Author Archives: News Sources

Libya: Britain prepares ‘bunker buster’ bombs for assaults

The Guardian reports:

Britain has ratcheted up the pressure on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by preparing to load heavy “bunker buster” bombs on RAF jets ready to attack his compounds in and around Tripoli.

Paveway bombs, weighing 2,000lbs, the largest in the RAF’s arsenal, have been dispatched to Gioia del Colle in southern Italy where RAF Tornado and Typhoon jets are based. While the Apache’s cannon and Hellfire missiles are used against small or moving targets, the Paveway bombs are expected to be used against bunkers underneath the Gaddafi regime’s Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli and elsewhere.

The MoD said on Sunday the enhanced Paveway III bombs, are designed “to punch through the roof or wall of a hardened building”. The bombs join smaller laser or satellite-guided Paveway bombs, Brimstone missiles and Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles, with which the army and navy have been attacking targets in Libya for more than two months.

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In Benghazi, shouts of thanks to America and the West

Rod Nordland reports:

Frustrated by the gridlocked traffic, the young man in fatigues was leaning on the horn of his old Chevrolet Impala, the one with the front and rear windshields shot out. The shrillness of the pointless noise made a foreigner in the car next to him wince.

Then came one of those Free Libya moments.

“Sorry, sorry,” the horn-blower called apologetically, in English. The young man riding shotgun, also in fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov, grinned sheepishly and apologized as well. Then he saluted, bringing his wounded right hand into view, a giant mitten of a bandage on it, blood soaking through in places.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “America No. 1.”

Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated hereabouts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Muslim country — even those with 100,000 American troops — in probably half a century or more. People smile and go out of their way to say hello to them, and are almost shockingly courteous. It is that oddest of oddities, an Arab war zone where foreign joggers are regarded, not with hostility or even that sympathetic puzzlement reserved for the insane, but with a friendly wave or a toot on the horn.

Here, even taxi drivers do not rip off foreign visitors, and when a taxi cannot be found, some passing driver will soon volunteer a ride, and will be likely to refuse any offer of payment. A big problem for non-Arabic speaking journalists who visit is trying to find a translator who will accept payment for his or her services. The rebels’ press office has signed up all the English translators it could find, and ordered them to work for free.

In some restaurants, they seem almost reluctant to accept a foreigner’s money. It is a society chronically short of change, so a lot of the coffee bars will just say skip it, and serve up an espresso for whatever loose change is handy, if any. Espresso is one of the welcome surprises of Libya, and while no one would confuse it with Tre Scalini, it is pretty good for a region where the standard stuff is either instant Nescafe or Turkish coffee so thick that a toothpick is needed afterwards.

The pizza, too, is respectable, especially at Pisa Pizza in Benghazi, where the pies are about a yard in diameter. Proof that Italian colonialism accomplished something after all.

In other parts of the Mideast, one refrains from advertising American nationality, if only just in case. This is a part of the world where, other than outside American embassies, the Stars and Stripes are most often spotted ablaze and stomped upon.

Here, crowds of chanting youth fly it proudly, alongside their own new flag, a tricolor with red, black and green horizontal stripes and a crescent and star in the center. (It was widely and quickly adopted by the rebels to replace the Qaddafi government’s hated green flag, an unadorned panel so plain that it has been derided as a putting green.) What popular Arab street movement has ever flown the flags of not only the United States, but the European Union, NATO, Italy, France and Qatar, all at once?

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Libyan tribal leaders call for united front

Al Jazeera reports:

More than 100 community and tribal leaders from Libya have met with members of the opposition National Transitional Council at a conference in Turkey, in a bid to show a united front against Muammar Gaddafi.

Most of the tribal leaders who gathered in Istanbul on Saturday and Sunday, were from the powerful Warfalla clan based in Baniwalid, a city in western Libya.

The delegates were calling for an end to the violence in Libya and the departure of Libyan leader Gaddafi and his sons.

An organiser of the conference told Al Jazeera that Gaddafi and his forces became aware of the conference yesterday and then moved in to seize control of Baniwalid.

“Fierce clashes broke out between Gaddafi’s forces and Warfalla members in Baniwalid, and at least 11 people died, including the brother of a conference delegate,” the source said.

Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Istanbul, said that the delegates were mostly senior professionals from both inside Libya as well as those who have been in exile for the last few years.

“They all stood up together and presented their declaration and sang the old Libyan national anthem – I watched grown men break down in tears and sob all their way through this,” our correspondent said.

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The psychology of dictatorship: Why Gaddafi clings to power

John Cloud writes:

Muammar Gaddafi continues to hold tightly to power even as NATO bombs rain down on Tripoli. Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad has killed more than 1,000 of his own people in an effort to quash protests. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has refused to step down despite months of unrest that has intensified into near civil war this week. The question is, why do all these guys fight so hard to keep power? Why not decamp to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela and live out their lives in luxury before being killed or held for trial like Hosni Mubarak?

Any attempt to diagnose a defining psychological feature of dictatorship would be facile. But in the public record available on many of them — Stalin and Mao, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi himself — one can begin to see patterns that shape a dictatorial personality. At least since the Office of Strategic Services (now known as the Central Intelligence Agency) commissioned a secret profile called “A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler,” which was issued in 1943, psychologists have sought an explanation for the authoritarian mind. New research has brought us closer than ever to understanding how leaders become despots.

There are at least three explanations for dictatorial behavior:

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Russia agrees to try to talk Gaddafi into stepping down

The New York Times reports:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev on Friday offered to leverage Russia’s relationships in Libya to try to persuade Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to leave power, an act of long-shot diplomacy that for the first time casts Russia as a central player in events unfolding in North Africa.

Mr. Medvedev’s announcement, which came a day after a 90-minute bilateral meeting with President Obama at the Group of 8 meeting in France, represents a pronounced shift in Russia’s tone on Libya. Russia’s criticism of NATO attacks had become increasingly tough over the last months, reviving a longstanding critique of American unilateralism that had quieted since Mr. Obama took office.

By signing on to the effort, Mr. Medvedev is taking a gamble. If Colonel Qaddafi could be persuaded to leave, Russia would win international plaudits but would also bear some responsibility for guaranteeing his safety. If he cannot, Mr. Medvedev might find it more difficult to keep his distance from the military campaign, which is not popular in Russia.

But all those risks may be mitigated by the prestige of being asked to defuse a violent standoff on behalf of world powers.

“Russia in the post-Soviet era has all these ideas about its influence and consequence in the world, and it is very sad for Russian politicians if it does not exist,” said Dmitri Oreshkin, an analyst with the Mercator Group, a Moscow-based advisory group. “In this case, it seems like it exists. This is a reason to feel strong and respected.”

Mikhail V. Margelov, Russia’s special envoy to the Middle East and Africa, said he had been ordered to fly to Benghazi, the rebel stronghold, to conduct negotiations with the Libyan opposition, with an eye to assessing their vision of a post-Qaddafi government. He has mentioned Qatar and Saudi Arabia as countries that might possibly offer Colonel Qaddafi asylum, and said Group of 8 allies have proposed a variety possibilities for his future, “from a quiet life as a simple Bedouin in the Libyan desert, to the fate of Milosevic in the Hague.”

Reuters reports:

NATO aircraft destroyed the guard towers at Muammar Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, a NATO official said on Saturday, then staged a rare daytime air strike on the Libyan capital, heightening pressure on him to quit.

“RAF Typhoons, along with other NATO aircraft, last night used precision-guided weapons to bring down guard towers along the walls of Colonel Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziyah complex in the center of Tripoli,” Major General John Lorimer, chief British military spokesman, said in a statement.

“Last night’s action sends a powerful message to the regime’s leadership and to those involved in delivering Colonel Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians that that they are no longer hidden away from the Libyan people behind high walls,” he said.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported:

President Obama has subtly shifted Washington’s public explanation of its goals in Libya, declaring now that he wants to assure the Libyan people are “finally free of 40 years of tyranny” at the hands of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, after first stating he wanted to protect civilians from massacres.

But if toppling Colonel Qaddafi is now the more explicit goal, Mr. Obama’s European trip this week has highlighted significant tensions over how much time the NATO allies have to finish a job that is now in its third month.

Mr. Obama has urged strategic patience, expressing confidence that over time the combination of bombing, sanctions and import cutoffs will force Colonel Qaddafi from power. “Time is working against Qaddafi,” Mr. Obama said on Wednesday at a news conference in London with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain.

But in Europe and in Libya, patience is calculated differently. Many countries are struggling with the rapid pace of operations. Some, like Norway, have already said they will sharply reduce their forces beginning next month. According to NATO officials, Colonel Qaddafi has a calculation of his own: facing a possible indictment by the International Criminal Court, he may soon have few places to go and little to lose by waiting out NATO and betting that European public opinion will tire of the bombing campaign and its costs.

In interviews in Washington, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in the alliance’s southern command center in Naples, Italy, officials have described a new strategy to intensify the pressure — and drive out Colonel Qaddafi, a goal that officials now privately acknowledge extends beyond the boundaries of the United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

The Associated Press reports:

The deputy leader of Libya’s rebel administration said it could take up to two years to organize elections, backtracking on promises of a six-month transition to democracy and adding to internal dissent already brewing within the movement seeking to topple Moammar Gadhafi.

Criticism of the rebel leadership’s National Transitional Council has been growing in its stronghold city of Benghazi, in the mostly rebel-held east of Libya. Deeper splits within the rebel movement could further hamper its faltering drive to remove Gadhafi, who has been in power for more than 40 years and is continuing to hold on despite NATO airstrikes in support of his opponents.

The announcement on Wednesday of a longer transition period has raised suspicions that some council members are intent on prolonging their power.

The council’s vice chairman, Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga, said a news conference that a one- to two-year transition period would be needed after the hoped-for ouster of Gadhafi. In that time, he said, the opposition would form a transitional legislative body tasked with writing a constitution, hold a referendum on the charter, form political parties and then hold elections.

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Dubai’s skyscrapers, stained by the blood of migrant workers

Nesrine Malik writes:

Visiting Dubai on a work trip, I was wandering the resplendent hallways of my a hotel searching for an ATM when a commotion occurred. Some of the hotel staff were scurrying about, looking obviously distressed. I asked one of them if there was any trouble and he responded with a glossy smile. There was no trouble, madam, and was there anything he could help me with?

A few hours later, I discovered that there had indeed been trouble. A man – an Indian worker – had jumped from Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and a symbol of Dubai’s prowess. It is a needle-shaped skyscraper which impales the bleak Dubai sky.

Originally known as Burj Dubai, the building was planned during the city’s orgiastic construction phase, where the sky was the limit, but completed after the bubble had burst. It was then renamed in honour of Abu Dhabi’s ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, who rescued Dubai from its debt crisis.

Gossip about the suicide was horrifyingly callous. “It only took 10 months” [after the opening of the hotel], one person said. “He’s inaugurated the building,” another almost laughed. “Why did he jump?” I asked. People shrugged. He’s probably an expatriate worker, I was told – it’s usually them.

There is nothing remarkable about people being desensitised to suicides. London commuters on the underground can probably understand, but when the suicides are almost exclusively from one minority working in certain jobs, it is nothing short of inhumane. The dark underbelly of Dubai is never far away and sometimes we see the effect of this uglier side lying lifeless on a pavement.

The man, apparently an Indian cleaner who had been denied a holiday, was scraped off the floor on which he landed on and life went back to normal. Tourists and expats lapped up the luxury and sunshine, while workers from south Asia, little moving dots on the facades of the buildings under construction throughout the city, were ferried in buses to and from their living quarters. A couple of days later, another Indian man jumped from Jumeirah Lake Towers.

The Indian consulate in Dubai has since revealed that at least two Indian expats commit suicide each week. The consul-general stated that most are blue-collar workers who are either semi-skilled or skilled.

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Can Obama beat the Israel lobby?

Henry Siegman writes:

How one gauges the importance or shortcomings of Barack Obama’s comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict in his speech of May 19 depends on how one understands the history of the Middle East peace process. My take on that history has always reminded me of the gallows humor that used to make the rounds in the Soviet Union: Soviet workers pretend to work, and their Kremlin rulers pretend to pay them. So it has been with the peace process: Israeli governments pretend they are seeking a two-state solution, and the United States pretends it believes them—that is, until President Obama’s latest speech on the subject. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The main agency for the promotion of this deception in the United States has been the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose legitimacy is based on the pretense that it speaks for the American Jewish community. It does not, for the lobby’s commitment is to Israeli governments of a certain right-wing cast.

AIPAC went into virtual hibernation during the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s because he disliked its politics and the notion that an Israeli prime minister needs AIPAC’s intercession to communicate with the US administration. The chemistry between them was so bad that Rabin encouraged the formation of a new American support group, the Israel Policy Forum.

It is not widely known that in 1988 the three major US Jewish “defense” organizations—the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League—joined in a public challenge to AIPAC (as well as to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations), charging that the policies it advocates do not always represent the views of the American Jewish community. I am familiar with the episode because I served on the executive committee of AIPAC for nearly thirty years—from 1965 to 1994—while heading the Synagogue Council of America and then the American Jewish Congress. As the New York Times reported at the time, the challenge was “politically significant because it suggests that American Jewish opinion is more diverse and, on some issues, less hard-line than the picture presented by AIPAC, which is viewed by Congress and the Administration as an authoritative spokesman for American Jews.” AIPAC managed to neutralize the challenge by promising deeper consultation with the three organizations, which of course it never did.

Today, AIPAC gives full and unqualified support to an Israeli government most of whose members deeply oppose a two-state solution. The lip service that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, pay to such an accord is a cover for their government’s overriding goal of foiling one. In fact, it is a goal that Israeli governments have pursued since 1967, when the Palestinian territories came under Israel’s control. As Aluf Benn of Haaretz noted this April:

Israeli foreign policy has, for the past 44 years, strived to prevent another repetition of this scenario [Israel’s withdrawals from territory beyond its legitimate borders, forced first by President Truman and then by President Eisenhower] through a combination of intransigence and a surrender of territories considered less vital (Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank cities, South Lebanon), in order to keep the major prizes (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights).

Most members of Netanyahu’s government do not hide their opposition to Palestinian statehood, and they openly advocate Israel’s permanent retention of the occupied territories. Danny Danon, a Likud member and deputy speaker of the Knesset, published an op-ed in the New York Times the day before Netanyahu met with President Obama at the White House, calling on Netanyahu “to rectify the mistake we made in 1967 by failing to annex all of the West Bank.”

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The surreal state solution

Sandy Tolan writes:

It’s always bizarre to watch the cheering throng of US congressmen, their pockets lined with AIPAC contributions, fawn over a visiting Israeli leader as if he were a conquering war hero of their own.

But seen on YouTube from the West Bank, Binyamin Netanyahu’s fanciful walk through Middle East diplomacy, and his disingenuous endorsement of peace and democracy – accompanied by an estimated 55 standing ovations – was truly surreal.

If a member of Congress were to actually bother to travel through the West Bank, he or she could be forgiven for wondering what the Israeli prime minister was talking about when he promised to make “painful compromises”.

Huge and expanding settlement blocs cut ever deeper into Palestinian lands, each day making the establishment of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state more difficult to imagine. One settler city of 20,000 – Ariel – sits nearly halfway to Jordan from the Mediterranean. Maale Adumim, population 34,000, lies well east of Jerusalem, on the way to the Jordan Valley.

In support of this settlement project, Israeli military jeeps and armored trucks crisscross the would-be future Palestine. This week, on a three and a half hour round trip drive between Ramallah and Jenin, I saw a dozen such patrols.

Near Nablus, a Palestinian vehicle was pulled over to the side of the road, with a soldier pointing his M-16 at the driver. Further on, an Israeli bulldozer scraped the land, uprooting an olive tree – the heart of Palestinian rural culture and economy.

Now Netanyahu is trying to cement Israeli policy of endless land seizures with a diversionary tactic – insisting that Palestinians acknowledge Israel as the national state of the Jewish people.

Yet he well knows that in the Oslo agreement of 1993, Palestinians formally accepted Israel’s existence and agreed to their own painful compromise: giving up 78 per cent of historic Palestine in exchange for establishing a state on the remaining land in the West Bank and Gaza.

By making a new demand, Netanyahu has moved the goal posts – insisting that a nation where one in every five people is Arab be formally recognised as a state for Jews only. This may make sense for a delusional congress, but why would any Palestinian leader agree to that?

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Saudis try to shield fragile Arab thrones

The New York Times reports:

Saudi Arabia is flexing its financial and diplomatic might across the Middle East in a wide-ranging bid to contain the tide of change, shield fellow monarchs from popular discontent and avert the overthrow of any more leaders struggling to calm turbulent republics.

From Egypt, where the Saudis dispensed $4 billion in aid last week to shore up the ruling military council, to Yemen, where it is trying to ease out the president, to the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco, which it has invited to join a union of Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia is scrambling to forestall more radical change and block Iran’s influence.

The kingdom is aggressively emphasizing the relative stability of monarchies, part of an effort to avert any dramatic shift from the authoritarian model, which would generate uncomfortable questions about the glacial pace of political and social change at home.

Saudi Arabia’s proposal to include Jordan and Morocco in the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council — which authorized the Saudis to send in troops to quell a largely Shiite Muslim rebellion in the Sunni Muslim monarchy of Bahrain — is intended to create a kind of “Club of Kings.” The idea is to signal Shiite Iran that the Sunni Arab monarchs will defend their interests, analysts said.

“We’re sending a message that monarchies are not where this is happening,” Prince Waleed bin Talal al-Saud, a businessman and high-profile member of the habitually reticent royal family, told The New York Times’s editorial board, referring to the unrest. “We are not trying to get our way by force, but to safeguard our interests.”

The range of the Saudi intervention is extraordinary as the unrest pushes Riyadh’s hand to forge what some commentators, in Egypt and elsewhere, brand a “counterrevolution.” Some Saudi and foreign analysts find the term too sweeping for the steps the Saudis have actually taken, though it appears unparalleled in the region and beyond as the kingdom reaches out to ally with non-Arab Muslim states as well.

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Israel apparently doing nothing to enforce international sanctions on Iran

Haaretz reports:

Benjamin Netanyahu, who endlessly preaches the need for firm action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear arms, is not lifting a finger to stop Israeli companies and individuals indirectly trading with Iran.

The Ofer Brothers Group may be scurrying into damage control in Israel, Singapore, London and Washington, after the United States blacklisted it for trading with Iran, but Israel seems to be doing nothing to enforce international sanctions on Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who endlessly preaches the need for firm action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear arms, is not lifting a finger to stop Israeli companies and individuals indirectly trading with Iran.

Nor is he acting against international companies and corporations that operate in Iran, while maintaining huge contracts with Israeli companies – including state bodies like the Electric Corporation and Airport Authority.

This incompetence, bordering on grave deficiency, is causing severe damage to the image of both Israel and its prime minister.

The Jerusalem Post adds:

A day after the US State Department announced it would impose sanctions on Israeli company the Ofer Brothers Group for its role in the sale of a tanker to a banned Iranian company, anti-corruption watchdog group Ometz sent a letter to the attorney general asking him to conduct a thorough investigation into the company’s Israeli holdings.

The Ofer Brothers group was identified as one of seven companies facing US sanctions, for its part in a September 2010 transaction that provided a tanker valued at $8.65 million to the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines.

According to a fact sheet released by the State Department, the Ofer Brothers Group, together with Singapore based Tanker Pacific, “failed to exercise due diligence and did not heed publicly available and easily obtainable information that would have indicated that they were dealing with IRISL.

“By imposing these sanctions, we’re sending a clear message to companies around the world: Those who continue to irresponsibly support Iran’s energy sector or help facilitate Iran’s efforts to evade US sanctions will face significant consequences,” read the statement.

Ofer Brothers Group denied it had knowingly traded with a company that has ties to Iran.

In its letter, Ometz wrote that in light of the potential harm to the company following the sanctions, and due to the fact that the Ofer Brothers Group controls a considerable portion of Israel’s export and foreign trade which might also be affected by the sanctions, it was asking the Attorney General to order a police investigation into all the Ofer family’s companies in relation to the alleged offenses pointed out by the US government, which are also violations of Israeli laws.

The New York Times reports:

While the State Department’s decision caused Israel considerable embarrassment, it was the timing that created the greatest stir. It came soon after Mr. Netanyahu’s friction with Mr. Obama over using the 1967 borders as a basis for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Nobody wants to over-interpret the choice of timing,” said an Israeli official who was speaking on the condition of anonymity for diplomatic reasons, “but there was no objective reason for the State Department to come out with the announcement on that precise day.”

“Does this carry meaning? I am unable to tell you. But you cannot blame anybody for being suspicious,” he said.

The Obama administration dismissed any connection between the sanctions and Mr. Netanyahu’s visit. “These sanctions take months” to work through the Department of Treasury’s vetting process, a senior administration official said. “There is a process.”

Still, the awkward fact remains that a corporation owned by one of Israel’s most prominent business families has been blacklisted for dealings, however indirect, with Iran.

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A Palestinian revolt in the making?

Jesse Rosenfeld and Joseph Dana write:

At 10:30 on May 15, two battalions of Israeli combat soldiers opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets on hundreds of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators at the Qalandia checkpoint dividing Ramallah from Jerusalem, sending people scrambling into the adjacent refugee camp. These were the opening shots of Israel’s response to protests commemorating the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, used to define Israel’s creation of 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948. By nightfall Israeli soldiers had killed thirteen Palestinian refugees and wounded hundreds with live fire on its borders with Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and inside the West Bank.

The May 15 demonstrations reinvigorated the long-alienated Palestinian refugee community; although it is 70 percent of the Palestinian population, it has been largely shut out of the negotiations process with Israel. The emerging unity was on display at Qalandia, where youth trying to symbolically march from Ramallah to Jerusalem wore black T-shirts with the slogan “Direct Elections for the Palestine National Council, a Vote for Every Palestinian, Everywhere.” The PNC is the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation organization and is responsible for electing its executive committee. Traditionally, seat allocation in the PNC has been divided to represent the influence factions within the PLO, of which Hamas is not a member.

The Nakba protests have been the largest so far of a growing Palestinian youth revolt. The protests—launched with unity protests on March 15 in the Palestinian Authority–controlled West Bank and Hamas-governed Gaza Strip—are the Palestinian response to the outbreak of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. While it is a new development, this manifestation of popular anger against Palestinian Authority concessions in the failed negotiations process—shockingly revealed with Al Jazeera’s January release of top-secret negotiation minutes, known as the Palestine Papers—and Israel’s practice of divide and rule has been simmering under the surface for the past three years.

“The unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas gave people hope to be here today and continue with this new phase of struggle,” said Fadi Quran, a founding organizer of the March 15 movement, amid the clashes with Israeli soldiers at the Qalandia checkpoint. “It showed us that something was possible and we must continue,” he added, coughing from tear gas.

Peter Beinart adds:

I watched Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress with a guy named Fadi Quran. He recently graduated from Stanford, where he double-majored in physics and international relations. He lives in Ramallah, where he’s starting an alternative energy company. And he just might rock our world.

Quran is helping to coordinate a raft of Palestinian youth organizations—located in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria—all united around one goal: to create a Palestinian Tahrir Square. They organized the unity march that helped pressure Fatah and Hamas to reconcile. Ten days ago, they organized the Nakba Day protests in which refugees marched on Israel’s borders.

What they’re doing isn’t exactly new. Palestinians in the West Bank have been conducting regular nonviolent protests for many years now, often against the separation barrier that stands between them and their fields. But Egypt and Tunisia made Quran and his colleagues realize that nonviolence was possible on a much larger scale. Not everyone in his movement believes in peaceful resistance as a matter of principle, he admitted sheepishly. But they all believe it represents the right strategy. They’ve been studying the civil rights movement and Gandhi’s struggle against the British and the movement that peacefully brought down Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. No one wants a second intifada, he insisted. “It hurt us much more than the Israelis.”

When I asked Quran what his movement believes, I expected to hear about borders and refugees and Jerusalem. Instead, he began talking about John Rawls and John Locke, a social contract between the government and the governed. A Palestinian government that denies his rights, he insisted, is as offensive as an Israeli one. When I pressed him on whether his colleagues want two states—one Palestinian, one Jewish—or a secular binational one, he seemed strangely agnostic. He said that in an ideal world one democratic state would be better, before adding that of course such a state would have to guarantee the safety and cultural autonomy of Jews. (One of his inspirations, he said, was Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher who advocated a binational state in the 1920s and 1930s). When I said I didn’t consider a binational state very realistic, he conceded the point, before noting that in the age of Netanyahu and Lieberman, most Palestinians don’t consider a two-state solution very realistic either.

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Iraq’s Moqtada al-Sadr warns Mehdi Army ready to fight

BBC News reports:

Iraqi cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr has threatened to take up arms against US troops unless they leave the country by the end of the year.

In a rare interview, he told the BBC he believed US forces would not stick to an agreement to withdraw from Iraq.

The US still has about 46,000 troops in Iraq, due to have withdrawn by January 2012.

On Thursday, tens of thousands of the cleric’s supporters rallied in Baghdad, calling for the Americans to leave.

The Pentagon has been pressing the Iraqi government to decide quickly whether it will ask some to stay on beyond the deadline.

In Sadr City, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Baghdad stronghold, his supporters marched in military formation, their boots trampling on the flags of the US, UK and Israel.

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Shattered humanity inside Syria’s security apparatus

Reuters journalist Suleiman al-Khalidi, a Jordanian citizen, was arrested by Syrian security police when covering the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the following story, he recounts his treatment at the hands of the Syrian intelligence services and the scenes of torture he witnessed around him during four days of confinement.

Like other foreign correspondents, he was subsequently expelled from Syria. He now reports on the continuing unrest from Amman.

Suleiman al-Khalidi writes:

The young man was dangling upside down, white, foaming saliva dripping from his mouth. His groans sounded more bestial than human.

It was one of many fleeting images of human degradation I witnessed during four days as an unwilling guest of Syrian intelligence, when I was detained in Damascus after reporting on protests in the southern Syrian city of Deraa.

Within minutes of my arrest I was inside a building of the intelligence services — known, as elsewhere in the Arab world, simply as the “Mukhabarat.” I was still in the heart of bustling Damascus, but had been transported into a macabre parallel world of darkness, beatings and intimidation.

I caught sight of the man hanging by his feet as one of the jailers escorted me to the interrogation room for questioning.

“Look down,” the jailer shouted as I took in the scene.

Inside an interrogation room, they made me kneel and pulled what I could just make out as a car tyre over my arms.

My reporting from Deraa, where protests against President Bashar al-Assad had broken out in March, had apparently not endeared me to my hosts, who accused me of being a spy.

The formal reason Syrian authorities gave Reuters for my detention was that I lacked the proper work permits.

That I was an established journalist working for Reuters, going about my professional business, was not an argument to men whose livelihood depends on breaking human dignity.

“So, you cheap American agent!,” the interrogator shouted.

“You have come to report destruction and mayhem. You animal, you are coming to insult Syria, you dog.”

From outside the room I could hear the rattling of chains and hysterical cries that echo in my mind to this day. My interrogators worked professionally and tirelessly to keep me on edge at every step of the questioning process over several days.

“Shut up, you bastard. You and your types are vultures who want to turn Syria into another Libya,” said another interrogator, who kept yelling: “Confess, liar!”

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Interview with Sinan Antoon: Literature and the Arab spring

Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and translator, interviewed by The Kenyon Review:

How do you think literature may or should respond to this spring’s events? What role (or roles) would you say literature has played, and how might those roles change?

Literature always responds to history, of course, but works hastily written under the pressure of responding often risk being pedestrian, but there are exceptions! The revolts are still ongoing and unfolding and we are all still processing their effects, but they have definitely energized all citizens, including writers. The challenge is how to represent these moments in their complexity and in beautiful forms.

Contrary to all the brouhaha about Twitter and Facebook, what energized people in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere, aside from sociopolitical grievances and an accumulation of pain and anger, was a famous line of poetry by a Tunisian poet, al-Shabbi. Poetry, novels, and popular culture have chronicled and encapsulated the struggle of peoples against colonial rule and later, against postcolonial monarchies and dictatorships, so the poems, vignettes, and quotes from novels were all there in the collective unconscious. Verses were spontaneously deployed in chants and slogans and disseminated in clips. The revolution introduced new songs, chants, and tropes, but it refocused attention on an already existing, rich and living archive.

Institutionally and structurally, the revolts further exposed how the state had neutralized certain intellectuals and writers and used them to legitimate its projects. The revolts reignited debates about the relationship between cultural production and state power. The revolts have already debunked the old cultural discourse and are threatening the dominant cultural elite, many of whose figures were at the service of state culture for a variety of reasons.

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The IMF versus the Arab spring

Austin Mackell writes:

In the midst of the media storm surrounding IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn last week, my feelings were perfectly expressed in a tweet by Paul Kingsnorth: “Could someone please arrest the head of the IMF for screwing the poor for 60 years?”

Without diminishing the seriousness of the sexual allegations against Strauss-Kahn, the role of the IMF, over past decades and at present, is a far bigger story. Of particular importance is its role at this crucial moment in the Middle East.

The new loans being negotiated for Egypt and Tunisia will lock both countries into long-term economic strategies even before the first post-revolution elections have been held. Given the IMF’s history, we should expect these to have devastating consequences on the Egyptian and Tunisian people. You wouldn’t guess it though, from the scant and largely fawning coverage the negotiations have so far received.

The pattern is to depict the IMF like a rich uncle showing up to save the day for some wayward child. This Dickensian scene is completed with the IMF adding the sage words that this time it hopes to see growth on the “streets” not just the “spreadsheets”. It’s almost as if the problem had been caused by these regimes failing to follow the IMF’s teachings.

Such portrayals are credulous to the point of being ahistorical. They do not even mention, for example, the very positive reports the IMF had issued about both Tunisia and Egypt (along with Libya and others) in the months, weeks, and even days before the uprisings.

To some extent, though, the IMF is aware that its policies contributed to the desperation that so many Egyptians and Tunisians currently face, and is keen to distance itself from its past. Indeed, as IMF watchers will know, this is part of a new image that the IMF, along with its sister organisation the World Bank, has been working on for a while. The changes, so far, do not go beyond spin. You can’t, as they say, polish a turd – but you can roll it in glitter.

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The arrest of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic

Robert Mackey reports:

Mr. Mladic, who was arrested in Serbia on Thursday in connection with the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in the days after the enclave for Bosnian Muslims was overrun by his forces, clearly enjoyed being filmed. As the footage of him sauntering around Srebrenica after its capture — toasting the commander of the Dutch peacekeepers he had just humiliated, pleasantly asking a young boy his age (while perhaps weighing if a 12-year-old could be considered of military age) — he appeared proud of what his forces had achieved and acted, for the cameras, almost more like a politician than a general.

The makers of a PBS documentary, “Srebrenica: A Cry From the Grave,” later used much of the footage shot by the cameras that accompanied Mr. Mladic during that week in 1995 to put together a chilling timeline of his hands-on leadership of the campaign. Here is one part of that documentary:

It was not until a decade later that video of a very different character, also filmed that week in Srebrenica, showing in graphic detail the execution of prisoners, was broadcast on Serbian television.

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Libyan gold rush followed end to sanctions

The Washington Post reports:

Some of the world’s most sophisticated banks and investment firms rushed to do business with Moammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya after the United States rescinded the country’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism five years ago, according to an internal financial document obtained by The Washington Post.

HSBC, Goldman Sachs and other top banks took on hundreds of millions in cash deposits. Hedge funds and private investment firms, including the Washington-based Carlyle Group, sold Libya’s investment authority complex financial products. The Libyan sovereign wealth fund bought more than $1 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, effectively giving Libya a chance to underwrite U.S. debt.

By last year, Libya’s fund recorded about $56 billion in assets around the world, the internal document shows.

The document, created for the Tripoli-based Libyan Investment Authority by management consulting firm KPMG, provides the most detailed accounting yet of how Libya invested its oil revenue in the years between its removal from the international blacklist in 2006 and the resumption of sanctions after a deadly crackdown on protesters earlier this year.

The report underscores that just months after Gaddafi’s government was cleared for international business deals, leading financial institutions were courting Gaddafi officials for access to a huge new reservoir of capital — more than $40 billion at the time.

The gold rush in Libya occurred with encouragement from U.S. officials, who wanted to reward Gaddafi for pledging to honor international law, disavow terrorism and compensate relatives of victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

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‘Wounded warriors’: sexual assault in the US military

At Open Democracy, Jenny Morgan writes:

First dinner of the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on ending sexual violence in conflict, and I had the good fortune to sit in on a wide-ranging conversation that started when Anu Bhagwati, the former US Marine Corps company commander who runs a campaigning organisation called the Service Women’s Action Network, told us that of the patients treated in US military veteran hospitals for sexual assault and harassment, 39 per cent are men.

These men have not necessarily been attacked for their sexual orientation, says Bhagwati, although homophobia is still very strong in the US military, along with discrimination against women. She believes one of the key features that leads to a man being sexually attacked by his male comrades-in-arms may be some form of outsiderness. She recounted the case of a tough 6-ft heterosexual man in the infantry, who spoke with an East European accent and was regularly teased, but then was gang-raped by his colleagues.

The phenomenon of sexual violence in the US military is massively under-reported — when the US airforce commissioned Gallup to do a poll, one in five serving women said they had been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and one in twenty men; but very few had formally reported the attacks to their commanding officer (or they may have tried, and been brushed aside and further victimised — Anu said the East European was actually discharged from the army for ‘being gay’. Rape survivors in the military are, she said, ‘hounded and hounded’, and the ‘final insult’ is to be kicked out for spurious reasons).

When the Department of Defence conducted a formal survey of gender relations in the military in 2010, it found around 19,000 sexual assaults happen a year (though nothing like this number are reported). 19,000 assaults a year breaks down to 52 rapes or assaults a day, most of them, says Bhagwati, on women, and most — contrary to what one might believe — on bases, not ‘in theatre’ where US forces are on active military service. Of the 3158 official reports made last year, only a quarter happened in theatre.

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