Category Archives: Lands

Mass migration: What is driving the Balkan exodus?

Der Spiegel reports: When Visar Krasniqi reached Berlin and saw the famous image on Bernauer Strasse — the one of the soldier jumping over barbed wire into the West — he knew he had arrived. He had entered a different world, one that he wanted to become a part of. What he didn’t yet know was that his dream would come to an end 11 months later, on Oct. 5, 2015. By then, he has to leave, as stipulated in the temporary residence permit he received.

Krasniqi is not a war refugee, nor was he persecuted back home. In fact, he has nothing to fear in his native Kosovo. He says that he ran away from something he considers to be even worse than rockets and Kalashnikovs: hopelessness. Before he left, he promised his sick mother in Pristina that he would become an architect, and he promised his fiancée that they would have a good life together. “I’m a nobody where I come from, but I want to be somebody.”
But it is difficult to be somebody in Kosovo, unless you have influence or are part of the mafia, which is often the same thing. Taken together, the wealth of all parliamentarians in Kosovo is such that each of them could be a millionaire. But Krasniqi works seven days a week as a bartender, and earns just €200 ($220) a month.

But a lack of prospects is not a recognized reason for asylum, which is why Krasniqi’s application was initially denied. The 30,000 Kosovars who have applied for asylum in Germany since the beginning of the year are in similar positions. And the Kosovars are not the only ones. This year, the country has seen the arrival of 5,514 Macedonians, 11,642 Serbians, 29,353 Albanians and 2,425 Montenegrins. Of the 196,000 people who had filed an initial application for asylum in Germany by the end of July, 42 percent are from the former Yugoslavia, a region now known as the Western Balkans.

The exodus shows the wounds of the Balkan wars have not yet healed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel’s non-democratic destiny

Michael N. Barnett writes: Believing in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today is a little like looking for unicorns on the moon — it doesn’t matter how much you search, you still won’t find any. As recognition of this fact has become increasingly widespread, grappling with its implications has been hampered by the lack of normatively attractive or politically viable alternatives. In his review of Padraig O’Malley’s “The Two State Delusion,” Peter Beinart calls the book and its research impressive but nevertheless faults the author for not telling us how the story ends.

Although Beinart and others committed to a two-state solution make it sound like the alternatives are a great mystery, the search for unicorns has been distracting them from increasingly plausible outcomes. As the two-state solution fades into history, its alternatives become increasingly likely: civil war, ethnic cleansing or a non-democratic state. Although all three are possible, the third is rising on the horizon. Whether it goes by the name of an apartheid state, an illiberal democracy, a less than free society or a competitive authoritarianism, the dominant theme will be a Jewish minority ruling over a non-Jewish majority. Although such an outcome would be an emotional blow to those who favor the two-state solution as a way to maintain Israel’s democratic and Jewish character, it looks quite familiar in a world where liberal democracy not only remains the exception but has actually lost ground over the last decade. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Droughts used to be given names as the came and went, but now the drought has no name because it never ends

Turane Mohamed says: I come from Wajir in Northern Kenya.

Pastoralists keep camels, cattle, sheep and goats. People also try to grow crops like maize, millet and sorghum, but they often fail because of poor soil and lack of rain.

The pastoralists have come through a long journey in adapting to climate variability.

From the 1950s to the 80s, the drought was minimal. Drought used to be given a name. You only needed a small number of animals to have food security.

As a child, I used to lose weight when I went to school in town and fill up on milk, ghee, meat and wild fruit when I came home for the holidays.

The trend from the 90s to today, the drought has been happening constantly. People have given up giving it a name. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

There may be reasons for hope in the Middle East

Henri J. Barkey and David F. Gordon write: The winds of change are unexpectedly blowing through the Levant.

In the aftermath of the Iran nuclear agreement, there was a broad expectation, both in the region and beyond, that sectarian tensions and conflict would intensify and deepen the proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In the United States, even some strong supporters of the nuclear deal emphasized that Washington needed to respond aggressively to the inevitable push by Tehran to expand its regional influence at the expense of traditional U.S. allies.

What we are seeing on the ground, however, looks quite different. There is an increasing possibility for new geopolitical alignments throughout the region. The confluence of the growing fear in both Saudi Arabia and Iran of the threat posed by Islamic State; the weakening of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policy shift to cooperate with the United States in Syria, and Moscow’s and Washington’s growing shared interests in steering the Saudi-Iran rivalry onto a less escalatory path, while also creating a broad coalition against Islamic State, is creating real political fluidity. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Prominent Iranians launch campaign calling on Congress not to kill Iran deal

The Guardian reports: Dozens of high-profile Iranians, many of whom have been jailed for their political views, launched a video campaign calling on the American people to lobby Congress not to jeopardise the landmark nuclear agreement.

The campaign includes messages from celebrated film-maker Jafar Panahi, Nobel peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, and British-Iranian activist Ghoncheh Ghavami.

Many of the campaign’s participants have been persecuted in Iran for their beliefs or activism, sentenced to lengthy prison terms or even solitary confinement. But they have expressed support for the Vienna nuclear agreement struck in July between Iran and the world’s six major powers, calling it a good deal which could avert threats of war.

Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, one of the organisers of the campaign, said the video was intended to show “that those who have paid the highest prices for the cause of democracy and human rights in Iran are supporting the deal”.

The video messages were gathered, to show to the world “that not only the overwhelming majority of Iranians, but also almost all the leading human rights and pro-democracy activists, prominent political prisoners and the independent voices of Iran’s society are wholeheartedly supporting the Iran deal,” the activist, who spent five months in solitary confinement in Iran, said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How the Iran deal will pass — and why it should

Fred Kaplan writes: It’s looking more and more like Benjamin Netanyahu committed a strategic blunder in so ferociously opposing the Iran nuclear deal and in rallying his American allies to spend all their resources on a campaign to kill the deal in Congress.

If current trends hold, the Israeli prime minister and his stateside lobbyists — mainly AIPAC — are set to lose this fight. It’s politically risky for Israel’s head of state to go up against the president of his only big ally and benefactor; it’s catastrophic to do so and come away with nothing. Similarly, it’s a huge defeat for AIPAC, whose power derives from an image of invincibility. American politicians and donors might get the idea that the group isn’t so invincible after all, that they can defy its wishes, now and then, without great risk.

It would have been better for Netanyahu — and for Israel — had he maybe grumbled about the Iran deal but not opposed it outright, let alone so brazenly. He could have pried many more favors from Obama in exchange for his scowl-faced neutrality. Not that Obama, or any other American president, will cut Israel off; but relations will remain more strained, and requests for other favors (for more or bigger weapons, or for certain votes in international forums) will be scrutinized more warily, than they would have been. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The desparate journeys of tens of thousands of people seeking refuge in Europe

The New York Times reports: Aieh is blond and scrappy, with an elfin face and a heart condition. She is 2 and a half years old, but looks more like six months. Her mother, Samar Joukhadar, has carried her from Syria in a pouch hanging on her chest. Her goal is to get her to a doctor who can operate on her heart.

For now, they sit at the railroad track in Idomeni, Greece, waiting to cross the border to the Gevgelija transit camp in Macedonia.

Aieh’s father is a doctor, but the officials at the Syrian government-owned hospital where he worked hassled him until he fled to Yemen, leaving his family behind, Ms. Joukhadar said. He is working in a hospital there. But, she said, that hospital is not capable of doing the operation her daughter needs.

Besides, she says: “I want to find somewhere where there are no Arabs. Europeans are better people. The Arabs hurt us a lot.”

Europe was not their first choice, Ms. Joukhadar said. She tried to find a doctor in Saudi Arabia who would do the operation, but she could not.

Ms. Joukhadar left Syria with her three children and her brother and his two children. They went to Turkey and tried to leave from Mersin, a city on the Mediterranean coast, by boat in December 2014. But the smugglers stole her money — $12,000. She went to the police and gave them names and photographs, but nothing happened, she said.

Finally, they were able to leave from Izmir by dinghy, paying $1,200 per person. They landed on Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea that has seen a surge in refugees and migrants since the beginning of the year.

As she spoke, Aieh fidgeted and then started to cry. A cousin, Sidra, 15, took her into her arms and fed her a bottle, quieting her down.

Once they reached Athens, they slept on the streets for five days, Ms. Joukhadar said. She made a budget of 50 euros a day for herself, her brother and the five children between them. With that, they were able to eat one meal a day, usually a chicken and potato sandwich.

She had not spoken to her husband in four or five months, she said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Erdogan’s war backfires

Kadri Gursel writes: Turkey is heading to snap elections Nov. 1 after a coalition or minority government could not be formed in the wake of the June 7 elections that ended the parliamentary majority of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Under constitutional rules, a cross-party interim government, which is yet to be formed, will rule the country until the elections.

The pre-election environment this time is distinctly different from earlier ones. For the first time in 13 years of AKP rule, Turkish elections will be held against the backdrop of violent confrontations between government forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The era of nonhostility since fall 2012 ended July 24 with massive Turkish air raids on PKK targets in the Qandil region of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

Reports indicate close to 60 members of the security forces were killed in PKK attacks from that date until Aug. 22. On the other side, the official Anatolia News Agency reported Aug. 22 that 812 PKK militants had been killed since July 22 in both Turkey and Iraq. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Second commander of Syrian rebels assassinated in two weeks

McClatchy reports: A key commander of the U.S.-supported Syrian rebel forces was assassinated in a car bomb attack in southern Turkey Wednesday, a sign that the war raging next door is spilling across the border again.

The target of the attack was Col. Jemil Radoon, a defected Syrian Army officer who lives in the ancient city of Antakya. Turkish officials said he had just turned on the ignition of his black Hyundai hatchback when a bomb exploded. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Turkish government officials blamed the Assad regime in Syria and said it was part of a campaign to assassinate rebel officers. Other defected officers are also targeted, a security official said, citing field intelligence. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Two-factor authentication phishing from Iran

The Daily Beast reports: Iranian hackers have now found a way to get around Google’s two-step verification system and infiltrate GMail’s most elaborate consumer security system, according to a new report.

The Citizen Lab’s John Scott-Railton and Katie Kleemola outlined a few new ways that Iranian hackers can compromise the accounts of political dissidents, or even everyday citizens.

“Their targets are political, and include Iranian activists, and even a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” said Scott-Railton in an email, referring to the digital rights organization. “In some cases they even pretend to be Reuters journalists calling to set up interviews.”

The report says attacks on political targets are new. But the methodology of the hack has been going on for years, especially as reliance on so-called “two-factor authentication” — using something in addition to a password to get into your account — has gone up. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Arab Spring was a revolution of the hungry

Thanassis Cambanis writes: Early in the Tahrir Square revolution, a group of retired Egyptian generals sat poolside at Cairo’s Gezira Club and worried about whether the country’s ruling elite could survive a popular uprising. It was February 2011, a week before President Hosni Mubarak was toppled. Millions of freshly politicized Egyptians had already taken to the streets. And yet, some of these career security men were unfazed.

“The only thing we really need to worry about is a revolution of the hungry,” said one, a retired Air Force general. “That would be the end of us.”

As it turned out, it took less than four years for Egypt’s dictatorship to reconstitute itself, crushing the hope for real change among the people. In no small part, the regime’s resilience was due to its firm grasp of bread politics. The ruler who controls the main staples of life — bread and fuel — often controls everything else, too.

Nonetheless, the specter of a “revolution of the hungry” still worries authoritarian rulers today, in Egypt and throughout the Arab world. Roughly put, the idea is shorthand for an uprising that brings together not only the traditional cast of political and religious dissidents but also pits a far greater number of poor, uneducated, and apolitical citizens against the state.

Look across the region, and regimes have good reason to be afraid. Even in countries where obesity is widespread, people suffer from low-quality medical care and malnutrition due to a lack of healthy food.

The basic equation is stark: The Arab world cannot feed itself. Rulers obsessed with security have created a twisted web of importers and bakeries whose aim is not to feed the population efficiently or nutritiously but simply to maintain the regime and stave off that much feared revolution of the hungry. Vast subsidies eat up the lion’s share of national budgets. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

World tunes out Netanyahu’s broken record on Iran

Akiva Eldar writes: It is hard to overstate the importance of the recorded confession by former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in which he reveals past discussions of a closed and confidential security forum concerning an eventual strike against Iran, aired by Channel 2 on Aug. 21. At this stage, clearing the ambiguity surrounding the plan to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities by one of its senior advocates is almost as important as renouncing Israel’s policy on its nuclear program. From Barak’s recorded comments, it appears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu favored a military solution to the Iranian military nuclear threat over “peaceful means.” Two civilians and one military man — Ministers Moshe Ya’alon and Yuval Steinitz, members of the “Forum of Eight” and then-Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi — stopped Netanyahu, Barak and then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman from going to war with Iran and perhaps with the entire region. On another occasion, according to Barak, American military maneuvers conducted in the region prevented an Israeli military move against Iran.

Barak’s disclosures call into question not only the judgment of the two Israeli leaders, turning a rumor about an Israeli decision to attack Iran into a quote straight from the mouth of one of the decision-makers, but also the credibility of the incumbent prime minister. In his March 3 speech to Congress, Netanyahu declared that “no country has a greater stake than Israel in a good deal that peacefully removes this threat.” He stressed that the alternative to the “bad deal,” in his words, was not war, as the supporters of the agreement contended, but rather a “good deal.” But the problem is that according to Barak, both of them came up with the war alternative long before anyone knew the nature of the deal with Iran, and whether an agreement would be signed at all.

How did Netanyahu know on March 3 that the deal wouldn’t “be a farewell to arms … (but) a farewell to arms control, and the Middle East would soon be crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires?” In those days, the United States kept Israel out of the loop regarding negotiations after the White House accused it of “cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the United States.” In reaction to April’s Lausanne understanding, Netanyahu warned that the proposed deal presents a real threat to the region and to the world and that “a deal based on this framework would threaten the survival of the State of Israel.” After that, negotiations continued for another three months, during which many drafts were prepared and endless changes introduced into central articles. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Germany is the first European country to free Syrian refugees from a draconian bureaucratic ‘trap’

Quartz reports: Germany, which has a better track record than most European countries on sheltering refugees, has made a move to address one of the more lunatic aspects of the European immigration crisis. The country has said (link in German) it will stop sending away refugees of the five-year war in Syria, and instead process their asylum claims in Germany.

Why doesn’t that already happen? It’s the result of a 2003 piece of legislation that human rights organizations have long been describing as a “trap.”

The legislation is called the Dublin Protocol, and was designed to stop migrants traveling through Europe to countries with favorable regimes before claiming asylum. If people need asylum, the argument ran, they should be claiming it straight away — and the state in which they do so should remain responsible for processing it.

There is a huge problem with this logic, however, and many northern European countries have chosen to turn a blind eye to it: geography. Most people fleeing from the wars in Syria or Afghanistan, as well as those trying to get to Europe for economic reasons, come by land or by sea. The land route brings them through Turkey, which is not a member of the EU, to Greece and Bulgaria, which are.

The sea routes, which are much more perilous and have led to thousands of deaths this year alone, lead migrants to Greece, to Italy, or to the islands of Lampedusa and Malta. Without the funds or paperwork necessary, most asylum claimants aren’t able to fly into the airports of northern European countries. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Gaza, Gulag on the Mediterranean

Mohammed Omer writes: At this time last year, as the missiles and bombs rained down in Israel’s lopsided seven-week war against Gaza, I wrote about our struggle to survive during the holy month of Ramadan. This year, another Ramadan has passed, Eid al-Fitr is over and the reality on the ground has changed very little.

The same dreadful conditions are creating desperation among Gaza’s inhabitants, whose lives are terrorized by war and stunted by the long blockade of this spit of land, 25 miles long and six miles wide. The only difference now is the absence of the smell of gunfire and explosives, and of the smoke trails from missiles fired by Israeli F-16s crashing down among civilian homes.

I recently visited some of the most heavily damaged areas of Gaza, starting with eastern Rafah, where massive destruction is still visible and bullet holes spatter the walls of houses. Up the road, in the half-ruined village of Khuzaa, the legacy of physical and emotional trauma has yet to be addressed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Over 2,000 Russian troops killed during Ukraine invasion

Paul Goble writes: A Moscow newspaper reported that Russia had lost “no fewer than 2,000” dead in the fighting in Ukraine and another 3,200 serious casualties by February 1, 2015, a story that stayed up until Kremlin censors removed those lines from the article lest it call into question Vladimir Putin’s constant refrain that there are no Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

In an article about increased pay for Russian soldiers in 2015, Delovaya zhizn reported these numbers, but they didn’t remain on the site for very long, according to Konstantin Zelfanov of Novy Region-2 yesterday.

But the original uncensored article remained accessible in a cached version, and the key passage of that reads as follows, Zelfanov says. “The government of the Russian Federation has taken an important decision about the monetary compensation of military personnel who have taken part in military actions in the east of Ukraine.”

“For the families of those who have died in the course of military actions in the east of Ukraine, monetary compensation has been set at three million rubles [40,000 US dollars] and for those who have become invalids during the military actions at 1.5 million rubles [20,000 US dollars].”

“In addition,” the original version said, Moscow plans to pay contract soldiers a supplement of 1,800 rubles [25 US dollars] for each day of combat. As of February 1, 2015, Moscow had already paid monetary compensation “for more than 2,000 families of soldiers who had been killed and for 3,200 soldiers who were seriously wounded and recognized as invalids.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Most mass shootings in the U.S. take place in private — most of the victims are women and children

Melissa Jeltsen writes: The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence. It is one of men (yes, mostly men) targeting and killing their wives or ex-girlfriends or families. The victims are intimately familiar to the shooters, not random strangers. This kind of violence is not indiscriminate — though friends, neighbors and bystanders are often killed alongside the intended targets.

The Huffington Post analyzed five years of mass shooting data compiled by Everytown For Gun Safety, a gun violence prevention organization backed by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. We looked at shootings in which at least four people were killed with a gun (the common definition of mass shootings, though there is debate over the best way to define them).

We found that in 57 percent of mass shootings, the shooter targeted either a family member or an intimate partner. According to HuffPost’s analysis, 64 percent of mass shooting victims were women and children. That’s startling, since women typically make up only 15 percent of total gun violence homicide victims, and children only 7 percent. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Europeans shocked by efforts of Israel lobby to block Iran deal

The New York Times reports: In the United States, pro-Israel groups have spent heavily on a campaign to block the deal in the Congress, organizing meetings with Israeli diplomats and a videoconference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has called the deal a “stunning historic mistake” that threatens Israel’s existence.

Although France’s main Jewish organization has expressed “very serious doubts” about the Iran deal, [Camille] Grand [director of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris and an expert on nuclear nonproliferation] said, its objections have not spilled into the political sphere.

“Netanyahu’s opposition was so extreme that it made it difficult for it to exist in any French debate,” he said. “Even critics couldn’t sign up to the Netanyahu narrative because it doesn’t offer a constructive solution.”

And then there is the money — huge sums being spent mainly by the pro-Israel groups, less by supporters of the deal — which shock Europeans unused to this kind of profligate lobbying. Some here are also baffled by the hyperbole coming out of Washington, with talk of a choice between war and peace, and oblique references to the Holocaust. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail