AUGUST 2006
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Wednesday, 30th August,2006
THE GREAT MEXICAN STANDOFF
If you thought the international class war was over, take a quick trip to Mexico and you'll think again. Far be it for a simple, working journalist to stoop to a cliche but what's happening does actually fit the classic definition of a Mexican stand-off. Here's Sophie McNeill in teeming Mexico City.
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Wednesday, 30th August,2006
DR MASSOUMEH EBTEKAR
Since he came to power, just over a year ago now, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has just about monopolised the world’s headlines. He has unapologetically advanced Iran's nuclear cause, ferociously questioned Israel’s right to exists and cast a pox on pretty much anybody’s house in the entire West.
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To many the militantly Islamic Iranian President is the world's current Public Enemy Number One? Last month at a press conference in Brisbane I met Dr Massoumeh Ebtekar, who until Ahmadinejad came to power last year was vice-president of Iran. This week, Dr Ebtekar agreed to talk to Dateline, from Tehran. -
Wednesday, 30th August,2006
EAST TIMOR - DOWNFALL OF A PRIME MINISTER
Two months back, when East Timor's then Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, was dramatically forced to resign after weeks of violence and chaos, from many quarters, there was an audible sigh of relief. Gone was the man variously described as undemocratic, alleged to have armed a hit squad to eliminate his political opponents and a crypto-bloody-Marxist to boot! Alkatiri, of course, maintains he was the victim of a concerted effort to oust him. Meanwhile, Australia has spent millions of dollars supporting the idea of constitutional democracy in East Timor and has hundreds of troops there maintaining the fragile peace.
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But, post the violence, there are key strategic and security issues at stake for both countries. Indeed, as we'll see in a moment, new information is coming to light that demands scrutiny. Dateline sent David O'Shea and John Martinkus, two Dateline reporters with a long history of covering East Timor, back to the troubled fledgling nation to our near North. -
Wednesday, 23rd August,2006
MADAME PRESIDENT
'Segomania' is a pretty odd term you have probably never heard before. Dateline certainly hadn't, until Dateline embarked on a profile of a French politician called Segolene Royal. The name itself is damned near reason enough to do a story on her. A recent poll named Segolene Royal as France's most popular politician. Not only a woman, but an unabashed socialist, Madame Royal believes she will be the next French president. On the face of it, a fair enough call. But in a classically Gallic twist, the biggest challenge she faces comes not just from within her own party but from within her own home. Her arch-rival for the job of Socialist presidential candidate is, wait for it, her own husband. George Negus shook his head too when he first heard that. But we're talking here about la belle France. On a recent trip into provincial France, Ginny Stein experienced Segomania up close.
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Wednesday, 23rd August,2006
DR ERAN LERMAN INTERVIEW
Meanwhile, as the Lebanese tried to put their lives and homes back together, across the border in Israel the angst and political fallout from the war has been both unexpected and considerable. Many are questioning Prime Minister Olmert's handling of the conflict and whether he is the right man to lead Israel in these precarious times. Also at issue is whether his Kadima Party, that heads the country's governing coalition, will survive. Earlier this evening George Negus spoke from Jerusalem with Dr Eran Lerman, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee's Middle East Office. The AJC is an influential think-tank. Dr Lerman served in the Israeli Defence Force, where he was a colonel in military intelligence.
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Wednesday, 23rd August,2006
THE SIEGE OF BEIRUT
In recent days, the world has welcomed the cease-fire - albeit a brittle one - between the Israelis and Hezbollah. Hopefully, a lasting peace is in the making. Of course, the citizens of Beirut have been there and done that before. During years of civil war in the '70s and '80s, the resilient Beirutis also held on grimly as missiles and bombs rained down. Since then, billions have been poured into rebuilding the city, literally from the ground up, and it looked as if Beirut was once again a vibrant, cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. Over the past violent month, however, the bad old days returned and large parts of the Lebanese capital, once famously dubbed "the Paris of the Middle East" is these days looking more like Stalingrad after the Second World War. Dateline reporter Nick Lazaredes was in Beirut before and after the announcement of the cease-fire.
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Wednesday, 9th August,2006
FAKE MEDICINE – AFRICA’S SCOURGE
In Africa more children die from malaria than any other cause, but in a shameful scam worth billions they're being given counterfeit drugs.
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The biggest killer of children in Africa is not aids, war or famine, its malaria. Now criminal gangs and companies have flooded the market with drugs that may contain nothing more than chalk.
One doctor has launched a crusade to rid Nigeria of this latest scourge. As she descibes it, "the fake drugs racket is one of the greatest evils of our time. It is mass murder. It is terrorism against public health."
Elizabeth Tadic uncovers the fake drug racket in Africa and asks why so little has been done. -
Wednesday, 9th August,2006
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV PART II
Now, as promised, the second part of our recent conversation with Mikhail Sergeyavich Gorbachev. In our first chat, Mr Gorbachev gave us some unique insights on the conflict in Lebanon. But this time, more the man himself. History has actually left us with not one, but two Gorbachevs - the international hero who presided over the end of the Cold War. And the other - the former Communist apparatchik whose radical glasnost and perestroika reforms ruined his country's economy and plunged his people into poverty and despair. So you could ask - will the real Gorby please stand up.
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Wednesday, 9th August,2006
THE ROAD FROM DAMASCUS
Wish Dateline could report otherwise, but the four futile weeks of tit-for-tat killing by the two warring sides in Lebanon and Israel, both of whom are absolutely convinced that they, and they alone, are the victims, continues unabated - with an early settlement little more than wishful thinking. In recent days, the Lebanese Prime Minister broke down in tears as Condoleeza Rice, grasping at straws, urged "everyone who has any influence with all the parties, to talk to them." We can only suppose the US Secretary of State was referring to the S and I words - Syria and Iran, now both acknowledged as critical to ending the conflict. Dateline reporter, Nick Lazaredes left here last week and made his way to Syria. Here is his report from Damascus, the capital and current heartland of George W. Bush's so-called "axis of evil".
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Wednesday, 2nd August,2006
MEAN STREETS SAO PAULO
And now to a conflict of a very different kind in a very different part of the world, but another with no resolution in sight. Imagine the reaction here in this country if criminal gangs, based in the jails, were to order the killing of as many police as possible and, within 48 hours, over 40 police had been shot dead? Well, this is precisely what happened in Brazil's largest city, San Paolo, back in May. But the story gets worse. The Sao Paolo police retaliated and after a week of fighting, 500 corpses littered the streets of the city slums. As it turns out, this appalling killing spree is just the latest exchange in a war between the overcrowded city's desperately poor and its police. Disturbingly, Olivia Rousset reports that there appears to be no resolution, let alone any justice, in sight. A warning though - Olivia's report does contain some pretty disturbing images.
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Wednesday, 2nd August,2006
MAYOR YONA YAHAV
Now though, an Israeli perspective. Last week Dateline showed you some on-the-spot footage from south Lebanon - Hezbollah territory - vacated over the last three weeks by hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from the devastating Israeli air and ground barrages. Over the border, over the same period, northern Israeli towns and villages have been the targets of sustained Hezbollah rocket attacks. One of the earliest to be hit was the port city of Haifa, Israel's third largest city after Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. This afternoon, early morning their time, George Negus talked to Yona Yahev, the Mayor of Haifa - usually a quarter of a million strong, but right now, considerably less.
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Wednesday, 2nd August,2006
DR BUTHAINA SHAABAN
For decades now, Syria has exerted considerable pressure on Lebanese politics, but was effectively thrown out of the country by the UN following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri early last year. So what is the connection between Damascus and Hezbollah? And do Syrians now regard themselves as a likely target in this widening war? Early today, George Negus spoke from Damascus to Buthaina Shaaban, Syria's Minister of Expatriates. She is a cabinet minister in the Assad Government and spokesperson for the President himself.
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Wednesday, 2nd August,2006
HEZBOLLAH BACKGROUNDER
If there was any doubt how temporary this week's cease-fire was going to be in the horrible Israeli-Hezbollah dog-fight in the Middle East, it is well and truly over now. Today, thousands more IDF troops poured into Lebanon, and Hezbollah rocketted northern Israel. Meanwhile, Israel's Shimon Peres appeared to be at odds with Condoleezza Rice when, despite increasingly desperate international calls for an immediate cessation of the fighting, he warned that the killing could go on for weeks.
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Meanwhile, the blame game continues apace with Hezbollah accusing the Israelis of genocide and the Israelis accusing Hezbollah of not just sparking the current crisis, but of working with Syria and Iran to destroy the State of Israel.
When Israel first invaded Lebanon back in 1978, and then again in 1982, their objective was to remove the old PLO from its northern border. They got rid of the PLO but their incursion into Lebanon gave rise to a new and equally defiant foe we now know as Hezbollah. Hezbollah, on the one hand, has gone on to become a popular nationalist political party in Lebanon. But, on the other, it has extremely cosy ties with Iran and Syria, sworn enemies of Israel. In a moment, interviews with a senior minister in the Assad Government in Damascus and the Mayor of Israel's port city of Haifa - a target of Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets. But first, from our own Dateline archives, just what is it that the IDF are finding so hard to defeat in southern Lebanon?
