Just Foreign Policy News
April 6, 2010
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Congressional Pressure Can End the War, Saving Many Lives
The fight over the war supplemental is tremendously important, because Congressional pressure can move Administration policy, even when critics of Administration policy don’t command a majority of votes. This is especially true when, as in this case, critics are in the majority in the President’s own party, and when, as in this case, the policy under pressure is an international policy which is also under significant international pressure.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/537
Progressive Democrats of America: Brown Bag Vigils at Congressional Offices
Highlighting the cost of the wars. Check to see if one is scheduled in your community.
https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/309/mtglist.asp?formid=meet&eventtypename=Brown%20Bag%20Lunch%20Vigil
Urge Congress to Talk About the Human Cost of War
In the next few weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to approve $33 billion more for war and occupation in Afghanistan. Urge your representatives in Congress to use this opportunity to shine a spotlight on the human cost of continuing war and occupation.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/humancost
Call Congress the Week of April 12 Against the War in Afghanistan
Groups are collaborating in generating calls to Congress against the war, urging: opposition to the war supplemental, support for a military withdrawal timetable, support for a public exit strategy and support for peace negotiations. Spread the word.
Highlights of the Afghanistan Debate
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/video/housedebate
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) NATO officials said they were looking into allegations by Afghan investigators that U.S. Special Forces tampered with evidence to hide responsibility for the death of three Afghan women in a Special Forces night raid, the New York Times reports. Initially, the US claimed that the women were already dead when they arrived and implied that they had been killed by their relatives. NATO denied that Special Forces had dug bullets out of the women’s bodies in order to hide what had happened, as alleged by the victims’ family members. [But NATO and US officials apparently did not explain why they had previously denied responsibility for the women’s deaths – JFP.]
2) President Karzai’s associates have said the president considers Western complaints of corruption a smoke screen to discredit his government and draw attention from the fact that most of the billions in international aid have been squandered by the donors themselves and not wasted by his government, AP reports. Moreover, Karzai has been frustrated by the reluctance of the U.S. to endorse negotiations with the Taliban leadership.
3) The Web site WikiLeaks.org released a video Monday showing an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver in a July 2007 attack in Baghdad, the New York Times reports. [ The video is here: http://www.collateralmurder.com/.] Reuters had pressed for the release of the video but its FOIA requests were not approved. On the day of the attack, US military officials said the helicopters had been called in to help US troops who had been exposed to small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. But the video does not show hostile action. Instead, it begins with a group of people milling around on a street. A wounded man can be seen crawling and the pilots impatiently hope that he will pick up a weapon so that under the rules of engagement they can shoot him again. A short time later a van arrives to pick up the wounded and the pilots open fire on it, wounding two children inside [this is clearly a war crime – JFP.] No disciplinary action was taken as a result of the incident.
4) The Pakistani army has allegedly committed hundreds of retaliatory killings and other ongoing human rights abuses in the Swat Valley since the end of its anti-Taliban offensive there in September, threatening billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid, the Washington Post reports. Human Rights Watch said it had documented the extrajudicial execution of as many as 300 alleged Taliban supporters and sympathizers in the area around Mingora, the Swat capital. The Obama administration has been aware of reports of abuse since last summer, U.S. officials said. A senior U.S. official said the administration has provided Congress with regular updates on the allegations since last summer as well as on steps taken to address them. Most U.S. aid to Pakistan falls under congressional restrictions requiring the administration to certify the country’s adherence to human rights laws and norms. Human Rights Watch has been unable to verify the military units involved in alleged abuses, as required by U.S. law before a cutoff of aid.
5) The Obama administration has begun talks with Indonesian military officials to establish a special training program for Kopassus troops despite human rights legislation known as the Leahy Law, the Los Angeles Times reports. Passed in 1997, the measure bars the U.S. from training foreign militaries facing accusations of human rights abuses unless officials attempt to bring all wrongdoers to justice. U.S. officials may try to circumvent the congressional prohibition by training younger Kopassus officers who, they insist, were not part of the unit during major human rights abuses. Sen. Leahy said Kopassus has committed some of Indonesia’s worst human rights atrocities. "For the United States to resume military aid, Kopassus needs to change," he said. "Kopassus can no longer violate human rights, Indonesian military officers who violated human rights cannot continue to serve in the military, and the military, including Kopassus, needs to fully cooperate with civilian investigations and prosecutions."
6) President Obama’s new nuclear weapons policy will foreswear the use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries [as the US is required to do under the NPT – JFP] But the countries must be in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations under international treaties. That loophole would mean Iran would remain on the potential target list [in violation of the NPT, in which the nuclear weapons states agreed not to threaten the non-nuclear weapons states with nuclear weapons – JFP.]
Afghanistan
7) Afghanistan’s election commission said it backed a decree by President Hamid Karzai that limits foreigners’ role in elections, Reuters reports. Parliament’s lower house unanimously rejected Karzai’s decree in a vote last week, but the upper house refused to vote on it, apparently ensuring the decree still stood. On Tuesday, Afghanistan’s government-appointed Independent Election Commission, which oversees the running of elections, said it now believed Karzai’s decree had the force of law and would act on it.
Iran
8) Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has voiced scepticism over the effectiveness of any further sanctions against Iran, saying he still supported a diplomatic solution, Reuters reports. Lebanon, Turkey and Brazil are likely to oppose new sanctions on the Security Council.
Israel/Palestine
9) Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the US appears to have hit a dead end in its attempts to revive Middle East peace talks, Reuters reports. Erekat said the Palestinians wanted U.S. guarantees that Israel would not issue more tenders to build on land where the Palestinians aim to establish a state, including East Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minster Netanyahu has yet to respond formally to a U.S. demand for confidence-building steps to try to persuade Palestinians to return to peace talks. Haaretz reported last week that Obama wanted Israel to freeze construction in East Jerusalem for four months.
10) Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment, the New York Times reports. Last summer, Prime Minister Netanyahu attacked a group published allegations by Israeli soldiers about human rights violations during the Gaza war. In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers, police have arrested dozens of Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months.
Egypt
11) Egyptian police Tuesday beat and detained pro-democracy demonstrators in Cairo calling for constitutional reforms and a repeal of the decades-old emergency law that restricts a broad array of personal rights, the Washington Post reports. At least 90 people were detained, according to organizers of the rally from the 6th of April movement. Police confiscated cameras and ordered passersby and journalists to stop taking photos.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Afghan Investigators Say U.S. Troops Tried To Cover Up Evidence In Botched Raid
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Abdul Waheed Wafa, New York Times, April 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/asia/06afghan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Afghan officials investigating the deaths of five Afghan civilians gunned down in February during a bungled raid by American Special Operations forces believe that troops tampered with evidence at the scene, the lead investigator said Monday. NATO officials disclosed that they were looking into the allegations.
Evidence tampering helps explain why NATO officials were so "confused" initially and offered inaccurate accounts of the killings, said the Afghan official, Merza Mohammed Yarmand, of the Ministry of Interior’s criminal investigation division.
The Feb. 12 nighttime raid left three women – two of them pregnant – and a local police chief and prosecutor dead. It was one of the latest examples of Special Operations forces’ killing civilians during raids, deaths that have infuriated Afghan officials and generated support for the Taliban despite efforts by American and NATO commanders to reduce civilian casualties.
The joint American and Afghan assault team shot five Afghans – all family members – from the roofs of buildings in a large residential compound near Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan, where members of an extended family lived in different homes, survivors said. The Americans did the killing, they said.
At first, the American-led military command in Kabul said that the two men who died were "insurgents" who had "engaged" – in other words, shot at – the forces at the scene. The initial account also said that the troops then stumbled onto the bodies of three women "tied up, gagged and killed" and hidden in a room.
Military officials later suggested that the women – who among them had 16 children – had all been stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid, implying that their own relatives may have killed them.
But the military later said the men were innocent civilians shot after they went outside, armed, to investigate the presence of the forces conducting the raid. Then on Sunday night they admitted that the women were also killed during the raid.
Family members said several dozen relatives and friends had gathered at the compound that night for the Afghan equivalent of a baby shower.
In an interview, Mr. Yarmand said the raiding party had killed all five Afghans – and then meddled with the scene. "We came to the conclusion that the NATO patrol was responsible for the killing of the two men and the three women, and that there was evidence of tampering in the corridor inside the compound by the members" of the assault team, Mr. Yarmand said. "There was a mess at the scene."
He said he was pleased that the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, had accepted findings that all five Afghans were civilians killed during the raid.
An official at the American-led NATO military command in Kabul said the tampering allegations had prompted the military to investigate. "We have found no evidence to support tampering," the official said. But, the official added, based on the allegations from the Afghan Interior Ministry, "We are further investigating to determine if there is any foundation to these claims."
Yet to be determined is whether Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the victims’ bodies in an effort to hide what had happened, as described by family members who survived the raid.
Mohammed Tahir, whose 18-year-old daughter was killed, said he had watched from the compound through an open door as an American knelt over one corpse with a knife and tried to extract bullets. "I saw them working on the bodies," Mr. Tahir said. "I saw a knife in one of the American’s hands."
Another family member, Abdul Ghafar, said the bullet entry wounds on the bodies had been widened or scraped out in an effort to remove bullets. "The holes were bigger than they were supposed to be," he said.
The NATO military official said: "We strongly deny having dug any bullets out of bodies. There simply is no evidence." In the interview, Mr. Yarmand said he did not know whether bullets had been dug out of the bodies. He said he would not dispute family members’ claims, but added, "We can not confirm it as we had not been able to autopsy the bodies."
2) AP Analysis: Karzai remarks risk US-Afghan rift
Robert H. Reid, Associated Press, Monday, April 5, 2010; 6:16 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503228.html
Kabul – President Hamid Karzai’s startling threat to join the Taliban if foreigners don’t stop meddling in Afghanistan and his strident criticism of the West’s role have worsened relations with Washington at a time when the U.S. military wants closer cooperation ahead of a potentially decisive offensive this summer.
Karzai has been fuming for months about what he considers Washington’s heavy hand. He’s gambling that blaming outsiders for the troubles in a society with a long tradition of resisting occupation will bolster his stature at home – while carrying little risk because the U.S. has no choice but to deal with him.
But managing the rift has now become a major problem for both sides, threatening even to rival the threat from the Taliban. President Barack Obama’s strategy depends on working with a strong, reliable Afghan partner to turn back a resurgent Taliban, raising the question of what will happen if that partnership fails.
[…] Karzai associates have said the president considers Western complaints of corruption a smoke screen to discredit his government and draw attention from the fact that most of the billions in international aid have been squandered by the donors themselves and not wasted by his government.
[…] Moreover, Karzai has been frustrated by the reluctance of the U.S. to endorse negotiations with the Taliban leadership. The Obama administration is keen to offer incentives to rank-and-file Taliban fighters to switch sides but believes negotiations with insurgent leaders are pointless as long as the insurgents believe they are winning. [It’s not clear that US officials really believe this, or are simply trying to delay meaningful talks so they can proceed with the Kandahar offensive – JFP.]
Karzai suspects the U.S. or the Pakistanis engineered the arrest in February of the Taliban’s No. 2 commander, with whom the Afghan leader had been in communication, as a way to cut off or take control of the negotiations, according to Karzai aides. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was confidential.
[…]
3) Video Shows U.S. Killing of Reuters Employees
Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, April 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/middleeast/06baghdad.html
Washington – The Web site WikiLeaks.org released a graphic video on Monday showing an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver in a July 2007 attack in Baghdad. A senior American military official confirmed that the video was authentic.
Reuters had long pressed for the release of the video, which consists of 38 minutes of black-and-white aerial video and conversations between pilots in two Apache helicopters as they open fire on people on a street in Baghdad. The attack killed 12, among them the Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and the driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
Reuters employees were allowed to view the video on an off-the-record basis two weeks after the killings, but they were not allowed to obtain a copy of it. The news organization said its Freedom of Information Act requests were not approved.
At a news conference at the National Press Club, WikiLeaks said it had acquired the video from whistle-blowers in the military and viewed it after breaking the encryption code. WikiLeaks released the full 38-minute video as well as a 17-minute edited version.
[…] On the day of the attack, United States military officials said that the helicopters had been called in to help American troops who had been exposed to small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades in a raid. "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force," Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad, said then.
But the video does not show hostile action. Instead, it begins with a group of people milling around on a street, among them, according to WikiLeaks, Mr. Noor-Eldeen and Mr. Chmagh. The pilots believe them to be insurgents, and mistake Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s camera for a weapon. They aim and fire at the group, then revel in their kills. "Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," the other responds.
A wounded man can be seen crawling and the pilots impatiently hope that he will try to fire at them so that under the rules of engagement they can shoot him again. "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon," one pilot says.
A short time later a van arrives to pick up the wounded and the pilots open fire on it, wounding two children inside. "Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one pilot says. At another point, an American armored vehicle arrives and appears to roll over one of the dead. "I think they just drove over a body," one of the pilots says, chuckling a little.
Reuters said at the time that the two men had been working on a report about weightlifting when they heard about a military raid in the neighborhood, and decided to drive there to check it out.
"There had been reports of clashes between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area but there was no fighting on the streets in which Namir was moving about with a group of men," Reuters wrote in 2008. "It is believed two or three of these men may have been carrying weapons, although witnesses said none were assuming a hostile posture at the time."
The American military in Baghdad investigated the episode and concluded that the forces involved had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group. No disciplinary action was taken.
[…]
4) Human Rights Report Threatens Aid To Pakistan
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, Tuesday, April 6, 2010; A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040504373.html
Islamabad – The Pakistani army has allegedly committed hundreds of retaliatory killings and other ongoing human rights abuses in the Swat Valley since the end of its successful anti-Taliban offensive there in September, threatening billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid to a crucial ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said it had documented the extrajudicial execution of as many as 300 alleged Taliban supporters and sympathizers in the area around Mingora, the Swat capital, in interviews with more than 100 Swat families in February and March. A report on the alleged abuses, including torture, home demolitions, illegal detentions and disappearances, is scheduled for release this month.
Based on a continuing pattern, "we can only assume it is part of the counterterrorism effort by the security forces to shoot people in the back of the head," said Ali Dayan Hasan, the organization’s senior South Asia analyst.
The Obama administration has been aware of reports of abuse since last summer, U.S. officials in Washington said, even as it has strengthened its relationship with Pakistan. Last month, the administration held a "strategic dialogue" with top Pakistani military and government officials.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Monday that "we take allegations of human rights abuses seriously" and that the U.S. military was "working with the Pakistanis" to address the situation and that progress was being made.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the administration has provided Congress with regular updates on the allegations since last summer as well as on steps taken to address them. "We are mindful of the legislative requirements," the official said.
Most U.S. aid to Pakistan falls under congressional restrictions requiring the administration to certify the country’s adherence to human rights laws and norms. Since 2002, the United States has provided $11.6 billion in military aid and $6 billion in development assistance, according to Congressional Research Service figures. The administration has requested an additional $3 billion in combined aid for 2011.
Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas denied allegations of abuse, saying that the military had invited human rights groups to investigate earlier charges during the June-to-September offensive in the former Taliban stronghold. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, he said, issued written directives ordering troops operating in Swat and other regions to respect the rule of law.
"If we are seen as becoming terrorists against the terrorists," Abbas said, "all we have gained will go up in the air." He suggested that reported killings or other abuses were the result of "scores being settled between the people and the Taliban," many of whom remain in the mountains surrounding settled areas in Swat.
The army is holding about 2,500 detainees from counterinsurgency operations in Swat and elsewhere in the north and west, about 1,000 of them in Swat. The military has no judicial arm to prosecute them and has complained that Pakistan’s slow-moving civilian judiciary was unable to handle them.
Hasan, of Human Rights Watch, said the military has not released the names of those being held or allowed outside access to them.
[…] Hasan said Human Rights Watch had investigated about a third of the abuse reports the group had received from the Mingora area and found most of them substantiated. "Certainly, some of these people are Taliban supporters and sympathizers," he said of Swat, but many are "caught in the middle."
The group has been unable to verify the military units involved in alleged abuses, as required by U.S. law before a cutoff of aid.
5) U.S. Plan To Train Indonesian Elite Army Unit Raises Alarm
The plan to train members of Kopassus, which is accused of rights abuses, would violate U.S. law, critics say. Analysts, however, say the goal is to engage, rather than isolate, troubled nations.
John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-indonesia-military6-2010apr06,0,1367132.story
Jakarta, Indonesia – Usman Hamid knows the fear of being stalked. He’s tasted the panic of receiving threatening, late-night phone calls. "They say, ‘I’m going to take out your eyes,’ " he said. "’I’m going to throw you into the ocean. I’m going to kill your mother.’ " The menace hasn’t come from any bandits or terrorists, he says, but from operatives who he suspects work for his own military.
Hamid is chairman of the Commission for Disappearances and Victims of Violence, a nonprofit that for years has investigated alleged human rights abuses by an elite army special forces unit called the Indonesian Komando Pasukan Khusus, known as Kopassus.
Allegations date to the squad’s inception in the 1950s and include beatings, abductions and assassinations that have gone largely unacknowledged – and unpunished – by officials here, Hamid said.
Now, contrary to U.S. human rights law, the covert counter-terrorism and intelligence unit that many here say already views itself as being above the law is about to go into business with the U.S. government. The Obama administration has begun talks with Indonesian military officials to establish a special training program for Kopassus troops despite legislation known as the Leahy Law.
Passed in 1997, the measure bars the U.S. from training foreign militaries facing accusations of human rights abuses unless officials attempt to bring all wrongdoers to justice.
Although details of the training remain unclear, Indonesian officials hint that they include bringing Kopassus officers to the United States for nonlethal counter-terrorism training.
[…] For the United States, the new military ties would help strengthen its position in the region as China’s influence rises. Kopassus officers recently visited the U.S., and Obama hopes to complete the training arrangement when he visits Indonesia in June, analysts say. "It’s just a matter of time, [maybe] a couple of months," former Indonesian Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono told the Jakarta Post about Washington’s intentions of lifting the training ban.
Indonesian military officials declined an interview request. But Hamid called the negotiations troubling. "This relationship has to be more fully explained," he said. "Are they going to solely focus on anti-terror operations or continue a secret war within Indonesian society? And how will the U.S. deal with past human rights abuses by Kopassus?"
For the Obama administration, any training deal struck with the red-bereted commandos will involve some delicate diplomatic footwork. U.S. officials may try to circumvent the congressional prohibition by training younger Kopassus officers who, they insist, were not part of the unit during major human rights abuses, analysts say.
Activist groups in Southeast Asia have organized petitions opposing the administration’s plan, which many characterize as a risky diplomatic and military gambit.
The U.S. Congress also has its concerns. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations who wrote the Leahy Law, said Kopassus has committed some of Indonesia’s worst human rights atrocities.
"For the United States to resume military aid, Kopassus needs to change," he said. "Kopassus can no longer violate human rights, Indonesian military officers who violated human rights cannot continue to serve in the military, and the military, including Kopassus, needs to fully cooperate with civilian investigations and prosecutions."
[…]
6) Obama To Take Middle Course In New Nuclear Policy
Mary Beth Sheridan and Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 6, 2010; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040504174.html
A year after his groundbreaking pledge to move toward a "world without nuclear weapons," President Obama on Tuesday will unveil a policy that constrains the weapons’ role but appears more cautious than what many supporters had hoped, with the president opting for a middle course in many key areas.
Under the new policy, the administration will foreswear the use of the deadly weapons against nonnuclear countries, officials said, in contrast to previous administrations, which indicated they might use nuclear arms against nonnuclear states in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack.
But Obama included a major caveat: The countries must be in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations under international treaties. That loophole would mean Iran would remain on the potential target list.
The new policy will also describe the purpose of U.S. weapons as being fundamentally for deterrence. Some Democratic legislators had urged Obama to go further and declare that the United States would not use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. But officials in the Defense and State departments worried that such a change could unnerve allies protected by the U.S. nuclear "umbrella."
The administration’s nuclear policy, contained in a document known as the Nuclear Posture Review, will be released at the start of a jam-packed week of events focused on one of the president’s signature issues. Obama is to sign a new arms-control treaty with Russia on Thursday, then host at least 40 world leaders next Tuesday at a summit on locking down nuclear material.
The Nuclear Posture Review is important because it sets the framework for decisions on U.S. nuclear policy for the next five to 10 years, including the size of the stockpile and investments in submarines, missiles and nuclear laboratories. This one had raised particularly high expectations because of the president’s nuclear agenda, which helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
The document will break with the Bush administration’s nuclear doctrine in several ways. But officials and analysts said the policy’s cautious tone reflected a desire to not upset the military or Republicans in Congress at a time when Obama hopes to get several nuclear treaties ratified.
[…]
Afghanistan
7) Afghan Poll Body Backs Karzai on Electoral Row
Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters, Tuesday, April 6, 2010; 5:50 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600274.html
Kabul – Afghanistan’s election commission said on Tuesday it backed a decree by President Hamid Karzai that limits foreigners’ role in elections, scoring him another point in a dispute that has put him at odds with Washington.
The procedure of how to run the parliamentary election, set for September, has emerged as a major bone of contention in Afghanistan, prompting an anti-Western tirade by Karzai last week that drew a sharp rebuke from the United States.
Holding a free and fair parliamentary election is seen as a crucial test for Afghanistan which is facing a resurgent Taliban, despite the presence of tens of thousands of Western troops, more than eight years since the militants’ removal from power.
Karzai gave a speech on Thursday accusing the West of perpetrating election fraud in Afghanistan, and he appeared to go one step further on Monday by singling out the United States as specifically to blame, drawing anger from the White House. U.S. officials worry that Karzai’s anti-Western rhetoric could erode public support for the war back home.
Karzai is wrangling with parliament and the United Nations over how the election should be run and wants to limit the influence of foreigners on a fraud watchdog that overturned his first-round victory in a presidential election last year.
In February, Karzai issued a decree stripping the United Nations of the authority to appoint the majority of members of the watchdog, allowing him to choose the panel himself. He then partly backed down, saying the world body could name two members of a panel of five.
Parliament’s lower house unanimously rejected Karzai’s decree in a vote last week, but the upper house refused to vote on it, apparently ensuring the decree still stood.
On Tuesday, Afghanistan’s government-appointed Independent Election Commission (IEC), which oversees the running of elections, said it now believed Karzai’s decree had the force of law and would act on it. "We will carry out our work and programs on the basis of the new law that the Justice Ministry has sent to us," IEC chief electoral officer Daoud Ali Najafi said.
Najafi said he believed the March compromise, under which Karzai would name two foreigners suggested by the United Nations to the five-member watchdog panel, still stood. "It is the authority of the president to name two foreigners and three Afghans," he said. "We have asked the president to present the five people to us as soon as possible."
[…]
Iran
8) Turkey Opposes Sanctions Against Iran
Sophie Hardach; Angus MacSwan, Reuters, April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/04/06/world/international-uk-iran-turkey.html
Paris – Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has voiced scepticism over the effectiveness of any further sanctions against Iran in the dispute over its nuclear programme, saying he still supported a diplomatic solution.
In an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro published on Tuesday, Erdogan criticised countries pushing for another round of sanctions in the Security Council, of which Turkey is a non-permanent member. "We consider that this question should be resolved diplomatically," he said. "Sure, sanctions are an issue at the moment, but I don’t think that the ones being discussed can bring results."
Erdogan is going to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday as part of a two-day trip to France. The United States, Britain, France, and Germany expect to meet with Russia and China in New York this week to begin drafting a new round of sanctions.
Once the five permanent, veto-holding Security Council members, plus Germany, agree, they will present the proposal to the other 10 council members. Lebanon, Turkey and Brazil are likely to oppose the idea.
"Those who took the decision to apply (previous sanctions) were the first to violate them," Erdogan said in the interview. "The French, the Germans, the English, the Americans and the Chinese. They are all involved and still manage to indirectly send their products to Iran."
[…] Erdogan said he had repeatedly told his "dear friend" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there should be no nuclear arms in the region. Iran is the second-biggest supplier of natural gas to Turkey, its neighbour, and Erdogan said their peaceful relations and trade ties must be taken into consideration in the talks.
Israel/Palestine
9) Palestinian fears U.S. Mideast push in trouble
Ali Sawafta, Reuters, Tuesday, April 6, 2010; 4:49 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040602658.html
Ramallah, West Bank – The United States appears to have hit a dead end in its attempts to revive Middle East peace talks, a senior Palestinian official said on Tuesday, urging Israel to halt settlement building on occupied land to give U.S. diplomacy a chance of success.
The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority has demanded a full halt to Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank before any resumption of negotiations suspended since December 2008.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the Palestinians wanted U.S. guarantees that Israel would not issue more tenders to build on land where the Palestinians aim to establish a state, including East Jerusalem. Israel must also cancel plans announced last month for more building in parts of Jerusalem it occupied, along with the West Bank in a 1967 war, Erekat added.
"This is what we expect," Erekat told Voice of Palestine radio. "But it appears that all the consultations that have happened with the Israeli government and the American administration and other states have reached a dead end with Israeli positions insisting on a continuation of settlement."
[…] Erekat told Reuters Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must choose between settlement building or peace. "If Netanyahu responds to the demand for halting settlement, that would mean giving the international community and the United States the chance they deserve to try to create peace," he said.
Netanyahu, who met U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington last month, has yet to respond formally to a U.S. demand for confidence-building steps to try to persuade Palestinians to return to peace talks.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last week that Obama wanted Israel to freeze construction in East Jerusalem for four months in the hope such a step would bring the Palestinians back to full negotiations.
Underlining the deep division over Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel would not agree to freeze building anywhere in the city. "Not in the west of the city and not in the east of the city, either for Jews or for Arabs," Lieberman, head of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, told Israel Radio.
[…]
10) Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege
Isabel Kershner, New York Times, April 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/middleeast/06israel.html
Jerusalem – Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their critics say endanger the country. The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country’s leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the limits of free speech and dissent in Israel’s much vaunted democracy.
"Over the years, in a variety of international arenas," said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, "it was key for Israeli officials to say, ‘Yes, there are many problems, perhaps even abuses; however, we have a strong, vibrant civil society with a plethora of voices and we are very proud of that.’
"It is inconsistent to make those statements and at the same time create a situation that colors us as traitors in the public eye."
Governments and the watchdog organizations that monitor them have rarely seen eye to eye. But rights advocates say that to many conservatives and leaders of Israel’s right-leaning government, the allegations of war crimes against the Israeli military that followed the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-9 have turned human rights criticism into an existential threat that is chipping away at the country’s legitimacy. And officials have been blunt in their counterattacks.
The chief catalyst was the United Nations report last fall on the war in Gaza, by a fact-finding mission led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since identified what he calls the "Goldstone effect," meaning the delegitimization of Israel abroad, as a major strategic threat.
Last summer, he attacked a leftist organization, Breaking the Silence, that published allegations by unnamed Israeli soldiers about human rights violations during the war, as selectively anti-Israel.
Some international rights groups that have been critical of Israel, like Human Rights Watch, have said Israel’s government was "waging a propaganda war" to discredit them. A senior Netanyahu aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was "going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups."
Israeli rights advocates say that such comments by officials have fostered an atmosphere of harassment. While they do not accuse the government of orchestrating a campaign against them, they point to a number of seemingly unconnected dots that they say add up to a growing climate of repression.
In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers, the police have arrested dozens of Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months. Mr. El-Ad was detained for 36 hours in January, along with 16 other activists, after he explained to the police that their decision to break up a rally had no legal grounds. One organizer of the protests was arrested at his parents’ Jerusalem home on a night in late March, and released three days later.
Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, she said, the authorities backed down.
Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im Tirtzu (Hebrew for ‘If you will it’ – the first part of Theodor Herzl’s famous maxim) attacked a major organization, the New Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right to be heard.
Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund. The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu’s findings as a fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.
Still, for three weeks, Im Tirtzu plastered billboards across the country with posters featuring a crude caricature of the New Israel Fund president, Naomi Chazan. The posters depicted her with a horn attached to her forehead (in Hebrew, the word for fund also means horn) and bore the legend "Naomi Goldstone Hazan."
Perhaps the most alarming sign to rights advocates was a preliminary vote in Parliament supporting a bill that called for groups that received support from foreign governments to register with Israel’s political parties’ registrar, which could change their tax status and hamper their ability to raise money abroad. It swept a preliminary vote in the 120-seat Parliament in February with 58 in favor and 11 against.
Proponents say the bill is needed to improve transparency. "Up until now they have enjoyed a halo effect as highly regarded human rights watchdogs," said Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a conservative watchdog group financed by American Jewish philanthropists. "They were not seen as political organizations with biases and prone to false claims. Now, they are coming under some kind of scrutiny."
But rights organizations say that they are already required to list publicly the sources of their funding, and that the bill is actually intended to stifle dissent.
Right-wing organizations like those encouraging Jewish settlement in Arab areas of East Jerusalem receive the overwhelming share of their financing from individuals and philanthropies whose identities are often not disclosed. For now, the bill has effectively been blocked until its proponents reach agreement with the Labor ministers in the governing coalition, who are trying to water it down. But Ms. Chazan said the bill could not be finessed. "This law has to disappear," she said. "It is the single most dangerous threat to Israeli civil society since its inception."
[…]
Egypt
11) Egyptian police break up pro-democracy demonstration
Janine Zacharia, Washington Post, Tuesday, April 6, 2010; 1:25 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600701.html
Cairo – Egyptian police on Tuesday beat back and detained pro-democracy demonstrators in central Cairo calling for constitutional reforms and a repeal of the decades-old emergency law that restricts a broad array of personal rights.
At least 90 people were detained, according to organizers of the rally from the 6th of April movement, a mostly youth-led organization formed two years ago that is pushing for more political freedom.
Protester Amal Sharaf, 35, an office manager in an advertising agency, was hysterical after being beaten by a police officer with a baton. "I’ve been to protests before, but I’ve never been beaten," she said, grabbing her wounded arm. "We’re trying to change the emergency law that we’ve been living with for 28 years."
The demonstration came amid political uncertainty, with parliamentary elections slated for this year and a presidential election next year. President Hosni Mubarak, 81, who had his gall bladder and a growth on his small intestine removed in a surgery performed abroad last month, has ruled Egypt for nearly three decades. He has not said yet whether he will compete in next year’s election, fueling speculation that he might try to ensure his son, Gamal, succeeds him.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian former head of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, returned to Egypt last month and has become a prominent opposition leader, calling for reforms including a repeal of the emergency law that allows wide detentions and prohibits large gatherings that could be perceived as agitating against the government. He is also advocating term limits for the president and other changes to the political system to ensure parties can compete freely in elections.
Authorities denied the 6th of April movement a permit to demonstrate Tuesday, but it decided to go ahead with the protest anyway. The group issued a statement before the rally urging the police not to harm the demonstrators. "Nothing will stop us from loving our country and hoping to change it," the group said.
Police, some dressed in riot gear, others in plain clothes, filled Tahrir Square at noon Tuesday and waited outside metro stations for demonstrators, who had originally planned to march from the square to parliament.
Instead, a few hundred demonstrators ended up gathering on the sidewalk outside the Shoura Council, the upper house of the parliament, on Kasr al-Aini Street.
Police initially surrounded the protesters, who were waving Egyptian flags, carrying signs that said "No to Emergency Law, a New Constitution," and chanting "Long live Egypt," and tried to keep them out of traffic. They then began to beat some demonstrators with batons and haul them one by one into blue trucks. Police confiscated peoples’ cameras and ordered passersby and journalists to stop taking photos.
[…] "I’m very disappointed," said Mohamed Safeyeldin, managing director of business development at an Egyptian construction company, as he watched the police round up the demonstrators and looked for his son in the fray. He said it was his first time at a demonstration. "We have to change this constitution. We can’t continue like this," he said.
[…]
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.