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OVERTIME--October 2004 issue
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Dedicated to reflecting the collective wisdom of enlightened workers.

Linda Featheringill
4651 West 41st Street, Down
Cleveland, OH 44109
(216) 661-0794

lfeatheringill@hotmail.com

August 2004
Volume 5, Number 5

Greetings!

Like many people in the Northern Hemisphere, I love the month of September, with its warm days and cool nights. This particular September, however, wasn’t good for everybody. Join us as we take a look at storms caused by nature and at some of the players in the manmade storms surrounding Chechnya.-- Linda Featheringill

Chechnya

The Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, by estimation from looking at a map, are from 300 to 400 miles [480 to 640 kilometers] apart, depending on which endpoints you choose. The land between the two inland seas is controlled by 7 different countries: Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Russia, and Turkey.

The southern border of Georgia lies along the northeastern border of Turkey, the northern border of Armenia, and the northwestern border of Azerbaijan. To the north, Georgia shares a border with Russia. Along part of the Georgia/Russia border, around the city of Grozny, lies the territory of Chechnya.

Chechens have struggled for autonomy since the days of the Russian tsars. Stalin considered them troublemakers but that doesn’t mean much because Stalin thought a lot of people were troublemakers. Post-Stalin USSR struggled with Chechnya from time to time and post-USSR Russia has wrestled with Chechnya almost constantly.

When the first days of September brought children throughout the Northern Hemisphere back to school, a group of Chechen militants attacked and took control of a school in neighboring Beslan, Russia. A thousand or so children and a few hundred adults were in the school buildings and all of them were held hostage. By the time the ordeal was over, about 350 people were dead, many of them school children.

The militant Chechen that is in the news most often is Shamil Basayev, who has been actively involved in the nationalistic struggle for about 15 years. He has been credited with masterminding the Beslan school raid. The following excerpt is taken from a longer analytical published in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal does not offer free access online, but it might be worth a trip to the library to read the whole article. [L.F.]

When Shamil Basayev, a Chechen warlord waging Islamic “holy war” against Russia, first took up arms more than a decade ago, he also took up a role model: an Argentine atheist lionized by the Soviet Union. Along with his gun, Mr. Basayev carried a picture of Marxist rebel Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

“He was his idol,” recalls Musa Shanibov, a former KGB informant who helped turn Mr. Basayev into a warrior during the turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Like me, Basayev was a Communist Youth member and a romantic,” Say Mr. Shanibov. “I never saw him pray.”

Today, Mr. Basayev, 39 years old, prays 5 times a day, styles himself “Allah’s slave,” wears a green headband with Islamic verse and, according to Russian officials, bears responsibility, among other atrocities, for the brutal hostage-taking at Middle School N. 1 in Breslan in early September. More than 350 people, many of them children, died in this incident.

Mr. Basayev’s journey from romantic rebellion to Islamist terror mirrors the evolution of the Chechen cause: It began as a nationalist struggle professing democracy and freedom as its goals, but is now soaked in the rhetoric and blood of global jihad.

Beneath the changing slogans is a broader shift set in motion by the end of the Cold War. Radical Islam has mutated into something akin to communism in the past - a convenient, off- the-shelf ideology that can clothe complex local conflicts that few would care about otherwise. Islamists have replaced communists as the principal source of opposition to established ruling orders.

By donning Islamist garb, leaders of widely different causes can open the door to foreign funds, particularly from wealthy Gulf states, and also to manpower from a pool of footloose militants looking for work. Many who have Mr. Basayev over the years question his newfound religious zeal but acknowledge his skill at tapping the opportunities offered by global jihad.

Chechnya’s feud with Russia dates back to the early 18th century, when tsarist troops first moved into the area. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported Chechens en mass to Kazakhstan in the 1940s, accusing them of collaboration with the invading Nazi army.

Chechnya declared independence from Russia at the end of 1991, led by Dzhokar Dudayev, as former Soviet bomber pilot with a Russian wife, a taste for Russian poetry, and a determinedly secular outlook. Preoccupied with economic collapse and a host of other problems, Moscow initially did little to challenge Chechnya’s “independence.” But after a bungled coup attempt by pro-Russian Chechens in 1994, President Yeltsin ordered the army in to restore control over the renegade region. Led by Mr. Basayev and other veterans, the Chechens put up fierce resistance. They halted the Russian assault on Grozny on New Year’s Eve. The struggle, however, continued.

Much of the money for the Chechen cause initially came from a Chechen diaspora in Jordan and Turkey. But as the war dragged on, Islamic charities in the Arab world also chipped in. An early conduit, say Chechen separatists and Russian officials, was a Saudi Islamist and Afghan war veteran known as Khattab, who came to Chechnya in 1995.

Mr. Basayev ran for president of Chechnya but lost by a large margin to a more moderate candidate, Aslan Maskhadov. Mr. Maskhadov appointed Mr. Basayev his prime minister.

Increasingly estranged from Mr. Maskhadov, the elected president, Mr. Basayev turned to Khattab and other radical Islamists, some from the neighboring Russian region of Dagestan, to build up a rival power base. As pressure from extremists built, Mr. Maskhadov introduced Shariah, the legal code of Islam, and authorized a series of public executions. Mr. Basayev set up kangaroo courts supposedly inspired by Islam and called for an “Islamic Emirate” uniting Chechnya and Dagestan.

The Islamic push met strong resistance from Chechnya’s homegrown guardians of Islam, traditional clerics who resented what they saw as an alien intrusion into the region’s more relaxed Sufi form of Islam. The region’s mufti, or senior cleric, later quit the independence cause and threw in his lot with Russia.

In February 200, Mr. Basayev led his men in a hasty retreat from Grozny under Russian fire and stepped on a land mine. It blew off is right foot. Slipping to a coma, he was operated on by Khassan Baiev, a Chechen doctor who had early been denounced by militants for treating Russians. Dr. Baiev says he gave Mr. Basayev a transfusion with blood from own arm. “Afterward a lot of Chechens criticized me for saving his life,” Says Dr. Baiev. “They said he brought so much grief to the Chechen people.”

Andrei Babitsky, a prominent Russian journalist once labeled a traitor by President Vladimir Putin for his sympathetic coverage of Chechen suffering and contacts with Chechen rebels, says he has no doubt that Mr. Basayev organized the Beslan School attack. The assault, he says, “was a fatal mistake. He had a chance to become the Islamic Che Guevara. With the blood of so many children on his hands, that’s all over now.” [From a longer article by A. Higgins, G. Chazan, and G. White for The Wall Street Journal (New York), September 16, 2004.]

Cult of Death.

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that makes a fetish death, and that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying. It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, “Love children,” and “Love life.” It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.
[David Brooks, New York Times, September 7, 2004.]

ECOLOGY

The only way we can preserve the earth is to grant every living entity what it needs to thrive and take from it only what it can afford to give.

Stormy weather

First, a look at hurricanes

Hurricanes come from tropical storms but where do tropical storms come from? I did some research and came up with the following facts:

In the warm seas around the equator, heated further by the summer sun, some of the water evaporates when the surface temperature reaches a critical temperature. The moisture in the air collects into clouds and rain and thunderstorms. If the winds are right, with an adequate differential between the wind speed on the surface and that higher up, these thunderstorms combine and start to spin in a circle. A tropical storm is born and may develop into a hurricane (in the Atlantic) or a typhoon (in the northern arm of the Pacific) or a cyclone (in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean).

There is a theory that global warming will be associated with more tropical storms than we have today. The idea is that as the base temperature of the ocean increases, the surface can reach the necessary evaporation hot-point more readily. This would cause the storm-producing season to start earlier and last longer. It would also expand the geographical area of storm production, as water further away from the equator reaches the critical point in spite of receiving less heat from the sun.

The longer season and larger area would lead to more evaporation of water and so to more clouds and thunderstorms. Some of these excess thunderstorms will coalesce into even more tropical storms. And some of these “extra” tropical storms will grow into hurricanes, typhoons, or cyclones.

But this is a look into the future. The consensus among US meteorologists is that while the core temperature of the oceans is somewhat higher, the current temperatures probably aren’t high enough to cause more tropical storms to form. [L.F.]

The 2004 Atlantic Hurricane Season [so far]
--Hurricane Alex: Hit the Outer Banks with Category 1 winds , 74-95 miles [118 to 152 km] per hour .
--Tropical Storm Bonnie: Hit Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, moved across the Gulf of Mexico to the Florida Panhandle (below Alabama).
--Hurricane Charley: Category 4 (145 mph [232 kph] winds). Hit southern Florida on the Gulf of Mexico shore and exited at the Atlantic side of northern Florida.
--Hurricane Danielle: Developed off African coast and dissipated at sea.
--Tropical Storm Earl: Lasted a day, blowing out over the Caribbean Sea.
--Hurricane Frances: Category 3 (115 mph [184 kph] winds) hit near Palm Beach, Florida and then moved across the state, hitting areas damaged earlier by Charley.
--Tropical Storm Gaston: Caused flooding in the Carolinas.
--Tropical storm Hermine: Formed west of Bermuda and dissipated over cooler Atlantic waters off Massachusetts.
--Hurricane Ivan: Hit Alabama with Category 3 winds (130 mph [208 kph]) and then traveled inland, across the southeastern US.
--Hurricane Jeanne: Hit Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
[Associated Press, September 17, 2004.]

And more, taken from daily news reports . . . .
--The death toll in Haiti from Hurricane Jeanne is estimated to be about 1700 people, mostly from flooding.
--Hurricane Karl - hit the Bahamas and then veered north into the Atlantic
--Tropical Storm Lisa veered north, without striking land Hurricane Ivan, reduced to a tropical storm, left the US land mass a bit south of Washington, DC. Once in the Atlantic, the storm split and part of it turned south, traveling across Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico.
--And Hurricane Jeanne, of course, turned north into the Atlantic but ran into a high pressure area, bounced back, and plowed right into Florida.

What next?

In 1995, after three relatively un-stormy decades, a naturally occurring oscillation in the Atlantic Ocean started a new active era for hurricanes.

“The number of major hurricanes went up by a factor of two and a half,” said Stanley B. Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane research division in Miami.

Some hurricane targets, like the Caribbean, have been hit several times since then. “They’ve been pounded,” Goldenberg said. “They know we’ve had an increase.”

Goldenberg and other hurricane experts said Florida and other parts of the US were fortunate that more disastrous storms had not struck in recent years. Of the 35 major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger, with sustained winds of more than 111 mph [178 kph]) that have formed in the Atlantic since August 1995, only 4 (less than 1 in 8) have hit the US as major hurricanes. Historically, the odds have been 1 in 3.

Between August and November of each year, about 60 low-pressure systems arise from off the western coast of Africa and waft westward. Warm waters and favorable winds strengthen some of then into tropical storms. Others dissipate and disappear.

Where a hurricane goes depends on the surrounding meteorological conditions. As they spin like tops across the Atlantic, some barrel straight west, into Central America or Mexico. Others, after passing a semi-permanent high-pressure system that sits over Bermuda in the summer months, take a sharp right turn to the north, missing land entirely. And some veer into the US.

Tropical storms acquire names when sustained winds exceed 39 mph [62 kph]. Hurricanes are Atlantic tropical storms with winds of at least 74 mph [118 kph]. An average hurricane season has 9.6 named storms, of which 5.9 become hurricanes and 2.3 of them turn into major hurricanes. But this year, 8 named storms formed during August alone - a record, and twice as many as forecast.

William Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, makes hurricane forecasts before each season. He recently increased his forecast for this year to 16 named tropical storms (up from 13), 8 hurricanes (up from 7), and 5 major hurricanes (up from 3).

“We don’t know why August was so active,” Gray said. “I think what we did was not account for sea surface temperatures in the eastern Atlantic. We will be doing research on this.”
[Kenneth Chang, New York Times, September 5, 2004.]

TOKYO, Sept. 8 - Japan's typhoon record was broken with a bang this week as battering winds and mountainous waves overturned ocean-going freighters, ripped out trees from Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, and shredded a 700-year-old shrine, long a national icon of tranquility.

With gales still buffeting the northern island of Hokkaido on Wednesday night, the human losses stood at 31 dead, 14 missing and about 900 injured, a steep toll for a middle-class nation that prides itself on its safety. With the arrival of Songda, the latest typhoon to churn across Japan, the nation has been hit by seven typhoons this year, the highest number since 1951, the first year of record keeping by the National Typhoon Center of the Japan Meteorological Agency. This year, 19 typhoons, 35 percent more than normal, have whirled out of their traditional incubating area, in the Pacific Ocean near the Philippines.

"This year, the number of typhoons has been unusually big," Mobutaka Mannoji, director of the typhoon center, said Wednesday in an interview. He attributed the increase to surface water temperatures in the Pacific that have been nearly two degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal. Japan also has had an unusually hot summer this year, with temperatures in Tokyo remaining above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for a 41-day period that ended in mid-August.

Isamu Yagai, a Meteorological Agency colleague who teaches at Japan's Meteorology College, blamed global warming for the typhoon upsurge.

"I can conclude there will be more typhoon activities, either in terms of more numbers or in larger sizes," he said, drawing on his interpretation of 110 years of Japanese temperature and rainfall data. "I think the same thing is happening with regards to the hurricanes in the U.S."
[James Brooke, The Guardian (London), September 9, 2004.]

And then a look at a drier sort of storm

Dust storms emanating from the Sahara have increased tenfold in 50 years. And one major cause is the replacement of the camel by four-wheel drive vehicles as the desert vehicle of choice.

Andrew Goudie, professor of geography at Oxford University, blames the process of “Toyotarisation” - a coinage reflecting the near-ubiquitous desert use of Toyota Land Cruisers - for destroying a thin crust of lichen and stones that has protected vast areas of the Sahara from the wind for centuries. Left undisturbed, desert ground is stable thanks to a thin coating of algae, lichen or clay. Four-wheel drive use, along with overgrazing and deforestation, are the major causes of the world's growing dust storm problem, the scale of which is much bigger than previously realized, Prof. Goudie, master of St. Cross College, told the International Geographical Congress in Glasgow.

"I am quite serious, you should look at deserts from the air, scarred all over by wheel tracks, people driving indiscriminately over the surface breaking it up. Toyotarisation is a major cause of dust storms. If I had my way I would ban them from driving off-road." The problem has become so serious that an estimated 2 to 3 billion tonnes of dust is carried away on the wind each year. Storms in the Sahara transport dust high into the atmosphere and deposit it as far away as Greenland and the US. Britain was seeing increasing levels of "blood rain" [rain drops that contain specks of red dust] in spring that came direct from the Sahara, Prof. Goudie said. From an aircraft over the Alps in summer it was possible to see the telltale colour of red dust on the mountains.

Although the storms are mainly particles of quartz, smaller than grains of sand, they also contain salt and quantities of pesticide and herbicide that can cause serious health problems. Microbe-laden dust from storms is also credited with carrying cattle diseases such as foot and mouth.

The world's largest single dust source is the Bodélé depression in Chad, between an ever-shrinking Lake Chad (now a twentieth of its size in the 1960s) and the Sahara. The depression releases 1,270 million tonnes of dust a year, 10 times more than when measurements began in 1947, according to Prof. Goudie's research. Taking the whole Sahara, and the Sahel to the south, dust volumes have increased four to six-fold since the 1960s. Countries worst affected are Niger, Chad, northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania, the research found.
· Dust storms are typically 200 km (125 miles) wide and carry 20 to 30 million tonnes of dust. Some carry up to 100 million tonnes
· Worldwide dust in the atmosphere is predicted to be 2 to 3 billion tonnes this year
· Florida receives more than 50% of the African dust that hits the US, causing increased respiratory problems
· Mauritania, which had two dust storms a year in the early 1960s, now has 80 a year
· The worst dust storm to reach Britain was in 1903 when an estimated 10 million tonnes landed from the Sahara.
[Paul Brown, The Guardian (London), August 20, 2004. Contributed by P.E.N., Colchester, England, UK.]

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