Author Archives: News Sources

Egypt: the mayhem

Yasmine El Rashidi writes: To live in Cairo these days is to live in constant disorientation. You wake up on Friday to violent clashes between the army and civilians, on Saturday to young people rescuing old books from a government building engulfed in flames, on Sunday to images of women being assaulted by uniformed soldiers, on Monday to pools of blood in the city’s central square, and on Tuesday to thousands of women marching through the streets of downtown chanting for freedom, cheered on by a human shield of men. A week later, nearly all the traces of these events are gone: except for some graffiti, the odd tent in Tahrir, and a few barricades of barbed wire and concrete blocks, the city feels listlessly unchanged, almost as if the revolution never happened.

The past two weeks in Cairo brought all of this and more, as has much of the fall. Amid moments of hope for stability and lasting change — such as Egypt’s first free and fair parliamentary elections, which began on November 28 and end next week — the country has faced wave after wave of unpredictable violence between civilians and security forces. Peaceful protesters are arbitrarily being arrested and thrown in jail; and the army’s estrangement from the activists who led the revolution is visible in the newly-erected concrete walls that sever downtown streets to separate its forces from the people. Last week, security forces raided 17 offices of internationally-funded NGOs, confiscating computers, documents, cameras, and bizarrely, even office tea kettles. It was the latest attempt to tarnish the image of the activists, and more urgently, abort the possibility of another ‘January 25’ — this time against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which has been in power since Mubarak stepped down.

From their position as the apparent protectors of last year’s revolution, SCAF have been pushed into increasingly brutal confrontations with civilians — at Maspero in October, during the run-up to elections in November, and most recently, during a week of mayhem in mid December. These spasms of violence, as important to the future of Egypt as the outcome of elections, often seem to have a logic of their own; December’s episode was set off by a chain of events few could have predicted. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

This smear against Israeli human rights activists is all too familiar

Ben White writes: Last week, the president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) launched an extraordinary attack on an Israeli human rights organisation, Adalah, comparing the NGO to the far-right French National Front and British National party.

Moshe Kantor, who heads the umbrella organisation for elected representatives of Europe’s Jewish communities, was responding to a leaked EU document that expressed concern for Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens (EJC declined to comment for this article). Claiming that the report had used Adalah as a source, Kantor said:

Adalah, an extremist organisation on the margins of society, openly declares a radical political agenda to change the nature of the state of Israel and has worked alongside some of the most radical elements in the region. It is like using sources from Front National to understand French society or the British National party to understand British society.

Adalah is a well-established legal rights centre in Israel that works to promote and defend the rights of Palestinian citizens (“Israeli Arabs”). It has special consultative status with the UN’s economic and social council (ECOSOC), and has received funding over the years from the likes of Oxfam, New Israel Fund and Christian Aid.

Just last month, as Adalah co-founder Hassan Jabareen received an award for his work, the NGO was described [PDF] by retired Israeli supreme court judge Ayala Procaccia as working “to advance human rights” with “outstanding intellectual power” and “high moral commitment”.

Why, then, would the EJC president compare this respected defender of minority rights to a party that Britain’s prime minister has previously described as “a bunch of fascists“?

In a disturbing parallel with the attacks on NGOs in Israel itself, the answer lies in Adalah’s record of defending Palestinian rights against human rights abuses and discrimination perpetrated by the Israeli government.

Facebooktwittermail

Israeli students to get $2,000 to spread state propaganda on Facebook

Ali Abunimah writes: The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) has become a full-time partner in the Israeli government’s efforts to spread its propaganda online and on college campuses around the world.

NUIS has launched a program to pay Israeli university students $2,000 to spread pro-Israel propaganda online for 5 hours per week from the “comfort of home.”

The union is also partnering with Israel’s Jewish Agency to send Israeli students as missionaries to spread propaganda in other countries, for which they will also receive a stipend.

This active recruitment of Israeli students is part of Israel’s orchestrated effort to suppress the Palestinian solidarity movement under the guise of combating “delegitimization” of Israel and anti-Semitism.

The involvement of the official Israeli student union as well as Haifa University, Tel Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University and Sapir College in these state propaganda programs will likely bolster Palestinian calls for the international boycott of Israeli academic institutions. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Dial 1 to speak to the Taliban

The Economist‘s Asia blog considers the prospects for peace in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has an official address — a political office in Qatar.

Peace with the Taliban has three main actors and a large unsupporting cast. The opening of a Taliban office in Qatar suggests a change of direction from one of the essential players, Pakistan. Previous attempts by senior Talibs to talk to the Americans and the Afghan government have been nixed by Pakistan, anxious to maintain a stranglehold over the Taliban movement and ensure that any peace process worked in Islamabad’s interests. Just last year when the media reported that Tayeb Agha, the former secretary to the Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, had been holding secret talks with German and American diplomats, his entire family in Pakistan was promptly put under house arrest.

The latest round of talks that led to the Qatar breakthrough was once again led by Mr Agha. Western experts in Kabul think the plan would never have got this far without a degree of Pakistani involvement, which in turn implies a measure of support from Islamabad.

America, the second big player, hopes that by dangling the possibility of releasing senior Taliban prisoners held in Guantanamo in exchange for a ceasefire, it can nurture a serious peace process. At the same time, American diplomats are talking tough, trying to convince the Taliban that they cannot win in the long-run, and have no chance of sweeping back to power and re-establishing their old regime.

For those Taliban who pay attention to geopolitics, the argument is convincing. First, a little background. The circumstances that saw the Taliban rise to power in 1996 are unlikely to be repeated. In those days America had withdrawn from Afghan affairs, whilst the Soviet Union no longer existed. Without the involvement of the two great superpowers, the field was left clear for Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s neighbour had long been anxious to see a weak, pliant regime in Kabul that would be hostile to India and not assert claims to territory ceded in 1893, under British pressure, to what is now Pakistan. Pakistan eventually got everything it wanted by throwing support behind an obscure bunch of pious former mujahideen led by Mr Omar, back when he was just a one-eyed mullah living in the rural outskirts of Kandahar. Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) helped put these religious “students”, or Taliban, in power by giving them military support, as well as paying-off power brokers who stood in their way.

Fast forward to today and things look far less congenial for the Taliban. Despite American weariness at the high cost in lives and treasure, it remains unlikely that Afghanistan will be abandoned again. Today’s insurgency remains a phenomenon restricted to just one ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Consequently it lacks the nationwide appeal that the mujahideen enjoyed in the 1980s. In military terms the insurgents have been clobbered in swathes of the south. They are only really vigorous in a relatively small number of districts. Also, despite the notorious short comings of the Karzai administration, the Afghan state continues to strengthen. In such circumstances it would make sense for the insurgents to make a deal sooner rather than later.

Facebooktwittermail

Iraq bombings, political crisis raise concerns of renewed civil war

Christian Science Monitor reports: At least 50 people were killed today in two predominantly Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, underlining Iraq’s tenuous stability as a political crisis threatens to inflame stark sectarian divisions.

There were at least four explosions across Baghdad. The first attack took place in Sadr City, in northeast Baghdad, and killed at least a dozen people. A half-hour later, another bomb went off nearby, killing one, the Guardian reports. The neighborhood of Kadhamiya, home to an important Shiite shrine, was blasted by a pair of almost simultaneous bombs two hours later. Yesterday there were a series of attacks on the homes of police officers and a member of a Sunni militia with ties to the government.

No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings yet, but The New York Times reports that they “appear similar” to previous attacks carried out by the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq. On Dec. 22, AQI staged a series of explosions throughout the capital that killed more than 60 people.

Two days before those attacks, the Monitor’s Dan Murphy warned of the growing parallels between trendlines of violence today, and the situation at the height of Iraq’s civil war.

Facebooktwittermail

Hard-line U.S. policy tips Iran toward belligerence

Vali Nasr writes: The latest warning by Iran, that a U.S. aircraft carrier that recently transited through the Strait of Hormuz should not do so again, is a sign to the West that should be well-observed. It tells us the regime in Tehran is ready for a fight.

Tensions between Iran and the U.S. are so high, a conflagration could be tripped off without either country intending it. This latest spiral of hostility began after the U.S. and its European allies responded to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran’s nuclear activities by imposing and threatening additional, tougher sanctions. New U.S. measures may drastically cut Iran’s oil revenue.

That, in turn, may threaten the Iranian regime’s hold on power. Predictably, then, the ruling clerics are responding with shows of strength to boost solidarity at home. And they can be counted on to accelerate Iran’s nuclear program, which they see as a deterrent to foreign intervention.

To escape this self-defeating outcome, the Western powers should imagine how the situation looks from Tehran.

In recent months, Iranian protesters have brazenly attacked the U.K. Embassy in Tehran. Iran has claimed to have downed a U.S. drone, put on 10-day war games simulating attacks on U.S. ships, and threatened to push oil prices to $250 a barrel and to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of all oil trade passes.

This defiance marks a change. Until recently, Iran had absorbed economic pressure from abroad. It had remained silent in the face of covert operations aimed at slowing the progress of its nuclear program, brushing off the destructive Stuxnet computer worm, apparently a joint U.S.-Israeli project. But the government has been embarrassed and unnerved by multiple assassinations of its scientists and by suspicious explosions at its military facilities. One blast killed the general charged with developing Iran’s missile program. The attacks have shaken the country’s security forces.

The ruling clerics are also worried about the impact of economic sanctions, which have greatly reduced Iran’s access to global financial markets, created shortages of imported items, and increased inflation and unemployment. The rial has fallen to its lowest point against the dollar, and capital is fleeing the country at an alarming rate. The government has been forced to scrap numerous infrastructure projects, especially in the oil- and-gas sector.

These hardships have caused popular discontent. The next set of sanctions may bring street protests. Iran’s rulers fear a repeat of the demonstrations of 2009. They now see the U.S. policy on Iran — of toughening sanctions and also, at the United Nations, addressing Iran’s human-rights record and support for terrorism — as one aimed at regime change.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports: European governments have agreed in principle to impose a ban on imports of oil from Iran, a potentially serious blow to the already unsteady Iranian economy and a significant escalation in the international pressure on the Tehran government.

Negotiations on a European oil embargo on Iran have been under way since an EU foreign ministers meeting last month. On Wednesday night a European diplomat said there was now a consensus that the ban on crude imports would be applied, but that there was still debate on the timing and duration of the measures.

“There is agreement in principle on Iranian oil imports,” the diplomat said. “What is now being discussed is what exceptions there would be for existing contracts and what kind of review clause there will be.”

The formal agreement on the measures is due to be finalised by the next EU foreign ministers meeting on 30 January, but the sanctions will probably not take effect immediately. One diplomat said they could come into force at the same time as US financial sanctions aimed at international banks financing Iranian crude oil sales.

Facebooktwittermail

In post-Gaddafi Libya, freedom is messy — and getting messier

Tony Karon writes: “I fear this looks like a civil war”, one Libyan rebel commander from Misrata told the Associated Press, in the wake of a fierce firefight between rival militia factions using heavy weapons in broad daylight in Tripoli on Tuesday. Four fighters were reportedly killed and five wounded in the clash ignited by the attempts of a Misrata-based militia to free a comrade detained by the Tripoli Military Council on suspicion of theft. But such clashes have become increasingly common in the Libyan capital over the past two months, as rival militias stake out turf in the power vacuum caused by the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. And while leaders on both sides of Tuesday’s clash were eventually able to broker a cease-fire, the deep fissures of tribe, region, ideology and sometimes even neighborhood that divide rival armed groups persist —and there’s no sign yet of the emergence of a central political authority with the military muscle to enforce its writ.

The residents and militias of Tripoli have been trying for months to persuade the Misrata and Zintan fighters who stormed the capital to topple the regime to go back to their home towns, but those fighters are staying put—and are accused of harassing the locals. They see themselves as the ones who shouldered the greatest burden in the battle to drive out Gaddafi, and they are suspicious of edicts by the National Transitional Council (NTC), which they see as self-appointed interlopers from Benghazi (the NTC’s recognition by the West and Arab governments as Libya’s legitimate government notwithstanding). The fighters of Zintan and Misrata are in no hurry to subordinate themselves to a national army led by returned exiles and a government of which they’re wary; nor are they willing to accept the authority of the Tripoli Military Council headed by the Islamist Abdel Hakim Belhadj, despite his endorsement by the NTC. Mindful of the political power that flows from being armed and organized, and determined to leverage that into a greater share of power and resources for the regions and towns they claim to represent, the regional militias are in no rush to give up their control of prized political real estate. They’ve ignored the Dec. 20 deadline to leave Tripoli. And, when NTC-backed armed groups tangle with them, as happened with the New Year’s Eve arrest of some of their men, they’re willing to fight.

Facebooktwittermail

Panetta’s indirect message to Iran

A shift in the Pentagon’s military doctrine also seems to be signalling an indirect message to Iran: the U.S. won’t go to war but it will “spoil” the Islamic state’s nuclear ambitions. The question is, how can the U.S. continue with its efforts to spoil Iran’s ambitions without sliding into war?

The New York Times reports: Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is set this week to reveal his strategy that will guide the Pentagon in cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from its budget, and with it the Obama administration’s vision of the military that the United States needs to meet 21st-century threats, according to senior officials.

In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military — and in so doing make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once.

Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to “spoil” a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.

Pentagon officials, in the meantime, are in final deliberations about potential cuts to virtually every important area of military spending: the nuclear arsenal, warships, combat aircraft, salaries, and retirement and health benefits. With the war in Iraq over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, Mr. Panetta is weighing how significantly to shrink America’s ground forces.

Facebooktwittermail

Syria opposition lacks solidarity

AFP reports: Syria’s opposition was in disarray Wednesday, struggling to present a united front in the face of a protest crackdown whose death toll rose again despite the presence of Arab League monitors.

Western powers have repeatedly called for the Syrian opposition to put aside differences and join forces in their bid to oust President Bashar al-Assad and his autocratic regime after more than nine months of bloody violence.

Stepping up its involvement, the United States sent Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, to Cairo overnight for consultations with the Arab League about Syria.

Democracy activists have denounced the 22-member Arab bloc over the “unprofessionalism” of a team of peace observers whose presence in Syria since last week has failed to stem the bloodshed.

Making matters worse, a pact that two of Syria’s main opposition factions — the Syrian National Council (SNC) and National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria (NCB) — agreed last week now appears to be in tatters.

The political agreement signed Friday in Cairo had outlined a “transitional period” should Assad’s regime be toppled by a pro-democracy uprising that erupted in March.

However, in a posting on its Facebook page, the Syrian National Council said late Tuesday that the “document conflicts with the SNC’s political programme and with the demands of the Syrian revolution.”

Widely regarded as the most inclusive of Syria’s opposition alliances, with representation from both the Muslim Brotherhood and parties drawn from the Christian and Kurdish minorities, the SNC has been at odds with some activists over the extent of foreign intervention required to bring change.

There was still no response to the statement from the NCB, an umbrella group of Arab nationalists, socialists, independents and Marxists which also comprises Kurds and is staunchly opposed to any foreign military intervention.

Michel Kilo, a prominent Syrian dissident who has been linked to the SNC, said the opposition grouping “considers itself the only representative of the Syrian population.”

“It refuses to accept the existence of other opposition forces and rejects the formation of a committee to lead the common work of the different opposition groups”, he added in remarks published Tuesday in France’s L’Humanite newspaper.

Facebooktwittermail

Climate change — our real bequest to future generations

Dean Baker writes: The guiding philosophy on this issue in the United States is pretty much that we can inflict whatever harm we want on people elsewhere in the world because we are powerful and they are not. This is certainly true today, but will it still be true 60 or 70 years from now? Do we expect that the United States will still be able to act unilaterally without regard to the consequences that our actions have on the rest of the world?

Before anyone tries to answer this question, they should consider that the International Monetary Fund’s projections show China’s economy surpassing the US economy before the end of the next presidential term. And China is not the only country whose growth is substantially outpacing ours.

The point is not that we should worry about an invasion from hostile powers, but instead, that we should not imagine that we will be able to inflict great harm on the rest of the world with impunity. In other words, our children and grandchildren may well be forced to pay a substantial price for the damage caused by our greenhouse gas emissions today.

Those who want to worry about questions of generational equity might start to wrap their heads around combating global warming. Global warming threatens to do far more damage to the wellbeing of future generations than the social security and Medicare benefits going to baby-boomers, no matter how much the deficit hawks try to twist the numbers to claim otherwise.

Facebooktwittermail

Santorum vs. Romney: The climate is screwed either way

Grist reports: Rick Santorum, who surged at the last minute to give Mitt Romney a real run for his money in Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, is less green than his rival, and decidedly nuttier when it comes to climate change. But let’s not split hairs here. Both men will staunchly defend fossil fuels, and neither is likely to do much of anything to fight global warming.

Mitt Romney has expressed qualified concern about climate change over the years, and then vacillated about how much of it is human-caused and whether we should try to do anything about it.

No wobbling of that sort from Santorum — he’s an out-and-out denier. “There is no such thing as global warming,” he told a smiling Glenn Beck on Fox News in June 2011. That same month, he told Rush Limbaugh that climate change is a liberal conspiracy: “It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.”

Santorum made a point of announcing his presidential candidacy this spring near the coalfields where his grandfather worked — so that’s your first clue as to how he feels about the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. During his 16 years as a member of Congress and then senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum was a big coal booster — and he’s continued to play that role even after his defeat in a 2006 Senate race.

Facebooktwittermail

Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo Bay to be released in peace talks deal

The Guardian reports: The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantánamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar, the Guardian has learned.

According to sources familiar with the talks in the US and in Afghanistan, the handful of Taliban figures will include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, and Noorullah Noori, a former governor in northern Afghanistan.

More controversially, the Taliban are demanding the release of the former army commander Mullah Fazl Akhund. Washington is reported to be considering formally handing him over to the custody of another country, possibly Qatar.

The releases would be to reciprocate for Tuesday’s announcement from the Taliban that they are prepared to open a political office in Qatar to conduct peace negotiations “with the international community” – the most significant political breakthrough in ten years of the Afghan conflict.

The Taliban are holding just one American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, a 25-year-old sergeant captured in June 2009, but it is not clear whether he would be freed as part of the deal.

“To take this step, the [Obama] administration have to have sufficient confidence that the Taliban are going to reciprocate,” said Vali Nasr, who was an Obama administration adviser on the Afghan peace process until last year. “It is going to be really risky. Guantánamo is a very sensitive issue politically.”

Facebooktwittermail

Why has the U.N. been so silent about the U.S. drone program?

Colum Lynch writes: Of the 60 people who have died in 14 reported drone attacks in Pakistan tribal areas since September, the names of all but one of the victims, an alleged leader of the Haqqani terror network named Janbaz Zadran, remain classified.

Since 9/11, the United States has dramatically expanded its covert drone program, killing between several hundred to more than 2,000 people, mostly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, according to human rights groups. Carried out it in near total secrecy (even the existence of the drone program is classified), it’s impossible for outsiders to assess whether U.S. kill operations meet the standards of international law.

The drone program has proven highly controversial in Yemen — where a U.S. strike, prompted by bad intelligence, in May, resulted in the killing of a Yemeni official — and in Pakistan, where it has strained U.S. relations with a key ally in the war on terror. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency temporarily suspended drone operations in Pakistan in an effort to repair the two countries’ relationship. But the U.N. leadership has shown little interest in registering concern about a practice considered highly controversial — even before the United States launched its war on terrorism after 9/11. While some of Washington allies’ are reportedly troubled by the scope of the U.S. killing campaign they have registered little public concern about it at the United Nations, leaving Iran as a relatively lone voice of protest against the program following their capture of an American surveillance drone in December.

Last month, Turtle Bay asked U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at his year-end press conference about his views on the use of drones, and whether he worries about countries like Iran or Russia taking up the practice. “I don’t have much to say about all this, what kind of means the member states use,” Ban answered. “This is something which national governments, military authorities, they may decide.”

Ban said that while he hoped these nations act within the bounds of “international regulations and understandings” he realizes that “with the rapid development of technology, many countries develop their own military means of getting, collecting information. Other than that, I do not have comments on this matter.”

Ban’s reluctance to address the drone policy stands in contrast to his predecessor Kofi Annan’s criticism of other controversial aspects of the U.S. led war on terror, particularly its detention and rendition policies.

Facebooktwittermail

The greatness of Ron Paul

Robert Wright writes: A dispute has broken out among fans of Ron Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy about whether he’s a strategic liability. Paul, says Kevin Drum, is such a “toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger” that “the only thing he’s accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is.”

It’s certainly true that Paul’s hawkish critics are using his weirder ideas and checkered past to try and make non-interventionism synonymous with creepiness. But, whatever their success, Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value.

It doesn’t lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I’m largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul’s critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, “Why wouldn’t it be natural that they’d want a weapon? Internationally they’d be given more respect.”

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

Facebooktwittermail