Observer & Busness 27 Mar 2012 - Oman Daily Observer

A bitter pill
By Louise Redvers
MANY white South Africans conscripted to ght for
the apartheid military in Angola still struggle to
swallow the bitter pill that their battle landed on the
wrong side of history.
Known here as the Border War, apartheid South Africa
sent troops to support Angola’s UNITA ghters, backed by
the United States against the then-Marxist MPLA government
and its Cuban allies.
The Cold War conict was depicted at the time as a battle
to stave off communism and black liberation, and until recently
few veterans dared talk about their experiences for fear
of upsetting South Africa’s ruling black majority.
In the past year there has been a surge in dialogue about the
Border War, including a raft of self-published soldiers’ memoirs,
some deemed insensitively nostalgic even racist.
But there have been some more considered accounts, and
several lm documentaries, including Marius van Niekerk’s
award-winning My Heart of Darkness which follows four exconscripts,
black and white, on an emotional journey back into
Angola. “I am trying to raise awareness of what happened in
Angola and lm is a good way to do that,” said Van Niekerk,
himself a Border War veteran.
“There is a lot of unresolved trauma, a misunderstanding
between different sides, we haven’t talked enough about how
we feel and we need to.”
Also adding to the discourse is the re-staging of Anthony
Akerman’s controversial and hard-hitting play Somewhere on
the Border which was banned under apartheid due to its brutal
language and its depiction of the South African Defence
Force. Akerman wrote the play in the 1980s while in exile in
Holland, having ed South Africa to avoid the draft.
“When the play was rst done in 25 years ago, kids who
couldn’t talk about their experiences of war took their parents
to see the play, and afterwards, they were able to talk,” Akerman
said.
“So now, maybe it’s the other way round, the guys who
were the kids at the border, now have their own kids who want
to know what happened and that can facilitate an inter-generational
dialogue again.”
Unlikely home
By Amy Coopes
A
RURAL Australian gold mining and farming town
famous as the birthplace of “Waltzing Matilda” poet
Banjo Paterson seems an unlikely home for refugees
eeing decades of conict in Sudan.
But what started with a single pioneering family has become
a thriving community of more than 300 people from
the strife-torn north African nation who call pastoral Orange
home. “Maybe its best town in the world, especially the
weather,” explained Sudanese refugee Fathi Shouma in broken
English.
“It is like area where we come from in Sudan, it’s looking
like same area and reminding me I’m living in the same area
when I was born. Happy life is going on here.”
Shouma’s road to peace has been a long one — he and wife
Neimat Darar spent three years in an Egyptian refugee camp
after eeing their native Nuba Mountains, in South Kordofan,
amid raging civil war. It was a time they would sooner forget;
women were known to vanish and there were stories of refugees
being killed for their organs, with overcrowding, heat
and disease a fact of daily life.
“Egypt is very hard,” says Darar, sadly. “We can thank the
God because he take us from there and we come here safely.”
Serving coffee in the kitchen of their modest brick home as
the laughter of their children can be heard from the front lawn,
Egypt seems a world away from suburban Orange.
But an inux of Sudanese have made it a home away from
home. At the time of last census in 2006, some 24 per cent of
people in Australia on refugee visas at that time were from
Sudan, making it the number one country of birth for humanitarian
migrants to Australia.
It has been seven years since the rst family — Osman
Tag, his wife and seven children — left Sydney where most
of the refugees are initially settled, to nd a new life in the
37,000-person town famed for its mines, agriculture, rugby
team and icy winters.
Paterson, one of Australia’s most famous poets and author
of the iconic national folk-song Waltzing Matilda, drew inspiration
from the region’s rolling hills and rivers, and Tag was
reminded of Sudan’s mountain country.
The dark horse
By Mark John and Diadie Ba
SENEGAL’S Macky Sall has leapt back from the political
wilderness with a crushing presidential run-off victory
over incumbent Abdoulaye Wade that cements the
West African country’s reputation as a stable democracy in a
restive region.
Sall is a one-time prime minister who served under Wade
but in 2008 lost favour with the outgoing octogenarian president
known as “The Hare”, a local symbol of cunning. At one
point, Sall seemed condemned to political obscurity.
But the 50-year-old geologist — whose campaign symbol
was a horse’s head — immediately hit the road to amass support
for a presidential bid which paid off when his ex-boss
conceded defeat in Sunday’s election.
“When I was crossing the country, I saw the enormity of
the challenges ahead,” Sall said in a campaign interview at his
home in the Atlantic Ocean resort of Saly.
“While those in power built monuments and motorways,
ordinary Senegalese were struggling to get access to drinking
water, healthcare and education,” Sall said in a dig at Wade’s
2010 “African Renaissance” monument, an edice bigger
than New York’s Statue of Liberty that towers over Dakar.
As poll returns overnight showed him ahead of his rival,
Sall accepted fellow liberal Wade’s admission of defeat and
pledged to be “president of all the Senegalese” in a gesture to
the left-leaning voters who backed him in the run-off.
A full 35 years younger than the outgoing president, Sall
embodies the generational change in Senegalese politics
which several foreign governments from Paris to Washington
had urged Wade to allow by not standing for a third term.
Despite some early violence by those opposing Wade’s
third-term bid, the election and its result appeared to consolidate
Senegal as an oasis of stability in a region plagued
by awed elections and conict, such as last week’s military
coup in Mali.
Sall has promised his rst steps will include moves to cut
the prices of basic foods, end a long-running teachers’ strike
and draft a constitutional reform reinforcing a two-term limit
for both him and successors.
But a decade of past membership of Wade’s ruling PDS
party, and personal wealth that includes the Saly villa and other
property, means Senegalese will watch Sall’s performance
keenly for a true break with 12 years of Wade rule that failed
to tackle poverty or corruption.
By Takehiko Kambayashi
A
JAPANESE power company
shut down its last atomic reactor
early yesterday for a
regular checkup, leaving the nation
with only one other of its 54 reactors
still in service one year after the start
of the world’s worst nuclear disaster
in 25 years.
The Tokyo Electric Power Co
(TEPCO) halted reactor 6 at the seven-unit
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear
Power Station on the Sea of Japan
coast in Niigata prefecture.
It was TEPCO’s only remaining
running reactor after the accident
at its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear
Power Station. The last one in the
country, reactor 3 at the Tomari Nuclear
Power Plant in northern Japan,
run by the Hokkaido Electric Power
Co, was to be stopped on May 5 for
12
ANALYSIS/OPINION
OMAN DAILY Observer
TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012
Japan power grid down to last N-reactor
SUPPORTERS of Suu Kyi’s party during an electoral rally in Kawhmu yesterday. — AFP
Personality cult dominates
By Kristina Rich
PEOPLE in Kawhmu are excited.
Myanmar opposition leader Aung
San Suu Kyi is vying for a parliamentary
seat from their rural township in
the April 1 by-elections.
“She seems so fragile yet full of energy!”
gushed the proprietor of the town’s
largest tearoom, on the only paved street
of the dusty, unremarkable place 90 minutes
drive south-west of Yangon.
At the market, the watchmaker’s
display case was adorned with a large
sticker depicting a ghting peacock and
white star on a red eld, the emblem of
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy
(NLD).
The vendor ashed the V-sign for
victory. The Lady, as Suu Kyi is known
throughout the country, will win, he asserted.
“No other candidate stands a
chance here,” the barber declared.
“April 1 will be a very special day for
us,” predicted a roadside vendor of areca
nuts and chewing tobacco. “She’s going
to work for us and the whole country and
help to improve our lives.”
Taxi driver Thaung Tin resembled
a walking advertisement for Suu Kyi.
The T-shirt he wore bore her image and
sported an NLD pin. His cap had an NLD
badge. Thaung Tin said he had been a
member of the party since its founding
in 1988.
“People are beating a path to our
door,” he said. “We’ve run out of membership
application forms and can’t print
them fast enough.”
The election campaign in Myanmar
By Nina Chestney
EUROPEA’S wave and tidal
power technology is likely to
disappoint EU expectations
for 2020 and take over a decade to
contribute to energy supply in a signicant
way, even though it is chalking
up rapid growth and drawing in
big industrial investors.
The nascent industry has attracted
a urry of investor activity over the
past year, securing an estimated few
hundred million euros from companies
such as Siemens and Vattenfall.
It is making fast progress from
prototype devices toward full-scale
sea trials and promises to be more reliable
than many types of renewable
power that depend on the weather.
But those numbers are far less than
European Union expectations for 8.5
billion euros ($11.3 billion) of invest-
maintenance, the company said.
The country’s reactors have been
falling idle, as operators have been
shutting them for maintenance, but
have faced stiff public and political
opposition to restarting them after
last year’s disaster.
Concerns have been rising about
severe power shortages this summer
in a country where 30 per cent
of electricity before the disaster was
from nuclear generation.
A recent survey conducted by the
Japan Association for Public Opinion
Research found 88 per cent of those
polled expressed concerns about nuclear
plants in the country, Tokyo
Shimbun reported in mid-March.
The Fukushima plant in northeastern
Japan went into meltdown
after it was hit by a magnitude-9
earthquake and tsunami on March
11, 2011. A series of blasts and res
is dominated by Suu Kyi. Her campaign
tours around the country ll the front
pages of newspapers and magazines.
Her likeness adorns calendars at the
market and posters in shops. T-shirts with
her image sell briskly. Her party’s logo is
plastered on cycle rickshaws, in the telephone
shop, everywhere.
It is as if Suu Kyi were a candidate
for president, rather than for one of 40
vacant seats in the 440-member lower
house of parliament.
Even if the NLD does extremely well,
the pro-military government would still
have an overwhelming parliamentary
majority. Not everyone considers the
personality cult surrounding the pro-democracy
icon to be a good thing.
Although Suu Kyi earned universal
respect for her uncompromising stance
against the former military junta — she
spent 15 years under house arrest and
won a Nobel Peace Prize — many people
doubt that she can single-handedly lead
the country into a rosy future.
A graduate of England’s Oxford University,
where she studied philosophy,
politics and economics, Suu Kyi has an
elitist air about her, contemporaries say.
She is not regarded as a team player.
“Immune to advice” is the description
by a female dissident who did time in
prison and worked closely with Suu Kyi
in the 1990s.
“She’s not exactly a dyed-in-the-wool
democrat,” said a diplomat who asked to
remain anonymous. “When you have a
conversation with her, there’s an aura of
having an audience with her.”
“The whole party is about her,” said
ment and generation capacity of 3.6
gigawatts installed by 2020.
The technology, like other renewables,
needs government nancing
help to reach commercial scale and
then subsidies after that as it grows to
more cost efcient.
Its timing as a latecomer behind
more established renewables such as
solar and wind is unfortunate.
Government nancing is hard to
come by while the euro zone faces
a sovereign debt crisis and governments
are cutting spending, including
on renewable energy.
Furthermore, its development
costs are still far higher than for other
renewables, including offshore wind
power.
“Any talk of gigawatts by 2020 is
optimistic. We are more on course for
hundreds of megawatts,” said Charlie
Blair, technology acceleration man-
at the plant triggered the massive
release of radioactive material into
the environment. Japan has turned
to thermal power generation to meet
its energy needs, leading it to greatly
increase the amount of fuel it imports
and generating trade decits.
“Without nuclear power, a stable
electricity supply cannot be expected
for the time being,” major daily
Yomiuri said in an editorial on Saturday.
“The nation cannot afford to
delay the reactivation of suspended
reactors when there is no rational
reason for doing so.”
On Friday, the government’s Nuclear
Safety Commission endorsed
the results of initial stress tests on
idled reactors 3 and 4 at the Oi Nuclear
Power Station in Fukui.
Safety assessments on nuclear
plants nationwide started in two stages
to reassure the public in the wake
Kyaw Min Swe, chief editor of the Burmese
weekly The Voice. “Imagine the
party as a snake and Suu Kyi as the head.
When the head is squeezed, the snake can
do nothing.”
The party was paralysed when Suu
Kyi was under house arrest, he said, adding
that there were few young party members
behind her to step into her shoes.
Voters are also constantly asking
what, specically, the NLD’s political
platform is.
“We all really wish she’d speak more
with the other democratic parties,” Kyaw
Min Swe said.
“The NLD boycott of general elections
in 2010 was a big mistake,” opined
Nyo Nyo Thinn, a member of the Yangon
regional parliament and the small Democratic
Party (Myanmar).
“That’s why more small democratic
parties emerged. If the NLD had taken
part, we’d all have voted for it and our
camp would be more unied.”
Physician and ction writer Ma Thida,
who spent ve years in prison for
supporting the NLD, takes a more conciliatory
view.
“We might have our concerns, but
let’s give her a chance,” she said. “She’s
an icon. Who knows how long the special
attention on her will last? As long as it
does, the government will have to listen
to her. She can move things.”
Meanwhile, party said Suu Kyi is recovering
after she fell ill on the campaign
trail, but must rest this week ahead of the
by-elections. She cut short a trip to the
south and cancelled campaigning this
week after she felt sick on Saturday.
ager for marine at the Carbon Trust.
Siemens, which increased its stake
in UK developer Marine Current Turbines
last month, sees double-digit
annual growth rates for marine current
renewables to 2020 from virtually
zero now and expects it ultimately
to meet 3 to 4 per cent of global energy
demand.
“The big industrial players getting
involved is what is needed to move
this sector forward. Utilities are looking
at these kind of projects, which
will be on a similar scale to wind energy
or conventional power plants,”
said Frank Wright, renewables manager
at Douglas Westwood.
Most experts expect the rst largescale
commercial projects of 1 MW
or more to emerge by 2016 or 2017
and ocean energy to start contributing
to the EU power mix between 2025
and 2030.
of the disaster. Idled reactors were
subjected to the so-called stress tests
focused on their capacity to withstand
earthquakes and tsunami.
“Nuclear plants that are judged
to have no problem with their safety
measures should be restarted,” the
daily said. Japanese media reported
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and
other ministers concerned were expected
to conrm the safety of the
reactors at the Oi plant, run by Kansai
Electric Power Co.
But Noda’s ruling Democratic
Party of Japan’s task force on issues
concerning last year’s nuclear disaster
compiled a report, urging the government
not to rush into the reactivation
of the idled reactors.
“It’s too early to make a political
decision on the issue of restarting,”
said the team led by House of Representatives
lawmaker Satoshi Arai.
By Lesley Wroughton
EMERGING economies
must be given a fair
shot at leading the institutions
at the heart of global
nance or they will end up
going their own way, a challenger
for the top job at the
World Bank said.
“The balance of power
in the world has shifted and
emerging market countries are
contributing more and more to
global growth — more than
50 per cent — and they need
to be given a voice in running
things,” Nigerian Finance
Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
said. “If you don’t, they will
lose interest.
Okonjo-Iweala, 57, was
nominated last Friday by African
power houses Nigeria,
South Africa and Angola to
lead the poverty-ghting
institution when its current
president Robert Zoellick
steps down in June.
She is going up against
Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-
American health expert whose
name was put forward by US
President Barack Obama last
Friday, and former Colombian
nance minister Jose Antonio
Ocampo, who was nominated
by Brazil.
It’s the rst time the post
has ever been contested.
Under an informal agreement
between the United
States and its allies in Europe,
Washington has laid claim to
the top post at the World Bank
since its founding after World
War II, while a European has
always led the International
Monetary Fund, its sister
Bretton Woods institution.
Okonjo-Iweala, a respected
economist and diplomat,
painted the convention as a
vestige of a bygone era.
“We’re not asking the US
not to compete, we’re just
asking for a level playing
eld where candidates can be
evaluated on their merits,” she
said.
A former World Bank managing
director known for her
colourful African head wraps
and dresses, Okonjo-Iweala
contrasted her experience
with that of Kim, who made
his mark battling disease in
some of the poorest corners of
the world.
She noted that she has
A big tidal device probably has a 1
MW capacity, but the next challenge
is to get to ve-to-10 MW arrays and
then move to hundreds of megawatts
by 2020 or beyond.
“We still need to prove a 10 MW
array can function on a commercial
basis and pay for itself by selling
electricity,” Blair said.
Not only are there technical challenges
in installing multiple devices
and in developing the grid infrastructure
and control systems, but developers
also must reduce the huge
costs of arrays.
Current estimates for the levelised
cost, or the constant price per unit of
energy for an investment to break
even, are 0.38-0.48 pounds/KWh for
wave energy and 0.29-0.33 pounds/
KWh for tidal, compared with 0.09-
0.10 pounds/KWh for nuclear and
offshore wind, according to the UK’s
The government has yet to make
sufcient preparations to judge the
safety of reactors, the team said.
In Fukui, government ofcials
have not even come to talk to residents
in a community which hosts
the Oi plant, whose two reactors
Tokyo wants to restart soon, said
Hisayo Takada, a Greenpeace Japan
ofcial stationed near the plant.
Oi town has not conducted any
evacuation drills in the rugged region,
either, even after the nuclear
disaster, she added.
A town ofcial conrmed there
had been no disaster drills and no
meetings with government ofcials
about the restart of the idled reactors.
Instead of rst discussing the restart
of idled reactors, “the government
should actively promote the
development of natural energy resources,”
Takada said.
TOUGH TALK
Balance of power
has shifted today
hands-on experience running
one of Africa’s largest economies,
as well as a proven track
record at the World Bank helping
nations in Asia, Africa and
the Middle East tap nancial
markets to fund development.
“I don’t have a learning
curve because I know how the
institution works and I know
what needs to be done to make
it work better and faster for
developing countries,” she
said.
“I know what its strengths
are, its weaknesses and importantly
I know what policymakers
need. I’ve actually
done it.”
US Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner said over
this week that he was condent
that Kim, president of
Dartmouth College, would
win global support for the job.
Through his work in ghting
HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and
getting healthcare to the poor,
Kim had shown an ability to
get things done in tough environments,
said Geithner.
Okonjo-Iweala admitted
that if the United States, the
nation with the largest World
Bank voting bloc, and Europe
held together, her candidacy
would be doomed. But she expressed
hope the World Bank’s
187 member nations would
hold true to their pledge for an
open, merit-based process.
“We are not just going into
this saying to ourselves we are
already defeated,” she said,
speaking by telephone from
Abuja. “We are hoping that
the Bretton Woods institutions
and their shareholders will
keep their word.”
“My biggest hope is that
this will be a fair contest.”
Okonjo-Iweala was named
by Forbes magazine last year
as one of the world’s 100 most
powerful women.
EU push for ocean energy set to fall short
Carbon Trust.
Funding constraints threaten to
impede the push towards commercial
deployment. Although government
funding is available for research,
there is less available for large-scale
demonstration projects.
Renewable UK estimates that at
least £120 million pounds ($190.4
million) is needed for the UK industry
alone to reach full-scale deployment.
The UK and Scottish governments
have pledged funding of £38 million.
Scotland added to that last week by
launching a £103 million fund for renewables
from money set aside from
a fossil fuel levy, and some of that
money will be used to develop tidal
and wave projects.
According to RenewableUK,
every pound of public funding in the
UK has unlocked £6 of private investment,
but more is needed.