bluewhiteandred

People are so angry..

2012-01-31T21:20:00.000+01:00

Is Damascus under siege?
We are surrounded. We can’t drive north. We can’t drive south. We can only go west, to Lebanon, a Syrian journalist told Liz Sly, of The WP.
Yabrud, Douma, Saqba, Hamuriyeh, Irbin, Al-Ghouta, Daraya, Ein Tarma, and Kfar Batna: the Syrian army launched a counterattack last weekend in order to wrest control of those suburbs of Damascus from the Free Syrian Army and its armed supporters.
The number of tanks is unimaginable. They are shelling the street randomly, one Yabrud resident told the NYT.
We are scared. We hear loud explosions and shooting. We don’t know what is going to happen, a resident of Daraya told the NYT.
The Free Syrian Army has made a tactical withdrawal. Regime forces have reoccupied the suburbs and started making house to house arrests, an activist from al-Ghouta told Aljazeera.
Regular Syrian army troops are also fighting the Free Syrian Army and other armed activists for control of Homs, Hama and Idlib.
The town of Rankous, near the Lebanese border, and home to 25,000 residents, has been under siege by the Syrian army (led by the Fourth Division, headed by Bashar Assad’s brother, Maher) since last Wednesday, in an attempt to drive out armed defectors.
At least 33 people were killed in that assault and more than 160 in Syria over the weekend. A further 100 died on Monday.
Clearly, the violence in Syria is escalating as more and more opponents of the government take up arms to defend themselves and their cause against a ruthless regime, which will stop at nothing to remain in power.
Case in point, twelve members (including four children) of a Sunni family, the Bahadours, were gunned down by Syrian army troops last Sunday in Homs, according to Le Monde (see photographs here).
Also in Homs, a family of six, including four children, suffered a similar fate in the Karm el-Zeitoun district.
In Hama, the bodies of dozens of executed prisoners were found on Thursday, according to the NYT.
We have the right to defend ourselves, activists chanted at last Friday’s national anti-Assad demonstrations. In addition, they are determined to do so, with or without your help, an activist told Aljazeera.
The Assad regime has resorted to brutal repression in order to crush the uprising.
That attempt however, has clearly failed, as more and more Syrians refuse to be cowed into submission.
Free Syrian Army branches are being created across the country, as well as military councils consisting of both civilians and defectors.
Yes, civilians who want to hold weapons are joining our struggle…Even if it requires us to smuggle weapons into the country we will do this. We are being killed. Whatever action we take to defend ourselves is justifiable, an activist named Omar told Aljazeera.
This is our right. It is our right to take up arms and we are not going to shy away from this any longer. We are being killed. We waited for any action from the Arab League and the United Nations and none was forthcoming. All they have been doing is stalling and that has given the regime time to crush the revolution, Omar said.
Defectors are joining the ranks of the armed resistance at a brisker pace than previously thought.
Each time they bring new forces here, some of them defect, Khaled Abou Salah, of the Homs Revolution Council, told the NYT.
Syria’s immediate prospects are dim at best.
What is happening is obvious. You can see it. It’s civil war. Everyone is trying to deny it but you can’t hide from it, a Syrian journalist told Liz Sly.
The Syrian resistance moreover, has been left to its own devices as the Arab’s League observer mission was suspended last Saturday
The observers had been sent to Syria last December to monitor the regime’s compliance with the Arab League peace plan it had approved.
The regime had agreed to pull back its troops; release all prisoners detained since the beginning of the uprising; allow the media to report on events in Syria and begin a dialogue with opposition groups.
Needless to say, the Assad regime failed to comply with any of these demands.
Given the critical deterioration of the situation in Syria and the continued use of violence…it has been decided to immediately stop the work of the Arab League‘s mission to Syria pending presentation of the issue to the League’s council, Nabil el-Araby, the Arab League’s secretary general declared last Saturday.
The Russians deplored the decision.
We would like to know why they are treating such a useful instrument in this way. I would support an increased number of observers. We are surprised that after a decision was taken on prolonging the observers’ mission for another month, some countries, particularly Persian Gulf countries, recalled their observers from the mission, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister said on Sunday.
Syria was disappointed as well.
This will have a negative impact and put pressure on Security Council deliberations with the aim of calling for foreign intervention and encouraging armed groups to increase violence, a statement on Syrian television indicated.
The Arab League however, has not abandoned its efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis.
Its secretary general, accompanied by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, in charge of the Syrian issue at the Arab League, are to present today a new peace plan at the UN Security Council in New York.
It calls for Assad to transfer his powers to the Syrian Vice-President, and the creation of a unity government, followed by elections.
Syria denounced the plan as a violation of its sovereignty.
Russian foreign minister Lavrov characterized the plan’s demand that Assad step down as absolutely unforgivable.
Yet, the new UN draft resolution under discussion in New York and sponsored by Morocco, calls for such a political transition.
By suspending the mission of the observers and seeking the backing of the UN Security Council for its new peace plan, the Arab League clearly seeks to increase the pressure on Assad and his principle supporter, Russia.
Why is Russia so keen on backing the brutal Assad regime?
Firstly, Syria is a major client of the Russian arms industry.
Recently, Syria signed a contract worth $550 million to purchase Russian jet fighters.
Secondly, the Russians are still seething over the West’s successful military campaign to oust the Qaddafi regime.
The Russians consider that they were deceived; as far as they were concerned, they had approved a UN Security Council resolution creating a no-fly zone in Libya, and not authorizing regime change!
We were naïve and stupid. The Chinese were the same. Trust this: that was the last mistake of such type, Yevgeny Y. Satanovky, president of the Institute of the Middle East in Moscow, told the NYT.
Russian support however, has encouraged the Assad regime to pursue obstinately its preferred, yet failing strategy: the brutal military repression of its own people.
It is central to the regime’s narrative and key to the cohesiveness of the regime’s ranks.
They believe that the international community is divided. So Russians are providing cover for the regime to push forward with their approach. There is a belief that all doors are not closed, Peter Harling, of the International Crisis Group, and an expert on Syria, told the NYT.
Syria doesn’t yet seem to feel that it’s sufficiently isolated, that it needs to change the course of action. It certainly won’t feel that as long as Russia is telling it that it still backs it, Aljazeera’s Anita McNaught said.
Hence, Russian support is encouraging Assad to seek a military solution to what is fundamentally a political problem, thereby radicalizing the opposition, and encouraging more and more Syrians to take up arms, if only to defend themselves.
The Russians, in order to alleviate the growing political pressure exerted by the Arab League and the UN Security Council, and portray itself not as the supporter of a pariah regime but as a responsible world power, invited representatives of both the opposition and the Syrian government to hold informal talks in Moscow to resolve the crisis.
In an attempt to contribute with the Syrians to a peaceful settlement without foreign intervention and with respect to the sovereignty of Syria, we have appealed to the Syrian government and to all opposition groups to send their representatives to Moscow at a mutually acceptable time for informal contacts without prior conditions, the Russian foreign ministry announced yesterday.
Although the Syrian regime responded favorably, the Syrian National Council declared that negotiations with the Assad regime were no longer possible.
The resignation of Assad is the condition for any negotiation on the transition to a democratic government in Syria, Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the Council, told AFP.
What then, will happen Tuesday in New York?
That the session is bound to be an important one is underscored by the list of attendees, which includes Hillary Clinton, and the foreign ministers of France and Great Britain, Alain Juppé and William Hague.
We have seen the consequences of neglect and inaction by this Council over the course of the last ten months, not because the majority of the Council isn’t eager to act-it has been. There have been a couple of very powerful members who have not been willing to see that action take place, declared Susan E. Rice, American ambassador to the UN, referring to Russia and China.
Failure to approve the resolution would lead to more violence and intensified chaos, she added.
What will the Russians do?
The western draft Security Council resolution in Syria will not lead to a search for compromise. Pushing it is a path to civil war, claimed Russian deputy foreign minister Gennady Gatilov.
As we have seen however, it is the current regime’s obstinate insistence on resolving the crisis militarily that is pushing the country towards civil war.
As such, with civil war looming, the West seems intent on accelerating a process that can only lead to Assad’s ouster.
Assad’s fall is inevitable, Jim Carney, the White House spokesman said yesterday.
Since it is inevitable, the sooner he leaves the better.
That is the prerequisite to resolving the crisis, and allowing meaningful negotiations between the parties to take place.
Russia’s behavior will thus be crucial. Only they can nudge Assad towards the door…
Will they have the wisdom and decency to do it?
The violence has now reached the hitherto peaceful cities of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest and commercial capital, and Damascus, thereby demonstrating that the regime’s strength is ebbing.
In Syria, looking weak is a dangerous thing, and if they can’t control the Damascus suburbs, they do look weak, a Western diplomat told Liz Sly.
Resistance against the regime is thus steadily spreading.
People are so angry, one a man selling headscarves in a Damascus souk told Liz Sly.
The brutal Assad regime has to go.
The Western powers in the UN Security Council seem keen on compelling both China and Russia to either abstain when the resolution comes to a vote, or take the very public responsibility of vetoing it.
Their allegiances would be crystal clear for the entire planet to see: support for a bloody and repressive regime intent on killing its own people if that is the price for remaining in power.
They can’t continue to defend an unsustainable status quo, one US official told the NYT.
Let us see if China and Russia have the nerve to rebuff the entire international community…
(thre photograph of the Free Syria Army soldier was found here)

Who will help the Syrians get rid of Assad?

2011-12-23T18:06:00.000+01:00

The first suicide car bomb struck the office of a Syrian security agency in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood of Damascus early this morning.
Then, the driver of a four-wheel drive vehicle rammed the latter into the building of the General Security Directorate (the loathed, repressive Syrian secret service), when guards inside ran into the street after hearing the first blast, according to a state-owned Syrian channel, al-lkhbariya al -Suriya.
The explosions shook the house. It was frightful, Nidal Hamidi, a journalist residing in Kafr Sousa, told AP.
Gunfire was also heard in the Malki district, in central Damascus.
Initial reports indicated that 40 people had been killed in the blasts, and over 100 injured.
Several soldiers and a large number of civilians were killed in the two attacks carried out by suicide bombers in vehicles packed with explosives against bases of State Security and another branch of the security services, state television reported.
Initial inquiries hold al-Qaeda responsibility, the network added.
Some reports indicated that a suspect had been arrested.
The Assad regime has been claiming from the outset of the uprising that it is not being challenged by peaceful pro-democracy activists, but by terrorists and armed gangs supported by foreigners.
Today’s attacks did seem to confirm this thesis.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem has said he expects the Arab observers to vindicate his government’s contention that the unrest is the work of « armed terrorists», not overwhelmingly peaceful protesters as maintained by Western governments and human rights watchdogs, wrote AFP.
Yet, the nature and timing of the attacks fuels suspicion that the Assad regime may itself have instigated them.
A terrorist attack conducted by al-Qaeda (already identified as the culprit in its immediate aftermath) neatly corroborated the Assad’ regime’s allegation that it is being targeted by the most formidable of Islamic terrorist organizations.
Secondly, the attacks took place the day after the arrival of a delegation of Arab League logistics experts. They are in Damascus to organize the mission of the hundreds of monitors expected as soon as Sunday to ascertain Syrian compliance with the Arab League peace plan that Assad signed in early November.
One article stipulates that the regime must cease resorting to violent means.
The authorities will undoubtedly (and expeditiously) provide the delegates with all the necessary evidence to confirm that its allegations concerning the origin of the violence were indeed accurate and thus always had been…The delegation was taken to a blast site this afternoon, according to The Guardian...
The regime will thus be in a position to demand sufficient leeway from the Arab League to confront this terrorist menace accordingly.
Furthermore, Damascus has been virtually spared the violence wracking other parts of the country.
In addition, no attacks of this nature, suicide bomb attacks, have been launched by the resistance movements, not even by armed groups.
Other elements also suggest the Assad regime was complicit in the attacks.
Omar al-Khani, of the Syrian Revolution General Commission opposition group, said that he lived three miles from the site of the explosions. Although the blasts rattled the windows of his house and woke him up with the noise, he said, he did not see any smoke rising from the area.
Khani said residents of Kafr Sousa reported that intelligence agents stationed near the building did not move when the explosions detonated. Instead, they continued to drink tea. Snipers and guards at the building also did nothing, he said, wrote Alice Fordham of the WP.
Half an hour before the bombing took place, there was a significantly high security presence. One side of the road was cut off 10 minutes before the explosion itself. As soon as the road was opened an explosion was heard, and then another one followed about 5 minutes later, a witness declared, according to enduringamerica.
Syria doesn’t really have a record of this. The security forces have not lost control of the situation to such an extent that this would seem likely, Salman Shaikh, of the Brookings Institute in Doha, told Alice Fordham.
The blasts occurred hours before a demonstration called to protest the Arab League mission was to have taken place.
On their Facebook page, activists condemned the Arab League’s plan to send monitors, fearing their presence will only legitimize the killing of protesters by the regime.
Protocol of death, license to kill was one slogan featuring on the page, according to al-Jazeera.
The activists demand that the United Nations Security Council, and not the Arab League, lead the international campaign against the Assad regime.
Omar Edelbi, of the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition movement inside Syria, denounced the Arab League mission as another attempt by the regime to bypass the Arab initiative and empty it of its contents, according to al-Jazeera.
The pro-democracy activists fear that the Assad regime will do its utmost to prevent the monitors from effectively fulfilling their mission (and first and foremost monitoring an end to the violence) all the while postponing the involvement of the UN Security Council.
In short, Assad will simply try to buy enough time to crush the uprising…
Skeptics also emphasize the fact that the full list of monitors has not yet been set, nor has the exact contours of their mission been finalized.
Lastly, the areas to be monitored will be negotiated with the Assad government…
The man chosen to lead the mission moreover, the Sudanese General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi lacks the necessary credibility to pursue it successfully.
Indeed, he was the head of military intelligence in Darfur where, according to the ICC, Sudanese troops committed war crimes, including genocide!
The Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir was charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by the ICC in 2008...
Is he truly the most suitable candidate to lead a mission the goal of which is the cessation of all violence?
In this context, it is quite possible that the Assad regime believes it can manipulate the monitors, if not obtain the tacit support of the mission’s leader, to continue its bloody repression of the Syrian uprising.
The Assad regime has repeatedly shown it will stop at nothing to retain power.
It has arrested, tortured shot and killed thousands of men, women and children…
More than 6,200 have died, including hundreds of children, according to a human rights organization.
As such, it is perfectly capable of having orchestrated these terrorist attacks in order to bolster its position before the arrival of the Arab League monitors.
These latest tragic events clearly demonstrate that Assad must go, and go now…
Who will help the Syrian people get rid of him?
(the photograph above of the Arab League delegation inspecting the blast site was found here)

"The army should kill all of us to stop the anti-Assad uprising"

2011-12-22T17:30:00.000+01:00

The Assad regime’s attempts to crush the Syrian resistance movement intensified this week.
Last Monday, some sixty to seventy defectors were gunned down by army troops near a military base in the Jebel Zawiyah area, near Idlib, in northwestern Syria, close to the Turkish border.
The next day, Syrian security forces continued their bloody assault, targeting villages in the area, believed to be providing support and a haven to defectors and armed anti-government insurgents.
Scores took to the hills in order to flee the advancing troops…
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, 111 were killed, victims of bombardments and heavy machine gun fire…
As the troops were passing through all the cities and towns in the area, they were firing artillery and tank shells and heavy machine guns, randomly and continuously. Daily, we live with the voices of missiles and explosions. The word « massacre» seems like too small to describe what happened, an activist hiding in the woods told the LAT.
One victim in the village of Kfar Owaid was Ahmed al-Dhaher, an imam.
According to witnesses, he was decapitated, and his severed head hung on a mosque door…
Concomitantly, the Syrian army attacked a group of soldiers fleeing their barracks in Idlib.
Some one hundred deserters were killed or wounded.
Activists said the Syrian military, using helicopters, tanks and artillery, continued the assaults on Wednesday, wrote the NYT.
France referred to the killings as an unprecedented massacre.
Everything must be put in motion to end this murderous spiral into which Bashar al-Assad is dragging his people, Bernard Valero, the French foreign ministry spokesman said.
The US government also condemned the violence.
While Syrian security forces have also taken casualties, the overwhelming majority of the violence and loss of life in Syria stems from the actions of the Assad regime, and we call on all parties to put an end to the violence, the White House declared.
The Syrian National Council demanded that the United Nations Security Council be urgently convened and that safe zones be established under international supervision in order to protect the Syrian people.
The Assad regime’s escalation of violence occurred, non-coincidentally, mere days before the arrival of an Arab League delegation sent to Damascus in order to prepare the mission of some 150 Arab League monitors.
Due in Syria before the end of the year, their mission is to assess the Assad regime’s compliance with the Arab League plan its subscribed to last month.
According to this plan, the regime agreed to a cessation of all violence; the return of all Syrian troops to their barracks; the release of all prisoners arrested since the beginning of the uprising in March, and the launching of talks with the opposition.
Once the monitors are on the ground, the security forces should no longer have a free hand to crush the uprising. How much freedom and autonmy will the regime allow them?
That remains to be seen...
The latest onslaught however, clearly evinces the regime’s desire to avoid at all cost the creation of a buffer zone on the Syrian-Turkish border that could provide a safe haven to defectors and armed militants.
Such a base would then allow them to plan and launch attacks against Assad’s security apparatus.
It is unlikely that Assad’s latest campaign will succeed.
Bashar al-Assad should have no doubt that the world is watching, and neither the international community nor the Syrian people accept his legitimacy, a White House spokesman said.
And yet, it is about time that the world did more than simply watch Assad massacre his own people.
Earlier this month, Assad told ABC News the following:
We don’t kill our people. No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person. There was no command to kill or be brutal.
Assad’s daily actions since last March have made a mockery of this feeble and preposterous attempt at self-justification.
His scurrilous regime is under siege, from both within and without.
It is high time that the UN Security Council muster the courage to condemn firmly and unequivocally the regime’s criminal behavior towards its own people…
(the title of this post is a quote of an activist, Abu Omar, and extracted from a NYT article;
the photograh above of Syrian demonstrators was found here))

"The regime wants the city to kneel..."

2011-11-09T11:37:00.000+01:00

Six days…
For six days, Syrian army tanks pounded Bab Amr, a residential neighborhood of Homs, Syria’s third largest city, home to 1.5 million people.
Then, in the early hours of Monday morning, soldiers and shabbiha (a pro-Assad militia) entered the city.
I didn’t want to turn on the lights of the stairs because there are snipers everywhere, and they will shoot whenever they see lights. I felt that the air was being sucked out of the room by the intensity and frequency of the explosions, a woman living in an adjacent neighborhood, told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
The city is an open wound, Mohammed Saleh, who fled to Damascus on Sunday, added.
Bab Amr had become a haven for many of those who deserted Assad’s army, refusing to use their weapons against their own people.
The defectors could not withstand the Syrian army onslaught, however.
Many fled or were arrested.
Over thirty died in what was a brutal confrontation.
Some Syrian soldiers, apparently exhausted, went door-to-door, requesting water, food and blankets, one Homs resident told Shadid.
On Monday morning, once the fighting had subsided, Syrian security forces arrested scores of young men, including some who had been wounded and hospitalized.
They are now storming houses and arresting people. The shabbiha have brought pick-up trucks and are looting buildings, Raed Ahmad, an activist from Homs, told Reuters.
I sneaked in to see my father today, who was hit by shrapnel. The number of troops and shabbiha in Bab Amr is now in the thousands and the looting is rampant, Sami, a Homs resident told Reuters.
Some of those arrested were detained in schools transformed into jails
For the residents of Bab Amr, living conditions were particularly harsh.
According to information the UN human rights office has received, the neighborhood has remained under siege for seven days, with residents deprived of food, water and medical supplies, Ravina Shamdasani, UN Human Rights Office spokeswoman told Reuters.
This is an extreme humanitarian crisis, Ausama Monajed, of the Syrian National Council, told the LAT.
More than 110 people were killed during the siege and assault, six of them on Monday, including two women, and an eight-year-old child.
What was the significance of the siege of Homs and the crushing of the military resistance led by the defectors?
The latter are too weak to pose a serious challenge to the Assad regime’s security apparatus.
The defectors and the people don’t have enough weapons or strength to wage a war against a professional and disciplined army. We cannot talk about a war between them because they’re not equal powers. It’s impossible for defectors to keep the city, Fayez Sara, an opponent of the regime based in Damascus, told the NYT.
What is clear is the following: months of bloody yet ineffectual peaceful protests have led some to resort to violence in order to topple a brutal and nihilistic regime that will stop at nothing to remain in power.
Not only defectors have drawn this conclusion, however.
In Homs, which some refer to as the capital of the Syrian revolution, the city population is a heterogeneous one, composed of not only Sunnis, but also Christians, Shiites and Alawites.
The upper echelons of the Assad regime are dominated by the Alawites.
As a result, the violence has become sectarian in nature, with Sunnis killing Alawites, and regime supporters gunning down Sunnis.
Christians have largely refrained form joining the uprising, no doubt preferring the devil they know…
The killing is sectarian, and it is being perpetuated by revenge without moral limits or rules. The situation is out of hand, and there is nothing that can hold it in check, Mohammed Saleh, the Homs activist, told Liz Sly of the WP.
The violence has also become particularly gruesome, as the conflict endures with no resolution in sight…
Some of the bodies have been stabbed from their heads to their feet, some have had their eyes taken out and the burned bodies cannot be recognized. Gunmen who are extremists are touring the city in cars kidnapping people and killing them, a doctor working at the Homs National Hospital told the WP.
Last week, more than 70 bodies bearing gunshot wounds were brought to the hospital in a twenty-four hour period, numbers reminiscent of the darkest days of the Iraqi civil war…
Sectarian violence, a budding insurgency, is the conflict in Syria changing in nature?
Eight months of demonstrations having failed to dislodge a regime willing to kill its own citizens to retain its privileges, is an armed struggle in the offing?
Homs is a turning point for now. It’s a successful model for self-defense, if you will, at a time when you really can’t expect people to take any more. They’ve seen too many corpses come back, too many people arrested, disappeared or returned after abominable treatment. It’s too much. And everybody seems to be losing control of the street, an analyst told Shadid.
If the analyst is correct, is civil war, at least in certain parts of the country, and particularly in Homs, around the corner?
That, surely, cannot be in anyone’s interest…
Yet, is not the looming threat of civil war the regime’s best and last hope of retaining the support of those minorities fearful of a post-Assad Syria, while justifying its brutal repression?
In any case, the Arab League’s plan to restore peace in Syria, and which the Assad regime had ratified on November 2, is now in tatters.
According to this plan, the Syrian troops were to return to their barracks; the regime was to cease all violence against its citizens, liberate all political prisoners; allow journalists access to the country and launch talks with the opposition.
The regime did release 553 detainees last Saturday and proposed an amnesty to those holding weapons if they turned themselves in…There are thousands and thousands of political prisoners currently detained in Assad's jails.
This was clearly insufficient to convince even the Arab League that Assad was serious about complying with the terms of the agreement.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, overseeing the issue for the Arab League, called for a further meeting on Saturday, due to the continuation of violence and because the Syrian government did not implement its commitments in the Arab plan to resolve the crisis, he said.
The Syrian Revolution General Commission, an umbrella organization within Syria representing several opposition groups, urged the League to meet sooner, so as not to give the regime another opportunity to bombard, strike and burn.
The Arab peace plan died on arrival. There has been no let-up in the violence. The Assad regime is in complete defiance mode, Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian scholar in Washington, told Reuters.
I don’t think anyone in his right mind was expecting Assad to pull his troops out of the streets and allow peaceful protests. Lack of even a threat of international intervention is viewed by the authorities as a license to kill, Walid al-Bunni, a lawyer and dissident exiled in Paris, told Reuters.
That seems to be the crux of the matter.
Without international pressure, Assad will pursue unabashed his vicious repression of the Syrian People.
Many, too many are apparently satisfied with the status quo, no matter how many Syrians die defending those values we in the West profess to embody.
The Syrians however, have paid too onerous a price to abandon the struggle now…
The people who are protesting in Syria seem to have crossed the barrier of fear, but the international community hasn’t, Nadim Shehadi, of Chatham House, a London think-tank, told Reuters.
Why should we fear to support without reservation those demanding justice, freedom and democracy?
They are our natural allies in the region (and everywhere else, for that matter), and certainly not those thugs and despots who still rule (and misrule) in too many Middle Eastern nations, in the name of stability and the purported defense of western strategic interests in the region.
French foreign minister Alain Juppé denounced on Sunday the Assad regime’s behavior as absolutely unacceptable.
Furthermore, he declared that the regime could no longer be trusted.
Its acceptance of the Arab League Plan was followed in the immediate hours by a new round of repression and new massacres, he added.
Why then not simply officially repudiate this odious regime (responsible for the deaths of over 3,500 Syrians since last March, according to the UN), and recognize instead the Syrian National Council as the legitimate government of the Syrian people?
(the photograph above was found here)

The beginning of a citizens' movement?

2011-10-22T09:52:00.000+02:00

Xu was on his way to Dongshigu, a village near Linyi (located in the vicinity of the east coast, north of Shanghai) when he was arrested by the police at the bus station.
Although not a militant or human rights activist, the forty-five-year-old Xu sought to visit Chen Guangcheng, a lawyer currently under house arrest.
I knew it was going to be dangerous, but I didn’t think it would be this dangerous, he told AP.
He was held for questioning, suspected of drug dealing, the police informed him.
He was eventually released and driven back home.
Gao Xinbo, a Chen supporter, managed to enter the village, but then was seized, beaten and robbed.
He was then thrown out of the car that had taken him away, forty miles from the village.
All those who have tried to see Chen have suffered a similar fate.
He is a legal citizen, not a criminal; we should have the right to visit him, Xu told AP.
Yet, some Chinese citizens are held incommunicado, although they have not been charged or convicted of any offense.
This policy is known as ruanjin, or soft detention. It is reserved for those Chinese such as lawyers, human rights activists and the like who have refused to be intimidated and submit to the will of the authorities, and yet have committed no crime.
Such rebels are also sometimes held in black jails (prisons that do not officially exist) or psychiatric wards (where Soviet dissidents were also held indefinitely).
In Chen Guangcheng’s case, soft detention began soon after his release following a four-year prison sentence for disturbing the peace and destroying public property.
Born in 1971, Chen lost his eyesight as a child due to illness.
Illiterate until his twenties, Chen attended a school for the blind, then studied medicine, before attending law classes.
A masseur at the Yunan county hospital, Chen began granting legal assistance to farmers threatened with the illegal seizure of their land.
In 2005, he defended the victims of a coercive abortion and sterilization program (even unlawful by Chinese standards) imposed in Shandong.
The authorities could not tolerate these revelations of abuse of power by local officials.
Chen was arrested, tried and jailed on bogus charges.
Upon his release in September 2010, he was placed under house arrest, a victim of soft detention.
I have come out of a small jail and walked into a bigger jail. What they are doing is thuggery…Why are they afraid of my talking to the outside world? Because they know full well that they are wrong. They know what they are doing is illegal, Chen proclaimed in a video that found its way to the West, and which denounced his living conditions.
Chen, as well as his wife, Yuan Weijing, was severely beaten in retaliation for the video’s release.
Many of their belongings (computers, cameras) were confiscated, and the electricity cut off.
They had already been deprived of a telephone line.
Video cameras monitor their every move; sheets of metal cover their windows, while roads leading to their village are under constant surveillance by armed thugs.
Their six-year old daughter has also been compelled to remain indoors, and thus, is also under house arrest…
Yet, Chen’s fate has attracted the attention of Chinese citizens not previously active in the human rights movement.
The fundamental unfairness of that really strikes a chord with Chinese citizens, Phelim Kine, of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, told the WSJ.
Indeed, the ruanjin policy, because blatantly illegal, does not officially exist.
The authorities deny that the family is under any restrictions. Confronted by European diplomats, Chinese officials have insisted there is no such thing as house arrest in China. Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Xue Jie, the director of the Yinan County propaganda bureau, suggested that a reporter could simply call Mr. Chen or just drop by, wrote Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield of the NYT last February. The NYT reporters tried to do just that but were harassed and compelled to leave...
Soft detention is simply one more expedient in China’s extra-legal arsenal to harass those rebels the authorities consider likely to undermine their authority should they be allowed to pursue their activities.
Moreover, if it can goad one such misfit into committing an illegal act liable to prosecution, conviction and incarceration, so much the better…
There are too many people doing too many different things, and the authorities know if they use so-called legal methods, it will only provoke a greater domestic backlash and more international pressure, Teng Biao, a lecturer at China University of Political Science and Law, told the NYT.
Discrete repression is, therefore, the preferred tactic of the regime.
But, their zeal to remain firmly in control of a population now adept at using the web to communicate and share information has led to an ever-harsher crackdown on those who refuse to submit.
The police are progressively trying new techniques, and it seems that Beijing is ready to go along.
We used to worry about people getting arrested and losing their jobs. Now we have to worry about them losing their lives, Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the NYT last February.
The authorities may be fighting a losing battle.
Activists have launched an internet campaign on behalf of Chen, particularly on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site with over 200 million users.
The campaign, called Operation Free Chen Guangcheng has awakened the civic consciousness of even ordinary Chinese.
I couldn’t believe something so dark and evil could happen in my country, so I had to see for myself, a young computer salesman told the NYT.
Along with five other citizens, he attempted to visit Chen. Their vehicle was set upon even before they had reached the village.
Earlier this month, some twenty other citizens made similar attempts.
It was unexpected that there would be so many spontaneous responses to the calls to visit him, especially from so many ordinary people with no previous experience in rights defense work...If they continue to do this, it will soon become a citizens' movement, He Peirong, a Chinese activist told AP earlier this month.
He tried on four occasions to see Chen, but was rebuffed and assaulted each time…
I think the campaign has entered an important new phase.
This time the social elite and the media are standing up for him, he told the NYT.
Indeed, a Chinese newspaper suggested that the authorities make a more earnest effort to explain Chen’s status.
Yesterday, the WSJ reported that the authorities had at last allowed Chen’s daughter to go to school…
This first victory should encourage the nascent citizen’s movement to intensify its campaign on behalf of Chen and all the others in a similar predicament.
The authorities are obviously listening and may be more vulnerable then many thought…
(the photograph of Chen Guangcheng above was found here)

*In May 2010, I wrote this post about the disappearance of Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese human rights lawyer, no doubt secretly arrested and detained by the regime…
Unfortunately, there has been absolutely no word since about his fate or whereabouts…

Laura Pollan Toledo 1948-2011...

2011-10-17T17:45:00.000+02:00

A few words (though this hardly does her justice) to pay tribute to a brave woman, Laura Pollan Toledo, founder of the Ladies in White in Cuba, which she established after the arrest of her husband, Hector Maseda, a journalist, in 2003 (I had written about Laura and the Cuban human rights movement last year in a post you can find here). Laura died last Friday in a Havana hospital of cardiac arrest, following a pulmonary illness.
The group was composed of the wives of dissidents, who demanded the release of all political prisoners arrested in the spring of 2003, during a wave of arrests referred to as the Black Spring..
We fight for the freedom of our husbands, the union of our families. We love our men, she declared in 2005.
All have now been released, but Laura pursued her campaign for democracy and justice nevertheless.
As long as this government is around there will be prisoners. Because while they’ve let some go, they’ve put others in jail. It is a never-ending story, she said last month.
We continue being defenders of human rights. We are not politicians, we want freedom for the country, democracy, she also declared.
The Ladies would dress in white every Sunday, and, after attending Mass, march down Havana’s main avenue, each holding a gladiolus.
Though regularly harassed by pro-government thugs, the Ladies never failed to demonstrate week after week…
It’s really bad news for the human rights and pro-democracy movement. It’s an irreparable loss. We ‘ll see with time if others step forward to take her place, Elizardo Sanchez, leader of the Cuban Commission of Human Rights, an independent NGO, told Reuters.
Yesterday, the Ladies marched (see the video here), though for the first time, without Laura…
Men were allowed to join them this time (including Hector Maseda), in her honor…
At the end of the gathering, instead of shouting Freedom as they traditionally did, they chanted Laura Pollan lives…
May the spirit of Laura Pollan inspire her Cuban compatriots and encourage them to pursue, as fearlessly as she did, the struggle for justice and democracy…
(the photograph above of Laura Pollan was found here)

Why not Barghouti?

2011-10-16T14:37:00.000+02:00

Gilad Shalit, the franco-Israeli soldier captured by Hamas militants in 2006 should be returning home next Tuesday.
Following a deal with Hamas negotiated with the help of Egypt and Germany, Shalit will be released into Egyptian hands before regaining Israel.
Once Shalit reaches the Sinai, Israel will release 27 female Palestinian prisoners.
After he sets foot on Israeli soil, another 450 Palestinian prisoners will be set free, the list having been compiled during the Hamas-Israel negotiations…
In two months, the agreement stipulates that Israel is to release an additional 550 prisoners, of its own choosing.
Israel has pledged however, to liberate security detainees, and not, to quote Haaretz, mere car thieves…
Of the 1007 Palestinians to be set free, 280 were serving life sentences in Israeli jails. All in all, according to the Israelis, they are responsible for the death of some 600 people…
The list of those being freed includes one of the founders of Hamas’ military wing, Yihya Sanawar.
Although all released detainees will be required to sign a statement vowing not to resort to violence in the future, Shin Bet, Israel’s national security agency expects that about 60% will probably do so anyway…
Hamas also made some concessions to clinch the deal.
Israel reserves the right, again with Hamas’ approval, oddly enough, to arrest or assassinate any released militant it chooses, should they be perceived as a potential threat to the state.
Furthermore, the agreement calls for the deportation of 203 Palestinians to Gaza, or foreign countries. Jordan and Turkey have been mentioned as possible new homes for these militants.
Israel had always refused to release so many prisoners it considered dangerous in exchange for Shalit’s liberation.
Why did it accept such terms now, five years after the young soldier's capture?
President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempts to gain UN recognition for the state of Palestine may have been the decisive factor in goading both sides to accept a deal that had been available for years…The Israelis were clearly intent on changing the subject and deflecting attention from the Abbas campaign.
Hamas is increasingly unpopular due to continued economic hardship imposed by Israel’s blockade of the territory, and its political isolation.
In addition, Hamas has thrown its support behind the Assad regime in Syria (one of its principle patrons), even though the latter has brutally cracked down on a popular uprising looked upon favorably by the peoples of the region (including Palestinians) and elsewhere.
Hamas’ leader Khaled Meshal lives in exile in Damascus…
Hamas was thus in dire need of a political boost.
The Islamic movement also managed to achieve what years of Israeli-Palestinian Authority negotiations never did: a mass release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails!
Their victory is another nail in the coffin of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues in the Fatah leadership. Again, as in the case of the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the Palestinians have learned that the diplomatic path leads them to a dead end, while terror gets settlers out of the territories and abductions spring hundreds of people out of jail, wrote Akiva Eldar, chief political columnist for the daily Haaretz.
Indeed, that was undoubtedly not lost on most Palestinians, thereby further discrediting the moribund peace process that has been agonizing for years and that the Quartet is now desperately seeking to resurrect, with little hope of success, judging from Israel’s latest real estate plans in Jerusalem..
More people will be convinced that the only thing Israel understands is power and force. This kind of achievement undermines the negotiation process, Abdul Sattar Kassem, a political science professor, and Hamas supporter, told the LAT.
It will destroy him (Abbas). It will show the only people who can release real prisoners are Hamas, while he can’t do anything, Hani al-Masri, a Palestinian political analyst predicted two years ago…
Some in Israel condemned the agreement for similar reasons.
The deal is a prize for terrorism. It isn’t a deal. It is capitulation, wrote the columnist Ben-Dror Yemini in the daily Maariv.
As a result, it is safe to say that a negotiated peace settlement is further away than ever. The Palestinians are divided and too feeble to extract Israeli concessions, while the Israelis are under no pressure to come to the negotiating table, and will only do so if they can dictate the terms of any agreement.
This situation may explain why Marwan Barghouti is not on the list of security detainees to be released.
Sometimes referred to as the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, he was jailed for life in 2004 by the Israeli authorities on five counts of murder.
Barghouti, it must be said, has a less inflated view of himself.
I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated-the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else, he once wrote.
He was found guilty of providing financial aid and weaponry to militants who, in a series of attacks, killed four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk, and of being the leader of Fattah’s military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
The latter organized suicide bombings during the Second Intifada inside Israel.
Barghouti declined to present any defense, considering his arrest illegal, and the court illegitimate. When the prosecutor branded him a terrorist, he retorted occupation is terrorizing, in Hebrew…
Barghouti remains influential in Palestine because he advocates not only negotiations with Israel (which have, after 17 years, failed to advance the Palestinian national agenda) but also resistance.
Betting on negotiations alone was never our choice. I have always called for a constructive mix of negotiations, resistance, political, diplomatic and popular action, he wrote in 2009.
Barghouti was born in 1958, in Kabar, near Ramallah.
He joined Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement when he was 15.
Three years later, he was jailed for four years by the Israelis for belonging to a terrorist organization (Fatah, also the party of Abbas, was considered as such by the Israelis at the time).
While in jail, he learned Hebrew and completed his high school education. He also claims to have been tortured by his jailers...
He would eventually earn a M.A. in International Relations from Birzeit University.
In 1987, he became one of the leaders of the First Intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation, in the West Bank.
As a result, he was arrested by the Israelis, and deported to Jordan.
After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Barghouti returned to the West Bank, and supported the negotiation process with the Israelis.
He also launched a campaign within Fatah to purge the movement, riddled with corruption, and another against Arafat’s security forces, who he accused of numerous human rights violations.
In 1996, he was elected to the Palestine parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council.
After the Camp David Summit ended in failure in 2000, Barghouti lost faith in the process, and when the Second Intifada erupted in September 2000, he became a vocal leader of the Palestinian resistance.
He also advocated the right of the Palestinians to self-defense in the Occupied Territories.
While I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbors, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom. If Palestinians are expected to negotiate under occupation, then Israel must be expected to negotiate as we resist that occupation, he wrote in the WP in 2002.
I do believe that I am one of the prominent people who support the peace process, he declared in a 2001 interview, however.
One can negotiate peace with Israel while simultaneously resisting its occupation of Palestinian land, according to Barghouti.
When we are talking about resistance, this also includes armed resistance against the Israeli occupation. This is very clear…As I said before, in principle, we oppose any kind of military activity inside Israel, but we do believe any activity inside the Occupied Territories is legal, he added.
If the Israelis tomorrow make a decision for full withdrawal from the territories, we will distribute flowers for the Israelis soldiers as they withdraw from the Occupied Territories…
We are talking about the 1967 borders. We recognized Israel, and we constantly repeat that. The question is not if we recognize Israel, but if Israel recognizes us, he told the interviewer, Jefferson Fletcher.
It must be said however, that during the Second Intifada, some Palestinian radicals had absolutely no qualms about targeting civilians inside Israel, making no distinction between Israel proper and the Occupied Territories.
Barghouti and the moderates were thus unable to contain the resistance movement.
We gave the OK to resistance by the gun against Israeli troops and settlers. We were against operations inside Israel, but it happened out of our control.
We made a big mistake, Ziad Abu Ain, now a deputy minister in the Palestinian government (in the West Bank) told The Guardian in 2009
In 2001, Barghouti narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when his car was struck by an Israeli missile…
Five years later, while in jail, Barghouti co-wrote the Prisoners’ Document (officially known as the National Reconciliation Document), along with the jailed leaders of four other Palestinian factions, including Hamas. It called for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 (thereby implicitly confirming Hamas’s recognition of the state of Israel) and the right of return of refugees.
Hence, Barghouti is a potentially credible partner in any genuine peace process, precisely because his legitimacy and popularity as a representative of the Palestinian people has rested on his two-track approach of negotiation and resistance.
Some in Israel are conscious of this.
Zelev Schiff, a prominent Israeli defense analyst now deceased, once described Barghouti as a charismatic, popular and worthy Palestinian negotiating partner, according to The Guardian.
He may be the only leader able to reunify the Palestinian nationalist movement, currently bitterly divided between Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza.
A peace agreement signed by Barghouti would thus have a genuine chance of winning the support of the Palestinian people.
Are the Israelis currently interested in striking such a deal?
The prevailing status quo, characterized by the division of the Palestinian nationalist movement into two antagonistic factions, serves the agenda of an Israeli government not keen on reaching an accord that will entail evicting Israeli settlers from occupied Palestinian land.
Arguably, the current division between the Palestinian factions works in Israel’s interests and Barghouti’s commitment to draw Fatah and Hamas back together might represent a serious strategic threat. Many in Israel’s intelligence agencies apparently think so, wrote The Guardian in 2009...
Nothing much has changed these last two years…
As long as the Palestinians are divided, and devoid of an undisputed leader, Israel is under little pressure to resume serious negotiations.
Similarly, Hamas was in no hurry to facilitate the release of a leader that could eventually dominate Palestinian politics and reunify the Palestinian nationalist movement at its expense…
Israel shall release Marwan Barghouti the day it is truly interested in negotiating a genuine and balanced accord with the Palestinians.
Until then…
(the above photograph of Marwan Barghouti was found here)

We really feel alone…

2011-10-10T17:23:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem urged foreign nations not to support or recognize the recently established Syrian National Council (SNC).
The architects of the organization succeeded in uniting all the various currents of the political opposition to the Assad regime.
Speaking after having met a delegation of Latin American countries (including Cuba and Venezuela) supporting Assad, the foreign minister said the following:
I am not interested in what they (the SNC) are trying to achieve. And we will adopt strict measures against any country that will recognize the illegitimate council.
What those measures would be he did not elaborate…
Formed earlier this month in Istanbul (after a long protracted process), the SNC is composed of 190 members representing the nation’s principle currents: the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic party, the Damascus Declaration, a pro-democracy organization led by dissidents; the Syrian Revolution General Commission, comprising forty opposition groups; representatives of various Kurdish parties, and other minorities, such as the Christians and the Alawites (a Shiite sect to which belong Assad and the dignitaries of his regime).
Significantly, it also represents those inside Syria leading the protest movement, the Local Coordination Committees. In fact, about 50% of the members are currently within Syria, resisting the regime.
A general assembly of all 190 members is to take place next month. A president of the council is to be elected then.
The council will function as a parliament, where policy options are to be reviewed and debated by its members.
The aim of the council is to offer support and encouragement to those protesting and thus risking their lives in Syria; propose an alternative to the vicious Assad regime; fill any leadership vacuum should the regime eventually collapse, and provide the international community with a legitimate representative of the Syrian people.
This had been a demand formulated by the West for some time.
I think the (international) pressure requires an organized opposition, and there isn’t one. There’s no address for the opposition. There is no place that any of us who wish to assist can go, declared last August Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The council’s spokesman, Bourhan Ghalioun, professor of Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, clearly affirmed the organization’s purpose: achieve the goals of the revolution to topple the regime, including all of its components and leadership, and to replace it with a democratic pluralistic regime, he said.
I think that this (Assad) regime has completely lost the world’s trust. The world is waiting for a united Syrian (opposition) that can provide the alternative to this regime, so that they can recognize it. The council denounces the (regime’s) policy of sectarian incitement…which threatens national unity and is pushing the country to the brink of civil war, he also declared.
The formation of the SNC did send an important message to the Syrians, but also to the international community, therefore.
The Syrian opposition had succeeded in bridging its differences at last, in order to achieve a common goal: hasten the demise of a brutal, illegitimate regime.
This is the real deal. I’m optimistic because finally we have a comprehensive council that we can say legitimately represents the revolution. This will reinvigorate the protesters and give us a voice with the international community, Shakeeb al-Jabri, an activist exiled in Beirut, told Liz Sly of the WP.
The council will also work towards obtaining the support and recognition of foreign powers in the near future.
We need to mobilize the international community to cut its relations with this regime and support the struggle of the Syrian people, Bourhan Ghalioun told Aljazeera.
Today, French foreign minister Alain Juppé, who had welcomed the formation of the SNC, declared that France would establish relations with it.
A number of urgent issues however, currently divide the council and will need to be addressed.
The first is whether to continue protesting peacefully against a regime unabashed about shooting at its own people, or take up arms as a matter of self-defense.
The other pressing question involves the role, if any, of the international community (and in particular of NATO), in ousting Assad.
The council rejects any outside interference that undermines the sovereignty of the Syrian people, Mr. Ghalioun declared in Istanbul. Yet, more ambiguously, he had also requested that the international community protect the Syrian people from the declared war and massacres being committed against them by the regime.
Can the uprising sustain itself without outside military help?
The situation is deteriorating rapidly on the ground. It’s a war, and the people inside are calling for all the help they can get, Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian dissident based in Washington, and a member of the council, told Liz Sly of the WP.
Many Syrians inside the country, bearing the brunt of the regime’s brutal and savage repression favor an outside intervention. Many of those in exile do not…
The question has yet to be resolved. This will be the most difficult decision for the council to take, Ziadeh added.
In any case, NATO has yet to show any particular interest in replicating the Libyan campaign in Syria. We took on responsibility in Libya because there was a clear UN mandate and because we received clear support from countries in the region. None of these conditions are fulfilled in regards to Syria, and these conditions are essential, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared last week.
In order to ensure that the Syrian opposition (unlike its Libyan counterpart in Benghazi) does not have a foothold inside the country from which to march on Damascus, Assad has done his utmost to crush all attempts by the most virulent supporters of the uprising (army deserters) to resist militarily, particularly in Rastan and Hama.
If the regime can prevent the opposition from controlling even a swath of Syrian territory from which to organize armed resistance against Assad, then those currently in power probably have faith in their ability to outlast the protest movement.
The Syrian regime feels it can weather this storm, David Lesch, a professor of Middle East studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, suggested to the LAT.
In addition, the regime warned its enemies that it would not hesitate to launch missiles on Tel Aviv should the West intervene militarily…
In essence, Assad is ready to do whatever it takes to remain in power…
The Syrians need our help.
We really feel we are alone. We feel no one is helping us. And after all the bloodshed we have seen, we want any kind of help, an activist told the WP.
We owe the brave Syrian people all the help that we can provide…
Actively supporting the SNC would be a significant first step.
France seems to have taken it.
May their American, British, German (etc., etc.) allies quickly follow suit…
(the photograph above of Bouhran Ghalioun is by Reuters)

Our revolution will eventually win...

2011-10-09T16:02:00.002+02:00

They summoned him outside but he refused to go.
A month before, they had already attempted to kill him…
As a result, the assassins stormed his apartment (located in Qamishli, in the Kurdish north east of Syria) and opened fire.
Mashaal Tammo, 53, founder and leader of the Kurdish Future Movement Party, a liberal organization, was killed.
His son, Marcel, and a party activist, Zahida Rashikilo were wounded in the attack.
Tammo’s politics were inclusive, his goal being to forge a democratic and pluralistic Syria. Not everyone in the Kurdish community shared his views…
He was also a member of the executive committee of the recently established Syrian National Council. The umbrella organization seeks to unite the disparate strands of the Syrian opposition movement.
Released after having spent over three years in jail for his political activities, Tammo had been organizing protests against the Assad regime in Qamishli.
The Syrian Arab News Agency, an official organ, claimed that Tammo was killed by an armed terrorist group. It elaborated by stating that those responsible were gunmen in a black car who fired at his car.
Tammo’s funeral was held the next day, on Saturday.
Some 50,000 people thronged the streets of Qamishli to pay him tribute, but also to vent their anger at the Assad regime.
All of Qamishli is out today. The funeral is turning into a massive protest, Mustafa Osso, a lawyer and Kurdish activist, told AP.
A general strike was also organized in the city on this day of mourning.
The crowds chanted, leave, leave; others demanded Assad’s execution.
Some also shouted Azadi, the Kurdish word for freedom.
Now Tammo has become a flame of the revolution, Abdul Ghafar Mohammed, a Qamishli resident, told CNN (Tammo‘s first name, Mashaal, means flame in Arabic…).
Predictably, Syrian troops fired into the crowd, killing five mourners.
The targeting of a prominent member of the Syrian opposition, of Kurdish origin, could prove an ominous development, however.
The Kurds, accounting for some 10% of Syria’s population of twenty million have long been a neglected minority, victims of discriminatory policies…
They cannot learn the Kurdish language in their schools, nor operate their own radio stations. Many have even been denied Syrian citizenship. At the outset of the uprising last spring, however, Assad promised to reverse course on this issue, in an obvious attempt to mollify them…
In essence, the Assad regime is no friend of the Kurdish people…
And yet, the Kurds have failed so far, to support wholeheartedly the anti-Assad opposition movement.
This long oppressed minority (also oppressed in Turkey, and until recently, in Iraq) is suspicious of Arab intentions generally and has little faith that a post-Assad regime would treat the Kurdish people more benevolently…
There is a mutual lack of trust between the two sides; the Kurds are worried. They already feel excluded from the decision making process and they fear for the future, a Syrian opposition leader told AP.
The killing of Tammo sparked outrage in Syria’s Kurdish province and may alter the political calculus of its political leaders…
This blood is precious to them (Kurds), they will not give up until the regime is overthrown and until the execution of Bashar al-Assad, one of Tammo’s sons, Fares, told Aljazeera.
My father’s assassination is the screw in the regime’s coffin. They made a big mistake by killing my father, he declared to the NYT.
Assad may indeed rue the day his security forces killed Tammo, should the Kurds now opt to support vigorously the anti-regime movement.
There’s a real potential for it (the security situation) getting out of hand, Peter Harling, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, and who is based in Syria, told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
Why then, make the potentially tragic and lethal mistake of killing a prominent Kurdish leader?
Is Assad still in control of the security apparatus, or did he grant it carte blanche to crush the movement as it saw fit?
What is clear however is that the regime has decided to confront the opposition movement solely with repressive, military means.
The security solution essentially amounts to giving a free hand to the security services to dramatically raise the levels of violence in an attempt to restore the wall of fear. In doing so, the regime has undermined its own ability to think and act politically. This is sheer violence, with no limits, a « solution» that has every chance of creating many new problems, Harling added.
Also on Friday, another prominent opposition figure, Riad Seif was arrested next to a Damascus mosque, but not before he was so severely beaten that he had to be hospitalized.
As far as the regime is considered, it is acting in self-defense.
Syria is the target of terrorist threats, its deputy foreign minister told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday.
He brazenly repudiated Western condemnations of the Assad regime’s behavior.
The culture of human rights is a disease. We have to take into considerations that the conduct of some of those developed countries is not honorable in the area of human rights. Syria has been subjected to a series of criminal attacks…accompanied by an unprecedented media campaign of lies and allegations, he added, according to AP.
The regime, quite clearly has neither the intention of changing strategy nor of seriously taking into consideration the Syrian people’s demands for change.
Even Russia, which last week, along with China , vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the violence, calling for an end to the repression and hinting at possible sanctions, at an unspecified future date, seems to be slowly coming to this conclusion….
If the Syrian leadership is unable to undertake these reforms, it will have to go, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev declared Friday.
Last month, the day after he narrowly averted an assassination attempt, Tammo declared the following: we’re living in chaos, and the regime is pushing us toward even more chaos. But we’ll never stop, according to the NYT.
As a result, the violence in Syria does seem to be escalating.
Razan Zeitouneh, a Syrian activist, director of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, who was this year’s recipient of the Anna Politkovskaya Award granted by the Group RAW in War, corroborated this view (for some background on Anna, see here, and on the prize, here).
The situation is getting more and more violent every day. Now the average number of people killed by the security (forces) and army is about 20 daily. The army still surrounds many cities and villages, every day new areas and new cities are raided by the security (forces) and the army. Hundred of people get arrested daily, the cases of (people) getting killed under torture is increasing, day after day. Kidnapping people from the street and killing them is also increasing, especially in the city of Homs. In spite of all of that, the protests are still going on, she told RFE/RL.
There is no doubt that the protesters and our revolution will eventually win. If we don’t believe that we will win, we couldn’t continue under all this violence by the regime. We couldn’t bear all these crimes against our people. I’m sure that every single Syrian believes that the revolution will win in the end, she concluded.
Let us hope that victory will be achieved quickly and that the West does its utmost to support the Syrian opposition any way it can, and continues to apply pressure on Syria’s few remaining friends, in particular China and Russia.
They must be made to realize that Assad’s days are numbered and that supporting the Syrian people is not only the wise thing to do, but also the right thing to do…
(the above photograph of Qamishli residents mourning Mashaal Tammo is by Safin Hamed AFP/Getty Images)

Once again, China and Russia come to Assad's rescue...

2011-10-05T19:33:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, China and Russia vetoed a UN resolution condemning Syria for its military crackdown against an overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement that has killed over 2,700 people, according to the UN.
The resolution, drafted by France, assisted by Britain, Germany and Portugal, demanded an end to the violence, condemning arbitrary executions, excessive use of force and the killing and persecution of protesters, and that those responsible for the repression be held accountable.
It also called for measures guaranteeing fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech, and of assembly, and demanded the release of all political prisoners….
The language on possible sanctions was modified three times in order to mollify potentially reticent members, and in the final draft, the term sanction is not even mentioned…Instead, the resolution merely refers to the possibility of sanctions in the future should Syria persist in defying the will of the international community.
The vote in the Security Council was nine in favor, and two opposed.
India, South Africa, Brazil and Lebanon abstained…
China and Russia voted against it, and since both possess a right of veto as permanent members of the Council, the resolution was rejected…
Its supporters were both disappointed and outraged.
Alain Juppé, France’s Foreign minister denounced Syrian President Assad as a dictator who is massacring his people, and pledged continued support for those in Syria demanding the respect of their fundamental rights.
France’s Ambassador to the UN condemned the veto as a rejection of the extraordinary movement in support of freedom and democracy that is the Arab Spring.
The US voiced its outrage at the resolution’s defeat.
During this season of change, the people of the Middle East can now see clearly which nations have chosen to ignore their calls for democracy and instead prop up desperate, cruel dictators, Susan E. Rice, the US ambassador declared.
The Russians justified their rejection of the resolution, considering it too confrontational. This approach is against the peaceful solution of the crisis on the basis of a Syrian national dialogue, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin declared.
The Chinese could not countenance the notion interference in Syria’s affairs…
In fact, both nations feared that a more robust resolution could lead to a Libya-like Western intervention in Syria, a proposition they could not possibly support.
Rice denounced this objection as a cheap ruse on the part of those nations determined not to lose their lucrative arms deals with Syria.
This is not, as some would like to pretend, a Western issue. We had countries all over the world supporting this resolution today, and we have countries throughout the region who’ve been very clear that the brutality of the Assad regime has to end and that the behavior of the regime is absolutely intolerable, she said.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan indicated that his nation would adopt its own sanctions against its neighbor.
Out of necessity our package of sanctions will come into effect, he declared.
Furthermore, to increase the pressure on Syria, the Turks announced that they would be holding military maneuvers lasting eight days in Hatay province, which borders the Syrian state…
Hence, the Russians and Chinese once gain came to the rescue of the brutal and despicable Assad regime…
This is hardly surprising, considering how Russia handled Chechnya’s quest for independence…
As for the Chinese, no one has forgotten how the despotic regime responded to the demands for freedom and democracy on the part of its youth one June day in 1989...
The Syrian people are unlikely to forget those nations that preferred to support a brutal despot victimizing his own people, instead of those brave citizens brazen enough to march in their cities' streets demanding justice, freedom and democracy…
(the photograph above of the Syrian child protester was found here...)

Drone justice...

2011-10-04T23:00:00.000+02:00

Last Friday, Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American Muslim cleric, was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen.
Another American who was with him, Samir Khan was also killed.
Mr. Awlaki’s name had been added to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command hit list in April 2010.
The ACLU, on behalf of Nasser al-Awlaki, the cleric’s father, had filed a lawsuit last year in order to prevent the administration from targeting him, but to no avail.
He was the only American citizen to be included on the hit list…
President Obama justified the killing thus:
Earlier this morning, Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was killed in Yemen. The death of al-Awlaki is a major blow to al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate. Awlaki was the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
In that role he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans. He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas day 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up US cargo planes in 2010. And he repeatedly called among individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.
Hence, the President repeatedly emphasized that Mr. al-Awlaki was a leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and that he directed specific attacks on US targets.
As a result, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki was justified, regardless of whether he was an American citizen or not…
What evidence did the President or his administration present to justify the killing of an American citizen, one who had never been charged with or convicted of any crime?
None.
Since the President asserted that Mr. Awlaki was affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or rather its leader, and this organization affiliated with the original al Qaeda, formerly led by the now deceased Osama ben Laden, then he was a legitimate target, since Congress had approved the use of military force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
The fact that the drone attack took place in Yemen and far from the original theater of war, Afghanistan was irrelevant, since the war on terror is a global one…
As a belligerent, Anwar al-Awlaki forfeited all due-process rights.
What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war, an administration official told the WP, therefore death by drone attack.
Furthermore, the Justice Department, in a legal memorandum, confirmed the legality of ordering the killing of a US citizen.
The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a US citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Awlaki, the officials said, wrote the WP.
Those who defended the killing of Mr. Awlaki made similar arguments.
Before someone like Mr. Awlaki is targeted, multiple intelligence sources support the conclusion that he is a dangerous threat, top lawyers from many agencies scrutinize the action, policy makers at the highest levels of government approve the action after assessing its legal and political risks, and the Congressional intelligence committees are informed about the intelligence community’s role in the operations, wrote in the NYT Jack L. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the preceding administration.
Satisfied therefore, that all relevant legal issues had been adequately addressed, and since the principle parties inside the administration agreed with the memorandum’s conclusions, Awlaki became a legitimate target, and killed at the first opportunity…
What was the administration’s legal analysis?
We do not know, for the document remains confidential, and the administration refuses to comment further on the matter.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Awlaki, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process, according to the WP.
The Fifth Amendment stipulates that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
In essence, why Mr. Awlaki was denied his basic constitutional rights remains classified and is none of our business…
As such, we shall have to satisfy ourselves with the President’s claims that Mr. Awlaki was the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula…the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that he took the lead in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans.
If the President says so then it must be true…
The President’s word will have to suffice, we are implicitly told…
We shall have to trust him and remain confident that he acted appropriately and that the nation’s laws were fully adhered to…
Did he not swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?
Yet, if the evidence against Mr. Awlaki is so convincing, why not share it with the rest of us?
If the finest legal minds of the administration concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Awlaki was a dangerous terrorist masterminding evil plots against the American people, why should these conclusions remain classified?
Secrecy can only fuel suspicion, and rightly so, for the historical precedents in this field are devoid of any ambiguity…
In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, US intelligence agencies were under great pressure to produce evidence the administration urgently required to justify its imminent attack.
As a result, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate confirmed with high confidence the existence of Iraq’s WMD programs…
That is what was expected from the intelligence community by the Bush/Cheney administration, and that is precisely what it delivered.
Prior to the war, the politicization of intelligence gathering and analysis was blatant and extensive, according to Paul Pillar, a former official of the National Intelligence Council.
A similar phenomenon can be detected concerning the Bush/Cheney policy of enhanced interrogation techniques, to use the official expression then in vogue.
The Bush/Cheney administration was obviously seeking legal cover to utilize methods universally considered torture, even by previous administrations, against high value terrorist suspects.
The Bush/Cheney euphemism covered such methods as grabbing and slapping detainees, forcing them to remain standing while handcuffed for forty hours or more; confining naked detainees in cold cells while regularly dousing them with cold water and, of course, waterboarding.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee dutifully complied, drafting a series of legal memoranda now infamously known as the Torture memos.
At my direction, Department of Justice and CIA lawyers conducted a careful review. They concluded that the enhanced interrogation program complied with the Constitution and all applicable laws, including those that ban torture, Georges W. Bush wrote in his memoirs…
As a result of this legal authorization, a number of suspects were waterboarded including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah.
The former was subjected to this part of the enhanced interrogation program some 183 times, the latter a mere 83 times, at least…
Through these memos (subsequently made public by the Obama administration in April 2009, following an ACLU FOIA request in court) Justice Department lawyers authorized interrogators to use the most barbaric interrogation methods, including methods that the US once prosecuted as war crimes. The memos are based on legal reasoning that is spurious on its face, and in the end these aren’t legal memos at all-they are simply political documents that were meant to provide window dressing for war crimes, concluded Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, upon their release.
The documents released today provide further confirmation that lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel purposefully distorted the law to support the Bush administration’s torture program, added Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU.
Should a man’s fate truly depend on advice and information coming from these quarters?
Is there any reason to believe that the intelligence services and the Justice Department are less politicized today then they were two years ago?
What is clear is the following: government departments run by political appointees cannot be trusted to deliver objective, unvarnished, and potentially undesirable advice to their employers in the White House.
As a result, should matters of signal importance such as constitutional rights, that concern every citizen in the land, be confiscated by politicians and their appointees, who purport to be the sole custodians of our best interests and most fundamental rights?
Should not evidence that can lead to the execution of a citizen be reviewed by independent parties?
What are courts and judges for?
President Obama has just asserted the hubristic authority to execute who he wants, when he wants, where he wants (even his fellow citizens), at his sole discretion!
In a democracy, a leader does not possess that kind of power.
If he does, then it is incumbent on the people and their representatives to deprive him of it.
American citizens are not to be trusted with the evidence that justified the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, since it will not be released.
Would they come to a different conclusion?
If not, why the secrecy?
In Obama’s America (a legacy of the Bush/Cheney administration he chose not to repudiate), the function of the citizen, kept willfully ignorant, is to salute the leader for his boldness, and express his gratitude for the President’s successful efforts to keep him safe…
Does a democracy worthy of the name function thus?
Drone justice just dispatched Anwar al-Awlaki into the next world.
That he was a radical who condoned violence in fiery sermons posted on YouTube and in interviews is irrelevant, or is the First Amendment, like the Fifth, obsolete as well?
Incidentally, the young American Samir Khan (who edited al Qaeda's online magazine Inspire) was also killed in the attack..
He had never been charged with any crime either.
Presumably, knowing and meeting with Awlaki was sufficient to deserve the death penalty. Up to seven people may have killed in the drone strike...
Awlaki and Khan yesterday…
Who shall it be tomorrow, who shall be obliterated by a drone or series of drones, after the President of the United States determines in total secrecy that that particular individual is an enemy of the US and thus deserved to die?
(the above photograph of a drone strike was found here)

Defectors flee Rastan as Syrian army tanks occupy the city...

2011-10-02T19:04:00.000+02:00

Today, after six days of fighting, the Syrian army retook control of Rastan, a city located 160 kilometers north of Damascus, the Syrian capital, where hundreds of defectors from the armed forces had taken refuge.
On Friday, the Syrian high command had dispatched 250 tanks to the city in order to crush the defectors’ resistance.
In fact, the defectors, members of the Khaled bin Al-Walid Battalion (named after the first Arab conqueror of Syria) chose to leave the city after enduring heavy machine gun fire and shelling, facilitating the deployment of Syrian troops in Rastan.
Because of major reinforcements and the weapons used in Rastan by Assad’s gangs, we have decided to withdraw in order to better wage the struggle for liberty, the defectors declared in a statement, according to Al Jazeera.
The Syrian army has taken complete control of Rastan, and 50 tanks left on Sunday. Many houses have been destroyed there and the humanitarian situation is very bad. We have information that dozens of civilians were killed and buried in the gardens of houses as the army shelled the town, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Great Britain, said.
Obtaining precise information from witnesses in Rastan was difficult, the regime having cut all phone and cell phone services in the city…
On Sunday, however, protests were planned throughout Syria, particularly in university towns.
Today is the day of the universities uprising. Everyone knows the fear universities inspire in the regime, a post on The Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page said.
(the photograph above of a tank in the city of Rastan was found here)

There are no signs of torture and murder abating in Syria...

2011-09-28T12:25:00.000+02:00

Zainab Al Husni, 19, was on her way to the grocery store when plain-clothed Syrian secret police agents abducted her on July 27.
Her brother Mohammad Al Husni was a prominent pro-democracy activist and organizer of protest marches against the Assad regime in Homs, a center of the unrest, located in central Syria.
Mr. Al Husni had gone underground to evade the security forces.
The regime’s intentions in abducting Zainab were clear.
The secret police kidnapped Zainab so they could threaten her brother and pressure him to turn himself in to the authorities. The government often uses this tactic to get to activists, a spokesman for the Homs Quarters Union, a pro-democracy organization, told CNN.
She would be freed, her family was told, only if her brother surrendered to the authorities.
Mr. Al Husni was subsequently arrested (in what circumstances, it is not clear), and on September 13, his mother was instructed to go the morgue in order to identify her son’s mutilated, bruised and burned body.
While there she came upon Zainab’s remains, which had been stored in a freezer at the Homs military hospital for quite a while…
According to Amnesty International, Zainab had been decapitated, her arms cut off and skin removed.
The human rights organization also disclosed that the family had been compelled by the security forces to sign a document stipulating that Zainab and Mohammad had been kidnapped and killed by an armed gang.
The regime continues to claim, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that those opposing it are not peaceful protesters demanding change, but criminal gangs manipulated bye foreign radicals.
At her funeral, mourners held signs in honor of Zainab (They killed the rose Zainab).
They also chanted Syria wants freedom and the people want the president’s ouster.
Since August 31, Amnesty International has documented at least fifteen other cases of detainees dying in custody. The bodies have borne signs of beating, shooting and stabbing, according to the organization.
The regime’s tactics are getting harsher, for the uprising, although having lost some momentum since the Ramadan, continues.
Hence, all those actively involved in the protest movement, which has been overwhelmingly peaceful, are targeted in order to crush it once and for all.
Known in Darayya, a Damascus suburb, for his determination to shun violence, Ghiyath Matar, a tailor almost twenty-five, and about to become a father, was nicknamed Little Gandhi.
During demonstrations, he would distribute roses to soldiers and offer them cold bottles of water, while chanting peaceful, peaceful.
The security forces arrested Matar and his fellow activist Yahya Sherbaji after the latter’s brother, already in detention was compelled to call Yahya and ask for help, claiming that he had been wounded.
Aware that they were perhaps about to fall into a trap, they responded to the call anyway…
Four days later, on September 13, Matar‘s body was released to his family.
There were bruises around his throat and burn marks across his body, as well as two bullet holes in his abdomen.
The fate of Mr. Sherbaji remains unknown.
Why would the Assad regime torture and kill someone as harmless as Ghiyath Matar?
Ghiyath’s peaceful nature, his refusal to resort to violence when confronted by violence blatantly contradicted the regime’s depiction of the protest movement as a violent uprising of armed groups.
His sole presence in a street demonstration made a mockery of the regime’s justification for utilizing brutal repressive tactics against demonstrators.
As a result, his example was perceived as a dire threat by the authorities.
Ghiyath was embarrassing the regime with his high morals and principles. The regime likes the radicals to justify the military crackdown, but with Ghiyath, the regime knew it would lose, Abu Omar, a Matar relative, told Nada Bakri of the NYT.
Aware that his activities would likely lead to a premature death at the hands of Assad’s security apparatus, Ghiyath Matar had prepared a statement to be read after his death.
Don’t think they triumphed over me with the bullet they shot me with. No, I won and my case won every time I went to the streets, he wrote.
Remember me when you celebrate the fall of the regime and remember that I gave my soul and my blood for that moment. May God guide you on the road of peaceful struggle and grant you victory, he added…
Ghiyath Matar’s wake was attended by a number of foreign ambassadors posted in Damascus, including US envoy Robert Ford, France’s Eric Chevallier and those of Britain and Japan.
Once they had departed, Assad’s security forces raided the event, firing live rounds and tear gas.
If the relatives of peaceful activists, as well as those peaceful activists themselves are being deliberately tortured and killed by the regime, does peaceful resistance have a viable future in Assad’s Syria?
The life of a Syrian activist is becoming more and more dangerous. They face the prospect of death, torture, humiliation every time they venture on the streets, Iyad Sherbaji, a friend, though no relation, of Yahya Sherbaji, told the NYT.
Can peaceful resistance hope to overthrow the regime?
We know how peaceful this guy (Matar) was, and he was tortured to death, and it shows that if we continue like this, we’ll be treated like anyone who had a gun and was a terrorist. Everyone’s really , really angry, a Damascus activist known by his nom-de-guerre Alexander Page, told the WP.
For Assad, anyone demanding that his basic rights be respected is a terrorist.
Matar’s supporters however, are determined to follow his example come what may.
There are many views, and one of them is to take up arms. But for me, and for his friends, and for his family, peaceful resistance is the only option, a friend told the WP.
As we have seen, the regime has fine-tuned its strategy and now specifically targets the leaders of the uprising.
In Daraya, near Damascus, the Assad security apparatus succeeded in arresting all the known leaders of the protest movement.
This did not deter the citizens of Daraya from demonstrating in the city’s streets at the first opportunity…
Daraya security is flabbergasted. More than two dozen field activists and protest organizers were in detention, and the town protested as usual.
It was as if nothing had happened, Mohja Kahf, an activist wrote on Twitter, according to the NYT.
The Syrian people are creative enough to find ways to overcome the repression and keep protesting, an activist told the NYT.
Indeed, they are…
This is a clear manifestation of the protest movement’s stamina and determination, and a vibrant testimony to the inordinate bravery of the Syrian people.…
Yet relentless repression and the inability of the democracy movement to overthrow the regime after six months of protests have engendered a great deal of frustration and dismay.
A lot of people have gone into hiding, and a lot of people are not taking part in protests, Page told the WP.
That said, the uprising is by no means vanquished, and, as far as many activists are concerned, it can only continue.
Were they to concede defeat, the regime would avenge itself mercilessly…
Protesters are telling authorities that they have the patience of Job.
They have faith and believe that, if the protests stop, there will be revenge and killings that no one will survive from. That is why people are insisting to continue until the end, Iyad Sherbaji told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
A stalemate of sorts has been established that some believe can only be overcome by force of arms, given the brutality of the Assad regime.
From the beginning, I knew that the revolution would take a long time for us.
But we are unarmed and I don’t think the regime will fall when faced only with peaceful protests, a doctor told Reuters.
In addition, the growing number of army defectors (mostly disaffected Sunnis who dominate the enlisted ranks) joining the anti-Assad movement has accelerated the militarization of the uprising.
Some 10,000 have already done so, forming the Free Syrian Army, and the apparently rival Free Officers Movement.
It is the beginning of armed rebellion. You cannot remove this regime except by force and bloodshed. But our losses will not be worse than we have right now, with the killings, the torture and the dumping of bodies, General Riad Asaad, who defected in July, told Liz Sly of the WP.
His objective is to replicate the Libyan scenario: conquer a swath of Syrian territory; obtain international protection akin to the NATO-imposed no-fly zone in Libya, then march on Damascus…
The armed rebellion may be only in its infancy, but Assad is taking no chances.
Rastan, a city in eastern Syria, has become a center of the armed resistance to Assad, and hosts hundreds of defectors.
On Tuesday morning, the Syrian army, equipped with tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters, attacked the city.
Tanks closed in on Rastan overnight and the sound of machine guns and explosions has been non-stop. They finally entered this morning, one resident told Reuters.
In spite of clashes of this nature, the uprising has been overwhelmingly a peaceful one, no matter what the regime’s propaganda claims.
I don’t think the numbers (of defectors) are big enough to have an impact one way or another on the government or on the contest between the protesters and the government. The vast majority of protests are still unarmed, and the vast majority of protesters are unarmed, Ambassador Ford told Liz Sly of the WP.
Yet by transforming the act of peacefully protesting into a potentially lethal endeavor, the regime has left its opponents with but two choices: relent and go home, thereby giving the regime a new lease on life, or take up arms against it, thus justifying the official propaganda claiming that it is compelled to use force against armed groups bent on destabilizing the country and seizing power.
Will the opposition be tempted to resort to violence if the peaceful protests fail to topple the regime, thereby falling into what Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group called a trap?
Would such a transformation of the uprising however, be morally reprehensible?
A people under attack, one that is being fired upon by its own army, and threatened with abduction and torture, has the right to defend itself.
Assad has taken the fateful decision to wage war on his own people.
They have the right to resist because their demands are legitimate, in order to ensure their safety and wellbeing.
As in all nations, they have the right to demand freedom, justice and democracy.
If Assad persists in standing in their way, preventing them from obtaining these universal and inalienable rights, then he should be removed, by force if need be.
Should the Syrians, however, choose the violent option?
Those on the opposing side are Syrians too who shall still be there when the struggle is over.
The regime still has the support of Christian (about 10% of the Syrian population), Alawite and other minorities who fear being the victims of the chaos that would ensue the fall of the repressive Assad regime.
We are all scared of what will come next, Abu Elias, a Christian, told the NYT.
Specifically, the Christians fear that a future Sunni government could persecute them for being Christians, and former supporters of the Assad regime.
The Iraqi precedent is not encouraging…
In addition, it is by no means clear Assad’s opponents could defeat the regime’s security apparatus, dominated by the Alawites, who have too much to lose should Assad (himself an Alawite) fall.
It is for the Syrians to choose however and not for us to advise them from the comfort of our studies thousands of miles away…
Yet, only by choosing the path of peaceful resistance can the opposition hope to convince these anxious minorities that the new post-Assad Syria that should soon emerge is also theirs...

There are no signs of torture and murder abating in Syria.
The mounting toll of reports of people dying behind bars provides yet more evidence of crimes against humanity and should spur the UN Security Council into referring the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court, wrote Philip Luther, of Amnesty International.
The UN Security Council has failed the Syrian people who deserve the support of all civilized nations.
How many Syrians will have to be arrested, tortured and killed ( over 2,700 to date, including some 100 children), how many more Zainabs and Ghiyaths sacrificed, before Syria’s patrons at the Council, Russia and China, finally decide to act?
(the photograph of Ghiyath Matar above was found here)

Will France be next...?

2011-08-11T21:36:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, the French stock market fell by 5.45% amid rumors that France was about to lose it AAA rating, and that Société Générale, the nation’s second largest bank, was in severe financial difficulties.
As a result, shares in SG fell by 14% and the bank lost three billion Euros in market value…
Britain’s FTSE 100 index fell by 3% and the Dow Jones by 4.6%.
French banks in general suffered yesterday since they are particularly exposed in Greece, holding over 40 billion Euros worth of Greek debt. SG alone holds some 2.64 billion Euros worth.
Crédit Agricol shares fell by 11.8% and BNP Paribas 9.5%.
The rumors, however, proved to be baseless. Standard and Poor’s, as well as Fitch and Moody’s, the three major rating agencies, all denied on Wednesday that France was about to be downgraded….
In addition, the Daily Mail, source of the rumors concerning the parlous financial state of SG, issued the following statement:
In an article that appeared in the print edition and online version of the Mail on Sunday on August 7, 2011, it was suggested that according to Mail on Sunday sources Société Générale, one of Europe ‘s largest banks, was in a «perilous» state and possibly on the «brink of disaster».
We now accept that this was not true and we unreservedly apologize to Société Générale for any embarrassment caused.
It remains to be seen whether SG’s beleaguered and now considerably poorer shareholders will accept the apology…
Yet, yesterday’s events made the following abundantly clear: investors are not the least interested in facts, and much prefer rumors, for the corrections, denials and apologies had little effect, as stock markets plunged across the planet…
The rumors presumably seemed sufficiently credible, in the eye of the average investor, to prod the latter into speculating against SG and other major French banks and firms.
As the NYT pithily put it, investors have played Who’s Next with the shrinking list of nations that still hold the top rating of AAA.
Though they may have been in the mood to play, no one else was.
Why is France being targeted?
Presumably, because it has the weakest economy among those nations retaining an AAA rating.
France’s budget deficit currently stands at 5.7% of GDP, the second highest in Europe after Britain.
The country’s debt, 85.3% of its GDP, is also the highest among all of the European countries holding the AAA rating.
We think from a fundamental perspective that France is due a downgrade. In essence, France is the country with an AAA rating that can least afford to pay into any future eurozone-wide bailout scheme, Lyn Graham-Taylor, a strategist at Rabobank, told the BBC.
Analysts at Citigroup concurred: we expect that France, with its high public debt and deficit, and popular resistance to cutbacks in its, even by euroarea standards, extremely large welfare state, is now likely to be the G7 country at the highest risk of losing its AAA rating, they indicated, according to The Guardian.
So, what can and should be done?
Stimulating economic growth is the obvious solution, yet difficult to achieve when you are simultaneously compelled by the markets to cut your budget deficit, and debt level.
France’s economy is only expected to grow by some 2% this year (while unemployment hovers around 9%), which is insufficient to significantly address the deficit and debt issue.
Though little interested in facts, the markets are looking for indications however, that political leaders in the US and EU are serious about tackling the deficit and debt issue.
It boils down to a crisis of confidence. We haven’t seen policy makers come out with a plan that is viewed as comprehensive, coordinated and credible, Philip Finch, global bank strategist at UBS, told the NYT.
The markets are therefore, looking for leadership, but will any be forthcoming?
On the European level, that is unlikely since there are no mechanisms in place to address effectively this pressing issue.
The Eurozone’s structure for coping with its debt problems at the relevant monetary union level aren’t even in place, let alone operational, Jean-Louis Nakamura, chief investment officer at Lombard Odier Investment Managers, told The Guardian.
As such, leadership must come from within the nations of Europe, and particularly, from France's Nicolas Sarkozy, who must act decisively and expeditiously…
Yet, with presidential elections looming in 2012, will Sarkozy risk taking measures to curb the deficit that are bound to be unpopular?
He has vowed not to increase taxes so as to avoid stiffling economic growth, however anemic it may be.
Yet additional revenues need to be found if France is to limit its budget deficit ot 5.7% for 2011, as it had pledged to do so.
Tax shelters and loopholes are thus the likeliest targets of France’s deficit-cutting efforts.
There are some 500 provisions in the French tax code that allow taxpayers to lighten their tax burden. The government needs an extra 5 billion Euros in revenue to reach its objectives.
Ultimately, however, Sarkozy shall have to decide whether it is more important to adopt the necessary policies to reduce France’s deficits, no matter how onerous they may be, or resort to cosmetic measures to enhance his electoral prospects.
President Obama once said he preferred to be good one-term president than a poor two-term one…
If he is true to his commitment to rather be a good one-term president, then this is the character test. In some respects, this is the 3 a.m phone call, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration Commerce Department official, told the NYT, referring to the US president’s current predicament, remarkably similar to Sarkozy’s.
Sarkozy should make the same pledge and act accordingly.
In any case, if he resorts to half-measures, the markets will react mercilessly.
Despite their haste and irrationality, this may be the markets’ redeeming feature: compelling leaders to take measures they could not or would not even previously consider politically palatable…
Yet there is one way, and only one way, to impose dire sacrifices on a nation, sacrifices necessary to solve the deficit and debt crisis and that entail a fall in the standard of living of the majority. People are ready to make sacrifices, but they are not willing to be cheated. You have to explain who is going to pay and how it will spread out over society. People aren’t willing to accept that part of the society pays while others have an easy life, Mario Baldassarri, head of the Italian Senate finance committee, and a member of the opposition, told the NYT.
In the US, a balanced and responsible anti-deficit policy would be based on increasing taxes on the wealthy and reducing the cost of defense and entitlement programs.
A similar recipe is necessary in France.
Indeed, why should the majority, which is just getting by at best, accept cuts in benefits and in its standard of living, if the wealthy are not also required to contribute to the common effort, in proportion to their earnings and holdings?
In the end, a successful policy will be based on justice and equity.
In addition however, our leaders must lead by example, it is a question of credibility, and remember who entrusted them with the powers they wield, and that their duty is to serve us and not themselves.
They must also share the burden if it is to be accepted by us all, and renounce their excessive perquisites and privileges, at least for the duration of the deficit and debt crisis.
Only then, will they have the necessary authority to demand sacrifices form the rest of us.
Such a political approach demands leadership, and thus could prove politically costly at the polls, yet it is the only viable one…
Sarkozy is to announce additional deficit reduction measures on August 24...
Will he have the courage to address the issue seriously?
(the photograph above is by AFP)

Laughter and applause are now subversive acts in Belarus...

2011-07-31T18:01:00.000+02:00

A draft law published Friday prohibits the “joint mass presence of citizens in a public place that has been chosen beforehand, including an outdoor space, and at a scheduled time for the purpose of a form of action or inaction that has been planned beforehand and is a form of public expression of the public or political sentiments or protest”, wrote Ilya Mouzykantskii, of the NYT...
Hence in Belarus, Europe's last extant dictatorship, a pedestrian may be arrested by the authorities, for walking down the street, even if all he or she is doing is...walking down the street.
One's mere presence may be construed, at the authorities' discretion, as a form of public expression, which is illegal in Belarus...
Anyone rounded up is liable to be held up to fifteen days in administrative detention...
Since fundamental civil rights such as the right to protest are routinely denied in Belarus, and those brazen enough to insist on exercising such rights beaten, harassed and arrested, activists
use Facebook and Twitter to invite opposition supporters to attend silent demonstrations.
Participants simply walk together, clap their hands in unison, or as Mouzykantskii indicated, have their cellphone alarms go off together...
President Alexander Lukashenko, reelected yet again after a rigged poll last December, considers these forms of expression to be subversive...(the protetsts that followed his last reelection were brutally repressed. Three opposition presidential candidates arrested in December are still in jail).
Last week, on the seventeenth anniversary of his rule, one such silent demonstration was organized...
After 17 years in power, Lukashenko has brought the country to a catastrophic situation, where people can't even clap their hands, one protester, Artur Stankevich told AP.
Some forty demonstrators were arrested, the security apparatus obviously keen to ensure that Minsk does not become another Cairo or Tunis...
Action and inaction, laughter and applause, coordinated cell phone ringings are now illegal in Belarus...
What will come next?
Singing, walking one's dog, or maybe smoking a cigarette on a park bench...?
The sheer absurdity of such measures would be laughable, were those accused of such grievous offenses not routinely beaten and abused...
These brutal and inane forms of repression have no place in Europe in the twenty-first century...
The European Union should at the very least, tighten its sanctions against the Lukashenko regime, to ensure that we do not facilitate in any way the brutal repression taking place there...
Hopefully, the brave Belarus people shall do the rest...
(the photograph of the arrest of a demonstrator in Belarus is by AFP)

Fragile and reversible..?

2011-07-29T19:26:00.000+02:00

Invited to speak at the Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris, last week, General David Petraeus, former Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, and now Director of the CIA, considered that NATO’s military campaign in Afghanistan was making progress.
The number of insurgent attacks had decreased in eight of the last twelve weeks, compared to last year, for instance.
Back in March, General Petraeus told the Senate Armed Forces Services Committee that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas.
However, while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible.
The general thought fit, nevertheless, to reiterate the latter assessment at the Forum in Paris.
Those gains remain fragile and reversible, he stated.
The events of the last few weeks clearly evince that the general was wise to be cautious.
On July 12, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan President’s half brother, leader of the Kandahar Provincial Council, was assassinated by a member of his staff inside his own home.
The assassin, Sardar Mohammed, was then killed by the victim’s bodyguards.
The Taliban took responsibility for the deed.
Sardar Mohammed is a friend of ours, and we gave him the task a long time ago to infiltrate and reach Ahmed Wali Karzai, a Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, told The Christian Science Monitor.
Ahmed Wali Karzai was the most powerful figure in the Kandahar region.
He was the president of Kandahar. The governor, police chiefs and other officials all had to discuss things with him before they made a decision, a prominent provincial figure, Abdul Samat Zarih, told The Guardian.
A US official told the paper that his demise was first and foremost a setback for Afghanistan as a whole…
Karzai was active on many fronts.
He had long been suspected of thriving from Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade, but also of being on the CIA’s payroll.
In fact, he rented Mullah Omar’s former compound on the outskirts of Kandahar to the CIA and US Special Forces.
AWK (Ahmed Wali Karzai) operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises, concluded one US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
In addition, he seems to have been involved in covert reconciliation talks with the Taliban…
His elimination was a clear blow to the President, and his Western patrons, as well as to the former’s authority in the country.
Five days later, Jan Mohammed Khan, President Karzai’s adviser on tribal affairs, was shot and killed in his home in western Kabul.
A member of the Afghan Parliament, Mohammed Ashim, was also killed in the attack.
Khan had previously been governor of Oruzgan province, dominated by the Pashtun, from 2002 until 2006, when he was forced to resign due to his alleged links to drug traffickers.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, stated that he was murdered because he had been aiding US forces in planning and executing night raids against Taliban militants, raids that have been effective but also very unpopular and denounced by President Karzai himself.
Last Wednesday, the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, was killed outside his office.
The assassin, concealing explosives in his turban, blew himself up next to the official.
US ambassador in Kabul, Ryan C. Crocker, declared that this series of assassinations did not demonstrate a resurgence of the Taliban’s capacity to strike at the heart of the Karzai regime, on the contrary.
Clearly these are horrific attacks, but they can be signs of weakness, he told the NYT.
Hamidi was among those slated to replace Ahmed Wali Karzai after his murder…
The mayor may have antagonized the Taliban by trying to regain possession of land in the north of the city that he claimed they had been occupying illegally…
On Thursday, or the next day, Taliban militants attacked the compound of Matiullah Khan, the nephew of Jan Mohammad Khan, and a powerful provincial leader in southern Afghanistan, located in Tirin Kot, capital of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar,
A car filled with explosives rammed through the gate of another compound, the Governor’s, and exploded, partially destroying the maternity ward of a hospital located next door. Ten infants and three women were killed.
The attack on Matiullah’s compound, home to the Highway Battalion, his militia, occurred simultaneously.
We have very good security here so they were not able to enter my battalion’s camp, so they attacked the television station instead, Khan, who escaped unscathed, told The Guardian.
Omaid Khapalwak, who worked for the BBC was killed in that attack against the Afghan Television building.
All in all, 21 people were killed, in addition to the perpetrators, and ISAF (allied forces) participation was necessary to restore order.
If the foreign troops hadn’t responded, the fighting would have lasted until morning, one resident told McClatchy, higly critical, apparently, of the local security forces' performance..
Because Khan’s militia controls the highway between Kandahar and Tirin Kot, convoys of supply trucks can reach US and ISAF forces unhindered.
According to The Guardian, Khan charges $1,700 per truck for his services.
Moreover, although his militiamen sometimes support US operations against the Taliban, Khan has been accused of bribing the latter to protect his lucrative activities, which allegedly includes drug trafficking with Ahmed Wali Karzai…
The Taliban are clearly targeting those powerful figures which are nominally allied with the president, and whom he needs to assert his authority in the south of the country, home of the Pashtun and center of the Taliban insurgency…
Eliminating them serves both to undermine Karzai politically but also to discredit him by emphasizing his feebleness: he and his warlords are powerless to prevent the Taliban from attacking whom they please when they please.
No one can protect them, and obviously not, alas, US and ISAF forces whose credibility also dwindles with each attack…
And yet, though purportedly allies and agents of both President Karzai and the West, they have their own agendas to pursue, and constituents and fiefdoms to protect…
As such, their interests do not necessarily coincide with their patrons’.
Promoting Karzai’s government and the West’s nation building and counterinsurgency agenda is not their sole preoccupation and certainly not the paramount one.
Their loyalties are multiple: tribal, economic, provincial, as are their allegiances.
Control of the drug trade also requires their attention.
As such, are they truly allies of Karzai and the West, or their own masters, which we have been compelled to try and co-opt, as we are unable to impose more compliant figures to take their place?
In any case, to base one’s counterinsurgency strategy on allies such as these is a risky proposition at best…
The Afghans will look after their own interests, and do not need us to do so, whatever agenda we may hope to pursue…
What, then, have we accomplished in Afghanistan these last ten years?
We are there to ensure that that country does not once again become a sanctuary to Al Qaeda or other terrorists, Petraeus said in Paris.
This objective has been attained, and the architect of the 9/11 attacks disposed of.
The only way to achieve that is to ensure that the Afghans secure themselves and govern themselves, he added.
That is something that we cannot do on their behalf.
In addition, of the 160 Afghan army battalions, only one is fully operational…
Ten years and billions of dollars to come to this…One battalion!
If, at the very least, we could protect the Afghan people, but we regularly kill innocent civilians, thereby objectively serving the interests and objectives of those we are there to defeat…
Last Wednesday, a French soldier killed three Afghan civilians and wounded three others at a checkpoint in Kapisa, a province in eastern Afghanistan.
A man, a pregnant women as well as a child riding in the car are now dead.
The French officially apologized to President Karzai for the tragic mishap, but the latter simply replied that no apology would be able to bring them back to life
The Taliban’s propaganda department shall undoubtedly make the most of this, and who can blame them for doing so?
Just this month, France lost seven soldiers, one to friendly fire, five in a suicide bomb attack, and one in a firefight.
So far this year, 18 have been killed, the most since France sent forces to Afghanistan ten years ago, and 70 since 2001..
During a formal ceremony at the Invalides in Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy paid them tribute.
You did your duty to the very end, he said, addressing the seven young soldiers, whose coffins rested in the center of the spacious Invalides courtyard, embodying the military virtues of discipline, bravery and honor. You died defending the great cause of freedom.
Yet, are we anywhere nearer to achieving our goals then when we first set foot on Afghan soil ten years ago…?
One prominent French politician, former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal spoke of a useless sacrifice, when describing the death of those seven soldiers.
The prime Minister François Fillon retorted that no one has the right to say that a soldier died in vain if he did so to defend his country and in the pursuit of peace.
And yet, though Royal’s comment was callous, especially for the bereaved, can it be simply dismissed as an opportunistic attack on a political rival?
Alas, I fear not…
Do not the brazen attacks on powerful allies of the Afghan president make a mockery of our efforts and pursuits in Afghanistan?
Is the situation not only reversible, but in the process of being reversed?
What is clear is the following: we shall never be able to build an Afghanistan in our image, nor should we wish to…
We have implicitly admitted as such, since a partial withdrawal of Western forces has been announced.
The US will withdraw 33,000 in the next year or so.
The remaining 88,000 are to leave by late 2014...
The French are to follow suit…
Why wait before sending them all home now, where they belong?
(the photograph above is by AFP)

Justice and democracy is the only way...

2011-07-27T22:04:00.000+02:00

The Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, says his country will "not be intimidated or threatened" by Friday's terror attacks, which left 76 people dead.
The country would "stand firm in defending our values" and the "open, tolerant and inclusive society", he said. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.", The Guardian wrote...
The Norwegians seem to understand that the only viable response to mass murder is not more violence, but more democracy...That is the antidote, and the only one, to violence.
Revenge, it must be said, is the tool of the feeble and inarticulate...
In this post 9/11 world, only progress, justice and democracy can defeat the extremists, and certainly not military might...
If our values, which we endlessly proffer, have any significance, then it is in times such as these that we must test them...and uphold them...
And yet, are we worthy of them? Hopefully so, or are the Anders Behring Breivik of this day and age correct to conclude that our present civilization is doomed and must be done away with?
It is in such crises that we must remain true to ourselves...
We can only prevail, for what do the nihilists have to offer?
Yet, shall we be brave enough, shall we have the necessary fortitude to remain who we are, no matter what the consequences?
We are in dire need of leadership...Perhaps, at last, shall we find some, not in Paris, Berlin, London or Washington, alas, but in Oslo...
(the photograph above is by AFP)

Justice for Natalia Estemirova...

2011-07-18T11:31:00.000+02:00

It has been two years already since she was abducted and murdered…
On July 15, 2009, Natalia Estemirova’s body was found in Ingushetia with bullet wounds to the head and chest.
She had been working diligently and tirelessly for Memorial, Russia’s most prominent human rights organization.
In Chechnya (a place Anna Politkovskaya called a small corner of hell), she specialized in cases of kidnapping, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings involving militants and others, cases that should have been investigated by the authorities, had the latter not been complicit…
In Chechnya, however, the security apparatus of Ramzan Kadyrov, the restive republic’s president, is widely suspected of being behind these egregious human rights abuses, part of the brutal campaign to crush the rebellion led by Islamic militants, and instigated by Kadirov’s patron, Vladimir Putin.
One week before her murder, she had issued a report on an execution involving the Kurchaloi district police that took place in the Chechen village of Akhkinchu-Borzoi.
Was her murder the police’s reply?
Perhaps, for she did have many enemies in Chechnya, particularly among those bent on prosecuting their vicious war against the militants and their relatives on their own terms, contemptuous of both justice and the rule of law…
Two years later, no one has been arrested by the authorities for the man accused by the latter of having committed the deed, Alkhazur Bashayev, an Islamic militant, was shot dead by Russian security forces in November 2009.
Hence, as far as the Russian authorities are concerned, the case is closed because it has been solved…The murderer having been identified (and killed, conveniently precluding the possibility of a trial), the Chechen authorities are thus absolved of any responsibility in the murder, and, consequently, in any other suspicious killing in the republic...
Since Natalia Estemirova did not issue any reports involving Mr. Bashayev, Russian human rights activists never took the official version seriously.
As a result, human rights organizations launched their own investigation into the murder in the hope that a credible police inquiry will one day take place…
The report, entitled Two Years After the Murder of Natalia Estemirova: Investigation on the Wrong Track, sponsored by Memorial, the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, (which published Politkovskaya’s reports on Chechnya) and the International Federation of Human Rights based in Paris, was presented last Thursday by Oleg Orlov, Memorial’s chairman.
According to the report, the examination of DNA samples found on Natalia Estemirova’s body did not match those of Mr. Bashayev or his brother, Anzor Bashayev, also charged in the case.
The latter, currently living in France, provided a DNA sample to Memorial.
The French authorities granted political asylum to Anzor Bashayev, and rebuffed Russian requests to extradite him.
There is no serious proof to really consider the version in which Alkhazur Bashayev is the main suspect in the killing of Natalia Estemirova, Orlov declared.
Human rights groups have accused the Russian authorities of fabricating a case in order to avoid exploring other possibilities, including the following embarrassing and explosive scenario: that officers in Chechnya’s security apparatus, at the behest of the republic’s president, eliminated a dangerous human rights activist that had been relentlessly exposing their criminal activities.
In this particular case it seems Special Forces tried to build a disguise version to take the investigation away from the real murderers, the report claims.
There were very strong circumstances around Estemirova’s murder that suggested that there could have been some official involvement. You know, the threats that had been made against Estemirova and others like her, the threats against Memorial, the timing of the threat, the kinds of crimes that Estemirova had been investigating-all of that pointed to a very strong official interest in seeing some kind of harm done to her, Rachel Denber, of Human Rights Watch, told RFE/RL.
Svetlana Gannushkina, a Memorial activist, presented a copy of the report to Russian President Dimitri Medvedev on July 5...He has yet to issue any comment…
The journalist Tom Parfitt once wrote that Natalia Estemirova was one of the bravest people in Russia. But, she was much more than that, for she knew whom she was confronting, yet plodded on nevertheless…
Significantly, other determined and brave human rights activists inspired by her example yet not deterred by her fate have been pursuing the same cause, justice and the rule of law.
In November 2009, four months after Natalia was killed, a group of Russian lawyers founded the Joint Mobile Group of the Russian Human Rights Organizations in Chechnya (Mobile Group).
The organization sends activists to Chechnya in order to investigate human rights abuses, record testimony and collect evidence.
Two months after its creation, the Mobile Group was asked to investigate the disappearance of Islam Umarpashaev, who was kidnapped from his home in Chechnya, on December 11, 2009, and held at the headquarters of the Chechen Special Task police Force (OMON). There, he claims he was abused and tortured by police officers.
The Mobile Group lodged an official complaint and seized the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. The latter then requested that the Russian government investigate the matter.
Three months after the Mobile Group’s intervention in the case, Umarpashaev was released because, according to one of his abductors, his father went all the way to the European Court and created problems.
The Mobile Group is now demanding that the Russian authorities launch an official and credible investigation into the matter and hold all those who may have broken the law accountable.
In the meantime, and for their own safety, the Umarpashaev family has had to flee Chechnya.
The Caucasian republic, therefore, remains a very dangerous place, particularly for those brazen enough to demand justice.
We have been working in Chechnya for many years. These days, people there are simply paralyzed by fear, not daring to lodge complaints against law enforcement and security officials under de facto control of the Chechnya leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. By persevering in his quest for justice, Islam Umarpashaev is displaying immense courage, Tanya Lokshina, Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch, declared.
Needless to say, Mobile Group activists have been threatened and harassed by the Chechen police.
For their efforts, the Mobile Group was awarded the 2011 Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.
The work of the Joint Mobile Group is an inspirational example of how committed individuals, despite all the pressures that are brought to bear on them, can hold the line in defense of justice, truth and the rule of law. It is the denial of access to justice that enables tyrants to prevail. This is why the work of human rights defenders like the Joint Mobile Group is so important, declared former Irish President Mary Robinson, now President of the Mary Robinson Foundation, upon presenting the award to Igor Kalyapin, founder and head of the organization, at Dublin City Hall.
Two years after Estemirova’s murder, there are more questions than answers about the circumstances surrounding her killing. The Russian authorities need to deliver justice in Estemirova’s case to demonstrate their sincerity about protecting human rights in Chechnya and throughout the Caucasus, Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.
As the Estemirova case has shown (the same, alas can be said concerning the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, killed on October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday…) the land of Putin, Medvedev and Kadyrov is incapable of delivering justice, and is not the least interested in doing so.
As such, we need not worry concerning their sincerity about protecting human rights.
They are much more interested in power than in justice…
Yet, as the bold and fearless Russian human rights community has demonstrated, the authorities can be compelled to release victims of human rights abuses if there is sufficient pressure exerted from both within and without Russia.
The Russians do seem loath to attract the attention of the European Court of Human Rights and suffer potentially ignominious legal defeats there, and, more generally, in the court of world opinion…
Therefore, it is vital that we all apply pressure on the Russian authorities and compel them to protect human rights activists in the Caucasus, and the Chechen people from violence and abuse…
Amnesty International has launched a campaign demanding justice for Natalia Estemirova.
Let us support this effort (you can sign the petition here).
Do we not owe at least this much to Natalia Estemirova?
(the photograph above is by Vladimir Rodionov RIA/Novosti)

Deference to power, in the land of Gavroche?

2011-06-01T20:28:00.000+02:00

In a column entitled DSK and Conspiracy Theory, The NYT columnist Roger Cohen discusses the cultural differences existing between France and the US that the DSK sexual assault case highlighted.
French deference to power, he writes, -with the accompanying conspiracy theories-has encountered the hard-knuckled application of US law applied equally to anyone accused of a serious crime.
Deference to power?
France is the land of the 1789 Revolution that overthrew the Ancien Régime, guillotined its king and queen, and founded the Ist Republic; a land where its newly restored king was sent packing upon Napoleon’s triumphant return from Elba during les Cent Jours in 1815; a nation that drove out its restored monarch during the July 1830 Revolution (les Trois Glorieuses) and yet again in 1848, that revolution giving way to the IInd Republic.
Incidentally, it was during the June Uprising of 1832, initiated by students rebelling against the new monarchical regime that had followed les Trois Glorieuses, that Gavroche, the archetype of the streetwise Parisian gamin, cheeky, brave and free, created by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, died while stealing bullets off the dead bodies of Gardes Nationales…
After the humiliating defeat at the hands of Germany in 1870, Napoleon III’s empire fell, and France’s IIIrd Republic was born, while in Paris, la Commune de Paris (the result of a popular uprising prompted by the military debacle) was brutally crushed by the government.
The feckless IVth Republic erected after the end of WWII was brought down by De Gaulle during the Algerian War so ineptly handled by preceding governments.
He created the Vth Republic, based on a strong presidency.
This system has prevailed to this day, though it was severely rattled in 1968, when France’s students once again took to the barricades in the capital’s streets demanding more freedom…
Deference to power?
French farmers routinely dump manure and various agricultural products in front of the gates of Prefectures (which represent the state in each of France’s Départements) whenever they are unhappy with their lot, which is often.
Not long ago, striking Continental Tire workers thrashed a Prefecture in Compiègne because their plant was about to close, and the state was not doing enough to help them.
A few years ago, a commando of farmers ransacked the office of the Minister for Environmental Affairs in Paris, to protest a new tax that would target environmentally unfriendly farms...
Such outbursts of indignation occur on a daily basis.
No week goes by without one group or another protesting vocally in the streets of France’s main cities.
Just last week, a Sarkozy government plan to outlaw GPS devices that allowed speeding motorists to detect the location of all radars along France’s road and designed to enforce speeding limits provoked such an indignant outcry that the Interior Minister had to back down.
A majority of the French considered the measure a crass provocation, designed to increase the number of fines imposed by the state in order to replenish its empty coffers in a period of huge public budget deficits, and not a measure intended to encourage drivers to slow down and limit the number of accidents and thus fatalities…
Few even bothered to suggest that only those who failed to respect the law (and thus the legal speed limits) would be penalized.
Deference to power?
In France, no such thing exists, which explains why it is a country so difficult to reform.
No government is ever considered sufficiently legitimate to enact a robust reform program.
Every reform that significantly alters the status quo engenders immediate and active resistance.
Millions then fill the streets, for weeks on end if need be.
This was the case last fall when Sarkozy sought to extend the legal retirement age to 62, (it was then set at 60). Sarkozy did not back down, but the conflict lasted months, and may cost him dearly in next year’s Presidential election.
Incidentally, when was the last time Americans demonstrated in the streets of the nation’s cities to defend their rights, or demand change?
Hence, the powers that be inspire nothing but contempt and suspicion.
The state is only legitimate when it provides protection and financial assistance…
As a result, it is not deference to power and the resulting tendency to believe in conspiracy theories that initially led many in France to believe that DSK had been set up.
This points to another cultural difference: the Cartesian strain in the French psychological makeup.
DSK headed a major, prestigious international organization that became even more influential after the global financial meltdown of 2008.
He regularly worked with the leaders of the globe’s major powers and was on first name basis with many of them.
He was also the most likely candidate to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s French Presidential election.
Hence, the Cartesian mind could not help but wonder why anyone with such influence and prospects would run the risk of losing it all (and spending the rest of his life in a US jail) and sexually assault a maid in a hotel room…
Indeed, there are more traditional and discreet ways to cater to such needs…Why would he attack the maid?
It made no sense, and explains why many in France thought that DSK’s enemies, in Washington or Paris, had engineered his downfall.
This in no way however, justifies the arguments utilized by his friends (all part of the same enlightened, leftwing elite) to defend him.
The fact that no one died, that DSK merely loves women, perhaps too exuberantly or that it was merely a case of détroussage d’une domestique (taking sexual advantage of one’s social inferiors), such statements clearly revealed the fact that some of DSK’s advocates had retained an Ancien Régime mindset, where a seigneur could do what he pleased because, well, he was a seigneur.
It is amusing to note that such contempt for women was voiced, albeit unwittingly, by those who consider themselves progressives and thus, defenders of women’s rights…
The conspiracy theory reaction was short-lived, however.
With perhaps one exception, no leader of the Socialist party (to which DSK belongs) ever suggested that he had been set up, even by the one most likely to benefit from his political demise, Nicolas Sarkozy.
In France, since his election in 2007, Sarkozy has been held responsible for anything and everything that goes wrong in the country (although, never for any positive developments), yet no prominent opposition figure has accused Sarkozy of having conspired against a dangerous political rival…
No doubt, this is due to the fact that they all knew their friend DSK was a serial, insistent womanizer.
One Socialist member of the National Assembly told the press last month she always made sure never to be alone in a room with DSK…
The French should have remembered their classics.
Are not Greek tragedies replete with heroes who provoke their own downfall due to some tragic flaw (Aristotle’s hamartia), that lead to disaster, but also serve to reveal their humanity?
Perhaps it was DSK’s tragic flaw that led him to assault a maid in a Sofitel hotel room, thereby recklessly destroying his reputation and dooming his political prospects…
Finally, one mere word about US law.
Many here in France were aghast to discover that it was the defendant’s responsibility to gather evidence that may benefit him or her during the trial.
In France, the Magistrate investigating a case gathers all the evidence that he or she can and finds relevant, no matter whose case it supports, the people’s or the accused.
DSK, with his millionaire wife, has had no difficulty hiring the best lawyers in Washington and New York, as well as private investigators instructed to unearth any element, in New York or Africa, that can be utilized against the maid, in order to discredit her and undermine the credibility of her accusations.
DSK will thus be well defended…
Would that have been the case had he been less well off?
Hardly…
Mr. Cohen writes of the hard-knuckled application of US law as applied to anyone accused of a serious crime.
I can hear, from my old house in the North of France, the guffaws of MM. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company, the architects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of the National Surveillance State erected after 9/11(Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, enemy combatants, enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), secret prisons, ghost detainees, warrantless wiretapping and so on are its sterling manifestations!)
at the suggestion that US laws also apply to them…
Alas, that is another, albeit sad, story...
(in Delacroix's painting of La Liberté guidant le Peuple, the child depicted on the right inspired Victor Hugo's creation of Gavroche)

Assad sends tanks to crush resistance in Baniyas...

2011-05-08T17:24:00.002+02:00

It is now Baniyas’ turn.
Syria army tanks withdrew from Dera’a last Thursday after an eleven-day siege.
Some fifty people were killed during this ordeal, as a result of what activists called indiscriminate shelling.
Tanks continue to surround the city however, thereby sealing it off from the outside world.
On Saturday morning, thirty tanks penetrated within Baniyas, a city located on the Mediterranean coast. An oil refinery is located there, and the town is a major center for the export of Syrian oil.
Residents of Baniyas tried to form human chains to prevent the tanks from advancing inside the city, but to no avail.
The army occupied Sunni districts, but not Alawite neighborhoods.
The Syrian government and its security apparatus are dominated by the Alawite, a Shiite minority sect.
Syrian forces also shot and killed several women on Saturday who were demonstrating against the government outside the city.
Members of the security forces asked them to leave and, when they refused to do so, they opened fire killing three of them and wounding five others who were hospitalized, an activist told Aljazeera.
The city’s electricity was cut, as were all means of communication.
Baniyas is now surrounded from all directions, not a single person can go in or out, a resident told Katherine Marsh, of The Guardian.
Residents are reporting the sound of heavy gunfire and seeing Syrian navy boats off the Baniyas coast. Sunni and mixed neighborhoods are totally besieged now, a human rights activist told Aljazeera.
Basically, we don’t know what’s happening in Baniyas, Wissam Tarif, the director of Insan, a Syrian human rights organization, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT. Speaking on the phone with a resident of Baniyas, he heard firing, bullets, shooting and screaming, and then we lost contact.
Security forces spread out inside the city, arresting many.
They are conducting search operations in several areas. The army has lists and looking for people based on it, Rami Abdul Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters.
Over two-hundred were arrested, including a ten-year-old boy. It appears to be designed to punish his parents, Mr. Abdul Rahman told AP.
The military occupation of Baniyas came one day after what activists called The Friday of Defiance.
A Syrian opposition Facebook page called The Syrian Revolution 2011 (with over 170,000 members) and which has been very active in mobilizing protesters, called for Syrians to demonstrate after Friday noon prayers.
We will challenge injustice, we will challenge oppression, we will challenge fear, and we will be freed, one comment on the page read.
According to human rights groups, twenty-seven people were killed throughout Syria during these demonstrations.
The Syrian government is unabashedly attempting to crush the uprising by militarily occupying the centers of revolt, resorting to mass arrests (8,000 Syrians have been jailed or are unaccounted for since the demonstrations began mid March), and firing on protesters.
According to the Committee of the Martyrs for the 15 March Revolution, 708 have been killed during the unrest.
The strategy of Assad’s government is obvious: dissuade Syrians from openly challenging his regime by rendering defiance as onerous as possible.
Today, demonstrating in the streets of Syria’s cities is a life-threatening endeavor.
In Homs for instance, the country’s third largest city and one of the centers of the uprising, those wounded during demonstrations are no longer taken to the hospital by their friends or families. I can’t take him to the hospital, Abu Kami, referring to a friend, told Spiegelonline. Anyone who is brought to the hospital will be arrested. Hence, some activists are left to die at home…
Residents cannot even donate blood. But the police had blocked off the hospital, one angry donor told Spiegelonline. They were literally waiting for the wounded so that they could arrest them.
Moreover, even those who die in the hospital are no longer claimed by their families.
The parents of people who were shot to death were forced to go on television and state that their children were radical Islamists (who the regime blames for the unrest). That’s why no one is coming forward anymore, the frustrated donor added.
The Friday of Defiance was particularly bloody in Homs.
We answered the call to protest today. But the intelligence forces attacked us right away by opening fire on us, one activist told the NYT last Friday.
The violence, the arrests, the intimidation, the harassment are clearly taking their toll.
The protests can’t get the momentum to increase the numbers on the ground, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. The collective punishment of cities, mass arrests and the tactics of snipers created some fear, Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human right activist, currently a scholar at Georges Washington University in Washington, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT.
Appalled by the violence, the European Union plans to impose travel restrictions and freeze the assets of fourteen Syrian dignitaries. Alas, Assad is not on the list.
The Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011 challenged Assad to rise to the occasion:
Stop shooting all demonstrators, allow peaceful demonstrations, release all prisoners, allow political pluralism and free elections in six months, it wrote.
Will Assad have the courage to heed this advice?
This is highly unlikely.
If he had, Syria would be a democratic society and he would no longer be in power.
Assad is only interested in Assad and his wealthy and corrupt clan.
He and they must go.
Let us hope that the brave Syrian people will have the necessary resilience to topple the despicable Assad regime which has been preying on the nation for over forty years…
(the photograph of Baniyas residents demonstrating last Thursday is by AP)

The war on terror is over. It is time to move on...

2011-05-05T12:22:00.000+02:00

Justice was done, President Obama declared last Sunday night in his televised address informing the nation and the world that US forces had killed Osama bin Laden.
Was the killing of bin Laden an act of justice?
He was shot twice in the head.
To date, no photos of his body have been released as they are deemed by the administration to be too gruesome to be made public.
On Wednesday, President Obama decided that none would be issued.
You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football, he said. The administration is worried that graphic pictures could further incite violence against Americans.
Yet, could bin Laden have been captured instead of killed?
Initially, the Obama Administration clearly indicated that the answer was no.
He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered, John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism adviser, told the press on Monday.
In addition, he unequivocally indicated that bin Laden was obviously a coward who preferred expensive mansions to Spartan caves:
Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.
It seems however, that Mr. Brennan spoke too hastily…
The very next day, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, contradicted this version of events.
In the room with bin Laden, a woman-bin Laden’s wife-rushed the US assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed, he said.
Osama bin Laden did not have a weapon nor did he hide behind a human shield when he was shot and killed by Navy Seals.
He did resist however. The resistance was throughout, as I said, the spokesman indicated.
What was the nature of bin Laden’s resistance, since he had no weapon?
Resistance does not require a firearm, Mr. Carney insisted, but he declined to elaborate.
If bin Laden was killed in the circumstances described by Mr. Carney, then should he not have been captured and brought to justice instead?
Indeed, as The Guardian columnist Gary Younge put it, this was not justice, it was an extra-judicial killing. If you shoot a man twice in the head, you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.
That many Americans felt avenged by the killing of bin Laden by US forces was obvious and perfectly understandable given the heinous nature of the crimes committed on 9/11.
As such, shortly after President Obama announced the news, many spontaneously took to the streets of New York and Washington D.C., and chanted USA, USA…
Yet, democracies, by their very nature, are committed to the rule of law.
Professor Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, told The Guardian that the killing of bin Laden did resemble an extrajudicial killing without due process of the law. It may not have been possible to take him alive, but no one should be outside the protection of the law.
Indeed, laws are surely designed to protect the weak and innocent, but everyone else as well, in a civilized society. As Mr. Grief indicated, even the Nazis were given trials at Nuremberg, after World War II.
Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves, they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice, Michael Mansfield, a leading British defense lawyer, told the paper.
Hongju Koh, a State Department legal advisor, did not share this view.
But a state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force, he said.
John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the Sate Department during the preceding administration, concurred. The assassination prohibition also does not apply to killings in self-defense. The executive branch will also argue that the action was permissible under international law both as a permissible use of force in the US armed conflict with al-Qaeda and as a legitimate action in self-defense, given that bin Laden was clearly planning additional attacks, he told The Guardian.
In any case, after 9/11, the Bush Administration decided to pursue what it branded the war on terror through military means, and military means only.
Afghanistan was invaded shortly after 9/11 in order to punish the Taliban government for harboring bin Laden and al-Qaeda, then Iraq, on the specious grounds that it posed an imminent threat to world peace. Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Bush/Cheney narrative, which he would then give to terrorist organizations bent on attacking the US.
In essence, MM. Bush and Cheney transformed al-Qaeda into an existential threat, which had to be annihilated, whatever the cost.
Hence, the US sought to eradicate the terrorists on their own turf, the logic in vogue at the time being that it was preferable to fight them there than here.
The Bush/Cheney administration devised a national security strategy that also militarized the US judicial system.
Guantanamo was transformed into an extra territorial prison for enemy combatants (that only the President had the power to designate as such) who would thus remain beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions.
Military commissions were set up to try these enemy combatants at Guantanamo, characterized by a drastic curtailment of the rights of the defendant. Detainees could aslo be held indefinitely without trial...
The CIA developed its own network of secret prisons, beyond the reach of the ICRC, where high value targets, ghost detainees, could be robustly interrogated, and tortured if need be.
Evidence obtained in such conditions would be admissible in a military commission.
In an age where terrorists could strike any time, anywhere, information needed to be obtained quickly, by whatever means necessary…
Warrantless wiretapping was secretly authorized by the Bush Administration to ensure the intelligence agencies could expeditiously detect any new potential threat to the homeland…
Fear of a second devastating attack was so pervasive in post-9/11 America that these measures hardly encountered any opposition at all (outside of the lefwing and libertarian blogosphere)…
Hence, the preservation of civil and constitutional rights was no longer a priority but subservient to the demands of national security.
Shielding the homeland from a new 9/11, whatever the cost, even if that meant we have to work the dark side, as Vice President Cheney put it five days after 9/11, had become the obsession of the Bush/Cheney White House.
In such a context, the rule of law, the necessity of respecting international law, was an anachronistic hindrance, a weakness that America’s enemies would surely capitalize on.
Yet, how many people have died, needlessly died, to avenge the 9/11 tragedy, and ensure that America is not attacked again?
In Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, over 100,000 civilians have been killed since 2003.
The Lancet study estimated that during the 2003-2006 period, 650,000 died.
In Afghanistan, another 10,000 civilians have lost their lives.
In both countries, the casualties keep mounting…
Was the Bush/Cheney militaristic approach, largely co-opted , alas, by Obama, the wisest and most efficient one in order to honor those who died on 9/11 and seek justice for the unconscionable crimes committed on that day?
Does the shedding of so much blood, so much innocent blood, constitute a fitting tribute to the victims of 9/11?
The Islamic extremists skillfully exploited this brutal, belligerent approach responsible for so many victims.
By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless?
By what school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water? Therefore, it is [only] just to respond in kind, and the one who started it is more to blame, bin Laden wrote in April 2004.
The extremists are adept at taking advantage of America’s prowess to further their own agenda.
Each civilian casualty at the hands of US forces is a propaganda victory offered to its enemies, who can then exploit it as a recruiting tool.
It is precisely that American capacity, propensity to destroy and kill that bin Laden hoped to harness by attacking the US on 9/11
He knew what the American response would invariably be: to lash out militarily against the ummah (the Muslim world), a senior al-Qaeda operative, Saif al-Adl said.
The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap, he added.
Indeed, two days before 9/11 bin Laden engineered the assassination of the most prestigious and powerful foe of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance, in anticipation of the upcoming invasion of the country…
The Afghan mujahidin had succeeded in defeating the Soviet empire after ten years of war, which eventually led to its collapse.
Such was bin Laden’s interpretation of the Soviet withdrawal and downfall.
If the mighty Soviet empire could be defeated, then there was no reason to believe that the US would not suffer a similar fate on Afghan soil. The strategy that had been so successful once only needed to be replicated. Bin laden defined it thus: employ guerilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.
His objective was, therefore, clear: continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, he said in 2004.
The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush, he gleefully concluded in 2007.
The paradox here is that bin Laden’s central objective was to drive out all US troops from the Muslim world, and then reestablish the Caliphate. Yet, he considered that only a massive influx of US troops to the region could ultimately bring this about…
Bin Laden believed that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Holy Land, Mecca being the birthplace of the Prophet, and Medina the place where he first established an Islamic state, was sacrilegious. But that was not his only grievance.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples, he wrote in his Fatwa Urging jihad Against America, in February 1998..
The US presence was thus not only sacrilegious, but also posed a threat to the region’s valuable resources and independence.
The fact they had been invited there by the Saudi royal family after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 was particularly humiliating, for he had proposed his services to the Saudi leadership: he would lead an army of mujahidin to confront Saddam Hussein…The Saudi leadership ignored his offer, preferring American assistance instead.
Secondly, bin Laden resented America’s policy towards Iraq, where the UN embargo, spearheaded by the US, was progressively strangling the country.
Iraq holds a special status for Muslims, for it was the seat of the Caliphate for some five hundred years.
Thirdly, the US’s indiscriminate and unflagging support for Israel, which was occupying the third holiest Muslim sanctuary, Jerusalem, was unacceptable.
He decreed these policies to be a clear declaration of war on God.
As such, he issued the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill Americans and their allies-civilian and military- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
Hence, and contrary to what is often stated, bin Laden did not target the US because he hates our freedom and is jealous of our way of life.
He did so because of its policies and their effects on Muslims…
After all, other democracies such as Switzerland or New Zealand share America’s values and way of life, yet have never been attacked by al-Qaeda…
They have no troops in Muslim lands and therefore have never harmed the local populations.
It must be made clear however, that nothing and certainly not US foreign policy, no matter what we may think of it, can ever justify mass terrorist attacks againstg civilians…
Nevertheless, It is important to place al-Qaeda’s agenda in its relevant political context.
Has bin Laden’s strategy succeeded, and is the American empire wobbling?
According to Nobel recipient, Joseph Stiglitz, the Iraq War will eventually cost the nation over $3 trillion and the conflict in Afghanistan slightly less
Homeland Security, a direct legacy of 9/11, has probably cost another trillion since September 2001.
The rise in oil prices also should be noted, as well as the economic slowdown that followed the attacks.
The US debt now stands at $14.3 trillion (compared to $9.8 in 2000), and the debt ceiling will have to be raised soon, otherwise the US will have to default in early August 2011.
Bin Laden did not fully succeed, yet neither did he utterly fail…
At this stage, it seems obvious that, ten years on, the US can no longer afford to sustain several major military conflicts simultaneously and for a long duration.
That phenomenon was precipitated by the al-Qaeda strategy, and Washington‘s reckless reaction to it…
US troops have not been driven form Muslim lands however, and al-Qaeda no longer has its charismatic leader to pursue its delirious agenda…
To return to our question posed earlier, could the Navy Seals have captured bin Laden?
It is difficult to say.
But this is a guy who’s extremely dangerous. If he’s nodding at someone in the hall, or rushing to the bookcase or you think he’s wearing a suicide vest, you’re on solid ground to kill him, suggested John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the State Department during the Bush Administration.
According to new details on the raid issued on Wednesday, bin Laden did have an AK47 and a Makarov pistol in the vicinity when the Seals entered the room
Yet, would the Obama Administration really have relished the prospect of trying bin Laden?
Probably not, if the administration’s handling of the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial is any indication…
As such, it seems evident that the founder of al-Qaeda would not have been tried in a civil court, but before a military commission in Guantanamo where he no doubt would have been held…
Criticism from within some circles in the US and from abroad would have been withering and thus unpleasant.
Yet, a fair and public trial given to bin Laden would have offered a powerful display of democracy and justice at work.
It would have demonstrated to the world what the rule of law signifies, and that even the most evil of men is treated in a civilized way, his fundamental rights as a human being (albeit, that he may not deserve) protected.
That our values are universal, that they apply to all and not only to some (the chosen few to which we belong) and that even our enemies are treated in accordance with them, a civil trial of bin Laden would have made obvious to all, including America’s enemies…
This will never happen, but, alas, the US is no longer equipped to hold such a trial, its judicial system having been grievously undermined by the Bush/Cheney and now Obama national security agenda.
If the war on terror had not so completely eroded the US judicial authority it is wholly plausible to conceive that bin Laden could have been tried exactly the same way as Sheikh Omar, mused Robert Lambert in The Guardian.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, was arrested in 1993 and convicted of seditious conspiracy in Federal District Court in Manhattan, after issuing a fatwa encouraging militants to bomb targets in New York City.
Is the war on terror over now that bin Laden is dead?
It must be.
The militaristic strategy recklessly followed these last ten years has engendered much too much death and destruction.
Why stay in Afghanistan now that the central objective there has been achieved, the eradication of al-Qaeda and the death of its founder and leader?
What, precisely, is the US currently accomplishing in Iraq?
War has never been the most efficient method to promote peace, progress and prosperity.
What are we waiting for to propose such an agenda?
Through arms sales and giveaways, its military presence and its propensity for intervention, the US has for decades underwritten and encouraged violence as the main stay of Middle East politics. Washington has talked peace while promoting war, Andrew Bacevich wrote in The LAT.
It is high time to pursue different policies and the Arab Spring offers us an opportunity to do so.
The revolt of the people across the Middle East clearly shows that they yearn for peace, progress, prosperity, and the opportunity to choose their own leaders…
Let us help them do just that, but not by resorting to Apache helicopters and the 82nd Airborne.
It is time to talk peace, but promote it as well…
(the photograph above is by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

An act of betrayal...

2011-04-26T00:11:00.002+02:00

Guantanamo is a particularly significant issue because it demonstrates Obama’s fundamental lack of core convictions, contrary to what he had led us to believe during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

We were told to expect change, that the Bush/Cheney world view and approach belonged to the past…The rule of law, and civilized behavior worthy of a great democracy would now be a political imperative for Obama’s America…

We were evidently misled…

The absolute ethical necessity to close Guantanamo may have reflected a belief he held at the time Bush/Cheney still wielded (many would have said, abused) power in Washington.

Once he arrived in the nation’s capital, however, the issue was less significant because he was now in charge, presumably. The concept of justice for all was once again in safe hands, that is to say, his own...Those who took human and constitutional rights seriously no longer had anything to worry about…This conviction was so universally engrained that Obama actually won the Nobel Peace Prize his first year in office.

Closing Guantanamo, the modern-day Bastille, and an infamous symbol of abuse and of arbitrary detention, demanded the new President’s undivided attention and wholehearted support…Since the Obama Administration claimed that the facility was a recruiting tool for terrorists, many assumed the new President would not relent until he had reached the intended objective. Obama had vowed to close it at the conclusion of his first year in office.

The new, excessively popular president could have exerted the necessary pressure on a Democratic Congress to ensure this blight on America’s reputation would be forever obliterated….

And yet, he failed to do so…

The rule of law was no longer a priority, but conditioned by politics…

The rule of law was no longer a popular, political issue, thus expendable…

The notion of trying terrorist suspects in civilian courts, of transferring those held in Guantanamo to the US mainland, ceased to make political sense. It seemed more politically savvy to cater to the people’s fear, than cultivate or educate their sense of justice and fairness…

We had hoped that a former professor of constitutional law would have done his utmost to promote the cause of justice, and not chosen the facile path of political expediency.

He had too much else to do than to fight for such fundamental principles, we were told.

Pardon my naiveté, but what is more important than that?

Similarly, the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed was to have been a defining event, according to Attorney General Holder.

Our nation has had no higher priority then bringing those who planned and plotted the attacks to justice, Holder also recklessly declared.

Justice?

Caving in to pressure from local NY politicians ( including, alas, the Mayor of New York) more interested in public opinion polls than principles, Holder relented.

KSM will be tried in Guantanamo, where justice is an alien concept, defiled by water-boarding, forced sleeplessness, other various “enhanced interrogation techniques” and arbitrary and indefinite detention...

Some have been held for nine years without charge, and will neither be tried nor released, thanks again to Obama who did not se fit to abolish the precedent set by his reckless predecessor …

Who would have thought that MM. Bush and Obama’s America would have resurrected les lettres de cachet abolished by revolutionary France in 1789? Can anyone, alas, now take the US seriously when it sees fit to lambast another nation’s human rights record?

This, also, shall be part of Obama’s legacy…

How many of us shall be able to forget and forgive this grievous act of betrayal?

(the photograph of Guantanamo can be found here)

Assad sends tanks to crush uprising in Dara'a

2011-04-25T19:21:00.000+02:00

In this military assault on Dara'a this morning, the Syrian army killed 25 protesters and left their bodies in the streets, according to a report by Euronews...
The army then combed the streets in an attempt to round up all potential demonstrators.
They are entering houses, they are searching houses. They are carrying knives and guns, one witness told The Guardian...
Assad has clearly opted for the Libyan option in response to his people's demand for freedom....
He is clearly his father's son, and reports that he was in fact a reformer capable of gradually transforming his country into a democracy were clearly misguided...
Assad and his clique must go and then be held accountable for their numerous crimes...
Some 400 Syrians have been killed since the beginning of the uprising last month...

Manning transferred to Fort Leavenworth

2011-04-24T16:39:00.000+02:00

Bradley Manning, charged with providing the WikiLeaks whistleblowing site with thousands of classified US government documents, was transferred last Wednesday to Fort Leavenworth's Joint Regional Correctional Facility. He had previously been held in harsh conditions at Quantico Marine Brig, in Virginia, since May of last year.
Earlier this month, 250 distinguished legal scholars condemned the military's treatment of Manning, characterizing it as not only shameful but unconstitutional.
Mannign was being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, and deprived of his underwear every night, purportedly for his own safety.
Juan Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has been trying to evaluate Manning's conditions, but prevented from doing so by US authorities, who refuse to allow him an unmonitored visit with him.
I am acting on a complaint that the regimen of this detainee amounts to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or torture...until I have all the evidence in front of me, I cannot say whether he has been treated inhumanely, he told The Guardian earlier this month...
Mendez would be authorized to meet with Manning, but only with a guard also present.
At such meetings, anything the prisoner says can then be used against him during his court martial...
Manning will be placed in a single cell in Fort Leavenworth, and he would not receive abusive treatment, officials said, according to Reuters.
It seems therefore, that the Obama administration no longer considers it useful to abuse Bradley Manning, as the young man's case receives ever gretaer attention...
It is also evident however, that it is convinced that Manning is guilty as charged, even though his trial is still many months away, and that, as such, he is considered innocent.
On Thursday, President Obama made this extraordinary statement: we're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.
Can we now reasonably expect Manning to receive a fair trial, since the verdict is already known?
Is the US still a nation of laws, when serious offenders such as those responsible for Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, "enhanced interrogation techniques", indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, secret prisons, ghost detainess and so forth are not prosecuted, let alone investigated, while a Private First Class accused of revealing information that the State Department itself concluded did little lasting damage to the US is already considered guilty before his trial has even begun?
(the photograph of an activist protesting against Manning's detention is by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Things you should know, take two

2011-04-24T12:16:00.000+02:00

The Assads do not take lightly any concerted attempt to question their authority.
In 1982, President Hafez al-Assad sent 12,000 soldiers to besiege the city of Hama in open revolt against his regime.
The Muslim Brotherhood had taken control of the city, and declared it liberated.
Assad, a member of the Alawite, a Shiite minority in Syria, shelled the city for weeks.
His troops then entered the town, eliminating all Muslim Brotherhood militants that they could find.
Some 1,000 were slaughtered.
Overall, Assad killed approximately 40,000 Syrians, displaced another 100,000 others, in order to reassert his authority.
Some 15,000 still remain unaccounted for…
The foreign policy analyst Robin Wright called the Hama Massacre the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East. That is no small achievement in a region that has had to endure the regimes of thugs the likes of Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi…
In many ways you can look at the Arab world over the last few decades and really if you want a turning point, I think the turning point was the terror unleashed on the Syrian people in the city of Hama in 1982.
For about 25 years the Arab people have been terrified of their rulers and the security states have really marginalized them and demolished their sense of dignity, Fouad Ajami, of John Hopkins University, told PBS.
It is that sense of dignity that the Syrians, following the lead of the Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis and Libyans, are seeking to retrieve.
Yet, they are still facing the same ruthless regime, now led by Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father after his death in 2000.
The revolt against the Assad tyranny began some five weeks ago in Deera, a city near the Jordanian border.
Last Friday, thousands of Syrians took to the streets anew, after prayers, to demand the fall of Assad.
The people want the overthrow of the regime, they chanted near Abbasside Square in Damascus.
Security forces shot and killed 109 demonstrators, clearly not hesitating to fire into the crowd.
Demonstrators raised their hands to show that they were unarmed. The fire intensified, wrote Reuters’ Khaled Yacoub Oweiss.
Many were shot in the head and chest, wrote Katherine Marsh of The Observer.
Yesterday, funeral processions for the preceding day’s fallen turned into angry demonstrations against the regime in Damascus, Douma, Barza, Maadamiah and Qabon, according to the NYT.
Bashar al-Assad, you traitor! You coward. Take your soldiers to the Golan, many chanted on Saturday (The Golan Heights were seized by the Israelis during the 1967 war, and remain under Israeli occupation).
In Barza, a witness who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal said that at least 1,000 mourners came under fire as they prepared to bury four men and two children, one 7 years old and the other 14. The witness said security forces aimed directly at the mourners, many of whom sought shelter in the nearby Al-Salam mosque, wrote Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
A further 11 were killed on Saturday, throughout Syria.
To date, 280 demonstrators have been killed since the beginning of the Syrian uprising.
Coverage of the events by traditional media has been difficult, as foreign journalists are not authorized to operate freely in Syria.
Yesterday, Carl Perry of Aljazeera was expelled from the country.
Hence, most reports of the events originate from the Syrian activists themselves.
Satellite phones, laptops and modems have been donated by the Syrian Diaspora to ensure that Assad’s brutal repression does not remain unreported.
The opposition movement also has a Facebook page, Syrian Revolution, to rally its supporters.
Assad has made several attempts to assuage the anger of the demonstrators.
He abolished the state of emergency in place since 1963, did away with the security courts, fired several provincial governors and released some political prisoners…
Yet, the fact that his security forces are unabashedly firing on unarmed demonstrators and that activists are still being arrested in midnight raids clearly evince the fact that Assad is more interested in saving his regime than reforming it…
In any case, since Assad has shed the blood of his own compatriots, and considering the brutal legacy of his Baath Party regime, nothing short of its elimination is likely to quell the unrest…
We want the toppling of the regime, a resident of Ezraa told The Observer.
The blood of our martyrs makes this our responsibility now.
Can Assad survive?
How many Syrians is he willing to kill in order to do so?
Will the Syrians persist and topple his regime?
Not all Syrians welcome the uprising.
Several religious minorities, including the Christians, fear that a post-Assad regime could be even worse…
Nevertheless, Assad is clearly unfit, both morally and politically, to rule Syria.
His fate, as well as the nation’s, is in the hands of the Syrian people…
(The photograph above of a demonstration in the Syrian city of Banias on Friday is by AFP)

Things you should know, take one...

2011-04-22T17:57:00.000+02:00

Is Misrata the new Sarajevo?
If so, then we should already be ashamed of ourselves.
How many times can the civilized world make the same mistake?
That it is a chillingly dangerous place, furthermore, was made abundantly clear yesterday for those not paying attention...
Two prominent and intrepid war photographers, Tim Hetheington and Chris Hondros were killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack instigated by pro-Gaddafi forces, according to the BBC.
Xan Rice, of The Guardian, manages to convey the current horrendous conditions in Misrata...
To date, some 1,000 have been killed, 90% of which are civilians, the journalist reports...
President Obama yesterday authorized US forces to use drones in order to enhance NATO's camapaign to protect Libyan civilians...
Some, including Glenn Greenwald, construed this move as an escalation of the war in Libya.
As the war in Libya escalates on a seemingly weekly basis, I think it's time for another urgent speech about how imperative it is we all tighten our belts. It's also probably time for another Nobel Peace Prize (and yes, I know: these drone attacks are designed to bring about peace-because War, as we know, is Peace), he wrote in his blog...

Al Jazeera reported the following today:Predator drones have routinely been flying surveillance missions in Libya, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday.

He said the US will provide up to two 24-hour combat air patrols each day by the unmanned Predators.

Is the introduction of two drones an escalation?

In essence, what is the welfare of the people of Misrata and Libya worth?

Is it our problem, and if so, how far should we go?

As Chirac said in 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, war is always the worse solution...

Yet, after Bosnia, Srebrenica and Rwanda, can we simply remain on the sidelines and watch a ruthless thug resort to heavy weaponry and cluster bombs in order to submit a people that is courageously fighting for its freedom and dignity?
(the photograph above of a Libyan revolutionary on the front line in Misrata is by Chris Hondros)

Where are Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi...?

2011-03-07T14:46:00.000+01:00

The Iranian authorities could not resist the temptation to take credit for the uprisings currently taking place across the Arab world.
Last month, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that the Iranian nation is witnessing the echo of its voice in other parts of the Muslim world.
That the revolutions have been secular in nature was not deemed relevant by the regime’s luminaries. They looked forward to a new Middle East, characterized by waning US and Israeli influence.
The Iranian opposition Green Movement, led by Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, seized the opportunity afforded by the uprisings and the regime’s purported support of them to call for a mass demonstration to express solidarity with the people’s movement in the region against their oppressive regimes, they wrote.
The Iranian government, arguing that this would be a political act, refused to authorize the demonstration even though it was called to support developments in the Arab world that it itself had encouraged…
The contradictions and hypocrisy of the regime were clearly exposed, which may also have been one of the objectives of Karroubi and Mousavi.
Despite the ban, Iranians took to the streets nevertheless, on February 14, notably in Tehran, where they converged on Enghelab and Azadi Square…
Two demonstrators were killed in clashes with the security forces.
Both Karroubi and Mousavi were prevented from attending and placed under house arrest.
The following day, 50 or so member of the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, shouted Death to Mousavi, death to Karroubi inside the chamber.
Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi are corrupts on earth and should be tried, others told the official IRNA news agency. The death penalty usually follows a conviction on such charges in the Islamic Republic…
Since their house arrest on February 14, nothing has been heard from them…
The two are currently in their home. There have only been some limitations on their contacts with suspicious elements, a justice ministry official told the Fars news agency last Monday.
Iran’s Prosecutor General, Gholam Hossein Moshseni Ejei, was more explicit.
Judicial action has been taken (against them), ultimatums have been issued. In the first step, their communications, including their comings and goings, and their telephone conversations have been restricted, and if need be, other steps will be taken, he warned last Monday as well.
Interestingly, four days later, Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, in an interview with Euronews, claimed that those gentlemen you refer to are in their homes, they are living ordinary lives…To the best of my knowledge, they are at their homes. They are always moving from one place to another. They are free to visit their families. They may have made their own decision to move.
He thus implicitly stated that they were no longer in their homes nor under house arrest.
Yet, if that is so, why has no one seen them?
We, like any other children that suddenly have been cut off from communicating with their parents, are highly concerned. We live in an absolute news blackout about our loved ones. It is clear to us that our loved ones are held by those who hate them only because of their ideals. We are concerned because we read that our parents have not been imprisoned, and are not under house arrest, but are only escorted by security agents, and that we, their children, can see them. But it has not been that way. We the children have not seen our parents, have not heard their voices, and what concerns us most is the contradiction between what the regime says and what is actually taking place, Mousavi’s three daughters declared in a statement quoted by tehranbureau last Thursday.
Opposition activists claim that the two men, along with their wives, Zahra Rahnavard and Fatemeh Karroubi, have been arrested and imprisoned.
It has been more than two weeks that Iranian authorities have put Mousavi and Karroubi in a situation such that no one has any reliable information about their conditions and health. There have been many speculations. For us, after we investigated, the report about the transfer of Mousavi and Karroubi and their wives to Heshmateiyeh (a Tehran jail) is considered credible, Amir Arjomand, a senior Mousavi advisor, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.
According to some sources, Vahid Haghanian, the Supreme Leader’s own deputy chief of staff, arrested Mr. and Mrs. Karroubi.
The fact that they are being held incommunicado is not a good sign.
Arbitrary and incommunicado detention in unknown locations is often associated with torture and ill treatment, even extrajudicial execution in Iran. Time and again opposition figures in Iran are detained without contact with their families or lawyers, only to undergo abuse and appear on TV weeks later confessing to baseless charges, Hadi Ghaemi, a spokesperson for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, declared.
The precedents are numerous and alarming…
Given the current context of uprisings throughout the Arab world, has the regime finally opted to do away with the opposition’s most prominent leaders in hopes of crushing it, even if it means flouting its own laws, let alone international law?
As such, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH in French) and the Iranian League for the Defense of Human Rights officially seized the United Nations Working Group for Involuntary Disappearances.
The houses of four opposition leaders have been surrounded by the security forces and all their contacts were under scrutiny for months. Now they have disappeared. Their case constitutes a clear application of enforced or involuntary disappearance. The Iranian authorities are responsible for their safety, Dr. Karim Lahiditi, vice president of the FIDH, announced.
Where are Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi?
We must insist that the thugs who rule in Tehran answer that question, and answer it now…
The events in Libya and elsewhere should not lead us to neglect their fate, or encourage the Iranian despots to believe that no one is currently concerned with their wellbeing…
(the photograph of Karroubi and Mousavi was found here)

Is this the treatment one should expect in Obama's America...?

2011-03-06T16:57:00.000+01:00

PFC Bradley Manning, suspected of having transferred troves of classified material to WikiLeaks, can no longer be trusted to sleep with any clothes on at all, according to officials at the Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia, where he has been held for ten months...
As a result, he has been compelled to surrender his underwear lest he injure himself…
How he could possibly manage that feat, the authorities did not care to explain.
This new regulation is for his own good, a simple precautionary measure, according to the military authorities detaining him…
Consequently, he will have to undergo morning inspections stark naked as well, to prevent being injured, presumably, by a potentially lethal piece of under clothing…
Why has this new procedure been put in place?
The military authorities will not elaborate, because to discuss the details would be violating the detainee’s privacy, they claimed.
For the Obama administration, stripping a detainee on a regular basis and subjecting him to daily inspections without any clothes on, does not qualify as a violation of Manning’s privacy, however…
Coincidentally, this precautionary measure, taken, naturally, for the detainee’s own good, came one day after the Army charged Manning with 22 additional counts, including aiding the enemy. That is a capitol offense.
The prosecution announced that it would not seek the death penalty, however.
Should that be the case, Manning could still face life in prison…
The Obama administration's strategy is clear: it is increasing the pressure on Manning, who has been held under harsh conditions since June of last year.
This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification. It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated, David Coombs, Manning’s lawyer declared.
Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell characterized Manning’s behavior at Quantico as exemplary.
Yet, this clearly does not matter since it is administration policy, evidently, to humiliate and intimidate Manning, now matter how he behaves.
He remains in his cell 23 hours a day.
Because of his Prevention of Injury status, the guards check up on him every five minutes.
At night, they can wake him up at any time if they cannot ascertain that all is well…
Yet, Manning is steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the prosecution and reach some kind of plea agreement conditioned on incriminating Julian Assange, editor in chief of WikiLeaks, as a co-conspirator, the real target of this case.
The increasingly abusive and disgraceful treatment inflicted on Manning suggests the authorities have no elements against Assange, and thus must obtain incriminating evidence from Manning
The young soldier is now accused of aiding the enemy, thus…
Yet, who, in fact, is the enemy? WikiLeaks, for releasing the classified material, or the Taliban, al-Qaeda or similar parties?
If the former, then since when has a media organization been considered an enemy for simply publishing information?
If the prosecution is referring to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, then traditional media organizations such as The New York Times should be prosecuted as well, for they were intimately involved in the vetting and publication of the classified material, which, the authorities claim, aided the enemy…
They also published the material before WikiLeaks actually did....
This charge of aiding the enemy may prove difficult to establish in court, thus the administration’s current efforts to extort a plea agreement from Manning.
So, this is the treatment that one should expect in Obama’s America?
Bush and Cheney could have done no better, and are surely pleased with this administration’s approach to civil and constitutional rights….
How frightening that, today, in America, there should no longer be a major political party to condemn such practices…Who now represents those who still believe in justice and individual rights?
Not only US, and international laws demand that human beings be treated in a dignified manner, particularly when they are in detention, and thus at the government’s mercy, but simple, common decency does as well.
Is that now also extinct in Washington?
One would have hoped that someone in the capital learned something from the despicable Abu Ghraib events.
Imagine the outcry in Washington and on the sets of 24-hour cable news networks if a US citizen held abroad was subjected to such degrading treatment?
Alas, it seems that abuse and humiliation are now standard procedure in US-controlled facilities, when detainees are deemed to hold potentially significant information, regardless of who is in the White House….
(here shall you find the photograph posted on top)

Joan is back, and lives in Washington...

2011-03-04T20:48:00.000+01:00

The illustrious pundit, enthralled with American might, the universal panacea to this poor planet’s conundrums, and ever the Francophile (did he not recently refer to King Louis XV in one of his sagacious sorties…?) feels some kinship with Joan of Arc! He is now hearing voices…
Voices around the world, our medium tells us, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for US intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi..
What voices? Only those in this pithy pundit’s wandering mind, it seems.
No matter, if he hears them, then they must exist, thereby vindicating his hero’s freedom agenda, a perpetual preoccupation…
For the obtuse, this refers to George W. Bush, that great leader no one in Iraq, Afghanistan, or New Orleans for that matter, is about to forget…
US intervention? No one is demanding any such thing, thanks, first and foremost, to the Iraq and Afghanistan precedents…The Libyans, like the Tunisians and Egyptians, would like to conquer their freedom themselves…Yes, alas, they are not keen followers of the George W. Bush freedom agenda, whose enthusiasts will consider bestowing democracy upon the deprived, after weeks of relentless bombing and years of occupation (to misquote Chairman Mao, in the Bush/Cheney world view, it is democracy that flows out of the barrel of a gun), but under certain conditions.
It must be easy (no military opposition, thereby rendering its shock and awe demonstration that much more potent), and there must be dividends….Do Libya’s paltry 2% of the planet’s oil resources qualify?
The Bush and Cheneys of America, the indispensable nation, are much more ambitious…
How dare these people conquer their freedom without George W. Bush in mind?
Yet, that is precisely what the Libyans wish to do. They do not want to be robbed of their revolution!
I think there’s a consensus that no one wants (foreign) troops on the ground. I think everyone-as a compromise-supports air strikes (on Gaddafi) under United Nations cover, a representative of the revolutionary committee of Benghazi, told TIME.
United Nation cover? How very French of them!!! That is exactly what President Chirac demanded in 2003 and that the supporters of the Bush freedom agenda found superfluous when they enthusiastically backed the invasion of Iraq, and thus splendidly ignored as they proceeded to shock and awe the ancient yet proud Mesopotamian civilization…
No matter. Do genuine freedom fighters fret over such bureaucratic details?
It’s time to get tough, the former Republican candidate for President John McCain, declared last week.
Now is the time for action, not statements, his faithful sidekick, Senator Joseph Lieberman, enjoined. I would also provide them with the arms to defend themselves, he added…
The fearless freedom fighters (though intervening, albeit, far from the front lines, as is their wont) were about to open a new chapter in the glorious George W. Bush’s freedom agenda saga…
Yet, something happened on the way to the Bushian liberation of Tripoli…
Two early proponents of military action in Libya, Senators John McCain and Joseph I. Lieberman, muted their comments in joint appearance on Thursday at The Brooking’s Institution.
« We are not advocating military (action) at this time», said McCain, Republican of Arizona. « We are not calling for military assistance to a provisional government at this time», the NYT reported. Surely, our intrepid Senators have not been consulting Jacques Chirac? Perhaps, quite simply, the Senators discovered that there was no provisional government to speak of, and that the issue is not one of weapons per se, but of transporting those weapons and the revolutionaries who wield them from Benghazi in the east, to Tripoli in the west?
Even our Bushian freedom fighters have to contend with the vexatious demands of geography, alas…
Should the West impose a no-fly zone?
So far, the Libyan Air Force has proved singularly inept, and done little damage…
Alternatively, perhaps, the pilots have deliberately missed their targets to spare their compatriots…
In any case, should a representative revolutionary Libyan entity make such a request, then we should seriously entertain it.
Let’s call a spade a spade, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses and then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down…
Surely, our prolific pundit has no qualms about attacking Libya. War is a sign of vitality and of America’s resolve to defend its noble and superior principles.
The more wars it wages, the stronger and more virtuous it becomes…
This revolution belongs to the Libyans as the preceding uprisings belonged to the Tunisians and Egyptians…Hopefully, the Algerians, Saudis, Yemenis, Syrians, Jordanians, etc will follow suit…
We, in the West, should provide whatever assistance we can, upon request, and in accordance with international law, the exact opposite, thus, of what the Bush Doctrine stipulates…
Facebook and Twitter have surely mediated this pan-Arab (and Iranian) reach for dignity and freedom. But the Bush doctrine set the premise, our poetic pundit concluded…
The premise? The man single handedly responsible for Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Falluja, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, ghost detainees, military commissions, indefinite detention, torture (what our delicate pundit and his like-minded colleagues could not bear to call anything else but enhanced interrogation techniques, unless inflicted by foreigners, then it definitely qualifies as torture), warrantless wiretapping, yes, the list is a distressingly long one, is it not?
What revolutionary worthy of the name and seeking to overthrow a dictatorship in order to establish a democratic regime would seek inspiration there?
The Libyans know what to do, and have nobly begun to conquer their fundamental rights.
They need no one's advice, and certainly not the Bushian freedom fighters' bellicose nonsense...
(the painting of Joan hearing voices was found here)

Why are we empowering the extremists...?

2011-03-03T14:59:00.000+01:00

The minister had just left his home, which he shared with his mother, and was on his way to a cabinet meeting.
His car was intercepted near a market in the nation’s capital, Islamabad, by a white Mehran filled with gunmen donning shawls. Four people were sitting in the car. One of them got out with a Kalashnikov. He came in front of the car and opened fire. I ducked. Minister died on the spot, his driver Gul Sher, who survived the ambush, told Reuters.
Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian Pakistani, and Federal Minister for Minority Affairs, hit by 25 to 30 bullets was declared dead upon arrival at Shifa International Hospital. He was 42.
The Qaeda and the Taliban of Punjab took responsibility for the assassination in leaflets found on the scene of the crime. This is the punishment of this cursed man, it wrote.
Bhatti was accused of being at the head of a governmental body charged with revising Pakistan’s blasphemy law. With the blessing of Allah, the mujahidin will send each of you to hell, the leaflets warned…
The Christian minister was the second high profile official campaigning against the blasphemy law to be assassinated since the beginning of the year (another prominent militant, Sherry Rehman, a member of parliament, is currently in hiding).
On January 4, Salmaan Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was also gunned down.
He had been openly and publicly campaigning (one brave feat) in favor of granting a presidential pardon to Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman with four children sentenced to death last year for committing blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. Enraged by his campaign, one of Taseer’s bodyguards assassinated him.
The killer, caught at the scene, was immediately embraced by many Pakistanis, and became the champion in the cause to preserve the country’s blasphemy law, resurrected in the 1980s by the authoritarian and Islamic government of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq.
The law, according to its critics, is designed to repress the nation’s small religious minorities. Christians account for about 2% of Pakistan’s 170 million people.
Conviction under the law is conditioned on the testimony of witnesses, and thus, easily obtained….
Although no one convicted has received the mandatory death penalty, many of those accused and later released on appeal were murdered by mobs seeking justice.
This law is being misused. Many people are facing death threats and problems. They’re in prison and are being killed extra-judicially, Bhatti declared last November, during the effort to obtain a pardon for Bibi.
After Taseer’s murder and the public reaction praising the Governor’s assassin for his deed, the government publicly abandoned all efforts to reverse the blasphemy law, thereby emboldening the extremists and undermining its own agenda.
This kind of attack (Bhatti’s murder) was expected after the government’s response to governor Taseer’s assassination. Because of the government’s very weak response, it has encouraged the hardliners in society, Amir Rana, of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, told Reuters.
Bhatti himself knew he was under threat.
They want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan, and whoever stands against their radical philosophy, they threaten them. When I’m leading this campaign against the Shariah laws, and for the abolishment of the blasphemy law and speaking for the oppressed and the marginalized, persecuted Christians and other minorities, these Taliban threaten me…I am ready to die for a cause. I’m living for my community and suffering people and I will die to defend their rights. So these threats and these warnings cannot change my opinion and principles. I will prefer to die for my principles and for the justice of my community rather to compromise, he declared in an interview.
In fact, his bodyguards were not by him at the time of the ambush, but were waiting for him in his office, at his request.
Bhatti clearly knew what was coming and that nothing or no one could prevent it.
I am sad and upset but not surprised. These people have a long list of targets, and we are all on it. It is not a matter of if, but when, Tahira Abdullah, a Pakistani human rights activist, told The Guardian.
The Pakistani government denounced the assassination, and President Asif Ali Zardari characterized it as a heinous act.
Yet, the reluctance of the authorities to alienate the extremists even after the Taseer murder, their refusal to confront directly and energetically those who seek not only to deny the right of free speech to their opponents, but have no qualms about brazenly killing them as well, in the capital’s streets and in broad daylight, has dangerous and pernicious consequences.
The radicals are now dominating the debate and manipulating the government’s agenda at will.
Unlike the government, they are not afraid to voice and defend their convictions, no matter how lethal or odious.
And the ideology that led to this assassination has now sent another determined and deadly message to the state-that it will continue to fight till the last liberal falls, wrote Aamer Ahmed Khan, editor of the BBC Urdu Service.
If the authorities choose not to react out of political expediency or pusillanimity, then the President and government should resign….The people should then be left free to elect whatever government it wants after a democratic electoral campaign…
It is time to implement the law and not surrender in front of extremists. Our founding fathers did not wage a struggle for an intolerant society. They wanted equal rights for all human beings regardless of their caste, creed and religion. We must reclaim our tolerant heritage. Pakistan cannot let the blood of Mr. Taseer and Mr. Bhatti go to waste. RIP Shahbaz Bhatti. A brave man like you will surely be missed, wrote the Daily Times in an editorial…
The Pakistani authorities have squandered that heritage and lost the courage and the will to defend, let alone promote, their own values.
Yet, what have we, in the West, done to help them?
In the name of eradicating Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, we have infected Pakistan, where offshoots of al-Qaeda now prosper and boldly attack those who embody the values we profess to defend and advocate for the region, purportedly with the support of the Pakistani government who pretends to share them, but is now too weak to defend itself.
Has not our war in Afghanistan simply moved next door?
Are we sure that military means are the best and only way to reach our objectives?
Just yesterday, Western forces killed nine youngsters (9 to 15 years old) in Afghanistan. They were gathering wood on a hillside…
NATO, naturally, apologized. We are deeply sorry for this tragedy, General David Petraeus declared, but the damage, alas, was already done.
Ten years, $383 billion, and tens of thousands of casualties later, we are still fighting in Afghanistan.
Does any one in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else for that matter, still believe that we are there to help and protect these people?
How many more supporters of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban did this latest tragedy spawn?
Is there any objective reason why, at this rate, we should not still be fighting the same war with the same results ten years from now?
What state will Afghanistan or Pakistan be in then?
In what state will we be in?
If we truly desire to thwart extremists in the region, then we must propose a radically different agenda, based on development, not the eradication of evanescent enemies: schools, clinics, water, electricity, trade; this is what these people yearn for…
Helping people to help themselves, and mobilizing the necessary resources to do so is a noble project, and that only we can offer.
How can the Taliban, of whatever variety, even begin to compete with that?
(the photograph above of Shahbaz Bhatti is by AFP)

No surrender, no going back...

2011-02-22T20:39:00.000+01:00

So, the wily yet ruthless Guide of the Libyan Revolution was still in town and keen on taming his rebellious capital. Dont't believe the dogs in the media (who had announced his nocturnal escape to Venezuela). I'm still here, he boasted, appearing on Libyan state television, beneath an unwieldy gray umbrella...
The Guide unleashed his special forces and mercenaries into Tripolii's streets, while pro-Gaddafi supporters invested the capitlal's Green Square. Snipers hovered over the demonstrators on rooftops.
Groups of Land Cruisers with masked men wearing military uniforms with heavy guns just passed in front of my street heading to downtown. They are the regime's guards. God help us tonight. Helicopters are shooting down on people on the ground in Tripoli, one resident told the WP.
Libyan airforce jets also dropped small bombs on the protesting crowds, as one witness told the NYT.
I can hear some shots and and some airplanes...We are expecting a disaster tonight. I don't know if I'm going to be alive tomorrow, a Tripoli resident told McClatchy.
In the Fashloum district of Tripoli, residents erected barricades to protect their neighborhood.
In the Tajura area, dead bodies still littered the streets; wounded protesters lay there as well.
Airstrikes and the targeting of ambulances prevented their evacuation.
Some witnesses told the WP that mercenaries riding in ambulances were shooting demonstrators in the streets...
In short, it was an obscene amount of gunfire, one witness recollected. They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.
An untold number of demonstrators were killed. One source counted 61 dead in Tripoli, according to Aljazeera.
The bloodbath sparked worldwide condemnation.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, declared that the Gaddafi regime's tactics against demonstrators amount to crimes against humanity.
The prominent suni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who returned to Egypt last week after fifty years in exile, and spoke to the two-million-strong crowd on Tahrir Square Friday, issued a fatwa urging Libyan soldiers to turn on Gaddafi. I am issuing a fatwa to kill Gaddafi. To any army soldier, to any man who can pull the trigger and kill this man to do so, he declared on Aljazeera.
The Guide finally addressed the nation this afternoon in a televised speech.
He refused to make any concessions, however and dismissed the demonstrators as rats and sick people.
A small group of young people who have taken drugs have attacked police stations like mice. They have taken advantage of this peace and stability. However, it is not their fault these young people; they tried to imitate what happened in Tunisia. However, there is a small group of sick people that has infiltrated in cities that are circulating drugs and money, the Guide affirmed.
He urged his fellow Libyans to eradicate these troublemakers for the good of the nation.
Go out to the streets, chase them, take away their arms, arrest them, prosecute them, hand them to security. The rebels are a bunch of terrorists, he claimed. He also asked them to demonstrate in support of the regime tomorrow...
More ominously, he announced that he had only begun to resist. I haven't even started giving the orders to use bullets, he said, and warned that he would cleanse Libya house by house, if the uprising did not end.
Though he did disclose that he would reform the government, he nevertheless vowed that he was going to die here as a martyr.
Gaddafi thus seems intent on doing whatever it takes to save his regime, even if that entails waging war on his own people..
His opponents have no illusions on this question.
He will never let go of his power. This is a dictator, an emperor. He will die before he gives an inch. But we are no longer afraid. We are ready to die after what we have seen, one protester, Abdel Rahman, told the NYT.
The only thing we can do now is not give up: no surrender, no going back. We will die anyway, whether we like it or not. It is clear that they don't care whether we live or not, Mari Al Mahry, a resident of Al Bayda, in eastern Libya, told The Guardian
Gunfire was heard in the streets of the capital after Gaddafi's speech...
Yet, the butcher of Tripoli is doomed.
The regime's dignitaries are bailing out, one after the other...
The east of the country has fallen...
The support of the tribes is disintegrating...
The only question remaining is the following:
how many will he slaughter before Libya is finally free?
(the photograph of Gaddafi addressing the nation is by AP photo/Libya State Television via APTN)

This is the end of the game...

2011-02-21T20:45:00.000+01:00

The unrest has now spread to Tripoli, after six days of violence in the east of the country...
Several hours after Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi's 1 AM televised speech on Monday morning, hundreds of demonstrators marched toward's the capital's Green Square, chanting slogans hostile to the regime.
Muammar Gaddafi, our leader, is leading the battle in Tripoli, and we are with him. The armed forces are with him. Tens of thousands are heading here to be with him. We will fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet, the Guide's son warned the nation.
Not only did the protesters not heed his words, but they seemed infuriated by them...
Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes, as well as police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. Security forces moved in, shooting randomly, wrote the NYT.
The People's Hall, Libya's Parliament, was torched, and the state television building attacked.
The mood is very tense here. We have heard that government buildings are on fire and locals are scared to leave their homes. Most foreigners are trying to leave, one hotel worker told The Guardian.
Protesters marching on Gaddafi's residence were targeted with live rounds, according to Aljazeera.
There are also reports that the Libyan Airforce is bombing targets in the capital...
The confrontation in Tripoli led to the deaths of at least 61 people, and maybe 200, the network indicated.
Benghazi, the nation's second largest city, has fallen, and is now under the control of the protesters...
Reinforcements sent to the city to assist the security forces entrenched in their military barracks defected to the opposition instead. The gunshots you hear are the gunshots of celebration, one Benghazi inhabitant told the NYT.
Other Libyan cities, such as Al Bayda and Sabha also appeared to be in the hands of demonstrators...
Support for Gaddadi continued ebbing on Monday.
The influential al-Warfalla and al-Zuwayya tribes condemned the regime's violent response to the demonstrations. We tell him (Gaddafi) to leave the country, a spokesman told Aljazeera...
A tribe in eastern Libya threatened to interrupt all oil exports to the west within twenty-four hours should the regime not cease all oppression of protesters, according to The Guardian.
The regime's dignitaries have also begun repudiating Gaddafi.
The Justice Minister and Libya's representative to the EU resigned on Monday.
Abdel Al-Howni, Libya's Arab League delegate, did likewise. I no longer have any links to this regime which has lost all legitimacy, he told new agencies.
Libya's ambassador to China followed suit...
This is the end of the game. The whole of the regime is crumbling. It will not be long before it is over, Libya's deputy ambassador to the UN, told Aljazeera.
Gaddafi's days are numbered.
The dictator assumed vicious and wanton violence would suffice to cow his people into submission.
It may have been a dangerous miscalculation.

Gaddafi's guards started shooting people in the second day and they shot two people only. We had on that day in Al Bayda city only 300 protesters. When they killed two people, we had more than 5,000 at their funeral, and when they killed 15 people the next day, we had more than 50,000 the following day. This means that the more Gaddafi kills people, the more people go into the streets,
Ahmad Jibreel, a Libyan diplomat, told Aljazeera.
Yesterday, in Benghazi, Gaddafi's security forces shot and killed sixty mourners...
Later that evening, the city had fallen...
Now people are dying we've got nothing else to live for. It's like a pressure cooker. People are boiling up inside. I'm not even afraid any more. Once I wouldn't have spoken at all by phone. Now I don't care, a blogger told The Guardian.
Fear, it seems, is changing sides.
The British Foreign Minister claims he has information indicating Gaddafi may be fleeing to Venezuela...
The Guide of the Revolution who was to fight until the last bullet may be reconsidering...
It would not be the first time a ruthless tyrant preferred to save his life, at the expense of his honor...
(the photograph of protesters in Benghazi is by Alaguri/AP)

Rise up...

2011-02-20T16:07:00.000+01:00

Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a renowned Sunni cleric, returned to Egypt last week after fifty years in exile.
He spoke at the rally held in Tahrir Square Friday to commemorate the fallen in the Egyptian Revolution that toppled Mubarak, before a crowd of some two million…
Don’t fight history, he told them. You can’t delay the day when it starts. The Arab world has changed.
The thugs ruling in Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and especially Libya failed to heed the wise cleric’s words…
At least 173 protesters have already been killed in less than a week by the Libyan security forces, and that may be a conservative estimate. Some residents of Benghazi claim that more than 200 have been killed in their city alone...
The guide of the First September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, as Muammar Gaddafi is officially called, has obviously no intention of following in the footsteps of Mubarak and Ben Ali.
Incidentally, the guide berated the Tunisians for having evicted their president.
You have suffered a great loss, he also added. There is none better than Zine (Ben Ali) to govern Tunisia. I do not only hope that he stays until 2014, but for life…
Inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, Libyan activists had called for a Libyan Day of Rage on Thursday, February 17.
On this day five years ago, twelve demonstrators were killed by the regime’s security forces.
Yet, the Libyan uprising began earlier than anticipated.
On Tuesday, a prominent Libyan lawyer and human rights activist, Fathi Terbil, was arrested. He has been representing the families of the 1,200 activists killed in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, in 1996.
These political opponents of the regime were then buried in secret mass graves.
Terbil, on behalf of the families, has been demanding that the regime explain the reasons for the massacre and indicate the place of burial of the victims.
When news of the lawyer’s arrest spread, relatives of the 1996 victims gathered in front of the police headquarters in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, one thousand kilometers east of the capital.
Soon, hundreds then thousands of citizens of Benghazi joined them.
The lawyer was released but the gathering turned into a mass demonstration against the regime. Rise up, oh Benghazi, the day you have been waiting for has come;
There is no god but God and Muammar (Gaddafi) is the enemy of God;
The people want the regime to fall, they chanted.
The writer Idris al-Mesmari, contacted by Aljazeera, told the network that the security forces were attacking the crowd. He was arrested shortly after the interview…
Though Libya possesses the largest oil reserves in Africa, it remains a country wracked by poverty and unemployment. Two-thirds of Libya’s 6.5 million inhabitants live on less than $2 a day, and 30% are jobless.
Yet, they have other demands reminiscent of those of their neighbors: freedom, democracy, justice, and an end to their despotic and corrupt regime.
The government announced that it would double the salaries of civil servants and release 110 political prisoners in an attempt to assuage the wrath of the demonstrators.
Sensing that this may be the time to rid the nation at last of Muammar Gaddafi, who has held absolute power since 1969, Libyans have been demonstrating for nearly one week.
Rise up Libyan women! You are half of the society. Bring your husbands and sons out, one woman from Tripoli, urged on a video.
On Thursday, the Day of Rage, protests erupted in eastern Libya, in the cities of Benghazi, Al Beyda, Zentan, Derna and Ajdabiya.
The east of the country, more hostile to Gaddafi, has long been neglected by the regime.
There were few signs of disturbance in the capital.
The regime had warned its opponents not to openly confront it, or rue the day that it did so. From Libya’s youth to anyone who dares to cross any of the four red lines, come and face us in any street on the ground of our beloved country, a widely disseminated SMS warned. The four red lines referred to Islamic law, the Quran, Libyan security forces and Gaddafi himself.
Yet, thousands demonstrated nevertheless.
What is astonishing is the bravery of the Libyans, who are running a great risk of disappearance and torture, Heba Morayef, of Human Rights Watch, declared.
The security apparatus responded ruthlessly.
According to multiple witnesses, Libyan security forces shot and killed the demonstrators in efforts to disperse the protests, Human Rights Watch stated.
In addition, there are reports that the authorities refused access to medical assistance to those demonstrators in dire need of it, and prevented ambulances from reaching the victims.
By Friday, the death toll had reached 84.
A doctor in Benghazi, Wuwufaq al-Zuwail, told Aljazeera that, on Friday, scores of bodies had been brought to his ward.
I have seen it on my own eyes. At least 70 bodies at the hospital.
Ahmed, a resident of Benghazi told Aljazeera that it’s a big, big massacre. We’ve never heard of anything like this before. It’s horrible. The shooting is still taking place right now. We’re about three kilometers away from it, and we saw this morning army troops coming into the city. You can hear the shooting now. They don’t care about us, he declared on Saturday.
Also on Saturday, the security forces stormed a makeshift camp erected in front of Benghazi’s courtroom by lawyers and judges.
They fired tear gas on protesters in tents and cleared the areas after many fled carrying the dead and injured, one protester told The Telegraph.
Furthermore, they attacked a funeral procession organized in honor of those killed the day before. Today, it’s a real massacre out there, Braikah, a doctor, told McClatchy.
Many of the dead were shot in the head and chest, the security forces clearly intending to kill them.
Snipers shot protesters, artillery and helicopter gunships were used against crowds of demonstrators, and thugs armed with hammers and swords attacked families in their homes as the Libyan regime sought to crush the uprising, wrote Nick Meo in The Telegraph.
With foreign journalists persona non grata, internet and phone services interrupted, Aljazeera and other foreign news outlets unavailable, the regime is doing its utmost to conceal its brutal crackdown.
In addition, there are reports that it has hired foreign mercenaries to do its dirty work.
In Shahhat, sixteen kilometers east of Al Bayda, two African mercenaries were killed and three others captured
A lot of thugs he’s (Gaddafi) employing are not Arabic speakers. They’re armed to the teeth and only use live ammunition. They don’t ask questions-they just shoot. Buildings and cars have been set on fire here, and the situation is getting worse. The dead and injured are everywhere. The mercenaries shoot from helicopters and from the top of roofs.
They don’t care who they kill, Fatih, 26 and from Benghazi, told The Telegraph.
There are also indications that some in the security forces, appalled at the brutality unleashed on the protesters, have switched sides.
Gaddafi is reacting to the protests with ruthlessness. Tanks are on the streets, and there are running battles between armed killers and protesters. Some of the soldiers have been so disgusted by what is going on that they have swapped sides, Omar, a young Benghazi civil servant, told The Telegraph.
Will the uprising resist this onslaught of vicious violence?
Some believe that the Libyans have no other option but to continue demonstrating come what may.
They’re not going to go back to their homes. If they do, he’ll finish them off. They know the regime very well. There’s no way to go back now. Never, never, an exiled opposition leader Abel al-Majid Mansour, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT.
That is a facile claim to make from Oslo.
The pro-government Al-Zah al-Akhdar newspaper warned that the government would «violently and thunderously respond» to the protests, and said those opposing the regime risked « suicide », The Guardian reported Saturday evening.
The coming days are bound to be crucial.
Either the brave Libyans pursue their efforts and prevail in spite of the regime’s ruthless tactics, or the latter will succeed in cowing them.
Shall they at one point relent, or die trying and failing to overthrow Gaddafi?
But then, perhaps it is already too late for the dictator...
Reflecting on the events in Egypt, one Tahrir protester said this.
They (the regime) empowered us through their violence; they made us hold on to the dream of freedom even more. We were all walking around with wounds, but we still kept going.
May Gaddafi become the last, ultimate victim of his own brutality…
(the photograph of Muammar Gaddafi was found here)

We did it...

2011-02-11T20:56:00.000+01:00

It was 6:01PM, and it lasted but some thirty seconds...
Taking into consideration the difficult circumstances the country is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave the post of president of the republic and has tasked the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to manage the state's affairs, the Vice President Omar Suleiman declared on Egyptian television.
Hosni Mubarak had just resigned, and the armed forces were now in charge of the nation...
Only the night before, Mubarak had vowed not to step down.
The thousands that had gathered in Tahrir Square expecting to celebrate the news of his departure were bitterly disappointed.
Thousands shouted Irhal! (Leave!), in unison, as their hopes of victory at long last were dashed by the old autocrat's obduracy.
The response from the people here is massive and direct. He can be as stubborn as he likes, but the will of the people is clear, Fakhr El-Sanhoury, a twenty-six-year-old architect, told Jack Shenker, of The Guardian.
Some people here worry about what is going to happen next, but I'm not scared. Just like the Tunisians did to Ben Ali, we will follow their example. We have won, whatever comes next, Nisma Saïd, a secretary, told Shenker.
Nisma was right.
Less than twenty-fours later, the despot was gone, driven away by his people's rigteous wrath...
Mubarak is gone, but the regime is still in place.

There will be time tomorrow to worry whether or not the army will respect its previous pledges to honor all of the Egyptians people's demand, and is ready to cede power to civilians of the opposition...
Tonight, they have earned the right to celebrate a glorious victory, obtained in just three weeks.
For 18 days we have withstood tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition, molotov cocktails, thugs on horseback, the scepticism and fear of our loved ones, and the worst sort of ambivalence from an international community that claims to care about democracy. But we held our ground. We did it, Karim Medhat Ennarah, a protester, told The Guardian.
Mubarak resigned thirty-two years to the day after the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran.
Wael Ghonim, a spokesman for the opposition sent this message to the Iranians, shortly before Mubarak's departure. I would tell Iranians to learn from the Egyptians, as we have learned from you guys, that at the end of the day with the power of people, we can do whatever we want to do. If we unite our goals, if we believe, then all our dreams can come true.
This was the great lesson of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.
Once the people acquire sufficient faith in their ability to take control of their own destiny, they are invincible...
May their example inspire all the oppressed in the Middle East and elsewhere...
It can be done...
The Tunisians and now the Egyptians have just done it...
(the photograph above is by Suhaib Salem/Reuters)

We are getting our country back...

2011-02-10T23:06:00.000+01:00

Tahrir Square is filling up at an unusually brisk pace tonight.
Is it in anticipation of tomorrow’s march of millions, or of a more momentous event to occur later this evening?
The president is to address the nation tonight.
The Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed forces met this afternoon, an extremely rare occurrence and without the president. An army official announced that all the demands of the crowd would be met...
Is Mubarak about to resign, thus?
Have the Egyptian people prevailed?
Demonstrators are already dancing in the streets…
The Prime Minister indicated that Mubarak was still president and that nothing had changed…Nothing?
Today, thousands of doctors and students demonstrated in the streets of Cairo and headed toward Tahrir Square, joining a movement whose vitality shows no sign of faltering.
Some three thousand lawyers did likewise, as did engineers, journalists and public transport workers, including bus drivers.
Even some journalists at the pro-government daily al Ahram went on strike, to protest the newspaper’s biased coverage of the unrest.
Protesters have now spent two days and two nights in front of the Parliament building, opening up a new front in the confrontation with the regime.
Yesterday, 6000 workers at the Suez Canal Authority participated in a sit-in. Striking textile workers blocked roads in Mahalla, 2,000 pharmaceutical workers went on strike in Quesna, and 5,000 unemployed young Egyptians marched in Aswan, demanding the resignation of the governor.
The unrest is spreading, for Egyptians are no longer fearful of voicing their grievances.
Not all the demonstrators have a political agenda per se, and many are demanding higher salaries and better working and living conditions. Yet, their activism is reinforcing the anti-Mubarak opposition.
Protesters are more emboldened and more determined by the day. This is a growing movement, it’s not shrinking, Ahmad Salah, an activist, told Aljazeera.
Vice President Omar Suleiman however, warned the protesters that the unrest would have to cease. We can’t bear this for a long time. There must be an end to this crisis as soon as possible. We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools, he declared yesterday.
Was the Vice President suggesting that a coup might be in the offing should the uprising not come to a swift conclusion?
Continued unrest would lead to the dark bats of the night emerging to terrorize people. There was only one alternative to the current, gradual transition process, he claimed: a coup... which would mean uncalculated and hasty steps, including lots of irrationalities.
Was the Vice President threatening to impose martial law if the opposition did not cease its daily demonstrations, now accompanied by social strife?
I mean a coup of the regime against itself, or a military coup or an absence of the system. Some force, whether it’s the army or police or the intelligence agency or the (Muslim) Brotherhood or the youth themselves could carry out creative chaos to end the regime and take power, he said.
This, however, did not deter the opposition activists from pursuing their campaign.
We are striking and we will protest and we will not negotiate until Mubarak steps down. Whoever wants to threaten us, then let them do so, Khaled Abdel-Hamid, an activist belonging to the youth movement, told The Guardian.
And I am telling this to Omar Suleiman. He’s going to watch this. You are not going to stop us. Kidnap me, kidnap all my colleagues. Put us in jail. Kill us. Do whatever you want to do. We are getting back our country. You guys have been ruining this country for 30 years, Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who was released earlier this week after twelve days in detention, told CNN.
The regime however, reiterated its threats today.
We have to preserve the Constitution, even if it is amended.
If chaos occurs, the armed forces will intervene to control the country , a step which would lead to a very dangerous situation, Aboul Gheit, Egypt’s Foreign Minister, declared today.
The regime had been clearly hoping that once a transition process had been announced, the unrest would gradually subside, alleviating pressure on Mubarak and the government.
The fact that it has not, quite the contrary, may explain its more intransigent attitude.
The Foreign Minister rebuffed US demands to repeal the emergency law, which gives the security apparatus sweeping powers, while the Vice President has steadfastly refused to consider establishing a transitional government that would include opposition leaders.
A more robust confrontation with the protest movement now seems likely.
The regime is taking a hard line and so negotiations have essentially come to an end.
Suleiman’s comments about there being a danger were shocking to us all. It was a betrayal of the spirit of negotiations, and is unacceptable. The regime ‘s strategy has been just to play for time and stall with negotiations. They don’t really want to talk to anyone, Diaa Rashwan, a member of the opposition organization the Council of Wise Men, told The Guardian.
Although the regime has striven to project a more benign and civilized demeanor, it has continued arresting. and torturing those it suspects of participating in the demonstrations.
The director of the Egyptian initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo, Hossam Bahgat, told The Guardian that he suspects hundreds if not thousands of Egyptians may have disappeared, abducted by the army.
One protester recounted his ordeal to Chris McGreal, of The Guardian.
They put me in a room. An officer came and asked me who was paying me to be against the government. When I said I wanted a better government he hit me across the head and I fell to the floor. Then soldiers started kicking me. One of them kept kicking me between my legs. They said I could die there or I could disappear into prison and no one would ever know. The torture was painful but the idea of disappearing in a military prison was really frightening.
Some people, especially the activists, say they were interrogated about any possible links to political organizations or any outside forces. For the ordinary protesters, they get slapped around and asked: « Why are you in Tahrir? » It seems to serve as an interrogation operation and an intimidation and deterrence, Bahgat added.
I think it becomes pretty obvious by now that the military is not a neutral party. The military doesn’t want and doesn’t believe in the protests and this is even at the lower level, based on the interrogations, Heba Morayef, of HRW, told Chris McGreal.
The journalist Robert Tait, of RFE/RL was himself abducted and detained for some twenty-eight hours.
In this hotel, there are only two items on the menu for those who don’t behave-electrocution and rape, the Mukhabarat thug told Tait and the numerous other detainees.
Fellow Egyptian detainees were ruthlessly beaten and abused with an electrocution device.
Get the electric shocks ready. This lot are to be made to really suffer, a guard said as a group of newly abducted Egyptians were brought in. Holding a British passport, Tait was spared this treatment.
I had flown to Cairo to find out what was ailing so many Egyptians. I did not expect to learn the answer so graphically, he wrote.
It is not only Mubarak that must leave and leave now, but his regime must be dismantled, including his ruthless security apparatus.
If Mubarak leaves, will not the military be tempted to seize power?
Will the armed forces jettison Mubark in order to preserve the regime?
We are not there yet!
Mubarak has spoken tonight and rejected the protesters' injunction to step down.
Satisfied with what I have offered the nation for more than sixty years, I have announced I will stay with this post and I will continue to shoulder my responsibilities, Mubarak declared.
We will not accept or listen to any foreign interventions or dictations, he added.
The president, defiant and highly pleased with himself, will remain President, come what may...
The struggle continues.
Tomorrow's march of millions will give the Egyptian people the opportunity to respond...
The old autocrat will fall.
It is only a matter of time...
The photograph above was taken on Egypt TV by APTN/AP)

Suleiman the democrat...

2011-02-08T22:14:00.000+01:00

Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, who fought against Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars, became the head of the country’s intelligence services in 1993.
A close confidante of Hosni Mubarak, he saved the president’s life (and also his own for he was traveling with him) when he insisted that the latter ride in an armored car while on a visit to Addis Ababa in 1995, thereby foiling an assassination attempt…
As head of intelligence, Suleiman was closely involved in nurturing relations with Israel. His duties also included waging a ruthless war against Islamic extremist groups within Egypt, which he succeeded in eradicating.
Recent WikiLeaks cables reveal that the Vice President has only contempt for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization he invited for talks last Sunday, which consists of, in his words, liars who only understand force.
He has cunningly manipulated the threat the Islamic movement supposedly represents to deflect Western pressure to democratize Egypt’s authoritarian regime.
Suleiman claimed that the MB (Muslim Brotherhood) had spawned different Islamic extremist organizations, most notably the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Gama’a Islamiya (Islamic Group), according to a cable written in February 2006 by the US ambassador, Francis Ricciardone.
In a previous cable, the ambassador wrote that the regime has a long history of threatening us with the Muslim Brotherhood bogeyman.
Suleiman was also an active and effective participant in the Bush/Cheney extraordinary renditions program.
The CIA seized alleged Al Qaeda operatives abroad and would then transfer them to Egypt so that Mr. Suleiman’s services could interrogate them. Torture was standard operating procedure. As another former ambassador recalled, he was not (a) squeamish man by any means…
Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda militant, was captured by the Pakistanis in November 2001 and handed over to the US at Bagram base, in Afghanistan.
He was then sent to Egypt, where Suleiman’s task was to convince him to confirm the Bush contention that Saddam Hussein was assisting Al Qaeda, and that the Iraqi dictator intended to provide biological and chemical weapons to the terrorist organization…
Libi confessed and the information extracted formed the basis of Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations in 2003, justifying the Bush/Cheney claim that Iraq presented a dire and imminent threat to the security of the United States…
The information provided by Libi turned out to be nonsense, but was the direct by- product of Suleiman’s interrogation techniques.
They were killing me, Liby declared later. I had to tell them something…
Not surprisingly, the Israelis trust Mr. Suleiman. There is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Suleiman succeeding Mubarak, a 2008 US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks indicated.
Suleiman is an imposing man. He’s pretty wily, very polished and extremely intelligent. People are scared of him, for obvious reasons, a former British ambassador, David Blatherwick, told The Guardian.
He is not known to be a progressive thinker. Nobody would consider him to be a democrat, Steve Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Guardian.
This is the man Washington believes is best suited to manage the transition process designed to lead to the establishment of a functioning democratic regime…
We hear that they are committed to this and when we press on concrete steps and timelines, we are given assurance that that will happen, Hillary Clinton told NPR.
A clear road map has been put in place with a set timetable to realize the peaceful and organized transfer of power, the Vice President declared Tuesday morning.
The US fully supports this process therefore, and now believes it is counterproductive to demand Mubarak’s resignation for that would lead to snap presidential elections, which could prove detrimental to the establishment of a genuinely democratic regime in the country. That risk could be avoided however, if a Mubarak resignation was followed by the suspension of the constitution, such that an interim government would have sufficient time to prepare fair and free elections. This is one of the opposition ‘s demands…
Free and fair elections demand preparation we are told, for the constitution must be amended. It is important to kind of look over the horizon. You don’t want to get to September and have a failed election and then people feel: What did we do, what was the point of all this, Hillary Clinton declared on Sunday.
The process must not be rushed!
Washington and Mr. Suleiman jointly believe that what must be averted at all cost is instability. Mubarak’s departure would have adverse consequences on the transition process. Other people who have their own agenda will make instability in our country, the Vice President suggested…
Yet, the man now custodian of the democratization process does not believe the country is ready for democracy and will not be until the people here have the culture of democracy, he insisted.
In addition, he accused the demonstrators of being manipulated by foreigners and Islamic groups. It’s not their idea, he said referring to the demands of the protesters. It comes from abroad…
The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs,condemned the Vice President’s remarks.
The notion that Egypt isn’t ready for democracy I think runs quite counter to what we see happening in Tahrir Square and on the streets in cities throughout the country. It’s clear that statements like that are not going to be met with any agreement by the people of Egypt because they don’t address the very legitimate grievances that we’ve seen expressed as a result of these protests, he said.
Should we be entrusting Egypt’s future to this man?
Yes, since our paramount objective here is not allowing the emergence of a democratic regime per se, but preserving the stability of the country, even if that entails it should remain an authoritarian one.
This sort of « orderly transition » in post-Mubarak Egypt is more likely to usher in a return to the repressive status quo than an era of widening popular participation, Joshua Stracher, an academic, wrote in Foreign Affairs.
It plays right into the hands of the regime. The longer this goes, the better it is for Mubarak, Suleiman and the rest of the military-dominated leadership, said Steve Cook.
I fear the administration is heading toward acceptance of the perpetuation of the Egyptian dictatorship in all but name, Robert Kagan, of the Brooking Institution, told Politico.
What do Egyptians make of the US position?
Don’t gamble on a leader-put your money on the people, a doctor, Lotfy Abdul-Mageed, told the Washington Post.
Others however, were not surprised, yet neither need nor want Western support.
If the United States supports the revolution, it is good for the United States. If they do not, it is an Egyptian issue, Islam Lofty, a lawyer, told the NYT.
In the end, does it matter what Washington says or does?
The administration is being hammered but it has no leverage to influence events, Steve Cook told The Guardian.
Hillary Clinton did concede as much.
Now the Egyptians are the ones who are having to grapple with the reality of what they must do, she said.
Indeed, and all the opposition groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood, have demanded the immediate resignation of President Mubarak.
Today, hundreds of thousands, according to Aljazeera, protested in Cairo demanding, once again, Mubarak’s immediate departure.
If, ultimately, the warnings and proclamations of Western leaders matter little on the ground, why are they not wholeheartedly supporting the brave Egyptian people who are demanding not only that Mubarak step down, but also those rights we already possess and take for granted: freedom of speech, freedom to choose one’s leaders and to earn a decent living…
The Obama administration obviously wants to support democracy. But the US has been backing the military regime in Egypt for 30 years, Andrew McGregor, of the Jamestown Foundation, told the NYT.
It is high time that we ceased supporting a sclerotic, authoritarian regime that is morally bankrupt and that has been preying on the population for much too long.
It is the regime itself that has become a source of instability, precisely that which we wish to avert at all cost…
We should be insisting on its downfall, therefore, so Egypt can transform itself, with our help if it wants it, into a functioning and vibrant democracy.
Supporting the people of Egypt instead of its current rulers is the only sensible thing to do. It is also the only ethical thing to do.
Who would we be if we did not say we stand on the side of the people, asked Chancellor Angela Merkel?
Saying that we are on their side is grossly insufficient.
The time has come for Western democracies to withdraw all support for the Mubarak regime, and help the Egyptians create their own future, on their terms, not ours…
(the photograph above can be found here)

This is our revolution...

2011-02-07T12:00:00.000+01:00

It was a new day in Tahrir on Sunday, the thirteenth in the Egyptian people’s struggle to overthrow the reviled Mubarak regime.
Approximately one million people (according to Aljazeera) attended this day of the martyrs, during which both Christian and Islamic services were held to commemorate the victims of the uprising.
The atmosphere however, remained festive and a wedding was actually celebrated on the square Sunday afternoon.
Yet, there were signs that the army was attempting to remove some of the makeshift barriers erected by the occupants as protection from hostile outside forces, and moving inside the square. As a result, some youths resorted to sitting down in front of the tanks to immobilize them…
As banks and shops began reopening, Vice President Omar Suleiman invited opposition forces to discuss constitutional reform.
Washington and other Western capitals support this process, and the man leading it, the Vice President.
That (an orderly transition) takes some time. There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare, Hillary Clinton said, in a speech given at a conference on security in Munich.
At the same event, Chancellor Angela Merkel made a similar statement.
There will be change in Egypt, but clearly, the change has to be shaped in a way that is peaceful, a sensible way forward, she declared.
The West clearly fears that the current revolutionary process could subvert the current order, creating a vacuum that would then be filled by forces (anti-Western Islamic forces) imposing an agenda hostile to its security interests.
The Palestinian precedent must also be haunting them: free and fair parliamentary elections were conducted in 2006 with Western support. Our friends, The Fatah of President Abbas, were trounced by Hamas, an Islamic movement opposed to the peace process with Israel.
Washington and the EU are keen on making sure such an outcome is not replicated in Egypt…The establishment of a democratic regime would be the desired outcome, as long as its leaders are pro-Western and Israeli…Elections must not be organized to soon, for only one party is currently sufficiently organized and influential to win them, the Muslim Brotherhood. President Obama claimed on Sunday evening that elements of its program are anti-American, according to Fox.
Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy only to see the process hijacked by new autocrats who use violence, deception and rigged elections to stay in power, Clinton added.
In light of such a risk, Washington prefers supporting the old autocrats, those it knows well and has been subsidizing for thirty years. If stalwarts of the old regime such as Suleiman supervise the transition leading to new elections in September, the greater the chance, it is hoped, that Egypt’s new leaders will pursue policies compatible with US and Israeli interests in the region.
To say that Mubarak should stay and lead the process of change, and that the process of change should essentially be led by his closest military advisor (Suleiman) who’s not the most popular person in Egypt, without the sharing of power with civilians, it would be very, very disappointing, Mohamed ElBaradei told Reuters.
There remained some confusion however, concerning what role, if any, Mubarak should play in this process. We need to get a national consensus around the pre-conditions for the next step forward. The president must stay in office to steer those changes. I believe that President Mubarak's continued leadership is critical-it's his chance to write his own legacy, declared Frank Wisner, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Egypt, on Saturday. This did not reflect, apparently, the official position of the United States.
In light of what’s happened the last two weeks, going back to the old ways is not going to work. Suppression is not going to work. Engaging in violence is not going to work, President Obama had declared on Friday.
He did not demand however (nor did the Europeans) that Mubarak resign.
Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq confirmed on Saturday that the Egyptian president would not step down before the end of his term, which expires in September…
Vice President Suleiman, thus, met with members of the opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, a party banned over fifty years ago, but that is tolerated in the country.
Suleiman did make some concessions. He called for the formation of a committee to examine possible amendments to the constitution that would permit free and fair elections; the prosecution of corrupt officials; measures to promote the freedom of the press; the lifting of the emergency law when conditions allow and the release of political prisoners currently in detention.
The Muslim Brotherhood however, was not satisfied.
We cannot call it talks or negotiations. The Muslim Brotherhood went with a key condition that cannot be abandoned, that he (Mubarak) needs to step down in order to usher in a democratic process, Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a spokesman for the organization, told Aljazeera. If they were serious, the parliament would have been dissolved, also a presidential decree ending the emergency law, he added.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who was not invited to participate, also criticized the Vice President’s approach. The process is opaque. Nobody knows who is talking to whom at this stage. It’s managed by Vice President Suleiman. It is all managed by the military and that is part of the problem, he told NBC.
The process initiated on Sunday satisfies the leaders of the current autocratic regime, and those of the West.
Yet, who consulted the main protagonists, that is to say the Egyptian people, so diversely represented at Tahrir Square?
The movement’s particularity is its amorphous nature and fundamental democratic character.
I was expecting to find the Wafd were the leaders, or the Brotherhood were the leaders. There are no leaders at all, one demonstrator told the NYT.
It is led, or rather, inspired and motivated by Egypt’s youth.
Those young men defended Egypt. They took the bullet, a leader of ElBaradei’s National Association for Change, told the NYT.
It is inside the Square that the demonstrators elaborated their own political agenda.
When the government shut down the web, politics moved on to the streets, and that’s where it has stayed. It’s impossible to construct a perfect decision-making mechanism in such as fast-moving environment, but this is as democratic as we can possibly be, a young demonstrator told Jack Shenker, of The Guardian.
Protesters debate the future of the nation.
Their delegates meet to refine this agenda and the proposals that are greeted with the loudest cheer and applause when communicated to the crowd by the PA system are adopted.
The regime is trying to demonize protesters as agents of foreign powers, fomenters of chaos and so on. But go down to Tahrir, sit on a corner, and within five minutes you’ll be in the middle of a spontaneous political discussion-the energy of people’s ideas is inspiring. It’s down there that the legitimate voice of the protesters and our revolution can be heard, Hossam el-Hamalawy, a journalist, told Shenker.
The revolution is now in the custody of the streets, and that is where its future lies, not in the White House, nor the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis.
What we have here is the opposite of a vacuum; we have democracy in action on the ground in Tahrir Square. We are full of hope and ideas, and our gallant young people are guarding our periphery, the author Ahdaf Soueif wrote in The Guardian.
The words of people are stronger than guns, one protester named Mohammed mused.
In the words of Anthony Shadid, Tahrir has become an idea as much as a place…
Those in the Square and elsewhere have been victimized, brutalized, robbed, disenfranchised and at best, ignored for over thirty years. The notion that Mubarak and his henchmen can be entrusted with the transition process the aim of which is to establish an authentic and functioning democracy is absurd.
Either the people or the regime will prevail; there can be no accommodation.
It’s in the streets now. It’s the people of Egypt protesting. We have no future. Either we die, or this regime goes completely, Omar Ghoneim, a businessman, told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
I am doing this for my son. Mubarak has to go because with Mubarak my son has no future…The government is Mubarak’s government, not our government. I will stay here until Mubarak leaves. I will stay here days, months, years, an accountant called Ismael told Chris McGreal of The Guardian.
But we cannot be afraid to free ourselves. I’m 30 years old and I’ve never voted in an election because they were always corrupt and fake. We are going to stay until he goes, Ahmed Moar, a university professor, told The Guardian.
The authenticity and power of the messages being hurled from Tahrir Square should not be ignored in Washington D.C.
Many Egyptians fear that the US, even Obama’s US, will do whatever it takes, even sacrificing their interests, to preserve the current regime, even in a diluted form, in order to protect Israel.
Egypt is not against America. I don’t want the Americans to tell my country what to do. All Egyptian people must decide. America has an agenda. It is not our agenda and this is our revolution, Ismael added.
What are the objectives of the revolution?
The former opposition presidential candidate, Ayman Nour tried to summarize the people’s fundamental demands:
*the eradication of the police state and its repressive apparatus;
*the formation of a national unity government tasked with drafting a new constitution;
*the organization of free and fair elections.
First and foremost however, Mubarak must leave, and leave now.
In essence, Ahdaf Soueif poses the fundamental question: can a people’s revolution that is determinedly democratic, grass-roots, inclusive and peaceable succeed?
It is the responsibility of all those who believe in freedom, justice and democracy to ensure that it does.
Crucially, this responsibility belongs to those who represent us, Mrs. Merkel, MM. Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy.
It is the revolution of the Egyptian people, which they have paid for with decades of abuse, and we have no right to strip it away from them, in order to preserve a sclerotic, corrupt regime which we foolishly believed could foster stability in the region.
Only a functioning democracy can achieve this, not brazen despotism.
So let us, at the very least, if we can manage no better, get out of their way, and allow them to finish what they have so valiantly started…
(the photograph of Christians and Muslims commemorating the fallen in Tahrir Square is by Amel Pain/EPA)

.

Vintage Mubarak...

2011-02-03T22:37:00.000+01:00

Some eight days after the start of the Egyptian people’s revolt, and which some have called a revolution, Mubarak’s supporters finally took to the streets, as if on cue.
Tens of thousands of them stormed Tahrir Square, hitherto the bastion of those demanding the President’s resignation.
In ten minutes, there will be a big fight here-it is an old game, the oldest game in the regime, one observer at the scene told the NYT.
Indeed, shortly, before 230PM, the violence began, instigated by Mubarak’s supporters.
The assault appeared well planned. Just twenty-four hours after Mubarak‘s speech during which he told his people he had no intention of stepping down, but would serve until the end of his term, and President Obama’s statement demanding that the political transition begin now, the old autocrat unleashed his supporters, brazenly announcing to all that he had not conceded defeat, on the contrary.
Mubarak is saying a big « F… you » to the United States and a big « F…you » to the Egyptian people, unfortunately. He’s saying, « you want me to leave? I will not leave. You will not intervene in my domestic affairs. And I will kill my people», Amr Shalakany, a professor at Cairo University, and the American University in Cairo, told McClatchy.
Some of his supporters arrived by bus. Some were reportedly paid 50 Egyptian pounds ($10 or so) to attend.
The onslaught started when Mubarak’s supporters threw projectiles at anti-government demonstrators thronging the square.
With our blood, we sacrifice for you, oh Mubarak, they chanted.
One hour later, the baltageya, or thugs in local slang, riding horses and camels, charged into the crowd wielding sticks and truncheons, striking all those within their reach…
The confrontation lasted some twenty hours, as each side lashed out at the other with clubs, sticks, bottles and rocks.
« He won’t go, » President Hosni Mubarak’s supporters chanted on the other side. « He will go, » went the reply. « We’re not going to go », reported Anthony Shadid, of the NYT.
Later Wednesday night, Mubarak supporters resorted to more lethal weapons, such as firearms and Molotov cocktails, thrown from rooftops onto opposition demonstrators below
Eight were killed, and some 890 injured during the violence, including some journalists (such as CNN‘s Anderson Cooper, who along with his crew was beaten up). Some two dozen others were also arrested.
Tellingly, the army refused to intervene.
Why don’t you protect us, the protesters complained to the idle soldiers?
Because of the mounting violence, the demands of anti-government demonstrators became more radical.
The people want the execution of the president. Mubarak is a war criminal, some shouted, according to the NYT.
They want to take the revolution from us. We are ready to die for the revolution, Mohamed Gamil, a dentist, told the NYT.
Who were the violent Mubarak supporters?
Many opposition demonstrators suspect that they were civilian-clad policemen, officers who vanished from the streets last Friday.
The strategy of sending in the thugs after making half-hearted promises was vintage Mubarak. The tactic is familiar to political observers, for he’s employed the same approach in national elections-assuring Western allies of fair polls and instead rounding up opposition candidates and dispatching foot soldiers to rough up supporters, wrote Hannah Allam of McClatchy.
Some Mubarak militants that were caught by opposition members possessed police identification cards. Some were severely beaten.
Not all were stalwart or opportunistic supporters of Mubarak, however.
Some attended because they considered that the concessions Mubarak had announced during his TV address (not seeking reelection, and amending the constitution to allow fair and free elections, for instance) were sufficient. There was no need to humiliate the President and demand his immediate departure..
People should leave Tahrir Square. The president has made the concessions he was asked for. So now people can go home. If he tries to undo the changes, we can always go back again, Mohamed Megahid, 30, told The Guardian.
On Thursday morning, bursts of gunfire were heard again in Cairo.
Clashes then erupted near the square.
This time however, the army did step in, positioning its tanks so as to separate the antagonistic factions.
Moreover, as more and more opposition demonstrators returned to the square (between 50 and 100,000 according to The Guardian), they remained firmly in control of this anti-Mubarak stronghold, and determined to pursue their campaign.
Yesterday was a slaughter. I will not leave Tahrir. I will be here until Mubarak leaves or I die, Mustafa Mohammad told the LAT.
The Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq actually apologized for the violence although a government spokesman denied the authorities had anything to do with the tragic events. I offer my apology for everything that happened yesterday because it is neither logical nor rational, he declared.
The opposition made it quite clear however, that it will not negotiate with the current regime, reflecting the will of the streets.
This is Mubarak’s mafia and they are trying to terrify us, Mohammed Ali, a twenty-three-year-old demonstrator told The Sydney Morning Herald, referring to the pro-Mubarak militants. We are not interested in negotiations. It’s been 30 years of talking. Mubarak has to leave.
The opposition has asked the Egyptian people to take to the streets again Friday, hoping that a massive turnout (which they have called the Departure Day demonstration) will finally convince Mubarak that it is time to leave.
Yet, it is not clear what will happen should, in all likelihood, he refuse to do so.
The lack of an effective and articulate opposition is also a legacy of Mubarakism.
The problem is that for 30 years, Mubarak didn’t let us build an alternative. No alternative for anything, Adel Wehba, an opposition supporter told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
If I resign today, there will be chaos, Mubarak told Christiane Amanpour, of ABC News, this afternoon. The old autocrat has lost all sense of reality.
Chaos risks engulfing the entire nation if he does not leave and leave now.
It is clear that Egypt’s youth, having discovered its power and potential after eight days of revolt, will not tolerate any other denouement than Mubarak’s departure
What we want is simple-democracy. We don’t want Mubarak’s son as the next president; we want free elections and the right to choose the best candidate for president.
The mood here is positive among young people. We feel we are doing something very great. We feel the country is now ours and that we can change anything, Mohamed Saad, a young Egyptian, wrote in The Guardian.
Saad and millions like him have just sealed Mubarak’s fate…
(the title of this post is borrowed from this McClatchy piece; the photograph above of Mubarak supporters confronting opposition demonstrators is by AP)

Welcome to a free Egypt...

2011-02-02T16:09:00.000+01:00

The authorities had done their utmost to limit the turnout for the March of Millions yesterday in Cairo. Roads between Alexandria and Cairo had been blocked, rail service and public transportation in the capital interrupted.
Yet, the crowds that reached and demonstrated in Tahrir Square were simply unprecedented.
Hundreds of thousands?
Aljazeera estimated that over two million Egyptians filled the square and adjacent areas to demand that President Mubarak resign at once.
Egyptians from all walks of life, many accompanied by their children were there and demanded to be heard at last.
Peasants from southern Egypt joined Islamists from the Nile Delta, businessmen from upper-class suburbs rubbed shoulders with street-smart youths from gritty Boulaqin in a square that served as a vast tapestry of a country’s diversity joined in the bluntest of message: Mr. Mubarak must surrender power.
« Go already», read one sign held aloft. « My arm’s starting to hurt », wrote Anthony Shadid and David D. Kirkpatrick in the NYT.
McClatchy’s Hannah Allam and Shashank Bengali described the scene thus:
All day long, protesters chanted « leave! » It came from the mouths of children draped in the Egyptian flag, bearded clerics in turbans, teenagers dancing to a drumbeat and elderly women with tears in their eyes. Long before the president’s speech, cameras flashed and video recorders rolled as the protesters documented what they hoped would go down in Egyptian history as the end of Mubarak’s regime.
« In my whole life, I’ve never known another president, and suddenly I can’t imagine how he can stay for even one more day, » said Tasneem Osman, 26. « He has to go. He will go. »
With information more and more difficult to obtain, as internet and mobile phone services were shut down by the authorities, rumors swirled in Tahrir Square. Some protesters cheered at the news that President Mubarak had fled the country. Alas, from the protesters’ point of view, this turned out not to be…
Google, Tweeter and Say now devised a system, speak2tweet allowing Egyptians to send Twitter messages by phone (Wednesday morning, however, the internet services were partially restored).
Originally, the huge crowd was to march on the Presidential Palace eight miles away, but the undertaking seemed too perilous, potentially leading to clashes with the army, which has, for the time being, refused to confront the demonstrators.
In the early evening, a huge television screen was installed in the square, broadcasting Aljazeera, a network officially banned by the authorities (it has now, once again, become available).
The determination of the Egyptians present seemed intact, even after a week of protest: everyone is out there to deliver a clear message to the system that we are not going to let go. We want our voices to be heard, one protester told The Guardian.
Moreover, the weeklong revolt has led to a virtual economic paralysis.
The stock market, which lost 17% last week, has been closed for four straight days.
The transportation of goods around the country has ceased due to a general lack of security. Shops and banks are closed, ATMs are empty and tourists are feeing the country.
Hence, most Egyptians did not receive their January salary as they are paid in cash, and none is available…
Life is therefore, becoming difficult, putting additional pressure on the protagonists. on President Mubarak, compelled to find a quick solution to the crisis, and on the demonstrators, obligated to choose between satisfying their material needs, and thus abandoning the struggle, or pursuing their political agenda and accepting the hardships that ensue.
Things are tough, but I’m more concerned about getting this government out of power. We can get by on less, Ahmad Ismail, a young real estate agent, told the NYT.
The pressure on President Mubarak to resolve the crisis has been intensifying.
The magnitude and intensity of the demonstrations convinced the Obama Administration last weekend that the days of the Mubarak regime were numbered.
As a result, and at Hillary Clinton’s behest, Frank Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt, was dispatched to Cairo to try to convince Mubarak to leave the scene…
Yesterday, in a NYT op-ed piece, unequivocally called Allying Ourselves With the Next Egypt, John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote that the stability of his country hinges on his willingness to step aside.
The message was clear. Mubarak was now recognized as an impediment to the emergence of a new, democratic Egypt.
Kerry also urged the President and his son, Gamal, hitherto considered his designated successor, not to run in next September’s Presidential election.
He also recommended that the US reorient its financial aid to Egypt, currently almost exclusively directed towards the Egyptian military, in support of Egyptian society.
Although he did not formally ask for the President’s resignation, he concluded his article thus,
It is vital that we stand with the people who share our values and hopes and who seek the universal goals of freedom, prosperity and peace.
For three decades, the United States pursued a Mubarak policy. Now we must look beyond the Mubarak era and devise an Egyptian policy.
The old autocrat was now clearly on his own…
As a result, President Mubarak told an expectant nation during a television appearance last night that he would not seek reelection next September.
I will say, with all honesty and without looking at this particular situation, that I was not intending to stand for the next elections because I’ve spent enough time serving Egypt. I’m now careful to conclude my work for Egypt by presenting Egypt to the next government in a constitutional way.
Yet, he also made it quite clear that he would serve the remainder of his term, which expires in September.
The events of the past few days impose on us, both citizens and leadership, the choice between chaos and stability. I am now absolutely determined to finish my work for the nation in a way that ensures its safekeeping, he added.
He was also defiant, vowing that no one would drive him from the homeland he had served for so long.
The Hosni Mubarak who speaks to you today is proud of his achievements over the years in serving Egypt and its people. This is my country. This is where I lived, fought and defended its land, sovereignty and interests, and I will die on its soil, he declared.
The demonstrators in Tahrir Square, who followed the speech on television, were deeply disappointed. Leave, they chanted.
Leave, have some dignity, others shouted.
The President’s concessions were deemed insufficient, too little too late.
The people said it clearly: they want a new democratic regime and this regime has lost its legitimacy.
I would have liked that President Mubarak would listen to the sounds of the millions that went out today, Mohamed ElBaradei told Aljazeera.
You see all these people, with no stealing, no girls being bothered, and no violence.
He’s trying to tell us that without me, without the regime, you will fall into anarchy, but we have told him, No, a demonstrator told Anthony Shadid of the NYT
The Egyptians no longer need Mubarak. He no longer protects his people, or the nation, but has become an obstacle to the development of their vast potential…
Nor is he serving the interests of his country, but only his own, at the expense of those of his people.
President Obama called Mubarak shortly after he had addressed the Egyptian nation, to inform him that the crisis could not wait until September to be resolved.
What is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now, the President said.
Though not asked to do so, it is clear the President was hoping that Mubarak would resign as soon as possible, for, as he declared, the status quo is impossible.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground was becoming more volatile.
Thousands returned to Tahrir Square (many have been there since…last week).
Some 3,000 of pro-Mubarak supporters also took to the streets this morning.
Some clashed with pro-democracy activists in Tahrir Square.
Thousands and thousands of pro-Mubarak supporters are now pouring into the square, Peter Beaumont, of The Guardian, reported this afternoon.
Fearing that the current situation was untenable and could degenerate into violence, the army issued a statement asking the demonstrators to go home.
Your message is received…Your demands became known. And we are here and awake to protect the country for you, not by power but by the love to Egypt. It is time to go back to normal life. You have the power to allow Egypt to return to normal life. We are with You. We will continue to secure our country, a Defense ministry spokesman declared this morning.
It seems that the pro-democracy camp intends to occupy Tahrir Square massively again on Friday, after mid-day prayers, hoping to force Mubarak from power at last.
Mubarak’s supporters seem intent on defending the old autocrat’s regime…
Mubarak should have done the honorable thing and resigned.
His legacy may now include helplessly presiding over a popular revolt that then degenerated into a violent bloodbath…
(the photograph of yesterday's demonstration in Tahrir Squrae is by Emilio Morenatti/AP Photo)

It is time to choose...

2011-02-01T16:39:00.000+01:00

The army has to choose between Egypt and Mubarak, read a banner held by protesters yesterday in Cairo.
As of yet, the army has refused to clarify its intentions.
Nevertheless, it did take one principled stand that may spell the end of Mubarak’s regime.
In a statement, the armed forces said the following:
The presence of the army in the streets is for your sake and to ensure your safety and wellbeing. The armed forces will not resort to use force against our great people
Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody.
That the army should be hesitant to support unequivocally the regime is not surprising.
The armed forces embody Egyptian nationalism.
A 1952 coup led by Gamal Abdul Nasser overthrew King Faruk and the monarchy.
The nation has been led by military men ever since.
An army composed of conscripts, it has close links with the Egyptian people.
As such, the lower ranks no doubt share the frustrations and demands of those demonstrating in the streets of Alexandria, Cairo and Suez.
The fact that the army has clearly stated that it would not fire on its own people may further embolden the Egyptian opposition movement.
Their leaders have called on all Egyptians to demonstrate today in unprecedented numbers in a march of millions, to commemorate the seventh day in the Egyptian people‘s campaign to rid the country of the autocratic Mubarak regime.
President Mubarak has refused to yield and appointed a new cabinet yesterday, including a new Interior Minister in charge of security, Mahmoud Wagdi, former director of Egypt’s prisons.
He did instruct his Vice President, Omar Suleiman (notorious for his role in the US extraordinary renditions program and his propensity to employ torture, when head of the country’s intelligence services) to begin talks with the opposition on constitutional reform. The president has asked me today to immediately hold meetings with the political forces to start a dialogue about all raised issues that also involve constitutional and legislative reforms in a way that will result in clear proposed amendments and a specific timetable for its implementation, he said, according to The Guardian.
The various strands of the opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Ayman Nour, the former presidential candidate, Mohamed ElBaradei’s National Association for Change, and the young activists in the April 6 Youth Movement, appointed a committee to negotiate with the Mubarak government.
Though the Muslim Brotherhood constitute the most powerful and influential current, ElBaradei was asked to lead it.
Well known abroad since his days as head of the IAEA, winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, he was considered a more appealing spokesman than a member of the Islamic organization…
A national salvation government was also appointed, to be led by Mr. ElBaradei as well, should President Mubarak resign in the near future.
Young political activists, particularly in the April 6 Movement, have been at the forefront of the opposition coalition, using the internet and social networking sites to mobilize disgruntled Egyptians against the regime (Egypt’s internet is now completely down, as the last provider Noor, was shut down as well yesterday. Satellite TV, and the coverage of Aljazeera, now fuel the movement though the network was taken off the air Sunday by the Egyptian government, which arrested six of its reporters yesterday, and confiscated their equipment).
The young people are still leading this, Ibrahim Issa, an Egyptian intellectual, told the NYT.
Mohamed ElBaradei himself has been following the advice of the young activists. At their request, he went to Tahrir Square on Sunday afternoon and addressed the demonstrators.
Their alliance with the older, traditional Egyptian opposition militants has given the opposition more coherence.
Leadership has to come out of the people who are already out there, because most of us are under 30. But now they recognize that we’re in the street, and they are taking us seriously, Amr Ezz, a lawyer and 27, member of the April 6 Youth Movement, told the NYT.
What are the opposition’s objectives?
The resignation of President Mubarak; the formation of a new government, and amending the constitution such that free and fair elections can then be held.
Yet, Mubarak is still there.
Will he still occupy the presidential palace if millions do march in Cairo’s streets today?
Yesterday, some 250,000, according to Aljazeera, demonstrated in the capital, demanding Mubarak’s resignation. They are unlikely to settle for anything less.
As one Aljazeera journalist wrote yesterday, but it is now blatantly obvious to anyone who mingled in Tahrir Square crowds growing larger by the day that they won’t go home until they have a new leader.
We have spoken. When the citizens speak, we cannot go back.
I came here to fight the fear inside me. Now people have lost their fear, Ahmed Mustafat, a demonstrator, told The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood.
To hasten the autocrat’s departure, opposition leaders will encourage protesters to adopt what David Kirkpatrick and Mona El-Naggar of the NYT called the hug a soldier strategy, to entice the military to support their cause.
We are dealing with the army in a peaceful manner until it proves otherwise, and we still have faith in the army. Until now, they are neutral, and at least if we can’t bring them to our side, we don‘t want to lose them, Mr. Ezz told the NYT.
Moreover, Mubarak has not yet lost US support.
The way Egypt looks and operates must change, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday, but it’s not for us to determine…undoubtedly in this case, transition means change.
That position is no longer tenable…
The Egyptian people demand the fall of the Mubarak regime, because the President has repeatedly demonstrated these last thirty years that he cannot, or simply will not, cater to the needs of his people: freedom, justice, democracy and decent living conditions.
Only a new republic founded on democratic principles can now satisfy the Egyptian people.
The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years will be the one to implement democracy, Mohamed ElBaradei told CBS’s Face the Nation.
It’s better for President Obama not to appear that he is the last one to say to President Mubarak, it’s time for you to go, ElBaradei said.
French junior minister for youth affairs, Jeannette Bougrab was bold enough to say that Mubarak should leave, but was then promptly summoned by French Prime Minister François Fillon and reprimanded...
Though Western support for the Egyptian demonstrators has been subdued, it is still considered recklessly excessive by the Israelis.
The Americans and the Europeans are being pulled along by public opinion and aren’t considering their genuine interests, a senior Israeli official declared, according to The Guardian.
If only that were true….Let us hope that the millions demonstrating today will finally compel the leaders of the Western world to support wholeheartedly the brave Egyptian people.
Do MM. Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy really wish to be remembered as leaders who betrayed the very foundations of their own societies and preferred to support an ailing despot until the bitter end, instead of a proud people demanding what is rightfully theirs?
(the photograph above is by Reuters)