2/28/00
- Albright tipped for Czech presidency
2/25/00
- Germany mulls opening tech jobs to foreigners
2/21/00
- NATO troops use tear gas, armored vehicles to
block ethnic clash
2/19/00
- Lure of the Emerald Isle
Madeleine Albright: Going back to her roots
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is
being tipped to run for the presidency of the
Czech Republic.
President Vaclav Havel has already openly
talked about the possibility of Ms Albright
succeeding him after he retires in 2002.
But speculation is being heightened this week
as Ms Albright prepares for a visit to the Czech
Republic, where she was born.
Michael Zantovsky, former Czech ambassador
to Washington, said on Sunday that he met
last week with Mr Havel and discussed, among
other things, the possibility that Ms Albright
might run to succeed Mr Havel.
He said: "I never made
it a secret that I think
that Madeleine Albright
could, one day in the
future, play a big role in
Czech politics." Time
magazine quoted
unidentified sources as
saying she "has begun
to consider the
possibility of running".
Mr Havel's chief policy adviser, Pavel Fischer,
told Time: "It is not impossible that they
(Albright and Havel) will talk about this."
And Jiri Pehe, an adviser to Mr Havel, also told
Time: "The ball is on her side ... I think she
would be the best candidate we could have for
that position."
Precedents
But Ms Albright's spokesman, James Rubin,
denied that she was considering running for
the presidency.
He acknowledged that
she had been
approached by Czech
officials and was
flattered by
suggestions that she
should run for office,
but said she had never
seriously considered it.
But such a move does
have its precedents.
The US Constitution
bars Ms Albright, or any other foreign-born
citizen from the American presidency, but
there appears to be no legal bar to keep an
American from assuming the presidency of
another country.
Lithuania's current president, Valdas Adamkus,
is a former US government bureaucrat,
Yugoslavia's former prime minister, American
Milan Panic, was a California millionaire before
returning to his homeland and in Israel, Golda
Meir moved from a Milwaukee classroom to
become prime minister of Israel.
Havel 'regrets'
Mr Havel first brought up the presidency idea
in 1998.
After returning to Prague from an official visit
to the US, he expressed regret that he had
not asked whether she would be available to
succeed him.
"It occurred to me on the plane on my way
back home," Mr Havel said, "so I did not have
the chance to ask her."
Ms Albright's maiden name is Marie Korbelova.
Her father was a Czech diplomat who took his
family to London as Germany took over their
homeland at the start of World War II.
The family then moved to Denver in 1948
rather than serve under a communist
Czechoslovakian government.
Her three-day visit starting on 5 March
coincides with the commemoration of the
150th anniversary of the birth of national hero
Tomas Masaryk, who served as the first
president of the Czechoslovak Republic after
the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918.
Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 APonline
By HANS GREIMEL
HANOVER, Germany (February 25, 2000 9:15 p.m.
EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Dressed in a crisp
blue suit, headhunter A. Ayyanarsamy has been
working the recruiter booths for five hours at the
world's largest technology fair, trying to find jobs
for computer wizards from India. So far, no luck.
Even with high unemployment, many jobs are going
unfilled in Germany because a snarl of red tape and
strict immigration laws have aggravated a shortage
of qualified help.
"Trying to find a job for a highly trained Indian is
next to impossible," says Ayyanarsamy as he
cruises the 150 recruiter stands at the high-tech
fair known as CeBIT.
This could change soon as business leaders and
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are pushing for
dramatic reforms that could open German borders
to 30,000 foreign workers.
There are now 75,000 empty positions that can't
be filled for lack of skilled workers, complains the
German association for computer and
telecommunications companies, BITCOM. That
number is expected to shoot up to 350,000 in the
next two years as the German economy continues
its shift from heavy industry to high technology.
There is a worldwide shortage of computer workers,
but it is especially acute in Germany, where
immigration laws typically slam the door on foreign
workers.
Without access to a vast global labor pool, German
companies fear they will fall behind - especially
compared with their U.S. competitors, who
routinely recruit the best and brightest from
overseas, contributing to a brain drain from
developing countries.
The dearth of talent is so bad, that for the first
time in its 30-year history, the CeBIT trade show -
which brings in 7,800 technology firms from 60
countries - has set up a high-tech job market to
match job seekers with employers.
But that's not enough. German businesses now
want to gear up for global competition by
implementing a U.S.-style "green card" system that
would let in 30,000 technology experts from
Eastern Europe and India. Green cards are the
documents foreigners need to work and live
permanently in the United States.
Schroeder endorsed the plan Wednesday night at
the opening of CeBIT. But he has yet to say how
many workers would be let in and how long they
would be allowed to stay. The chancellor hopes to
provide details of the plan by March 13,
government spokesman Bela Anda said Friday.
Schroeder has made clear, however, that
companies could qualify for the special workers only
if they make equal efforts to retrain unemployed
Germans.
Employers at the trade show welcomed the news
as a major breakthrough.
"The problem is there are less people leaving school
with the required skills, but there are more jobs
being created every day as the technology industry
takes off," said Winfried Hartl, head of recruiting at
Siemens AG, a large electronics company which is
trying to fill some 1,000 jobs.
"It will make it a lot easier to fill those positions if
we can hire from Eastern Europe where there is a
tremendous surplus of skilled technicians because
the economy there is so bad," he said.
Companies looking to hire from abroad confront a
wall of bureaucracy. In order for a prospective
employee to win both a residence permit and a
working permit, the hiring company must prove that
an equally qualified worker can't be found in
Germany or in any of the 14 other countries in the
European Union.
In the end, permits are granted on the basis of
whether it is in the "public interest," a criterion that
businesses complain is vague and open to abuse.
"What I like about the United States is it's just as
easy to have a telephone interview with someone
in India, say, 'OK, we'll hire you,' go down to the
consulate, fill out the papers, get your stamp, and
then boom you're on a plane," Ayyanarsamy said.
"That would never happen in Germany."
Ayyanarsamy who headhunts throughout Europe,
typically avoids Germany because of the tough
laws. He ventured to CeBIT, sensing change was in
the air.
But plans to bring in foreign workers come at a time
when Germany is battling a chronic unemployment
rate of roughly 10 percent, with more than 4 million
people out of work. Creating jobs was a
cornerstone to Schroeder's successful election bid,
and he is now accused of backpedaling.
IG Metall, the world's largest union and guardian of
German workers' high wages and generous benefits,
attacked the plan. It wants businesses to focus on
retraining Germany's unemployed.
The opposition Christian Democratic party
complained the plan only treated the symptoms
without curing the disease: poor training in German
schools. Even Labor Minister Walter Riester, from
Schroeder's own party, has expressed reservations.
In the meantime, Ayyanarsamy said he will keep
making the rounds at CeBIT selling German
companies on the virtues of hiring computer
experts out of the city of Bangalore, India's
equivalent of the Silicon Valley.
"I'm getting a lot of interest," he said. "But until the
law changes, it's very difficult to get anywhere in
this country."
-top-
Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 Associated Press
By ELENA BECATOROS
KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia (February 21,
2000 3:35 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) -
French and British troops fired tear gas to push
back thousands of ethnic Albanians trying to force
their way across a bridge into the Serb-controlled
side of this ethnically divided city Monday.
Up to 4,000 Serbs were waiting on the north side
of the bridge, determined to battle the Albanians to
keep them from entering their part of this
northwestern Kosovo industrial city.
The Albanian crowd, numbering between 6,000 and
10,000, managed to breach French positions on the
approach to the bridge over the Ibar River, and
more French troops rushed to the bridge and began
firing volleys of tear gas in five-minute intervals.
British troops blocked the bridge with armored
vehicles and pushed away ethnic Albanian men who
tried to climb over the vehicles.
By the start of a daily 12-hour curfew at 6 p.m.,
crowds on both sides were dispersing.
In a sign that the Serbs were prepared for a
showdown, some Serb women and children began
evacuating the city, and a local Serb leader, Nikola
Kabasic, told a Belgrade radio station that the
Serbs were bringing in reinforcements from
neighboring villages to defend their part of the city
if NATO cannot control the Albanians.
No American troops were involved in the scuffles at
the bridge. On Sunday, U.S. troops taking part in a
weapons search in the Serb part of the city
withdrew to the ethnic Albanian south bank after
Serbs pelted them with stones.
Gen. Klaus Reinhardt of Germany, the commander
of the NATO-led Kosovo Force, congratulated the
troops for showing restraint in the face of
escalating tensions, which threaten to engulf the
city and potentially the entire province in a new
round of bloodletting.
"The key thing really was to prevent an escalation
in which somebody fired on the other one,"
Reinhardt said. "It would have been a disaster. My
soldiers were very reasonable. They used just the
amount of power needed and did not overreact."
Kosovska Mitrovica is the most ethnically tense city
in Kosovo because it contains the largest Serb
community remaining in the province. Most Kosovo
Serbs fled following the withdrawal of Yugoslav
troops in June and the arrival of NATO-led
peacekeepers.
In New York City, Richard Holbrooke, the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, blamed the
Yugoslav government for fomenting trouble in
Kosovska Mitrovica.
"I think there is no question who's responsible for
it. It's Belgrade," Holbrooke told reporters at the
United Nations. "The leadership in Belgrade is
fomenting trouble north of the Mitrovica bridge."
The 9,000 Serbs who remain here fear that if the
90,000 ethnic Albanians living across the river are
allowed free access to the north side, they will
launch reprisal attacks for the Serb-led campaign
of terror authorized by Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic against Kosovo's Albanian majority. Similar
attacts occurred elsewhere in Kosovo after
Milosevic halted his crackdown against ethnic
Albanian separatists and withdrew his troops from
the province following a 78-day NATO bombing
campaign.
The recent tensions began after a grenade attack
on a U.N. bus Feb. 2 killed two elderly Serbs just
south of the city. That triggered a round of
revenge attacks that have left nine dead and
scores injured.
Fears of an ethnic explosion mounted Monday as
tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians set out from
the provincial capital Pristina on a 25-mile march to
Kosovska Mitrovica.
U.N. police and NATO-led troops accompanied the
demonstrators and U.S. military vehicles and
soldiers lined the road into the center of town to
prevent the protesters from entering the city
center.
The ethnic Albanian leader of the city, Bajram
Rexhepi, said Albanian organizers decided to return
the marchers to their homes because the crowd
"got out of control."
"Mitrovica needs peace and dialogue," Rexhepi said.
"I am against any incidents at the bridge, and
those who organize them are against law and
order."
Saturday, 19 February, 2000, 17:09 GMT
Lure of the Emerald
Isle
Migration has forged Ireland's
identity over centuries
By BBC Dublin correspondent Kevin
Connolly
For centuries, emigration has helped
to shape Ireland and the Irish view of
the world.
In the 80 years after the famine of
the 1840s, more than four and a half
million men, women and children left
to build new lives far from home.
In a country where the population has
never been more than eight million,
an exodus of those proportions had
profound economic and social
consequences which are still being
felt today.
But there are clear signs now that the
tide of history is turning.
Boom time
Twenty-first century Ireland boasts
one of the strongest and
fastest-growing economies in Europe,
expanding at such a rate that it
urgently needs immigrant labour to
sustain the boom.
Piaras Mac Einri, of
the Migration
Studies Centre at
Cork University,
says that
historical shift has
forced the Irish to
look at themselves
in new ways.
"The stories of
emigration have
been an
enormously
important part of history here ," he
explains.
"Now we face the question as a
society of how we cope with
immigration and with the new idea of
having ethnic minorities here."
Vocal opposition
The new phenomenon of immigration
has brought with it another new
experience for Ireland - the
anti-immigration campaigner.
The most vocal and most energetic of
these is Aine Ni Chonnail, a
diminutive teacher of history and
Irish from the seaside town of
Clonakilty in County Cork.
She is convinced that she speaks for
the silent majority in Ireland when
she calls for the government to be
tougher - much tougher - about the
number of people it allows into
Ireland and the ease with which Irish
citizenship can be acquired.
" People do have a
terrible fear of
being politically
incorrect," she
says. " I think it is
very significant
that we receive
anonymous letters
of support, from
people saying
'keep up the good
work', but being
too frightened to
put their names to
it"
Aine Ni Chonnail insists she is not
motivated by racism, whatever her
critics say. She argues that the whole
issue of immigration is growing, and
is one that Ireland has to face up to -
and quickly.
Asylum seekers
The statistics indicate that, whether
you agree with her views or not, she
has a point. One of the commonest
ways for immigrants to try to get into
Ireland is by seeking political asylum.
In 1992, there were 39 such cases -
but by last year the number had risen
to nearly 8,000, the bulk of them
from Romania and Nigeria.
Derek Stewart, a
Dublin lawyer who
specialises in such
cases, says there
is a danger that
newcomers will
find themselves
being blamed for
chronic social
problems.
"There's no doubt
in certain areas
where new arrivals
settle, they will find themselves
being made scapegoats for problems
that existed long before they arrived.
It is an issue for the politicians as
well as for the Irish people."
The issue of immigration is certain to
remain high on Ireland's political
agenda in the years to come.
And the underlying issue is a
fascinating one - does a country
which was shaped by emigration feel
it has a special responsibility to
immigrants as they begin to arrive in
ever-greater numbers ?