Elsewhere today (365)
Aljazeera:
UN snubs Lebanese plea
Friday 14 July 2006, 20:14 Makka Time, 17:14 GMT
An appeal by Lebanon to the UN Security Council for a ceasefire order against increasingly fierce Israeli raids on its territory has fallen on deaf ears.
Nouhad Mahmoud, a Lebanese foreign ministry official, made his plea at an emergency session of the 15-nation council.
But members said they planned no immediate action apart from a statement welcoming a decision by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, to send a team to the region to encourage restraint.
The United States vetoed a resolution on Thursday drafted by Arab nations calling on Israel to end a separate two-week military incursion in Gaza.
John Bolton, the US ambassador, called the measure "not only untimely, but already outmoded" and biased against Israel.
Mahmoud said Israel's actions against his country were "aimed at bringing Lebanon to its knees and subverting it by any means".
"I do not need to explain to you here who the victim is and who the aggressor is," he said.
He asked the council "to take an immediate and clear decision calling for a comprehensive, immediate ceasefire, a lifting of the air and sea blockade imposed upon Lebanon and calling for an end to Israeli aggression".
However, Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, said the Lebanese government had brought trouble on itself by allowing the resistance movement Hezbollah to remain armed.
He said this gave it de facto control over southern Lebanon and enabled it to cross the border to seize two Israeli soldiers.
'Axis of terror'
"Lebanon is today occupied by terror," he said, accusing Hezbollah of comprising "an axis of terror" along with Hamas, the governing Palestinian group, and Syria and Iran, which he said supported Hamas and Hezbollah.
He urged Lebanon to extend its authority across all of its territory "and exercise sovereignty over a free Lebanon".
Ibrahim Gambari, the UN undersecretary-general for political affairs, said that escalation was "in no one's interest".
"The space for diplomatic initiative is quickly closing," he said.
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2611F642-A664-40FE-8BA2-FA698BDA0ED1.htm
allAfrica:
Explosion Shoots Up Oil Price
By Crusoe Osagie And Patricia Ubaka With Agency Report
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
July 14, 2006
Crude oil prices yesterday surged to a record near $77 per barrel as the international market was hit with fresh concerns over oil supply from Nigeria following the attack on an Agip pipeline in Bayelsa State as well as crises in the Middle East.
Agip may lose as much as 120,000 barrels of oil a day after the two pipelines were attacked while Israel attacked Lebanon in retaliation for raids by Hezbollah terrorists. US crude traded at $76.85, while London Brent went up to $76.95.
In Nigeria, two suspected explosions at a crude pipeline operated by Agip, a unit of Italy's Eni, caused oil spills which Eni denied any act of sabotage saying damage would be repaired soon.
The oil spillage occurred on a Nigeria Agip Oil Company (NAOC) pipeline at Lagosgbene in Brass Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, following an explosion on its 10 inch pipeline along the River Nun near Igbomotoro Village.
The explosion followed the massive spillage along the Clough Creek flow station in Tebidaba in Southern Ijaw LGA where a similar explosion had earlier taken place.
Traders said the upswing in oil prices was also triggered by other global factors including the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon, which has already heightened international tensions, the Iran nuclear row now appearing to be heading to the United Nations Security Council and sharp drop in crude inventories in the US.
The Special Adviser to the Governor of Rivers State on Oil and Gas, Chief Dikivie Ekiogha who confirmed both incidents said they are still trying to get officials of the NAOC, the owners of the facilities affected by the explosion to know the extent of damage.
Shell Petroleum Develop-ment Company (SPDC) which pumps about half of the country's output, had halted about 473,000 barrels a day of production after a series of militant attacks since January.
Foreign workers of energy and oil services companies have been targeted by militants in the Delta region who are unhappy about the extent of foreign control over the country's oil industry.
An employee of Royal Boskalis Westminster NV, the world's largest dredger, was freed July 10 after being kidnapped by unidentified assailants in Nigeria while working on a Shell project in Bayelsa state.
Oil prices were also pushed up when the Energy Department reported yesterday US gasoline stockpiles fell more than expected last week, amid higher fuel demand during summer driving season.
Supplies of the motor-fuel fell 426,000 barrels in the week ended July 7, the department said, almost twice the 250,000 barrels forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.
According to reports, pump prices for regular gasoline averaged $2.961 a gallon Wednesday, up 28 percent from a year before, according to the American Automobile Association.
Yesterday, gasoline for August delivery was up 1.91 cents, 0.9 percent, at $2.275 a gallon in New York while the contract rose yesterday 2.9 percent to $2.2559.
The Energy Department report yesterday showed US oil stockpiles fell by 6 million barrels, almost five times the decline forecast by analysts while daily gasoline demand exceeded 9.6 million barrels for a second week.
At the UN, US Ambassador John Bolton said yesterday the Security Council may vote next week to demand Iran stop enriching uranium.
The US and European Union suspect Iran wants the enriched uranium for weapons but Iran has so far refused to respond to a five-week-old offer of incentives to halt its research. It claims it wants to build nuclear power plants.
China and Russia agreed to support a binding UN resolution demanding that Iran suspend uranium enrichment or face economic penalties, France's foreign minister said after a major-power meeting in Paris yesterday.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened to revise Iran's cooperation with international bodies monitoring its nuclear program after the dispute was referred back to the Security Council, Agence France-Presse reported, citing an address by Ahmadinejad on state television.
Copyright © 2006 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200607140008.html
AlterNet:
A Wave of Sexual Terrorism In Iraq
By Ruth Rosen, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 14, 2006
Abu Ghraib. Haditha. Guantanamo. These are words that shame our country. Now, add to them Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a young Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up their crimes, her father, mother, and sister murdered. The rape of this one girl, if proven true, is probably not simply an isolated incident. But how would we know? In Iraq, rape is a taboo subject. Shamed by the rape, relatives of this girl wouldn't even hold a public funeral and were reluctant to reveal where she is buried.
Like women everywhere, Iraqi women have always been vulnerable to rape. But since the American invasion of their country, the reported incidence of sexual terrorism has accelerated markedly - and this despite the fact that few Iraqi women are willing to report rapes either to Iraqi officials or to occupation forces, fearing to bring dishonor upon their families. In rural areas, female rape victims may also be vulnerable to "honor killings" in which male relatives murder them in order to restore the family's honor. "For women in Iraq," Amnesty International concluded in a 2005 report, "the stigma frequently attached to the victims instead of the perpetrators of sexual crimes makes reporting such abuses especially daunting."
This specific rape of one Iraqi girl, however, is now becoming symbolic of the way the Bush administration has violated Iraq's honor; Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has already launched an inquest into the crime. In an administration that normally doesn't know the meaning of an apology, the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad and the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. both publicly apologized. In a fierce condemnation, the Muslim Scholars Association in Iraq denounced the crime: "This act, committed by the occupying soldiers, from raping the girl to mutilating her body and killing her family, should make all humanity feel ashamed."
Shame, yes, but that is hardly sufficient. After all, rape is now considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court.
It wasn't always that way. Soldiers have long viewed women as the spoils of war, even when civilian or military leaders condemned such behavior, but in the early 1990s, a new international consensus began to emerge on the act of rape. Prodded by an energized global women's movement, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993. Subsequent statutes in the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, as well as the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court in July 2002, all defined rape as a crime against humanity or a war crime.
No one accuses American soldiers of running through the streets of Iraq, raping women as an instrument of war against the insurgents (though such acts are what caused three Bosnian soldiers, for the first time in history, to be indicted in 2001 for the war crime of rape).
Still, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women - and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world - they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.
Rape and sexual humiliation in prisons
The scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib focused on the torture, sexual abuse, and humiliation of Iraqi men. A variety of sources suggest that female prisoners suffered similar treatment, including rape.
Few Americans probably realize that the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib also held female detainees. Some of them were arrested by Americans for political reasons - because they were relatives of Baathist leaders or because the occupying forces thought they could use them as bargaining chips to force male relatives to inform on insurgents or give themselves up.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, the secrecy surrounding female detentions "resulted from a collusion of the families and the occupying forces." Families feared social stigma; the occupying forces feared condemnation by human rights groups and anger from Iraqis who saw such treatment of women by foreigners as a special act of violation.
On the condition of anonymity and in great fear, some female detainees nevertheless did speak with human rights workers after being released from detention. They have described beatings, torture, and isolation. Like their male counterparts, they reserve their greatest bitterness for sexual humiliations suffered in American custody. Nearly all female detainees reported being threatened with rape. Some women were interrogated naked and subjected to derision and humiliating remarks by soldiers.
The British Guardian reported that one female prisoner managed to smuggle a note out of Abu Ghraib. She claimed that American guards were raping the few female detainees held in the prison and that some of them were now pregnant. In desperation, she urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail in order to spare the women further shame.
Amal Kadham Swadi, one of seven Iraqi female attorneys attempting to represent imprisoned women, told the Guardian that only one woman she met with was willing to speak about rape. "She was crying. She told us she had been raped. Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off, and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"
Professor Huda Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University, also told the Guardian that women in Abu Ghraib have been sexually abused and raped. She identified one woman, in particular, who was raped by an American military policeman, became pregnant, and later disappeared.
Professor Shaker added, "A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib, she started crying. Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape."
Shaker, herself, encountered a milder form of sexual abuse at the hands of one American soldier. At a checkpoint, she said, an American soldier "pointed the laser sight [of his gun] directly in the middle of my chest... Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'"
Writing from Baghdad, Luke Hardin of the Guardian reported that at Abu Ghraib journalists have been forbidden from talking to female detainees, who are cloistered in tiny windowless cells. Senior US military officers who have escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib, however, have admitted that rapes of women took place in the cellblock where 19 "high-value" male detainees were also being held. Asked how such abuse could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, now in charge of the prison's detention facilities, responded, "I don't know. It's all about leadership. Apparently it wasn't there."
No one should be surprised that women detainees, like male ones, were subjected to sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib. Think of the photographs we've already seen from that prison. If acts of ritual humiliation could be used to "soften up" men, then the rape of female detainees is hardly unimaginable.
But how can we be sure? In January, 2004, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. military official in Iraq, ordered Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba to investigate persistent allegations of human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Taguba Report confirmed that in at least one instance a U.S. military policeman had raped at least one female prisoner and that guards had videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. Seymour Hersh also reported in a 2004 issue of the New Yorker magazine that these secret photos and videos, most of which still remain under wraps by the Pentagon, show American soldiers "having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner." Additional photos have made their way to the web sites of Afterdowningstreet.org and Salon.com. In one photograph, a woman is raising her shirt, baring her breasts, presumably as she was ordered to do.
The full range of pictures and videotapes are likely to show a great deal more. Members of Congress who viewed all the pictures and videotapes from Abu Ghraib seemed genuinely shaken and sickened by what they saw. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn called them "appalling;" then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle described them as "horrific." Ever since the scandal broke in April 2004, human rights and civil liberties groups have been engaged in a legal battle with the Department of Defense, demanding that it release the rest of the visual documents. Only when all those documents are available to the general public will we have a clearer ¬and undoubtedly more ghastly ¬record of the sexual acts forced upon both female and male detainees.
Sexual Terrorism on the Streets
Meanwhile, the chaos of the war has also led to a rash of kidnappings and rapes of women outside of prison walls. After interviewing rape and abduction victims, as well as eyewitnesses, Iraqi police and health professionals, and U.S. military police and civil affairs officers, Human Rights Watch released a report in July, 2003, titled Climate of Fear: Sexual Violence and Abduction of Women and Girls in Baghdad. Only months after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, they had already learned of twenty-five credible allegations of the rape and/or abduction of Iraqi women. Not surprisingly, the report found that "police officers gave low priority to allegations of sexual violence and abduction, that the police were under-resourced, and that victims of sexual violence confronted indifference and sexism from Iraqi law enforcement personnel." Since then, as chaos, violence, and bloodletting have descended on Iraq, matters have only gotten worse.
After the American invasion, local gangs began roaming Baghdad, snatching girls and women from the street. Interviews with human rights investigators have produced some horrifying stories. Typical was nine-year-old "Saba A." who was abducted from the stairs of the building where she lives, taken to an abandoned building nearby, and raped. A family friend who saw Saba A. immediately following the rape told Human Rights Watch:
"She was sitting on the stairs, here, at 4:00 p.m. It seems to me that probably he hit her on the back of the head with a gun and then took her to [a neighboring] building. She came back fifteen minutes later, bleeding [from the vaginal area]. [She was still bleeding two days later, so] we took her to the hospital."
The medical report by the U.S. military doctor who treated Saba A. "documented bruising in the vaginal area, a posterior vaginal tear, and a broken hymen.'
In 2005, Amnesty International also interviewed abducted women. The story of "Asma," a young engineer, was representative. She was shopping with her mother, sister, and a male relative when six armed men forced her into a car and drove her to a farmhouse outside the city. They repeatedly raped her. A day later, the men drove her to her neighborhood and pushed her out of the car.
As recently as June 2006, Mayada Zhaair, spokeswoman for the Women's Rights Association, a local NGO, reported, "We've observed an increase in the number of women being sexually abused and raped in the past four months, especially in the capital."
No one knows how many abducted women have never returned. As one Iraqi police inspector testified, "Some gangs specialize in kidnapping girls, they sell them to Gulf countries. This happened before the war too, but now it is worse, they can get in and out without passports." Others interviewed by Human Rights Watch argued that such trafficking in women had not occurred before the invasion.
The U.S. State Department's June 2005 report on the trafficking of women suggested that the extent of the problem in Iraq is "difficult to appropriately gauge" under current chaotic circumstances, but cited an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation.
In May 2006, Brian Bennett wrote in Time Magazine that a visit to "the Khadamiyah Women's Prison in the northern part of Baghdad immediately produces several tales of abduction and abandonment. A stunning 18-year-old nicknamed Amna, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, says she was taken from an orphanage by an armed gang just after the US invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric's office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence 'for her sake' to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director."
"Families and courts," Bennett reported, "are usually so shamed by the disappearance [and presumed rape] of a daughter that they do not report these kidnappings. And the resulting stigma of compromised chastity is such that even if the girl should resurface, she may never be taken back by her relations."
Disappearing women
To avoid such dangers, countless Iraqi women have become shut-ins in their own homes. Historian Marjorie Lasky has described this situation in "Iraqi Women Under Siege," a 2006 report for Codepink, an anti-war women's organization. Before the war, she points out, many educated Iraqi women participated fully in the work force and in public life. Now, many of them rarely go out. They fear kidnap and rape; they are terrified of getting caught in the cross-fire between Americans and insurgents; they are frightened by sectarian reprisals; and they are scared of Islamic militants who intimidate or beat them if they are not "properly covered."
"In the British-occupied south," Terri Judd reported in the British Independent,"where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi's Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death."
Invisible women - for some Iraqi fundamentalist Islamic leaders, this is a dream come true. The Ministry of the Interior, for example, recently issued notices warning women not to go out on their own. "This is a Muslim country and any attack on a woman's modesty is also an attack on our religious beliefs," said Salah Ali, a senior ministry official. Religious leaders in both Sunni and Shiite mosques have used their sermons to persuade their largely male congregations to keep working women at home. "These incidents of abuse just prove what we have been saying for so long," said Sheikh Salah Muzidin, an imam at a mosque in Baghdad. "That it is the Islamic duty of women to stay in their homes, looking after their children and husbands rather than searching for work--especially with the current lack of security in the country."
In the early 1970s, American feminists redefined rape and argued that it was an act driven not by sexual lust, but by a desire to exercise power over another person. Rape, they argued, was an act of terrorism that kept all women from claiming their right to public space. That is precisely what has happened to Iraqi women since the American invasion of Iraq. Sexual terrorism coupled with religious zealotry has stolen their right to claim their place in public life.
This, then, is a hidden part of the unnecessary suffering loosed by the reckless invasion of Iraq. Amid the daily explosions and gunfire that make the papers is a wave of sexual terrorism, whose exact dimensions we have no way of knowing, and that no one here notices, unleashed by the Bush administration in the name of exporting "democracy" and fighting "the war on terror."
Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/38932/
Asia Times:
It's war by any other name
By Sami Moubayed
Jul 15, 2006
DAMASCUS - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described what is happening in Lebanon as saying. "This is an act of war." Olmert is correct. This is war. It has been war, non-stop, since 1948. What is happening in Lebanon today is yet another chapter of bloody Middle East events that will last for generations to come, because it is impossible, after so many years of conflict, for the Israelis and Arabs to forgive and forget.
In this week's events in Lebanon, the one set of parties, which include Syria, the Palestinians, Iran, Arab nationalists in the Middle East and North Africa, along with jihadi Muslims in the Muslim World, believe that escalation is the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
They claim that the Arabs tried to talk peace with the Israelis after the Palestinians signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1993, and ended up with nothing. They say that war is correct, justified morally, politically and religiously.
To them, it is legitimate self-defense. They back this argument by saying that Israel still controls the Sheba Farms, which are part of Lebanon, and still has Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails. Also, they add that the Israeli tank destroyed by Hezbollah, and the soldiers captured and killed on July 12, had trespassed into Lebanon's side of the border with Israel.
They argue that if the Arab world cannot fight Israel, then the least Arab countries can do is permit -or facilitate - a proxy war with Israel through the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon.
US President George W Bush, who commented on Lebanon from Germany 24 hours after violence had spiraled out of control, described the situation as "pathetic". He also expressed concern that Israel's offensive into Lebanon could destabilize or even topple a Lebanese government that Washington supports. He made things worse and further infuriated the Arab street by expressing Israel's "right to defend herself".
The other party (centered mainly in Lebanon) argues that Lebanon is paying a high price for a war that does not concern all Lebanese. The Christians of Lebanon, along with a majority of the Sunni Muslims, want a war-free Westernized country that thrives on tourism and sound economic policies.
The Christians in particular were never too fond of the Shi'ites of Lebanon. They treated them as an underclass in the 1950s and 1960s, allocating no more than 0.7% of the budget for construction and health care in their districts, waged war against them in the 1970s and 1980s, then tried to mend relations with them from 1990 onwards.
The Christians were worldly, well-educated and worked in business, politics, literature and the arts, while the Shi'ites were mainly laborers, farmers and ordinary citizens with limited social mobility. Even their deputies in parliament were feudal landlords who cared little for the community's welfare.
These Christians today - despite all the unity talk heard in Lebanon - do not feel that the Hezbollah prisoners in Israeli jails concern them. Nor do the Sheba Farms. They dislike the Shi'ite south of the country in as much as the Shi'ite leaders dislike the Christian districts of Lebanon.
Therefore, they feel indifferent to the plight of Hezbollah. They do not want Lebanon to become the "Che Guevara" of Arab politics. They argue that all this military escalation does is wreck plans for Lebanon's rebirth. On July 13 - as the Christians feared - tourism suffered tremendously after the Israelis struck at Beirut Airport. In one day, over 15,000 tourists fled Lebanon by land to Syria.
Both pro and anti-Hezbollah arguments are valid, depending on where one stands today in the Arab world.
It all started on July 12 when Israel troops were ambushed on Lebanon's side of the border with Israel. Hezbollah, which commands the Lebanese south, immediately seized on their crossing. They arrested two Israeli soldiers, killed eight Israelis and wounded over 20 in attacks inside Israeli territory.
This unleashed hell in Israel, and Olmert immediately responded by mounting a war on Lebanon. A sea, air and ground blockade was enforced on Lebanon, and a systematic destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure was began.
Hezbollah responded by wounding 11 Israelis with Katyusha-style rockets fired on the town of Safad in northern Israel. Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah gave a press conference hours after the hostilities started. He was confident, articulate, strong and very defiant, as usual, saying that this operation aimed at getting the Israelis to release Lebanese prisoners from their jails.
Counter-operations would not release the two abducted Israeli soldiers, he pointed out. Statements by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora, who wanted to distance himself from the attacks, said that his government had not authorized the Hezbollah operation.
His claim, however, fell on deaf ears in Israel. Damaging his credibility was a statement by Lebanon's ambassador to the United States, Farid Abbud, who spoke on CNN and demanded a prisoner exchange between Hezbollah and Israel, adding that Israel must return the occupied Sheba Farms to Lebanon.
His statements gave the impression that the Lebanese government, which he was officially representing, approved of the kidnapping and was echoing the demands of Nasrallah. As a result, he was recalled to Lebanon.
Undaunted by Siniora distancing himself from the Hezbollah operation, Israel responded by bombing Rafik al-Harriri International Airport in Beirut, bringing all aviation to a halt, and bombing two other airports in northern and southern Lebanon.
These airports, Israel claimed, were being used to channel money and arms to Hezbollah. One of the party's offices in the suburb of Beirut was bombed, and so was a post in the ancient city of Baalbak. And Israel battered roads, flyovers and fuel tanks in Lebanon early on Friday.
A division of 12,000 troops has been stationed on the Lebanese-Israeli border. The Israeli Ministry of Defense has threatened to bomb the Damascus-Beirut highway. If this happens, Lebanon would become completely isolated, with no ground route to Syria, and its other outlets by sea and air blocked by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Hezbollah threatened that if more attacks ensued, it would target Haifa, the third-largest city inside Israel (which it then did), but Israel military commanders said that no targets in Lebanon were safe from reprisal attacks so long as the two Israeli soldiers were still held hostage in Lebanon.
Israeli chief-of-staff Dan Halutz said that the operations would continue "to restore calm to northern Israel". These responsibilities, he added "particularly bombings by air and artillery, target Lebanon itself and Hezbollah. They will continue as long as necessary until our objectives are reached."
Israel military commanders have pledged to plunge Lebanon back 20 years if hostilities did not end immediately. Bridges inside Lebanon, near the city of Sidon and throughout the south, were also destroyed. The death toll, at the time of writing, is over 50 Lebanese killed. Another 103 have been wounded.
Meanwhile, according to the IDF, 90 people had been injured inside Israel. This is the largest Israeli offensive in Lebanon since the IDF invaded and occupied Beirut to defeat the Palestinian Army of Yasser Arafat in 1982.
Apart from all of these facts, everything gets muddled in Lebanon. Israel announced on July 13 that two rockets had landed on Haifa from Lebanon, as Hezbollah had promised, but Hezbollah denied the accusation.
If Hezbollah did not fire the rockets, however, who did? Is it a fabricated story being used by Israel to launch more offensives into Lebanon, because minutes after the story was revealed, and despite Hezbollah's denial, Israel jets raided fuel tanks at Beirut airport.
The question on everybody's mind is: why is all of this happening now? Apart from the soaring emotions and reminders of trumpeting Arab nationalism of the 1960s, it is sheer madness for anyone to believe that Hezbollah would be able to defeat, or even inflict maximum pain, on Israel - and get away with it.
Too much is at stake inside Israel for Olmert to let the offensive pass without transforming it into all-out war. In October 2000, right at the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in Jerusalem, Hezbollah did a similar stunt by kidnapping Israelis in Lebanon.
At the time, prime minister Ehud Barak refused to seriously push for their release, fearing that opening another front against Lebanon, while the Israelis were busy combating the Palestinians at home, would only endanger Israeli lives. Five months later, Barak was voted out of office, in March 2001, for a variety of reasons, prime among them being his passive response to Hezbollah.
So, is anybody influencing Hezbollah to dramatically escalate the conflict? Has Hezbollah coordinated these attacks with Hamas inside Palestine, believing that the time was ripe since relatively new and inexperienced leaders were now in power in Israel (in reference to Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Olmert)?
Never before has Hezbollah carried out such a massive offensive, not even during the heydays of the Syrian presence in Lebanon in the 1990s when most of south Lebanon was still occupied.
What makes it believe that this time - with the tense international situation - it can get away with it? Ultra-nationalists in Hamas, like the Damascus-based Khaled Meshal, have certainly supported the Lebanese group, injecting them with confidence and prompting them into "defiance" mode.
Meshal, who leads the anti-pragmatism fold in Hamas that still wants to destroy the Jewish state, is not satisfied by the overtures of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya towards Israel. Haniyya, voted into office early this year, wants to run a country and is suffering from an international boycott on food, medicine and money into the Palestinian territories.
Wages have not been paid in Palestine since February. Haniyya made several gestures of goodwill toward Israel (much to the displeasure of Meshal), to prove that he was not in power to combat Israel but to improve the livelihood of the Palestinians.
Meshal had other plans for the Hamas-led government, which contradicted with what Haniyya was seeing on the ground in Palestine. The two men drifted apart on how to lead the government, and split when three resistance groups in Palestine, apparently coordinating with Meshal's team, kidnapped the 19-year old Israeli soldier on June 25.
This sent shockwaves throughout Israel, and Olmert responded with grand force, re-occupying Gaza and killing, to date, an estimated 75 Palestinians in revenge. Electricity was destroyed in Gaza, and currently 1.5 million inhabitants live in darkness. Israel struck at buildings, an Islamic university and official buildings, including that of Haniyya and his Foreign Minister Mahmud al-Zahhar (which was destroyed on July 13).
Ministers have been arrested, along with parliamentary deputies, and brought before military courts clad in chains to their feet and hands. Haniyya, who sees the state he is heading crumbling before his very eyes, wanted to solve the crisis politically, claiming that all the Palestinians living under his control were suffering from Israel's military response. The resistance groups demanded a prisoner swap where 1,000 Palestinians would be released from Israeli jails, in exchange for the young Israeli soldier. Israel has refused.
Haniyya is closer to a solution that releases the Israeli soldier in exchange for Israel releasing Palestinian funds (frozen since Hamas came to power in January, and its authorization to bring clean drinking water, food and medicine into the Occupied Territories. Both solutions have not yet materialized, and in the middle of all the chaos and war, came the Hezbollah operation.
Men of war
This is where the Meshal-Nasrallah connection comes into play. Both leaders are clearly not interested in peace with Israel. Their views are mirrored with their two allies in Tehran and Damascus. Both leaders are unimpressed by Arab regimes that call for peace and dialogue - prime on the list being Mahmud Abbas in Palestine.
They are being aggressive with Israel so Israel can respond with similar aggressiveness - killing whatever dreams Arabs peacemakers have in mind. The same formula applies inside Israel, where many do not want room for moderation in Israeli-Arab relations.
They want to root out the moderates to justify aggression against the Palestinians and Lebanese. Meshal would very much love to see Hamas out of the political process. It would then be restored to the fold of the resistance, and freed from the burden of government, able to focus on military operations once again.
The same applies to Nasrallah. If Israeli leaves the Sheba Farms and frees all Lebanese prisoners from its jails, there would no longer be a need for Hezbollah. The reason behind such calculations, however, and the dramatic side-effects such adventures have on Palestinian and Lebanese lives, are colossal.
They believe, however, that war on two fronts would achieve one of two things. Either it would get Israel to show aggression, justifying their own aggression against the Israelis. Or a best-case scenario would be that a two-side war would break Israel. Either outcome, Hezbollah and Hamas are the victors.
The final argument - based on conspiracy theories - in the war of Lebanon is that somebody convinced Hezbollah of this offensive with the purpose of destroying Hezbollah, forcing them to commit "political suicide". This "somebody" has given Hezbollah enough rope to hang itself, making it believe that it could turn the tables on Israel by capturing two Israeli soldiers.
The reason for this argument is that Hezbollah, for the past two years, has been a topic of international concern. Everybody wants Hezbollah to disarm (except Syria and Iran) but do not have the means to make them lay down their weapons. It certainly is not working by dialogue - because Hezbollah would not hear a word of it, and, therefore, has to be done by force through a foreign power. The only power able and willing to inflict a deadly blow on Hezbollah is Israel.
Having the Americans pressure Hezbollah to disarm would be considered aggression on the Shi'ite community as whole. It would enrage Iran and alienate whatever support the Americans still had left among the Shi'ite community in Iraq. The leaders of Lebanon, who came to power after the Syrian troop withdrawal in April 2005, wanted to court Hezbollah. They believed that by making them shoulder responsibility for government, Hezbollah would show more reason in dealing with Israel.
The same reasoning applied to the Americans when they brought the Sunnis to power in Iraq, hoping that this would help end the Sunni insurgency. The Lebanese, headed by Siniora, reasoned that with seats in parliament and government ministries allocated to Hezbollah, the resistance group would not possibly engage in war with Israel.
Apparently, they were wrong.
Many wrongly believed that once the Syrian army left Lebanon, Hezbollah would be weakened, gradually losing its influence in the country. This turned out to be nonsense, since contrary to what is commonly portrayed in the Western media, Hezbollah is a party that is totally independent in Lebanon from control of the Syrians.
They used to work under Syria's umbrella under former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad in the 1990s, needing his support to keep their arms in the post-war era, but since their victory in liberating south Lebanon in 2000, they have become independent of Syrian control.
They still confer with the Syrians, seek their advice and coordinate with Syria but they do not take orders, money or arms from Damascus. For example, they had four parliamentary seats in 1992, and four for their allies, a total of only eight, and this in the heyday of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon. Today, with Syria out, they have 14 seats.
This explains why Hezbollah remained pro-Syrian until curtain-fall. Nasrallah never relied on the Syrians for his power base, nor did any member of Hezbollah. Also in Hezbollah's favor now is the victory of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has shown strong support for the Shi'ite Lebanese resistance. Ahmadinejad clearly believes in the vision of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to promote Shi'ite Islam and help emancipate the Shi'ites of Lebanon.
Ahmadinejad said on Thursday any Israeli strike on Syria would be considered an attack on the whole Islamic world that would bring a "fierce response", state television reported.
Relevant to all that is happening in Lebanon today is the degree of support Hezbollah and Nasrallah have in the Shi'ite community - and the amount of animosity in non-Shi'ite districts. One reason the Shi'ites support Hezbollah is religion. It is not the only one, however, because a study conducted by Dr Judith Harik, a professor at the American University of Beirut in 1996, showed that 70% of Hezbollah's supporters saw themselves only as moderately religious, and 23% said they were religious only out of obligation.
Pragmatism, nationalism and charity networks, rather than Muslim ideology, are the secrets of Hezbollah's success. Hezbollah enjoys authority and commands unwavering loyalty among Shi'ites because it always appears to be a confident political party that is doing an honorable job in fighting Israel. Adding to the nationalist aspect is the social one, which is that many people in the Shi'ite community, mainly at the grass-root level, rely on Hezbollah for charity and welfare.
Hezbollah has succeeded in promoting itself through the media, igniting confidence, safety and security among the 10 million viewers of al-Manar television, for example. Many of those viewers are Shi'ites. Not once does al-Manar, for example, show viewers a member of Hezbollah defeated. Rather, it shows pictures of dead Israelis, real footage of Hezbollah operations and programs highlighting Hezbollah's charity organizations. Hezbollah is a movement inspired by nationalism rather than religiousness.
Precisely for these reasons it would be difficult for anyone to tackle Hezbollah. The only way to disarm is for the Shi'ite group to wait until the Israelis leave Sheba, then free all prisoners. They would then have to modify their agenda, after quiet discussions with everybody in Lebanon, and transform themselves from a military party into a political one.
That would have been the logical response, but Nasrallah proved otherwise. What he has done in the past few days is show the world that if he so wishes, he can create havoc in Lebanon and the entire Middle East.
Nasrallah is sending a message to the world - and to his opponents inside Lebanon - that he is still strong and a force to be reckoned with. He is also sending a message to the United States, Israel and the Lebanese that the Shi'ites are still there - still strong, still a force and still visible to the rest of the world.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG15Ak02.html
Asia Times:
Tremors rock Syria
By Dahr Jamail
Jul 15, 2006
DAMASCAS - Syrians are outraged over Israeli air strikes in Lebanon that have killed at least 27 civilians and closed down Beirut's international airport.
Israeli air strikes early Thursday targeted the new Rafik al-Hariri International Airport, and strikes continued on other facilities on Friday. Israeli naval vessels entered Lebanon's territorial waters and blocked access to ports while its forces launched an offensive in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah fighters.
Hezbollah is a militant group that has long engaged in armed conflict with Israel. It is believed to be strongest in the south of Lebanon, in the areas bordering Israel.
The Israeli offensive was launched in response to the killing of eight Israeli soldiers in clashes with Hezbollah fighters on Wednesday near the border 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean. Two Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. An Israeli soldier had earlier been captured in Gaza.
In an escalation of the conflict, an Israeli woman was killed after Hezbollah fighters fired rockets across the border into the Israeli town Nahariya. An Israeli air base was hit by rockets, along with other towns in the area. Several Israeli civilians have been wounded.
The Israeli military entered Lebanon for the first time since withdrawing six years ago. "I doubt you will find one Syrian who will not denounce what Israel is doing in Gaza, the West Bank and now in Lebanon," independent publicity consultant Ibrahim Yakhour told Inter Press Service (IPS). " Syrians believe that what the Palestinians suffer is what the Syrians suffer."
Yakhour, a 60-year-old retired journalist, said political parties in Syria had been calling for a peaceful political process in the Middle East for the past 30 years. "But when people are humiliated, attacked and killed, radical reactions commence, which are deleterious to the political process."
People in Damascus also fear that a regional war may spread to Syria. "The entire region is now involved," said Emad Huria, a 45-year-old literary critic. "All Arabs should raise their voices against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon."
Maher Skandyran, a 37-year-old worker at a watch store in downtown Damascus, said Israeli double standards were making people furious. "I feel angry. Ninety-five percent of the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel are innocent civilians, including women and children. Nobody says a word about this. But when three Israeli armed soldiers are detained, this is such a big crime, and everyone is outraged. Is this justice?"
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the Israeli soldiers had been seized to push Israel to release prisoners.
Israel reacted with unexpected aggression. An Israeli military spokesman told reporters, "Since this morning Israeli naval vessels have enforced a full naval closure on Lebanon, because Lebanon's ports are used to transfer both terrorists and weapons to the terror organizations operating in Lebanon."
Another official said the attacks had been launched to pressure the Lebanese government to deal with Hezbollah. Hezbollah's al-Manar television station in Beirut was bombed. Israel also bombed several bridges that link southern Lebanon with the rest of the country.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the action was in response to "an act of war by the state of Lebanon". His cabinet promised a response with "appropriate severity".
But the root of the Lebanese problem could lie in the occupation of Palestinian areas. "Everything which is happening illustrates the main problem, which is the Israelis invading and occupying Palestine and taking the land," 55-year-old local merchant Faez Ashoor told IPS. "When that situation ends, we will have peace."
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG15Ak03.html
Guardian:
Lebanon suffers as Israel braces
Bombardment of Lebanon continues as Israelis told to stock up on supplies
Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv and agencies
Friday July 14, 2006
Israeli jets continued to bomb Lebanon today, hitting Beirut airport and 18 other targets as Jerusalem threatened to escalate its attack on the besieged country even further. Three people were killed. Hizbullah fired 13 more rockets at northern Israel, but caused little damage.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were advised this morning to stock up on essential supplies before returning to their bomb shelters by noon. The residents of northern Israel had emerged from their shelters after a relatively quiet night. Yesterday more than 150 Hizbullah rockets had been fired, killing two people.
Israeli officials and politicians said there would be no end to the campaign to destroy Hizbullah and free two Israeli soldiers. They expected Hizbullah to continue to fire some of its estimated 12,000 missiles over the weekend.
The soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, were captured by Hizbullah guerrillas in a cross-border raid on Wednesday to be used to barter for the release of Lebanese prisoners. Eight Israeli soldiers and a Hizbullah fighter were killed in the raid.
The calm in the north of Israel was bought at the expense of the residents of southern Lebanon and Beirut, who were bombarded by the Israeli air force throughout last night.
Israeli aircraft hit offices, fuel depots, roads, bridges and junctions, killing three people and injuring 50, according to news agencies. About 50 people, including four Brazilians, have been killed since Israel started attacking Lebanon.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said aircraft had targeted 18 sites, including the airport, the offices of Hizbullah in Beirut and bridges and sections of road on the Beirut-Damascus highway. The conflict has affected both the Lebanese and Israeli economies. Tourists in both countries have fled and stocks and currency values have plummeted.
Yet Israeli officials vowed to escalate the conflict and assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader.
Diplomatic pressure around the conflict was stepped up when Israel's UN ambassador named Syria and Iran as the backers of Hizbullah and Hamas.
It is widely known that Damascus and Tehran support the militant groups, but the remarks - in the midst of a security council debate about censuring Israel's actions in Gaza and Lebanon - ratcheted up fears that the countries may be dragged directly into the conflict.
"What we are seeing are the actions of Hamas and Hizbullah, but they are merely the fingers of the bloodstained hands and the executioners of the twisted minds of the leaders of the world's most ominous axis of terror, Syria and Iran," said Israel's ambassador, Dan Gillerman.
Earlier today, the Finnish foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja, warned that the violence risked dragging in Syria, which ruled Lebanon as a puppet state until it withdrew troops last year and still has the support of the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud.
Israeli commentators wrote that Israel would profit from the crisis by pushing Hizbullah away from the Israeli border.
Amnon Dankner, the editor of the newspaper Ma'ariv, said it was ironic that Amir Peretz, the defence minister, and Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, who had never been senior military men, had the task of repairing the damage done by Israel's previous prime ministers, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who were both decorated generals. This damage included allowing Hizbullah to deploy thousands of missiles close to the border and exchanging hundreds of prisoners for the bodies of Israelis and a single hostage, he said.
Other commentators compared Israel's situation to Britain's during the time of the blitz and said "everything is permissible" in the campaign against Lebanon.
The crisis in the north has completely overshadowed the situation in Gaza, where the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit remains a captive of Hamas and the already desperate living conditions of Gazans continue to deteriorate.
Piles of rubbish are mounting in the streets as there is no fuel for garbage trucks. The shortage of electricity, caused by airstrikes on a power station, means there is not enough power to pump sewage or water. Untreated sewage is running directly into the sea and crowds gather round water tanks to fill jerry cans and plastic bottles.
Virtually no wages have been paid to employees of the Palestinian Authority and the rest of the economy is at a standstill. Israel allows enough fuel and food to enter but Gazans cannot leave or enter the strip. Thousands have been stuck on the Egyptian border waiting to return home. The Red Cross reported that four people had died because of the lack of shelter and services.
Israel pulled its forces out of central Gaza overnight, although they remain in the south near Rafah. The air force continued to bomb parts of Gaza, hitting buildings, roads and bridges, and the army shelled northern Gaza, where a man was killed when a tank fired at his car.
Since the offensive began, Israeli forces have killed 86 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier in a friendly fire incident. Many of the dead were gunmen, but about a fifth were civilians. The latest victim was a 10-year-old boy who died in a hospital on Friday, four days after being wounded in Beit Lahiya in the north.
Today, the Israeli army said that three Qassam rockets had landed in the city of Sderot in northern Israel without causing any damage.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1820615,00.html
Guardian:
Trapped in Beirut
A first-hand account of how the Israeli strikes have traumatised Beirut asks why the EU and America have done so little to help Lebanon
Schona Jolly in Beirut
Friday July 14, 2006
Just two days ago, this city had blown away every preconception of the Middle East that a westerner could hold. The 17-year civil war had left scars, of course - terracotta French Mandate buildings, complete with ornate balconies, were riddled with the pockmarks of shelling and sniper fire. Yet like remnants of a childhood disease, the markers resembled memories that were being pushed far away.
The Beirut I have seen seemed, until yesterday, to be a place of dreams coming true. Its residents, toned and coiffeured amid the rose-flavoured haze of narghileh smoke, make looking good an art form. Nowhere in the west can quite compete with the glitz and razzmatazz the like of a night out here. Young Beirutis everywhere speak in east coast American accents, mingled with the French of a bygone era, blended with the local lilting Arabic. Downtown has been rebuilt with such speedy finesse that one marvels at the Lebanese ability to move on to the good life and forget the armed militias and shelled-out buildings once housed there.
Last Sunday this city was caught up in a friendlier battle. The Lebanese, without their own national team in the World Cup Finals, had taken ardent sides with other national sides and the city seemed roughly divided between supporters of Italy, France and Brazil. People were still fixated on whether Zizou had responded to vicious taunts from Materazzi when the news filtered in that Hezbollah had taken two Israeli soldiers.
And so, in the flash of a kidnapping, war hovers over these skies ahead, complete with night-vision goggles and the tacit support of a world that won't condemn the Israeli strikes at the heart of a sovereign country. Bombs are raining down. A naval blockade is in force. In the heart of the tourist season, which is ploughing millions of much-needed dollars into the new-born economy here, thousands of tourists are trapped.
South Beirutis are either stuck in their own homes or fleeing. The airport looks sets to be bombed again and again. The roads are bombed or blocked and there is almost no way out of the country. Hundreds tried to get on buses to Syria, but the buses were long full and now, there is no certainty on travel across the Bekaa valley, which is likely to be struck again and again. So long as we stay out of south Beirut, and the regions close to that magnificent tourist attraction of Ba'albeck, we will probably all be safe.
We would probably have been fine in the Christian areas of Beirut where we were staying, such as Achrafieh and Geymazeh, but we are traveling with a nine-month-old baby and we dare not take any risks. So, for now, we are holed up in Byblos, about 35km north of Beirut, the home of writing and a 7,000-year-old culture. There is no significant army presence here, and certainly no people handing out sweets at traffic lights to celebrate the Hezbollah's kidnappings. We hear young Israelis are demonstrating outside their Parliament against these attacks. This is a young population in a country with a young government, who wants peace.
Of course, there are those who support Hizbullah. But the majority of the people I have met everywhere, Christian and Muslim, just want calm, quiet lives. In short, they want the peace that we take for granted in the west. Young people here realise Israelis want the same. A young Lebanese student said to me yesterday: "Khallas, this is 2006, why can't we just talk at a table, why are they bombing us?". Everyone, everywhere here is asking the same question: how can the international community allow Israel to strike us, our whole country, in this way? Why has the US not spoken out? Why does the EU refer only to "disproportionate force"? We are at war, they say - again - and we are being held to ransom by terror.
Anyone who understands anything about this country knows the government is powerless to stop Hizbullah. With that information at hand, one wonders why the Israeli government is taking these actions. What do they hope to achieve, except the destruction, wholesale, of a country's economy and life line again? Imagine France bombing Heathrow, Gatwick, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, the M1 and M25, as well as strategic locations in the north in order to force Tony Blair to control those Al-Qaeda elements that operate from London. That is what is happening here.
For now, we tourists are all trapped here. But at least we can leave, we hope, in a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks. For the Lebanese, there is no way out. They will have to rebuild their infrastructure, their cities and their economy again. This may be called the "war on terror", but whose war is it, and whose terror?
·Schona Jolly is a human rights lawyer who works for equality, anti-discrimination and freedom for minorities worldwide, with a particular interest in genocide
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,1820570,00.html
Guardian: Peace talks put off
as India claims Pakistan 'hand' in Mumbai bombs
· Police say Lashkar-e-taiba militants behind attacks
· Photos of two Muslim suspects shown on TV
Randeep Ramesh in Mumbai
Friday July 14, 2006
The peace process between India and Pakistan fell victim to the Mumbai bombings yesterday as talks scheduled for next week were reportedly delayed because New Delhi said it had evidence that its neighbour had a "hand" in the attacks.
Top civil servants of each country's foreign ministries were to have discussed seemingly intractable border disputes. New Delhi TV reported that the talks would be postponed, although no new dates were mentioned.
Police in Mumbai named the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba as prime suspect for Tuesday's wave of blasts in India's commercial hub in which almost 200 people were killed.
Photographs of two Muslim suspects, named as Sayyad Zaibuddin and Zulfeqar Fayyaz, who it was claimed were key operatives in the bombing, were shown on television. The nationalities of the two young bearded men were not given, nor was it clear where the photos - headshots which appeared to have been taken for identification documents - originated.
The news of the delayed talks brought a sharp reaction from Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. He said India should be careful about trying to attribute the attacks to Pakistan-based militants.
"There are attacks in other parts of India, there should not be a knee-jerk reaction that everything happening in India starts in Pakistan," he said.
The Mumbai bombs have swung public opinion against the government's moderate stance on Pakistan, with Indian newspaper editorials calling for "the jihad factory next door" to be shut down.
Television channels ran telephone polls which claimed that 99% of respondents thought the government was too soft on terrorism.
The attacks have also energised the Hindu nationalism of the opposition and the pressure on the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to act has been acute.
Mumbai's commuters were back on the city's packed public transport in their millions yesterday, but remained uneasy.
The city authorities stepped up airport security after the admitting that airports could be the next targets and they also installed closed circuit television at some railway stations.
In the gathering investigation in Mumbai, police scoured hotels and homes for clues to the train bombers. They detained more than 250 people for questioning although no one has been formally arrested or charged.
The naming of two suspects came as a man claiming to represent al-Qaida reportedly claimed the terror network had begun operating in Kashmir, the Himalayan region divided between India and Pakistan, where Muslim militants are fighting for independence.
The claim could not immediately be verified, but if true it would be the first time Osama bin Laden's network has claimed to have spread to Indian territory. Intelligence experts have warned that al-Qaida has been looking at ways of increasing support among India's Muslims, especially after George Bush's visit to India earlier this year.
"Since 2003 Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No 2 in al-Qaida, has been critical of India and the Hindus. Since President George W Bush's visit to India in March 2006, Bin Laden has joined this criticism," a former Indian intelligence official, B Raman, wrote this week. "Before March 2006 al-Qaida and Bin Laden used to talk of a Crusader-Jewish conspiracy against Islam. Since March 2006 they talk of a Crusader-Jewish-Hindu conspiracy against Islam."
In an interview with the Guardian, India's top civil servant in the home ministry, V K Duggal, said he had "put people on to the job to check the veracity of the [al-Qaida] statement. At this point of time a lot of groups would like to create a scare or panic so we treat the claims with caution."
Mr Bush telephoned Mr Singh last night to express condolences and offer support in the struggle against terrorism.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,1820262,00.html
Jeune Afrique:
Coulisses de campagne
par PHILIPPE PERDRIX, ENVOYÉ SPÉCIAL
CONGO (RDC) - 9 juillet 2006
Avions, hélicoptères, affiches... pour les élections du 30 juillet, les candidats ne lésinent pas sur les moyens pour quadriller leur pays. Et misent beaucoup sur quelques hommes clés et leur savoir-faire politique.
Au nombre d’affiches dans les rues de Kinshasa, Joseph Kabila et Jean-Pierre Bemba arrivent largement en tête. Le chef de l’État sortant soutenu par l’Alliance de la majorité présidentielle (AMP) s’est réservé l’allée centrale du boulevard du 30-Juin. Le candidat du Regroupement des nationalistes congolais (Renaco) a monopolisé les panneaux disposés sur les bas-côtés. Pour ces premières élections présidentielle et législatives libres depuis l’indépendance, « la culture du vote en fonction d’un programme n’existe pas en République démocratique du Congo (RDC). Pour être élu, il faut matraquer l’électeur de quelques mots d’ordre », déplore un journaliste congolais : Kabila se présente comme « l’artisan de la paix » ; Bemba s’engage en faveur de la « justice, de la sécurité et du développement » ; l’ancien gouverneur de la Banque centrale du Zaïre sous Mobutu, Pierre Pay-Pay de la Coalition des démocrates congolais (Codeco) promet de « gouverner autrement ». C’est-à-dire « ne jamais faire comme avant et ne plus faire comme aujourd’hui ». Quant au vice-président Azarias Ruberwa du Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie (RCD), il offre une « candidature de qualité ». Voilà pour la rhétorique électoraliste censée départager, le 30 juillet, ?les 33 postulants à la magistrature suprême.
Les équipes de campagne sont chargées de mettre tout cela en musique, mais seuls quelques candidats sont en mesure de mener bataille dans l’ensemble du pays. Afin de franchir la ligne d’arrivée en vainqueur dès le premier tour, l’amoureux des grosses cylindrées, le candidat Kabila, dispose d’une belle mécanique. « Le Parti du peuple pour la reconstruction et la démocratie (PPRD) est la clé de voûte. Mais avec l’AMP, qui réunit 30 formations politiques, nous voulons ratisser le plus large possible et, surtout, affaiblir nos principaux concurrents dans chaque partie du territoire. Le 30 juillet, chaque voix va compter », reconnaît l’un des plus proches collaborateurs du chef de l’État qui organise la campagne depuis le palais de la présidence.
Sur le terrain, le secrétaire général du PPRD, Vital Kamerhe, natif de Bukavu, est chargé de la mobilisation. Non sans talent. À vrai dire, la machine n’a pas attendu le lancement de la campagne, le 29 juin, pour se mettre en branle. Une semaine avant la tournée présidentielle dans les deux provinces du Kivu, du 26 juin au 3 juillet, l’ancien ministre de l’Information et porte-parole du gouvernement, entre 2003 et 2004, était sur place. Pour une visite tenue secrète jusqu’au dernier moment, tout a été très bien préparé. Des foules immenses, abondamment filmées par les caméras de la télévision nationale (RTNC), sont venues acclamer et écouter « Joseph » qui doit se rendre dans toutes les provinces. « J’irai là où lui n’ira pas », ajoute Kamerhe. « Depuis plusieurs mois, je suis allé, à pied, en pirogue, dans les coins les plus isolés du pays pour sensibiliser les populations », avoue un autre membre du PPRD.
Tout cela exige une grosse logistique. Un Boeing 727, trois Antonov, un jet et deux hélicoptères ont été loués à une société privée de droit congolais, Executive Jet Service. Pour quelle somme ? « Cela reste secret, car nos compatriotes pourraient être effrayés par certains montants, mais nous n’utilisons pas les moyens de l’État. Nous avons en revanche des amis et des chefs d’État qui nous aident », affirme le secrétaire général du PPRD. Le trésorier de campagne, Augustin Katumba, est présenté comme un personnage clé du staff de Kabila. Dans sa chambre d’hôtel à Kinshasa, le coordinateur de l’AMP et ancien ministre (Agriculture, Économie, Industrie puis Finances) de 2001 à 2005, André-Philippe Futa, originaire du Kasaï oriental, multiplie les entretiens. « Je garde la maison lorsque les autres sillonnent le pays, et l’AMP sera le seul couloir de décision. Son budget de fonctionnement est de 100 000 dollars », déclare celui qui affirme avoir des rapports de « confiance et de liberté » avec le chef de l’État.
« Vu mes mauvaises relations avec Kabila père, le fait que Joseph m’ait appelé en 2001 lors de son accession au pouvoir relève du parricide intellectuel », sourit-il. Futa avait sans doute, aussi, des ambitions présidentielles lorsqu’il a créé le Parti de l’alliance nationale pour l’unité (Panu). À défaut de moyens suffisants pour partir seul à la bagarre électorale, il dispose d’une place de choix dans l’écurie Kabila. Plus encore que Futa, Olivier Kamitatu est un transfuge hors pair. L’an dernier, il était encore le bras droit de Jean-Pierre Bemba, et, à ce titre, président de l’Assemblée nationale. Début 2006, il a failli faire tandem avec Pierre Pay-Pay. Aujourd’hui, il n’est rien moins que le secrétaire permanent et le porte-parole de l’AMP de Joseph Kabila.
Kamitatu parti, Antoine Ghonda ayant rejoint, en 2004, le camp présidentiel comme ambassadeur itinérant, Jean-Pierre Bemba a constitué une équipe resserrée autour du dernier carré de fidèles. À commencer par le secrétaire général du Mouvement pour la libération du Congo (MLC), François Mwamba Tshishimbi du Kasaï occidental. L’actuel ministre du Budget et porte-parole de campagne est par ailleurs coordinateur de la Renaco qui regroupe une vingtaine de partis et - surprise - deux autres candidats à la présidentielle. La manœuvre semble risquée. Ces candidats peuvent prendre des voix à Bemba. Mais celui-ci fait un tout autre calcul. Il fait le pari que l’ancien ministre mobutiste Christophe Mboso, dans le Bandundu, et l’ex-patron de la très puissante Minière de Bakwanga (Miba) dans la région diamantifère du Kasaï, capteront un électorat que convoite le président sortant.
Dans son bureau, situé dans les locaux du vice-président Jean-Pierre Bemba, sur les bords du fleuve Congo, le directeur de campagne Fidèle Babala, du Bandundu, « ajuste et organise les déplacements en fonction des adversaires ». « Le mois de campagne va être très chargé, et il faut sillonner l’ensemble du pays », précise celui qui travaille en étroite collaboration avec les représentants du parti dans chaque province. Depuis sa résidence privée le long du boulevard du 30-Juin, Bemba reçoit à longueur de journée, s’inquiète des journalistes qui le suivront et prépare ses tournées électorales. Pour une véritable campagne à l’américaine, les moyens doivent suivre. Si aucun chiffre n’est confirmé, la logistique est impressionnante et le marketing politique se veut très efficace. L’ancien homme d’affaires dispose de sa flotte personnelle composée de six avions, dont un Boeing 727, et un hélicoptère. Pour relayer son message, le candidat dénonce « un accès limité aux médias publics », mais peut compter sur ses deux chaînes de télévision, Canal Kin TV et CCTV.
Alignant les audiences dans sa résidence de Kinshasa, l’autre vice-président candidat, Azarias Ruberwa, compte bien faire mentir ceux qui estiment que son poids réel n’est pas à la hauteur de ses fonctions actuelles. L’accord sur la transition de décembre 2002 lui a permis de traduire en postes institutionnels les conquêtes militaires du RCD, mais, électoralement, son réservoir de voix semble limité. Par ailleurs, sa campagne connaît quelques retards à l’allumage. La dernière visite à l’intérieur du pays remonte au mois d’avril, à Lubumbashi. Une plate-forme est annoncée, mais les soutiens se font rares après les nombreuses scissions au sein de l’ancien mouvement rebelle. Quant à l’équipe, elle est dirigée par le secrétaire général du RCD, Hubert Kabasu Babo, du Kasaï, et le professeur d’université, Jean-Pierre Bilusa, de Kisangani.
Même si l’ancien gouverneur de la Banque centrale du Zaïre de 1985 à 1991, Pierre Pay-Pay, né à Bukavu, a bien du mal à assumer son héritage mobutiste, la Coalition des démocrates congolais (Codeco), créée en décembre 2005, permet d’y voir un peu plus clair. Le porte-parole, André-Alain Atundu Liongo, n’est autre que l’ancien patron des services de renseignements du maréchal Mobutu. Quant au coordinateur de campagne, Charles Mwando, il s’agit d’un ancien dignitaire (gouverneur de provinces et ministre de l’Intérieur) du régime balayé en 1997. « Personne ne peut renier son passé mais nous ne sommes pas des nostalgiques », affirme Atundu, qui manie avec talent le bon mot et qui préfère donner rendez-vous au club de golf de Kinshasa, à l’écart de la ville. Habile à la manœuvre, le maître-espion reconnaît malgré tout que la campagne « commence comme un diesel ». Un seul avion a été affrété. Quant aux finances, « cela fait partie des informations stratégiques que nous préférons garder, car nous avons un budget arrêté contrairement à nos principaux adversaires, qui disposent de moyens illimités ».
Sans concession pour Mobutu, mais sans illusion sur la « génération spontanée », le vieux Antoine Gizenga, vice-Premier ministre de Patrice Lumumba en 1960, se distingue à tous points de vue. Par son âge (81 ans) et sa campagne. Le leader du Parti lumumbiste unifié (Palu) compte bien profiter du boycottage du leader historique de l’opposition, Étienne Tshisekedi, et de l’Union pour la démocratie et le progrès social (UDPS). Sans moyens financiers, mais jouissant d’une certaine estime due à son parcours d’irréductible, il mise sur son image personnelle pour créer la surprise.
En fait, une ligne de fracture sépare la classe politique entre ceux qui se sont imposés depuis 1997 et les rescapés de l’époque Mobutu. Les premiers ont conquis le pouvoir par les armes ou à la faveur de la transition. Aujourd’hui, ils comptent sur les élections pour demeurer aux plus hautes fonctions. Pour cela, ils nouent des alliances tous azimuts avec un sens aigu de l’opportunisme. Les autres refusent de disparaître et cherchent à se refaire une virginité grâce au suffrage universel.
© Jeuneafrique.com 2006
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_jeune_afrique.asp?
art_cle=LIN09076couliengapm0
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Cohetes en Haifa y bombas en Beirut
LA GUERRA ENTRE HEZBOLA Y EL EJERCITO ISRAELI YA CAUSO DECENAS DE MUERTES
La aviación israelí bombardeó el sur del Líbano y el aeropuerto de Beirut causando 53 muertes, mientras los cohetes de los milicianos chiítas mataron a dos civiles israelíes y a una argentina. Israel se cuida de avanzar sobre Siria, su verdadero enemigo.
Por Robert Fisk*
Desde Beirut, Viernes, 14 de Julio de 2006
Durante toda la noche escuché el rugido de los jets sobrevolando el Mediterráneo. Duró horas, pequeñas luciérnagas que miraban a Beirut, quizás esperando la madrugada, porque fue entonces que descendieron. Primero llegaron al pequeño pueblo de Dweir, centro de Nabatiya en el sur del Líbano, donde un avión israelí bombardeó la casa de un clérigo chiíta musulmán. Murió. También su mujer. También sus ocho hijos. Uno fue decapitado. Todo lo que se pudo encontrar del bebé fue su cabeza y su torso que un joven del pueblo sacudía furioso frente a las cámaras de televisión. Luego los aviones visitaron otro hogar en Dweir y acabaron con los siete miembros de una familia.
Era un enérgico comienzo del Día Dos en la última “guerra contra el terror” de Israel, un conflicto que usa el mismo lenguaje –y algunas de las mismas mentiras– que la más grande “guerra contra el terror” de George W. Bush. De la misma manera que nosotros “degradamos” a Irak, en 1991 y en 2003, ayer le tocó el turno al Líbano de ser “degradado”. Esto significa no sólo la muerte, sino la muerte económica y éstas llegaron al brillante y nuevo aeropuerto de Beirut de 500 millones de dólares, justo antes de las seis de la mañana, mientras los pasajeros se preparaban para abordar los vuelos para Londres y París.
Desde mi casa, escuché el F16 que apareció de pronto sobre la pista de aterrizaje más nueva y disparó una serie de misiles sobre ella, rompiendo 20 metros de asfalto y lanzando toneladas de concreto por los aires en una explosión masiva, antes que una cañonera israelí Hetz disparara sobre las otras pistas. Dos ómnibus de Middle East Airlines quedaron intactos, pero a los pocos minutos el aeropuerto quedó desierto cuando los pasajeros huyeron a sus hogares y hoteles. Las pizarras de los vuelos contaban la historia: París, vuelo cancelado, Londres, vuelo cancelado, Cairo, vuelo cancelado, Dubai, vuelo cancelado, Bagdad –del caldero al fuego si alguien hubiera elegido tomarlo– vuelo cancelado. Por los altoparlantes se escuchaba “No llores por mi Argentina”.
Luego los israelíes se dirigieron a la estación de televisión de Hezbolá, “Al-Manar”, cortándole su antena con un misil pero no pudiendo sacar la estación del aire. Este podría ser un blanco más comprensible –“Manar”, después de todo, emite la propaganda de Hezbolá–. Pero ¿esto estaba pensado para encontrar o recuperar a los dos soldados israelíes capturados el miércoles? O para vengarse de los nueve israelíes muertos en el mismo incidente, uno de los días más negros en las reciente historia del ejército israelí, aunque no tan negro como lo fue para los 52 civiles libaneses muertos y 103 heridos en las últimas 24 horas. Una mujer israelí también murió por un cohete de Hezbolá lanzado hacia Israel. De manera que en la triste tasa de intercambio de estos desgraciados conflictos, una muerte israelí es igual a más de tres muertes libanesas: y se puede pensar que la tasa de intercambio aumentará aún más.
A la tarde, las amenazas eran peores. Israel no iba a esperar cruzado de brazos. Ordenó a toda su población en los suburbios del sur –donde están los cuarteles de Hezbolá– que huyera de sus hogares a las 15 horas. Salvo por un centenar de familias, que tercamente se negaron a partir. Ahora, cualquier lugar en el Líbano puede ser un blanco, anunciaron los israelíes. Si Israel bombardeaba los suburbios, rugía Hezbolá, ellos lanzarían sus Katyushas de largo alcance sobre la ciudad israelí de Haifa. Uno de ellos aparentemente ya había dañado una base aérea en Miron, un hecho que los censores israelíes ocultaron. Otros cayeron sobre Nahariya y mataron a tres civiles.
Los asustados turistas del golfo del Líbano llenaron los caminos desde Bhamdoun en sus 4 x 4, huyendo hacia la seguridad de Siria y a vuelos de regreso a sus hogares desde Damasco. Otra pequeña muerte económica para el Líbano. Pero, ¿qué querían decir todas estas amenazas? Me senté en mi casa al comienzo de la tarde, revisando mis archivos sobre las declaraciones de Israel. Resulta que Israel había amenazado con “no esperar de brazos cruzados” al Líbano por lo menos en seis ocasiones en los pasados 26 años, la más famosa cuando el ex primer ministro israelí Menajem Begin prometió que no “esperaría de brazos cruzados” mientras se amenazaba aquí a los cristianos en 1980, sólo para retirar a sus soldados y dejar a los cristianos abandonados a su sangriento destino tres años más tarde.
Los libaneses son siempre abandonados a sus destinos. El primer ministro israelí, Ehud Olmert, responsabiliza al gobierno libanés por los ataques sobre la frontera el miércoles. Pero Olmert y todos saben que el débil gobierno del primer ministro libanés Fouad Siniora no es capaz de controlar a un solo miliciano, ni hablar de Hezbolá. Pero ¿no era éste el mismo grupo de líderes políticos libaneses que Estados Unidos felicitó el año pasado por su elección democrática y por haber logrado su libertad de Siria? Por cierto, un hombre que considera a Bush un amigo es Saad Hariri, hijo del primer ministro libanés que construyó gran parte de la infraestructura que Israel está destruyendo ahora y cuyo asesinato el año pasado, a manos de agentes sirios, supuestamente enfureció a Bush. Ayer a la mañana, Saad Hariri, el hijo, estaba volando a Beirut cuando los aliados israelíes de Estados Unidos llegaron para bombardear el aeropuerto. Tuvo que volver, ya que su avión dio la vuelta y se dirigió a Chipre en busca de refugio.
Más puentes fueron destruidos en el sur del Líbano, así como algunas centrales eléctricas en el valle de Bekaa. ¿Cuanto faltará para que estalle el viaducto en Sofar y las usinas eléctricas en este verano asolador y que los teléfonos celulares no funcionen más? En cuanto a Occidente, el famoso Occidente que quiere la democracia y la libertad para todos los pueblos de Medio Oriente, aconseja su mentada “moderación”, que es una cualidad que Hezbolá y los israelíes desconocen. Los estadounidenses llaman “terroristas” a Hezbolá y Bush culpa a Siria. Tenía razón, por supuesto, pero por los motivos equivocados. Un vocero del Ministerio del Exterior israelí dijo, también, que la culpa era de Siria, pero parecía menos entusiasta con la idea de atacar a Siria. ¿Por que sería eso? ¿Por qué anunciaría Israel un “bloqueo marítimo” del Líbano para evitar que los “terroristas” reciban armas por mar, cuando Hezbolá recibe sus cohetes por tierra desde, bueno, sí, Siria?
Pero lo que era particularmente temible ayer, era la corriente subterránea del terror. El Líbano era un “eje del terror”. Israel estaba “combatiendo al terror en todos sus frentes”. Durante la mañana de ayer, tuve que interrumpir una entrevista con una radio australiana cuando un periodista israelí declaró que había guardias revolucionarios iraníes en el Líbano, lo cual no era verdad, y que no todas las tropas de Siria se habían retirado. Y ¿por qué habían atacado los israelíes el aeropuerto seguro y cuidadosamente monitoreado de Beirut, utilizado por diplomáticos y líderes europeos, un lugar tan seguro como cualquiera en Europa? Porque, dijeron los israelíes, era “una central para transferir armas y pertrechos a la organización terrorista Hezbolá”. Si los israelíes realmente quieren saber dónde está el centro, deberían estar buscando en el aeropuerto de Damasco. Pero eso lo saben, ¿no es cierto?
De manera que nuevamente es el terror, terror, terror, y se vuelve a señalar al Líbano como el mítico centro de terror en Medio Oriente, junto, supongo, con Gaza. Y Cisjordania. Y Siria. Y por supuesto Irak. Y Afganistán. ¿Y quién sabe cual es el próximo?
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12. Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhère.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-69887-2006-07-14.html
Página/12:
Ese monstruo de Gila
Por Juan Sasturain
Viernes, 14 de Julio de 2006
No sé qué habrá dicho Gila cuando se murió, entero y con más de ochenta hace exactamente cinco años, el 14 de julio del 2001, en Barcelona. El, que había hecho infinitos chistes de muertos en el cajón o en el cementerio bajo tierra, de muertos en guerra, de muertos en general, y de viudas, de asesinos y de verdugos, debe de haber vacilado en el minuto final, como uno de sus cejijuntos personajes a rayas frente al pelotón de fusilamiento. “¿Ahora qué pasa?”, lo apura el militar a cargo de la ejecución. “Nada –contesta la inminente víctima–. Que estoy pensando una frase final y no sé si decir ¡Ay, madre! o ¡Mira qué leche!”
La cuestión es que se murió pero es como si no. Ayer estábamos escuchando una cinta con sus monólogos en vivo –creo que el disco original se llamaba Historias de mí– y un amigo recordaba cuando, de pibe y en familia, allá por los sesenta, veían a ese gallego flaco y de gorra haciendo el número del teléfono en “Sábados Circulares” de Pipo Mancera: “¡Que se ponga...!”, etcétera. Todos se reían y el abuelo –un gallego, qué otra cosa iba a ser– repetía habitualmente con incredulidad y sin ironía alguna al terminar el sketch: “¿Y este hombre vive de hacer eso?”. Sí, claro que sí: Gila vivía del humor y es probable que el humor (negro, absurdo, absolutamente bestia, incorrecto, bien de gallego) lo haya salvado, le haya permitido vivir.
Su historia es simple, ejemplar. Miguel Gila Cuesta había nacido en 1919 en el madrileño barrio de Chamberí. Huérfano de padre, pobre de salida nomás, abandonó la escuela para trabajar desde chaval. Fue mecánico y fresador. Militante adolescente en las Juventudes Socialistas, al estallar la Guerra Civil se alistó como voluntario –junio de 1936– en el Quinto Regimiento de Lister. En diciembre de 1938 fue capturado e internado hasta mayo del año siguiente en un campo de prisioneros donde coincidió con Miguel Hernández. Lo pasearon después por varios penales e hizo cuatro años de servicio militar...
Siempre había dibujado, de chico. En 1942 apareció La Codorniz, que dirigía Miguel Mihura. Mandó un chiste –uno lo ve y se acuerda de Landrú, de Oski, que empezaban también por entonces, pero acá– y se lo publicaron: un soldado de rostro y gesto primitivo dice ante su superior: “Mi capitán, se me ha roto el caballo”. Y trae la cabeza y parte del cuello bajo el brazo; el resto está parado, atrás... Una barbaridad, nada que ver con nada. O sí: la añeja negrura española, algo que viene de Goya, de más atrás. Ese costumbrismo feroz, virado al humor negro y absurdo que jamás lo abandonará, será su registro, marca de fábrica y también sello identificatorio de muchos de sus coetáneos y sucesores: de Chumy Chúmez, Perich, Summers hasta Ops o el Forges... Para no hablar de Azcona y Cía. en el cine.
Después Gila colaboró semanalmente en Don José, en Hermano Lobo, hasta que a principios de los cincuenta –sin dejar de dibujar nunca– saltó al teatro como un espontáneo, improvisando un monólogo sobre su experiencia como voluntario en una guerra. Y arrasó. A partir de ahí trabajó en radio y en el escenario con ese material de su invención, sus monólogos seudoautobiográficos, sus increíbles charlas telefónicas con la voz de un solo lado, al estilo de La voz humana de Cocteau. Tuvo un éxito terrible, vendió discos y discos, hizo películas, se convirtió en un cómico famoso. Después, las giras por Latinoamérica que ante la presión e incomodidad del régimen franquista derivaron en exilio. Trabajó y vivió en México, también en Cuba y en todas partes. Hasta que en la segunda mitad de los sesenta recaló en la Argentina, convirtió a Buenos Aires en su lugar de anclaje. Y se quedó muchos años.
En 1972, Ediciones Sunda publicó su único libro acá: Gila y su gente, en el que juntaba chistes de curas, de pobres, de militares, de verdugos, un par de monólogos –“Historia de un militar contada por su huerfanito” y “Recuerdos de mi infancia”– y ciertos “Pensamientos para no pensar”:”Para saber si una tortuga es macho o hembra se le hacen cosquillas en la panza; si se pone contento es macho y si se pone contenta es hembra”. A la muerte de Franco volvió a publicar allá –hay un lindísimo libro del ’75, Libro de quejas– y fue de gira después de tanto tiempo, en 1977. Volvió a su patria definitivamente recién en 1985. Tenía 66 años.
En Internet se pueden encontrar estos datos y muchos más. Sobre todo, los libros que publicó en los noventa e incluso los que salieron después de su muerte: Cuentos para dormir mejor, del mismísimo 2001, por ejemplo. Pero para el que quiera tener una imagen más completa de este gallego de gorra sempiterna que decía “¡Que se ponga!” al teléfono y contaba la guerra en clave de siniestro absurdo, acaso le convenga conseguirse un volumen chico, de 1976, editado por Planeta de España en su colección Fábula, que se llama simple, modestamente, Un poco de nada.
Desde la tapa nomás, un Gila de mirada melancólica avisa del tono. Esas memorias de a pantallazos –que de eso se trata– son por lo menos dos cosas: un documento crudo e imperdible y la revelación de un notable narrador. Gila, un verdadero monstruo.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-69873-2006-07-14.html
The Independent: Israel widens bombing campaign
as Lebanese militia groups retaliate
By Donald Macintyre in Nahariya and Eric Silver in Jerusalem
Published: 14 July 2006
Israeli forces blockaded Lebanese ports and bombed runways at Beirut airport yesterday in a series of fierce reprisal attacks that Lebanese officials say have killed 55 civilians.
Tthe biggest military operation since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon six years ago came in response to a raid by Hizbollah on Wednesday in which two soldiers were seized while on patrol on the Israeli side of the border. The most serious casualties were caused by a series of air raids on south Lebanon that Lebanese security officials say killed 55 people and wounded 110. Sources said 10 members of a single family were killed in Dweir village and seven from another family were killed in Baflay.
The Israeli military said Hizbollah guerrillas fired more than 100 Katyusha rockets in retaliation at towns and villages across the north of Israel, killing two women in what was the most serious barrage since the mid-1990s. One woman was killed in Nahariya and another woman died from her wounds in Safed.
The guerrilla group appeared last night to have dramatically exceeded the rocket's previous range by launching two at the coastal city of Haifa. Another landed in the suburbs. Danny Ayalon, Israeli ambassador to the US, said the attack was a "major, major, escalation" but Hizbollah's initial reaction was to deny its rockets had been fired at Haifa.
Israeli planes late last night launched a second attack on Beirut's airport, setting fuel tanks ablaze, and leafleted residents in the crowded southern suburbs of Beirut, warning them to stay away from Hizbollah sites in an apparent prelude to further air raids. Israeli jets also bombed the highway linking Beirut with the Syrian capital, Damascus.
The Iranian PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad responded by warning Israel against an attack on Syria. "If the Zionist regime commits another stupid move and attacks Syria, this will be considered like attacking the whole Islamic world and this regime will receive a very fierce response," he said.
Earlier, Israeli forces attacked two military bases and hinted at a ground offensive, the Lebanese Information Minister, Ghazi al-Aridi, said that Lebanon wanted a comprehensive ceasefire and an end to "this open-ended aggression" by Israel.
Israeli helicopters also fired on three facilities of the Hizbollah-operated al-Manar television network. One person was reported killed and 10 wounded.
The US vetoed a UN resolution last night that demanded Israel halt its military offensive in Gaza °© the first UN Security Council veto in almost two years.Ten of the 15 countries voted in favour; while Britain, Denmark, Slovakia and Peru abstained.
President George Bush voiced concern about the fate of Lebanon's fragile government, which is no longer dominated by Syria, but said: "Israel has the right to defend herself." Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, said Israel should respond to the "inexcusable provocation" in a "measured and proportionate" way.
The seized Israeli soldiers were named as Ehud Goldwasser, 31, of Nahariya, and Eldad Regev, 26, of Kiryat Motzkin. The deputy director general of the Foreign Ministry, Gideon Meir, said Israel would not negotiate "with any organisation that kidnaps soldiers".
The operation in Lebanon has opened a second front a fortnight after Israeli troops staged their first military operations inside Gaza since withdrawing from the Strip last summer. After 23 Palestinians were killed in attacks on Wednesday, Israel's air force bombed the Hamas-controlled Foreign Ministry overnight. The operation in Gaza was launched with the stated aim of freeing an abducted 19-year-old army corporal, Gilad Shalit, and stopping Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza.
Israel said it was hitting targets that were of assistance to Hizbollah and which had been operating without interference from the Lebanese government.
The main players as Israel fights on two fronts
Ehud Olmert
Four months after his election victory promising a West Bank withdrawal and greater security, Prime Minister Olmert is fighting on two fronts.
Amir Peretz
Leader of Israel's Labour party, he has had his pacifist beliefs sorely tested since becoming defence minister in March. Faces international pressure to minimise civilian casualties.
Bashar Assad
The Syrian President will feel increasing international pressure to rein in his Hizbollah and Hamas allies. The US holds Syria responsible for the crisis.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah
Hizbollah's leader, believed to be in southern Beirut, threatened further rocket attacks if Israeli air strikes continue, and said the two soldiers will be freed only in an exchange.
Khaled Mashal
The Hamas political leader is in hiding in Damascus. Has said Hamas will only release the Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza in exchange for prisoners.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1174314.ece
ZNet | Israel/Palestine
Racism Plagues Western Media Coverage
by Ramzy Baroud; July 13, 2006
Racism is "the belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another and the practices of the dominant group to maintain the inferior position of the dominated group. Often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination."
This is how the British Library defines racism on its Web site. The above definition hardly deviates from the essence of almost all definitions of the ominous concept. And, indeed, the concept is being fully utilized with Israel's onslaught against the Palestinians, and the international community and media's mild, if not accommodating response to the onslaught.
The capture of Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit is an act of self-defense. According to international law and the Geneva Conventions, he can be considered a prisoner of war, but not according to CNN, Fox News and the increasingly spineless BBC, which presents the soldier as a victim, who was "kidnapped" by Palestinian "militants" who are "affiliated" with the Hamas government.
By not challenging the Israeli narrative in any meaningful way, the uncritical media has become a tool in the hands of Israel's war strategists and their eternal concoctions.
Consider this example. An Israeli military commander tells a BBC correspondent dispatched to the border area between Israel and Gaza, that Israel intends on opening the border for "as long as it takes" to offset the humanitarian crisis developing in Gaza. The Israeli Army representative in a barefaced lie declares that the border has always been open, despite the perpetual Palestinian threat on the state of Israel. The BBC correspondent thanks him and signs off.
Is it possible that the BBC is unaware of the fact that Gaza has been under a strict military siege since Hamas' democratic advent to power through the January 2006 elections? Could it be that the Western media has missed the dozens of shocking reports that have warned that the Israeli siege - which began months before the capture of Shalit - was soon to create chaos and panic among the already malnourished Palestinians in Gaza? Did they all miss statements by top Israeli officials vowing to carry on with the siege until the outset of Hamas?
Some reporters misrepresent facts out of ignorance, not by design. But if that indeed was the case, then how can one excuse the fact that the same media that coined the term "kidnapping" to describe the action of the Palestinian fighters who captured Shalit refused to use the same association to describe the kidnapping of most of the elected Palestinian Cabinet, mostly academics with no connection to any militant wing?
Israel's military spokesman insisted that they are "all terrorists" and Israel, "like any democratic" country has the right to protect itself against terrorists. If that was true, why did Israel refrain from kidnapping them until Palestinian fighters embarrassed the Israeli Army and captured their first prisoner of war in a long time? Is "rounding up" Palestinian ministers and scores of legislators the same as having a soldier captured in what has been for long a one-sided Israeli war?
If you are an avid viewer of Fox News or a reader of the New York Times, then Israel is yet to exceed its legitimate legal boundaries: that of a democracy opting to defend its citizens. But only racism can lead to such rationale. Only a racist media portrays the capture of a soldier whose army units have besieged Gazans for years, denying them food and medicine, as a violation of all that is holy. Only a racist media presents the kidnapping of 9,000 Palestinians, now in Israeli jails, as a just outcome of Israel's routine arrests of Palestinian terrorists or potential terrorists. Only racism can play down the Israeli destruction of Gaza's infrastructure, which is justified without question, for such actions are necessary to impede the militants' efforts.
And yet, Israel is praised for its "generous" act of allowing some food to be transferred to Gazans, who ironically have gone hungry because of the Israeli-spearheaded international campaign to punish Palestinians for electing Hamas.
Only racism can completely remove from the current discourse the murder of dozens of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Israeli Army (90 civilians in seven weeks) as the reason that led to the Palestinian raid on the Israeli Army post and the capture of Shalit, and instead depict the current escalation as if it was entirely the work of the Palestinians, with Israel's slate still clean.
Indeed, Israel's slate will continue to be clean as long as racism and inequality are the concepts according to which this conflict is explained. Israel has the right to do all the above actions without hesitation because Israel is not Palestine, and the lives and well being of the residents of Israel, at least some of them, cannot be equated with Palestinians. Turn the tables for a moment and you'll understand how repellent such racism is.
Inequality has always been at the heart of this conflict, the late professor Edward Said used to say. Racism is at the heart of inequality, I must add. The media can be ignorant, biased and self-serving, indeed, but it can also be utterly racist.
-Ramzy Baroud's latest book: "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronology of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) is now available at Amazon.com.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10572
posted by attilav at 23:49
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