the rijsttafel are Tempo Doeloe on Utrechtsestraat and Kantjil & De Tijger on Spuistraat.
For a more domesticated taste, try patat, the local version of what we call chips. The crisp, fresh, fried potato strands are only a distant culinary cousin to the greasy slabs served up in fast-food joints. They’re served from outdoor stands scattered all around town. One of the best is Vleminckx on Voetboogstraat. Locals have it with mayonnaise – so speak up when you order unless you want your order drowned in the white stuff.
There are a number of big baroque barracks on the main plazas and a few design-oriented boutique hotels like Blakes, the local branch of Anouska Hempel’s London-based temple of trendiness. But part of the charm of a stay in Amsterdam is cozying into a canal-side hotel that’s been sewn together from neighboring town houses.
I stayed at the Pulitzer Hotel, with its sparkling gold lights outlining the roofs of the 17th-century homes that form its facade. Though it’s affiliated with the Sheraton chain, there’s none of the artificial feel of a business hotel.
A perennial favorite among travelers is the Ambassade Hotel, a small hotel made from a string of canal houses not far from Spui Square. One that’s not in a lot of the guidebooks, but that I found charming, is Hotel van Onna, a nice canal-side budget hotel. The rooms are small and Spartan, but I loved its pretty Christmas ornamentation inside and out.
Another small hotel enjoying a lot of buzz these days is ‘t Hotel, an eight-room mansion turned hotel built in 1690 that houses its own antique shop. Rooms look out either on a canal or over the pretty gardens.
I’ve already got a list of what to explore next time. Yes, there will be a next time. First, a return in the spring – I’ll put up with the crowds to experience the flowers. I’ll wander the pretty Leidsegracht canal and go see the Poezenboot – a barge filled with cats – that’s moored on the Singel. I’ll drop into the Amsterdams Historisch Museum to see if it offers better insight into how the 17th-century stolid commercial town became the free wheeling place of today.
After so long avoiding Amsterdam, I want to go back. It doesn’t intrigue like Berlin or warm like Rome. It doesn’t have the treats of Paris or the ease of London. But it deserves better than the just-passing-through Brussels treatment.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
SCIENCE: July 05, AU Edition
COPY CATS
Entrepreneurial American scientists are destined for the dog house, says Susanne Quick
It’s just another brown brick building in a suburban American business park. But Suite J at the Waunakee Business Center in Wisconsin is about to turn into the animal cloning debate’s ground zero. Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. – the entrepreneurial outfit that introduced the first cloned pet cat to the world in December – is opening its doors in this small Madison, Wis., suburb this month. The company’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, has promised that by year’s end, a dog will be born here.
In the eight years since Dolly the Sheep’s birth was announced to the world, research into animal cloning has progressed in ways few dreamed possible a decade ago.
Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and endangered species. They’ve created cloned cows from frozen steaks and cloned mice from cancer cells. They’ve talked about resurrecting extinct creatures such as woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. And with the news on Thursday that soft tissue from dinosaurs had been discovered, re-creating these giant lizards does not seem so farfetched. Despite the scientific excitement, creativity and ingenuity that have inspired and driven this research, cloning remains uncomfortable – even freakish – for many people.
Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy animals or deformed monsters? How many animals are sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in the end, what will it lead to?
As ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations for animal cloning – improving the food supply, fighting disease, saving endangered animals – the arguments for and against cloning mutate and evolve along with the research advances.
That debate is now moving to the backyard.
In December, Genetic Savings & Clone announced the birth of Little Nicky, the first cloned cat to be sold as a pet. The recipient, a Texas woman known only as Julie, paid $50,000 to have her beloved – but dead – kitty cloned. While some say she was swindled, Hawthorne believes she was given an incredible, if expensive, gift.
‘Our product is based on love’, Hawthorne said.
David Magnus, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, scoffed at this claim. He said the high death rates and possible cruelty that go into cloning make Genetic Savings & Clone’s product anything but ‘loving’.
Also, he and other critics said consumers are being duped: The animals they think they are getting – their original pets – cannot be reproduced.
And finally, they think Genetic Savings & Clone’s product is grossly frivolous in light of the number of animals in shelters who need homes.
‘Everything about this is objectionable’, Magnus said.
But Autumn Fiester, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said there isn’t evidence to show that animals are suffering – at least any more than commercially bred dogs or cats.
She added that the claim that pet owners are being duped is condescending. As for the frivolous argument, she says, ‘Then you’re arguing against buying any luxury good.’ Among those involved in cloning, she is in the minority.
Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology – a Worcester, Mass., company at the forefront of cloning technology – called it ‘troubling.’
Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, called pet cloning ‘ridiculous’ and ‘preposterous.’
Somatic cell nuclear transfer – the shop name for cloning – is conceptually a pretty easy process.
A cell – such as a skin cell – is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, and the DNA it houses, is sucked out and placed next to an empty egg cell that’s had its nucleus removed. The new egg-nucleus combo is then jolted with electricity or bathed in a chemical cocktail.
‘What you want to do is basically trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm’, said Neal First, a retired professor of animal sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the first researcher to clone cattle.
If all goes well, the duped egg starts to divide, eventually creating an incipient embryo, which researchers implant into a surrogate animal.
While this may sound pretty straightforward, it’s actually a messy, hit-or-miss process that yields few successful clones.
Depending on whom you talk to, the number of successful clones – i.e., those which survive beyond birth – can run as low as one-in-1,000 to as many as 15 percent.
Researchers believe this is the result of a host of molecular issues, some they can pinpoint, others they can’t.
The mystery is in the egg. ‘There are molecules in the egg that allow the DNA to reprogram’ and start anew so that it’s read as the blueprint for an embryo, not an old skin cell, Lanza said.
But what those molecules are and how they work remains elusive.
There is also an issue of extra DNA in the egg. Even though the egg’s nuclear DNA is removed, other genetic material remains floating around the egg cell in a form known as mitochondrial DNA.
No one knows for sure what effects this might have on a developing clone embryo, but it does mean that the clone, despite its name, is not an exact genetic duplicate of the donor. It has some other DNA that may or may not affect its development.
Then there’s the issue of imprinting. Mammals carry two copies of each gene: one set from their mother, the other from their father. But only one of these copies is active at any one time.
In a clone, ‘the normal battle between mom and dad’ is not taking place, Lanza said. The end result: critical messages from the genes are being lost during an embryo’s development, potentially leading to cardiac problems, respiratory ailments and ‘a messed up placenta.’
The hurdles don’t end here.
When DNA is in a quiescent state, it looks like spaghetti noodles with proteins attached to it. This means that when the skin cell DNA is sucked out, it’s carrying a lot of protein baggage. It is possible these proteins may get in the way of the egg-skin cell DNA fusion.
Researchers at Genetic Savings & Clone say they have solved this problem by using a new technique called chromatin transfer that cleans the DNA. The result, according to Hawthorne, is higher efficiency.
‘Our losses are well under 50 percent’, he said, adding that such losses are typical in commercial breeding.
Magnus and others question these claims; scientists at Genetic Savings & Clone have not published their results. But Jim Robl, president of a South Dakota biotech company called Hematech and one of the developers of chromatin transfer, said he, too, had gotten good results using this method to clone cows.
Yet, the battle over pet clones only partially hinges on technical and molecular hurdles.
These animals are behaviorally complex. They are not just products of a strict genetic blueprint, but of the multicolored and textured tapestry of their environment and experiences.
This means that a consumer who’s paying thousands of dollars in hopes of getting the same dog or cat will be getting an animal that behaves differently than the original. That, said Magnus, is ‘a rip-off.’
Finally, critics of pet cloning said there’s the issue of the millions of animals who don’t have homes that are living on the streets or housed in shelters.
Magnus and Spiegel-Miller believe Hawthorne’s business is minimizing the plight of these animals.
They charge that the money Hawthorne’s clients are willing to spend on a clone would be better used on these other animals, that Genetic Savings & Clone clients should head to a local shelter, pay $50 for a cat or dog that needs a home and donate the rest to the shelter.
That would be a more ethical way to spend their money, they say.
Fiester and Hawthorne dismiss the criticism as baseless.
‘Why should someone who loves their cat be more obligated
to donate money or help shelter animals than someone else?’ Fiester said.
He also threw back the notion that cloning for agricultural or medical purposes is somehow more ethical.
In the end, he said, the future of the pet cloning business will depend upon the quality of the product.
If Genetic Savings & Clone can create animals that pet owners are happy with – animals that aren’t sick or compromised and behave in ways similar to the original – the business will succeed, Hawthorne said.
His scientists also are looking into how to enhance pets and make them live longer and healthier.
‘Our clones will be better than normal,’ he said. ‘Clones are going to become the preferred pets.’
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
TECHNOLOGY: July 05, AU Edition
IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD
From cough syrups to eyeglasses for cows, Martha McKay takes a peek into a very tiny future
At the nanotechnology show in New York City recently, companies touted the state-of-the-art, from quantum dots to microscopes powerful enough to see atoms.And then there were two guys from Cleveland hawking cough syrup.If you follow the nanotechnology industry closely, this sort of thing isn’t surprising.
But if you don’t, such seemingly humdrum technology on display alongside the advances at the fourth annual NanoBusiness conference might seem unusual.
Spend time with nano-experts and one thing becomes clear: nanotechnology is more commonplace than you might think – from nano-engineered eyeglass coatings used on one in five pairs of eyeglasses, to sunscreens and stain-resistant fabrics.
One of the most hyped areas of technology since the Internet, nanotechno- logy is the study and engineering of really small things – particles and gizmos from 1 to 100 nanometres, or a billionth of a metre, in size to be specific. The paper you are reading this on is about 100,000 nanometres thick.
As you might expect, there are hundreds of ways of using nano-sized particles and devices, with new ideas popping up all the time.
The U.S. government will pour an estimated $1.3 billion into nano-based R&D with a particular emphasis on such areas as cancer research. Here in Australia, governments are putting up $100 million for domestic nanotechnology research this year.
Jeffrey M. Jaffe, president of research and advanced technologies for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, told conferees how telecommunications networks could be transformed by nano-sized devices. Tiny power supplies working together with nano-sized microphones, tiny sensors and video displays could one day give us a communications ‘wallpaper’.
Even the ability to have ‘several microphones inside a phone would be a tremendous (sound quality) improvement’, he said.
Out at the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium, university researchers have 60 to 80 nano-based projects under way.They include building a stress gauge to strap on the back of a fruit fly. The tiny device will enable scientists to tell if the drosophila is asleep (they don’t have eyelids, in case you wondered). Researchers, who
study fruit flies because they are well-suited to genetic studies, want to be able to test whether their modifications to the fruit fly’s sleeping patterns work.
They are also looking into ways to build an electronic nose that can smell, a real-time DNA analyzer, and what they call a ‘rubber mirror’, which would map the imperfections of your eye and allow the creation of perfect corrective lenses.
‘We could fit a cow with glasses’, says David Bishop, vice president of nanotech-nology research at the labs.
But along with purely scientific uses for nano-devices, many companies hope to turn a profit – the motivation behind Cleveland-based Five Star Technologies and its cough formula. Nano-emulsions and dispersions made using a patented technique called controlled-flow cavitation make the cough syrup adhere to the throat better.
Gerry Weimann, Five Star’s CEO, doesn’t think consumers really care about the ‘nano’ aspect of the syrup, which is made by another company called Improvita Health Products.
‘Most people are just looking for a good experience – not a lot of people wonder about the technology behind it’, says Weimann.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
TRAVEL: Sep 05, AU Edition
SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT
After a whirlwind trip through India’s sights, smells and sounds, Robert Cross vows to return
AIPUR, India – ‘I was told that the first thing you’ll notice is the smell,’ said my friend Dave with a faint leer. Just a friendly word of warning to get me going on the wrong foot.
My wife, Juju, and I had been hearing a lot of secondhand and even firsthand tidbits like Dave’s almost every time we told anyone about our travel plans. Visiting India? Get ready for a shock: Pollution. Dirt. Poverty. Stifling heat. Noise. Weird behaviour. Those odors.
I’m here to testify that any negatives were far outweighed by the beauty, culture, architectural grandeur and spirituality we were privileged to sample during a brief visit to a few cities in the north.
After we cleared the jetway in New Delhi at 5:30 a.m. on an autumn Saturday, the only smell came from the universal airport brew of electric-light ozone, air conditioning and passenger scents no different from those at Sydney or Heathrow.
Instead, the first thing we noticed was the wallpaper on immigration officers’ cubicles, a darling blue-and-pink-flowered pattern of the sort that might decorate a little girl’s nursery.
The officers’ faces remained properly stern, of course, and they worked deliberately. We heard a constant thumping of rubber stamps and piped-in native music that sounded like the whining of a thousand mosquitoes, and after about 45 minutes, a man in uniform summoned Juju and me to his posy-splashed quarters, examined our documents and pounded on them with his stamps.
Still no smell when we finally carted our luggage to the parking lot. Obviously, Dave had been misinformed.
Our driver, Remish, helped with the bags, and we set off on the five-hour drive to Jaipur and the beginning of our seven-day India adventure. Dawn greeted New Delhi with a gray haze of pollution, and my chest felt heavy. Our little white van seemed to be the only passenger vehicle on a highway filled with trucks and bicycles. Huge cows, some gray, others black, lolled on the median strip.
Those trucks provided some color in the otherwise drab outskirts of the big city. Each one had been professionally painted with garlands of flowers, soaring birds, cartoonish tigers, lovable bovines and complex geometric patterns. Some bore neatly scripted slogans on their sides, like ‘I Love My India’ or ‘The Great Indian Spirit’. On the rear end of each lorry, the artists had painted a fervent plea: ‘PLEASE HONK YOUR HORN’. Remish hit the horn incessantly, sticking to the right-hand lane and passing the endless parade of freighters – India is a left-hand-drive country – while deftly avoiding wayward bikes and meandering cows.
Two hours later, as we drove into the state of Rajasthan, the roadside scene abruptly changed. Our divided highway became a two-laner, adding to our excitement the real possibility of head-on collisions.
In downtown Jaipur, Juju and I felt as if we had been dropped into the middle of a Bollywood epic. Film buffs use the term to describe Bombay’s prolific movie industry, and here we had subcontinental action in three dimensions. We entered Jaipur during rush hour, so some of the streets leading to our hotel had been temporarily declared one-way in the wrong direction, apparently an effort – largely futile – to prevent gridlock. While Remish circled the city at a crawl, trying to find a route, we suddenly were interacting with the people. A few tapped on the windows to beg for money or sell us things. But most were in cars or riding mopeds – intent on honking their way through thickets of traffic, but still taking a moment to smile and wave at Juju’s video camera.
We found ourselves in the middle of an enchanting old city, alive with markets and the brilliant colors of the dresses and turbans worn by residents going about their business. Pedestrians skittered between vehicles, which slowed down only when a cow or two decided to lounge in the middle of the street.
Remish at last found the hotel entrance, a discrete opening in a wall and a long driveway leading to the magnificent, cream-colored Jai Mahal Palace. The 250-year-old building had once served as a palace for one of Jaipur’s many royals. Rajasthan has had a bewildering lineup of rulers and high-ranking court figures through its long history, and we soon lost track of the lineage, despite the best efforts of our local guides. But the maharajas sure had good taste in housing.
We felt entitled to a few hours of leisure. The lawns, pools and statuary of the Jai Mahal Palace invited meditation and brought a welcome element of tranquility to soften the jet lag. A pantalooned and turbaned house musician entertained two children with an old stringed instrument while they frolicked on the grass near a pavilion where we and a few other guests ate lunch. Juju and I still felt dragged down by travel overload. A visitor to India should schedule a day of retreat every so often to avoid becoming overwhelmed by exotica and to think about the meaning of it all. Our tight schedule denied us that luxury.
The next morning, our guide, who introduced himself as G.S. Arora, joined us and Remish in the van for a tour of Jaipur. His eyes sparkled mischievously behind his glasses. We would have other guides in the days ahead – a scholarly gentleman in Agra and at the Taj Mahal; a religion expert amid the Hindu temple carvings (some quite erotic) in Khajuraho; the harried scout who showed us the sights in Delhi.
Even so, Arora was the first, and this is a story about first impressions, so the task of satisfying our basic curiosity about the Indian way of doing things fell to him.
We headed for the heart of Old Jaipur, the walled and picturesque enclave known as the Pink City. Arora explained that in 1876 the reigning maharaja, Ram Singh, ordered all buildings near the palace painted pink to celebrate a state visit from the Prince of Wales, who later would ascend to the English throne as King Edward VII. ‘Pink is the color of warmth and welcome,’ Arora informed us, and pink the old city has remained. The buildings within the wall are repainted every couple of years. ‘People can use different shades of pink, but the basic color has to be pink,’ Arora said. ‘The authorities take care of the painting.’
We paused at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, for what Arora termed ‘a Japanese stop.’ He said that meant a stop for photographs. Although Juju is Asian, she laughed at the stereotype, one that I thought the world and its technology had obliterated. For a second, the guide’s little joke made India seem even more deliciously anachronistic.
The Palace of the Winds was pink, naturally, a beautiful 204-year-old facade about 5 stories high and dotted with tiny windows. From rooms and balconies on the other side, ladies of the court at the adjoining City Palace could discreetly peek down at the street scene.
On Tripolia Bazaar and other streets of the Pink City, merchants with open-air shops were selling everything imaginable. Although we felt the urge to get out and look at the displays of produce, spices, clothing, tools, toys and all the rest, we had a schedule to meet.
Arora did pause long enough to point out a milk market, where farmers had lined up canisters containing the morning’s output from their goats, cows, sheep and buffaloes.
The guide called our attention to a potential customer dipping his hand into a can. ‘To make the milk more profitable, a lot of water is added to this milk’, Arora said. ‘When the buyer comes in, he will put his hand in the milk, shake it out, rub the milk on his fingertips and see how much fat is in it. So the more hands that go into this can of milk, the better the milk becomes because of this added flavor. Thankfully, this is not the milk supplied to your hotel.’
That led to the subject of cows. ‘Every morning people would milk their cows and then leave them in the street to be fed by people,’ he told us. ‘The cow being a sacred animal, every household would try to feed them. After eating, they stand in the middle of the road or sit in the middle of the road and chew cud. This is good, because it slows and controls the traffic. And the cows like it, because the fumes make them feel high. In India, every animal except the husband is sacred.’
‘How do the cows know how to get home?’ Juju asked.
‘They always know. They are like homing pigeons.’
At the Amber Palace, our next stop, we found it easy to avoid eye contact with the hawkers because the palace itself commanded our full attention. The pinkish-beige structure sprawls across the crest of an imposing, rocky hill about 7 miles north of Jaipur. Begun in 1592 and completed in 1639, it served for more than 100 years as the capital of Rajasthan. In 1727, the reigning maharaja, Jai Singh, moved the capital to Jaipur, but the royal family continues to take up residence in the Amber Palace from time to time, even though the government now owns it.
We decided to ride an elephant up the hill to the palace entrance, a popular if somewhat hokey way to get there. Jeeps were also available, and visitors can hike up the steep ramp if they wish. Juju and I climbed onto a little seat behind our elephant driver. It swayed and tilted, while the driver engaged in a long, loud argument with his supervisor. Evidently, the driver wanted two more passengers for his mount, because the seat can hold four. Juju said, ‘I don’t like this at all. It’s scary. I want to get off.’ But before we could figure out how to do that, the elephant started up the ramp.
Arora, not being a tourist, preferred the Jeep. He met us in the palace courtyard, which was crowded with visitors and the elephants they came in on. He showed us around the wonderfully carved and pearl-inlaid areas where rulers held their audiences. We peeked into the artistically decorated private chambers that housed the maharajas and their concubines. A sandstone garrison stood grimly at a higher level, and both buildings spread their ramparts far along the mountainside like a truncated version of China’s Great Wall. Such a display of power and wealth must have intimidated enemies and subjects alike.
In the days that followed, we moved on to Agra and India’s absolute must-see, the Taj Mahal. After taking in the sights of Agra, we flew to Khajuraho, a relatively tranquil village famous for its beautiful Hindu temples dating back to the Chandela dynasty, which ruled for 500 years until overrun by the Moguls early in the 16th Century. The structures were a pleasant contrast to the palaces, tombs, fortifications and congestion of Rajasthan and Agra. We beheld an array of temple towers surrounded by lawns laced with uncrowded pathways.
Our guide that afternoon introduced himself as Mr. Singh. Immediately, he began to explain at great length the Hindu religion and how the carvings on those temples – built within a 100-year period, starting in AD 950 – illustrated the complexities of Hinduism and honored its divinities in all of their forms. He said the towers had been constructed in this out-of-the-way place to protect the sandstone images from frequent rains and floods that hit the Chandela capitals.
The masterful carvings encircled the towers in rows all the way to the top. They depicted gods and goddesses, of course, but also aspects of everyday life. Animals hauled farm goods, musicians played, soldiers fought, hunters stalked, and beautiful, exaggeratedly proportioned female dancers swayed. Animals both real and figments of artisans’ imaginations cavorted – leopards, elephants, horses, boars and combinations thereof.
Most famously, human couples were shown locked in carnal embrace, striking many of the positions detailed in the Kama Sutra.
‘You know about yoga?’ Mr. Singh asked. ‘There are a hundred kinds of yoga These are the way to reach the ultimate goal of life that is the next incarnation. These poses are a part of it, specific positions. Even sex could be a part of yoga.’
We were still pondering the complexities of the Hindu religion that night, as we dined at the rooftop Blue Sky Restaurant. Below us, merchants sold souvenirs, fabrics, saris, books and miniature copies of temple carvings. Across the street, the actual temples glowed with golden light and a voice boomed in Hindi – a sound and light show. We filled up on helpings of a dish very much like fried rice but punctuated with masala, a mixture of spices that provided a delicious mosaic of flavors.
Up there on the Blue Sky, we met a young couple from France who had been traveling through India for several weeks. They described wonders we would miss, experiences we wouldn’t have. At least not now. They were merchants, buying materials for their shop in Brittany. ‘We did make a short visit one time’, the man said, ‘and it was very difficult and frustrating. Doing it this way can still be difficult and sometimes frustrating, but there is so much to see.’
Intrepid INDIA
Classic Rajasthan
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, Ranthambhore National Park, Pushkar camel safari, Keoladeo Bird Park, Jaipur, castles
Brief: Rajasthan is home to all the colours of India. On our classic Rajasthan adventure we discover hidden forts, majestic palaces, colourful bazaars and of course enjoy a camel safari. This is the essence of Rajasthan.
Departure: Departs every Sunday from September to April and selected dates in July and August.
Price: AU$1020, plus Local Payment of US$200 per
person
Unforgettable India
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Delhi, Khajuraho’s erotic temples, the River Ganges, Orchha, Chitrakoot, markets, Varanasi, Taj Mahal
Brief: India is vibrant, intoxicating, inspiring, dramatic and above all, unforgettable. From the Mughal splendour of Delhi and Agra, to the reminders of the Hindu epics in Chitrakoot and memories of prehistoric man in Chanderi, this trip offers it all. Join pilgrims as they undertake their daily rituals on the banks of the Great Mother Ganges.
Departure: Departs every Saturday from September
to April.
Price: AU$920, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person
India Unplugged
22 days Delhi to Kolkata
Trip Style: Intrepid Basix
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, desert scenery, towns lost in time, palaces, Kolkata
Brief: Chaotic and inspiring, this is the real India. India Unplugged is a far-flung adventure to one of the planet’s most exotic destinations. See towering fortresses and holy rivers, cosy up with camels, try your hand bargaining in bazaars and still have time to check out the Taj Mahal.
Departure: Departs on a Sunday.
Price: AU$1080, plus Local Payment of US$150 per person
India Family Adventure
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Family
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, Ranthambhore National Park, Bundi, Pushkar, camel safari, Jaipur
Brief: Come and meet India’s people and let them show you their homeland. This itinerary is designed for adults and children alike. Explore some of India’s most famous sights and experience an overnight camel trip into the desert, seek wildlife at Ranthambhore and learn local crafts around Jaipur.
Departure: Departs on a Saturday.
Price: AU$1270, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person
For more information on traveling in India with Intrepid Travel, please visit www.intrepidtravel.com, free call 1300 360 887 or come and see us at 360 Bourke Street, Melbourne.
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
Best time of year to travel? India’s climate varies enormously from region to region and from season to season. While southern India basks in a reasonably constant tropical climate, the temperatures in the Rajasthan desert can vary from 50 degrees Celsius in July to 0 degrees Celsius at night in January. Monsoons bring torrential rain to most areas between June and August.
Religion: 81% Hindu, 12% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Sikh, 3% other
Language: Hindi (official) plus 12 other official languages and over 1600 dialects
Currency: Rupee (INR)
Visas: India does not offer visas on arrival - they must be applied for prior to travel. Conditions vary with country of origin and they usually take 1-2 weeks to process. In Australia, most travellers will apply for a 6 month multiple entry visa.
Electricity: 220-240V, 50 Hz
Times to avoid: Because climate changes so much within India, times to avoid certain areas will vary according to season. In addition, India is a land of festivals – best to check whether there is a festival going on in the area you want to travel to and book well in advance!
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
THE WATCHER: Dec 05, AU Edition
ALAN RM JONES
The year of the monkey…
It was an annus horribilis for an increasingly isolated and beleaguered Republican president under attack from a scathing media and irresolute Democrats in Congress. Each day’s news appeared more dreadful than the last; a constant stream of casualties and poor generalship and setbacks.
Even the president’s attempts to honour the nation’s war dead was sharply condemned. The Chicago Times said he ‘misstated the cause for which they had died’. In other words, he had lied. And, they added, ‘the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States’.
Pretty harsh words. They were to be expected, though, from pundits and cartoonists who frequently questioned the president’s intelligence and who had regularly drawn him as a chimpanzee. Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to give 1863 a miss entirely. But then 1862 hadn’t been a banner year, either. At Antietam, Union forces suffered over twelve thousand casualties, the South nearly fourteen thousand; many more would fall in the year ahead at Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
One of the few bright spots in an otherwise grim political landscape was that Congressional Democrats were severely split. The so-called ‘War Democrats’ were all for it, but squabbled over every battlefield disaster, of which there was no shortage. If that wasn’t enough, the War Dems also accused Lincoln of being a tyrant – packing the Supreme Court with cronies that would do his bidding to destroy civil liberties.
On the other side of the Democratic divide were the ‘Peace Democrats’, who had bitterly attacked Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration on job protection and racist grounds – proof, they wailed, that he had lied all along about the real aims of the war he had foisted upon the nation. They demanded that the war, which was being ‘fought on a lie’, be ended at once, even if the Confederacy was allowed to secede.
Even some Republicans voiced their doubts. Covetous European powers were encouraged.
Simian sophistry
Today, the Democratic and media chorus sings the same tune: ‘Chimpy lied and thousands died’. George Bush, from the beginning of his presidency portrayed as having apelike characteristics, has been accused of lying the nation into war the war in Iraq.
While the Big Lie charge has always focused on WMD, it has morphed through three distinct ‘lies’, each charge itself a lie. The first version of the lie, in the immediate aftermath of the war, went something like this: Bush lied when he claimed that Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the national security of the United States.
Of course, Bush had never argued that Iraq posed an imminent threat. He had clearly argued that in a post-September 11 world, preventative action was justified to prevent gathering threats from metastasizing to the point where it was too late to act.
In a major pre-war speech, Bush said: “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.”
Bush argued, in accordance with international law that threatened nations need not wait for an “armed attack” or even an “imminent” threat before responding with force. Rather, as the distinguished diplomat, presidential adviser, and Yale Law School Dean, the late Eugene Rostow, maintained: ‘the target of an illegal use of force need not wait before defending itself until it is too late to do so. International law, after all, is not a suicide pact’.
It is past ironic that Bush – who was and still is scolded for his doctrine of early preemption (i.e., preventive or anticipatory self-defence) against gathering threats – was attacked for not meeting a standard which he explicitly rejected.
The second Big Lie invention that has been peddled is that Bush argued that the war in Iraq was, in the words of California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, ‘all about WMD, full stop’. Boxer made this outburst during Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice’s confirmation hearing earlier this year. It would be generous to accept that Boxer simply forgot what she had voted for in authorising military force against Iraq:
“Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait...
“The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to:
“(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
“(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq”.
Or as Bush stated in October 2002:
“America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights, to the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor; self-government to the rule of terror and torture. America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, Shi’a, Sunnis and others will be lifted. The long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin”.
The third Big Lie furphy, re-heated lately by Chimpler critics the New York Times and Democratic Chairman Howard (‘Yeeeeeaaaahhhh!’) Dean, is that the Bush Administration twisted and lied about pre-war WMD intelligence. Congress and every other intelligence service in the world, including those of nations which were against enforcing the UN Security Council’s resolutions – chiefly France and Russia –had access to the same intelligence and agreed the threat that Saddam posed was real. The Mesopotamian miscreant’s record spoke well enough for itself: four wars, genocide, WMD use and support for terrorists.
To this Dean et al now claim bizarrely that Bush had a secret stash of heretofore uncovered intelligence that showed Saddam had uncovered all of his WMD. Again, it would be charitable to suggest that such charges are based on an innocent overlooking of extensive bipartisan and independent investigations in the US and Britain that showed intelligence had not been cooked up to stage a war.
If the Bush administration could be criticised for anything, it would be for indulging the doubters in the first place. It was never for the UN or the US to prove that Saddam still had WMD; rather, it was always for him to prove that he did not. This he failed to do, or even attempt in good faith to do, and the message and precedent was made clear by Bush’s response.
Nevertheless, Bush has hit back at his critics:
While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.
Bush was up-front about his war aims. While Lincoln planned the Emancipation Declaration in secret, after the war had begun, Bush at least outlined all of his goals before the first shot was fired. But like the Civil War, the war in Iraq was always about much more than the primary stated aim.
While the Civil War was fought, initially, to save the Union, in the end it was and had to be about freedom. The denial of freedom was, after all, what had led to secession and war. Likewise, the absence of freedom in Iraq, and in the Middle East generally, was the proximate cause for terrorism and the spread and use of WMD. For it is a simple fact of the modern world that democracies not only do not repress and terrorise their own people, they do not terrorise or otherwise attack other democracies. It is why, so long ago, the Great Emancipator’s work remained unfinished.
Lest it descend into the Planet of the Apes.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
FOOD: May 05, AU Edition
HOMEMADE PROZAC
When the weather’s cold and the sun sets mid-afternoon, Eli Jameson finds brightness in the kitchen
It has always amazed me that when T.S. Eliot wrote the line, ‘April is the cruelest month’, he wasn’t talking about the onset of winter. Of course, this is hardly surprising given that he lived in the northern hemisphere. But for myself, April, with all its attendant rituals – the changing of the clocks, the airing of the jumpers – has always been a grim affair.
Somehow, it’s hard to be cheery when the sky turns black at what always feels like four o’clock.
To cope with this seasonal black dog, I’ve tended to take refuge in good food and cooking: after all, much better to stick a roast in the oven than your head in one. Not only does keeping the cooker on full-bore help heat at least one end of my drafty circa-1890s terrace house, but it also provides something in the neighbourhood of an acceptable substitute to that favourite summer pastime – namely, standing in front of the barbeque searing off ribeyes and drinking shiraz at 8:30pm, when it’s still bright and sunny.
Another advantage is that winter comfort food (for lack of a better, and less hackneyed, phrase) can be as simple or as complicated as one likes. For the home chef with a busy work schedule who still likes to muck about in the kitchen a few nights a week, this is a great advantage: if I’ve knocked off a bit early and am home by six or seven, then I might happily bread and fry some eggplants, knock up a red sauce, grate a few cheeses, and boil some spaghetti (perhaps even making the noodles myself, if the mood strikes) to wind up with a ridiculously huge platter of eggplant parmagiana that will keep me in lunches through the week. (Fill a good bread roll with a few rounds of the leftovers, wrap in foil and bake until gooey). Otherwise, tossing a tray of veggies in the oven to roast for an hour or so while pottering around the house tidying or simply watching the 7:30 Report over a quiet drink pays a myriad of dividends. Out of a concession to age and arteries, I don’t do this very often, but lately I’ve taken to tossing the results of this together with some pasta, cream, and good freshly-grated cheese (see recipe).
Another old standby for when people come by the house is a lamb-and-pasta dish I picked up when I lived in New York (and yes, I realize that complaining about a Sydney winter after spending one particularly bleak December-through-February living next to the East River does show a lack of perspective, but bear with me). This involves getting some lamb steaks, flattening them out, rolling and tying and them up into little parcels with mint, rosemary, and cheese.
I then brown the packets, set them aside, and make a rich red sauce in the same pan – deglazing, of course, with some hearty red wine. That done (and here’s the beauty: all this fiddly work can be done in the afternoon), I boil up some orichiette pasta, and serve it in bowls with some of the sauce and a couple of lamb rolls. If you’re out to impress, cut the lamb on a bias and arrange artfully on top of the pasta.
Whether simple or complicated, there is something restorative about the whole cooking process that shuts off the white noise of the previous twelve hours and makes for a welcome distraction from a bout of winter blues. As American novelist Nora Ephron once put it, ‘what I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.’
WINTER-WARMING BEAN SOUP
Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian
This a great winter soup that’s not too complicated for a weeknight and packs a spectacular payoff. Plus, with the exception of the optional truffle oil, it costs virtually pennies a bowl to make. My family eats vats of this over winter.
You’ll need:
• Approx. 250g Great Northern beans, soaked overnight
• 2 litres vegetable stock
• 2-3 peeled garlic cloves
• Dried mint, oregano and/or other dried herbs
• Olive oil
• 3-4 diced onions
• 2 starchy potatoes, peeled and diced
• Leaves of one silverbeet or one head rocket, thinly shredded
• Fresh parsley
• Salt and pepper
• Good extra-virgin olive oil (or, for something really special, truffle oil)
1. In a biggish, heavy-bottomed pot, bring the stock and the beans to the boil. Skim off the froth that comes to the surface, and add the garlic and dried herbs. Give it a good stir and simmer, loosely covered, for up to an hour or until the beans are tender. At this point, crush the garlic cloves against the side of the pan.
2. In a second, bigger pot, bring some olive oil up to a medium-high heat and add the onions and potatoes, stirring so that nothing sticks and everything picks up a bit of colour (about five minutes), with a shot of salt and pepper. Add the silverbeet or rocket, stir until just wilted, and pour the other pot with the beans over the whole affair. Bring it all to a boil, then simmer and stir occasionally for about half an hour.
3. Just before serving, toast some thick slices of good crusty country bread and set aside. Using a wooden spoon, mash some of the potatoes and beans against the side of the pot – this nicely thickens the broth. Check seasoning and ladle into bowls, and drizzle a little good extra-virgin olive or truffle oil over each dish. Serve with toasted bread.
Serves: an army.
ROAST VEGETABLE PASTA
Even though it takes a little while to roast the veggies, the actual work time involved in this pasta is virtually nil. And all the cream and cheese makes the healthy bits of the dish much more palatable.
You’ll need:
• 250g dried pasta, such as fettucini, papardelle, or rigatoni
• An assortment of baby eggplants, fennel bulbs, zucchini, onions, et cetera – whatever looks good at the market that day, roughly chopped
• 200ml whipping cream
• 1 cup (or more) freshly-grated grana padano cheese
• Fresh parsley, for garnish
• Olive oil
1. Place the chopped vegetables in a roasting tray with a good glug of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Toss the lot around to coat, and place in a reasonably hot pre-heated oven. Meanwhile, place a pot of salted water on the stove to boil.
2. After about 45 minutes or so, check the vegetables – when they are good and soft and roasted, throw the pasta in the water.
3. Warm some cream in a wide saucepan, bringing just to the boil. When the pasta is a few minutes away from being al dente, remove the vegetables from the oven and toss with the cream. Add a good handful of the cheese.
4. Drain the pasta, and toss with the cream, vegetables, and cheese. Serve in warmed pasta bowls and sprinkle on some more cheese and fresh parsley.
Serves four
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)
THE ARENA: Dec 05, AU Edition
JAMES MORROW
Get ready for a long, hot summer…
Anyone who has ever taken a holiday in a beach community knows that such places can be fairly insular places. When so much time is spent looking out to sea, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there’s a whole land-based world behind you. And with a little bit of paradise on their doorstep, it’s no wonder that locals get possessive and resentful when outsiders roll in and start violating all the little informal and unwritten rules that make a place where everyone enjoys a common piece of property – the beach – function properly. Just ask fish-kisser Rex Hunt, who was accosted with his teenage son by a group of toughs in Byron Bay recently.
But the riots which swept over Sydney’s eastern beaches recently in the wake of the bashing of a lifeguard by young “men of Middle Eastern appearance” (as the popular press so gingerly puts it; it’s amazing that they don’t use the abbreviation MoMA to save column inches, though perhaps a certain museum in New York might not be so happy about it) were something else entirely.
It is no secret, to anyone who has cared to look for it, that there have long been simmering tensions between packs of youthful “MoMAs” and not just beachside locals but about anyone else who is unfortunate enough to cross their path. In places like Cronulla, the only Sydney beach with its own train stop, this simmer has been on the verge of boiling over for months if not years, as locals share stories of disrespect, abuse and attacks by young Lebanese males pouring in from the western suburbs and causing trouble and charging around the place with a disrespectful swagger.
(Apparently one of the favourite lines of these thugs, cited by the Daily Telegraph’s Anita Quigley, to women and girls who reject their advances is to turn to their mates and say, “She’s not worth doing 55 years for” – a reference to the sentence handed down to gang rapist Bilal Skaf. Combine this with the statements of a Pakistani recently convicted of rape to the effect of “my culture made me do it”, and it’s not hard to see why people get nervous).
But the sad thing about the recent riots is that in many ways they were completely preventable. Although the popular press has been quick to cry “racism” and cite the riots as another example of just what an uncouth bunch of bogans we are in Australia, race ultimately had precious little to do with it. (Just ask the infamous Bra Boys gang of Maroubra, which had a starring role in the riots and which over the years has become a fairly multicultural operation, united in defence of former NSW Premier Bob Carr’s postcode). Instead, John Howard had it right when he said that the “behaviour was completely unacceptable but I’m not going to put a general tag (of) racism on the Australian community … I think it’s a term that is flung around sometimes carelessly and I’m simply not going to do so.”
The problem could have been headed off at the pass years ago had police in NSW – ironically enough, largely under the leadership of Bob Carr – not been systematically stripped of their powers to deal with trouble before it gets out of hand. And while in a free society the presumption of innocence lies with the individual, there’s also a noble tradition of what might be called informal “hidden law”, which says that cops know when a group of kids are up to no good, and should have the power to move them on, arrest them, or break them up accordingly.
Instead, Cronulla residents tell hair-raising stories of offensive and threatening conduct by Lebanese youth, and being told by the police that they can only do something if matters get violent – by which point, of course, the damage is already done.
Nature and criminals abhor a vacuum, and if criminals see that police have, by their absence, created a space where bad behaviour is permissible, they will rush in to fill the gap. That’s been happening for years at Cronulla, and locals finally got sick of it – and of trusting the police to deal fairly with their complaints (hence the violence). But unlike Macquarie Fields, where cops hung back after the riot began at the behest of a politically-timid leadership that kept front-line officers from doing their job, in Cronulla and at other beaches, the failing has been going on for ages, leading many to believe that there is one law for the testosterone-charged MoMAs and one for everyone else.
NSW Police could learn a lot from the example of New York, where an aggressive police campaign against the sort of anti-social behaviour committed regularly not just by ethnic gangs but all sorts of people ended years of “long hot summers” of riots and slashed the crime rate to previously-unimaginable levels.
Or, closer to home, they could look at New Zealand, where a few years back Auckland cops employed a change in the unlawful assembly laws to tackle similar problems of race riots and thuggery.
There’s an old cliché in politics that goes something along the lines of, “the first person to call their opponent ‘Hitler’ loses”. There’s something similar when gangs go at each other: the first group to pelt an ambulance with bottles loses, at least in the eyes of the media. And certainly the thugs of Cronulla who went on a rampage against anyone with too dark a tan are no better than the thugs of Bankstown or Lakemba who, fighting massive internal cultural conflicts, treat beachgoing women as objects of both desire and scorn. But it’s amazing to think how much of this could have been prevented if the provocation – community concern at the thuggery on the part of visiting gangs – was dealt with by the cops at a much earlier stage. It’s time to empower cops to crack down on yobbos and crims – no matter what their ethnicity.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
FOOD: Sep 05, AU Edition
NOODLING AROUND
Want a fun challenge in the kitchen? Make your own pasta, says Eli Jameson
Ah, the pasta aisle of the supermarket. Fettucini, cavatelli, oricchiette, rigatoni, penne rigate...just reading off the names on the different boxes and bags is enough to make one feel Italian. And so many of these shapes have names that sound cool even in English: Does a plate of priest’s caps (agnolotti) appeal? No? Well, perhaps a steaming bowl of strozzapretti – or ‘priest stranglers’ – will sate your appetite as well as your anti-clerical urges.
But almost every packet of pasta for sale in the supermarket has one thing in common, regardless of shape: it is dried. Which means that it is made by combining water and hard semolina flour and extruded in factories through various shaped dies. Some of these pastas are very good, and indeed gourmet dried pastas are showing up on the shelves of more and more suburban markets (tip: look for noodles that have a particularly rough sauce-holding surface as a sure tip-off of quality), but they lack a certain something. Now, I keep a five kilogram sack of penne rigate in the cabinet because it’s an incredibly economical and convenient base for a huge number of dinners. But there are times that some occasions, and some recipes, that call for more than just a couple of scoops of Barilla tossed into boiling water.
That alternative is, of course, fresh pasta. Contrary to what one might think, fresh pasta is not simply the pre-dried version of what comes in a rectangular blue box with instructions to ‘cottura 11 minuti’. Instead it is made from eggs and flour – which is why the stuff has a pretty firm use-by date – and unlike dried, only takes a few minutes to cook.
So where to get the stuff? Some fresh pasta is available from gourmet Italian delis and even supermarkets, but it is ridiculously expensive considering what goes in to it. Instead, I say, make your own.
I sometimes think that there is a conspiracy out there in the world of TV chefs and cookbook authors to keep certain ideas and techniques just vague and complicated enough so that the average punter remains mystified and unable to fully recreate certain end-products – or at least not regularly enough to become adept at them. I have a fantastic cookbook by the American chef Charlie Palmer which is almost like a detective hunt: every photograph of a finished dish has some extra touch or flourish not included in the printed recipe, and the reader has to study it closely to discern the hidden item. Call it The DaVinci Cookbook school of food writing. The end result is it convinces ordinary home chefs that fresh pasta can only be made with two kinds of imported artisinal flour and lots of kneading, followed by ample time for both chef and dough to have a good rest.
This is, of course, completely untrue, and there is no reason why fresh homemade pasta can’t become part of any home chef’s regular – i.e., at least weekly – routine. The advantages are numerous: though it takes a little longer to prepare on the front end (and we’re only talking about twenty minutes, with a little practice), it takes only moments to cook. One need only be up from the table for five minutes, tops, to knock up a pasta course before rejoining the rest of the party.
Furthermore, the texture is night-and-day to that of dried pasta. It holds sauce much more effectively – one might even say intimately – and as a result, one needs less to coat it. This is where the old adage that pasta is not about the sauce but the pasta comes from, and it’s impossible to understand unless one has experienced the difference. Fresh pasta absorbs sauce in a way dried simply can’t.
To make fresh pasta, one really only needs to get a hand-cranked pasta machine, costing between $60 and $90, depending on brand, at decent homewares stores. Word to the wise: spend the money on the more expensive Italian model if you can. The cheaper look-alike made in Korea will do the job just as well, but doesn’t stand up to regular use over the years, and will need to be replaced far sooner. Beyond that, the only ingredients are flour (I prefer Italian strong, or ‘00’ flour, but the basic house-brand stuff will do just as well) and eggs (see last month’s column on the virtues of fresh eggs – they make a difference here as well). Ready? Let’s begin.
To make a simple pasta like, say, fettucini for two, just place two cups of flour in a bowl, make a well in the middle, and crack the eggs into it. (Rule of thumb: one plate = one egg = one cup of flour). With a fork, begin to combine the eggs with the flour until you have a mass of dough. On a well-floured work surface, knead this well until it becomes a ball, and it starts to get stretchy when worked with the meat of your hand.
Now comes the fun part. Take about a third of the dough, flatten it, and run it through the machine on its widest setting (1). It may take a few goes at this stage to get it fully formed and looking like a square of pasta, but once that is achieved, keep running it through until you reach the second-thinnest setting (generally number 8). Give this sheet a dusting of flour, and repeat with the remaining dough. And when it’s all done, run it through the wide noodle cutters that come with the machine. Presto! You’ve just made fettucini!
So what now? Well, for one thing, it should be lightly dusted with flour and laid out on a sheet so that it doesn’t stick together, and allowed to dry out a bit. One can also make this at lunchtime for an evening’s dinner party without worrying a bit. When cooking time comes, plunge it into a pot of boiling, well-salted water, and let cook for just 2-3 minutes before tossing it into a pan of sauce. Make an alfredo by frying off some finely-diced onion in a large whack (100 grams) of butter, and adding a good slug of cream, a handful of parma cheese, salt, pepper and nutmeg. (Healthy it up with some greens, asparagus, or mushrooms if you like).
Or make a ravioli – those same sheets can be cut into circles and pressed together around a filling of your own invention, sealed by an egg wash. Use the flat edge of your chefs knife to press them shut so they don’t pop in the water. A favourite stuffing in our house is beetroot, sage, and goat cheese, served in a brown butter sauce jazzed up with beetroot greens.
Whatever you do, don’t be intimidated, and don’t let yourself be constrained by your imagination. Once you’ve got the technique down, you can knock up sheets of the stuff in all of twenty minutes. Your guests – and your palate – will thank you.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
May 05, AU Edition
TRAFFICKING IN TEARS
Slavery was supposed to be a thing of the past. But in the dark corners of Australia, it is still flourishing – and as SHAUN DAVIES reports, despite recent efforts the government is losing the fight against the devastating trade in human property
It’s a story that’s guaranteed to break your heart. A 22-year-old law student from Thailand, promised a job in a restaurant where she can legitimately earn millions of baht (the Thai currency), flies into Australia in late November 2002 with high hopes of saving up enough money to buy a car.
But within 24 hours, the student’s situation takes a nightmarish turn. Instead of starting work in a restaurant, she is taken to a house in Surry Hills, handed a g-string and informed that she owes her new employers $200,000.
She has been bought to work as a prostitute – and she can’t leave until she pays the money back.
Shipped from brothel to brothel, she is forced to have sex with up to 20 men each day. If clients refuse to use condoms she can’t turn them down. At night she is locked in a house with fourteen other girls. She begs clients for help – and exchanges phone numbers with some of them – but no-one comes to her aid.
So on the afternoon of January 5, 2003, the student makes a decisive move. She convinces her manager to let her use the brothel’s telephone, telling him she wants to order a pizza. Locking herself in a bathroom, she dials the number she found in the ‘big yellow book’: 000.
‘I want police help me, understand?’ she tells the operator. ‘People come here, lie on me, work in store... Help me, I want to go home, OK?’
The manager bursts into the cubicle and ends the call abruptly, but police raid the brothel later that day and take the student away to a woman’s refuge.
The student’s disturbing allegations, heard recently in open court in Sydney, led to the arrest of two women alleged to own the brothel, and another man alleged to have managed it. All three have pleaded not guilty two charges including exercising ownership over a slave, knowingly conducting a business involving sexual servitude and causing a person to remain in sexual servitude. They are facing jail terms of up to 25 years.
In some ways the case is a landmark – the first of its kind since current legislation against human trafficking was introduced in 1999. It is also the first since the Federal Government allocated $20 million over four years to combat sex slavery in 2003, following public pressure after the death of a trafficked woman named Puontong Simaplee in Villawood detention centre.
This substantial package funded a new federal police task force, as well as education programs for police and immigration officers. The Government also placed an official in Thailand with a brief to combat sex slavery and created new visas that allow trafficked women to stay in Australia. (See sidebar.)
A spokesman for the Minister for Justice and Customs, Senator Chris Ellison, told Investigate that the government has been ‘doing its utmost to fight this crime through concerted domestic, bilateral, regional and international efforts’.
But those who work closely with trafficked women believe much more still needs to be done. And it seems that the crooks are getting smarter – finding methods to avoid detection and legal loopholes to escape prosecution.
So are we winning the fight against sexual servitude and slavery? And if not, what more can we do?
Besides weapons and drugs, international crime syndicates are increasingly trading in a less risky commodity: human beings. International estimates of total trafficking levels (which includes trafficking for the labour market as well as the sex industry) vary wildly, but the US government believes the total figure is somewhere in the vicinity of 600,000 to 800,000 persons ever year. Interpol and the United Nations both rate the issue as a top priority.
Some experts say that the rise in trafficking for sexual servitude to developed nations has been brought about by demand. Women from rich countries don’t want to work in the sex industry, but at the same time more men are using sex workers, so demand is outstripping supply – and organised crime is filling the gap.
Others say the push is coming from the supply side. Sex workers from poor countries want to migrate to developed nations but cannot do so legally. So they look to traffickers to sneak them into a country of choice.
While we know for certain that Australia is a destination market for trafficking, it is impossible to know exactly how many women are brought here each year, says University of New England academic Kerry Carrington.
‘For a start it’s difficult to quantify any form of crime – it’s always going to be hidden. But an added issue here is that it’s not only the criminals. The victims may also hide the crime because of other consequences,’ she says.
A recent Government report claimed there were probably less than 100 trafficked women in Australia. However, Carrington is more inclined to agree with groups who put the figure much higher – around 1000 women every year.
Carrington has one major gripe with the Government’s policy on trafficking - criminal justice visas are only granted to women when there’s a strong chance their evidence will lead to a successful prosecution. Otherwise they are repatriated to their home countries and back into danger when the syndicates that trafficked them seek revenge.
‘I think it’s dubious to say that this meets our obligations under human rights laws,’ she says.
‘As there is no guaranteed migration outcome for assisting a prosecution, there is still little incentive (for the women) to assist prosecutions. Those victims unable to assist the prosecution of traffickers for fear of reprisal, either against themselves or their families abroad, or other reasons, remain unprotected.’
Senator Ellison’s spokesman told Investigate that the visa regulations were fair and ‘provide support to people in genuine need
of protection and who are assisting law enforcement agencies with their investigations’.
But in an interview with the ABC in 2004, the Senator was more direct: ‘We don’t want to make it too attractive for people to come here because they’ll think that they’ll get very good benefits and
so they can come here and then claim to be a victim and enjoy
those benefits.’
But Carrington says that each woman’s case should be critically assessed while she is on a bridging visa. If her case meets a civil level of proof (that is, it seems true on the balance of probability), they should get a longer-term visa.
Shirley Woods, an outreach worker for Australian NGO Project Respect, works with trafficked women on a daily basis. She believes that the approach of police and immigration officers has come a long way since the days of kicking down brothel doors and shipping illegal workers out as soon as possible, though Investigate was supposed to meet with an allegedly trafficked woman from Thailand for this article who was picked up by DIMIA and deported before we could speak with her.
However, Woods says there’s some way to go before officers can handle cases of trafficking with the deft sensitivity that would make trafficked women trust them.
‘I think it’s a matter of more people knowing the right questions: “Do you have your passport?”, “Where do you live?”. A lot of women are shipped from brothel to brothel and don’t know their address,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of questions you can ask.’
In October 2003, the AFP delivered an intensive four-week course in dealing with trafficking to senior investigators from DIMIA, state police agencies, customs and the tax department. Woods believes these education programs will eventually have an impact.
‘It’s very difficult because it’s almost an instinctive thing. So I think that as more immigration and police officers work with trafficked women the situation will get better.’
The jewel in the crown of the Government’s trafficking package is the Transnational Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking Team (TSETT) – a kind of sex-slave commando force which the AFP says is ‘modelled on the successful narcotics strike team approach, with intelligence-driven investigations and the flexibility and capacity to respond quickly to the highest priority cases.’
It’s difficult to quantify how effective this task force has been. We do know that the AFP has conducted 38 investigations into sexual servitude and slavery-related offences since 2003, and that a total of 15 people are currently facing charges for these crimes.
The AFP has not responded to queries about the current level of trafficking in Australia. But Project Respect’s Shirley Woods says she has come across more trafficked women since the taskforce was established (which, she points out, may just be chance). She believes traffickers are getting smarter.
‘There’s been a huge shift away from Thai women and towards Korean women recently because they can get student visas here. The whole payment system and everything has changed,’ she says.
In one recent case, Woods says, trafficked women in a Melbourne brothel were actually given one-third of the money they earned. But of this third, an extra portion went to the brothel owner to service the woman’s debt, and another portion was given to an ‘interpreter’ who couldn’t speak Korean. All up, the women still only kept one-ninth of the money they earned.
‘I think the traffickers have sat down and had a think about what the legislation means and how they can get around it,’ says Woods. ‘I’m interested in how they’re getting around the education issues associated with student visas - maybe they’re paying off [English language] schools.’
Kerry Carrington also believes that the traffickers have changed tactics. ‘I’ve heard anecdotally that the modus operandi of the traffickers is now to circulate the women and move them along, so that they can avoid being detected,’ she says.
Some advocates believe a radical approach is needed to defeat trafficking - issuing temporary visas to sex workers so that they can legally work in Australian brothels.
Fiona Patten, spokeswoman for the Eros Foundation, says giving sex workers temporary visas would completely undercut the trafficking market. She points out that many Thais pay huge amounts of money to legitimate employment agencies to organise a job and a visa in Australia – at least as much as trafficked women pay to brothel owners. The problem, Patten says, is that sex workers can’t go to a legitimate employment agency.
‘From the industry’s point of view, we see sex work as valid work. By enabling women to come out here and work legally in a system where you can ensure that they’re working in safe conditions, where you can ensure that they’re not being exploited, is that not a better thing?’
However, Patten admits that any political party who took up this idea would be committing electoral suicide.
Ranged against Patten and other sex industry groups (such as the Scarlet Alliance and SWOP) are abolitionists who say that cutting demand by outlawing prostitution is the only way to stop trafficking. Project Respect president Kathleen Maltzahn is a careful advocate of this position.
‘We’ve got to go back to asking who prostitution works for – and it’s not the women who do it,’ she said in a 2004 lecture. ‘Prostitution is set up for men. That’s what trafficking tells us so clearly. When there are enough women who agree to do prostitution the industry will use them, but if there aren’t... the industry brings women in, with absolute disregard for their choices, desires, hopes.’
‘We need to stop talking about prostitution as if women’s choices make it happen and start asking about men’s choices. Without this work trafficking will continue unabated.’
In the US, a different group of abolitionists are dominating the trafficking debate – the Christian right. Groups such as the International Justice Mission have the ear of President Bush, who has pledged $150 million to eradicating sex slavery over two years. But sex industry lobbyists are vehemently opposed to the abolitionist approach. It’s supply, they say, not demand, which is driving the trafficking market.
‘I think when you consider (the abolitionist) argument in a global context it doesn’t make sense,’ Scarlet Alliance president Janelle Fawkes says. ‘Many people travel for work, often to another country where the earning potential is greater.’
She gives the example of Burmese women who migrate to Thailand to do sex work, which she says does not make sense in terms of demand.
‘Trafficking happens not because of an unmet demand by clients, but a demand by sex workers who seek to enter Australia to work in the sex industry. It’s a worker’s market, not a client’s market.’
As Investigate goes to print, the trial of Tran, Qi and Xu is still in progress. Another slavery-related trial has just begun in Melbourne and three further matters are ready to go before the courts.
Compare this to 2003, when only one person had ever been convicted of sexual servitude offences in Australia: Melbourne brothel owner Gary Glazner, who made an estimated $1.2 million peddling women to the sex industry. For his crimes, Glazner (who was tried under the Victorian Prostitution Control Act 1994) received a pathetic $30,000
fine and a 30-month suspended sentence.
Although the situation has improved, trafficking will never be completely stamped out unless there is a major shift in our approach to the sex industry as a whole. If there is a market for trafficking (whether supply or demand-driven), criminals will always find ways to exploit this – no matter how well-trained the AFP’s special taskforce is.
While a controversial idea, a legitimate working scheme for foreign prostitutes might cut the market from beneath the trafficker’s feet, and give these women a chance to come to the country for a short time and provide a regulated working environment. But realistically, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Australia will embrace the idea of visas to foreign prostitutes. For now we’ll have to rely on more basic initiatives and the experts agree that the Government is heading down the right track. It just needs to walk a little further and a little faster.
WHAT’S IN THE PACKAGE?
The Government’s $20 million package attempts to deal with attempts deal with trafficking through a number of initiatives, including:
* The establishment of the AFP’s Transnational Sexual
Exploitation and Trafficking Team – there have been AFP 38 investigations into trafficking since 1 January 2004.
* The creation of a new position to combat trafficking - Senior Migration Officer Compliance (SMOC). This position is based in Thailand, which has until now been the source country for most women trafficked into Australia.
* Changes to visa regulations. Women who may have been involved in trafficking are now granted a bridging F visa which allows the AFP to assess their case. If a woman can assist the AFP in a prosecution she is granted a criminal justice visa. Women deemed to be in some kind of danger if they return to their home country may be granted a witness protection visa (trafficking).
* Education of immigration and police officers to ensure that trafficking is recognised and that women are not deported before they can give evidence.
* Proposed amendments to legislation that will bring Australian law more closely into line with UN trafficking protocol. These have been tabled in the senate and are under consideration.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, AU Edition
ON TERROR’S FRONTLINE
Last March, Investigate brought you the story of al-Qai’da’s Pacific hideaway in the Philippines. In this exclusive dispatch from deep in the island jungles of our northern neighbour, journalist MATTHEW THOMPSON and photographer RENAE CARLSON report that the war against the Islamic terrorists who have us in their sights is being hindered by fake treaties, political opportunism, and bad intelligence.
The War on Terror is a circle of wars. It has hot zones like the Philippines, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, all sharing the experience of war, but each with its own logic, reason, and radius of impact.
The war also has cooler areas, cities across the world where sleeper cells wait for contact from their superiors in the mechanics of terror – master bomb-makers and logistics experts.
These areas are battlegrounds of intelligence rather than arms. If the intelligence fails, jetliners ram city buildings, shrapnel sprays through shopping centres and churches, and the logistics men retreat to their sanctuaries.
The jihadist’s great crimes of the past year include scattering train carriages in Madrid; transforming a Russian school into an abattoir; demolishing a Hilton hotel in Egypt; and sinking a Philippine passenger ship as it sailed from Manila. Several hundred civilians were deliberately targeted and killed in these attacks alone, and more than one thousand injured. Today nearly three years have passed since the night Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) breathed fire across Bali’s nightlife, burning and blasting more than 200 to death, including 88 Australians, and wounding many times that number.
Yet there has still been no atrocity here on our own soil, even if one of JI’s bombing crew at Bali, Ali Gufron (a.k.a. Mukhlis), told interviewers the attack was ‘a curse from God that [Australians] be afraid of their own shadow’.
These curses have been strongly encouraged by JI’s allies, al-Qa’ida. A month after the Bali atrocities, bin Laden said ‘we warned Australia before not to join in in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali.’
The pain and loss from Bali was overwhelming, but consider the trauma if al-Qa’ida or its regional allies carry out the threat to send ‘cars of death’ into Australia, perhaps to Melbourne’s Lygon Street, Campbell Parade at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, or into the heart of Fremantle. Gone would be the sanctuary, the division between Australia’s relative orderliness and the turmoil of her neighbours. Whether or not the Spirit of Tasmania gets sunk en route to Hobart, a P&O cruise is bombed at sea, or a pair of vans explode at opposite ends of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, depends to a considerable degree on how tough the Philippine military is on the Australia-hating terrorists who infest their south. Is it safe for the likes of the Bali-bombers to come and go, and to hold courses in bomb-making, or are these people being relentlessly and ruthlessly hunted?
If Australians want to know who to support in the War on Terror, they should look north to a bunch of ill-equipped, underpaid, malaria-wracked young men in uniform, who cope with violent death, corruption, and political incompetence in a struggle to shut down terror camps and hold their nation together. While Australian troops are serving a world away in the deserts and alleyways of Iraq, just a few hours flying time from here, Filipino grunts are locked in a hot war with our enemies.
***
Australia’s sworn enemy in the region, JI, is one of the most aggressive and entrenched terrorist organisations in the world, with the U.S. State Department estimating that its membership numbers in the thousands. Like all paramilitary groups, JI depends on experienced cadres to discipline and train recruits. Many of JI’s veterans cut their teeth in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and later joined armed conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1990s. These cadres have much to teach potential terrorists about how to protect themselves against intelligence and military operations, and offer expertise in the delicate arts of bomb manufacturing and detonation.
JI is like an Islamic Ku Klux Klan on speed. They are violent bigots who hate race-mixing and multi- culturalism, even if they will exploit
the West’s pluralism to further their aims, and who are fighting to bring large portions of South-East Asia under the sway of their own intolerant brand of Islam – a brand similar to that of their former benefactors, the Taliban.
And while much is made of poverty and lack of educational opportunities as ‘root causes’ of terrorism, many of JI’s luminaries lack these excuses. One of the senior Bali-bombers, Dr Azahari Husin, is a scientific author who studied engineering in the UK and lectured at university in Malaysia, yet still managed to fit in explosives training in Afghanistan and the Philippines.
Experts like Dr Azahari and his accomplice, Dul Matin – believed to have built the larger of Bali’s two bombs – have a habit of becoming known, so to avoid arrest they spend much of their time beyond the reach of the law. Since the mid-1990s, JI’s best and brightest have chosen to kick back in the picturesque mountains, swamps and jungles of the southern Philippines, within large regions controlled by Muslim rebels. There, JI has joined forces with elements of South-East Asia’s toughest guerrilla army, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (or MILF), and its most extreme, the head-lopping, bomb-planting, anti-Christian marauders of the Abu Sayyaf Group.
As Investigate revealed last March, members of the Australian Federal Police are in the Philippines, helping local authorities with counter-terrorism measures. The United States is more heavily involved, running the controversial ‘intel-fusion’ program which sees American military operatives stationed in terrorist hot zones to provide local armed forces with target information gathered via high-tech means such as state-of-the-art communication intercepts. This has caused a backlash from the shrill anti-American lobby in the Philippines, who paint the U.S. as greedy puppet- masters every chance they get. However, there are also concerns within the military about the intelligence’s accuracy. A general spearheading the war in central Mindanao’s terrorist heartland told me that the information is better for ‘storytelling’ than for war, because it is often out of date. He said that relying on the U.S. advice has led to botched raids, needless deaths, and could undermine the chances for peace in Mindanao.
But, in the ever-shifting alliances and deals in the war on terrorism, it turns out that the military is also getting help from the dominant faction of JI’s Philippine patrons, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The MILF is increasingly split between those who are open to a peace deal that will deliver land rights for their tribes, and the extremist commanders who will not abandon what they see as a religious war, and who embrace JI, the Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qa’ida.
This means that in some areas the military is getting tip-offs from the MILF which enable them to launch strikes on terrorist suspects inside rebel-held areas. A pro-peace MILF spokesman even told me that his organisation gave the police the information they needed in 2003 to trap and kill one of JI’s most formidable bombers, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi. This is a remarkable betrayal, given that al-Ghozi, an esteemed Afghan veteran, had been very close to the MILF, establishing the JI training camp within their territory in the mountains of Mindanao and conducting joint JI-MILF terrorist attacks.
Yet in other areas the military seems to get nothing from the MILF and sits in idle observance of the current ceasefire, even with strong suspicions about terrorist recruitment and training taking place a stone’s throw from the frontline troops.
The Mountains
At a machine gun nest on a high ridge in the malarial mountains, the world divides between the known and the unknown.
Behind lies a beautiful and fertile valley, its lowlands lined by forested peaks as it widens toward the warm waters of the Moro Gulf. Ruins from the valley’s previous inhabitants dot the climb to this outpost. Back down to the left I can see the bombed-out remains of a large reinforced concrete building we hiked through. My hiking companions pointed out the proliferation of doors – most rooms had multiple entries and exits – and as fighting men, they saw meaning in this. The soldiers also showed me tunnels leading back into the mountain. They showed me cramped chambers with barred ventilation holes high on the walls and hooks hanging from the ceiling. Torture, they said. This is what they do to their own. This side of the ridge hosted the Bali bombers of JI when they practised the art of terrorist bombings, and it has since been picked over by the government forces that captured it four years ago.
Now all attention is directed north of the ridge into lands still controlled by thousands of Islamic rebels.
We crouch behind sandbags and gaze ahead into the vast volcanic wilderness of the Mount Kararao region, watching mists and low cloud drift across the jungle.
The reconnaissance company’s young commander, Lieutenant Jeriko Roman P. Sasing, tells me that worrying sounds often echo from the mountains. ‘We hear them playing with their bombs; their terror explosions’, says Sasing, whose few dozen men are charged with guarding this rugged frontier.
Sasing’s men are perched on the border of lands under the control of the MILF.
The Government has been unable to defeat the MILF despite three decades of fighting, so it has offered the rebels a ceasefire while the two sides discuss how much sovereignty the Republic of the Philippines is willing to cede.
The MILF fields about 12,000 full-time, uniformed fighters armed with automatic rifles, heavy machine- guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and intimate knowledge of Mindanao’s rugged terrain. It can also call on tens of thousands of irregulars from the region’s farming men. More than a half-million people turned up to a MILF forum in May.
Full-scale fighting with the military breaks out every couple of years, but more often than not the ceasefire (signed in 1997) maintains the conflict as an armed stand-off punctuated by skirmishes which kill a mere dozen or so. About 120,000 people have been killed since the modern Muslim rebellions kicked off in the early 1970s. Having the ceasefire-protected time and space to be ‘playing with their bombs’ has been terrific for the MILF’s civilian-targeting units and their Indonesian friends from JI, who moved their training from Afghanistan to rebel territory in Mindanao in the mid-1990s.
The leaders of another al-Qa’ida affiliate, the Abu Sayyaf Group, hide in MILF areas and have merged their terror operations with JI.
Together, Mindanao’s bomb crews have killed hundreds and wounded thousands in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past few years. Including, of course, the 88 Australians at Bali three Octobers ago.
Disturbingly, reports have lately emerged from captured terrorists that the jihadist groups have been training together to strike shipping in the Asia-Pacific region, a threat that should be taken seriously after the Abu Sayyaf’s sinking last year of a passenger ship leaving Manila Bay. The bombing of the Superferry 14 killed an estimated 130 people and stands as the deadliest-ever maritime terrorist attack.
Yet as accomplished as they are, Sasing, who walks everywhere with an M16 slung over his back and whose eyes never stop moving, doesn’t much care for his neighbours. Not only are they noisy, they’re also pushy.
‘We had to withdraw from there’, he says, pointing about 100 metres up the ridge to a thickly-forested summit sporting an abandoned system of trenches and lookouts. ‘It was too dangerous. The enemy was harassing us’, says Sasing, using the military euphemism for being shot at. The MILF know these outposts well; they built them – the trenches, the sleeping huts.
‘Could they be sitting there watching us?’ I ask.
‘Yes, possibly.’
‘Do you patrol forward of here to see what they’re doing?’
‘No, that would be a breach of the ceasefire. Also, they have laid landmines and it is too dangerous’, Sasing says.
Ropes run along the perimeter of the outpost, and at likely jump-in points the soldiers have strung bottles of rum, each empty except for a bullet suspended inside to rattle if the ropes are bumped.
‘Sometimes deer sound them. The men up here hunt deer when they can, because all food and water has to be carried in and it can be very basic. But the enemy know this, and once when a soldier heard a deer call and went forward to hunt it, it was the enemy making the call’, says Sasing, cupping his hand over his mouth and simulating the animal sound. ‘They captured the soldier and cut off both his heads, above and below, then put them together and dumped him in a sack. No one here wants to be taken alive’, he says.
Sasing’s enlisted men receive about A$8.20 per day for their work. If the situation erupts, such as it might if they weren’t ordered to withdraw when harassed, then their combat bonus would be another 20 Australian cents per day. Their equipment is antiquated – this outpost’s main weapon is a World War II machinegun – and many soldiers are sick.
‘I have about 12 men in hospital with malaria’,
laments Sasing, as the rains come in. They used to receive anti-malarial pills, but ‘now there are shortages, so we rely on mosquito repellent’, he says.
I ask how frustrating it is for he and his men, all aged in their twenties, to camp for months and months on the edge of enemy territory, within which terrorists freely practise their trade, watching each other succumb to malaria.
‘We can only do what we are ordered to. The military is just a tool of politics. You know, on clear nights we see spotlights from [the MILF’s] Camp Sultan’, says Sasing, pointing across the jungle to a mountain obscured by clouds.
The enemy are close. The first contingent of guerrillas is one kilometre away – ‘just there’, says Sasing, jabbing a finger down the hill - and another six bases have been identified in the region. The most notorious of their bases is Jabal Quba, where JI moved much of its training after the valley behind us, formerly known as Camp Abu Bakar, fell to the Government in 2001. About 100 soldiers died on the road into Abu Bakar, yet now Government troops are restrained by the ceasefire, reduced to watching as fresh MILF forces move into the area each month and others leave in a rebel troop rotation.
Sasing leads me back down the ridge, slipping and sliding on trails now turned to mud. ‘It rains every day,’ he says, picking up his thongs and walking barefoot.
Once again we pass the ruined complex of the late founder of the MILF, Salamat Hashim, where an Islamic crescent moon rises from the broken roof. Soldiers have graffitoed the building with lists of battles and military campaigns; one artist’s work depicts a particularly acrobatic sexual feat.
Sasing is careful about what he says, but other senior military sources report their bitter frustration with the peace process. One senior army officer tells me that the ceasefire even prevents the military from building fences around MILF areas in the hope of hindering guerrilla troop movements and arms shipments, and that they likewise cannot conduct reconnaissance flights over the Mount Kararao region to see what JI, the Abu Sayyaf and their MILF hosts are up to.
These restraints remain despite a backdrop of continuing terrorist attacks. Bombers have hit the CBD of Manila and locations in two other major cities, Davao and General Santos City, as recently as Valentine’s Day, killing about a dozen and injuring almost 150.
The triple bombing followed the military’s airstrike on suspected JI and ASG leaders in Mindanao’s vast marshlands.
Romero is intimately familiar with Abu Bakar, and he tells me over fried fish and fruits that the threat grows worse the longer the ceasefire continues. The MILF is recruiting and rearming under cover of the peace talks, and weapons shipments have been reported landing on the coast, most likely from Malaysia. He tells me that there may well be a peace deal struck sometime in the next year, but it will let the MILF keep its weapons and leave large areas under its de facto control, just like the 1996 agreement signed with another Muslim guerrilla army – the Moro National Liberation Front – elements of which continue to attack Government forces.
All of which is ideal for the terrorists and kidnappers working out of MILF areas, he says.
‘There are JI about four or five kilometres from [Government occupied] Abu Bakar. The boundaries are imaginary, but if we cross, we will be charged with violating the ceasefire … and we will be fired at’, Romero says.
The guerrillas and the terrorists learn much from each other, with JI agents absorbing the skills of insurgency on Mindanao’s frontlines. In turn, members of the MILF’s special operations group ‘are taught by JIs to make IEDs [improvised explosive devices]’, he says.
While the troops sweat it out with malaria, World War II-era guns and 20 cent-per-day combat bonuses, the enemy is cashed up. Romero says that the MILF pocket percentages of ransoms from Mindanao’s thriving kidnapping trade; that they and their terrorist allies receive money from international Islamic charities; that they seize ‘revolutionary taxes’ from farming communities; that they have their fingers in the zakat, or Islamic donations given at mosques; that they run illegal logging operations. The overtly terrorist groups, the Indonesian JI and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, also receive large payments from foreign backers, all of which makes it easy for the jihadists to pay locals to shut up when the military comes around asking questions.
And without local sources of intelligence, the military has very little to go on indeed. ‘We are facing a face- less JI – they look the same [as Filipinos]; they have learned our dialects – so unless someone tells us, we don’t know what they are doing,’ Romero says. The Government has more than 50,000 troops in Mindanao, yet even so, ‘we have sacrificed some areas’, says Romero, telling me a story later corroborated by Australian and US sources.
He takes my map and points out substantial stret- ches of the Mindanao coast and hinterland where the military has only a token presence. ‘It’s practically a free-zone for them [JI and the Abu Sayyaf], but if we move troops from Abu Bakar, then they will take it over again’, Romero says.
The US is providing satellite imagery, communication intercepts and other ‘technical intelligence’, but as long as local civilians who could potentially supply up to date ‘human intelligence’ are more likely to encounter terrorists and rebels than Government forces, the free-zones will remain, Romero says.
‘They are getting stronger.’
The Swamps
‘If the rain continues water will cover all of this,’ says Lieutenant Rhoel C. Tremedal of the Philippine light infantry, gesturing across the lush fields we glimpse between fruit trees. The scattering of homes our patrol passes are built on stilts, and their occupants watch blankly as we walk along the riverbank.
Tremedal and his men are stationed on the edge of Mindanao’s vast marshlands, their base a checkpoint on one of the tributaries of the Rio Grande. They have a sandbagged machinegun nest from which to order passing boats to pull in for inspection, but no one is stationed on the other side of the river, nor do any soldiers take to the water for river patrols.
‘We would be too vulnerable to ambush’, says Tremedal, one of the Philippines’ many bright young men who is spending his twenties clutching a gun, sleeping rough, and surrounded by farmers who commonly stash automatic rifles wrapped in greased-rags near their houses and whose sympathies often lie with the Islamic rebellion.
The rains make everything more dangerous in the marshlands, Tremedal says. When the water level rises from rain either in the marshes or in the surrounding mountains, boats can move swiftly in almost any direction, giving the enemy extraordinary mobility. By contrast, Tremedal’s troops will be struggling to secure what they can while their bunkers fill with water.
‘We will make necessary precautions – we will protect any Government facilities in the area’, he says. With roads becoming impassable and the waterways too dangerous because of the known presence in the marshlands of the MILF, JI, the Abu Sayyaf and bandits, ‘we will just move by foot’, says Tremedal, whose handful of men operate in a municipality with a population of about 80,000.
The entire marshlands cover about 500,000 square kilometres and contain about 500,000 people, almost all of them Muslims, who have never been conquered – not during more than 300 years of Spanish colonisation, not in the half-century of U.S. rule, not during the days of the Japanese invasion, and not by their own Government in the post-WWII years of Philippine independence.
Tremedal calls the patrol to a halt when the banana and palm trees thin out and we find ourselves entering a large open plain bordered a few kilometres away by thick forest and steep hills. The infantrymen fan out and study the horizon. ‘We should not go any further’, Tremedal says.
While small-group terrorist training and operations continue in the mountains and elsewhere, central Mindanao’s huge swamp is known as the main hideout for JI and the Abu Sayyaf’s top commanders. The coastal ‘free-zone’ on its western flank allows for easy entry and exit; the terrain is excellent for hiding in and is an attacker’s nightmare.
Back in the 6th Infantry Division’s operational base for the region, outside Cotabato City, the general who plans raids and airstrikes on marshland stilt houses suspected to be occupied by terrorists, Brigadier General Horacio T. Lactao, talks me through his difficulties.
‘The ground appears from the air as if it’s a hard surface, but it’s just water lilies. If you step on it, you go under. Even the bombs are not so good – the bombs sink because it’s this high with liquid mud’, says Lactao, holding his hand at his waist. ‘And the water is above a person’s head, so even if a bomb hits 10 metres away it will not damage the structure. The rivers are their mode of movement, and a lot of routes are unknown to us.’
Lactao is one of the Philippine military’s hardened journeymen – one of those officers who have not gone bureaucratic despite decades of active service; who are instead still sweating it out in the shacks and trucks of the hot zone. Lactao asks if I mind if he has a cigarette, then leans in with smoke curling from his mouth while an enlisted man paints small pieces of wood to add to a three-dimensional map of the marshlands. The general ashes, drifts his hand across the diorama, and tells me, ‘this area has been in constant armed conflict since early times. This part of the [Philippine] islands has never been subjugated because of its social structure. It was governed by Muslim warrior kings [called] Datus.’
‘The Spanish, when they conquered one Datu kingdom, they would be surprised that another would rise up. Each of these had their own domain. There’s a natural defence system here. Now that Datuism’s not being practised anymore, there emerged another group – the MNLF, and then the MILF. Then the Abu Sayyaf. Whoever has provided the guns is the one who commands’, Lactao says.
The Government will always be at a disadvantage to militant Islamic groups in central Mindanao, an intensely religious region, Lactao says.
‘Our laws are not consistent with the Koran – which one will they follow? Not ours. The Koran provides them with their standard. When you interview the Abu Sayyaf, they say the Constitution is just provided by man’, he says.
Terrorists such as those who blew the Australians to hell at Bali fit straight into this system, using their explosives expertise, money and reverence for Allah to win over the large number of Islamic clerics commanding MILF units in the marshlands. Jemmah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have fused operations in the marshlands and move together, Lactao says.
‘The terrorists contact the MILF’s Ustadz [military commanders who are also clerics], then move to them for protection. The MILF units of the fundamentalist leaders then form the outer ring of security around the terrorists, and because of the ceasefire we must avoid [military] contact with the MILF.’
The military has been cultivating informants in the marshlands, and Lactao says that a picture has emerged of how some of the most wanted men in the world move around. There is a group of about 37 JI explosives and logistics experts who have attached themselves to Khaddafy Janjalani, the Abu Sayyaf leader who has earned the blessing of al-Qa’ida through his ruthlessness, and enjoys a cult of personality throughout the world of jihad. Janjalani and his JI team, sometimes including Bali bomber Dul Matin, are surrounded by an inner security team of up to one hundred Abu Sayyaf fighters from the southwestern islands of Basilan and Sulu. Then that group will be surrounded by another ring of gunmen supplied by MILF commanders religiously disposed towards international jihad.
Janjalani, who has a US$5 million bounty on his head for his multitudinous outrages, always keeps his face covered, sometimes dresses as a fully-covered Muslim woman, and wears a bomb vest so that he can blow himself to atoms if cornered, Lactao tells me. ‘Then we will not have his body and someone else can become Janjalani, because that is the name that brings in large finances from foreign sources. For every bombing that [the Abu Sayyaf] conduct, they will receive US$200,000. In this way they made large amounts of money from the Superferry bombing and the Valentine’s Day bombings.’
Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have targeted U.S. citizens and interests, and in an attempt to eradicate these groups, the U.S. has stationed military intelligence personnel throughout Mindanao in what is known as ‘intelfusion’. The Americans are not universally welcome, especially with the mayor of Cotabato City, a former MNLF guerrilla named Muslimin Sema. Sema refuses to acknowledge his region has a terrorism problem, despite multiple arrests, exposed JI safe houses, testimonies from detained militants in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the still-unsolved 2003 car-bombing of the airport.
The U.S. has plans to fund highway construction near Cotabato City, but the project is suspended due to a perceived lack of action on terrorism. Sema is pissed off about this and has plastered the city with signs and banners calling American diplomats ‘agents of Satan’, proclaiming that ‘Arabs are charitable’, and denouncing the U.S. as ‘the world’s number one terrorist’. Sema knows that the US is providing counter-terrorism intelligence assistance, so signs around town also read: ‘Reject the terroristic policies of the U.S. in Mindanao’, and ‘U.S. presence here in Cotabato get out’.
All of which make working in and around this gunned-up frontier town an uneasy experience for a Western journalist. The first assumption of everyone I speak to is that I am American military, and it is hard not to be a little edgy when walking the streets or driving through the city outskirts, the roads hazy from countless barrels of burning coconut husks. Paranoia comes easily when I am told by one of the least drama-prone, most understated intelligence sources I know to ‘stay in your room at night’, and ‘do not overdo your luck.’ Pour another San Miguel and pass the ammunition.
Lactao smiles when I ask about the value of the high-tech intelligence he receives on terrorist positions and movements from the Americans based in central Mindanao. ‘It is only good if it comes in time. If it comes late, it is just good for storytelling. Sometimes they will be sending it way after the people have left. The Americans are learning much from us – some of them don’t have any experience’, he says, tapping out another cigarette to smoke.
The general stares at me. ‘Let me tell you about some recent operations targeting Janjalani and JI, who we know are in constant contact. On January 27 we conducted airstrikes against seven targets [houses] stretching over a kilometre along the river. We believe some were wounded, but not the main personalities. Now they learn their lessons, and the leaders will be sleeping outside in a hammock or sleeping bag or a banca [small boat] 50 to 100 metres away from the structure. They let their men sleep in the house.’
The terrorists struck back a fortnight later with the Valentine’s Day bombings – blasts in Manila and two of Mindanao’s cities, Davao and General Santos City. Twelve dead and almost 150 wounded. Several other devices were discovered before they could be detonated.
Lactao then tells me that as Janjalani and the JIs kept moving through the marsh in April, the military correctly anticipated that the MILF commander who had been protecting the terrorists would sign them over to another guerrilla commander well known as a fundamentalist Islamic cleric. The vow of protection is binding, and ‘if anything happens there will be an investigation within the MILF and within the al-Qa’ida organisation’, Lactao says.
Yet the military also faces heavy political fallout when it launches a strike or raid and hits the MILF instead of JI or the Abu Sayyaf. ‘It could disturb the peace process. We have to be dead sure that we are striking the right place at the right time. If they are in this house, we can only hit this house. The people in the marsh area are very religious; they look at the ASG [Abu Sayyaf Group] as international mujahadeen. If we hit the wrong house and kill innocent civilians, then it helps the enemy’, Lactao says.
The MILF is comprised of semi-autonomous units, with each commander operating like the Datu warlords that gave the Spanish such grief centuries ago. More secular elements currently have the most sway politically, and are using all their power to convince the organisation’s independent-minded commanders to stick to the peace negotiations with the Government. Getting into shootouts with the mainstream of the MILF could set off full-scale war again, of the sort last seen in 2003. ‘We must be 100 per cent sure of our information. It should be very precise because we are constrained by the peace agreements’, Lactao says.
It was in this climate that word came in April that the terrorists were staying on a particular hill inside the marshlands. About 120 special forces in plain clothes were dispatched from Davao in nondescript vehicles to a small town on the edge of the marsh area where they assembled for the assault. There the surprise was lost, however, after a civilian spotter text-messaged the enemy with a warning about Government troops massing. ‘Filipinos are fond of texting’, Lactao says.
Yet, Lactao says that the attack may still have succeeded, but for ‘some errors in the system’. The intelligence provided by the U.S. was out of date, and caused the Philippine airborne and land units to attack one kilometre to the side of the terrorists, starting a firefight with the MILF in violation of the ceasefire.
‘Intelligence must be real-time’, Lactao says.
Three soldiers were hit before they pulled out, including one man shot in the face, and on the other side, several MILF guerrillas were killed and a dozen or so wounded. To calm the situation, the Government flew the dead and wounded rebels to hospital.
The April incident was a lost opportunity to kill or capture scores of South East Asia’s most skilled and ruthless terrorists; men in close contact with al-Qa’ida. Nevertheless, Lactao says that the combination of informers selling out the jihadists and the sudden violence their information brings is having an effect on his prey: ‘They are getting paranoid and that’s why they are asking for shabu [methamphetamine].’
Yet the US can quite reasonably argue that without the millions of dollars worth of training and equipment it gives the Philippines each year, the country would be taking even more of a hammering from
the terrorists.
Until the US ran the Balikatan (‘shoulder-to-shoulder’) joint military and development exercise across Janjalani’s home island of Basilan in 2002, the Abu Sayyaf were running rings around the armed forces, sacking Christian towns and conducting mass-hostage takings at schools, hospitals and even Malaysian resorts. (When French and Germans were taken, the European response was worse than useless – funne- ling a US$25 million ransom through Libya with which the Abu Sayyaf bought more weapons, faster speedboats, and launched a new wave of violence.) A private security consultant based in Manila told me that the US and Philippines need each other. The Philippines needs the US to keep badgering it about JI, the Abu Sayyaf and al-Qa’ida. The US needs the Philippines to learn how messy life is. One matter the U.S. State Department will not stop pushing is the need for the Philippines to enact counter-terrorism legislation, which would enable security forces to detain suspected foreign terrorists. Lactao says that without that power, the military can only watch as suspected al-Qa’ida operatives roam Mindanao.
‘We monitored a meeting where one of these Middle Eastern men was trying to convince everyone to sign on with the cause. He said that the Muslim community is the next superpower, and he praised the head of al-Qa’ida.’ Yet most suspects can only be detained for six hours, or 72 if the offence is grave, and there are strict limitations on intelligence gathering.
‘We are not allowed to tap anyone’s phones, and we couldn’t detain anyone for interrogation purposes’, he says.
With Mindanao hotly contested ground in the war on terror, the island has more than its fair share of international undesirables, but when suspects have discovered they are under surveillance, they have complained to their embassies, with the military personnel involved castigated, Lactao says.
‘According to our reports, some of these Middle Eastern men are recruiting children as young as twelve to use later’, says Lactao, stubbing out his cigarette and smiling.
Still, a few undesirables are moved on or arrested. Two Middle Eastern men suspected of involvement with al-Qa’ida arrived in the Philippines in March this year – around the time when police seized hundreds of kilograms of explosives at a Manila house, apparently ready for use in the bombing of Easter celebrations. Philippine security officials speculated that al-Qa’ida was sending in specialists to coordinate the terror campaign. A Saudi Arabian national, Abdullah Nassar al-Arifi, was deported soon after arriving at Manila’s airport due to his listing on terrorism databases, while a Palestinian, Fawas Ajjur, was arrested in Mindanao. Ajjur was allegedly identified by Abu Sayyaf prisoners as their former explosives instructor on the blood-soaked
island of Jolo (pronounced HO-lo), in the Sulu archipelago.
The Jungle
‘Don’t misinterpret this as flippant. We are sad because today we have killed people’, says Colonel Orlando E. De Leon of the Philippine Marines.
I am in a Philippines Marine base on the island of Jolo, eating raw goat and drinking ice-cold San Miguel beer as an officer croons another karaoke epic of lost love.
‘This is our way of coping with what we do,’ De Leon says.
Today the Marines shot and killed about ten Abu Sayyaf fighters in an attack on a terrorist camp just four kilometres from my military lodgings. The operation began at around 10 o’clock last night when a local informant slipped the Marines a tip about the jungle camp and said that the 30 or so ‘Abus’, as the troops call their enemy, were holding a kidnap vi