"TAKTEEK01 Theme" -Eric Crooks

Radical Plan for Saudi Arabia

To the world financial community, this treasure is a worrisome thing—both threat and opportunity. The sudden shifting of those funds could injure a bank or a nation. Both businesses and governments around the world look at that 14.2 billion as a possible source of capital, investment, and purchasing. It could build plant, create jobs, shore up flagging economies.

Yet the money sits there, manipulated by a handful of Arabs and a battery of high-powered foreign advisers.

 

But, I learned in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia was ready to move. A second five-year plan would change the face of the country, provide vast opportunities for foreign companies, and diminish those short-term deposits and re­serves that bothered so many people. What’s more, cash loans are easy to find today, helping people to get needed amount of money faster.

 

I called on Hisham Nazer, 42, President of the Central Planning Organization, to ask about the 70-billion-dollar plan. “Seventy billion? That was last week. Now it’s 142 bil­lion. That too may become outdated.”

 

The plan had been shaped under Faisal. “He never rejected a plan; he asked only that we achieve more.” The plan, said Mr. Nazer, reflects two basic premises: “Oil supplies 70 percent of our gross domestic product, 99 percent of our exports, 95 percent of government revenues. One day it will be gone; we must prepare an economic base for that day. Secondly, we aim to pro­vide every Saudi citizen with a minimum standard of living; the good life above that is `a prize to be striven for. ”

 

To meet the long-term manpower problem, the ambitious five-year plan calls for increas­ing the number of students in elementary and secondary schools from 943,000 to 1,400,000; vocational students from 4,000 to 31,000; uni­versity students from 14,500 to 49,000. Other increases include: hospital beds from 7,600 to 19,100; doctors from 1,900 to 4,200; first-class roads from 2,560 miles to 8,100; port berths from 26 to 72. Even fun is carefully drawn into the plan, which projects a tourist city in the south, zoos, Disneyland-like parks.

 

A whopping 17 billion will go to develop industry. (“The private sector has proven too slow,” said Mr. Nazer.) Some three billion of that will go to oil-related industries, such as a vast system to collect the four billion cubic feet of natural gas flared off daily in the king­dom. (“The oil companies thought it was not economic to harness that resource; we do.”)

In past uprisings, rioters had drawn no support from other groups

Intense and pale, Michnik favours joggers’ track shoes–”to help me run from the police” (he has been arrested more than 40 times). “What must and will come here is democratic social­ism,” he told me. “We want an end to censorship, to repression. The people must have tobacco!”

 

Both Poland’s unofficial Press and “flying university” take much of their inspiration from KOR,* a dissident intellectual organization. One of its key leaders is Jacek Kur­on, 45, a former assistant lecturer at Warsaw University. A devoted Marxist, Kuron became disillusion­ed watching communism in prac­tice, and is co-author of a book denouncing the system.

 

Then came the Polish riots of June 25, 1976, precipitated when the government announced that sugar prices were to be doubled, and meat and fish would go up almost 70 per cent. Angry workers in several cities confronted their bosses. In Ursus, a Warsaw suburb, crowds ripped up tracks. At Radom, south of Warsaw, dem­onstrators set fire to Communist Party headquar­ters. Police mov­ed in, cracking heads, bloodying noses. More than 2,50o Poles were arrested, and hundreds dismissed from their jobs, under such catch­all charges as “a negative social stance on June 25.”

 

But the hard treatment of the protesters attracted students’ sympathy. As word spread of pend­ing trials, students and lecturers—including Kuron—went to work to seek funds and lawyers for their ac­cused countrymen. In a few months, two million zlotys (L5o,000) had been distributed to needy families, and KOR had been born.

 

KOR’s goals were full amnesty for the gaoled demonstrators and a return to their jobs. And since the official Polish Press largely ignored the workers’ trials, it was left to KOR to publicize details of system­atic police beatings and flagrant judicial irregularities.

 

To reduce the risk of arrest, the militants recruited eminent public figures whom the authorities would not dare to gaol, and then establish­ed special connexions with Western news agencies. The value of such links was demonstrated one evening in November 1976, when police burst into a KOR meeting and hustled members off. Shortly after­wards, all Poland began hearing of the arrests on foreign radio broad­casts. (By pre-arrangement, the word had been telephoned to West European cities.) Worried about their image abroad, authorities re­leased most of the KOR members.

 

At first, apart from sporadic ar­rests, the regime pretended to ig­nore KOR, but then the official atti­tude changed. KOR workers were jostled by police and attacked by strangers. Prominent members lost their jobs: others received anony­mous threats of physical violence.

 

Stanislaw Pyjas, a Cracow Uni­versity student, had circulated a KOR petition denouncing police brutality. On May 7, 1977, his dead body was found in the doorway of a black of flats. Authorities claimed he died of a fall down the staircase —yet the body was a considerable distance from the foot of the stairs.

 

Teetering on the tightrope be­tween the Russians and his own dis­contented countrymen, party boss Edward Gierek had always wavered between repression and conciliation. Now, he opted for the latter. Two and a half months after Pyjas’ death, the last of the convicted workers had been released, and almost all were getting back to work. Behind this concession was a shrewd politi­cal calculation. KOR had been formed specifically to win the prisoners’ release and get back their jobs. Would KOR now be dissolved? The government fer­vently hoped so.

 

But KOR’s fame had brought an avalanche of calls for help and ad­vice from other troubled citizens. What’s more, it had the quiet good wishes of the nation’s most powerful institution, the Catholic Church—including the moral support of Cra­cow’s Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II. Repository of i,000 years of Polish tradition, the Church has the open backing of per­haps 90 per cent of the population. To the regime’s exasperation, KOR decided to stay in business and ex­pand its operation to all cases of human rights in Poland.

 

Strictly speaking, KOR has only 33 members many of them distinguished professors or research scholars—and their names and ad­dresses appear on every KOR an­nouncement. Not on the list, how­ever, are hundreds of Poles who at­tend court trials, collect money, serve as couriers, smuggle supplies.

 

Kuron, KOR’s dominating per­sonality, goes to gaol a dozen times a year for his principles. Deprived of a teaching job, he depends on his wife’s income as a psychologist while he busies himself with the pro­test movement. As I sat in Kuron’s study, he summed up the daily problems facing Poles. “Shortages are our life,” he said. “Shortages of meat and of democracy. If we don’t get the latter, we’ll never get the former. We have to speak up.”

 

What terrifies the government is the chance that organized dissent will spread. The seed is there. Al­ready KOR has been joined by two other civil- and human-rights pro­test movements.

Workers, students and peasants are becoming more politically con­scious. At the village of Zbrosza Duza, 35 miles south of Warsaw, I found the peasant organizers of a protest committee that attracts hun­dreds at Sunday meetings in the local church. The farmers’ griev­ances include poor fertilizer; eternal shortages of coal, cloth, meat; a miserable mud road to the near-by market town.

 

Hut more than anything else, they hunger for a voice in their own gov­ernment. One of their resolutions reads : “Nothing about us—with­out us.” A yearning for democracy echoes throughout Poland. Its peo­ple have lost none of the fierce na­tionalism that made them a thorn in the flesh of the tsars in the nine­teenth century and the invading Nazis in the twentieth. And al­though they are locked by geo­graphy and Soviet armed might into the Kremlin’s empire, the Poles are at heart part of the Western world and long to share its values.

 

 

 

The world is a strange place

A celestial dumb-bell

American astronomers William K. Hartman and Dale P. Cruikshank propose that Hektor is, in fact, two spherical asteroids stuck together. They approached at such a slow speed that they did not strike splinters off one another and rebound. Instead the two aster­oids nudged gently together, and ended up held in permanent contact by each other’s weak gravity, like a celestial dumb-bell.

When astronauts of the future reach the asteroid belt, what they won’t find is evidence of an ancient civilisation. What they will find may be equally exciting. Already we can predict that asteroids are often weirdly shaped, some — perhaps many — with moons of their own. The astronauts will be metal­lurgical prospectors, sounding out the iron asteroids for their commercial potential. They will also test the asteroids whose re­flected light tells us they are ‘peculiar’, to find just what odd kinds of rock they are made of—rocks left over from the birth of the solar system.

Another target for enquiry will be the carbonaceous asteroids. Although their carbon compounds are unlikely to be the products of life, they may well be the com­pounds from which life on the Earth sprang, back in the early days of our own planet.

All we know of the asteroids comes in­directly at the moment. Astronomers study their motions, analyse their reflected light, and interpret meteorites as asteroid debris strayed from its home regions. When Man reaches the asteroids, these mysteriously diminutive worlds of the solar system will undoubtedly have more surprises in store.

 

Conflagration of a clergyman

While away from his parish in Stock-cross, Newbury, England, the Reverend Mr Adams went to buy cheap cigarettes online before his death in a hotel room in New York, in 1876, apparently as a result of spontaneous combustion. In Fire from heaven, Michael Harrison remarks that ‘ecclesiastics, as a class’ seem strangely vulnerable to SHC and other paranormal heat phenomena.

 

The scorching of a slim lady

Photographic evidence of bizarre burn­ing deaths is very rare and not readily accessible even to the dedicated and bona fide researcher. The charred re­mains shown here are of ‘a slim lady, 85 years old, who was in good health’ when she was consumed by flames in Novem­ber 1963. The case was investigated by Dr D. J. Gee. Because of extensive damage to the body (but to little else) it was assumed that the victim had been in a state of unusual combustibility, and was set alight by an ember or a spark — a theory that would accord with the results of Dr Gee’s experiments and the theory of preternatural combustibility

 

A burning rage

Reviewing the cases of shc in his book Mysterious fires and lights (1967), veteran Fortean Vincent Gaddis noted that a high proportion of victims had appar­ently given up on life. ‘Some were alco­holics, and alcoholism is a form of escape from reality . . . Most were elderly with lowered resistance and perhaps tired of life. Many were invalids or poverty-stricken, dying in rest homes or alms­houses. Many led idle, sedentary lives.’ Charles Fort and his successors have also observed a significant number of ‘no­hopers’ among aHc victims. In Fire from heaven Michael Harrison suggests that there are several kinds of SHC, one of which is self-induced by people who are depressed, lonely, deprived, frightened and perhaps resentful. Harrison won­ders if normally controlled reserves of physical and psychical energy are not suddenly released in a fatal confla­gration, as a kind of ‘psychic suicide’.

Suicide by fire has always had sym­bolic overtones, and has been used to make a political gesture. That a massive build-up of rage or despair may result in a spontaneous blaze is appealing, but it is highly conjectural. Besides, it would account for only some cases.

 

Poland’s Rising Voice for Freedom

All is not quiet on Russia’s western front as organized groups of determined Poles proclaim their disaffection with communist tour falls, and most of War­saw heads home for dinner and bed. But not carloads of determined Poles driving to the countryside to help defiant farmers organize a rural underground to resist the communist regime.

In the streets of Poland’s capital, scores of young people slip furtively to work at the hide-outs of the coun­try’s prolific dissident Press. Else­where in the city, dozens of stu­dents assemble for an unauthorized lecture by a distinguished professor on aspects of modern Polish history not in the university curriculum.

These glimpses of protest illus­trate Poland’s unique position in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In other satellite nations, dissident voices rise from time to time, then fade or are snuffed out. But in the past few years, the Polish opposition movement has acquired a remark­able air of permanence—feeding hard facts and fresh ideas to a public starved for uncensored information.

For the anxious government, the dilemma is acute. Poland is heavily indebted abroad, hamstrung by lag­ging farm and industrial produc­tion, plagued by shortages. Largely because of the shaky economy, its communist bosses dare not risk a massive crack-down on the opposi­tion for fear of provoking the kind of disorders that have twice un­seated post-war governments.

Yet Poland’s powerful neighbour Russia is aware that every Pole who stands up for his rights and gets away with it is an object of envy to the 333 million people in the rest of the Soviet bloc—and an example they might copy.

For all the dangers, the opposition voice in Poland has an exhilarating ring to a people used to the communist version of history, politics, art and literature. Official newspapers avoid mention of the crippled economy. Censors ban practically all reference to a staggering range of subjects—including fires, epidemics,drownings and car accidents, unless they occur in the West. Criticism of the Soviet Union ? Never.

The underground Press, on the other hand, thrives on bad news. At least 30 papers appear bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly, with a com­bined total circulation of 25,000 to 30,000, and each copy may be read by loo people.

Biuletyn In formacy jny (Informa­tion Bulletin) and Opinia (Opinion)lists details of the latest police arrests, official threats and brutality. Robotnik (Worker) explains the dearth of meat by revealing that certain butchers have lists of police officers, factory managers and other favoured customers who get prefer­ential rations. Gospodarz (Farmer) asks impudently : Who needs the Warsaw Pact? The paper’s answer : Certainly not Poland.

A few papers are produced on slick offset presses. But most are printed with home-made ink (lamp­black mixed with linseed oil) and cranked out on ancient mimeograph machines, smudged and often all but illegible. Volunteers slip completed papers into offices, factories and schools all over the country.

Poland’s biggest unofficial publisher is pale, slim Miroslaw Chojecki, 29, a chemistry resear­cher who, fired from Poland’s in­stitute of nuclear energy because of Miroslaw Chojecki political activities, paints house interiors for a liv­ing and runs secret printing shops on the side. He is responsible for the two prestigious underground literary quarterlies called Zapis (Record) and Puls (Pulse), and each time he leaves his Warsaw flat he knows that he must dodge plain­clothesmen waiting to follow him to one of his presses.

Several months ago Chojecki was furtively approached by a stranger who offered to sell him a brand-new printing machine. Suspecting a trick to learn the location of his print-shops, Chojecki asked that the ma­chine be delivered to an address just opposite Warsaw’s cathedral.

When the gleaming duplicator arrived, Chojecki and a colleague carried the crate across the street into the cathedral, where police would never dare to follow. Hastily, the two took the machine out of its box and ostentatiously carried the empty crate to their car and roared off. The police followed at high speed, and only when the chase ended many miles away did they realize their mistake. Back at the cathedral, meanwhile, the machine had been dismantled and carried away piece by piece by Chojecki’s accomplices.

While editors fight censorship with their illegal presses, dozens of professors do much the same with their “flying university” courses held at private homes. Poles pack into living-rooms to hear economics, history, literature and sociology dis­cussed without the shackles of com­munist doctrine, and to analyse the work of writers out of official favour.

Wladislaw Bartoszevski, for one, often locks horns with the commu­nist version of twentieth century history. The official Historia Polski (History of Poland) contains no ref­erence to the tragic consequences of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, which fa­cilitated Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

There are also no references to the Soviet massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn Forest in 1940, or to the fact that during and after the Warsaw uprising in 1944 Russia halted its troops outside the city for five months to permit the Nazis to wipe out the remaining Polish forces and blast the capital to rubble. Bartoszevski’s “flying uni­versity” gives the whole grim story.

Police raids are frequent, especial­ly for lecturer Adam Michnik, 32, who teaches the history of post-war Poland under communism. One evening, police burst in as Mich­nik was getting started. “This is an illegal assembly,” shouted an officer.        “Leave this instant!’ 74115w Michnik ignored the order and kept on talking. With that, the militiamen fired rear-gas into the room and forced evacuation.