Just Foreign Policy News
March 11, 2011
*Action: Urge your Rep. to sign the bipartisan "significant July drawdown" letter
So far, 54 Reps. have signed a letter being circulated by Barbara Lee’s office, urging President Obama to follow through on his promise of a July drawdown of troops from Afghanistan with a significant withdrawal. Urge your Rep. to sign.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/leeletter
"No-Fly Zone"? Senator Kerry, the UN Charter Is Supreme Law
A no-fly zone in Libya, if it is not authorized by the UN Security Council, would violate the UN Charter. The framers of the UN Charter gave this power to the Security Council for a reason: to ensure that military force would only be authorized with broad consent. The Security Council should use its leverage to press for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict that recognizes the interests of all the stakeholders in Libya.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/no-fly-zone-senator-kerry_b_833060.html
Action: Urge President Obama and Members of Congress to oppose a unilateral U.S. military intervention in Libya
Unilateral U.S. military action without UN Security Council authorization would be a grave violation of the UN Charter. As U.S. military officials have pointed out, the imposition of a "no-fly zone" would not be "bloodless": it would be preceded by extensive bombing of Libya’s anti-aircraft facilities. Such bombing would almost certainly cause civilian casualties. As Defense Secretary Gates has said, the last thing the U.S. needs is a war in another Muslim country. Urge the White House and your representatives to oppose a unilateral U.S. military intervention.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/nobombsforlibya
*Action: Lee bill for military withdrawal from Afghanistan
"H.R.780 – To provide that funds for operations of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan shall be obligated and expended only for purposes of providing for the safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan of all members of the Armed Forces and Department of Defense contractor personnel who are in Afghanistan."
Check to see if your Rep. has co-sponsored; ask them to co-sponsor if they haven’t.
You can view the cosponsors here
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR00780:@@@P
You can ask your Rep. to co-sponsor here:
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/hr780
Video: Rep. Ellison challenges anti-Muslim bias at Peter King’s "Muslim extremism" hearing
Ellison tells the story of Muhammad Hamdani, a 9/11 first responder who was killed at the World Trade Center.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faxbht2lCoQ
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) A South African Foreign Ministry official said Friday that former Haitian President Aristide will return within days from seven years in exile, AP reports. An official with Aristide’s party confirmed his return is "imminent." Aristide emerged as a leading voice for Haiti’s poor and helped lead a popular revolt that forced an end to the Duvalier family’s 29-year dictatorship. He became Haiti’s first democratically elected president, despite opposition from the army and Haiti’s elite. Aristide’s party was barred from taking part in recent elections.
2) An International Criminal Court may be a reason why the Libyan leader has chosen to fight instead of seeking exile, the Wall Street Journal reports. "The very real fear that Gadhafi & Co. effectively may have no place to go outside Libya where they would be safe from pursuit…provides a compelling incentive to fight on," said a former State Department intelligence official. "An ICC indictment, or a possibility of an ICC indictment, can cause dictators to dig in their heels," says Mark Quarterman, who helped run U.N. investigations into the assassinations of Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri and Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto
3) NATO appeared to walk back from earlier claims about a night raid that killed a 60-year-old cousin of President Karzai, saying it was investigating, the Guardian reports.
4) A report analyzing the amount of overlap between 66,000 civilian deaths reported in the WikiLeaks Iraq war logs, and the previously known listing of Iraq Body Count, found that only 19% of the WikiLeaks reports of civilian deaths had been previously recorded by IBC, according to Les Roberts, a co-author of the original Lancet study. With so little overlap between the two lists, it is almost certain that both tallies combined are missing the majority of civilian deaths, suggesting many hundreds of thousands have died, Roberts writes.
5) State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley called the treatment of accused Wikileaks leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid," CBS News reports.
6) The White House announced a five-point program of steps to isolate Muammar el-Qaddafi and ultimately drive him from power, all stopping well short of military action, the New York Times reports. Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates warned about the potential dangers of US military involvement, unless it was authorized by the UN and unless neighboring countries joined in the effort. The White House campaign to convince Qaddafi’s loyalists and NATO allies that the Libyan dictator’s days are numbered were undercut by a military assessment given earlier in the day by the director of national intelligence James Clapper that the regime would eventually prevail. A senior Administration official said the President did not agree with this assessment.
Saudi Arabia
7) Saudis held peaceful demonstrations in and around the eastern city of Qatif, a day after police fired on protesters there, the Washington Post reports. In Qatif, police shot and wounded at least two protesters Thursday night, and a police officer was also injured, according to the Interior Ministry.
Yemen
8) Tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators gathered at Sanaa University Friday to demand President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ouster, and mourn the death of a protester who had been shot in the face by security forces, the Washington Post reports.
Egypt
9) Mohammed ElBaradei has said he intends to run for president in Egypt’s 2011 presidential election, Al Jazeera reports. ElBaradei criticized proposed constitutional amendments for not changing the laws that regulate forming political parties. ElBaradei said this would allow remnants of Mubarak’s party and the well organized Muslim Brotherhood to control the new parliament.
Israel/Palestine
10) Relatives of an engineer from Gaza who disappeared last month in Ukraine said Thursday he had been kidnapped by Mossad agents and transferred to an Israeli prison, the New York Times reports. The engineer, Derar Abu Sisi, is the operating manager of the only power plant in Gaza. An Israeli human rights organization, HaMoked, which assists Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, received confirmation this week from the Israel Prison Service that Abu Sisi has been in detention since Feb. 19. A spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said Abu Sisi disappeared "under unknown circumstances" Feb. 19 after boarding a train that was bound for Kiev.
Colleagues at the Gaza power plant said Abu Sisi was a professional engineer who was respected by all parties. It was widely assumed in Gaza that the detention was linked to his position at the power plant and the successful efforts of Hamas to reduce the station’s dependency on industrial diesel fuel imported from Israel. In January, the Hamas authorities said that they had managed to adjust the station’s turbines to run on regular diesel fuel, which is smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, saying that Israel was not letting in sufficient amounts of fuel.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Aristide returning to Haiti in days
AP, March 11, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hcSt5tvy4V6Yy_n-JPAU78P95mwQ
Johannesburg – Ousted ex-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide will return within days to his homeland ending seven years in exile, a South African official said Friday. The former slum priest remains hugely popular and his return could disrupt elections this month in his earthquake-ravaged country.
In Haiti, an official with Aristide’s party confirmed that his "return is imminent," but declined to say how or when he’s coming back. "It’s an important event for the people in Haiti because they have waited so long for this," said Maryse Narcisse, the head of Lavalas’ executive council. "He will not be traveling incognito. People will know he is coming."
The party was barred from taking part in the vote, and thousands of his supporters vowed last month to disturb the election if he was not allowed to come back. The U.S. has warned his presence "would prove to be an unfortunate distraction to the people of Haiti."
On Friday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner told The Associated Press "this is a matter for the Government of Haiti."
"The U.S. remains focused on helping ensure a peaceful and democratic transition of power in Haiti, and that the second round of elections, scheduled for March 20, accurately reflect the will of the Haitian people," he said.
A South African Foreign Ministry official told the AP that Aristide would return in the coming days. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to make the official announcement.
[…] Aristide emerged as a leading voice for Haiti’s poor and helped lead a popular revolt that forced an end to the Duvalier family’s 29-year dictatorship. He became the troubled country’s first democratically elected president, despite opposition from the army and Haiti’s elite.
[…]
2) Threat of Trial Keeps Gadhafi Fighting
Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704823004576192453695164080.html
Cairo – When Nigeria delivered exiled Liberian leader Charles Taylor to an international court in 2006, Libya’s Col. Moammar Gadhafi, whose regime had armed and funded Mr. Taylor, called it an "immoral act" and warned that "every head of state could meet a similar fate."
Now that the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into Col. Gadhafi himself, such fears may well be a reason why the Libyan leader has chosen to battle his own people instead of seeking exile like Mr. Taylor or Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the former Tunisian president now residing in Saudi Arabia.
Col. Gadhafi’s behavior illustrates a thorny moral dilemma: An international drive to ensure ousted dictators answer for their crimes may, perversely, end up prolonging their rule-and extract a heavy toll in human lives.
"The very real fear that Gadhafi & Co. effectively may have no place to go outside Libya where they would be safe from pursuit…provides a compelling incentive to fight on," explains Wayne White, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington and a former State Department intelligence official.
For the international community, the dilemma has often amounted to a trade-off between conflict resolution and justice. In recent years, though, the arc of history has leaned toward justice, no matter the consequences.
In 1986, the U.S. convinced Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier to depart as he faced an uprising. "We were able to say, ‘the only way you can stay is if you kill a lot of people. Wouldn’t your life be better if you went to France instead?’ And he did," recalled Elliott Abrams, who was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the 1980s.
In South Africa, in the early 1990s, the choice was made to give amnesty for apartheid-era atrocities to those who confessed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission-ensuring a democratic transition.
[…] Concern that Mr. Taylor’s fate would make other dictators more reluctant to part with power was widely expressed at the time, said John Campbell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The U.S. and other governments believed that the deterrent effect on others contemplating bloodshed would outweigh that concern, he said.
President Barack Obama’s administration has moved the U.S. closer to embracing international criminal justice, though the U.S. hasn’t ratified the ICC statute and doesn’t recognize its jurisdiction, in part because of fears that American soldiers and politicians could find themselves prosecuted one day for their involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
When the U.N. Security Council referred the violence in Darfur to the ICC in 2005, resulting in the indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the U.S. abstained. But last month, the U.S. joined the entire 15-member Security Council in voting to refer Libya’s regime to the international court, and to slap an asset freeze and travel ban on Col. Gadhafi and his entourage.
The Security Council’s referral gives the ICC jurisdiction over Col. Gadhafi’s regime even though Libya hasn’t acceded to the ICC statute. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said he has started an investigation that focuses on alleged abuses by Col. Gadhafi, his sons and close associates during the recent revolt.
The Libyan regime, while denying it has targeted civilians, has followed the international sanctions and reports of the ICC investigation by intensifying air and artillery attacks on opposition-held areas. An ICC spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the court’s investigation is prompting Col. Gadhafi to fight with more determination.
"It really relates to the question of unexpected consequences: an ICC indictment, or a possibility of an ICC indictment, can cause dictators to dig in their heels," says Mark Quarterman, who helped run U.N. investigations into the assassinations of Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri and Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, and is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
[…]
3) Nato troops ‘kill Afghan president’s cousin’
Hamid Karzai and Nato launch separate investigations as nighttime shooting points towards potential intelligence failure
Jon Boone, Guardian, Thursday 10 March 2011 13.53 GMT http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/10/nato-troops-kill-afghan-presidents-cousin
Kabul – A furious row between Nato-led forces and the Afghan president over the killing of civilians looks set to turn into a full-blown crisis after an elderly cousin of Hamid Karzai was killed during a botched Nato operation.
Officials in the southern province of Kandahar confirmed that Haji Yar Mohammad Karzai, a second cousin of the president, was accidentally shot during an overnight operation in the family village of Karz.
Senior tribal leaders, including Karzai’s powerful brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, had gathered for the funeral in keeping with the Islamic tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours.
Athough details are scarce, it appears that a major intelligence failure could have been responsible for the deaths after Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) issued a statement correcting an earlier press release that had claimed a man killed in operations in the area was the father of a Taliban leader.
The original statement said the Taliban leader was being targeted for distributing materials to make car bombs that were being used throughout Kandahar province. It said soldiers had approached a compound and called for all the people inside to come out so they and the building could be searched.
Deadly force was used after a man was seen carrying a weapon, according to the first statement: "A member observed an armed individual with an AK-47 in an adjacent building within the same compound. The security force assessed the male as an immediate threat to the security force, and engaged him. The individual killed was the father of the targeted individual. The leader and suspected insurgents were detained as a result of initial questioning at the scene."
The new statement said the coalition was "now aware of conflicting reports about the identities of those involved" and an inquiry had been launched.
[…] Details of what happened are still unclear, although one senior member of the Alokozai tribe, who attended the funeral, said the attack took place at some point after midnight and American soldiers were responsible. "There were many tanks that came and surrounded the house, but they did not attack any other building," said Haji Padshah. "The Americans then went in, brought out Haji Mohammad and shot him."
[…] Mahmoud Karzai, another of the president’s brothers, said the killing was a "shocking development" and he could not understand why Nato forces would be hunting for insurgents in Karz, which is in the relatively peaceful district of Dand, not far from Kandahar City. "Karz is our stronghold, there are absolutely no Taliban there and there never will be," Mahmoud Karzai told the Guardian.
He said he "smelled a very deep conspiracy" behind the episode, possibly involving a family feud within the Karzai clan that goes back to the jihad period of the 1980s. "If this is a deliberate setup where the US military is being given false information to settle a personal vendetta then this is very serious," he said. "I hope there is a full investigation."
[…]
4) WikiLeaks analysis suggests hundreds of thousands of unrecorded Iraqi deaths
Les Roberts, 05 March 2011
http://www.brussellstribunal.org/Roberts050311.htm
Imagine that the New York Times revealed that five Senators were known to be taking bribes from a particular corporation. Some days later the Washington Post runs a story saying they had independent sources suggesting that four Senators were taking bribes from that same corporation but goes on to state that this was nothing new as the story was already covered, neglecting to mention that three of the four names were different than those previously reported by the Times. This is hard to imagine because eight named Senators in a scandal is not the same as five named Senators, and because healthy competition between papers would tend to point out the information missed by a rival. Yet, this is, at least numerically, what happened following the October 22nd, 2010 release of the Iraq War Logs by WikiLeaks.
The release which supposedly included over 391,000 classified DoD reports described violent events after 2003 including 109,000 deaths, the majority (66,000) being Iraqi civilians. At the time of the release, the most commonly cited figure for civilian casualties came from Iraqbodycount.org (IBC), a group based in England that compiles press and other descriptions of killings in Iraq. In late October, IBC estimated the civilian war death tally to be about 104,000. Virtually all authorities, including IBC themselves, acknowledge that this count must be incomplete, although the fraction missed is debated. The press coverage of the Iraq War Logs release tended to focus on the crude consistency between the number recorded by WikiLeaks, 66,000 since the start of 2004, and the roughly 104,000 recorded deaths from Iraqbodycount since March of 2003. The Washington Post even ran an editorial entitled, "WikiLeaks’s leaks mostly confirm earlier Iraq reporting" concluding that the Iraq War Log reports revealed nothing new.
A research team from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health released a report this week analyzing the amount of overlap between the 66,000 WikiLeaks reports and the previously known listing of IBC. The team developed a system for grading the likelihood that the WikiLeaks War Log record matched an entry in IBC, scoring the match between 0 (not a match) to 3 (very likely a match). The matching records were graded by at least two reviewers and then a third reviewer arbitrated any discrepancies. The conclusion? Only 19% of the WikiLeaks reports of civilian deaths had been previously recorded by IBC. With so little overlap between the two lists, it is almost certain that both tallies combined are missing the majority of civilian deaths, suggesting many hundreds of thousands have died.
On some level, not noticing that the WikiLeaks list of 66,000 deaths were different events than those previously recorded by IBC is somewhat understandable. Reporters have precious few hours to read, assess, reach out to experts, and then produce copy on the topic of the day. It takes several minutes to review a particular War Log and then go to the public database on Iraqbodycount.org and see if on that specific day there was an event that seems to match the War Log description. In fact, many papers ran an AP wire article on the WikiLeaks release so it is likely very few reporters actually looked at the Iraq War Logs.
On the other hand, WikiLeaks gave these records in advance to five papers including the New York Times and it took the Columbia University team just minutes to realize that for most events reported outside of Baghdad (where matching takes more work) there were no reported killings in a particular city or province on that day within IBC’s database.
[…]
5) State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley decries Bradley Manning’s treatment as "counterproductive," "stupid"
Stephanie Condon, CBS News, March 11, 2011 12:48 PM
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20042169-503544.html
State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley, speaking at an academic event regarding new media and foreign policy Thursday, called the treatment of accused Wikileaks leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid," according to reporting from BBC reporter Philippa Thomas.
Crowley was speaking at an event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he was asked about the treatment of Manning, who is currently detained at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.
Crowley criticized the Defense Department’s handling of Manning but added that "Nonetheless Bradley Manning is in the right place." Crowley continued that "there is sometimes a need for secrets… for diplomatic progress to be made."
A State Department official told CBS News that Crowley’s comments reflected his personal opinion and do not reflect the official policy of the U.S. government.
Manning has been held in restrictive conditions at Quantico since July 2010, and some have questioned why the legal proceedings against him have taken so long to begin. Earlier this month, the Army filed 22 new charges against Manning and for the first time formally accused Manning of aiding the enemy, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported.
Following news that Manning is being forced to sleep without clothes in his cell, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) charged that the miilitary’s treatment of Manning is comparable to the abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
[…]
6) U.S. Escalates Pressure On Libya Amid Mixed Signals
David E. Sanger, New York Times, March 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/world/africa/11diplomacy.html
Washington – The White House announced a five-point program on Thursday of steps to isolate Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and ultimately drive him from power, all stopping well short of military action, but distanced itself from the assessment of the nation’s top intelligence chief, who said Thursday that "over the longer term" Colonel Qaddafi’s superior firepower "will prevail" over the opposition.
The steps that the White House announced include a partial embrace of the opposition movement as well as threats to track and prosecute, in international courts, loyalists to Mr. Qaddafi who commit atrocities. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she would meet with Libyan opposition leaders next week, and President Obama’s national security adviser made it clear that Washington was looking for ways to aid the Libyan leader’s opponents.
"We’re coordinating directly with them to provide assistance," said the adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, though the United States has stopped short of recognizing them as the legitimate government of Libya. The help, he added, consisted of humanitarian aid and advice on how to organize an opposition government.
But on a day when military momentum moved back toward Mr. Qaddafi’s forces, it was not evident that the efforts the White House announced would be enough to ensure an end to Mr. Qaddafi’s 41-year-long rule, or even to slow the pace of his attacks.
In Brussels, NATO deferred until at least next week any decision on establishing a no-flight zone over Libya, amid hesitations in Washington and several European capitals over being drawn into a civil war in a country the West does not consider critical to its security. Both Mrs. Clinton, speaking in Washington, and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, in Brussels, warned about the potential dangers of American military involvement, unless it was authorized by the United Nations and unless neighboring countries joined in the effort.
"It’s not enough for them to just cheer us on," one senior administration official said Thursday. "They have to put some skin in the game. The president has made clear it can’t just be us."
The White House campaign to convince both Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists and NATO allies that the Libyan dictator’s days are numbered were undercut by a military assessment given earlier in the day by the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper. Responding to questions, Mr. Clapper told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that Colonel Qaddafi had a potentially decisive advantage in arms and equipment that would make itself felt as the conflict wore on. "This is kind of a stalemate back and forth," he said, "but I think over the longer term that the regime will prevail."
Mr. Clapper also offered another scenario, one in which the country is split into two or three ministates, reverting to the way it was before Colonel Qaddafi’s rule. "You could end up with a situation where Qaddafi would have Tripoli and its environs, and then Benghazi and its environs could be under another ministate," he said.
The White House was clearly taken aback by the assessment that Mr. Qaddafi could prevail, and Mr. Donilon, talking to reporters a few hours later, suggested that Mr. Clapper was addressing the question too narrowly.
"If you did a static and one-dimensional assessment of just looking at order of battle and mercenaries," Mr. Donilon said, one could conclude that the Libyan leader would hang on. But he said that he took a "dynamic" and "multidimensional" view, which he said would lead "to a different conclusion about how this is going to go forward."
"The lost legitimacy matters," he said. "Motivation matters. Incentives matter." He said Colonel Qaddafi’s "resources are being cut off," and ultimately that would undercut his hold on power. A senior administration official, driving home the difference in an e-mail on Thursday evening, wrote, "The president does not think that Qaddafi will prevail."
[…] Both Mr. Gates and the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, stressed that NATO would agree to a no-flight zone only with "a clear legal basis" – in short, authorization from the United Nations. Both also said in nearly identical statements that NATO would not take military action unless there was "a demonstrable need" and strong support from neighboring Arab nations.
Europe is also riven by disagreements on how to force Mr. Qaddafi out. When France stepped ahead of the rest of the military alliance on Thursday morning to become the first country to recognize the rebel leadership in Benghazi, Britain took exception. In comments at the European Union in Brussels, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, said that the Libyan rebels "are legitimate people to talk to, of course, but we recognize states rather than groups within states."
Saudi Arabia
7) Saudi Arabia quiet on planned ‘Day of Rage’ as protests spark violence elsewhere
Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, Friday, March 11, 2011; 3:16 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/11/AR2011031102965.html
Qatif, Saudi Arabia – A "Day of Rage" planned by critics of the Saudi Arabian government proved relatively calm Friday, with peaceful demonstrations in and around the eastern city of Qatif, a day after police fired on protesters there, and elsewhere in oil-rich Eastern Province.
Witnesses reported a heavy police presence in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, but no protests.
In other countries in the region, protests led to violence. Demonstrators in Bahrain who have been on the streets for almost a month calling for democratic reforms were attacked by government supporters brandishing sticks and knives, witnesses said. Police fired tear gas on the protesters as they attempted to march to a royal complex on the outskirts of Manama, the capital.
In Yemen, security forces opened fire on protesters near Aden, injuring at least six, the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people gathered in the capital, Sanaa, to demand the immediate ouster of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh and to mourn the death of a protester killed by security forces at a rally on Tuesday.
Also Friday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates flew to Bahrain to meet with officials there, in a sign of the United States’ continued concern about the events unfolding in the region.
In Saudi Arabia, hundreds marched in Al-Ahsa, an oasis town in the country’s largely Shiite Eastern Province, and several protesters were arrested, but there was no violence, said Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, president of the country’s Human Rights First Society. Another witness said that marches were held in three small towns outside Qatif and that late in the evening hundreds of people marched in Qatif itself. All the protests took place without incident.
Protesters have called for increased democracy in the country that has been ruled by the al-Saud family since they united it by conquest almost 80 years ago. The royal family and the majority of the country’s population are Sunni Muslims, and Shiite Muslims in Eastern Province – home to the bulk of the nation’s oil reserves – have urged an end to what they say are discriminatory government measures that prevent them from holding many public positions and restrict their public services.
Fridays have been the biggest days for demonstrations and confrontations since protests started sweeping North Africa and the Middle East two months ago; the Saudi government had indicated this week that it would do whatever it took to stop demonstrations from taking place this Friday. Protests, even small ones, are highly unusual in the authoritarian country.
In Qatif, police shot and wounded at least two protesters Thursday night, and a police officer was also injured, according to the Interior Ministry.
[…] "The entire area, the designated area for protests, was completely barricaded by police cruisers. You see police checkpoints at every place to get in," said Mohammed al-Qahtani, the head of the Association of Civil and Political Rights in Saudi Arabia.
In Bahrain, security forces fired rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters, most of them Shiites, who were trying to march to the royal palace, and a group of government supporters attacked the protesters with sticks and knives, witnesses said, adding that dozens of people were injured. Witnesses said that some protesters retaliated by throwing rocks at the security forces.
[…]
Yemen
8) Yemen protesters demand president’s immediate ouster, mourn slain demonstrator
Portia Walker, Washington Post, Friday, March 11, 2011; 12:40 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/11/AR2011031103541.html
Sanaa, Yemen – A day after Yemen’s opposition rejected a presidential proposal for a new constitution, tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators gathered at Sanaa University in the capital Friday to demand President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s immediate ouster and mourn the death of a protester who had been shot in the face by security forces earlier in the week.
Surrounded by pictures of the dead man, who was buried Friday afternoon at a cemetery near the opposition camp at the university, the demonstrators chanted, "The people want the fall of the president" and "Leave!"
Anti-government protests have been held daily across Yemen for the past four weeks.
[…]
Egypt
9) ElBaradei ‘to run’ for president
Nobel laureate says he will run for president and urges for a new real democratic system in Egypt.
Al Jazeera, 10 Mar 2011 00:40 GMT http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/03/201139231048821536.html
Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate and former head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency, has said on a privately owned TV channel that he intends to run for president in Egypt’s 2011 presidential election. "When the door of presidential nominations opens, I intend to nominate myself," ElBaradei said on ONTV channel on Wednesday.
ElBaradei also said that suggested constitutional amendments to move Egypt toward democracy are ‘superficial.’ He appealed to the military rulers to scrap them or delay a scheduled March 19 referendum on them. "We are at a decisive period in Egypt’s history, We shouldn’t rush. Everything should be on a solid basis." he said.
The constitutional amendments limit a president to two four-year terms. They also allow independent and opposition members to run, impossible under the regime of deposed president Hosni Mubarak.
The military rulers have said they want to hand over power six months after the ouster of Mubarak. The proposed amendments suggest that elections, both presidential and parliamentary, would take place during that period.
However, there is no proposed change in the laws that regulate forming political parties. This, ElBaradei said, would allow remnants of Mubarak’s party and the well organised Muslim Brotherhood to control the new parliament.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
10) Israel Holds Gaza Engineer, Relatives Say
Fares Akram, New York Times, March 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/world/middleeast/11gaza.html
Gaza – Relatives of an engineer from Gaza who disappeared last month in Ukraine said Thursday that he had been kidnapped by Mossad agents and transferred to an Israeli prison.
The engineer, Derar Abu Sisi, is the operating manager of the only power plant in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave that is controlled by Hamas, the Islamic militant group. He is married to a Ukrainian woman and was in the country applying for citizenship, relatives said.
Israeli officials have not commented on the case, which is subject to a court-imposed gag order in Israel. But an Israeli human rights organization, HaMoked, which assists Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, received confirmation this week from the Israel Prison Service that Mr. Abu Sisi has been in detention since Feb. 19 and was currently in Shikma prison near the Israeli coastal town of Ashkelon, just north of Gaza.
A lawyer from Israel’s public defender’s office, Michal Orkaby-Danziger, who is representing Mr. Abu Sisi, was unable to comment because of the gag order.
Mr. Abu Sisi’s relatives heard from an Israeli lawyer about 10 days ago that he was in an Israeli prison, was in good health and had not been charged with a crime.
A spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that Mr. Abu Sisi, 42, disappeared "under unknown circumstances" in the early hours of Feb. 19 after boarding a train in the eastern city of Kharkiv that was bound for Kiev, the capital, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Abu Sisi had traveled to Ukraine with his wife, Veronika, but she had returned to Gaza to look after their six children by the time he disappeared. Relatives said that his wife lost contact with him on Feb. 18 when he did not answer his cellphone. Friends in Ukraine told her by telephone that they had dropped him off at the train station, where he was supposed to board a train. He was planning to meet his brother, who was flying into Kiev’s airport that night. Mr. Abu Sisi’s wife has returned to Ukraine to search for him, his sister, Susan Abu Sisi, said.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Abu Sisi said her brother was not a Hamas activist. She noted that he had been working at the power plant for nearly a decade, long before Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007.
Colleagues at the Gaza power plant said Mr. Abu Sisi was a professional engineer who was respected by all parties, including Hamas.
[…] While the reasons for Mr. Abu Sisi’s detention were unclear, it was widely assumed in Gaza that it was somehow linked to his position at the power plant and the successful efforts of Hamas to reduce the station’s dependency on industrial diesel fuel imported from Israel. In January, the Hamas authorities said that they had managed to adjust the station’s turbines to run on regular diesel fuel, which is smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, saying that Israel was not letting in sufficient amounts of fuel.
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