Mobutu Sese Seko
Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga was the military dictator and President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. He served as Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity in 1967–1968. During the Congo Crisis, serving as Chief of Staff of the Army and supported by Belgium and the United States, deposed the nationalist democratically elected government of Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Mobutu installed a government that arranged for Lumumba's execution in 1961. Mobutu continued to lead the country's armed forces until he took power directly in a second coup in 1965; as part of his program of "national authenticity", he changed the Congo's name to Zaire in 1971, his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko in 1972. Mobutu developed a totalitarian regime, amassed vast personal wealth, attempted to purge the country of all colonial cultural influence. At the same time, he was given considerable support by the West and China, owing to his strong anti-Soviet stance, he was the object of a pervasive cult of personality.
During his reign, Mobutu amassed a large personal fortune through economic exploitation and corruption, leading some to call his rule a "kleptocracy". The nation suffered from uncontrolled inflation, a large debt, massive currency devaluations. By 1991, economic deterioration and unrest led him to agree to share power with opposition leaders, but he used the army to thwart change until May 1997, when rebel forces led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila expelled him from the country. Suffering from advanced prostate cancer, he died three months in Morocco. Marshal Mobutu became notorious for corruption and the embezzlement of between US$4 billion and $15 billion during his reign, he was known for extravagances such as shopping trips to Paris via the supersonic and expensive Concorde. He presided over the country for more than three decades, a period of widespread human rights violations. Mobutu, a member of the Ngbandi ethnic group, was born in 1930 in Lisala, Belgian Congo. Mobutu's mother, Marie Madeleine Yemo, was a hotel maid who fled to Lisala to escape the harem of a local village chief.
There she married Albéric Gbemani, a cook for a Belgian judge. Shortly afterward she gave birth to Mobutu; the name "Mobutu" was selected by an uncle. Gbemani died. Thereafter he was raised by a grandfather; the wife of the Belgian judge took a liking to Mobutu and taught him to speak and write fluently in the French language. Yemo relied on the help of relatives to support her four children, the family moved often. Mobutu's earliest education took place in Léopoldville, but his mother sent him to an uncle in Coquilhatville, where he attended the Christian Brothers School, a Catholic-mission boarding school. A physically imposing figure, Mobutu dominated school sports, he excelled in academic subjects and ran the class newspaper. He was known for his impish sense of humor. A classmate recalled that when the Belgian priests, whose first language was Dutch, made an error in French, Mobutu would leap to his feet in class and point out the mistake. Mobutu stowed away aboard a boat to Léopoldville in 1949.
The priests found him several weeks later. At the end of the school year, in lieu of being sent to prison, he was ordered to serve seven years in the colonial army, the Force Publique; this was the usual punishment for rebellious students. Mobutu found discipline in army life, as well as a father figure in Sergeant Louis Bobozo. Mobutu kept up his studies by borrowing European newspapers from the Belgian officers and books from wherever he could find them, reading them on sentry duty and whenever he had a spare moment, his favourites were the writings of French president Charles de Gaulle, British prime minister Winston Churchill, Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. After passing a course in accounting, Mobutu began to dabble professionally in journalism. Still angry after his clashes with the school priests, he did not marry in a church, his contribution to the wedding festivities was a crate of beer, all his army salary could afford. As a soldier, Mobutu wrote pseudonymously on contemporary politics for Actualités Africaines, a magazine set up by a Belgian colonial.
In 1956, he quit the army and became a full-time journalist, writing for the Léopoldville daily L'Avenir. Two years he went to Belgium to cover the 1958 World Exposition and stayed to receive training in journalism. By this time, Mobutu had met many of the young Congolese intellectuals who were challenging colonial rule, he joined Lumumba's Mouvement National Congolais. Mobutu became Lumumba's personal aide. Several contemporaries indicate that Belgian intelligence had recruited Mobutu to be an informer to the government. During the 1960 talks in Brussels on Congolese independence, the US embassy held a reception for the Congolese delegation. Embassy staff were each assigned a list of delegation members to meet, discussed their impressions afterward; the ambassador noted, "One name kept coming up. But it wasn't on anyone's list because he wasn't an official delegation member, he was Lumumba's secretary, but everyone agreed that this was an intelligent man young immature, but a man with great potential."Following the general election, Lumumba was tasked with creating a government.
He gave Mobutu the office of Secretary of State to the Presidency. Mobutu held much influence in the final determination of the rest of the government. On 5 July soldiers of the Force Publique stationed at Camp Léopold II in Léopoldville, dissatisfied with their all-white lea
Private Eye
Private Eye is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986; the publication is recognised for its prominent criticism and lampooning of public figures. It is known for its in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups. Private Eye is Britain's best-selling current affairs magazine, such is its long-term popularity and impact that many of its recurring in-jokes have entered popular culture; the magazine bucks the trend of declining circulation for print media, having recorded its highest circulation in the second half of 2016. The forerunner of Private Eye was a school magazine published at Shrewsbury School in the mid-1950s and edited by Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot. After National Service and Foot went as undergraduates to Oxford University, where they met their future collaborators Peter Usborne, Andrew Osmond, John Wells and Danae Brooks, among others.
The magazine proper began when Usborne learned of a new printing process, photo-litho offset, which meant that anybody with a typewriter and Letraset could produce a magazine. The publication was funded by Osmond and launched in 1961, it was named when Osmond looked for ideas in the well-known recruiting poster of Lord Kitchener and, in particular, the pointing finger. After the name Finger was rejected, Osmond suggested Private Eye, in the sense of someone who "fingers" a suspect; the magazine was edited by Booker and designed by Rushton, who drew cartoons for it. Its subsequent editor, pursuing a career as an actor, shared the editorship with Booker, from around issue number 10, took over from issue 40. At first, Private Eye was a vehicle for juvenile jokes: an extension of the original school magazine, an alternative to Punch. However, according to Booker, it got "caught up in the rage for satire". After the magazine's initial success, more funding was provided by Nicholas Luard and Peter Cook, who ran The Establishment – a satirical nightclub – and Private Eye became a professional publication.
Others essential to the development of the magazine were Auberon Waugh, Claud Cockburn, Barry Fantoni, Gerald Scarfe, Tony Rushton, Patrick Marnham and Candida Betjeman. Christopher Logue was another long-time contributor, providing the column "True Stories", featuring cuttings from the national press; the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster wrote extensively for the magazine before he fell out with Ian Hislop and other writers, while Foot wrote on politics, local government and corruption. Ingrams continued as editor until 1986. Ingrams remains chairman of the holding company. Private Eye reports on the misdeeds of powerful and important individuals and has received numerous libel writs throughout its history; these include three issued by James Goldsmith and several by Robert Maxwell, one of which resulted in the award of costs and reported damages of £225,000, attacks on the magazine by Maxwell through a book, Malice in Wonderland, a one-off magazine, Not Private Eye. Its defenders point out that it carries news that the mainstream press will not print for fear of legal reprisals or because the material is of minority interest.
As well as covering a wide range of current affairs, Private Eye is known for highlighting the errors and hypocritical behaviour of newspapers in the "Street of Shame" column, named after Fleet Street, the former home of many papers. It reports on parliamentary and national political issues, with regional and local politics covered in equal depth under the "Rotten Boroughs" column. Extensive investigative journalism is published under the "In the Back" section tackling cover-ups and unreported scandals. A financial column called "In the City", written by Michael Gillard under the pseudonym "Slicker", has generated a wide business readership as a number of significant financial scandals and unethical business practices and personalities have been exposed there; some contributors to Private Eye are media figures or specialists in their field who write anonymously under humorous pseudonyms, such as "Dr B Ching" who writes the "Signal Failures" column about the railways, in reference to the Beeching cuts.
Stories sometimes originate from writers for more mainstream publications who cannot get their stories published by their main employers. Private Eye has traditionally lagged behind other magazines in adopting new typesetting and printing technologies. At the start it was laid out with scissors and paste and typed on three IBM Electric typewriters – italics and elite – lending an amateurish look to the pages. For some years after layout tools became available the magazine retained this technique to maintain its look, although the three older typewriters were replaced with an IBM composer. Today the magazine is still predominantly in black and white and there is more text and less white space than is typical for a modern magazine. Much of the text is printed in the standard Times New Roman font; the former "Colour Section" was printed in black and white like the rest of the magazine: only the content was colourful. While the magazine in general reports corruption, self-interest and incompetence in a broad range of industries and lines of work, certain people and entities have received a greater amount of attention and coverage in its pages.
As the most visible public figures, prime ministers and senior politicians make the most n
United Nations
The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization, tasked to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international co-operation and be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. The headquarters of the UN is in Manhattan, New York City, is subject to extraterritoriality. Further main offices are situated in Geneva, Nairobi and The Hague; the organization is financed by voluntary contributions from its member states. Its objectives include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development and upholding international law; the UN is the largest, most familiar, most internationally represented and most powerful intergovernmental organization in the world. In 24 October 1945, at the end of World War II, the organization was established with the aim of preventing future wars. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; the UN is the successor of the ineffective League of Nations.
On 25 April 1945, 50 governments met in San Francisco for a conference and started drafting the UN Charter, adopted on 25 June 1945 in the San Francisco Opera House, signed on 26 June 1945 in the Herbst Theatre auditorium in the Veterans War Memorial Building. This charter took effect on 24 October 1945; the UN's mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades during the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies. Its missions have consisted of unarmed military observers and armed troops with monitoring and confidence-building roles; the organization's membership grew following widespread decolonization which started in the 1960s. Since 80 former colonies had gained independence, including 11 trust territories, which were monitored by the Trusteeship Council. By the 1970s its budget for economic and social development programmes far outstripped its spending on peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War, the UN shifted and expanded its field operations, undertaking a wide variety of complex tasks.
The UN has six principal organs: the General Assembly. The UN System agencies include the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, UNICEF; the UN's most prominent officer is the Secretary-General, an office held by Portuguese politician and diplomat António Guterres since 1 January 2017. Non-governmental organizations may be granted consultative status with ECOSOC and other agencies to participate in the UN's work; the organization, its officers and its agencies have won many Nobel Peace Prizes. Other evaluations of the UN's effectiveness have been mixed; some commentators believe the organization to be an important force for peace and human development, while others have called the organization ineffective, biased, or corrupt. In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international treaty organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross was formed to ensure protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and strife.
In 1914, a political assassination in Sarajevo set off a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I. As more and more young men were sent down into the trenches, influential voices in the United States and Britain began calling for the establishment of a permanent international body to maintain peace in the postwar world. President Woodrow Wilson became a vocal advocate of this concept, in 1918 he included a sketch of the international body in his 14-point proposal to end the war. In November 1918, the Central Powers agreed to an armistice to halt the killing in World War I. Two months the Allies met with Germany and Austria-Hungary at Versailles to hammer out formal peace terms. President Wilson wanted peace, but the United Kingdom and France disagreed, forcing harsh war reparations on their former enemies; the League of Nations was approved, in the summer of 1919 Wilson presented the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations to the US Senate for ratification.
On January 10, 1920, the League of Nations formally comes into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, takes effect. However, at some point the League became ineffective when it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria as in February 1933, 40 nations voted for Japan to withdraw from Manchuria but Japan voted against it and walked out of the League instead of withdrawing from Manchuria, it failed against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War despite trying to talk to Benito Mussolini as he used the time to send an army to Africa, so the League had a plan for Mussolini to just take a part of Ethiopia, but he ignored the League and invaded Ethiopia, the League tried putting sanctions on Italy, but Italy had conquered Ethiopia and the League had failed. After Italy conquered Ethiopia and other nations left the league, but all of them realised that they began to re-arm as fast as possible. During 1938, Britain and France tried negotiating directly with Hitler but this failed in 1939 when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
When war broke out in 1939, the League closed down and its headquarters in Geneva remained empty throughout the war. The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the U. S. State Department in 1939; the text of the "Declaration by United Nations" was drafted at the White House on December 29, 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins
Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld
Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a German-born prince, the consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. He belonged to the princely House of Lippe and was a nephew of the Principality of Lippe's last sovereign Leopold IV. From birth he held the title Count of Biesterfeld, he worked as an executive secretary at the Paris office of IG Farben. In 1937 he married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, was given the title Prince of the Netherlands with the style of Royal Highness. Upon his wife's accession to the throne, in 1948 he became the prince consort of the Netherlands. Although his private life was rather controversial, Prince Bernhard was still regarded as a popular figure by the majority of the Dutch for his performance as a combat pilot and his activities as a liaison officer and personal aide to the Queen during World War II, for his work during post-war reconstruction. During World War II, he was part of the London-based Allied war planning councils, he saw active service as a Wing Commander, flying both bomber planes into combat.
He was a Dutch general and Supreme Commander of the Dutch Armed forces, involved in negotiating the terms of surrender of the German Army in the Netherlands. For proven bravery and loyalty during his wartime efforts, he was appointed a Commander of the Military William Order, the Netherlands' oldest and highest honour. After the war he was made Honorary Air Marshal of the Royal Air Force by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. In 1969, Bernhard was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Bernhard helped found the World Wildlife Fund, becoming its first president in 1961. In 1970 he established the WWF's financial endowment "The 1001: A Nature Trust". In 1954, he was a co-founder of the international Bilderberg Group, which has met annually since to discuss corporate globalisation and other issues concerning Europe and North America, he was forced to step down from both groups after being involved in the Lockheed Bribery Scandal in 1976. Bernhard was born Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter, Count of Biesterfeld in Jena, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Empire on 29 June 1911, the elder son of Prince Bernhard of Lippe and his wife, Armgard von Cramm.
He was a grandson of Ernest, Count of Lippe-Biesterfeld, regent of the Principality of Lippe until 1904. He was a nephew of the principality's last sovereign, Leopold IV, Prince of Lippe; because his parents' marriage did not conform with the marriage laws of the House of Lippe, it was deemed morganatic, so Bernhard was granted only the title of "Count of Biesterfeld" at birth. He and his brother could succeed to the Lippian throne only if the entire reigning House became extinct. In 1916, his uncle Leopold IV as reigning Prince raised Bernhard and his mother to Prince and Princess of Lippe-Biesterfeld, thereby retroactively according his parents' marriage dynastic status; the suffix Biesterfeld was revived to mark the beginning of a new cadet line of the House of Lippe. After World War I, Bernhard's family lost their German Principality and the revenue that had accompanied it, but the family was still reasonably well-off. Bernhard spent his early years at Reckenwalde ), the family's new estate in East Brandenburg, thirty kilometres east of the River Oder.
He was taught and received his early education at home. When he was twelve, he was sent to board at the Gymnasium in Züllichau. Several years he was sent to board at a Gymnasium in Berlin, from which he graduated in 1929. Bernhard suffered from poor health as a boy. Doctors predicted that he would not live long; this prediction might have inspired Bernhard's reckless driving and the risks that he took in the Second World War and thereafter. The prince wrecked several planes in his lifetime. Bernhard studied law in Berlin. In the latter city, he acquired a taste for fast cars, horse riding, big-game hunting safaris, he was nearly killed in an aeroplane crash. He suffered a broken neck and crushed ribs in a 160 km/h car crash in 1938. While at university, Bernhard joined the Nazi Party, he enrolled in the Sturmabteilung, which he left in December 1934 when he graduated and went to work for IG Farben. The Prince denied that he had belonged to SA, to the Reiter-SS, to the NSKK, but these are well-documented memberships.
While he was not a fierce champion of democracy, the Prince was never known to hold any radical political views or express any racist sentiments, although he admitted that he had sympathised with Adolf Hitler's regime. The Prince went to work for the German chemical giant IG Farben the world's fourth-largest company.. He lodged with Count Pavel Kotzbue, an exiled Russian nobleman, his wife Allene Tew, born in the United States. After training, Bernhard became secretary in 1935 to the board of directors at the Paris office. Bernhard met then-Princess Juliana at the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Juliana's mother, Queen Wilhelmina, had spent most of the 1930s looking for a suitable husband for Juliana; as a Protestant of royal rank (the Lipp
White South Africans
White South Africans are South Africans descended from any of the white racial or ethnic groups of Europe. In linguistic and historical terms, they are divided into the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of the Dutch East India Company's original settlers, known as Afrikaners, the Anglophone descendants of predominantly British colonists. In 2016, 57.9% were native Afrikaans speakers, 40.2% were native English speakers, 1.9% spoke another language as their mother tongue, such as Portuguese or German. White South Africans are by far the largest European-descended population group in Africa. White South Africans differ from other White African groups, because they have a sense of separate cultural identity, as in the case of the Afrikaners, who established a distinct language and faith; the history of European settlement in South Africa started in 1652 with the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company under Jan van Riebeeck. Despite the preponderance of officials and colonists from the Netherlands, there were a number of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at home and German soldiers or sailors returning from service in Asia.
The colony remained under Dutch rule for two more centuries, after which it was annexed by Great Britain around 1806. At that time, South Africa was home to about 26,000 people of European descent, a relative majority of whom were still of Dutch origin. However, beginning in 1818 thousands of British immigrants arrived in the growing Cape Colony, looking to join the local workforce or settle directly on the frontier. About a fifth of the Cape's original Dutch-speaking white population migrated eastwards during the Great Trek in the 1830s and established their own autonomous Boer republics further inland; the population of European origin continued increasing in the Cape as a result of immigration, by 1865 had reached 181,592 people. Between 1880 and 1910, there was an influx of Eastern Europeans of various nationalities a large Jewish community from the Baltic region Lithuania; the first nationwide census in South Africa was held in 1911 and indicated a white population of 1,276,242. By 1936, there were an estimated 2,003,857 white South Africans, by 1946 the number had reached 2,372,690.
The country began receiving tens of thousands of European immigrants, namely from Germany, the Netherlands and the territories of the Portuguese Empire during the mid to late twentieth century. South Africa's white population increased to over 3,408,000 by 1965, reached 4,050,000 in 1973, peaked at 5,044,000 in 1990; the number of white South Africans resident in their home country began declining between 1990 and the mid-2000s as a result of increased emigration. Today, white South Africans are considered to be the last major white population group of European ancestry on the African continent, due in part to the mass exodus of colonialists from most other African states during regional decolonisation. Whites continue to play a role across the political spectrum; the current number of white South Africans is not known, as no recent census has been measured, although the overall percentage of up to 9% of the population represents a decline, both numerically and proportionately, since the country's first multiracial elections in 1994.
Just under a million white South Africans are living as expatriate workers abroad, which forms the majority of South Africa's brain drain. Under the Population Registration Act of 1950, each inhabitant of South Africa was classified into one of several different race groups, of which White was one; the Office for Race Classification defined a white person as one who "in appearance is a white person, not accepted as a coloured person. Many criteria, both physical and social were used when the board decided to classify someone as white or coloured; this was extended to all those considered the children of two White persons, regardless of appearance. The Act was repealed on 17 June 1991. In Employment Equity Act of 1994, legislation propagates employment of black South Africans. Black Economic Empowerment legislation further empowerers blacks as the government considers ownership, employment and social responsibility initiatives, which empower black South Africans, as important criteria when awarding tenders.
However, private enterprises adheres to this legislation voluntarily. Some reports indicate a growing number of whites suffering from poverty compared to the pre-apartheid years and attribute this to such laws — over 350,000 Afrikaners may be classified as poor, with some research claiming that up to 150,000 are struggling for survival. This, combined with a wave of violent crime, has led to vast numbers of Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans leaving the country. Genocide Watch has theorised that farm attacks constitute early warning signs of genocide against White South African and has criticised the South African government for its inaction on the issue, pointing out that the murder rate for "ethno-European farmers," as stated in their report is four times that of the general South African population. There are 40,000 white farmers in South Africa. Since 1994, close to three thousand farmers have been murdered in thousands of farm attacks, with many being brutally tortured and/or rape
Bilderberg Meeting
The Bilderberg Meeting is an annual conference established in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands "to foster dialogue between Europe and North America". Participants are European and North American political leaders, experts from industry, finance and the media; the meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule. The Bilderberg meetings are unofficially called the "Bilderberg Group", "Bilderberg conference" or "Bilderberg Club"; the first conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, from 29 to 31 May 1954. It was initiated by several people, including Polish politician-in-exile Józef Retinger who, concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism—better understanding between the cultures of the United States and Western Europe to foster cooperation on political and defense issues. Retinger approached Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who agreed to promote the idea, together with former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland, the then-head of Unilever, Dutchman Paul Rijkens.
Bernhard in turn contacted Walter Bedell Smith, the then-head of the CIA, who asked Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson to deal with the suggestion. The guest list was to be drawn up by inviting two attendees from each nation, one of each to represent "conservative" and "liberal" points of view. Fifty delegates from 11 countries in Western Europe attended the first conference, along with 11 Americans; the success of the meeting led the organizers to arrange an annual conference. A permanent steering committee was established with Retinger appointed as permanent secretary; as well as organizing the conference, the steering committee maintained a register of attendee names and contact details with the aim of creating an informal network of individuals who could call upon one another in a private capacity. Conferences were held in France and Denmark over the following three years. In 1957, the first U. S. conference was held on St. Simons Island, with $30,000 from the Ford Foundation; the foundation supplied funding for the 1959 and 1963 conferences.
The participants are between 120 and 150 people composed of political leaders, experts from industry, finance and the media. About two thirds of the participants come from the rest from North America. Attendee lists have been weighted toward bankers, directors of large businesses and board members from large publicly traded corporations, including IBM, Royal Dutch Shell and Daimler. Heads of state, including former King Juan Carlos I of Spain and former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, have attended meetings. A source connected to the group told The Daily Telegraph in 2013 that other individuals, whose names are not publicly issued, sometimes turn up "just for the day" at the group's meetings; the group's original goal of promoting Atlanticism, of strengthening U. S.–European relations and preventing another world war has grown. In 2001, Denis Healey, a Bilderberg group founder and a steering committee member for 30 years, said, "To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair.
Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn't go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing."According to the web page of the group, the meetings are conducted under the Chatham House Rule, allowing the participants to use any information they gained during the meeting, but not to disclose the names of the speakers or any other participants. According to former chairman Étienne Davignon in 2011, a major attraction of Bilderberg group meetings is that they provide an opportunity for participants to speak and debate candidly and to find out what major figures think, without the risk of off-the-cuff comments becoming fodder for controversy in the media. A 2008 press release from the "American Friends of Bilderberg" stated that "Bilderberg's only activity is its annual Conference and that at the meetings, no resolutions were proposed, no votes taken, no policy statements issued."
However, in November 2009, the group hosted a dinner meeting at the Château of Val-Duchesse in Brussels outside its annual conference to promote the candidacy of Herman Van Rompuy for President of the European Council. Meetings are organized by a steering committee with two members from each of 18 nations. Official posts include an Honorary Secretary General; the group's rules do not contain a membership category but former participants receive the annual conference reports. The only category that exists is "member of the steering committee." Besides the committee, there is a separate advisory group with overlapping membership. Dutch economist Ernst van der Beugel became permanent secretary upon Retinger's death. Prince Bernhard continued to serve as the meeting's chairman until 1976, the year of his involvement in the Lockheed affair; the position of Honorary American Secretary General has been held successively by Joseph E. Johnson of the Carnegie Endowment, William Bundy of Princeton, Theodore L. Eliot Jr. former U.
S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Casimir A. Yost of Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. According to James A. Bill, the "steering committee met twice a year to plan programs and to discuss the participa
Afrikaners
Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving in the 17th and 18th centuries. They traditionally dominated South Africa's agriculture and politics prior to 1994. Afrikaans, South Africa's third most spoken home language, is the mother tongue of Afrikaners and most Cape Coloureds, it evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland, incorporating words brought from the Dutch East Indies and Madagascar by slaves. Afrikaners make up 5.2% of the total South African population based on the number of white South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language in the South African National Census of 2011. The arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498 opened a gateway of free access to Asia from Western Europe around the Cape of Good Hope. One European power followed another, all eager to trade along this route; the Portuguese landed in Mossel Bay in 1500, explored Table Bay two years and by 1510 had started raiding inland.
Shortly afterwards the Dutch Republic sent merchant vessels to India, in 1602 founded the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie. As the volume of traffic rounding the Cape increased, the Company recognised its natural harbour as an ideal watering point for the long voyage around Africa to the Orient and established a victualling station there in 1652. VOC officials did not favour the permanent settlement of Europeans in their trading empire, although during the 140 years of Dutch rule many VOC servants retired or were discharged and remained as private citizens. Furthermore, the exigencies of supplying local garrisons and passing fleets compelled the administration to confer free status upon employees and oblige them to become independent farmers. Encouraged by the success of this experiment, the Company extended free passage from 1685 to 1707 for Hollanders wishing to settle at the Cape. In 1688 it sponsored the immigration of 200 French Huguenot refugees forced into exile by the Edict of Fontainebleau.
The terms under which the Huguenots agreed to immigrate were the same offered to other VOC subjects, including free passage and requisite farm equipment on credit. Prior attempts at cultivating vineyards or exploiting olive groves for fruit had been unsuccessful, it was hoped that Huguenot colonists accustomed to Mediterranean agriculture could succeed where the Dutch had failed, they were augmented by VOC soldiers returning from Asia, predominantly Germans channeled into Amsterdam by the Company's extensive recruitment network and thence overseas. Despite their diverse nationalities, the colonists used a common language and adopted similar attitudes towards politics; the attributes they shared came to serve as a basis for the evolution of Afrikaner identity and consciousness. Afrikaner nationalism has taken the form of political parties and secret societies such as the Broederbond in the twentieth century. In 1914 the National Party was formed to promote Afrikaner economic interests and sever South Africa's ties to the United Kingdom.
Rising to prominence by winning the 1948 general elections, it has been noted for enforcing a harsh policy of racial segregation while declaring South Africa a republic and withdrawing from the British Commonwealth. The term "Afrikaner" presently denotes the politically and dominant group among white South Africans, or the Afrikaans-speaking population of Dutch origin—although their original progenitors included smaller numbers of Flemish, French Huguenot, German immigrants; the terms "burgher" and "Boer" have both been used to describe white Afrikaans speakers as a group. The term was in common usage in both the Boer republics and the Cape Colony by the late nineteenth century. At one time, burghers denoted Cape Dutch, settlers who were influential in the administration, able to participate in urban affairs, did so regularly. Boers referred to the settled European farmers or nomadic cattle herders. During the Batavian Republic, "burgher" was popularised among Dutch communities both at home and abroad as a popular revolutionary form of address, or citizen.
In South Africa, it remained in use as late as the Second Boer War. The first recorded instance of a colonist identifying as an "Afrikaner" occurred in March 1707, during a disturbance in Stellenbosch; when the magistrate, Johannes Starrenburg, ordered an unruly crowd to desist, a white teenager named Hendrik Biebouw retorted, "Ik ben een Afrikaander - al slaat de landdrost mij dood, of al zetten hij mij in de tronk, ik zal, nog wil niet zwijgen!". Biebouw was flogged for his insolence and banished to Jakarta, it is believed that "Afrikaner" in question indicated Cape Coloureds or other groups claiming mixed ancestry. Biebouw himself may have identified with Coloureds socially. However, this defiant secession from Dutch law and sovereignty was a leap towards defining another consciousness for white South Africa, suggesting for the first time a group identification with the Cape Colony rather than any ancestral homeland in Europe; the Dutch East India Company had no intention of planting a permanent European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope.
From the VOC's perspective, there
