Just Foreign Policy News
August 9, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
A Historic Opportunity to Cut Military Spending
The agreement in Washington to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for deficit reduction has made a lot of people very unhappy. But the agreement had one important positive aspect: it created a historic opportunity for significant cuts in projected military spending.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/20118711133701977.html
Take Action: Urge Congress and the President to Put Military Cuts First in Line
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/cutpentagonfirst
Van Jones: Progressive Groups Unveil ‘Contract For The American Dream’
Bullet #8 is "end the wars and invest at home."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/progressive-groups-unveil_n_921520.html
Call to Action: nationwide protests on September 15, 2011 in support of Palestine
A Palestinian state is on the UN’s table. But the US is acting to block Palestinian self-determination.
http://september15.org/
Think Progress: US military budget = 6 times China, Iran, and North Korea combined
Think Progress mocks Secretary Panetta’s contention that we cannot cut the military budget because of the threat from China, Iran, and North Korea.
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/05/289395/u-s-defense-expenditures-dwarf-china-iran-north-korea/
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) In an interview with National Public Radio, Representative Barney Frank introduced reporter Steve Inskeep to some facts Inskeep seemed to be unaware of concerning proposals to cut the military budget: that the President is trying to keep US troops in Iraq; that there is no firm deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan; that a significant number of Tea Party Republicans are willing to break with the establishment view that the U.S. must police the whole world; that the U.S. is currently defending Western Europe from nonexistent threats from Iran; that the defense budget is bigger than Medicare.
2) The Pentagon said it would ban media coverage of the return of 30 dead U.S. troops to U.S. soil after they were killed in the deadliest day of the decade-long Afghanistan war, the Washington Post reports. But the Pentagon denied the decision was an attempt to restrict public images of the horror of war. Instead, officials said, the decision was due to the fact that it was impossible to separate and identify the soldiers’ individual remains, and therefore impossible to get the families’ individual permission for media coverage.
3) Peace Now says the Israeli government spends at least $570 million per year to subsidize life in the settlements, Al Jazeera reports. The Adva Center estimates the occupation’s total cost since 1967 at more than $50 billion.
The housing ministry will spend $22 million to provide security for Israelis living illegally in predominantly Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, places such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. Roughly 2,000 Israelis live in these neighborhoods, meaning the Israeli government spends $11,000 per settler. That’s more than double what the Israeli government spends on a per-child basis for primary education.
Some of the subsidies given to settlers are hard to quantify, either because Israeli government statistics do not separate them out, or because the numbers are not public at all.
"If we didn’t have the settlements we would have a peace agreement, so we would have lower costs for the military, for security; we would have more investment, we would have peace," said Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now’s settlements project. "And we can’t calculate how much that would be worth."
4) The US said it was requesting a dispute settlement panel to hear its complaint that Guatemala has failed to protect workers’ rights as required under the CAFTA-DR trade agreement, Reuters reports. The AFL-CIO and six Guatemalan unions filed a complaint in April 2008, accusing the Guatemalan government of failing to effectively enforce laws guaranteeing workers the right to organize and bargain collectively as well as the right of association and acceptable conditions of work. The Administration is currently pressing Congress to pass the Colombia trade agreement, which unions and many Democrats oppose due to Colombia’s history of anti-union violence.
Afghanistan
5) According to the UN refugee agency, more than 150,000 Afghans were displaced during the past 12 months, a 68 percent increase compared with the same period a year earlier, the New York Times reports. There are about 437,810 displaced Afghans within the country. Many resettlement villages in eastern Afghanistan are struggling to retain residents because the villages lack jobs, transportation, water, and electricity.
Libya
6) Rebel leaders dissolved their cabinet, in an effort to placate the family of an assassinated rebel military leader and quiet discord, the New York Times reports. For months, there had been complaints that cabinet members were unknown to most Libyans, spending most of their time abroad. In recent months, Islamists have been suspected in the killings of other former Qaddafi officials. Despite pledges by the rebels to fully investigate, the shootings of at least three former Qaddafi internal security officers several months ago remain unsolved.
Iran
7) There’s at least one thing that most Iranians share a common view on, and that is their dislike of the Iranian opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK/MKO), reports Golnaz Esfandiari for Radio Liberty. Talk of removing the group’s designation as a terrorist organization, which the US is currently considering, is sure to anger not only the Iranian government, but Iranians across the political spectrum, including the Green Movement opposition.
Saudi Arabia
8) The beheading of an Indonesian domestic worker by the Saudi government has led to widespread revulsion in Muslim Indonesia against Saudi Arabia’s ultra-puritanical and officially sanctioned Wahhabist sect of Islam, the Washington Post reports. At least 20 Indonesians, nearly all women, are on death row in Saudi Arabia. Migrant Care, an Indonesian group that lobbies on behalf of workers abroad, said it has this year already received 6,500 reports of violence, sexual harassment, rape and other abuses against Indonesians in Saudi Arabia. Indonesia’s government announced a moratorium from Aug. 1 on labor exports to Saudi Arabia. One leader of a major Muslim organization in Indonesia who studied in Saudi Arabia for 13 years described the kingdom’s religious and political order as "jahiliyyah" – the period of ignorance and hypocrisy that, according to the Koran, prevailed there before the arrival of the prophet Muhammad.
Venezuela
9) Venezuela’s political opposition is slamming House Republicans for voting to cut off U.S. funding to the OAS, ostensibly with the goal of promoting democracy in Venezuela, the Washington Post reports. The opposition said that they were counting on the OAS to monitor Venezuela’s presidential election next year.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) U.S. Can No Longer Afford To Be World’s Policemen
Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services
Committee, talks to Steve Inskeep about his opinion on the S&P credit downgrade. Frank says the U.S. spends too much money being the military policemen of the world.
Steve Inskeep, NPR, August 9, 2011
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/139234858/u-s-can-no-longer-afford-to-be-worlds-policemen
Inskeep: Next, let’s hear one more voice on the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt and the broader economy. Democratic Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts is one of his party’s leaders in financial issues.
Inskeep: Whatever you think of the S&P downgrade, is it at least correct to say the United States does have a serious long term problem with deficits and debt?
Rep. Frank: We have a long-term problem. It does not threaten default. So my response to Standard & Poor’s is that, once again, they have made an error. But the error is a fact that we have to deal with.
Standard & Poor’s, frankly along with Moody’s – although Moody’s was more responsible this time – has an extraordinary record. They have consistently overrated private debt. They have told people – and they were one of the reasons we got into a terrible crisis – that it was safe to buy junk, to buy subprime bonds. The people who read, for instance, Michael Lewis’s "The Big Short" will see how shockingly inadequate they were.
At the same time, they’ve had a history, less well known, of undervaluing the debt of governments. They have these ratings, and if you look at any given rating – double A, double B, whatever – at any given level, municipalities are much, much, much less likely to default than corporate…
Inskeep: Congressman, let me just pick up here on the question of given that the rating is what it is, and that the debt situation is what it is, you said there is a long-term problem. Do you see a way that Democrats and Republicans can agree on long-term deficit reduction, as this special committee is supposed to do in the coming months?
Rep. Frank: Yes. There is some issues where we’ll have debates. I will continue to believe that if you’re making more than $250,000 a year in taxable income, that for the government to get another $30 out of every additional thousand will have no negative impact on you or the economy and can help us reduce the deficit without savage cuts in the environment and highways.
But there is another area that I would hope we would get some agreement on. It’s something I’ve been working on. And that’s telling the rest of the world that they can no longer count on America to be their military budget, their policemen. I would begin by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of $125 billion a year.
Inskeep: You mean withdrawing more quickly and more dramatically than is already happening.
Rep. Frank: Well, withdrawing from Iraq, definitely. The president is unfortunately talking about staying in Iraq at a cost of billions of dollars a year, beyond the end of this year, which would put him there longer than George Bush. And I’m hoping he could be persuaded not to do that. But in Afghanistan, while there is a withdrawal – there is a drawdown going on, there is no firm withdrawal date, and they’re talking about staying there for several more years.
In addition to saving the 125 billion, if we were out by a few months, in both of those, as soon as you can do it in a responsible way – given the physical need to withdraw safely – it’s time for us to tell NATO that they no longer need American protection. That began in the ’40s to protect poor nations devastated by World War II from a communist threat. Everything has changed except the tens of billions of American money that goes there.
Inskeep: Congressman, Leon Panetta, the Defense secretary, among others, have said that the defense cuts have already gone steeply enough. He would resist that along with, I am sure, a great many Republicans.
Rep. Frank: I understand, although many Republicans now are starting to move in this direction. Obviously, I and the Tea Party disagree on a number of issues, but a significant number of them are willing to break with an establishment view that it somehow is America’s responsibility to guard the whole world. I know Panetta says that. I was disappointed because – I guess you become secretary of defense, and that’s your institutional responsibility.
There is no justification for America protecting Western Europe against nonexistent threats. There is no justification for us building anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic to protect them against nonexistent attacks from Iran.
Inskeep: Congressman, if I can, we’ve just got a few seconds. You have mentioned defense spending. You’ve mentioned tax increases. Those are two areas of disagreement. The biggest part of the federal budget is entitlements…
Rep. Frank: No, wrong. I’m sorry. The defense budget is bigger than Medicare, and Social Security is, in fact, self-financing, still is.
Inskeep: Let’s stipulate for this conversation: a very, very, very, very, very big part of the budget is entitlements. Democrats are seen as resisting cuts. Is your side – in a couple of seconds – going to appoint people to this special committee who are ready to make a deal?
Rep. Frank: I am not going to tell an 80-year-old woman living on $19,000 a year that she gets no cost-of-living, or that a man who has been doing physical labor all his life and is now at a 67-year-old retirement – which is where Social Security will be soon – that he has to work four or five more years.
[…]
2) Pentagon bans media coverage of ceremony to return remains of soldiers killed in helo crash
Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, 08/08/2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/pentagon-bans-media-coverage-of-ceremony-to-return-remains-of-soldiers-killed-in-helo-crash/2011/08/08/gIQAhZz02I_blog.html
The Pentagon said Monday that it would prohibit media coverage of the return of 30 dead American troops to U.S. soil after they were killed in a helicopter crash in the deadliest day of the decade-long Afghanistan war.
The somber military ritual at Dover Air Force Base of welcoming home those killed in wars overseas was re-opened to the public in March 2009 after an 18-year ban. Coverage of the return of troops’ flag-draped remains – termed "dignified transfers" by the military – has been permitted since then as long as relatives of the deceased give their approval.
But Pentagon officials said Monday that the catastrophic nature of the crash had made it impossible to separate the service members’ remains or to make a preliminary identification of any of the individuals. As a result, they said, family members won’t have the option of granting permission for media coverage at Dover.
Marine Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said the decision was not an attempt to restrict public images of the horror of war.
[…]
3) Will the Israeli left talk about occupation?
Gregg Carlstrom, Al Jazeera, 09 Aug 2011 12:19
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/08/20118815462771250.html
[…] The left’s sudden return to politics has, in turn, led some commentators to speculate that protesters might broaden their focus beyond purely socioeconomic issues – that they might agitate for equal rights for Israeli Arabs, or push for an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Those issues were visible at Saturday night’s massive rally in Tel Aviv, attendees say, though far from the focal point of the protests. People waved Palestinian flags, chanted "end the occupation", and carried posters with slogans linking Israel’s occupation to the broader demand for social justice. The "1948" tent on Rothschild Boulevard houses Palestinian and Israeli activists who argue for Palestinian rights. It was attacked on Sunday by nationalist Jewish extremists belonging to a Kahanist group.
But for all those efforts, activists do not expect the protest movement to speak out loudly on the occupation or social justice for Palestinians. Organisers are reluctant to touch the issue, they say, because of fear that it will divide a movement which so far has almost universal support in Israel.
Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories may at first seem unrelated to the protests, which have focused on socioeconomic issues inside Israel – skyrocketing rents, the high cost of living, social services and the like.
Activists tend to make two arguments for connecting the two. One is moral: A movement that wants social justice for Israeli Jews should demand the same for Israeli Arabs, and for the Palestinian people, they argue.
The other argument is more pragmatic. Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank is expensive, and activists argue that those resources could be better spent on social programmes inside Israel.
Settlers, after all, receive benefits – such as subsidised mortgages and tax breaks – not unlike the ones protesters are demanding.
The government spends at least 2 billion shekels ($570 million) per year to subsidise life in the settlements, according to the Israeli group Peace Now. The Adva Center, a think tank in Tel Aviv, estimates the occupation’s total cost since 1967 at more than $50 billion.
That annual spending is admittedly a fraction of Israel’s 350 billion shekel budget, a fact often pointed out by settler groups. But critics retort that the "settlement subsidies" are unfair, benefiting only a small minority of Israelis who choose to live in settlements which most of the world considers illegal.
The housing ministry, for example, will spend 76 million shekels ($22 million) to provide security for Israelis living illegally in predominantly Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, places such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. Roughly 2,000 Israelis live in these neighbourhoods, according to Peace Now, meaning the Israeli government spends 38,000 shekels ($11,000) per settler. That’s more than double what the Israeli government spends on a per-child basis for primary education.
Some of the subsidies given to settlers are hard to quantify, meaning the 2 billion shekel figure may be an underestimate.
One example: Most West Bank settlements are designated "national priority areas", which means Israelis buying homes are eligible for low-interest mortgage loans subsidised by the state. They also receive discounts on the land they buy – up to 70 per cent, in some cases.
The government will spend 160 million shekels this year ($46 million) to subsidise those national priority areas, but the budget does not specify how much will be spent in the settlements, and how much within Israel proper.
Other settlement-related costs are contained within the defence budget, which is not detailed to the public.
"You can go further. I believe that if we didn’t have the settlements we would have a peace agreement, so we would have lower costs for the military, for security; we would have more investment, we would have peace," said Hagit Ofran, the director of Peace Now’s settlements project. "And we can’t calculate how much that would be worth."
[…] Polls conducted over the past few years have found the public almost evenly split on a variety of questions, such as whether Israel should freeze new construction in the settlements, or whether Israelis would support a peace agreement with the Palestinians which required evacuating settlements in the West Bank.
"[This is] an amazing stage for us to push our message, and all organisations feel the same," said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Hebrew University student who protested with a group that chanted about the occupation. "But I don’t think this will translate to the official demands, interviews of the leaders, because they know that this will split the movement right away."
[…] "Generally the awareness of the costs of the occupation to Israel is not that high," Swirski said. "To most Israelis, what happens on the other side of the Green Line might as well happen in Afghanistan or on the Moon."
[…] In private conversations, though, many protesters say they care about these issues, and argue that a liberal Israeli government would be more likely to halt construction in the settlements. The protests will not bring about short-term policy change, in other words, but many Israelis hope they will lead to a long-term shift in politics.
"This is the rise of a new movement and it could have a big impact on Israeli policy, Israeli politics," Cohen said. "This might bring a new party into the political scene. At least it will bring new politicians, and younger ones, who can connect leftist ideas about the economy to other leftist issues like the occupation."
4) U.S. requests panel to decide Guatemala labor case
Doug Palmer, Reuters, 5:28pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/09/us-usa-guatemala-trade-idUSTRE7785LO20110809
Washington – The United States said on Tuesday it was requesting a dispute settlement panel to hear its year-old complaint that Guatemala has failed to protect workers’ rights as required under a free-trade agreement. "While Guatemala has taken some positive steps, its overall actions and proposals to date have been insufficient to address the apparent systemic failures," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement.
The action is taken under the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, known as CAFTA-DR.
The Obama administration is hoping to win approval of three long-delayed free trade pacts with South Korea, Panama and Colombia when Congress returns in September from its recess.
U.S. labor groups strongly oppose the pact with Colombia, which they call the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists because of the Andean nation’s history of anti-union violence.
[…] The AFL-CIO labor federation and six Guatemalan unions filed a complaint in April 2008, accusing the Guatemalan government of failing to effectively enforce laws guaranteeing workers the right to organize and bargain collectively as well as the right of association and acceptable conditions of work.
Following an investigation also involving the State Department and the Labor Department, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office formally requested talks with Guatemala on the issue in July 2010.
At the time, Kirk also expressed concern that anti-labor violence was escalating in Guatemala, but said that was not part of the United States’ formal trade complaint.
The United States and Guatemala held two rounds of talks on the labor concerns in late 2010. Washington ratcheted up the pressure in May, when it requested a meeting of the CAFTA-DR Free Trade Commission to discuss the matter.
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives cheered the action, even though they overwhelming opposed the CAFTA-DR agreement when it was put to a vote in 2005 on the grounds its workers rights protections were not strong enough.
"We applaud the Obama administration for taking action in view of the failure of Guatemala to implement even the worker standards obligated under CAFTA as negotiated," said Representative Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and mainly exports goods like clothing, flowers, jewelry, coffee and raw materials to the United States.
[…]
Afghanistan
5) In Afghanistan, a Village Is a Model of Dashed Hopes
Jack Healy, New York Times, August 8, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/world/asia/09land.html
Alice-Ghan, Afghanistan – This tiny village rose from the rocky soil with great hopes and $10 million in foreign aid, a Levittown of identical mud-walled houses built to shelter some of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans set adrift by war and flight.
Five years later, the village of Alice-Ghan and those good intentions are tilting toward ruin. Most of its 1,100 houses have been abandoned to vandals and the lashing winds. With few services or jobs within reach, hundreds of residents have moved away – sometimes even to the slums and temporary shelters they had sought to escape.
"No people," said Amir Mohammed, a village elder, as he threaded through the grid of dirt roads, pointing at the vacant, identically built two-room houses.
The settlement, a little more than an hour’s drive north of the capital, Kabul, on the border with Parwan Province, is one of 60 scattered across the country. It has become a demonstration of the miscalculations and obstacles that have thwarted so many similar efforts to tackle huge problems like poverty, hunger, illness and dislocation in Afghanistan.
Most of the families that moved to Alice-Ghan had fled to Iran or Pakistan during the chaotic civil war that ended when the Taliban took control in 1996. Sensing opportunity, the refugees were among millions of Afghans who returned after the American-led invasion. A new village, built fresh, seemed like a chance to start again.
"At the beginning, when we first came here, we thought the government finally understood us, that we finally had a chance," said Nuragah, a resident who uses only one name. "But the problems just added up."
These returning families have since failed to gain a foothold in an Afghanistan that nearly a decade later is still struggling to get on its feet. While the number of displaced Afghans has fallen since the early days of the war, refugee advocates warn that growing numbers of civilians are now fleeing their homes because of the country’s continuing violence and instability.
More than 150,000 Afghans were displaced during the past 12 months, a 68 percent increase compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Many trickle back home once the shooting stops. Others end up with relatives, in district and provincial centers, or inside tent cities and shantytowns on the edges of Kabul’s sprawl.
In all, there are about 437,810 displaced Afghans within the country.
Humanitarian concerns aside, refugee advocates contend that the growing numbers of poor, displaced Afghans offer the Taliban a wide pool of potential recruits, and pose a long-term risk to the country’s stability, especially as NATO troops begin to head home.
Government officials said some resettlement villages in eastern Afghanistan had flourished. But many are struggling to retain residents or break ground on promised homes. In all, about 5,000 families live on land designed for as many as 300,000, according to the Afghan Refugees Ministry.
A lack of electricity and running water has driven residents away. Many of the sites are deep in the countryside, far from any reliable source of work, and few people have cars. The land is often rocky and dry, with little irrigation. Traveling into town to buy groceries can take more than an hour.
"We have received no clean water, no jobs, no roads," said Salam Khan, an elder in the Barikab settlement, a short drive from Alice-Ghan. He said its population of 640 families had fallen by more than half in the past two years. "We still have not received anything."
Corruption has also dogged the program. Families with homes have fraudulently acquired free plots of land with the hopes of flipping them later. Some of the government officials who gave out the home sites were accused of fraud, and a few ended up in jail, according to the United Nations.
Set against a moonscape of mountains, amid patches of land mines, the village of Alice-Ghan began as an attempt to do some good for displaced Afghans living around the capital.
The Afghan government provided the land. The Australian government gave nearly $9 million. The United Nations Development Program took the lead in building homes, schools, roads and water tanks.
But today water is trucked in, while efforts to build a permanent water-storage facility progress only haltingly. Several times a day, children push wheelbarrows to storage tanks to fill plastic jugs for laundry and cooking.
A mobile health clinic visits on Tuesdays, but residents said there was no reliable health care within miles for emergencies.
The district center is about five miles away, a 30-minute drive across bone-jarring dirt roads. A newly paved highway now offers a quicker path to Kabul’s markets and employers, but most of the men in the village do not have cars. They rely on a bus donated by the United Nations development wing that makes the trip four times a day.
Cultural blind spots also angered residents. With no high exterior walls built around each home, women in this deeply conservative village could not walk outside their small houses or to backyard outhouses without risking the shame of public exposure.
[…] Hanifa Shamsala, a widow with orange streaks in her hair and three children, said she had no choice but to stay. She could not afford rent in Kabul, and had nothing but the home she was given. "Where would I go?" she said. "What would I do?"
Most residents, however, are ready to go. "It is better to leave this place," said Amir Mohammed, the elder. "It is a desert. There is nothing."
Libya
6) Libyan Rebels Dissolve Cabinet Amid Discord
Kareem Fahim, New York Times, August 8, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/world/africa/09libya.html
Benghazi, Libya – Rebel leaders dissolved their own cabinet on Monday, in an effort to placate the family of an assassinated rebel military leader and quiet discord in a movement already struggling to remove the country’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, from power.
A rebel spokesman said that the prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, the only member of the cabinet who kept his job, would have to present a new slate of cabinet members to the rebel legislative body, the Transitional National Council, for approval in the coming days. The cabinet was dissolved, the spokesman said, "for improper administrative procedures" that led to the arrest and subsequent killing of the military leader, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, a former top Libyan commander who defected to the rebel side.
The move left the rebels without several of its leaders – including the ministers of defense, finance, interior and justice – as they try to fight a three-front war, run dozens of cities under their control and rein in armed militias that have multiplied since the February uprising.
And it threatened to halt a flurry of negotiations between the rebels and foreign governments, just as the rebels have started to wrest millions of dollars in loans and other grants from their allies.
[…] The reshuffling also seemed to represent an effort by interest groups within the rebel movement, including homegrown leaders who helped start the uprising, to assert their power by sidelining leaders who had returned from exile and held key posts.
For months, there had been complaints that cabinet members were unknown to most Libyans, spending most of their time abroad – especially in Qatar, the country that has emerged as the rebels’ most enthusiastic patron.
A rebel spokesman said that Mr. Jibril, who has rarely been seen in Benghazi, would be required to start spending more time in Libya.
The killing of General Younes had raised fears of internal strife, after members of his tribe, the Obeidi, said they would turn to violence unless there was a proper investigation. His family cautiously welcomed Monday’s reshuffling but demanded more action. "We only care about justice," the family said in a statement that was also signed by the Obeidi. "We don’t seek power. We insist on bringing those involved with the assassination, regardless of their ranks or titles, to be prosecuted by a fair, civilized judicial system."
[…] In recent months, Islamists have been suspected in the killings of other former Qaddafi officials. Despite pledges by the rebels to fully investigate, the shootings of at least three former Qaddafi internal security officers several months ago remain unsolved.
Iran
7) Iranian Activists Warn That MKO Delisting Would Send Negative Signal To Iranians, Golnaz Esfandiari, Radio Liberty, August 9, 2011
http://www.rferl.org/content/iranian_activists_warn_that_mko_listing_would_send_negative_signal_to_iranians/24291688.html
Iranians hardly ever agree on anything. But there’s at least one thing that most Iranians share a common view on, and that is their dislike of the Iranian opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO).
For this reason, talk of removing the group’s designation as a terrorist organization, which the United States is currently considering and which the European Union did in 2009, is sure to spark protests from Tehran.
But the issue also draws protests from a less likely source — members of Iran’s Green Movement who themselves are critical of the exiled group and are wary of attempts by the MKO (aka People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran) and by the Iranian government to portray them as allies in opposition.
And Green Movement members also warn that removing the MKO’s terrorist designation could inadvertently send a negative signal to people in Iran and tarnish their view of the United States.
The MKO’s involvement in a series of violent acts in the 1970s and 1980s in Iran, and its decision to side with Iraq during the bloody 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, led to the group being labeled as traitors among Iranians.
So much so, that opposition member and former lawmaker Ali Mazrouei believes removing the MKO from the State Department’s terror list would not be well-received.
"It will be definitely viewed very negatively by the people," he says. "This group is one of the most-hated political groups among Iranians, because during the difficult time of the war it joined the enemy that had attacked Iran’s territory and fought against the Iranian nation."
In the international arena, the group has proven to be a sticking point for decades. Following its founding in 1965, MKO members took up arms against the Iranian shah and were involved in the killings of several U.S. citizens working in Iran in the 1970s.
After initially supporting the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the MKO went underground when an uprising against the new regime failed. The United States put the group on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 1997 in what was widely considered to be a goodwill gesture to former President Mohammad Khatami.
Nevertheless, following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, coalition forces considered MKO members on Iraqi soil a "protected people," in keeping with the Geneva Conventions.
MKO members were provided refuge at Camp Ashraf, where their numbers today stand at around 3,000. But the handover of control to the Iraqi government clearly exposed the controversy over their presence on Iraqi soil, with Iraqi officials openly suggesting that Iran’s extradition requests be heeded, while the UN reminded the Iraqi government of the MKO members’ rights as minorities.
The MKO, as the State Department reviews their status, has argued that it has renounced violence and claims to be working for democracy in Iran. It has also launched an extensive campaign to push for its reclassification.
According to Tehran-based political analyst Nejat Bahrami, the delisting of the MKO would make average Iranians frustrated with the United States.
"The messages [President Barack] Obama has sent to the Iranian people on several occasions, including for Nouruz, have been very encouraging," he says. "But I think [the delisting of the MKO] would neutralize those positive statements. And it might lead to frustration with U.S. policies and even hatred."
"Newsweek" correspondent Maziar Bahari, who was jailed in Iran amid the unrest that followed the country’s contentious 2009 presidential election, believes the move could have damaging implications.
"Despite the historical mistakes the U.S. government committed — from the 1953 coup d’etat to its full support for the shah’s regime — many Iranians still believe the U.S. can be their potential ally in their fight for freedom," Bahari says. "The delisting of the MKO would send the wrong signal to those young Iranians who have been pushing for democracy peacefully in the past 2 1/2 years."
The thought of MKO members portraying themselves as united oppositionists does not sit well with Green Movement members.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one Green Movement member in Iran claims that if he had to choose between the current leaders in Iran and the MKO — which is led by Maryam Rajavi and Massoud Rajavi (who hasn’t been seen or heard from in the past several years) — he would definitely "keep" the current regime.
"I know they claim abroad they’re part of the Green Movement [but] it’s a big lie," he says. "We don’t want to have anything to do with them."
[…] Bahrami believes the Iranian government might actually benefit from the possible delisting of the MKO, because the move could feed Tehran’s propaganda machine and give it more ammunition to attack U.S. policies.
"If the delisting takes place, Tehran would say U.S. policies are contradictory," he says. "At a time when the U.S. claims it fights terrorism, the Islamic republic can refer to MKO’s past actions and challenge the U.S."
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected in the coming weeks to make a final decision about whether to keep the MKO on the terror list or remove it.
Saudi Arabia
8) Saudi beheading fuels backlash in Indonesia
Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, August 8
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/saudi-beheading-fuels-backlash-in-indonesia/2011/07/17/gIQAc7OU3I_story.html
Jakarta, Indonesia – As leader of Indonesia’s – and the world’s – largest Muslim organization, Said Aqil Siraj used to get pelted with angry e-mails and text messages whenever he questioned Saudi Arabia’s rigid, ultra-puritanical take on Islam.
But the often menacing messages recently stopped – cut off by a single stroke from a Saudi executioner’s sword to the neck of an Indonesian maid in Mecca.
"Now I don’t get sent anything," Siraj said. He is glad to be out of the firing line, at least for the moment, but is appalled that it took the beheading of a 54-year-old Indonesian grandmother to quiet abuse by supporters of Saudi-style Islam.
The beheading of Ruyati binti Satubi – executed in June for the killing of an allegedly abusive Saudi employer – stirred such revulsion here that even the most strictly observant Indonesian Muslims now ask how the guardians of Islam’s most sacred sites can be so heedless of their faith’s call for compassion.
At least 20 Indonesians, nearly all women, are on death row in the Persian Gulf kingdom.
While few doubt that Satubi stabbed her boss, the mother of three is widely viewed as a martyr – the victim of a harsh and often xenophobic justice and social system rooted in Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi creed, a highly dogmatic and intolerant strand of Islam that, in its most extreme forms, helped provide the theological underpinnings for jihadi militants.
"Some Indonesians began to think that Wahhabism is the true teaching of Islam, but thanks to God, there has been a change of thinking," said Siraj, who heads Nahdlatul Ulama, an organization with about 50 million members and 28,000 Islamic boarding schools.
The beheading, which triggered protests outside the Saudi Embassy and elsewhere, "has had a good influence" by accelerating a backlash against harsh imported strains of Islam, Siraj said.
"Mecca is a holy place, but the people who live there are very uncivilized," said the executed maid’s daughter, Een Nuraeni, who prays regularly and wears a veil pulled tightly over her hair. "There is nothing in Islamic law that says you can torture or rape your housemaid."
Her mother, desperate for money, had worked for three families in Saudi Arabia since taking her first job there in 1998. On trips home, Nuraeni said, she complained of being spat at in the face, beaten, deprived of food and other mistreatment, but kept going back "for the sake of her children."
Migrant Care, an Indonesian group that lobbies on behalf of workers abroad, said it has this year already received 6,500 reports of violence, sexual harassment, rape and other abuses against Indonesians in Saudi Arabia. Eighty percent of the more than 1.2 million Indonesians working there are women, mostly maids.
Indonesia’s government, complaining that it received no advance notice of Satubi’s execution, recalled its ambassador from Riyadh and announced a moratorium from Aug. 1 on labor exports to the Gulf kingdom. Police set up a special unit at Jakarta’s main airport to enforce the order.
The acrimonious rift between the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad and Indonesia, home to the largest community of his followers, even led to calls for a boycott of Mecca by hajj pilgrims.
[…] Indonesia has traditionally embraced mostly relaxed forms of Islam. But starting in the 1970s under then-dictator Suharto, a flood of money from Saudi Arabia to fund mosques and other ventures helped boost a Wahhabi-tinged form of Islam known as Salafism, which sometimes veered into violent extremism.
[…] Siraj, the leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama organization, studied in Saudi Arabia for 13 years and came to despise the kingdom’s religious and political order, which he describes as "jahiliyyah" – the period of ignorance and hypocrisy that, according to the Koran, prevailed there before the arrival of the prophet Muhammad.
[…] But what the Saudi government now condemns as mutant strains have nonetheless put down thin but tenacious roots on the margins in Indonesia, shielded in the past by a reluctance by many to criticize views supposedly rooted in the land of Muhammad’s birth.
"Saudi Arabia is the holy land, so people always used to make excuses for it," said Wahyu Susilo, a policy analyst for Migrant Care. "They now realize that Saudi Islam is not the right image of Islam." To protest the June beheading, his group printed thousands of posters saying: "Saudi Arabia – the killing fields for Indonesian women migrant workers."
The Indonesian government, under fire for not doing enough to protect its citizens, last month secured the release of an Indonesian maid on death row in Saudi Arabia. It did this by paying compensation of $538,000 to the family of her employer, whom she killed after he allegedly tried to rape her.
Arab News, a newspaper based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, reported last week that Saudi authorities have agreed to spare two more Indonesian maids from beheading, including one convicted of using black magic to hurt her employer.
At her family’s village near Bekasi, east of Jakarta, Nuraeni, the daughter of the beheaded maid, has received a procession of visitors offering condolences and angry views on Saudi Arabia. Scores of women in the village have spent time working in the kingdom and shared stories of their travails there.
Even Nuraeni’s elderly grandfather, a sternly devout Muslim who has memorized the Koran and made a hajj trip to Mecca, wants nothing to do with the kingdom. "He now hates Saudi Arabia," Nuraeni said.
Venezuela
9) Venezuelan opposition resists Republican measure
Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, August 6
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/venezuelan-opposition-resists-republican-measure/2011/08/05/gIQANSF0yI_story.html
Don’t do us any favors. That’s the message that Venezuela’s political opposition is sending to House Republicans, who recently voted to cut off U.S. dues to the Organization of American States.
Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), who introduced the amendment scrapping the $48.5 million annual dues, singled out what he called the organization’s support of autocratic President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. "Let’s not continue to fund an organization that’s bent on destroying democracy in Latin America," he said in the debate last month.
But it turns out some of the very people the Republicans presumably wanted to help – Venezuelans seeking to oust Chavez – are alarmed. Venezuelan opposition leaders wrote recently to "express our deep concern with the unintended and grave consequences" of the measure.
"It is our view that international law and multilateral diplomatic action . . . are the only acceptable tools for the international community to support our democracy," said the leaders of the Mesa de Unidad Democratica (United Democratic Coalition), in a July 29 letter to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
The measure cutting U.S. dues to the OAS passed the committee on a 22-20 party-line vote. It was part of a bill authorizing State Department funding for 2012.
The Venezuelan opposition group said the OAS, while not as forceful as it could be, has been "a last resort to defend human-rights causes." In addition, the organization’s election monitoring system would be needed when Venezuela holds presidential elections next year, said the letter, obtained by The Washington Post.
"The measures approved by your committee, if in effect, will jeopardize the opportunity to restore democracy and the rule of law," the letter concluded.
[…] If the bill passed the full House, the legislation will almost certainly fail to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The OAS, founded in 1948, brings together countries in the hemisphere to address political, legal and development issues. The U.S. government pays about half its annual budget.
[…]
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