{jcomments on}OMAR, AGNEWS, BXL, le 11 avril 2010 – www.nzherald.co.nz- April 11, 2010–The murder this week of Eugene Terre’Blanche, the loathsome ultra-right-wing white supremacist by, it is thought, a couple of farm hands upset that their wages had not been paid, seems to have been a spark to ignite what was obviously building as a racial storm.
RWANDA
UGANDA
TANZANIA:
CONGO RDC :
KENYA :
ANGOLA :
SOUTH AFRICA:
Why colour still defines everything in South Africa
By Karen Allen /BBC News, South Africa/ 11 April 2010
The road to Ventersdorp, home of the late Eugene Terreblanche, is fringed with fertile fields.
It is a breath of fresh air driving through the countryside.
But then you see the road signs, they are daubed with racist graffiti.
You think it is a throwback to the 1980s, but then you realise the spray paint is still fresh and these racist slogans come from the mouths of a post-apartheid generation.
You can almost taste the racism in Ventersdorp.
I was trying to get a sense of how people were reacting to the killing of the town’s most infamous resident and whether the extreme right-wing views he represented had become less evident since the fall of apartheid.
Looking for vengeance
I intercept a white woman as she emerges from a chip shop. With her neatly coiffed hair and freshly-applied lipstick, she is a picture of what might appear to be “rural decency”.
And she is happy to talk. “Did she expect a backlash following Terreblanche’s death?” I enquire politely.
“Yes,” she says. And, taking me by surprise, she describes rather forcefully how she would happily take up arms herself to avenge the killing.
This lady may represent an extreme of Afrikaner thought, but in this town, where the swastika-like emblem of the AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) stands proud, there are many conservatives whose views have hardened these last few days.
One black woman I talked to lamented that Eugene Terreblanche had been made a martyr.
“We may pay the price,” she told me.
The khaki-and-black clad members of the AWB were largely dismissed in the mid-90s as an embarrassment and an irrelevance.
I was told in Ventersdorp that since Terreblanche’s killing, the AWB claim that new members are queuing up to join, but few here believe they will be a significant political force.
It was teeming with rain when I met Harry at a farm half-an-hour’s drive from Ventersdorp.
He had just picked his son up from university where black and white students now study side by side. Harry’s parents were killed two years ago in a brutal robbery at their home.
His best friend Paul was gunned down on his farm in Limpopo just a few weeks back.
Farm killings, fuelled by South Africa’s gross inequalities, have become big news.
And because the majority of farmers are white, it has assumed a racial dimension.
New dawn fades
This febrile atmosphere has not been calmed by the rantings of the youth league of the ruling African National Congress, who have been taunting the farmers with anti-white songs from the days of the liberation struggle.
Harry is one of those South Africans who was full of hope when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994.
But now, he tells me, he feels let down by President Zuma. He said he had expected him to behave like a father protecting all his children.
“This he has failed to do,” he said.
The great irony is that the frustration of white farmers like Harry is shared by many blacks.
Jabu is a black businessman in Soweto, the township in southern Johannesburg which is associated with the liberation struggle.
Fear of crime, I realised later, was the common thread that united these two men.
But one of them thinks the answer is a return to racial segregation. The other says the country needs to come together and move on.
Race ‘excuse’
Jabu was sipping sodas at Sakumzi’s restaurant in Soweto when I first met him. He is bright, streetwise and was wearing the football strip of one of the local clubs.
Playing on a white assumption, he introduces himself to me as a car thief. I very quickly realise he was joking.
He was the only black player on the student football team when he studied at the University of the Witwatersrand back in the early 1990s.
Now nearly two decades later, he says the racial mix there has remained virtually the same. But he is certain that things are changing for the better in South Africa and he prides himself on having a racially mixed social circle.
Jabu sympathises with the white farmers who express their fears over crime but insists that everyone in South Africa is affected.
“I grew up in my neighbourhood with thieves,” he tells me. “And now, most of them are dead.”
There is a man up the road who specialise in “panga” or machete killings, he says bluntly.
“What can we do?” he asks. “We just try to rub along together and remember the spirit of “ubuntu”, or brotherhood, that Nelson Mandela showed us. We also need to do more to bridge the economic divide. And we’ve got to stop using race as an excuse.”
This is famously the rainbow nation and much has changed here since the days of apartheid. Yet colour, it seems to me, still defines everything in South Africa.
White anger highlights dark factors
By Paul Holmes/ www.nzherald.co.nz/ Sunday Apr 11, 2010
Something very bad is happening in South Africa.
The murder this week of Eugene Terre’Blanche, the loathsome ultra-right-wing white supremacist by, it is thought, a couple of farm hands upset that their wages had not been paid, seems to have been a spark to ignite what was obviously building as a racial storm.
Terre’Blanche will not be missed by anyone halfway intelligent or decent, either outside or inside South Africa.
Most of us had long forgotten him from the days before the election of Nelson Mandela when he formed his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) party in the 1980s to fight the ascension to power of the ANC.
Terre’Blanche wanted a separate country for the Afrikaner, nothing less.
He was a brutal clown, Terre’Blanche. He fancied himself as another Paul Kruger, the Afrikaner Boer War leader. He railed against change, railed against the government of FW de Klerk.
He addressed rallies from a horse, in the manner of the old Boer campaigners. For a few years, he was a real worry for those dreaming of a new South Africa.
In 1988, there were allegations that he had been seen deshabille with a blonde journalist at a sacred Afrikaner monument. It was a bad look for him amongst the God-fearing Afrikaner volk.
In fact that, and the tide of history, more or less finished him. He served six months in 2000 for assaulting a petrol attendant and setting his dog on him and then did three years of a six-year jail sentence imposed in 2001 for beating a farmworker so badly that the man was brain-damaged.
But, as I say, his death this week seems to have sparked something. His followers are vowing revenge. They will have a meeting in a month to work out exactly what form that will take.
A Mr Visagie from the AWB says darkly, “They attacked him in such a way it was difficult to recognise the face of Eugene Terre’Blanche.”
The two men accused of his murder are alleged not only to have bludgeoned him savagely, but also to have removed his trousers after they had killed him to enhance the insult.
Then strangely, almost poignantly, you would have to say, they waited by the body for the police to arrive. How can a person ever work out Africa?
Having vowed revenge, this Mr Visagie offered a warning to the soccer nations not to send their teams to the World Cup. “Don’t do it if you don’t have sufficient protection for them.” Then he declared that the murder of Terre’Blanche was a declaration by blacks of war upon the whites.
Actually, the London newspaper the Times interviewed Terre’Blanche in October last year. His line had not changed from 30 years ago.
He told the Times, “Our country is being run by criminals who murder and rob. This land was the best and they ruined it all. We [the Afrikaners] are being oppressed again. We will rise again. Our people are being slaughtered. The whites are being chased out of the country.”
But what Terre’Blanche’s death has highlighted in such a shocking way this week is South Africa’s breathtaking violent crime statistics. The South African Police say there are 60 murders a day in the country.
The Department of Home Affairs puts the figure at 83. Interpol believes the murder total in the Republic is 149 a day. That means, depending on whom you believe, that South Africa has as few as 21,000 murders a year or as many as 55,000 a year.
Now, South Africa is a nation of 50 million people. But in a per capita comparison with other countries South Africa is the second most murderous country after Colombia. The United States, interestingly, is 24th on the list, with New Zealand coming in down the table at 54.
Although lately, God knows, you could get the feeling that we are creeping right up the table.
But where the Terre’Blanche killing is a worry is that it highlights another terrible statistic and that is that since 1994 and the birth of the Rainbow Nation, some 3000 farmers have been murdered – and nearly always they were tortured before they were killed. The farmers, of course, are white. The farmers, of course, are Afrikaner. And the farmers were Terre’Blanche’s base.
Other stats. Between April 2005 and March 2006 there were in South Africa 18,500 murders, 20,500 attempted murders and 55,000 rapes.
There were a quarter of a million assaults with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Ten per cent of South Africans live with HIV/Aids – over five million people. Average life expectancy in South Africa is 50 years.
Unemployment is some 25 per cent – a figure that is roughly unchanged since 1998, and that kind of rate, as we know here, is a recipe for violent disaster.
Having said all that, South Africa has always been a country of gifted leaders, eternal hope and faith and immense goodwill between blacks and whites, despite it all.
It has, after all, produced Nelson Mandela, the man who, along with Mahatma Gandhi, remains one of the most remarkable leaders of the 20th century, one of the greatest leaders ever.
Who will ever forget the sight of Mandela at Ellis Park meeting the teams in his No6 Springbok jersey and what that meant to the Republic that day.
But Mandela’s time has passed. Mbeki seemed to achieve little and the jury is still out on Jacob Zuma, the current president. The ANC is so powerful as to be unchallenged from without.
This may be South Africa’s main handicap; a party that no one can get rid of.
The killing of Terre’Blanche and the crime statistics it has alerted us to are a bad, sad look, coming as they do just a couple of months before South Africa’s hosting of the soccer World Cup.
Just when the country will be hoping to show the best of itself to the entire international community, the new South Africa seems not to be working.
The AWB may be hurt and bloodied this week, but they are nevertheless a fringe group of old-guard separatists. They have no appeal in the cities and few outside the old rural Afrikaner communities will feel inclined to too much anger over his murder.
No one is going to rise up over an old farmer who won’t pay his men. But one senses a new and sudden anger, a new frustration in that most beautiful of lands from which so many of the talented and go-ahead people have long since departed.
Cry, the beloved country.
By Paul Holmes
AFRICA / AU :
Abel Muzorewa, Cleric and Politician in Zimbabwe, Dies at 85
By ALAN COWELL/ www.nytimes.com/Published: April 11, 2010
Bishop Abel T. Muzorewa, once a central player in white minority plans to blunt black majority rule in what is now Zimbabwe, died on Thursday in Harare, the capital, the state-controlled newspaper The Herald said Friday. He was 85.
Bishop Muzorewa enjoyed brief renown as prime minister of an unrecognized white-dominated government before history, war and diplomacy moved on without him.
In a career as a cleric and political activist in what was then called Rhodesia, Bishop Muzorewa initially attracted a following as a nationalist leader, thwarting British plans to strike a deal in the 1970s with former Prime Minister Ian D. Smith.
But the nationalist struggle splintered into many factions. A fundamental divide opened between those black politicians, like Bishop Muzorewa, who chose to remain inside the country to pursue a political settlement, and those, like Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe — now president of independent Zimbabwe — who went on to conduct a guerrilla campaign from exile.
The war began in 1972, and as it intensified and international economic sanctions deepened, Mr. Smith came under pressure from neighboring, apartheid-ruled South Africa to seek black leaders for what was called an “internal settlement.”
The deal, struck in 1978, offered the first all-race elections — albeit under white supervision — since Britain’s arch-colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, carved out a land from the savannas of central Africa and named it for himself in 1890.
Among those black leaders was Bishop Muzorewa, head of the United African National Council. He campaigned in the 1979 elections under the slogan “The Winner,” and T-shirts handed out to supporters showed him clutching a ceremonial baton.
Bishop Muzorewa’s victory made him prime minister of a nation then called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia — and brought enduring condemnation from more radical nationalists, who labeled him a puppet of Mr. Smith’s South African-backed machinations.
With the bush war still raging, Bishop Muzorewa’s government was shielded by those same white-led security forces that were fighting the exiled guerrilla movements led by his rivals. Mr. Mugabe, Mr. Nkomo and their followers boycotted the 1979 vote. The United Nations called Bishop Muzorewa’s government illegal.
As the war continued, Britain used its formal position as the colonial power to convene a peace conference in London in late 1979. Those negotiations led to elections that brought Mr. Mugabe to power as prime minister upon independence in 1980.
Bishop Muzorewa won only 8 percent of that vote. The outcome dashed any last hopes by the white minority, South African leaders or British diplomats that Bishop Muzorewa, a member of the majority Shona people, might act as a bulwark against Mr. Mugabe.
His political career as a minority legislator lasted only four years, but he continued as a declared opponent of Mr. Mugabe for many years, courting arrest on charges of conspiring against the government.
Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa was born in eastern Rhodesia in April 1925, the eldest of eight children. He had been a schoolteacher and a lay preacher before he went on to theological college. As secretary of the Students’ Christian Movement, he established himself as an opponent of the white minority rule that Mr. Smith once vowed would last for 1,000 years.
He was consecrated as Bishop of Rhodesia in the United Methodist Church in 1968.
Mr. Mugabe routinely labeled Bishop Muzorewa a sell-out. Referring to his diminutive stature, the somewhat larger Mr. Nkomo liked to call him “the little bishop.” Bishop Muzorewa retired formally from politics in 2001.
US captures suspected pirates after attack
April 11 /www.thesundaily.com/- dpa
Washington (April 11): The US Navy captured six suspected pirates in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday off the coast of Djibouti, the military said. The men fired on the USS Ashland, which was on a routine patrol in the Gulf of Aden, the Navy said. The ship returned fire on the skiff, which then caught on fire, prompting the alleged pirates to abandon ship. The men were then taken on board the Ashland, where they received medical treatment.
It was the third confrontation between the US Navy and pirates within 10 days and the second in which US ships came under fire. A total of 21 suspected pirates have been taken into custody.
UN /ONU :
UN remains proper platform for climate change talks: De Boer
English.news.cn /By Xinhua writer Liu Xiaoyan, Huang Kun/2010-04-11
BONN, Germany, April 10 (Xinhua) — Future climate change talks should continue to be conducted within the UN framework instead of through platforms such as the G20 summit, United Nations climate change talks chief Yvo de Boer said in an interview with Xinhua on Saturday.
“I don’t think that the G20 could ever be an appropriate platform to deal with climate change,” de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), responding to some critics’ claim that the UN negotiation mechanism is not as effective as forums like G20.
He explained that if fighting climate change was only reducing emissions, then the G20 might be a good forum.
“But the climate change process and the climate change convention is also about sustainable economic growth, poverty eradication and adapting to the impacts of climate change,” de Boer said.
He said more than 100 developing countries are not invited to the G20 and although they bear no responsibilities for climate change, they will be confronted with all of its impacts.
According to de Boer, the world needs a broader platform like the UN so climate issues can be tackled in a balanced way, “focusing on both mitigation and adaptation.”
The UN climate chief also spoke highly of the Copenhagen conference.
“With 120 heads of states and government have been there and some very important commitments have been made, I think it’s a historical moment in this process,” said de Boer. “What came out of Copenhagen can be used in a very constructive way to get the negotiations moving again.”
He said there are some differences that can be resolved by the Copenhagen accord, such as the 2-degree maximum temperature increase, verification actions and financial reporting.
But de Boer also admitted there were also issues unresolved in Copenhagen, such as the question of finance.
The outgoing UN climate chief, who announced he will retire on July 1, said he felt disappointed that the Copenhagen conference failed to conclude with an outcome in a formal sense.
While recognizing potential difficulties, he hoped that breakthroughs could be made at UN climate change talks to be held in Cancun of Mexico at the end of this year.
“And my hope is that Cancun will do what Copenhagen failed to do, that in Cancun we will have a series of decisions that will allow for immediate implementation,” he said.
“After Cancun, you can decide if you want to turn it into a treaty or not,” de Boer said, adding that a treaty is possible at the climate change talks to be held in South Africa in 2011.
Securing world’s nuclear materials goal of U.S. summit
McClatchy News Service/www.miamiherald.com/Sunday, 04.11.10
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The Obama administration wants nations to `lock down’ uranium and plutonium stocks that are vulnerable to theft.
BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY
WASHINGTON — Early on Nov. 8, 2007, armed men penetrated a 10,000-volt security fence, disabled intrusion detectors and scaled a ladder into the emergency control center of the Pelindaba nuclear facility, the repository of highly enriched uranium removed from the six bombs of South Africa’s defunct nuclear arsenal.
The gang, which shot and wounded a security officer during the 45 minutes they spent inside the center, left empty-handed. Its members have never been captured or identified, however, and their ability to penetrate what was supposedly one of South Africa’s most heavily guarded installations highlights what experts warn is growing danger that terrorists or criminals will obtain small amounts of highly enriched uranium and build a crude nuclear weapon.
Securing the world’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, also known as HEU, and weapons-grade plutonium is the goal of a two-day nuclear summit involving leaders from 46 countries that begins Monday in Washington. President Barack Obama hopes that the attendees will acknowledge the threat and will begin a concerted effort to “lock down” all HEU and plutonium stocks vulnerable to theft within four years.
`BIGGEST CONCERNS’
“Our biggest concerns right now are actually the issues of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation: more countries obtaining nuclear weapons; those weapons being less controllable, less secure; nuclear materials floating around the globe,” Obama said in Prague on Thursday after signing the new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.
The summit — the largest gathering of international leaders in the U.S. in more than 60 years — is the next step in Obama’s plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons eventually. In addition to the treaty with Russia, Obama last week announced a new U.S. nuclear strategy that embraced further cuts in the U.S. arsenal, ruled out the development of new warheads and excluded most of the world’s countries from U.S. nuclear attack.
Whether the summit will accomplish its goal, however, is unclear.
On Friday, Iran, which denies U.S. charges that it’s seeking to build a nuclear weapon, unveiled a new device that it claimed would accelerate the uranium enrichment program that it has pursued in defiance of U.N. demands that it be suspended.
ISRAEL OUT
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu withdrew from the summit after allegedly learning that Turkey and Egypt planned to call on Israel to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Meanwhile, more counties are planning to build nuclear power plants; smuggling networks such as the one led by Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan have flourished, and terrorists are thought to be ready to use any nuclear bomb-making materials they might lay their hands on.
“Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda are clearly interested in obtaining and using nuclear technology,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “At this point, they don’t appear to have made much progress, but we continue to review every bit of information that comes in.”
No new agreements are expected at the summit, though the U.S. and Russia will sign a long-delayed agreement under which each side will dispose of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium left over from the Cold War, U.S. officials said.
Instead, the administration hopes to win the commitment of the leaders attending to take their own steps to strengthen the security of HEU and plutonium stocks, most of which is fuel for research or medical isotope reactors.
For instance, the U.S. is expected to push the leaders to ratify an amended U.N. convention that requires nations to protect nuclear materials on their territories. Currently, it only mandates protecting materials that are being shipped across borders.
“Everybody would benefit from strong national and international actions,” said Gary Samore, the White House nonproliferation expert who’s overseen the summit preparations. “This is an area where we do believe there is an ability to build broad consensus.”
USA :
Al-Qaeda threatens to bomb World Cup game with U.S., England
By Joseph L. Giacalone / joe@theklaxon.com /theklaxon.com/ 04.11.2010
Mark the calendars, security officials. Recent reports state the North African franchise of al-Qaeda have made threats to blow up the soccer stadium in South Africa during the World Cup when the United States takes on England June 12. The game is set to be played in Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, which has a gross capacity of 42,000 and is likely to be sold out.
In an unusual move—and unlike al-Qaeda operations in the past—the organization announced the target in advance, still with hope to cause mass fatalities.
“How amazing could the match United States vs. Britain be when broadcasted live on air at a stadium packed with spectators when the sound of an explosion rumbles through the stands,” al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb allegedly posted on “Yearners for Paradise,” an online militant magazine.
FIFA refused comment on the situation, stating, “Such matters will be dealt with together with the relevant security authorities and will not be made public.”
As security officials prepare to create an “impenetrable” physical security zone with barriers and strict access control, they must also be cognizant that al-Qaeda may be planning to hit elsewhere or at multiple locations. There are an additional eight stadiums that are hosting soccer games during this year’s World Cup in South Africa, which will spread security thin and leave avenues open for an al-Qaeda attack.
Evidence does exist on the style and tactics al-Qaeda uses when they conduct suicide missions involving vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs). In a captured training video from the early stages of the invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda operatives are shown driving up on security forces with motorcycles, while killing the guards with small-arms fire and paving the way for the VBIEDs.
If al-Qaeda is planning to attack the stadium or multiple stadiums during the World Cup, they more than likely will use a series of suicide truck bombings, a hallmark of al-Qaeda-style attacks. In a recent attack on the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, operatives attempted to penetrate security with small-arms fire and two trucks packed with explosives.
Security forces can mitigate the chances of an attack at the soccer stadiums by creating a zone of safety between the stadium and the parking areas by erecting barriers. This solves a security problem, but creates havoc for visitors because it will remove a number of parking spaces. This easily can be fixed by setting up parking further away from the stadium and have the visitors bussed to the stadium entrances. If barriers are not an option, then a series of security layers must be in place that will give ample time for security to react to an attack.
If the “bomb talk” is just a ruse, then security personnel must be prepared for a Munich Olympics-type of situation—players being taken hostage. In that case, strict access control, visitor identification and stadium worker background checks must strictly be enforced.
If officials choose to take the backseat approach to such mitigation strategies, however, there’s no question that al-Qaeda and other terror organizations will score the last goal.
CANADA :
AUSTRALIA :
EUROPE :
CHINA :
China hands over revamped stadium to Zimbabwe
Sun Apr 11, 2010/Reuters
BEIJING (Reuters) – China has handed over a revamped national stadium to Zimbabwe after refurbishments costing $10 million, state media said on Sunday, in a further sign of Chinese support for a government reviled in the West.
China first built the 60,000-seat stadium in 1987, but it has been closed for renovations for the past three years, the official Xinhua news agency said.
“The construction and refurbishment of the stadium cement the traditional friendship between our two countries,” it quoted Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe, Xin Shunkang, as saying.
Zimbabwe’s Vice President Joyce Mujuru “thanked China for renovating the stadium and assisting other areas of the Zimbabwean economy”, Xinhua added.
The stadium has been “transformed into a world-class stadium that met the standards of the Confederation of African Football”, the report said.
Hailed as a saviour by fanatical supporters and praised throughout Africa for standing up to what many see as bullying by the West, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is hated in equal measure by opponents who accuse him of being a dictator.
Mugabe denies charges of human rights abuses and insists the West has withheld aid mainly in protest over his controversial seizure of white-owned commercial farms for resettlement among blacks.
Mugabe has tried to boost economic ties with Asian countries such as China and Malaysia.
China’s embassy in Zimbabwe in February threw a birthday party for Mugabe.
Beijing and Chinese companies have pledged tens of billions of dollars to Africa in loans and investments, mostly to secure raw materials for the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
Rights groups have repeatedly criticised China for propping up dictatorial and corrupt African nations. China counters it offers no-strings aid and that its pledge not to interfere in any country’s internal affairs is welcomed by African nations.
INDIA :
Paramount Airways vouches to offer business class comfort at no-frill prices
economictimes.indiatimes.com/Pallavee Dhaundiyal Panthry,ET Bureau/11 Apr 2010
Paramount Airways, promoted by M Thiagarajan, which claims to be the first Airline in India to launch the New Generation Embraer 170/190 Family
Series Aircrafts, has now launched a range of Delhi centric flights unlike the past when Bangalore used to be the hub.
The airlines company vouches to offer business class comfort at no-frill prices. But people looking for budget airlines will not opt for Paramount Airways immediately given that the minimum fare for one way starts from Rs 8,000 onwards.
Notably, its fares are more than the budget flights like Indigo, GoAir, Jet Konnect, Jetlite, Air India (Express) but less than the premium flights like Air India (Domestic), King Fisher and Jet Airways (Domestic). “We are the only airline in India to offer full business class service at prices comparative to normal economy class fares of other airlines” , exclaims Thiagarajan.
The company boasts to offer exceptional value for money and to make traveling experience a true delight with a world of difference. The company is the first to offer full business class service but at prices that are equivalent to the economy class fares of other carriers.
For its target customers are business class ones, Paramount Airways is least bothered about the budget fares offered to economy class people by other domestic airlines.
According to Thiagarajan, the airlines was created with a vision – a dream to revamp air travel, taking it to higher vistas of comfort and class coupled with incredible economyensuring that the passengers are is guaranteed true value for money. “After all, luxury should be everyone’s prerogative.
This is the reason why all our passengers travel elite business class-because we believe in pampering customers every step of the way” , he added.
The moot question is whether it’s a viable business for an airlines company to have all business class seats in a carrier? Normally there are not more than 12 to 16 business class seats in a domestic airline apart from normal economy class seats.
How many passengers really board a flight like Paramount Airways on daily basis? Is such a business model profitable in these times when people are trying to cut down on costs after recession?
The airline definitely offers luxury services like valets at disposal for assistance , gourmet meals and a range of in-flight services and entertainment, yet the question is whether the airlines is really making profits.
Paramount Airways hopes to be a premium service schedule airline offering competitive fares, and first time direct services to a number of commercial hubs in India, connecting these to primary metros across the country.
BRASIL:
EN BREF, CE 11 avril 2010 … AGNEWS / OMAR, BXL,11/04/2010
