The Pentagon today called on the highly publicized withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan a sham. Moscow announced earlier this month that it would complete the withdrawal of 6,000 men from Afghanistan by the end of October. NPR's Allen Burlow has the story. "The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Leonard Perutz said the Pentagon has developed clear and convincing evidence that the Soviet troop withdrawals are a deception. Perutz said the Soviets deliberately inserted additional tank and rifle regiments into Afghanistan for no reason other than to withdraw them. 'What the Soviets have done is to remove some unneeded units and to substitute others, so that the number of military useful troops in Afghanistan is basically unchanged.' Perutz said half of the Soviet units withdrawn were for air defense. Since the Afghani Mujahidin rebels have no air force, Perutz said, the Soviet withdrawals have no military significance. Perutz said the withdrawals were designed to enhance General Secretary Gorbachev's image at home and abroad. He said about 116,000 Soviet troops remain in Afghanistan. I'm Allen Burlow in Washington."


South African's black miners have observed a one-day strike to mourn the death of one hundred and seventy-seven of their co-workers killed in a fire at the Kinross gold mine last month. Workers in other industries also participated in the symbolic action. Nigel Rench reports from Johannesburg. "More than a quarter of a million black miners were on strike to protest their colleagues' deaths, about half the country's total of 600,000 gold and coal miners, costing the mining industry an estimated $4,000,000. The stay-away was total at the Kinross gold mine where last month's disaster occurred. Black miners stayed inside their barrack-like hostels. Reporters were barred from the mine. In central Johannesburg, a protest meeting was held by the Black National Union of Mineworkers which called the strike action. A union spokesman said miners had gathered not to mourn, but to commit themselves to liberation from apartheid and economic exploitation. White church leader, Bayers Nordea, told the crowd, 'The accident at Kinross need never have occurred, and the one hundred and seventy-seven men need not have died.' For National Public Radio, this is Nigel Rench in Johannesburg."


The King of Saudi Arabia has removed Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani as Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister. Yamani had held the job for twenty-four years. Although it's been rumored for a few years that Yamani was out of favor with the King, his firing shocked the oil market. Yamani's replacement, Hicham Niza, is Saudi Arabia's Planning Minister. NPR's Barbara Mantell has details. "Oil traders here in New York on the mercantile exchange said they had no idea that Yamani was about to be fired, but they took it as a sign that world oil prices would start to rise. Yamani had been leading OPEC in a price war over the past ten months. Saudi Arabia, the largest producer in the cartel, had raised its production and created an oil glut. That lowered the price of oil by 50%. Analysts say Saudi Arabia's King Fahd's supposedly had enough of the price war and of Yamani. King Fahd has said that he would like to see the price of oil rise to about $18 a barrel. And at noon today, New York time, when Saudi Arabia's new Oil Minister called for an emergency OPEC meeting, traders at the mercantile exchange frantically bid up oil prices. They were betting that King Fahd and his new Minister were going to try to set a new policy of higher prices in motion. I'm Barbara Mantell in New York."


Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani is generally regarded as the mastermind behind the Arab oil strategy of the 1970s. The man who introduced the word "petro-dollars" into our vocabulary, and who helped bring about one of the most dramatic shifts of international economic and political power in this century. NPR's Elizabeth Coulton has a report:
Yamani was appointed to the post of Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources in 1962, and it was then he began leading the campaign to wrest control of Arab oil resources from foreign-owned companies. He was only thirty-two years old when he took over his country's oil ministry. But he was then among the few Saudis to have had higher western education, including, in his case, legal training at Harvard. Although Yamani was only a commoner in the Kingdom, some members of the royal family had begun to recognize the contribution such a technocrat could make to the Saudi government. Then crown prince Faisal, later the King, championed young Yamani and gave him a clear mandate to do whatever necessary to keep his country's oil benefits home in Saudi Arabia. A natural diplomat, Yamani quickly became the unproclaimed leader of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as the global cartel, OPEC. In November and December of 1973, Sheik Yamani toured western capitals to explain OPEC's radical policies, including why oil prices were going to go up by 70%.
His announcement shocked the world and his name became an international household word. In London, one journalist wrote at the time that Sheik Yamani of Saudi Arabia was the most formidable eastern emissary to arrive in Europe since the Tartars swept into Russia or the Muslim hordes reached the walls of Vienna in the Middle Ages. In 1975, Yamani was the target when terrorists seized OPEC headquarters in Vienna and took the ministers hostage for several days. Ever since, then, Yamani surrounded himself with tough British bodyguards, and he kept his movements secret. Whenever he was seen abroad, he appeared as a superstar with his entourage.
At home, in the royal kingdom however, his position was somewhat different. He remained a commoner and, consequently, always an outsider, useful to the monarchy only as a technocrat who could manage Saudi wealth for the true owners, the royal family. Sometimes, at OPEC meetings, he would have to fly back home to consult with the King before proceeding with negotiations. At such times, ministers from revolutionary member states, like Iran, would criticize Yamani for being only a lackey with no power to make decisions on his own. At the same time, many observers believe that Yamani's ouster yesterday was caused by King Fahd's irritation with Yamani's power base outside the kingdom. OPEC specialist, Yousef Ibrahim of the Wall Street Journal , say Yamani got caught between demands.
Yamani is also said to be an extremely sensitive and religious man. He has been concerned that peoples of the world should try to understand each other. For example, in a conversation once with this reporter, Sheik Yamani said he believed all world leaders, like himself, should have at least an introductory course in social anthropology in order to be tolerant of other cultures. The cosmopolitan Sheik Yamani will be remembered as not only a wizard of oil economics, but perhaps more as a leading diplomat who brought the Arab world into the fore again, and changed the course of late twentieth century history. I'm Elizabeth Coulton in Washington.


This week in the United States, the Senate voted to reject the $200,000,000 in additional aid to the Philippines. That money was approved by the House after President Corazon Aquion delivered an emotional address to a joint session of Congress during her visit a few weeks ago. In that speech, Aquion thanked those law-makers who, she said, had balanced US strategic interests against human concerns and turned US policy against Ferdinand Marcos.
However, the conflict between strategic US defense interests and the everyday human needs of Filipinos remains at the heart of US-Philippine relations. It was a major issue in the Senate debate over increased economic aid when concerns were raised about the Philippines' commitment to retaining two major US military bases. Nowhere is this conflict more tangible but in Philippine base towns themselves. NPR's Allen Burlow has a report:
The frightening roar and fearful symmetry of an F-4 Phantom Fighter plane racing down the runway of Subic Bay Naval Station, are quickly lost in wonder as the 23-ton Phantom arches gracefully into the blue morning sky and disappears among the clouds of the South China Sea. The exact nature of today's mission is unknown. Perhaps it is a routine exercise, or training hours for a young pilot on one of the more than 200 daily flights from Subic Bay. It is impossible to say what thoughts occupy this pilot's mind, whether they pertain to the endless briefings on the strategic importance of Subic Bay, to the threat of communism, to the issues of nuclear war, or to the theoretical battles of superpower strategists who have him racing through the heavens away from the city of Olongapo.
Olongapo, located about 50 miles northwest of Manila, is the city just outside the Sublic Bay Naval Station. Olongapo is where the Filipinos live and where the Americans come to play. In a way, Olongapo is a microcosm of the tensions in US-Philippine relations. Before the Subic Bay installation was built, Olongapo was little more than a fishing village. Today, the local economy benefits from tens of millions of dollars spent there annually. At the same time, the extraordinary and pervasive influence of Sbic Bay on the economy and culture of Olongapo and the Philippines as a whole has led many Filipinos to question whether the base should be allowed to stay.
On any given day, there are 10,000 Americans at Subic Bay. They deal with the big issues like nuclear war and communism. But Philippine President Corazon Aquino must deal with more mundane matters, like the economic crisis her country faces in places like Olongapo and places like Pergasa.
Pergasa is the barrel where the city of Olongapo dumps its garbage. It is also home for the city's most destitute. While Pergasa is separated from the Subic Bay Naval Station by only a few yards, a moat of raw sewage, and a fence of barbed wire, the concerns of its residents could not be more distant.
Verhilio Fransi has lived here almost 10 years. He, his wife, and 8 children, occupy a one-room scrapwood shack. They live off the dump, collecting bottles and plastic cartons.
"In one day, we get almost forty-five, fifty pesos, in one day."
"And who does the work, you or all your children?"
"All of us."
"All of you together. You make forty-five pesos."
"All of us in one day."
"And do you also find food here or not?"
"We got ... we found food, but it's canned foods."
"Can you eat that food?"
"Sometimes, but when it tastes no good, we throw it."
Fransi says some days his children go hungry. The earnings he mentioned for his family of ten come to about $2 a day. In the local dialect, Pergasa means hope. Last year, Verhilio Fransi found a solid gold bracelet in the dump. He sold it for about $10.
In Pergasa, you breathe the unmistakable acrid smoke of smouldering garbage coughed up by fires that never go out. In Pergasa, there are thick clouds of flies, millions of flies humming their monotonous song of decay as they swarm about the mountains of garbage rising ten, fifteen, thirty feet into the air.
Catolino Trancy, his wife and nine children live off the dump. Near the entrance to their mud-floor shack, there is a pan with eight pigs and an oil drum filled above its rim with blood-stained bones. I asked Mr. Trancy why he collected these.
"There is a ... that skulls and bones."
"And how much money do you get for skulls and bones?"
"About seventy-five centavos a kilo."
There is a dumpster in front of Trancy's house that says "Donated to Olongapo city by the US navy". Another sign bears one of the slogans of a former mayor. It reads, "It's forbidden to be lazy in this city."
Some two hundred families live here in Pergasa. Chickens and dogs and rats can be seen running about. A little girl walks through the flattened cans and the bottle caps, dragging a plastic bag on a string or a sort of kite. She falls into the broken glass and ashes and doesn't cry.
In the Pergasa, the houses are of wood, tin and cardboard boxes that say things like "This side up" or "Fragile". There's a house with a faded green "Merry Christmas" sign, another that says "God bless you". There is irony here for journalists, but there is no electricity or basic services.
The US navy is in Olongapo because it is one of the best naturally protected harbors in the world. It is there because the Pentagon thinks Subic Bay is essential to protecting US security interests in Asia, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. But whether the US will be allowed to remain in Olongapo will eventually be decided by Filipinos. In a national referendum promised by President Aquino, they will be asking what kind of friend the US had been, if the bases serve Philippines' security interests as well as very real human needs of their country, if the income from the base offsets the damage done to the structure of Philippine society and to Philippine sovereignty. As this debate heats up, the United States faces a difficult task in convincing people that its concerns extend beyond global issues of security down to the very real everyday problems faced by ordinary Filipinos. I'm Allen Burlow reporting.