For contracts, Corrupt China ‘buys’ Namibia’s elite

Like parents everywhere, mothers and fathers in Namibia, an impoverished southern African nation, worry about college costs and opportunities for their children. The Chinese government has stepped forward to help — for a select and powerful few.

So far this year, the Beijing government has secretly awarded scholarships to study in China to the offspring of nine top officials, including to the daughter of Namibia’s president, Hifikepunye Pohamba. Two young relatives of Namibia’s former president and national patriarch, Sam Nujoma, also received grants.

The disclosure of the scholarships, first revealed by a feisty Namibian newspaper, has unleashed a wave of fury from the nation’s civil society groups and youth organizations. In a country where five in six high school graduates do not go on to college, many find it unconscionable for well-paid government leaders to accept overseas university scholarships for their children.

“Only senior people in government knew about the scholarships,” said Norman Tjombe, director of the nonprofit Legal Assistance Center. “No chance was given at all to the general public.”

The controversy has reignited a simmering debate in Namibia over deals with the Chinese government, already under scrutiny by Namibian prosecutors.

Inquiries there and in other developing countries in Africa and Asia have cast a fresh light on how China sometimes uses its treasure chest of foreign loans and aid to create elite alliances and ease the approval of no-bid contracts.

Even some within Namibia’s governing Swapo party are asking whether China is trying to buy influence with their nation’s political leadership to gain access to mineral resources or to win business for its well-connected companies.

“How is it that this favor just comes like manna from heaven?” said Elijan Ngurare, secretary general of Swapo’s youth league, in a telephone interview. “Clearly there must be something that they are after.”

To some international relations experts, the scholarship controversy illustrates a blind spot in China’s aggressive strategy to cement diplomatic alliances, lock in natural resources and solicit trade and business on the African continent. In Namibia at least, Chinese government officials seem caught off guard by the public scrutiny exercised by a vibrant civil society.

China Supporting Terrorism , Supplying Arms and Money

Ulfa buying Chinese arms, supplying to Maoists

A startling revelation by two top Ulfa leaders, now in police custody, has corroborated what Union home secretary G K Pillai had hinted

Ulfa 'foreign secretary' Sashadhar Choudhury and 'finance secretary' Chitrabon Hazarika have told cops that their 'commander-in-chief' Paresh Baruah is not only procuring arms from Chinese manufacturers but is also selling them to terror outfits such as National Democratic Front of Boroland, National Libertaion Front of Tripura, All Tripura Tiger Force and Maoists.

On November 8, Pillai had said, "Chinese are big smugglers... suppliers of small arms. I am sure that the Maoists also get them." With Bangladesh mounting pressure on Ulfa, the banned outfit is desperately seeking shelter in China. Baruah has reportedly visited Yunnan province thrice in the past two years. Though China have not yet agreed to provide shelter to Baruah, weapons have been obtained from suppliers based in that country, they have told police.

China gifted 50kg uranium for two bombs to Pakistan

China’s dirty little secret of nuclear proliferation to Pakistan, including virtually giving Islamabad two nuclear weapons on a platter while the US remained oblivious and smug, has exploded in Washington. Embarrassingly for President Barack Obama, the disclosures come on the eve of his much-anticipated visit to Beijing.

The broad story is known to every Tom, Dinesh, and Hamid in strategic circles — that sometime in the early 1980s, China provided Pakistan with nuclear know-how and materials to enable it to make the bomb, in part to weigh down India and in part out of gratitude to Islamabad for facilitating its opening to US. But astonishing details of the transaction, which China has blithely denied because it is in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations, have been exposed courtesy A.Q.Khan, Pakistan’s Dr Strangelove, to spite the military which incarcerated him.

In a letter that Khan sent to British journalist Simon Henderson, parts of which have already been made public with the latest dribble coming out ahead of Obama’s visit to China next week, the Pakistani metallurgist reveals the following sequence of an episode the broad contours of which are well known despite Chinese-Pakistani subterfuge for nearly 30 years: In 1976, some four years after India tested its first nuclear device, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto approached China’s supreme leader Chairman Mao in his quest for the nuclear bomb. By this time, Bhutto had already invited expat Pakistani scientists, including A.Q.Khan, to return home to help Islamabad make the bomb to ensure that the country was never again humiliated by India the way it happened in 1971.

Mao died soon after, but according to Khan, the matter was advanced in talks he and two other Pakistani officials, including then foreign secretary Agha Shahi, had with Chinese officials at Mao’s funeral. It was not a one-sided transaction: the Pakistanis told the Chinese how European-designed centrifuges (whose designs Khan had stolen) could swiftly aid China's lagging uranium-enrichment program.

"Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology" from Pakistan and Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong in central China, where they helped "put up a centrifuge plant," Khan said in an account he gave to his wife after Musharraf purged him under US pressure. That letter eventually found its way to the Henderson who shared it with the Washington Post, which advanced the story on Thursday. "We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges," Khan wrote. "Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time."

Initially, it appears China sent Pakistan 15 tons of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan's centrifuges that Khan's colleagues were having difficulty producing on their own. Evidently, Khan had made the centrifuges from the designs he stole but did not have enough raw material to run it. Khan said the gas enabled the laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium in 1982. Chinese scientists also helped the Pakistanis solve other nuclear weapons challenges.

By then, Gen.Zia-ul Haq had taken over the reigns in Islamabad and had hanged Bhutto. Rumors of a pre-emptive strike by India and Israel on Pakistan’s nuclear program rattled Zia, who sent Khan and an unnamed Pakistani general to Beijing with a request in mid-1982 to borrow enough bomb-grade uranium for a few weapons.

After winning Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's approval, Khan, the general and two others flew aboard a US made Pakistani C-130 to Urumqi. Khan says they enjoyed barbecued lamb while waiting for the Chinese military to pack the small uranium bricks into lead-lined boxes, 10 single-kilogram ingots to a box for a total of 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU), for the flight back to Islamabad. "The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium," Khan wrote in letter to his wife Henny which was meant to be an expose to get even with the military, which locked him up on proliferation charges even though Khan says they were part of the transactions approved by all governments that came to power in Islamabad, civilian or military.

By Khan’s account, Pakistan did not initially use the Chinese fissile material and kept it in storage till 1985 because they had made a “few bombs” with their own material. The Pakistanis then asked Beijing if it wanted its nuclear material back. After a few days, Khan says the Chinese wrote back "that the HEU loaned earlier was now to be considered as a gift... in gratitude" for Pakistani help. The Pakistanis promptly used the Chinese material to fabricate hemispheres for two weapons and added them to Pakistan's arsenal.

Khan sees this act of stealing, begging and borrowing to make the bomb as a supreme accomplishment by Pakistan. "The speed of our work and our achievements surprised our worst enemies and adversaries and the West stood helplessly by to see a Third World nation, unable even to produce bicycle chains or sewing needles, mastering the most advanced nuclear technology in the shortest possible span of time," he boasts in a separate 11-page narrative that the Post said he wrote for Pakistani intelligence officials.

Through all the skullduggery, it appears that Beijing continued to lie baldly even as Washington lived in blissful ignorance through occasional lurking suspicion. Time and again, Chinese officials lied about adhering to the international duty of prevention the proliferation of nuclear weapons. US officials too hummed and hawed about the transactions because at the height of the Islamabad-Beijing exchanges, Washington was dependent on Pakistan to rout Soviet Union from Afghanistan and it was also warming up to Beijing, where the senior George Bush had served as the US envoy before returning to Washington DC as the CIA Director and then becoming vice-president under Ronald Reagan.

But the big question now is what Barack Obama will do about a transaction the Washington Post called ''an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power.'' The US President, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his activism on several fronts, including his intent to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, arrives in Beijing on Tuesday on a swing through East Asia that will take him to Japan and South Korea, two other US allies also concerned about China. Unless Obama takes note of the disclosures and acts on them, he will be seen to joining a long list of US Presidents, including Reagan, Bush, Clinton, whose concern about proliferation were largely cosmetic and selective, resulting in a free pass to China and Pakistan.

Shun Escort Girls, China tells partymen

Chinese communist cadres are being told to scorn prostitutes and avoid "vulgar" places of entertainment, in the latest bid to boost decaying morality and rein in corruption.

Li Yuanchao, head of the organization department that controls major personnel appointments, warned that officials could receive black marks in their behavioural assessments for visiting hostess bars, the state-run China News Service said.

Officials must avoid such temptations, since they are often a gateway to corruption and abuse of power and harm the image of the party and its cadres, Li said. He was quoted as issuing the warnings in recent speeches at the opening of fall classes at the party's official training academies.

Li's remarks follow similar pronouncements by party leaders linking clean morals to graft, including one that claimed that 95% of corrupt officials had mistresses.

"Party cadres must refuse to allow themselves to be contaminated by that which is impure. Integrity and cleanliness cannot be separated," Li said. "Of leading cadres who fall into the abyss of corruption, the majority start with an inability to remain pure," Li added.

Cadres should keep a wary eye on businessmen seeking to corrupt them, develop healthy outside interests, and cultivate friendships with ordinary folks and those of high moral and academic standing, Li said.

Tibetans protest China’s Tibet policy

The Tibetan parliament-in-exile and various non-governmental organisations of the exiled Tibetans living in McLeodganj have disapproved China’s Tibet policy. Hundreds of Tibetans, including monks and nuns, held a silent protest march on Thursday and also organised a rally on the premises of the Buddhist temple, calling for democracy in China.

The protesting Tibetans sported black badges.

The Chinese Communist Party completed 60 years of its rule on October 1.

“On the pretext of observing the 60th anniversary of PRC (People’s Republic of China) the Government of China is taking up a number of policies and programmes that contradict with reality. Such deceptive actions cannot be recognised as fulfilling the real aspirations of the minority nationalities in China. Therefore, the Tibetan parliament-in-exile strongly opposes these actions,” reads the statement issued by the Tibetan government-in-exile.

The statement said the Chinese Government wanted to show that huge progress had been made in Tibet but the reality was otherwise. “Not only the land of Tibet has been damaged, but its religion, culture, language and script have also taken a hit,” the statement said.