Saudi Arabia pledges $3-B aid to strengthen Lebanese army
BEIRUT—Saudi Arabia has pledged $3 billion for the Lebanese army to buy equipment from France, Lebanese President Michel Sleiman announced on Sunday.
The kingdom “decided to provide generous assistance to Lebanon in the form of $3 billion for the Lebanese army to strengthen its capabilities,” Sleiman said, adding that it was the largest assistance provided in Lebanon’s history.
French President Francois Hollande, on a visit to Saudi Arabia, said his country would “meet” any requests from Lebanon.
“I am in touch with President Sleiman... If requests are addressed to us, we will meet them,” Hollande told reporters answering a question about SENDAI—Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homelessmen.
He isn’t a social worker. He’s a recruiter. The men in Sendai station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan’s nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head.
“This is how labor recruiters like me come in every day,” Sasa says, as he strides past men sleeping on cardboard and clutching at their coats against the early winter cold.
It’s also how Japan finds peoplewilling to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the $35-billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong.
Almost three years ago, a massive earthquake and tsunami leveled villages across Japan’s northeast coast and set off multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Today, the most ambitious radiation cleanup ever attempted is running behind schedule. The effort is being dogged by both a lack of oversight and a shortage of workers, according to a Reuters analysis of contracts and interviewswith dozens of those involved.
In January, October and November, Japanese gangsters were arrested on charges of infiltrating construction giant Obayashi Corp.’s network of decontamination subcontractors and illegally sending workers to the government-funded project.
In the October case, homeless men were rounded up at Sendai’s train station by Sasa, then put to work clearing radioactive soil and debris in Fukushima City for less than minimum wage, according to police and accounts of those involved. The men reported up through a chain of three other Sleiman’s announcement that came as the French leader arrived in Riyadh for talks with King Abdullah.
The aid pledge comes amid mounting sectarian tension in Lebanon related to the war in neighboring Syria.
Lebanon’s powerful Shiite Hezbollahmovement is fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces against an uprising that many Lebanese Sunnis support.
Saudi Arabia is a leading backer of the rebels battling Assad’s regime, which has relied on strong support from Shiite Iran.
Sleiman’s announcement comes two days after a bombing that targeted a leading critic of Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, though the Saudi aid companies to Obayashi, Japan’s second-largest construction company.
Obayashi, which is one of more than 20 major contractors involved in government-funded radiation removal projects, has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But the spate of arrests has shown that members of Japan’s three largest criminal syndicates—Yamaguchigumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai—had set up black-market recruiting agencies under Obayashi.
“We are taking it very seriously that these incidents keep happening one after another,” said Junichi Ichikawa, a spokesperson for Obayashi. He said the company tightened its scrutiny of its lower-tier subcontractors in order to shut out gangsters, known as the “yakuza.” “There were elements of whatwe had been doing that did not go far enough.”
Part of the problem in monitoring taxpayer money in Fukushima is the sheer number of companies involved in decontamination, extending from the major contractors at the top to tiny subcontractors many layers below them. The total number has not been announced, but in the 10 most contaminated towns and a highway that runs north past the gates of the wrecked plant in Fukushima, Reuters found 733 companies performing pledge did not appear to be directly related.
He said the money would be used to buy weapons from France, pointing to the “historical ties that link it to Lebanon and the depth of the military cooperation between the two countries.” Sleiman did not specify what weapons would be purchased.
Lebanon’s armed forces are woefully underequipped and face multiplying security challenges, underlined by the bomb attack on Friday and rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel on Sunday that prompted return fire from the Jewish state.
The armed forces are responsible for domestic security as well as national defense and contain members from across Lebanon’s multisectarian population. work for the Ministry of Environment, according to partial contract terms released by theministry in August under Japan’s information disclosure law.
Reuters found 56 subcontractors listed on environment ministry contracts worth a total of $2.5 billion in the most radiated areas of Fukushima that would have been barred from traditional public works because they had not been vetted by the constructionministry.
The 2011 law that regulates decontamination put control under the environment ministry, the largest spending program ever managed by the 10-year-old agency. The same law also effectively loosened controls on bidders, making it possible for firms to win radiation removal contracts without the basic disclosure and certification required for participating in public works such as road construction.
Reuters also found five firms working for the Ministry of Environment that could not be identified. They had no constructionministry registration, no listed phone number or website, and Reuters could not find a basic corporate registration disclosing ownership. There was also no record of the firms in the database of Japan’s largest credit research firm, Teikoku Databank.
The powerful Hezbollah movement remains the country’s best-armed and -trained organization, however, and its arsenal has drawn domestic criticism, including from former Prime Minister Saad Hariri and the so-called March 14 coalition.
Hariri, whose father was assassinated in an attack blamed on Hezbollah, welcomed the Saudi pledge and said it came as part of a project to impose state control.
Sleiman “announced an exceptional step in the transition to a real state whose authority prevails over any other authority and whose army is not exceeded by any other army,” Hariri said in a statement.
Sleiman visited Saudi Arabia last month.
7 schoolchildren drown in Vietnam
HANOI—Seven Vietnamese schoolchildren drowned while swimming in the sea during a picnic near the southern business hub of Ho Chi Minh City, local police said. The school trip ended in tragedy on Sunday after the children were swept out to sea by strong waves at Can Gio beach, a coastal area on the outskirts of Vietnam’s second city. “The last bodies were found early Monday morning,” a policeman told AFP. The children were aged between 12 and 14 years old.
China’s ex-security chief’s aide probed
BEIJING—A former close colleague of China’s ex-chief of internal security Zhou Yongkang is under investigation for “law and discipline violations,” authorities have announced. Li Chongxi, chair of the Sichuan province Political Consultative Conference—a debating chamber that is part of the Communist Party-controlled governmental structure—is being probed for “suspected severe violation of discipline and the law,” the ruling party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said. The phrase is commonly used as a euphemism for corruption.
El Salvador volcano erupts
SAN SALVADOR—Some 2,000 people were evacuated in eastern El Salvador on Sunday when the Chaparrastique volcano belched and spewed a column of ashes high into the sky. The 2,330-meter-high volcano began erupting around 1630 GMT, and authorities suspended scores of flights across parts of the small Central American country. No victims were reported. The volcano belched for about 2 and a half hours, the environmental ministry said. The eruption produced a dense column of gas and ashes that rose more than 5,000 m into the air.