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At 11:45 a.m. today, billionaire and president-elect Sebastian Piñera will be inaugurated in Valparaiso as the next President of Chile. In the wake of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit the country on Feb. 27, the ceremony will be a sober one, says The Santiago Times.

“We cannot celebrate while our fellow citizens are suffering and have lost everything. These are times of solidarity, of national unity and of working together to fix the country,” said the new government in a statement this week.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, President José Mujica of Uruguay and Felipe de Asturias, the Crown Prince of Spain, will be attending the service, as well OAS General Secretary Jose Miguel Insulza and representatives from other countries including the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Piñera will dedicate part of the day to several protocol activities and talking to the various international leaders.

The inauguration will be followed by a lunch in el Palacio de Cerro Castillo in Viña del Mar with the heads of state. Piñera will then travel by helicopter to Constitución, Chile’s second largest city and the community hit hardest by last week’s earthquake and tsunami, to further assess the damage and announce the first concrete measures his government will take in rebuilding the area.

Meanwhile, Piñera’s ministers will be settling into their offices in Santiago to start up their respective ministries.

After returning to Santiago this evening, Piñera will salute the capital city for the first time as president by driving down Alameda, the city’s main thoroughfare. After being greeted by national authorities at la Moneda, he will appear at the building’s balcony to speak to the country.

The future president invited close to 80 people to his inauguration ceremony, of which 30 are family members. Other invitations were given to friends, former heads of state and sports and entertainment figures.

Carabineros police will be on hand should protests occur. Protesters handed out pamphlets this week calling for a boycott of the new government.

The transition to the new center-right government has been remarkably civilized, not withstanding criticism levelled at outgoing-president Michelle Bachelet for allegedly failing to act aggressively enough during the first hours following the February 27 earthquake.

Despite some friction on the issue, President elect Piñera said his future government is already working closely with Bachelet’s cabinet to take appropriate safety measures and retaining a number of Bachelet-era appointees to assure expedited emergency relief.

Meanwhile, the strongest aftershock since Chile’s devastating earthquake rocked the South American country Thursday as President Sebastian Pinera was sworn into office.

The 7.2-magnitude aftershock was stronger than the quake that destroyed the Haitian capital on Jan. 12, reports the AP.

There were no immediate reports of damages or injuries but the temblor – and at least three other aftershocks – strongly swayed buildings – shook windows and provoked nervous smiles among the dignitaries attending Pinera’s inauguration at the congressional building in coastal Valparaiso.

The biggest aftershock happened along the same fault zone as Chile’s magnitude-8.8 quake on Feb. 27, said geophysicist Don Blakeman at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.

“When we get quakes in the 8 range, we would expect to see maybe a couple of aftershocks in the 7 range,” he said.

Blakeman said Chile now can expect to feel “aftershocks of the aftershock.”

“It’s not a sign of anything different happening. But what does occur when you get these large aftershocks, typically we have a whole series of aftershocks again,” Blakeman said.

Bolivian President Evo Morales seemed briefly disoriented and Peru’s Alan Garcia joked that it gave them “a moment to dance.”

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Many women at the Jean-Marie Vincent site for displaced people (IDPs) in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince wash themselves inside their makeshift tents because the only alternative is to do so out in the open. Given the overcrowding and meagre security, this exposes them to the risk of attack or rape.

Going to the site’s latrines is also risky, especially at night, for there is no lighting and some toilets are isolated.

“We have not yet reached a standard of organization that respects women’s rights,” Smith Maximé of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Haiti told IRIN.

“We have registered rape cases that occurred when women were in the latrines. When toilets are not secured – as in many of the camps – women are often attacked there,” he added.

“We are not safe here,” one woman in the Jean-Marie Vincent camp told IRIN, holding her two-month-old baby. “Three men attacked me as I walked to a latrine. They covered my face and my mouth and raped me.” Initially she said nothing but her pain was so intense, after three days she told some relatives.

The failure to meet established minimum disaster relief standards is “creating serious security, privacy and dignity concerns”, according to the Gender in Humanitarian Response Working Group*.

“Increased lighting surrounding those latrines should be an immediate priority to ensure the safety of women and girls using sanitation facilities at night,” the Group said in a statement issued in late February.

“Increased attention must be paid to the provision of dedicated and private bathing facilities to reduce women’s current vulnerability to sexual violence. Though many women and girls bathed outdoors prior to the earthquake, the nature of many IDP sites (crowded living conditions, living near strangers) is creating new vulnerabilities to violence and exploitation, in particular at night, that did not necessarily exist before,” it said.

Read more here.

Iraq’s electoral commission has urged Iraqi political parties to wait for the announcement of official results before declaring victory in the country’s parliamentary poll.

Farag al-Haidary, the chairman of the commission, made the appeal in a news conference on Sunday as election officials began counting the ballots following the close of polls.

“The commission calls on all political parties leaders and the Iraqi people to wait until the election outcomes are formally and officially released, as the commission needs a great amount of time in order to reach the rightful conclusion,” he said.

“So far no tangible results have been reached.

“[But] there is no doubt that the outcome will pave the way for a new era of democratic system and peaceful rotation of power.”

The commission is to announce preliminary results from the election on March 10-11, based on votes from about 30 per cent of the polling stations.

The supreme court would then certify the poll results, after hearing appeals, within about a month of the election.

Read more here.

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The approval of the Armenia “genocide” resolution by a U.S. House committee is perhaps not “the end of the world” but surely is the “end of the historic protocols” signed between Turkey and Armenia, according to a top official.

“No one should expect Turkish Parliament to proceed with the protocols at least until April 24,” a senior foreign ministry official told a limited group of journalists Friday. April 24 is the commemoration day of the alleged killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.  Many Armenians would like the U.S. president to use the word “genocide” in the annual written statement to mark the date.

Turkey and Armenia signed two protocols last year to establish diplomatic ties and open the border after decades of hostility between the two neighboring countries. The protocols, however, are yet to be ratified by either parliament. The resolution came at a moment when Turkey and Armenia were engaged in a diplomatic process to resolve problems that are blocking the ratifications.

“Turkey has internal dynamics, too. The Parliament cannot make any step with regard to the protocols. There is a very important reaction,” the official told journalists. However, the hurdles before the reconciliation process are not limited to the House panel’s approval. The lack of any development in the peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabahk problem stands as an additional problem for Turkey, which promised its ally Azerbaijan not to proceed with the protocols unless Yerevan withdraws its troops from occupied Azeri lands.

According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, some circles in the U.S. administration think the resolution can be used as leverage against Ankara for swift ratification of the protocols. “We know who they are and what they are planning. They should know such an attempt will never be responded to by Turkey,” the diplomat noted.

“They perhaps wanted to give a message to Turkey to urge that, in the case of the failure of the process, they are ready with their sticks in hand.”

The same source also touched on the role of the Israeli lobby during this process. “Our ambassador to Washington met with all prominent representatives of the Israeli lobby. They promised to give support, but when compared to the past, their support was minimal. Perhaps they also wanted to give a message to Turkey to show the damage in ties between Ankara and Tel Aviv,” added the diplomat.

Read more here.

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Earthquakes never come at a good time, but Chile’s catastrophic earthquake of last Saturday picked a particularly bad time because a political earthquake was already going on in the country.

Chile is in an interregnum between the governing-but-rejected center-left Concertación that groups four political parties and has run the country for the last 20 years, and the center-right Coalition for Progress that will take power, under President elect Sebastián Piñera, on March 11.

The Concertación and the Coalition haven’t been able to stay out of each other’s way. When Piñera suggested that his incoming ministers collaborate with current President Michelle Bachelet’s ministers in responding to the earthquake emergency the country faces, he was told that the Concertación was going to stay in full authority till the last minute of its mandate.

When the Coalition’s leader in the decimated city of Concepción, Mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, pointed out some of the tragic mistakes the Bachelet administration has made in the quake’s aftermath (see Santiago Times, March 2, 2010), the Coalition’s incoming interior minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, jumped to Bachelet’s defense. “It’s not the time to criticize and point out what could have been done better,” he said. “What we’ve got to do now is join with the administration, collaborate with it, and encourage the Chilean people to support it.”

In an editorial, Tuesday’s Washington Post criticized Bachelet, as van Rysselberghe did, for not having declared a state of emergency in the hardest-hit areas and immediately sent the army to prevent looting, and for suggesting that Chile didn’t need any international help in dealing with the earthquake’s aftermath.

But the truth no one likes to admit is that the Chilean government is so Santiago centered that few people in the capital, which suffered little damage compared with parts of the South, realized how serious the earthquake had been until the damage began being shown on TV. This may be the first national disaster in a country advanced enough to have one TV per family and one videocamera for every 20 (I’m guessing) families. The TVs and cameras have changed Chilean history: made the country’s leaders realize what the worst-off commoners were suffering.

Bachelet’s and Piñera’s reactions were the same: to admit on Sunday that the earthquake was much worse than it had seemed on Saturday. As Piñera said, “This calamity is much deeper, much more damaging and much more serious than we had thought.”

There may be another reason that the Concertación wanted to downplay the earthquake.

It’s recently come to light that the current, much praised finance minister, Andrés Velasco, has presided over an unpredicted 2009 fiscal deficit of 4.5 of GNP. The deficit is largely due to the government’s have spent 3 percent more than planned in the last quarter of 2009. The extra money was spent, as the business daily Estrategia put it, “in an election context—fertile ground for spending as much as possible on the greasy engine of propaganda.”

The Concertación may have hoped to escape the problems the earthquake caused on the cheap. Alas, that’s not going to be possible. The country will be paying for this tragedy for years.

Read more here.

With the death toll remaining stable at just over 700 since Saturday’s earthquake, desperation is growing in areas of the country worst hit three days ago by the 8.8-magnitude tremor.

Scenes broadcast on local television emphasized further damage to the Maule and Biobio regions from what many are calling a ‘full tsunami.’ “It’s worse than what we imagined, than what we see in the media,” reporter Rafael Araneda told local channel TVN. “This is going to take a lot of time, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of help… You can see the sea went inland one or two kilometers,” he said from Constitucion.

Areneda toured the home of a local resident, where rubble completely covered the streets outside and signs of water levels could be seen above the door frame. The house normally is four blocks from the ocean.

Some local news coverage criticized the navy and government for downplaying the severity of the tsunami that followed in the wake of Saturday morning’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake, which killed at least 724 and left more than a million homeless, many still without food, water, electricity or communication with the outside world.

Military presence have been increased and curfews enforced in an effort to quell looting and chaos; residents desperate for food and water, as well as others who are taking advantage of the breakdown of infrastructure by stealing electronics and other goods.

Public Works Minister Sergio Bitar told local reporters that officials would be “extremely tough” on anyone involved in looting. Meanwhile, residents of Talcahuano were reportedly wearing white ribbons to distinguish themselves from looters.

In Concepcion, a large fire consumed La Polar superstore, and streets had bumper to bumper traffic, vehicles trying to leave the city, although it was unclear whether they were able to get out.

The Santiago Times spoke with some citizens who were further south than where the earthquake hit and who were prevented from driving north by the lack of available gasoline.

Read more here.

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After 8.8-magnitude quake hits the country Saturday, government estimates more than 2 million have been affected, writes The Santiago Times.

The death toll from Saturday’s devastating earthquake more than doubled Sunday to 700, sparking fears the true effects of the quake have yet to be measured.

Communication to the areas worst hit, especially Concepcion, Constitucion, Talca and Chillan, is nearly impossible; some desperately trying to reach family and friends have resorted to using radio channels.

An 8.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the country early Saturday morning, during what should have been the last hurrah of Chile’s summer vacation.

Yesterday, Sunday, the government estimated at least 700 dead and more than 2 million affected — many were left homeless, without water, electricity or communication to the outside world.  Reports have been limited to government statements and limited video images coming out of the area.

The epicentre of the quake, which struck just after 3:30 a.m. Saturday, was in the Bio-Bio area (Region VIII), more than 200 miles south of Chile’s capital city, Santiago.

Communities on the Pacific coast were hardest hit with whole neighbourhoods destroyed, hundreds of casualties and many reported to be trapped. The death toll is expected to climb.

The immediate effects were widely felt — most of the country was awoken early Saturday to the tremor, with several buildings collapsing in the capital city, including a parking lot which flattened, crushing around 50 cars between levels. Highways cracked, overpasses and bridges fell and Santiago’s airport suffered damaged and was forced to close, forcing incoming flights to divert to Argentina or Peru.  Churches and museums were also damaged, the streets covered in loose concrete and glass.

Chile’s current president Michelle Bachelet called for calm and declared a “state of catastrophe.”

“We’re doing everything we can with all the forces we have. Any information we will share immediately,” she said.

Bachelet and the President-elect Sebastian Piñera – who takes office March 11 – both flew south by helicopter to assess the damage.

Strong aftershocks, some up to 6 points on the Richter scale, continued into Sunday; dozens were recorded. Many people, even in Santiago, were reportedly too afraid to return to their homes and slept outside. Many city services got back on line as of Sunday evening, however, including Santiago’s metro service. And a limited number of flights were allowed to land at the international airport.

Meanwhile, at least 100 people continue to be trapped in a 14-storey building in Concepcion; more than 40 were already rescued as of Sunday morning. Elsewhere in the city, the large superstore Lider was looted for food, water, and electronics. And more than 200 prisoners escaped a prison in nearby Chillan.

Back in Santiago, many shelves were emptied of water late Saturday. Long queues outside call centers in the capital poured out into the streets, people trying to reach relatives in the south. But most cellphone networks were down and communication with those in the affected areas was nearly impossible.

Many countries immediately pledged aid — U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has left the U.S. and was expected to arrive in Chile within a day on a previously scheduled visit — however Chile has not yet formally asked for foreign aid.

Read more here.

Foreign Minister, Jorge Taiana will raise Malvinas issue and protests over British oil exploration to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today at 5.30pm (local time).

A resolution is also set to be tabled in the UN General Assembly condemning Britain for allowing the Ocean Guardian oil rig to begin drilling 60 miles north of the islands after Argentina announced new shipping controls.

Desire Petroleum Company, which is operating the rig, has said that the drilling will take about a month. Further exploration is likely by other companies. According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, the arrival of the rig comes despite Argentina’s reiterated warnings to oil companies operating in the islands that they might be “subject to lawsuits in the highest courts over the potential exploration and exploitation of Argentine resources.”

Meanwhile, the British newspaper The Times publishes on today’s edition that although both sides played down the prospect of renewed military conflict, the UK has already taken military precautionary measures.

“A government source told The Times that a submarine had been made available to supplement the routine military presence, although it is not yet in waters off the Falklands. The Ministry of Defence said that HMS York, a frigate, was expected to remain there for the foreseeable future. The Falklands air defences were quietly upgraded late last year with the arrival of four Typhoon jets.”

At the Rio Group summit, held in Cancún, Argentina scored a coup in the war of words when 32 heads of state backed its “legitimate rights in the sovereignty dispute with Great Britain”.

Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan President, had used a television address to reiterate his support, bellowing: “Give the Falkland Islands back to Argentina, Queen of England. The time of empires is gone.”

The Times also indicates that “the backing of countries such as Chile and Brazil has concerned British diplomats.”

During the Rio Summit, Brazilian president Inacio Lula da Silva made an out loud counterblast on the Malvinas Issue as he condemned the United Nations Organization (UN) and its Security Council for not recognizing Argentina’s sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands.

“Our attitude is one of solidarity with Argentina,” Lula said, adding the question: “What is the geographical, political and economic explanation for England to be in the Malvinas?”

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said that Britain had broken a UN resolution forbidding unilateral development in disputed waters, and accused Britain of double standards in its pursuit of the islands’ natural resources.

What went through your mind the moment the earthquake struck?

‘Nothing. I tried to save myself. That’s all.’

The story of survival in Haiti is always the same. In those 37 interminable seconds of destruction, there was no time to think. But the real emergency in what was once called the Pearl of the Caribbean is only now beginning as emotion gives way to realization. And, however generous the global community’s aid efforts are, they are now confronted with the worst natural disaster to hit the Americas since the time of Columbus.

With 230,000 dead, 300,000 injured, and 12 percent of a population of 8.3 million left homeless, the Haiti disaster has taken on a tragic toll, proportionally similar to the amount of casualties suffered by Germany, the UK, France or Italy in World War II.

The Haiti tragedy, however, was not an unforeseeable calamity. It was the result of chaotic development, poor building, unregulated growth, and the suffocation of its tropical vegetation under endless flows of cement. Today, Port-au-Prince is a city of 4 million inhabitants surrounded by pancaked shopping centers and shameful slums. Shrouded by dust rising up from its ruins and its permanent traffic jams, it literally risks death by suffocation.

“Il y avait l’embouteillage.” Bottleneck traffic. The most common explanation for why it takes two hours to travel 5 kilometers in this Third World country.

And yet the geologists had issued ample warnings. The 10 km-deep fault line located near Port-au-Prince sooner or later would have unleashed a devastating earthquake. They just didn’t know when.

Thus, the only solutions for avoiding a catastrophe would have been either to move the Haitian capital elsewhere or rebuild it according to antiseismic criteria. In other words, due to Haiti’s economic plight, averting the disaster would have been a utopian impossibility.

Port-au-Prince now resembles a torn-up anthill. Arrogant edifices, government buildings and apartment blocks, built quickly and poorly, now lie in frantic ruins along with churches and hovels, trapping tens of thousands of people beneath them.

Since the days of ‘Papa Doc’, little has changed. According to a recent UN inquiry, Haiti ranks 149^th out of 182 countries in terms of quality of life. The devastating earthquake has now delivered Haiti’s coup de grace. The brutal tremors that brought Port-au-Prince to ruin has reduced 30 percent of its buildings to rubble and left one million people homeless. Areas outside the capital, though sparsely populated, suffered even greater levels of devastation. 60 percent of the coastal city of Pétit Gouave, for example, crumbled. The hospital is severely damaged, the dead still line the streets, and there is no electricity.

So, how are the rescue efforts taking place?

In front of the Presidential Palace, flattened like a layer cake, an extreme free-for-all is underway. At the Place des Heroes de l’Independence, where all the ministerial buildings collapsed, documents flutter about the square carried by the slightest breeze. One of them, signed by Health Minister Hénri-Claude Voltaire, confirms the receipt of a donation of 14 million condoms from the UN. In the city’s park, thousands of people have camped out under trees with plastic sheets. A naked woman washes herself, then reuses the water to wash a young boy as an elderly woman waits her turn nearby. At the cemetery, a sign written in Creole reads “Tou o plen, nou pakà pran ankò.” The cemetery is full; we can’t take any more bodies. But someone has knocked down a wall in order to dump the naked, swollen corpse of a woman by a small mound of earth and refuse. Not far away, the decomposed bodies of two children are covered by a swarm of flies.

One can feel indignation for the treatment of the dead, abandoned like trash on the streets. But the real problem remains the thousands of sick and injured who desperately await urgent treatment. In the chaos of the General Hospital, where US Marines do everything from keeping order to improvising as nurses, doctors operate in open-air surgeries, swatting flies away with their free hands.

“We came here from all over the world as volunteers, full of enthusiasm and the desire to help. We brought the best teams, the best medicines and the best equipment,” says a young doctor from New York University. “But there is little coordination. This is a Noah’s Ark where everyone makes tremendous efforts but each group works separately: French, Norwegians, Swiss, Americans, Cubans, Chinese, Russians, Italians, even the Sisters of Mother Theresa and the Church of Scientology. More often than not, our equipment is rendered useless because it’s not compatible or the generators don’t work. When we amputate, we frequently use morphine as an anesthetic, as was done in the 1800s.”

It is obvious to all that Haiti will never be able to recover without foreign assistance. To understand this, one need only go to Port-au-Prince’s port, closed to sea traffic, except for the flotilla of military ships arriving from around the world. There is the US aircraft carrier Vinson and the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour with their fleet of helicopters, water purification systems, and field hospitals.

But this is not enough to solve Haiti’s historic ills.

Matieu Derisse, the author of a comment posted the day of the earthquake on Haitian President René Preval’s blog, appears to concur. “For 206 years,” he writes, “the mulatres [the mulatto caste] have dedicated themselves to the sacking the country, and through Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce, otherwise know as the Chambre des Grands Dons Mulatres, they have managed to seize all the political and administrative power in the country. It’s our slave mentality that is the sole culprit for our social ills.”

Renzo Cianfanelli is a journalist and international contributor who has worked for Corriere della Sera, Il Secolo XIX, and the BBC.

Wanted by Dubai Police? Image via Wikipedia

Interpol has issued red notices for the 11 suspects in the murder of the senior Hamas leader, Mahmoud al Mabhouh, on January 19, with Dubai’s police chief confirming that the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad was involved.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National that Interpol issued the notices for the suspects, who have been identified as being behind the killing. “The red notices were issued with the names and features, based on evidence we provided, the notices were issued based on evidence we provided to the Interpol,”said Gen Tamim.

The suspects identified by Dubai Police were six British, three Irish, one German and one French. However, since the revealing of the identities the government of these countries had said that the passports are fake or bore fake identities.

Gen Tamim also confirmed for the first time that their investigations indicate that Mossad were behind al Mabhouh’s murder.

“Our investigations reveal that Mossad is involved in the murder of al Mabhouh. It is 99 per cent, if not 100 per cent that Mossad is standing behind the murder,” said Gen Tamim.

The evidence that Dubai Police have shows a clear link between the suspects and people with a close connection to Israel, according to Gen Tamim. However, he did not disclose what the evidences were.

Earlier Gen Tamim had said if it is proven that Mossad is responsible for the killing of al Mabhouh “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai’ and that an arrest warrant will be issued against him.

Read more here.

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