collapse CUBA may suspend most of its sugar trade after a slump of over one-third in the sugar harvest. It is hoped that the harvest, the worst since the 1959 revolution, will still meet the oil-for-sugar barter deal with Russia. It was the blockaded islands chronic oil shortage that caused the poor harvest. Mechanical farming and transport has had to be replaced with hand-cutting and ox-drawn carts. A tropical storm in March further reduced the harvest.
Yeltsin silences Congress speaker RUSSIAN President Boris Yeltsin denied his chief rival a chance to speak when the new Constituent Assembly opened last week. Designed by Yeltsin to quickly approve his draft constitution, the Assembly had a majority of his supporters who proceeded to drown out the attempts of parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khusbulatoy to speak.
Yeltsin's plan is to introduce a more powerful presidency that would limit the ability of the opposition to organise politically through the Soviets. councils and parliaments. Li Peng 'disappears' LI PENG, the member of the Chinese leadership most associated with the 1989 Tiananmen Square THE RESULT of the UN-organised elections in Cambodia could bring Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge guerrillas back into a coalition government, despite their refusal to participate in the elections.
Four million people voted, 85 This was a victory of the UN task force Untac, and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party govBut althoush the Khmer Rouge failed to disrupt the electons, so tar it is ine runcinpee coalition led by former ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk which is leading the count. Sihanouk's support is particularly strong in the capital Phnom Penh.
Sihanouk is pledged to 'national reconciliation", which decoaco means bringins fac Khmer Rouge into a coalition government. It would be an obscene result if the mass murderers led by Pol Pot came back into the government.
The Khmer Rouge have been treated with great respect by the United Nations which refers to them by their official name- the 'Democratic Forces of Cambodia". Pol Pot has only survived his sokliers by the United States. Bnian and China Cambodia is littered with land mines, mainly laid by the Khmer Rouge; they have resulted in tens of thousands lostaught the Khmer Rouge this form of warfare were from Britain's SAS, a fact that the govcrament nas persistently trico to cover up.
The clections, held in conditions of virtual partition of the country between different armed factions, have been forced on Cambodia by the 'inBlockade Through most of the 1980s the US ensured a virtual coonomic blockade occause of the presence of Vietnamese troops, and its characterisation of the Hun Sen govemment as a 'puppet' of the Vietnamese.
It was those same Vietnam ese that by their 1979 invasion which crushed Pol Pot's genocidal regime.
The Cambodian Peoples Party has asked the UN to stop declaring election results be"irregularities' in the counting. This is a sure sign that they expect to lose. If they do, it will be because of Sihanouk's promise to end the fighting; the dous impact in a country so warweary - in the same way as it did in the 1991 clection in Nicaragua. But if the result is contested or a Fancinpec victory there is no guarantee that the CPP will accept it. A return to all-out war, and western aid to Pol Pot would be the probable result. The irony is that Sun Hen's willingness to accept a market IMF and Workd Bank. But in US eyes must be ditched because of his former alliance with the ViWORLD NEWS Western Province. She is also supported by the reformist LSSP and Communist Party, who see the SFLP as a vehicle for socialism.
Chandrika's public embrace of market economics and the deteriorating coonomy means that disillusioned workers and disa fected youth will be looking for an alternauvc. anis is inc chalenge tor toe real lei.