Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi scattered antitank land mines on the port of this besieged city late Thursday night, threatening once more to close the city’s only route for evacuation and supplies, according to accounts of witnesses, photographs and physical evidence collected on the ground.
The land mines were delivered by a Chinese-made variant of a Grad rocket that opens in flight and drops mines to the ground below, each slowed slightly and oriented for arming by a small green parachute, according to an identification of the sub-munitions by specialists who were provided photographs and dimensions of the weapons.
The mines hit the port at 9 or 10 p.m. Thursday, after rockets were heard being fired on the city from the southeast. A short while later, a truck driven by rebels who were patrolling the harbor struck two of them. Both men inside were wounded, according to a port supervisor and one of the victims, Faisal el-Mahrougi, the driver.
Officials and guards said more than 20 mines were distributed in the attack, and remains of at least 13 were observed firsthand. It was not possible to verify an exact number, as many had been destroyed by rebels who, to clear the mines, shot them with rifles, causing them to explode. By nightfall on Friday, the port appeared to have been cleared.
Attacks by forces loyal to Colonel al-Gaddafi on civilian and residential areas of Misratah may amount to war crimes, Amnesty International said today in a new report on the bleak situation in the besieged city.
Misratah: Under Siege and Under Fire [PDF] accuses al-Gaddafi forces of unlawful killing of civilians due to indiscriminate attacks, including use of heavy artillery, rockets and cluster bombs in civilian areas and sniper fire against residents.
It also documents systematic shooting at peaceful protesters and enforced disappearance of perceived opponents, which can amount to crimes against humanity.
Of all the generalizations commonly made by foreign observers and subjectively augmented by Gaddafi about Libya, especially during the people’s present remarkable quest for freedom and democracy, one of the least valid is that tribalism is pervasive in the Libyan society and its politics.
Characteristically, Libya is the most homogeneous, both culturally and religiously, in Africa and the Arab world. The tribal structure is merely a social phenomenon and has no fundamental importance aside from being only a thing of the past, a part of the cultural lore of the people and their history.
There is no lack of effective sense of national unity in Libya. This unity has been formally initiated by Independence and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and subsequently preserved by astute political awareness on the part of the citizens and a deep sense of common destiny. Thus, conscious of their identity as an independent political unit, the Libyan people all over the liberated regions of the country are relentlessly and genuinely sounding their voice in their peaceful demonstrations nowadays that “Libya is one nation, one clan, one family” and that the myth of tribalism exists only in the mind of the dictator and his few deceived followers.
Furthermore, the appearance and amazing proliferation of the constitutional flag, the symbol of national independence, fluttering almost everywhere in great numbers and shapes, bear unmistakable witness to such unity.
Troops loyal to Colonel Gaddafi continued to shell the port of Misrata on Wednesday as a British-funded rescue ship docked to deliver 180 tons of relief supplies.
Passengers quickly boarded the Red Star One, which left Misrata carrying about 800 migrants, journalists and wounded Libyans. At least four people were reportedly killed in the latest attack on the port.
When the bloody siege of this isolated city began, the rebels who rose against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s conventional army had almost no firearms. Many of them relied on hands, knives and stones.
Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.
The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.
The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for three days journalists for The New York Times were granted access to two of them, on the condition that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be taken of their entrances.
On display inside were both the logistics and the mentality of the seesaw fight for Libya’s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya’s central and western stretch of Mediterranean coast, to withstand a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the arms and munitions an oil state can buy.
In these places — the fledgling war industry for a force that regards itself as a democratic insurgency — weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been modified for manual use.
Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing — land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use — have been converted to other types of lethal arms.
The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their production is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to drive back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.
In his harshest comments to date on the situation in Libya, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a regional power broker, told reporters here on Tuesday that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had chosen “blood, tears, oppression” and that he must “immediately step down.”
Turkey has historic and business ties to Libya, and during more than two months of conflict it has tried to act as an intermediary between Colonel Qaddafi’s government and the rebels seeking his ouster. As a result, each side has accused Turkey of favoring the other, or of hedging its bets.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan appeared to draw a line, saying during a televised news conference that Colonel Qaddafi had violently resisted calls for change and that he must leave power for the good of the country and the Libyan people.
“Muammar Qaddafi, instead of taking our suggestions into account, refraining from shedding blood or seeking for ways to maintain the territorial unity of Libya, chose blood, tears, oppression and attacks on his own people,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Now, at this stage, the thing that needs to be done is Muammar Qaddafi to immediately step down from power that he holds in Libya.”
About 25,000 Turkish workers were engaged in major construction projects in Libya at the beginning of the unrest in February, and Turkey led an extensive evacuation operation for its citizens and others. The two countries began a visa agreement last year, allowing Libyan citizens to stay in Turkey for at least three months without a visa and signaling a turn in diplomatic and business relations.
A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Mr. Erdogan had spoken with Colonel Qaddafi three times in private, “urging him to step down peacefully and allow establishment of an administration to reflect people’s demands,” but that Colonel Qaddafi had refused.
The Libyan regime’s claims that Nato is attempting to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi have intensified following the apparent death of one of the leader’s sons and three of his grandchildren in an air strike on Tripoli.
Gaddafi was at the one-storey house in a residential area of Tripoli when the missile struck late on Saturday, according to the government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.
In a rare acknowledgement that security around Gaddafi may not be watertight, Ibrahim told reporters that intelligence about Gaddafi’s whereabouts or plans must have been leaked to Nato. (The Guardian)
The claim that Muammar Qaddafi’s three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike conducted by NATO late Saturday is not true, an Al Arabiya source has revealed. A source close to the Qaddafi family has confirmed the death of Colonel Qaddafi’s youngest son, Saif al-Arab, in the airstrike but has denied the story that Mr. Qaddafi’s three grandsons were killed. (Al Arabiya)
Shashank Joshi writes: The death of Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, if confirmed, is likely to have come as a consequence of Nato’s increasingly aggressive tactics, undertaken by the alliance to shake up a stalemate in the conflict.
But his killing in an air strike is a grievous strategic error – militarily insignificant but diplomatically disastrous.
Towards the end of April, Nato states made a number of operational innovations. Three member states – Britain, France, and Italy – injected military advisers into rebel-held eastern Libya. Another, the US, began continuous patrols of armed drones.
Third, and most important, air strikes began to target command, control, communications and intelligence networks (known, in military parlance, as C3I). The Bab al-Aziziya compound includes all three such networks, and it was presumed that their disruption would disorient regime soldiers on the front line, cut off field commanders from Tripoli, and sow confusion in the ranks.
But was the strike also an assassination attempt?
Assassination of a head of state is illegal under international law, and forbidden by various US presidential orders. On the other hand, the targeted killing of those woven into the enemy chain of command is shrouded in legal ambiguity. (BBC News)
Britain has ordered the expulsion of the Libyan ambassador to London, Omar Jelban, in retaliation for an attack on the British embassy by a pro-Gaddafi crowd in Tripoli.
Jelban has been given 24 hours to leave the country.
“I condemn the attacks on the British embassy premises in Tripoli as well as the diplomatic missions of other countries,” said the foreign secretary, William Hague. “The Vienna convention requires the Gaddafi regime to protect diplomatic missions in Tripoli. By failing to do so that regime has once again breached its international responsibilities and obligations. I take the failure to protect such premises very seriously indeed.” (The Guardian)
They sniff with contempt at a passing car filled with Moammar Kadafi’s supporters. They turn up the volume on Al Jazeera just when a report chronicling the government’s attacks on civilians in rebel-held Misurata comes on.
Or they make a cryptic remark, like the driver working with the government minders assigned to monitor foreign reporters.
“God willing, spring will come soon,” he said.
But spring began weeks ago.
“God willing, in two weeks,” he said with a smile.
“Two weeks” is the time in which Libyans have been assuring themselves that their nightmare will come to an end. (Los Angeles Times)
Pro-Gaddaffi forces have been seen roaming the streets of Misurata wearing gas masks, contacts in Libya’s besieged city have reported to timesofmalta.com .
Sources at the hospital confirmed that pro regime troops were wearing gas masks. An independent source said there were reports that thousands of gas masks had been distributed to troops yesterday. (Times of Malta)
Shattered glass litters the carpet at the Libyan Down’s Syndrome Society, and dust covers pictures of grinning children that adorn the hallway, thrown into darkness by a NATO strike early on Saturday.
It was unclear what the target of the strike was, though Libyan officials said it was Muammar Gaddafi himself, who was giving a live television address at the time.
“They maybe wanted to hit the television. This is a non-military, non-governmental building,” said Mohammed al-Mehdi, head of the civil societies council, which licenses and oversees civil groups in Libya. (Reuters)
David Kenner writes: Bashar al-Assad never saw it coming. In a Jan. 31 interview with the Wall Street Journal, the Syrian autocrat boasted that his regime was immune from the revolutionary wave spreading across the Middle East because it “very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”
Over the past month and a half, Syrians have made a liar out of their president. Small protests broke out in Damascus on March 15 and have slowly spread to towns and cities throughout the country. And as the movement has gained strength, Assad’s crackdown has increased in brutality. The Syrian regime has killed at least 450 people since the uprising began, according to human rights groups, and this week sent tanks into the mutinous southern town of Daraa to quell the protests.
So far, the regime’s attempts to quash the demonstrations have only caused them to increase in size. Tens of thousands of Syrians came out to the protests this Friday, with crowds demonstrating in more than 50 towns throughout the country. The protests’ growing strength has produced a reaction in Washington: Following days of escalating statements, President Barack Obama issued new sanctions today against three of the regime’s most notorious officials, including Bashar’s brother, Maher al-Assad. The U.N. Human Rights Council also denounced Assad’s use of violence against peaceful protesters on Friday, calling for a team to visit Syria in order to “ensur[e] full accountability” for those who perpetrated the attacks.
So who’s leading the charge against Assad? The president has accumulated no shortage of enemies over his decade-long rule, many of whom have little in common besides their enmity toward the Syrian president. If he continues his ruthless crackdown, however, it just may be enough to unite them. (Foreign Policy)
When protests erupted in March in the forlorn Syrian border town of Dara’a, demonstrators burned the president’s portraits, then set ablaze an unlikely target: the local office of the country’s largest mobile phone company, Syriatel, whose owner sits at the nexus of anger and power in a restive country.
Syriatel is owned by Rami Makhlouf, first cousin and childhood friend of President Bashar al-Assad and the country’s most powerful businessman. In the past decade, he has emerged as a strength and a liability of a government that finds its bastions of support shrinking and a figure to watch as Mr. Assad’s inner circle tries to deal with protests shaking his family’s four decades of rule.
Leery of the limelight, he is alternatively described as the Assad family’s banker or Mr. Five Percent (or 10, or whatever share gets the deal done). His supporters praise him for his investment in Syria, but they are far outnumbered by detractors, who have derided him in protests as a thief or worse. Sometimes more than Mr. Assad himself, he has become the lightning rod of dissent.
“We’ll say it clearly,” went a chant in Dara’a. “Rami Makhlouf is robbing us.”
Egypt had Ahmed Ezz, the steel magnate who favored tight Italian suits (and now faces trial in white prison garb). In Tunisia, it was Leila Traboulsi, the hairdresser who became the president’s wife, then a symbol of the extravagance of the ruling family. Mr. Makhlouf, 41, is Syria’s version, a man at the intersection of family privilege, clan loyalty, growing avarice and, perhaps most dangerously, the yawning disconnect between ruler and ruled that already reshaped authoritarian Syria even before the protests. (New York Times)
Zvi Bar’el writes: Israel’s Pavlovian response to Palestinian reconciliation, which included the usual threats of boycott, is the result of the ingrained anxiety of people who no longer control the process. For five years, Israel has done everything to change the outcome of Hamas’ watershed victory in the elections in the territories. It did not recognize the Hamas government or the unity government, and of course, it did not recognize the Hamas government that arose after that organization’s brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza became a synonym for Hamas; that is, for terror, and the West Bank stood for the land of unlimited possibilities. Israel made an enormous contribution toward building up Hamas into an institution, not only an organization. The cruel closure of Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, turning Gaza into a battle zone and the saga of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, with Israel continuing to negotiate with Hamas while striking out against it – all this has transformed Gaza into a symbol of the occupation and a focus of international empathy.
Israel, in its diplomatic blindness, saw the product it helped manufacture as a huge diplomatic achievement. Its working assumption was that the split between Gaza and the West Bank would allow Israel to pursue the appearance of negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while fighting another part of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel interpreted the political conflict between Abbas and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza and Khaled Meshal in Damascus as an unsolvable ideological conflict and a reality in which, in Israel’s thinking, Palestine is divided not only into two regions, but into two mutually hostile peoples. Israel tortures one side while celebrating with the other at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opening of a shopping center. (Haaretz)
Israel has suspended tax transfers to the Palestinians, its finance minister said on Sunday, fearing the money will be used to fund Hamas after President Mahmoud Abbas struck a unity deal with the Islamists.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), led by U.S.-backed Abbas, asked foreign powers to stop Israel from blocking the transfers, which make up 70 percent of its revenues. A senior Palestinian official said Israel, by its action, had “started a war.”
Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said he had suspended a routine handover of 300 million shekels ($88 million) in customs and other levies that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians under interim peace deals. (Reuters)
Serious differences have emerged within Iran’s top leadership, media reports suggest, pitting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, against Aytollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
Ahmadinejad has boycotted cabinet meetings since Heider Moslehi, the intelligence minister, was reinstated after he was forced out of the government.
Moslehi was restored to the powerful post by Khamenei after Ahmadinejad had forced him to resign on April 17.
Ahmadinejad’s opponents, meanwhile, have seized the opportunity.
According to the Shargh newspaper, a group of 216 lawmakers, more than two-third of the 290 members in the Iranian parliament, have issued a letter to Ahmadinejad, urging him to call off his cabinet boycott for the good of the country.
“You are expected to follow the supreme leader,” the lawmakers wrote.
On Friday, a hardline cleric used his nationally broadcast sermon to indirectly warn Ahmadinejad that he would be moving into dangerous territory by escalating his challenges to Khamenei.
“Obedience to the supreme leader is a religious obligation as well as a legal obligation, without any doubt,” Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said. He did not mention Ahmadinejad by name, but it was clear he was referring to the president. (Al Jazeera)
John Norris writes: In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly say they believe that foreign aid makes up a larger portion of the federal budget than defense spending, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, or spending on roads and other infrastructure. In a November World Public Opinion poll, the average American believed that a whopping 25 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The average respondent also thought that the appropriate level of foreign aid would be about 10 percent of the budget — 10 times the current level.
Compared with our military and entitlement budgets, this is loose change. Since the 1970s, aid spending has hovered around 1 percent of the federal budget. International assistance programs were close to 5 percent of the budget under Lyndon B. Johnson during the war in Vietnam, but have dropped since. (Washington Post)
About 250 people raced across the Syrian border into Turkey, government officials said Saturday, a flight that reflects the fear and violence gripping the Arab nation.
The people hustled to the southern Turkish Yaylidagi district in Hatay province on Friday afternoon, according to local and federal government officials.
Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Selcuk Unal said the government is trying to determine more about the people and how and why they chose to leave Syria.
“They just came to the border post and want to go in without passports. They were let in,” Unal said. “We are trying to figure out whether this is an individual event or the tip of the iceberg.” (CNN)
Members of two Syrian army units have clashed with each other over carrying out orders to crack down on protesters in Deraa, the southern city at the heart of an anti-government uprising, according to a witness and human rights groups.
More than 500 people have been killed across Syria – about 100 in Deraa alone – since the popular revolt against the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad began in mid-March, according to human rights groups.
While the infighting in Deraa does not indicate any decisive splits in the military, it is significant because the army has always been seen as a bastion of support for the regime. The Syrian military has denied that there have been any splits in the military. (Al Jazeera)
“L.A” writes: Syria is known for its complicated sectarian mix. The Assad government and ruling Baath party are run by Alawites, a Shia sect followed by around 12 percent of the population. The majority of Syrians are Sunnis, but there are also Christians of all denominations (10 percent), other Shia, Druze, and a tiny Jewish minority. In recent weeks, the government has cited the threat of Islamist extremism as a reason to crack down on protesters. However, despite the veils and niqabs I encountered, there was little evidence in Douma of either an Islamist or sectarian element to the political demands being made.
“We don’t have Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) in Douma,” one man told us. “They’re just conservative around here.” Later, Alaa said the same thing, explaining that much of the local population belongs to the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam, the most conservative of the four Sunni schools. But there were also Shia and more secular people in the crowd. One young man I met, “Imad,” was secular, university-educated, and worked for a large company. He had been demonstrating alongside laborers wearing dusty clothes and the red and white keffiyeh, and religious conservatives. The diversity was also apparent in the different colored ribbons worn as armbands by the mourners—green for the Shia, red for the Sunni.
In other protest cities, such as Latakia and Baniyas, the demonstrations have been even more mixed, with many Shia and Christians participating. Protests in different parts of the country have generally cut across both religious and ethnic divisions: Ismailis (a Shia sect) in Salamiya near Hama, Kurds in the north, Armenians in Latakia, and Druze in Suweida. (NYRB Blog)
Syria’s loosely organized pro-democracy movement drew tens of thousands of people into the heart of Damascus and cities across the country Friday, a major victory against a government campaign of violence that has killed hundreds of peaceful protesters.
Activists said security forces, who have deployed tanks in some cities, killed 64 people Friday as they tried to crush the 6-week-old protest movement.
In Washington, the White House said President Obama had signed an executive order imposing sanctions on three Syrian officials the United States believes engaged in human rights abuses. (Los Angeles Times)
Libyan opposition forces have rejected a ceasefire offer by Muammar Gaddafi and dismissed his regime’s claims that loyalist forces had cut off access to the crucial seaport in the besieged city of Misrata.
In a rambling, defiant speech on state television on Saturday, in which he declared that he was “more sacred [to Libyans] than the emperor of Japan is to his people”, Gaddafi called for talks with Nato, which is conducting air strikes against his forces.
“The door to peace is open,” Gaddafi said. “You are the aggressors. We will negotiate with you. Come, France, Italy, UK, America, come, we will negotiate with you. Why are you attacking us?”
More than two months into the Libyan revolution, loyalist forces are becoming increasing stretched. In the east, they are preventing the rebel advance near the town of Ajdabiya; in the far west, they are trying to quell a more recent uprising near the border with Tunisia. And just 130 miles from Tripoli, the battle for the industrial city of Misrata continues, with at least six people killed before noon on Saturday. (The Guardian)
Egypt is charting a new course in its foreign policy that has already begun shaking up the established order in the Middle East, planning to open the blockaded border with Gaza and normalizing relations with two of Israel and the West’s Islamist foes, Hamas and Iran.
Egyptian officials, emboldened by the revolution and with an eye on coming elections, say that they are moving toward policies that more accurately reflect public opinion. In the process they are seeking to reclaim the influence over the region that waned as their country became a predictable ally of Washington and the Israelis in the years since the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
The first major display of this new tack was the deal Egypt brokered Wednesday to reconcile the secular Palestinian party Fatah with its rival Hamas. “We are opening a new page,” said Ambassador Menha Bakhoum, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. “Egypt is resuming its role that was once abdicated.”
Egypt’s shifts are likely to alter the balance of power in the region, allowing Iran new access to a previously implacable foe and creating distance between itself and Israel, which has been watching the changes with some alarm. “We are troubled by some of the recent actions coming out of Egypt,” said one senior Israeli official, citing a “rapprochement between Iran and Egypt” as well as “an upgrading of the relationship between Egypt and Hamas.” (New York Times)
Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces General Sami Anan warned Israel against interfering with Egypt’s plan to open the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on a permanent basis, saying it was not a matter of Israel’s concern, Army Radio reported on Saturday.
Egypt announced this week that it intended to permanently open the border crossing with Gaza within the next few days.
The announcement indicates a significant change in the policy on Gaza, which before Egypt’s uprising, was operated in conjunction with Israel. The opening of Rafah will allow the flow of people and goods in and out of Gaza without Israeli permission or supervision, which has not been the case up until now. (Haaretz)
Adam Shatz writes: The agreement is arguably one of the first diplomatic fruits of the Egyptian revolution. But Barack Obama also deserves some of the credit. Abbas has been humiliated by Obama, and he is clearly angry. As he told Newsweek, ‘It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder, and he removed the ladder and said to me: “Jump.” Three times, he did it.’ The Obama administration also urged Abbas to oppose a draft UN Security Council resolution demanding that Israel ‘immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory’. ‘It’s better for you and for us and for our relations,’ Obama told Abbas by phone, before enumerating the sanctions Palestinians would suffer if the vote went ahead, and warning that Congress might not approve $475 million in aid. In fact, there was little the PA could do to advance Palestinian interests that wouldn’t have put US aid at risk: soon after the unity agreement was announced, Washington chimed in with Tel Aviv’s denunciations of Hamas as a ‘terrorist organisation’, and three members of Congress, led by the House foreign affairs chairwoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, threatened to cut off aid.
But Obama may have done Abbas a favour: by revealing in the starkest terms the unconditional nature of US support for Israel – and how slender the rewards are for being America’s man in Ramallah – he has forced Abbas to do something that, for once, may win him some Palestinian goodwill. And he may just be able to sell the agreement – in other words, the inclusion of a party that has not renounced violence or recognised Israel – to the EU, which has become increasingly exasperated with Obama’s timidity on Palestine. The unity agreement may turn out to be a bluff, Abbas’s way of reminding his patrons that he has other options, and that they can’t simply ignore Palestinian interests. But perhaps Abbas and the old men in Fatah are at last rediscovering the virtues of self-reliance. (LRB Blog)
We are told that war is the pursuit of politics by other means. Attributed to Clausewitz, the thought is actually rather comforting. War may be violent but at least it’s rational. It is a sometimes necessary strategy to achieve objectives.
A world is imagined in which armed force is an instrument that can be calibrated, here a scalpel, there a hammer. Violence – the destruction of bodies and things – becomes a means to be assessed for its efficacy in attaining ends.
How much ‘punishment’ will the people of Gaza take before they get rid of Hamas? How much ‘pressure’ needs to be applied before the Gaddafi regime collapses?
Experts offer authoritative analyses. PowerPoint slides are produced, briefings given. Leaders make informed decisions. The balloon goes up. Operation Cast Lead or Unified Protector or some other begins.
Speeches follow; political, legal and moral justifications are made. Politicians and their advisors claim truth in the face of war. They speak of their rational command of force, of the effects it will have among the target populations.
Clausewitz also likened war to a wrestling match. Players in a game know it can take on a life of its own. Each move is countered, and then countered again. They are caught in a system neither side controls, each seeking a dominance that often turns out fleeting.
Like many veteran soldiers, Clausewitz well understood that the enemy always has a vote, that plans are cast aside on first contact, and that outcomes are ultimately unpredictable. Amidst the fog of war, calculations must be made with variable quantities. It was precisely for these reasons that he enjoined politicians and generals to think so carefully about their objectives in going to war.
What Clausewitz actually teaches us is that war is far more likely to make us its servants than we are to make war our instrument. War subjects us to its dynamics, it draws in ever greater resources, and it changes everything, especially but not only for those caught in the direct grip of its violence.
Muammar Gaddafi is arming Libyan 17-year-olds to build a “home front” against Nato military intervention and the possibility of rebels from the east of the country reaching largely loyalist towns and cities in the west.
As part of the drive towards an unofficial civilian army, the government is releasing thousands of AK-47 assault rifles into communities and is organising classes in the use of weapons.
At a women’s training centre in the town of Sbia, 30 miles south of Tripoli, young women crowded round a trestle table as a soldier wearing camouflage fatigues and thick red lipstick demonstrated how to field-strip and reassemble the guns.
Officials said the minimum age for weapons training was 17, although the centre was crowded with girls as young as seven who were schooled in loyalist chants and waving portraits of Gaddafi. (The Guardian)
The death sentence imposed on four Bahrainis caught up in the Shiite uprising is a “deplorable” act, the president of the European Parliament said Thursday.
Bahraini authorities announced via the state-run news agency that four men were sentenced to death and three others were given life-in-prison terms for the reported killing of two police officers during demonstrations in March.
Bahrain is facing international scrutiny for its response to the Shiite uprising. Opposition leaders accuse the ruling Sunni minority of cracking down on healthcare workers and hospital patients in order to downplay the severity of the violence. (UPI)
The former head of an agency accused of torture and human rights abuses is expected to be a guest at Friday’s royal wedding, the Guardian has learned.
Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa is a former head of Bahrain’s National Security Agency (NSA) and will attend the wedding in his role as the current Bahraini ambassador to London.
British sources confirmed he had been invited and a spokesperson for the Bahraini embassy in London said he was expected to attend. (The Guardian)
The rival Palestinian movements Fatah and Hamas agreed Wednesday to reconcile and form an interim government ahead of elections, after a four-year feud, in what both sides hailed as a chance to start a fresh page in their national history.
Israel said the accord, which was brokered in secrecy by Egypt, would not secure peace in the Middle East and urged Abbas to carry on shunning the Islamist movement, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007 after ousting Fatah in a civil war.
Forging Palestinian unity is regarded as crucial to reviving any prospect for an independent Palestinian state, but Western powers have always refused to deal with Hamas because of its refusal to recognize Israel and renounce violence.
“We have agreed to form a government composed of independent figures that would start preparing for presidential and parliamentary elections,” said Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of Fatah’s negotiating team in Cairo. “Elections would be held in about eight months from now,” he said, adding the Arab League would oversee the implementation of the agreement. (Reuters)
Zvi Bar’el writes: For the past four years, it has been clear to Fatah and Hamas that they had no alternative but to reach a reconciliation. The controversy was over the price. Even now, when the draft agreement is signed, the portfolio allocation, the type of election, the date of the election and the designated ministers and prime minister have yet to be agreed on.
The successful implementation of the reconciliation agreement is largely dependent on both sides recognizing that they will have to make decisions and cooperate without outside help. There is no certainty that Assad, who navigated Hamas’ diplomatic moves, is in a position to continue setting the Middle Eastern agenda, as he had hoped after Mubarak’s fall. It is clear to Fatah, and especially Mahmoud Abbas, that General Tantawi’s Egypt is not Mubarak’s Egypt and the Egyptian public pressure to open the Gaza border and the regime’s readiness to respond would deprive him of the main leverage over Hamas.
The reconciliation has direct bearing on Abbas’ intention to ask the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state. Such a state would include the Gaza Strip, as had been agreed in the Oslo agreement and as Abbas reiterates constantly. Abbas will not be able to pass himself off as one who represents the Palestinian people without reconciling with Hamas, especially when Gaza has played such a major role in evoking international sympathy, perhaps even more than Abbas’ infrastructure in the West Bank.
Operation Cast Lead, the Turkish flotilla and the prolonged blockade of Gaza, as well as Israel’s settlement policy, helped Abbas persuade world leaders to remove their support from Israel’s position and adopt the Palestinian-state idea.
The reconciliation was enabled, among other things, by the fact that Hamas will not be obliged to recognize Israel, because if the United Nations recognizes the Palestinian state, Hamas’ specific recognition would be meaningless. Hamas will be part of a Palestinian government making sovereign decisions. Hamas has already said in the past it was willing to recognize all the agreements and decisions accepted by the Arab League, including the Arab Initiative.
Even the United States will not be able to object to a united Palestinian government, in which Hamas is a partner. After all, it had agreed to accept and even support, economically and militarily, a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah was partner. Nor will the United States and Europe be able to object to general elections in the territories, or deny their results, when the West is demanding Arab leaders implement democratic reforms.
Israel could find itself isolated yet again if it objects to the reconciliation or the election. (Haaretz)
David W. Lesch writes: Early this year, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad portrayed his country as being different, almost immune from the uprisings that had beset Tunisia and Egypt. The mouthpieces of the Syrian regime consistently echoed this arrogance, even to the point of siding with the protestors in their Arab brethren countries. They pointed out that the septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders of these states were out of touch with their populations. They were also corrupt lackeys of the United States. The implication, of course, was that Asad, a relatively young 45, was in touch with the Arab youth. He also confronted the United States and Israel in the region and supported the resistance forces of Hamas and Hizbullah, thus brandishing credentials that played well in the Arab street.
This may have bought him some time, but it was a misreading of the situation—or denial of it. Having met with Asad a number of times over the past 7 years, I can almost guarantee that he was absolutely shocked when the uprisings in the Arab world started to seep into his own country. I believe he truly thought he was safe and secure…and popular beyond condemnation. But not in today’s new Middle East, where the stream of information cannot be controlled as it has been in the past. The perfect storm of higher commodity prices, Wikileaks, and the youth bulge—and their weapon of mass destruction, the social media—have bared for all to see widespread socio-economic problems, corruption, and restricted political space, and authoritarian regimes can no longer shape or contain this information. In this Syria was no different.
One might recognize the stages of shock in Asad, similar to the five stages of grief. Following his denial, Asad displayed incredulity, even anger that fueled a blatant triumphalism, apparent in his initial speech of March 30 that incorrectly placed the bulk of the blame for the uprisings in Syria on conspirators and foreign enemies, thus ignoring the very real domestic problems that lay at the root of public frustration and despair.
Asad then reached the bargaining stage, where one attempts to do anything possible to postpone one’s fate. There is recognition of problems and attempts to address them, apparent in Asad’s speech to his new cabinet on April 16, when he announced the lifting of the almost 50-year state of emergency law, among other proposed reforms. But the protests and associated violence continued. The most dangerous phase could be if Asad withdraws into seclusion, trying to come to grips with the reality of the situation. This is dangerous because Bashar might cede his leadership role to others, and filling the void could be hardliners who advocate an even harsher crackdown. This may be what is happening now. One hopes that Asad passes through this stage very quickly and reasserts himself toward the final one, that of acceptance. (Syria Comment)
Dozens of tanks have been reported to be en route to Deraa, the Syrian city at the centre of protests against President Bashar al-Assad, as a series of EU nations protested at the increasingly bloody government crackdown that is now believed to have killed more than 450 people.
Deraa remained largely cut off to outside communications but sources reported gunfire again on Wednesday. Amnesty International quoted eyewitnesses who said army snipers were shooting at injured people on the streets and those who tried to reach them.
Witnesses reported seeing a convoy of at least 30 army tanks leave an area near the Golan Heights front line with Israel and head south, apparently towards Deraa, where the protests against Assad’s authoritarian regime began six weeks ago. (The Guardian)
Joshua Landis writes: Bashar al-Assad is determined to quell the Syrian revolt, which is why he has sent in the military with tanks and is now arresting the network of opposition activists and leaders that his intelligence agencies have been able to track.
There is an element of “shock and awe” to the operation. Tanks are clearly not useful for suppressing an urban rebellion, but they demonstrate the superior firepower of the state and the determination of the president. It is a classic military strategy – go hard and quick. Take out the opposition before t has a chance to harden and develop a durable command a reliable cell structure. This is precisely what the US military tried to do in Iraq. It is what it failed to do in Libya, when it allowed Qaddafi to regroup and regain control of Tripoli and Western Libya after his initial confusion and weakness.
I do not believe that the regime will be able to shut down the opposition. Unlike the Iranian opposition, which was successfully put down, the Syrian opposition is more revolutionary, even if, perhaps, not as numerous in the capital. The Green movement did not call for the overthrow of the regime and an end to the Islamic republic, but only reform. The Syrian opposition is revolutionary. Although it began by calling for reform, it quickly escalated to demand an end to the regime. It is convinced that reform of the Baathist regime is impossible and Syria must start over. It wants an end to the Baath Party, an end to Assad dynasty, an end to domination of the presidency and security forces by the Alawite religious community, and an end to the domination of the economy by the financial elite which has used nepotism, insider trading, and corruption to monopolize the ramparts of trade and industry. In short, the opposition abhors most aspects of the present regime and is working to uproot it. It is more determined and revolutionary than was the Iranian Green movement that Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei successfully suppressed. (Syria Comment)
Moved by escalating violence in Syria, European leaders warned Tuesday that they will impose new sanctions on Damascus unless President Bashar al-Assad halts his bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters.
The warnings reflected a growing sense of outrage in European capitals since Assad sent tanks and armored personnel carriers into the rebellious southern city of Daraa on Monday, firing at youths in the street and inflicting a death toll estimated by human rights activists at two dozen. (Washington Post)
Another 203 members of Syria’s ruling Baath party announced their resignation Wednesday in protest of the deadly crackdown on protesters, raising the number to 233, according to lists seen by AFP.
The latest group to step down were members from the Houran region, which covers the flashpoint town of Daraa in the south of the country. Earlier 30 members resigned from the restive city of Banias in northwest Syria. (AFP)
NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.
White House officials said President Obama had been briefed on the more energetic bombing campaign, which included a strike early on Monday on Colonel Qaddafi’s residential compound in the heart of Tripoli, the capital.
United States officials said the effort was not intended to kill the Libyan leader, but to take the war to his doorstep, raising the price of his efforts to continue to hold on to power. “We want to make sure he knows there is a war going on, and it’s not just in Misurata,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity in discussing military planning.
The NATO campaign, some officials said, arose in part from an analysis of Colonel Qaddafi’s reaction to the bombing of Tripoli that was ordered by President Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago. Alliance officials concluded that the best hope of dislodging the Libyan leader and forcing him to flee was to cut off his ability to command his most loyal troops.
“We don’t want to kill him or make a martyr out of him in the Arab world,” said a senior NATO diplomat familiar with the evolving strategy. “But if he sees the bombing happening all around him, we think it could change his calculus.” (New York Times)
A statement in French by 61 Libyan tribal leaders, delivered to Bernard-Henri Levy. Automated translation by Google Translate.
We, heads or representatives of the tribes of Libya, met today in Benghazi, around Daihoum Doctor, member of the National Transition Council. Faced with threats to the unity of our country, facing the maneuvers and propaganda of the dictator and his family, we solemnly declare this.
Nothing can divide us.
We share the same ideal of a Libya free, democratic and united.
Every Libyan has certainly had its origins in a particular tribe. But he has complete freedom to create family ties, friendship, neighborhood or fellowship with any member of any other tribe.
We train, we, the Libyans, a single tribe, the tribe of Libyans free, fighting against oppression and the evil spirit of division.
It is the dictator, trying to play the Libyan tribes against each other, dividing the country and rule. There is truth in this myth, it has fed an ancestral opposition today to a rift between tribes of Fezzan, of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.
Libya tomorrow, once the dictator gone, will be a united Libya, including the capital Tripoli and will be where we are finally free to form a civil society according to our wishes.
We take this message, told a French philosopher, to thank France and through France, Europe: it is they who have prevented the bloodshed that we had promised Gaddafi, it is thanks to them and with them that we build Libya free, and one tomorrow.
Evidence of the ferocity of the fighting in Libya’s western mountains was clear Monday at the Nalut central hospital. One young rebel lay dead under a shroud; nobody yet knew his name. Some were too badly injured to talk. One said a battle that day – in which loyalist troops were forced to retreat six miles with heavy losses – was a “big victory.”
“It is the heart that is fighting,” said the fighter as he lay in a hospital bed. He refused to be pictured wearing an oxygen mask “because they will say Qaddafi is winning.”
Few journalists have so far crossed into these western mountains, but the picture now emerging is that of a heavily outgunned militia – perhaps better organized than the rag-tag rebels in the east – that has leveraged local knowledge, international support, and deep-seated anger at Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi into unlikely victories. (Christian Science Monitor)
Moammar Gadhafi has suffered military setbacks in recent days in western Libya, a sign that his grip may be slipping in the very region he needs to cling to power.
His loyalists were driven out of the center of the city of Misrata, a key rebel stronghold in Gadhafi-controlled territory. A NATO airstrike turned parts of his Tripoli headquarters into smoldering rubble. And rebel fighters seized a border crossing, breaking open a supply line to besieged rebel towns in a remote western mountain area.
Front lines have shifted repeatedly in two months of fighting, and the poorly trained, ill-equipped rebels have given no evidence that they could defeat Gadhafi on the battlefield. The Libyan leader has deep pockets, including several billion dollars in gold reserves, that could keep him afloat for months. And his forces continue to bombard Misrata from afar, unleashing a fierce barrage Tuesday on the port – the city’s only lifeline to the world. (AP)
The Western bombing campaign in Libya is now in its sixth week but despite a series of eye-catching NATO initiatives there is little sign of a decisive military shift that will bring a quick end to the war.
And there are few signs either of significant divisions within Muammar Gaddafi’s government that would hasten a political solution to the conflict.
NATO, which took over the air campaign from a coalition led by France, Britain and the United States a month ago, can point to some successes in protecting civilian populations in eastern Libya from attack including in Benghazi and Ajdabiyah.
But the siege of Misrata continues and the commander of the NATO operation, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, conceded on Tuesday that the alliance had yet to remove the threat posed to civilians by Gaddafi’s forces. (Reuters)
Aisha el-Qaddafi, the daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, likes to tell her three young children bedtime stories about the afterlife. Now, she says, they are especially appropriate.
“To make them ready,” she said, “because in a time of war you never know when a rocket or a bomb might hit you, and that will be the end.”
In a rare interview at her charitable foundation here, Ms. Qaddafi, 36, a Libyan-trained lawyer who once worked on Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team, offered a glimpse into the fatalistic mind-set of the increasingly isolated family at the core of the battle for Libya, the bloodiest arena in the democratic uprising that is sweeping the region.
She dismissed the rebels as “terrorists” but suggested that some former Qaddafi officials who are now in the opposition’s governing council still “keep in touch with us.” She pleaded for dialogue and talked about democratic reforms. But she dismissed the rebels as unfit for such talks because of their use of violence, hurled personal barbs at President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at one point, appeared to disparage the basic idea of electoral democracy. (New York Times)
The secret document described Prisoner 269, Mohammed el-Gharani, as the very incarnation of a terrorist threat: “an al Qaeda suicide operative” with links to a London cell and ties to senior plotters of international havoc.
But there was more to the story, as there so often is at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. Eight months after that newly disclosed assessment of Mr. Gharani was written by military intelligence officials, a federal judge examined the secret evidence. Saying that it was “plagued with internal inconsistencies” and largely based on the word of two other Guantánamo detainees whose reliability was in question, he ruled in January 2009 that Mr. Gharani should be released. The Obama administration sent him to Chad about five months later.
The secret assessment of Mr. Gharani, like many of the detainee dossiers made available to The New York Times and other news organizations, reflected few doubts about the peril he might have posed. He was rated “high risk,” and military officials recommended that he not be freed. But now, a comparison of the assessment’s conclusions with other information provides a case study in the ambiguities that surround many of the men who have passed through the prison at Guantánamo Bay. (New York Times)
Jason Burke writes: Hidden deep in the leaked Guantánamo files is a small but important trove of information, too historical and too technical to have commanded much space in newspapers keener on hyperventilating about “nuclear al-Qaida hellstorms” this week. Each of the 700-plus files includes a short biography of its subject. These cover his “prior history” and “recruitment and travel” to wherever he became fully engaged with violent extremism and, with brutal if unintended efficiency, demolish three of the most persistent myths about al-Qaida.
The first is that the organisation is composed of men the CIA trained to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan who then turned on their mentors. In fact among the bona fide al-Qaida operatives detained in Guatánamo Bay there are very few who are actually veterans of the fighting in the 1980s, and none of these were involved with groups that received any substantial technical or financial assistance from the US, even indirectly via Pakistan.
The second is that an “international brigade” of Islamist extremists was responsible for the Soviet defeat. The records make it clear that their combat contribution was negligible.
The third myth is that most of those currently waging “jihad” against the Crusader-Zionist alliance or the “hypocrite, apostate regimes” of the Muslim world were actively recruited by al-Qaida and brought, brainwashed, to Afghanistan to fight or be trained. The descriptions of almost all those in Guantánamo genuinely associated with al-Qaida shows that in fact they spent much time and money overcoming many difficulties to find a way to reach al-Qaida. They were not dumb or vulnerable youths “groomed” to be suicide bombers; they were highly motivated, often educated and intelligent, men. (The Guardian)
An explosion early Wednesday on a gas pipeline in the northern Sinai Peninsula cut supplies of Egyptian natural gas to Israel for the second time this year, according to Israeli and Egyptian officials, in what many here suspected was an act of sabotage by local Bedouin or possibly Palestinians.
The blast came as the authorities in Cairo began to investigate public suspicions of corruption and mismanagement by the former Mubarak government in its gas export deal with Israel. It also prompted renewed calls in Israel for the country to reduce its dependency on outside sources and speed up development of its own newly found gas fields.
“Regional instability is likely to continue in the near term, and we must attain energy independence,” Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister of Israel, said in a statement.
Details of who carried out the attack remained unclear. Egyptian security officials said a package containing TNT caused the blast. There were no immediate reports of casualties and it was not known how long repairs would take. (New York Times)
Rami G. Khouri writes: Syria is now the critical country to watch in the Arab world, after the homegrown regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt, and the imminent changes in Yemen and Libya.
The Syrian regime headed by President Bashar Assad is now seriously challenged by a combination of strong forces within and outside the country. His current policy of using force to quell demonstrators and making minimal reform promises has lost him credibility with many of his own citizens, largely due to his inability to respond to his citizens’ reasonable demands for democratic governance. His downfall is not imminent, but is now a real possibility.
The next few weeks will be decisive for Assad, because in the other Arab revolts the third-to-sixth weeks of street protests were the critical moment that determined whether the regime would collapse or persist. Syria is now in its fourth week. Having lost ground to street demonstrators recently, the Assad-Baathist-dominated secular Arab nationalist state’s response in the weeks ahead will likely determine whether it will collapse in ruins or regroup and live on for more years.
Assad should recognize many troubling signs that add up to a threatening trend. The number and size of demonstrations have grown steadily since late March, making this a nationwide revolt. Protesters’ demands have hardened, as initial calls for political reform and anti-corruption measures now make way for open calls for the overthrow of the regime and the trial of the ruling elite. Some portraits and statues of the current and former president are being destroyed, and government buildings attacked. More protesters openly call for the security services to be curbed – an unprecedented and important sign of the widespread popular loss of fear of security agencies that always bodes ill for such centralized systems of power.
Syrian security forces have arrested at least 500 pro-democracy activists, a rights group said, as the government continues a violent crackdown on anti-government protests across the country.
The arrests followed the deployment of Syrian troops backed by tanks and heavy armour on the streets of two southern towns, the Syrian rights organisation Sawasiah said on Tuesday.
The group said it had received reports that at least 20 people were killed in the city of Deraa in the aftermath of the raid by troops loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Monday. But communications have been cut in the city, making it difficult to confirm the information. (Al Jazeera)
European governments urged Syria on Tuesday to end violence against demonstrators after President Bashar al-Assad sent tanks to crush opposition in the city of Deraa where an uprising against his rule first erupted.
“We send a strong call to Damascus authorities to stop the violent repression of what are peaceful demonstrations,” Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said at a joint news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Rome.
International criticism of Assad’s crackdown, now in its sixth week, was initially muted but escalated after the death of 100 protesters on Friday and Assad’s decision to storm Deraa, which echoed his father’s 1982 suppression of Islamists in Hama. (Reuters)
NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.
White House officials said President Obama had been briefed on the more energetic bombing campaign, which included a strike early on Monday on Colonel Qaddafi’s residential compound in the heart of Tripoli, the capital.
United States officials said the effort was not intended to kill the Libyan leader, but to bring the war to his doorstep, raising the price of his efforts to continue to hold on to power. “We want to make sure he knows there is a war going on, and it’s not just in Misurata,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity in discussing military planning.
The NATO campaign, some officials said, arose in part from an analysis of Colonel Qaddafi’s reaction to the bombing of Tripoli that was ordered by President Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago. Alliance officials concluded that the best hope of dislodging the Libyan leader and forcing him to flee was to cut off his ability to command his most loyal troops. (New York Times)
Refugees fleeing Libya’s Western Mountains told of heavy bombardment by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces as they try to dislodge rebels in remote Berber towns.
The capture of the Dehiba-Wazin crossing on the Tunisian border by rebels last week has let refugees flee in cars or on foot along rocky paths, swelling the numbers of Libyans sheltering in southern Tunisia to an estimated 30,000 people.
While the world’s attention has been on the bloody siege of the western rebel stronghold of Misrata and battles further east, fighting is intensifying in the region known as the Western Mountains.
“Our town is under constant bombardment by Gaddafi’s troops. They are using all means. Everyone is fleeing,” said one refugee, Imad, bringing his family from Kalaa in the heart of the mountains. (Reuters)
Egypt ex-minister put on trial for shootings
Habib al-Adly, Egypt’s ex-interior minister, has gone on trial in Cairo for the second time.
He is accused of having ordered the shooting of demonstrators during protests that toppled the former regime.
Adly has been charged along with six former aides, the state news agency reported on Tuesday. His case has been adjourned until late May.
He is also being held responsible for insecurity that prevailed after police disappeared from the streets of Cairo in the early days of the protests.
According to an official toll, 846 people were killed and several thousand wounded during 18 days of massive nationwide street protests that forced president Hosni Mubarak to quit on February 11. (Al Jazeera)
Yemen’s opposition has agreed to take part in a transitional government under a Gulf-negotiated peace plan for embattled leader Ali Abdullah Saleh to step aside in a month in exchange for immunity for him and his family.
A spokesman for an opposition coalition said on Monday that his group had received assurances in order to accept the deal.
“We have given our final accord to the [Gulf] initiative after having received assurances from our brothers and American and European friends on our objections to certain clauses in the plan,” Mohammed Qahtan said.
He added that the Common Front, a Yemeni parliamentary opposition coalition, had notified Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) secretary-general Abdullatif al-Zayani of the decision.
But many pro-democracy protesters, who are not members of the coalition that agreed to the peace talks, appear to be unconvinced by the Gulf-proposed deal and have called for fresh demonstrations, as security forces continued their crackdown. (Al Jazeera)
More than half of all Egyptians would like to see the 1979 peace treaty with Israel annulled, according to results of a poll conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center released Monday.
The poll highlights the deep unpopularity of the three-decade-old treaty, which is central to U.S. policy in the region and was scrupulously adhered to by former President Hosni Mubarak, until his Feb. 11 ouster.
The poll also revealed that most Egyptians are optimistic about where the country is headed following the 18-day popular uprising that brought down the president, and they look forward to greater democracy in their country.
The fall of Egypt’s autocratic leader and the rise of a more democratic system, however, could threaten relations with neighboring Israel.
According to the poll results, only 36 percent of Egyptians are in favor of maintaining the treaty, compared with 54 percent who would like to see it scrapped. (Associated Press)
Stretched close to the limit by combat in Afghanistan and determined not to get into a ground war in Libya, the Pentagon is stepping up the pressure to maintain a huge US troop presence in today’s largely peaceful Iraq. What might seem at first sight strange and unnecessary is in fact fully in line with the ambitions of those who planned the invasion eight years ago. Whether neocons or “realists”, they always wanted to have a long-term political and military footprint in the northern sector of the Middle East, strategically placed between Syria and Iran.
As with so many elements of the geopolitical strategy he inherited from George Bush, Barack Obama has gone along with it. So it should be no surprise that Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chief of staffs, was in Baghdad on Friday urging the government to amend the agreement under which all US forces have to leave Iraq by the end of this year. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, was in the Iraqi capital on a similar mission a few weeks earlier.
Both Sunni and Shia protesters were on the streets last week to denounce the US plans, united by a common sense of nationalism that has not been seen since the first year of the US occupation, before sectarian divisions were artificially inflamed. In Mosul around 5,000 people, including provincial council members and tribal leaders, rallied against any extension of the US presence, while supporters of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr marched in Baghdad. (Jonathan Steele)
Protesters in Saudi Arabia: “Down with the Khalifas, Down with America, Down with Israel, Down with Wahhabism!”
More Syrians are missing, hinting at a wider crackdown
Dozens of residents have disappeared in Syria since Friday, many of them from the restive city of Homs and towns on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, human rights activists said Sunday, amid signs that the Syrian government may widen its crackdown on a five-week uprising that has already killed hundreds.
The disappearances were yet another indication that the government’s decision to lift emergency rule, in place since 1963, might prove more rhetoric than reform. Though the government has proclaimed the law’s repeal on Thursday as a sweeping step, the past few days have proven some of the bloodiest and most repressive since the uprising began.
On Friday, at least 109 people were killed, as security forces fired on protesters in 14 towns and cities. At least 12 more were killed Saturday, when mourners sought to bury the dead from the day before. Another person was reported killed Sunday in Jabla, where security forces fired on residents after the visit of the governor. “We don’t trust this regime anymore,” one protester there said. “We’re sick of it.”
Human Rights Watch called on the United Nations to set up an international inquiry into the deaths and urged the United States and Europe to impose sanctions on officials responsible for the shootings and the detentions of hundreds of protesters. (New York Times)
Iran has been targeted by a new computer virus in a “cyber war” waged by its enemies, according to a senior military official of the Islamic republic.
Gholam Reza Jalali, commander of civil defence, told the semi-official Mehr news agency on Monday that the new virus, called Stars, was being investigated by experts.
“Certain characteristics about the Stars virus have been identified, including that it is compatible with the [targeted] system,” he said.
He said that Iranian experts were still investigating the full scope of the malware’s abilities. (Al Jazeera)
Chris McGreal, who is covering the war in Libya for The Guardian and who as the paper’s South Africa correspondent witnessed the end of the apartheid era, says: “Few revolutions have been more inspiring. After years of reporting uprisings and conflicts driven by ideology, factional interests or warlords soaked in blood — from El Salvador to Somalia, Congo and Liberia – Libya’s uprising seems to me more akin to South Africa’s liberation from apartheid.”
He writes:
The Middle East. A man with a car fashioned into a bomb. He disguises his intent by joining a funeral cortege passing the chosen target. At the last minute the man swings the vehicle away, puts his foot down and detonates the propane canisters packed into the car.
It all sounds horrifyingly familiar. Mahdi Ziu was a suicide bomber in a region too often defined by people blowing up themselves and others. But, as with so much in Libya, the manner of Ziu’s death defies the assumptions made about the uprisings in the Arab world by twitchy American politicians and generals who see Islamic extremism and al-Qaeda lurking in the shadows. Ziu’s attack was an act of pure selflessness, not terror, and it may have saved Libya’s revolution.
In the first days of the popular uprising he crashed his car into the gates of the Katiba, a much-feared military barracks in Benghazi, where Muammar Gaddafi’s forces were making a last stand in a hostile city. At that time the revolutionaries had few weapons, mostly stones and “fish bombs” — TNT explosive with a fuse that is more usually dropped in the sea off Benghazi to catch fish. The soldiers had heavy machine guns and the revolutionaries, often daring young men letting loose their anger at the regime for the first time, were dying in their dozens as they tried to storm the Katiba.
Then Ziu arrived, blew the main gates off the barracks and sent the soldiers scurrying to seek shelter inside. Within hours the Katiba had fallen.
Ziu was not classic suicide-bomber material. He was a podgy, balding 48-year-old executive with the state oil company, married with daughters at home. There was no martyrdom video of the kind favoured by Hamas. He did not even tell his family his plan, although they had seen a change in him over the three days since the revolution began.
“He said everyone should fight for the revolution: ‘We need Jihad,'” says Ziu’s 20-year-old daughter, Zuhur, clearly torn between pride at her father’s martyrdom and his loss. “He wasn’t an extreme man. He didn’t like politics. But he was ready to do something. We didn’t know it would be that.”
Ziu may have been unusual as a suicide bomber, but he was representative of a revolution driven by dentists and accountants, lorry drivers and academics, the better off and the very poor, the devout and secular. Men such as Abdullah Fasi, an engineering student who had just graduated and was in a hurry to get out of a country he regarded as devoid of all hope until he found himself outside the Katiba stoning Gaddafi’s soldiers. And Shams Din Fadelala, a gardener in the city’s public parks who supported the Libyan leader up to the day government soldiers started killing people on the streets of Benghazi. And Mohammed Darrat, who spent 18 years in Gaddafi’s prisons and every moment out of them believing that one day the people would rise up. [Continue reading…]
From Washington’s vantage, every Friday is becoming Black Friday in the Middle East. Muslim prayers turn to protests that keep building toward full-scale uprisings faster than anyone had predicted, and with potentially cataclysmic consequences nobody dares imagine. This Friday, the shock came in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad runs one of the Middle East’s most repressive regimes. Across the country, protesters have grown ever more emboldened in recent weeks, and on Friday they poured into the streets by the tens of thousands to face the deadly fusillades of Assad’s security forces. More than 70 died. What did the White House have to say? From Air Force One: “We call on all sides to cease and desist from the use of violence.”
Surely President Obama can do better than that. Or perhaps not. The drama—the tragedy—increasingly apparent at the White House is of a brilliant intellect who is nonetheless confounded by events, a strategist whose strategies are thwarted and who is left with almost no strategy at all, a persuasive politician and diplomat who gets others to crawl out on limbs, has them take big risks to break through to a new future, and then turns around and walks away from them when the political winds in the United States threaten to shift. It’s not enough to say the Cabinet is divided about what to do. Maybe the simplest and in many ways the most disturbing explanation for all the flailing is offered by veteran journalist and diplomat Leslie H. Gelb: “There is one man in this administration who debates himself.” President Obama.
These patterns of behavior and their consequences have been on horrifying display in the blood-drenched streets of Misrata, Libya, where the population has begged for more support from NATO and the United States. But they did not begin with Libya, or with the surprise uprising in Tunisia in January or the stunning fall of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in February. They were evident from Year 1 of the Obama presidency in his excruciating deliberations over the Afghan surge, in the hand extended ineffectually to Iran, and the lines drawn in the sand, then rubbed out and moved back, and further back, in the dismal, failed efforts to build a Palestinian peace process. But in Libya the crisis of American tentativeness has grown worse almost by the day. Muammar Gaddafi holds on, despite Obama’s demand for him to leave, and the civilians that the Americans, their allies, and the United Nations vowed to protect are being slaughtered.
Heavy fighting has raged anew in Misurata, leaving at least 25 people killed and at least 71 others critically injured as forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi gave up more ground inside Libya’s third-largest city.
Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said early on Sunday the army had suspended operations against rebels in Misurata, but not left the city, to enable local tribes to find a peaceful solution.
“The armed forces have not withdrawn from Misurata. They have simply suspended their operations,” Kaim told a news conference in the capital.
If the rebels don’t surrender in the next two days, armed tribesmen will fight them in place of the army, he said. (Al Jazeera)
Moammar Kadafi’s forces came by the thousands with tanks, armored vehicles and rocket launchers to quell an uprising in the forbidding Western Mountains region of Libya.
They left Zintan last month in a rout, rebels and Western journalists say, running through the woods as residents of the rebellious city pursued them using weapons and equipment seized from troops. It was a decisive battle that exposed the far western flank of Kadafi’s security forces.
“What happened here was a beautiful thing,” Milad Lameen, a 59-year-old former Libyan Airlines official and businessman who now serves as a political leader in Zintan, said in an interview conducted over Skype. “The equation was absolutely against us. But his troops and his mercenaries did not have a winning cause. We have a good cause.”
While international attention has been focused on the rebel-controlled stronghold of Benghazi in eastern Libya and the besieged coastal city of Misurata, tens of thousands of Libyans have taken control of a mountainous region stretching about 100 miles from the Tunisian border toward the capital, Tripoli. The provisional government in the far west is in touch with the rebels in Benghazi but not under their authority. (Los Angeles Times)
The international drive to freeze the Libyan regime’s foreign assets is running into stiff resistance in many parts of the world, allowing Moammar Kadafi to dig into a vast hoard of cash that has helped him cling to power as he battles rebel forces.
Although the United States and the European Union have blocked access to more than $60 billion in Libya’s overseas bank accounts and investments, other nations have done little or nothing to freeze tens of billions more that Kadafi and his family spread around the globe over the last decade, according to U.S., European and U.N. officials involved in the search for Libyan assets.
Kadafi has moved billions of dollars back to Tripoli since the rebellion began in mid-February, the officials said. The totals are not clear, in part because investigators believe the Libyan ruler made significant investments in companies and financial institutions that shield his identity.
Kadafi’s ability to skirt sanctions has undermined the Obama administration’s attempts to force his ouster after four decades in power. And his access to ready cash has hampered efforts to persuade his top aides and military commanders to defect as the conflict drags on, officials acknowledged. (Los Angeles Times)
Syrian mourners ‘cut down like weeds’
Al Jazeera’s Cal Perry writes: Every other journalist is trying to get into Syria, but on Saturday I was trying to get out. The government had made it perfectly clear: My visa was expiring and unless I left on April 23, I would “face the full force of the law”.
I had agreed the night before with my cameraman, Ben Mitchell, over a drink that neither of us wanted to discover what “full force of the law” meant. So the debate was really whether I should fly out from Damascus or drive to Amman, Jordan, and fly from there.
The decision was made that he would fly out from Damascus, the Syrian capital, with the gear and I would drive to Amman. I had left my second passport there with a friend. One for Arab countries and the other for Israel. Welcome to 21st century diplomatic relations.
I decided to wait until after noon prayers before setting out south to the border. If the roads were going to be blocked with various pieces of burning detritus, as they had the day before, I wanted to know first. It’s about 125km from Damascus to the Jordanian border – a drive that should only take an hour or so, especially with the way Syrian drivers tend to step on the gas.
I was in a really bad mood on this particular morning as I was by default being expelled from the country. I said very little to the driver as we set out, which is unusual for me. I’ve been grilled in the old school style of journalism: I can still hear the voice of one of my mentors saying “eyes and ears Mr Perry … eyes and ears”.
The only two questions I asked my driver as we left Damascus were his name, and where he was from. “Abdel … from Daraa,” he told me.
“Beautiful city,” I responded.
Truth was: I didn’t know if it was beautiful or not. It was less than four weeks ago when I tried to access the city (which lies right against the Jordanian border in the South) and was turned back by the army. It was my first week in Syria when we tried to cover the initial protests in Daraa. I remember coming across that army checkpoint and two machine-gun positions had been “pre-sighted”.
On the bloodiest day of Syria’s uprising, Rami Nakhle’s fingers drifted over the keyboard in a room silent but for the news bulletins of Al Jazeera, yet filled with the commotion on his computer screen.
As the events unfolded Friday, user names flashed and faded. Twitter flickered with agitprop and trash talk. And Facebook glided past Gmail and Skype as Mr. Nakhle joined a coterie of exiled Syrians fomenting, reporting and, most remarkably, shaping the greatest challenge to four decades of the Assad family’s rule in Syria.
“Can you hear it?” Mr. Nakhle cried, showing a video of chants for the government’s fall. “This is Syria, man! Unbelievable.”
Unlike the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia and even Libya, which were televised to the world, Syria’s revolt is distinguished by the power of a self-styled vanguard abroad to ferry out images and news that are anarchic and illuminating, if incomplete.
For weeks now, the small number of activists, spanning the Middle East, Europe and the United States, have coordinated across almost every time zone and managed to smuggle hundreds of satellite and mobile phones, modems, laptops and cameras into Syria. There, compatriots elude surveillance with e-mailed software and upload videos on dial-up connections.
Their work has ensured what was once impossible.
In 1982, Syria’s government managed to hide, for a time, its massacre of at least 10,000 people in Hama in a brutal crackdown of an Islamist revolt. But Saturday, the world could witness, in almost real time, the chants of anger and cries for the fallen as security forces fired on the funerals for Friday’s dead. (New York Times)
Syrian security forces detained dozens of opposition activists and others in raids Sunday launched less than a week after President Bashar Assad’s regime abolished emergency laws used for decades to crush dissent, a human rights activist said.
In the coastal town of Jableh, meanwhile, witnesses said that army troops and police opened fire from rooftop positions even though no protest was in progress, killing one person and wounding several others. The reports said that angry residents later blocked the main highway linking the cities of Tartous and Latakia to protest the attack.
The police sweeps, which began late Saturday, reinforce opposition claims that the repeal of the nearly 50-year-old state of emergency codes offers no protection against blitz-style detentions by Assad’s forces. (Associated Press)
When Syria’s president visited Iran late last year, he received a heroes’ medal and spoke about unbreakable bonds in a ceremony broadcast on national television.
Now, a nervous leadership in Iran has imposed a media blackout on Bashar Assad’s struggle against a swelling Syrian uprising and Tehran faces the unsettling prospect of losing its most stalwart ally in the region.
The Islamic Republic managed to choke off its homegrown “Green Revolution” after the disputed June 2009 presidential election. But now it is being dragged into the uprisings sweeping across the Middle East and stirring unrest in Syria, and unfriendly neighbor Bahrain. (Associated Press)
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Saturday that he remained ready to intervene in the country’s political affairs if the nation’s interests were being “neglected,” continuing a rare public flexing of his power days after a disagreement with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flared into the open.
In a speech to supporters in Fars Province that was broadcast live on state television, he praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s administration. But he said that the country’s religious leadership would remain the ultimate authority. “While the leadership is alive, it will never allow deviation in the movement of the Iranian nation toward its goals,” he said.
The statement came after a week of public tension between the president and Mr. Khamenei over what was seen as an effort by Mr. Ahmadinejad to extend control over the politically sensitive Intelligence Ministry. (New York Times)
Egypt on Saturday ordered former energy minister Sameh Fahmy and six other officials to stand trial on charges related to a natural gas deal with Israel, the public prosecutor said.
The decision is part of a crackdown on graft during the 30-year rule of deposed President Hosni Mubarak by the government appointed by the military generals who now rule Egypt.
A statement from the prosecutor said the officials, who were ordered detained earlier this week, would be tried at a criminal court in Cairo at a date to be decided later.
It said they were charged with “committing the crimes of harming the country’s interests, squandering public funds and enabling others to make financial profits through selling and exporting Egyptian gas to the state of Israel at a low price below international market rates at the time of the contract.”
The statement said the deal in question caused Egypt losses worth more than $714 million and enabled a local businessman, also indicted in the same case but at large, to make financial profits.
Israel gets 40 percent of its natural gas from Egypt under an arrangement put in place after a 1979 peace deal.
Opposition groups have long complained gas was being sold at preferential prices and East Mediterranean Gas (EMG), the company which supplies it, violated bureaucratic regulations. (Reuters)
Syrian security forces fired their weapons into crowds of mourners in at least three towns on Saturday as tens of thousands of people buried protesters who were killed a day earlier in the worst bloodshed since the uprising began last month. Human rights activists and witnesses said at least 11 people were killed on Saturday.
The death toll from the protests on Friday, one of the bloodiest days in the so-called Arab Spring, had risen by Saturday to 109 people, a number that activists said was likely to rise as more bodies were returned to their families. Another group said 114 people had been killed.
The bloodshed on Saturday followed a pattern seen frequently in the tumult that has swept the Arab world. Funerals have often turned to demonstrations, where more have been killed by security forces bent on crushing dissent against authoritarian leaders. While Saturday’s death toll paled in comparison with the number killed on Friday, it suggested that the country might be entering a prolonged period of turmoil as protesters continue to press the greatest challenge to the Assad family’s four decades of rule.
President Bashar al-Assad’s government has struggled to cope with the unrest, offering concessions that would have been startling at one time, while using violence against those who persist in demonstrations. Though the revolt has drawn large numbers into the streets since it started on March 15, it has yet to achieve the critical mass of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. However, organizers say they believe the bloodshed may draw more people into the uprising’s fold.
In a possible sign of cracks in the government’s facade, two members of Syria’s largely powerless Parliament resigned on Saturday. The two, Khalil al-Rifai and Nasser al-Hariri, both independent lawmakers from Dara’a, where the uprising started, told Al Jazeera that they were resigning to protest the killing of demonstrators. (New York Times)
The first person to file an application under Syria’s new law “permitting” demonstrations – Fadel al-Faisal from Hassakeh in the north-east of the country – ended up being detained for several hours by the authorities, the Guardian reports.
That, basically, tells us everything we need to know about President Assad’s so-called reforms. The regime hasn’t changed its attitude, and it isn’t going to change. Though the law – at least in theory – now allows Syrians to protest, complying with the requirements is extremely difficult and its overall effect is to criminalise any demonstrations that the authorities disapprove of. (Brian Whitaker)
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces have withdrawn from most of the besieged city of Misurata, rebel spokesmen and independent observers said Saturday, but they continued to fire artillery barrages into the heart of the city, with heavy loss of life.
Rebel leaders were puzzling over whether the move was an abrupt change in their fortunes, a subterfuge by pro-Qaddafi forces who might return in plainclothes under the guise of a tribal conflict, or a redeployment to new fronts in the mountains along the western border with Tunisia.
Rebels in Misurata, speaking over Internet phone, said that Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers had disappeared from all but two buildings, where they were besieged while rebels demanded their surrender. Captured Libyan soldiers told Reuters that they had been ordered to withdraw, which would correspond to a plan the government announced Friday to turn the fighting there over to tribal supporters.
NATO announced that the first airstrike by a Predator drone had taken place in the Misurata area, and rebels said it destroyed government tanks stationed at the city’s vegetable market, which had been heavily contested just the day before.
Rebels were encouraged by Saturday’s developments and celebrations broke out in the provisional rebel capital of Benghazi, in the east, but there were no celebrations in Misurata, where hundreds have been killed in two months of violence. On Saturday, doctors said 24 had died and 70 were wounded, most of them civilians caught in artillery barrages.
Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, announced Friday night that the Libyan army would turn the battle for Misurata over to area tribes, some of which may have historical rivalries with the people of the city. One rebel said they already feared that the Qaddafi government was trying to inflame tribal animosities by telling residents of the nearby cities of Zliten and Bani Walid that their relatives had been killed by Misurata residents. (New York Times)
On February 17, Ahmed el-Mahdawi’s duty engineer called him from the Libyana mobile phone company’s switch room in Benghazi’s Fuihat neighbourhood. Military and internal security forces had begun brutally repressing anti-government protesters in Libya’s second-largest city, and gunfire rang out through the darkened streets.
“Ahmed, it’s dangerous, I’m going home,” the man said.
Ahmed told him to go. The man closed down the office, locked the door and left. The team would return five days later. In the meantime, protesters overthrew the city’s military garrison and ousted forces loyal to longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Hundreds of civilians were killed and injured.
As the violence raged, Gaddafi’s regime severed eastern Libya’s communication with the outside world, blocking internet access and international phone calls. News of the brutal crackdown leaked out through rare satellite Internet connections that allowed residents to make intermittent Skype calls, MSN chats, and sometimes upload mobile phone videos. Occasionally, an international call connected to a voice in Benghazi.
Through luck and ingenuity, Libyana, one of the country’s two main mobile phone providers, managed to stay online, providing free service throughout the uprising and allowing members of the opposition movement to communicate with one other.
Now, more than two months after the revolt began, and with eastern cities poised to soon regain internet access and international calls, Mahdawi and other local engineers explained how they kept the lines open and why they are upset that a Libyan-American executive living in the United Arab Emirates seems to have gotten all the credit. (Al Jazeera)
Everyone in opposition-held territory seems to have a story about how much nicer people are to one another now that Gaddafi is gone. “Before the revolution, you’d go out into the street and find a bunch of angry people,” says Shawg, the anesthesiologist. “They’d be taking it out on each other — you’d find a lot of fights on the street, people saying bad stuff to each other, or even [getting angry at one another while] driving. Sometimes you’d find people just fighting for the sake of fighting. Everyone was in a bad mood, all the time.”
“But after the revolution,” she continues, “we discovered that all the anger, all the negative feelings … were toward Muammar [Gaddafi] and his system. We discovered that we don’t have problems with each other — we only have a problem with the system, not with our neighbor or the guy in the market.”
The goodwill extended to taking pride in the city. Mardiya El-Fakhery, a 28-year–old anesthesiologist, recalls that before the revolution, “you’d never see Libyan boys cleaning up the street and taking ownership [of their city]. People had the attitude that [Benghazi] is already [dirty], so just let it go.” But as soon as the revolution began, she saw young boys and old men taking to the streets with brooms. The opposition government has sought to build on this goodwill around the territory their control, posting billboards throughout eastern Libya exhorting citizens to keep their cities clean. (Ryan Calder)
Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed on Saturday to leave power after 32 years of autocratic rule, according to a top Yemeni official, but only if the opposition agrees to a list of conditions, including that he and his family be granted immunity.
Opposition leaders said they were prepared to accept most of the terms of the deal, which both they and a Yemeni official said would establish a coalition government with members of the opposition and ruling party. The president would turn over authority to the current vice president 30 days after a formal agreement was signed.
But the opposition said it could not guarantee at least one of Mr. Saleh’s demands — that demonstrations be halted — and opposition members said they would quickly present a counteroffer to the president. The opposition said it had little influence with the tens of thousands of mainly young protesters who have been demanding Mr. Saleh’s departure.
Even if the opposition and the government agree to a deal, it is unclear if the demonstrators will go along, especially after pro-government snipers brutally crushed a protest on March 18, killing 52.
Mr. Saleh is a wily political survivor, and it was unclear whether his offer was a real attempt to calm the political turmoil and growing demonstrations that have rocked his country for weeks or a way to shift blame for a stalemate to the opposition. His offer follows days of unrelenting pressure — from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring states fearful of more instability in the region — for him to step aside. (New York Times)
In a small room in Benghazi some young men and women are putting out a new opposition newspaper. “The role of the female in Libya,” reads one headline. “She is the Muslim, the mother, the soldier, the protester, the journalist, the volunteer, the citizen”, it adds.
Arab women can claim to have been all these things and more during the three months of tumult that have shaken the region. Some of the most striking images of this season of revolt have been of women: black-robed and angry, a sea of female faces in the capitals of north Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the Syrian hinterland, marching for regime change, an end to repression, the release of loved ones. Or else delivering speeches to the crowds, treating the injured, feeding the sit-ins of Cairo and Manama and the makeshift army of eastern Libya.
But as revolt turns into hiatus and stalemate from Yemen to Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Bahrain and Syria, one thing is clear: for all their organising, marching, rabble-rousing, blogging, hunger-striking, and, yes, dying, Arab women are barely one small step forwards on the road to greater equality with their menfolk. Women may have sustained the Arab spring, but it remains to be seen if the Arab spring will sustain women. (The Guardian)
The White House has approved the use of missile-armed Predator drones to help Nato target Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya.
Coalition commanders have been privately urging the Americans to provide the specialist unmanned aircraft, which have become a favoured – if controversial – weapon in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Their ability to hone in on targets using powerful night-vision cameras is considered to be one way of helping rebels in the besieged city of Misrata, where a humanitarian crisis has unfolded in the last week.
The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said Barack Obama had approved the use of the Predators which are armed with Hellfire missiles, signalling a marked growth in the US contribution to the Nato effort.
Gates told a Pentagon news conference that the Predator was an example of the unique US military capabilities that the president is willing to contribute while other countries enforce a no-fly zone. (The Guardian)
Libyan rebels overran forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at the international border crossing near this tiny village Thursday, wresting control of a strategic supply route.
The crossing into a mountainous region has been under government siege since Libya’s uprising began two months ago.
The early morning gunfight is the first major victory on Libya’s western front for the ragtag alliance of rebel fighters seeking to topple Gaddafi and end his four decades of authoritarian rule. (GlobalPost)
I think there is actually some benefit to the war not ending quickly with a swift Eastern conquest of the West with NATO backing. That may be what happens in the end. But in my view it would be preferable for the elites in Tripoli to gradually be pushed back and surrounded and put under such pressure that they turn on Qaddafi and declare for Free Libya. That way you don’t have a permanent group of losers, like the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, who would tend to make trouble in the medium term if not the long term.
The fight may last a few more weeks and even months, but there is not much doubt about the outcome. In the end, the Qaddafis are toast, as long as the UN allies remain committed to protecting the Libyan population from them. (Informed Comment)
“I had to change my practice from oncology surgery to war surgery,” said [Dr. Mohammed al-Fagieh, chief surgeon at Hilal Hospital in Misrata] the Edinburgh, Scotland-educated doctor with a neatly trimmed beard beneath his mask.
“We care for all types on injuries that we receive from homes, from the street, from the site of a fire,” he said. “We receive all types of injuries — destruction of limbs, upper limbs, lower limbs, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvis — everywhere. There’s no special site for any injury.”
There’s a temporary feel to the 45-bed facility, with hallways filled with boxes of medical supplies stacked five feet high. Patients are separated by sheets, with lots of people walking in and out.
Three bodies were brought in Wednesday, along with 12 severe wounds and about 25 others with lesser injuries.
On a normal day, the clinic gets 10-20 critical cases and 25-30 lighter injuries, he said. Often, they have to set up extra beds to expand it to 60.
Of seven patients in one room, three were civilians and four were fighters against Gadhafi’s troops.
One old man was fleeing his house amid shelling when he fell and broke his hip.
In the next bed, Mohammed Braiks, 27, was back for the second time. About a month ago, he was fighting with a group near Tripoli Street, the scene of the fiercest battles, when he came under machine gun fire. A close friend next to him was shot and killed. Braiks got two bullets in his left shin, one in his back and one in his hip. He spent three days in hospital.
“I got out and went back to the front,” he said.
On Tuesday, a sniper shot him in the wrist. He was hoping to have the bullet removed soon so he could rejoin the fight.
“I’ll go back to exactly where I was,” he said. (Associated Press)
This Greek passenger ferry [The Ionian Spirit] streamed toward the besieged Libyan port city of Misrata on Wednesday, its mission to deliver 500 tons of food and medical supplies and spirit away 1,000 people fleeing weeks of heavy shelling by forces loyal to ruler Moammar Gadhafi.
The ferry is part of a flotilla of ships, fishing trawlers and tug boats that have become the lifeline for the last significant rebel-held city in western Libya as it tries to hold out against a crippling siege that has dragged on for more than 50 days, devastating the city of 300,000.
They brave sailing into a port that is under frequent shelling — some of the smaller vessels have been fired on with rockets or chased by government warships.
The flotilla, motoring back and forth across Libya’s Gulf of Sirte between Misrata and the rebel capital Benghazi in the east, not only keeps residents alive. It also keeps them fighting, bringing weapons and ammunition to Misrata’s defenders. (Associated Press)
Muammar Gaddafi has remained in power for 42 years through tactful and respectful negotiation with those who disagree with him. He is adept at finding middle ground between opposing views and is known for encouraging reconciliation wherever it is possible. All those who have dealt with Gaddafi can testify that he is a reasonable, consistent, trustworthy humanitarian statesman whose word is his bond.
Are you cringing yet? Good. Then you’ll know exactly how to receive the statement by Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, Gaddafi’s foreign minister, that if the UN cancels the no-fly zone, and that if diplomatic and material support is withdrawn from the Libyan interim national council in Benghazi, Gaddafi and his hostage government will begin negotiations with the council that would lead to free elections within six months.
Obeidi has declared that discussions would include the issue of “whether the Leader [Gaddafi] should stay and in what role, and whether he should retire”. This must have come as a shock to Gaddafi himself, who maintains that he has no position of authority from which to step down.
These false promises are purely for foreign consumption and cannot be given any credence. They are intended to buy time and place domestic political pressure on the Americans, British, French, Italians and other governments to soften their stance on the Gaddafi family, who they’ve all said must leave power in accordance with the demands of the Libyan people. (Alaa al-Ameri)
Security forces in Syria fired tear gas and live ammunition Friday to disperse crowds of demonstrators who took to the streets of Damascus and other cities after the noon prayers that have been a focus of uprisings across the Arab world, according to protesters, witnesses and accounts posted on social networking sites.
The authorities had deployed police officers, soldiers and military vehicles in two of the country’s three largest cities ahead of a call for nationwide protests testing the popular reception of reforms decreed by President Bashar al-Assad as well as the momentum that organizers have sought to bring to the five-week uprising.
In the restive city of Homs, Syria’s third largest, where major protests erupted earlier in the week, activists said large numbers of security forces and plainclothes officers from the secret police flooded the city, putting up checkpoints and preventing all but a few dozen protesters from gathering.
Abu Kamel al-Dimashki, an activist in Homs reached by Skype, said that 16 of those who were protesting went missing. His account could not be confirmed independently.
“I tried to go there, but I couldn’t,” Mr. Dhimashki said. “The secret police is all over Homs. The sheik at the mosque told us after the prayers not to protest today because we would have been killed for sure.”
Several thousand protesters demonstrated in Damascus, Baniyas, Qamishli, Hama Amouda and other places, chanting “freedom, freedom and “the people want to topple the regime.” At least three people were wounded when the police opened fire on protesters in Douma, a town on the outskirts of Damascus, activists said.
Mohamad Abdel Rahman, a witness from Homs speaking on Al Jazeera, said at least one person was shot dead after he left a mosque in the Khalidiyeh neighborhood.
Earlier, residents described a mobilization in the capital, Damascus, and, in more pronounced fashion, in Homs, where a government crackdown this week dispersed one of the largest gatherings since demonstrations began last month. For days, organizers had looked to Friday as a potential show of strength for a movement that has yet to build the critical mass reached in Egypt and Tunisia. (New York Times)
An American human rights group said on Friday that the number of physicians who have gone missing in Bahrain has risen to more than 30, the latest indication that the country’s health care system being drawn into Bahrain’s confrontation with pro-democracy campaigners.
Physicians for Human Rights, with offices in Cambridge, Mass., and Washington, cited reports from Bahrain as saying that “doctors are disappearing as part of a systematic attack on medical staff. Many physicians are missing following interrogations by unknown security forces at Salmaniya Medical Complex” in Bahrain’s capital, Manama.
In a Web posting, the group published a list of more than 30 medical personnel, from ambulance drivers to consultants and surgeons, who it said had been held at secret locations.
“Although families have tried to contact administration officials, the administration denies any knowledge of their whereabouts,” the Web posting said. “According to family members, the physicians are being held incommunicado in unknown locations.”
There was no immediate response to the allegation from authorities in Bahrain, which enlisted military help from more than 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to put down a pro-democracy uprising last month and sent army and security forces to crush dissent. (New York Times)
Misurata, the only rebel-held city in western Libya, has asked that NATO troops be sent to fight alongside the rebels holding off Libyan forces, a local government representative said Tuesday.
“If they don’t come, we will die,” Nouri Abdul Ati, a member of the 17-member ruling body in Misurata, told reporters as heavy machine gun fire, rockets and mortar rounds exploded in the near distance. “Grad rockets don’t leave anybody alive,” he said, referring to the truck-mounted rockets used by the Libyan military.
The local council in this besieged city sent its plea via letter a week ago to the Transitional National Council, the national opposition government in Benghazi in eastern Libya. The letter urged that NATO or United Nations troops be asked to defend Misurata against Moammar Kadafi’s forces, Ati said. The national council has yet to reply.
“We need a force from NATO or the U.N. on the ground now,” Ati said at a house set amid date palms, as the night’s regular roar of heavy shelling commenced. “We did not accept any foreign soldiers on our land, but that was before we faced the crimes of Kadafi.” (Los Angeles Times)
As NATO struggles to break a deepening stalemate in Libya, the British announced on Tuesday that they were sending military advisers to help build up a rebel army that has stumbled against the superior forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The first question the British will face is “Whose army?”
For they will find themselves advising a ragtag rebel force that cannot even agree on who its top officer is, amid squabbling between two generals who both come with unsavory baggage.
The dysfunction was on full display here this week. “I control everybody, the rebels and the regular army forces,” one of the two, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, said in an interview on Monday. “I am the field commander, and Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes is chief of staff. His job is to support us in the field, and my job is to lead the fighting.”
The rebels’ civilian leadership, the Transitional National Council, has insisted, however, that General Younes remains in charge of the military. “This is not true,” an official close to the council said Tuesday when told of General Hifter’s claims. “General Younes is over him, this is for sure, and General Hifter is under him.”
General Hifter made it clear that he viewed General Younes as an officer who was serving in a support or logistical role, and he explicitly blamed him for a string of humiliating retreats by rebels along the seesawing front line between Brega and Ajdabiya, most recently on Sunday, when seven rebels were killed during a counterattack by government forces that turned into a near rout.
“All of what happened there resulted from the command of Abdul Fattah Younes,” he said. “That’s why I came back to take charge, and in the next couple days I will take charge of every unit, not one unit. I am getting ready to lead the forces from now on.”
From the beginning, the NATO military effort has been hampered by the rebels’ disorganization and lack of training, equipment and experience, which have left them unable to capitalize on the damage NATO airstrikes inflicted on Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. The British mission is aimed at addressing those shortcomings, improving the rebels’ organization, communications and logistics. (New York Times)
New tactics used by the Qaddafi forces — mixing with civilian populations, camouflaging weapons and driving pickup trucks instead of military vehicles — have made it hard for NATO pilots to find targets. At the same time, loyalist artillery and tanks have hammered the rebel-held city of Misurata, reportedly with cluster bombs, which have been banned by much of the world, making a mockery of NATO’s central mission of protecting civilians.
But as much as the new Qaddafi tactics, divisions within NATO seem to be harming the strategy, said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Only six of the 28 member countries are participating in the airstrikes, and France and Britain are doing half of them while Denmark, Norway, Belgium and Canada are doing the rest.
Prominent nations like Italy and Spain are hanging back, and others have sent planes only to support the no-fly zone, or are helping to enforce the arms embargo. The Obama administration, which has ruled out deploying American troops in Libya, announced Wednesday that it would authorize as much as $25 million in military surplus supplies, though not weapons, to the Libyan opposition forces.
“You want to send Qaddafi a message of collective will, that there’s no way out, that he’s facing a determined and unified opposition,” Mr. Niblett said. “And he’s seeing a European-led NATO that is not sufficiently cohesive.”
“If I were him, I would look at European disagreements and take heart from them, especially when the opposition appears so weak,” Mr. Niblett said.
Colonel Qaddafi “senses there is a gap between means and ends,” he added. “He can look at divisions among members of NATO and feel he can be part of a political solution, because in the end he may feel there is not sufficient cohesion to follow the strategy through to its end,” which is his ouster. (New York Times)
The French and Italian governments said Wednesday that they would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support the ragtag rebel army in Libya, offering a diplomatic boost for the insurgent leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, as he met with President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.
After the meeting, The Associated Press reported, Mr. Sarkozy pledged to intensify French airstrikes that started in March.
The announcements came as the international community searched for a means to break a bloody battlefield deadlock that has killed hundreds in the contested cities of Misurata and Ajdabiya and left the rebels in tenuous control of a few major coastal cities in their campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
They also coincided with word out of Qatar that Moussa Koussa, the former Libyan foreign minister who defected to Britain last month, was seeking asylum in that Arab emirate. In an interview with Al Arabiya, another Qaddafi minister, Abdulrahman Shalgam, said that Mr. Koussa — who has been freed of the financial sanctions slapped on all Libyan officials but who faces possible prosecution over the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in Scotland — is most likely to remain in Qatar, where he went for a conference last week.
The decision to send military advisers seemed to push the three countries closer toward the limits of the United Nations Security Council resolution in mid-March authorizing NATO airstrikes but specifically “excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” But the promised deployments also seemed a tacit admission that almost five weeks of airstrikes have not been enough to disable Colonel Qaddafi’s troops and prevent his loyalists from threatening rebel forces and civilians.
The French government spokesman, François Baroin, told reporters on Wednesday that the number of military liaison officers would be in single digits and that their mission would be to help “organize the protection of the civilian population.” The British deployment could involve up to 20 advisers. (New York Times)
In 2004, Dave Roberts, a little-known British communist running for the equally obscure Socialist Labour Party, stood as a candidate in the Leicester South by-election. He won 263 votes — just 38 more than the Monster Raving Loony Party’s candidate RU Seerious.
In other circumstances they could have been a group of British package tourists, clad in identical T-shirts, clambering on and off buses with cameras hanging around their necks.
But Libya has no tourists now, let alone of the package variety. And the 13 Britons who toured the west of the country over eight days, had a self-declared mission: to “find facts” about the situation in Gaddafi-controlled Libya to counter what they described as the manipulation and distortion of the western media.
The group, calling itself British Civilians for Peace in Libya, had found each other through word-of-mouth and the internet. They were, they said, academics, lawyers, a doctor, humanitarian campaigners and “independent journalists”, collectively outraged about the attacks on Libyan government forces by “the biggest military force in the world” – Nato.
Roberts fell in love with Gaddafi’s Libya back in 1999 when he was sent their by his SLP boss, Arthur Scargill, to attend an international youth conference in Tripoli.
After visiting the National Soap Factory, Libya’s largest, comrade Roberts was apparently so inspired by what he had seen that he delivered the following speech on behalf of the SLP’s NEC, “which was received by rapturous applause”.
He said: “Brothers and sisters, it is a great privilege to be here with you today on the occasion of your celebration of the great Al Fatah revolution. Here in the Great Socialist Jamahiriya, a free land amongst a free people, I bring you socialist and internationalist greetings from the Socialist Labour Party in Britain.
“Many young people who have been involved in the international camps during the last eight years have seen at first hand and marvelled at the great social and economic, political developments you have achieved throughout your 30 years of revolutionary struggle …
“Those of us fighting for the liberation of our countries from imperialism, and our people from capitalism, pay tribute to the generosity of the Libyan people for the solidarity they have shown to anti-imperialist and progressive movements throughout the world. We hope one day to be able to return to a future celebration of the Al Fatah revolution, and announce that we too have defeated capitalism in our countries and are joining with you in the building of a socialist world. In the meantime we say: Long live the Great Socialist Libyan Peoples Jamahiriya. Long live Muammer Al Gadaffy. Al Fatah forever!”
Meanwhile, here are some passionate performances from Muammar’s local supporters — no translation required:
In the aftermath of Israel’s 2008-2009 intervention into the Gaza Strip, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, led a vigorous campaign to stymie an independent U.N. investigation into possible war crimes, while using the prospect of such a probe as leverage to pressure Israel to participate in a U.S.-backed Middle East peace process, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables provided by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
The documents provide a rare glimpse behind the scenes at the U.N. as American diplomats sought to shield Israel’s military from outside scrutiny of its conduct during Operation Cast Lead. Their release comes as the issue is back on the front pages of Israel’s newspapers, following the surprise recent announcement by Richard Goldstone — an eminent South African jurist who led an investigation commissioned by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council — in a Washington Post op-ed that his team had unfairly accused Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians.
The new documents, though consistent with public U.S. statements at the time opposing a U.N. investigation into Israeli military operations, reveal in extraordinary detail how America wields its power behind closed doors at the United Nations. They also demonstrate how the United States and Israel were granted privileged access to highly sensitive internal U.N. deliberations on an “independent” U.N. board of inquiry into the Gaza war, raising questions about the independence of the process.
In one pointed cable, Rice repeatedly prodded U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to block a recommendation of the board of inquiry to carry out a sweeping inquiry into alleged war crimes by Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants. In another cable, Rice issued a veiled warning to the president of the International Criminal Court, Sang-Hyun Song, that an investigation into alleged Israeli crimes could damage its standing with the United States at a time when the new administration was moving closer to the tribunal. “How the ICC handles issues concerning the Goldstone Report will be perceived by many in the US as a test for the ICC, as this is a very sensitive matter,” she told him, according to a Nov. 3, 2009, cable from the U.S. mission to the United Nations. (Foreign Policy)
[T]he PLO is as much a part of the crumbling Arab order as any of the collapsing regimes around it; and it is now losing the last vestiges of its founding legitimacy as a product of the era of armed struggle and the contemporary national movement forged by Yasser Arafat. Today the PLO can claim no genuine representative status; (its local arm the Ramallah PA) the PA rules by decree and is sustained by a combination of foreign aid, the power of the Israeli military, and Palestinian police action on the ground; and the factions that once were a credible reflection of the Palestinian political will (such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) have faded into ossified insignificance, their power-sharing formula fatally compromised by the absence of Hamas.
The Gaza-West Bank split, the experience of PA rule, the failure to stem the tide of Israeli settlement, and the increasingly strident terms for any final agreement articulated by Israel have all contributed to a new popular Palestinian mood where the goal of statehood has lost most if not all its glitter and resonance. While UN recognition will undoubtedly mark an important stage in the Palestinian struggle, there is a clear and growing realisation that this will neither fulfil Palestinian national aspirations nor address the needs of significant constituencies such as the diaspora and Israel’s Arab citizens – together a majority of the Palestinian people. For those under occupation in the West Bank or besieged in Gaza, moreover, it will have no palpable effect.
What is emerging instead is a slow but sure manifestation of a new transnational movement, centred less on statehood and more on forging a national project that will traverse the existing Palestinian divides – diaspora, occupied territories and Israeli Arab citizens – and bypass the notion of an independent Palestinian state on part of Palestinian soil.
In what may be the beginnings of an unprecedented and fertile exchange of ideas, recent meetings have brought together intellectuals, opinion-formers and policymakers from the different Palestinian constituencies to review the challenges arising from the blocked prospects for negotiations and the surging revolutions changing the map of the Arab world. This has been matched by a renewed spirit of popular activism that is starting to take hold in the occupied territories, spurred and inspired by events elsewhere in the region.
What this approach, still in nascent and tentative form, reflects may be profoundly important for the future of the struggle; a move away from seeking the ever-shifting goalposts of an inevitably constrained and incomplete form of statehood that would come at the expense of equally fundamental rights to a much broader interpretation of self-determination that includes all the divergent Palestinian constituencies, and a much wider and continuing confrontation with the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. (Ahmad Samih Khalidi)
The government in Syria tried to placate protesters with declarations of reform Tuesday while bluntly warning its people to end more than a month of demonstrations, a now-familiar strategy in one of the Arab world’s most repressive countries that has so far failed to blunt the most serious challenge to its 40-year rule.
The mix of concession and coercion came hours after police, army and the other forces of an authoritarian state were marshaled to crush one of the biggest gatherings yet by protesters bent on staging an Egyptian-style sit-in in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city. At least two people died as security forces cleared the square, protesters said, but there were conflicting accounts on casualties.
The warning by the Interior Ministry — forbidding protests “under any banner whatsoever” — suggested that the government was prepared to escalate a crackdown, even as the promised repeal of emergency law, in place since 1963, went far in meeting at least some of the demands of protests that have mirrored uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world and reverberated across a region where Syria’s influence outstretches its relative power. The repeal must still be formally approved by Parliament or the president, but that amounts to a formality.
Since the uprising began, the government has vacillated between compromise and crackdown, a formula that proved fatal for strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt. But the combination Tuesday was most remarkable for how divergent it was. Even as protesters buried those killed in Homs, the reforms ostensibly granted civil liberties, curbed the power of police and abolished draconian courts. The reforms also legalized peaceful protests — coded language for those approved by the government — as the Interior Ministry warned that it would bring to bear the full breadth of the law against any other kind of demonstration.
“The street is in one world and the president and the regime are in another,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian rights group, reached by telephone.
The statements followed another government crackdown on protests, this time in Homs, an industrial city near the Lebanese border.
For days, organizers in Syria have sought to replicate the experience of Tahrir Square in Cairo, where hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered to demand the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule. The square became symbol and instrument of the demonstrations, eventually forcing him to resign in February. Organizers envisioned as their equivalent Abbassiyeen Square, a crucial artery in the capital, Damascus, but were prevented by security forces. Some organizers said they turned instead to Homs, where funerals Monday for 14 demonstrators killed a day earlier drew thousands.
Some protesters said the security forces seemed taken aback by the crowds, which grew through the day. “A sit-in, a sit-in, until the government falls!” some shouted. Mr. Tarif cited witnesses who said protesters served tea and sandwiches as night fell, and organizers said mattresses were carted in so that protesters could serve in shifts.
Security forces made some attempts to disperse the crowds but relented until after midnight. Then, protesters said, a mix of soldiers, security forces and police officers attacked the crowd with tear gas and live ammunition after the crowds had dwindled. Videos posted on Facebook showed scenes of chaos as volleys of gunfire echoed over a square faintly lit by yellow streetlights. Mattresses were strewn across the square, where a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad superimposed on a Syrian flag read, “Yes to living together, no to strife.”
“This is reform? This is reform?” asked a protester in one of the videos. (New York Times)
The regime’s double-edged strategy of cracking down hard on protesters (200 have reportedly died in the last month), while simultaneously promising reform, is not working.
The protesters seem undeterred by memories of the Hama massacre in 1982, which showed just how brutal this regime can be, and each new attack fuels their anger. Monday’s protest in Homs was triggered by the deaths of 17 people in a protest on Sunday – and that protest in turn had been triggered by the death in custody of a prominent tribal figure. Deaths mean funerals, funerals mean protests and protests mean more deaths.
At the same time, the regime’s efforts to blame the demonstrations on foreign conspiracies, armed gangs, sectarian elements, militant Salafists and the like, are self-defeating. Disinformation of that kind might have worked years ago when the state had total control over the media, but today its absurdity is far too obvious.
On the reform front, protesters have every reason to be sceptical of the president’s promises: they have heard it all before and won’t take it seriously unless or until it actually happens. (Brian Whitaker)
The armed men arrived this month, pounded on the door and took Ibrahim’s cousin away. There was not a word of explanation and not a word since about where he has been taken.
“I can’t even ask anyone where my cousin is. It’s too dangerous,” the 33-year-old told two reporters who had briefly slipped away from their government minders, on a chance encounter in the mazelike streets of Tripoli’s walled old town.
“Everyone is scared,” he added, looking furtively to the right and left, wary of government informers. “We can only talk to a few close friends. We can’t trust anyone else.”
Human rights groups say the Libyan government embarked on a systematic and widespread campaign to imprison critics in Tripoli after protests against Moammar Gaddafi’s rule erupted — and were violently put down — in February. Ibrahim’s account, and that of other Tripoli residents, suggests that the campaign is continuing this month, albeit at a slower pace.
“Gaddafi and his security forces are brutally suppressing all opposition in Tripoli, including peaceful protests, with lethal force, arbitrary arrests and forced disappearances,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Given Libya’s record of torture and political killings, we worry deeply about the fate of those taken away.”
The rebel Transitional National Council — the de facto government in eastern Libya — says 20,000 people have been “kidnapped” by the Gaddafi government and are being held in inhumane conditions in several prisons across the capital, as well as in police and army camps and in an old tobacco factory. That figure could not be independently confirmed, but Human Rights Watch said the detentions have been significant and widespread. (Washington Post)
A month ago in Libya, troops loyal to Moammar Kadafi were advancing on opposition-held areas, tens of thousands of civilians feared for their lives, and rebel forces appeared in disarray with little prospect of driving Kadafi from power.
After four weeks and hundreds of airstrikes by the U.S. and its NATO allies, in many ways little has changed.
Kadafi’s tanks and artillery no longer threaten the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi in eastern Libya, and Kadafi’s combat aircraft and helicopter gunships are grounded. But the disorganized rebel forces are still outmatched and outnumbered by Libyan army units, which, along with their leader, show no sign of giving up.
Rather, Kadafi has intensified his counteroffensive in recent days. Human rights groups accused Kadafi’s military of using cluster bombs and truck-mounted Grad rockets to bombard residential areas of Misurata, the only city in western Libya still in rebel hands.
“We rushed into this without a plan,” said David Barno, a retired Army general who once commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. “Now we’re out in the middle, going in circles.” (Los Angeles Times)
Escalating violence has tempered the regional euphoria that followed the youth-led revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. And yet, young people will continue to play an important role in the Arab Spring. This month, The New York Times interviewed more than two dozen of them, from Morocco to the West Bank, to find out how they consider their moment in history and their generation’s prospects for the future.
For those who’ve forgotten what real journalism looks like, Matt Lee provides a welcome reminder
Numbers alone tell much of the story: we are now spending 50% more (even excluding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) than we did on 9/11. We are spending more on the military than we did during the Cold War, when U.S. and NATO troops stared across Germany’s Fulda Gap at a real super-power foe with real tanks and thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at U.S. cities. In fact, the U.S. spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.
And yet we feel less secure. We’ve waged war nonstop for nearly a decade in Afghanistan — at a cost of nearly a half-trillion dollars — against a foe with no army, no navy and no air force. Back home, we are more hunkered down and buttoned up than ever as political figures (and eager defense contractors) have sounded a theme of constant vigilance against terrorists who have successfully struck only once. Partly as a consequence, we are an increasingly muscle-bound nation: we send $1 billion destroyers, with crews of 300 each, to handle five Somali pirates in a fiberglass skiff.
While the U.S.’s military spending has jumped from $1,500 per capita in 1998 to $2,700 in 2008, its NATO allies have been spending $500 per person over the same span. As long as the U.S. is overspending on its defense, it lets its allies skimp on theirs and instead pour the savings into infrastructure, education and health care. So even as U.S. taxpayers fret about their health care costs, their tax dollars are paying for a military that is subsidizing the health care of their European allies. (Time)
A drive down Tripoli Street, Misrata, during Ramadan in August 2010, uploaded to YouTube by HoneyBees1985:
Below is a picture of the same street, taken a few days ago by Telegraph photographer, Geoff Pugh.
Through his slogan, “God, Muammar and Libya only,” Gaddafi wants to portray himself as inseparable from identity and fate of the country he controls. The assault on Misrata suggests Gaddafi believes he can only save his country by destroying it.
A walk down Tripoli Street, video posted at The Telegraph on April 12:
Click on the image below to view a larger version of this map at LibyaFeb17.com.
Ziu was not classic suicide-bomber material. He was a podgy, balding 48-year-old executive with the state oil company, married with daughters at home. There was no martyrdom video of the kind favoured by Hamas. He did not even tell his family his plan, although they had seen a change in him over the three days since the revolution began.
