Just Foreign Policy News
May 16, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
Why We Must Sail To Gaza
A year ago, solidarity activists tried to break the blockade of Gaza with an international flotilla of ships. They failed, in the sense that the Israeli government attacked the flotilla, took control of the ships, and brought the ships to Israel. They succeeded, in the sense that the flotilla and the Israeli attack brought attention to the Israeli-U.S.-Egyptian siege of Gaza, dramatically increasing political pressure on the three governments, leading to a partial easing of the siege. Now an even larger flotilla, with the participation of more ships and more activists from more countries — including, crucially, the U.S. ship Audacity of Hope — is preparing to set sail in June.
http://www.truthout.org/why-we-must-sail-gaza/1305382992
*Action: Urge your Rep. to co-sponsor the McGovern-Jones bill
Reps. McGovern and Jones have introduced a bill – HR 1735, the "Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act" – requiring the President to: present Congress with a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan; report quarterly on the implementation of the plan for military withdrawal and the costs of continuing the war; report on the savings to taxpayers of ending the war in 6 months vs. continuing it for 5 years.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/hr1735
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Palestinian activists are calling it a preview of new tactics to pressure Israel and win world support for statehood: Masses of marchers, galvanized by the Arab Spring and brought together by Facebook, descending on borders and military posts – and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot, AP reports. After attempted border breaches from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza left 15 Palestinians dead Sunday, Israeli officials openly puzzled over how to handle an unfamiliar new phase. "The Palestinians’ transition from terrorism and suicide bombings to deliberately unarmed mass demonstrations is a transition that will present us with difficult challenges," said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
"There is a new energy, a new dynamism," said Hanan Ashrawi, a former Palestinian negotiator. "The Palestinians feel they have put themselves on the map again."
It’s unclear whether future calls for more mass marches will produce a similar turnout since Sunday’s casualties underscored the heavy risks, AP says. But Palestinian activists in recent months have spoken of employing such tactics throughout the West Bank.
Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian negotiator, said he believes Sunday’s marches were just a hint of what’s to come. "These people are motivated now by the revolutions that succeeded in the Arab world, and I don’t think anybody can stop them," said Shaath, speaking from Slovenia, where he was trying to add one more country to the list of dozens who have already recognized a Palestinian state in principle.
2) Unarmed protesters penetrated farther into Israel on Sunday than any army in a generation, Time Magazine reports. The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day. But those closer to events found in the day the makings of a new narrative. The Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank approached Israeli gun positions on Sunday without arms of their own. If some teenagers threw rocks, a protest leader said they had apparently failed to attend the workshops on nonviolence the organizers arranged in what they call a new paradigm for the conflict. The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.
Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967. Senior Israeli officers acknowledged their vulnerability to the approach, which dovetails with the strategy of Palestinian leaders to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestinian state in September.
"What we saw today was the promo for what we might see in September on the day the United Nations declares a state: Thousands of Palestinians marching toward Israeli checkpoints, Israeli settlements and the fence along the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians coming with their bare hands to demonstrate," a senior Israeli officer tells TIME. "This is a huge problem."
3) Senator Kerry acknowledged that Afghan President Karzai’s complaints about civilian deaths, house searches, and night raids were "correct," the New York Times reports. One benefit of reducing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Kerry implied, would be to reduce such searches and civilian casualties.
4) For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the killing of a second boy, the New York Times reports. "American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," the district governor said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," the governor said. The boy was the son of an Afghan National Army soldier, according to the headmaster of the school. Although he was 15, like many rural Afghans, he was in a lower grade because he had not been able to go to school regularly.
5) Recollections of his widow and friends, as well as his writings, reveal that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke opposed the surge in the military "surge" in Afghanistan and believed strongly that the only way out of the mess in Afghanistan was a peace deal with the Taliban, writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. Holbrooke believed a crucial step to reducing radicalism in Pakistan was to ease the Kashmir dispute with India, and he favored more pressure on India to achieve that, Kristof writes. Obama should finally heed Holbrooke’s advice, Kristof says.
6) Pressure is growing on the Obama Administration to significantly alter plans for US Marine basing arrangements on Okinawa, writes Peter Ennis for Dispatch Japan. On May 13, Senators Levin, McCain, and Webb issued a joint statement calling for the Defense Department to "re-examine plans to restructure U.S. military forces in East Asia," saying "current DoD realignment plans are unrealistic, unworkable, and unaffordable." The senators called for "abandonment" of the unpopular Henoko project at Camp Schwab as a replacement for the Futenma facility and home-basing in Hawaii or at Camp Pendleton the 8,000 Marines now scheduled to redeploy to Guam.
7) State Department officials skipped a Congressional hearing on human rights in Bahrain, Zaid Jilani reports for Think Progress. At the hearing, Human Rights Watch’s Joe Stork stressed the need for a more forceful response from the US. "… at a time when night after night masked armed men, both uniformed and plainclothes, are breaking into homes and hauling off Bahrainis to unknown locations, to interrogation centers where torture or ill-treatment are routine, a time when people are pulled out of cars at checkpoints and beaten, a time when people suffering gunshot or other wounds inflicted by security forces fear going to medical centers where other security forces beat and arrest them – these are times when something more forceful and more specific is badly needed," Stork said.
Israel/Palestine
8) Amnesty International’s annual report for 2010 stated that the "blockade of the Gaza Strip, in force since June 2007, suffocated the economy and drove people there further into poverty," Al Ahram reports. AI "considered the blockade to constitute collective punishment in breach of international humanitarian law and called repeatedly for it to be lifted." The report states that "Israeli security forces used excessive force against Palestinian civilians, including non-violent demonstrators in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as farmers, fishermen and others working in the Israeli-declared ‘exclusion zone’ inside Gaza or its coastal waters."
9) Middle East analysts say that if President Obama doesn’t want to face a vote on Palestinian statehood at the UN in September, he has to put forward a plausible alternative now, NPR reports. "If the United States wants to avoid a showdown at the U.N. in September… the president needs to act now," says Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street.
Afghanistan
10) Two NATO service members were killed in Helmand province by an Afghan policeman, AP reports. On April 27, a veteran Afghan military pilot opened fire at Kabul airport, killing eight U.S. troops and an American civilian contractor.
Mexico
11) Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who since the killing of his son has helped lead a growing movement in Mexico against the drug war, says President Calderón admitted to him that he should have focused more on rebuilding the nation’s social and judicial institutions than on battering the cartels with the military and federal police, the New York Times reports. Sicilia’s camapaign is pressing the government to de-emphasize combat with cartels in favor of fighting corruption and impunity, put more attention on youth and social services, and legalize drugs. He scolded the US as not doing enough to curb consumption and halt the flow of guns to Mexico and suggested the Mexican government negotiate with cartels to leave civilians out of the conflict.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Palestinians test new uprising strategies ahead of UN statehood bid
Associated Press, Monday, May 16, 1:36 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/palestinians-test-new-uprising-strategies-ahead-of-un-statehood-bid/2011/05/16/AFYjz34G_story.html
Ramallah, West Bank – Palestinian activists are calling it a preview of new tactics to pressure Israel and win world support for statehood: Masses of marchers, galvanized by the Arab Spring and brought together by Facebook, descending on borders and military posts – and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot.
It could prove more problematic for Israel than the suicide bombings and other deadly violence of the past – which the current Palestinian Authority leadership feels only tainted their cause.
After attempted border breaches from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza left 15 Palestinians dead Sunday, Israeli officials openly puzzled over how to handle an unfamiliar new phase.
"The Palestinians’ transition from terrorism and suicide bombings to deliberately unarmed mass demonstrations is a transition that will present us with difficult challenges," said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Sunday’s protests were driven by renewed hopes that Palestinian statehood – at least as an internationally approved idea within specific borders – is approaching after years of paralysis.
The optimism is fed by reconciliation efforts between the Islamic militant Hamas and the Western-backed Fatah movement after a four-year split, as well as growing international support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ plan to seek U.N. recognition of a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in September over Israel’s objections.
Although some say U.N. recognition will change little on the ground, the pro-democracy revolts in the Arab world have instilled a new sense of possibility among Palestinians, who had been dejected after two failed uprisings against Israeli rule and fruitless peace talks over the past 20 years.
Meanwhile, the Facebook generation is increasingly taking a lead in the Palestinian arena, at times sidelining political veterans stuck to more traditional ways.
"There is a new energy, a new dynamism," said Hanan Ashrawi, a former Palestinian negotiator. "The Palestinians feel they have put themselves on the map again."
Sunday’s marches occurred on the day Palestinians mourn Israel’s 1948 creation, when hundreds of thousands of their people were uprooted and scattered throughout the region.
Marking the anniversary, called the "nakba," Arabic for "catastrophe," Palestinian organizers bused hundreds to Lebanon’s border with Israel and to the Syrian frontier in the Israeli-held Golan Heights. Surprised and overwhelmed, Israeli troops fired to keep the crowds from breaching the borders. Four Palestinians were killed in the Golan and 10 in Lebanon, while a 15th was fatally shot as dozens rushed Israel’s border wall with the Gaza Strip.
It’s unclear whether future calls for more mass marches will produce a similar turnout since Sunday’s casualties underscored the heavy risks.
However, Palestinian activists in recent months have spoken of employing such tactics throughout the West Bank, the core of a hoped-for future Palestinian state.
Some in Israel suspected that allies of arch-foe Iran, including the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, had a hand in the border breaches or that Syria helped instigate them to divert attention from its brutal crackdown on domestic unrest. In Lebanon’s border area, Hezbollah activists with walkie-talkies directed buses and handed out Palestinian flags.
However, the Palestinians say it was purely their initiative, launched on Facebook several months ago, with heavy involvement by expatriates. "No one expected it to work, and it did work," said Hazem Abu Hilal, a Palestinian organizer.
Palestinian officials quickly embraced the campaign as a boost for their three-pronged strategy – seeking U.N. recognition, building a state from the ground up and fostering nonviolent protests.
Abbas declared a three-day mourning period for Sunday’s dead, and flags were lowered to half-staff. "You assert to everyone that … peoples’ wills are stronger than their oppressors," he said in a televised speech, addressing the protesters.
Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian negotiator, said he believes Sunday’s marches were just a hint of what’s to come. "These people are motivated now by the revolutions that succeeded in the Arab world, and I don’t think anybody can stop them," said Shaath, speaking from Slovenia, where he was trying to add one more country to the list of dozens who have already recognized a Palestinian state in principle.
Although they now claim inspiration from other Arab rebellions, the Palestinians were among the first in the Arab world to launch a popular uprising. In the late 1980s, they challenged Israeli military rule with mass marches, rock-throwing protests and general strikes, laying the groundwork for negotiations that led to interim peace deals with Israel, included self-rule in parts of the occupied areas.
The second uprising, a decade later, was typified by shooting attacks and suicide bombings which killed many hundreds of Israelis. The violence eroded much of the worldwide sympathy for the Palestinians and triggered Israeli countermeasures which killed thousands of Palestinians.
"This is what put us on the contemporary map, unarmed people facing a brutal occupation," Ashrawi said of the first uprising. "Now again, it is evident that this kind of resistance not only gets you the moral high ground, but also exposes the immorality of the occupation."
[…] Alon Liel, a veteran Israeli diplomat, said the momentum is with the Palestinians. "This is a new type of enthusiasm around Palestinian nationalism, tied to the expectations in September," he said.
2) Palestinian Border Protests: The Arab Spring Model for Confronting Israel
Karl Vick, Time Magazine, Monday, May. 16, 2011
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2071673,00.html
After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel’s border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation.
Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that had caught Israel’s vaunted military and intelligence complex flat-footed was announced, nursed and triggered on the social networking site that has figured in every uprising around the Arab World – and is helping young Palestinians change the terms of their fight against Israel.
The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day: at least four people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the Syrian fence line, and as many as 10 were killed either by Israeli or Lebanese army gunfire at a similar demonstration on the nearby frontier with southern Lebanon. The death toll, along with the accounts of stone-throwing and tear gas, comport with the familiar narrative of the conflict, one constructed over years of Israel describing efforts to defend itself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged that narrative on Sunday, arguing that the protesters were undermining the very existence of the State of Israel.
But those closer to events found in the day the makings of a new narrative. The Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank approached Israeli gun positions on Sunday without arms of their own. If some teenagers threw rocks, a protest leader said they had apparently failed to attend the workshops on nonviolence the organizers arranged in what they call a new paradigm for the conflict. The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.
Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967. As the dust settled Sunday, senior Israeli officers acknowledged their vulnerability to the approach, which dovetails with the strategy of Palestinian leaders to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestininian state in September.
"What we saw today was the promo for what we might see in September on the day the United Nations declares a state: Thousands of Palestinians marching toward Israeli checkpoints, Israeli settlements and the fence along the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians coming with their bare hands to demonstrate," a senior Israeli officer tells TIME. "This is a huge problem. Well have to study what happened today to do better."
Sundays protests marked the anniversary of Israels 1948 declaration of statehood, a day known as Nakba, or the catastrophe, to Palestinians who lost their land to the Jewish state. The day is routinely occasion for protests, and Israel had prepared for unrest. But in the Golan Heights, high ground Israel took from Syria in 1967, only 30 to 40 soldiers were on duty where hundreds of Palestinians began arriving by bus and marching toward the fence. Troops were ordered to shoot to maim. Four protesters were killed, and at least 100 scrambled into Majdal Shams, a Druze village so close to the Syrian frontier it’s known for the shouting hill where families separated by the fence gather to exchange news by hollering across no-mans land.
Less clear was how the protesters navigated the Syrian security which usually maintains strict control over the border area. Israeli officials interpreted protesters’ apparent ease of access to a military zone as evidence of sponsorship by the battered government of President Bashar al-Assad. With street protests threatening his regime in cities across Syria, the reasoning goes, al-Assad found in the Nakba protests a perfect opportunity to shift the focus to Israel.
But Fadi Quran, a Ramallah organizer in the Palestinian youth movement that promoted the marches, says his contacts in Syria were actually terrified of the Bashar government, which took steps to prevent some from traveling to the protests from refugee camps near Damascus where they have lived since fleeing their homes in what is now northern Israel.
Governments of other neighboring states that host large Palestinian populations, apparently were aware of the protest plans, and responded according to their own interests. Egypt and Jordan, which have treaties with Israel, impeded the demonstrations. Those who are hostile, including Lebanon, eased their way into military zones. But Damascus appeared to be pre-occupied with its own domestic unrest, according to Quran. "I honestly think to a very large extent they took the Syrian government by surprise," he tells TIME.
Demonstrators also gathered in Gaza and on the West Bank. Even there, on a march toward the Qalandia check-point near Ramallah, Quran insists no stones were thrown until Israeli troops fired tear gas, and then only by adolescents. But the overall make-up of the crowd, featuring older women and men as well as students, was a change from previous years, according to Shawan Jabarin of the human rights advocacy group Al Haq.
"They say the Arab Spring gives people encouragement and makes people feel they can make a difference," says Jabarin. "The consciousness of the people, you feel it’s something different."
Also encouraging people into the streets: The complete breakdown of peace talks with Israel. If Palestinians needed any additional reminder, the resignation of former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell as President Obamas special envoy for peace was announced two days before Nakba Day.
"We have to come up with an improvement in non-lethal weapons, no doubt," says an aide to an Israeli cabinet minister. "But if we have a new approach to peace talks then we won’t have to deal with non-lethal weapons in September."
For their part, Palestinian protesters feel they’ve found a winning formula. The main political factions, Hamas and Fatah, were forced into their embrace by the same non-violent youth movement that now summons ordinary Palestinians to unite in shaming Israel into concessions.
"They understand the path to freedom is going to be long," Quran says "but were going to continue training in nonviolence, and were going to continue marching in nonviolence until it is very clear in the international media who is violating human rights."
3) Afghanistan May Be Open to New Path, Kerry Says
Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/world/asia/16afghanistan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Osama bin Laden’s death will allow "a new phase" in the United States’ relationship with Afghanistan, one that could include reductions in troops and spending, Senator John Kerry said while visiting here on Sunday.
That message, which has been bandied about in Congress and on television talk shows in the wake of Bin Laden’s killing in Pakistan two weeks ago, appears to be more of an inevitability as policy makers look closely at the amount being spent in Afghanistan and ask where security threats are most severe.
[…] As far as Afghanistan goes, he said, "We’re at a critical moment where we may be able to transition at a greater speed."
Mr. Kerry did not specifically mention civilian casualties. But when he spoke about "reducing the footprint," he seemed to indirectly allude to civilian casualties and the house searches and night raids that Afghans hate.
After years of Western military and civilian leaders arguing that the deaths and raids, while regrettable, were a byproduct of NATO’s fight against terrorism, Mr. Kerry said that President Hamid Karzai’s complaints about them were "correct." One benefit of reducing the number of troops, he implied, would be to also reduce such searches and civilian casualties.
What is being talked about, he said, is a "a smart, thoughtful way to rapidly, as rapidly as possible, while maintaining progress, shift responsibilities to Afghans," he said.
[…]
4) For Second Time in 3 Days, NATO Raid Kills Afghan Child
Sharifullah Sahak and Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15afghan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy.
A NATO spokesman apologized for the child’s death, which took place early Saturday in western Nangahar Province in the Hesarek District, a remote poppy-growing area close to Kabul Province and Logar Province. There has been almost no NATO presence there throughout the war, and the area is thought to be heavily penetrated by the Taliban.
The district governor, Abdul Khalid, said he had feared a Taliban attack on the government center and had called for help from local Afghan security forces. At the same time, there was a raid, he said. "American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," he said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.
The boy was the son of an Afghan National Army soldier, according to Noor Alam, the headmaster of the school the student attended. Although the boy was 15, like many rural Afghans, he was in a lower grade because he had not been able to go to school regularly, local residents said.
When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy’s village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans and throwing rocks at police vehicles and the Hesarek government center, according to the district governor and the headmaster.
The police opened fire in an effort to push back the crowd to stop its advance to the district center. A 14-year-old boy was killed, and at least one other person was wounded, Mr. Khalid said.
[…] On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.
[…]
5) What Holbrooke Knew
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15kristof.html
When he was alive, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was effectively gagged, unable to comment on what he saw as missteps of the Obama administration that he served. But as we face a crisis in Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden, it’s worth listening to Holbrooke’s counsel – from beyond the grave.
As one of America’s finest strategic thinkers and special envoy to the Af-Pak region, Holbrooke represented the administration – but also chafed at aspects of the White House approach. In particular, he winced at the overreliance on military force, for it reminded him of Vietnam.
"There are structural similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam," he noted, in scattered reflections now in the hands of his widow, Kati Marton. "He thought that this could become Obama’s Vietnam," Marton recalled. "Some of the conversations in the Situation Room reminded him of conversations in the Johnson White House. When he raised that, Obama didn’t want to hear it."
Because he was fiercely loyal to his friend Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, Holbrooke bit his lip and kept quiet in public. But he died in December, and Marton and some of his friends (me included) believe it’s time to lift the cone of silence and share his private views. At this time, with Pakistan relations in a crisis and Afghanistan under review, our country could use a dose of his wisdom.
Holbrooke opposed the military "surge" in Afghanistan and would see the demise of Bin Laden as an opportunity to go into diplomatic overdrive. He believed strongly that the only way out of the mess in Afghanistan was a peace deal with the Taliban, and his team was secretly engaged in outreach to figures linked to the Taliban, Marton says.
"Reconciliation – that was what he was working toward in Afghanistan, and building up the civilian and political side that had been swamped by the military," Marton recalled. "The whole policy was off-kilter, way too militarized. Richard never thought that this war could be won on the battlefield."
His aim, she says, was something like the Balkan peace agreement he negotiated at a military base in Dayton, Ohio. The process would be led by the United States but include all the regional players, including Pakistan and Iran.
"He was dreaming of a Dayton-like setting somewhere, isolated, no media, no Washington bureaucracy," Marton said. "He was a long way from that, but he was dreaming of that."
Vali Nasr, a member of Holbrooke’s team at the State Department, puts it this way: "He understood from his experience that every conflict has to end at the negotiating table."
Nasr says that Holbrooke’s aim for Afghanistan was "not cut-and-run, but a viable, lasting solution" to end the civil war there. If Holbrooke were still alive, Nasr says, he would be shuttling frantically between Islamabad and Kabul, trying to take advantage of Bin Laden’s killing to lay the groundwork for a peace process.
To do that, though, we have to put diplomacy and development – and not 100,000 troops, costing $10 billion a month – at the heart of our Afghan policy. Holbrooke was bemused that he would arrive at a meeting in a taxi, while Gen. David Petraeus would arrive escorted by what seemed a battalion of aides. And Holbrooke would flinch when Petraeus would warmly refer to him as his "wingman" – meaning it as a huge compliment – rather than seeing military force as the adjunct to diplomacy.
As for Pakistan, Holbrooke told me and others that because of its size and nuclear weaponry, it was center stage; Afghanistan was a sideshow.
"A stable Afghanistan is not essential; a stable Pakistan is essential," he noted, in the musings he left behind. He believed that a crucial step to reducing radicalism in Pakistan was to ease the Kashmir dispute with India, and he favored more pressure on India to achieve that.
[…] It’s a vision of painstaking diplomacy toward a strategic goal – peace – and it’s what we need more of. President Obama said wonderful things at the memorial service for Holbrooke. But the best tribute would be to listen to his advice.
6) Pressure builds for US shift on Okinawa
Peter Ennis, Dispatch Japan, 05/13/2011
http://www.dispatchjapan.com/blog/2011/05/pressure-builds-for-us-shift-on-okinawa.html
Pressure is growing on the Obama Administration to significantly alter plans for US Marine basing arrangements on Okinawa, but chances seem slim for a policy shift at least until Defense Secretary Robert Gates departs office late next month.
Several factors have converged to give the issue new urgency. Opposition remains strong on Okinawa to construction of a new facility in the Henoko Bay area, to replace the US Marine Air Station Futenma, which has been slated for closure since 1995. There is simply no momentum in Japan to move forward with the project, a situation made more stark by the Great Eastern Earthquake of March 11. Tokyo is intensely focused on reconstruction efforts; neither the financial nor political capital is available to push the Henoko project through.
Meanwhile, construction delays and cost overruns continue to bedevil a critical, related portion of the plan: the relocation of over 8,000 Marines and 9,000 family members from Okinawa to Guam.
And in Washington, an increasingly debt-weary Congress is asking whether it is worth the cost of building the new Henoko facility and the new Marine housing and related facilities on Guam, when cheaper force configurations more conducive to strategic needs in Asia might be found.
Diplomats are under stress to find some answers because of plans for a "2+2" meeting of defense and foreign ministers from the two countries, to be followed by a summit meeting between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Naoto Kan. With leaders in Japan tied down with reconstruction efforts, no schedule has yet been set for either meeting, though staging both by the end of June has been discussed.
When those meetings do occur, it won’t be possible to simply ignore Futenma and related Okinawa issues. It is very possible Washington and Tokyo will agree to state the obvious: the 2014 deadline to complete the Okinawa and Guam force structure realignment will have to be pushed back.
[…] Tokyo continues to insist Japan fully backs the plan for a new facility at Henoko, fearful that admitting the plan is dead will cause tension with Washington. And Washington continues to back the Henoko plan, because no political decision has been made to abandon the bureaucratic status quo.
With no decision yet made to abandon the Henoko project, none of the necessary talks about a new plan can proceed. That leaves the US-Japan alliance dangerously vulnerable to a crisis in the event of a helicopter crash at the Futenma facility, which is surrounded by civilian communities.
Into this bureaucratic quagmire have stepped three senior and very influential US senators: Carl Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee; John McCain, the Ranking Republican on Armed Services; and, Jim Webb, chairman of the Asia subcommittee of Senate Foreign Relations. On May 13, the three senators issued a joint statement calling for the Defense Department to "re-examine plans to restructure U.S. military forces in East Asia." The senators said the US "strongly supports a continuous and vigorous US presence in the region," but emphasized that they "believe the current DoD realignment plans are unrealistic, unworkable, and unaffordable."
While the statement was "joint," Senator Levin seemed to emphasize the need for restraint, and cost-effectiveness, in defense spending, especially in the construction of new overseas facilities. Senator McCain tended to emphasize strategy, saying: "The Asia-Pacific region’s growing role in the global distribution of power requires us to consistently view and update plans for the U.S. military’s role in the region." And Webb forcefully challenged the Marine Corps claims that construction of a new facility in Henoko Bay to replace the Futenma air station is indispensable to the Marine presence in, and thus the stability of, East Asia.
Webb brings to the issue years of experience as a Naval Academy graduate, a highly-decorated Marine officer, a military planner, a former Secretary of the Navy, and now almost a full term as a US senator.
With Webb taking the lead, the three senators proposed a dramatic overhaul of the US Marine presence in East Asia. The key elements would include: a) "abandonment" of the Henoko project at Camp Schwab as a replacement for the Futenma facility; b) integration of the Marine Corps assets at Futenma into Kadena Air Force base, while dispersing some Air Force assets now at Kadena to other areas of the Pacific; c) home-basing in Hawaii or at Camp Pendleton the 8,000 Marines now scheduled to redeploy to Guam, and deploy those Marines on a rotating basis throughout the Pacific.
[…]
7) At Bahrain Hearing State Department Skipped, Human Rights Groups Urge ‘Forceful’ Action
Zaid Jilani, Think Progress, May 14th, 2011 at 9:20 pm
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/14/bahrain-hearing-state-department/
Yesterday, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission – an entity within Congress chaired by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) charged with investigating human rights abuses – held a hearing titled "Human Rights in Bahrain," designed to probe abuses against pro-democracy activists in the Arab monarchy.
Noticeably absent among the witnesses testifying were any representatives from the U.S. government, which has been closely allied with Bahrain throughout the uprising and resulting humanitarian crisis. On the hearing’s website, you can see that both witnesses called from the State Department, William J. Burns and Jeffrey D. Feltman, declined to appear.
[…] McClatchy reports that "scheduling conflicts" are the reason that the two officials did not appear, although no explanation is given why the State Department did not send replacements. "I was expecting at least one, possibly two witnesses from the State Department to testify," said a disappointed McGovern.
At the hearing, Human Rights Watch’s Joe Stork stressed the need for a more forceful response from the United States, which has been very mute in reaction to the abuses in the country, an oil-rich monarchy that houses U.S. military forces:
"And unfortunately, in contrast to Syria, Libya, and other sites of unrest and repression, the United States government has had little to say about any of this, at least in public, and those few words have tended to be general in the extreme. […]"
"Quite frankly, at a time when night after night masked armed men, both uniformed and plainclothes, are breaking into homes and hauling off Bahrainis to unknown locations, to interrogation centers where torture or ill-treatment are routine, a time when people are pulled out of cars at checkpoints and beaten, a time when people suffering gunshot or other wounds inflicted by security forces fear going to medical centers where other security forces beat and arrest them – these are times when something more forceful and more specific is badly needed."
The latest outrage in the brutal crackdown in Bahrain involves the demolition of mosques. Dozens of mosques frequented by the oppressed Shiite majority have been bulldozed and destroyed by the ruling government, including some that were centuries old.
Israel/Palestine
8) Amnesty International: Gaza is still suffering – and so is the West Bank
Amnesty International’s annual report details the ongoing human rights violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories
Dina Ezzat, Al Ahram, Sunday 15 May 2011
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/12125/World/Region/Amnesty-International-Gaza-is-still-suffering-%E2%80%93-an.aspx
Amnesty International has released its annual report for this year, reporting in detail about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The report states that the "blockade of the Gaza Strip, in force since June 2007, suffocated the economy and drove people there further into poverty. Amid continuing health and sanitation problems, poverty and malnutrition, some 80 per cent of Gazans were forced to depend on international humanitarian aid, the flow of which was impeded by the blockade."
"Most UN reconstruction projects to provide clinics and schools had to be delayed; as a result, some 40,000 Palestinian children eligible to enroll in UN schools in September had to be turned away."
In addition, "Israel continued to ban all export of goods from Gaza until 8 December, and the announced easing of restrictions on exports had not been implemented by the end of the year."
Amnesty "considered the blockade to constitute collective punishment in breach of international humanitarian law and called repeatedly for it to be lifted."
Meanwhile, the report notes that "hundreds of Israeli military checkpoints and barriers restricted the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank, hindering or blocking access to workplaces, education and health facilities, and other services."
The report refers specifically, and in detail, to the continued construction of the separation wall and its influence on the lives of Palestinians living in West Bank villages. It also refers to the harsh treatment that Palestinians encounter at checkpoints. Forced evictions and house demolitions at the hand of Israeli authorities are also highlighted.
Moreover, the report states that "Israeli security forces used excessive force against Palestinian civilians, including non-violent demonstrators in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as farmers, fishermen and others working in the Israeli-declared ‘exclusion zone’ inside Gaza or its coastal waters."
The Amnesty International report also highlights the "impunity" of Israeli soldiers and settlers for their mistreatment of Palestinians under occupation: "Israeli soldiers, members of the security forces and settlers continued to enjoy impunity for human rights abuses committed against Palestinians, including unlawful killings. Settler violence included shooting at Palestinians and destruction of Palestinian property. In only extremely rare cases were the perpetrators held to account for their actions."
9) Obama Pressed To Get Mideast Peace Talks Moving
Michele Kelemen, NPR, May 16, 2011
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136345994/obama-pressed-to-get-mideast-peace-talks-moving
President Obama’s speechwriters have been working on their latest message to the Arab and Muslim world. The administration has been struggling to come up with a consistent response to the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The president also is under pressure from some quarters to do more to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All of that will be on his agenda as he plays host this week to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Administration officials say Obama wants to talk about U.S. policy following the killing of Osama bin Laden and the uprisings in the Arab world.
Former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher says the president can’t ignore one of the core issues: Palestinian aspirations for statehood. "The U.S. will not be able to carry the argument to the Arab world that if they are Egyptians or Libyans working for or yearning for freedom, the U.S. is with them, but if they are Palestinians yearning for freedom, it’s complicated," Muasher says.
[…] The Palestinians are working on plan B – taking their case to the United Nations, where they plan to seek recognition of an independent Palestine when the general assembly meets in September.
Muasher, who is with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the U.S. can’t wait around to see how things play out. "A push for peace must be made now rather than waiting for a few years until the dust settles. I don’t think events on the ground allow anyone to wait at any rate," Muasher adds.
He says that’s the message Jordan’s King Abdullah will likely to bring to the White House on Tuesday.
U.S. officials, though, are not raising any expectations that the president will lay out any serious initiative on Arab-Israeli peace just yet. They seem to be waiting to hear what Netanyahu has to say when he’s in Washington for a meeting at the White House and speeches to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and Congress.
Former ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, of the Brookings Institution, says his advice to Obama is to put his arm around Netanyahu and explain:
"You can’t stop something with nothing. If you don’t like what’s coming down the track in terms of United Nations actions, is going to isolate Israel, delegitimize it, and declare it as an occupying power of a member state of the United Nations, you’ve got to come up with an initiative that the United States can get behind. And it’s got to be a credible initiative."
If the Israelis want a Palestinian state, Indyk adds, they ought to spell out where it is going to be so the two sides can finally negotiate the deal.
But former Jordanian official Muasher doubts anything Netanyahu will offer will move things forward and says Obama should be the one laying out a plan.
That’s also the view of Jeremy Ben-Ami, who runs J Street, an advocacy group that describes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace. "He doesn’t need to dot every I or cross every T, but he’s got to lay out the key questions before the parties and ask them for yes-or-no questions to gauge their seriousness in order to assess who’s ready to move forward and who isn’t," Ben-Ami adds.
Like Muasher, Ben-Ami argues that the Obama administration has a limited time frame. "If the United States wants to avoid a showdown at the U.N. in September, which most people agree will not be productive, then the president needs to act now," Ben-Ami says.
[…]
Afghanistan
10) NATO says Afghan policeman kills 2 service members in southwestern Afghanistan
Associated Press, May 13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nato-says-afghan-policeman-kills-2-service-members-in-southwestern-afghanistan/2011/05/13/AFkkCQ2G_story.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Two NATO service members were killed in southwestern Helmand province by an Afghan policeman, the coalition said Friday.
The two were mentoring an Afghan National Civil Order brigade and were shot and killed inside the police compound on Thursday as they sat down to eat lunch, NATO said in a statement. Other soldiers returned fire and the policeman was wounded and hospitalized. The names and nationalities of the service members, along with other details, were not released.
"While this is a serious incident, the actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners," said U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. James B. Laster, International Security Assistance Force Joint Command Deputy Chief of Staff Joint Operations. "We remain committed to our partners and to our mission here."
It is the latest incident in which a member of the Afghan security services has killed members of the coalition.
On April 27, a veteran Afghan military pilot said to be distressed over his personal finances opened fire at Kabul airport after an argument, killing eight U.S. troops and an American civilian contractor.
[…]
Mexico
11) Violence Suffocated a Father’s Poetry, but Not His Voice
Randal C. Archibold, New York Times, May 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/world/americas/14sicilia.html
Mexico City – As a poet, novelist and essayist, Javier Sicilia tapped a deep strain of Catholicism to obsess over "the mystery of God in a broken world," as he put it two years ago when he was awarded Mexico’s top poetry prize.
Now that his own world had been shattered by the killing of his son in March – an innocent, the police said, caught up in a drug-trafficking attack that captivated the nation – Mr. Sicilia, 56, said he had kept his faith but had felt it sink to a "dark, deep place." So he turned to that other mystery, poetry.
After burying his son, Juan Francisco, 24, a university student who was found bound and shot along with six friends in the city of Cuernavaca, Mr. Sicilia stood before well-wishers and read his latest work, an ode to his son:
"The world is not worthy of words
they have been suffocated from the inside
as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs …
the pain does not leave me
all that remains is a world
through the silence of the righteous,
only through your silence and my silence, Juanelo."
Then, Mr. Sicilia, one of the country’s most acclaimed poets, told those who had gathered that they had just heard the last poem he would ever write. "Poetry doesn’t exist in me anymore," he explained later in an interview.
But that does not mean Mr. Sicilia has any intention of remaining quiet.
Since his unlikely tragedy, he has led two marches with the slogan "¡Hasta la madre!" – which roughly translates as "We have had it!" – and has issued a series of public denunciations, providing an exclamation point to this country’s campaign against drug cartel violence, which has left nearly 40,000 people dead in the four years since President Felipe Calderón began a crackdown on organized crime.
"What my son did was give a name and a face to the 40,000 dead," Mr. Sicilia said. "My pain gave a face to the pain of other families. I think a country is like a house, and the destruction of someone is the destruction of our families."
Previous mass demonstrations here claiming to be the vanguard of a new movement against violence eventually petered out, with mixed results. Mr. Sicilia’s own call for the resignation of Mr. Calderón’s public safety director went nowhere.
But Mr. Sicilia, not a household name here but well known in political and media circles through his literature and regular columns in Proceso magazine, has achieved what others have failed to do: he has provoked serial public responses from the Calderón administration.
Mr. Calderón appeared on national television a couple of days before the most recent march, on Sunday, both to defend his policies and express sympathy for the victims, including the more than 300 whose bodies have been dug up from mass graves in two states in recent weeks.
As he left Monday on a trip to New York and Washington, Mr. Calderón issued five messages on Twitter expressing solidarity with the marchers. "I celebrate the March for Peace, and its legitimate and just intentions to put an end to the problem of insecurity," said one. Others called for a national dialogue to find solutions to the crisis.
Mr. Calderón also met privately with Mr. Sicilia more than a week ago, and Mr. Sicilia said he had extracted a confession of sorts from the president. "He said, ‘I agree I made a mistake but I can’t go back now,’ " Mr. Sicilia said in an interview.
He said Mr. Calderón agreed that he should have focused more on rebuilding the nation’s social and judicial institutions than on battering the cartels with the military and federal police. A spokesman for Mr. Calderón gave a different account, though, saying he might have critiqued a policy point or two but had never expressed regret over his strategy and remained committed to it.
Whatever the case, Mr. Sicilia has kept up his campaign, which seeks a "pact" between citizens and political leaders to thoroughly investigate the drug war deaths, de-emphasize combat with cartels in favor of fighting corruption and impunity, and put more attention on youth and social services.
He has called for the legalization of drugs (though, contrary to reports on social networking Web sites, he said he did not smoke marijuana or use other illicit narcotics), scolded the United States as not doing enough to curb consumption and halt the flow of guns to Mexico and suggested that the government negotiate with cartels to leave civilians out of the conflict.
[…]
–
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