A Muslim stonemason who spent nearly four decades helping to restore a Roman Catholic cathedral in France has been immortalized as a winged gargoyle peering out from its facade — with the inscription "God is great" written in French and Arabic.
It was conceived as a symbol of inter-religious friendship that reflects the city of Lyon's links to its large Muslim population. But a widely publicized outcry from a small extreme-right group has forced the Archdiocese of Lyon into damage control.
"This has nothing to do with religion. It's a sculptor who wants to pay homage to a construction site chief," said the Rev. Michel Cacaud, rector of the cathedral. "That's all."
In France, where Islam is the country's second religion, the government has worked to integrate Muslims into French culture, while at the same time confronting cases of Islamophobia, from the desecration of Muslim graves to attacks on mosques.
Ahmed Benzizine, who was born in Algeria, a former French colony, sees the gargoyle in his image as "a message of peace and tolerance."
"When I started to work in churches ... exactly 37 years ago, it was considered a sin that a Muslim enter a place of worship other than a mosque," he said.
He has worked off and on since 1973 at St. Jean Cathedral, which dominates the old city of Lyon and has been honored as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Benzizine is tickled to see his likeness on the facade of the cathedral, which dates to the 12th to 14th centuries and combines both Gothic and Roman architecture.
"It looks like me except for the ears," the 59-year-old told The Associated Press. "They're pointed like the devil. But the sculptor told me that angels have pointed ears, too."
He likes the idea that he'll still be around in stone when his friends are long gone.
"I tell my buddies ... I'm present in this stone so I can tell them if the neighborhood has changed," he said, laughing.
For Emmanuel Fourchet, the sculptor who immortalized Benzizine, "it was an occasion to pay tribute."
"I've known him for more than 20 years. He was already working in churches when I wasn't even a stonemason apprentice. This is an acknowledgment," he said.
Gargoyles, usually grotesque creatures with open mouths originally used as water spouts, dot the facades of cathedrals in France and elsewhere. The sculptures, often part animal, were popular in Medieval times and may also have been used to scare off evil, experts say.
Benzizine is not the first artisan to find his likeness on a cathedral, in his case with wings and clawed feet.
"It's a long tradition, to represent the artisans who worked on a site ... either for humor, derision or to pay them homage," Cacaud said.
The Benzizine gargoyle had been in place for about six months without drawing much notice until the extreme-right Identity Youth of Lyon began a campaign denouncing the likeness of a Muslim on a Catholic institution, and the inscription "God is great" in French and Arabic — "Dieu est grand, Allahu akbar."
"Just the fact that it's written in Arabic, it shocked a minority" because it evokes Islam, Benzizine said.
But, he added: "God is great. It's not talking about Muhammed," the Muslim prophet and founder of the Islamic faith. He noted that he works on all historic monuments, whether they are cathedrals, mosques or synagogues.
Identity Youth of Lyon said on its website that the "clearly symbolic" inscription is "the manifestation of a conquering Islam."
"How many 'Ave Marias' are inscribed on how many mosques?" it asked.
The Archdiocese of Lyon has been quick to point out that the extremist group is alone in criticizing the gargoyle. No parishioners have complained, said Cacaud.
For the archdiocese, the gargoyle symbolizes two traditions: honoring artisans in a cathedral's stone work and embodying the Christian-Islamic dialogue that is part of Lyon's recent religious history.
In France's third-largest city, an archdiocese official is devoted to relations with Islam. In 2007, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, and a local Muslim leader, Azzedine Gaci, led a pilgrimage to Tibhirine, an Algerian village where seven Trappist monks were executed in 1996 by radical Islamic insurgents.
"There is no religion that doesn't say 'God is great,' (be it) Christian, Jewish, Muslim," said Cacaud.
The gargoyle, he said, was merely a way to honor a faithful worker and "to say simply and solely 'thank you.'"
2010年9月15日星期三
2010年9月9日星期四
Critics say Mexico needs to learn from Colombia
With a blunt remark that grated on Mexicans, Washington's top diplomat was merely echoing a growing concern about the alarming violence and instability being caused by Mexico's war on drug cartels.
Mexican officials publicly disputed on Thursday the declaration by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton the previous day that Mexico is "looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago."
Clinton's assessment is nevertheless shared by the crime-fighters who dismantled Colombia's killer cartels and have been offering Mexican officials, police and prosecutors advice and training for more than two years.
Critics say Mexican President Felipe Calderon's government has been too slow to heed that advice.
Colombia's police director, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, and others who fended off a criminal takeover in the Andean nation believe Mexico is on the cusp of a battle royale in which politicians, police and judges will increasingly be targeted and terror used against civilians — just as Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cocaine cartel did in their country.
"They are headed there," Naranjo said in a recent interview.
Organized crime analyst Edgardo Buscaglia in Mexico says the escalation of cartel violence in this country mirrors Colombia's experience because it is "directly related to the weakness of the state." It differs, he says, in that it arises mostly as rival gangs fight to put their own people in key jobs at the provincial and local level — such as mayor, prison warden, police chief.
The cartel assault on Colombia's national government was initially mounted by Escobar himself — atop a single organized crime group — when then-Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara outed him as a narco.
Before police gunned him down in 1993, Escobar and his henchmen waged a decade-long reign of terror. They killed hundreds of police, judges, journalists and politicians, starting with Lara.
The successor Cali cartel kept up Escobar's battle against extradition of traffickers to face U.S. charges — but less violently, choosing instead to buy off much of Colombia's Congress.
Naranjo was chief of police intelligence in the 1990s when Washington lavished aid on his boss, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, as he purged and professionalized the force. With close cooperation from Washington — and the passage of extradition, money-laundering and asset forfeiture laws, Colombia dismantled its major cartels.
Traffickers compartmentalized their business to better shield themselves. They handed over U.S. distribution networks to Mexican cartels, and Colombia's illegal armed groups — leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries — got deeply involved in cocaine production.
This year, Naranjo was able to scratch off the last name from a list of the country's top 28 fugitive drug traffickers that he drew up in May 2004. All had been been captured.
Among suggestions Naranjo and a brain trust of Colombian crime-fighters and allies have offered to the Calderon government:
Create an elite, uncorruptible counterdrug unit in the national police, as Colombia did, and protect delicate narcotics investigations by compartmentalizing information.
Attack money-laundering and political corruption with legislation that makes it easier to track drug money, freeze narco assets and seize traffickers' property.
Offer better protection to news organizations to encourage more robust and independent reporting on traffickers.
Calderon hasn't moved fast enough to implement such initiatives, many analysts say.
A special investigative unit trained by Colombians and other foreign experts was only recently deployed to the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez — that city's first real investigative police. And last month, the government announced the firing of 3,200 federal police this year for failing tests designed to root out corruption.
A raft of obstacles unique to Mexico explain the slow pace.
Mexico has more than 1,600 separate state and local police agencies, while all policing in Colombia is handled by its national force.
"It's an enormous disadvantage," Calderon said in a radio interview last month, noting Mexico has about 33,000 federal police officers compared to 430,000 state and local cops.
Jorge Castaneda, a former foreign minister, is among Mexicans advocating the creation of a single national force. Calderon has instead proposed eliminating all municipal forces and replacing them with a single state force in each of Mexico's 31 states and federal capital district.
Then there is Calderon's decision to put the military in charge of his war against the cartels, which has led to killings of noncombatants and other abuses. Human rights groups aren't the only critics of such a strategy.
"The military is trained to kill people. The military isn't trained to do criminal investigations. The military shoots first and asks questions later," said Thomas Cash, a former top U.S. drug agent for the region.
Cash was also hard on Calderon for not doing enough about Mexico's rampant money laundering.
"They have been no significant laws that even define money laundering," he said, as well as a weak and splintered judicial system where provincial judges barely make a living wage.
Calderon, who has just two years left in office and is barred by law from running for re-election, didn't make good on a promise to introduce money-laundering legislation until last month.
Mexican officials have long argued that their country is nowhere near as violent as Colombia, where leftist insurgents have been battling the state for nearly a half century. Mexico's murder rate last year was 14 per 100,000 — well below Colombia's rate of 39 per 100,000.
Mexican officials answered Clinton sharply.
Alejandro Poire, the chief security spokesman, said Calderon's government is attacking the problem before it reaches the magnitude it did in Colombia.
"We think the most important (difference) is that we are acting in time," Poire said.
Time may be running out.
Ciudad Juarez has become one of the world's deadliest cities, with more than 4,000 people killed there in last two years. And while Mexico's cartels have not staged anything approaching the scale of the Medellin cartel's 1989 downing of a domestic airliner, which killed 110 people, they are increasingly experimenting with terror.
In July, the Juarez cartel staged the first successful car-bombing in Mexico, killing three people.
More than 2,000 Mexican police and nearly 200 soldiers have been killed since Calderon took office in late 2006. The vast majority of 28,000 drug war victims have died in battles between drug gangs, but mayors and police chiefs have been assassinated and ambushes staged against security officials — and their families. Three mayors in northeastern Mexico have been killed in the past month alone.
Mexico has far surpassed Colombia as the most dangerous country in the Americas for journalists. Twenty-two have been killed since Calderon took office, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. In Colombia, one journalist was killed last year and none in 2008.
Mexico's news media have, with a few exceptions, balked at taking on the cartels. Many regional newspapers and broadcasters don't even cover the drug war. And CPJ director Joel Simon says cartels in some Mexican cities are paying off journalists.
That contrasts with Colombia, where journalists in the Medellin cartel's heyday boldly took on the narcos, often serving as a proxy for a justice system crippled by cartel attacks.
To protect reporters from assassination, Colombia's news media would often share and publish the same information simultaneously and without bylines.
In Mexico, that's not happening.
Mexican officials publicly disputed on Thursday the declaration by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton the previous day that Mexico is "looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago."
Clinton's assessment is nevertheless shared by the crime-fighters who dismantled Colombia's killer cartels and have been offering Mexican officials, police and prosecutors advice and training for more than two years.
Critics say Mexican President Felipe Calderon's government has been too slow to heed that advice.
Colombia's police director, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, and others who fended off a criminal takeover in the Andean nation believe Mexico is on the cusp of a battle royale in which politicians, police and judges will increasingly be targeted and terror used against civilians — just as Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cocaine cartel did in their country.
"They are headed there," Naranjo said in a recent interview.
Organized crime analyst Edgardo Buscaglia in Mexico says the escalation of cartel violence in this country mirrors Colombia's experience because it is "directly related to the weakness of the state." It differs, he says, in that it arises mostly as rival gangs fight to put their own people in key jobs at the provincial and local level — such as mayor, prison warden, police chief.
The cartel assault on Colombia's national government was initially mounted by Escobar himself — atop a single organized crime group — when then-Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara outed him as a narco.
Before police gunned him down in 1993, Escobar and his henchmen waged a decade-long reign of terror. They killed hundreds of police, judges, journalists and politicians, starting with Lara.
The successor Cali cartel kept up Escobar's battle against extradition of traffickers to face U.S. charges — but less violently, choosing instead to buy off much of Colombia's Congress.
Naranjo was chief of police intelligence in the 1990s when Washington lavished aid on his boss, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, as he purged and professionalized the force. With close cooperation from Washington — and the passage of extradition, money-laundering and asset forfeiture laws, Colombia dismantled its major cartels.
Traffickers compartmentalized their business to better shield themselves. They handed over U.S. distribution networks to Mexican cartels, and Colombia's illegal armed groups — leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries — got deeply involved in cocaine production.
This year, Naranjo was able to scratch off the last name from a list of the country's top 28 fugitive drug traffickers that he drew up in May 2004. All had been been captured.
Among suggestions Naranjo and a brain trust of Colombian crime-fighters and allies have offered to the Calderon government:
Create an elite, uncorruptible counterdrug unit in the national police, as Colombia did, and protect delicate narcotics investigations by compartmentalizing information.
Attack money-laundering and political corruption with legislation that makes it easier to track drug money, freeze narco assets and seize traffickers' property.
Offer better protection to news organizations to encourage more robust and independent reporting on traffickers.
Calderon hasn't moved fast enough to implement such initiatives, many analysts say.
A special investigative unit trained by Colombians and other foreign experts was only recently deployed to the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez — that city's first real investigative police. And last month, the government announced the firing of 3,200 federal police this year for failing tests designed to root out corruption.
A raft of obstacles unique to Mexico explain the slow pace.
Mexico has more than 1,600 separate state and local police agencies, while all policing in Colombia is handled by its national force.
"It's an enormous disadvantage," Calderon said in a radio interview last month, noting Mexico has about 33,000 federal police officers compared to 430,000 state and local cops.
Jorge Castaneda, a former foreign minister, is among Mexicans advocating the creation of a single national force. Calderon has instead proposed eliminating all municipal forces and replacing them with a single state force in each of Mexico's 31 states and federal capital district.
Then there is Calderon's decision to put the military in charge of his war against the cartels, which has led to killings of noncombatants and other abuses. Human rights groups aren't the only critics of such a strategy.
"The military is trained to kill people. The military isn't trained to do criminal investigations. The military shoots first and asks questions later," said Thomas Cash, a former top U.S. drug agent for the region.
Cash was also hard on Calderon for not doing enough about Mexico's rampant money laundering.
"They have been no significant laws that even define money laundering," he said, as well as a weak and splintered judicial system where provincial judges barely make a living wage.
Calderon, who has just two years left in office and is barred by law from running for re-election, didn't make good on a promise to introduce money-laundering legislation until last month.
Mexican officials have long argued that their country is nowhere near as violent as Colombia, where leftist insurgents have been battling the state for nearly a half century. Mexico's murder rate last year was 14 per 100,000 — well below Colombia's rate of 39 per 100,000.
Mexican officials answered Clinton sharply.
Alejandro Poire, the chief security spokesman, said Calderon's government is attacking the problem before it reaches the magnitude it did in Colombia.
"We think the most important (difference) is that we are acting in time," Poire said.
Time may be running out.
Ciudad Juarez has become one of the world's deadliest cities, with more than 4,000 people killed there in last two years. And while Mexico's cartels have not staged anything approaching the scale of the Medellin cartel's 1989 downing of a domestic airliner, which killed 110 people, they are increasingly experimenting with terror.
In July, the Juarez cartel staged the first successful car-bombing in Mexico, killing three people.
More than 2,000 Mexican police and nearly 200 soldiers have been killed since Calderon took office in late 2006. The vast majority of 28,000 drug war victims have died in battles between drug gangs, but mayors and police chiefs have been assassinated and ambushes staged against security officials — and their families. Three mayors in northeastern Mexico have been killed in the past month alone.
Mexico has far surpassed Colombia as the most dangerous country in the Americas for journalists. Twenty-two have been killed since Calderon took office, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. In Colombia, one journalist was killed last year and none in 2008.
Mexico's news media have, with a few exceptions, balked at taking on the cartels. Many regional newspapers and broadcasters don't even cover the drug war. And CPJ director Joel Simon says cartels in some Mexican cities are paying off journalists.
That contrasts with Colombia, where journalists in the Medellin cartel's heyday boldly took on the narcos, often serving as a proxy for a justice system crippled by cartel attacks.
To protect reporters from assassination, Colombia's news media would often share and publish the same information simultaneously and without bylines.
In Mexico, that's not happening.
2010年9月8日星期三
Australian Labor Party wins enough support to rule
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard barely retained power when the last two independent legislators made kingmakers by deadlocked elections ended a tense 17-day standoff and agreed to join her government. Her next challenge? Keeping the unlikely bedfellows of her coalition together.
Gillard managed Tuesday to persuade sufficient independent lawmakers to support her center-left Labor Party to form the first minority government in the House of Representatives in 67 years.
Australia's first female prime minister promised the government will be stable over the next three years, although the defection of a single lawmaker would bring down her administration. While Labor expels lawmakers for failing to vote along party lines, Gillard must get three disparate independent lawmakers plus one from the Greens party to support her legislative agenda.
That agenda includes imposing a new 30 percent tax on iron ore and coal miners' profits, which are burgeoning with the voracious demand for raw materials from Chinese and Indian manufacturers, and making Australia's biggest polluters pay for carbon gas emissions.
Her newfound supporters have their own agendas. The Greens want gays to be allowed to marry and Australian troops withdrawn from Afghanistan while independent Andrew Wilkie wants federal action to protect problem gamblers from poker machines.
Gillard has rejected legal recognition of gay marriage, but has agreed to allow a parliamentary debate on the future of Australia's deployment of 1,550 troops in Afghanistan. She has agreed to take legal advice on what federal powers the government has over the availability of poker machines, which are regulated by state legislation.
"No one should underestimate the problems Julia Gillard's got," said Australian National University political scientist Norman Abjorensen.
"She's got to satisfy people on the left and right of Labor and it's a very uneasy coalition of interests to keep in check on every available issue," Abjorensen added.
Among foreign government leaders to congratulate Gillard on forming a government were British Prime Minister David Cameron and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.
The British conservative leader and Gillard spoke by phone Tuesday, and both stressed their commitment to the Afghanistan mission, Cameron's spokesman Steve Field told reporters.
Key, the conservative leader of Australia's neighbor New Zealand, said he had already established a strong relationship with Gillard since she came to power in an internal Labor Party coup less than three months ago and he looked forward to continuing to work with her.
The government will be unstable by the standards of modern Australia, where parties have governed with strictly disciplined majorities since 1943.
But some analysts believe that Gillard's minority government would be more stable than one created by opposition leader Tony Abbott's conservative coalition, which enlisted only 74 of the 76 seats it needed in the 150-seat House of Representatives.
Nick Economou, a Monash University political scientist, said Abbott, who rules out ever making polluters pay for their carbon emissions, could not deal with the Greens, who support charging polluters.
The Greens won 12 of the 76 seats in the Senate, where neither Gillard nor Abbott command a majority.
"If Tony had become prime minister, he would have quickly run into serious trouble with the Senate," which would have resulted in an early election, Economou said.
In return for the Greens' support, Gillard has agreed to a range of their demands, including establishing an expert committee to investigate how Australia could introduce a price for carbon gas pollution.
Gillard has also agreed to give up some of a prime minister's traditional tactical advantages in return for the independents' support. While prime ministers have the freedom to call elections at times that suit their political interests, Gillard has agreed to confer with allies before setting an election date.
She has also agreed to change rules of parliamentary procedures to give individual lawmakers a greater voice.
The last two independents to agree to support Gillard's government, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, are former members of the conservative Nationals party, which is part of Abbott's coalition.
Gillard rewarded the two rural-based lawmakers by promising 10 billion Australian dollars ($9 billion) in new investment for rural schools and hospitals.
She has also offered Oakeshott a Cabinet post, which he had yet to accept.
Oakeshott said on Tuesday that governing with the support of four lawmakers from outside Labor would be "ugly, but it's going to be beautiful in its ugliness."
Gillard said her deal to deliver a government demonstrated that the Australian political system worked.
"This process, born of parliamentary deadlock, has resulted in more openness, transparency and reform in how we conduct our parliament and the business of government than at any other time on modern Australian politics," Gillard told reporters.
"Can I say we live in a lively and a resilient democracy and it works," she added.
The lawmakers from outside Labor have agreed to oppose any no-confidence motion in the prime minister which would bring down her government.
Abbott said it was up to the government's performance whether it survived the full three-year term or was brought down by such a motion.
"If the government is seriously incompetent, it should be gone as quickly as possible," Abbott told reporters.
Gillard managed Tuesday to persuade sufficient independent lawmakers to support her center-left Labor Party to form the first minority government in the House of Representatives in 67 years.
Australia's first female prime minister promised the government will be stable over the next three years, although the defection of a single lawmaker would bring down her administration. While Labor expels lawmakers for failing to vote along party lines, Gillard must get three disparate independent lawmakers plus one from the Greens party to support her legislative agenda.
That agenda includes imposing a new 30 percent tax on iron ore and coal miners' profits, which are burgeoning with the voracious demand for raw materials from Chinese and Indian manufacturers, and making Australia's biggest polluters pay for carbon gas emissions.
Her newfound supporters have their own agendas. The Greens want gays to be allowed to marry and Australian troops withdrawn from Afghanistan while independent Andrew Wilkie wants federal action to protect problem gamblers from poker machines.
Gillard has rejected legal recognition of gay marriage, but has agreed to allow a parliamentary debate on the future of Australia's deployment of 1,550 troops in Afghanistan. She has agreed to take legal advice on what federal powers the government has over the availability of poker machines, which are regulated by state legislation.
"No one should underestimate the problems Julia Gillard's got," said Australian National University political scientist Norman Abjorensen.
"She's got to satisfy people on the left and right of Labor and it's a very uneasy coalition of interests to keep in check on every available issue," Abjorensen added.
Among foreign government leaders to congratulate Gillard on forming a government were British Prime Minister David Cameron and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.
The British conservative leader and Gillard spoke by phone Tuesday, and both stressed their commitment to the Afghanistan mission, Cameron's spokesman Steve Field told reporters.
Key, the conservative leader of Australia's neighbor New Zealand, said he had already established a strong relationship with Gillard since she came to power in an internal Labor Party coup less than three months ago and he looked forward to continuing to work with her.
The government will be unstable by the standards of modern Australia, where parties have governed with strictly disciplined majorities since 1943.
But some analysts believe that Gillard's minority government would be more stable than one created by opposition leader Tony Abbott's conservative coalition, which enlisted only 74 of the 76 seats it needed in the 150-seat House of Representatives.
Nick Economou, a Monash University political scientist, said Abbott, who rules out ever making polluters pay for their carbon emissions, could not deal with the Greens, who support charging polluters.
The Greens won 12 of the 76 seats in the Senate, where neither Gillard nor Abbott command a majority.
"If Tony had become prime minister, he would have quickly run into serious trouble with the Senate," which would have resulted in an early election, Economou said.
In return for the Greens' support, Gillard has agreed to a range of their demands, including establishing an expert committee to investigate how Australia could introduce a price for carbon gas pollution.
Gillard has also agreed to give up some of a prime minister's traditional tactical advantages in return for the independents' support. While prime ministers have the freedom to call elections at times that suit their political interests, Gillard has agreed to confer with allies before setting an election date.
She has also agreed to change rules of parliamentary procedures to give individual lawmakers a greater voice.
The last two independents to agree to support Gillard's government, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, are former members of the conservative Nationals party, which is part of Abbott's coalition.
Gillard rewarded the two rural-based lawmakers by promising 10 billion Australian dollars ($9 billion) in new investment for rural schools and hospitals.
She has also offered Oakeshott a Cabinet post, which he had yet to accept.
Oakeshott said on Tuesday that governing with the support of four lawmakers from outside Labor would be "ugly, but it's going to be beautiful in its ugliness."
Gillard said her deal to deliver a government demonstrated that the Australian political system worked.
"This process, born of parliamentary deadlock, has resulted in more openness, transparency and reform in how we conduct our parliament and the business of government than at any other time on modern Australian politics," Gillard told reporters.
"Can I say we live in a lively and a resilient democracy and it works," she added.
The lawmakers from outside Labor have agreed to oppose any no-confidence motion in the prime minister which would bring down her government.
Abbott said it was up to the government's performance whether it survived the full three-year term or was brought down by such a motion.
"If the government is seriously incompetent, it should be gone as quickly as possible," Abbott told reporters.
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