What Iran nuclear framework deal could mean for the region – and the world

By Edward Wastnidge, The Open University

And so it came, after years of protracted negotiations, extended deadlines and a diplomatic dance of unprecedented proportions – a deal that could signal a new era for Iran’s relations with the world. From media to academia, commentary ranges from cautious optimism to hawkish condemnation – but the historic nature of this deal is one thing that most agree on. Beyond the technical details of the agreement lies a triumph of diplomacy and the potential, if not for a realignment of US interests in the Middle East, then certainly a significant adjustment which has concerned its traditional allies in the region.

The deal came after what commentators cited as the longest continuous negotiations since the Camp David Accords were signed in 1979. The required patience and diplomatic nous needed to sustain this level of interaction was eased, in part, by the relationships developed between the chief negotiators during these marathon talks.

Personal chemistry

One thing that stood out in the negotiations was the seemingly good relationship between the chief protagonists, namely US secretary of state, John Kerry, and Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, and also between other members of the negotiating teams. Zarif, a seasoned diplomat, was empowered more than any previous Iranian foreign minister to take charge of the negotiations, while deferring to the wishes of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and his personal red lines for the negotiations.

Having previously acted as Iran’s ambassador to the UN from 2002-2007, Zarif proved to be a consummate diplomat, presenting a face of moderation and diplomatic maturity far removed from the revolutionary posturing of the Islamic Republic that has historically grabbed the headlines. Kerry also has a long and distinguished pedigree in foreign affairs, and like Zarif played the combination of candour and respect required in such delicate negotiations.

John Kerry.
Ralph Alswang, CC BY-ND

Their joint stroll through Geneva, and the numerous smiling photo-ops that the talks have produced between not just Kerry and Zarif but with the wider P5+1 representatives, show that a respectful relationship has been built up between the sides. This was borne out by Kerry’s very public offering of commiserations to Iranian negotiator Hossein Fereydoun (brother of Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani) on the death of his mother during the talks.

A further personal connection was re-enforced between the “number two” negotiators from the US and Iran, US energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, and head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi. Both had connections with the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where Moniz had worked as a professor and Salehi had completed his doctoral studies. On hearing the Salehi had recently become a grandfather, Moniz presented Salehi with MIT-embossed baby gifts at the talks.

Mohammad Javad Zarif.
U.S. Mission / Eric Bridiers, CC BY-ND

This is far removed from the mutual distrust and suspicion that has clouded relations in the past, and while the developing relationship was not supported by conservative factions at home on both sides, it provided the critical momentum needed to bring negotiations to a mutually agreeable conclusion. Contrast this personal chemistry with the frostiness that now characterises US relations with Israel, notwithstanding Israeli premier Netanyahu’s warm welcome among Senate Republicans, and one can see how priorities may be changing.

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Kenya attack: al-Shabaab’s violent radicalism can’t be tackled by force alone

By Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham

The terrorist group al-Shabaab has claimed an attack on Garissa University College in eastern Kenya, in which an unclear number have been killed and many others taken hostage.

The attack is another step in the ongoing escalation of the terrorist group’s activities, and a clear indicator that the security situation in East Africa is deteriorating fast.

Somalia-based al-Shabaab has been behind a string of recent attacks in Kenya, the most well-known of them being the massacre at the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi in 2013.

Cross-border raids into Kenya by the group, however, date back to 2011. Al-Shabaab incursions triggered a military response by the government in Nairobi, which sent troops to Somalia as part of an African Union mission in support of Somalia’s internationally recognised government that had been under pressure from al-Shabaab and other militants for several years.

Al-Shabaab is predominantly driven by the same radical interpretation of the Koran as al-Qaeda and Islamic State, but also employs more opportunistic approaches to shoring up local support. Its origins lie in Al-Ittihad al-Islami (Unity of Islam), one of several militant factions that emerged in the wake of the fall of Siad Barre in 1991. These disparate groups fought each other and a UN peacekeeping mission in the Somali civil war that led to the complete collapse of the country, from which it has yet to recover almost quarter of a century later.

An evolving threat

Al-Shabaab (literally “the Youth”) split from Unity of Islam in 2003 and merged with another radical Islamist group, the so-called Islamic Courts Union. As their alliance obtained control of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu in 2006, Ethiopia, the only majority Christian country in the region, took military action against the group. The offensive weakened al-Shabaab and pushed it back into the rural areas of central and southern Somalia, but it failed to defeat it.

To the contrary, Ethiopia’s invasion and occupation of parts of Somalia – although invited by the Somali government and backed by the African Union – enabled al-Shabaab to partially re-invent itself as both an Islamist and nationalist force opposing a foreign “Christian” invasion.

Initially, the group primarily attacked Ethiopian forces, but soon began to “expand” its activities against the Somali government as well. The first attack outside Somalia was in the Ugandan capital of Kampala in 2010. Soon after this, cross-border raids in Kenya began, predominantly targeting Christians.

Aftermath of an al-Shabaab suicide bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia in December 2014
EPA/Said Yusuf Warsame

Increasing its links with al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab declared its full allegiance in 2012 – and it is not clear whether it will switch allegiances to Islamic State. Much will depend on how the relationships between al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a long-time ally of al-Shabaab based in Yemen, and Islamic State develop.

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To beat the terrorists Kenya must break free of Western thinking

Mwenda Kailemia writes: On Wednesday night, life was normal for the close to 800 students of a university college in the remote part of Kenya’s north east, which borders Somalia. And then, at dawn on Thursday, all hell broke lose: Masked gunmen stormed the fortified campus dormitories shooting indiscriminately at the fleeing students before taking several hundred hostages. The dawn-to-dusk siege ended when the four gunmen detonated their suicide vests, with a fifth arrested. The attack left at least 147 people dead, mostly students, with survivors afterward recounting how the militants singled out and executed Christians.

It is the deadliest attack yet by al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-affiliated Somali militant group, which declared war on Kenya after the country sent its troops into Somalia in 2011. In a similar attack in 2013, armed gunmen stormed the Westgate shopping complex in Nairobi, selectively killing Christians and taking many people hostage. By the time the guns fell silent three days later close to 70 people had been killed.

The attacks have raised fundamental questions about Kenya’s security strategy. Recent commentary has emphasised the toxic mix of corruption and the structural alienation of Kenya’s Muslim population. Immigration and police officials, it is argued, can be bought by the highest bidder. Recently there have been widely publicised accounts of how foreigners have managed to acquire Kenyan passports within a few weeks of sneaking into the country. This corruption has played into the hands of both al-Shabaab and the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), a secessionist outfit in the country’s coastal regions, with both capitalising on popular disenchantment of the Kenyan Muslim minority for their recruitment.

Following yesterday’s attacks, it took security services several hours to arrive at the site of the siege because of bad roads in the area. Neglect by successive administrations has ensured that Garissa, like most of Kenya’s north east, is part of Kenya by name only: before this week’s attack, the local leadership had given the government an ultimatum: either ensure security or allow locals to take up arms to defend themselves from threats that range from al-Shabaab attacks to cattle rustling and inter-clan warfare. Thus, while the story of Kenya’s struggle with terrorism has been dominated by images of urban sieges, the untold story – until yesterday anyway– was the insecurity and neglect that the people of north eastern Kenya have had to endure for decades. The country may have won international acclaim for major investments in infrastructure, but it is not lost on locals that the whole region bordering Somalia has less than 100 miles of tarmacked roads. [Continue reading…]

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Houthi rebels may pose threat in fourth-busiest oil and fuel shipping bottleneck in the world

Bloomberg reports: Houthi rebels in Yemen have strengthened their positions on two islands in the strait of Bab el-Mandeb, deploying weapons that may put commercial and military vessels at risk, Djibouti’s foreign minister said.

The fighters have placed missiles, long-range cannons and “small rapid boats” loaded with heavy weaponry on Perim, the island that divides the strait into two channels between Djibouti and Yemen, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf said in an interview Thursday in Djibouti City. The Houthis are also reinforcing their positions on a smaller island in the area, he said.

“They are preparing themselves, at least to defend themselves if there is a blockade, or to attack vessels in the strait of Bab el-Mandeb if they feel that they are threatened when it comes to the control of the coastal areas of Yemen,” Youssouf said. “The prospect of a war in the strait of Bab al-Mandeb is a real one.”

The Bab el-Mandeb is the fourth-busiest oil and fuel shipping bottleneck in the world by volume. It’s located between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea, and gives crude tankers access to the Red Sea as well as the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The strait is 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen’s children: ‘When can I go out and play again?’

Al Jazeera reports: Among piles of rubble and strewn personal belongings in a residential area outside of Sanaa’s international airport, two young children lay injured and unconscious.

Mariam and Zain al-Jumozee, eight and five years old, suffered cuts from glass windows that shattered during Saudi-led air strikes against the Houthi rebels last week. When they finally woke at the Saudi German Hospital in Hadda, the siblings instantly knew their parents had died. Unable to communicate, covered in plaster and stitches, they remained silent as gunfire continued to pummel the Yemeni capital.

The Saudi-led offensive, aimed at quelling the rise of Yemen’s Houthi rebels, has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties, with more than 60 children among the dead, according to aid agency UNICEF. Scores of others have been injured.

“Children are in desperate need of protection, and all parties to the conflict should do all in their power to keep children safe,” UNICEF’s representative for Yemen, Julien Harneis, told Al Jazeera. [Continue reading…]

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Searching the web creates an illusion of knowledge

Tom Jacobs writes: Surely you have noticed: A lot of people who have no idea what they are talking about are oddly certain of their superior knowledge. While this disconnect has been a problem throughout human history, new research suggests a ubiquitous feature of our high-tech world — the Internet — has made matters much worse.

In a series of studies, a Yale University research team led by psychologist Matthew Fisher shows that people who search for information on the Web emerge from the process with an inflated sense of how much they know — even regarding topics that are unrelated to the ones they Googled.

This illusion of knowledge appears to be “driven by the act of searching itself,” they write in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Apparently conflating seeking information online with racking one’s brain, people consistently mistake “outsourced knowledge for internal knowledge.” [Continue reading…]

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Reactions to the Iran nuclear deal

The U.S. State Department has released the Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program.

The International Crisis Group says:

If finalised by its 30 June deadline and implemented, the nuclear accord could put an end to a prolonged and multidimensional standoff; effectively block overt and clandestine pathways to nuclear militarisation; set a positive precedent for the non-proliferation regime; provide the Iranian people with economic relief; offer a path for normalising Iran’s relationship with the international community; and thus open the door to the possibility of constructive engagement on critical issues of peace and security in the Middle East.

Negotiated outcomes by nature are imperfect. These agreed upon parameters provide Iran with an enrichment capacity higher than the U.S. and its allies preferred, and sanctions relief slower and more circumscribed than Iran desired. But both sides have protected their core interests and rightfully can claim victory – a precondition for any sustainable solution.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace experts James Acton, George Perkovich, and Karim Sadjadpour discuss the details of the deal and its implications here.

Ariane Tabatabai writes: The coming months will involve a great deal of legal and political wrangling. In the United States especially, due to anxious allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel) and some domestic opposition (especially among Republicans in Congress), negotiations will keep the White House busy.

Nonetheless, this is a good agreement for both sides, as indicated by some of its key components.

First, most of the public discussion about the negotiations has until now been focused on quantifiable elements, such as the number of centrifuges and amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran gets to keep, and the length of the deal’s implementation. But perhaps the most crucial aspect lies in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) access to Iranian facilities. In the framework deal, Tehran has said it will once again voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol to its existing IAEA safeguards agreement, granting the nuclear watchdog more inspections authority. (Iran had previously implemented the Protocol but stopped adhering to it.) This means that IAEA inspectors will be able to regularly monitor Iranian facilities and can conduct unannounced inspections as well. Inspectors will also have access to the supply chain through which Iran obtains materials for its nuclear program. Inspections will likely last for about 25 years, longer than the implementation period of the agreement itself.

Second, Iran’s enrichment program will be limited. It has agreed not to build any new enrichment facilities for 15 years, and will not enrich uranium above 3.7 percent—a level suitable for commercial power plants, but too low to practically be used in a nuclear weapon—for at least that long. It is also reducing its current stockpile of 10,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium to a small fraction of that amount.

The Fordow nuclear facility will cease enriching any uranium and will be converted into a research center instead—one barred from doing research on enrichment. In fact, Iran will not keep any fissile material at Fordow for 15 years.

Iran will instead make the Natanz facility the focus of all enrichment activities. There, it will use only its first-generation (IR-1) centrifuges to enrich for 10 years. The more advanced IR-2m centrifuges will be stored for that period, under IAEA monitoring. In fact, advanced centrifuge models (the IR-2, IR-4, IR-5, IR-6, and IR-8) will not be used for enrichment for 10 years.

In total, Iran will reduce its current enrichment apparatus by roughly two thirds. It will have only 6,104 installed centrifuges, as opposed to the current 19,000. All of them will be the IR-1 model.

Third, Iran will implement Modified Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements to its IAEA Safeguards Agreement, which requires it to give early notification that it is constructing new nuclear facilities.

Fourth, Iran will take steps to address concerns over the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD) of its program.

Fifth, Iran will redesign and rebuild the Arak heavy water reactor. The design will be agreed upon by negotiators from the six world powers, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. The redesign will mean that the reactor will not be able to produce weapon-grade plutonium. Iran is also recommitting itself to not developing a reprocessing capability. (Reprocessing, the back end of the fuel cycle, is a vital component in developing a plutonium bomb.) The original core of the reactor will be removed and either destroyed or taken out of the country. Additionally, Iran agrees not to build a new heavy water reactor for 15 years.

A number of these steps will, in effect, be irreversible. They will not just limit Iran’s nuclear capability for 10 to 15 years, but will reshape it entirely and indefinitely. [Continue reading…]

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Pragmatism driving Iran’s Supreme Leader toward nuclear deal

AFP reports: A nuclear deal with Iran is finally within sight because its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has chosen pragmatism over hardline rhetoric and possible conflict with the West.

Throughout 18 months of diplomacy between Iran and six world powers led by the United States, the question that has dominated all others is whether Khamenei will ever sign off on an accord.

Iran’s negotiators, led by the wide-smiling, US-educated Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, have often seemed desperately hemmed in at the talks by stringent red lines set by Khamenei.

The supreme leader, who has the final word on all policy matters foreign and domestic, has also previously cast doubt on whether dialogue would produce results, citing his distrust of America.

But the key parameters agreed in Lausanne on Thursday confirm the 75-year-old cleric’s intention to conclude a deal by June 30, analysts say. [Continue reading…]

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Iranians celebrate nuclear deal: ‘This will bring hope to our life’

The Guardian reports: Jubilant Iranians took to the streets on Thursday night to celebrate news of a breakthrough in nuclear negotiations with the West, and to express their hopes that the deal will end years of international isolation and economic hardship – and avert the threat of war.

The news from Switzerland was especially sweet coming as Iranians celebrated the final day of their Nowruz new year holidays. Even though newspapers, bazaars and state institutions were closed, many welcomed the landmark agreement which they believe will have a dramatic effect on the lives of ordinary Iranians.

Drivers in the streets of Tehran honked their car horns as news of the deal started to break. At 1am in the morning, t the capital’s longest street, Val-e-Asr Avenue, was still lined with cars, with men and women waving flags and flashing V-for-victory signs from open windows.

“Whatever the final result of the negotiations, we are winners,” Behrang Alavi told AFP. “Now we will be able to live normally like the rest of the world.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran nuclear talks: the long and winding road to a landmark agreement

Julian Borger reports: When Kerry first met Zarif at the UN general assembly in September 2013, it was a historic rarity for two countries that had not had diplomatic relations for 33 years. By the time the framework deal was agreed, the two men had spent more time in each other’s company than with any other foreign official. The pressure from hardliners back home gave the negotiators common cause. And Kerry took Zarif’s recommendation on the best Persian restaurant in Switzerland. The US energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, bonded with his opposite number, Ali Akbar Salehi, over physics and shared years teaching and studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Salehi became a grandfather for the first time during the Lausanne talks, the New York Times reported, Moniz presented him with baby gifts embossed with the MIT logo.

They worked through weekends and holidays. As the talks approached and passed a deadline in July 2014 in Vienna, Zarif worked through Ramadan, but it was impossible to negotiate and fast at the same time. Shia Islam exempts you from fasting for ten days if you are away from home, but if you want to extend the exemption after that you have to travel just over 25 miles a day (equivalent to 8 farsang, an ancient measure of distance) to justify it. So Zarif would get in a car every day and be driven in and out of the Austrian capital until he had clocked up the requisite mileage.

The foreign ministers came and went, but the technical experts often stayed behind, renting apartments in the host cities. One European non-proliferation expert missed most of the early life of his first child, spending three-quarters of his time on the road. A few of the negotiators received lucrative job offers during the course of the talks but had to defer them until the deal was done. Kerry’s deputy and master-negotiator, Bill Burns, had to put off retirement because both the Obama administration and the Iranians insisted that he stay. At critical points along the way, the technical and legal specialists often had to negotiate through the night.

“A lot of time it is not a matter of who is the smartest person in the room. It is a question of who has the most stamina,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former state department official who worked on the Iran dossier. “And Kerry had an incredible amount of stamina.”

The desired end-state of the negotiation was clear enough: Iran’s programme had to be limited so that it would take the country’s leaders at least a year to make a bomb, if they decided to do so, giving the rest of the world time to react. In return, the stifling sanctions regime buildup over the past nine years would be dismantled.

However, getting to that end-state has been endlessly complex. Fixing Iran’s “breakout” time at a year is a function of numbers of centrifuges, their efficiency and the already low stockpile of enriched uranium. To verify their calculations, American scientists constructed mock-up cascades of Iran’s centrifuges, using machines of the same vintage taken from Libya. Working at a classified site, the centrifuges were spun in an effort to determine how long they would take to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium. The UK and Israel, and perhaps other western European states, also had smaller-scale centrifuge mock-ups, and made their own calculations of breakout times.

The complexities were not just scientific. The web of interlocking international sanctions posed dense legal challenges when it came to drawing up a timetable for their lifting that was acceptable to all sides. [Continue reading…]

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Iran, U.S. agree on outline of nuclear deal

The Associated Press: Iran and six world powers have agreed on the outlines of an understanding to limit Iran’s nuclear programs, officials told The Associated Press Thursday. Negotiations continued on a dispute over how much of it to make public.

The officials spoke outside weeklong talks that have been twice extended past the March 31 deadline in an effort to formulate both a general statement of what has been accomplished and documents describing what needs to be done to meet a June 30 deadline for a final accord.

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Al-Qaeda’s freedom grows in Yemen following Saudi attacks

From the vantage point of Washington, a view consistent for many years has been that the danger posed by failed states is that they become havens for extremism.

U.S. governments apparently have little interest in the welfare of the populations in such states (unless images of starving children inconveniently appear in the media). The overriding concern for the U.S. is the potential for al Qaeda or its likes to take advantage of these kinds of environment.

A few days ago, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made a surprising claim about the implications of Yemen falling apart. Supposedly, this will have little impact on U.S. counter-terrorism efforts:

“We would greatly prefer to have U.S. personnel on the ground in Yemen that would enhance our efforts. But the fact that they have had to temporarily relocate does not mean that we are unable to continue to apply pressure on extremists who may be plotting against the United States and the West inside of Yemen,” Earnest said. “We do continue to have that capability. So, for as dangerous as Yemen is to American personnel, Yemen is also a dangerous place for those extremists.”

Hundreds of al Qaeda prisoners have just been freed from a prison in al-Mukalla. Is the White House now going to argue that this represents a setback for al Qaeda with its operatives having lost the relative safety of their prison cells?

Gregory D. Johnsen reports: Around 1 a.m. on Thursday, masked gunmen armed with RPGs, hand grenades, and assault rifles stormed a central security prison in eastern Yemen, freeing more than 300 prisoners, including a top al-Qaeda commander.

Pictures posted to social media, apparently pulled from CCTV footage near the prison, show a pick-up truck full of heavily armed men near the prison. Other photos capture a large explosion punching through the dark sky and, in another, an open gate with a few figures walking away.

The prison break in al-Mukalla – one of the largest cities in Yemen and 300 miles east of fighting in Aden – freed Khalid Ba Tarfi, an AQAP regional commander who was captured in 2011, along with hundreds of others. In recent years, Yemen’s prisons have become de facto jihadi academies as more hardened veterans have been dumped into communal cells with younger more impressionable prisoners.

The incident underscores the degree to which the country’s security forces have collapsed amid months of political chaos and the recent barrage of a Saudi-led bombing campaign.

“Things have completely spiraled out of control in the south,” one Yemeni government official told BuzzFeed News. “There’s been a total collapse.”

One of the predictable, if unintended, consequences of more than a week of Saudi airstrikes is the growing freedom al-Qaeda has to operate in the country. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia’s plans for a ground invasion of Yemen

The Associated Press reports: Saudi Arabia and its allies plan an ambitious ground offensive on multiple fronts in Yemen. It may be inevitable if they want to defeat Iranian-backed Shiite rebels but it also carries enormous risks, from the inhospitable, mountainous terrain and a possible guerrilla war to al-Qaida militants waiting in the wings.

The first main objective of a ground assault would be to secure the southern port of Aden and its immediate vicinity to allow the return of Western- and Gulf-backed President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled the Arabian Sea city last month in the face of a push south by the rebels. There, the troops would begin the task of building a new Yemeni army, replacing a military fragmented by the conflict.

The more daunting part of the plan is for Saudi-led forces to cross the border from Saudi Arabia into Yemen, according to Egyptian and Yemeni military and security officials briefed on planning. That means entering a mountainous landscape that is the home stronghold of the Shiite rebels, known as Houthis. There in Saada province, they have battled Yemen’s military to a standstill in six wars over the past decade. [Continue reading…]

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Putin: Try to take Crimea away and I will give you a nuclear war

The Times reports: The Ukraine crisis has brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point for a generation, according to an account of a secret meeting between Russian and American military and intelligence figures.

As President Putin celebrated the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea on March 18 with an appearance at a concert outside the Kremlin, a group of retired Russian generals sat down in Torgau, Germany, with a group of their American counterparts. The assembled Russians once ran the interior ministry, the military directorate in charge of nuclear weapons, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) and the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB). The American individuals present had similar backgrounds in the military, CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency.

Behind closed doors, over two days, the Russians delivered a series of blunt warnings from Moscow that reveal just how precarious Europe’s security has become over the past year, and how broad the gulf between the Kremlin and the West now is.

The US party at the Elbe Group talks appears to have been surprised to discover that Russian security experts believe that the US is bent on destroying their country — and that Russia is both entitled and fully prepared to use nuclear force to defend itself. That point of view reflects both Mr Putin’s assessment of Russia’s vulnerability and the KGB background shared by him and his closest advisers, according to Kremlin insiders.

Swaggering nuclear rhetoric has increasingly permeated Russian life. In a recent documentary, Mr Putin said that when he gave the instruction to annex Crimea, he also ordered that Russia’s nuclear forces be placed on full alert.

He has referred to Russia’s nuclear might many times since the Ukraine crisis began, including in remarks to a group of schoolchildren in August, when he reminded them that “Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers”, and “it’s best not to mess with us”. [Continue reading…]

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As F-16s trump democracy for Egypt, Sisi becomes the latest Middle East leader to outmaneuver Obama

Joyce Karam writes: The “free and fair elections” and the “inclusive government” that the Obama administration once called for in Egypt is now part of a long wishful list for the 44th U.S. President in the Middle East. The “rule of law” and the “transition to democracy” did not transpire in Cairo, prompting Washington to reverse its punitive path and resume the military aid to Egypt, being withheld since 2013.

Obama’s reversal this week of his own decision concludes this administration’s failed experiment in Egypt. The Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi joins the club of many Middle East leaders who outmaneuvered Obama and forced a change in U.S. calculus instead of the changing theirs. Sisi did so through a strategy that challenged Obama regionally and on his own turf in Washington, while clamping down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and executing a new power grab.

The full resumption of military aid to Egypt, and this time with no strings attached is an admission that the policy of the last two years fell flat. The U.S. administration is practically meeting all Sisi’s demands without Egypt’s strongman giving an inch, not even promising parliamentary elections or the release of political prisoners. [Continue reading…]

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Why Palestine joining the International Criminal Court could be a total game changer

By Kurt Mills, University of Glasgow

After more than five years and much diplomatic wrangling, Palestine has joined the International Criminal Court (ICC). Now, the prospect of Israel being held accountable for war crimes has greatly increased, and that will have significant repercussions for the peace process and for Palestinian statehood.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation on January 16. This can investigate everything that has happened in Palestinian territories since June 13 2014 – the date that Palestine formally accepted ICC jurisdiction. This is also the date when Israel broke a ceasefire with Hamas leading to Operation Protective Edge, which raged throughout the summer of 2014, leading to the deaths of at least 1,473 civilians in Gaza and bringing widespread international condemnation against Israeli actions.

The story dates back to 2009, when the Palestinian Authority requested that the ICC investigate Israel over Operation Cast Lead, but was rejected for not being a state. It was rejected for full membership in the United Nations in 2011, but was granted the status of non-member observer state the following year.

Palestine then joined numerous international organisations, such as UNESCO, and while the question of its statehood remains controversial, it has now been allowed to join the ICC. In the interim it has periodically indicated it would refer Israel to the ICC, but was held back by pressure from the US, the UK and France – and because using the threat suited Palestinian political interests.

Avenues of enquiry

The prosecutor could investigate the civilian casualties in Operation Protective Edge. She could also investigate whether the Israelis carried out the war crime known as collective punishment. This includes demolishing the homes of suspected Hamas militants, thus rendering their families homeless, as well as killing civilians in these buildings. During Operation Protective Edge alone, Amnesty International reported that “more than 18,000 homes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair”.

Israeli tanks in action during Operation Protective Edge
EPA

The prosecutor would also be likely to investigate Palestinians over the hundreds of rockets Hamas fired indiscriminately into Israel from Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of at least six civilians.

Most substantially, Bensouda could look at the continued occupation of Palestinian territory, including both the West Bank and Gaza. Specifically this might look at Israel’s settlement policy, which appears to contravene Article 8 of the ICC’s founding Rome Statute.

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