November 14, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Globalization, Human Rights, Water
Africa Lifelines: A THREE-DAY SERIES
Engucwini, Malawi - Five times a day, Agnes Munthali hikes barefoot half a mile from a grass-roofed hut to fetch water for her thirsty children, balancing a sloshing 5-gallon bucket on her head. Corn barely sprouts from surrounding fields. Nearly half of Malawi’s 12 million people face starvation.
But water needs gnaw most urgently here and across rural Africa,
where 303 million villagers lack access to a safe source.
Waterborne disease kills thousands every day.
Munthali and others carry the buckets, weighing up to 45 pounds,
using bone, muscle and sheer will, while the gray Zombwe Mountains
loom in the distance.
On a recent clear morning, Munthali, a vivacious 35-year-old whose
smile reveals a missing front tooth, shrieked with laughter at an
outsider’s suggestion that the government will address water woes.
For villagers, government “doesn’t work,” Munthali said.
Villagers can’t even approach politicians, she said. If one did,
politicians “would turn him down.”
As it is, Munthali and her water- carrying neighbors consider
themselves lucky.
For the first time in years, the water they haul is clean - not
because Malawi’s government helped, but because Engucwini connected
with a private group of Americans half a world away.
The villagers teamed up with Water for People, a Denver-based group
that funds self-help projects. This year, the group arranged for
installation of a 150-foot-deep well within a mile of Munthali’s
mud-brick hut.
“I’m very happy about this,” she said.
More than 2,000 villagers a day flock to this well for clean water.
Previously, they had no choice but to drink contaminated water from
hand-dug pits.
Americans may assume the world’s poorest people suffer silently,
but more and more are able to ask for help using cellphones, e-mail
and other connections, circumventing corrupt or cumbersome
governments, said Solomon Nkiwane, a Zimbabwean political scientist
at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Villagers increasingly form committees and pursue their interests
anywhere they can find help, Nkiwane said.
“This people-to-people thing is beginning. It may be a drop in the
bucket. But maybe this is the approach we should take,” he said.
Malawian life expectancy has fallen from 42 years in the 1970s to
39 in recent years because of AIDS and diseases caused by
contaminated water. And income is falling. Farmers in this area
earn about $8 a month.
The project began a few years ago when the local doctor, Steven
Chavinda, 65, called chiefs together and asked: “What are your
greatest needs?” All the chiefs said the same thing: clean water.
One chief, Mishek Ndzima, had lost his son to cholera, spread by
feces in water.
Chavinda told a U.S. Peace Corps worker posted nearby, who informed
a Malawian who worked as regional coordinator for Water for People.
That led to installation over the past 18 months of two wells at a
cost of $25,000. Denver-based supervisors lined up a local crew to
drill the holes and oversee maintenance training.
“The best solutions come from sitting down as close to the problem
as possible and talking with the people,” said Steve Werner,
executive director of Water for People, at his headquarters in
Denver.
Villagers worldwide propose dozens of projects each month, often
learning of the group through the Internet. Werner and 20 staffers
in five countries review all proposals. Sponsored by the American
Waterworks Association trade group, they fund what they can on an
annual budget of around $2.8 million: about 80 projects, including
40 wells from Bolivia to Vietnam.
In Malawi, the first of the two wells helped revive the local
health clinic. The clinic, built in 1984, for years offered only
limited services because of a lack of water. Government officials
never supplied medicine as they do at other rural clinics. Radios
for emergency communications weren’t maintained. A 10-bed maternity
wing never opened.
This year, villagers notified health officials that the clinic has
water from a foreign-funded well with a solar-powered pump. And
health-ministry crews delivered mattresses for maternity beds, said
Manford Nyirenda, 49, chairman of the village water committee.
“We pushed them into action,” Nyirenda said, smiling, finger on
the pump power switch.
At the other well, Munthali gripped a hand pump and pushed up and
down as the noon sun beat down. Clear water gushed from the tap.
Women and girls took turns filling blue and orange buckets,
chattering. Between buckets, girls jockeyed to drink from the tap,
including Munthali’s pride and joy, Memory, 8, in a torn red
dress.
Last year, Memory got sick after drinking contaminated water from a
shallow well. “Very bad for her,” Munthali said. Purifying water
by boiling was impractical, given limited wood in the area.
Most of the 18,000 villagers around Engucwini still rely on water
drawn from hand-dug pits. Cloudy, stagnant pools in the pits
contain bacteria that cause cholera and diarrhea, known locally as
“open bowels.”
Malarial mosquitoes breed in mud around the pools. Women wash
clothes close by.
At the health clinic, the doctor Chavinda recently faced Ester
Chiumia, 32, cradling her dehydrated month-old son, Samuel. She had
walked since sunrise to reach Chavinda in his concrete building
without electricity. Now it was noon.
Gazing down at her baby, Chiumia said Samuel had bloody diarrhea
and no appetite.
Chavinda looked at her silently at first. At that moment, he lacked
the right medication. He saw Chiumia practically shaking with fear.
He gave her a folded piece of paper containing a couple tablets of
an adult antibiotic - the closest substitute he could find - with
instructions to cut each pill in half.
Chiumia nodded, still worried. She told the doctor the water she
hauls “looks dark. … We have no choice.”
At least 150 villagers die around Engucwini each year from easily
preventable sickness from contaminated water, Chavinda said. Deaths
decreased a bit recently in the area around Engucwini’s two new
wells, he said, “but we’ve got a lot more work to do.” He
reckoned Engucwini needs at least 20 wells.
Today, girls skip school to join the stoic parade of women hauling
water. And mothers are resigned that contaminated water will kill
kids.
“We do take chances here,” one woman said, watching her
granddaughter, Tiyese Chirwa, climb down a log into a muddy pit and
dip her bucket into a plate-sized milky pool of water.
Some villagers here struggle to find water at all. At an outlying
area called Chileda, there are no wells within 5 miles for an
estimated 5,000 people. For them, even marginal water is precious.
Barefoot boys in raggedy clothes were there, some with bellies
bloated from malnourishment, crouched around a drying water hole.
They had been digging it out a bit trying to coax more water from
the ground. A saucer-sized cloudy white pool of water only grew
more opaque.
Desperate, Chileda chiefs recently dispatched Frank Kumwenda, 29,
to go to the regional capital, Mzuzu, for help.
He set out by bicycle at 4 a.m., bouncing down a dirt road. He
pedaled furiously, crossed the sewage-contaminated Kasitu River
before anybody was up and reached the pavement of Malawi’s main
north-south road.
Then, moving along faster, he noticed some roadside villages had
wells. “I compared them to us,” Kumwenda said. “We are still
behind.”
Kumwenda drank from one well, savoring the water on his journey.
He reached Mzuzu and its government offices by 9 a.m.
“I found the secretary,” Kumwenda said.
He announced that he had come to get help for his village.
“The secretary said, ‘The boss is not in the office,”‘ he said.
When he rode home that afternoon after a fruitless wait and told
what had happened, the chiefs were angry.
Kumwenda planned to try again soon.
Meanwhile, Munthali, sitting with relatives at their tidy farm
compound, said she wants to be part of a local maintenance team to
make sure the new wells work properly.
Men had assumed they would travel for maintenance training, but
Munthali said, “We’ll need a good mix.” After all, women haul
most of the water.
And while acknowledging the pressing needs of villagers at Chileda,
she also proposed drilling a new well closer to her home.
Today, even with a clean water source a half mile away, she and
Memory still must devote much of each day to trekking back and
forth.
In America, “people have a much easier life,” Munthali said.
“How can that happen here?”
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
November 13, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Counter-Terrorism, Globalization, Human Rights, Migration, Security, U.S. Role in the World
Denver agent training Kenyan officers in forensics The U.S. views Africa with interest as a frontier for terrorism, but any military acts can stoke resentment.
Nairobi, Kenya - Nine thousand miles from his home in Denver, FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff faced 60 top African detectives packed into a room in Nairobi as part of a new U.S. focus on Africa.
Schlaff’s mission: to work with these African counterparts on
forensics and cultivate them as security partners.
The U.S. government views Africa with renewed interest as a
frontier for terrorism where al-Qaeda and other Islamic radicals
hide. Africa also supplies a growing share of the oil Americans
consume - nearly a fifth.
Terrorists in Africa could affect U.S. interests and organize
attacks inside the United States, said William Bellamy, U.S.
ambassador to Kenya.
“We try to monitor as best we can” airport travelers to prevent
terrorists from entering America, he said. “But I would not
exclude the possibility that could occur. … It’s certainly
possible.”
Kenyan police recently found anti-tank missiles - some U.S.-made - in a terrorism suspect’s apartment at Mombasa, Kenya.
The U.S. priority in Africa of combating global terrorism has led
President Bush to deploy military forces at a growing network of
bases from Algeria to Uganda - in a pattern Bush set after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
About 1,600 U.S. soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors are posted
in Djibouti at a base called Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign
Legion outpost. It is the first large long-term deployment of U.S.
forces to Africa.
Bush also sent special forces soldiers to Mali, Chad and Niger for
exercises with local forces against radical Muslims.
And U.S. officials have delivered more than $152 million in weapons
to sub-Saharan Africa since 2001, up from $92 million during the
previous four years.
But the military approach stokes resentment. African leaders say
they’re more interested in fighting worsening poverty than serving
U.S. interests.
African authorities believe young men were willing to join
anti-U.S. groups “because they had no jobs,” said Nicholas
Kamwende, commander of the Kenyan National Police anti-terrorism unit.
“We think fighting poverty is one of our ways of fighting
terrorism,” he said.
Kamwende said the United States traditionally has used skillful
diplomacy and developmental aid to help Africa address water,
health care and economic needs.
Tensions are mounting. Kenyan courts recently acquitted several
terrorism suspects indicted in the United States, and Kenyan
lawmakers have refused to pass an anti-terrorism law.
U.S. State Department officials say savvy cops such as Schlaff, who
also has worked in Botswana and the Red Sea area, can be more
effective than soldiers in helping locals root out terrorists.
In a spartan conference hall in Nairobi, Schlaff wore a sport shirt
and slacks instead of the camouflage fatigues that mark most U.S.
warriors.
He smiled the way he might over coffee back home as the African
detectives in coats and ties stood quiet. He handed out FBI pins,
patches, fingerprint kits and cameras. He showed photos of his
family in the Colorado mountains.
He told of his forensics work on the FBI team that investigated the
bombing of the USS Cole warship that killed 17 sailors. Schlaff
helped dredge the harbor off Yemen and found part of an outboard
motor that cracked the case.
The attentiveness of Kenyan police officers impressed him, Schlaff
said.
“Their focus is street crime. We’re not suggesting a different
focus. We’re just trying to make them aware there could be a
terrorism matter involved.”
Now, Schlaff is back in the United States. But detectives he
coached are working in Eastleigh, a Somali-run ghetto on the
outskirts of Nairobi, trying to recruit sources, offering money for
tips.
They’ve discovered funds flowing from Somalia to Eastleigh for
construction of shopping malls. They’re investigating who might be
sinking roots or raising money in Kenya.
These efforts bore out Schlaff’s conclusions. Street-
level police when treated with respect “are genuinely interested
in working with us” against terrorism, he said.
“If you want to convince people Americans are not the aggressor, I
think you’ve got to do it by being there low on the ground.”
November 13, 2005 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Africa Lifelines, Globalization, Human Rights, Water
Idweli, Tanzania - From the back of a lantern-lit schoolroom at a rural orphanage, Fodi Julius fixed his shining eyes on the blackboard. He was fighting exhaustion and trying to please his parents.
They died three years ago, leaving Fodi, 11, and his brother,
Nhambo, 8, among Africa’s 12.3 million children who’ve lost parents
to AIDS.
Their mom and dad’s final advice: Do well in school, because
survival depends on it.
Before moving to the orphanage, Fodi and Nhambo rose each morning
from their mats by a fire pit in their crumbling mud-brick hut.
They straightened their smudged school uniforms. Their small
fingers wove grass in place of lost buttons to fasten tattered
shirts.
The boys set out barefoot and without breakfast down the dirt path
to school. At lunch break, while others ate, they waited. Finally,
when the teacher dismissed them for the day, Fodi and Nhambo
wandered through farm fields, foraging for food.
“We’d get leaves,” Fodi said. He weighs 48 pounds, half the
weight of others his age.
He mixed those green leaves with water and urged Nhambo to eat, no
matter how bad the leaves tasted or how sad he felt.
“I’d just tell him: ‘She died. There’s nothing we can do about
it.’ I’d tell him: ‘Even if you cry, she’s not coming back. So we
should stop crying and do what we have to do.”‘
But now, after three years on their own, Fodi and Nhambo have beds,
meals and basic instruction at an experimental children’s center
where they live with 56 other orphans on the outskirts of this
dusty, Swahili-speaking village.
Americans half a world away in Colorado and Oregon set up the
center - stepping in where governments and big charities had done
nothing.
As the world grows more intertwined, African villagers mired in
disease, poverty and conflict - and those who want to help them -
are discovering new ways to connect, bypassing Africa’s
corruption-crippled governments and Western bureaucrats.
Television, radio and reports from migrant sons and daughters have
whetted village appetites for better living conditions. The recent
arrival of cellphones and e-mail in rural hubs encourages direct
links with Americans.
Help began with an e-mail
Here at Idweli, whose 1,300 people include more than 200 orphans,
the children’s center where Fodi now finds full plates of rice and
potatoes began with a simple e-mail.
Godfrey Mahenge, a student from Idweli studying medicine in
Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, five years ago vowed to do
something to help orphans back home. He’d told elders of his plans.
They’d dismissed him as a dreamer.
Mahenge drowned five years ago while swimming in the ocean. But his
girlfriend, Neema Mgana, kept sending e-mail queries to groups
outside Africa. One e-mail reached Barry Childs, 61, a corporate
executive turned philanthropist in Oregon who’d formed the group
Africa Bridge to try to help villagers.
Instead of dismissing the message as just another African e-mail
scam, Childs asked for details. He paid for Mgana to visit him.
Childs enlisted Vic Dukay, 49, a former aviation-business owner in
Denver with experience running AIDS projects, to work with him at
Idweli. Their first visits in 2002 focused on listening to children
and village elders.
“You want to be useful,” said Dukay, a heavyset, jovial man prone
to overworking himself. Orphaned at age 15, he was later moved to
tears as he sat with kids unsure where they’d find their next meal
and who habitually raised their hands before speaking.
“It took me back instantly to when I was 15,” he said. “That
look in the eye, body language, speech, that low, soft voice,
wanting to be in the back of the room away from everybody, not
wanting to be seen. You look in their eyes. Have you ever seen
anybody really sad? I can see sadness in somebody’s eyes. …
Probably from looking at myself.”
Dukay and Childs guided construction of the center, five ochre-hued
buildings with cement-and-stone foundations. Village men did the
work. There’s no electricity or running water.
This year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dukay a grant to
assess whether the children’s center is meeting village needs. He
led an evaluation team, including psychologists and social workers,
on his 10th visit to Idweli this fall - feeling “more alive than
I’ve ever felt,” he said.
Staving off extremists
Sustaining this children’s center, and possibly replicating it
elsewhere, is more than a humanitarian effort, Dukay said. Security
analysts worry that Africa’s millions of desperate AIDS orphans
will join jobless urban masses adrift and vulnerable to extremists
who could lure them into violence.
“Where best to recruit?” Dukay said. “Out here in the
hinterlands where there is no security.”
He watched Fodi playing soccer in donated white sneakers, fighting
hard for the ball against bigger players, despite his physical
weakness after three years of eating very little. Nhambo, solitary
and silent, played a bit, too.
Any chore, Fodi volunteered. He hauled a 16-foot-long bamboo pole
for a mile to help cooks who were building a shelf.
Life’s better now than before, Fodi said, recalling how taunts from
children with parents tormented him.
“I’d leave, go sit someplace alone. Very bad to hear. I thought:
‘This will happen many times in my life. People will always be
telling me I am an orphan.”‘
Far more typical across Africa today are orphaned children who
raise other children with no help. Village elders are overwhelmed.
Nearby at the village of Ndulamo, three teenage girls - Shida
Mahenge, 16, and her sisters, Ona, 14, and Rehema, 12 - huddled
together at sunset. When they beg for food from neighbors, “people
cannot give,” Shida said.
For five years after AIDS killed their father and then their
mother, Shida served as surrogate parent and caretaker, insisting
that Ona and Rehema stay in school.
“I’m always telling them they need to behave and to listen to
their teacher and when they don’t understand, to ask questions,”
she said.
She deals with food. Working to earn money means enduring
harassment from boys and men unaccustomed to working with a girl.
First, Shida broke rock into gravel that villagers sell to road
crews for maintenance.
“Very hard work. You have to carry the rocks. It takes a long time
with the hammer to break the rocks into small stones. Now, I work
carrying timber. I think it might be better.”
But this night they had no food or wood to burn and stay warm. The
girls huddled silently in the cold, blue darkness. They were
hungry, barely able to think about their dreams of attending a
vocational school.
“We like to pray,” Shida said. “We have a very hard life now. We
pray to God to help us, so that we will not get sick. … We need
help to survive.”
HIV adds to struggles
Helping children such as this can be difficult because many are
infected with HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Doctors are scarce,
about one per 50,000 people in rural Tanzania, let alone anti-retroviral drugs for villagers.
At a German-run clinic nearby in Bolongwa, Dr. Rainer Brandl was
amazed to see a tiny, bloated girl, her feet swollen, staggering in
from a farm.
When he tested Veneranda Ganga, 13, he found she was HIV-positive with virtually no immunities. Doubting she’d survive,
Brandl put her on anti-retrovirals.
Veneranda gained strength. She began helping around the hospital,
cradling an abandoned 1-year-old girl. She told nurses she’d been
sick for years, after her father died of AIDS. Later, her mother
died, too, when Veneranda was 5. Before dying, she said, her mother
told her: “You must listen to other people. One day I will die,
and you must get along.”
Each day Veneranda retrieved water, washed dishes and took care of
her brother and an aunt’s two young children. This year, she grew
too weak to work. “I told my uncle, I better go to the
hospital.”
Frustrated and deluged with sick children, Brandl works on a
shoestring, unable to pay and keep staff. United Nations and U.S.
aid often funds workshops for doctors and social workers in cities,
drawing them away from urgent work in villages, he said.
“Nobody wants to work out here,” he said.
Orphans start to cope
At the Idweli children’s center, regular meals, chores and classes
let orphans begin coming to terms with their plight.
Vaileti Bonifasi, 14, who was 2 when her parents died, said she’d
been sneaking away to visit their graves, praying a bit, talking
and crying.
“I was walking back home from school thinking: ‘How can I not even
know what my mother looked like?”‘ Vaileti said. “I thought about
it all the way home. And I was lying on my bed. When I got up, the
ghost of my mother came to me. She was speaking to me. But I
couldn’t understand her.”
Godfrey Mahenge’s younger brother Elia, 21, told Vaileti she should
ask her brother Fred at the family house by the graves if he had a
photo of their mother. When they arrived, they found Fred standing
with his wife, Gloria, and their baby.
“There’s no picture” of their mother, Fred said. Instead, Fred
produced a wrinkled, laminated driver’s license showing their
father, who died in 1994. Vaileti clutched it but still wanted a
photo of her mother.
“I need to compare it with the face of the ghost,” she said.
Involving the villagers
The cost of the project at Idweli, including construction and
support for daily operations, has been about $300,000. Now Dukay’s
evaluation is focused on perceptions of villagers and the
children.
“Are there any concerns?” Dukay asked recently in the meeting
hall, addressing village elders. “If there are any problems in
what we are doing, I would like to know directly.”
Some villagers benefit - such as Florence Doset, 39, a mother of
two who teaches at the center. She earns $50 a month.
“Because of these children, we have money,” she said. “So we’re
happy.”
Others are bewildered. Orphans at the center suddenly enjoy better
living conditions and food than other children living with their
parents. Project supporters have begun to give small
“microcredit” loans to villagers.
Fodi is now studying as his parents advised, but the habit of
worrying about Nhambo is ingrained. He recently warned Elia that
Nhambo’s mind wanders in school.
But Fodi also was beginning to think about himself. In the
classroom where he sat recently in the early evening, he summoned
the last energy he had to hold his head up. Three lanterns cast a
golden light just bright enough to illuminate the blackboard. Elia
was teaching English, writing sentences - “You sing a song” - for
students to copy.
This was extra instruction to give the orphans a better chance at
school. Twenty boys, mostly older, were taking advantage.
And Fodi was especially resolute.
He wanted to be ready for competitive tests that determine who
qualifies for college.
“I want to be a teacher,” Fodi said. “Then I can help other
people.”
———————————-
SERIES TEAM
Series reporter: Bruce Finley covers international affairs and
security for The Denver Post, which he joined in 1988. He has
reported from more than 30 nations, including his third tour in
Iraq with a U.S. combat unit earlier this year. This is Finley’s
fifth Africa assignment.
He grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford University in 1984
and earned master’s degrees in international relations as a
Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at NorthwesternUniversity.
Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
Series photographer: Helen H. Richardson previously traveled to
Thailand and Indonesia to cover the South Asian tsunami and to Rome
for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, among other overseas
assignments for The Post, which she joined in 1993. Her freelance
work has appeared in The New York Times and Christian Science
Monitor.
Richardson grew up in Aspen and graduated from Parsons School of
Design in New York.
Richardson can be reached at hrichardson@denverpost.com
Series editor: Mark Harden
Photo editor: Larry C. Price
Copy editor: Eddie Chuculate
Maps and graphics: Severiano Galván
Multimedia producers: Doug Conarroe, Demetria Gallegos
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
Today: A Coloradan works in a Tanzanian village where the spread of
AIDS is leaving growing numbers of children parentless.
Also, a Denver FBI agent cultivates African police as partners
against terrorism.
Monday: Efforts by Colorado-based Water for People to drill wells in Malawi help
thousands who search daily for safe water.
Tuesday: Colorado engineers assist Rwandan schoolgirls quavering
from the horrors of war.
Some quoted material in these reports was translated from Swahili,
Tambuka, Kinyarwanda and local dialects.
October 30, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights
Rights activist fears crackdown
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - As this former Soviet state prepares
for the arrival of American troops and the secretary of defense,
Nozima Kamalova is glad yet worried.
Glad because as head of the Legal Aid Society, which
encourages human rights, she applauds Uzbekistan’s growing role in
fighting terrorists.
But concerned too, because she says the war against terrorism
could threaten the frail new freedoms she seeks. Authorities here
have locked up more than 7,000 political prisoners, squelched
political opposition and beaten critics, human rights groups say.
“I am very concerned,” she said. “Maybe they will think that
they can do anything now.”
This is the Uzbek version of the dilemma that Americans face,
too. Retaining civil liberties while cracking down on terrorists
is emerging as a global challenge that different nations approach
from divergent positions.
Last week, before it was announced that Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld would be coming to Uzbekistan, U.S. human rights
groups urged U.S. officials to make sure new military alliances
with Uzbekistan and other authoritarian Central Asian nations
don’t become excuses for abusive internal crackdowns.
Central Asia is “home to brutal dictatorships that use tools
of repression they inherited from the Soviet Union against any
political or religious group they cannot control,” wrote Kenneth
Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, in a letter to U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Tighter airport security
Uzbek officials hope the United States also might learn from
the experience of Uzbekistan, where many still speak Russian and
the government has fought militant Islamic insurgents for the past
two years.
On Feb. 16, 1999, five bombs exploded simultaneously around
the capital city of Tashkent, killing 16 people. Security measures
were imposed - such as checkpoints on roads outside the capital.
Airport security is far more intense than in the United States.
Despite increased security, attacks on Uzbekistan continued.
Last year, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan insurgents attacked from
neighboring Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Over two months, Uzbek
forces repelled them.
“They are very strong Islamic extremist groups,” said
Jakhongir Mavlany, assistant to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s
foreign commercial service officer in Uzbekistan. “Their final
goal, according to their press releases, is to create a pure
Islamic empire in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asian
republics, including parts of western China.”
The situation calmed this past year. U.S. companies led by
Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp. - which invested $300 million in
a gold-processing joint venture - see business potential in
Uzbekistan.
Mavlany said leaders of the insurgency “are linked with Osama
bin Laden,” the suspected terrorist. In his speech after the Sept.
11 attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush referred to
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and its link to bin Laden’s
al-Qaeda group.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in an interview
during the presidential campaign, said Central Asia could become a
hotbed of anti-U.S. terrorism, funded by sales of heroin from
Afghanistan.
Most of the people across the region are Muslims - 88 percent
of Uzbekistan’s population of 25 million. Widespread poverty -
with salaries at about $25 a month - creates potential recruits
for radicals, even though literacy rates are high.
Rumsfeld’s visit, following stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,
is designed to build cooperation for attacks on Afghanistan, which
harbors bin Laden.
Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov is hosting Rumsfeld on
Friday.
Kamalova will watch closely.
A 39-year-old lawyer who first toured America as Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s guest, she witnessed the destruction of the Sept.
11 attacks in New York while attending a United Nations conference.
Now she awaits the results. Karimov offered access to air
bases - including those near Tuzul, Termez and Samarqand - for
U.S. warplanes and troops. Many have been idle since Soviet forces
withdrew about 11 years ago and require improved electronics, air
control systems and fueling stations. A contingent from the 10th
Mountain Division is expected soon.
One fear here is that Americans might strike Afghanistan and
then withdraw, leaving Uzbekistan to face enraged radical Muslims.
So far, despite concerns, Kamalova said her group,
Uzbekistan’s first officially registered human rights
organization, finds that officials “are listening” to civil rights
concerns.
“I think,” she said, “it’s good that they let the Americans
come here.”
October 21, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Latin America
Millions of producers in Third World mired in poverty
UNILDE, Nicaragua - Standing in a cloud forest on the side of
a volcano, Santiago Rivera closes his calloused fingers over green
coffee fruits blushing ripe - future flavor for U.S. consumers.
He descends a twisting trail, past banana trees and the
donkey he fondly calls “the squirrel,” to his adobe house with an
earthen kitchen floor and no plumbing.
He gets by thanks to the “fair trade” deal that gives him 91
cents a pound - double what most growers here get. In fact, Rivera
is the model campesino pictured on brochures touting Starbucks
Coffee’s participation in fair trade, in which companies and
consumers team up to get more money to peasants.
But millions of other coffee producers, across Central
America and much of the Third World, are mired in some of the
planet’s worst poverty. A few hours from Rivera, women give birth
in fly-infested black-plastic shanties without medical help, and
barefoot children grow up on one meal a day.
The survival or suffering of people who produce your coffee
is one of many aspects of today’s world that U.S. consumers can
control. Today, poverty and despair are spreading, creating
breeding grounds for trouble in a world where the threshold for
violence rose Sept. 11.
Leading analysts, including former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado,
who recently led a sweeping appraisal of U.S. national security,
say we must confront global poverty - especially to combat
terrorism.
“There must be much more concerted international effort to do
what the Army calls drying up the swamp. The swamp is composed of
four things - money, weapons, shelter and the fourth thing -
recruits,” Hart said. “The only way you do the fourth is by ending
the despair and offering hope through concerted
economic-development programs.”
The emerging fair-trade movement tries to accomplish this
within the market system instead of relying on aid handouts or
moving farmers into low-wage factories. The way it works is U.S.
consumers pay 5 to 10 percent more for products with fair-trade
labels. Those additional cents, and savings from companies buying
the products more directly from producers and co-ops abroad, can
give producers in the field a minimum price. Inspectors verify
whether the money gets through.
This movement brought “fair trade” coffee to Starbucks a year
ago along with other coffee shops - Kaladi Brothers in Denver,
Coffee Jones in Boulder and Bongo Billy’s Coffees in Buena Vista,
among them. Now, movement leaders target giant corporations that
drive world prices - owners of Maxwell House, Folgers and the
like. More than 80 percent of the coffee Americans drink is this
relatively inexpensive canned coffee.
Fair-trade leaders also plan to broaden their strategy to
encompass producers of other commodities - bananas, sugar,
chocolate, clothing.
But consumer-led poverty reduction isn’t possible unless
corporations agree to offer fair-trade products. Many refuse. As
it stands now, few coffee growers benefit because less than 1
percent, or 2.19 million of the 219 million cups of coffee
Americans drink daily, is certified as fair trade.
Meanwhile, a global coffee crisis caused by overproduction
drives millions ever deeper into poverty.
“We eat only beans,” said Paula Mercado, 40, in a dark
hillside shack near Rivera. “We’re killing ourselves working, and
we can’t get a decent price.”
Highly traded commodity
Four in five U.S. adults drink coffee, helping to make coffee
the world’s second most-traded commodity after oil with $55
billion in annual sales. And industry experts say the very best
coffee generally comes from small-scale farmers like Santiago
Rivera laboring in tropical highlands from Ethiopia to Indonesia.
This fine coffee grows on shaded plots, under diverse
canopies considered ecologically healthy, where complex flavors
develop. Here in the mountains of northern Nicaragua, brilliant
blue butterflies bounce around Rivera’s carefully tended coffee
plants.
His classic method and wise, weathered face made him a
modern-day Juan Valdez for Starbucks, which distributes its
fair-trade brochures at 3,000 shops around North America. Soon
Starbucks will offer fair-trade coffee worldwide, chief executive
Orin Smith said. “We’re going to be a force within our industry
… working very hard to make this program work.”
It isn’t charity, he said. To keep selling top-quality
coffee, “we need these people to survive.”
For his role, Rivera gained a public-relations tour of
America last year. He saw “streets made of nothing but buildings -
beautiful.”
Now back home he struggles, perched on a wood chair teetering
on an uneven floor, weighing his finances. His wife, Ermelinda,
brings him a cup of his own coffee - one of the few luxuries in
his life. His earnings as a coffee grower aren’t enough even to
afford Nescafe instant from the village store, let alone an $11.45
bag of his beans in America.
He collects 91 cents a pound because he’s part of a
cooperative - Prodecoop based in Esteli - that sells 60 percent of
its coffee at fair-trade prices - $1.26 a pound for fair-trade
beans and $1.41 for beans also certified as organic. Directors
said farmers usually receive about $1 a pound depending on
deductions for transport, processing and community projects.
Rivera’s 91 cents means his six children can attend school
and, at this time of drought, eat store-bought rice and corn. He
still relied on aid handouts after Hurricane Mitch to repair his
roof and an outhouse.
Yet his struggles are minimal compared with those of
neighbors around him who must sell their beans for 45 cents a
pound. They beg regularly to let them join his co-op. Rivera must
say no until demand grows - which torments him.
“You should be able to work and have a better life,” he said.
Sales are still low, but the volume of fair-trade coffee
imported by the United States has more than doubled since 1999,
said Paul Rice, director of the TransFair USA organization that
coordinates monitoring and labeling.
“U.S. consumers are a sleeping giant,” Rice said. “As it
awakens, corporate America has to sit up and listen.”
But fair traders face an uphill battle.
Across coffee-dependent Central America - where good times
mean living on $2 a day - relief agencies estimate 1.5 million
peasants lack food as a coffee crisis worsens. World market prices
plunged to all-time lows last week - 19 cents a pound for
low-quality robusta and 45 cents for arabica beans. In Nicaragua
alone, a quarter-million people are suffering, and United Nations
officials said more than 12,000 coffee workers now receive
emergency food aid.
What caused this crisis? Investors over the past decade
sensed profit opportunities in Vietnam, where peasants work as
cheaply as anywhere in the world. Financiers and Vietnam’s
government directed rapid development of coffee plantations.
Vietnam now is the second-largest coffee producer behind Brazil -
churning out cheap robusta coffee that corporate giants like
Procter & Gamble buy. A resulting glut of this coffee sucked down
world prices.
Vietnamese peasants win.
But in Nicaragua, Victor Manual Alvarez, 45, sat on the floor
of his two-room house measuring out the last of the corn that
feeds his family. His four barefoot children watched listlessly.
“When this runs out …” His voice trailed off. The family
has no money, he said. A dry cornfield behind the house isn’t
planted. He still counts on coffee, but unable to sell at
fair-trade prices he must settle for 50 cents a pound. After
tending to his coffee plants and harvesting, moving his coffee to
local middlemen requires five day-long donkey treks down the
volcano and then along a rocky 5-mile road to Somoto.
He devotes more time now to searching for construction work
that might bring some money for food. Sometimes he’s gone for
weeks.
“It’s not fair,” he said. “Fifty cents a pound is not enough
to provide coffee.”
There was a time when he envisioned a better life for his
children. “I’ve been working with a machete since I was a little
boy. I never studied.”
Now he just wants them to survive. “Give a good price to us,
the poor producers of your coffee,” he implored. “The coffee we
produce is good coffee.”
United Nations World Food Program supervisor Rosario Sanabria
laments that too many commodity producers are falling behind.
“The companies play an important role,” Sanabria said. “Their
values are not human. They are commercial. What is their
responsibility? In general, we’re not taking care of human values.
The world would be a little more fair if we thought more about
human values.”
Inside a Starbucks cafe on Denver’s 16th Street Mall,
bank-loan specialist Beth Bockenstedt, 44, ordered up a $3.80
Caramel Macchiato last week. She knew about fair-trade coffee.
She’d seen the brochure featuring Santiago Rivera. The cafe in
Denver offered no fair-trade coffee as a daily brew. Bockenstedt
said she might be inclined to try it or buy fair-trade beans for
home instead of French Roast - even if those beans aren’t quite as
good.
But she doubts fair-trade money really reaches peasants. She
views fair trade as “just a gimmick” to hook socially conscious
consumers.
At Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, chief executive Smith
worried about the quality of fair-trade coffee. He said he wants
fair-trade leaders to work with industry leaders to find
cooperatives that can produce the best coffee in large volumes.
Specialty-coffee lobbyists fear this is happening too slowly
and that an industrywide roughening of quality will result as
Vietnamese robusta drives out savory arabicas.
Fair-trade pitch rejected
“We can’t do what we need to do with fair trade,” said Ted
Lingle, director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
“We can’t get consumers to connect with the issue fast enough to
make a real difference for the farmer.” Lingle wants coffee-market
leaders in New York and London to remove “triage” waste products
that inflate global coffee volume, in an emergency effort to
resuscitate prices.
Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble directors at a shareholder
meeting Oct. 9 rejected a pitch to offer fair-trade coffee. P&G
prefers to help impoverished producers by giving aid, spokeswoman
Margaret Swallow said.
Executives are looking for groups that work with farmers to
help them switch from coffee into growing more profitable crops,
she added.
Pressure groups plan to attack P&G as suppliers of “sweatshop
coffee.”
And in the U.S. Congress, lawmakers are trying to make up
their own minds about what kind of coffee to drink. Last week
lawmakers tested fair-trade blends in a congressional cafeteria.
Yet so far nobody is making a real difference for coffee
workers.
In a fly-infested shanty camp near Matagalpa, Dimas Carrazo,
40, grips an ax, trolling for wood to cut and sell, the only way
he can afford food for his four starving kids. Frustrations mount.
Carrazo and others once fought as U.S.-backed contra fighters to
subvert Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Many still wear blue
contra caps emblazoned “Guardians of Democracy.”
Americans should help with the coffee crisis, said Marcos
Molina Velazquez, 40, an ex-fighter now raising five kids. “If
they helped us before to get arms, now they should help us get
tools.”
In another roadside camp, Samuel Tinoco, 53, suggested:
“Maybe I should go to Vietnam?”
Leading a group of 350 landless coffee workers, who marched
all the way to Managua pleading for aid to sick children and then
camped at the National Assembly, Maria Victoria Picado, 45,
announced: “If nobody does anything, this will get violent.”
This year, a U.S. State Department report warned that “endemic
poverty” in Nicaragua is driving entire communities into smuggling
drugs from Colombia north to the United States.
Even Santiago Rivera questions the free-market system right
now. He has friends in the United States, and excused himself
tearfully after watching the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center. “We’re all brothers.”
Yet in Nicaragua’s election next month, he’s backing
ex-Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, a man with questionable
connections to Libya and Iraq who once tried to lead Central
America toward socialism. He’s worth another try, in Rivera’s
view, as a leader responsive to real people.
October 7, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - As the first U.S. ground troops in
Central Asia reach this former Soviet republic, leaders of the war
on terrorism are depicting a resolute march toward justice.
That march, underscored by further warnings from President
Bush, on Friday took Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld up the
curving, brass-railed marble stairs in Uzbekistan’s White Palace.
There, bolstering new alliances the United States is trying
to forge, the secretary of defense shook hands with President
Islam Karimov, a burly former Communist Party boss.
They sat at a long table facing each other, palavered for an
hour and then strolled across a gleaming wood floor.
Karimov said yes, the United States could use one military
base for search and rescue and humanitarian operations - which
would provide key access to an area just north of Afghanistan
where suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.
But the Uzbek leader also said no, the U.S. cannot yet launch
strikes directly from his country. And no, U.S. special operations
soldiers, key to efforts in Afghanistan, won’t be allowed in the
country.
“We are not quite ready for this,” Karimov said.
Now some 1,000 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division -
created in Colorado during World War II, and now based in New York
- are charged with setting up operations at the Uzbek air base.
Rumsfeld’s five-country mission to build support paired with
a swing by British Prime Minister Tony Blair through Russia,
Pakistan and India. As they returned home, England and the U.S.
talked tough, but vaguely, to Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders.
“Time is running out,” Bush warned.
“Things are coming into place,” vowed Blair.
But what? When?
“The timing of any action is a matter to be discussed with
our close allies,” Blair allowed. “What has been happening is that
there is a political and diplomatic coalition there that’s very
strong.”
But not as strong as the U.S. had hoped. None of the five
countries Rumsfeld sidled up to granted the unrestricted access
officials seek to conduct commando raids and bombing runs on
Afghanistan.
Pakistan, on Blair’s itinerary, is nervous about civil unrest
if it abets war against fellow Muslims in the Taliban - a regime
Pakistan has aided and, alone in the world, still officially
recognizes.
In Pakistan, some embassies are shedding nonessential staff
and closing offices in smaller cities. A metal detector suddenly
is the mark of a better hotel in Islamabad, the capital.
Only hours before Blair’s visit Friday, Maulana Fazlur
Rahman, leader of the extremist Jamiat Ulema-I-Islam party,
visited Rawalpindi and sent a crowd of about 5,000 storming
through the streets screaming anti-American and pro-Taliban slogans.
“The religious parties are united in their stand,” said
Muhammed Sharif Chowdry, 75. “If the government provides support
to America in an attack on Afghanistan, the government will fail.
“It will not be able to face the people. Not only the people of
Pakistan, but the Muslims of the whole world are behind
Afghanistan.”
There is also unease in Uzbekistan.
“If Americans attack Afghanistan, it’s OK,” said Natasha
Ignatkina, 40, inside a smoky tea and kabob den in rural Angren.
“But only if Uzbekistan will be safe.”
In his palace, the president said much the same thing.
“We do need guarantees that tomorrow we will not be left alone
to confront a terrorist menace,” Karimov told several reporters
after Rumsfeld left. “We need this guarantee. We don’t want to be
used or manipulated in any way.”
Did the meeting with Rumsfeld allay these concerns?
“No guarantees so far. No reassurances.”
Karimov agreed with Rumsfeld that there must be a concerted
effort to counter terrorism.
“We’ve got to unite,” Karimov said. “We’ve got to respect
each other. We have to stand up and defend the world, defend the
clear skies over our heads.”
But the details can be pesky. Many key members of the
coalition Bush is trying to form were holding something back this
weekend.
Significantly, Saudi Arabian officials refused to allow air
attacks launched from U.S. military bases in their country.
Charges of betrayal in coalition ranks also surfaced this
weekend. Afghan Northern Alliance backers in Tashkent accused
Pakistan of continuing its support for the Taliban regime.
Pakistani intelligence agents and the government “are
supporting the Taliban - sending military equipment to
Afghanistan, still,” Consul Ali Ahmad said at the former
government’s Embassy of the Islamic State of Afghanistan. “They
should seal that border completely.”
India and Pakistan continue a bloody dispute over Kashmir,
making them uneasy allies.
And while Bush on Saturday spoke of the post-Taliban era and
the aid Afghanistan would receive, questions loom about whether
the fractious tribal alliance - or anyone - can govern a country
that’s been at war for a generation and could see more conflict
soon.
“Maybe another Taliban will form,” said Tamara Prokopjeva,
whose Orbita TV station, housed in a converted eight-room
apartment, is one of the few nongovernment stations in a country
where more than 7,000 perceived opponents of the government are
jailed.
“So many people think the way they do, other groups could get
together.”
The events of the last few days in Uzbekistan and Pakistan
show that it’s a tricky new world for the U.S.
“No question,” Rumsfeld said after meeting with Karimov.
“Circumstances in the world have shifted.”
The United States seeks to enlist Muslim allies against
accused Muslim terrorists. At the same time, Bush states that he
will retain ties to familiar allies such as Israel, whose leader,
Ariel Sharon, voiced strong warnings to the U.S. not to appease
Arab countries.
“In a year, or two, or three, we’ll see considerably
different arrangements in the world than existed prior to Sept.
11,” according to Rumsfeld. “It’s not certain yet how that will
play out.”
Uzbekistan exemplifies that uncertainty.
A predominantly Muslim country of 25 million, Uzbekistan has
fended off its own Islamic fundamentalist assaults in recent
years.
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, tied to bin Laden and
Afghanistan, wants to overthrow Karimov and establish a more
rigorous Islamic life. The movement is suspected of setting off
five simultaneous bomb blasts around Tashkent in February 1999
that killed 13 and injured 120 - leading to a crackdown that
limits worship to government-approved mosques.
People here live in blocks of uniform ap
October 4, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights
Some in Pakistan enjoy measure of freedom, education, basic rights
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Shabab Naqvi has a little problem with
her husband. Here she is, working at her government job all day,
raising five kids, doing all the cooking and cleaning, and taking
care of her 90-year-old mother-in-law, and does he help?
Get real.
“Whenever I need him, he is gone,” she said, raising her
hands and rolling her eyes heavenward as she voiced the classic
lament of the working woman.
Except that this is Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim
country where - according to stereotype - women don’t work. Nor do
they go to school, leave the home or have opinions that contradict
their husbands’; opinions that would be muffled, in any case, by
the enveloping burka beneath which they supposedly live.
Put that scenario to some Pakistani women, and then step
back - you’ll need to give them room for a belly laugh.
“It’s a real misconception,” said Aisha Nafees, 21, a
business student here in Pakistan’s capital city. She tossed her
hair in indignation as she spoke - hair that was not, by the way,
covered by a veil. Like many women here, Nafees wears a length of
chiffon draped across her throat, its ends trailing over her
shoulders and down her back. “I pray five times a day. I recite
the holy Koran. I do not need a veil.”
There’s the stereotype of the constrained Muslim woman. Then
there are women such as Naqvi and Nafees.
They coexist in this part of the world, which has become
central to the Bush administration’s campaign against terrorism.
The treatment of women in neighboring Afghanistan, which harbors
suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, has become part of
the debate.
Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban imposes many rules on women,
such as requiring them to be fully covered and forbidding
education for girls older than 8. Taliban opponents in the
Northern Alliance depict themselves as more progressive, for
example by allowing education for some women.
Pakistan, home to about 2 million Afghan refugees, is 97
percent Muslim. But within that populace, contrary to popular
belief, limitations on women vary from city to city and
neighborhood to neighborhood.
Recent reports by agencies as varied as the United Nations,
the U.S. State Department and the Progressive Women’s Organisation
paint a bleak picture of life for Pakistani women.
The U.N. and the State Department, in reports written in 1999
and 1998, respectively, found domestic-violence levels as high as
90 percent. The State Department said a third of the women in
jails in the Pakistani cities of Lahore, Peshawar and Mardan faced
adultery charges.
That report also found that only about 2 percent of the women
in rural areas such as Sindh and Baluchistan, in southwest
Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, can read. Nationally 50 percent of
men are literate, twice the rate for women.
“Yes, you find that in the villages,” said Younas Khalid,
director of the Baluchistan office of the women’s rights group
Audad. “Our religion gives them rights. Our constitution gives
them rights. Our job is to make sure they know about those rights.”
In a different way, that is Farida Nigar’s job, too.
Nigar is a vice president and branch manager for First
Women’s Bank Ltd., founded in 1989 to help women manage their own
financial affairs. At noon Wednesday, the bank, in a fashionable
area of Islamabad, was crowded with customers, all waiting to
speak with one of the women - all the bank employees are female -
sitting behind a dozen desks that formed a horseshoe in the
office. The clients included everyone from stylishly dressed women
like Nigar to women so heavily veiled that only their eyes were
visible. Several men also waited for service.
“This is a commercial bank, so we take accounts from gents
also,” Nigar said. “But we have special arrangements for women.”
Those include a credit program for women who want to start, or who
already own, businesses, and loans to businesses that have at
least 50 percent female partnership and whose chief executives are
women.
“The women are not treated with importance in other banks
where men are working,” Nigar said.
First Women’s Bank tries to help women learn their financial
rights and how to stand up for them. It holds seminars in money
management and gives computer training.
But instilling a belief in those rights is a struggle, she
said.
“Generally,” said Nigar, “even when a woman works, her
husband controls her money.”
Audad, also, tries to apprise women of their rights.
Audad - Urdu for “women” - was founded 15 years ago. Last
year, President Pervez Musharraf founded the National Commission
on the Status of Women. Just this year, Musharraf’s government
ruled that 33 percent of all seats in local elections must go to
women. “This is a landmark in Pakistan,” said Khalid, who said the
group’s next goal is to have the same requirement for the national
elections next year.
Meanwhile, Audad - much like women’s organizations in the
United States - mostly helps women with legal matters.
Divorce is legal in Pakistan. Men don’t have to prove
cause; women, however, do. The husband usually gets custody of the
children. And few women know they can receive alimony, Khalid
said. Article 25 of Pakistan’s constitution states that no citizen
shall be discriminated against on the basis of gender, religion or
ethnic background. Audad’s job, said Khalid, is to make antiquated
laws comply with the constitution. There is a poster on his office
wall: “My wife does not work. But then - whose work provides the
time for the man to drink with his friends, smoke his hookah, gamble?”
Khalid’s wife studies for a master’s degree in education (she
already has a master’s in math) while raising their young son and
daughter. Far more unusual - especially in Baluchistan, where
women are rarely even seen on the street - she drives.
“I do believe that if male members of society understood the
rights of women,” Khalid said, “that the women would not be
deprived of their rights.”
Under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, those rights are more
tenuous.
Sitting in a guest house in Peshawar, a 22-year-old Afghan
woman quietly recalled a lashing she witnessed. It happened when
she entered a shop near her home in the capital city of Kabul, she
said. She wore her burka as required.
“Hard to breathe or to see,” she said. “Sometimes it gets
caught under your legs so you can’t walk. And in summer? Very
hot.”
Inside the shop, she reached the jackets. She found one she
liked, but the shop was too dark to see. Not many people were
around. She pulled up the burka for a peek.
A Taliban man then entered the shop holding what she
described as a short, thick whip resembling a riding crop. He
raised it.
“The Taliban was hitting the shopkeeper” - punishing him for
the woman’s transgression. “I said: “It’s not his fault. It was my
fault. Stop hitting him.’ The Taliban said: “Shut up.’ Then he hit
me. I covered my face and went home.”
She left for Pakistan, seeking more freedom. Yet here, too,
Islamic fundamentalism is strong. Some Taliban leaders got their
start here in religious schools.
“We are afraid of the Taliban,” she said, asking that her
name not be used. “Even sometimes here, the Taliban will say:
“Cover your face.’”
But she usually doesn’t. “The law of Islam says men and
women have equal rights. We want to be free, as free as women in
other countries.”
Some of that freedom can be found in Quetta’s narrow,
high-walled side streets, not far from Audad’s office, at Allana
Iqbal Open University, which offers courses over the Internet.
Nuzhad Rajbud is a student counselor there, and she gets in
your face fast if you suggest that some people in the U.S. think
Muslim women are oppressed.
Half the students at Iqbal Open are women, she said, adding
that the distance-learning format appeals to mothers with young
children, and women in more conservative areas such as Quetta
where purdah, a tradition where women appear in public rarely and
only under heavy veils, is practiced.
“This way, if they are used to purdah they can complete their
education,” she said.
Rajbud is one of six sisters to obtain a university
education, on insistence of their mother, who was widowed when the
girls were young. Rajbud said her mother believed, “You have to
live, you have to work, you have to fight.”
Then Rajbud, who had spoken animatedly of her pride in her
work and love for her job, leaned across her desk to confide. At
age 29, it was time to marry. Soon, she was to meet a professor
from Virginia, back home in Pakistan for a six-week visit.
They would decide whether they were compatible. If so, they
would marry in three months, and she would return to Virginia with
him.
But what if she didn’t like him? Could she say no?
Rajbud frowned.
“But I like everyone,” she said. “I like all human beings.”
No, no - what if she didn’t think he would make a good
husband?
Again, the frown, and a shrug.
“I will like him, inshallah,” she said - God willing.
“I will not compromise. But I will make it work.”
May 6, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Human Rights
To some, holding the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will right wrongs; to others, it is just wrong
BEIJING - Red digits on a countdown clock blink out the days
until the International Olympic Committee chooses which country
will host the 2008 Summer Games.
An enormous scroll unfurled from China’s Great Wall recently
proclaimed “Success to Beijing!” and “We will win!”
At bid committee headquarters, architect Steven Gao showed
off his model of a remade Beijing, from Tiananmen Square and the
Forbidden City, where emperors sipped tea, to sparkling modern
sports facilities.
The 2008 Olympics, Gao said, will be the “continuation of
traditional China culture.”
Many agree with him that China is a likely bet to host the
Games. Commercial sponsors - primarily U.S. corporations - want
access to 1.3 billion Chinese. Olympic movement leaders want to
take the Games to regions such as China, Africa and South America
that haven’t hosted the Olympics. China lost the 2000 Games to
Australia by two votes.
But China remains relatively isolated despite two decades of
economic opening. And just as campaigning in Beijing culminates
with nationalistic public displays, China faces increasing
conflict with the United States over human rights and military
postures that threaten to turn confrontational.
The conflict gives grist for a renewed debate over whether
China deserves to host the Olympics. China’s communist leaders
bristle. They figured China already has done plenty to win global
acceptance.
New freedoms are allowed here and spreading, said Wang Wei,
secretary general of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Bid Committee.
“China people, now we can comment on government affairs.
That’s a change that has taken place,” Wang said.
And the 2008 Olympics would be a “catalyst” for more change,
Wang said, “for human rights as well.” Changes “will not be as
fast,” he said, if China’s bid fails.
Beijing’s success also could help U.S. interests in hosting
the 2012 Olympics, Wang added.
“It will be very hard” for the U.S. to host the 2012 Games if
Toronto hosts the Olympics in ‘08, he said. “It’s very important
not to let Toronto have it this time.”
Yet, opposition from some Americans is adamant. That is
especially true after last month’s detention of a U.S. spy plane
crew for 11 days and the continuing clash over returning the plane.
Hosting the Olympics “brings a certain status to a city and a
country,” Gov. Bill Owens said. “I don’t think, given China’s
human rights record, that it would be any more appropriate to have
had the Olympics in Cape Town,” South Africa, under apartheid.
Cleaning up Beijing
On July 13, IOC members will meet in Moscow to select a host
for the 2008 Games. Competing with Beijing are Istanbul, Turkey;
Osaka, Japan; Paris; and Toronto. U.S influence is limited, with
four U.S. members on the 126-person committee. Ballots IOC members
cast in a multiround elimination process are secret. Members from
candidate countries can’t vote.
IOC members this month are to receive technical reports from
committee experts who visited and evaluated candidate cities. The
reports are supposed to focus on site preparations - not politics.
And on that score, China has begun an all-out push including
flashy proposals for beach volleyball and other events to be
conducted at Tiananmen Square, site of China’s massacre of
pro-democracy supporters in 1989.
Consider the $12.2 billion Olympic environmental clean-up
Beijing launched after teaming with a Denver-area company.
Some of the world’s deadliest pollution hangs over Beijing.
Congested masses here hack and wheeze as they move through
the corrosive, gray murk. Breathing 24 hours of the pollution from
factories, coal-fired power plants and thickening traffic is the
equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, according to
world health authorities. Beijing is one of several Chinese cities
where, Chinese authorities reported this past decade, air
pollution caused millions of deaths.
China’s government accepted that Beijing’s pollution could
choke the throats - and memories - of visiting IOC technical
experts. So, in 1998, China turned to CH2M Hill.
A 12,000-employee engineering firm based in Greenwood
Village, CH2M Hill has been contracted to clean up messes from New
York’s toxic Love Canal to the Rocky Flats radioactive nuclear
weapons waste west of Denver.
In February, when the IOC experts arrived in Beijing for
inspections, CH2M Hill’s managing director for China, Sarah Liao,
presented the “Action Plan for a Green Olympics”:
Plant millions of fast-growing trees throughout Beijing (pop.
12 million) covering 100 square kilometers - an area the size of
Denver International Airport. The goal: Improve air quality and
shield Beijing from Gobi Desert dust that mixes with smog.
Reduce urban industrial pollution by moving factories away
from Beijing.
Double sewage treatment capacity so that most wastewater is
recycled.
Convert 90 percent of Beijing buses and 70 percent of taxis
to clean-burning natural gas.
Urge every citizen to recycle at least half their garbage.
IOC experts recorded this in detail. Americans and Chinese
involved contend this sort of U.S.-China cooperation could prove
far more effective than confrontation for both countries - and the
world - in the future.
“I think Beijing deserves the Olympics,” said CH2M Hill chief
executive Ralph Peterson, who was in Beijing on business last
month during the spy plane standoff.
Chinese leaders “have made tremendous progress” over the past
two decades, Peterson said. Letting Beijing host the Olympics now
“is a matter of encouraging China’s active participation in the
global community.”
U.S.-China relations
IOC vice president Dick Pound, one of five contenders to
succeed outgoing IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch in July,
applauded China’s environmental clean-up efforts during a Denver
Post interview.
“I don’t know whether it could win it for them,” Pound said,
“but it would certainly take out of play a major concern that
might otherwise be a question mark.”
Pound won’t vote because he’s Canadian, and Toronto is a
contender for the 2008 Games. But he’s familiar with IOC thinking.
The spy plane incident, Pound said, “is not going to play much of
a role at all. I don’t see that as even being on the radar screen
come July 13.”
But rancorous U.S.-China relations raged anew after President
Bush’s recent assertion that the United States will back Taiwan,
which China regards as a rebellious province, militarily if
necessary. Last week, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld downgraded
U.S. military relations with China, and China warned President
Bush’s proposed missile defense system will set off an arms race
that could threaten world peace. Bush then lashed out at China for
not allowing greater religious freedom, denouncing this as a sign
of weakness.
In the U.S. Congress, lawmakers want to use the Olympics as a
political wedge to punish China. Some 60 House members and more in
the Senate have sponsored bipartisan resolutions that the 2008
Olympics should not be conducted in Beijing unless China releases
all political prisoners and improves civil liberties.
Support is strong, said U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., on
the House International Relations Committee.
“This doesn’t mean we end trade with China,” Tancredo said,
casting the resolution he co-sponsored as political “cover” for
those leery of cutting economic ties. “This is a statement that
needs to be made. China and the world need to see that there is
strong concern in the United States about human rights in China
and the aggressive nature of the regime.”
Whether any of this will make any difference is unclear.
European leaders recently declined to join the United States in
sponsoring a United Nations censure of China. Choosing an Olympics
site is up to IOC members - not Congress.
But the highest-ranking U.S. member - IOC vice president
Anita DeFrantz - said, “I always take very seriously the opinions
expressed by Congress.” She discussed human rights in China
recently with Amnesty International Director William Schulz.
DeFrantz is another candidate to succeed Samaranch, the
outgoing IOC president. As an Olympic rower in 1980, she went to
court to oppose the U.S. government boycott of the Moscow Olympics
to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Yet DeFrantz said her vote in July will depend mostly on what
athletes want, including any concerns athletes may voice regarding
China’s human rights. “I am listening to many arguments,” DeFrantz
said.
The U.S. State Department’s latest assessment describes
worsening human rights in China, including crackdowns on religion
and the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a blend of meditation and
stretching that has attracted millions of Chinese followers. The
report also documents repression of minority groups, such as
Tibetans, and suppression of political dissent.
Some human rights groups are refocusing their campaigns
against China to challenge Beijing’s Olympics bid.
In Denver recently, Students for a Free Tibet, with 600
chapters nationwide, launched a campaign under the banner “No
Olympics for China until Tibet is Free.” College and high school
students sent hundreds of letters to IOC leaders: “Say No to
Beijing 2008.” And Tibetan immigrants across the United States are
mailing white silk “khata” prayer scarves as reminders that China
punishes Tibetans who challenge Chinese rule, said campaign leader
Tenzing Jigme, 32, a Tibetan student at the University of Colorado
in Denver.
“America has so many economic ties to China, people don’t
want to mess around,” Jigme said. “But the Olympics is one area
where you can maybe send a warning.”
“We want to vote’
In Beijing, news that anybody opposes Beijing’s bid brought
scowls from residents who overwhelmingly support hosting the
Olympics. Even some democracy advocates contend the Games would
promote positive change.
“There’s room to improve the system,” said Liu Dageng, 33, at
a restaurant with his wife, who was at Tiananmen Square shortly
before China’s 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators.
“We want to vote, of course.”
But denying the Olympics to try to force change misconstrues
the Games “as a kind of gift,” Liu said. That “hurts the
Olympics,” he said. “Keep it simple. This is against the Olympic
spirit.”
IOC officials have conducted the Games in politically
controversial places before - the Soviet Union in 1980, South
Korea in ‘88 when Korea technically was at war and the government
clashed regularly with labor demonstrators, and Spain in ‘92 when
sometimes-violent Basque separatists were active. Some Olympics
leaders say the Games can boost human rights in host countries.
The blotch on that argument is Berlin, in 1936, where the
Olympics gave Hitler a platform shortly before he led the
Holocaust killing of 6 million European Jews.
Now in Beijing, residents eager to impress the world are
trying to help China’s Olympics campaign. They can’t do much about
their government’s approach to human rights and military buildup
with missiles aimed at Taiwan - which many support. But growing
numbers participate in the “Action Plan for a Green Olympics.”
A new Olympics-driven activism is emerging in some areas,
with restaurant operators considering whether to ban smoking.
University students recently debated forest-friendly alternatives
to China’s reliance on wood for hundreds of millions of chopsticks.
In the Chen Shou Yuan neighborhood southwest of Tiananmen
Square, residents planted trees, grass and flowers for an Olympics
Park amid their apartment towers.
Friends played pingpong in the park one recent evening, and
factory janitor Song Yue Ze, 49, laughed about the U.S.-China spy
plane standoff, pounding his fists together. Then he played tour
guide, pointing out how pleasant Beijing neighborhoods can be. “I
want your vote,” Song said.
And Liu Hung Ngor, apartment manager, earnestly taped up a
handwritten sign at the base of a stairwell. The sign urged
residents to go to the apartment office and pick up a new gas
nozzle, free, to attach to their stoves and limit pollution.
“It will be much cleaner,” Liu said. “We want Beijing to be
able to host the Olympics. And by hosting the Olympics, we can
tell the world what we are like. We are proud of our heritage.”
March 21, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Webb to open office in nation at odds with U.S.
On the surface, Beijing and Washington spar over destroyer
sales to Taiwan, missile defense and human rights.
But behind the scenes, U.S. business and local governments,
including Denver’s, conduct taxpayer-funded courtships of China,
forging closer and deeper relations than ever before.
This week, when Denver Mayor Wellington Webb departs for
China with 47 executives, scholars and city officials, he’ll push
the courtship to a new level by opening the first U.S. city office
in China.
Webb lined up a carpeted, bedroom-size sixth-floor office in
central Shanghai to serve as a conduit for business and pro-Denver
buzz. Connecting with China’s 1.3 billion people will propel
Denver “ahead of the curve,” Webb said in an interview, promising
local economic growth and “a relationship that will last long
after I am mayor.”
The City Council approved $160,000 for the China project, and
the eight-day trade mission is expected to cost another $36,000.
Shanghai-based trade representative Roland Tong’s salary will be
$84,000 to serve city interests across China.
An office-opening ceremony is set for Thursday with
Shanghai’s mayor.
Then, after swings through China’s ancient capital of Xi’an
and Beijing, Webb hopes to meet with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.
Webb and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens hosted Zhu in Denver two years
ago. Zhu oversees China’s economy and access by foreign companies.
Corporate executives accompanying Webb want to win
construction contracts in China, line up direct flights to Denver,
supply television programs and help China land the 2008 Olympics.
But they’re pursuing their interests as a high-level drama
between Washington and Beijing tilts U.S.-Chinese cooperation
toward competition. President Bush soon must decide whether to
defy Chinese President Jiang Zemin by selling four high-tech
destroyers to Taiwan. A Chinese diplomat last week warned of a
very serious setback if the sales go through. Diplomats also
dicker over Pentagon plans for missile defense, and evidence that
China recently aided Iraq. A new U.S.-backed United Nations
resolution would condemn China for human rights abuses - just as
Beijing seeks the Olympics.
Yet state and city ties to China and elsewhere deepen as
mainstream America connects with the global economy.
Over the past 30 years, states established at least 132 trade
offices worldwide, according to state records. Governors and
mayors also lead more trade missions and typically support
international sister-city links. In contrast, U.S. federal
government representation abroad, with 257 posts, stayed
relatively steady through the 1990s.
Relations with China in particular are growing. China
supplies U.S. families with affordable toys, shoes, clothing and
other merchandise worth $100 billion a year. In China, 15 states
run mainland or Hong Kong offices.
Among cities, Houston, too, is considering an office in China.
“If China is our strategic competitor,” Webb said, “one of
the ways to address that is to find areas where we agree, and
where we disagree. … It’s better to trade and tie your economies
together than have military buildups.”
Possible drawbacks
But even proponents see risks.
A risk that China won’t open up. China agreed to lower
tariffs as a condition for its expected entry into the World Trade
Organization this year. Currently, Colorado-based ConAgra Inc.
faces 40 percent tariffs to sell beef in China. In Fort Morgan,
sunflower seed entrepreneur Mike Erker, whose sales to China
topped $1.5 million last year, pays 32 percent tariffs that he
suspects back-channel seed sellers from Taiwan avoid.
A risk that strife between between Beijing and Washington
could stifle business. Englewood-based Jeppesen-Sanderson, which
makes navigational charts for airlines, can’t obtain coordinates
for some Chinese runways because Chinese military officials
object, chief executive Horst Bergmann said. “The political
climate is important for the business climate,” Bergmann said. “If
Washington would open up, I think China would possibly be more
lenient.”
A risk that even if China does cut tariffs and bureaucracy,
companies from Colorado still won’t be able to compete. U.S. trade
with China is increasingly imbalanced in favor of China. The
United States recently posted a record $83.8 billion deficit.
In the Rocky Mountain region, imports from China topped $883
million last year, up from $32 million in 1990, according to U.S.
customs data analyzed for The Denver Post by federal trade
specialists. The region includes Colorado and parts of Wyoming,
Idaho, Utah and Montana. The specialists said state-by-state
import statistics aren’t available but that the bulk of the
regional imports probably went to Colorado.
Meanwhile, exports of Colorado goods and services to China
were valued at just $164 million, up from $41 million in 1996.
Mainland China ranks 14th among Colorado trading partners. If
exports to mainland China are combined with the $233 million to
Hong Kong and $196 million to Taiwan, the “Chinese Economic
Region” looks more promising. Colorado’s top trade partner is
Canada, which bought goods and services worth more than $1 billion
last year, followed by Japan.
Human rights concerns
Beyond the risks, critics question whether cities and states
should deal with China, a communist dictatorship, on principle.
“China has the most repressive government on the planet,”
said Denver Councilman Ed Thomas, who tried unsuccessfully to
block public funding for Webb’s venture. “I don’t think we should
be over there shaking their hand.”
Thomas lambasted Webb for courting China when Webb previously
led city efforts to boycott South Africa under apartheid.
“People are setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square.
How much more odious do you want to get?” Thomas said. “You can’t
justifiably shut the door on South Africa and then offer an olive
branch to the government in China, where people are setting
themselves on fire in demonstrations.”
Chinese dissident Harry Wu, an author and lobbyist in
Washington, D.C., contends China’s treatment of political
dissidents, religious believers and labor activists is worsening.
Denver taxpayers “have to stop courtship like this,” Wu said.
“This is using the common people’s money for business, business
associated with a communist government. Why do you want to set up
all kinds of relations with this regime? You never wanted to do
this with the former Soviet Union because it was the “Evil
Empire,’ right?”
At least Webb should “strongly raise concerns,” said Jie Sun,
a Chinese immigrant in Denver devoted to the Falun Gong spiritual
movement, which China’s government has banned.
“To sacrifice human rights for a good trading relationship is
to sacrifice the American value of freedom of belief.”
In Washington, conservatives press for a harder line on
China. U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Littleton - a House International
Affairs committee member who opposed granting China permanent
normalized trade relations last year - denounced Webb’s overtures
as “ridiculous, naive at best. This will only increase our trade
imbalance with China, not improve it. There will be these little
sops they throw. We’ll get a contract here, a contract there.”
Yet Webb is adamant. He says human rights in China is a
serious issue but that economic engagement will increase U.S.
leverage and improve human rights and labor conditions.
Cheap labor beckons
And China with its 1.3 billion people - many of them willing
to work for 20 cents an hour - entices. More Colorado
businesspeople attend programs on China than on any other country,
said Jim Reis, chief of the Denver-based World Trade Center and an
architect of Denver’s trade mission.
For them to profit from China, veteran U.S. diplomats say,
support from political leaders helps.
Politician-led trade missions “have reasonable paybacks”
though generally nothing immediate, said Craig Johnstone, a
retired U.S. ambassador now serving as president of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce Center for Corporate Citizenship.
“Very few are boondoggles,” he said. “It’s a shame more
public officials don’t do more of this.”
Most of the 30 or so businesspeople accompanying Webb already
have connections in China. They represent large companies such as
CH2M Hill, the Gates Corporation, Harza Engineering and RNL
Design, and a few smaller firms such as Chi Investments and Revis
Asbestos.
Few see Webb’s help and a trade office as crucial.
“We probably don’t need it as much as maybe some other
companies,” said Jim Nelson, vice president and general counsel
for Gates.
But Nelson and others said Webb, if effective, could boost
Colorado business by opening doors. In China, government approval
is required for just about everything, and building relationships
with ministry officials is seen as crucial. Often there’s no
occasion to do that without politicians and pomp - supported by
taxpayers.
Going to China with Webb will give “access to people and
resources that you would not have going alone,” said Michael
Burke, vice president for Startek, a supply chain management
company with offices in Denver, Greeley and Grand Junction.
Some executives also hoped to get a better feel for the human
rights climate in China. It’s not a matter of questioning
government policies but rather understanding project-level
procedures such as how Chinese partners would treat contract
workers.
“If we can’t agree on certain principles, it would be
impossible for us to work,” said Dean Nelson, vice president of
Mortenson Construction, a top U.S. contractor that built Denver’s
Pepsi Center and Coors Field and is exploring opportunities in
China.
“From the humanitarian side, I think there are issues
everybody has trouble with,” Nelson said. “How are we going to
control safety for these people? … We simply couldn’t accept a
project or work under conditions where we would put people at risk.”
The businesspeople met with city officials last week - a
session city officials closed to reporters.
They also received guidance from Hai Yan Zhang, an
interpreter and cultural consultant who grew up in Beijing. She
said she always dreamed of building bridges between Colorado and
China.
Her advice to Webb and crew: Avoid the impatience, arrogance
and ignorance that often plague Americans in China. And pay
attention to image. Denver’s sixth-floor office in central
Shanghai - adjacent to a Ritz Carlton hotel in an
internationalized district with a Starbucks Coffee outlet - sends
the appropriate signal. A basement office would give “no face, no
status,” she said.
“In China, who you are and what you are doesn’t matter. It’s
what people think.”
November 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Low wage workers fuel world economy
LOTUS MOUNTAIN, China - The shiny blue and maroon fabric that worker No. 0391 guides into a Chinese factory sewing machine could be on your back this winter.
The worker, Lu Huikun, makes ski jackets, including this U.S. Ski Team model, for Colorado-based Spyder Active Sports. The jackets cost up to $529 in Denver-area stores.
Lu is paid 31 cents an hour if she keeps a brisk pace at the rattling machine.
A 36-year-old mother of two, she considers herself lucky. Bulldozers making room for factories scraped away her family’s rice field 12 years ago. Lu’s job sewing sportswear for Spyder, Adidas, Champion and other companies helps sustain her family.
“May you all be champions,” she says to those who would buy her jackets this fall.
But Lu’s eyes are tired from overtime shifts. Her thin legs tremble as she pedals her bicycle down People’s Road. More overtime lies ahead.
Lu’s daughter is gradually going blind. She needs special glasses that cost $250 - five months’ wages. When Lu reaches home, crosses a brick courtyard and bends to pump water, the 9-year-old clings to her leg, frightened by a world growing cloudier each day.
Behind many of your possessions - and goods you may buy in the holiday shopping blitz that began Friday - are desperate laborers like Lu in low-wage countries worldwide.
They are the invisible backbone of today’s world economy. But their presence increasingly raises policy questions in corporate boardrooms, spawns riots at trade summits from Seattle to Prague, ruffles consciences of some shoppers in malls.
This report will show you how these workers - in most cases the only people to touch your possessions before you - count on your purchases to survive. Still, they lack many things Americans take for granted.
And in the corporate drive for flexibility and low-wage efficiency, some are treated in ways Americans won’t tolerate at home.
A Denver Post examination of the system traced the origins of products into China, where U.S. firms farm out production of everything from ski coats to computers. Many companies try to shield this information from the public.
Once, such products might have been labeled “Made In USA.”
But today if you buy one of those trendy collapsible scooters, odds are it was made in China. Same with many skateboards, snowshoes, inline skates. The fireworks you shoot on the Fourth of July? Made in China. Your child’s school backpack or the one you wear hiking? Stitched and inspected in China.
The Post gained access to eight factories and interviewed dozens of workers and managers. Compulsory overtime here is the norm. Uniformed guards patrol gated factory compounds, where up to eight workers reside in dormitory rooms. Workers are paid based on quotas that punish any lapse. Wages in China vary, but 30 cents an hour is common; factories producing for Americans typically pay roughly minimum wage. Sometimes workers can’t leave factory compounds. Police on motorcycles cruise industrial zone streets looking for factory workers who cause trouble.
China’s central government requires 40-hour weeks, limits overtime to no more than three hours a day or 36 a month, and bans workers under 16.
Yet with tens of millions fleeing rural areas to seek work, factory managers say the labor law is seldom enforced. Workers often don’t receive extra pay for overtime and can’t refuse to stay late, said Kent Guo, a U.S. Foreign Commercial Service officer posted in Guangzhou.
“The employers say, “If you don’t want to work overtime, I’ll fire you.’ Or they find another reason to fire you.”
Compound-restricted workers proudly build “gliding boards’
Inside the Circle Skater Corp. factory - about two hours north of Hong Kong near Dongguan - 1,500 workers run by Taiwanese managers produce many things sold in America.
It’s a typical factory, a gated cluster of three-story buildings. The workers are migrants who live at the compound where, as at many factories, room and board is provided. Normally they’re allowed out three times a week, factory manager Circle Yan said. A team of 30 ex-soldiers in blue-and-white uniforms patrols 24 hours a day, registering who comes and goes.
The factory supplies sporting goods including skateboards, beginner snowboards bearing Bugs Bunny and the Time Warner logo, plastic snowshoes and inline skates, elbow and kneepads. One of the hottest products made here for U.S. consumers, Yan said, is a silvery collapsible scooter. The Chinese call these “gliding boards.”
Factory sales of all products top $23.6 million a year. You can find stuff made here in Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Toys ‘R” Us among others, Yan said.
Soon after receiving an order, he mobilizes assembly lines that roar, hum and shake as workers rivet, glue, hoist and haul. Workers seldom speak in the process.
Boxed products roll out of workshops on conveyor belts leading into shipping containers mounted atop trucks. The trucks travel new concrete highways to Hong Kong for shipping to the United States. The journey from Chinese factory to Colorado store can take as few as 14 days.
Workers earn an average of 20 cents an hour, Yan said. That’s based on a quota tied to how much and how well they produce. The official work week is eight hours a day for six days - more days than China’s law allows. About 12 hours of overtime is typical, he said - again, more than permitted.
The workers are restricted in leaving the compound, Yan said, because he needs them close to respond quickly to orders from the United States.
“We are very busy. Most of the time they work.”
The restriction breeds bitterness.
“Here there’s a lack of freedom,” said 19-year-old Huang Changbin, a migrant villager diligently assembling scooters.
“We can’t go out when we want. I want to go out and play.”
Huang and his crew of 60 workers assemble 2,000 scooters in 12 hours, a foreman said proudly. Each scooter retails for about $75 in the United States. That’s about $150,000 worth of scooters for U.S. retailers. The workers combined, at 20 cents an hour each, earn about $144 for their part - one one-thousandth of the market value of their products.
Like many here, Huang migrated from a village in western China after completing junior high school. “There was nothing to do,” he said. He paid $25 for a third-class train ticket, a huge burden for his subsistence-farming family, and rode for 36 hours to Dongguan.
This Pearl River Delta region in South China - where Lu Huikun works too - draws millions of migrants into what may be the world’s biggest industrial zone. From Lotus Mountain, a 1,000-foot-high knoll in the middle of it, gray-black factories splay out spewing noise and smoke into a thick acid haze.
Here, Huang can earn up to $50 a month. “My family will save it for when I return,” he said. “I wanted to see the world, what’s going on here.”
He shares a room with seven others. Homesick and confined to the compound, he devotes off hours to writing letters to his parents and 16-year-old sister Changyan.
His advice to his sister: “Stay at home. Study. Read more books.”
But he’ll gut this out.
He’s worked as much as 70 hours in one week. He wants more, maybe a better job sewing. “I can get more money.”
He characterized his life as “not very good, not very bad.”
There was one high point.
He got to try out one of the “gliding boards” he assembles. He smiled as he described zipping across a factory floor on the scooter. Supervisors waived company rules for that test ride.
Back assembling handlebars, Huang takes consolation imagining he is an instructor for young riders in America showing them how to set up the scooter, watching them glide down a street.
“I know American little friends will enjoy playing with this,” Huang said, looking up from the factory line. “Let them play happily.”
U.S. companies try to respond to labor concerns with codes
Few U.S. corporations that sell things made in China allow scrutiny. Many won’t even identify who makes their products.
Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams declined repeated Denver Post requests to visit any Wal-Mart supplier factory, saying locations of factories are a closely held secret because “everybody watches everybody else and where they buy.”
Target spokeswoman Susan Eich said “we don’t have any such list” of supplier factories in China.
Kmart, too, counts on China. Chinese suppliers of electronics, bicycles and other products are required “to notify us of who their subcontractors are,” said Dale Apley, Kmart’s public policy director. But he wouldn’t give details or allow a visit.
Colorado-based corporations such as bicycle maker Schwinn, ski clothing company Obermeyer, and Crazy Scrubs - colorful medical wear - take a similar approach.
Meantime, public concern is growing about globalization hurting human rights. Street riots that shut down Seattle during World Trade Organization meetings last year were motivated in part by a sense of injustice in factories abroad.
“We get dozens of letters every month. A lot are form letters: “We want you to stop exploiting children,’” said Tim Lyons, spokesman for J.C. Penney, which sells products made in China at 1,100 stories across 50 states. The ideological anti-corporate tenor of some critics is such, Lyons lamented, that “you can’t win.”
Many corporations have responded. Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney officials say their suppliers must agree to obey local labor laws, pay prevailing wages, and ban child or forced labor.
Some companies such as Nike and Levi Strauss established elaborate codes of conduct that are posted on factory walls. Some firms hire auditors to review supply-chain conditions, sometimes visiting factories unannounced and conducting off-site interviews with workers.
In Colorado, Spyder this fall began negotiating a code of conduct with 24 suppliers in Asia. Chris Okazaki, formerly with Nike, is helping lead Spyder’s effort.
Fireworks industry an example of raw capitalism of China
Still, shoppers eyeing foreign-made products generally can’t tell from packaging the conditions in which those products were made.
And tracing products to specific factories “is probably one of the toughest things you could ever try to do,” said John Colledge, the U.S. Customs chief of forced-labor investigations. “We need substantive information to tie the product back to the factory. That’s what the consumer is going to need too.”
A 1930 U.S. law prohibits import of products made with forced labor. U.S. investigators say access in China in particular is so restricted that they’ve resorted to offering money over the Internet for tips.
And even inside factories in China, the source of a product isn’t always obvious.
Just as U.S. companies farm out production to factories in China, many big factories in China farm out work to smaller and smaller factories down to informal village-level “cottage” labor.
U.S. fireworks companies such as Rocky Mountain Fireworks in Denver rely on factories in China. Rising labor costs and safety regulations forced closure of factories at home, said Bill Stonebraker, president of Rocky Mountain Fireworks.
And demand is growing. U.S. consumers bought $625 million worth of fireworks in 1999, a figure that increased by about $25 million a year through the decade, according to Julie Heckman, director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.
One of the emerging new suppliers handling orders from Stonebraker and others is Brothers Pyrotechnics, based in Beihai, in a rural area near Vietnam along China’s southern coast.
Much of China’s fireworks industry is struggling after a series of explosions at factories. Most recently, an explosion July 1 at a plant in Guangzhou killed 40 workers, and central government officials shut down factories nationwide.
But by mid-September, Brothers was up and running. U.S. industry safety inspectors stationed in Beihai give the company high marks.
In charge is Garry Wang, 38, the son of a fisherman turned into flamboyant entrepreneur. Relying on a network of 20 rural Chinese factories, he sells $20 million worth of fireworks a year to Stonebraker and others.
Wang lives in a mansion with marble floors in Beihai. Recently at midnight, he strolled outside across his manicured grounds, fountains burbling, to practice golf.
Gardeners teed up balls and Wang swung away. A day later, he sat beneath a full moon by his swimming pool with two old friends, after a feast and footrubs, and addressed the matter of U.S. sensitivity about working conditions in China. The capitalism emerging here is raw, he said, like in the United States last century, with huge rich-poor gaps and also huge opportunity.
“Comparatively speaking, I think the United States is more important to China than China is to the United States,” he said. “Imagine what would happen if Americans stopped buying all these products. So many Chinese people would lose their jobs.”
Indeed, workers at Wang’s supplier factories said they were grateful for their jobs.
But some doubt they’ll ever get ahead.
“I know people enjoy these,” said Mou Qijuan, 30, piecing together a golden cardboard “Mighty Dragon” firework in a room at one factory with a dozen other women. The Mighty Dragons, which when lit roll around spitting sparks, sell for $3 or so at U.S. fireworks stands. Silently she and her co-workers folded, twisted and glued labels on hundreds of small fireworks every hour. Mou said she earns 15 cents an hour if she works at top speed.
Life for Mou is “just work, nothing exciting.”
She does a lot better than the cottage-worker villagers who make cardboard tubes for fireworks outside factories. They earn the least of all.
As Mou and her colleagues worked, she allowed that “sometimes my back hurts.” She added: “No rest.” Still, any overtime work was welcome. “If I am paid more,” she said emphatically.
The problem, she said, is that she isn’t paid enough.
Now that her son Lu Tiehua is 6, she said, she pays $12.50 a month - half her earnings - for child care so she can work. Not to mention money for food, and medicine when he falls sick.
“How can you save?” Mou asked indignantly.
As she spoke, Zheng Daji, 41, the factory manager, looked on. He’s run this compound with 2,200 workers since 1985.
Zheng acknowledged the plight of his workers. “If we don’t have orders for more fireworks, we have to ask people to leave,” he said.
He often hears complaints, usually about money. ” “Can you pay more?’” He always says no, fearing others would make demands too. He said he’s worried about growing unrest. “I’m afraid it will happen.”
But Brothers assistant business manager Judy Zhu, who accompanied Zheng as an overseer of his factory, hastily downplayed this. Jobs are too scarce, there are too many workers, she told Zheng. “I don’t think it will happen.”
Back in Colorado, Stonebraker at Rocky Mountain Fireworks said conditions that look harsh to Americans must be seen in the different context of China. He suggested U.S. consumers, not human rights groups, should guide how the United States handles standards in the global economy.
“It’s what you are going to pay for that product that governs what the manufacturer has to do,” Stonebraker said.
And for Chinese people “their recreation is work, more than in the United States. We don’t know what work is anymore. These people are happy in their way of doing things. We need to leave them alone. They do well by themselves. And they are advancing themselves at a pace they can stand.”
Villagers chase dreams with assembly-line jobs
Many villages offer Chinese workers little opportunity beyond subsistence farming.
In western China’s impoverished Yellow River Basin, landowner Hou Jianguo, 46, found growing crops in the dry clay soil of Gansu Province too hard. The family barely survived, eating almost all that they grew.
So in 1997, Jianguo decided to move his family. He, his wife and 19-year-old daughter rode a train for three days and two nights to China’s eastern coast south of Shanghai.
He found work burning holes into nylon pullstraps for Colorado-based Samsonite at a factory the company owns in Ningbo.
He calls his $112-a-month wages “very good.” He lives apart from his wife and daughter. His daughter works and lives at a garment factory nearby. His wife lives with a relative in town taking care of children while the relative works.
Jianguo’s family will endure the separation, he said on the Samsonite assembly line, because eventually they’ll attain their dream: returning to Gansu and opening a small tailoring shop.
“I’ll work until I’m old,” he said looking down at a stack of nylon pullstraps he’ll prepare for “Worldproof” suitcases. “Then I’ll return to my hometown.”
Similarly, Yiana Zhenghai, 24, left her village near Ningbo when she had a son in hopes that he might live more like American children. Her mother watches the boy each day while Yiana works in a backpack factory.
Workers there recently were stitching up wallets for Esprit and “America’s No. 1″ backpacks for Jansport. Manager Sunshine Gui walked across the factory floor picking up odds and ends from the floor. Workers at sewing machines eyed her nervously as she passed.
At the end of the line, Yiana inspected every stitch. She and the others amaze manager Gui with how intensely they work for piecework wages. During lunch break many continue to work, she said, to earn a little more money.
“Of course I will spend the money I earn on my son,” Yiana said.
Despite the economic lure, the factory system also traps workers such as 22-year-old Zhang Youyan.
Now tending a juice shop near Dongguan, she made clothing for export since age 14. The juice job is easier but a dead end.
“People like me,” she said, “we just live one day at a time. We don’t think about the future. … It’s not that I don’t dream. I do dream. I just don’t have the opportunity to make it.”
Consumer group aspires to “fair labor’ labels
While the laborers churn out consumer goods, a growing debate about corporate responsibility is taking a new twist. Beyond street protests, a fledgling movement aspires to give U.S. consumers information about how products are made in hopes they’ll discriminate carefully. Leaders of the effort contend workers bear disproportionate burdens and that Americans would respond if they knew.
“If you believe that you are your brother’s keeper, you have some obligation to the people who are the least advantaged in the world,” said Sam Brown, director of the Fair Labor Association in Washington, D.C. “If your prosperity is built on the backs of people who are being exploited, then you have an obligation.”
Brown said retail discount giants in particular are perpetuating a shameful global “race to the bottom.” Within two years, he said, companies that adhere to humanitarian standards will be able to put “fair labor” labels on their products and gain a competitive boost.
But manager Yan at the scooter factory figures codes of conduct and labeling won’t amount to much. It’s window-dressing for image-conscious companies, he said, sitting in the office where he receives orders.
U.S. executives “only care about good products,” Yan said.
“They don’t care about human rights. They are businesses.”
Worker sadly, proudly toils to earn glasses for daughter
Lu Huikun and her colleagues at the sportswear factory doubted Americans who buy their products think about factory workers.
Even if Americans did care, they “can’t do much to help me,” Liang Qianzhen said, finishing some Adidas trousers. “There are too many people in this country.”
The best hope is that Americans consume as much as they can while workers here toil as fast as they can, Lu said. “I just want more work from you so I can make more money.”
She’s given up travel plans she and her husband, a delivery motorcycle driver, once shared. Now, instead of imagining a family vacation in Beijing, she thinks of her daughter’s future, and worries about her impending blindness.
Her daughter is bright and talks of becoming a doctor or teacher. “Mommy and Daddy save money,” the girl says.
Doctors insist there’s no cure. “Sometimes my daughter feels bad that she can’t see clearly,” Lu said. “When that happens, I tell her: “Don’t think too much about this problem. You were born with it.’”
So Lu toils and saves for special glasses. Tears streaked her face as she spoke. She sees no end to her struggles for her child.
And making things for Americans probably won’t meet her needs. She sat silently at her machine for a moment. But rather than dwell on consumers far away, she resumed sewing.
“I’ll try,” she said proudly, “as hard as I can.”
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For 20 years, journalist Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. A staff writer for 