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Reuters
9 July 2008
By Opheera McDoom

Sudan’s army said Ethiopian troops attacked a military camp in northern Sudan on Tuesday, killing about 19 people.

A senior Ethiopian official played down the allegation, saying any “minor incident” on the border could be easily resolved.

Sudan’s military spokesman said the attack took place early on Monday in the Jabel Hantub area of Sennar state.

“They hit a camp belonging to the central reserve police and they killed about 19 people,” the Sudanese army spokesman said. He did not know how many people were injured.

The central reserve police are a heavily armed military unit and are often deployed along border areas or to defend the capital Khartoum.

“This was an attack and we don’t know the reason — we have no problem with Ethiopia and there are no border disputes or tribal clashes in that area,” the army spokesman said.

Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, told Reuters in Addis Ababa the problem was that the long frontier was not properly demarcated.

“Sometimes locals from both sides trespass and minor incidents do happen,” he said, denying troops were involved.

“If there was a minor incident involving local inhabitants … Ethiopia is confident both governments will solve the problem in accordance with the prevailing peaceful norms we maintain.”

Sudan signed a north-south peace deal in 2005 which ended Africa’s longest civil war and also improved relations with its east African neighbours.

One Sudanese security source and another government official said the attack may have been because Sudan had given refuge a to local Ethiopian officials few weeks earlier and had refused to hand them over to Addis Ababa.

It was not clear why the officials sought refuge in Sudan. Ethiopia is fighting rebels from the Oromo region which borders Sudan and who want greater autonomy for their areas.

The Sudan army spokesman said a joint Ethiopian-Sudanese committee had been formed to investigate the attack.

(Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

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Sudan Tribune
8 July 2008

Editor’s Note: For further information on the contract and PA&E, please see the Corpwatch article, “Darfur Diplomacy: Enter the Contactors,” by Pratap Chatterjee from 24 October, 2004.

The contract for a US firm building infrastructure for peacekeeping forces in Darfur will be terminated mid-July, a UN official confirmed.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (right) swears-in Susana Malcorra, new Under-Secretary-General of the Department of Field Support in New York May 6, 2008(UN) The new head for the UN Department of Field Support Susana Malcorra told Inner City Press website that the contract will be “broken up into smaller pieces for a broader range of vendors including from Sudan”.

The controversial no-bid contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin’s PA&E subsidiary by the UN Secretariat drawing fire from UN members.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon defended the contract at the time saying that under the time constraint to build bases for peacekeepers in Darfur.

“You don’t have many vendors who are readily available to provide such service at a limited time. And that is why, in accordance with the necessary rules and regulations bestowed upon me as the Secretary-General, I have taken an exceptional decision. I am allowed to do that” he said last January.

Sudan told a visiting UN Security Council (UNSC) delegation last month that it will not allow PA&E to operate in Darfur in retaliation to the long standing sanctions imposed by Washington.

The US special envoy Richard Williamson told reporters that he has raised the issue with Sudanese officials saying Washington wants to see the “job done”.

“PA&E has experience; they were a company used by the US when we built 30 African Union camps…it would be prudent if they are allowed to continue to perform their service…There would be a substantial lag of you try and bring someone new” he said.

But the UN peacekeeping official ruled out any possible extension.

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KUALA LUMPUR: Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani Tuesday said Pakistanis working for the world peace and stability by playing the role of frontline state in war against terrorism and extremism.”We are working for the whole humanity and peace in the world…the world needs to support us,” Prime Minister Gilani told reporters at a joint press conference along with the D-8 leaders at the conclusion of 6th D-8 Summit.The Prime Minister said his government was following a three-pronged strategy to deal with the menace of terrorism comprising dialogue with peaceful and non-militant tribals as well as increased focus on socio-economic uplift of the areas bordering Afghanistan. He however made it clear that the government would not talk to the militants or those who do not lay down arms.The Prime Minister mentioned the presence of three million Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil as one of the causes of the problem.The Prime Minister said Pakistan was taking all necessary steps to check illegal movement across the Pak-Afghan border.He said it was difficult to stop the movement across the 2,000 kilometer long porous border.The Prime Minister said the issue of terrorism and extremism was not discussed at the 6th D-8 summit.He stressed upon the D-8 countries to shift theirfocus on agriculture in view of the surging food pricesin the world. Earlier, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah AhmadBadawi of Malaysia told the media that D-8 summit wasvery successful as the member states discussed and agreed to enhance trade and economic cooperation within the grouping of eight developing nations.He responded to various queries about the declaration of 6th summit and the role of D-8 in resolving the issues.

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After his disgraceful tenure as U.S. Attorney General and his humiliating resignation, I did not expect to hear from Alberto Gonzales for at least the number of years John McCain says we will be in Iraq.

But, lo-and-behold, on July 2, Alberto Gonzales published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. That alone is surprising. But what is even more remarkable is the subject of his piece.

In “What Latinos want from their president,” the disgraced former Attorney General, a Latino, has the audacity to purport to speak for the Latino community in the U.S. and to offer advice to the presidential candidates on how to court, attract and capture the Latino vote.

In his piece, Gonzales says

Pew’s numbers now show that Latino voters are heading back into the Democratic fold, but the message in these voting patterns and in the demographic projections is that neither party can afford to take the Latino vote for granted.

What a condescending piece of advice from a person who took the American people, the Constitution, the law, etc., for granted, and worse.

When discussing the issues that “resonate” with Latinos, Gonzales says:

Among them, of course, is immigration. Latino support will swing to the political party that has the courage and fortitude to put forward a specific immigration solution that is effective and efficient in securing our borders, that supports the economic interests of the nation and that is compassionate in a way that is consistent with the character of a nation of immigrants.

What did you do, Mr. Gonzales, to put forward or champion a “specific immigration solution” during your tenure?

And

…although we know that America strives to be a fair country, the harsh reality is we are not one nation with liberty and justice for all. And yet equal opportunity — to a job, to capital and to credit — is a cornerstone of American success. The promise of equal opportunity is what drew our parents and grandparents and what still draws immigrants to the U.S., and it is what firmly knits them into the country once they are citizens.

“The harsh reality is we are not one nation with liberty and justice for all.”? As the people’s lawyer, this is one area you could have really helped improve, Mr. Gonzales. Instead we got illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens and other horrors.

“…equal opportunity — to a job”? How about the eight fired U.S. attorneys, including one of your own, David Iglesias.

Now, some may call this “reverse stereotyping,” but it is Mr. Gonzales himself who puts his Latino heritage at play when he says, “We must also consider the divide between the majority from another group, one that I happen to belong to: Latinos.” By the way, I am a Latino, too.

A letter to the editor writer in today’s LA Times, Julio Zamarripa, perhaps says it best:

I was certainly hoping never to hear from Gonzales again; however, since he decided to appoint himself as some kind of a spokesman for the Latino community, I feel the former attorney general needs help on his convenient lack of recollection about some important issues that were intrinsic to his duties as the highest law enforcement official in the land.

During his watch, the scandal of the political firing of 11 U.S. attorneys reached all the way to Congress, where Gonzales demonstrated contempt for the very laws he had taken an oath to uphold. He became an embarrassment to the entire nation. His lack of integrity hardly gives him moral authority to speak on behalf of any racial, political or religious group.

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ATLANTA: A Pakistani killed his 25-year-old daughter after she demanded the divorce from her husband in Atlanta. Clayton county police said on Tuesday Ch Rashid, father of deceased Kanwal, had given the hand of his daughter to a person in Chicago however she was seen living with her father for the last three months.Kanwal wanted a divorce but her father was against it, police said.Father killed his daughter on Sunday morning. Police was in police custody and will be taken to the court for trial, it said.

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Malta Today
6 July 2008
By MATTHEW VELLA

Controversial and notorious – nothing could be closer to the truth for the man whom the Maltese government has licensed to conduct oil exploration in the islands’ south-eastern shelf, close to the disputed median line with Libya.

That man is British oil tycoon Tony Buckingham, chief executive of the Canadian company Heritage Oil. Last December, Heritage was given two offshore areas spread over 18,000 square kilometres in a 30-year deal.

But Buckingham is not the average chief executive who slogged his way up through boardroom battles.

The truth can be found right inside Heritage Oil’s 300-page prospectus, which explicitly points out how “Mr Buckingham… has had no involvement with any military or security operators since the spring of 1998”.

This, then, is how Tony Buckingham’s mercenary past in Africa and beyond, his befriending of dictators and oil barons, took him to the London listing of the €940 million Heritage Oil, with its assets in Russia, Oman, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Pakistan, Kurdistan, and now even in Malta.

Friends in dark places

Only two weeks ago, mercenary Simon Mann went on trial in Equatorial Guinea. Mann, a former Scots Guard, is imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea, and faces trial for leading the failed coup to depose oil dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled the country since 1979.

He was arrested in 2004 disembarking from a plane with 60 other mercenaries in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.

Today, Heritage Oil’s prospectus makes it clear that Buckingham “has had no substantive business contact with Simon Mann since 1998 and no contact of any nature with him since 2000. He had no knowledge of Mr Mann’s activity Guinea.”
And the reason for such a dubious disclaimer is Mann’s and Buckingham’s past in the mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes, which they used to recover oil installations belonging to Heritage Oil from UNITA rebels in Angola.

For Tony Buckingham, the fact that his old friend is on trial for the foiled coup has brought yet more digging inside his business connections in the Caribbean tax havens.

Mann is the director of the company Logo Limited, the company he used for purchasing arms and paying mercenaries. The Equatorial Guinea legal action is connecting Logo to Hansard Trust Company Ltd and Hansard Management – companies which hold one share in each of four companies within Heritage Oil’s corporate structure. What is known is that both Logo and Hansard have the same business address in St Peter Port.
There is yet, no evidence links Buckingham with Mann, although it’s the latest in a series of connections between the two.

War mercenary

Born in 1951, Heritage’s prospectus says that in 1989, Anthony Leslie Buckingham, a former British SAS officer, became an adviser to the government of Angola and assisted the Angolan Oil Ministry in establishing Sonangol as an oil and gas exploration and production company. He founded Heritage Oil in 1992, and together with Sonangol held operations there.

In 1993, when the Angolan holding was overrun by communist UNITA rebels, Buckingham, together with Lt-Col Eeben Barlow – a former Apartheid-era member of the South African Defence Force – and former Scots Guard Simon Mann became business partners in Executive Outcomes, a private military company formed by Barlow in 1989.
Executive Outcomes’ senior personnel were composed primarily of former members of the South African Defence Force and later fought against UNITA to retake their operations.

But Executive Operations is also infamous for its involvement with another British mercenary company, Sandline International, that broke a UN arms embargo in Sierra Leone, allegedly with British government approval. Sandline’s CEO was the retired Lt-Col Tim Spicer OBE.

In 1995, the government of Sierra Leone engaged Executive Outcomes to train the Sierra Leone army and support it in defeating RUF rebels. Sandline International was formed in late 1996 with Buckingham as one of the principals.

In 1997, when a military coup ousted president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone, millionaire Indian financier Rakesh Saxena contracted Sandline to organise a counter-coup in exchange for diamond exploration permits. The Heritage prospectus says Sandline had the tacit approval of the British government as well as support from a Royal Navy frigate. Saxena is implicated in the fraud and collapse of the Bangkok Bank of Commerce in 1996 and is today trying avoid extradition to Thailand from Canada to face embezzlement charges.

According to the British Parliament’s Report of the Sierra Leone Arms Investigation, Saxena would raise the money so that Sandline could hire soldiers and buy equipment.
Sandline was also engaged by the government of Papua New Guinea to suppress the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), which was seeking independence from the PNG.
At the Papua New Guinea Commission of Enquiry into Sandline’s contract with the PNG government, the enquiry concluded that the ‘controllers’ of Sandline were obviously Buckingham and at least to some extent Spicer. It said Executive Outcomes was a ‘significant’ sub-contractor of Sandline and ‘supplied a significant number of the personnel’ brought to PNG by Sandline.

Sandline International became dormant and the company was dissolved in 2004, while Executive Outcomes was dissolved in 1999.

Besides Sandline and Executive Outcomes, Tony Buckingham is also the principal shareholder in Indigo Sky Gem, a mining company which bought the exclusive prospecting rights for diamonds on the Neu Schwaben farm from the Namibian government. It is accused of using ‘strong-arm’ tactics to evict some 1,000 small-time miners who had been digging for the gems for years.

Such is the risk, then, documented inside Heritage’s prospectus: “Adverse media… about the CEO’s past associations could materially adversely affect the group’s reputation and the market price of the ordinary shares.”

And even though the prospectus neatly transcribes Buckingham’s mercenary past into struggles aimed at restoring internationally recognised governments and combating rebels, or that Heritage’s efforts are firmly focused in oil and gas exploration, the perfect tonic to Buckingham’s reputation is JP Morgan Cazenove’s research note: “Heritage ought to be seen as a high-risk, high-impact play… with a tolerance for share-price volatility.”

mvella@mediatoday.com.mt

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MADRID: The second bull-run of the San Fermin festival was organized on Tuesday.Hundreds of people and six fighting bulls accompanied by steers printed the 850-meter (half-mile) route through cobblestone streets in just over two minutes Tuesday.The first run on Monday first run took over four minutes and left13 people injured but none gored.The running of the bulls became world famous with the publication of Ernest Hemingway’’s 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.””

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KARACHI: Monthly exports of diesel to Afghanistan for its reconstruction has been increased by 50 per cent.According to a foreign news agency, this year 100,000 tons of diesel per month are being exported to Afghanistan for June-September whereas normally this quantity is 50,000 to 70,000 tons per month.During the period of June-September last year, 60,000 tons to 70,000 tons per month were sent to Afghanistan.The agency said that Pakistan had stopped the monthly exports of 10,000 tons of fuel for planes to Afghanistan from June 25 this year after which Afghanistan is importing this fuel from Iran.

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ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani has formed a committee to review the recent increase in gas tariff and in this regard present its report in a week.Sources told Geo News that Federal Minister for Finance, Naveed Qamar heads the committee which will also review the input and output price of CNG.The aim of the committee is to ensure supply of gas to the consumers at a justifiable rate.Before the recent rise in gas prices, the government was providing gas to CNG stations at Rs16.49 per kilogram while its retail price was Rs38.25 per kg.After rise in gas price, the government is providing gas to CNG stations at Rs22.07 per kg while the stations are selling CNG to end consumers at Rs48.36 per kg.The committee will come up with recommendations to put and end to the unjustifiable profiteering of the CNG stations.

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ISLAMABAD: PML-Q has cancelled the membership of Kashmala Tariq for what it called disagreeing with party decisions and trying to make a forward bloc within the party.A PML-Q spokesman told Geo News that three months back Kashmala Tariq had been issued a notice to show cause for not casting her vote for Chaudhry Pervez Elahi for the post of premiership. He said the MNA pointed fingers at the decisions of the party leadership many a time and tried to create a forward bloc in the name of reformation.The spokesman said that due to this attitude, PML-Q members had demanded disciplinary action against her. He said Kashmala Tariq had been informed about the party decision. However, Kashmala denied having been informed about any such decision.

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