INDIAN INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH INTO TRUE HISTORY

Newsletter No 34 of 16 October 1998

1 News and current affairs

1.1 Mr Godbole has passed the examination for the Membership of the Chartered Institute of Transport.

1.2 The Aryan Problem

This book contains papers read at a seminar held in Bangalore, South India in July 1991. The papers expose the falsity of the concept of Aryan race and the Indo-European language they were supposed to have spoken.

Prof. Bharadwaj, President of Arya Samaj, West Ealing, London. was anxious to send copies of this book to various scholars. Mr Godbole, accordingly sent copies to the following :-

Library of De Montford University, Leicester

Royal Asiatic Society, London

1.3 Rationalism of Veer Savarkar

Mr Godbole has checked the typing of the first 100 pages of this book ( in Marathi ). Hopefully the book will be printed early next year. .

Mr Godbole has translated into English, the Preface and Part 1 of this book. These have been sent by Internet to friends & well wishers.

ISBN number for the Marathi book is 81-900976-8-7

1.4 Around London Tour of places associated with Indian freedom fighters

*

One such tour took place on 15 August 1998. There were four people. Three from India, and Sudesh Sangray from Luton University. Mr Sahasrabuddhe, a BJP scholar was expected to join in. Unfortunately he was delayed in Germany. He has gone to America on a scholarship awarded by Rotary Club International to study how democracy functions in USA. He is likely to join in a tour when he travels back to India via London.

* A Gujarathi leaflet on the tour is being typed.

* A slide show on the tour took place at Hounslow branch of RSS on

7 October 1998. Twenty five people attended.

* Dadabhai Naoroji used to live at 8 Percival Street, near Farringdon tube station. We gathered this information from his election leaflet. Unfortunately this house does not exist any longer. All the houses on this street have been pulled down and flats erected in their place.

* Some useful information for the tour

(a) Transport in the days of Veer Savarkar.

Tottenham Court Road - Euston - Archway section of the underground was not open till 22 June 1907. So, for the first year Savarkar must have travelled by trams or buses between 65 Cromwell Avenue, Highgate and Grays Inn.

Highgate station of the underground was not opened till 1941.

(b) Statue of Sir Arthur Harris.

Stand along Aldwych facing the Indian High Commission. Turn left, if you walk for about 5 minutes you come across two statues, one on the left is of Sir Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Command, one on the right is that of Lord Dowding, Air Chief Marshall, during second world war. Further lie the church called St Martin in Field. It is a RAF church.

When the statue of Sir Arthur Harris was unveiled by Queen Mother ( i.e. mother of present queen ) in 1993, there was an outcry in Germany. Why ? Because he ordered bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, which had no military installations. Both places were full of women and children. It was bombing for the hell of it. Germans never forgot that. Churchill was shown aerial photographs of the bombing. He exclaimed, ' Are we cannibals ? '

(c) Public toilets are available at Notting Hill Gate station

(d) The tour could start from either Euston Square or Warren Street tube station.

1.5 Taj Mahal and the Great British Conspiracy

* Dr Patnaik of Bhagyanagar ( Hyderabad ) wrote a review of this book of Mr Godbole, in the 1998 Annual Report of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History.

* ISBN number for the book is 81-900976-5-2

1.6 British Justice today

On 4 June 1998 Times & Citizen of Bedford reported : A frail motorist has told how he was blinded and handcuffed in a terrifying ordeal at the hands of 6 ft 2 inches tall traffic policeman who fired CS gas in his eye.

Kenneth Whitaker, 67, told Luton Crown Court, PC Andrew Taylor sprayed the gas after the pensioner had parked on a double yellow line. Mr Whitaker, of Rosamond Road, Bedford, had parked his Vauxhall Vectra outside Holders Haircare in High Street, Kempston, so that his disabled wife Phyllis could visit the hairdressers.

When the policeman approached, a row broke out, and Mr Whitaker had CS gas sprayed in his face.

The pensioner was pulled out of the car, handcuffed and driven off in a police car with flashing blue lights.

...Mr Whitaker, who appeared in court with a stick, told the jury he always parked on double yellow line for 10-15 seconds when he took his wife to the hairdressers. The retired insurance salesman told the jury the police car pulled up alongside him and one officer shouted at him :' You are causing an obstruction.'

Mr Whitaker told the officer, ' you are causing even worse double parking there like that. No-one can get by. Go away you little man '

PC Taylor and his colleague screeched away and stopped suddenly 15 yards down the road.

Mr Whitaker said the policeman started shouting at him when he refused to get out of his car. ...... I suddenly felt a blow to my face. I wasn't aware what it was, only an excruciating pain in my right eye he said.

' He dragged me out and put a cuff on my wrist.' Mrs Whitaker, who had left her orange disabled sticker at home, told the jury that, when PC Taylor confronted her husband, she told him : ' For Christ's sake don't hurt him.' She was told she would get the same treatment and was told to take her f***ing hand off the door

The barrister told the jury there was no need for PC Taylor to arrest Mr Whitaker. He said ' the pensioner could only have been arrested under Section 25 of the Criminal Justice Act if the name and address of a person involved in a minor offence is unknown and cannot be reasonably be ascertained.

A short radio call would have ascertained the keeper's details. The defendant used unjustified and unlawful use of CS spray. ' Mr Whitaker, who suffers from sciatica, said he suffered cuts to the nose and head, and that his body was in terrible pain. He said he could not see out of his right eye for some days. Dr Roland Morris, who examined him at Greyfriars just after the incident, said : ' He was agitated, distressed and tearful, with a red eye and tenderness to his right wrist which was swollen, and pain in his back.'

....PC Taylor told the court he thought Mr Whitaker was going to bite him - and that using CS gas would be the best way of dealing with him. He said his colleague had been told to p***off right at the start of the incident. He said his intention was to diffuse the situation, but when Mr Whitaker put his hand on the gearstick, he thought he was going to drive off.[ so, how was the P.C in danger ? ] I leaned in and turned the ignition off and withdrew the keys. He lunged forward towards my arm with his mouth open and his teeth showing. I heard his teeth clenched together. He was being aggressive and from his body language I thought he was going to strike. If I had used manual force there was danger I might have been bitten

On 11 June 1998 the paper reported :-

........The jury of eight women and four men ruled the traffic policeman had acted within the law when he blinded Mr Whitaker. But they were rebuked by Judge Daniel Rodwell QC, after their deliberations of four and a half hours. He told them, ' You will perhaps consider in future if any old age pensioner are gassed or assaulted by police officers they will have this particular case in mind. This was a disturbing and upsetting case and I believe the reaction in the civil court would be quite different and cost Bedfordshire Police Authority quite a lot of money.

Judge Rodwell firmly rejected a defence plea for PC Taylor's costs to be paid out of public funds, saying it would be totally inappropriate..........Meanwhile it has been revealed Bedfordshire Police has already paid £7,500 to Mr Whitaker

Bedford & Kempston MP Patrick Hall had urgent meeting with Home Office Minister Alun Michael. He said, ' The jury decision was inexplicable. It seems it is acceptable for the police to gas a person who is sitting in his car with his seat belt on.'

Points to ponder :-

(1) Both the police and his victim were white. How would a white policeman treat a black person ?.

(2) What would have happened if the policeman was black ?

(3) Was the pensioner carrying a firearm ? NO. A knife ? NO. A baseball bat? NO. So, how was the policeman threatened ? Just because he felt so!!

(4) Imagine the life in England 30 years ago - when the notorious 'sus law ' operated. You were guilty if a policeman felt that you were acting suspiciously

Oh yes. That was the " law " And many black people did suffer.

2. History today

2.1 Plight of the gypsies in Europe

2.1.1 No Refuge in England

Gypsies from the Czech Republic and Slovakia sought refuge in England in November 1997. How were they treated ?

On 13 November 1997 Paul Waugh reported for the Evening Standard. He says :-

GIRO CZECHS HIT LONDON ( as if London is hit by plague )

" A Coachload of 60 refugees arrived in London today demanding political asylum and free food, housing and health care - the vanguard of an invasion that could be hundreds strong. The Tory council is furious that the refugees were let into the country and has asked the Home Office to explain how its Dover passport checks are operating. "

On 14 November 1997 David Taylor and Patrick Sawer reported for the Evening Standard. They say :-

Gypsy refugees return in fear to face Dover race march.

" A coachload of gypsy refugees who turned up in London demanding to be housed were back in Dover today fearing for their safety as Right wing extremists prepared to march on the coastal town. The National Front will march through Dover demonstrating against Czech and Slovak asylum seekers who claim they have fled similar nationalist race hatred in their own country.... It was after nightfall and long arguments through an interpreter that they reluctantly accepted Westminster social services would not rehouse them and climbed on a bus to Dover. "

"....... In an emotional outburst inside the Westminster housing assessment and advice centre on Harrow Road, one father-of three said he would rather take his wife and children and jump off the Tower of London than return .... ".

We found only one dissenting voice. Edie Friedman, Director of Jewish Council for Racial Equality wrote to the Times on 28 October 1997. He says, " As an organisation which is both Jewish and concerned with racial discrimination, we are appalled at the hysteria which is being whipped up by some politicians and newspapers surrounding the arrival of 800 Gypsy asylum-seekers in Kent. One basic fact seems to have escaped their attention : some of these asylum-seekers may have a valid claim to be refugees. It is widely acknowledged that

Gypsies are a persecuted and a scapegoat minority in many countries. Those vitriolic critics would have us send people back without waiting to find out if they would be in danger if returned. Have we as a society learnt nothing from the history of the last 100 years ?

2.1.2

Cook closes the door on gypsies

Katherine Butler reported from Prague for The Independent on 28 November 1997. She says :- Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, pledged yesterday to throw open the doors of the European Union to the Czech republic. The warmth of his embrace however was not immediately felt among the country's 300,000 gypsies, who were warned to expect no welcome in Britain. Mr Cook's tough words appeared aimed at demonstrating to a home audience the Government's ruthless approach to immigrants or benefit scroungers ....... We have a very clear message to anyone contemplating travelling to Britain, Britain does not have an open door policy to those who allege persecution and cannot prove it.

( In the Czech Republic ) ... Violence is common: a Romany man was beaten to death in front of his children by skinheads in one recent incidence. ........ . One of the complaints is that Romany children are systematically placed in schools for the retarded because Czech is not their mother tongue. Illiteracy, unemployment and criminality are all extremely high and the Czech government's insistence that many gypsies are ethnically Slovak means that they have difficulty establishing citizenship rights.

As expected there was only one TV programme, but no gruelling of Czech and Slovak Ministers or Officials on TV. No monitoring of any progress of any improvements in conditions of gypsies. No threat that unless the lot of gypsies improves the Czech Republic and Slovakia will face trade sanctions from EU countries, not to speak of any obstructions for admission to EU.

2.1.3 NEO-NAZI GANGS WAGE WAR ON CZECH GYPSIES

On 22 March 1998 Francis Harris reported from Prague for the Daily Telegraph -

Neo-Nazi violence is reaching epidemic proportions in the Czech Republic, raising fears of a race war between skinhead gangs and their victims in the gypsy minority. Human rights groups say that at least 30 gypsies and foreigners have been murdered and thousands attacked by well-organised and brazen skinhead gangs. A leaked government report has warned that the violence will probably spread to other groups the skinheads consider inferior. This is causing growing alarm among European Union governments and could affect the country's bid for EU membership. Negotiations with Czechs and other central European applicants open in Britain next week.

A lot of EU people are going to be worried about the issue of free movement within the EU. They won't want hordes of people turning up as refugees in Vienna, or Berlin, or Birmingham, said one Western diplomat. If the violence in the Czech Republic goes on, member states are going to defend themselves. He predicted a rough ride for Czech negotiators.

The European Commission has told the Czechs to step up action. The main EU report on the Czech Republic said : [ Romanies ] are the target of numerous forms of discrimination and suffer particular violence from skinheads, without adequate protection from the police or the authorities.

An EU spokesman in Brussels said the issue was raised with Prague. ......

But last week, Cyril Svoboda, the interior minister, said the problem was negligible, despite contradictory evidence from the government's own agencies, which say racial attacks are massively under-reported.

The government's Council on Nationalities even publicly condemned one judge who said an attack on a gypsy had no racial motive because the skinheads were not screaming racial abuse during the assault. Instead, Mr Svoboda blamed the problem on charities and human rights groups painting a false impression abroad..

There have been two exoduses of Romanies, both last year when hundreds arrived in Britain and Canada seeking asylum. Gypsy leaders last week threatened a third mass migration, this time to the United States, unless the government took action.

Ministers seem bewildered by the threat and uneasy about the casual and almost universal racism of the white population. One opinion poll suggested that more than 20% of the Czechs sympathise with the aims of the skinheads, and 50% would like gypsies to leave the country.

Meanwhile, police have done little. They say they are observing the skinhead movement, which is based around a hard core of 5,000 activists in 30 gangs. The skinheads receive inspiration and assistance from neo-Nazi groups in Germany, where scores of foreigners have died in street violence and firebomb attacks.

Gangs with names such as Blood and Honour, Hammer Skins and the European National Socialist Movement roam the streets of northern Czech towns where many of the country's 300,000 strong gypsies live. In a series of horrific incidents, one young Czech gypsy mother drowned after skinheads beat her unconscious and tossed her into a river, and a six-year-old gypsy boy was tortured to death by a 22-year-old racist. Street brawls between Romanies and skinheads have become common as gypsies fight back, causing widespread fears of what one mainstream newspaper termed the risk of racial war .........

With gypsy ghettos now cracking with tension, young men have armed themselves. The result has been a wave of attacks on policemen, regarded as skinhead sympathisers. Critics say that skinhead gangs are indeed unmolested by often supportive policemen, some of whom are alleged to be gang members themselves.

Judges often acquit skinheads in the courts. There were 653 prosecutions for racial crimes in 1996, but 271 convictions. The courts also have been accused of sympathising with skinhead defendants. They cite examples such as the two skinheads acquitted for threatening to throw a Romany child from a moving train. Protests from the justice minister resulted in a re-trial and convictions.

The minister also forced a retrial for four skinheads who chased a gypsy into a river where he drowned. They had been sentenced to less than three years each.

Human rights groups say there are at least 50 racist publications in the Czech Republic, none of which has been prosecuted or closed by police, who never raid neo-Nazi bases. The country's reputation for lax policing has attracted neo-Nazis from neighbouring countries, particularly Germany and Austria. Two Austrians are known to be publishing racist material. German neo-Nazis have used record plants to manufacture racist records and CDs.

2.1.4 Czech cities plan apartheid wall around gypsy ghettos.

On 27 May 1998 Adam LeBor reported for the Independent. He says :-

The wall, symbol of a divided Eastern Europe, is back. Not in east Berlin, but in two cities in the Czech Republic, where local officials are planning to construct barriers to segregate gypsies, or Roma, as they prefer to be known, from the rest of the population. Municipal leaders in Usti Nad Labem, an industrial city on the Elba, and in Pilsen, the country's brewing capital, plan the apartheid-style measures which human rights activists and Roma leaders say are reminiscent of the Nazi era when Roma, along with Jews, were separated from the rest of the population. Usti Nad Laben officials plan to build a wall around two apartment buildings that house over three dozen Roma families ....... Milan Knotek, spokesman for the Utsi city council said

' The fence will separate this problematic community from those people who have private houses on the road.' The plans for Pilsen are more elaborate, and look set to infringe human rights even more. Municipal officials there plan to construct a compound on the city's outskirts composed of portable cabins surrounded by a fence with its own police station that will stay open 24 hours a day.

Roma are regularly attacked by neo-Nazis who have links to organised far-right groups in Germany and Austria. Harassment by police is routine, as is discrimination by housing and welfare officials. Early this month a Czech Roma man died after skinheads beat him unconscious and left him in the street where he was run over by a truck and killed.

Comments :- Why is the Pope silent on plight of the gypsies ?

What are the church leaders doing to help the gypsies ?

Why don't they flock to the Czech Republic and Slovakia ?

Why are they so much interested in India alone ?

2.1.5 Gypsy rights go down the Tube

On 1 December 1997 Vitali Vitaliev wrote for The Guardian. .

He refers to an Asian couple dancing on a platform of a Northern Line station of London Underground. He says :-

.... To the majority of Englishmen, foreigners are dirty foreigners wrote Stephen Greham in his book The Gentle Art of Tramping, published in 1992. Or take the appalling treatment of the so-called enemy aliens during the second world war, or the post-war outbursts of anti-Semitic and so on .....

I was shocked by the recent deportation of several hundred Czech and Slovakian gypsies ( or Romanies, as they prefer to call themselves), mostly young couples with children, who had come to these shores in search of freedom. Having visited former Czechoslovakia several times in recent years, I can testify to the sad fact that the Romany population there remains one of the most ruthlessly persecuted minorities in Europe. Travelling around Slovakia and the Czech Republic, I often had to pass through derelict, vermin-infested shanty towns, where the gypsies lived in terrifying poverty and filth. In the cities, I saw them aimlessly hanging around street corners; the unemployment among Romanies was close to 90 per cent. They were meticulously oppressed, abused and humiliated.

In 1993, the so-called Romany Clause passed by the Czech parliament, stripped 100,000 gypsies of citizenship rights - the first case of mass disenfranchisement in post-war Europe. ( Did America or Britain or any western country impose sanctions against the Czech Republic ? Of course not. The BBC did not even announce this news ).

Echoing Hitler's genocide of 500,000 Romanies, some modern Czech politicians have publicly called for sending gypsies to the gas chamber and for buying them one way tickets to Canada.

In October 1996 the Prague Post ran a poignant letter, written by an American female computer technician of Indian descent who lived and worked in Prague. Because of her dark skin, she was often mistaken for a Romany. '' I was asked to leave the first youth hostel I stayed in. The staff ladies used to spit whenever they saw me .... I've been stared at, glared at, spat upon by teenagers, cursed, ordered out of the buildings where my friends live .... All because I look like a Romany. I have seen a Czech store owner set dogs on the Romany kids who entered his store. ...I am scared ... A Czech friend tried to comfort me by saying Oh, not you. You are Indian not Romany, that makes you equal I am not comforted. Could I respect if I were? Still I am pretty lucky. When I get off the plane at JFK Airport in New York, I am suddenly a white girl again.

Wish those British officials who took the decision to deport the Romany families could hear this harrowing cry of despair. "

2.1.6

It's payback time on gypsy gold

On 28 November 1997 the Guardian published a letter by Francesca Ball of Peace Studies, Bradford University. She says :-

Robin Cook is to open the International Conference of the Tripartite Commission next week which deals with questions about the origins and dispersal of Nazi gold. Your report

( Greece finally lifts its veil on its forgotten Jews, November 25 ) fuel this complex debate. There is the cynical news that Belgium bought tons of Nazi gold stolen from Austria and Czechoslovakia for up to one month before they were invaded. Then the German government has been overwhelmingly condemned because an estimated 10,000 Jewish holocaust survivors in East Europe have no compensation, while alleged Nazi war criminals received war pensions. Incomprehensibly, gypsies are not mentioned even though their racial categorisation for extinction was twice as strict as that for Jews.

Thirdly, Greek Jews had a 43-year struggle against state sanctioned suspicion of minorities to erect a monument in memory of the 56,000 Jews who were deported to Germany. Only 10,000 returned. Again there was no mention of gypsies even though it is well known that Greece had a large gypsy population.

The Swiss Pro Juventute Foundation was, until 1973, still removing children from Romani families without their consent and putting them in foster homes, where their names were changed. This was not made public until 1980s. They still refuse access to records which would help parents to locate their children. Surely they should now undertake this as a minimal gesture, since there is no doubt that the Swiss banks made a profit from an unknown quantity of gold stolen from gypsies ?

2.1 7 HOLOCAUST'S FORGOTTEN VICTIMS SEEK ADDRESS

Kate Connolly reported for the Guardian on 6 April 1998

Bozena Ruzickova traces the outlines of faces on the photographs of her Romany wedding. She and her husband Antonin are surrounded by 13 family members. She points gently at each of them in turn, recounting their names and the concentration camps in which they died. She is the only one to have survived. At the age of 74 she is still fighting for recognition as a victim of the Holocaust.

Today Mrs Ruzickova makes ends meet with the odd cleaning job as well as selling hand-made linen from door to door in her neighbourhood in Liberec, a town 100 miles north-east of Prague.

She is one of the 100 or so survivors from Lety Gypsy concentration camp in south Bohemia who is still alive. Most have received nothing in spite of the Czech government's 1994 compensation law, because camp records were either missing or falsified. .........

Mrs Ruzickova says despite countless promises she does not believe she will see just recompense, although she lost her two children, her mother and seven brothers and sisters in the camp. Her husband was guillotined in Prague after escaping from Lety.

I have to bribe the authorities to look at my documents, and they say to me,

' You can't have anything. you were not a political prisoner.' she says. Her spotless flat is almost empty. I have had to sell most of my furniture to keep up the rent payments she says.

.....Future Fund was launched under a declaration by the Czech Republic and Germany in January. Czech victims of Nazism are entitled to compensation of up to £1,000 plus medical help - if they can prove persecution.

................

So far there has been no one to represent the Gypsies, and they are not very good at this themselves. Many cannot read or write, there is very little documentation and the Holocaust is still very much a taboo subject for them. They are the forgotten Holocaust victims.

An estimated 39,500 Czech Romanies perished in the Holocaust - 98 per cent of their population. The American writer and historian Paul Polansky, who lives in Prague, has produced the first detailed account of Czech Romany Holocaust survivors in his book Black Silence, to be published in September. He fears that the Romanies will not live to see their compensation.

Since the news of the fund was announced, half of the survivors have died. Mr Polansky said, The authorities seem to be deliberately dragging their heels. It seems hardly anyone can stomach helping Gypsies. If you go into most pubs people will say, They shouldn't be compensated for their time in the camps. The camps should be reopened and the Gypsies put back in them.

Romanies were not given Czech citizenship until the 1950s under communism, despite having settled in the country almost 600 years before. But the ultimate insult for Mrs Ruzickova and the rest of the Romany community lies not in the tardiness of payments but in the present state of Lety camp. In the 1970s, the graveyard was covered over and has been used for almost 30 years, as a pig farm and meat-processing plant.

Mrs Ruzickova, who is to return there in May for a reunion of survivors, angrily wave her arms, and her voice broke as she says, The pig farm is the national monument

to Romany Holocaust.

2.2 How West cages Asian tigers in IMF trap

On 24 December 1997 Janet Bush reported for The Times. She says :-

The fire sale of Asia has begun. Goldman Sachs is today reported to be preparing to spend $4 billion ( £ 2.4 billion ) on buying up bundles of asset-backed loans from stricken Japanese banks, the equivalent of one eighth of all Japan's bad loans. Other American investment banks, who learnt the art of buying and repackaging bad loans during the Latin American debts crisis of the 1980s, will surely follow. These forays are the very early signs of an American takeover of Asia's financial and banking sectors, aided and abetted by the International Monetary Fund.

It is too easy to accuse the IMF of incompetence in its handling of the Asian crisis. Its critics charge that the IMF's imposition of a monetary squeeze on Asian economies is inappropriate for what is essentially a crisis of bad debt. High interest rates virtually ensure that a large proportion of Asia's financial institutions will go to the wall, they wail. Surely the IMF must see that identikit austerity packages imposed on the fiscally profligate in the developing world are not appropriate for Asia ? These charges are perfectly valid but miss the point. Even the IMF could not get its diagnosis and treatment this badly wrong by mistake.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that its region open to takeover by foreign interests.

The IMF knows very well that the American banking system was saved and nursed back to health after the 1987 stock market crash because the US federal Reserve pumped masses of liquidity into the economy and kept interest rates low for a long time. It is no mistake that the very opposite is being imposed on Asia. At the same time as the IMF is ensuring a brutal shake-out of Asian financial institutions, it is demanding that Asian governments open their financial markets to foreign investment at their point of maximum vulnerability and when assets are cheapest.

Lest anyone dismiss this is a silly conspiracy theory, just remember the speech that Mickey Kantor, former US Commerce Secretary, made to the Confederation of British Industry this month. He told his audience that the troubles of the tiger economies should be seized as a golden opportunity for the West to reassert its commercial interests. When countries seek help from the IMF, he said, America and Europe should use the IMF as a battering ram to gain advantage.

The pact that Asian governments have made with IMF is positively Faustian. They get billions of dollars in the short-term but lose control of their destinies. The tigers will emerge from the current crisis declawed and owned by the West.

The IMF may genuinely believe that West is best and that Japan and South Korea will end up with a sound financial system much more quickly if their banks are run by Goldman Sachs or Citicorp. But there is still something faintly obscene in the way that western commercial interests always appear to profit from others misfortunes ( and avoid paying for their own mistakes in the case of US banks who leant so widely in Latin America.)

What is happening to Asia is verily reminiscent of what happened to East Germany when the Berlin wall came down. An entirely inappropriate macroeconomics policy - monetary union between the deutsch mark and ostmark - ensured that every East German firm was rendered instantly uncompetitive and went bankrupt. The Treuhand was set up, took over East Germany's assets and sold them off cheap. East Germany was bought and sold in little more that two years. The price of agreeing to the hostile takeover, which came to be known as the second anschluss, was an influx of MacDonalds drive-ins and Volkswagen dealerships.

Perhaps the saddest group in East Berlin after unification was an association of entrepreneurs. Many of them had been imprisoned by the Communist regime for daring to embrace capitalism and, when the wall came down, they thought that their day had come. Many of them set up small businesses, only to find themselves the takeover targets of west German companies. One entrepreneur was literally driven out of business by a west German firm that wanted to buy him out; his delivery trucks kept being shunted off the road by his white knight. Many members of his association committed suicide.

East Germany's roads became notorious for road rage incidents. There was an astonishing explosion in car crash statistics, explained largely by the fury of west German drivers of fast Mercedes and Audis at being held up by dawdling Trabants.

East Germans were dismissed as country bumpkins by their rich cousins. The peoples of Asia are similarly being written off by triumphalist voices in the West. The Asian model of economic development may be undergoing reassessment but the western model of capitalism is distastefully arrogant and sneering. The Asian economies may come to regret taking the IMF billions.

2.3 US in the dock for prison cruelty.

On 6 October 1998 Nick Hopkins reviewed for the Guardian recent Amnesty International Report on America. He says :-

Torture and sexual violence against prisoners is widespread in jails across the United States, according to a report published today, which also accuses the country of wholesale human rights abuses.

The two-year study by Amnesty International, its first comprehensive analysis of north America, accuses the US of failing in its duty to provide a moral lead to the rest of the free world.

Across the USA, thousands are victims of human rights violations said Pierre Sane, Amnesty International secretary general.

Too often, human rights in the USA are a tale of two nations, Rich and poor, white and black, male and female.

In particular, Amnesty concentrated on the penal system, where it claims, the breakdown in basic human rights has led to atrocities more commonly associated with authoritarian third world regimes.

The massive increase in the prison population -- it has trebled to 1.7 million in the past 18 years- has put the system under tremendous strain, resulting in a shift away from rehabilitation towards --- incapacitation and punishment.

Overcrowding and a lack of central control have also provided prison staff with opportunities to exploit inmates, especially women.

The report cites two recent examples : the Department of Justice sued Arizona and Michigan states for failing to protect women from sexual assaults and prurient viewing during dressing, showering and use of toilet facilities.

And earlier this year, the Federal Bureau of Prisons paid £30,000 to settle a law-suit brought by three women who claimed they had been beaten, raped and sold by guards for sex with male inmates at a federal prison in California.

The indiscriminate use of leg irons, restraint poles, restraining chairs and electro-shock weapons, including stun belts, stun shields and stun guns, is also alleged to be common.

There were two other major areas where Amnesty said it found persistent abuses, brutality by the police and the arbitrary, unfair and racist use of the death penalty.

The report, Rights for All, claims it has evidence that police officers regularly beat and shoot suspects who are not resisting arrest, and that there is widespread misuse of batons and chemical sprays.

The victims are mostly from ethnic minority backgrounds and the officers, who are encouraged to be aggressive, nearly always seem to get away without punishment, even when charges are brought against them.

At a briefing in London, Piers Bannister, one of the researchers who compiled the 153 page report, said that racial discrimination within the police was virulent.

It makes a mockery of the slogan which many of them use ' To Protect and Serve ' he said.

Mr Bannister described how an unarmed African American William J Whitfield, was shot dead in a New York supermarket on Christmas Day last year when an officer mistook the keys he was carrying for a gun.

After the policeman was cleared, it emerged that he had been involved with eight prior shootings, yet had not been placed on a monitoring programme.

Amnesty says that black officers have complained of institutionalised discrimination, pointing out that 23 black undercover detectives have been shot by their colleagues after being mistaken for suspects.

Though Amnesty has long railed against America's use of death penalty, it claims that there has been another worrying development.

The US has started to execute juvenile offenders, in clear breach of article six of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. America was one of only two countries to opt out of signing this provision of the treaty, which covers the execution of minors.

Two men were killed by lethal injection in Texas this year, even though they were 17 when they committed their offences, and another 65 juveniles are on death row across the country.

Such executions are rare worldwide, the report says. Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are the only other countries known to have executed juvenile offenders since 1990.

Amnesty makes a series of recommendations. These include provision of extra funding for the Justice Department so that it can properly implement the Police Accountability Act and provisions of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

The USA has little room for complacency in terms of human rights, both in terms of some sectors of US society and of the country's role in the international arena. said Mr Sane.

[ The article is accompanied by a photograph of women on a chain gang in Phoenix, Arizona ]

Cut in crime blinds Americans to unfair system.

On the same day Mark Tran reported from New York for the Guardian. He says :-

Jessie Jackson and other civil rights leaders have tried to make an issue of the disproportionate number of African- Americans in prison, highlighted in the Amnesty International's report, as a sign of unfairness of the justice system. But they are fighting an uphill battle.

Most Americans see the growing prison population as the inevitable flipside of a more welcome development - the steep drop in crime rates.

President Clinton hopped on the law and order bandwagon when running for president. He established his credentials by allowing the execution of a prisoner in Arkansas even though the man was mentally handicapped. Once in the White House, he robbed the Republicans of a favourite theme when he backed the three strikes and you are out initiative - legislation that made it easier to put criminals away for life if they had committed three serious crimes.

Americans have responded favourably.

The most telling sign that public sentiment has hardened is the steady erosion of the ability of prisoners to use the courts to redress grievances.

Amnesty says that over 60 per cent of prisoners in the US are from racial minorities. One reason has been the disproportionate impact of drug sentencing policies on back Americans. Between 1985 and 1995, drug offences accounted for 42 per cent of the increase in the number of blacks jailed, compared with 26 per cent for whites.

There has also been a higher rate of increase in women prisoners than men. Women now comprise over 10 per cent of the jail population, again largely because of drugs offences.

...... Some of the most serious abuses in recent years have involved a steel-framed restraint chair securing both arms and legs, and with straps which can be tightened across the arms and chest. In June 1996 a man died in an Arizona jail of asphyxia after being placed in a restraint chair with a towel wrapped over his face.

AND AMERICA LECTURES THE WORLD ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS !!

2.4 United Europe must stand up to US bullying

On 13 October 1997 William Davis wrote for the Evening Standard. He says -

Talks are due to resume in Brussels this week about America's attempt to legislate for the world. If the new Labour Government really means business about playing a leading role in Europe it should join forces with our EU partners in standing up to Washington. Strenuous efforts have been made, behind the scene, to ensure that the dispute does not get out of hand. But there is no doubt about the strength of feeling on both sides of the Atlantic.

The issue is whether the United States has the right to prevent other countries from doing business with regimes it doesn't like.

There was a row when the US threatened to punish foreign companies that treaded with Cuba and, more recently, there has been another confrontation over the contract signed by TOTAL, the French energy group, to develop an Iranian gas field. A six-month truce over Cuba is due to end on Thursday. The US will have to say whether it is serious about enforcing its laws, and what it intends to do. Europe will have to spell out the consequences.

Sir Leon Brittan, the EU trade commissioner, has asked for sanctions to be waived. Failure to do so, he says, could unleash " a chain of events which would seriously damage the wider relationship which is of such importance to both of us." Another spokesman for the European Commision has said that any US action over the TOTAL investment would be ' illegal and unacceptable'

The dispute has much wider implications. During President Clinton's first term alone, the US has imposed unilateral sanctions, or threatened to do so, no fewer than 60 times on 35 countries. Congress, which passed most of these laws in election years, is determined to do more and the Clinton administration appears to be willing to go along. It has vowed to " take whatever action is appropriate under the law."

The European view, shared by others, is that the US is entitled to say which countries its own companies should be allowed to deal with and to ask for support from its friends. It is not entitled to dictate international behaviour by way of US legislation.

James Schlesinger, a former US Secretary of Defence and Energy, has warned that " the tolerance of our allies, and of others whom we would have followed us, is not inexhaustible." That is a diplomatic way of saying that there are likely to be repercussions.

The European Union has threatened to take its case to the World Trade Organisation, but the Americans have said that they will not accept any WTO ruling. In theory, the Commission could tell them Europe will hit back by making life more difficult for the many US companies that have big interests on this side of the Atlantic. In practice, such threats would have little credibility unless member states declared themselves willing to co-operate in such a drastic step, which seems unlikely.

It may well be possible for the EU and the US to settle their differences this week. I certainly hope so. A breakdown in relations is no-one's interest.

We all have our own options about countries like Cuba and Iran, but that does not mean we should allow the US to bully everyone else. This is one transatlantic argument that Washington does not deserve to win.

COMMENTS

If the European Union is scared of US bullying in 1997, what must be the pitiable position of other countries ?

2.5 Mute Mexican slaves spark US shouting match

On 29 July 1997 Mary Dejevsky reported from Washington for The Independent. She says :-

When a police raid 10 days ago turned up a group of deaf-mute Mexicans held as virtual slaves in a New York suburb, there was universal shock and disgust that such conditions should exist in the Land of the Free. Since then, however, scarcely a day has gone by without concerned members of the public or media sleuths reporting new groups of exploited immigrants, including several more groups of deaf-mute Mexicans, and the first righteous indignation is giving way to a lively public debate.

The proliferation of reports indicates that deaf Mexican street pedlars of New York were not unique. Last Friday, immigration officials, discovered a dozen deaf Mexican after raiding houses in the small town of Sanford, North Carolina. Another seven were found in a northern suburb of Chicago, while reports from Los Angeles said that deaf immigrants had long been a common sight on the streets of Californian cities where - like their New York counterparts - they sold key-rings and other trinkets.

Both in North Carolina and Chicago, the authorities say they are trying to establish whether the Mexicans were subject to the same coercion and deprivation as they appear to have been in New York, This is a crucial question.

It was, after all, less the fact that deaf-mute Mexicans were selling knick-knacks on the street that unleashed the initial public outrage than that they appeared to have been recruited on false pretences, held against their will in appalling conditions and deprived of what money they earned.

As these cases have come to light, some commentators - not just on the political right - have started to ask whether the deaf Mexicans were really so badly off after all and whether slavery was really the appropriate description for their condition. Their point is not whether the Mexicans were exploited, but whether - given the extent of poverty in Mexico and the position of deaf people in that country - they would not have been worse off if they had stayed at home ........

Liberals find themselves divided. Their initial response was to decry the con