Mohamed Morsy looking for another Mohamed Bouazizi

Egypt’s Daily News reports: President Mohamed Morsy used his legislative powers to pass a law on Sunday, enacting stricter penalties against street vendors who violate the law.

Under the new law, numbered 105/2012, vendors can now be sentenced to six months imprisonment, be fined up to EGP 5,000 and have their goods confiscated.

The new measures in prison time and fines represent a significant jump from what had been implemented in the past.

Prior laws stipulate that vendors sell their goods in designated areas throughout Cairo. However, many street vendors operate unlicensed, often without repercussions.

Egypt’s informal economy stands as a valuable source of income to many citizens and accounts for anywhere between 20 and 50 per cent of the total economy.

(For those in the U.S. who have forgotten his name, Mohamed Bouazizi was the Tunisian street vendor whose death sparked the Arab Spring.)

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Meshaal: Hamas, Fatah must forgive each other

Ma’an News Agency reports: Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said Sunday that it was time for his party and their Fatah rivals to put their mistakes behind them.

“Hamas can’t live without Fatah and other factions, neither can Fatah live without Hamas,” the exiled party chief, on his first visit to the Gaza Strip, said during a ceremony at the Islamic University in Gaza.

“We made mistakes against each other but God puts our wrongdoing behind us, so let’s forgive each other,” Meshaal said.

Palestine is greater than any one faction, he continued.

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Arabs offer Palestinians $100 million a month ‘financial safety net’

Reuters reports: Arab states agreed to provide the Palestinian Authority with a $100 million monthly “financial safety net” to help President Mahmoud Abbas’s government cope with an economic crisis after the United Nations granted de facto statehood to Palestine.

Israel has responded to the November 29 U.N. vote by ordering 3,000 Jewish settler homes be built in the occupied West Bank and announced it would hold back payments of customs duties it collects on behalf of the Palestinians to pay an outstanding electricity bill.

In a statement issued on Sunday after a meeting in Doha, Arab foreign ministers called for the “immediate implementation” of a resolution passed at an Arab summit in Baghdad in March, which called for the provision of a $100 million monthly safety net.

But the statement did not give details of how the money would be paid or who would pay.

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Morsi annuls decree but constitutional referendum will go ahead

The Guardian reports: The Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, has scrapped a decree that had generated widespread unrest by awarding him near-absolute powers. But he insisted a referendum on a new constitution would go ahead as planned this week.

The announcement, which is unlikely to placate Morsi’s opponents, came after Egypt’s military warned that failure to resolve a crisis over the drafting of the constitution would result in “disastrous consequences” that could drag the country into a “dark tunnel”.

Selim al-Awa, an official who attended a “national dialogue meeting” called by Morsi at the presidential palace in Cairo but boycotted by his opponents, said the Islamist-dominated discussion recommended removing articles that granted the president powers to declare emergency laws and shield him from judicial oversight.

Earlier Egypt’s military had issued a statement saying: “Dialogue is the best and only way to reach consensus. The opposite of that will bring us to a dark tunnel that will result in catastrophe and that is something we will not allow.” Failing to reach a consensus was “in the interest of neither side. The nation as a whole will pay the price,” it added.

State radio and television interrupted programmes to read the military statement. A Muslim Brotherhood official welcomed the army’s “balanced” line. Former Arab League chief Amr Moussa, now an opposition leader, said that the army was reacting to an “enormously dangerous” crisis.

The statement came ahead of a new law to be issued by Morsi that will grant the armed forces the power to arrest civilians, alongside police forces, until a constitution is passed. The law makes the army responsible for the protection of state premises and maintaining security, and allows it the use of force if necessary to carry out these duties.

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Palestinians skeptical about significance of U.N. vote

The Economist: With the triumphant arrival of Khalid Meshal, the leader of Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, on December 7th, President Mahmoud Abbas could be forgiven for wondering who will remember his return from the United Nations armed with international recognition of Palestine as a non-member state.

“Jubilant Palestinians celebrate UN vote,” trumpeted Fox News, an American cable news channel. “Abbas returns to hero’s welcome,” cried Al Jazeera. But for all the international fanfare accompanying the overwhelming international support for Mr Abbas, at home the Palestinian public failed to rally with the exuberance Mr Abbas’s spokesmen and the international media claimed. Only a few hundred people—mostly civil servants, journalists and plain-clothes police in their tell-tale fur-lined jackets—filled the small space in front of a stage of Ramallah’s small central square where the Palestinian Authority relayed President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech. Elsewhere the streets seemed eerily quiet.

For Mr Abbas’s international backers, who hoped that the UN vote might bolster his domestic standing, the turnout was disappointing. Hours before the vote on November 29th, European diplomats predicted that tens of thousands would attend. While 138 countries voted for Mr Abbas’s resolution, his own population appeared agnostic at best. Orjwan, a raucous bar favoured by Ramallah’s moneyed elite had more clientele than PA-sponsored rallies in some Palestinian cities. Although two television screens relayed the UN vote in the packed bar, the volume was muted. Mr Abbas “epitomises the decades devoted to a fruitless peace process and trust in the international community,” says a Palestinian businesswoman, who stayed away from the rallies. “It doesn’t convince anyone.”

Many Palestinians are dubious that the vote will prompt outsiders to do anything to end Israel’s 45-year-long occupation. Twenty years of international grand-standing from the White House lawns to the UN podium have left Israel’s hold on the West Bank increasingly entrenched with three times more Jewish settlers occupying the territory than when the Oslo process began in 1993. Ironically, the strongest show of support for Mr Abbas’s UN bid took place in Hamas’s enclave of Gaza, where an estimated 7,000 took to the streets. Based in the Highlands of the West Bank, Mr Abbas has not visited Gaza since 2007, and has no control on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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The Israeli billionaire accused of looting Congo at the expense of its people

Bloomberg Markets Magazine: Dan Gertler’s bearded face lights up as he looks out the helicopter window. Below, an installation twice the size of Monaco rises from a clearing in the central African forest, where it transforms ore mined from the ochre earth into sheets of copper.

“Look at it, look at it,” the Israeli billionaire, 38, shouts through the headset above the thrum of rotors. “This is what life is all about,” Gertler says as the chopper lands in the scorching, dry afternoon heat of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Everyone comes with dreams and illusions and promises. Everyone wants quick deals. They don’t want to invest. We are real.”

Wearing a black suit by French fashion house Zilli, ritual white tassels hanging off both hips and a black-velvet yarmulke, Gertler hops out into the dust of Mutanda, a mine controlled by his partner, Glencore International Plc (GLEN), that holds cobalt and some of the highest-grade copper in the world, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

He climbs into an air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruiser to tour the mine, tapping messages into one of his three BlackBerrys, whose batteries, like those of smartphones and laptops everywhere, often depend on cobalt to keep their charge.

Gertler has stakes in companies that control 9.6 percent of world cobalt production, based on U.S. Geological Survey data and company figures.

That’s just the beginning of Gertler’s influence in Congo, the largest country of sub-Saharan Africa, with the world’s richest deposits of cobalt and major reserves of copper, diamonds, gold, tin and coltan, an ore containing the metal tantalum, which is used in consumer electronics. His Gibraltar- registered Fleurette Properties Ltd. owns stakes in various Congolese mines through at least 60 holding companies in offshore tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands.

Gertler, whose grandfather co-founded Israel’s diamond exchange in 1947, arrived in Congo in 1997 seeking rough diamonds. The 23-year-old trader struck a deep friendship with Joseph Kabila, who then headed the Congolese army and today is the nation’s president. Since those early days, Gertler has invested in iron ore, gold, cobalt and copper as well as agriculture, oil and banking. In the process, he’s built up a net worth of at least $2.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He’s also acquired a roster of critics. Many of the government’s deals with Gertler deprive Congo’s 68 million people of badly needed funds, according to the London-based anticorruption group Global Witness and lawmakers from Congo and the U.K., the country’s second-biggest aid donor after the U.S.

“Dan Gertler is essentially looting Congo at the expense of its people,” says Jean Pierre Muteba, the head of a group of nongovernmental organizations that monitor the mining sector in Katanga province, where most of Congo’s copper is located.

“He has political connections, so state companies sell him mines for low prices and he sells them on for huge profits. That’s how he’s become a billionaire.”

In the eight months preceding November 2011 elections, in which Kabila won a second five-year term, companies affiliated with Gertler bought shares in five mining ventures from three state-owned firms, according to minutes of board meetings, company filings and documents published later. The state companies didn’t announce the sales.

In at least three of the cases, prices paid were below valuations of the projects made by analysts at Deutsche Bank AG, London-based Numis Securities Ltd. and Oriel Securities Ltd. and Atlanta-based consulting firm Golder Associates Inc.

Gertler denies that he purchased companies at below-market rates or that any of his deals have involved kickbacks.

“The lies are screaming to the heavens,” he says in his native Hebrew in a June interview, during three days Bloomberg reporters spent with him in Congo and Israel.

He returns from Congo to his home in Bnei Brak, an ultra- Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, each week to spend the Sabbath with his wife, Anat, and their nine children. [Continue reading…]

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Congo: a case study in how not to run a peace process

John Prendergast writes: Only in the Alice in Wonderland world of war-torn eastern Congo would the withdrawal of M23 rebels from Congo’s eastern provincial capital of Goma be cause for major celebration. The truth is that the retreat is just the latest chapter in a long story involving competing mafia-like political and military alliances controlled by leaders in the capitals of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda, all of whom justify their actions in terms of national security concerns to mask economic and political interests. Sometimes these competing elites fight each other and sometimes they cooperate for control of lucrative resources such as land, livestock, minerals, and timber.

The opportunity that the rebel withdrawal presents should not be squandered by leaving the resolution of the conflict solely to these three governments while ignoring the root causes and the real representatives of the local communities most affected by the bloody conflict in eastern Congo. The time has come, finally, for a real international peace effort — the kind that actually has a chance of ending the deadliest war the world has witnessed since World War II. This week, the biggest guns are once again assembling to re-divide the pie — this time in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, where peace talks are beginning between the main combatants.

By global standards, the effort to construct a credible peace process for Congo is manifestly derelict, and has only condemned that country to further cycles of devastating conflict. Each time that Rwandan-backed Congolese rebels with shifting acronyms have taken or threatened Goma over the past decade, hasty backroom negotiations have produced deeply flawed deals that have reduced the military pressure on Congolese President Joseph Kabila’s weakened government and permitted the Rwandan-backed rebels to administer strategic eastern zones and oversee taxation and resource looting. When one looks behind the occasional United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for an end to violence, the international diplomatic response is exposed as shockingly ineffective — perhaps even violating the Hippocratic Oath’s command to “do no harm.”

An entire semester’s curriculum could be built around Congo as a case study for how not to run a peace process. Every item on any conflict resolution 101 checklist has been violated or neglected. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinians should only negotiate with Israelis as equals

In an interview with Paul Martin, editor-in-chief of ConflictZones.tv, Moussa Abu Marzook, deputy politburo leader of Hamas and a strong contender to replace outgoing chairman Khaled Meshaal, says: “It is not useful for us to negotiate [with Israel] at this time. Negotiations, they have two conditions: the first condition, to be equal; the second condition” to be strong enough to prevent Israel doing anything unacceptable to the Palestinians.

Marzook also says that there will be no solution to the Palestinian problem until the Arab states resolve their own economic, political, and security problems. Only once having addressed these problems can Arabs be united and help each other. “We can talk about a new Palestine after we see all of those countries solve their problems.”

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Canadians favor even-handed approach to Middle East conflict

CBC reports: Nearly half of Canadians polled would prefer the federal government be neutral when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, a new poll suggests.

According to the CBC/Nanos survey, 48 per cent of people asked how the government should handle Middle East foreign policy said they want the government to favour neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians.

Another 27 per cent said they are unsure.

Of those who had a preference, 19 per cent said they want the government to favour the Israelis, with six per cent wanting the government to favour the Palestinians — a three-to-one ratio.

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Syria not alone in spying on citizens

CSO: The Internet, long viewed as a tool to expand freedom, is an equally effective tool for repression. That is just as true in the United States as anywhere else.

Security guru Bruce Schneier noted in a recent blog post, citing Evgeny Morozov’s book, “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” that, “Repressive regimes all over the world are using the Internet to more efficiently implement surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. And they’re getting really good at it.”

Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT and a well-known author, wrote that while IT technologies are generally mastered first, “by the more agile individuals and groups outside the formal power structures … unfortunately, and inevitably, governments have caught up.”

One of the most visible examples of that at present is Syria, where in February 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring demonstrations, the government of President Bashar al-Assad inexplicably reversed a long-standing ban on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the Arabic version of Wikipedia.

But it was essentially a sting. The government used those social networking sites to spy on and track dissidents, and then to arrest and torture them, Stephan Faris reported for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Faris reported on the case of Taymour Karim, who withstood torture under interrogation and refused to give up the names of his friends, all for naught.

“It didn’t matter,” Faris wrote. “His computer had already told all. ‘They knew everything about me,’ Karim said. ‘The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account … My computer was arrested before me.'”

Assad has long been known as an oppressive dictator, and U.S. officials including President Obama have called for his ouster. But Americans watching from half a world away should not get too smug, say some security experts. If the U.S. ever gets its own version of a President Assad, the tools are not only in place to monitor the activities of citizens, they are already in use. [Continue reading…]

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Syria and lessons from Libya

One of the warnings most frequently issued by critics of NATO intervention in Libya was the danger this would pose by setting a precedent: if the West intervenes on behalf of Gaddafi’s opponents, then all across the Arab world, those who rise up to challenge their authoritarian rulers will expect similar outside support. This fear then fed widespread skepticism about the magnitude of the imminent threat to the population in Benghazi. Was an atrocity really about to take place or was this prediction merely being used as a pretext for intervention?

Subsequent events across the region have demonstrated that even if there were some pro-interventionists who imagined that Libya set a precedent, it has instead served if anything as a model not to be followed. Moreover, as warnings about the peril of chemical weapons in Syria are issued, the Obama administration seems to have drawn another lesson from Benghazi: an atrocity can only serve as a justification for military action after it has taken place.

So, those who are alarmed that the specter of WMD is being raised now in order to justify direct military involvement by the U.S. in Syria can take comfort in this thought: the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrians over the last two years has not been enough to draw America into another war. The only thing that would precipitate such involvement would be the deaths of thousands more and even then, these would have to occur over a period of days rather than months.

The lesson from Libya is that the U.S. will not intervene to prevent genocide; it will only intervene after genocide has already occurred. Indeed, the administration’s red line is merely that if Assad uses chemical weapons, there will be “consequences” — no one has actually spelled out what those consequences might be, so even in such an event we should not assume that military action will follow.

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Chemical weapons in Syria: fact, fiction, and fib

In a guest post at Joshua Landis’ Syria Comment, Aron Lund writes: On the WMD discussion in your last post, which I think was spot on: My guess is that what’s happening is that some intelligence agencies are really picking up signals of WMD motion on the ground, but that the dramatic “mixing sarin and putting it into bombs” info is pure propaganda. It seems designed to spook the public, make a case for intervention, and, to some extent, force the hand of the Obama administration.

In the unlikely event that Assad has really started activating his WMD capacity, it could be for a military purpose or as a political signal. There are basically three things he would be interested in: 1) to threaten any would-be intervention force, e.g. Turkey, 2) to remind everyone that he could carry out a lethal last strike on Israel if the regime falls, 3) possibly, to shift chemical material over to allies in Lebanon, to create a kind of second-strike capability if the regime is attacked and unable to respond.

None of these things involve gassing populated areas in Syria with air-dropped bombs. It could perhaps be done, but it would be hugely counter-productive, not least in terms of an international response, and it’s obviously dangerous on a complex close-quarters battlefield such as Syria’s. It is certainly possible that the regime could have an internal meltdown and start making irrational choices, but so far its decision-makers seem to be acting rationally and in their own best interest. Given that, they’re not going to be poison-gassing Aleppo anytime soon. [Continue reading…]

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End the war on terror and save billions

Fareed Zacharia writes: As we debate whether the two parties can ever come together and get things done, here’s something President Obama could probably do by himself that would be a signal accomplishment of his presidency: End the war on terror. Or, more realistically, start planning and preparing the country for phasing it out.

For 11 years, the United States has been operating under emergency wartime powers granted under the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” That is a longer period than the country spent fighting the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. It grants the president and the federal government extraordinary authorities at home and abroad, effectively suspends civil liberties for anyone the government deems an enemy and keeps us on a permanent war footing in all kinds of ways.

Now, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, an administration official has sketched a possible endpoint.

In a thoughtful speech at the Oxford Union last week, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing general counsel for the Pentagon, recognized that “we cannot and should not expect al-Qaeda and its associated forces to all surrender, all lay down their weapons in an open field, or to sign a peace treaty with us. They are terrorist organizations. Nor can we capture or kill every last terrorist who claims an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”

But, he argued, “There will come a tipping point . . . at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” At that point, “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.”

Phasing out or modifying these emergency powers should be something that would appeal to both left and right. James Madison, father of the Constitution, was clear on the topic. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” he wrote, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2 trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. [Continue reading…]

And ending the war on terror wouldn’t just save money — it would allow for the possibility that America as a nation might be able to climb out of one of the most destructive expressions of collective insanity into which any nation has ever fallen.

Politics might dictate that this war can only be ended through some kind of declaration of victory, but an honest reckoning will eventually require acknowledging that this was the greatest blunder in America’s history. A trap was laid, and like a brainless giant, the United States stepped right into it.

Who could imagine that by making the meager investment of a few flying lessons and some box cutters, a small band of fanatics could persuade a country that prides itself as “the greatest nation on earth” to near bankrupt itself, act with such stupidity and inflict such enormous harm?

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Syrian military officers: ‘There’s no one left from our graduating class’

Reporting for the Daily Star, Marlin Dick describes a phone conversation, claimed to be between two Syrian military officers — a conversation that was recorded presumably without the awareness of either party and then posted on YouTube. Dick acknowledges that the authenticity of the recording cannot be verified, but he presents several reasons for concluding that it is not a fake. As for why it was recorded and then ended up on YouTube, he writes:

“The likeliest explanation is that the conversation was recorded, possibly as a part of the regime’s surveillance of its officers, and then seized when Base 46 near Maaret al-Numan was taken by the rebels, several weeks after the Eid.

“Regime positions at Saraqeb were overrun right after the purported conversation took place.

“A Syrian Alawite familiar with military culture described the men’s dialect as impeccable and their conversation as natural.”

The phone conversation described is around 11 minutes long. An army operator makes a brief appearance at the beginning, to put the call through to a Lt. Mohammad.

The two officers then engage in a back-and-forth conversation whose staccato pace signals that they know each other well. Their accents indicate they are Alawites, although that sect is not mentioned, and neither are the civilian casualties, or any political aspects of the war.

The caller passes on holiday greetings for the Eid al-Adha, indicating that the conversation took place at the end of October. He immediately senses that the officer, possibly a relative, is either upset or in pain.

“What’s the matter, you’re not doing well?” the caller asks, generating the weary response: “It was the worst day of my life.”

At first the two avoid discussing the details of battles and other military operations; they complain about the lack of opportunities to make telephone calls using either land lines or cellphones due to poor network coverage.

They move to the news that a friend or acquaintance has been killed in battle; the word “martyred” is used, which is common in Arab armies.

They debate when exactly, and from whom, they heard the news. The two men spend time discussing several such cases of friends lost, and the caller notes sadly how their graduating class is becoming depleted. He goes on to mention how he has now lost two commanding officers, and laughs nervously.

They talk about where mutual acquaintances are posted, and what they know of conditions in these places. In answer to a question, the caller says he is stationed in Maaret al-Numan, probably meaning in or near the largely rebel-held town, while the other man is in Saraqeb, a town in Idlib 30 kilometers to the north.

The caller describes the constant rebel attacks on army checkpoints in the Idlib area and the many regime troops who have been killed.

In response to a question about his duties in Maaret al-Numan, the caller says he commands a unit responsible for guarding a nearby depot in Wadi Daif, the airbase that has been under siege by rebels since October.

“What’s in the depot?” the officer in Saraqeb asks.

“There’s fuel – 5,000 liters of gasoline. Enough to blow Maaret al-Numan and Kafranbel to smithereens,” he says.

“So blow it up, and get out of there,” the officer responds.

The caller is amused by the idea and quickly dismisses it. This doesn’t prevent his friend from repeating the suggestion over the next few minutes, in a tone that manages to be both playful, and serious.

They both complain about the lack of support from other units, the inability to use many roads – “you just get blown up if you do” – and the isolation.

Throughout the rest of the conversation they make several brief references to the state of the war and the regime’s prospects for victory.

The caller talks about being a “strike force” in the area while the second man, who is markedly demoralized, rejects the idea, based on the steady, bloody attrition.

“No … no … we’re not a strike force,” he insists, before asking: “What’s the point of being out here?”

The caller tries repeatedly to boost his friend’s morale but at one point blurts out: “There’s no solution.”

When the caller asks about defections, the demoralized officer’s response is: “No, there haven’t been any defections … there’s just … disgust.”

Neither man presumes to predict how or when the war will end.

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