The West African Monetary Institute (WAMI), in collaboration with the government of Guinea, hosted the 2024 mid-year statutory meetings of the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) in Conakry, capital of Guinea, from Monday to Friday, with six West African countries planning to create a single currency called "ECO" by 2027.
The five-day meetings assessed the implementation of this monetary integration policy.
During the meetings, officials and experts from Guinea, Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone examined issues related to macroeconomic convergence of WAMZ member countries. They also focused on trade integration, monetary cooperation, financial sector stability, payment systems and the exchange rate.
According to the technical commission of the monetary zone, considerable progress has been made to achieve monetary integration in the six member countries by 2027.
"The new roadmap projects the creation or official launch of this new common currency by 2027. But before that, there are prerequisites. So these different meetings are part of the examination and assessment of the progress to meet different criteria which are classified at two levels. We have the first-rank level and the second-rank level," said Mamoudou Toure, chairman of the WAMZ technical committee.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the WAMI, an institution of the WAMZ, support the six countries in their desire to achieve monetary integration. For these two organizations, the creation of ECO currency will be a great asset for the development of West Africa.
"We are driving this process together. We are driving it in the right way. There are few challenges and the challenges are not big. These are challenges that if we stay together, we'll be able to drive the initiative together. And I'm happy to tell you that we have gone far in terms of financial integration. The banking sector now is being harmonized, the non-banking sector is being harmonized. The insurance is being harmonized. We have a debt robust capital market initiative, as well as a domestic debt market initiative," said Olorunsola Olowofeso, director general of WAMI.
Of the four criteria defined by the WAMZ to achieve monetary integration, Guinea has only managed to meet two. But the Guinean authorities assured that the challenge will be met before 2027.
"Guinea has met two of the four criteria, namely the budget deficit related to GDP and the financing of the budget deficit by the Central Bank of the Republic of Guinea. The country is determined to continue its efforts to support the achievements and meet the other two criteria before the 2027 deadline," said Guinean Minister of Economy and Finance Mourana Soumah.
WAMZ 2024 mid-year statutory meetings in Guinea assess monetary integration
Japanese Army Unit 731, a biological and chemical warfare unit stationed in northeast China during World War II, had a strict evaluation and assessment system for technicians, allowing those who conducted live human experiments to be promoted, according to a newly discovered document of the notorious unit.
The new document was disclosed by Japanese scholar Seiya Matsuno, a specially-appointed professor at Heilongjiang International University, in September ahead of the 93rd anniversary of the September 18 Incident of 1931. The archive is important evidence for deepening the research on Japan's bacterial warfare system and is of great significance to fully exposing Japan's biological warfare crimes.
The September 18 Incident of 1931 taking place in the city of Shenyang in northeast China was a precursor to Japan’s launch of a full-scale invasion of China, and a key event ahead of the outbreak of World War Two in Asia.
The new files include the evaluation forms of Unit 731 technicians. On these forms, red words such as "excellent" and "good" are marked. For example, Yoshimura Hisato，a war criminal and leader of the unit’s frostbite study squad, has four "excellent" and one "good" ratings. During this period, Hisato compiled the relevant content of the experiments conducted in Unit 731 into a paper and published it in Japan.
"This paper is a confidential document written by Yoshimura Hisato, a technician with Unit 731, about frostbite. It was published on October 26, 1941. There is a table called Experiment 5, which contains the frostbite resistance index of people under various living conditions. The subjects are marked with ABCDE, and then the data of frostbite resistance indexes are counted under various living conditions, such as soaking in cold water, soaking in warm water, fasting for two days, fasting for three days, and the subjects staying awake day and night. Such data obtained through live human experiments can be seen everywhere in the paper," said Tan Tian, researcher at the exhibition hall of evidence of crimes of Unit 731 in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.
According to staff from the International Research Center of Unit 731 under the Harbin Academy of Social Sciences, Hisato joined Unit 731 in March 1938 as a sixth-class technician. While conducting frostbite research and experiments, he was also responsible for the management of the special prison where the subjects were detained, making him a researcher as well as a core secrets administrator of the of Unit 731. He was promoted to the rank of fourth-class technician in October 1942.
"From the perspective of Yoshimura Hisato, he joined Unit 731 in 1938 and completed a three-step career jump in less than four years until 1942. Lying behind such fruitful achievements were the bloody live human experiments he made. Yoshimura Hisato published at least 200 medical papers in his career. The Japanese medical community tacitly approved the anti-human atrocities and human experiments of Unit 731, which further reflects the organized nature of these crimes," said Gong Wenjing, director of the International Research Center of Unit 731 under Harbin Academy of Social Sciences.
Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing in China during World War II. The unit is estimated to have killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people. It was based in the Pingfang District of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China, formerly named Manchuria) and had active branch offices throughout China and Southeast Asia.
Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese aggressor troops. It routinely conducted tests on people who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs". Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ procurement, amputation, and standard weapons testing. Victims included not only kidnapped men, women (including pregnant women) and children but also babies born from the systemic rape perpetrated by the staff inside the compound.
Newly discovered document exposes evaluation system of technicians under wartime Japan's germ warfare unit
