Just Foreign Policy News
April 7, 2010
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Real News: U.S. covering up reality in Honduras
State Department campaign denies the systemic repression that continues nine months after coup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4C6RqYTAZI&
Congressional Pressure Can End the War, Saving Many Lives
The fight over the war supplemental is tremendously important, because Congressional pressure can move Administration policy, even when critics of Administration policy don’t command a majority of votes. This is especially true when, as in this case, critics are in the majority in the President’s own party, and when, as in this case, the policy under pressure is an international policy which is also under significant international pressure.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/537
Urge Congress to Talk About the Human Cost of War
In the next few weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to approve $33 billion more for war and occupation in Afghanistan. Urge your representatives in Congress to use this opportunity to shine a spotlight on the human cost of continuing war and occupation.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/humancost
Call Congress the Week of April 12 Against the War in Afghanistan
Groups are collaborating in generating calls to Congress against the war, urging: opposition to the war supplemental, support for a military withdrawal timetable, support for a public exit strategy and support for peace negotiations. Spread the word.
Highlights of the Afghanistan Debate
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/video/housedebate
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Senator Feingold and Representative McGovern are expected to introduce legislation as early as next week calling for a "flexible timetable" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, reports Tom Hayden in the Nation. A troop withdrawal deadline is seen by peace advocates as an incentive to draw the Taliban into peace talks, directly and indirectly, Hayden writes. Some Congressional staff and peace advocates are considering demands to make as possible amendments on the war supplemental, including requiring all-party talks in Afghanistan leading to new internationally supervised elections, including elements of the Taliban, as a condition of funding; replacing ISAF troops in Afghanistan with peacekeepers from non- aligned countries, challenging drone attacks in Pakistan.
2) Even as a new investigation of a February U.S. Special Forces night raid was being announced, General McChrystal’s spokesman insisted that there had been no U.S. cover-up of the killing of Afghan civilians in the raid, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. Asked by IPS how the US could have arrived at its initial claim that three Afghan women were already dead when Special Forces began the raid, McChrystal’s spokesman suggested that US forces had not found the bodies for some time. But family members have told reporters a very different story. Family members told CNN and the UN that two of the victims died hours later, after US forces prevented family members from taking them to the hospital.
3) Senior Palestinian leaders are promoting and participating in nonviolent resistance against the Israeli occpuation, the New York Times reports. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. Billboards have sprung up as part of a campaign against buying settlers’ goods, featuring a pointed finger and the slogan "Your conscience, your choice." The Palestinian Ministry of Communications has banned the sale of Israeli cellphone cards because Israeli signals are relayed from towers inside settlements. A senior PLO official was arrested at demonstration protesting Israeli restriction on travel to Jerusalem.
4) A spokesman for US Central Command said Tuesday that Central Command was "looking into" the U.S. shootings of two Reuters employees in Iraq following Wikileaks’ release of the military video, but stopped short of referring to it as an investigation, the New York Times reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists said the video "confirms our long-held view that a thorough and transparent investigation into this incident is urgently needed."
5) Former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Samuel Berger have told the Obama Administration it will have to put its own proposal on the table for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to get talks moving, the New York Times reports. A senior US official said such a move would not happen now, but would happen once talks started and got bogged down. Most Middle East experts draw the same outline for a peace deal, the Times says: Palestinians would have to accept compensation rather than return for 1948 Palestinian refugees and their descendents; Jerusalem would be shared, with Israel’s capital in the West and Palestine’s in the east; Israel would return to its 1967 borders, give or take a few negotiated settlements and territorial swaps; the US or NATO would give Israel security guarantees; Arab states like Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel.
6) The US and Brazil have reached an agreement aimed at settling a dispute over US subsidies to cotton growers, the New York Times reports. The announcement came one day before Brazil was to begin imposing up to $830 million in sanctions with authorization from the WTO. The case was closely watched because Brazil would have been the first country to violate U.S. intellectual property claims in retaliation for unfair trade policies with the approval of the WTO. Brazil had threatened to stop charging its farmers technology fees for seeds developed by US biotechnology companies and to break US pharmaceutical patents before their scheduled expiration.
7) The Kyrgyz opposition said on Wednesday it had forced the Central Asian country’s government to resign after troops shot at protesters besieging government buildings, killing dozens, Reuters reports.
Israel/Palestine
8) Israeli journalist Anat Kamm is scheduled to go on trial in Israel for allegedly having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter, the New York Times reports. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. If Kamm is found guilty, she could face up to 15 years in jail. Observers have speculated that the recipient of the documents was Uri Blau from the newspaper Haaretz. According to The Independent, Blau is currently "hiding in Britain." A November 2008 article by Blau suggested that the killing of Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha by Israeli forces contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling.
9) The IMF says there has been no significant easing of Israeli restrictions in the West Bank in 2010, the New York Times reports. The IMF says unemployment in the West Bank is 18%; in Gaza it is 39%.
Afghanistan
10) The brother of Gul Rahman, who died in a CIA prison in Afghanistan in 2002 from exposure when he was left shackled and half-naked at near-freezing temperatures, says Gul Rahman braved rocket and small-arms fire in 1994 to rescue now-President Karzai, AP reports. Karzai, then deputy foreign minister, had been arrested by Afghan intelligence, by some accounts because he was in contact with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other militia leaders to end the civil war. Gul Rahman’s family is appealing to the Red Cross and the US to return Rahman’s body for burial.
Pakistan
11) Despite pending constitutional changes expected to strengthen democracy in Pakistan, the US is likely to continue to prefer dealing with Pakistan’s military, the New York Times reports. Under the changes, provinces will eventually have the right to legislate, to control their own education programs and significantly more of their finances
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) A Withdrawal Plan for Afghanistan
Tom Hayden, The Nation, April 7, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/hayden
Two key antiwar critics, Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Jim McGovern, are expected to introduce legislation as early as next week calling for a "flexible timetable" for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The proposal, now in final stages of preparation, was confirmed by McGovern and by Feingold’s office.
The coordinated effort, the first of its kind during the Afghanistan war, is reminiscent of similar House-Senate proposals that eventually succeeded in winning majority support during the Vietnam War. During the Iraq War, resolutions calling for a timetable steadily advanced as well, until they became Obama’s platform in 2008.
The new initiative will challenge the Obama administration and offer an organizing vehicle for the peace movement. The recent sixty-five votes for Representative Dennis Kucinich’s antiwar resolution is not a true measure of antiwar sentiment in the Congress, McGovern told me, adding, "We haven’t had our full debate on the war." Congressional restlessness is climbing over sacrificing American lives and dollars for a corrupt and recalcitrant Karzai government, he argues.
A Congressional letter from Feingold and McGovern questioning the current policy is expected shortly, to be followed by introduction of the legislation. McGovern also will introduce an updated version of last year’s resolution requesting an exit plan from the administration. Last year’s version had 100 House sponsors.
Congressional attention will soon turn to the Pentagon’s requests for $33 billion to fund the current Afghan escalation and $159 billion for Iraq-Afghanistan war funding in fiscal year 2011. Obama has spoken against open-ended funding and pledged to "begin" troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011. Yet he has refused to agree to a date by which all troops will be withdrawn as he did during the Iraq war in 2008.
The Feingold-McGovern proposal could challenge the president if it achieves debate and a substantial, though minority, vote in favor. But it also will reveal a lack of Democratic unity in both houses. According to one ranking insider, "the mood…seems to be granting the administration some additional time as the new troops deploy. It may not be the right strategy but it suits most people politically."
A troop withdrawal deadline is seen by peace advocates as an incentive to draw the Taliban into peace talks, directly and indirectly. There are behind-the-scenes debates already underway over providing safe-passage documents which would enable Taliban leaders to enter Kabul or a third country for political negotiations, which Karzai favors. Former United Nations envoy Kai Eide supports negotiating with the Taliban too, but the US State Department and Pentagon are so far opposed both to negotiations and safe-passage documents.
Meanwhile, some Congressional staff and peace advocates are evaluating a menu of demands to make as possible amendments fleshing out an exit strategy in the budget battles ahead, among them:
– ending the Iraq War according to agreements already supported by the Obama administration. Currently, existing Congressional budget language supports the timelines of (1) a US-imposed deadline of this August 3 for all US combat forces to be withdrawn, and (2) the US- Iraq pact’s official December 31, 2011, deadline, when all remaining troops and contractors must leave Iraq, and bases shut down or handed over to the Iraqi government;
– requiring all-party talks in Afghanistan leading to new internationally supervised elections, including elements of the Taliban, as a condition of funding;
– conditioning further humanitarian and educational aid on protections for Afghan women’s rights, and recognized human rights standards for detainees;
– replacing ISAF troops in Afghanistan with peacekeepers from non- aligned countries, particularly from Islamic-majority ones;
– challenging drone attacks as pre-emptive invasions of Pakistan’s sovereignty to perform secret extra-judicial killings, which result in large-scale civilian deaths and alienate the population.
[…]
2) Afghan Official Says U.S. Raiders Hid Killings
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, Apr 7
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50944
[…] Even as the new investigation was being announced, McChrystal’s spokesman Breasseale was continuing to defend the official claim that no evidence of a cover-up has emerged.
In an e-mail response to a question from IPS about how it was possible that the U.S. SOF personnel had killed the women but believed they had been killed before the raid, Breasseale suggested that the joint force had not discovered the bodies for some extended period of time after beginning their search of the compound.
"Your question assumes that the ground force went directly into the room where the women were," he wrote. "I can tell you that there were other members of the extended friends and family of the owners of the compound present as well as various other rooms and buildings in the compound."
Family members have told reporters a very different story, however. A male relative of the victims of the raid who watched them bleed to death told CNN in an interview published Tuesday that the attacking force "did not allow him to take the wounded to the hospital".
A similar account was given by family members to a United Nations investigating team, as reported by Starkey in the Times Mar. 16. The family members said the police commissioner and the 18-year old girl who were killed, died hours later and might have survived had they been taken to a hospital immediately.
U.S. and Afghan forces had refused to get them to a hospital immediately, according to their account.
[…]
3) Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance
Ethan Bronner, New York Times, April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07westbank.html
Ramallah, West Bank – Senior Palestinian leaders – men who once commanded militias – are joining unarmed protest marches against Israeli policies and are being arrested. Goods produced in Israeli settlements have been burned in public demonstrations. The Palestinian prime minister has entered West Bank areas officially off limits to his authority, to plant trees and declare the land part of a future state.
Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance.
"It is all about self-empowerment," said Hasan Abu-Libdeh, the Palestinian economy minister, referring to a campaign to end the purchase of settlers’ goods and the employment of Palestinians by settlers and their industries. "We want ordinary people to feel like stockholders in the process of building a state."
The new approach still remains small scale while American-led efforts to revive peace talks are stalled. But street interviews showed that people were aware and supportive of its potential to bring pressure on Israel but dubious about its ultimate effectiveness.
Billboards have sprung up as part of a campaign against buying settlers’ goods, featuring a pointed finger and the slogan "Your conscience, your choice." The Palestinian Ministry of Communications has just banned the sale of Israeli cellphone cards because Israeli signals are relayed from towers inside settlements.
[…] Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent. But the current set of campaigns is trying to incorporate peaceful pressure in limited ways. Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march. Next week, Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak here at a conference on nonviolence.
On Palm Sunday, the Israeli police arrested 15 Palestinians in Bethlehem who were protesting the difficulty of getting to Jerusalem because of a security closing. Abbas Zaki, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arrested, prompting demonstrations the next day. Some Palestinians are also rejecting V.I.P. cards handed out by Israelis allowing them to pass quickly through checkpoints.
Palestinian political analysts say it is too early to assess the prospects of the nonviolent approach. Generally, they say, given the division between Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority here, nothing is likely to change without a political shakeup and unified leadership. Still, they say, popular resistance, combined with institution-building and international appeals, is gaining notice among Palestinians.
"Fatah is living through a crisis of vision," said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. "How can they combine being a liberation movement with being a governing party? This is one way. The idea is to awaken national pride and fulfill the people’s anxiety and passion. Of course, Hamas and armed resistance still remain a real option for many."
Khalil Shikaki, who runs the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, said: "The society is split. The public believes that Israel responds to suffering, not to nonviolent resistance. But there is also not much interest in violence now. Our surveys show support for armed resistance at 47 percent in March. In essence, the public feels trapped between failed diplomacy and failed armed struggle."
Israeli military authorities have not decided how to react. They allow Mr. Fayyad some activity in the areas officially off limits to him, but on occasion they have torn down what he has built. They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.
[…] One effort to increase a sense of hope is a new push to ban goods made in the settlements, symbols of occupation. A $2 million project called the Karama National Empowerment Fund, jointly financed by Palestinian businesses and the government, aims to spread the message through ads and public events.
Mr. Abu-Libdeh, the economy minister, said a law was likely to go into effect soon barring the purchase of settlers’ goods, a trade worth at least $200 million a year. Efforts to end Palestinian employment in settlements will not carry penalties, he said, because the government does not offer unemployment insurance and it is unclear whether the 30,000 Palestinians who work in settlements could find new jobs.
Palestinian industrialists have financed the settlers’ goods ban partly because they hope to replace the goods with their own. They do not single out other Israeli goods, which are protected under trade agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
[…]
4) For 2 Grieving Families, Video Reveals Grim Truth
Tim Arango and Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07baghdad.html
Baghdad – The women of Saeed Chmagh’s family wept, but the men did not as they watched a video of him being shot to death by a gunner on an American Apache attack helicopter. "I saw the truth," Samir Chmagh, 19, son of the dead man, said Tuesday in his family’s living room in Baghdad. "They saw clearly that they were journalists and that they were holding cameras. It was painful when we saw this movie."
It was a fog-of-war moment in July 2007 on the streets of Baghdad in which American troops gunned down men they identified as insurgents. The attack left 12 people dead, including Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old Reuters photographer, and Mr. Chmagh, 40, a driver and assistant for the news agency.
A video from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter was released on Monday by WikiLeaks.org, an online organization that said it had received the video from a whistle-blower in the military. The video has become an Internet sensation, with defenders saying the soldiers believed they were under threat and critics denouncing what they said were callous and bloodthirsty comments by the soldiers as they killed about a dozen people.
A spokesman for United States Central Command, Lt. Cmdr. Bill Speaks, said on Tuesday that the Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was "looking into" the shootings, but stopped short of referring to it as an investigation.
The only investigation so far has been one directed in 2007 by Maj. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, who at the time was a brigadier general and the deputy commander of international forces in Baghdad and the surrounding areas. The inquiry concluded that the pilots had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group on the street. No disciplinary action was taken.
[…] The Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group based in New York that promotes press freedom and monitors violence against journalists around the world, said in a statement that the video "confirms our long-held view that a thorough and transparent investigation into this incident is urgently needed."
Since 2003, when the Iraq war began, 140 journalists have been killed, most who were singled out by other Iraqis because of their sectarian identity, the group said. The group has tracked 16 cases in which journalists were killed from fire by American forces, although in none of these cases is there evidence the journalists were intended to be targets. This list, however, does not include Mr. Chmagh, because he is considered a media support worker. "It’s the most deadly conflict ever recorded by C.P.J.," said Joel Simon, the organization’s executive director. "It’s probably the most deadly ever, certainly more deadly than Vietnam."
For Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s family, the video seemed to bring closure for an event that had left many questions unanswered. "God has answered my prayer in revealing this tape to the world," said the photographer’s father, who taught his son how to take pictures. "I would have sold my house and I all that I own in order to show this tape to the world."
5) In Quest to Break Mideast Stalemate, a U.S. Option Emerges
Helene Cooper, New York Times, April 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/world/middleeast/08prexy.html
Washington – Two weeks ago, Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, was holding a meeting at the White House with a high-powered array of his predecessors when President Obama dropped in.
The men gathered in the Situation Room had trolled through a number of national security issues, from China to Afghanistan to Iran. But on that Wednesday, the morning after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had failed to resolve a standoff over new construction in East Jerusalem with Mr. Obama in White House talks, the major discussion topic was the Middle East. And the question on the table after Mr. Obama joined in: had the time come for the president to put forward his own proposal outlining what a peace deal should look like?
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Samuel Berger, the national security advisers to Presidents Carter, Ford, the senior Bush and Clinton, advocated such a move, according to several current and former administration officials in the room. Mr. Scowcroft cast the issue in terms of United States national security and its relations with the Arab world. He argued that only American leadership would break the cycle of distrust, hostility and violence that has prevented Israel and its Arab neighbors from forging a lasting peace deal.
[…] Still, for all of that, a consensus appears to be growing, both within the administration and among outside advisers to the White House, that Mr. Obama will have to consider suggesting a solution to get the two sides moving.
Such a move is "absolutely not on the table right now," a senior administration official said, adding that the United States wanted to first see the start of the indirect, American-brokered peace negotiations, which diplomats refer to as "proximity talks." But the official said those talks would "undoubtedly get mired down, and then you can expect that we would go in with something."
What that would be remains up in the air, but most Middle East experts draw the same outline for an eventual peace deal. First, Palestinian officials would have to accept that there would be no right of return for refugees of the 1948 war that established the Israeli state, and for their millions of descendants. Rather, the Palestinians would have to accept some kind of compensation. Second, the two sides would have to share Jerusalem – Palestinians locating their capital in the east, Israelis in the west, and both signing on to some sort of international agreement on how to share the holy sites in the Old City.
Third, Israel would return to its 1967 borders – before it captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War – give or take a few negotiated settlements and territorial swaps. Fourth, the United States or NATO would have to give Israel security guarantees, probably including stationing troops along the Jordan River, to ease Israeli fears that hostile countries could use the Palestinian state as a springboard for attacks. And finally, Arab neighbors like Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel.
"It’s not rocket science," said Robert Malley, director of the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based organization that seeks to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts. "And a lot of people who have looked at this have reached the conclusion that the parties won’t reach there on their own. If the U.S. wants it done, it will have to do it."
[…]
6) U.S. and Brazil Reach Agreement on Cotton Dispute
Sewell Chan, New York Times, April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/business/07trade.html
Washington – The United States and Brazil have reached an agreement aimed at settling a long-standing trade dispute over American subsidies to cotton growers, officials in both countries said Tuesday.
The announcement came one day before Brazil was to begin imposing up to $830 million in sanctions with authorization from the World Trade Organization. The trade body had ruled last August that American subsidies to cotton growers had violated global trade rules.
Under the preliminary deal, Brazil would hold off on retaliation in exchange for American concessions that include the modification of an export loan program and the establishment of a temporary assistance fund for the Brazilian cotton industry. The broader issues in contention would be deferred until Congress takes up the next farm bill, most likely in 2012.
The Brazilian sanctions were to include $591 million in higher tariffs on a wide array of goods, including autos, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, electronics, textiles and wheat.
The case was also closely watched because Brazil would have been the first country to violate American intellectual property rights in retaliation for unfair trade policies under the approval of W.T.O. arbitrators.
Brazil had threatened, for example, to stop charging its farmers technology fees for seeds developed by American biotechnology companies and to break American pharmaceutical patents before their scheduled expiration. Those retaliatory actions would have cost American businesses up to $239 million.
"Traditionally, retaliation in trade has been the preserve of the largest developed countries, which have market power," said Robert Z. Lawrence, a professor of international trade and finance at the Harvard Kennedy School. "But this mechanism – suspending intellectual property protection – gives smaller, developing countries a way to enforce their rights under trade rules."
[…] Under the agreement, the Agriculture Department will modify a program that guarantees loans extended by American banks to approved foreign banks for purchases of American agricultural products by foreign buyers.
The United States will also set up a technical assistance fund of $147.3 million a year. The amount represents the value of the retaliation the W.T.O. had authorized for American payments to cotton producers under a marketing loan program and a countercyclical loan program. The fund would remain in place until passage of the next farm bill or a mutually developed solution, whichever occurs first.
[…] The Brazilian government, under pressure from its cotton growers, filed the case in 2002. In 2005, and again in 2008, the W.T.O. found that the American agricultural subsidies violated trade agreements.
[…]
7) Kyrgyz opposition says it has taken power
Olga Dzyubenko and Maria Golovnina, Reuters, Wednesday, April 7, 2010; 2:35 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/07/AR2010040700460.html
Bishkek – The Kyrgyz opposition said on Wednesday it had forced the Central Asian country’s government to resign after troops shot at protesters besieging government buildings, killing dozens. "We have reached an agreement that the government will resign. That has not been signed on paper yet," Galina Skripkina, a senior official in the opposition Social-Democratic Party and member of parliament, told Reuters.
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev had flown to the southern city of Osh. "Bakiyev has taken a plane from Bishkek to Osh and he has already landed there," she said. "The opposition is in full control of power," an opposition leader, Roza Otunbayeva, said, Russian news agency RIA reported earlier.
The announcement followed a day of violent clashes in Bishkek and other towns. Spokesmen for the government and the president were not available for comment.
Another opposition leader, Temir Sariyev, said the opposition had entered the government building in central Bishkek and Kyrgyz Prime Minister Daniyar Usenov had written a resignation statement, RIA reported.
[…] Kyrgyz troops earlier shot at thousands of anti-government protesters who tried to smash two trucks through the perimeter fence of government buildings, a Reuters reporter said. Around 1,000 people stormed the prosecutor-general’s office before setting fire to the building. Opposition activists also took control of state television channel KTR.
"There are dozens of dead bodies, all with gunshot wounds," Akylbek Yeukebayev, a doctor at a Bishkek hospital told Reuters. Many of the injured had gunshot wounds to their heads. "They are killing us," said one wounded man on the emergency ward.
"About 100 people were killed today, possibly more. What kind of negotiations with the government can we talk about when they are killing our people?," prominent opposition and human rights campaigner Toktoaim Umetaliyeza told Reuters. The Kyrgyz Health Ministry said the official death toll in Bishkek was 40, with around 400 injured across the country.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
8) Debate in Israel on Gag Order in Security Leak Case
New York Times, April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07israel.html
A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case. A court-imposed gag order has prevented any reporting of the case in Israel, but on Tuesday, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge sharply criticized the forced news blackout, saying in a radio interview that it must be fought, and stirring a public furor.
The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military service. Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the liberal newspaper Haaretz, and that he used the documents as the basis for a 2008 exposé.
Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz. Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media have so far made only cryptic references to the case.
[…] The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 issue that readers searched the Internet with the keywords "Israeli journalist gag" in order to learn about an affair of interest to Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same newspaper ran a translation of an article by Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, on the case, with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally blacked out.
If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up to 15 years in jail.
[…] According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected of having used the confidential military documents, is currently "hiding in Britain."
The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two Palestinian militants belonging to the Islamic Jihad group were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces.
Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the militants, Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for assassination by the Israeli Army’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank.
Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited the circumstances in which the military can to carry out pre-emptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were eligible targets alongside the report.
[…]
9) West Bank Growth Seen as Imperiled
Ethan Bronner, New York Times, April 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/world/middleeast/08palestinians.html
Jerusalem – The International Monetary Fund is preparing a report on the Palestinian economy that praises the actions of the West Bank government and the large donations of Western, especially European, countries, but argues that healthy recent growth rates are imperiled by the parties that claim to have the most at stake – Israel and the Arab states.
"There is a very high risk that the growth of the last year will not last," Oussama Kanaan, head of the fund’s mission to the Palestinian territories, said in an interview ahead of a meeting in Madrid next week of donor countries where he will present the report. "There has been no additional significant easing of restrictions by Israel so far in 2010. And there is a lack of donor support, especially among the Arabs, who need to give in a more systematic and predictable way to build investor confidence."
Following the violent uprising of late 2000 and fierce Israeli countermeasures, an economic crisis began that lasted until 2007 when mild growth began. For 2009, Mr. Kanaan said, the economic growth rate for the West Bank and Gaza was the highest in years, 6.8 percent, of which 8.5 percent was in the West Bank and 1 percent in Gaza.
He attributed the growth for the West Bank to improved security, institution building and transparency from the government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, an Israeli easing of restrictions on movement and access and substantial foreign government donations. All three needed to continue in a predictable way in 2010, Mr. Kanaan said, but so far the Palestinian Authority was the only player clearly living up to its promises.
The challenge of economic growth for Gaza is of a different order of magnitude than for the West Bank. Gaza, ruled by Hamas and shunned by the international community, has been suffering under a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt for several years. There is an underground economy dependent on smuggler tunnels as well as daily truckloads of donated goods permitted by Israel aimed at staving off a humanitarian crisis.
But there is only a skeletal economy there now – unemployment, according to the fund’s report, stands at 39 percent – and the report is said to call for a complete lifting of the blockade. Israel’s war in Gaza 15 months ago destroyed some 4,000 homes and a number of factories and facilities that have not been rebuilt because the blockade bars most building materials.
[…] The Palestinian Authority needs to be able to export its goods for its economy to grow and the Israeli restrictions make it difficult, the report said, especially because the West Bank has no seaport or airport. West Bank unemployment stands at 18 percent.
Hasan Abu Libdeh, the Palestinian national economy minister, said in a separate interview that exports were a serious problem. "The cost of shipping goods from here to Tel Aviv is higher than to Brussels," he said, because of Israeli security measures. He also accused Israel of failing to live up to promises to expedite industrial parks and large-scale projects, something the Israeli official denied.
Mr. Kanaan of the International Monetary Fund said his report would urge Israel to remove impediments to public and private Palestinian investment in the 60 percent of the West Bank currently under strict Israeli control.
[…]
Afghanistan
10) CIA victim said to have rescued future Afghan pres
Kathy Gannon and Adam Goldman, Associated Press, Tuesday, April 6, 2010; 11:31 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040601219.html
Islamabad, Pakistan – The only prisoner known to have died in the CIA’s network of secret prisons once rescued Hamid Karzai, wading through rocket and small-arms fire to take the wounded future president to safety in Pakistan, according to his brother and former associates.
The prisoner, Gul Rahman, died in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002, after being shackled to a cold cement wall in a secret CIA prison in northern Kabul known as the Salt Pit, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the case confirmed. His family is appealing to the International Red Cross to return his body.
Rahman was captured about three weeks before his death in a raid in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad against Hezb-e-Islami, an Afghan insurgent group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which was believed to have ties to al-Qaida. Rahman was arrested along with Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, Dr. Ghairat Baheer.
Baheer, who was later released, was part of a Hezb-e-Islami delegation that came to Kabul last month to talk peace with Karzai.
Rahman’s brief association with the future Afghan president, reported by his brother Habib Rahman, adds an ironic twist to the account of his death at the hands of the CIA, and illustrates the complex history of the different Afghan factions still competing for power in this war-ravaged country.
After Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, Afghanistan descended into civil war as the Islamic groups that ousted the Soviets fought each other for control of the capital, Kabul.
During fighting in 1994, Karzai, then deputy foreign minister, was arrested by Afghan intelligence, by some accounts because he was in contact with Hekmatyar and other militia leaders to end the conflict.
[…] According to Habib Rahman, his brother, Gul Rahman was sent to fetch Karzai by Hekmatyar, whose forces had long been suspected of firing the rockets at the building. Gul Rahman carried a letter for Karzai from Hekmatyar, saying he had been sent to rescue him at the request of Karzai’s father, the brother said.
Habib Rahman said his brother took Karzai to a safe house in Kabul, then drove with him to the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where Karzai was hospitalized for two days.
Although Karzai has not confirmed Rahman’s role, Hekmatyar spoke about it in an interview last year with the Afghan Pashto language Web site Benawa.com. Hekmatyar complained that Karzai had promised to release those who helped him "but look, Gul Rahman is still not released but Karzai is president." The whereabouts of his body are unknown.
Sam Zarifi, who was part of a Human Rights Watch investigation into the rocket attacks of the early ’90s, said he believed the version provided by Gul Rahman’s brother was "an utterly plausible story."
"How Karzai got out of Kabul and through the front lines to Peshawar was always mysterious to us," said Zarifi, who now works for Amnesty International. "We always just wondered as to how he did that. That was the question for us: Unless he had high level contact, how did he get through these front lines?"
The AP interviewed Habib Rahman in Islamabad, at the home of Hekmatyar’s son-in-law that was raided in 2002.
Habib Rahman said his brother had come to Islamabad a day before the Oct. 29, 2002 raid for a medical checkup for his allergies and was planning to return the next day to the Shamshatoo refugee camp near Peshawar, where he lived with his wife and four daughters and sold wood.
He said the agents surrounded the marble-fronted house at 1:30 a.m., arresting Rahman and four others. Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, Baheer, spent six years in the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Field and six months in the Salt Pit. He told The AP earlier he was stripped naked and shackled. Occasionally his interrogators would put a chair on his exposed belly and sit on it.
[…]
Pakistan
11) Pakistan Weighs Changes To Revise Constitution
Sabrina Tavernise and Salman Masood, New York Times, April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/asia/07pstan.html
Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan’s Parliament opened debate on Tuesday on a set of amendments intended to refurbish the Constitution after decades of distortions inflicted by a series of military autocrats.
The changes were widely heralded here as important step toward improving the long-term health of the country’s beleaguered democracy. But they also threatened to open a new chapter of instability for the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, as they strip away his powers and leave him more vulnerable to challenges from the opposition.
The changes, which are expected to pass this month, represent a rare moment of consensus in Pakistan’s fractious politics. Representatives from 14 political parties, led by a member of Mr. Zardari’s party, spent 10 months preparing 102 amendments.
On paper, the changes restore the country’s democracy to its original form – a parliamentary system run by a prime minister – and undo the accumulated powers that the country’s military autocrats had vested in the presidency.
[…] For the United States, the changes mean two conflicting things. Over the long run, they could lift Pakistan’s prospects to have stronger, more effective civilian governments, something the Obama administration has said it wants.
But short-term security interests have trumped even the best of intentions throughout the history of American-Pakistani relations, and the urge to default to dealing with the military, an effective, if bossy, institution, is likely to remain strong.
Many argue that this is already happening. Military leaders have had their way in defining Pakistan’s relationships with the United States and India, and they dismissed Mr. Zardari’s attempts to place the powerful military spy agency under civilian control. Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, took center stage in a high-level meeting in Washington last month and led a meeting of federal officials before leaving for the United States, a first in Pakistan’s history.
"Power has moved from Islamabad to Rawalpindi," said Farrukh Saleem, a columnist for The News, an English-language daily, referring to the country’s capital and the city its army calls home. "The civilians may be in power, but they don’t really control much."
In theory, the changes would set into motion a reorganization of power that could start to alter that situation. The president will lose the controversial ability to dissolve Parliament, a 1980s-era weapon that has long been used by warring political parties, egged on by the military, to destroy rival governments. The president would move closer to figurehead status, and the prime minister would get new powers.
[…] For the time being at least, although many of his powers will be shifted to the prime minister, the man who holds that post, Yousaf Raza Gilani, is part of the political party Mr. Zardari controls and is unlikely to challenge him. In Pakistan, party leaders wield immense power, as they control who gets to run on the party ticket, a huge advantage for provincial politicians. "He is a very unpopular figure, but he is the source of power in the P.P.P., and institutionally, the prime minister will have to answer to him," said Rasul B. Rais, a professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
One of the most serious long-term implications of the changes, analysts said, would be a shift in power in favor of the provinces. After decades of being run from Islamabad, provinces will eventually have the right to legislate, to control their own education programs and significantly more of their finances, among other things, a difficult retooling that could lead to even more instability if it is not handled delicately.
Still, Hasan-Askari Rizvi, an analyst in Lahore, said he believed that the changes improved the prospects for Pakistan’s shaky democracy, if for no other reason than after years of narrow, partisan squabbling, politicians actually came together over something important. "Pakistani politicians have actually agreed on something," Mr. Rizvi said. "They are not in the habit of agreeing on anything."
[…]
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Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
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