Aftermath News

March of the titans: Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles roll through the square

Daily Mail | May 9, 2008

Kremlin’s blast from the past: Awesome display of military power in Red Square for Russia’s new leader

By EDWARD LUCAS

It was a chilling sight from a different age.

Yet we should be deeply alarmed about the politicians who command them, greeted with the traditional chants of “Ura! Ura!” (Hurrah! Hurrah!) by the 8,000 troops who goose-stepped through the ceremony, which marks Stalin’s victory in the Second World War.

There they stood on their podium, the great leader, Vladimir Putin, and the new president, Dmitri Medvedev.

Master and his pupil: Putin, centre, and Medvedev, right

Mr Putin, now prime minister, is credited with rescuing Russia from chaos and poverty, while Medvedev will supposedly add the ingredients of freedom and the rule of law.

So those hurrahs from the Russian troops - known as the Red Army until 1946 - in Red Square yesterday are echoed by the Kremlin’s supporters abroad too, who maintain the country is on the verge of a golden age.

But keep the cork in the shampanskoye (Russia’s sickly tank-fermented version of champagne).

The grim military parade reflects the Kremlin’s increasingly ruthless approach to politics - and the direct threat it poses to to Georgia, a plucky western ally on Russia’s southern flank.

Even if Mr Medvedev wants to change the style of Kremlin rule, and dares to try, how will the brooding steely figure of the prime minister, his political mentor and the darling of public opinion, react?

Mr Putin has said that no big changes in Russia’s policies at home and abroad should be expected.

He has come close to humiliating Mr Medvedev over the tiniest perceived differences of opinion. It is his hands that will stay on the levers of power.

Never has the gap between deeds and words seemed bigger. Mr Putin claims to have stepped down out of respect for the Russian constitution, which allows only two successive terms.

Yet he remains the most powerful person in the country.

Mr Medvedev, a diminutive lawyer with - unusually for the Kremlin - no background in the military or espionage, talks about freedom and the rule of law, which Mr Putin and his ex-KGB pals have trampled into the ground.

Make no mistake: Mr Medvedev’s job is to put a presentable face on the sinister regime that runs Russia.

He may criticise, rightly, Russia’s colossal corruption, shambolic public services, crumbling infrastructure, soaring inflation, grotesque abuses of power, sprawling bureaucracy, and overweening state intervention in the economy. But that does not mean he can or will do much about them.

A system that has proved so hugely lucrative to the hard men in the Kremlin is not going to disappear over night, if at all. Mr Medvedev’s “hurrah chorus” say that the ruthless tycoon-bureaucrats of the Putin regime will be pensioned off.

They will either accept their “severance packages” of a few billion dollars or they can join Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil baron who was once Russia’s richest man, in his prison cell near the Chinese border.

But for this to happen, Mr Medvedev will have to turn on his own.

Nothing in his eight years in senior positions at Gazprom, Russia’s biggest company, suggests he will do so. For a start, the firm epitomises the overlap between business and politics that he claims to despise.

It would be better named ‘Kremlin Inc (Gas Division)’ for its unwavering support of Russian diplomacy.

Nor is there any sign that Mr Medvedev will change Russia’s prickly relations with the west, and its bullying of former captive nations.

Earlier this year he described the U.S. as a “financial terrorist” for seeking to impose its accounting standards on the rest of the world.

Mr Medvedev has called the British Council, sponsor of folk dancers and well-meaning culture vultures, a nest of spies.

His supporters stress he likes rock music and yoga. He has a glamorous and devoutly religious wife. Such clues are spun into an illusory blanket of good intentions.

But those who have met Mr Medvedev speak of a pedantic, chippy figure, a nervous nitpicker ill at ease with the limelight.

He may change. Mr Putin did. I remember how he emerged into public view in 1999, looking more like Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter than a world leader.

Many thought the third-rate spy with a taste for gutter slang would last months, not years.

How wrong they were. It is now Mr Putin who dominates Russian politics. The clan of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, is history.

So are the “oligarchs”, the overmighty tycoons who once ruled the political roost. Some are in exile. Others have kow-towed to the Kremlin, gaining even greater riches in return for obedience.

Under Mr Putin, elections have become a sham, dissent criminalised, the legal system part of the Kremlin, and assassination a tool of foreign policy.

Many blame the Kremlin for the poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, who fled to Britain after uncovering what he termed murderous corruption in the FSB, the KGB’s successor.

Since then Russia’s relations with Britain have been in a deep freeze, thawed only by the recent “football diplomacy” in which both countries have relaxed visa regulations for each other’s fans.

Changing Russia’s increasingly hard-edged foreign policy stance would be a formidable undertaking for Mr Medvedev.

And why bother? The current policy is working well. The Russian people delight in the stability and high living standards that the Putin era has brought - in contrast to the poverty and uncertainty of the 1990s.

Many Russians are pleased too that their country is respected (or at least feared) by its neighbours.

A muzzled, sycophantic media means that the country’s real problems, and the corrupt, threadbare record of the Putin years, receives little scrutiny.

Nor is there much to worry about abroad. The bullying of Georgia has brought only ineffectual bleats of protest from the EU and NATO.

Germany’s cosy ties with Russia have created a Trojan Horse in the heart of the west’s two main alliances.

Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy and Nicolas Sarkozy’s France adopt the same stance: accepting the riches of trade with Russia, while ignoring the political cost.

The U.S. and Britain are too distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet Lithuania, one of the smallest and poorest countries in Europe, is bravely challenging the consensus, insisting that the EU toughens its stance before starting talks with the Kremlin.

Its neighbour Latvia is scraping together some symbolic diplomatic support for Georgia.

Every new man in the Kremlin enjoys a honeymoon with the west. And in each case that is followed by bitter disillusion: Mikhail Gorbachev caved in to hardliners and proved ineffective; Yeltsin succumbed to alcohol and the corruption of his cronies; Mr Putin turned into a menacing autocrat.

How long before we learn our lesson?

People carry signs with photographs of Cuba’s retired leader Fidel Castro and his brother President Raul Castro during the May Day parade at Havana’s Revolution Square May 1, 2008.

ASSOCIATED PRESS | Apr 29, 2008

By Anita Snow

HAVANA – President Raul Castro is shoring up Cuba’s one-party rule after an unexpectedly smooth leadership change from his brother Fidel, announcing a Communist Party congress that should cement the move to a more institutionalized power structure.

The younger Castro announced Monday that the party will hold its first congress in a dozen years on a yet-unspecified date in the second half of 2009. Fidel Castro officially still heads the party as first secretary, and the congress is likely to select a new chief, ending his last formal claim to power.

Party congresses historically have been held every five years or so to renew leadership and set major policies.

Castro also announced that officials would commute the death penalty for an unspecified number of common prisoners and he said it was reviewing the cases of two Central Americans on death row for hotel bombings – including one that killed an Italian tourist – as well as a U.S.-based exiled convicted of killing a fisherman during a 1994 commando raid.

Excerpts of his speech to party cadres were aired on state television.

Fidel Castro, 81, has not been seen in public since July 2006, when he underwent emergency intestinal surgery and relinquished power to Raul, five years his junior. He formally stepped down as president in February, but keeps a presence through essays published in state media.

The bearded revolutionary cast a large shadow over the island during his almost half-century in power. His once-high-pitched voice was the soundtrack of daily life as his hours-long speeches emanated from radios and television sets.

Far less charismatic, Raul shuns the public stage Fidel once relished and is moving to replace his brother’s personalized rule with the Communist Party’s collective leadership.

“In these times, and those to come, it will be necessary and decisive to count on political, government, mass, social and youth institutions,” Raul told party leaders. “When difficulties are greater, more order and discipline will be required. For that, it is vital to strengthen institutions.”

The younger Castro also shored up support for his own leadership by naming two military men and a political ally to the party’s select Politiburo. They are Gen. Alvaro Lopez Miera, defense vice minister and chief of staff, Ramiro Valdes Menendez, a revolutionary commander and communications minister, and Salvador Valdes Mesa, secretary-general of the Cuban Workers Union.

The new president spent most of his life as defense minister and he draws much of his support from the island’s armed forces.

Lopez Miera and Valdes Mesa were added to Cuba’s supreme governing body, the Council of State, when Raul Castro assumed the presidency two months ago. Valdes Menendez was already a member.

Raul Castro also announced a further centralization within the party by creating a super-exclusive directing committee of himself and six other men inside the 24-member Politburo. Fidel Castro was not among them.

The president said that the Council of State was reviewing the cases of Salvadorans Ernesto Cruz Leon and Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, who say Cuban exiles hired them for a 1997 bombing campaign to scare tourists away from the island.

Also under review is the case of Humberto Eladio Real Suarez of Florida, who was arrested after an October 1994 raid that killed a fisherman.

Cuba halted capital punishment from 2000 until 2003, when three armed men who hijacked a ferry were sent before a firing squad. The executions brought worldwide condemnation, and Raul Castro said capital punishment has not been applied since.

AFP | Apr 29, 2008

KATHMANDU (AFP) — Former rebel Maoists warned Wednesday they will form a new government in Nepal with or without the help of the mainstream political parties they resoundingly defeated in landmark elections.

The ultra-leftists — who waged a bloody guerrilla war for a decade before a peace deal was brokered in 2006 — took twice the number of seats won by their nearest rival in the 601-member body that will chart Nepal’s political future.

“We will lead the government as we are the biggest party,” spokesman Krishna Bahadur Mahara told AFP on the sidelines of a Maoist central committee meeting in Kathmandu.

“If the other parties don’t want to join us in a coalition, we will form the government by ourselves,” Mahara said.

Under the timetable laid out in Nepal’s interim constitution, the first meeting of the body that is set to abolish the world’s last Hindu monarchy in its first session, has to be held before May 26.

Established political parties fared dismally in the elections to the constituent assembly, despite predictions they would win handsomely.

The Maoists took 220 seats, twice as many as the traditionally dominant Nepali Congress (NC), while the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist; CPN UML) won 103.

The Nepali Congress and Communist Party of Nepal are currently holding internal meetings amid deep divisions in their ranks about whether they should join the Maoists in government.

Senior leaders from the Nepali Congress, firm favourites before the shock results, have suggested that the current interim government, led by the architect of the peace process, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, should remain.

Mahara said that those who wanted to retain the status quo were working against the mandate given to the Maoists in the April 10 elections.

“The other parties said they were committed to democracy, but by suggesting they will not join the government and that we should not lead it, they are showing they are not committed to democracy,” Mahara told AFP.

The general secretary of the Nepali Congress, Bimalendra Nidhi, said the party had yet to decide whether to join the government, but that the Maoists would not be able to go it alone.

“The Maoists can’t form a government unilaterally. It’s true they are the largest party, but they still need to gain the confidence of the other parties,” Nidhi said.

Koirala has called for the mainstream parties and Maoists to start discussions on forming the new government, but formal talks are yet to begin, Mahara said.

The larger parties will have to work with the former rebels but are having difficulty adjusting to their unexpected trouncing, Krishna Jwala Devkota, editor of the Nepalese daily Naya Patrika, told AFP.

“This is a bargaining phase to try and secure respectable positions in government. It’s also a tactic to pressure the Maoists politically,” said Devkota.

“Think of it this way: if the NC or CPN (UML) had emerged as the biggest parties, there would not be any question of who would lead the government,” he said.

The elections were a central plank of the peace deal between the Maoists and mainstream parties.

The peace pact ended the Maoists’ “people’s war,” launched in 1996, which left at least 13,000 people dead and destroyed an already fragile economy.

Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) Chairman Prachanda speaks to an AFP reporter during an interview at his home in Kathmandu, on May 03, 2008. Nepal’s Maoists and mainstream political parties held a first round of talks Friday to set up a new government following the former insurgents’ stunning win in landmark polls, officials said.

AFP | May 6, 2008

KATHMANDU (AFP) — The leader of Nepal’s Maoists, Prachanda, says the victory of his left-wing former rebels in last month’s landmark elections is a sign of the global resurgence of communism.

The former schoolteacher, once branded a “terrorist” and wanted by Interpol, is now vying to be the first president of a republican Nepal, and he says his party’s success at the ballot box is rooted in its communist ideals.

“The revolutionary process is now happening in third world countries, and when it is completed in developing countries, a new wave of socialist revolution will be there in developed countries,” Prachanda said.

“Here in Nepal we are trying our best to develop our ideology according to the changed situation,” the 54-year-old told reporters from AFP and an Italian news magazine.

“Communists all over the world need to understand the new challenges, the new developments of the 21st century.”

The Maoists won 220 seats — more than twice as many as its closest rival, the Nepali Congress — in the April 10 elections for a 601-member body that will rewrite Nepal’s constitution and abolish the monarchy.
“Our victory in the constituent assembly elections will be a big reference point for Maoists all over the world,” said the moustachioed Maoist, whose nom-de-guerre means “the fierce one.”

After living underground for 25 years, Prachanda emerged from the shadows to sign a peace deal in 2006 and end a decade-long revolt that left at least 13,000 people dead and destroyed Nepal’s already fragile economy.

The Maoists are now promising radical change in Nepal, a traditionally conservative country with strict caste, ethnic and gender divisions where around 31 percent of people live on less than a dollar a day.

“We have come to a new understanding that multi-party competition is a must, even in socialism,” said the Maoist leader, whose party displayed portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong at campaign rallies.
“Without having multi-party competition, it is not possible to create a vibrant society.”

The Maoists warned last week that they would form a new government with or without the help of the mainstream political parties with which they signed the 2006 deal — and which they resoundingly defeated in the April elections.

Senior leaders from the Nepali Congress, firm favourites before the shock results, have suggested the current interim administration led by Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala should remain.

But Prachanda has said he has the right to lead the next government.
The Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal are now holding internal meetings amid deep divisions about whether they should join the former rebels.

Under the timetable laid out in Nepal’s interim constitution, the first meeting of the constituent assembly has to be held before May 26.
The Maoists promised voters to bring about “revolutionary” land reform but they have also said they want to attract foreign investment and start to tap the Himalayan country’s massive potential for hydro-electricity.

“We are interested in private investment from inside and outside the country, but the priority of the investment will be decided by the Nepalese and Nepalese government,” Prachanda said.

The Maoist leader said he believes that no matter what follows, his party has secured a place in history.

“I think history should remember our ideology and actions as this is something new for the 21st century,” he said.

“Communism has revived itself from all the old experiences. New ideology, new strategy has been created by the Nepalese Maoists.”

Telegraph | May 9, 2008

By Richard Spencer in Beijing

China is undertaking a dramatic overhaul of its nuclear weapons in an effort to modernise and expand its arsenal.

Bates Gill, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), said that as a result it was developing more flexible delivery systems, including from submarines, as well as the capacity to use multiple warheads.

“Among the major nuclear powers China stands out in its effort to modernise, expand and improve its nuclear weapons capability,” he said at a conference in Beijing.

China’s first nuclear test took place amid huge patriotic pride in 1964.

But Chairman Mao was famously ambiguous about such weapons, once calling them “paper tigers”.

Its arsenal, estimated at between 100 and 200 warheads, is the smallest of the big powers – the United States, Russia, Britain and France. The US is currently updating its missiles and warheads.

China now has a stated policy of never using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country and never as a “first strike”. But Dr Gill said its static nuclear delivery system had left it vulnerable to a first strike.

A sea-based capability would “make it less likely that an adversary could wipe out the possibility of a response,” he said.

The Telegraph disclosed last week that China is constructing a secret nuclear submarine base to bolster its capabilities in the Pacific.

Dr Gill said the advances China was making raised questions about whether it could be an active participant in future arms control or reduction talks.

His comments were notable for being presented alongside a spokesman for China’s own arms control association, which is publishing the Chinese language version of Sipri’s annual report.

Teng Jianqun, a former navy colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, said the increase in military spending was partly a result of improving equipment and the living conditions for its troops, and partly due to refocusing strategy across the Taiwan strait.

On the positive side, Dr Gill said that China had made a complete about-turn in policy on weapons proliferation compared with 15 years ago, when it actively sought to undermine international treaties.

He also said that despite criticisms over its supplies of weapons to Africa and other unstable regions, its share of the global arms trade had fallen to about two per cent.

“We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a New World Order and yet we squandered them,” he said.

Telegraph | May 7, 2008

Gorbachev: US Imperialists could start new Cold War

By Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith in Paris

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War.

With Dmitry Medvedev due to be inaugurated today as Russian president, the Soviet Union’s last leader said that the White House’s claims of peaceful intentions towards its former superpower rival could no longer be trusted.

Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia.

From Nato’s expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington’s proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr Gorbachev said.

“We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them,” he said.

“The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently.

“Every US president has to have a war.”

The 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s denunciation of the US mirrors the most belligerently anti-Western speeches of Vladimir Putin – who is said to consult Mr Gorbachev on foreign policy matters.

Mr Putin may be switching jobs to become prime minister, but many expect him to remain the most powerful figure in Russian politics.

Mr Gorbachev hinted that the former KGB spy could still direct Russia’s foreign policy, leaving President Medvedev – seen by some as more liberal than his mentor – to concentrate on internal matters.

Yet if Washington blames Mr Putin’s self-aggrandising rhetoric for the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War, for Mr Gorbachev the blame lies entirely with the administration of President George W Bush.

“The problem is not with Russia,” he said, speaking at a friend’s château outside Paris.

“Russia does not have enemies and Putin is not going to start a war against the United States or any other country for that matter.

“Yet we see the United States approving a military budget and the defence secretary pledging to strengthen conventional forces because of the possibility of a war with China or Russia.

“I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world.”

Last year, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, told a congressional committee that America needed to boost military spending to counter myriad threats including the “uncertain paths of China and Russia”.

Those comments caused uproar in Russia, with pro-Kremlin newspapers claiming they heralded the start of a new Cold War.

Tensions have already been heightened by a US proposal to build a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to counter a nuclear strike by Iran.

Mr Gorbachev, however, claimed the plans were an aggressive act against Russia.

“Erecting elements of missile defence is taking the arms race to the next level,” he said. “It is a very dangerous step.”

Relations have further deteriorated after Nato promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, a move interpreted by Mr Gorbachev as an attempt to extend America’s sphere of influence into Russia’s backyard.

“The Americans promised that Nato wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”

For a man hailed as one of the heroes of the 20th century, Mr Gorbachev, now 77, often sounded like the ageing hardliners he struggled against in the Kremlin during the 1980s.

He railed against a “military-industrial complex” that he insisted was the “real government” of the US and, quoting a Russian documentary on state television, suggested that Margaret Thatcher had supplied weapons to Chechen terrorists.

Still, while Mr Gorbachev may be delighted by the rebirth of what many see as Russian imperialism, many wonder whether he approves of the way in which Mr Putin has eroded freedom of expression to such an extent that some claim glasnost is dead.

“I do not think that glasnost is dead in Russia,” he said.

“There is a phenomenon in the West to criticise Putin’s domestic record. But in Russia he has mass support. His popularity ratings are 70 to 80 percent.

“Is this not democracy?”

Reuters Apr 29, 2008

BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands of children in southwest China have been sold into slavery like “cabbages”, to work as labourers in more prosperous areas such as the booming southern province of Guangdong, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

China announced a nationwide crackdown on slavery and child labor last year after reports that hundreds of poor farmers, children and mentally disabled were forced to work in kilns and mines in Shanxi province and neighboring Henan.

“The bustling child labor market (in Sichuan province) was set up by the local chief foreman and his gang of 18 minor foremen, who each manage 50 to 100 child labourers,” the Southern Metropolis Newspaper said.

“The children generally fall between the ages of 13 and 15, but many look under 10,” it added.

The newspaper said 76 children from the same county, Liangshan, had been missing since the Chinese Lunar Year festival in February, 42 of whom had already left the region to work.

“The youngest kids found in the child labor market were only seven and nine years old,” it said.

According to a contract exposed by an undercover reporter, a child laborer is paid 3.5 yuan ($0.50) an hour and must work at least 300 hours a month.

“These kids are robust and can do the toughest work,” a foreman was quoted as saying, as he pulled a scrawny girl to stand beside him, the paper said.

Xinhua news agency said the county government had sent officials to rescue the children, but some were unwilling to leave, having been sold into slavery by their parents or volunteering to work themselves.

An armored personnel carrier was on display at the police equipment trade show in Beijing.

With the slogan “dress to kill” on their black T-shirts, top executives from Magnum of Britain showed off their latest police boots.

NY Times | Apr 26, 2008

At Trade Show, China’s Police Shop for the West’s Latest

By KEITH BRADSHER

BEIJING — For the Chinese police agency boss who thought he had everything, the police equipment trade show here was a chance to scrutinize the latest offerings from manufacturers around the world for secretly copying computer hard drives, suppressing riots or collecting video surveillance of public streets.

China’s crackdown in Tibet after violent protests there has set off strong criticism from human rights groups and confrontations in several countries between police officers and demonstrators during the Olympic torch relay. But here in China, the world’s fastest-growing market for security and crime-control equipment, it is business as usual between Western multinationals and Chinese police agencies.

At the recent China International Exhibition on Police Equipment here, sponsored by the Ministry of Public Security, DuPont had a large exhibit promoting Kevlar bulletproof fabric for riot police use. Motorola was selling police radio systems as well as wireless systems for transmitting vast quantities of video surveillance data.

And with the slogan “dress to kill” on their black T-shirts, top executives from Magnum of Britain showed off their latest police boots. “Chinese police deserve the best — Magnum protects the protectors,” said Paul Brooks, the company’s president, in a speech to police officials.

The most intriguing device offered at the show to senior Chinese security agency officials was the Image Masster RoadMasster, a powerful computer system that swiftly copies computer hard drives without leaving any trace and comes concealed in its own color-coordinated briefcase.

Gonen Ravid, the chief executive of the device’s manufacturer, Intelligent Computer Solutions in Chatsworth, Calif., said that the company sells exactly the same equipment in the same briefcases to the Pentagon for use in Iraq, and to the Central Intelligence Agency and other Western intelligence agencies for use around the world.

No company in China makes similar equipment, he said. “The U.S.,” he said, “is still leading with this.”

Full Story

Zimbabweans demonstrate in Pretoria, South Africa, over the arms shipment from China

Independent | Apr 19, 2008

By Ian Evans in Cape Town

Chinese troops have been seen on the streets of Zimbabwe’s third largest city, Mutare, according to local witnesses. They were seen patrolling with Zimbabwean soldiers before and during Tuesday’s ill-fated general strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Earlier, 10 Chinese soldiers armed with pistols checked in at the city’s Holiday Inn along with 70 Zimbabwean troops.

One eyewitness, who asked not to be named, said: “We’ve never seen Chinese soldiers in full regalia on our streets before. The entire delegation took 80 rooms from the hotel, 10 for the Chinese and 70 for Zimbabwean soldiers.”

Officially, the Chinese were visiting strategic locations such as border posts, key companies and state institutions, he said. But it is unclear why they were patrolling at such a sensitive time. They were supposed to stay five days, but left after three to travel to Masvingo, in the south.

China’s support for President Mugabe’s regime has been highlighted by the arrival in South Africa of a ship carrying a large cache of weapons destined for Zimbabwe’s armed forces. Dock workers in Durban refused to unload it.

The 300,000-strong South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) said it would be “grossly irresponsible” to touch the cargo of ammunition, grenades and mortar rounds on board the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang anchored outside the port.

A Satawu spokesman Randall Howard said: “Our members employed at Durban container terminal will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road. South Africa cannot be seen to be facilitating the flow of weapons into Zimbabwe at a time where there is a political dispute and a volatile situation between Zanu-PF and the MDC.”

Three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 3,000 mortar rounds and mortar tubes are among the cargo on the Chinese ship, according to copies of the inventory published by a South African newspaper.

According to Beeld, the documentation for the shipment was completed on 1 April, three days after the presidential vote.

Zimbabwe and China have close military ties. Three years ago, Mr Mugabe signed extensive trade pacts with the Chinese as part of the “Look East” policy forced on him by his ostracising by Western governments over human rights abuses. The deal gave the Chinese mineral and trade concessions in exchange for economic help.

The shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague called on David Miliband to demand a cessation of arms shipments.

A South African government spokesman Themba Maseko said it would be difficult to stop the shipment.

Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Independent | Apr 15, 2008

From the old railway station, now a hollow shell covered in weeds, a long concrete stairway, sheltered by sub-tropical foliage, winds from the centre of Sukhumi up to a collection of buildings, many pocked with bullet holes or crushed by bombs.

The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures.

This is what remains of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the first primate testing centre in the world, and possibly the site of a macabre Stalinist experiment to breed a human-ape hybrid. Set amid palm trees and lush greenery on a hill just outside the centre of Sukhumi, it was once the envy of the West. Its behavioural and medical experiments set it at the forefront of groundbreaking medical discoveries, and trained monkeys for space travel.

But the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, then the Georgian-Abkhaz war, took a heavy toll on the centre. Most of its scientists left to set up a new centre in Russia, along with most of the monkeys that were not killed. What is left today is a disturbing shadow of the institute’s former glory.

Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Scientists at the institute today admit that these experiments did go on at the institute, though they deny it was part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new race. The tests were performed by Ilya Ivanov, an eminent Russian biologist who had also collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. About the turn of the century he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares, and had also produced cross-breeds between various different species. Then, Europe was alive with ideas of eugenics, and the Soviets were out to prove once and for all that Darwinism had superseded religion.

“Professor Ivanov started these experiments in Africa and continued them here in Sukhumi,” says Vladimir Barkaya, who started at the institute in 1961 and is now scientific director. “He took sperm from human males and injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of it.” Professor Barkaya denies monkey sperm was used on human females, although letters were apparently received by the institution by people of both sexes offering to participate in the experiments.

In time, the institute evolved from science fiction to evidence-based practice. Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century.

One man’s name is synonymous with the centre. Boris Lapin was born in 1921 and after a heroic turn in the Second World War, started work at the Sukhumi monkey colony in 1949. In 1959 he was appointed director of the institute, and ran it up until 1992, when during the Abkhaz-Georgian war he fled along with the majority of employees and monkeys across the border to Russia. Despite being in his late eighties, he still runs the institute set up at Adler in Russia.

“My biggest achievement over all this time is that we were able to build the institute up from scratch again,” he says, from his Adler office, plastered with photographs of famous visitors to the Sukhumi institute over the years, from Nikita Khrushchev to Ho Chi Minh.

In the 1950s, as Professor Lapin was taking over, word got out to the rest of the world about the uses to which monkeys were being put at Sukhumi. “At the time of Sputnik, there was a huge amount of curiosity in the West about what else the Soviets might have up their sleeves in the fields of science and technology,” says Douglas Bowden, an American primatologist who has co-operated with the Sukhumi, then Adler centres since 1962. An expert commission headed by President Dwight Eisenhower’s personal doctor went to the Soviet Union in 1957 and visited Sukhumi. “They were so impressed with what they found there that when they came back to the US they recommended to Eisenhower that a similar institute should be set up in the US.” In the end, seven centres were set up in the US.

As time went on, the centre also became closely involved with the Soviet space programme, training six monkeys to send into space. “We had to make sure they were intelligent monkeys to perform all their duties in space,” Professor Lapin says. “Not every monkey was capable of that sort of thing.” After the monkeys blasted off, the centre’s employees would watch them on television at Sukhumi.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a disaster for scientists across the vast empire. They went from the pride of the country to being neglected and unfunded. “They were terrible times,” says Professor Barkaya. “Many monkeys died, and many people too. We had nothing to feed the monkeys with, and there was no electricity or heating. Many of them simply froze to death.”

Violeta Agrba, who was the acting director of the institute during the war, while Professor Lapin was arranging the transfer to Adler, says: “I remember walking around the cages in the winter of 1992, during the war, and seeing a baboon shivering in his cage. It was so sad. But even though we couldn’t do any medical work, and there was a war on, we all came to work every day.” Professor Agrba once found an unexploded shell on the conference table in her office. There was a huge hole in the ceiling.

The centre also had 1,000 monkeys that lived freely in a special zone in the mountains in the south of Abkhazia, where they were monitored and their behaviour studied. When the war started, many died in the crossfire; some were stolen by troops and used as mascots. “Some are still alive,” Professor Agrba says. “But after everything that happened in the war, they are so scared of people they don’t approach anyone. We need to do a helicopter survey and find the remaining ones, but there’s no money for that.”

Today, the centre at Sukhumi, where a few staff who refused to leave during the war have bravely remained and tried to resurrect their scientific work, is struggling to get back on its feet. A German scientist who worked with the institute before the war and took pity on their situation ships them medicines and equipment each year. But most of the best employees went to Alder, and the monkeys seem to have nothing to eat except mandarins.

“The level we had before is very difficult to attain now,” Professor Barkaya says. “But while we used to write to people asking to co-operate with them, now they’re again coming to us. We had an interesting proposition from St Petersburg, from a company that has produced medicine to reduce blindness in old people. They’ve tested it on dogs and horses and now they want to test it on monkeys.”

The Adler centre in much better shape, with all the most modern equipment and is still at the forefront of medicine, working on stem-cell research and birdflu vaccines, and testing the effects of radiation on monkeys in preparation for a manned flight to Mars. “We’ve discovered that their immune systems are severely weakened by the radiation given off by solar flares,” says Professor Agrba. “Now we need to see how serious this is and how long it lasts.”

But even at Adler, the financial situation isn’t easy. “One girl used to work here as a lab assistant and got paid 3,000 roubles (£65) a month,” Professor Agrba says. “She left to work selling blankets in the market and now she makes 15,000 roubles (£325).”

Obtaining new monkeys is almost impossible now, with most countries banning their export. The days when Professor Lapin and colleagues would simply fly to Nigeria and spend weeks negotiating with tribes for the purchase of monkeys, as happened in the 1960s, are long gone. The Adler institute has a breeding programme, which ensures that its population of 3,700 monkeys is refreshed each year. But for Sukhumi, with just 286 monkeys, inbreeding is a serious problem.

The staff at both centres is split between dignified octogenarians with decades of scientific experience, and budding young scientists. The middle ground is missing. “It’s a problem across the former Soviet Union,” Professor Barkaya says. “The generation of scientists who came of age during perestroika went into business. Now there is again an interest in science, and it’s left to us to pass on our knowledge as best we can to the younger generation to ensure the good work continues.”

Ethical concerns that would undoubtedly surround such ventures in Europe are absent both in Abkhazia and in Russia. Neither institute has any security; the thought of animal rights protesters attacking does not even occur to the scientists.

“Of course, we’re aware of the ethical difficulties,” says Professor Lapin. “But in some cases monkeys are the only animals we can use. Thalidomide was tested on mice and other animals but not on monkeys, and you remember what happened there.”