A former Pakistani journalist has carried off an unusual scoop following an encounter with South Africa's former first lady, Winnie Mandela, the ex-wife of Nelson Mandela.

The journalist in question is Nadira Naipaul who used to be a famous and much admired Lahore-based journalist until she met and married Nobel Literature prize winner V.S. Naipaul. And although Nadira has spent the last several years in the shadow of her widely revered husband, her old instincts to get a good story have not entirely deserted her.

Hence the scoop in which she quotes Winnie as saying that Mandela had done little for the poor blacks of South Africa. In the interview widely quoted in the British media, including the Daily Mail, Winnie says her former husband did nothing for the poor and should not have accepted the Nobel Prize with South Africa's last white president, FW de Klerk, 'the man who jailed him'.
'This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family,' Winnie said in the interview.
'You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died.

'Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a young revolutionary but look what came out.
'Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically we are still on the outside. The economy is very much “white”.

'I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel with his jailer de Klerk. Hand-in-hand they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart?

'He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.'
Winnie is also quoted as describing former Truth and Reconciliation Commission chairman Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu as a 'cretin'.

'What good does the truth do? How does it help anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried?

'That Bishop Tutu who turned it all into a religious circus came here. He had a cheek to tell me to appear. I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me.'
Most damagingly she goes on to allegedly describe Mandela as becoming a 'corporate foundation' wheeled out only to raise money for the ANC.

'Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more.
'They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the most affluent white area of Johannesburg. Not here (in Soweto) where we spilled our blood.

'Mandela is now like a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money.'
Since the interview was published embarrassed senior members of South Africa's ruling African National Congress have said they will ask Winnie to explain and justify her extraordinary attack on Mandela.

ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said senior party members wanted to know if the comments attributed to Winnie were indeed correct. 'We have to be fair, so we would want to hear from her whether she has been correctly quoted. It sounds very much out of character, but we will want to know in what capacity she was speaking because this sounds like a very drastic attack on the former president,' Mthembu said. He added that the ANC would not tolerate any such attacks on the party or its former leader, but further action was pending a full explanation from Winnie.

An explanation did come through the Nelson Mandela Foundation wherein Winnie said the article (in a London newspaper) had been based on a 'fabricated interview'. Winnie called it 'an inexplicable attempt to undermine the unity of my family (and) the legacy of Nelson Mandela…'

Nadira, meanwhile, has returned with her husband to the safety of their Wiltshire home in the UK and Winnie, for her part, is making no further comments to the media.

British plane spotters in and out of spot

Plane spotting was an innocent spectator sport back in the days of propeller aircraft when mass international tourism was unheard of and long before the advent of international terrorist strikes.

But 9/11 changed the world forever as governments around the world became aware of how civil passenger aircraft could be manipulated by terrorists to strike at tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

In these changed circumstances the prospect of suspicious looking foreigners milling around and about the perimeter of international airports, noting down the arrival and departure times of aircraft is enough to chill the most sophisticated police force.

So it is all to the credit of the authorities at Delhi's Indira Gandhi  International Airport that they responded in double quick time when their attention was drawn to two British nationals who asked hotel staff for a room overlooking one of the airport runways.

British tourists are among the more eccentric of their breed, but even experienced police experts were taken aback when the two men, Stephen Hampton and Steven Ayres, were found to be carrying an air traffic control scanner, laptop, binoculars and cameras.

In other circumstances the two could have been charged with spying, which carries a jail sentence of up to 10 years, but quick work by their Indian defence lawyer and their own willingness to admit that they might inadvertently have broken Indian laws resulted in a comparatively minor sentence.

Charged under section 20 of the Indian Telegraph Act, which carries a three-year sentence and/or a fine, the two railway workers from Bristol, were each fined 25,000 rupees (approximately £350) for illegally monitoring aircraft.
Before they left Delhi for home in the UK, defence lawyer Rajeev Awasthi commented, 'The case was really complicated but respective agencies have played a very fair role and they have not attributed any serious offences.'
'The court, instead of giving them prison for three years, appreciated my argument and took a lenient view and cleared them to leave the country…Formalities were concluded within a day and these persons are back home safely without any problems.'

Hampton and Ayres were arrested only two days after terrorists targeted and killed innocent civilians at a German bakery in the West coast Indian city of Pune.

His last Leader in 'Sunday Leader'

Sri Lanka continues to be dragged ever deeper into the list of those countries where democratic liberties are under threat and human and civil rights have degenerated into a charade.

Fingers continue to be pointed at the country's controversial leader, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who won a decisive victory in the country's recently concluded presidential election.

Before and after the election, however, Rajapaksa's actions have been compared to those of a leader heading a banana republic who threatens or kills his critics.

They include former army chief Sarath Fonseka who dared to stand against Rajapaksa. Following the election, carefully timed and calculated leaks from Rajapaksa's supporters hinted that Fonseka could be tried and executed for treason. The leaks were typical of Rajapaksa's style of using stealth and manipulation to silence those who stand up to him.

Subsequent actions attributed to the Rajapaksa regime include the deliberate leaking of a list of some 35 journalists and NGO officers who are said to be of interest to the country's secret services. Each of the individuals named has been graded with due regard of their importance to the country's intelligence services.

A spokesman for Amnesty International commented, 'Such a blatant leak can have only one purpose and that is to intimidate those individuals on the list and deter anyone from speaking to them. Journalists are often at the forefront of protecting and defending individuals' human rights. It is their bravery that can help expose abuses and bring them to an end. Sri Lanka needs to respect media freedom and allow human rights defenders to go about their work freely and without harassment.'

Amnesty calculates that at least 14 media workers have been killed in Sri Lanka since the beginning of 2006 with more than 20 journalists leaving the country following death threats.

One of those who failed to leave in time was Sri Lankan editor Lasantha Wickramatunga who anticipated his own killing in January 2009 and wrote an editorial which was subsequently published in the Sunday Leader newspaper.
'No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces — and, in Sri Lanka, journalism,' Wickramatunga wrote.

'In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been burned, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories, and now especially the last.'

Dubai going the desert way?

Gone are the days when Dubai was a liberal haven in a region all too often at the mercy of power-crazed despots and religious fundamentalists.

Gulf wars came and went, Middle East conflicts rose and fell, but Dubai — like Beirut before — remained an oasis for frightened foreigners who could fly into the city without fear of being harassed for holding hands or consuming a drink by the swimming pool. No longer.

Earlier this year a casual drink over dinner and the innocent kissing of cheeks led to the arrest of a visiting British couple. They were given a month's jail sentence after a local mother complained to the authorities that her child had witnessed them kissing.

Their comparatively innocent act of a peck on the cheek was a far cry from a 2008 court case when another British couple was sentenced for engaging in sex on the beach. They were deported after narrowly avoiding a three month jail term.

Earlier this year yet another British couple, who shared a hotel room, were accused of having illicit sex. They avoided trial after producing a wedding certificate. In a separate case this year, a British couple who shared a hotel room managed to escape trial in Dubai for having sex out of wedlock by producing a marriage certificate.
The latest case of indecency involves two cabin staff from Emirates Airlines who have been sentenced to three months in prison after being found guilty of exchanging sexually explicit text messages.

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