Saudi Women for Driving, a coalition of leading Saudi women’s rights activists, bloggers and academics campaigning for the right to drive, sent the following letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday. A similar letter was sent to Clinton’s EU counterpart Catherine Ashton.
Dear Secretary Clinton,
On June 3 we wrote a letter asking you, our friend, to make a public statement supporting our right to drive.
Many of us have met you personally during your decades-long journey as a champion of women’s rights all over the world, and we expected our call to be met with a warm, supportive response.
Unfortunately, that has not happened, and we write to express our deep concern over the US government’s public silence on the issue of Saudi women’s right to drive.
Three days ago, on June 17, more Saudi women drove a car than ever before. But as we launch the largest women’s rights movement in Saudi history, where are you when we need you most? In the context of the Arab Spring and US commitments to support women’s rights, is this not something the United States’ top diplomat would want to publicly support?
We were encouraged to see public statements of support from more than half a dozen Congresswomen, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But we believe that you personally making a public statement of support for Saudi Arabia opening the country’s roads to women would be a game changing moment.
Women remain barred from driving in Saudi Arabia, one of the strongest and longest standing US allies in the Middle East. This has gone on for way too long and now, this week, we really need you to speak up about it.
Senior U.S. diplomats have been dropping by the royal palace in Amman almost every week this spring to convince Jordanian King Abdullah II that democratic reform is the best way to quell the protests against his rule.
But another powerful ally also has been lobbying Abdullah — and wants him to ignore the Americans.
Saudi Arabia is urging the Hashemite kingdom to stick to the kind of autocratic traditions that have kept the House of Saud secure for centuries, and Riyadh has been piling up gifts at Abdullah’s door to sell its point of view.
The Saudis last month offered Jordan a coveted opportunity to join a wealthy regional bloc called the Gulf Cooperation Council, a move that would give the impoverished kingdom new investment, jobs and security ties. To sweeten the pot, the Saudis wrote a check for $400 million in aid to Amman two weeks ago, their first assistance in years.
The quiet contest for Jordan is one sign of the rivalry that has erupted across the Middle East this year between Saudi Arabia and the United States, longtime allies that have been put on a collision course by the popular uprisings that have swept the region.
A simple two-line email – sent to me at the beginning of May from a mysterious account named “W2Drive” – was all it took to put Manal Al-Sharif and I on the same path. A group of Saudi women were now renewing the call that began in 1990, when an group of prominent Saudi women, mainly from academia and conservative Riyadh society, drove their cars. Their rebellious actions were in vain, for the country was on the verge of the first Gulf War, and it was easy to discredit their initiative; all it took back then was to proliferate conspiracy theories – alleging these women were pushing a foreign agenda, trying to Westernise the country and break the unity of the people.
The first campaign ended with the women involved severely punished, with a ban on work and travel that lasted for years. These women subsequently avoided any media attention for the following 20 years, putting a lid on their failed attempt.
Since then, many have eagerly awaited someone to pick up that cast-off torch and finish what was started. Manal Al-Sharif was in a prime position to do just that.
She is a successful, award-winning, US graduate of information technology, leading a career in a prestigious oil company. She is divorced with a four-year-old boy in her custody. She knows what it takes to be an independent woman in Saudi Arabia. She lives far from her parents and is committed to varying work hours, but most importantly, she can’t allow a personal driver to live in her apartment. Manal was angry and frustrated enough to upload YouTube footage of herself demanding the right to drive.
A Bahraini journalist and blogger spoke at the Netroots Nation conference today about how her country’s protest movement has been beaten back, the personal costs of supporting the uprising, and how the U.S. State Department remained silent.
Lamees Dhaif said that she supported the protest movement that became widespread in Bahrain following the initial outburst of the Arab Spring. “It was very simple,” she said. “Those people have rights.” But her outspoken support cost her jobs at three newspapers in one day and her family was targeted. “As bloggers, as journalist,” she said
we pay [very high] price of speaking loud. I don’t think any American citizen can understand what I’m saying. If we say one word that they consider wrong, they can punish you in every possible way. They can punish you, they can punish your family, they can hunt you everywhere. [They] tried to burned my house with family in, attacked my house. My brothers were hunted in their jobs; they were punished because of their sister. My sister [was] arrested for fifty days as a punishment to me, to force me to stop writing.
Dhaif is in the U.S. as part of a State Department-sponsored tour for foreign journalists.
The Obama administration has agreed to investigate concerns raised by the AFL-CIO labor federation that Bahrain has failed to live up to its obligations to protect workers rights under a free trade pact with the United States, the labor group said on Thursday.
“The egregious attacks on workers must end, and the Bahraini government’s systematic discrimination against and dismantling of unions must be reversed. These actions directly violate the letter and the spirit of the trade agreement,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement.
Bahrain’s ruler has canceled all vacations for top officials next month. A special center and mediator have been named for talks with opposition groups that are proposed to open July 1.
Now the question is whether anyone will show up.
The Shiite groups that speak on behalf of protesters — who took to the streets four months ago to demand greater rights — have shown no rush to embrace the appeals for dialogue by the Sunni monarchs they accuse of creating a two-tier society in the strategic Gulf kingdom.
The possible failure to open talks could be interpreted as far more significant than simply a payback snub by Bahrain’s Shiite majority after unrest that’s claimed at least 31 lives and left hundreds of people detained or expelled from jobs and studies.
It would serve as clear recognition that the complexities on the tiny island — drawing in heavyweight issues such as U.S. military interests and Arab worries over Iran — are too vast to solve over cups of tea between the rulers and the opposition.
“Events seem to have gone too far and too fast for some kind of quick fix through talks,” said Toby Jones, an expert on Bahrain at Rutgers University.
For its size — about 525,000 citizens on an island that can be crossed in 30 minutes — Bahrain perhaps packs more high-stakes challenges that any of the other Arab uprisings.
It’s hard to imagine a more disastrous year for Saudi foreign policy. In January, Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled from riotous mobs to exile in the Saudi port city of Jeddah. Now the new regime in Tunis wants him back to put him on trial. In February, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime Saudi ally, was forced from office. In the space of days, Washington went from words of support for Mubarak to saying it was time to go. Then in March, after Bahrain looked as if it may concede the principle of a government ruled through the will of the people, Saudi riot-control forces backed by tanks poured across the causeway to the island.
In Riyadh and other Gulf Arab capitals, princes and sheikhs were left wondering how solid U.S. support would be for them. Last month, they got their answer, when President Barack Obama slammed Bahrain for its handling of demonstrations in his major May 19 foreign-policy address on the Middle East. To emphasize the point, when the island kingdom’s Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, visited Washington this month, his meeting with Obama was reduced to a “drop-by,” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t extend the courtesy of a joint press conference after their meeting.
Even Saudi dominance of international oil markets, by virtue of the country’s leadership within OPEC, is under threat. Last week’s gathering of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna ended in discord, with Saudi representative Ali al-Naimi describing it as “one of the worst meetings we have ever had.” Naimi had, a little late perhaps, been leading a ploy to increase production quotas in order to ease high oil prices, which have been threatening the world’s economic recovery. But Iran led a bloc of OPEC members that disagreed, preferring high revenues. It’s not clear who has whom over a barrel — but the Saudi response is predicted to be a unilateral increase in production. This might help U.S. gas prices, but it means that Saudi Arabia will “go it alone” instead of exhibiting world energy leadership.
Saudi Arabia feels like a realm that has come to a standstill in a rapidly changing world. Its leaders, most notably the 86-year-old King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, are pinning their hopes on the old principle of stability, as if Ben Ali had not been driven out of Tunisia, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had not been toppled and Yemen’s Saleh had not just been admitted to one of their hospitals with a piece of shrapnel in his body.
King Abdullah must have been pleased to see his enemy Moammar Gadhafi in difficulties, but it troubled him to see the avalanche the young protesters in Tunis had unleashed. He didn’t hesitate a moment before offering exile to the embattled Ben Ali.
Abdullah was disgusted to see what happened to Mubarak in Cairo. Saudi Arabia still hasn’t come to terms with the Egyptian revolution. Nevertheless, it promised €2.7 billion ($3.98 billion) to the military council in Cairo to provide the new leadership with “a certain level of comfort,” as an Arab financial expert put it. It went without saying in Cairo that the Saudis wanted the Egyptian courts to spare the elderly Mubarak, and the Egyptian chief of staff personally thanked the Saudi king for his pledge of financial support.
Abdullah noted angrily how the spark of revolution jumped to the small country of Bahrain in February, and the Shiite majority rebelled against the Sunni Al Khalifa royal family. The moderate king finally lost his patience and, in a first in Saudi history, sent the soldiers of his national guard across the King Fahd Causeway to Manama to crush the uprising.
Saudi Arabia cannot intervene directly in Syria, where the unrest began in March and came to a preliminary head last week with a massacre in the city of Jisr al-Shughour. The House of Saud and the clan of Syrian President Bashar Assad have eyed each other suspiciously for years, and yet the Saudis would like to see the Syrians released from the embrace of their Shiite archenemy Iran. But there is one concern the two leaders share: They want calm in their countries, not change. As a result, Damascus supported Riyadh when its troops marched into Bahrain, and Riyadh is remaining silent, no matter how brutally Assad’s forces crush the protests in Syria.
Nawaf Obaid, a Senior Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research & Islamic Studies in Riyadh, is confident that Saudi Arabia has the military and economic strength sufficient to crush the aspirations for political freedom that threaten Saudi and other autocratic rulers across the region.
The so-called “Arab Spring” has not brought new life to the Middle East, but leaderless anarchy, creating a virtual pan-regional movement that is alarmingly dangerous and ultimately unsustainable.
Recognizing the threat that the spread of this movement represents, Saudi Arabia is expanding its role internationally and mobilizing its vast resources to help countries facing domestic upheaval.
As the birthplace of Islam and the leader of the Muslim and Arab worlds, Saudi Arabia has a unique responsibility to aid states in the region, assisting them in their gradual evolution toward more sustainable political systems and preventing them from collapsing and spreading further disorder.
That the Kingdom has the ability to implement this foreign policy goal should not be in doubt – it is backed by significant military and economic strength.
The foundation for this more robust strategic posture is Saudi Arabia’s investment of around $150 billion in its military. This includes a potential expansion of the National Guard and Armed Forces by at least 120,000 troops, and a further 60,000 troops for the security services at the Interior Ministry, notably in the special and various police forces. A portion of these will join units that could be deployed beyond the Kingdom’s borders.
In addition, approximately 1,000 new state-of-the-art combat tanks may be added to the Army, and the Air Force will see its capabilities significantly improve with the doubling of its high quality combat airplanes to about 500 advanced aircraft.
A massive new missile defense system is in the works. Finally, the two main fleets of the Navy will undergo extensive expansion and a complete refurbishment of existing assets.
As part of this new defense doctrine, the leadership has decided to meet the country’s growing needs for new equipment by diversifying among American, European and Asian military suppliers.
Protesters danced, sang and slaughtered cows in the central square of Yemen’s capital Sunday to celebrate the departure of the country’s authoritarian leader for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after he was wounded in a rocket attack on his compound.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh was undergoing surgery to his chest at a military hospital in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, said a Yemeni diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity under diplomatic rules. One of Saleh’s allies said the president, in his late 60s, was hit by jagged pieces of wood that splintered from the mosque pulpit when his compound was hit by a rocket on Friday.
There was no official announcement on who was acting as head of state. But under Yemen’s constitution, the vice president takes over for up to 60 days when the head of state is absent. Vice President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi met Sunday with U.S. Ambassador Gerald Michael Feierstein, a strong indication that he is in charge.
With the departure of President Ali Abdullah Saleh for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, Yemenis now have a chance to resolve the political crisis that has bedevilled the country since February.
Contrary to the official story that he merely suffered scratches and/or a slight head wound in the explosion on Friday, latest reports say he has second-degree burns to his face and chest, plus a piece of shrapnel lodged near his heart which is affecting his breathing – though Saleh, who is 69, is said to have been able to walk from the plane when he landed in Riyadh.
A second plane followed him, reportedly carrying 24 members of his family. This is one indication that to all intents and purposes the Saleh era is finished. He is unlikely ever to return to Yemen as president – and the Saudis and Americans will be working behind the scenes to ensure that he doesn’t.
It’s also worth mentioning that others injured by the explosion include the prime minister, deputy prime minister, the heads of both houses of parliament and the governor of Sana’a, the capital. Some of them have also been flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment. One of Saleh’s nephews, the commander of the special forces, is said to have been killed. So, even discounting Saleh himself, what’s left of his regime is in serious disarray.
Bahrain’s security forces are increasingly targeting women in their campaign against pro-democracy protesters despite yesterday lifting martial law in the island kingdom.
Ayat al-Gormezi, 20, a poet and student arrested two months ago after reading out a poem at a pro-democracy rally, is due to go on trial today before a military tribunal, her mother said. Ayat was forced to turn herself in when masked policemen threatened to kill her brothers unless she did so.
She has not been seen since her arrest, though her mother did talk to her once by phone and Ayat said that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has since been told that her daughter has been in a military hospital after being tortured.
“We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,” a film captures Ayat telling a cheering crowd of protesters in Pearl Square in February. “We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice.” She addresses King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa directly and says to him: “Don’t you hear their cries, don’t you hear their screams?” As she finishes, the crowd shouts: “Down with Hamad.”
Ayat’s call for change was no more radical than that heard in the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi at about the same time. But her reference to the king might explain the fury shown by the Bahraini security forces who, going by photographs of the scene, smashed up her bedroom when they raided her house and could not find her.
There are signs that Bahraini police, riot police and special security are detaining and mistreating more and more women. Many are held incommunicado, forced to sign confessions or threatened with rape, according to Bahraini human rights groups.
Saudi Arabia has remained fairly quiet during the recent months of Arab uprisings. A few demonstrations did take place, mostly in the Eastern province, but never gathered more than a couple of thousands. As for the Facebook calls for a “Saudi revolution” on March 11th, they had no real impact on the ground. Some observers found this surprising, given the fact that many of the causes of revolutions elsewhere in the region exist in Saudi Arabia. There is corruption, repression and, despite the country’s wealth, socio-economic problems that particularly affect the youth — it is said that at least 25 percent of Saudis below the age of 30 are unemployed.
Some observers argued that nothing had happened, or even could happen, in Saudi Arabia because the Kingdom possesses two extraordinary resources in huge quantities. This first is a symbolic resource, religion, through the regime’s alliance with the official Wahhabi religious establishment, while the second resource is a material one, oil. These resources, however, have their limits. The real reason that Saudi Arabia has not seen major protests is that the Saudi regime has effectively co-opted the Sahwa, the powerful Islamist network which would have to play a major role in any sustained mobilization of protests.
Neither Islam nor oil wealth necessarily shield the Saudi state from criticism. Religion can be, and has been, contested by opponents of the state, particularly by Islamists. The Wahhabi religious establishment is currently led by relatively weak figures. The current mufti Abd al-Aziz Al al-Shaykh lacks the strong credentials of his predecessor, sheikh Abd al-Aziz bin Baz. Oil money, however abundant, inevitably creates frustrations because its distribution follows established networks of patronage that favor some over others. This is especially notable at the regional level, where Najd receives much more of the state’s largesse than does the Kingdom’s periphery. What is more, the announcement on March 18th, 2011 by King Abdallah of a $100 billion aid package wasn’t only met by cheers as some expected. It also provoked angry reactions in some intellectual circles, who saw this as an insult to the Saudis’ “dignity.”
Saudi Arabia has more of a history of political mobilization than many realize. A pro-democracy current has evolved over the last 10 years. Its core component has historically been the dozens of intellectuals, Sunnis and Shiites, of Islamist and liberal backgrounds, who have come together since 2003 to repeatedly demand, through increasingly provocative petitions, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in the Kingdom. Among the latest, and boldest, moves made by members of this group have been the creation in October, 2009 of the Kingdom’s first fully independent human rights organization, the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, and the establishment in February, 2011 of the Kingdom’s first political party, Hizb al-Umma. Although members of this group have been repressed, many have pledged to continue their activism.
The woman who spoke to NPR says she was taken by bus to a police station, blindfolded, and made to stand for five hours in a room. She was accused of working to bring down the Bahraini regime.
“They tried to force me to confess that I told people at my work to be against the regime,” she says.
Authorities showed the woman a picture of someone protesting at Pearl Roundabout. At the time, Bahrain’s crown prince said it was legal to protest. Now, authorities say it’s a crime.
“They tried to force me to confess that a picture in a protest — that it is my picture. And it was really not my picture,” the woman says.
She was taunted about one of her relatives, who has been jailed without charge for many weeks. “They said very bad things about him,” she says. “And they told me that, ‘Do you think he will come out of the jail? He will die in jail.'”
But perhaps the worst part of the ordeal was that the woman was detained at all. In an Arab culture, particularly in the Gulf, detaining a woman is the ultimate humiliation, going back to the days when the way one tribe defeated another was to capture and rape its women.
“They told me if I didn’t confess they will let men come and — continue with me,” the woman says. “They told me that.”
Britain is training Saudi Arabia’s national guard – the elite security force deployed during the recent protests in Bahrain – in public order enforcement measures and the use of sniper rifles. The revelation has outraged human rights groups, which point out that the Foreign Office recognises that the kingdom’s human rights record is “a major concern”.
In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in “weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training”. The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier.
The MoD response, obtained yesterday by the Observer, reveals that Britain sends up to 20 training teams to the kingdom a year. Saudi Arabia pays for “all BMM personnel, as well as support costs such as accommodation and transport”.
Bahrain’s royal family used 1,200 Saudi troops to help put down demonstrations in March. At the time the British government said it was “deeply concerned” about reports of human rights abuses being perpetrated by the troops.
Saudi Arabia is flexing its financial and diplomatic might across the Middle East in a wide-ranging bid to contain the tide of change, shield fellow monarchs from popular discontent and avert the overthrow of any more leaders struggling to calm turbulent republics.
From Egypt, where the Saudis dispensed $4 billion in aid last week to shore up the ruling military council, to Yemen, where it is trying to ease out the president, to the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco, which it has invited to join a union of Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia is scrambling to forestall more radical change and block Iran’s influence.
The kingdom is aggressively emphasizing the relative stability of monarchies, part of an effort to avert any dramatic shift from the authoritarian model, which would generate uncomfortable questions about the glacial pace of political and social change at home.
Saudi Arabia’s proposal to include Jordan and Morocco in the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council — which authorized the Saudis to send in troops to quell a largely Shiite Muslim rebellion in the Sunni Muslim monarchy of Bahrain — is intended to create a kind of “Club of Kings.” The idea is to signal Shiite Iran that the Sunni Arab monarchs will defend their interests, analysts said.
“We’re sending a message that monarchies are not where this is happening,” Prince Waleed bin Talal al-Saud, a businessman and high-profile member of the habitually reticent royal family, told The New York Times’s editorial board, referring to the unrest. “We are not trying to get our way by force, but to safeguard our interests.”
The range of the Saudi intervention is extraordinary as the unrest pushes Riyadh’s hand to forge what some commentators, in Egypt and elsewhere, brand a “counterrevolution.” Some Saudi and foreign analysts find the term too sweeping for the steps the Saudis have actually taken, though it appears unparalleled in the region and beyond as the kingdom reaches out to ally with non-Arab Muslim states as well.
While all eyes are on Libya, Syria and Yemen, a different kind of rebellion is taking place in Saudi Arabia. A group of Saudi women have set up Women2Drive, a right-to-drive campaign, with a launch date of 17 June.
Last week one of its members, Manal al-Sharif, took to the streets and drove a car for a couple of hours, filming her trip (her father assisted) and posting it on YouTube. On Sunday, she was arrested along with her brother, who reportedly has now been released.
This isn’t the first time that there has been a push to drive in the kingdom. In the early 1990s, members of a similar campaign were arrested and some were fired from their jobs.
Against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings, it might seem like a frivolous thing to ask, especially when we are told that Saudi women do not need to drive, as they are so covetously protected and provided with drivers to save them the trouble.
The irony is that although the entire system is constructed to prevent men and women finding khalwa, or privacy, together, it is permissible to be alone in a car with one’s non-Saudi driver – the perfect confluence of racism and patronage that exposes the absurdity and confusion behind arbitrary laws of public female deportment in Saudi Arabia.
NATO carried out its most forceful attacks in weeks in Libya on Tuesday, part of an apparently coordinated push with rebel forces to bring an end to Moammar Gaddafi’s 41-year-long rule.
NATO warplanes pummeled command-and-control targets in four cities, including Tripoli and Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. U.S. officials said NATO had increased the tempo of its airstrikes throughout the country, and members of the alliance spoke of improved targeting of dug-in loyalist forces, made possible in part by the presence of U.S. Predator drone aircraft.
The new assault appeared to reflect increased cooperation between NATO and the rebel army, allowing the rebels to make modest gains on the ground this week, particularly in and around the western city of Misurata. Although it was too early to tell whether the advances would mark a meaningful turning point in a conflict that has left the country divided since February, the progress “shows where the momentum lies,” said a European diplomat privy to NATO’s internal discussions.
“It is noteworthy that Gaddafi’s forces have not been able to mount a sustained attack for quite some time,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military operations. He said the rebels’ recent success in Misurata was largely due to the fact that government troops had been forced to abandon entrenched positions, making them vulnerable to ground attack. (Washington Post)
leader Muammar Gaddafi has until the end of May to agree his exile before an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court is issued, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Wednesday.
‘There are countries that in recent weeks have indicated… a willingness to welcome him,’ Mr Frattini said in an interview with RAI public radio.
‘It’s clear that if there is an international arrest warrant it would be more difficult to find an arrangement for the colonel and his family,’ he said.
‘This will happen by the end of May,’ he added.
Mr Frattini also said he believed there were ‘many defections’ from the regime underway, adding: ‘This shows we have probably arrived at a turning point.’ (AFP)
Three weeks ago, a traveler spotted a man’s body in the farmland on this city’s outskirts, shot twice in the head with his hands and feet bound. He had disappeared earlier that day, after visiting a market.
Ten days later, near the same spot, a shepherd stumbled upon the body of a second man, killed with a single bullet to the forehead. Masked, armed men had taken him from his home the night before, without giving a reason, his wife said.
The dead men, Nasser al-Sirmany and Hussein Ghaith, had both worked as interrogators for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s internal security services, known for their brutality against domestic dissidents. The killings, still unsolved, appeared to be rooted in revenge, the families said, and have raised the specter of a death squad stalking former Qaddafi officials in Benghazi, the opposition stronghold.
The killings have unsettled an already paranoid city, where rebel authorities have spent weeks trying to round up people suspected of being Qaddafi loyalists — members of a fifth column who they say are trying to overthrow the rebels. If the violence continues, it will pose a stern challenge to a movement trying to present a vision of a new country committed to the rule of law, while potentially undermining hopes for a peaceful transition if Colonel Qaddafi surrenders power.
The rebels say their security forces are not responsible for the killings. Prosecutors here say they are investigating at least four attacks, including another murder in March, and they are exploring the possible involvement of Islamists who were imprisoned by the Qaddafi government and are now settling old scores. “It’s our responsibility to protect people,” said Jamal Benour, the justice coordinator for the opposition in Benghazi. “It’s important the killers are punished. The law is most important.”
But some here dismiss talk of Islamists, saying they believe the killings are being carried out by an armed group allied with the rebels, or possibly Qaddafi loyalists pretending to be. (New York Times)
Rebels in the contested western city of Misurata stormed the city’s airport on Wednesday afternoon, swarming over the grounds from the south and east and reclaiming it from the military of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Seizing the airport in Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, which has been under siege for nearly two months, marked one of the most significant rebel victories in the Libyan conflict.
The airport and its approaches were the last remaining pieces of significant terrain in the city to be controlled by the Qaddafi soldiers. (New York Times)
Nick Clegg has backed a decision by the home secretary, Theresa May, not to open Britain’s borders to migrants fleeing the turmoil in Libya and North Africa.
Instead the Liberal Democrat leader said Italy should be offered practical assistance in helping those refugees and migrants who manage to complete the dangerous journey from Libya across the Mediterranean.
On Thursday May is to confirm Britain’s rejection of calls to take part in a European-wide “burden-sharing” scheme when she meets EU interior ministers in Brussels to discuss the north African situation. (The Guardian)
Simon Tsidall writes: Given the mad rush to war in Libya, when Britain and others suddenly decided Benghazi risked becoming the new Srebrenica, it is unsurprising that little or no thought was given to the seemingly unrelated question of sub-Saharan migration into the EU. But the law of unintended consequences is inexorable. What began as a quixotic fight in a faraway country has mutated into a life-or-death struggle on the tourist beaches of Europe. Apparently, nobody saw it coming.
The people dying in this war within a war are not Libyans, not the Gaddafi-ites, not the rebels. They are not the endlessly affronted residents of Lampedusa and other Italian and Maltese islands. Nor are they British or other Nato airmen. They are the people who always die first in such situations: the poor, the uneducated, the dark-skinned.
They are people from Eritrea and Somalia, from Chad and Niger, and from other sub-Saharan loser nations. And they are now being washed up daily on Europe’s shores, some just alive, others not so lucky – washed up in their hundreds and thousands, unknowing and blameless, the helpless collateral victims of the high-handed US-British-French decision to rid the world of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and damn the consequences. (The Guardian)
Secret filming conducted by Al Jazeera has revealed shocking evidence of the brutal crackdown against pro-democracy protesters in the Gulf state of Bahrain.
An undercover investigation conducted by Al Jazeera’s correspondent, Charles Stratford, has unearthed evidence that Bahraini police carried out periodic raids on girls’ schools since the unrest began.
The government of Bahrain deployed security forces onto the streets on March 14 in an attempt to quell more than four weeks of protests.
A three-month “state of emergency” that was declared by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa on March 15, is due to be lifted on June 1.
At the height of the protests, up to 200,000 people rallied against the government. The crackdown was an attempt to end the protests that demanded the end of the despotic rule of the Khalifah royal family.
In an interview “Heba”, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, alleges she, along with three of her school friends, were taken away by the police from their school and subjected to severe beatings while in custody for three consecutive days. (Al Jazeera)
Witnesses say Yemeni security forces and snipers have opened fire on thousands of anti-government protesters marching towars the cabinet building in Sanaa, the capital.
A doctor who treated some of the wounded said that at least one protester had been killed and dozens more wounded.
The doctor, who wished to remain anonymous, said that wounded protesters were still arriving at a field hospital where he was treating patients.
The protesters were calling for the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the country’s logtime president, when they came under fire on Wednesday. (Al Jazeera)
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Bahrain’s security forces are increasingly targeting women in their campaign against pro-democracy protesters despite yesterday lifting martial law in the island kingdom.