Palin Administration Against Sudan Divestment Before It Was For It, Documents Show
By JUSTIN ROOD, ABC NEWS
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin fought to protest atrocities in Sudan by dropping assets tied to the country’s brutal regime from the state’s multi-billion-dollar investment fund, she claimed during Thursday’s vice presidential debate.
Not quite, according to a review of the public record and according to the recollections of a legislator and others who pushed a measure to divest Alaskan holdings in Sudan-linked investments.
“The [Palin] administration killed our bill,” said Alaska state representative Les Gara, D-Anchorage. Gara and state Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, co-sponsored a resolution early this year to force the Alaska Permanent Fund – a $40 billion investment fund, a portion of whose dividends are distributed annually to state residents to divest millions of dollars in holdings tied to the Sudanese government.
In Thursday’s debate, Palin said she had advocated the state divest from Sudan. “When I and others in the legislature found out that we had some millions of dollars [of Permanent Fund investments] in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars,” Palin said.
But a search of news clips and transcripts from the first three months of this year did not turn up an instance in which Palin mentioned the Sudanese crisis or concerns about Alaska’s investments tied to the ruling regime. Moreover, Palin’s administration openly opposed the bill, and stated its opposition in a public hearing on the measure.
“The legislation is well-intended, and the desire to make a difference is noble, but mixing moral and political agendas at the expense of our citizens’ financial security is not a good combination,” testified Brian Andrews, Palin’s deputy revenue commissioner, before a hearing on the Gara-Lynn Sudan divestment bill in February. Minutes from the meeting are posted online by the legislature.
Gara says the lack of support from Palin’s administration helped kill the measure.
“I walked out of that hearing livid,” Gara recalled of the February meeting. Because of the Palin administration’s opposition to the bill, “We could not get a vote in that committee,” he explained. At no point did Palin come out in support of the effort, Gara said.
The bill’s Republican co-sponsor remembers things differently. “I know she was very strongly behind this,” said Rep. Lynn. Asked why, if Palin supported the bill, one of her administration’s officials would speak against it, Lynn demurred. “We don’t all work in lockstep here,” he said. “People have different opinions,” he added.
Lynn said he and Palin agreed to re-introduce the bill next January, and push to pass it then. He declined to consider whether stronger support from Palin would have helped the bill survive this winter. “I’m not going to do this what if, what if, what if,” he said. “These are hypotheticals.”
Gara said that after it was clear the bill had stalled, he and others pressed the administration directly on Sudan divestment.
“We were outraged,” Gara recounted. “We went to the Commissioner of Revenue and said, ‘What the hell are you guys doing? This is genocide. We’re going to keep pushing this until we divest.”
Two months later, at the end of the legislative session, the administration softened its position. Appearing before a Senate committee which was considering a companion measure to Gara’s bill, Palin’s Revenue commissioner, Patrick Galvin, stated the administration supported such a measure, though it hoped to amend the bill to allow for investments held indirectly, for example in index funds.
“We have a moral responsibility to condemn the genocide in Darfur,” Palin told a reporter in April, through a spokesperson. “I commend the actions of the Senate State Affairs Committee and I hope the entire legislature gets a chance to weigh in on this matter.”
“At the last minute they showed up” and supported the divestment effort, Gara said. But by then the legislative session was almost over, and there wasn’t enough time to get it passed.
The Alaska Permanent Fund currently holds $22 million in Sudan-linked investments, according to the non-profit Sudan Divestment Task Force. Divestment advocates say the fund does not need an act of the state legislature to divest itself of those holdings.
The McCain-Palin campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been a strong supporter of Sudan divestment efforts, and has urged Americans to liquidate their holdings in companies who do business there. He was criticized for that position when it was revealed in May his wife Cindy held $2 million in investment funds owning shares of Sudan-linked companies. She sold those holdings following a reporter’s inquiries.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — Meles Zenawi’s dictatorial regime in Ethiopia on Saturday denied claims by Human Rights Watch that it tortured terror suspects held in prisons since 2006 when Addis Ababa despatched troops to neighbouring Somalia to quell Islamist rebels.
The New York-based rights watchdog said Wednesday that at least 90 people were rendered from Kenya to Somalia and then to Ethiopia in the aftermath of Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s 2006 invasion of Somalia.
Several detainees were housed in solitary cells with their hands cuffed in painful positions behind their backs and their feet tied, it said in a report. It added that many were held incommunicado and without charge.
“Despite HRW’s claims none of these people has been maltreated,” Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s foreign ministry said in a statement. “In fact many of the details claimed by HRW are unsubstantiated and most are simply untrue.”
The ministry added that the suspects were not “arbitrarily” arrested, but “were found in a theatre of war or trying to cross the Somali-Kenya border.”
“There were strong grounds for suspicion of terrorist involvement. Under the circumstances of the time, it would have been irresponsible to leave them at large,” it said, adding that Mogadishu lacked secure and acceptable prisons.
“Ethiopia Woyanne has not hidden the identity, fate or whereabouts of anyone brought from Somalia for investigation,” it said.
But the rights group said that at least 10 suspects are still languishing in Ethiopian Woyanne jails some 15 to 21 months after they were first arrested and that the wherabouts of 22 others remained unknown.
It also said US intelligence agencies had questioned the suspects during their captivity in Ethiopia.
Eight Kenyans among dozens who had been rendered to Ethiopia returned home overnight, government spokesman Alfred Mutua said Saturday, adding that the suspects had initially denied being Kenyan.
“The government never deported any known Kenyans from from this country,” Mutua said in a statement.
Kenya sent a team to Addis Ababa in August to negotiate their release amid mounting pressure from the detainees’ families and rights groups.
According to Kenyan security sources, some of the eight are suspected of links to Al Qaeda-affiliated groups in the region.
PRESS TV
Somali insurgents have killed the head of security forces in Baidoa while the house of the country’s parliament speaker has been attacked.
Ibrahim Maadey was shot dead on Saturday by armed insurgents in Bay Region in the city of Baidoa, 256 kilometers (159 miles) northwest of capital Mogadishu, Press TV correspondent reported.
Shortly after the killing, insurgents attacked the house of Somali parliament speaker Sheikh Adan Mohamed Nuur in Howlwadaag district.
At least four heavy mortars landed near the house and one inside, killing four guards in the house, while 11 civilians were severely wounded in the attack.
Baidoa has been home to Somalia’s interim parliament since February 2006.
A witness to the incident told our correspondent that Mohamed Nuur was not in the house when it was attacked.
The attack comes a day after Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed rejected a call by the Horn of Africa states to transfer the country’s transitional government to Kenya.
Yusuf said what the government was in need of at present was more military backup from African nations in its battle against insurgency.
Organizations such as the Arab League have reportedly refused to help Somalia’s transitional government, saying the government, which is backed by Ethiopian Woyanne forces, is responsible for the death of thousands of civilians in the violence-ridden country.
Yusuf has said in case the African nations fail to provide the military aid, the Somali government would turn to a bigger organization such as the UN.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (APA)
The Ethiopian authorities on Friday evening announced the increase of fuel prices by lifting subsidies, despite a decline of the price of oil in the international market.
The new tariff on fuel will be implemented on Saturday, which is also expected to lead to a rise in transport fares and the prices of other commodities, including food prices.
The Ethiopian Ministry of Trade and Industry said in a statement issued here Friday that the government has decided to increase the oil price to avoid any subsidy on oil.
The ministry indicated that the government used to subsidize oil by investing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
“This new tariff was introduced to lift the government’s subsidy on oil, which has been made during the past several years. Now, the government has decided to subsidize food items instead of oil,” the statement said.
Accordingly, the statement said, the government increased the price of benzene from 9 birr and 65 cents to 10 Birr and 15 cents, which makes the price to exceed one US dollar for the first time.
PRESS TV
Meles Zenawi’s dictatorial regime in Ethiopia release eight of nine Kenyans detained in secret jails since 2006 for questioning–some of them by US agents–return home.
The suspects were under arrest in Ethiopia without charge for one-and-half-years on suspicion of ties to al-Qaeda-linked groups. They were among a group of at least 150 who were arrested in late 2006 by Kenyan forces on its border with Somalia as they fled Ethiopia’s war with Somali rebels.
Later they were handed over to the Ethiopian Woyanne military and transferred to several detention facilities in Ethiopia, Ali-Amin Kimathi, the chairman of Kenya’s Muslim Human Rights Forum (MHRF), told AFP.
Kimathi said the ninth suspect, Abdulkadir Mohamed Aden, who worked with Somalia Red Crescent when arrested, remains in Ethiopian Woyanne custody for unknown reasons. A number of the detainees are said to have been interrogated by US agents in an aggressive manner.
MHRF and other rights groups said several of them were tortured, and accused Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia of breaking humanitarian laws.
Kimathi also accused Washington of pressuring these African governments to violate human rights.
US and other intelligence services interrogated several foreign nationals – including men, women and children – in detention in Nairobi and Ethiopia. The detainees were also denied access to legal counsel and their consular representatives, rights groups have said.
The detainees were from more than 18 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Other detainees included Somalis, Ethiopian Ogadenis and Eritreans.
By Stephen Morrison, Los Angeles Times
Maso Aliyi mourns his dead child, Shibre Aliyi, at his home in the village of Kararo in Ethiopia on Thursday. Shibre had spent almost a month at a therapeutic feeding center. A lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age 5 at risk from malnutrition, according to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which also asserts that some eight million people need urgent food relief and another 4.6 million need emergency assistance.
