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Today's Headlines...
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| IGC head murdered |
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5/17/2004 -Short Attention Span Theater-
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5/17/2004 Afghanistan/South Asia
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Afghans begin disarmament process
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The Afghan government has launched a nationwide campaign to disarm the country’s militia forces, seen as crucial to the holding of elections. The Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) initiative has been running as a pilot programme in five Afghan regions since October. The United Nations-backed plan is for 40,000 former fighters to be demobilised by the end of June. But UN officials say that some regional leaders are jeopardising the process.
The campaign was launched at a Kabul military base where a former anti-aircraft defence unit ceremonially handed over its missiles. But most of the missiles did not look especially threatening. Many had holes in, and several were missing their nose cones. Major Jerry Knight, a British officer watching the handover, admitted that in their current state none of them would work. "But with a bit of loving care to the electrics and some explosives and propellant, some of them could be brought back into service. So there is value in removing this stuff from the streets," he said. It was perhaps not the most convincing start to this nationwide disarmament campaign.
The UN officials who run it admit that it is going to be difficult, especially when it comes to persuading powerful regional leaders to comply: men such as Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat, or Mohammed Atta in Mazar-e-Sharif . One issue is that no-one really knows how many men they control. Nationwide, the estimate is that there are a 100,000 militia fighters, but no-one believes that. In many cases commanders have given inflated figures, partly to enhance their local status and power, but also in the hope of claiming more funds for demobilising their men.
Yet some Afghans are concerned the Western-backed disarmament programme is uneven, pressuring some commanders but not others, and therefore risking renewed instability. The picture is just as confusing with heavy weapons like missiles and tanks. They are all supposed to be in central government control by the time elections are held in September. But disarmament officials still do not have an accurate inventory of what is hidden around the country. Some Western diplomats say even the Defence Minister, Qasim Fahim, is a problem on this issue, dragging his feet on revealing what weapons his supporters still control. Yet as one political analyst argues, with the elections approaching, no-one has any incentive to come clean right now. Everyone with an armed force is bargaining right now for their position after the elections are over.
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MUSLIMS ARE NOT TERRORISTS
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| Published untouched by human hands. |
| Well... Reformatted a litte. But not one word changed. |
I read the commnets in yeloow shades on my article and was gretly surprised and pettied on the foolishness of this man who critcised me in such a manner that he nver can be regarded as human because he is prejudistic and let me tell you one thing man... Islam is a religion of peace and you people consider there freedom fight an dmovements terrorism because you fear of their supremacy because you have an experience in past.. the experience of the sword of muslim. Isalm has not changed and we still ahve the spirit of jihad thats why Waziristanis supported there brothers ...because every muslim is the brother of another muslim....and this spirit and brotherhood is lacking among you...
You called the Alqaeda fighters dogs...on account of terrorism...but you are so stupid that you never thought of the Bush and Shairoon who are indeed the greatest devils and suppotters of terrorism.The word; TERRORISM was first used by American politicians... which is clear indication of the raise and growth of this term form there(US). What BUsh and Sheroon doing in Israel and Iraq and in Afghanistan....is that not terrorism???IS to kill the innocent people nad to break the records of bombarding the innocent afghani childs is not terrorism?? What u want from afghanistan and iraq?why You are becoming our masters? We are enough to ourself.....
by; ZAHEER ABBAS MASEED ISHANGI
EX-CADET OF CADET COLLEGE RAZMAK(N.WAZIRISTAN)
GOVT COLLEGE UNIVERSITY LAHORE
CONTACT ME THROUGH MY GROUP...GROUPS.MSN.COM/CADETCOLLEGERAZMAK
| Ladies and gentlemen, you may fire when ready. |
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Qazi escapes injury as stage collapses
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| Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal acting president Qazi Hussain Ahmed escaped unhurt when the stage he was seated on at the Kashmir Integrity Conference (KIC) collapsed on Sunday, the organiser said. The incident spread panic at the conference, he said. Political and religious leaders of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Northern Areas also fell but there were few minor injuries. Jamaat-e-Islami activists rushed towards Qazi Hussain and encircled him after the stage was collapsed. However, Islami Jamiat Talba Pakistan President Zubair Ahmed Gondal continued his speech without any pausing and succeeded in regaining the attention of the audience.
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US Troops Crossing Border Into Pakistan, Seizing Tribal Leaders
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From Jihad Unspun
The American occupiers now routinely invade Pakistani territory by crossing over the Pakistan border regularly. On Saturday they entered in the tribal areas and kidnapped a tribal chief which they later took back into Afghanistan. According to details, the American forces along with collaborators were from the tribe of Tani entered in Waziristan agency in Pakistan and surrounded the house of Malik Nur Khan who is a leader of the Madakhel Tribe. They forcibly evicted him from his own house and then took him to Afghanistan. The afghan collaborators beat the men who tried to argue with the men to not take the respected leader. They also attempted to kidnap another leader, Fatah Khan, but he was away at the time. It remains to be seen what the tribal Jirga will rule on the matter considering one of its leaders was kidnapped in broad daylight by American criminals.
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Another day, another lashkar in Waziristan
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A jirga of the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe on Sunday decided to form a 4000-man lashkar to fight foreign militants in South Waziristan if they did not agree to register with the authorities.
| "Yeah! We're gonna getchoo!" |
Meanwhile, two Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) parliamentarians were still engaged in talks with the authorities to find a peaceful solution. “We will take on Nek Muhammad as well if he continues to support foreigners,” Malik Janan from the Kakakhel tribe told Daily Times on the phone from Wana, grimacing ferociously. The lashkar will not move unless a 40-member committee that is engaged in talks gives its approval. “We will request the foreigners to register with the government. If they refuse to do so, we will ask them to leave Waziristan,” he said.
| "Beg yer pardon, but would you mind vacating this end of Pakland? Thanks awfully!" |
Brig (r) Mehmood Shah, FATA security chief, said that the lashkar could begin an operation from Monday. “If they do not register themselves and refuse to leave Waziristan, the lashkar will take action against them,” Janan said, frightening a child with his demeanor. He said the lashkar would not let anyone use Pakistan’s soil against a third country. “We will defend our country’s sovereignty,” he added, rolling his eyes. Nek’s absence from Sunday’s jirga indicated that the issue of foreign militants’ registration is unlikely to be resolved peacefully.
| I have my doubts it's ever going to be resolved at all. Talk, talk, talk, make faces, ride around in pickup trucks... That's about the extent of it. |
“He (Nek) did not show up at the jirga,” Janan and tribal elders said. “What the government wants is unlikely to happen,” was the defiant message from one of Nek’s aides. “There has to be a give-and-take policy,” he added.
| "Yeah! Youse guys give, us guys takes!" |
The Ahmedzai jirga announced stern measures against those who opposed registration. “The houses of local residents sheltering foreigners will be demolished and offenders will be fined Rs 1 million,” the jirga said. The jirga also recommended 25 years of rigorous imprisonment and forced exile for tribesmen found sheltering foreign militants. Janan said the 40-member committee would meet on Monday in Wana to work out its strategy. But another tribal elder was not optimistic that the lashkar would succeed in its mission. “The administration will point out where a foreigner is and then the lashkar will move in. This will give the foreigner time to relocate because Al Qaeda’s intelligence network in Waziristan is better than the administration’s,” said the tribesman who requested not to be named. “It all depends on how strong Chief Administrator Asmatullah Gandapur is and how much the Army is backing him to deal with the situation politically,” said the tribal elder.
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Wait for foreign inputs on Afroze to end
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For the past two years, the Mumbai police have been waiting for information on suspected al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Afroze from the US, UK and Australia. The wait seems to have been futile and on Wednesday, Judge A P Bhangale of the special Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) court will frame charges against Afroze and his brother Farooq without the information from abroad. Special public prosecutor Ujwal Nikam, who is appearing in the Afroze case, told the POTA court recently that the investigation would be incomplete till they received information from the USA, UK and Australia. Only the Australian authorities responded to the request, saying they wanted an undertaking that the concerned person would not be given capital punishment.
The special POTA court in 2002 had issued the letters rogatory to three countries on the request made by the Mumbai police. A letter rogatory is a communication sent by the court, in which a case is pending, to a foreign court requesting information from its (the foreign court’s) jurisdiction. Reacting to the prosecution’s claims that the investigation was incomplete without the inputs from overseas, Afroze’s lawyer, Mubin Solkar, said, “This is just a delaying tactic. It is true that after filing a charge sheet in the case, the prosecution got court permission to investigate further. However, the court had also asked them to file a fortnightly report on the investigation. The prosecution has never filed those reports.”
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5/17/2004 Africa: North
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Chad quells army mutiny
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Chadian security forces quelled an overnight mutiny by soldiers disgruntled over pay at an army barracks just north of the capital N'Djamena, a source close to the presidency said on Monday. A diplomatic source said forces loyal to President Idriss Deby had surrounded the barracks on Monday and "contained" 80 to 100 mutineers, after arresting up to 30 ringleaders. Residents in the dusty, rundown capital said they had heard sporadic shooting at about 3 a.m. on Monday. There was no official word on casualties.
Witnesses said there had been unusual troop movements in the central African country's capital on Sunday with loyalist soldiers taking up positions around the state radio and television stations. Two tanks were positioned outside the presidency on Monday morning, the diplomatic source said, although the city was otherwise calm with businesses open as normal after the weekend. The source close to the presidency said the mutiny had been triggered by Deby's recent decision to suspend wage payments to soldiers in an effort to fight corruption in the armed forces. "The group of mutineers was encouraged by officers who lost out due to the president's measures," he said. "The situation is under control. The officers have been arrested and the soldiers loyal to them have also been detained." Deby announced he wanted to reorganise the army last year after finding out the payroll included non-existent troops and that some soldiers were claiming ranks higher than their genuine positions. He then suspended military pay earlier this year. Acting Defence Minister Emmanuel Nadingar declined to comment on the abortive mutiny. He said the government would issue a statement later on Monday.
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Pentagon cannot confirm Chadian rebel claims
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| U.S. officials say they cannot confirm claims by a rebel group in Chad that it is holding a feared North African terrorist and is seeking to turn him over. U.S. officials have felt since earlier this year that Algerian-born terrorist suspect Saifi Amari survived a shootout with government forces in Chad. More than 40 members of his Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat were killed in the clash. A leading Pentagon official indicated at the time the alleged terrorist leader, nicknamed "The Para," had escaped. But his whereabouts remained unknown.
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Egypt swoops on Muslim opposition
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Egyptian police have arrested about 50 members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement in dawn raids in five cities including Cairo. The organisation said those detained included doctors, engineers, civil servants and businessmen, adding that bank accounts had been frozen. The offices and companies of some members were also shut down by police. The authorities regularly take action against the Muslim Brotherhood, seen as Egypt’s main opposition movement. It is tolerated by the authorities and has 16 members of parliament, who were elected as independents. The Brotherhood was banned in 1954 for advocating violent means to turn Egypt into an Islamic state but today it supports peaceful methods of change.
Like killing all the Jews?
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5/17/2004 Africa: Subsaharan
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Gambia's got a live one
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| Mauritanian man was arrested by the Gambian authorities on suspicion of belonging to a dormant al-Qaida cell in the West African country, sources said. The source, who spoke Monday to United Press International on condition of anonymity, said Abdullah Ould Nafeh was arrested Saturday for interrogation "and is being held in an unknown place where even his family could not reach him." He said he got the information from the Mauritanian expatriate community in Banjul. The source said Mauritania's consul in Banjul appears to be involved in Ould Nafeh's arrest. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network has several dormant cells in the western part of the African continent where the Senegalese authorities arrested two nationals two weeks ago carrying powerful explosives. The two detainees were accused of belonging to al-Qaida.
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5/17/2004 Arabia
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Saudis desert the euro
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Saudi Arabia has abandoned its policy of diversifying foreign reserves into euros, deeming the eurozone unfit to manage a major world reserve currency.
Muhammad Al-Jasser, the deputy chief of Saudi Arabia's monetary agency, said the dollar remained the safest bet for central banks in the Middle East, despite America's trade and budget deficits. "The euro has not yet gained a competitive status against the dollar as a major reserve currency. People are not going to switch to euros until European financial markets become more competitive, deeper, more liquid and diversified," he said.
A spokesman for Frits Bolkestein, the European single market commissioner, said the criticism is harsh but true. Mr Bolkestein has devoted much of the last five years trying to break down barriers to free capital movement, but has met with implacable resistance from vested interests.
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Saudi royal guard aided al-Qaeda in Riyadh bombings
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Al-Qa'ida terrorists whose suicide bombs killed 35 people and injured 200 at a housing compound in Riyadh last May were secretly assisted by certain members of the Saudi National Guard which protects the royal family, military trainers employed by a US firm have claimed. In exclusive interviews with The Independent on Sunday, the former trainers for the Vinnell Corporation, which has an $800m (£460m) contract to advise the Saudi National Guard, allege:* Some members of the Saudi National Guard knew about the bombing in advance and gave inside help to al-Qa'ida, including possibly a detailed map of the target.
* An "exercise" organised by the national guard removed 50 of 70 security staff for the day of the bombing, thus leaving the compound "defenceless."
* Security was generally lax, with machine guns unloaded and guards unarmed.
* Vinnell and the Saudis were given detailed, repeated warnings that Islamic militants were planning an attack, but did nothing to upgrade security. These claims will renew the controversy over the failure of the Saudi royal family to deal with Islamic insurgents. In recent weeks al-Qa'ida has renewed its attacks on Western targets in Saudi Arabia which have killed several British workers. The former trainers, who were injured in the attack, will require long-term medical care and now plan to sue Vinnell for compensation. They thus have a case to make, but their lawyer, Richard Fields, of Dickstein Shapiro in Washington, said: "They believe that Vinnell failed completely to take any measures to protect them." Vinnell, a subsidiary of the US defence contractor Northrop Grumann, has denied that security arrangements were deficient. It maintains the compound was "secure" and "hardened" but declined to comment when further questioned by the IoS.
The bombing on 12 May 2003 was implemented with precision based on meticulous intelligence. Lt-Col Raphael Maldonado, then a Vinnell instructor, claims al-Qa'ida received inside assistance from National Guard members. "This compound was too big and complex to be bombed without inside help", he said. He points to the discovery of a detailed map in the car left behind by the assailants and an improvised ladder consisting of concrete blocks and the trace of shoe markings made by people rushing to escape just before the explosion. On the morning of the atrocity, Lt-Col Maldonado noticed that none of his Saudi co-workers was present. A fellow Vinnell adviser angrily told him that a Saudi National Guard commander had suddenly notified him that they were leaving the compound to perform night manouevres with 50 trainers. "I don't understand why they are suddenly going into the field for just one night," he told Lt-Col Maldonado, who was even more concerned when he drove past the local mosque at noon and noticed far fewer shoes outside the door than usual. Lt-Col Maldonado believes that removing 50 of the 70 Vinnell trainers on what he claims was a "pointless" and unscheduled expedition 40 miles away just before the bombing, was deliberate, leaving the compound defenceless. "There is no doubt we were set up," he said. "Someone in the upper echelons of the Saudi National Guard knew the bombing was imminent."
A former Vinnell security officer, Felix Acevedo, argues that the compound was a sitting target because of the lack of vigilance on the gate. "The terrorists could see that the security was insufficient to keep them out," he said. Despite regular complaints, security was not upgraded. "It was unbelievable," said Lt-Col Maldonado. "The large steel gates were left open. There were just two to four Saudi guards at one corner with only 9mm guns. There was a machine gun on a vehicle, but it was unloaded because the gun did not have a belt to connect the ammunition to the gun's feeder. The lighting was inadequate and there were no night-vision devices. There were no wire barriers above the security walls, no metal detectors, no cameras to monitor access, no weapons checks and no bomb-detection dogs for vehicles. And Saudi nationals not working at Vinnell were not checked on entry."
The bomb, estimated to be 400lb of Semtex, was devastating. The front of the high-rise block was destroyed and the blast was so extensive that it was felt miles away. But it should not have been a surprise to the Saudi royal family and Vinnell. For there had been warnings that al-Qa'ida was targeting softer, less-secure sites in Riyadh. Two weeks earlier an individual was seen videoing the front-gate operations at the compound. A guard gave chase but he avoided capture. A week later the same individual was one of nine terrorist suspects captured during a raid in Riyadh. On 1 May 2003 the US State Department declared there were "strong indications" that Islamic militants "may be in the final phases of planning an attack on American interests in Saudi Arabia". This was based on intercepted satellite phone calls and "intelligence traffic" showing contact between Osama bin Laden's son, Saad, and an al-Qa'ida cell in Riyadh. The US ambassador, Robert Jordan, pleaded with Vinnell to upgrade security. And, a week before the bombing, a huge weapons cache was discovered by police at an al-Qa'ida safe house in Riyadh. According to The Washington Post, the arms had been sold by Saudi National Guard members to al-Qa'ida. The Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, condemned the bombing and called for public assistance in capturing 19 suspects. But the reaction showed how al-Qa'ida has retained support. Three prominent clerics declared the terrorists were "devout" men and called on people to disobey the regime's request. They said any help to the police would constitute aid to the US in its "war against Islam". Ten of the suspects remain at large.
For the former trainers the memory of 12 May is intensely painful. Lt-Col Maldonado now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Mr Acevedo was so badly lacerated that he was unrecognisable. He needed 94 units of blood and was kept in hospital for two months. "It was a senseless and needless tragedy," he said.
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Time for more festivities in the Magic Kingdom
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| Al Qaida was said to be preparing for another major attack in Saudi Arabia. Western diplomatic sources said embassies and foreign companies have been warned of the prospect of another major Al Qaida strike in the kingdom. The sources said the Al Qaida network in Saudi Arabia has been encouraged by the flight of Westerners from the kingdom in wake of previous insurgency strikes. "The most likely prospect is an attack on a Western compound or office," a diplomatic source said. "It's a tried-and-true method and it causes the most panic among the expatriate community." On Saturday, a gun battle took place outside a Western housing compound on the edge of Riyad. Reports of the shooting were sketchy with witnesses asserting that four gunmen were captured. Nobody from the compound was injured, and later the Interior Ministry denied that an attack had taken place.
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5/17/2004 Britain
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Gays Attacked At Palestinian Protest
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Hat tip LGF
(London) Members of two British gay rights groups were attacked when they attempted to participate in a demonstration for Palestinian rights.
OutRage and Queer Youth Alliance went to the protest march at Trafalgar Square to show their support for people of Palestine. But they also urged the Palestinian Authority to halt the arrest, torture and murder of homosexuals.
As soon as they arrived at the square members of the two groups were surrounded by an angry, screaming mob of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican clergymen, members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, and officials from the protest organizers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).
They variously attacked the gay activists as “racists”, “Zionists”, “CIA and MI5 agents”, “supporters of the Sharon government” and accused the gays of “dividing the Free Palestine movement”.
PSC organisers asked the gay activists to “stand at the back of the demonstration”, and when they refused blocked their placards with their own banners and shouted down the gay campaigners as they tried to speak to journalists and other protesters.
Most people at the Palestine protest expressed no hostility towards OutRage! and the Queer Youth Alliance. Some expressed positive support.
In the end, the gay groups were allowed to march in the demonstration. The two groups carried placards reading: "Israel: stop persecuting Palestine! Palestine: stop persecuting queers!"
”We call on the PLO and Palestinian Authority to condemn homophobia, uphold queer human rights, and to order an immediate end to the abuse of lesbian and gay Palestinians", said OutRage! protester, Brett Lock.
"Having experienced the pain of homophobia, we deplore the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli government”.
Another protester, Peter Tatchell, said: "Gay Palestinians live in fear of arrest, detention without trial, torture and execution at the hands of Palestinian police and security services. They also risk abduction and so-called honor killing by vengeful family members and vigilante mobs, as well as punishment beatings and murder by Palestinian political groups such as Hamas and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement".
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5/17/2004 Caucasus
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Basayev sez he iced Kadyrov
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Chechnya’s top separatist field commander Shamil Basayev has claimed responsibility for the Grozny blast that killed Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov on Victory Day at the Dinamo Stadium, in a letter published on the separatist kavkaz.center.ru site. The suspected terrorist also made vague threats against Russia’s top leadership, referring to the Prime Minister. According to Basayev’s statement, the stadium blast that killed six people and wounded 89 was part of Operation Revenge, and the sentence issued by the Chechen Shariat court has been carried out. Basayev called May 9 a holiday — “a small victory over fascism and Russism[sic].” “We want to apologize to President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Aslan Maskhadov for not being able to throw the head of Kadyrov at his feet as we promised a month ago,” Basayev’s statement read.
An FSB official in Chechnya, commenting on Basayev’s statement, said investigators are looking into several versions of the incident, including one in which the blast was organized by Basayev. “The version… is being investigated, but it is not the only one,” the regional FSB chief, Yuri Rozhin, told Interfax. Basayev, meanwhile, made further threats in his statement, alluding to the prime minister and the Russian president. “We are interested in who will be prime minister of Russia, Masha, or Katya... if, through the kindness of Allah, we successfully conduct special operation Moska-2,” he said. Masha and Katya are the names of President Vladimir Putin’s two daughters.
Meanwhile, according to investigators, the chief suspect so far is bricklayer Lomali Chupalayev, who was detained May 12, the Izvestia daily reported in an interview with the suspect’s family. As MosNews reported earlier, Chupalayev, 37, had been involved in construction work at the stadium, including laying the foundations. On April 15 and 16 he had taken part in construction work on changing rooms beneath the stand where Kadyrov was killed. Chupalayev is also suspected of being involved in the activities of militant groups, the newspaper reported, citing a police dossier on the suspect. One of his brothers served in a militant group led by field commander Ruslan Gelayev, another — Said-Magomed Chupalayev — served under Shamil Basayev and was sentenced in 2003 to 16 years in prison. Five people have been detained in connection with the blast so far. Investigators are working on four different versions of the attack, Russian media quoted the nation’s deputy general prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky as saying. According to one, the blast was an assassination attempt of a member of the Chechen administration. According to the other three, the blast was a terrorist act meant to destabilize the situation in the republic.
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Caucasus Corpse Count
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| Eight Russian soldiers were killed in fighting or by explosions in Chechnya over the past day, an official in the Kremlin-backed Chechen administration said on Sunday. Four of the deaths came in rebel firing on Russian military positions, the official said on condition of anonymity. Another five soldiers were wounded and in all, separatist fighters fired on Russian positions 18 times, the official added. Two servicemen were killed and four wounded in a clash with rebels near the town of Vedeno and another clash near Gudermes , Chechnya 's second-largest city, killed one soldier and wounded three, along with four rebels, the official said. One Russian soldier was killed and three wounded when their vehicle detonated a land mine, the official said.
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5/17/2004 China-Japan-Koreas
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US to pull out Sth Korea troops
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Update on previous articles today
THE US has notified Seoul it will withdraw 4000 US troops from South Korea for combat duty in Iraq, a Pentagon official confirmed today. The redeployment was part of a phased rotation of US forces in Iraq, said Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman. "Over a period of months, the army looked at various units and recently, very recently, came to the conclusion that the best unit to provide the support was going to come from South Korea," he said.
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Bigger boom than Kimchee admits
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Via the Prof:
Ryongchon Explosion Eight Times as Great as North Claims
Japan’s Kyodo News, citing numerous diplomatic sources in Vienna, reported Saturday that the force of April 22’s train explosion at the North’s Ryonchon Station was about that of an earthquake measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale, which would have required about 800 tons of TNT -- about eight times that officially announced by North Korea. The sources referred to earthquake figures gotten by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency had previously reported that the destructive power of the blast was that of 100 tons of dynamite, and explained that the accident was caused by "the electrical contact caused by carelessness during the shunting of wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and tank wagons".
The CTBTO feels that the cause of the explosion may differ from the North’s explanation, and noted the explosion might have been caused by highly-explosive materials like military-use fuel going off. Officials at the CTBTO plan to look into the causes of the accident. The CTBTO said the explosion at Ryongchon was observed using seismological observation stations in Korea, Japan, the United States and Russia. The stations were built to detect nuclear tests. In Japan’ case, seismological observation stations in Nagano, Oita and Okinawa picked up the Ryongchon blast. The CTBTO collected data from various observation posts, analyzed the data at its International Data Center and estimated the size of the blast. About a week after the explosion, it provided the data to CTBT member states.
The CTBT, written in 1996, has to be ratified by all its signatories for it to be effective, but 44 nuclear and potentially-nuclear states like the United States, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea have put off ratifying the document, which is now on the verge of collapse.
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US troops in S Korea ’off to Iraq’
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| THE United States wants to move some of the 37,000 US troops stationed in South Korea to Iraq, South Korean officials said today. "The US government has told us that it needs to select some US troops in South Korea and send them to Iraq to cope with the worsening situation in Iraq," said Kim Sook, head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry’s North American Bureau. "South Korea and the United States are discussing the matter."
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US to redeploy troops in S. Korea to Iraq
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SEOUL, May 17 (Xinhuanet) -- The United States wanted to pull some of its 37,000 troops out of South Korea to help operations in Iraq,confirmed a South Korean official on Monday. The United States has recently notified Seoul of its intention and the two countries have just begun talks on the issue, Kim Sook,chief of the Foreign Ministry's North American Affairs Bureau, wasquoted by South Korean Yonhap News Agency as saying.
The South Korean official stressed the talks are at a "very early stage" and that nothing specific has been decided. The official also said the issue has nothing to do with Seoul's plan to send 3,000 additional troops to Iraq, rejecting speculation that the US plan is meant to pressure South Korea to act quickly on its troop dispatch promise.
At the request of Washington, Seoul decided to dispatch 3,000 troops to Iraq besides the some 500 non-combatant troops which now are working in the Middle East country. But the plan was delayed for several times because of the deteriorating security situation and the changing of deployment site.
Kim's comments were a response to a newspaper report that about 4,000 US troops stationed in South Korea will be redeployed to Iraq within several weeks. The vernacular daily JoongAng Daily said the US government plans to withdraw a brigade-level force from the 2nd Infantry Division, the most forward-deployed among the 37,000 US troops near the inter-Korean border, and send it to Iraq.
| And if you can't trust a vernacular daily, who can you trust? |
It is unclear whether those troops will return to South Korea after conducting stabilizing operations in Iraq, the paper quoted an unidentified government official as saying. "We cannot completely rule out the possibility of a brigade-level force leaving the Korean peninsula and not returning," the official was quoted as saying.
| Or it might be a new rotation plan. |
Meanwhile, the US military here neither confirmed nor denied the plan.
"A number of options are being discussed to help ensure the US meets its obligations to Operation Iraqi Freedom, while ensuring the US also meets its ongoing commitments throughout the Asia Pacific region," said Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the US military in South Korea.
| Another fine member of the Army of Steve™. |
"When any decision is made on future deployments, we will conduct consultations, notifications and announcements at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner," he said.
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5/17/2004 Down Under
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Aussie Muslim Convert Said an al-Qaida Recruit--Trial starts
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A British-born Muslim convert was recruited by al-Qaida for a plan to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra with a truck bomb, prosecutors said Monday on the opening day of the man’s trial. Jack Roche, 50, was told by senior officials in Osama bin Laden’s terror network to form a terror cell in Australia to carry out the plot, prosecutor Ron Davies told Perth District Court. Roche has pleaded innocent to one charge of conspiring to damage the Israeli embassy by means of explosives, and as a consequence harm diplomatic staff. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in convicted.
Prosecutors told the jury Roche traveled to Afghanistan to meet with senior figures from the terrorist organization — including bin Laden — in March 2000. Davies said that Roche had several meetings with one of bin Laden’s deputies, identified in court documents as Abu Haifs, and had one meeting with bin Laden himself in which the plan to bomb the embassy was forged. It was not immediately clear if the court papers were referring to Abu Hafs al-Masri, the alias of Mohammad Atef, a top lieutenant of bin Laden who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. In the indictment papers, Roche reportedly told Australian Federal Police that the man identified as Abu Haifs was bin Laden’s second in command.
Roche trained with explosives for 10 days at an al-Qaida camp nine miles from Kandahar, Afghanistan, before returning to Australia and beginning surveillance operations of the Israeli diplomatic building in Canberra, as well as the Israeli consulate in Sydney, Davies said. He also began recruiting people to take part in the plot and checked the availability of explosives, the court heard.
Ibrahim Fraser, who learned about explosives while working in a mine, told the court he met Roche at a Sydney mosque, where Roche boasted to him several times he was going to destroy Canberra’s Israeli embassy — and that bin Laden had told him to do it. "He said it was bin Laden’s way to remind the people of the problems in Palestine," Fraser told the court. "I thought he was crazy." Fraser said Roche had asked him how he could get hold of TNT.
Raids on Roche’s house in Perth recovered video recordings, still photographs and notes made during the surveillance, the court was told. Davies quoted Roche’s comments in a newspaper interview before his arrest in November 2002, in which he was asked about targeting the Israeli embassy. "He said he had no qualms about the Israeli people around the embassy ... in his words, not mine, they were fair game," Davies said.
Roche, who is an Australian citizen, converted to Islam more than 10 years ago.
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5/17/2004 Europe
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Expelled imam ’gets French visa’
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Monday, 17 May, 2004, 15:27 GMT 16:27 UK
An Algerian imam deported from France for defending wife-beating says he has a visa to return. It follows a French court ruling that last month’s deportation order for Abdelkader Bouziane was unlawful. Mr Bouziane, 52, who was the imam of a mosque in Lyons, said he was looking forward to seeing his family again. It is still unclear when Mr Bouziane will return to France, but he told French television on Monday it would be "in a few hours".
The cleric was deported to Algeria on 21 April for saying that the Koran authorised the stoning and beating of adulterous women. The remarks caused an outcry in France, with many Muslim leaders condemning them as un-Islamic. But two tribunals have ruled the deportation illegal and said Mr Bouziane should be allowed to return to France.
Charges
The new Interior Minister, Dominique de Villepin, had argued that the deportation was legal on the grounds that the imam used his mosque to advocate violence. But on Monday, his lawyer Mahmoud Hebia told the Associated Press: "I am in the process of organising his return to Lyon." He refused to say when the imam would return "in order to protect him".
Mr Bouziane had lived in France for 25 years on a renewable residency permit and reportedly has 16 children there. But he may not get a friendly welcome from the French authorities. A state prosecutor has opened a case against him on charges of excusing a crime and encouraging harm to others. And French President Jacques Chirac said that if the law needed to be changed to prevent a repetition of the Bouziane saga, then modifications would be made.
EMPHASIS ADDED
Sixteen children?!? Isn’t an investigation of polygamy or at least one of child abuse called for? Imam’s are not famous for their high salaries. Similarly, neither are their wives usually well compensated executives or major bread winners in any case. Where is the money coming from to support all of these children? If there is no readily apparent source of income, shouldn’t the contributions to this violent thug’s life style be scrutinized thoroughly? This stinks like week old fish.
At least Chirac has put down payment on a clue.
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Ukraine Says It Seized 'Red Mercury'
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KIEV, Ukraine - Ukrainian security officers have arrested two Middle Eastern men whom they said possessed a substance that has been touted by sellers as an ingredient in nuclear weapons and dismissed by others as a hoax. Security agents in the southern city of Odessa seized 24 pounds of a substance they said was radioactive and identified as "red mercury," a State Security Service spokesman said Monday on condition of anonymity. He said they arrested two men from a Middle Eastern country,
| Any country we'd have heard of before? |
"Foreign citizens were looking for an opportunity to purchase a quantity of radioactive material in Ukraine and to sell it in the Middle East," said the spokesman, who would not say what country the men were from or where the material came from. He said the arrests were made several weeks ago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, black marketeers have been peddling substances they call red mercury, apparently passing it off to buyers as a highly radioactive compound that purportedly was developed in Soviet nuclear facilities and could be used in powerful weapons.
| Pssst, hey! You, in the turban. Wanna buy some Red mercury? Good stuff, un-cut, I promise. |
Samples that have turned up in Europe have proved to be bogus, however, and many scientists and law enforcement officials say the substance does not exist or is far less potentially dangerous than it has been made out to be.
| Errr, either it doesn't exist, or it's less dangerous, make up your minds. |
Still, the Ukrainian statement appeared likely to add to concerns that terrorists have been seeking to acquire radioactive substances in the former Soviet Union.
| Don't want any Red Mercury? How about a suitcase nuke then? Only one owner, never been used. |
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No ouda for Qazi
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The Netherlands will refuse entry to Pakistani Muslim militant Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who was controversially booked to speak at meeting organised by the Dutch-Belgian Arab European League (AEL) later this month. A Justice Ministry spokesman confirmed on Sunday that Hussain Ahmed will be denied entry to the Netherlands based on national security and public order reasons, news agency ANP reported. Colleagues of Hussain Ahmed also told the Dutch branch of the AEL on Saturday night that the leader of Pakistan's largest Islamic party is not welcome in the Netherlands. The AEL — which campaigns for the rights of Muslims living in both the Netherlands and Belgium — had invited Hussain Ahmed to visit the Netherlands and speak at a public meeting. He was due to arrive on Wednesday. According to the AEL, the Pakistani politician possesses a diplomatic passport and his party is investigating legal options in a last-ditch bid to allow him to enter the Netherlands.
The Hague-based Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) has warned the visit will endanger national security due to Hussain Ahmed's incitement against non-Muslims. It urged the Dutch government to refuse entry to the Pakistani. CIDI director Ronny Naftaniel also said on Sunday the decision to refuse Hussain Ahmed entry is more than justified. Hussain Ahmed is the leader of the Pakistani fundamentalist party Jamaat-i-Islami. He is known to have supported the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and has in the past expressed sympathy for Osama bin Laden, the leader of terror network Al Qaeda. The AEL had planned to hold its public meeting on 21 May, but has run into difficulties in finding a venue. Both the Nederlands Congress Centrum in The Hague and the Haagse Hogeschool have refused to host the event. The AEL was founded in 2001 in Antwerp, Belgium. The organisation — which later set up a branch in the Netherlands — claims to support integration, but not assimilation of Muslim and Arab immigrants into European society.
| Cuz that would be un-islamic. |
In April this year, the AEL's website "saluted" the armed resistance to the US-led coalition being mounted by "the Iraqi population" in Fallujah.
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Bombs explode at HSBC branches in Turkey
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Four small bombs exploded outside branches of British bank HSBC in the Turkish cities of Ankara and Istanbul on Sunday night, hours before British Prime Minister Tony Blair was set to visit Turkey.
Police and local media said the blasts caused minor damage and no casualties.
A police official said one percussion bomb, believed to have been placed under a car, smashed windows of a bank branch in the capital Ankara when it exploded around 10.30 pm (1930 GMT).
There was also an explosion in front of another branch in the city, he said.
State-run Anatolian news agency said there were two similar blasts outside two HSBC branches on the Asian side of the country's commercial hub Istanbul around 10 pm, which were also caused by percussion bombs and caused some damage.
Percussion bombs, often used by militant groups in attacks in Turkey, generally produce a loud bang but little damage.
Television pictures showed slight damage to the wall of one of the banks, which had been cordoned off as police officers inspected the area for evidence.
Blair was expected to pledge his support for Turkey's bid to join the European Union and to discuss turmoil in neighbouring Iraq during his six-hour visit to the capital Ankara.
He will be the first British leader to visit Ankara since Margaret Thatcher 16 years ago and is expected to praise Turkey's political reforms and stress its importance as a moderate Muslim country espousing democratic, secular values.
He is set to meet Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
Iraq, which has badly sapped Blair's support at home, will also feature on Monday's agenda. Some Turkish left-wing groups are planning protests against Blair's visit over Iraq.
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Iran: Germany supplied chemical weapons to Iraq
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TEHRAN, Iran: Two Iranian war invalids unveiled a plaque outside the German Embassy in Tehran on Friday that accuses Germany of supplying chemical weapons to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.
| Say, whatever happened to the left-overs? |
One of the two veterans who unveiled the plaque, Ahmad Paryab, who spoke with plastic pipes running into his nose to assist breathing, called for the prosecution of Germany’s top officials during the Iran-Iraq war. "We demand that the then leaders of Germany be tried in an international court for war crimes and that the German government pay compensation to us," Paryab told about 100 people who attended the ceremony. Paryab was wounded by chemical weapons in the war, as were other members of the crowd.
"The world has not forgotten the crimes committed by Hitler during World War II. And it should not forget this crime as well," he told reporters.
In Germany on Friday, government officials said the German ambassador to Tehran had sent a letter to the associations of Iranian victims of Iraqi chemical attacks, expressing sorrow for their plight but rejecting any German government responsibility.
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5/17/2004 Fifth Column
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DU posters question nerve gas reports
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Are we supposed to just beleive the Army when it says there was Sarin gas?
seems to me these fellas in control haven’t exactly been forthright with anyone up until now....but now we’re being told a single shell was found that contained traces of sarin gas -- but this time its the truht?!?!? anyone want to bet that, in the interest of "national security", no one is allowed to inspect the shell and it will be destroyed in some remote field..... That didn’t take ’em long, did it? (Note the poster’s excellent written rhetoric, spelling, and punctuation.) The thread just opened up as of this posting; check back later in the day to see how far from reality these moonbats can get.
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5/17/2004 Great White North
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5/17/2004 Home Front: Culture Wars
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’Culture’ is no excuse
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A man from Maidstone had this letter published in the Independent last week. ’Why is it barbaric,’ he asked, ’to decapitate an innocent man with a knife but civilised to do it with a laser-guided bomb?’ Or to rephrase the question, is the video executioner of Nicholas Berg in any way morally deficient compared to the general or politician who gives an order that - whatever the intention - will almost certainly lead to the death of an innocent somewhere?
Other, similar, relativities have been knocking around this week. Also in the Independent, former editor Andreas Whittam Smith - infuriated by the government response to the Iraqi prison scandal - contrasted the high language of exporting democracy with the accusation that ’the coalition appears to have created a gulag stretching from Afghanistan through Iraq and ending in Guantanamo Bay, where "undesirables" ... can be mistreated for as long as Stalin, sorry I mean Messrs Bush and Blair, decide.’
Mr Whittam Smith, I am sure, doesn’t really believe that Mr Blair is like Stalin. One of the most important characteristics of Stalin (as with his imitator, Saddam) was, after all, that no one got to say that he was a dictator and survive. But you know what is being said here. That if the coalition ever held the moral high ground it has forfeited it. And then there is something implied, as it has been implied in virtually every anti-war position which has ignored the question of what would have been happening in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere had the invasion not taken place. This something is the idea that, even if you were to forget about Fallujah and the abuse of detainees, ’our way’ is no better than ’their’ way. That what is going on is essentially, a collision of two cultures, with ours wrongly attempting to gain supremacy.
Let’s see. The beheading of Nick Berg has now become probably the most public execution ever staged. This strangely guileless young man’s murder caused Acme Commerce of Malaysia to shut down the Ansar website, initially because of the volume of net users who wanted to see him die. Those viewers would have heard Berg’s self-identification, almost exactly like that of Daniel Pearl two years before, then heard him scream as his head was cut off with a large knife. The accompanying statement was all about retrieving honour and averting shame. So, the shame of Islam could be partly mitigated by the decapitation of any American that the killers could get their hands on.
A week before the Berg killing I found myself in conversation with an Iranian man in his late thirties. He told me how he had run a family business in Tehran. There, five years ago, he met a girl, they had had an affair, and shortly afterwards he came to Europe. After his departure there was silence from his lover - she didn’t return letters and her phone was silent. A year or so later an aunt advised him to stop looking for the girl. ’She is dead,’ the woman said. ’She was pregnant and they executed her. So don’t ask any more.’ And this, the Iranian man said with contempt, in the 21st century.
I was worried about this story so I began researching into judicial executions for sexual impropriety in Iran, and - because this was also possible - into extra-judicial honour killings. Sure enough, until very recently women (and men) were being stoned to death in Iran for adultery. In July 2001, according to the Financial Times, a Maryam Ayoubi was executed at Tehran’s Evin prison at dawn. Iranian newspapers carried an account of her being ritually washed, wrapped in a white shroud and then carried to the place of execution on a stretcher where she was buried up to her armpits. There were many such stonings during the Nineties.
In 2003 an aide to the governor of the Iranian province of Khuzestan told the press that his office had received reports of the murder of 45 young women in a two-month period in honour killings. None of these crimes were prosecuted. Honour killings are rife in Pakistan, and there are a large number in Iraqi Kurdistan. In Jordan the sentence for carrying out an honour killing is set at six months. In the first part of this year more than a dozen Jordanian women were killed by their relations for having ’sullied the reputation of their family’.
And just so that we have an idea of what we may be talking about here, a fortnight ago there was a report from Istanbul about the trial of the father and brothers of a 14-year-old girl. This child had been raped and imprisoned by another man. The men of the family, from eastern Turkey, held a council and decided their honour could only be salvaged if the girl was killed. She was strangled by her father with a piece of electrical flex. He told police: ’She begged as I was strangling her ... but I did not take notice of her cries.’
In the 21st century? And there are less appalling variants of the same attitude. In Baghdad a month ago, while Nick Berg was staying at a hotel just down the road, I spoke with a representative of Moqtada al-Sadr. There were two things that concerned this cleric most about the new Iraq. The first was the rights of minorities to exercise a constitutional veto, which he opposed, and the second - more substantial - concerned his rejection of a code enshrining equality for women. He wanted it to be illegal to dress ’immodestly’, for example. This was his red line.
Now, this is not a matter of Islam versus Western values per se. Those who have campaigned hardest against honour killings have been Muslims themselves, and the tribal values that are enshrined in the commodification of women precede Islam. In Jordan, Queen Rania has come out for tougher laws but until now she has been thwarted by Islamist parties in the Jordanian parliament, who complain about a possible breakdown of family values if men are punished for killing erring wives and daughters.
Last September, in Britain, Abdulla Muhammad Yunis was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his 16-year-old daughter, Heshu. The judge, passing sentence, said it was ’a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of Western society’. An organisation called Kurdish Women Action Against Honour Killing wrote to him and rejected the possible logic of his words. The group demanded ’the recognition and insistence that universal human rights must be a redeemable promissory note for all ... With the turning of a ’blind eye’, the notion of human rights loses meaning as a set of principles that govern all.’
Do we agree with this? And if we agree with it here, why would we not agree with it in Iraq or anywhere else? True, an easy assumption of superior virtue can blind you to what is good about others and what is bad about yourself. But do we really believe that it is the same thing accidentally to kill a civilian with a bomb as it is to cut off his head on camera? Or that a society and polity that is rightly horrified by prisoner abuse is to be compared with the one presided over by Stalin?
The other night I met a progressive American journalist - hated Bush, was, on balance, against the war in Iraq. Somehow we got to talking about capital punishment in the US, and he told me it didn’t bother him too much, though he knew the English didn’t like it. ’I guess it’s a cultural thing,’ he said.
If that’s true, then what the hell is it all for? Why tell the Mississippi folk how to treat their ’nigras’? Ain’t that cultural? And wouldn’t it have been less imperialistic of Robinson Crusoe to tell Man Friday that he ought to go back to the cannibals because, on the whole, it would be better for him to be eaten?
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5/17/2004 Home Front: WoT
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Oil ends at a fresh high of $41.55
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Oil futures close at a new high of $41.55
U.S. stocks end sharply lower on Iraq instability, oil
Rosy scenario for the U.S. economy didn’t last long
Gold futures, metals shares at seven-session high
"Simply put, oil is a runaway train," said Kevin Kerr, editor of newsletter
If anyone is interestested I predict oil is going to 60$ per B at which point Asian economies tank and Europe goes into a severe recession. Some time in July looks about right.
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Films of Subduing of Guant’o Prisoners Becoming an Issue
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Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed. The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatised to speak until now, prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately. ...
Dergoul tells of one assault by a five-man ERF in shocking terms: ’They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. ’They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.’
After their release last March, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, the so-called Tipton Three from Staffordshire, told of similar ERF attacks. Rasul said they led to a new verb being coined by detainees: ’to be ERFed’. That, he said, meant being slammed against a floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and beaten up by five armed men.
However, it is Dergoul who now reveals that every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened. Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force spokesman, confirmed this last night, saying all ERF actions were filmed so they could be ’reviewed’ by senior officers. All the tapes are kept in an archive there, he said. He refused to say how many times the ERF squads had been used and would not discuss their training or rules of engagement, saying: ’We do not discuss operational aspects of the Joint Task Force mission.’
The Observer can also now disclose that a British military interrogator posted to the now notorious Abu Ghraib abuse jail raised the alarm about maltreatment of detainees by US troops as long ago as last March. While ministers insisted last week that the three Britons working in the jail did not see any of the systematic and sadistic abuse, an unnamed lieutenant - a debriefer trained to deal only with co-operative witnesses - made an official complaint to US authorities after seeing what he considered to be ’rough handling’ of prisoners. ...
In London, Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, said: ’The Government must demand that these videos be delivered up, and the truth of these very serious allegations properly determined once and for all. ’The videos provide an unequalled opportunity to check the veracity of what Mr Dergoul and the other former detainees are saying.’
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5/17/2004 International-UN-NGOs
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Head of Red Cross tires of its BS
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the Washington office of the International Committee of the Red Cross has resigned for "personal reasons," amid turmoil created by a secret ICRC report on Iraqi prisoner abuse by U.S. forces.
Christophe Girod, a 17-year veteran of the international body, declined Monday to comment on his reasons for leaving and would not say whether his decision was linked to dismay over the world body’s handling of the Iraqi abuse scandal.
"I am leaving for private reasons. I have had 17 years of the ICRC and it’s time to try something else," said Girod, who heads up the ICRC’s work in the United States and Canada.
In Geneva, the ICRC said Girod resigned "for personal reasons" about a month ago and the decision had nothing to do with the prison abuse scandal.
Earlier this month, a 24-page ICRC report was leaked to the media in which the Red Cross said the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers was "in some cases tantamount to torture."
The February report came to light days after the U.S. media published graphic photographs showing U.S. forces humiliating and degrading Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
The report raised questions over the ICRC’s policy of neutrality and public silence over what it hears or sees about prisoners as a price for gaining access to jails in trouble spots around the world.
Asked whether he thought the ICRC had handled the prison scandal correctly by not speaking out earlier when it knew of the abuses, Girod declined to comment.
"I have nothing to say on the matter," he said. "This is not our policy to go public with internal matters and our relationship with detention powers."
The ICRC, which complained repeatedly in private to U.S. authorities over possible prison abuses, only reveals acts of torture or worse when faced with flagrant cruelty and impunity and when the authorities involved refuse to take action.
For example, it spoke out against blatant violations in the late 1980s in a bid to win the release of prisoners of war captured during the Iran-Iraq conflict. It also went public with criticism 20 years ago about Israeli mistreatment of detained Palestinians.
Girod broke this tradition of silence last October when he publicly criticized the indefinite detention of "war on terror" suspects being held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay.
So the Red Cross only goes public when its the USA, Israel or Iran, and only when the ’victims’ are Arabs. My suprise meter is reading 0.000.
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5/17/2004 Iraq-Jordan
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Aussie SAS - join hired guns
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AUSTRALIAN mercenaries are risking their lives to make a fortune in Iraq on protective security detail. About 100 Australians - including about 40 former SAS troops - are working as hired guns in private security forces. An Australian security worker checks over a bombed out ute in the Iraq desert. The former SAS elite earn up to $9000 a week to guard corporate managers and infrastructure projects. Each day they face attack or ambush, including bombs hidden in dead dogs beside the roads, an ex-SAS officer said from Baghdad. Yet six ex-SAS, who were part of last year's invasion force, quit Australia¡¯s front-line troops to sign up. Other soldiers of fortune include former Australian Federal and State Police from counter-terrorist and specialist units. "It really is a scene out of a Mad Max movie - incredibly lawless with no one fully controlling the highways," said Gordon Conroy, a former regiment major and head of athletes' security at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Mr Conroy, who commanded the SAS's counter-terrorist squadron until 1997, is now co-director of security firm Unity Resources Group. "We have been caught by IED (improvised explosive device) ambushes on roadways, rocketed and mortared in our accommodation, caught in protests that have suddenly turned violent and turned on our men," he said. "We've been involved in small arms and RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attacks, driven through checkpoints minutes before suicide car bombs have gone off. We've had to evacuate clients out of various hot spots with little or no military support, had to deal with false police checkpoints."
An unknown number of international privateers among the estimated 10,000 security contractors have been killed. Some, like the four US security contractors slain in Fallujah last month, have suffered a gruesome and very public death. "I can't say how many have been killed since the end of the war but the majority of PSD (protective security details) working out here all know of people who have been injured or killed," Mr Conroy said. "It's an intense environment and most security operators in Iraq will witness and be involved in incidents that would take their counterparts working elsewhere in the world a lifetime to experience. Two days ago we drove a client from the Green Zone to Baghdad International Airport and came across a soft-skinned Land Cruiser with a single expatriate inside who had been attacked in a drive-by shooting."
Mr Conroy said Iraq was still in a state of war, a year after Saddam Hussein was toppled. "We have been living and operating in many of the hot spots that have been in the news recently," he said. "There have and continue to be a number of tricky situations faced by our men on a daily basis." This Australian guard protects a bullet-riddled utility after it was ambushed. "Travel along the roads and highways throughout Iraq is risky business - every day coalition convoys are hit. Contractors are seen as soft targets and are more frequently hit by IEDs which are secreted along the roadways in Amco rail barriers, cemented into guttering or hidden in roadside debris such as dead dogs, soft-drink cans, rubbish bags."
Attacks had become more sophisticated over the 11 months Mr Conroy has been in Iraq as experienced terrorists enter the conflict. "The foreign terrorists have had a lot of practice, been able to refine their modus operandi and time is definitely on their side - not ours," he said. "Attacks are now combining IEDs with small-arms fire follow-up. You cannot take this environment for granted for a second and people who first arrive here see it as truly surreal. Over time, people tend to become more accustomed to things - this is when you must be very careful and never become complacent. The environment is absolutely ruthless to those who don't respect it." Mr Conroy said the coalition military was overstretched and often unable to support private security officers. "When you get into trouble you have to get yourself out and this may not be just the one time during a journey, it could be a few," he said.
Better for us than against us.
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No let-up in Shiite uprising
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This news report is from the Bahrain Tribune so read between the lines at times. The editors of this newspaper are Sunni Muslim thus share no love for the ’infidel’ Shi’ites.
Shiite militiamen clashed with coalition troops yesterday as the month-old uprising by Shiite scholar Moqtada Al Sadr raged on and the US military came under new fire over the abuse of prisoners. Three Iraqis were killed in a rocket attack targeting a British camp near the main southern city of Basra and another two were killed and 15 wounded during clashes in the central holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. Twenty people were also wounded when a shell exploded in a market in the southern city of Nasiriyah, where Al Sadr loyalists traded fire with Italian forces. Dozens of people have been killed in fighting between Al Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia and the US-led coalition since Friday. Two Iraqis working for the US-led coalition were shot dead and two others wounded when their vehicle came under a hail of gunfire in southern Baghdad late on Saturday, the US military said. The US death toll in Iraq has risen to 782, the coalition said, after one US soldier was killed in a roadside bombing late on Saturday.
With less than 50 days to go to the coalition’s June 30 deadline for the handover of power, interim foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said the Sadr uprising was inflicting great harm to the aspiration of Iraqis. Zebari said Al Sadr should concentrate on contesting January elections rather than fighting coalition forces and Iraqi police. But despite becoming increasingly isolated among the Shiite community, the renegade scholar was offered help from across the Islamic religious divide. Nine pick-up trucks filled with food and medicine were brought for his militia by a delegation from the Sunni insurgent bastion of Fallujah where fighters battled US forces for more than a month. The trucks were parked outside Kufa’s grand mosque, a Sadr stronghold where he normally delivers the sermon at the main weekly Muslim prayers.
Despite the persistent violence, Secretary of State Colin Powell stressed that a US commander would manage a multinational force for a “considerable period of time”. “There will be a period of time, some considerable period of time, before we can see conditions of security that can be placed totally into the hands of Iraqi security forces,” Powell told Fox television said. He also told NBC that Washington would also accept any government chosen by the Iraqi people in elections tentatively scheduled for January, even an Islamist one, when asked if an Iranian-style theocracy would be acceptable. In a fifth straight day of clashes in Karbala, US tanks made a brief foray into the city centre yesterday morning, approaching two of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines. Although the coalition has urged residents to leave the city, around 500 gathered for a rally called by another hardline scholar to protest the coalition onslaught against the city. “Long live Sadr, the Americans are an army of infidels,” the demonstrators chanted as some 15 tanks approached the area before pulling back as the crowd swarmed towards them.
In the holy city of Najaf further south, two Sadr militiamen were killed and two wounded when they attacked a US convoy, a US officer said. And in Nasiriyah, 20 people were wounded when a shell exploded in a market as Sadr’s militiamen and Italian troops continued to trade fire, officials said. On Saturday, 13 civilians and journalists were evacuated to the Italian base from the Nasiriyah headquarters of the US-led coalition as it came under fire, said an Italian military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Perrone.
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51 Bad Guys assisted from gene pool
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| U.S.-led forces in Iraq have killed 51 guerrillas, including 20 in an air strike on insurgents loading and unloading weapons from vehicles in southeastern Iraq, the U.S. military said Monday. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference U.S.-led forces had killed 17 militiamen loyal to rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr near shrines in the holy city of Kerbala in the past 24 hours. Thirteen Sadr militiamen were killed in other areas, he said. Insurgents had fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and automatic rifles on U.S. forces in the city, 110 km (68 miles) south of Baghdad, Kimmitt said. "Sounds of fighting in the downtown area could be heard for much of the night," he said. One other insurgent was killed Monday in Najaf when U.S.-led forces were sent to defend police stations which had come under attack, he said. Fighters from Sadr's militia say U.S.-led forces in Iraq routinely exaggerate casualties. U.S.-led forces are trying to crush Sadr's uprising before handing sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30.
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US Still Welcome in Kurdistan
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American soldiers based here don’t have to call in air strikes against foreign fighters or exchange gunfire with Baathist loyalists. Nor do they live in mortal fear of deadly IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, along the roadsides. In fact, says one soldier who travels in this area, "I always see the thumbs up, and little kids offer us candies."
Major John T Hubert, one of around a hundred members of the US army and special forces based in the Sulaimaniyah governorate in north-eastern Iraq, said, "I tell people I have the best job in Iraq. People love us here." He and his fellow soldiers in the 451 civil affairs battalion are assigned to monitor up to 28 CPA projects initiated by the local Kurdish government. The Kurds have been running their own governments in parts of northern Iraq since the end of the 1991 Gulf war. With a budget of 1.6 million US dollars, the civil affairs soldiers have overseen school renovations, bridge and sewage reconstruction, and the building of a 195,000 dollar dialysis centre. They have also equipped student activities centres, and other smaller projects.
Based in an old Iraqi military facility on the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah, the American troops spend their spare time playing cards and chatting online with their families and friends back home. They also venture out to explore nearby mountains or stay in the luxurious hotel at Dukan Lake, 45 minutes from Sulaimaniyah. To make life a bit safer for them, Kurdish peshmerga fighters protect the American base and accompany soldiers on the main roads. "I gain a lot of comfort from the PUK [Patriotic Union of Kurdistan] leaders and peshmergas," said Sgt George L Rivera, who sent Iranian rugs and jewellery to his family in America, along with the standard photographs. "I feel safe here," he said. Other US soldiers echo his feeling. "The Kurdish military and police made every resource available to ensure the safety of American troops" said Major Mike Simonelli of the US army reserves who served in Sulaimaniyah from the end of the fighting last year until this March.
Significantly, the Kurds do not view the US soldiers as foreign occupiers of their land. "We look at them like guests who will not stay here forever," said police officer Abdulla Kamal. The Kurdish press - both party and independent - never refer to American forces as "occupiers", "invaders" or "the enemy", as do news outlets in other parts of Iraq. Here, they are called coalition forces, US soldiers or liberators. And in other parts of Iraq, where Shia and Sunni religious leaders form a nucleus of opposition to the coalition forces, Kurdish clerics espouse a more tolerant view. "We are happy the American forces are here," said Sheikh Majed Hafid, whose grandfather, Sheikh Mahmood, led the Kurdish rebellion against the British occupation in the early 1920s. The sheikh is the Imam of the Grand Mosque which lies in the heart of the Sulaimaniyah bazaar, not far from a billboard-sized mural of his grandfather who looks over a bustling traffic circle – the site of demonstrations against the British and their Iraqi government in the 1920s. Deep inside the mosque, Sheikh Majed sits at his computer in front of a bookshelf which houses classical poems in the Farsi language by the Iranian poet Hafiz, along with Arabic religious texts and Kurdish language Islamic books. Throughout the centuries, the sheikh points out, the Kurds have been under the rule of Persian, Ottoman and the Baath party invaders. But the Americans are a lot easier to get along with. "We don’t care if they stay here for another 100 years," he said.
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Car Bomb Attack Kills Iraq Governing Council Head
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A suicide car bomb killed at least nine people outside the main coalition headquarters in Baghdad Monday, including the head of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, officials said. Abdul Zahra Othman Mohammad, a Shi’ite council member also known as Izzedin Salim, had been waiting at a checkpoint to enter the sprawling "Green Zone" compound in Baghdad when the bomb went off, Deputy Foreign Minister Hamed al-Bayati told Reuters. "Izzedin Salim was martyred," he said. Salim, from Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, was the head of the Islamic Dawa Party in Basra and the editor of several newspapers and magazines. He was one of the nine council members who each hold the rotating presidency for a month at a time.
Bayati said Salim’s car had been the last in a convoy which included other council members. "The other members escaped unharmed. They managed to get through the checkpoint before the explosion. Salim was still waiting to enter. It is too early to say whether the attack specifically targeted the Governing Council convoy," he said. Salim, who had been the current holder of the rotating Governing Council presidency, was the second of the 25-member Council to be killed. In September gunmen assassinated Aqila al-Hashemi, one of the three women in the council.
U.S. officers said the explosion had been caused by a car bomb. The checkpoint was crowded with civilian cars and minibuses. More than a dozen vehicles were destroyed by the blast, which melted the asphalt of the road and covered it in pools of blood. Doctors wearing masks and rubber gloves pulled burned bodies from twisted wrecks of minibuses. Shoes and body parts were hurled through the air. A scorched foot hung from barbed wire 30 yards away. "There was a huge crowd at the checkpoint," said Raad Mukhlis, a security guard at a nearby residential compound. "There were a lot of cars and people on foot standing there, and then this massive explosion. I saw body parts and martyrs everywhere."
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The Democracy Option
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Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A20
THE TROUBLES in Iraq are prompting a swelling chorus of manifestos from critics of the Bush administration, both liberal and conservative, who would have it abandon its goal of establishing a democratic regime in place of the former dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The critics style themselves as hard-nosed realists; they say it’s time to dispense with the administration’s utopian illusion that Iraq could be made a model for political freedom in the Middle East. It’s time, they say, for a more pragmatic exit strategy. Their critique of the administration’s shallow thinking and incompetent planning is incisive, and they are right that the United States needs to adjust its policy to reflect its depleted legitimacy in Iraq. But there’s a problem: The ways out of Iraq offered by the "realists" are as illusory in their fashion as were the Pentagon’s plans for a quick and easy transition.
Some want the United States to resign itself to Iraq’s becoming a military-run soft autocracy, like Egypt; they point to the emergence of a military force in Fallujah commanded by former Baathist generals as the beginning of that trend. Yet Iraq could not be consolidated under such a regime without massive bloodshed; that Saddam Hussein remained in power by filling mass graves was not an accident. Some, especially those in Washington who have long championed the cause of the Kurds, favor Iraq’s partition into three loosely confederated mini-states. This would please the Kurds but almost certainly lead to a Yugoslav-like series of wars that would prompt the intervention of Turkey, Iran and other neighbors. The Shiite and Sunni Arab populations in Iraq do not live in easily partitioned districts; Baghdad, for example, is home to millions of both.
Liberal opinion is drifting toward support for unilateral withdrawal or perhaps the fixing of a firm departure date for U.S. troops. But withdrawal in defeat would be catastrophic for U.S. interests around the world and a historic victory for Islamic extremism. The announcement of a pullout deadline would be almost as bad. If Iraqis become convinced that the United States is prepared to leave without achieving its political objectives, those objectives will be immediately discredited, leaving civil war as the only means for resolving how the country will be governed.
The administration was wrong to believe that an Iraqi democracy could be quickly established or that the resulting regime would necessarily become a showcase of liberal values. Yet now that Iraq’s previous dictatorship has been destroyed and the country’s varied communities have been freed from the apparatus of terror, the supposed utopian solution -- elections -- offers the most pragmatic way of establishing a viable government. Elections, as opposed to war or outside appointment, are still the mechanism favored by the country’s most powerful political forces for determining Iraq’s future. They offer the best chance of defeating the extremists.
Elections, in short, are the best U.S. endgame in Iraq -- provided the administration adopts a realists’ view of them. It is sensible for the United States to give the United Nations as large a role as it will accept in organizing and conducting those elections; it is foolish to cling to the idea that U.S. political favorites, such as some of the exiles on the appointed Governing Council, can survive a popular vote.
Until the United Nations shows even a minute degree of scrupules or simple competence, they have no place in Iraq. The UN’s "Oil for Food" program is solid proof of their ineligibility for such a monumental and ethically challenging task.
It is unrealistic to believe that U.S. appointees and advisers can be positioned to control the future government or that unilateral U.S. control over security matters can be maintained past the first ballot; Iraqi forces must be prepared to control security. The Bush administration also must accept, sooner rather than later, that an elected Iraqi government is likely to embrace economic or social policies not favored by the United States and may not be particularly friendly to Washington or to Israel.
At best an elected Iraqi government will be a fragile and awkward entity that exercises only loose control over the country and requires long-term support by foreign troops and other outsiders. It will look more like Lebanon than Switzerland. Getting there will require an enormous second effort by the United States, which will have to sacrifice more while somehow recruiting more support from the rest of the world. Failure is a distinct possibility. So why should democracy be tried? We believe that it is a vital goal. But it is, at this point, also the most realistic way forward.
The prospect of resurgent theocracy in Iraq must be fought at all costs. If the price is continued American military occupation, so be it. The notion of Iraq potentially falling under the spell of Iran’s lunatic mullahs is unconscionable.
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Outnumbered Brits Defeat Iraqi Attackers in Hand-to-Hand Combat
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| Outnumbered British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago. The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down. Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara. The battle erupted after Land Rovers carrying 20 Argylls came under attack on a highway. After radioing for back-up, they fixed bayonets and charged at 100 rebels using tactics learned in drills. When the fighting ended bodies lay all over the highway — and more were floating in a nearby river. Nine rebels were captured. ....
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5/17/2004 Israel-Palestine
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3 Palestinians killed in Israeli missile strike in Rafah
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Three Palestinians militants were killed early Tuesday and eight people were wounded when an Israeli helicopter fired three missiles at an unoccupied part of the Rafah refugee camp on the Gaza-Egypt border, in what appeared to be the beginning of a large-scale Israeli operation aimed at widening a border buffer zone.
All three Palestinians killed were identified as gunmen in factions linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.
A helicopter gunship hovering above the camp fired the missiles into a group of masked gunmen, killing three who were taking cover behind a wall. Medics said eight people, including militants and civilians, were hurt in the attack.
A few minutes after the missile strike, Israeli bulldozers began leveling land next to the refugee camp. Palestinian security officials said the huge, armored bulldozers moved to the edge of the Qishda section of the camp near the border and began working on land in an Israeli-controlled zone.
Personaly, I’d widen the security strip to encompass the whole of Gaza.
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Powell bawls out the Fish
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Hat tip LGF
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday blamed Yasser Arafat for blocking U.S. efforts to strengthen Palestinian security forces as a means of ending terror attacks on Israel.
Winding up his latest effort to push peacemaking forward, without any apparent concrete results, Powell also criticized Arafat for a statement the Palestinian leader made Saturday to his people urging them to "find whatever strength you have to terrorize your enemy."
"Mr. Arafat continues to take actions and make statements to make it exceptionally difficult to move forward" on peacemaking, Powell said at a news conference before returning to Washington from the World Economic Forum held at an isolated Dead Sea resort.
He said Arafat "refuses to allow consolidation of security forces" among the Palestinians, a key U.S. demand intended to curb terror attacks and motivate Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to push ahead with efforts to reach a settlement with the Palestinians.
"What I need from the Palestinians is for them to get themselves ready to exercise solid political control over Gaza when it’s turned back to them and to put into place security forces that can do that," Powell said later in an interview taped with ABC for broadcast on the network’s "This Week" show. "What they need to do is to wrest control of the security forces from Chairman Arafat. ... The Palestinian leaders can do it and the leaders of the Arab world can do it by saying to Chairman Arafat that you’re policies have not been successful, your leadership has not be successful in moving this process forward."
In a separate interview for the same ABC show, King Abdullah II of Jordan avoided a direct answer when asked whether Arafat was an obstacle to peace, but said: "There is this unfortunate competition between Palestinian political society and that is weakening the Palestinian position. Until they can unify and come up with strategy that allows the international community to help them, then they will be in a very weak position. Arafat will have to decide how he is going to sort of implement himself in the future of Palestine."
Powell also had some criticism for Israel at his news conference.
"We oppose the destruction of homes," said Powell. "We don’t think that is productive. We know Israel has a right for self-defense, but the kind of actions that they’re taking in Rafah with the destruction of Palestinian homes we oppose."
Powell met Saturday with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei in Amman, the Jordanian capital, and urged him to seize the opportunity for dismantling Israeli settlements in Gaza and some on the West Bank under a proposal offered by Sharon.
Qurei was noncommittal in his public statements afterward, but Powell said the prime minister, on whom the Bush administration has pinned much of its hopes for a reversal in lagging peace efforts, had agreed to look at whatever refinements Sharon makes in his proposal to evacuate all soldiers and the 7,500 Jewish settlers from the coastal strip following its rejection by hard-liners in his own Likud party.
President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is due to meet in Berlin on Monday with Qurei as part of the renewed Bush administration effort to bring about Palestinian statehood sometime next year, a goal the president himself recently acknowledged was in danger of not being met.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher, standing beside Powell at a joint news conference, said he hoped the meeting with Rice "will be a step toward moving the process forward."
Powell, again endorsing Sharon’s proposal, called it "a way to get us out of this circle" and said the Israeli people want to move ahead on coming to terms with the Palestinians.
On the touchy issue of U.S. soldiers mistreating Iraqi detainees at a prison in Baghdad, Muasher said "there was an uproar" among Arabs, while Powell said "we are doing everything we can to deal with the frustration in the Arab world."
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Arafat at heart of rights abuse report
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ARAB prisoners beaten and tortured, innocent bystanders killed by gunfire - another damning human rights report. But the difference this time is that the violence is being perpetrated not by coalition forces in Iraq, but by the Palestinian Authority, and the victims are its own people. The report, partly funded by the Finnish government, claims Palestinian cities are in a state of near anarchy, with people on the payroll of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA) blamed for 90 per cent of gangland violence. It highlights numerous incidents of torture of prisoners and refers to the killing of civilians in gunbattles between Palestinian factions.
It is another blow for Mr Arafat’s organisation, which was recently accused of misusing £134 million of European Union funds. Mr Arafat was accused of signing cheques to people linked with terrorist activity. The organisation behind the latest report, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG), has won few friends for its work documenting human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Although it has been strongly critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, its criticism of the PA has seen its funding by European governments slashed. Its latest report describes the situation in PA areas as "the Intra’fada" or "the chaos of the weapons", and paints a picture of a society where the proliferation of guns has brought grave consequences for the people. It says: "PA security forces do not live up to international laws and regulations concerning the treatment of individuals under arrest. There have been several cases in which Palestinian civilians were arrested without proper reason, and suffered beatings and other forms of torture at the hands of the police."
It cites an incident in July last year in which a worker from Bethlehem was forcibly taken from his house and interrogated by members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, working with the PA, who accused him of collaborating with Israel. "Under threat of violence [including firing at his feet] the man confessed to having committed certain thefts, but insisted that he was not responsible for Israeli assassinations of Palestinians in Bethlehem. "When he finished his ‘confession’, the militants broke his hand and leg, smashed his teeth and hit him with an iron bar on his back. He was then dumped into a garbage container where he was found the next day."
The report says the examples quoted are the tip of the iceberg. "Violence permeates the security forces, and it is worsened by legal confusions. Unless and until more accountability and order is introduced, the problem will remain and could worsen as PA control continues to deteriorate," it says. Just as the Red Cross and Amnesty investigators focused on cases in Iraq where civilians had been caught in gunbattles, the PHRMG identifies incidents in PA-controlled areas in which innocent bystanders have been struck by bullets. "Sometimes violence erupts between police members and loyalists of political factions," it says.
The report does lay some of the blame for the violence at the feet of Israel. It says that the failure to reach a substantive and acceptable peace agreement has led Palestinians to vent their feelings of futility against Palestinians. According to the US-based Middle East Media Research Institute, Basem Eid, the man who set up the PHRMG after years investigating Israeli human rights abuses, has struggled to find funding because his former backers were concerned about the political implications of being seen to support a group that exposes Palestinian abuses. Yesterday, MEMRI’s director, Yigal Carmon, said that as soon as Basem Eid decided to investigate Palestinian abuses as well as Israeli abuses, his support dried up
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Arab columnist urges Arafat to quit
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May. 16, 2004 22:56 By KHALED ABU TOAMEH=
Jihad al-Khazen, a prominent columnist and former editor-in-chief of the London-based, Saudi-owned daily Al-Hayat, has called on Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to resign to pave the way for a young leadership to take over. His call came in an open letter to Arafat published in Al-Hayat, one of the Arab world’s leading newspapers. He also accused Arafat of driving the Palestinian cause to a dead end.
Memo to Nobel Committee: Front runner for Understatment Medal.
"Our dear brother Yasser Arafat, I suggest that you resign," Khazen, who describes himself as a longtime friend of the PA chairman, wrote. "You have done your best. It is time to give the wheel to younger hands. The American administration wants you to leave the scene, and Ariel Sharon wants to kill you.
And for all the right reasons.
The reasons of both are known. They took a stance from you based on enmity. I came to this conclusion out of love. I am worried about you." Khazen cited Arafat’s age and health as good reasons why he should step down. "You are not young anymore," he wrote. "You are not in the best of health. Your cause is weaker than you are.
And Arafat is wholly responsible for weakening the Palestinian cause.
It needs a brilliant mind and hands that do not shake. I ask you to resign because I am your friend. I wish you well and I want your cause to live."
Many do not, and rightfully so.
He advised Arafat to resign while he is still popular among his people. "You are a democratically elected president," Khazen noted.
| "can u han be mi ips? anks." |
| "One man, one vote, one time..." |
Note: More prize winning material.
"If presidential elections were held in the Palestinian territories tomorrow, you would win again with a sweeping majority. That is why I hope you would leave the presidency in your moment of strength, not weakness. This way, you would always be the father of the revolution and death of the homeland. "I know you do not like to listen to someone asking for your resignation. However, I am your friend; and your friend is the one who is sincere with you. Do you remember how our friendship began in 1967 at the office at Al-Hussein camp in Amman? Perhaps you do not; since you have thousands of friends. However, I remember the stairs that I went up, which led to a large room leading to your office. We came out after a meeting that lasted less than an hour to take photos under a bulb that hung from the ceiling. "Thirty-seven years have passed; I wish them to be 40, even 50 years.
Sounds a lot like complicity to me.
"I saw you at the Wahadat camp, then at Al-Fakhani camp. I saw you in London, Washington, Paris, and Davos. Our friendship did not falter in the face of the revolution’s mistakes in Jordan and Lebanon. I was in Washington during the Israeli invasion. I saw you turn tail and run leave for Tunisia. I boycotted you to object to the accumulation of mistakes in those five years. Later, I weakened in front of the revolution and its leader, and we resumed our friendship." Khazen reminded Arafat that he was present during the signing of the Oslo Accords and the handshake at the White House and later at the Davos summit. "Do you remember when I was with you at the same dinner table next to President Hosni Mubarak’s table and his wife in Davos, and Binyamin Netanyahu’s table was in the corner of the hall?" he asked. "And the after-dinner meetings with supporters. They included many peace-supporting Jews. Where are they now? The last thing that I remember from Davos is your awful speech at the end of January 2001. Who advised you to give that speech? Who wrote it? Why? I did not get a convincing answer when other friends and I blamed you in your hotel suite that evening. "Oh my friend. I write this after a sleepless night; thinking about you and your situation. I am not reviewing the mistakes of Jordan and Lebanon. I am not questioning your position on the occupation of Kuwait or your relations with Saddam Hussein. I will not list the missed opportunities in the peace process.
Or, evidently, the horrendous murder committed in his name.
"What you and we are suffering is not enough. The cause is at a dead end, to which you drove it.
A scintilla of truth finally leaks out from around the edges of this sob sister’s story.
This is the truth. You are besieged with the cause. "Do I hear you standing to say: I tried my best, I was right and made mistakes, and I brought back the name of Palestine on the map? Do I hear you say: I resign, and I move out of the way of a leadership which could transfer the name from the map to the land of Palestine? Over 37 years with you, I never doubted your patriotism, and I am not today. You are slime molded by the cause. Since this is the case, I cannot see you allowing Yasser Arafat to become the obstacle or barrier in front of the establishment of the Palestinian state.
No matter how much Arafat continues to be exactly that.
"I do not care what the enemies say. I care about you. However, I care more about the Palestinian cause, which must be more important to you than yourself.
Something Arafat is utterly incapable of realizing.
Nevertheless, you did your very worst best for Palestine. It is your right now to remain dead relax. If you are offed resign today, you will leave with your head on a pike up high. A democratically elected Arab president resigns. Democratic elections are rare in our countries; resignation is rarer.
You folks in Oslo getting all of this?
"My friend, resign. Enough is enough. Do it and give yourself a chance. Give the cause a chance for once."
EMPAHSIS ADDED
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Israeli missiles strike Fatah office in Gaza
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Israeli helicopters have fired missiles at an office of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and that of another faction in Gaza City. Medics said the Fatah building and offices of the Democratic Front faction were empty at the time of Monday's early morning strike and there were unfortunately no casualties. An Israeli military statement said the missiles struck two offices "which served as focal points for Palestinian terrorist activity" in the raid close to the site of an ambush that killed six soldiers a week ago. Ramzi Ramab, of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the offices targeted, told Reuters his workers had a narrow escape, having managed to flee as they heard the helicopters in the sky, "but the office was destroyed".
| I think I'd have helicopters buzzing all different parts of the city. See who starts running. |
The Fatah-linked militant group, al-Aqsa Marytrs Brigades, called on supporters "to launch painful strikes against the enemy" in revenge for the missile strike.
| "We must have Dire Revenge™!" |
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Israel plans to destroy dozens of Gaza homes
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Hundreds of Palestinians living along the Egypt-Gaza border will soon lose their homes to Israeli bulldozers.
| Rantburgers will be relieved to know that the Israelis have made provisions for the baby ducks. |
Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon says the houses in the area of Rafah are marked for destruction and the Israeli Supreme Court is backing them up. The court's three judges say that after one of the bloodiest weeks in the current round of fighting, the army has a "real, imminent need'' justifying the destruction. Thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip last week.
The destruction plans came as Israeli soldiers killed four Palestinians as they tried to cross the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Sunday evening, Israel Radio reported. Earlier in the day, Israeli missiles struck a branch office of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and a building housing a pro-Hamas newspaper. The campaign appeared to be continuing Monday morning, as Israeli helicopters fired five missiles at an apartment building housing a Fatah movement office in the Gaza City neighborhood Zeitoun. Zeitoun was the site of heavy fighting last week after Palestinians blew up an Israeli armored personnel carrier, killing six soldiers.
The United Nations and the European Union have condemned the Israeli practice of bulldozing people's homes suspected as hideouts or cover for militants.
| Far better to rehab them into condos. |
The United Nations says Israel has made more than 12,000 families and colleagues of terrorists people homeless in Rafah since the start of a Palestinian uprising when peace talks failed in September 2000. They say further demolitions would be in "grave breach" of unilaterally-enforced international law applied only against Israel and the U.S..
This past Friday, army "Corrie" bulldozers demolished 88 houses in Rafah, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency, which aids refugees. The demolitions left about 1,000 Palestinians homeless, UNRWA said. Peter Hansen, the UNRWA chief, said he was "extremely alarmed" by Israel's plans to take down more homes.
| "Youse guys keep dis up and I won't haves me meal ticket!" |
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell also expressed rare criticism of Israeli policy, by announcing that the U.S. is also opposed to destroying the homes adjacent to the "Philadelphi" buffer zone. "We don't think that is productive," Powell said at the World Economic Forum in Jordan. "We know Israel has a right for self-defence, but the kind of actions that they're taking in Rafah with the destruction of Palestinian homes, we oppose."
"Marvin! Do I really have to say all this crap?"
"Yes, Mr. Secretary, it's part of the plan."
"Arrgh, someday, Marvin, someday I'll say what I really think."
"Not while you're a diplomat, Mr. Secretary." |
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Israel, Egypt discussing Gaza deployment
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| EFL. Registration required. Israel and Egypt are discussing altering several security clauses in the Camp David accords that would allow Egypt to introduce additional forces close to the Gaza border to fight arms smuggling into Rafah. Clashes between IDF forces trying to plug up smugglers’ tunnels that honeycomb the Egypt-Gaza border and Palestinians endeavoring to keep them open have led to 13 Israeli deaths and dozens of Palestinian fatalities in the past week. "There is no doubt that the Egyptians can do more," Chief of General Staff Moshe Ya’alon told the cabinet Sunday. Under the terms of the Camp David Accords, the Egyptians can only introduce a limited number of lightly armed forces near the border. "They want to introduce better trained forces, but that entails changes in the agreement," Sharon said. Sharon said he is in contact with the Egyptians about the issue, and expects to see an emissary of President Hosni Mubarak – likely Egyptian Intelligence chief Omar Suleiman – about the issue this week. Ya’alon said the arms being smuggled through tunnels in the Rafah area originate in Iran, and – with Hizbullah’s help – are brought to the region through Africa. One wonders if Ya’alon’s remarks are diplomatic or true. Surely the Egyptians wouldn’t risk allowing arms shipments into their country that could be diverted to their own Islamists? The Egyptians have know what’s passing through the tunnels because otherwise they’d risk losing control.
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5/17/2004 Russia
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Rice, Putin seek way forward in Iraq
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U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wrapped up her three-day visit to Moscow on Sunday saying she had fresh assurances of Russia's support for U.S. efforts to stabilize the situation in Iraq.
But the two countries still remained at loggerheads over how much control the planned Iraqi caretaker government will have over security and other key issues.
"I think we, the United States and Russia, share a common understanding of how we should move forward," Rice said in a Russian voice-over in a television interview aired after she completed her series of meetings with top Russian officials, including a closed-door meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
In a short interview aired on NTV television's "Namedni" program Sunday, Rice said the United States and Russia had a shared interest in preventing destabilization in Iraq. She offered a generally positive assessment of U.S.-Russian relations, but was noticeably short on details.
"Everyone agrees that the most important thing at the moment is to give Iraq stability and pass a UN Security Council resolution. I hope we will be able to prepare the text of this resolution with help of our Russian partners" among others, she said.
Rice met with Putin on Saturday to deliver a personal letter from President George W. Bush with "general affirmation of our desire to work with them [the Russians] on Iraq and on the broader partnership," a senior U.S. diplomat told reporters Sunday.
Rice also met with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, as well as Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov and chief of the presidential administration Dmitry Medvedev.
While Iraq dominated Rice's visit, she discussed a wide range of other issues with Russian officials traditionally high on the agenda between the two countries -- energy cooperation, terrorism, weapons proliferation, Iran's nuclear program, developments in former Soviet republics and the Middle East, according to the U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Rice also "underscored our continued interest in democratization, the rule of law and independent media in Russia" and "a peaceful solution in Chechnya," but made no linkage to other issues in U.S.-Russian relations, the U.S. diplomat said.
"It is important that democratic institutions take root and strengthen in Russia," Rice told NTV.
Russian officials also chose not to probe sore spots for the Bush administration, with the scandal swirling around the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. service personnel mentioned only in passing, the diplomat said.
The Russians reassured Rice that Moscow will support a United Nations Security Council resolution endorsing the transition of power from U.S. administration to the planned Iraqi government on June 30, the diplomat said.
He said the United States would share the text of the UN resolution with Russia as soon as it was drafted.
But he declined to comment on whether Washington and Moscow saw eye to eye on how much control the new government and U.S. military commanders would have over security issues, or when and for how long international peacekeeping troops could be deployed in Iraq.
Nor would the diplomat say if the two sides agreed on whether the UN resolution should be adopted before the June 30 transfer of power, or after.
While Washington has said it is prepared to see an international peacekeeping force deployed in Iraq, it wants to retain overall security control after the transfer of power to an Iraqi caretaker government, which will rule until national elections are held.
Russia will support the deployment of peacekeepers, but only if they are given a clear mandate and timeline, Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov said last week.
Russian diplomats have also called for the Iraqi caretaker government to be given greater control, and suggested that an international conference be organized before June 30 to discuss the new government.
During her Moscow visit, Rice said the United States would be interested in discussing the idea of an international forum, which Russia wants Iraqi leaders, neighboring countries and UN Security Council members to attend, but is not ready to support it outright, the U.S. diplomat said.
In comments ahead of Rice's visit, Fedotov suggested that the Security Council adopt two resolutions on Iraq. The first resolution should be passed after Brahimi's announcement, while the second should be passed after consultations with members of the new government to spell out "future steps toward an Iraqi settlement," Fedotov said.
But during Rice's visit, her "interlocutors" made it clear to her that Russia would not insist on passing two resolutions, rather than one, the U.S. diplomat said.
Russia opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and warned that the war could lead to instability and a growth in terrorism in the country. But during their meetings with Rice, none of the Russian officials made any "I told you so" comments, the diplomat said.
Instead, they displayed a "genuine desire to help us ... so Iraq will not become a long-term source of terrorism," the diplomat said.
Rice also discussed with Russian officials the Middle East and recent developments in former Soviet republics, including Adzharia, Nagorny Karabakh and Transdnestr, the U.S. diplomat said.
Sergei Ivanov also briefed Rice on the security situation in Uzbekistan after his recent trip to Tashkent, while Fradkov briefed her on the Russian government's ongoing economic and administrative reforms.
On energy cooperation, Russian officials acknowledged that the decision to cancel ExxonMobil's operatorship of the Sakhalin-3 offshore field "remains on the table," the U.S. diplomat said. Regarding the overall U.S.-Russian energy dialogue, Rice said the results were "a little bit disappointing" as it has stalled, he said.
Rice left Moscow for Berlin on Sunday for security talks with European countries, including France and Germany. The U.S. diplomat said that talks between with Russia would resume Wednesday, when Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton is due in Moscow for two days of talks.
Kremlin and government sources would only reveal the issues discussed with Rice, but offered no further details of the talks.
News of a consensus on Iraq between the two sides could be revealed when Bush and Putin meet during the 60th anniversary celebrations of the D-Day landings in France on June 8, Izvestia reported.
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5/17/2004 Southeast Asia
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Policeman Killed in Thai South, Schools Under Guard
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A Thai policeman was killed and another wounded in separate shootings Monday in the country’s Muslim south where troops were on high alert for possible militant attacks on the first day of a new school year. The Muslim policeman died in hospital hours after he was shot in the head as he rode his motorcycle to work in Pattani province, police said. In a separate incident, gunmen shot a former drug-busting Muslim policeman in Narathiwat province as he walked to a tea shop. "He was shot three times in his cheek, chest and torso and is being treated," a police colonel said. "We suspect some drug gangs might want to take a revenge on him or Muslim militants might just want to cause havoc."
The shootings came as thousands of heavily armed police and soldiers guarded about 1,000 schools in the restive region, where at least 200 people have died since January in a flare-up of separatist violence that had been dormant for two decades. Thai television showed armored vehicles bristling with machine guns parked inside playgrounds as students dressed in crisp, new uniforms greeted their teachers in the three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia. State-run schools have been targeted by militants as symbols of government authority since the unrest began in January.
Bomb blasts at three Buddhist temples in Narathiwat on Sunday threatened to escalate tensions between Buddhist Thailand and its Muslim minority, who make up 10 percent of the country’s 62 million population. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said on Monday the temple attacks had been carried out by the "same group of militants" who had raided police outposts on April 28. Thai troops and police crushed the uprising, killing more than 100 people, mostly young Muslims. "The majority of Muslims in the region disagree with this means and they never think of causing religious conflicts," Thaksin told reporters in Bangkok. "But the perpetrators never give up and they want to convince our society that there is such conflict," he added. Many within the predominantly Muslim local community were outraged at what they said was an excessive use of force on April 28. In the bloodiest incident, soldiers and police stormed a historic mosque in the town of Pattani and killed 32 militants hiding inside. Mystery still surrounds the mainly machete-wielding attackers. Officials say they were drug-crazed and manipulated by extremists, who gave them magic spells to recite and told them prayer beads would ward off bullets.
Malaysia, which had earlier irritated Bangkok by offering temporary refuge to Thais fleeing the violence, has deployed an extra battalion to boost security along its border with Thailand, Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama reported on Sunday. Malaysia now has four battalions totaling 1,600 soldiers patrolling the border, Bernama quoted the army chief, General Azumi Mohamed, as saying.
The Thai government has issued conflicting statements about the latest chapter of a conflict that dates back centuries, to when the kingdom of Pattani in southern Thailand ruled the south and parts of present-day northern Malaysia. Thaksin has blamed the violence on drug dealers, contraband smugglers and gunrunners, acting under the cover of separatism. But cabinet members and top military officials say they suspect the attacks are the work of Islamic radicals with support from foreign militant groups. Anger over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq may be a contributing cause. Last month, the Thai embassy in Sweden received a letter threatening attacks like those on Spain in retaliation for Thailand sending troops to Iraq.
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Asian stock slide: Canary or just the jitters?
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EFL. This may be nothing, but the Asian economies seem particularly fragile right now. At any rate it bears watching
Asian stocks slumped after oil prices climbed to a 21-year high, threatening to slow global economic growth. Samsung Electronics Co. and Advantest Corp. led declines. `A rise in oil prices would mean a profit squeeze for companies, which isn’t good news,’’ said Kiyohide Nagata, who helps manage about $3.2 billion at Invesco Asset Management (Japan) Ltd. in Tokyo. Taiwan’s Taiex Index tumbled 5 percent after China warned President Chen Shui-bian three days before his inauguration for a second term that he must accept Chinese sovereignty or ``face destruction by playing with fire.’’ India’s Mumbai stock exchange halted trading for an hour after the Sensex slid 10.9 percent.
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Islamic separatists challenge Bangkok
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An uprising in southern Thailand by Muslim separatists — in which Thai soldiers recently killed more than 100 suspected radicals on a single day, including 30 who took sanctuary in a historic mosque — has opened a new front in Southeast Asia's war on terror.
Eric Teo Chu Cheow, chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, said Jemaah leaders met twice in southern Thailand to plan the bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002 that killed 202 persons, mostly foreign tourists.
Local officials say one of the suspects sought for involvement in a January raid at an army camp in southern Thailand is related to Hambali, al Qaeda's operational leader in southeast Asia, who was arrested near Bangkok last year.
Independent estimates already put Jemaah membership in southern Thailand as high as 10,000, and the Thai military says that it is hunting down at least 5,000 armed separatists.
In the growing unrest, Buddhist Thai nationalists see a threat of "Arab influence" in the region, first brought home in 2002 when two dozen Middle Eastern suspects were arrested for forging travel documents for al Qaeda.
Southern Thailand is also home to the Yala Islamic College, run by influential hard-line cleric Ismail Lufti. The modern college is funded by Saudi money and has 800 students taught hard-core Wahhabi doctrine.
Vairoj Phiphitpakdee, a Muslim member of parliament for Pattani, has said that some Thai Muslims mistakenly believe that Islam is just about adopting Arab customs.
"They're taken to the Middle East, and they're brainwashed," he recently told reporters.
The success of the military operation against the Islamist militants depends on closer cooperation from neighboring Malaysia.
Thailand says the terrorists find refuge in the northern Malaysian states of Kelantan and Kedah. While there have been official pledges by both governments to boost border patrols, all that has been achieved thus far is the arrest of a sole Malaysian taxi driver, who was charged in Kuala Lumpur with aiding the Thai militants by ferrying some of them across the common border.
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5/17/2004 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
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Iran leader condemns US ’stupidity’
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(We shall see who is stupid very soon.)
Iranian Supreme leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has condemned what he described as the "stupid" and "shameless" actions of US troops in the Iraqi Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
This bearded, 7th century looking Shi’ite ’cleric’, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , neglected to include Iran’s ongoing infiltration of hard-core jihadists, and their Tehran ordered methods of instigating fire fights with American, British, Italian, Polish and other Coalition troops whose duty is re-establish order, along with assisting in the rebuilding of the nation Saddam & his Ba’ath Party cohorts ruined.
Iran’s dictatorship is fully aware an economically stable Iraq via exporting Iraqi crude oil in huge amounts for needed national revenue, coupled with a higher standard of living (if allowed) will eventually draw the attention of Iran’s dissatisfied population to their own deplorable repressive condition.
The ruling, fanatical, Iranian mullahs have had the population of Iran enslaved since 1979. Since over 50% of Iranian were born after Khomeini was allowed to overthrow the Shah in 1979 the younger people of ’Persia’ want the same freedoms other youth have in western nations.
The Iranian ’leaders’ of world-wide jihad revolution are on a time table and time is not on their side much longer.
He said the abuse of prisoners in Iraq showed that the US had merely taken the place of Saddam Hussein, and that it was time for them to leave the "bog of their own making". The following are excerpts from his remarks, delivered in a speech to theology students and broadcast by Iranian radio:
No Muslim, particularly a Shia, can remain calm in the face of the recent events in Najaf and Karbala...
[The US soldiers] have taken their tanks and artillery and armed forces to the holy site of Karbala. They have shown disrespect to the sacred dome of the Lord of the Faithful. They have fired bullets at the dome. That is not something that faithful Muslims can tolerate or accept...
We would not want to upset the dear peace loving terrorists, would we? Let them hid their imported weapons in the massive Shi’ite cemeteries, and use mosques as operational bases to murder more Americans and anyone else who is on the jihad hit list....it’s okay Iran, although you export thousands of terrorist trained killers into Iraq, we will just roll over....all of you ....with our tanks!
The Americans have combined stupidity with shamelessness. They are audacious and unrestrained. They are encroaching upon the people’s sanctities and what the people love... Muslim people, particularly Shia - in our own country or in Iraq, in various Iraqi cities or in other parts of the world - will not remain silent at this American encroachment and audacity... They think they can rule Iraq without any difficulty, take Iraq’s oil and humiliate the Iraqi people. What happened at Abu Ghraib prison showed this, and recently it became clear that this has not happened only at Abu Ghraib. It has happened at all, or at least most, American prisons in Iraq...
The president and the gang ruling America say they did not know what was going on. That is how they have apologised. They say they did not know and that they have closed Saddam’s torture chambers... You have not closed Saddam’s torture chambers. You have replaced Saddam... They say they did not know. They are lying, because the Red Cross explicitly declared that it had informed senior army officers and Americans of what was going on a long time ago...
It was wrong for the Americans to go into Iraq. It was wrong for them to stay. Their treatment of the people was wrong. Imposing an American ruler on the people was wrong. Going to Karbala and Najaf was wrong. The things that they did recently were especially wrong. They should realise that the Islamic world, and particularly the Shia world, will not remain silent... They have killed the innocent people of Najaf and Karbala. The have killed dozens of people. The crime that they have committed is the greatest of crimes. The Islamic world condemns it. The Iranian nation condemns it. The world’s Shia condemn it.
Najaf and Karbala??...WOW we did that ..there was not one terrorist in either one of those rat holes..WOW!
The Americans will fail on this path. The more they go along this path, the more they will sink in this bog of their own making... The Americans are trapped. There is nothing they can do. They will fail if they continue along this path, and they will failif they pull out. But continuing will be the greater defeat.
Hey, Mr Shi’ite! If you check your road map you shall notice the only one trapped ...........is you! We have you surrounded on Iran’s southern flank in the Gulf! Eastern and western borders, those are ours too...what options remain? Jump in the Caspian Sea and swim for it? That might work :)
This crumb must have overdosed on his on verbal rubbish!
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Iran’s Mullahs Losing Their Will to Control the Population
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... if it [Iran] were an efficient police state, it might survive. But it’s not. It cracks down episodically, tossing dissidents in prison and occasionally even murdering them (like a Canadian-Iranian journalist last year). But Iran doesn’t control information — partly because satellite television is ubiquitous, if illegal — and people mostly get away with scathing criticism as long as they do not organize against the government.
The embarrassing point for us is that while Iran is no democracy, it has a much freer society than many of our allies in the Middle East. In contrast with Saudi Arabia, for example, Iran has (rigged) elections, and two of its vice presidents are women. The Iranian press is not as free as it was a few years ago, but it is now bolstered by blogs (Web logs) and satellite TV, which offer real scrutiny of government officials.
I was astonished that everywhere I went in Iran, people would immediately tell me their names and agree to be photographed — and then say something like, "There is no freedom here."
All this means, I think, that the Iranian regime is destined for the ash heap of history. An unpopular regime can survive if it is repressive enough, but Iran’s hard-liners don’t imprison their critics consistently enough to instill terror.
Pet dogs, for example, are strongly discouraged in Iran as dirty and contrary to Islam, and traffic police regularly arrest dogs and their owners. But the number of pet dogs is multiplying, and Tehran now has dozens of veterinary clinics. ...
In the end, I find Iran a hopeful place. Ordinary people are proving themselves irrepressible, and they will triumph someday and forge a glistening example of a Muslim country that is a pro-American democracy in the Middle East. I treasure a memory from the airport: after I was detained, a security goon X-rayed my bags for the second time and puzzled over my computer equipment. He snarled at me, "American reporters — bad!" The X-ray operator, who perhaps didn’t know quite what was going on, beamed at me and piped up, "Americans — very good!"
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Turks Change Laws In Serious Effort to Suppress Honor Killings
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.... a 15-year-old ... was raped by a visiting relative and impregnated. .... her 16-year-old brother ... slashed her with a meat cleaver around the head and shoulders and pounded her with rocks. ....
.... brothers Ferit and Irfan Toren were arrested and charged with shooting their 22-year-old sister, Guldunya, twice in the head, killing her, as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from an earlier attack by the same brothers. ....
.... Mehmet Halitogullari confessed to strangling his 14-year-old daughter, Nuran, with a wire, after she had been kidnapped on her way home and sexually assaulted for six days. ....
Such killings are also getting unprecedented public attention in Turkey. The news media report each new case, and doctors’ organizations, bar associations, women’s groups, law professors and several prominent artists are campaigning for a crackdown on the crime.
A year ago, the Turkish national assembly abolished a law that allowed light sentences in honour killings, raising the maximum to 24 years in prison. But activist groups, citing legal loopholes, continue to push for comprehensive reform of Turkish penal code provisions that favour men over women. Such reform is now well underway. Draft amendments to the code are before the justice subcommittee of the national assembly and said to be only weeks away from becoming law. The action reflects an apparent willingness to end official complicity in the killings through laws that allow the perpetrators — who are always male — to get off lightly. .... Four years ago, a sustained campaign by Women For Women’s Rights led to the overhaul of Turkey’s civil code. .... Partly as a result of the process, the government last year abolished Article 462, which had given judges discretion to reduce a murder sentence in honour killings by as much as 80 per cent. But other articles still allow such killers to get off lightly, Bilgutay says.
"The ’unjust provocation’ article is one. It says that if you suddenly do something bad to me and I react with rage and kill you, I get a reduced sentence because you were unjustly provoking me. In honour killings, men are getting reduced sentences by arguing, `I saw my daughter with a boy in front of the cinema, so I was really shocked and provoked, and I killed her.’ In fact, most honour killings are premeditated." ....
Aysegul Kaya, an Istanbul lawyer active in women’s rights issues, takes hope from what she sees as a landmark judgment set on March 9 in the southeast city of Sanliurfa ... The victim in the case was Emine Kizilkurt, 14. After she was raped and impregnated by a villager, a family council of men resolved to kill her. A 20-year-old cousin, Mahmut Kizilkurt, strangled her to death with a scarf. At trial, judge Orhan Akartuna handed Kizilkurt an aggravated life sentence, the stiffest penalty possible. For their complicity, the judge also sentenced the father, an uncle and six cousins to jail terms ranging from eight months to 16 years. "This is a first in Turkey," says Kaya. "There will be an appeal, but a judge has ruled that the family council was responsible, not just the killer." The sentences totalled 133 years and eight months.
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E.U. will ignore U.S. sanctions directed at Syria
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LONDON – The European Union has decided to ignore U.S. sanctions on Syria.
EU officials said the Bush administration’s decision to impose economic sanctions on Damascus would not affect plans by Brussels to increase trade with Syria. They said the EU planned to maintain a high-level dialogue with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad to facilitate the signing of a trade agreement.
On Sunday, European Commission Vice President Loyola de Palacio was scheduled to arrive in Damascus to meet Assad and other Syrian leaders. Officials said the discussions would focus on the role of Syria in a regional energy network. Syria exports natural gas and has proposed serving as a way-station for the transfer of Egyptian gas to Europe.
| Egypt to Syria to Europe. Hmmm, isn't there something in between Egypt and Syria? Gaza? Well, yeah ..., um, something else ... hmmmm ... |
Spain, which invited Assad to Madrid in early June, has criticized the U.S. sanctions on Syria. Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos said Europe and Spain must cooperate in supporting Syria as a Euro-Mediterranean partner. "Sanctions don’t ensure the appropriate climate for a constructive understanding, but they focus the minds of the thugs in charge in Syria increase factors of tension in the region." Moratinos said. "They have to develop and defend the fruitful relations with the terrorist thugs who run Syria."
| Zappie's apologist offensive continues. |
Britain was the only EU member to support the U.S. decision to impose sanctions on Damascus. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his government shares U.S. concerns over Syria’s weapons of mass destruction programs and its harboring of groups deemed terrorists. "We have concerns also about WMD, terrorism, human rights and cooperation over Iraq," Dean MacLaughlin, a spokesman for Blair, said. "We expect Syria to take these concerns seriously. In particular, we expect Syria to take a constructive approach to the situation in Iraq and work with us to restore stability and aid Iraq’s reconstruction."
But the British goverment ruled out imposing similar sanctions on Damascus. London has sent a series of military delegations to discuss cooperation with Syria, but does not export lethal weapons to Damascus. "We have similar objectives and concerns to the U.S., but we pursue those through a policy of critical and constructive engagement which allows us to encourage and support reform while talking frankly and robustly about issues of concern," MacLaughlin said. "Sanctions are a matter for the EU as a whole, not individual countries."
| Which undercuts the ability of the Brits to be the good cop as they were in Libya. |
Political sources said senior figures in Blair’s Labor Party have urged the prime minister to disassociate from Washington’s policies in the Middle East. They said a key area where Britain should not follow the United States regards sanctions against Syria.
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