"FALANDO PARA A FITA COLA"

Eu,

já não tenho adjectivos, já não tenho palavras, e já não tenho paciência

em 1992 quando fui à Judiciária pela 1.ª vez trataram-me mal, puseram-me na rua e ignoram-me como se fosse um animal

em 1996, a mesma coisa, e nem na PGR me deixaram apresentar queixa, que apenas consegui escrever no livro amarelo

em 2001, a mesma merda

em 2007, estiveram-se cagando que eu tivesse estado na Embaixada de Israel, e trataram-me como psicologicamente perturbada e sei lá

os israelitas em 2004, levaram o assunto muito a sério

hoje, o País está totalmente sob escuta, totalmente vigiado por mini câmaras ocultas

o País é totalmente controlado pela Colômbia

a manipulação da mente, é de tal maneira um assunto sério

e Portugal não tem a minima noção do que se trata, 

os políticos que de economistas têm queijos da serra nos cornos

a PJ que devia ganhar o prémio Nobel da incompetência

pois, eu "safo-me" cada um por si Deus por Todos

vocês?

façam o que puderem

Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant is an unfinished nuclear power plant in Lemoniz, Spain. Its construction stopped in 1983 when the Spanish nuclear power expansion program was cancelled following a change of government. Its two PWRs, each of 900MWe, were almost complete but were never operated.

Conflict concerning the Lemóniz Nuclear Power Plant was one of the major anti-nuclear issues in the 1970s and 1980s in Spain.^[1]

[edit]ETA response

The building of the power station was opposed by ETA, a terrorist Basque independentist organisation. The first attack on the site took place on 18 December 1977, when an ETA commando unit attacked a Guardia Civil post which was guarding the station. One of the cell members, David Álverez Peña, was injured in the attack and died a month later. On 17 March 1978, ETA planted a bomb in the reactor of the station, causing the death of two workers (Andrés Guerra and Alberto Negro), and wounded another two. The explosion also caused substantial material damage to the facility, which set back construction.

Gladys del Estal, anti-nuclear activist killed during the construction of the station.

Logo created by the sculptor Chillidaagainst the Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant.

On 3 June 1979, the anti-nuclear activist Gladys del Estal from Donostia died after being hit by a bullet from the police force Guardia Civil during a demonstration in Tudela (Navarra) on the international day of action against nuclear power. Ten days later, on the 13th of June, ETA managed to get another bomb into the works on the facility, this time in the turbine area. The explosion caused the death of another worker, Ángel Baños. Meanwhile, numerous demonstrations, activities and festivals attended by thousands were being held across the southern Basque Country by ecologists and left leaning groups to demand the closure of the station

The escalation of ETA's actions came to a head on 29 January 1981, when they kidnapped the chief engineer of the power station, José María Ryan, from Bilbao. They gave a week for the facility to be demolished and threatened to kill the kidnapped engineer. Although there was a large demonstration in Bilbao for the liberation of the engineer, and after the deadline for demolishing the station had passed, ETA killed Ryan, causing an outcry and the first anti-ETA strike.

However, the killing of Ryan resulted in the de facto stoppage of works at the site, and the power company Iberduero, owner of the facilities, officially stopped the works while waiting for the Basque Government to explicitly support continuing the development.

LOOK AT OBAMA'S CHIMPANZE AND THE BEAUTIFUL CARLA BRUNNI

Société de Distribution Africaine is a company created by its CEO, the Belgian Philippe de Moerloose

The investigations published by Maka so far have prompted an increasing interest in bringing to light new corruption cases, as was hoped from the beginning.

The most recent case that has come to our attention illustrates the role of foreign investment in broadening, consolidating and institutionalising corrupt dealings with the country’s political leaders. This case involves the ‘general distributor of Mercedes-Benz cars for Daimler in Angola’.

On 12 July 2009, the minister of state and head of the Military Bureau in the presidency of Angola, General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Júnior ‘Kopelipa’, set up the company Auto-Star Angola, making himself the majority shareholder. The deputy director of the Office of National Reconstruction (GRN), Manuel José Cardoso do Amaral Van-Dúnem, and the faithful depository of General Kopelipa’s businesses, were each granted a 10 per cent shareholding. The businessmen Herculano Adelço de Morais and António de Lemos received 30 per cent and 10 per cent of the shares respectively. 

The website of the Belgian company Société de Distribution Africaine (SDA) announced the creation of Auto-Star with the intention of setting up ‘a Belgian and Angolan joint-venture that officially represents Mercedes and Evobus in Angola’. The website describes Auto-Star Angola as a subsidiary of SDA and as having modern facilities, including offices and salesrooms on a 2,000m site in the Viana industrial area in the suburbs of Luanda. The company’s own publicity brochure says the site is 89,000,000m in size with facilities ‘planned by Mercedes-Benz’s Architectural Office’. The site is in the special economic zone in Viana, which falls under the jurisdiction of the GRN. Until last April the director of the GRN was General Kopelipa himself, while Manuel Van-Dúnem, his partner in Auto-Star Angola, is still the GRN’s deputy director.

THE FOREIGN PARTNERS AND THE LAW

Société de Distribution Africaine is a company created by its CEO, the Belgian Philippe de Moerloose. The Report of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in November 2009, mentioned De Moerloose as having flouted UN Security Council Resolution nº 1807 (a, 5). This resolution provides that any consignment of weapons or related material to the DRC must be reported in advance to the UN, in accordance with its peace mission mandate in that country.

According to the report, Philippe de Moerloose holds 70 per cent of the shares in Hewa Bora Airways, which was used to transport arms and ammunition to the Congolese army in 2008 and 2009. The same Philippe de Moerloose is also quoted in his capacity as founder and chairman of Demimpex, a company that served as an intermediary in the sale of military vehicles to the Congolese government in 2008. The experts confirmed with the Belgian authorities that Demimpex, now associated with Auto-Star Angola, has no licence for the import, export or transport of weapons, ammunition, military equipment and associated technology. The experts stressed that the relevant Belgian legislation applies to its citizens and companies, regardless of whether or not military material passes through Belgian territory.

On 12 August 2010, the German ambassador to Angola, Jorgen-Werner Marquardt, gave an interview to Semanário Económico, the Angolan business weekly, in a move to promote German business interests. This newspaper belongs to the Media Nova group, owned by General Kopelipa in partnership with his current top adviser, General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento, and Manuel Vicente, the chairman and CEO of Sonangol, the Angolan national oil company.

During the interview, Marquardt highlighted the investments of the German automobile industry in Angola: ‘Mercedes has opened in Viana with a sales dealership and repair shop. It will also have the capacity to assemble trucks on a 500-hectare site. I hope to visit the location soon. There is also a similar project by Volkswagen, which is taking place.’

The chairman of the board of Auto-Star Angola is Jörgen Nührmann, who among other posts at Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, was previously director of after-sales service in Mexico.

From the legal point of view, Angola’s current Law on Probity defines the receiving of economic advantage by a public official, in the form of a percentage of a business deal, as an act leading to illegal enrichment (article 2, 1, a). This is exactly what General Kopelipa and Manuel José Cardoso do Amaral Van-Dúnem did when, as officials in the GRN, they acted in favour of Auto-Star’s business.

SDA and Mercedes-Benz, for their part, engaged in acts defined by law as of active corruption of public officials (article 21 of the Angolan Penal Code). It has become normal for foreign investors to ignore anti-corruption laws thanks to the impunity that they enjoy through their association with the regime’s most corrupt and abusive figures. Angolan law nevertheless incorporates international treaties against corruption, such as the United Nations Convention against Corruption. Belgium, SDA’s home country, became a signatory to the same convention on 25 September 2008.

The Law on Probity (article 31, 1, b) provides for several penalties such as seizure of the ill-gotten assets and their incorporation into state ownership, dismissal from public office and the surrender of goods acquired illegally by the public servants involved. The same article states that companies who break this law may be punished by being barred from entering into further contracts with public entities. This could apply to Auto-Star Angola.

CONCLUSION

This is not the first time that the German car industry has been involved in influence-peddling in Angola. Volkswagen has already set a serious precedent. The Council of Ministers, in its Resolution 39/04 of 23 December 2004, authorised the National Private Investment Agency (ANIP) to enter into an investment contract with the American company Ancar World Investments Holding for the installation of an assembly plant for Volkswagen and Skoda cars in Viana, Luanda, an investment valued at US$48 million. The agreement was signed on 26 January 2005 and included an undertaking to concede 49 per cent of the shares in Ancar to five Angolan entities, namely:

- ACAPIR Lda., a company owned by the Angolan president’s daughter, Welwitchia dos Santos, usually known as Tchizé dos Santos
- Mbakassi & Filhos, official representative of Volkswagen in Angola
- GEFI, a company owned by the MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola - Labour Party)
- Suninvest, the investment arm of the Fundação Eduardo dos Santos (FESA), the president’s private concern
- Tchany Perdigão Abrantes, the president’s niece.

The businessman António Mosquito objected to the arbitrary transfer of 16 per cent of the shares that had belonged to his company, Mbakassi & Filhos, to Tchizé dos Santos who took on the role of vice-chair of Ancar’s board.

In an effort to settle the dispute, Ismael Diogo, the chairman of FESA, held a meeting at the president’s foundation headquarters. The minutes of the meeting stated that he did so on behalf and ‘according to a mandate from His Excellency the President of the Republic, Engineer José Eduardo dos Santos, to clarify the circumstances and the reality that ACAPIR Lda. would have to participate in the Ancar – Automoveis de Angola joint-venture, owing to the fact that one of the shareholders was the daughter of the head of state, to obtain his favour for the approval of the investment project’.

The meeting, according to the minutes, concluded that ‘at no moment did Ancar Worldwide Investments Holding justify the offer of 16 per cent to ACAPIR Lda. in order to benefit from the favours of His Excellency, the President of the Republic, in the approval of the project’.

Consequently, according to reports in the German press, the Volkswagen head office delayed the building of the vehicle production line in Angola. More details are contained in the report ‘MPLA Ltd’, which can be read athttp://makaangola.com/wp-content/uploads/MPLA-Limited.pdf .

In the words of an Angolan political analyst, who preferred to remain anonymous, ‘when it comes to doing business with the Angolan regime, foreign investors do not want to be left out from the corruption schemes.’

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS 

* This article was originally published by Maka Angola.
* Rafael Marques de Morais is an Angolan journalist and writer with a special interest in Angola's political economy and human rights. In 2000 he won the distinguished Percy Qoboza Award for Outstanding Courage from the National Association of Black Journalists (US). In 2006, he received the Civil Courage Prize, from the Train Foundation (US) for his human rights activities. 
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Trillions hidden in offshore accounts

E estamos no jogo: Os espanhois não conseguem jogar, o Porto domina a bola, passe atrás de passe, é só descer a baliza, não tem tido muita sorte, os remates saem ao lado, parece que o defesa do Porto está fora de jogo, o juiz da linha está a vê-lo, de repente o jogador sobe até aos espanhois, já não está em posição irregular, do outrol lado do campo, alguém desce de repente, à boca da baliza, passa a abola de um lado ao outro, remata, Golo! Jogada duvidosa dizem os espanhois...

Preto está calmamente no camarote, não sabe que vamos para as Competições europeias. Vamos para a Suiça, onde os euros são congelados, e não vem na Imprensa:

More than half the world‘s money passes almost undetected through a series of financial black holes that shelter it from not only the tax collector but from shareholders, partners and wives, a Tribune-Review investigation found.

Once employed by gangsters such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, these secret bank accounts have grown so vast and lawless that some experts tell the Trib they fear the amount of money involved threatens societies from China to Africa, Europe and the United States. World leaders railed against the impact of secret havens during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh three years ago.

“They have caused a huge imbalance in the market,” said John Christensen, director of London-based Tax Justice Network, which was established by the British Parliament in 2003 to examine tax issues worldwide.

“They are the very opposite of capitalism, which is supposed to be based on transparency. They are the shadow economy.”

From Switzerland and a couple of Caribbean islands, the black holes are in 70 or more countries. Christensen said studies by several organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, put the total stash at as much as $25 trillion.

In contrast, the Commerce Department pegs the gross national product of the United States at more than $15 trillion.

The black holes emit no light, according to organizations that study them, including the IRS. They hide owners and assets. Officers and directors are strawmen. Host countries get little, if any, taxes and earn fees mostly by promising to keep everyone in the dark. Few public records exist.

Owners revealed by accident typically are corporations in other black holes halfway across the world.

Though tax evasion and avoidance are only part of the reason for the shadow economy, they play a role. Tax losses to the United States amount to $1 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. That‘s the amount congressional leaders tried to cut in last summer‘s deficit showdown.

Across Europe, experts say tax dodgers undermine economies in places such as Greece and Spain, threatening the euro as a whole.

It isn‘t just tax dodgers or “old money” in New York or London who use the accounts. New players have caught on.

For every $1 that Western companies invest in China, a Trib analysis found, the Chinese hide $4 offshore.

From 2000 to 2009, that net illicit outflow totaled $2.74 trillion, according to Global Financial Integrity, which champions tax reform in the developing world.

“Corruption in China dwarfs the rest of the world,” Global Financial spokesman Clark Gascoigne said. “The economists here are very pessimistic about China‘s long-term prospects.”

James Henry, owner of the Sag Harbor Group in New York, an international business consulting agency, said he disagrees with the methodology that Global Financial uses to reach its figure, but agrees that there is significant capital flight from China. He said at least half of world funds pass through shadow jurisdictions, at least on paper.

China soon will see the effects of corruption in the failure of infrastructure the Communist Party built during the past decade, said Sarah Freitas, one of the economists who wrote the Global Financial report.

Until then, the Chinese appear determined to shovel their newfound wealth out of the country. A 2011 study by China Merchants Bank and Bain & Co. found that nearly 60 percent of wealthy Chinese have or will invest overseas.

The British Virgin Islands is a favorite haven. The islands‘ 30,000 people host more than 400,000 corporations – at least 13 for each resident.

A SIMPLE, SHADY PROCESS

Offshore accounts can hide wealth and disguise losses. Enron Corp. used off-shore accounts to hide weakness in its balance sheet, records show.

The shadow economy reaches virtually every place on Earth.

Western Pennsylvania companies have more than 300 subsidiaries in countries that federal researchers deemed to be “financial privacy jurisdictions,” such as the Cayman Islands, Singapore and the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. Nationwide, doctors set up Caribbean island accounts to hide assets in case of malpractice suits.

Anyone with an Internet connection could, for example, create a company in the Indian Ocean nation of Mauritius that would control a shell company in Wyoming and be run by a trustee in the Central American country of Belize.

Because it can be done so easily for just a few hundred dollars, a husband sitting at home could hide nearly all of a couple‘s money before driving to a courthouse to file for divorce.

‘STEP AHEAD OF THE SHERIFF‘

Americans who hide money illegally in foreign accounts cost the United States up to $70 billion a year, the Congressional Research Service reports.

David Alan, a Greene County optometrist, set up accounts in the Bahamas and the Caribbean island of Nevis to avoid income taxes. He claimed just $38 in income – and $4 in federal taxes – for a year when actual amounts were $242,740 in income and $66,898 in taxes, prosecutors said. Alan went to federal prison in October after a former employee reported him to the IRS.

“It‘s a blatant defiance of the tax law,” said Sybil Smith, acting special agent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division at Pittsburgh‘s IRS office. “It shifts the tax burden to innocent taxpayers, and is that fair?”

Efforts to sweep up tax cheats largely have foundered. Since 2009 and the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, world leaders have stepped up enforcement but dodgers have moved money to more obscure hideouts.

Evasion was the tack followed by a Pittsburgh couple who opened a secret Swiss account in the 1960s. Because their bank was compelled to turn over account information in response to a U.S. indictment, the couple moved their money to a smaller, private Swiss bank and then to another. Finally, one of their grown children talked with Swiss bankers about coming clean to the IRS. U.S. prosecutors now are using the family to go after the bankers.

In all, more than 33,000 Americans voluntarily came forward in 2009, 2011 and this year to disclose $5 billion held in secret foreign accounts, the IRS said last month. No one knows how much remains hidden.

Rules that take effect in 2014 under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act require foreign banks to report holdings by Americans or be subject to a 30 percent withholding tax on money leaving the United States.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has led the international effort to bring havens into compliance with information-sharing agreements about hidden bank accounts. Still, the group cannot estimate how much money remains hidden, according to Monica Bhatia, head of the OECD‘s Global Forum on Transparency.

“It‘s a work in progress,” she said. “As we progress, we‘re making life more and more difficult for people to hide money anywhere.”

Nations that benefit from taxes and bank fees on offshore accounts have no self-interest in helping developed countries track down hidden money, said Robert Kudrle, a professor at the University of Minnesota. “Nobody really wants to do anything, other than stay one step ahead of the sheriff.”

COUNTRIES PAY HIGH COST

Though the numbers are “squishy,” corporations using mostly legal tax dodges through subsidiaries in offshore financial havens cost the United States $60 billion a year, said Jane Gravelle, a researcher with the Congressional Research Service.

Offshoring combined with transfer pricing – in which profits are shifted to low- or no-tax jurisdictions – plays a big role, the service reports.

U.S. companies hold $22 trillion abroad, according to a Commerce Department annual survey, and much of it pools in places known for low taxes and tight secrecy: $1.25 trillion is in Luxembourg and Mauritius holds $34 billion.

Even when companies say they are using legal means to avoid paying taxes, it can lead to disputes.

Drug company Merck paid $2.3 billion in back taxes and penalties as part of a 2007 agreement with the IRS; GlaxoSmithKline paid the feds $3.4 billion in back taxes and fines a year earlier because of a transfer pricing dispute.

Lawmakers could close legal loopholes but don‘t, said Dhammika Dharmapala, an economist at the University of Illinois College of Law and an expert on corporate tax havens.

“It should be a no-brainer,” said Joseph Stead, senior economic justice adviser for Christian Aid, a British charity that tracks lost taxes in developing countries. “You have governments all over the world in desperate need of revenues at the minute, and this would help them track it down. And yet they‘re not.”

SECRECY FIRST

Tax evasion no longer is the lead motivation for much of the money flowing into the shadow economy. Often, people simply want to hide what they have — either from law enforcement or lawsuits.

Websites offer to help small business owners protect assets from potential litigants and tell divorcees how to keep their former spouses from touching their assets. Money flowing from other countries ends up in states such as Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware with low reporting requirements.

Corruption, kickbacks, bribery and illicit trade pricing throughout developing countries accounted for most of the $8.4 trillion siphoned out in the century‘s first decade, according to Global Financial.

In developing countries, the amount of money leaking out often equals or exceeds aid flowing in, Stead and other experts said. Fixing that problem could reduce dependence on foreign aid.

Ethiopia‘s 94 million people are among the world‘s poorest, with per capita income of about $1,000 by CIA estimates. The country received $829 million in development assistance in 2009.

The Global Financial analysis found that the Ethiopian elite transferred $3.26 billion out of the country that year. The impact of that lost bounty, it said, is clear: “The people of Ethiopia are being bled dry.”

———

Editor‘s note: This story is one in a series on hidden money.

Lou Kilzer and Andrew Conte are staff writers for Trib Total Media. Kilzer can be reached at 412-380-5628 or lkilzer@tribweb.com. Conte can be reached at 412-320-7835 or andrewconte@tribweb.com.

Read more: http://triblive.com/news/2126360-74/tax-money-accounts-taxes-countries-financial-hide-billion-china-global#ixzz2Hwks4duq 
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PRETO ESCARUMBA, FILHO DA PUTA, CÃO (FOTOGRAFEM A SEGURANÇA DESTA PRETALHADA, NÓS ESTAMOS A CHEGAR!)

PRETO ESCARUMBA FILHO DA PUTA

QUE GRANDE TRISTEZA! QUE ÓDIO!

Eu sei que não costumam acompanhar o meu facebook, e portanto quando eu disser 2pessoal da rádio frequência" vocês não vão perceber.

Mas mesmo que não percebam, fiquem-se com esta história:

um amigo meu, vendia carros, não consegue vender há mais de 14 meses, nem único carro, hoje está com uma dor de dentes tão brutal, tão grande, sem dinheiro para o dentista, que não existem nos Hospitais, que foi á Urgência pedir analgésicos. Só lhe deram 2 comprimidos. Não tem dinheiro para comprar rigorosamente nem uma única caixa de anti-inflamatório. estava tão endoidecido com as dores, que tentou arrancar o dente sozinho, ficou com uma hemorragia, mas que também não tratam no Hospital. A família que já não o pode ver de tanto "emprestadado" lá lhe emprestou 15 euros, porque eu disse-lhe que havia uma dentista em Queluz que tirava dentes particularmente por esse preço, e ela só demora 10 minutos a aviar centenas de pessoas ao dia.

No café, uma rapariga que trabalha na boutique fina, onde só vão pretas cheias de dinheiro, contou-me que outro dia chegou lá uma Sra, que lhes pediu que lhes comprassem 3 laranjas e 3 tangerinas, que ela tinha roubado, porque ela e a filha já não comiam há 4 dias.

Até quando?

Romeo Dallaire, a Wikipedia diz que é "agente humanitário"

Este Sr. General francês foi para o Rwanda com os capacetes azuis, estabelecer a Paz, certo? estavam lá duas seitas de pretos, ús cocuanas e os kzuanas a matarem-se todos. dois dias de lá ter chegado, ou atingiram um soldado francês, talvez, ou o General "passou-se" dos cornos com a catinga, manda abrir fogo!! Quando a francepress lá chegou, eram quilómetros e quilómetros de macacos pelas estradas fora, todos mortos.

Depois esta merda foi para o conselho de segurança da ONU, e a Madelein Albright começa a dar na cabeça aos franceses. Os russos estavam calados, os chineses calados estavam, os japoneses liam o jornal, os ingleses calados, e os americanos todos fodidos por não lhes terem perguntado nada.

Entretanto, os franceses foram obrigados a dar nas orelhas do General, e ele respondeu á Imprensa francesa: Eu quero bem é que vocês se fodam! estabeleci a Paz! Não me chateiem nunca mais!" E até hoje.

Na Wikipedia, lá vem o General Dalloire, como "agente humanitário"

Eis o texto da Amnistia Internacional:

Gen. Romeo Dallaire defied U.N. orders to withdraw from Rwanda. Without the authority, manpower, or equipment to stop the slaughter, he saved the lives he could but nearly lost his sanity.

***

In an indifferent world, Gen. Romeo Dallaire and a few thousand ill-equipped U.N. peacekeepers were all that stood between Rwandans and genocide. The Canadian commander did what he could-did more than anyone else-but he sees his mission as a terrible failure and counts himself among its casualties.

After a 100-day reign of terror, some 800,000 Rwandan civilians were dead, most killed by their machete-wielding neighbors. Dallaire had sounded the alarm. He'd begged. He'd bellowed. He'd even disobeyed orders. "l was ordered to withdraw...by [then-U.N. Sec. Gen. Boutros] Boutros Ghali about seven, eight days into it. .. and I said to him, 'I can't, I've got thousands' -by then we had over 20,000 people-'in areas under our control,"' Dallaire said in a recent interview with Amnesty Now. The general's hands, always moving, rose beside his face as if to block the memories. "The situation was going to shit....And, I said, 'No, I can't leave."'

The U.N. had sent Dallaire and 2,600 troops, mainly from Bangladesh and Ghana, to Rwanda to oversee a peace accord between the region's two main groups, Hutus and Tutsis. But on April 6,1994, eight months after the peacekeepers arrived, a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, both Hutus, was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Hutu-controlled radio blamed the Tutsis and immediately began calling for their extermination, as well as for the murder of moderate Hutus considered friendly to the Tutsi "cockroaches." The broadcasts gave details on whom to kill and where to find them.

Dallaire and his troops were about to become spectators to genocide. As bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N. mandate that didn't even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt.

The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500 per flight-hour.

Dallaire's pain is palpable as he remembers his yearlong mission. His words, raw as a wound, make a grim contrast to the carefully parsed regrets of the world leaders who actually had the power to stop the genocide but turned away. He has just spoken at an Amnesty-sponsored conference in Atlanta on law and human rights, and he looks tired- older than his 56 years. His eyes are close set, raptor-like, but his gaze is warm and direct. "When you're in command, you are in command," he says. "There's 800,000 gone, the mission turned into catastrophe, and you're in command. I feel I did not convince my superiors and the international community," he says. "I didn't have enough of the skills to be able to influence that portion of the problem."

Three days after the Rwandan killings began, with Dallaire's troops running short of rations as well as ammunition, about l,000 European troops arrived in Kigali. The general watched with frustration as the well-armed, well-fed Westerners landed and left again as soon as they'd evacuated their own nationals. Then, after Hutu militias killed ~o Belgian paratroopers, Brussels withdrew all of its peacekeepers (the only significant Western contingent and the only one that was properly equipped) from the U.N. mission. Dallaire's depleted force was on its own.

Even as the already desperate situation worsened, Washington called for a complete withdrawal of peacekeepers. On April 21, after international pressure, the U.S. agreed to a limited force and supported a Security Council resolution slashing the force to 270 peacekeepers. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright accurately described the tiny force as enough "to show the will of the international community."

Remarkably, with scant resources-indeed, with only one satellite telephone for the whole mission-Dallaire was able to maintain safe areas for those 20,000 terrorized Rwandans. But he could do little else, and the killing continued.

Eight years later, in daylight and in dreams, Dallaire still hears the cries of wounded children, the weeping of survivors, the voice of the man who died at the other end of a phone line as the general listened. He still can't escape the smell of death, the memories of hacked-off limbs scattered on the ground, and worst of all, he says, the "thousands upon thousands of sets of eyes in the night, in the dark, just floating and looking back" at him in anger, accusation, or eternal pleading.

With counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, and a handful of pills a day, he is working to use his experiences to prevent another Rwanda. But the baleful ghosts remain, and the book he is writing about the slaughter is rousing them. "As I go over what I have written," he says, "more and more I see lost opportunities; more and more I see errors because of lack of intelligence or simply from mis-assessing a situation. I'd take a decision on the phone, and people would die within seconds. I was getting pressure from everybody not to use my soldiers." His voice fades to a whisper . "It's horrific because every day decisions were taken on life and death. Every day. Real people, real people."

We are sitting in a dark taxi and I can't see his face. He maybe remembering when the Belgian senate blamed him "at least partially" for the deaths of its paratroopers. Or he may be listening to his Rwandan voices. As we near his hotel, he says, "l always have people with me. Like tonight, I'll ask the guys at the desk to just check on me because I'm not supposed to be alone because it can go to extremes."

Dallaire says that about 20 percent of troops and humanitarian workers on missions like his suffer much the same thing, as do 5 to 10 percent of diplomats. "They are casualties," he tells me. "High suicide rates, booze, drugs, pornography, finding themselves on skid row."

When Dallaire returned to Canada from Rwanda, he tried to drink himself into a stupor of forgetfulness. He raged at his family. He tried to kill himself In 2000 a few months after he was medically released from the Canadian Forces, he was found passed out drunk under a park bench in Hull, Quebec. "He was curled up in a ball," photographer Stephane Beaudoin, alerted by a police report, later told the Ottawa Citizen. "I never took a photo. I felt sad for him. I thought, 'This man has done so much for us. How did he come to be here?"'

Dallaire's reluctance to give himself credit for what he managed to accomplish certainly contributed to his breakdown. Asked directly, he admits saving people, "sometimes by the thousands, you know, just by giving appropriate orders to my troops." Past and present merge as Dallaire remembers one day when he, his driver, and aide-de-camp "were making our way through a large population move in the hills. It was raining and cold because it's fairly high up. And there this woman was, right there by the road, and people are walking around her, and she is giving birth. And so, as we're inching, the child came out. The woman, already emaciated, sort of picked up the child and then fell back. So we jumped out, you know, because nobody was stopping. The mother was dead. We tried to wrap the baby up as best we could, brought it back, and then other people sorted it out."

But Dallaire quickly returns to the people he failed to save and to the limits of his skills. "Thirty years ago when I joined the army, if somebody mentioned human rights, we immediately equated them with communists," Dallaire now says. The former career officer has come to believe that, along with the ability to attack and kill, soldiers must learn peacekeeping, negotiation, and human rights preservation. That belief is reflected in the war stories he chooses to tell. Rather than tales of derring-do, he offers anecdotes that plumb the moral ambiguities of modern soldiering.

"A young officer is entering a village," Dallaire recounts. "The village has been wiped out except for a few women and children still alive [in a ditch filled with bodies]. There is 30 percent AIDS in that area. There is blood all over that place, no rubber gloves. Does the platoon commander order his troops to get in there, into the ditch risking AIDS, and help?" The question, it turns out, is not an exercise in armchair ethics. "When I asked the platoon commanders, those from 23 of the 26 nations that sent forces said they would order their troops to keep marching. Commanders from three nations- Holland, Ghana, and Canada-were saved the complexity of the question because by the time they turned around their troops were already in the ditch."

Dallaire continues, his hands alive, his eyes still, the Gallic-tinted accent of his native Quebec growing more pronounced. "Or a soldier is watching two girls, 13 or 14, both with children on their backs, with a crowd spurring on the one with a machete to kill the other girl because she is different. What does the soldier do? Shoot the girl with the machete, possibly killing her baby? Shoot into the crowd? Do nothing?"

"Should I myself," he asks, "negotiate with a militia commander with gore on his shirt and his hands from the morning's work, making a joke, to get him to withdraw his gang so I can move thousands of people [to safety] Or do I pull out my pistol and shoot him between the eyes?"

"The corporal," says; Dallaire, returning to the soldier watching the machete-wielding girl, "tried to negotiate his away through the crowd to stop the attack but headquarters in his home country ordered him not to intervene. That corporal is now an injured ex-corporal," Dallaire says, and like the ex-general himself, a casualty of post-traumatic stress.

For all the blame he heaps on himself, Dallaire also faults the strictures that bound him in 1994 and that will have to change if the world is to avoid another Rwanda. The institution of peacekeeping missions, he says, is deeply flawed. Even if he had received the political and humanitarian training the job demanded, the U.N.'s rules would have robbed him of the ability to use his military skills. With thousands of civilians begging for protection as they were hunted down in their homes and churches,

"I could tell [the peacekeepers] to do things," he says, "but they would check with their country. The troops are under my operational command, but they remained under the ultimate command of their nations, so. . . if a national capital feels that a [rescue] mission is unwarranted, or too risky, or something, the soldiers can turn around and say, 'No, I can't do it."'

Asked to name one of the countries that ordered its soldiers not to move injured Rwandans to safe areas, even when Dallaire told them to, the general hesitates for a long time before saying, "Bangladesh." It was the Ghanaians, he adds, who performed most humanely.

With the exception of the Red Cross, the non-governmental organizations were clueless, Dallaire says. "When they started sending people in, they kept sending me assessment teams. Assessment teams! 'Listen, I don't need a goddamn assessment team. I need food, medical supplies, water for 2 million people, and I've got to feed them twice a day. Get the shit in here. We'll sort out the distribution.' "

If Dallaire's anger at those who did too little is fierce, his fury at world leaders who feigned ignorance and did nothing is white hot. He cannot forget, for example, that President Clinton stopped for a few hours in Kigali in 1998, after it was all over, and with the engines of Air Force One running, said he was sorry; he didn't know.

Or that David Rawson, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda at the time of the mass murders, waited a month before declaring a "state of disaster," and then dismissed the slaughter as "tribal killings." Calling what happened in Rwanda "tribal" conflict made intervention seem futile. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, who had pushed hard for the U.S. to "neutralize" Hutu hate radio, later explained to author Samantha Power, "What I was told was, 'Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time."'

The designation of "tribal" conflict also nicely avoided the word "genocide." Had a major power or the U.N. invoked that term in time, all states that were signatories of the 1948 convention on genocide would have been obliged to condemn the slaughter and act to stop it.

Avoiding the word did not however avoid the fact. "They knew how many people were dying," Dallaire says, no matter what word they used. "The world is racist," he says bitterly. ,' "Africans don't count; Yugoslavians do. More people were killed, injured, internally displaced, and refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than in the whole eight to nine years of the Yugoslavia campaign," he says, and there are still peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia while Rwanda is again off the radar. f "Why didn't the world react to scenes where women were held as shields so nobody could shoot back while the militia shot into the | crowd?" he asks. "Where... boys were drugged up and turned into child soldiers, slaughtering families?...Where girls and women were systematically raped before they were killed? Babies ripped out of their stomachs? ...Why didn't the world come?"

Dallaire supplies his own answer: "Because there was no self-interest....No oil. They didn't come because some humans are [considered] less human than others."

Nonetheless, Dallaire still calls himself an optimist. Despite its troubles, he believes that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which operates out of Arusha, Tanzania, "is one of those great potential instruments of the future." His own job, he says, won't be done until the tribunal finishes its investigation. "My duty as force commander who ultimately became head of mission will not end until the Arusha Tribunal says it doesn't need me to testify anymore, or when the tribunal decides to hold me accountable."

There is virtually no chance the international court will blame him. The question is whether he'll one day stop blaming himself. "The work I'm doing helps," he says, referring to his campaign to stop the use of children as soldiers. Counseling seems to be helping, too.

"One day after a couple hours of therapy," he says, "we're sitting there, and, you know, to-ing and fro-ing. I all of a sudden felt joy in my stomach. You know when you feel happy in your tummy? And I had not felt that in the seven years since Rwanda. All of a sudden I said, 'jeez, I feel, I feel better."' Dallaire stopped, tilted his head as if to listen to his own words and broke into a smile as sweet as warm winter sun. "My therapist let me savor that-and then we talked. And at the end of it, I said, I think I have moved from survival to living. And maybe to getting better."

The world, he knows, has not. Without the political will and institutional mechanisms to stop it, "Rwanda" will happen again.

 

PORTUGAL'S PM AND HIS CHIMPANZE FAMILIY, 3 BLACK MONKEYS AND AN' ALBINE SLEEPING AT S.BENTO