Published on The Economist, January 22, 2010.

SPEAKING your mind can be costly in Vietnam. This week a court in Ho Chi Minh City, the main city in the south of the country, sentenced four democracy activists to jail terms ranging from five to 16 years. Two of the men, Le Cong Dinh and Nguyen Tien Trung, had previously studied and lived abroad and one, Mr Dinh, is among the country’s best-known criminal defence lawyers.

Their “crimes” were little more than daring to express frank opinions about the state of political freedom in the country and, in the case of Mr Dinh, having defended human-rights activists who had been detained following a brief wave of political openness in 2006. 

Mr Trung had made the mistake of responding to a public call in 2006 by Vietnam’s education minister, who asked for ideas for improving the country’s woefully inadequate public schooling system. Mr Trung, who lived abroad at the time, wrote him a letter and, when he got no answer, naively published it on his blog. Soon police visited his family and friends in Vietnam, asking about his political views. Infuriated, Mr Trung and other Vietnamese students abroad launched a website, “Vietnamese Youth for Democracy”.

The site became popular in Vietnam and attracted the attention of the anti-communist Vietnamese diaspora. Mr Trung then met Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, various American congressmen and even, briefly, in 2006 the then American president, George Bush. When he moved back to Vietnam he fell in with a group of activists who were supported by Vietnamese exiles in California. The group strove to revive a defunct political party. Mr Trung led its youth wing … //

… Mr Dinh got off more lightly because he admitted in his trial to being “influenced by Western ideas”. He acknowledged that he had broken Vietnamese law, because the constitution reserves the leading role in state and society for the Communist Party, so support for a different political party is illegal.

It is not clear why Vietnam’s government has embarked on the latest repression of bloggers, activists, religious groups and others. It may be that the authorities are anxious about the forthcoming 11th Party Congress and a struggle between pro-Chinese and pro-Western factions in the Politburo could have provoked a crackdown. Political openness comes and goes, but smart young Vietnamese, especially those who have ventured abroad, are becoming increasingly frustrated by a stifling system. (full text).

As you are no doubt aware, Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake earlier this week. The devastation was amplified by Haiti’s unaddressed extreme poverty because Port-au-Prince is crowded with economic refugees from the countryside, forced to live in substandard housing. President Obama has promised that the U.S. will do all it can to help Haiti in this moment of crisis.

But the Obama Administration has a simple tool at its disposal to help Haiti that it has so far refused to use: it can grant Haitians in the U.S. “Temporary Protected Status,” allowing them to stay and work in the U.S. until Haiti recovers.

Would you write to President Obama and your representatives in Congress and ask them to grant Haitians Temporary Protected Status? … (full text).

Daniel Gray examines the significance of the popular response to the publication of his well-received study of Scots volunteers in the Spanish Civil War:

From the Glasgow Communist Party to the St Margaret’s boarding school, for some reason they all wanted to hear about Scotland’s role in the Spanish Civil War.

In all, twenty eight disparate groups invited me to speak in person on the subject in 2009 following the publication of my study of Scots volunteers in the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War. Group sizes ranged from two to 400, ages nine to 99. Despite my own fascination with all things International Brigades, this popular level of interest staggered me. 

It gave me hope, too; people were engaging, locking horns with ideas and embracing history, their history. Indeed, they were choosing to make this their history by their willing identification with it. At no time was the end of my speaking greeted with stony silence; questions and opinions were plentiful and varied, from ‘could British intervention in Spain have prevented World War Two?’ to ‘would Rabbie Burns have gone?’ and ‘did the Brigaders smoke cigars while they were there?’ … //

… At every juncture, I have learned more about the conflict, more about Scotland’s role and more about Scotland now. I’ve heard inspiring stories of a generation of Grannies boycotting Spanish fruit ‘fae the Republic’ once Franco won. In Aberdeen, a dapper man in his eighties rose slowly to announce that he had been one of the anti-fascist boy scouts of the 1930s I had spoken of earlier in the evening.

I’ve encountered (and hopefully encouraged) a feeling that this history must not be seen as a static entity that ended in 1939, something to be closed shut in a book and put up on a dusty shelf. Rather, it can be and must be a galvanising, continuous and inspiring thing. Just as Scots wholeheartedly banded together to oppose the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, so must they do so to attack the British National Party in 2010. Brigaders that saw and continue to see the emergence of the BNP repeatedly rammed home this message. I heard one Brigader even go so far as to say ‘never mind Spain, let’s fight these bastards today’.

As they slowly and sadly die out, there is a feeling that the baton is being passed to a new generation. The very greatest tribute modern Scots can pay is to continue the fight against fascism. Scotland must take the unity of the 1930s and let it inspire a unity of purpose today. That is a heavy legacy, but one collective action can bear the weight of. (full text /page 17).

(A paperback version of Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War is now available (price £9.99) in bookshops and on-line. Daniel Gray is its author).

By Jan. 13, less than a day after the earthquake struck Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, 30 Cuban doctors were caring for the wounded in a fully equipped field hospital. Over the next 24 hours they saw 1,000 patients and performed dozens of operations. They were followed shortly by 30 more doctors bringing additional medical supplies. By the week’s end the Cuban doctors were working in two of their field hospitals, plus two relatively undamaged existing hospitals.

Some 6,000 Cuban doctors have provided medical care in Haiti since 1998, and almost 400 were on hand there when the earthquake hit. Those in Port-au-Prince, 152 of them, were available to work with the doctors newly arrived from Cuba. 

Cuban medical help took the form also of Haitian young people trained as doctors in Cuba, 551 so far. They studied at Havana’s famous Latin American School of Medicine (LASM), and in December, 67 of them returned to Haiti for their last student year to work as interns.

Students at LASM from at least 13 countries formed the “January 12 Internationalist Brigade of Solidarity with the Peoples” and asked to go to Haiti. “We feel the moral duty, internationalist and in solidarity, of devoting ourselves entirely to the urgent needs of the Haitian population,” they said in a letter. “We’ve been educated as an army of health guardians at the service of our people and of mankind,” they indicated.

Cuba is far from alone in helping stricken Haiti. Countries from every corner of the world have sent medical providers, food, medical and surgical supplies, and much more. The first planes to arrive on Jan. 13 were those of Venezuela, China and Cuba. Bolivian President Evo Morales announced plans to visit Haiti on Jan. 19 … //

… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed appreciation to authorities in Havana for opening up Cuban air space to U.S. military planes traveling to and from Haiti, thereby saving 90 minutes in flying time.

The Common Dreams web site reported on a media survey showing only two U.S. mainstream news stories on Cuban assistance in Haiti. The story put out by Fox News stated that Cuba had not offered aid. The Christian Science Monitor reported on the Cuban doctors’ arrival there, citing former U.S. Defense Department official Lawrence Korb’s view on the Cuban doctors that the United States “should see about flying them in.” (full text).

In a welcome move, President Obama’s US trade representative, Ron Kirk, has made a new year’s resolution to craft “a new kind of trade agreement for the 21st century.” Those were the words he used in his letter to congressional leaders notifying them of the administration’s intent to negotiate the Trans-Pacific partnership agreement (TPP), a proposed eight-country trade deal with countries as diverse as New Zealand, Chile and Vietnam. 

The trade pact would be the largest US endeavour since the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) was signed between Canada, Mexico and the US. Kirk is yet to unveil many specifics, but a 21st century trade agreement that brings growth, stability, and prosperity to the US and its trading partners will have to abandon the out-dated Nafta-model.

This month is the 16th anniversary of Nafta coming into force, so the agreement is now old enough to be tried as an adult. In the US, the agreement is blamed for job losses, for adding downward pressure on wages, particularly in manufacturing, and for contributing to a large US trade deficit. In Canada, critics point to job losses, the declining competitiveness of the manufacturing sector, and the constraints Nafta has put on Canada to deploy adequate policies for public welfare.

As we detail with Mexican economist Eduardo Zepeda in a new report, Rethinking Trade Policy for Development: …

… A key recommendation by the task force is that any 21st century trade agreements should not elevate the rights of private firms over governments and should provide safeguard measures to make sure nations can adequately address financial, environmental and development-related challenges. Currently, US trade agreements allow private companies to undermine national efforts to regulate for the public interest. Under current rules, it is not clear that proposals for financial regulatory reform, climate change mitigation or poverty alleviation would be allowed under trade agreements because they could be construed as “tantamount to expropriation,” as not providing a stable regulatory environment, or simply because some agreements don’t provide safeguards for public welfare provisions.

Nafta offers lessons for future agreements, but what about North America? President Obama should also make good on his promise to fix Nafta as well. Canada and Mexico are the US’s first and third biggest trading partners and account for more than one quarter of total US trade. Key to revitalizing Nafta would be a reforming the rules and invigorating the North American Development Bank to help address the pre-existing development asymmetries among Nafta partners that have only been accentuated by the agreement. Nafta should not merely serve as a pilot project for other, less economically important, trade agreements. Nafta’s failures in Mexico have direct repercussions in the United States, be it migration, the drug trade or weak demand for US exports.

It is welcome news that the administration has picked 2010 to chart a new course for US trade policy. It is clear that a 21st century trade agreement should not look like Nafta. Neither should Nafta. (full text).

Published on January 7 in the Guardian.  More Gallagher columns.

IT HAS been an inauspicious start to the year for justice in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A court in Abu Dhabi, the richest of the federation’s seven states, acquitted a senior prince of criminally abusing an Afghan grain dealer, despite television footage that showed the accused beating the man with a stick, pouring salt in his wounds and driving over him in a car. At the other end of the justice system, a young British tourist in Dubai, the UAE’s other main state, faces up to six years in jail after reporting to the police that she had been raped. 

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi prince, was acquitted on the ground of diminished responsibility. The court accepted his defence that he had been drugged by erstwhile business partners, a couple of Lebanese-American brothers, so apparently he could not be held accountable for his actions. Those partners, who leaked a video of the attack to an American television network, were given jail sentences in absentia. Sheikh Issa is a half-brother of the UAE’s president, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

While Sheikh Issa went free, the 23-year-old British woman was barred from leaving the country while awaiting trial. On New Year’s Day she told police she had been raped the previous evening by a waiter at a five-star hotel. Remarkably, the charges against her are not connected to that claim. Rather, the police arrested her after she revealed during questioning that she had drunk alcohol and had sex with her fiancé, with whom she was on holiday.

The cases highlight the cultural ambiguity that permeates life in the UAE. The country wants to cosy up to Western governments, companies and tourists, while clinging to its traditional laws and customs. Many hotels are owned by the government and make fortunes selling hotel rooms and booze to foreign tourists, often unmarried couples. Under sharia law, sex out of wedlock and the drinking of alcohol are illegal for Muslims. So hotel managers, eager to turn a good profit, happily turn a blind eye. Yet the police evidently do not. The British woman in question is of Pakistani descent. She and her 44-year-old fiancé both face charges.

She is by no means the first to be jailed for unrelated offences when reporting rape. And earlier this month a survey by YouGov Siraj, a research company, revealed that half of women in the UAE would be loth to report a sexual assault for fear of prosecution or because it might embarrass their families … (full text).

In the hours following Haiti’s devastating earthquake, CNN, the New York Times and other major news sources adopted a common interpretation for the severe destruction: the 7.0 earthquake was so devastating because it struck an urban area that was extremely over-populated and extremely poor.  Houses “built on top of each other” and constructed by the poor people themselves made for a fragile city.  And the country’s many years of underdevelopment and political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster.

True enough.  But that’s not the whole story.  What’s missing is any explanation of why there are so many Haitians living in and around Port-au-Prince and why so many of them are forced to survive on so little.  Indeed, even when an explanation is ventured, it is often outrageously false such as a former U.S. diplomat’s testimony on CNN that Port-au-Prince’s overpopulation was due to the fact that Haitians, like most Third World people, know nothing of birth control.

It may startle news-hungry Americans to learn that these conditions the American media correctly attributes to magnifying the impact of this tremendous disaster were largely the product of American policies and an American-led development model.

From 1957-1971 Haitians lived under the dark shadow of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a brutal dictator who enjoyed U.S. backing because he was seen by Americans as a reliable anti-Communist. After his death, Duvalier’s son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” became President-for-life at the age of 19 and he ruled Haiti until he was finally overthrown in 1986.  It was in the 1970s and 1980s that Baby Doc and the United States government and business community worked together to put Haiti and Haiti’s capitol city on track to become what it was on January 12, 2010.

After the coronation of Baby Doc, American planners inside and outside the U.S. government initiated their plan to transform Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.”  This small, poor country situated conveniently close to the United States was instructed to abandon its agricultural past and develop a robust, export-oriented manufacturing sector.  This, Duvalier and his allies were told, was the way toward modernization and economic development.

From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Haiti was the perfect candidate for this neoliberal facelift.  The entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.

But USAID had plans for the countryside too.  Not only were Haiti’s cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production.  To accomplish this USAID, along with urban industrialists and large landholders, worked to create agro-processing facilities, even while they increased their practice of dumping surplus agricultural products from the U.S. on the Haitian people.

This “aid” from the Americans, along with the structural changes in the countryside predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive to migrate to the cities, especially Port-au-Prince where the new manufacturing jobs were supposed to be.  However, when they got there they found there weren’t nearly enough manufacturing jobs go around.  The city became more and more crowded.  Slum areas expanded.  And to meet the housing needs of the displaced peasants, quickly and cheaply constructed housing was put up, sometimes placing houses right “on top of each other” … (full text).

Links:

The video: Dog senses Arcata Earthquake at News Station, 0.59 min, 9 jan. 2010, … and he gets the hell out of there!

Haiti Needs Help – and a Serious Plan, by Teresa Bo, January 15, 2010;

The truth about Haiti’s suffering, by Finian Cunningham, Jan 15, 2010;

Haiti: US troops deployed as popular anger mounts, by Bill Van Auken, 16 January 2010;

La dette extérieure d’Haïti, une hypocrisie française, par Etant DUPAIN, 14 Janvier 2010;   P.S.: MICHEL COLLON RECOMMANDE CES ROMANS: Pour découvrir un pan d’Histoire soigneusement caché -  La cruauté impitoyable de l’Empire français, mais aussi l’extraordinaire combat des esclaves rebelles. Tout le drame d’Haïti a commencé là. Un style flamboyant à la hauteur du sujet:

• Le soulèvement des âmes, Actes Sud, 1996,
• Le maître des carrefours, Actes Sud, 2004.

The Real-World Economics Review Blog is holding polls to determine the awarding of two prizes:

• The Ignoble Prize for Economics , to be awarded to the three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse (GFC), and
• The Noble Prize for Economics , to be awarded to the three economists who first and most cogently warned of the coming calamity.

It is accepted fact that the economics profession through its teachings, pronouncements and policy recommendations facilitated the GFC.  We also know that danger signs became visible long before the event and that some economists (those with their eyes on the real-world) gave public warnings which if acted upon would have averted the human disaster. 

With other learned professions entrusted with public confidence, such as medicine and engineering, it is inconceivable that their professional bodies would not at the very least censure members who had successfully persuaded governments and public opinion to ignore elementary safety measures, so causing epidemics and widespread building collapses.

To date, however, the world’s major economics associations have declined to censure the major facilitators of the GFC or even to publicly identify them.  This silence, this indifference to causing human suffering, constitutes grave moral failure.  It also gives license to economists to continue to indulge in axiom-happy behaviour.  Nor has the economics establishment offered recognition to those economists who were not taken in by fads and fashion and whose competence, if listened to, would have prevented the collapse.

These two silences reveal a continuing moral crisis within the economics profession . The Ignoble and Noble Prizes for Economics are being offered as small first steps towards a cure.

Poll Procedures for the Ignoble Prize for Economics

Stage One: Nominations and Evidence:

Nominations for both prizes are open to the international community of economists, rather than limited to a closed and secret shop.  For each nominated economist an evidence page will be opened on http://rwer.wordpress.com/ to which people can leave evidential comments. In this way a documented case for (and against) each candidate will be built up.

There are two ways, one direct and the other indirect, by which you can nominate and post evidence.

Direct Method:

You can nominate economist X  or economists X and Y, or X, Y and Z (maximum of three) by leaving a comment on the  Nominations for the Ignoble Prize for Economics page for which there is a link near the top of the blog’s home page’s
right hand column.  Your comment needs only to say “I nominate X … for the Ignoble Prize for Economics.”

You can post evidence regarding a nominated economist by leaving a comment on their evidence page, which in most cases will be opened within 24 hours of their nomination. These pages are sub-pages of the “Nominees and Submission of Evidence” page and will be link-listed in a box near the top of the home page’s right hand column.

Indirect Method:

Because of the current nature of the economics profession, some economists will fear that going public with their professional views on these matters could jeopardize their careers or those of people associated with them. Therefore nominations and evidence can be put forward anonymously by emailing them to this mail-address, preferably with the subject heading “Nominations and Evidence”.  The editor will then post the material on the relevant pages.  Strict confidentiality will be maintained.

Stage Two: Short List:

After an appropriate interval, most likely one month, nominations and the submission of evidence will be closed.  Through consultation, authors of the Real-World Economics Review Blog will compile a short list of the strongest nominees, probably 10 or 12.  At this time a final dossier, based on the evidential comments posted on the blog, will be compiled and posted for each short-listed candidate.  Voting will then open.

Stage Three: Voting:

The voting will be conducted using PollDaddy.  Its system uses cookies to prevent repeat voting.  A voting box showing the short-listed candidates will be displayed prominently on the home page of the Real-World Economics Review Blog.  Close by will be links to each candidate’s final dossier.  Voting is open to all interested parties. Each voter can vote for up to three of the listed candidates.  The ballots are secret.  Voting will remain open for several weeks.  No results will be announced before closing the poll.

Stage Four: Results:

Within 24 hours of the closing of the poll, the results will be announced.  The three economists receiving the highest number of votes will be declared the joint winners of the prize.

General Rules;

• Only economists may be nominated, and they must have been active during part of the last quarter century.  Joke nominations (e.g., Baker, Keen or Roubini for the Ignoble Prize) or ones suspected of being motivated by malice or for which no supporting evidence is forthcoming will not be accepted or allowed to stand.  Likewise evidence submitted must be substantive, accurate and presented in good taste.

Poll Procedures for the Noble Prize for Economics:

• These will be approximately the same as for the Ignoble Prize, but may be adjusted in view of lessons learnt.  It is expected that nominations and submission of evidence for this prize will commence when voting for the Ignoble Prize begins.

Nominations and submissions of evidence for the Ignoble Prize for Economics are now open at Real-World Economics Review Blog.

… There are several reasons behind elite panic. Many elites and bureaucrats (like racists) may sincerely believe that their or their organizations’ intervention is essential to safeguarding peace and order in the aftermath of a disaster. But their panic is also inseparable from their own self interest, reflecting their need to justify the ongoing concentration of power in their hands. If the public is permitted to take control, and it succeeds, the bureaucracy and hierarchy on which elite power is based will be exposed as illegitimate. This principle holds true for the everyday functioning of society, but is especially true in times of disaster, when bureaucratic organizations like FEMA or the military are expected to perform with competence and agility to protect the public. Solnit notes that in disaster, “They are being tested most harshly at what they do least well” (p. 152).

These fears are justified: the past century featured many dictators and oligarchic regimes who met their downfall in large part as the result of their inability or unwillingness to address crises (e.g., Nicaragua’s Somoza following the 1972 earthquake, Mexico’s PRI dictatorship following the 1985 quake, Bush II following Katrina). Addressing, or appearing to address, the crisis in its aftermath while at the same time reining in citizens’ attempts at independent organization—both of which President Bush did successfully after 9/11—can preserve or strengthen the regime, but failing in one or both regards can precipitate regime downfall—as Bush learned after Katrina and his administration’s foreign policy “failure” in Iraq.

Solnit rightly emphasizes the central role of the corporate media in propagating disaster myths that justify intensified hierarchy, militarization, and repression. The best example is again Katrina, when respected press outlets like CNN reported “rampaging gangs” and widespread “looting” in New Orleans based on little or no evidence, often mischaracterizing the necessary requisitioning of emergency food and medicine from flooded stores as “theft” (especially when black men were photographed doing it). They uncritically reported the comments of the New Orleans mayor and police chief, who disingenuously told stories of “hooligans killing people” and “little babies getting raped” inside the Superdome sports complex in which thousands had taken shelter (pp. 236-37). In the media narratives that followed both Katrina and 9/11, the heroes were males, usually uniformed professionals, while the thousands of women and ordinary civilians who saved countless lives remained unsung. The corporate press’s coverage of Katrina, 9/11, and other disasters is thus a microcosm of its more general tendency to promote fear, individualism, chauvinism, and a host of other destructive hallmarks of “Hobbesian behavior” among the public (p. 93).

Solnit’s double contribution is in exposing this process of mythmaking while also recovering the stories of ordinary people and the extraordinary possibilities they represent. She is interested not just in the immediate aftermath of disasters, but also with “larger questions about how human beings behave in the absence of coercive authority and what kind of societies are possible” (p. 81). Her anarchist or socialist-libertarian leanings are clear: Solnit wants the kind of society where people have control over their labor and the products of that labor, where work is meaningful and allows for human creativity, where everyone’s basic needs are met, and where power is decentralized and vested in local groupings of socially-connected and community-minded people. She is ultimately concerned with disasters for what they suggest about the everyday, arguing that “to recognize and realize these desires and these possibilities in ordinary times…without crisis or pressure is the great contemporary task of being human” (pp. 307, 113). Obviously there is no magic recipe for doing so, though she does suggest that religious and activist groups can help foster the spirit of “beloved community” at the heart of strong grassroots movements and meaningful human existence in general.

Yet while Solnit’s writing is unabashedly political, her values never get in the way of a scrupulous fidelity to the historical facts: her use of firsthand accounts and her synthesis of disaster research prove that such scenarios are possible. In this regard her work follows in the tradition not only of the disaster sociologists but of labor and business historians who have demonstrated the viability of non-bureaucratic forms of industrial organization in England and the US prior to 1900; as these scholars have proven, less-hierarchical forms of industrial production were eliminated in the nineteenth century not due to any inherent inefficiency but because of the power of factory owners and ascendant corporations who promoted the factory model and specific forms of technology in large part as a way of better controlling the workforce and raising profits [3]. Proving that more desirable alternatives are indeed possible—that there is nothing in human nature that consigns humanity to the misery, hierarchy, and oppression that characterizes so much of our current world—is no small contribution in a time when many in this country and around the world are so disillusioned that, as Solnit notes, they “do not even hope for a better society” (p. 9). Convincing the excluded majority that alternatives are possible is also a key step in the process that scholars of social movements have called “cognitive liberation”: in order to participate in a movement for change, cynical people must first become convinced that the current order is not inevitable [4] …

… This small reservation aside, A Paradise Built in Hell is an inspiring model of politically-engaged scholarship that blends moral passion, academic sophistication, and readability (arguably the three greatest virtues of all historical and political writing). Rarely does a book combine these traits so masterfully. Its usefulness is apparent on multiple levels: it is a must-read for all government officials, especially those in charge of disaster preparedness (even if most higher-level officials are unlikely to willingly delegate greater power to ordinary citizens); a powerful denunciation of elite crimes and media complicity; and an inspiring set of historical case studies for progressive-minded people who have become too cynical and dejected to bother with activism and organizing. The book “speaks truth to power,” but far more importantly it uncovers truth for use by the powerless—they who must labor to construct paradise while those in power steer us toward hell. (full text and notes).

Received by e-mail: From: Belgian Association for Solidarity with Jammu And Kashmir BASJAK.org, Date: 01/01/2010

Dear Madame, Dear Sir, On this first day of the year 2010 we hope this year will be a miraculous year bringing a peaceful solution for the Kashmir issue:

• There can’t be a solution without compromise.
• There can’t be a solution in a violent environment.
• There can’t be a solution as long as fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, human rights violations are there.

We hope common sense will prevail.  

We hope all concerned parties from all different parts of Jammu and Kashmir will come together and have the wisdom and the courage to work out a solution. We hope the leaders will work for the betterment of the Kashmiris all over Jammu and Kashmir:

• be it in Jammu Province,
• be it in the Valley,
• be it in Ladakh,
• be it in Azad Kashmir,
• be it in Gilgit-Baltistan
• be it in Aksai Chin.

If all this could be realised in this year, 2010 will be a miraculous year, a year that will be remembered eternally in the history of mankind.
We send our best wishes to all of you: a lot of happiness and satisfaction and above all good health. Paul Beersmans, President Belgian Association for Solidarity with Jammu and Kashmir. Visit our website.