<a href=www.thestar.com>The Toronto Star Apr. 20, 2003. 09:10 AM OAKLAND ROSS FEATURE WRITER

There are roughly 6.3 billion people in the world. Not all of them live in Iraq.

In fact, only about 0.37 per cent of them do, while the rest live someplace else.

Granted, this is not the impression that TV viewers — or newspaper readers — might have gained in recent weeks, as the eyes and ears of the globe have been straining toward Baghdad, bent on registering every conceivable detail of the U.S.-led war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (now better known as former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein).

Since the desert hostilities began on March 19, when the first U.S. missile of the war lit the night sky above the Iraqi capital, almost every other news story on the planet — from a crackdown on political dissidence in Cuba to a still unexplained massacre in northeastern Congo — has been pushed to the bottom of the headlines, shunted from TV screens and all but ignored by the scribes, pundits and populace of this war-weary orb called Earth.

There have been exceptions, of course — notably, the rapid and alarming spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has jetted from China to Hong Kong, Singapore and beyond. Metropolitan Toronto has been especially hard hit by the new and sometimes lethal virus.

Concern about SARS has at times equalled and even overshadowed the Iraq war in the hearts, minds and media outlets of Toronto.

But for the most part, here as elsewhere, the past month has been dominated by images of bombs in the night over Baghdad, tanks and armoured personnel carriers rattling across the Iraqi desert, and the rudely inverted statues of a widely reviled man.

Meanwhile, far from the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the rest of the world has blundered on — unnoticed perhaps, but undeterred.

Herewith, as a service to readers, the Star provides some snapshots of the world beyond Iraq. This is what news junkies may have missed while waiting for Saddam to fall.

• First stop: Venezuela.

When last featured in the news, before being obscured by the dust storms of Iraq, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez seemed poised to survive a general strike called by his opponents in an effort to force his resignation.

Last December and early this year, the oil-rich but conflict-ridden South American republic tottered on the brink of outright civil war, but the left-leaning Chavez seemed determined to tough out the street demonstrations and the strife, not to mention the near strangulation of his country's economy by various sectors opposed to his rule.

Well, he seems to have made it.

The former paratroop officer, who once served two years in prison for leading a failed military coup of his own, is still in power and has lately taken to criss-crossing the length and breadth of Venezuela in efforts to rally support for his presidency, an office that at least twice he has seemed likely to lose.

In fact, just over a year ago, he himself was temporarily overthrown in a coup. That upheaval took place on April 12, 2002.

But the voluble and combative ruler resurfaced two days later and was restored to office, where he has continued to arouse his supporters and enrage his opponents with interminable speeches spiced with searing invective and populist rhetoric.

Political unrest continues, and the Venezuelan economy has plummeted, but Chavez's opponents seem to accept that they cannot topple him — or anyway not now. Instead, they are turning their attention toward the midpoint of the president's six-year term in August, when they will be legally entitled to seek his peaceful removal in a national referendum.

Chavez, who may not be everyone's idea of a statesman but is surely a survivor, has vowed to fight them every step of the way.

• And so to Cuba, where long-time ruler Fidel Castro — a close friend of Chavez, as it happens — chose the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq as the perfect moment to launch a harsh crackdown on mounting dissent.

The severity of his response stunned Cuban reformers and outraged governments and human-rights agencies abroad.

In all, 75 Cuban opposition activists were rounded up, to be jailed, tried and convicted in an exercise of repression whose severity is possibly unmatched in Cuba since the 1960s.

Long jail sentences were imposed against all of the detainees, ranging in most cases from 14 to 28 years.

• On April 12, in a separate case, a Cuban firing squad executed three men who had been convicted of trying to commandeer a ferry on Havana bay in a failed attempt to abscond to Florida, the latest in a recent string of mostly unsuccessful hijackings. The executions followed brief, secret trials and have been roundly criticized abroad.

Cuban authorities cast much of the blame for the crackdown on the U.S. government, which they accuse of aggressively fomenting rebellion within Cuba while not doing enough to discourage Cubans who try to flee the island.

Still, Castro's heavy-handed response seems certain to isolate his regime from democratic friends such as Canada and the European Union, while only deepening the rancour that already exists between Washington and Havana.

• As the war in Iraq was raging toward Baghdad, another, far bloodier conflict finally seemed to be edging toward a close — the long spiral of horrors that has convulsed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in West Africa since 1998.

Earlier this month, most of the parties to the war — including the armies of at least six neighbouring countries, in addition to a welter of rival armed factions within the Congo itself — finally signed a peace accord hammered out in South Africa. Not a moment too soon.

Last week in New York, an organization called the International Rescue Committee announced that the Congolese war has claimed the lives of at least 3.3 million people during its five-year span, making it "the deadliest documented conflict in African history."

Unfortunately, the death toll continues to rise.

Only days after the signing of the Congo peace accord in Cape Town, reports began to filter out of northeastern Congo concerning a series of apparently co-ordinated massacres committed in and around a town called Drodro, in which upwards of 1,000 people were feared dead.

So far, details of the atrocities remain uncertain, although it seems the carnage was not as great as initially thought — perhaps 150 to 350 people may have died. Still, the latest killings are harrowing evidence that the only reliable peace accords are the ones written, not on paper, but in the hearts of men.

It is not yet clear who was responsible for the recent massacres or why.

• Farther south on the same continent, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe — who apparently bases his notion of statecraft on the example set by Saddam Hussein — has had an awkward few weeks.

Intolerant of dissent in any form, Mugabe was undoubtedly dismayed this month when the opposition Movement for Democratic Change held a protest rally in Bulawayo, the southern African country's second largest city.

But his efforts to make his displeasure felt have lacked their usual sting.

First, Zimbabwean police detained Gibson Sabanda, the MDC's vice-president, for his role in organizing the protest. But they released him on April 7, a week after his arrest. Then, they promptly detained the organization's chief spokesperson, Paul Themba-Nyathia, and tossed him in jail instead.

That didn't work, either. Through error or oversight, the authorities failed to charge Themba-Nyathia properly, and a high court judge ordered his release four days later.

If Zimbabwean politics were played with bats, balls and wickets, Mugabe would be falling behind in the score. Unfortunately, the septuagenarian president's game is anything but cricket, and he makes most of the rules.

Still, Mugabe has had a sticky fortnight, and the Zimbabwean opposition has scored a few, which must count for something, somewhere.

• In Israel and the occupied territories, hostilities continue. A Canadian serving in the Israeli army was shot and killed on Tuesday in the West Bank city of Nablus, after a Palestinian emerged from a building under siege and began firing a pistol. Daniel Mandel, 24, of Toronto was shot dead and another soldier was wounded.

The armed Palestinian, identified as Mazen Fraitekh, was also killed in the shooting.

In another incident the same day, two Israeli workers were killed and three were wounded when a Palestinian threw grenades and opened fire near a truck crossing between Israel and Gaza.

• Finally, on a happier note, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has declared voodoo to be an official religion.

Now, Haiti's thousands of voodoo priests — known as houngans — will be able to exercise many functions formerly denied them, such as performing legal marriage ceremonies.

The African-based faith is practised by many and perhaps most of the country's more than 8 million people.

For further developments in these and other stories, check your newspaper. Normal coverage has resumed.

Oregon Magazine Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols 

The liberals, or whatever they are calling themselves today (in addition to Democrats), are shaping up for a new assault on America. They've listened to the gripes of the public and hope to co-opt those complaints for their own purposes. Their focus will be the commercial media, especially  television. To the public, TV shows are often silly, or too violent, or they set a bad moral example for our youngsters;  the endless commercials are annoying, and news reporting is often biased and incomplete. Those are the complaints. 

To understand why the liberals are interested in these complaints, consider how they have in the past taken our concerns and irritations and created from them anti-American movements. For many decades citizens were active in improving and conserving the quality of our environment. Singly and in groups they began taking steps to preserve our waterways, forests and air quality.  During the seventies and eighties radical Leftist front organizations launched  the environmental movement, with lobbyists in Congress petitioning for greater and greater government control over the uses of private and public land, assuming authority as 'the experts,' acquiring massive government grants to fund their activism,  and eventually almost replacing citizen activism. 

Another example was civil rights. Few Americans were comfortable with institutionalized discrimination against the nation's black citizens.  Martin Luther King Jr,. along with many other citizens black and white, brought the issue to a head, and pressured our politicians to end the apartheid laws.  The Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress and the nation moved giant steps toward ending racism in America.  But the radical Left within the Democratic  Party seized the opportunity to alter the course of this development by playing on another of our concerns: after generations of being held back, would blacks be able to integrate fully and catch up in education and employment?  Before we had opportunity to even consider the tremendous progress blacks had already made despite discrimination, in areas such as their higher rates of employment than whites, higher rates of marriage, their substantial rates of property and business ownership, the Democrats convinced blacks to accept not the end of apartheid but a reformed apartheid in the shape of State-subsidized dependency -- welfare, public housing, and university  and job preferences. 

In these cases and others the public yielded to the Left's co-option of cultural progress.  Changes brought about through citizen involvement usually moves forward in faltering steps, with a lot of questioning about goals, consequences and legalities.  On the other hand, the Left never falters;  its untested solutions are presented and promoted aggressively and confidently, organizations are formed swiftly to help shape government regulations and to gain access to government funding. Citizens hesitantly step aside, allowing these juggernauts to forge ahead.  Usually we're only too thankful to let someone else do the work. 

A funny thing has happened over the past fifty years, though. The bright hopes for full integration and participation of our black citizens has become instead a massive movement of divisivenessness, engendering suspicion, anger, and resentment on the part of both races.  Environmentalism has become a tool for social engineering rather than a genuine commitment  to the preservation of our environment for our use and enjoyment. The Left may not again find us so gullibly acquiescing to their radical solutions. 

In their book Our Media Not Theirs,  McChesney and Nichols propose to solve our dissatisfactions with the media,  television and newspapers, too,  by placing them under the ownership and management of the government, funded entirely by taxes.  They attempt to frame this government take-over of the media as essential to the survival of our democracy, but the attempts are weak and unconvincing. 

Though they insist that every citizen should have a voice in what is offered on TV (and newspapers and magazines), they present no method by which this could be accomplished other than to suggest that most programming would focus on narrow local issues and interests.  Decisions about the presentation and content of national and international news presumably would be made by government bureaucrats. Expensive entertainment programs would avoid violent cop shows, insipid sit-coms and soap operas, or crude reality shows.  They would instead be uplifting and educational. 

Under the authors' plan, "media users" (currently called "consumers") would have access to programs that reflect "the best judgement of media workers, not the surreptitious bribe of a commercial interest."  Media workers, whoever they might be, would give us their best shot at providing programs that are good for us, rather than leaving us to the tender mercies of the  advertisers who will give us precisely the programming we want if only we'll buy their products. In a contest between government 'media workers' educating us, and commercial media anxious to learn what most appeals to us and trying to provide it,  most of us would choose to endure the commercials. Logically, commercial media seems more "ours" than publicly owned media. 

There's a thread of resentment hinted at throughout the book, resentment that the authors' opinions and desires are being ignored, and they consider it their best bet to be heard if the government has control and forces the rest of us to listen, to not be distracted by our own, to them, petty interests.  Consider who wrote forewords to the book: Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader.  Outside of academia and those who believe in massive government control of everything, who listens to them? 

Most astonishing in the book are the exhortations that Americans have a lot to learn about improving our media from other countries -- such as East Timor, New Zealand, Venezuela -- countries whose movement toward government funding and control of the media is making good progress. 

The book is a not very coherent diatribe against all private property ownership -- including copyright and patents -- which is in fact the very basis of American liberties and prosperity.  The authors suggest that in our efforts to reform the media we should connect with other organizations and movements such as the unions, minorities, the feminists, and other special interest groups.  They pooh-pooh the importance of the internet and the rising star of Fox News. They also insult America's President Bush as the "moronic child of privilege."  The authors seem to have little use for conservatives, or anyone to the right of Robert Fisk.  The book will appeal most to those who enjoy blaming big business and global free markets for their personal problems as well as the world's ills. The authors are confident of success in ridding the media of commercialism, citing the opening doors in Congress from such representatives as Ernest Hollings, Jesse Jackson Jr. and John Conyers, very liberal Democrats all.. 

McChesney and Nichols want the media to become the new "issue" for us, as the environment and civil rights have been before, and then to leave it to them to guide the way. But their record has not been a happy one for us; powerful Leftist organizations coupled with government ownership and regulation have increased the nation's ills, not reduced them.  Much better that we muddle along, getting information and making our individual voices heard over the internet, in public meetings, making changes through our vote and through our very powerful 'wallet vote.'  We've learned our lesson about the Left's 'solutions'; we'll  willingly shoulder the burden of shaping the media to our own liking. 

Peggy Whitcomb 

www.vheadline.com Posted: Friday, March 14, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

CECODAP child advocacy group director Oscar Misle says the new media law should clearly establish citizen and media owner’s responsibilities. “The politicization of the debate on the social responsibility law should not become an obstacle to establishing norms on TV norms as part of integral protection of children and teenagers … we must reach the widest consensus possible.”

Misle argues that TV cannot be blamed for all the violence and evils and people who support a better programming should not be branded as "Chavists."

The independence of the new regulating body, Misle points out, does raise concern because of the composition of the new National Institute of TV and Radio (INTVR), which is a dependency of the Infrastructure Ministry ... "8 of the 11 members are appointed by the National Executive (5) and National Assembly (3) respectively.

Misle insists that government TV and radio stations must comply with legal dispositions, including spots reserved for Executive

www.vheadline.com Posted: Friday, March 14, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

El Nacional newspaper has officially apologized to Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) president, Ali Rodriguez Araque for a report involving his deceased son in alleged illegal business deals.

Rabid anti-Chavist columnist, Ibeyise Pacheco wrote a piece on February 14 accusing Rodriguez and his son, Ali Rodriguez Garaton of shady gasoline distribution deals.

El Nacional CEO Manuel Sucre admits that the piece was not accurate or truthful but defends the top bracket journalist, pointing to her correction of the error in her February 28 column.

The mistake is attributed to one of Pacheco’s sources but Sucre insists that El Nacional's editorial policy is not to damage reputations or the memory of the deceased.

“We ratify our apologies to the family and reiterate our disposition to publish any reply from Dr. Ali Rodriguez Araque and members of his family.”

Sunday, February 23  

For a second, I worried it had been a one-off. But reading this AP story I’m more and more convinced that the foreign media’s coverage of the crisis is now shifting very significantly.

Up until a few weeks ago, incidents like last night’s shootout outside PDVSA (two blocks from where I live, incidentally!) were covered in a scrupulously agnostic way – especially by the agencies. You kept running into phrases like “a shootout ensued,” or “each side blamed the other for starting the violence,” or “after an armed confrontation, X people lay wounded” – formulations specifically designed not to place the blame on one side or the other. And last night’s shootout was, at least as I saw it, murky enough that it could, imaginably, have been the work of agents provocateurs. It’s not likely, of course: as per usual, all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it was yet another unprovoked chavista attack, but it’s not entirely impossible that some shady right-wing group could have done it to raise trouble – absent footage of known chavistas shooting, how can you be sure?

In the past, that level of doubt would have been enough to elicit the wishy-washy, non-committal language described above. It drove opposition minded Venezuelans crazy reading stuff like that, because many times the weight of evidence against the government seemed so crushing that refusing to assign blame sometimes bordered on complicity with government-sponsored violence. There were some very unfortunate episodes where chavistas were demonstrably, evidently to blame for serious attacks - more than a couple of incidents were even photographed and videotaped and really left no room for doubt - and yet the foreign papers were just not willing to come out and say it clearly.

That’s one problem we don’t have in the post-Fernández-arrest era. The AP write-up is astonishingly unambiguous in assigning blame over last night’s shootout:

"Gunmen loyal to Chavez ambushed a group of policemen overnight, killing one officer and wounding five others, said Miguel Pinto, chief of the police motorcycle brigade. The officers were attacked Saturday night as they returned from the funeral for a slain colleague and passed near the headquarters of the state oil monopoly, which has been staked out by Chavez supporters since December. After a series of attacks on Caracas police by pro-Chavez gunmen, Police Chief Henry Vivas ordered officers to avoid oil company headquarters. But the funeral home is located nearby.

'We never thought it would come to this,' Pinto said.

Chavez's government has seized thousands of weapons from city police on the pretext that Vivas has lost control of the 9,000-member department. Critics allege Chavez is disarming police while secretly arming pro-government radicals."

Now, the journalists reading this know how the sausage is made. This is not the way you write a story if you mean to leave any doubt in your readers' minds about who's responsible for the killing. It’s a gutsy way to write, really - and refreshing to see in the typically bland AP. It just goes to bolster my theory that Chávez screwed up big time with Carlos Fernández – the speed with which the benefit of the doubt has vanished is amazing. He can expect to get raked over the coals abroad for every little slip up now. Once the media start treating you this way, it’s a matter of time until you end up with full-on pariah status. This shift has been a long time in the making. Now, it’s happening.