Many of the colourful masks had sewn up lips and resembled more like Hannibal Lecter than haute couture.

National surveys on female genital mutilation in Haute Guinée Moyenne Guinée and in Guinée Forestière Basse Guinée, which showed that 96.4 per cent of women surveyed had undergone excision.

The MASPFE therefore plans to take account of forest dwelling women in its training programme for the conservation and processing of food products, as has been done with women in Basse and Haute Guinée.

Nearly 1.5 million Cubans will never have a stake in the industries controlled by the military bourgeoisie. Nor was the issue of land ownership resolved only a few plots will be leased in some form.

The national survey of December 2001 estimated the national prevalence of the infection at 2.8 per cent, with variations ranging from 2.1 per cent in the urban areas of Haute Guinée to 7 per cent in the urban areas of Guinée Forestière.

The old proletariat and the old bourgeoisie are gone. Instead we see what has sometimes been called a levelled in middle class society, albeit one with an important elite of the super rich at one end and an underclass at the other.

Although Chávez s legend may survive, Chávismo probably will not, for it is not truly a doctrine, but a sentiment based on the rejection of the old political order and the invention of enemies. It lacks the solid foundations of, say, Perónism, an inclusive movement that relied on a traditionally well organized working class and a nationalistic bourgeoisie.

If anything has been laid to rest by China s rising wealth, it is the comforting idea that capitalism, and the growth of a prosperous bourgeoisie, will inevitably lead to liberal democracy. On the contrary, it is precisely the middle class, bought off by promises of ever greater material gains, that hopes to conserve the current political order.

In Italy, the bourgeoisie of Milan and Rome have made a point of spending winter days dressed in characteristically German Loden overcoats. When Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently appealed for a Latin empire to assert itself against Germany, his call was widely rejected, with several of his contemporaries asserting that, on the contrary, Germany should serve as a model for Italy as it seeks to overcome its current malaise.

(b) To strengthen the transitional institutions, in particular to set up effectively the Independent Electoral Commission, and to make more effective the institutions for the strengthening of democracy, namely, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Human Rights Monitoring Centre and the Haute Autorité des Médias, and to re establish stability and the rule of law over the entire territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thereby returning peace and progress to its people

Marx s comparative advantage was to read Hegel and create a narrative in which history is the history of class struggle, with the newly emergent industrial proletariat destined to develop class consciousness and overthrow the political and economic order created by the bourgeoisie. Liberal democracy has been at a disadvantage in the battle for the narrative because it tends to treat the collective self as if it were just a rational median voter in search of a better job.