Need Info About Chimp In Phillipines

[KingOfLostSouls]

quick plug here

I'd heard from a girl I know living in the philipines that when smirky d. chimp was in the philipines, the shanty towns were ordered destroyed to make the area "presentable."

she told me traffic was held up everywhere, and that whole homes were demolished, rendering somewhere into the high hundreds to thousands of people homeless.

wanted to know if anyone has any more info on this? quite disturbing to see that the chimp really is acting like emperor to go out having simple people's homes leveled. not surprising though.

[abbyhoffman]

1. yes

its true my co-workers from the philipines were talking about it and it was in the philipine news paper they sell here in San FRancisco with photo's

[LittleApple81]

2. I remember having read in the international press that they also

destroyed trees and corraled people for the whole day when he visited Africa. But I don't remember where I read the articles.

[Buns_of_Fire]

3. Try here...

BUSH VISIT: RESIDENTS HERDED LIKE SLAVES

GOREE ISLAND, Senegal (Reuters) - President Bush made an eloquent speech but did not win many friends during his brief visit to Goree Island off Senegal on Tuesday.

"We are very angry. We didn't even see him," said Fatou N'diaye, a necklace seller watching dignitaries file past to return to the mainland at the end of Bush's tour.

N'diaye and other residents of Goree, site of a famous slave trading station, said they had been taken to a football ground on the other side of the quaint island at 6 a.m. and told to wait there until Bush had departed, around midday.

[LittleApple81]

4. I also found this in the Nation

Bush's Visit Shuts Down Senegal
by Jonah Engle
snip...

On the way from the airport to the presidential palace, where jubilant crowds of thousands had lined the streets to cheer the entrance of President Clinton in 1998, Bush's motorcade sped by buildings ordered shut and small numbers of spectators, many of them staring impassively, arms folded. A Senegalese activist reported that trees, some more than a century old, had been cut down everywhere the President was scheduled to pass.

snip...

As dawn broke on the day of the presidential visit, Senegalese police officers in red berets accompanied by American officials went house to house with bomb-sniffing dogs. In each house, the residents were ordered out and led to a soccer field ringed with metal cordons, where they were forcibly held without food for six hours until Bush's safe departure, "like sheep" said 15-year-old Mamadou to a Reuters correspondent. Reporters described the normally bustling tourist destination as looking like a "ghost town," its bright shutters tightly drawn, fishermen's pirogues idle in the bay--patrolling US Secret Service agents with dogs and frogmen swimming through the shallows provided the only signs of life. With the island's inhabitants safely quarantined, President Bush and the First Lady toured the old red-brick slave house. Standing over an air-conditioning vent, the President then delivered a speech to 300 or so carefully selected guests.

Describing slavery as "one of the greatest crimes of history," he bore witness to the island's cruel past: "At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold," and he honored the indomitable spirit of those who had been held captive on it: " flame was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, were no chain could bind the soul." Meanwhile, out in the midday heat, Goree's inhabitants required no history lessons: "All that was missing were the handcuffs," exclaimed one resident to a reporter from Wal Fadjri. "Esclaves, esclaves ," cried another.

more...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030804&s=engle

[LittleApple81]

5. Found this by googling

Scrubbed streets, protests to greet Bush in Manila
By John O'Callaghan

snip

FEWER EYESORES FOR BUSH

On the drive in from the airport, Bush and his entourage will speed along clear streets with freshly painted lines and new plant-pots along the side, oblivious to the traffic jams that routinely paralyse the metropolis of 12 million people.

They also won't see the shantytowns recently flattened by bulldozers or suddenly obscured by billboards welcoming Bush. The presidential palace and the area around the House of Representatives, where the U.S. president will give an address, have been spruced up as part of Manila's $180,000 makeover.

That may not seem much of a price to impress a leader of Bush's stature, but it's a considerable sum in a nation where a third of the 82 million people live on a few dollars a day and the government must forgo development projects to repay debt.

"We're not even sure if Bush will pass through here, yet all of us were told to go," Charlie Aresga, one of hundreds of squatters whose shacks were levelled, told a local newspaper.

But Bush may not even see much of the selective improvements -- or the protests -- if a plan comes through for him to rise above the congested, polluted capital in a helicopter.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MAN169274.htm