france: gare au retour de manivelle

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http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2010/10/07/97001-20101007FILWWW00398-crise-10000-soldats-mobilisables.php

Crise: 10.000 soldats mobilisables

AFP
07/10/2010

En cas de crise majeure, l'armée peut engager 10.000 hommes sur le territoire national, selon une instruction interministérielle rendue publique au moment où sort un livre dont l'auteur assure que "l'Etat prépare la guerre dans les cités françaises". L'existence de ce texte, daté du 3 mai 2010, et dont l'ouvrage ne fait pas spécifiquement mention, est révélée dans le dernier numéro d'Armées d'aujourd'hui, une des publications officielles du ministère de la Défense.

Cette instruction a été rédigée, avec le concours des ministères de l'Intérieur et de la Défense, par le Secrétariat général de la défense et de la sécurité nationale (SGDSN). Ce service du premier ministre a confirmé à l'AFP l'existence de ce texte en précisant qu'il était classifié "confidentiel défense". Le SGDSN est notamment chargé de la planification des plans de réponses aux crises : plan Vigipirate et ceux de la famille "Pirate" (Piratair, Pirate-mer, NRBC ...).

En cas de crise, cette instruction, qui découle du Livre blanc (2008) énumérant les priorités stratégiques de la France pour les quinze années à venir, fixe ainsi le "contrat opérationnel 10.000 hommes" que les armées doivent pouvoir déployer en quelques jours. Interrogé par Armées d'aujourd'hui, le préfet François Lucas, alors directeur de la protection et de la sécurité de l'Etat au SGDSN, a défini une crise majeure comme "un évènement - pandémie, attaque terroriste, catastrophe, crise d'ordre public - dont la gravité et la portée conduisent les autorités gouvernementales à activer le dispositif interministériel de crise".

Les trois armées (terre, air, mer) interviennent déjà lors de catastrophes naturelles (inondations, tempêtes ...) pour épauler les services de secours civils, pour assurer en permanence la "police du ciel", les missions de l'Etat en mer ou renforcer, depuis la fin des années 90, les effectifs de police et de gendarmerie dans le cadre de Vigipirate.

Dans "Opérations banlieues, comment l'Etat prépare la guerre urbaine dans les cités françaises" (éditions La Découverte, jeudi dans les librairies), Hacène Belmessous, présenté comme "journaliste et chercheur indépendant", est beaucoup plus direct. L'auteur assure notamment que les opérations de rénovation urbaine visent à faciliter les interventions policières, voire militaires, à venir dans les quartiers difficiles.

Selon lui, le "contrat 10.000 hommes", dont il dit avoir eu connaissance au mois de juin sans pour autant citer le texte du 3 mai, vise "un seul territoire qui absorbe l'entière attention de Nicolas Sarkozy depuis les émeutes de l'automne 2005 : les quartiers sensibles". Dans ce livre brûlot, l'auteur va jusqu'à dénoncer une "inquiétante dérive vers la préparation d'une guerre totale contre les territoires perdus de la République".

http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2010/10/09/notre-societe-ressemble-de-plus-en-plus-a-celle-de-l-ancien-regime_1422804_823448.html

"Notre société ressemble de plus en plus à celle de l'Ancien Régime"

Le Monde
09.10.10

Banquier d'affaires chez Rothschild, ancienne plume de Jean-Pierre Raffarin à Matignon, Hakim El Karoui, 39 ans, fait partie des nouvelles élites françaises. Il publie Réinventer l'0ccident. Essai sur une crise économique et culturelle (Flammarion, 17 euros, 241 pages, à paraître le 13 octobre), dans lequel il analyse ce qu'il appelle "la désoccidentalisation" du monde. Dans l'entretien qu'il a accordé au Monde, il analyse les peurs de la société française, sans verser dans le pessimisme. Extraits

Par quoi les classes moyennes se sentent-elles fragilisées ?

Par l'organisation actuelle de la mondialisation qui ne leur laisse pas de place. Depuis 20 ans, nous assistons à une polarisation sociale extrêmement forte : de plus en plus de riches, de plus en plus de pauvres et de plus en plus de gens qui ont le sentiment d'être en voie de déclassement social. Dans la mondialisation il y a des gagnants – ceux dont la compétence est de niveau mondial – et des perdants – ceux qui n'ont plus leur place dans les nouveaux processus de production. On essaye de les gérer mais c'est difficile….

La crise économique aggrave-t-elle ces phénomènes ?

Oui, parce qu'il ne s'agit pas seulement d'une crise financière, comme on voudrait le laisser penser. L'origine de la crise se trouve dans l'endettement excessif des ménages américains et européens. Pendant des années, on a remplacé les salaires par l'endettement – public ou privé, selon les pays.

Ce système a explosé avec la crise et il faut donc s'attendre à ce qu'en Occident les classes moyennes et populaires expérimentent une baisse inédite de leur niveau de vie. Or, tant que les gouvernements européens n'auront pas trouvé les moyens de relancer les salaires, ils seront tentés de trouver dans le populisme, de droite ou de gauche, la justification de leur existence. A droite, on joue sur la xénophobie ; à gauche, sur la haine des patrons présentés comme des voyous.

Vous comparez la France actuelle à la société d'Ancien Régime. Pourquoi ?

Nous ne sommes pas dans une société pyramidale comparable à celles des pays émergents. Mais notre société ressemble effectivement de plus en plus à celle de l'Ancien régime avec une base très large, une petite élite et une masse assez importante de personnes – des avocats, des médecins à honoraires libres, des professionnels des loisirs… – qui travaillent pour la petite élite au sommet.

Le reste de la société est entraînée vers les emplois de service peu qualifiés payés 40 % de moins que les emplois industriels. Qui occupera ces emplois de services ? Les plus fragiles, femmes, jeunes et enfants d'immigrés.

Dans ce contexte difficile, le système français d'intégration des immigrés fonctionne-t-il ?

Oui, je le crois, malgré les apparences. Nous n'intégrons pas les immigrés, nous les assimilons. Du coup, plus le système fonctionne, plus les différences s'estompent parce que les immigrés sont devenus des Français comme les autres. Ce modèle crée de l'anxiété parce qu'on voit toujours ce qui va mal et jamais ce qui fonctionne. Or, lorsqu'on observe globalement les populations issues de l'immigration, on se rend compte qu'en termes de réussite scolaire, de mariages mixtes, de comportements démographiques, de progression sociale, les évolutions sont positives.

texte complet

Hakim El Karoui, 35 ans, ancien élève de l’ENS et agrégé de géographie, a été la plume de Jean-Pierre Raffarin avant d’être chargé de la prospective à Bercy jusqu’en août 2006. Il est membre du Conseil scientifique de la Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. Il a créé le Club XXIe Siècle, qu’il préside.

Propos recueillis par Luc Bronner et Cécile Prieur


http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20100916

September 16, 2010

Sarkozy alienates French intelligence services

By courtesy of Wayne Madsen

WMR's informed French sources report that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has incurred the ire of the chief of France's foreign intelligence services, Erard Corbin de Mangoux of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) who has quietly made it clear that they are supporting Sarkozy's bitter rival, Dominique de Villepin, to be the next President of France. In 2008, Sarkozy combined the Renseignements Généraux (RG) and the Department of Surveillance of the Territory (DST) internal security agencies to form the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI).

Sarkozy placed his friend, Bernard Squarcini, in charge of the new super-agency. Known as "the Shark," the Rabat. Morocco-born Squarcini has beefed up the surveillance of Muslims in France. Last March, Squarcini said his agency broke up a planned terrorist attack on an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) fundraising event in Paris. Squarcini has also increased the sharing of French intelligence with Israel. Earlier this week, Squarcini hyped up a false aarm bomb threat against the Eiffel Tower, hours after the French Senate voted to ban the wearing of the burqa in France.

In April, Squarcini admitted using French intelligence to track down the sources of rumors of marital problems between Sarkozy and French First Lady Carla Bruni that began to appear in the European media. French intelligence agents reportedly tapped the cell phone calls of a number of French government and European Union officials.

Sarkozy decided to clip the wings of the RG because he suspected RG agents of providing criminal investigation evidence to his political rival de Villepin that Sarkozy contends was part of a smear campaign. Sarkozy later brought criminal charges against de Villepin but they were dismissed. The chief charge was that de Villepin conspired to smear Sarkozy by leaking false documents showing Sarkozy received foreign bribes through a Luxembourg banking entity known as Clearstream, which has been linked to money laundering by the Russian-Israeli Mafia, including exiled Russian Jewish oligarchs living in Britain, the United States, and Israel.

The anti-de Villepin media in France hyped the fact that the Clearstream documents were forgeries. WMR has learned from French intelligence sources that the original Clearstream documents that showed Sarkozy has received illegal foreign payments were, in fact, authentic. Sarkozy allies went to work to remove certain information and enter false information in a later version of the documents that were used to show how Sarkozy was a victim of a smear campaign based on forgeries.

Some press reports suggested that Sarkozy's name was added to the Clearstream list of politicians who maintained secret bank accounts in Clearstream. In fact, Sarkozy's name was on the original Clearstream spread sheet audit records but data associated with Sarkozy and Sarkozy's mentor, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, were cleverly altered by agents who had long been grooming Sarkozy for the top job in France: President of the Republic.

The culprits who took the original Clearstream documents and forged them are reported to have been working for the Israeli Mossad. The French media has reported that documents that surfaced in 2007 show that Sarkozy was, and may still be, and agent for the Mossad. Sarkozy reportedly was recruited in 1978 when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the Mossad to penetrate the Gaullist Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UPM). Sarkozy became a rising star in the UPM, having served as mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the home to many wealthy French Jews.

In 1993, Sarkozy, the Budget Minister and Neuilly-sur-Seine mayor, was propelled on to the national stage when a mentally unstable man claiming to be wearing an explosive belt and waving a pistol took a number of children and their teacher hostage in a classroom in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Sarkozy walked unarmed into the classroom and negotiated for the release of 15 of the 21 children. The hostage taker, Eric Schmitt, who was born in French-controlled Algeria, was shot in the head three times by French police sharpshooters after he briefly fell asleep. He had on his person papers bearing the words "Human Bomb." Some French intelligence sources now believe that the hostage taking event was staged as a method of increasing Sarkozy's popularity in order to set the stage for a run for higher office.

Sarkozy first attempted to gain access to national politics by dating the daughter of Paris's UMP Mayor Jacques Chirac, who would eventually become French President. Although marriage into the Chirac family was not in the offing for Sarkozy, his relationship with Chirac, the mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine's neighboring larger city, grew closer. Sarkozy went on to hold the post of Interior Minister during Chirac's presidency and he antagonized Muslims by calling alleged Muslim rioters "scum." French Muslims responded by calling Sarkozy "sale juif" or "dirty Jew." Sarkozy is believed to have been behind many of the arson attacks that swept through France in 2005 in order to show how tough he could be with rioters and arsonists. The scheme worked and Sarkozy was elected President in 2007 as a "law and order" man.

It was while mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine that Sarkozy is reported to have first started receiving bribes, via Clearstream, from a sweetheart naval frigate deal between French defense contractor Thomson-CSF, now known as Thales, and the Taiwanese Navy. The French bank Societe Generale, also arranged for bribes to be paid to top Taiwanese government officials. The cost of the French frigates was inflated in a scheme to plow some of the payments back into the pockets of French and Taiwanese politicians in the form of "commissions." The commissions, which were forbidden by the contract with Taiwan, were reported to have been huge amounts of money.

Taiwanese prosecutors first discovered the Clearstream involvement in 2001 when an examination of Taiwanese politicians' foreign accounts into which bribes were paid by Thompson-CSF, discovered them to be deposited in banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, Cayman Islands, and, more importantly, Luxembourg.

When initial news of the Taiwan and Clearstream affair was first about to break in 1993, Sarkozy, groomed by the Mossad, was threatened with exposure and the end of his political career at an early stage. Sarkozy had to be protected at all costs from those who had knowledge of the illegal payments and might be prepared to talk. Mossad "wet affairs" teams went to work. The director of Taiwan's naval procurement office, Captain Yin Ching-Feng had discovered the over-charging by Thomson and was prepared to go public with the evidence. However, Yin's body was found floating in the sea in the Taiwan Straits by fishermen and Taiwan police later concluded he had been murdered by a sharp blow to the head or neck. In 1996, Yin's nephew, Yang Yi-li, who was investigating the murder of his uncle, was himself found murdered in Canada.

The trail of murders moved to France. On October 10, 2000, Thierry Imbot, a French intelligence agent, was thrown from a fourth-floor window in Paris. Imbot was assigned to Taiwan to monitor the frigate contract. Imbot's father was retired General Rene Imbot, former chief of the DGSE. Retired French Navy Captain Jean-Claude Albessard, who was also part of the Taiwan contract, died from a fast-acting cancer in Japan. In 2001, Jacques Morrison, a Thomson official who worked on the Taiwan deal, fell to his death from a fifth-floor apartment window in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Sarkozy's old home town.

De Villepin, a former foreign minister, has been assured of support from the French diplomatic corps but the intelligence service chiefs considered it a long-shot for de Villepin to beat out other candidates who are eager to challenge Sarkozy. However, with Sarkozy's poll numbers plummeting to new depths over outrage over pension reform, expulsion of the Roma, and antagonizing French Muslims over the burqa ban, the DGSE chief now regards de Villepin as a viable contender to replace Sarkozy. But there is an added twist, WMR has learned that DCRI chief Squarcini, Sarkozy's long-time confidant, has grown tired of the impetuousness of the French president and his misuse of the intelligence services for personal reasons. Sarkozy has threatened to hang de Villeoin on a butcher's hook.

Squarcini, we are told, has decided to signal to de Villepin, who has called Sarkozy a "dwarf" and a "midget," that he is ready to quietly assist with the presidential aspirations of de Villepin, Sarkozy's most hated enemy. And to make matters worse for Sarkozy, his wife, Carla Bruni, was reported to be smitten with de Villepin and in April there were reports of secret trysts between the two.

mongolia famine, arsenic water in bangladesh

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/mongolia/7488202/Death-stalks-the-frozen-land-of-Genghis-Khan.html

Death stalks the frozen land of Genghis Khan

Mongolia is experiencing the worst famine in a generation, as Peter Foster found when he spent time with nomads in the one of the most inhospitable terrains on earth.

Peter Foster in Uliastai
21 Mar 2010

The looming catastrophe is so serious that the United Nations has issued an urgent appeal for assistance for this remote corner of Asia, a region so inhospitable that westerners rarely penetrate it. Photo: ADAM DEAN

The gaunt carcass of the horse lay where it had fallen, the cause of death - a slow, painful starvation - obvious from its near-fleshless, silvery bones that gleamed under an ice-blue Mongolian sky.

In a nearby tree, a murder of glossy crows sat patiently waiting their chance to feast on the latest victim of the white dzud, the name Mongolian herders use to describe a winter of such ferocity that it comes round only once in a generation.

This has been one of those winters; fattening the carrion feeders, the crows, magpies and stooping, black vultures on the carcasses of more than two million farm animals, with another two million expected to perish before the winter ends.

The looming catastrophe is so serious that the United Nations has issued an urgent appeal for assistance for this remote corner of Asia, a region so inhospitable that westerners rarely penetrate it.

A drought last summer meant that the sparse grazing yielded even less nutrition than usual. Now, as The Sunday Telegraph became the first western newspaper to witness at close quarters, Mongolian herdsmen, the ancestors of the warrior clans that conquered most of Asia under Genghis Khan, face a struggle just to keep alive.

The herdsmen are no strangers to hardship, inured to tending their flocks in temperatures below -40C, but even they have been defeated by the savagery of this particular season.

"It died this morning, I skinned it for its coat which is worth a little money," said the owner of the dead horse, retreating into his ger, the traditional round felt-lined dwelling of Eurasian nomads. "On January 20 I had 1080 head of stock. I have lost more than 800 since then."

On that night, recalled 35-year-old Batbayar Zundui, the first big snows of winter came driving down the valleys of the western Mongolian Altai mountains where he lives with his wife and three-month-old daughter.

"The snows were too deep for the animals to reach the pasture. We brought them in, but because of the drought last summer we didn't have enough fodder to feed them. Many starved to death where they stood," he says matter-of-factly.

Batbayar, who had 70 horses last December of which only eight remain, cannot hide his despair as he explains how some mornings he wakes to find two animals dead, other mornings 10.

Recently his three elder daughters returned home from the nearest town where they attend a government boarding school, to discover the rising mound of carcasses behind the family home.

"Some of the animals that died were owned by them and they loved them especially dearly," he says, unable to hold back a tear. "My daughters cried and then they blamed their parents for failing them."

Such stories are told over and over in the mountains outside Uliastai, the capital of Mongolia's western Zavkhan province 620 miles from the capital Ulan Bator, and indeed over swaths of the country which has declared a national disaster in 12 of its 21 provinces.

The United Nations and aid organisations such as Save the Children have issued an urgent appeal for assistance to clear fallen livestock and deliver food, fuel and medical care to the herdsmen and their families who account for more than a third of Mongolia's 2.7m population.

"Mongolia is in the middle of a major emergency," says Anna Ford, Asia specialist with Save the Children. "Tens of thousands of families don't know how they are going to feed their children, heat their homes or keep their animals alive and things are only going to get worse."

The scale of the emergency, and the difficulty of delivering assistance, becomes gruesomely clear as we drive north from Uliastai along unmarked roads, churning across the windblown steppe through mile after mile of drifting snow and sliding wildly across frozen rivers.

In a country three times the size of France, many of the herders remain unreachable, locked in the vastness of some of the most inhospitable inhabited terrain on the planet.

The evidence of Mongolia's animal holocaust lies all around; horses and cows skinned at the roadside where they fell and, in gully after gully, piles of sheep and goat carcasses, frozen by the Siberian winds. Only the camels seem to survive.

But if nature is the principle cause of this disaster, it may not be wholly to blame for its debilitating impact on the herdsmen.

Elders who remember the great dzuds of 1968 and 1944 say the ability of modern Mongolian farmers to cope with the disaster has been diminished by a combination of greed and neglect.

Since Mongolia embraced market reforms and abandoned its Soviet-inspired co-operative agriculture system in the 1990s the numbers of animals on the pastures has doubled to an unsustainable 44 million.

Grazing land has been chronically over-used, particularly by destructive, grubbing goats bred to feed the international demand for cashmere wool.

Up in a narrow crease of a snow-filled valley, a 70-year-old herder called Baavankhon frames Mongolia's problems in more poetic terms.

Like many herders, Baavankhon worships the land that sustains him, making offerings to a sacred mountain but in recent years, he says, people have been cutting firewood from the holy places; just one example of how the ancient compact with nature has been broken in modern Mongolia.

"We have mountains, rivers and sky and the most powerful of these is the sky," he says as outside the snow begins to fall again. "If the sky is in a good mood, it brings us warmth and moderate rains that bring us a good life. But if the sky is angry it sends us cold and snow and then we are ruined."

The dzud poses a huge problem for a country struggling to adapt to the post-Communist era, mired in corruption and unplanned urbanisation.

Allegations of vote rigging in a 2008 parliamentary poll sparked violent protests, but calm returned last May after 46-year-old Tsakhia Elbegdorj was elected President on an anti-corruption ticket.

International investors are now queuing up for the chance to exploit Mongolia's vast mineral reserves - gold, silver, copper, iron and uranium – which are being eyed by neighbouring China.

However with a third of Mongolians living in poverty, it remains unclear whether Mongolia's 180,000 herder families will benefit from their country's massive potential.

For now those development goals are subordinate to the immediate task of delivering help to those in need.

Herders like 25-year-old Bayambajav Choijin, who has already lost more than a third of her flock of 300 sheep and goats, know that April will prove the cruellest month as stores run out.

"Normally when we buy food we don't pay cash, but agree that in the spring, when we sell cashmere from the goats, we'll pay back the shopkeeper, but with the large number of animals dying they won't give us anything now," she says.

The UN reports infant mortality rates are already rising by 40 per cent in worst-affected districts and in Uliastai where the hospital has 42 cases for its 35 beds, doctors predict rising numbers of suicide and neurosis.

Bayambajav says the impacts of the dzud will be felt by her family for years to come and that she will now never be able to provide the college education she dreams of for her son, Batmagnal.

"The animals mean everything for us," she says looking on as the boy plays at her feet, oblivious to his shrinking fortunes.

"They are our food, our store of wealth and on their backs rest all our future plans."

*To donate to Save the Children's Emergency Fund go to www.savethechildren.org.uk/cef

see also: mongolia maps

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/how-the-west-poisoned-bangladesh-1924631.html

How the West poisoned Bangladesh

A UN project aimed to help millions - but it brought them water contaminated with arsenic

By Andrew Buncombe
Sunday, 21 March 2010

Up to 20 million people in Bangladesh are at risk of suffering early deaths because of arsenic poisoning – the legacy of a well-intentioned but ill-planned water project that created a devastating public health catastrophe.

Four decades after an internationally funded move to dig tube wells across the country massively backfired, huge numbers of people still remain at higher risk of contracting cancer and heart disease. The intellectual development of untold numbers of children is also being held back by the contamination of drinking water. Poor diet exacerbates the risk.

Bangladesh's arsenic crisis dates back to the 1970s when, in an effort to improve the quality of drinking water and counter diarrhoea, which was one of the country's biggest killers of children, there was large-scale international investment in building tube wells. It was believed the wells would provide safe supplies for families, otherwise dependent on dirty surface water which was killing up to 250,000 children a year.

Yet the move, spearheaded by the UN and the World Bank, was fatally flawed. Although checks were carried out for certain contaminants in the newly sourced water, it was not tested for arsenic, which occurs naturally in the Ganges and Brahmaputra deltas. By the early 1990s, when it was found that up to half of 10 million tube wells were contaminated with arsenic, Bangladesh was confronting a huge problem. The World Health Organisation called it "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history... The scale of the environmental disaster is greater than any seen before; it is beyond the accidents in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986".

Some subsequent studies predicted that, ultimately, one person in 10 who drinks water from the arsenical wells would go on to die from lung, bladder or skin cancer. Even though some of these conditions take decades to develop, by 2004, about 3,000 people a year were dying from arsenic-related cancers.

Since the 1990s, organisations such as Unicef have led the effort to develop and provide alternative sources of water, such as collecting rainwater and filtering surface water. Slowly, the percentage of families exposed to contaminated water has fallen. But a survey conducted by Unicef last year found that 13 per cent of people are still using contaminated water. "That equates to 20 million people," says Yan Zheng, a Unicef arsenic specialist based in Dhaka. "The health impacts vary. The skin lesions that arsenic causes are well recognised by the villagers. But the cancer and cardiovascular diseases are still not fully recognised by the villagers and some health professionals." Ms Zheng says a recent study showed significantly higher death rates for those exposed to arsenic: "It was as you would expect – the higher the exposure, the higher the risk.".

Government and UN officials will publish a new report tomorrow calling for urgent action to tackle what remains a huge problem of contamination, both from drinking water and from crops such as rice that are irrigated with contaminated water. According to the report, being released to coincide with World Water Day, arsenic poses health risks to a significant proportion of the population, though children are particularly vulnerable.

The skin lesions caused by arsenicosis are just the first sign of many possibly fatal health problems. The lesions still attract widespread social stigma in Bangladesh, with many people until recently believing they were the result of a curse.

"Urgent action is needed to refocus the attention of the nation towards an arsenic-safe environment," says Renata Lok Dessallien, the UN chief in Bangladesh. "Concerted efforts by the government and all stakeholders are necessary to reinvigorate arsenic monitoring and mitigation efforts, and to conduct comprehensive research on emerging threats."

The arsenic contaminating so much of Bangladesh's water occurs naturally in the water courses of the rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people. Many underground sources around the world suffer from arsenic contamination and there have been health issues in countries ranging from Argentina to Taiwan and India. There is also considerable arsenic contamination in parts of the US.

In Bangladesh, a fierce row continues to rage over the responsibility for the massive contamination. While aid groups and the UN insist their testing at the time met international standards, others have argued that there should have been a more thorough awareness of the local geology and topography. Yet more have said that the UN and the World Bank were slow to acknowledge their role in the tragedy.

Dipankar Chakraborti, of the Jadavpur University in West Bengal and a leading expert, says the level of arsenic contamination in Bangladesh is worse than anywhere else globally. He says the international bodies have never fully acknowledged their role in a crisis that will be played out for years to come. "It is a major problem," he says. "We have found that when we went back to people with skin lesions whom we interviewed 15 years ago, about 30 per cent of them had developed some sort of cancer."

Last year scientists concluded that arsenic entered the water in tube wells as a result of thousands of ponds that were dug across Bangladesh to provide soil for flood protection. Disturbing the ground released the organic carbon, which in turn causes arsenic to leach from sediments. The scientists from MIT in Boston concluded that one solution would be to dig "deeper drinking-water wells, below the influence of the ponds".

Meanwhile, educating the public about the dangers of arsenic poisoning, and disabusing them of the widespread idea that its effects are the result of a curse, or infectious, is essential. "Raising awareness among people on the danger of arsenic is essential," says Bangladesh's minister of health, Dr A F M Ruhal Haque. "Health workers can disseminate this message, while the government will continue to invest in screening and treatment of arsenicosis patients in affected districts."

Britain's toxic beer

Arsenic was a pervasive contaminant in Britain and the US in the 19th century. It was used in wallpaper, fabric dyes, and even as a colouring in confectionery.

One of the worst instances of man-made arsenical poisoning came in Lancashire in late 1900. Large numbers of people in the Manchester and Salford areas displayed symptoms of what was thought to be simple over-indulgence. But, as the cases mounted, and people began to turn up with blackened skin and other tell-tale signs, arsenic poisoning was suspected. This was confirmed, and eventually traced to the firm that supplied sugar used in brewing.

Before the poisonings had run their course, more than 6,000 people had been affected, and 80 of these died. The episode was instrumental in securing more rigorous legislation on food safety.