Elsewhere today (379)
Aljazeera:
Hezbollah in deadly rocket attack
Sunday 06 August 2006, 15:54 Makka Time, 12:54 GMT
Israel is pressing on with its bombardment and ground offensive in Lebanon as Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets at its northern towns.
The attacks on Sunday, the 26th day of the Israeli offensive, left nine civilians and a Palestinian fighter dead and 10 other people wounded in Lebanon, police said.
And in Israel at least 10 people have been killed in Hezbollah's deadliest rocket attack so far since fighting began on July 12.
Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets at towns across northern Israel, including one rocket which landed near the entrance to the communal farm of Kfar Giladi.
Israeli Channel Two television reported that nine army reservists were among the dead.
Fourteen people were wounded, including four who are in a serious condition, rescue officials said.
The mayor of Kiryat Shmona, Haim Barvivai, said other rockets landed around the Israeli border town damaging a synagogue and starting a series of fires.
Forty-two Israelis have been killed in rocket attacks on the north of the country.
Hezbollah attacks
Hezbollah said it had also attacked Israeli forces in south Lebanon on Sunday, inflicting several casualties. There was no immediate word from the army on Israeli casualties in the fighting.
Hezbollah fighters targeted Israeli military vehicles in Wadi Honeen on the border and an armoured Israeli unit trying to advance towards Adayseh village, killing or wounding several soldiers, the group said. Two tanks and two bulldozers were reportedly destroyed.
Israeli troops trying to advance north near Biyada village were also attacked and two tanks damaged, it said.
Eight civilians were killed as Israel continued air strikes across south Lebanon, security sources and witnesses said. Artillery on the Israeli side of the border pounded towns and villages.
Five died when Israeli aircraft bombed a house in the southern Lebanese village of Ansar and three were killed in Naqoura, on the Mediterranean coast side of Lebanon's border with Israel.
Lebanon says more than 900 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by Israeli attacks.
Meanwhile, Israel said that one of the Hezbollah fighters involved in the raid during which two soldiers were captured has been seized in Lebanon.
"We can confirm that one of the Hezbollah we have captured and interrogated was involved in the kidnapping of our soldiers," an army spokeswoman said.
The raid led to Israel's offensive against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Israel said it seized several Hezbollah members during a raid on the town of Baalbek last week. Hezbollah denied those taken were part of the group.
Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0627BA25-B6BB-40EC-9BDA-090F4931C344.htm
Arab News: India Bans Arab TV Channels
Under Pressure From Israel
Shahid Raza Burney, Arab News
Sunday, 6, August, 2006 (12, Rajab, 1427)
BOMBAY, 6 August 2006 — In a country widely referred to as the world’s largest democracy, the Indian government has succumbed to mounting Israeli pressure and ordered a nationwide ban on the broadcast of Arab television channels.
The Indian government’s ban on Arab television stations is in complete contrast to the friendship that Arab countries imagine exists with their neighbor across the Arabian Sea. It seems the ban is a move to ensure that Indians do not get to see the atrocities that are presently being committed by Israel in Lebanon and the occupied territories.
Nabila Al-Bassam, a Saudi businesswoman on a trip to Bombay, told Arab News how she became exasperated at not being able to watch Arab channels at Bombay’s leading five-star Oberoi Hotel. When she took up the issue with the hotel manager, she was told that Arab television channels had been banned across India.
A perplexed Al-Bassam then sent an SMS to Arab News Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena to verify whether this was indeed the case. “Oberoi Hotel tells me that the government of India has banned all Arab TV channels. Why? I hate watching CNN and BBC,” she wrote to Almaeena.
Talking to Arab News, Oberoi Hotel Manager Mohit Nirula did allude to the fact that a ban was in place. “The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has laid down certain rules. It is our duty to abide by and follow the rules of the country,” he told this correspondent.
Minister of Information and Broadcasting Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi was busy in Parliament and was unavailable for comment on the issue. However, a ministry official explained why the Indian government decided to enforce the ban. The official highlighted that India enjoys close and cordial relations with Israel and the US more than any of the Arab governments.
According to another source within the government, the ban is a clear sign to all governments in the Middle East that the Israeli, American and British governments carry far more influence in India than any of the Arab governments.
Several senior Indian journalists explained that the ban was an indication that India had succumbed to Israeli pressure rather than American.
“The whole exercise is to browbeat Arabs and show them as terrorists. The government is subscribing to the absurd argument that channels like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya promote hatred and encourage terrorism,” they said.
Political analysts in India described the move as a game of double standard that India is playing. On the one hand India establishes friendship with the Arab world while simultaneously it joins with Israel and the US in defaming them. It seems that the pro-Israeli lobby wishes to drive a wedge between India and its time-tested Arab allies. The Indian government’s present stance is in stark contrast to the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s staunch support of the Palestinian cause.
The banning of Arabic channels is a federal government decision, done under what senior Indian journalists claim to be intense pressure from the Israeli, American and British governments.
The Indian government has been vocal in its condemnation of Israeli barbarity and has offered millions of rupees in aid to refugees in Lebanon. Arabs sympathetic to India have therefore met the news with surprise.
Many Arabs draw inspiration from India’s heroic struggle against British imperialism and the Indian independence struggle is seen by Palestinians as a brilliant example of throwing out the yoke of imperialism. It is sad that 50 years after independence the world’s largest democracy unfairly suppresses alternative opinion and allows itself to be dictated to by foreign powers.
The analysts believe the Indian government may have used a clause within the Cable TV Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995, that certain channels or programs that can potentially cause damage to India’s friendly relations with foreign countries can be banned, a clear violation of democratic ideals such as freedom of expression and freedom of speech.
The response to the ban by hotel administrations across Bombay has been dismal. Chad Alberico, JW Marriott’s customer care official in Washington, said: “We have reviewed your recent inquiries regarding the television offerings at our JW Marriott Bombay. We have phoned our colleagues at the hotel to discuss the matter at hand, but as it is the weekend, we will need additional time to form a complete response.”
“I’m on my way home, it’s the weekend and I will respond on Monday,” said Shehnaz Ankelsaria from the Taj President Hotel. Annan Udeshi from The Hilton was unavailable and asked for a message to be left on her recorder. Khushnooma Kapadia of Marriott Hotel said she would get back later. Rafat Kazi from the Grand Central Sheraton said that she would answer after consulting her general manager. Puja Guleria of Sheraton Maratta said she needed time to deal with the questions. Firuza Mistry of Grand Hyatt said that she was not aware of the facts and would check and respond, and Priya Mathias of Hyatt Regency said that she would also need to check with her senior officials to comment.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=75907&d=6&m=8&y=2006
Arab News: Mideast:
A Change in Direction Needed Now
Samar Fatany, Arab News
Sunday, 6, August, 2006 (12, Rajab, 1427)
How many more innocent children must die for Israel to quench its blood thirst? How long will the world choose to watch helplessly the images of children’s corpses split in half, mothers screaming in anguish for rescue, or ambulances not allowed to reach the wounded and the dead, and humanitarian agencies forbidden to extend basic relief to the living in Lebanon?
What is Israel really targeting?
I have watched with despair the terror that children have had to endure in Lebanon. What brutality and what barbarity is this? Nothing can justify this criminal policy. Human rights groups attacked Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign against innocent civilians. Researchers found that numerous cases in which Israeli forces launched artillery and air attacks on dubious military targets were at excessive civilian costs.
For example, a July 13 Israeli airstrike targeted the home of a scholar known for Hezbollah sympathies but not for any active role in the hostilities. The strike killed him, his wife, their 10 children and the family’s Sri Lankan maid.
“Hezbollah fighters must not hide behind civilians,” Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth said in a statement. “That’s an absolute — but in many cases of civilian deaths examined by Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops had nothing to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around. Issuing warnings of imminent attacks do not turn civilians into military targets. The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game.”
Roth’s statements demonstrate his unbiased resolve to speak the truth. He exposes Israeli atrocities without buckling to the pressure of the Israeli lobby unlike many others in America. Many have suffered dearly because they dared to speak out.
Congressman Paul Findley lost his seat because of his critical views of US-Israeli policy. Others have paid a price as well, including the late Marlon Brando, Dan Rather and recently Mel Gibson.
I met Roth at the Fortune Aspen Institute Brainstorm event in June, and he was just as bold and righteous then. In a session about finding solutions to remedy global misunderstanding and distrust, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke about America’s commitment to establish democracies in the Middle East in order to help the region gain prosperity for its people.
However, Roth differed with her and asserted that the US should be promoting human rights in the Middle East and not democracy to bring prosperity to the region. He also said that the US must first regain its credibility that has been damaged if it hopes to have any kind of influence or impact in the region.
What is happening in Palestine and Lebanon today proves his point. Last week, I wrote an article calling upon world leaders to put a stop to Israeli brutality. To my dismay, I received hate mail from the US for expressing my outrage and condemnation. The letters were so arrogant and cold with no compassion for those suffering and dying. The repeated phrase that I keep hearing is that Israel has a right to defend itself with total disregard for the rights of the Lebanese and Palestinians to defend themselves.
I am sincerely shocked by the inhumanity of some American Jews. I thought that Jews more than any other people should be sensitive to pain and torture for what they have had to endure. I suppose that some of these people living in the comfort of their homes do not want to think of bad things that happened in the past. They have a dream that they want to pursue at any cost — even if it means the destruction of the whole world.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was alarmed by the lack of Israeli respect for international humanitarian law. Why should Israel be above the law? American citizens need to review their blind support that allows Israeli aggression and state terrorism. Arab resistance to occupation is legitimate.
The Lebanese and Palestinians have a right to fight for what is legitimately their land. Killing their resistance leaders will not end the bloodshed. The inaction by the UN to protect Palestinians and its inability to stop the brutal attack against Lebanon is a dangerous development.
The UN has become a tool for the big powers to enforce their policies of sanctions and attacks on countries with no military might. The failure of the UN to enforce international law to protect states against aggression and occupation has deprived it of its legitimacy and respect.
As a result the world is falling into a state of lawlessness. Without a change in policy, the only alternative left for the oppressed will be to form underground organizations to recruit freedom fighters to resist occupation and defend their people against injustices and brutality. Under such circumstances they will be justified and supported by the people of conscience who value their freedom.
President George W. Bush claims that Americans value the principle of freedom; however, his policies of aggression and occupation in Iraq and Palestine — and lately Lebanon — indicate that he reserves that privilege for Americans only. Israel and the US want the Arab world to abandon the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance or else terror will reign on all. Today, Lebanon; tomorrow Syria, and who knows, perhaps Saudi Arabia will be targeted next.
American money that supports Israeli terror methods of assassinations and brutal aggression makes the US a partner in the war crimes conducted by Israel against the innocent children of Lebanon and Palestine. It is now obvious that the “New Middle East” the Bush administration has in mind is one that is subservient to Israeli hegemony over the whole region.
Disrespecting international law and taking the military path will never end the conflict in the Middle East. World leaders must recognize the UN as the only legal international body to implement world order and global security.
Antagonistic policies and double standards have pushed the Middle East into an arms race and has created an urge in some for the acquisition of nuclear weapons to safeguard the territorial integrity of threatened Middle Eastern states.
As long as Israel continues to pose a threat to Arab countries with its expansionist policies to create a greater Israel there will be no peace in the Middle East, and the threat of terrorism will continue to haunt us all.
— Samar Fatany is a radio journalist. She is based in Jeddah.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=75908&d=6&m=8&y=2006
Clarín: A 61 años del horror, Japón recuerda
a las víctimas de la bomba atómica en Hiroshima
En el acto principal, el alcalde de esa ciudad, Tadatoshi Akiba, pidió que se eliminen todas las armas nucleares. Unas 45 mil personas asistieron a la tradicional ceremonia, que se realizó en el Parque de la Paz.
Clarín.com, 06.08.2006
El alcalde de Hiroshima pidió hoy que se eliminen todas las armas nucleares, al conmemorar el 61º aniversario de la bomba atómica, que mató a más de 140 mil personas en esa ciudad japonesa. Tras expresar su preocupación por la proliferación mundial de esa clase de armas, el alcalde de Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, instó al gobierno de Japón para que asuma el liderazgo de los esfuerzos por erradicar los arsenales nucleares.
"Han pasado 61 años desde que la radiación, los rayos de calor y una explosión atómica desataron un infierno en la Tierra", dijo Akiba durante un discurso en el Parque de la Paz de Hiroshima, cerca del lugar donde cayó la bomba. "Pero el número de naciones cautivadas por el mal y esclavizadas por las armas nucleares se ha incrementado", se quejó.
La ceremonia comenzó a las 8.15 con el sonido de una campana que recuerda la hora exacta en que el bombardero estadounidense B-29 Enola Gay arrojó la bomba sobre Hiroshima el 6 de agosto de 1945. Unas 45 mil personas, entre sobrevivientes, residentes, visitantes y funcionarios de todo el mundo, rezaron por las víctimas del ataque y guardaron un minuto de silencio. Luego, fueron liberadas cientos de palomas.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/08/06/um/m-01247475.htm
Clarín: Pese a las gestiones diplomáticas, siguen
los bombardeos entre Israel y Hezbollah en la frontera del Líbano
Beirut rechazó el plan para un alto el fuego presentado por EE.UU. y Francia y continuó su ofensiva: diez israelíes murieron y otros nueve resultaron heridos en una localidad del norte. En tanto, los ataques aéreos contra la milicia shiíta no se detienen.
Clarín.com, 06.08.2006
Diez israelíes murieron hoy y otros nueve resultaron heridos, cuatro de ellos de extrema gravedad, por cohetes disparados por Hezbollah contra una localidad del norte de Israel. Según la televisión de ese país, el ataque se registró en la localidad de Kfar Giladi. Sin embargo, también resultaron afectadas las localidades de Kiriat Shmoná, donde al menos doce personas resultaron heridas de gravedad, San Juan de Acre, Maalot, Safed y otras comunidades situadas en los Altos del Golán.
El ataque de Hezbollah fue en respuesta a los intensos bombardeos de esta mañana, a cargo de la aviación israelí, en el sur de Líbano. Nueve civiles murieron y otros seis resultaron heridos en esos ataques.
Seis de los muertos fueron víctimas de un bombardeo en Ansar, un poblado del sur libanés, cerca de Sidon (a 40 kilómetros al sur de Beirut), mientras que los otros tres murieron en la ciudad fronteriza de Naqura.
Los aviones israelíes también bombardearon tres rutas que unen el valle de la Bekaa con el este del país, Beirut y la costa mediterránea.
Horas antes, el gobierno libanés había rechazado rotundamente el proyecto de EE.UU. y Francia para negociar el alto el fuego en el marco de la ONU. "Líbano quiere que el proyecto se base en el plan en siete puntos presentado por el Gobierno libanés, que incluye una retirada israelí del territorio que ocupa en el sur y la tutela de la ONU en las granjas de Chebaa ocupadas por Israel", dijo una fuente gubernamental.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/08/06/um/m-01247470.htm
il manifesto:
Cittadini in 5 anni, la riforma dell'Unione
Più facile acquisire la cittadinanza italiana: cinque anni di permanenza e non più dieci. Più semplice anche per i bambini che nascono in Italia. Stretta sui matrimoni. La destra insorge Il ministro Amato: «Con le nuove norme arriveranno circa 180 mila domande all'anno». Il disegno di legge prevede che anche i minori non nati nel nostro paese possano diventare cittadini se hanno frequentato la scuola. Per gli stranieri che si naturalizzano si prevede la verifica «della reale integrazione linguistica e sociale
Cinzia Gubbini
Roma
Lo avevano detto, e lo hanno fatto. Più o meno a cento giorni dall'insediamento del governo dell'Unione, il consiglio dei ministri ha varato ieri il disegno di legge che riformerà la legge sull'acquisizione della cittadinanza italiana, datata 1992. Ora la palla passa alle Camere, che dovranno approvare il ddl. Tempo previsto: un anno e mezzo.
Per gli immigrati che vivono nel nostro paese sarà un po' più facile diventare cittadini italiani. Da dieci anni di permanenza - il periodo più lungo previsto in Europa - si passa a cinque anni (come era con la legge del 1912) per «lo straniero che risiede legalmente nel territorio della Repubblica», recita l'articolo 4. Ma la vera rivoluzione è per i bambini che nascono in Italia da genitori stranieri. Finora, non sono cittadini italiani fino al compimento dei diciotto anni. Se non lo fanno diventano stranieri come qualsiasi altro immigrato e devono passare per le forche caudine dei dieci anni di presenza regolare e «continuativa» (quest'ultimo elemento è stato introdotto dal decreto attuativo della legge, nel 1993).
Ora, invece, diventeranno automaticamente italiani se almeno uno dei due genitori è presente regolarmente in Italia da cinque anni ed è «in possesso del requisito reddituale per il rilascio del permesso di soggiorno CE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo». In pratica, uno dei due genitori deve avere le caratteristiche richieste per ottenere la carta di soggiorno: cinque anni di presenza regolare in Italia e un reddito annuale pari all'assegno sociale (circa 400 euro al mese). Oltretutto il disegno di legge prevede che la presenza legale di uno dei due genitori sia «senza interruzioni». Stesso criterio per i minori che non sono nati in Italia: in questo caso potranno diventare cittadini se hanno frequentato almeno un ciclo scolastico in Italia o un corso di formazione professionale, oppure se hanno svolto un'attività lavorativa regolare per almeno un anno. Dovranno essere presenti in Italia da cinque anni «senza interruzioni» e uno dei due genitori dovrà avere i requisiti per la carta di soggiorno. Siccome tanto per chi nasce in Italia che per i minori saranno i genitori a chiedere la cittadinanza, una volta raggiunta la maggiore età potrà rinunciare a essere italiano. Perché, ha spiegato il ministro dell'interno Giuliano Amato che insieme al ministro per la Solidarietà sociale Paolo Ferrero ha studiato il provvedimento «la cittadinanza è un diritto e non un obbligo». La stretta arriva sui matrimoni: mentre ora chi sposa un cittadino italiano può chiedere subito la cittadinanza dopo sei mesi di residenza nel terriotiro della Repubblica, ora dovrà aspettare due anni. Altra novità l'arrivo dei «test». Per le naturalizzazioni, infatti - cioè per lo straniero che chiede di diventare italiano - l'articolo 5 prevede «la verifica della reale integrazione linguistica e sociale dello straniero nel territorio dello Stato». Inoltre, non sarà più il Presidente della Repubblica a conferire la cittadinanza, ma il ministero dell'Interno. Infine, il ddl annuncia che per il giuramento verranno stabilite nuove regole da un successivo regolamento. Probabilmente, si pensa di introdurre la famosa «cerimonia» tanto cara al premier Prodi. Secondo il ministro Amato con le nuove norme arriveranno «circa 180 mila domande l'anno».
L'Unione, all'unisono, plaude al varo del ddl: una decisione di civiltà, dicono tutti, che avvicina finalmente l'Italia all'Europa. Certo, c'è chi osserva che ci sono ora altri passi da fare: il Prc e il Pdci tornano a chiedere al chiusura dei cpt e l'abrogazione della Bossi-Fini, e la deputata Graziella Mascia di Rifondazione si raccomanda che - nell'acquisizione della cittadinanza - vengano anche sveltite le pratiche (oggi, oltre a aspettare dieci anni ce ne vogliono altri due per concludere l'iter). Per il sottosegretario alla giustizia Luigi Manconi il prossimo passo deve essere «la concessione del voto amministrativo». La destra, invece, grida allo scandalo accusando il governo di voler aprire «scontri etnici». Disponibilità è venuta solo dal presidente di An Gianfranco Fini «discuterò serenamente», ha detto, precisando che, secondo lui, la residenza legale deve essere di «almeno 7 o 8 anni». Per l'Udc è Bruno Tabacci che parla di «strategia giusta». La Lega, invece, si lascia andare ai soliti deliri. Roberto Calderoli parla di «voto ai bingo bongo» e annuncia «guerra» non soltanto in parlamento, ma anche «nelle strade».
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/05-Agosto-2006/art34.html
Inter Press Service News Agency:
Thousands Face Expulsion From France
Julio Godoy
PARIS, Jul 31 (IPS) - The French government is poised to expel about 20,000 illegal immigrants, mostly Sub-Saharan Africans, campaigners say. The French move runs contrary to the trend across Europe.
Minister for the interior Nicolas Sarkozy announced Jul. 24 that most illegal immigrants who had applied for a residence permit over the last six weeks would be expelled.
"The fate of people living illegally is to be expelled to their place of origin," Sarkozy said.
Sarkozy had announced in October last year that his ministry would expel 30,000 illegal immigrants, including children and teenagers attending school. On Jun. 13 this year he announced that under certain circumstances illegal immigrants would be allowed to stay, leading large numbers to apply for legalisation.
Sarkozy said Jul. 24 that his ministry had received 20,000 such applications. The government has set Aug. 14 as the last date for receiving applications for legalisation of status.
After that date the government will begin "normal management of the cases of foreigners," Sarkozy said.
"Sarkozy is again opening a hunt for children, to expel them from France," said Richard Moyon, coordinator of Education without Borders (RSEF, after its French name), a network of French teachers and school workers.
RSEF has been leading the opposition to Sarkozy's policy against immigrants for the last two years, and encouraged French citizens to shelter immigrant children attending school.
The French policy on immigration contrasts sharply with that of other European governments such as Germany, Spain, and Italy.
In Germany the local government of Berlin announced last week that it would immediately end the policy of expelling long-term illegal immigrants.
The local ministry of the interior announced that some 14,000 refugees who arrived in Berlin before Jan 1, 2000 will be allowed to remain in the city.
This measure anticipated a new rule expected to be passed later this year for all of Germany to legalise the residence status of between 150,000 and 250,000 refugees who have been living in the country for a long time.
This directive aims at legalising the status of refugees who applied for asylum in Germany earlier, but whose applications were rejected. Other beneficiaries of the directive will be illegal immigrants, parents of children who reached adulthood during their stay in Germany, and refugees who entered Germany as minors.
Last year the Spanish government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero legalised some 570,000 illegal immigrants. In Italy, Prime Minister Romano Prodi recently passed an order to regularise the status of 517,000 illegal immigrants.
Italian minister for the interior Giuliano Amato said the move "is not only an act of solidarity towards these workers, but also a decision in favour of Italian society. These people are already in Italy, and their status so far condemned them to work illegally."
In France, Sarkozy has been accused of placing the immigration issue at the core of his campaign ahead of presidential elections due early next year. Sarkozy is expected to contest.
Catholic church leaders have described Sarkozy's policy as a populist move aimed at gaining far right votes.
"His aim with this law is to please the extremist right-wing electorate, whose only political objective is to reject immigrants' otherness," Bishop Olivier Berranger, leading member of the Council of French Christian Churches said earlier in a radio interview.
The far right constituency represents some 15 percent of the French vote. In the last presidential election of 2002, the neo-fascist Front National (FN) led by Jean-Marie Le Pen won almost 17 percent of the vote.
But the populist move may not be a practical one. Illegal immigrants do not usually hold identity papers, and if their supposed countries of origin refuse to recognise them as citizens, the French government may not know where to send them to.
The French government is putting pressure on foreign countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, to accept immigrants being expelled from France.
Annette Huraux of the Ecumenical Mutual Aid Service (CIMADE, after its French name), a Catholic organisation helping immigrants, said "Sarkozy is putting enormous pressure upon those countries not cooperating."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34161
Jeune Afrique:
Vacances au bled
ALGÉRIE - 30 juillet 2006 - par CHERIF OUAZANI, ENVOYÉ SPÉCIAL À ALGER
Chaque année, en juillet et en août, un million d’émigrés rentrent au pays pour les congés. Et partent presque aussitôt à l’assaut des plages.
Stabilité politique, nette diminution de la violence islamiste, amélioration des conditions d’accueil… Jamais les Algériens de l’étranger (plus d’un million de personnes, sans compter les binationaux) n’ont eu autant de raisons de rentrer au pays pour les vacances. Et ils ne s’en privent pas. Très majoritairement établis en France, les membres de la diaspora se heurtent pourtant à d’énormes difficultés pour trouver une place dans les dizaines d’appareils longs-courriers qui assurent les liaisons avec les huit aéroports internationaux que compte l’Algérie.
Plus d’un demi-million de passagers ont été recensés par les compagnies aériennes desservant les grandes villes algériennes à partir de Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille ou Nice. Air Algérie, la compagnie nationale, se taille la part du lion sur ce marché, mais deux autres compagnies, Air France et Aigle Azur, font également le plein de voyageurs. Et comme c’est encore insuffisant, les tour-opérateurs sont contraints d’affréter des vols charters.
Les vacanciers qui choisissent la capitale sont, à leur arrivée, surpris par la qualité des prestations fournies par le nouvel aéroport international. Agréable et fonctionnel avec ses deux terminaux et ses six passerelles, il permet une plus grande fluidité et diminue sensiblement le temps de traitement et d’acheminement des bagages. Les « Algériens du Nord » n’en sont pas peu fiers. « C’est aussi bien que la plate-forme de Francfort », s’émerveille l’un d’eux, qui n’avait pas remis les pieds en Algérie depuis quinze ans. Il n’en a pas fini avec les surprises.
Sortant de l’aéroport, il découvre, éberlué, un entrelacs d’échangeurs et de bretelles d’autoroute. Les tours et les centres commerciaux ont poussé comme des champignons. « Je ne reconnais plus grand-chose », dit-il. Les nostalgiques s’interrogent : les casbahs d’Alger et de Constantine, les médinas d’Oran et d’Annaba n’ont-elles pas été sacrifiées sur l’autel du développement tous azimuts ? Ils sont vite rassurés. L’« authenticité » est loin d’avoir disparu, avec son cortège de mauvaises odeurs et de bâtisses menaçant de s’effondrer au premier coup de vent… À Alger, l’occupation de l’espace est toujours aussi irrationnelle.
Les dessertes aériennes ne suffisant pas à satisfaire la demande, le transport maritime est appelé à la rescousse. Chaque jour, près de 2 000 passagers et 800 véhicules débarquent dans le port d’Alger, venant de Marseille, Barcelone ou Alicante. La frontière terrestre avec le Maroc étant fermée depuis 1994, les « vacanciers du bled » qui ont choisi de venir avec leur véhicule sont contraints de passer par la mer. Les ports d’Oran et de Ghazaouet, dans l’Ouest, sont quotidiennement desservis par des ferries venant d’Espagne, afin de diminuer la pression sur le port de Marseille. Deux sociétés algériennes, la Compagnie nationale de navigation (Cnan) et l’Entreprise nationale maritime de transport des voyageurs (ENMTV), et une française, la SNCM, se partagent ce juteux marché. Les deux premières ont fait l’acquisition de nouveaux ferries qui permettent une traversée plus rapide (vingt heures au lieu de vingt-quatre) et plus confortable.
S’il n’a pas réservé plusieurs semaines à l’avance, le voyageur n’a aucune chance de trouver une place en cabine. Dans ce cas, il fera la traversée sur le pont, dans un fauteuil. Pour gagner du temps, les formalités administratives sont accomplies à bord. Les douaniers délivrent aux automobilistes une carte grise temporaire et une police d’assurance (30 euros pour un séjour d’un mois). Le prix de la traversée reste abordable : 200 euros, en moyenne, par passager et le double pour le véhicule.
Quelque deux mille véhicules débarquent ainsi quotidiennement dans les quatre ports assurant les liaisons Europe-Algérie. Ils viennent encombrer un peu plus les axes routiers du pays. Près de cent cinquante mille voitures neuves étant vendues chaque année, le parc automobile a pris un sérieux coup de jeune. Du coup, l’émigré en vacances n’impressionne plus par la puissance et le luxe de son véhicule. L’Algérie a décidément bien changé ! « Il y a encore quelques années, j’étais, avant mon départ, littéralement harcelé par mes nombreux cousins et cousines, qui m’adressaient d’interminables listes de produits à ramener, raconte un émigré. À Orly, ma facture pour excédent de bagages était, chaque fois, astronomique. Aujourd’hui, personne ne me demande plus rien. L’excédent de bagages, c’est plutôt au retour ! »
Le vacancier du bled découvre aussi - et ce n’est pas forcément une bonne surprise - que la monnaie locale, le dinar, s’est sensiblement appréciée depuis son dernier séjour. Naguère, profitant des congés à l’étranger des « autochtones » aisés, il parvenait à négocier ses euros au prix fort : environ 130 dinars pour 1 euro. Aujourd’hui, il n’y a plus guère de différence entre le cours réel et celui pratiqué par les banques locales (93 dinars pour 1 euro).
Le nombre des nouveaux hôtels construits dans les stations balnéaires est véritablement impressionnant. Du coup, les capacités d’accueil se sont nettement améliorées et les prix flambent. Aujourd’hui, un mois de vacances revient à environ 3 000 euros par famille, soit près de deux mois de salaire d’un ouvrier qualifié. Mais quand on aime, on ne compte pas.
Autre évolution notable : avant, l’émigré en vacances ne quittait guère la dechra (« hameau ») ou le village de sa famille, situé dans une région généralement enclavée. Aujourd’hui, il n’y passe plus qu’un jour ou deux, avant de partir à l’assaut des plages. Celles-ci son désormais gérées par des concessionnaires qui offrent des prestations, disons, acceptables.
© Jeuneafrique.com 2006
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_jeune_afrique.asp?
art_cle=LIN30076vacandelbua0
New Statesman:
Mugabe: Why Africa applauds him
Christina Lamb
Monday 7th August 2006
He is responsible for the hunger, homelessness and exile of millions - black and white - yet neighbouring countries still dignify him with a hero's welcome. Christina Lamb reports on the tolerance of tyranny
When Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, took his seat for the new session of parliament on 25 July, it was on a specially designed leopard-skin throne flanked by two giant elephant tusks. Next to him sat his young wife, Grace, in a chair artfully positioned on a zebra skin. Stuffed leopards and antelope heads adorned newly painted walls. The parliament needs many kinds of reform, but a Changing Rooms-style make-over was not on anyone's list, particularly given that Zimbabwe is in the midst of what the World Bank calls the worst economic crisis of any country in peacetime.
While Mugabe was showing off his redesign on national TV, less than a mile away Memory had to crawl to get into the cardboard hovel that now passes for her home. Twice during the past month she had been arrested for selling cups of sadza (porridge) on the streets of Harare to try to earn money for her two sons to go to school. "The police took my pot, fined me and held me three days," she said, coughing, as she showed me the waist-high dwelling on the dusty ground. "Mugabe has turned us into beggars."
At night she suffers nightmares about the government bulldozers that destroyed their home last year, smashing beds and wardrobes, her husband's carpentry workshop and everything they had ever worked for.
Thabitha Khumalo, a courageous mother-of-two from Bulawayo, has been arrested 22 times. Her crime: campaigning against a critical shortage of tampons and sanitary towels caused by Zimbabwe's economic crisis, forcing women to use newspaper, which often leads to infection. On one occasion Thabitha was tortured so badly that her front teeth were knocked up her nose; on another she had an AK-47 thrust up her vagina until she bled.
To Memory, Thabitha and millions of other Zimbabweans forced by their government into hunger, homelessness or fleeing the country, it is a mystery why the man responsible for their plight continues to be treated like a hero in the rest of Africa. Not only does he receive standing ovations whenever he appears at pan-African gatherings, but Malawi has even named a new road after him. The Robert Gabriel Mugabe Highway from Blantyre to the Indian Ocean ports of Mozambique, opened by the Zimbabwean president in May, is a huge embarrassment for the European Union, which funded it and has sanctions in place against Mugabe and his regime.
The multimillion-dollar road has become such a symbol of Africa's failure to deal with Mugabe that the Malawian police have to guard the plaques bearing his name day and night. Even so, last month a group of 20 men armed with machetes and pangas managed to overcome them and smash the signs.
"Zimbabwe is a test case for the African continent on how we deal with dictatorships and black-on-black repression," said Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), when we met in Harare just before Easter. He shook his head as I counted out the huge stack of notes needed just to pay for our coffee, a bill of more than a million Zim dollars (the official inflation rate is 1,042 per cent). "So far it seems to be failing."
A deputy president of a neighbouring country told me he was at the second inauguration of Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa in 2004, when Mugabe walked in and the entire audience rose in applause. "I was so embarrassed," he said. "How can we in Africa complain about the west when we applaud such a tyrant?"
As a result of Mugabe's land reform the countryside looks blighted by a terrible scourge, and four million Zimbabweans depend on food aid. Many more subsist on roots and fried termites, and the country's life expectancy has dropped to the lowest in the world - just 34 for women. Yet the programme responsible was recently described as "commendable" by Isak Katali, Namibia's deputy minister of lands. "We feel if Zimbabwe did this, we can do it in the same manner," he said.
As someone who has travelled back and forth reporting on the country since 1999, witnessing the demise of what was one of the most affluent and educated countries on the African continent, this attitude seems inexplicable. Yes, Mugabe was a liberation hero, leading his country to independence from Britain in 1980, but surely that does not excuse him all subsequent excesses?
Unhappy alliances
It is the silence from neighbouring South Africa that is hardest to understand. South Africa is the place most affected by Mugabe's actions, hosting more than two million refugees from Zimbabwe, who get blamed for crime and stealing jobs. Every day, hundreds more desperate Zimbabweans attempt the journey across the crocodile-infested Limpopo River. South Africa is also best placed to do something - it could literally pull the plugs, switching off both credit and electricity.
Instead, President Mbeki has relied on so-called "quiet diplomacy". This involves sending letters that Mugabe ignores and occasionally extracting minor concessions. One was the use of transparent ballot boxes in the last election. Mugabe immediately turned this to his advantage by warning people that he could see how they voted.
Some even accuse Mbeki of complicity, suggesting that South Africa has benefited from the influx of well-educated Zimba bweans into areas such as financial services. A report by the South African Institute of International Affairs blames his tolerant approach for deterring firmer action by other members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). "Apart from complicity with some other SADC countries in keeping the Zimbabwe issue off the agenda at successive SADC and African Union meetings, the South African government has actively supported Zimbab we in blocking motions of censure against Zimbabwe in international forums, most notably the UN Human Rights Commission," claims the report, A Nation in Turmoil: the experience of South African firms doing business in Zimbabwe.
As I arrived in Johannesburg recently for a week-long visit, I wondered if there was an element of denial in the Zimbabwe situation similar to Mbeki's stance on Aids, which he refuses to accept is linked to HIV. One of the first things that struck me was the absence of posters warning about Aids or advising the use of condoms, such as those you now see everywhere in Africa. Yet South Africa has one of the highest rates of infection in the world; almost six million of its people are living with HIV. "We spend more time at funerals than we do having our hair cut or shopping," said a fashion-conscious friend, "but to Mbeki Aids is not an issue."
However, denial is not the whole story. Within a day in Johannesburg, I experienced at first hand the difficulties of engaging with Zimbabwe. I was due to address a lunch about my new book on the country, and should have realised the nature of my audience when the man next to me said: "Rhodesia used to be a wonderful place - they didn't let blacks walk on the pavements."
When I commented that it was nice to be back in Joburg, where I had lived in 1994, in "the exciting days of Mandela taking over", there were audible tut-tuts. It soon became clear that I had myself a group of "when-wes", people who refer nostalgically to the old days when black people could not vote and knew their place. During the entire discussion not a single person referred to the neighbouring country as Zimbabwe, its name for the past 26 years. They insisted on calling it Rhodesia.
When later I described the lunch to an old friend, Barney Mthombothi, editor of the Financial Mail and one of South Africa's leading political commentators, he laughed heartily. "For Mbeki to take on Mugabe would be to be seen as allying with these people," he said. "That's the problem."
This does not mean that Mbeki is happy about the situation. His party, the ruling African National Congress, has little affection for Mugabe's Zanu-PF; during the liberation struggle it had much closer ties to Zapu, the rival movement led by Joshua Nkomo. Friends say that Mbeki is so frustrated that he never refers to Mugabe by name, but as "that man up there". One of his closest advisers, Aziz Pahad, the deputy foreign minister, stated in May that the Zimbabwe situation required "an urgent solution". It was widely regarded as an admission that quiet diplomacy had failed.
Power at all costs
But what to do? "Mugabe has very successfully portrayed the Zimbabwe crisis as an anti-colonial and anti-imperial problem, and in so doing has forced other African countries to support him," explains Brian Raftopoulos, programme manager for the Cape Town-based Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, himself an exile from Zimbabwe. "To criticise Mugabe is to be seen as pro-western and anti-African."
The issue of who owns the land in Africa is one of the biggest challenges for post-colonial governments, particularly in Zimbabwe, where both whites and blacks consider themselves indigenous. It was without doubt unfair that most of the good land remained in the hands of white people 20 years after independence, but only a warped mind could call what Mugabe has done land reform. Of the 4,500 commercial farms that were seized, the vast majority have ended up not in the hands of landless people but, through Mugabe's web of patronage, in the hands of cronies from the ruling Zanu-PF, military commanders, high court judges and even the Anglican bishop of Harare.
The western media share the blame for making the land invasions look like a racial issue by focusing on white farmers. Some newspapers even put the plight of white farmers' pets on their front pages but neglected the hundreds of thousands of black farmworkers who were left with neither home nor job, and many of whom were tortured or raped.
Yet what Mugabe has done is not about race or righting the perceived injustices of colonialism. It is about power and one man's determination to hang on to it at all costs. If there was any doubt about that, it was surely removed last year with the launch of Operation Murambatsvina (meaning "Operation Drive Out the Filth"), in which Mugabe's bulldozers destroyed the homes and livelihoods of 700,000 people like Memory and her family.
At 82, Mugabe is nothing if not cunning, and he has been an unlikely beneficiary of the war in Iraq. "His job has been made easier by western leaders like Bush and Blair and what they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan," says Raftopoulos. "Not only has this taken attention off Zimbabwe, but it's enabled him to plug into a growing sense of anti-imperialism in the third world."
The last thing Mbeki wants is to look like the bully boy of Africa, and although it is easy to criticise South Africa, it is not so easy to come up with solutions. Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist who left school at 13 to support his family, has failed to impress. When the opposition party recently split, Mbeki tried to bridge the gap by bringing the leaders together in Pretoria. Tsvangirai refused to attend the meeting, and then claimed he had never been invited, prompting an exasperated phone call from Mbeki. The opposition's ineptitude has left Mbeki turning to Mugabe's Zanu-PF in the hope of finding a so-called "Zanu-lite" figure to replace him. But the Zimbabwean ruling party itself is bitterly divided between two rival successors.
"South Africa is pursuing a policy of stability rather than democracy," complained Tsvangirai on a recent trip to Britain. "They are very suspicious about any change of government."
Yet little in South Africa provokes such hand-wringing as Zimbabwe. A regular theme at dinner parties is the question: "Are we going to go the same way?"
As was the case in Zimbabwe, most farmland in South Africa is still in white hands, and the country has its own problem of farmers being killed. Roughly 1,700 such murders have occurred since the start of majority rule in 1994, far outnumbering the 18 killed in Zimbabwe's land-grab campaign. "They've become so common we hardly report them," admits Tim du Plessis, editor of Rapport, South Africa's Afrikaans-language Sunday newspaper. "And some cases are just too grisly, where soles have been skinned off the feet and farmers' wives murdered in baths of boiling water."
The big difference is that these killings were not instigated by the government. Instead, they seem motivated by financial gain and part of a nationwide epidemic of violence, in which 18,000 people were murdered last year.
Unlike Zimbabwe, South Africa now has model policies in place for the restitution of land of those who were displaced by the apartheid regime. The legislation includes validation by the land claims courts and compensation at market value. Progress has been slow, however, and more than a decade after the end of apartheid less than 5 per cent of commercial farmland is in black hands. Not surprisingly, there are growing signs of impatience. New possibilities of legalised expropriation were introduced in March and a more hardline agriculture minister has just been appointed.
"We've got lessons to learn from Zimbabwe," said the South African deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, at a recent conference in Pretoria. "How to do it fast. We need a bit of oomph. So we might want some skills exchange between us and Zimbabwe." Although the remark was made with a smile, the laughter was muted.
Christina Lamb is foreign affairs reporter for the Sunday Times. Her new book, "House of Stone: the true story of a family divided in war-torn Zimbabwe", is available from Harper Press (£14.99)
Hard to defend
"The issue of whether an elected president of Zimbabwe continues to be the elected president of Zimbabwe is surely a matter for the Zimbabwean people."
Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa, refusing to criticise the political chaos in Zimbabwe, October 2000
"The problem is that Mugabe didn't lose as some people would have wanted him to lose. If you don't lose as somebody wants you to lose, that is an offence."
Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, responding to allegations of electoral malpractice in Zimbabwe, January 2004
"Zimbabwe should be for Zimbabweans. Africa for Africans. This is our sacred land . . . We died for it and the whites have no place in Africa as they belong in Europe."
Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, touring Zimbabwe in July 2001
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200608070030
The Independent:
Robert Fisk: Slaughter in Qana
In his weekly dispatch from the front line, our veteran war reporter witnesses the aftermath of a massacre
Published: 06 August 2006
Sunday, 30 July
Qana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook. Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds - the shells exploded in the air - and now today I am heading south again to look at the latest Qana massacre.
Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were "hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.
But the roads, my God, the roads of southern Lebanon. Windows open, listen for the howl of jets. I am astonished that only one journalist - a young Lebanese woman - has died so far. I watch the little silver fish as they filter through the sky.
On my way back to Beirut, I find the traffic snarled up by a bomb-smashed bridge, where the Lebanese army is trying to tow a vegetable-laden truck out of a river. I go down to them and slosh through the water to tell the army sergeant that he is out of his mind. He's got almost 50 civilian cars backed up in a queue, just waiting for another Israeli air attack. Leave the lorry till later, I tell him.
Other soldiers arrive, and there is a 10-minute debate about the wisdom of my advice, while I am watching the skies and pointing out a diving Israeli F-16. Then the sergeant decides that Fisk is not as stupid as he looks, cuts the tow-rope and lets the traffic through. I am caked in dust, and Katya Jahjoura, a Lebanese photographer colleague, catches sight of me and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. "You look as if you have been living in rubble!" she cries, and I shoot her a desperate look. Better get out of this place, in case we get turned into rubble, I reply.
Monday, 31 July
Benjamin Netanyahu tries another lie, an old one reheated from 1982, when Menachem Begin used to claim that the civilian casualties of Israel's air raids were no different from the civilians killed in Denmark in an RAF raid in the Second World War. Ho hum, nice try, Benjamin, but not good enough.
First, the story. RAF aircraft staged an air raid on the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, but massacred more than 80 children when their bombs went astray. The Israelis are slaughtering the innocent of southern Lebanon from high altitude - high enough to avoid Hizbollah missiles. The reason the RAF killed 83 children, 20 nuns and three firemen on 21 March 1945 was that their Mosquitoes were flying so low to avoid civilian casualties that one of the British aircraft clipped its wing on a railroad tower outside Copenhagen central station, and crashed into the school. The other aircraft assumed the smoke from its high-octane fuel was the target.
Interesting, though, the way Israel's leaders are ready to manipulate the history of the Second World War. No Israeli aircraft has been lost over Lebanon in this war and the civilians of Lebanon are dying by the score, repeatedly and bombed from a great height.
Tuesday, 1 August
Electricity off, my fridge flooded over the floor again, my landlord Mustafa at the front door with a plastic plate of figs from the tree in his front garden. The papers are getting thinner. However, Paul's restaurant has reopened in East Beirut where I lunch with Marwan Iskander, one of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri's senior financial advisers.
Marwan and his wife Mona are a source of joy, full of jokes and outrageous (and accurate) comments about the politicians of the Middle East. I pay for the meal, and Marwan produces - as I knew he would - a huge Cuban cigar for me. I gave up smoking years ago. But I think the war allows me to smoke again, just a little.
Wednesday, 2 August
Huge explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut shake the walls of my home. A cauldron of fire ascends into the sky. What is there left to destroy in the slums which scribes still call a "Hizbollah stronghold"?
The Israelis are now bombing all roads leading to Syria, especially at the border crossing at Masna (very clever, as if the Hizbollah is bringing its missiles into Lebanon in convoys on the international highway). Then the guerrilla army, which started this whole bloody fiasco, fires off dozens more rockets into Israel.
I put my nose into the suburbs and get a call from a colleague in south Lebanon who describes the village of Srifa as "like Dresden". World War Two again. But the suburbs do look like a scene from that conflict. My grocer laments that he has no milk, no yoghurt, which - as a milkoholic myself - I lament.
Thursday, 3 August
More friends wanting to know if it's safe to return to Lebanon. An old acquaintance tells me that when she insisted on coming back to Beirut, a relative threw a shoe and a book at her. What was the book, I asked? A volume of poetry, it seems.
Electricity back, and I torture myself by watching CNN, which is reporting this slaughterhouse as if it is a football match. Score so far: a few dozen Israelis, hundreds of Lebanese, thousands of missiles, and even more thousands of Israeli bombs. The missiles come from Iran - as CNN reminds us. The Israeli bombs come from the United States - as CNN does not remind us.
Friday, 4 August
The day of the bridges. Abed and I are up the highway north of Beirut with Ed Cody of The Washington Post (he who reads Verlaine) and we manage to drive on side roads through the Christian Metn district, which has inexplicably been attacked (since the Christian Maronites of Lebanon are supposed to be Israel's best friends here). "You cannot believe how angry we are," a woman says to me, surveying her smashed car and smashed home and shattered windows and the rubble all over the road. A viaduct has fallen into a valley, all 200 metres of it, though another side road is left completely undamaged, and we cruise along it to the next destroyed bridge. So what was the point of bombing the bridges?
We drive back to Beirut on empty roads, windows open and the whisper of jets still in the sky. I go to the Associated Press office, where my old mate Samir Ghattas is the bureau chief. "So how were the bridges?" he asks. "I guess you were driving fast." He can say that again.
I do an interview with CBC in Toronto and talk openly of Israeli war crimes, and no one in the Canadian studio feels this is impolitic or frightening or any of the other usual fears of television producers, who think they will be faced with the usual slurs about "anti-Semitic" reporters who dare to criticise Israel.
I turn on the television, and there is Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's boss, threatening Israel with deeper missile penetrations if Israel bombs Beirut. I listen to Israel's Prime Minister, saying much the same thing in reverse.
I call these people the "roarers", but I leaf through my tatty copy of King Lear to see what they remind me of. Bingo. "I shall do such things I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth." Shakespeare should be reporting this war.
Saturday, 5 August
Lots of stories about a massive Israeli ground offensive, which turn out to be untrue. The UN in southern Lebanon suspects that Israel is manufacturing non-existent raids to pacify public opinion as Hizbollah missiles continue to fly across the frontier. But a friend calls to tell me that Hizbollah might be running out of rockets. Possibly true, I reflect, and think of all the bridges which haven't yet been blown to pieces.
More gruesome photographs of the dead in the Lebanese papers. We in the pure "West" spare our readers these terrible pictures - we "respect" the dead too much to print them, though we didn't respect them very much when they were alive - and we forget the ferocious anger which Arabs feel when these images are placed in front of them. What are we storing up for ourselves? I wrote about another 9/11 in the paper this morning. And I fear I'm right.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1215967.ece
The Independent: Ceasefire hopes rise
as thousands march in London against war
By Francis Elliott and Lauren Veevers in London and Eric Silver in Jerusalem
Published: 06 August 2006
The UN Security Council met last night to review the text of a resolution that might bring about a ceasefire in Lebanon within days, but as the bloodshed continued, thousands of protesters marched in London and other capitals to demand an immediate halt to the fighting.
Tony Blair, who delayed his holiday to help draw up the resolution, called it "a first step" last night. The Prime Minister held out the hope of "the cessation of hostilities literally within the next couple of days", but a formal vote is not expected immediately, and a Hizbollah cabinet minister in Lebanon, Mohammed Fneish, said there would be no ceasefire while Israeli soldiers remained on Lebanese soil.
Israel also ruled out an immediate halt to fighting, though it said agreement by France and the US on the wording of the resolution was an "important development". The text calls for a "full cessation of hostilities" and a commitment to work "on a permanent ceasefire for a long-term solution". But it is understood to allow Israel to respond to attacks launched by Hizbollah.
Yesterday Hizbollah rocket attacks killed three people and wounded five in northern Israel, while Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets in the port of Sidon, warning the inhabitants to leave ahead of army attacks against rocket launching sites. Earlier, Israeli naval commandos raided Tyre, killing seven men in close combat. Israel said they were the leaders of a Hizbollah cell they blamed for launching long-range missiles, and that eight commandoes had been wounded in the operation, two seriously.
Israel also continued its military campaign against Palestinian militias in Gaza. Hospital officials reported four Palestinians killed and four wounded in air strikes on the town of Rafah early yesterday. The dead included a brother and sister, aged 15 and 16, and two Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen.
The Stop the War Coalition, which organised yesterday's rally in London, claimed 100,000 people turned out, but police estimated the figure was closer to 20,000. As protesters marched past Downing Street to Parliament Square, they dropped children's shoes around the Cenotaph to symbolise the loss of young lives in the Middle East.
Speaking before the draft UN resolution was announced, Downing Street officials acknowledged that significant issues remained unresolved, including the composition, mandate and timing of deployment of the stabilisation force. Even more contentious is the exchange of Hizbollah and Israeli prisoners. "It's about making sure the situation remains frozen and doesn't just present Hizbollah a chance to rearm," said one source.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1215981.ece
The Observer:
The draft UN resolution
This is the draft concluded between the US, France and Britain on resolving the Lebanon crisis which has yet to be agreed by the Security Council
Sunday August 6, 2006
The Security Council,
PP1. Recalling all its previous resolutions on Lebanon, in particular resolutions 425 (1978), 426 (1978), 520 (1982), 1559 (2004), 1655 (2006) and 1680 (2006), as well as the statements of its President on the situation in Lebanon, in particular the statements of 18 June 2000 (S/PRST/2000/21), of 19 October 2004 (S/PRST/2004/36), of 4 May 2005 (S/PRST/2005/17) of 23 January 2006 (S/PRST/2006/3) and of 30 July 2006 (S/PRST/2006/35),
PP2. Expressing its utmost concern at the continuing escalation of hostilities in Lebanon and in Israel since Hizbollah's attack on Israel on 12 July 2006, which has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides, extensive damage to civilian infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons,
PP3. Emphasizing the need for an end of violence, but at the same time emphasizing the need to address urgently the causes that have given rise to the current crisis, including by the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers,
PP4: Mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of prisoners and encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel,
OP1. Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;
OP2. Reiterates its strong support for full respect for the Blue Line;
OP3. Also reiterates its strong support for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally recognized borders, as contemplated by the Israeli-Lebanese General Armistice Agreement of 23 March 1949;
OP4. Calls on the international community to take immediate steps to extend its financial and humanitarian assistance to the Lebanese people, including through facilitating the safe return of displaced persons and, under the authority of the Government of Lebanon, reopening airports and harbours for verifiably and purely civilian purposes, and calls on it also to consider further assistance in the future to contribute to the reconstruction and development of Lebanon;
OP5. Emphasizes the importance of the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory in accordance with the provisions of resolution 1559 (2004) and resolution 1680 (2006), and of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, for it to exercise its full sovereignty and authority;
OP6. Calls for Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on the following principles and elements:
· strict respect by all parties for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Israel and Lebanon;
· full respect for the Blue Line by both parties;
· delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including in the Shebaa farms area;
· security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed and security forces and of UN mandated international forces deployed in this area;
· full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006) that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of July 27, 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state;
· deployment of an international force in Lebanon, consistent with paragraph 10 below;
· establishment of an international embargo on the sale or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government;
· elimination of foreign forces in Lebanon without the consent of its government;
· provision to the United Nations of remaining maps of land mines in Lebanon in Israel's possession;
OP7. Invites the Secretary General to support efforts to secure agreements in principle from the Government of Lebanon and the Government of Israel to the principles and elements for a long-term solution as set forth in paragraph 6 above;
OP8. Requests the Secretary General to develop, in liaison with key international actors and the concerned parties, proposals to implement the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), including disarmament, and for delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including by dealing with the Shebaa farms, and to present those proposals to the Security Council within thirty days;
OP9. Calls on all parties to cooperate during this period with the Security Council and to refrain from any action contrary to paragraph 1 above that might adversely affect the search for a long-term solution, humanitarian access to civilian populations, or the safe return of displaced persons, and requests the Secretary General to keep the Council informed in this regard;
OP10. Expresses its intention, upon confirmation to the Security Council that the Government of Lebanon and the Government of Israel have agreed in principle to the principles and elements for a long-term solution as set forth in paragraph 6 above, and subject to their approval, to authorize in a further resolution under Chapter VII of the Charter the deployment of a UN mandated international force to support the Lebanese armed forces and government in providing a secure environment and contribute to the implementation of a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution;
OP11. Requests UNIFIL, upon cessation of hostilities, to monitor its implementation and to extend its assistance to help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the safe return of displaced persons;
OP12. Calls upon the Government of Lebanon to ensure arms or related materiel are not imported into Lebanon without its consent and requests UNIFIL, conditions permitting, to assist the Government of Lebanon at its request;
OP13. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Council within one week on the implementation of this resolution and to provide any relevant information in light of the Council's intention to adopt, consistent with paragraph 10 above, a further resolution;
OP14. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838369,00.html
The Observer:
Where the shepherds tend guns by night
In this border village, many civilians flee the Israeli bombardment. But others, compelled by a mix of religion and patriotism, have joined the fight
Peter Beaumont in Kfar Kila
Sunday August 6, 2006
When war came to the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Kila, a stronghold of the Hizbollah-led Islamic Resistance, it did not have very far to travel. A kilometre of olive groves, and decades of hatred and mutually divisive history, separate this impoverished mountain village from the uniformly red-roofed houses of Metula, Kfar Kila's nearest neighbouring town. Except Metula is in Israel.
They are so close that from the village you can see Israeli cars parked by their houses. So close that the border at one point - at the Fatima Gate - forms the eastern boundary of the village.
Now Israel is at war with Hizbollah, Kfar Kila is at the very front of the front line. The olive trees on the ridge above the village have been scorched black by the phosphorus flares Israeli soldiers used last week to set them aflame. Buildings have been smashed and ruined, set on fire. Some are stained with blood.
Farm animals, kept in sheds and yards behind the bigger houses, have been injured by the shrapnel from tank shells, which scream in with a jarring, lethal regularity. Ibrahim Yahia, a 26-year-old farmer and part-time defender of Kfar Kila, leads us to a Friesian cow, blinded in one eye by shrapnel. Blood streams from one nostril. As Yahia tries to take its muzzle and comfort it, the animal is spooked, and bucks and kicks.
But nothing appears to spook Yahia. A member of Amal, the group fighting alongside Hizbollah in the Islamic Resistance, he barely flinches as the Israeli shells crash in. The streets are open on one side to observation from the gunners around Metula. 'If they want to come, they'll come,' he said sombrely, showing off the rubble in his parents' house, where a shell had punched a hole through the wall. 'Then we will fight them.'
It is a confidence buoyed by the sense of victory that followed the fighters of Kfar Kila's first major encounter with Israeli ground forces in this war. The day before we spoke, the Israelis had tried to take the village with three tanks and infantry advancing from two directions. Over two days, Yahia and his colleagues fought them to a standstill.
One tank was disabled, by Israel's account - three according to Hizbollah's - before the Israeli troops pulled back from Kfar Kila across the fence, burning the olive groves as they went, to resume the business of hurling high explosives against the ridges above the village.
'I'm not like the Israelis,' Yahia said.
'I won't fight without a reason. But because I have a reason I will fight. Because this is my land, I am prepared to die for it. How could you stay silent when you see your land burn and your children get killed? The whole population here is now resisting.'
It is a crucial difference, he seems to suggest, which explains why Israel is struggling to make ground in this campaign - its soldiers are not fighting in their own villages to defend their homes. 'They hit and run,' Yahia said scathingly about the Israeli tactics. 'When they meet us they run like rabbits.'
It is something that strikes you forcefully when you reach the front line of this war. In these villages that form the strongholds of the Islamic Resistance, the men - many of them obviously fighters out of uniform - do not talk much in terms of ideology or religious fanaticism. They are not the zealots and jihadis that Israel claims. Instead, they talk about their damaged property and their livestock scattered by the shelling on the mountains. They talk about family who have fled and those who have stayed. And all the time they carefully skirt talk of the fighters. If they do talk politics it is sometimes with an unexpected spin. Several say that it is not so much the Israelis they blame for this - indeed, who they suggest would agree to a truce - but US President George Bush, who they claim is the real force behind the war.
While religion is an element, it is part of a much more complex formula. Yahia mentions that he follows Ayatollah Sistani, the moderate Shia leader in Iraq, and says he is prepared to be a martyr in this fight for his home. But it is said in a casual way. For Yahia, like the other men in the village, religion is important in the same way as his land, his home, his family and his people.
The south of Lebanon, with its Shia majority, is both strongly observant and socially conservative. 'We do have time to pray while we are fighting,' said Yahia. 'Some of us defend while others pray and then we pray while others defend. If I get an hour of rest I will try to visit my family. Otherwise we eat sand and bullets!'
As we talk, Yahia's commander and another younger fighter arrive to examine a dud shell. The older man is bearded and in his late fifties. 'I don't want to say how many fighters we have in Kfar Kila, but it is a large number. If the Israelis come again they will not get in.'
All the evidence suggests that the commander is not exaggerating. While uniformed members of the Hizbollah missile brigades in the villages around the largely Christian town of Marjeyoun are almost invisible, evidence of their presence is not. It suggests that the fighters here are more numerous, better armed and better trained than Israel imagined.
One afternoon, by chance, we do see three Hizbollah fighters walking down from the olive groves on the slopes into Kfar Kila carrying an ammunition bag. Despite the bombardment, their walk is jaunty and they return a wave with an embarrassed grin, as if caught out by being spotted in the open.
Otherwise, the presence of Hizbollah is only discernible in the puff and whoosh of their missiles; by the scorched ground in the scrub where the launchers briefly halt to fire, and by their many bunkers, heavily camouflaged on the hillsides.
While both sides speak of their victories, seen from the frontline vantage point of Kfar Kila, this is a grinding, grimly pointless war of mutual intimidation that, it appears, neither side can win.
Israeli jets drop their expensive US bombs, usually far from where Hizbollah has been firing. Tanks pound the limestone ridges and envelop them in smoke ('Shooting at ghosts and trees,' says Yahia wryly). In retaliation, Hizbollah fires its rockets blindly across the border, while Metula's sirens wail.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army, the world's fourth most powerful, is driven back by the fierce resistance of shepherds, farmers and mechanics - who are not afraid to die, unlike young Israelis - and then retreats, while leaders on both sides threaten worse, while hinting at conditions for peace.
Caught in the middle, inevitably, are Lebanon's civilians. And every day they flee or die. And sometimes both. Last Tuesday afternoon, as the Israelis were still trying to enter Kfar Kila, we met Ismail Hamoud, 53, on the northern outskirts of the town. His family have gone but, like so many men, Hamoud has chosen to remain.
'It's the second day that the Israelis have tried to advance,' he said wearily, after a sleepless and fearful night and amid the noise of shellfire hitting the village's southern half. 'They already tried once to get into the village and then at 5.30 last night they tried again to come in from the other side of the town.
'We heard small-arms fire, but the resistance fought back and hit three of their tanks. That is when they started firing phosphorus and setting fire to the crops, burning all the houses on the hill.'
And while the Islamic Resistance claimed the battle as a victory, other villagers are less certain. The Israeli action, they suspect, was not to capture Kfar Kila, but to frighten out its remaining residents.
With Hamoud was Yamen Hassan, a tattooed young man in a blue T-shirt. As Hamoud looked warily up the street, Hassan called us over to observe a small group of approaching Israeli troops, moving through the olive trees on the small plain between Metula and the northern outskirts of Kfar Kila, trying to outflank the fighters in the village.
Hassan had come to Kfar Kila to rescue families trapped beneath the Israeli bombardment, but he had halted on its outskirts. 'I am crazy,' he said. 'But I am not so crazy that I will go any further.'
Instead, Hassan had found different passengers to drive out of the town, Mousab and Zainub Rida, who on hearing that Israeli soldiers were creeping through the groves beside their home, elected to flee with a handful of their belongings. As Zainub packed a few possessions on to a tractor-trailer for her husband to take out of town, she wept.
'I've had enough,' said Mousab, a rubbish collector. 'And my wife is just too scared for us to stay.'
A day later, however, they returned to their house. It was only a brief respite. The next day, amid new fears of a general Israeli invasion of the south, up to the Litani river, we saw them once again. This time they finally had fled Kfar Kila. They had not been alone in struggling between fear and their desire to remain.
After more than three weeks of shelling that has seen most of the population of 12,000 flee, a handful are still slipping out of the village every day, their endurance finally brought - like the Ridas' - to snapping point. A few escape in private cars driven by volunteers such as Yamen Hassan. Others leave in a private ambulance, whose insanely cheerful drivers - apparently impervious to the fear of death - shuttle in and out a day, even under the worst fire, delivering bread and other food provided by the local municipality and taking out those who want to leave to the school in Marjeyoun.
But there are those in Kfar Kila - a few hundred at most, perhaps - who have decided to stay. Among them is Mahmoud Hassan Ali, 76. We met him among a small group of women and children who had emerged from their shelters during a lull in the bombing. He showed us his home, damaged by an Israeli shell. 'We were in the house sleeping when the shell came in,' he said. 'Then we ran.'
While we were talking another shell came into the village, scattering the residents back to their homes and basement shelters. So Kfar Kila's war goes on.
Day 25 of conflict
· Helicopter-borne Israeli commandos attack Hizbollah guerrillas near Tyre. The Lebanese say that 900 civilians - a third of them children - have died since hostilities began on 12 July.
· Hizbollah rockets wound five people north of Haifa. Israeli television reports that three people die in a rocket strike on a house in Galilee. 2,600 rockets have now killed 33 Israeli civilians.
· Eight Israeli commandos are wounded, two seriously, in an operation against militia fighters suspected of firing missiles at Israel
· An Israeli air strike kills two Palestinians, including an elderly woman, in Rafah, Gaza.
What comes next
Tomorrow
Final version of the draft Security Council resolution must be formally tabled and voted on, a process that could be wrapped up by tomorrow if no last-minute disputes intervene.
Over the week
Israel and Hizbollah would have to cease-fire under the reported terms, though the Israelis would be likely to hold their positions inside Lebanon until an international force could be assembled and deployed under a further Security Council resolution.
Over the next fortnight
Negotiations to put together an international 'stabilisation' force, probably led and dominated by French troops, with the eventual aim of disarming or displacing Hizbollah and giving Lebanon's regular army sole military control of the entire country.
Aid cut off
The amount of aid entering Lebanon was still severely limited yesterday, the day after Israeli bombers severed the road artery, or 'umbilical cord', used to feed thousands of displaced citizens.
The United Nation's World Food Programme (WFP) distributed food to 8,000 in Beirut after warplanes struck four key bridges necessary for the delivery of supplies by road, but said that thousands still remained helpless.
The WFP said that tens of thousands more were trapped without aid.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838321,00.html
The Observer:
Israeli pilots 'deliberately miss' targets
Fliers admit aborting raids on civilian targets as concern grows over the reliability of intelligence
Inigo Gilmore at Hatzor Air Base, Israel
Sunday August 6, 2006
At least two Israeli fighter pilots have deliberately missed civilian targets in Lebanon as disquiet grows in the military about flawed intelligence, The Observer has learnt. Sources say the pilots were worried that targets had been wrongly identified as Hizbollah facilities.
Voices expressing concern over the armed forces' failures are getting louder. One Israeli cabinet minister said last week: 'We gave the army so much money. Why are we getting these results?' Last week saw Hizbollah's guerrilla force, dismissed by senior Israeli military officials as 'ragtag', inflict further casualties on one of the world's most powerful armies in southern Lebanon. At least 12 elite troops, the equivalent of Britain's SAS, have already been killed, and by yesterday afternoon Israel's military death toll had climbed to 45.
As the bodies pile up, so the Israeli media has begun to turn, accusing the military of lacking the proper equipment, training and intelligence to fight a guerrilla war in Lebanon. Israel's Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, on a tour of the front lines, was confronted by troubled reserve soldiers who told him they lacked proper equipment and training.
Israel's chief of staff, Major-General Dan Halutz, had vowed to wipe out Hizbollah's missile threat within 10 days. These claims are now being mocked as rockets rain down on Israel's north with ever greater intensity, despite an intense and highly destructive air bombardment.
As one well-connected Israeli expert put it: 'If we have such good information in Lebanon, how come we still don't know the hideout of missiles and launchers?... If we don't know the location of their weapons, why should we know which house is a Hizbollah house?'
As international outrage over civilian deaths grows, the spotlight is increasingly turning on Israeli air operations. The Observer has learnt that one senior commander who has been involved in the air attacks in Lebanon has already raised concerns that some of the air force's actions might be considered 'war crimes'.
Yonatan Shapiro, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a 'refusenik' letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information. According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of 'common sense' and in the context of the Israeli Defence Force's moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.
Shapiro said: 'Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they're afraid people will be there, and they don't trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets.'
He added: 'One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hizbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house ...
'Pilots are always being told they will be judged on results, but if the results are hundreds of dead civilians while Hizbollah is still able to fire all these rockets, then something is very wrong.'
So far none of the pilots has publicly refused to fly missions but some are wobbling, according to Shapiro. He said: 'Their target could be a house firing a cannon at Israel and it could be a house full of children, so it's a real dilemma; it's not black and white. But ... I'm calling on them to refuse, in order save our country from self-destruction.'
Meron Rappoport, a former editor at the Israeli daily Haaretz and military analyst, criticised the air force's methods for selecting targets: 'The impression is that information is sometimes lacking. One squadron leader admitted the evidence used to determine attacks on cars is sometimes circumstantial - meaning that if people are in an area after Israeli forces warned them to leave, the assumption is that those left behind must be linked to Hizbollah ... This is problematic, as aid agencies have said many people did not leave ... because they could not, or it was unsafe to travel on the roads thanks to Israel's aerial bombardment.'
These revelations raise further serious questions about the airstrike in Qana last Sunday that left dozens dead, which continues to arouse international outrage. From the outset, the Israeli military's version of events has been shrouded in ambiguity, with the army releasing a video it claims shows Katyusha rockets being fired from Qana, even though the video was dated two days earlier, and claiming that more than 150 rockets had been fired from the location.
Some IDF officials have continued to refer vaguely to Katyushas being launched 'near houses' in the village and to non-specific 'terrorist activity' inside the targeted building. In a statement on Thursday, the IDF said it the air force did not know there were civilians in what they believed was an empty building, yet paradoxically blamed Hizbollah for using those killed as 'human shields'.
Human rights groups have attacked the findings as illogical. Amnesty International described the investigation as a 'whitewash', saying Israeli intelligence must have been aware of the civilians'.
One Israeli commander from a different squadron called the Qana bombing a 'mistake' and was unable to explain the apparent contradiction in the IDF's position, although he insisted there would have been no deliberate targeting of civilians. He said he had seen the video of the attack, and admitted: 'Generally they [Hizbollah] are using human shields ... That specific building - I don't know the reason it was chosen as a target.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838437,00.html
Tomgram:
Judith Coburn on Flunking Counterinsurgency 101
TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute
compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt
On the April day in 2003 when American troops first pushed into Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young noted a strange phenomenon. In a single rush, the Vietnam War vocabulary had returned to our media. She promptly dubbed Iraq, "Vietnam on crack cocaine."
It's true that, for a while, the administration played an eerie opposites game, spending much of its PR time avoiding any whiff of Vietnam terminology. "Body bags" were renamed (and the homecoming dead hidden from the cameras); "body counts" were excised from the official military vocabulary - or as General Tommy Franks, commander of our Afghan War, put it in 2002: "I don't believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered… You know we don't do body counts" (except privately, of course).
But that was then, this is now. Here we are, well into the second term of Bush's Vietnam-on-crack-cocaine, Global-War-on-Terror policies. Significantly more time has passed, as Newsweek's Michael Hirsh recently pointed out, than it took the U.S. to win World War II in the Pacific:
"We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it."
And, as if giving up in its titanic struggle against the undead of our Vietnam experience, the Bush administration is now openly recycling in ever more chaotic, violent, and disastrous Iraq ancient, failed Vietnam-era policies. It's enough to give old-timers that Post-Traumatic-Stress-Syndrome feeling, as Vietnam-era war correspondent Judith Coburn explains vividly below.
Of course, we all know that Iraq is not Vietnam - and not just because of the lack of jungle or the different language. But here's one difference between the two eras that is perhaps worth a little more attention:
In Vietnam, the U.S. military, the mightiest force then on the planet, was fought to a draw and defeated politically by a remarkably unified Vietnamese national resistance movement led by North Vietnamese communists, but with a powerful southern guerrilla element. The guerrillas in the south were backed by the North Vietnamese (and, as the war went on, by enormous chunks of the North Vietnamese military); North Vietnam was supplied with weaponry and massive support by a superpower, the Soviet Union, and a regional power, emerging Communist China.
Now consider Iraq. The U.S. military - even more now than then the mightiest force on the planet - has been fought to something like a stalemate by perhaps 20,000 relatively underarmed (compared to the Vietnamese) insurgents in a rag-tag minority rebellion, lacking a unified political party or program, or support from any major state power. Now consider Lebanon, where the mightiest regional military in the Middle East, the Israeli Army, which in 1982 made it to Beirut in a flash before bogging down for 18 years, has in the last three weeks not managed to secure several miles on the other side of its own border against another relatively isolated minority guerrilla movement. This perhaps tells us something about the way, in this new millennium, we are not in the Vietnam era, but you'd be hard-pressed to know that from the Bush administration's recent policies.
What's so grimly fascinating, as Coburn indicates below, is that our old counterinsurgency policies, which didn't work in Vietnam, have now proved utterly bankrupt against vastly weaker forces. On guerrilla war, our leaders, political and military, are evidently nothing short of brain-dead. Now, consider Coburn's striking piece on two failed wars, two disastrous eras of U.S. military policy abroad, and wonder whether we aren't really in Hell. Tom
How Not to Vietnamize Iraq
By Judith Coburn
Through a scrim of red, dry-season dust, the sign appeared like an apparition hanging low over the no-man's land of the South Vietnamese-Lao border: "Warning! No US Personnel Beyond This Point." Its big, white expanse was already festooned with grunt graffiti, both American and Vietnamese. It was February, 1971, the afternoon before the invasion of Laos, and the sign but the latest bizarre development in the Pentagon's campaign to "Vietnamize" the war in Vietnam. The journalists who had hoofed it all the way to the border found the sign so grimly funny that we lined up for a group photo in front of it.
It all started in late 1969, when President Richard Nixon announced the first withdrawal of American soldiers from South Vietnam and their replacement by South Vietnamese troops. The new policy was dubbed "Vietnamization" by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and hailed as the beginning of the end of America's war in that land. But the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi wasn't fooled for a minute. The communists believed Vietnamization was only intended to de-Americanize the war, not to end it.
Hanoi was right - more right than anybody at the time could have imagined. In the five-plus years of war that followed, more than 20,000 American soldiers would still die; Nixon would actually widen the war by invasions of both Cambodia and Laos; and brutal American bombing campaigns would kill over a million more Indochinese. In fact, more Indochinese and Americans would be killed or wounded during the Vietnamization years than in the war before 1970.
While comparisons to Vietnam and terms from that era like "quagmire," "hearts and minds," and "body counts" swamped the media the moment the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, "Vietnamization" didn't make it into the mix until that November. Then, the White House, which initially shied off anything linked to Vietnam, launched a media campaign to roll out what they were calling "Iraqification," perhaps as an answer to critics who doubted the "mission" had actually been "accomplished" and feared that there was no "light at the end of the [Iraqi] tunnel." But the term was quickly dropped. Perhaps it resurrected too many baby-boomer memories of Vietnamese clinging to the skids of choppers fleeing the fruits of Vietnamization.
It seems, however, that there is no way of keeping failed Washington policies in their graves, once the dead of night strikes. I was amazed, when, in 2005, in Foreign Affairs magazine, Melvin Laird resurrected a claim that his "Vietnamization" policy had actually worked and plugged for "Iraqification" of the war there. Soon after, journalist Seymour Hersh, famed for his reportage on the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre (and the Iraq-era Abu Ghraib abuses), reported in the New Yorker that the Vietnamization policy of the Nixon era was indeed being reclothed and returned to us - with similarly planned American drawdowns of ground troops and a ramping up of American air power - and I wondered if we could be suffering a moment of mass post-traumatic stress syndrome.
When General George William Casey, Jr. - whose father, a major general, died in Vietnam in July 1970 - announced in June 2006 that the Pentagon might soon begin the first American troop withdrawals from Iraq, I couldn't help wondering where the Iraqi version of that sign might eventually go up. In the desert? On the Iranian or the Syrian border? (The "withdrawals" were, however, rescinded before even being put into effect in the face of an all-out civil war in Baghdad.)
However it feels to anyone else, it's distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war. Some kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new heights of despair.
While brooding about Iraqification, I was reminded of what historian and Vietnam-era New York Times journalist A.J. Langguth said about Vietnamization. "By [1970], well over a hundred thousand [South] Vietnamese soldiers were dead, crops destroyed, cities in ruins, and we're talking about Vietnamization as though the Vietnamese weren't already bearing the brunt of the war," he told historian Christian G. Appy for his oral history of the Vietnam War, Patriots. "It was one of those words that gave a reassuring ring in Washington, but it was really insulting."
A point well taken as Iraqification is heralded in the land.
The Sound of Vietnamization
One night back in 1971 on the Lao border, not far from that big, white sign, I was to witness Vietnamization in action in its starkest terms. Two photographers, another reporter, and I were camped out with South Vietnamese Army troops who were to lead the next morning's invasion of Laos. (As it happened, the Vietnam War lacked a speech-writerly slogan like President Bush's, "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," but the policy was the same.) What I heard then was three sharp cracks, the sound - we figured later - of cluster bombs hitting the ground no more than twenty feet from us, mistakenly dropped by an American Navy bomber. A hurricane clatter of shrapnel fanned out toward us. It felt like sharing the same foxhole with a machine gun drawn dead on you. As the universe exploded in flames, our brains were blasted blank.
We thrashed for cover in what seemed like slow motion. Minutes later, with the plane long gone, the slopes around us were drenched in blood and strewn with the broken bodies, shredded or pockmarked with shrapnel, of hundreds of young Vietnamese soldiers. Helping drag the wounded to the medics, I left my tape recorder running. For me, the screams recorded on that tape have remained forever the sound of Vietnamization.
The Air Force called it "precision" bombing back then - and still does. In guerrilla war, where fighters live among civilians, no bombing missions, no matter how carefully targeted, can avoid killing civilians. The Pentagon reports that, right now, on average on any given day, 45 American and British war planes are in the air over Iraq, plus Army, Marine and Special Forces helicopters. Most of the bombing is being done by American F-15s and F-16s from bases outside Iraq and F-14s and F/A-18s from carriers in the Persian Gulf. They mostly drop 500 pound bombs, though Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones and other unmanned aircraft do their share of damage, and in Afghanistan both B-52s, those old Vietnam warhorses, and B-1s have been called in. In addition, as one would expect in a "Vietnamization" program, the number of air strikes has risen sharply in recent months. Last summer, air missions in Iraq averaged 25 a month; by last November, they had jumped to 120 a month and have remained at that level ever since.
Occasionally, American military commanders remark that civilian casualties, sanitized with the euphemism "collateral damage," are regrettable; but, in areas where local residents are believed to support the guerrillas, civilian casualties may actually be the goal rather than so many mistakes. In Vietnam, the Pentagon created "free fire zones" in the countryside where any living thing was fair game. The theory was simple, if bloody-minded: If the guerrillas swam in the sea of the peasants, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had so famously argued, then, as American counterinsurgency experts were fond of explaining, it was necessary to "drain the sea."
With last week's announcement that more American troops were being rushed to Baghdad to put a brake on the fast-developing civil war in the capital, we may be seeing a new twist on the old theme of Vietnamization - Americans may up the use of air power in al-Anbar Province and elsewhere in the heartland of the Sunni insurgency as a substitute for troops "drawn-down" to Baghdad. As I saw in Indochina, however, air operations rarely succeed anywhere as a substitute for crack ground troops. They can kill enormous numbers of people without significantly tipping the military balance.
Here's how one helicopter pilot described the effectiveness of air ops during Lam Son 719 (the official name for the invasion of Laos): "Before the first insertion of ARVN [South Vietnamese] troops on one firebase, we laid in B-52 raids, tac air, and napalm for five hours. Then we waited a half hour and went in. Our first three helicopters were shot down. There were still a million guys out there."
Flunking Counterinsurgency 101
In his recent book Fiasco and accompanying articles in the Washington Post, reporter Thomas Ricks argues that neither the American military, nor the Bush administration learned even the most elementary counterinsurgency lessons from Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Ricks reports, has refused even to admit that his troops were fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq, just as the Pentagon insisted in Vietnam that the North Vietnamese were the real enemy, discounting the guerrillas in the South.
The use of high profile, aggressive tactics like round-ups, constant patrolling, indiscriminate firepower, and the abuse of prisoners has alienated civilians in Iraq just as such tactics did in South Vietnam. When American soldiers in Iraq complain - just as they did in Vietnam - that the enemy "melts" away or that they're "hiding" among civilians, it's because, on some very basic level, they and their commanders just don't get how a guerrilla war actually works.
One American general I interviewed in Vietnam was incredulous when I told him that I attended a Vietnamese wedding in the largest, most "secure" provincial capital in the Mekong Delta, only to discover that about half the guests were National Liberation Front (NLF) officials - that is, southern guerrillas.
He was no less shocked to hear about a day I spent in 1971 in a "secure" Delta village watching most of the residents line up placidly to vote for the only candidate on the ballot, American-backed President Nguyen Van Thieu. The next morning, back in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, I found an NLF flag in my hotel mailbox wrapped in a message from those same villagers. The point they were making was a simple one about the hidden complexities of that war. The NLF, they explained, had decided to urge the villagers to vote for Thieu so that the area would continue to look "secure" and village support for the NLF would remain under the radar screen.
Recently, the Pentagon claimed that it was changing course in its counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, each zig and zag like this one seemingly intent on replicating the worst of that long-gone era. In an eerie echo of Vietnamization, the old, failed military policy of "clear and hold" - the idea of clearing designated limited areas of guerrillas and supportive civilians, securing those areas, and then, in "ink blot" fashion, spreading out from there - is being resuscitated. It is meant to replace the modern equivalent of General William Westmoreland's discredited big-unit "search and destroy" operations. In Iraq, however, in a deft, cynical PR twist, the phrase has been recoined as "clear, hold, and rebuild." (No matter that Iraqi "reconstruction," long ago bankrupted by corruption, cronyism, and pure administration incompetence, has already wound down without a "mission accomplished" banner in sight.)
Standing Up or Standing Down?
Well, forget "rebuild." Key to whatever new strategy does exist is the Bush administration's stumbling, fumbling, already bloody Iraqification policy aimed at "standing up" a national army. Our media dutifully passes on the administration's impressive stats on new troops and police trained. Critics insist those troops are ill-equipped and badly trained.
I remember identical glowing reports on American-trained troops in South Vietnam in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, deeper questions about the effectiveness of proxy armies are almost never explored. How do you really get them to do your bidding? How do you even make them believe that what they are doing is for them and not for you?
In South Vietnam, there was a draft for the army and, by 1970, when President Nixon was praising our efforts to create an effective indigenous force (as is George Bush today), the desertion rate was 50%. In Iraq, there's no military draft, but there is an economic one in which the desperate and jobless sign up because they can find no other way to get a half-decent paycheck or support their families. Many of them, like the South Vietnamese grunts I spent time with, are loyal to the idea of survival, not to a corrupt, divided, and ineffective government. Any number of these Iraqi young men are, in fact, already pledging allegiance to powerful Shiite militias, even while serving in the government's police or army.
Now the US finds itself fighting those same militias as well as the insurgents. American troops have battled the Mahdi Army on more than one occasion, have demanded the disbanding of Shiite militias and death squads to no avail, and are now being drawn into a Sunni/Shiite civil war, which is now killing an estimated 100 Iraqi civilians a day.
As George Orwell wrote in his famed essay, Shooting an Elephant, about his days as a British colonial policeman in the Burma of the 1920s, pesky locals always seem to manage to muck up the best laid plans of foreign occupiers, no matter how good those plans may look on paper or sound on the lips of high officials.
Two weeks into Lam Son 719, we international journalists mounted our daily assault on U.S. and South Vietnamese military flacks at the Saigon press briefing known then as the "five o'clock follies."
"Why haven't the so-called crack South Vietnamese troops from the First Division advanced even a meter in Laos in the last week?" my notes quote one exasperated reporter as asking. "Why did General Abrams [commander of American forces in South Vietnam] fly north yesterday?" shouted another. "General Lam [South Vietnamese commander of I Corps] will advance his troops when he desires to," the South Vietnamese military briefer answered stiffly. "General Abrams is reviewing the situation," his American counterpart added wearily.
It took only a few days for Vietnamese reporters to nail down the painfully obvious story. Lam Son 719 was an American construct - we all knew that from the get-go. It was to be a major test of Vietnamization, wherein South Vietnamese troops were to, in today's parlance, decisively "stand up." But President Nguyen Van Thieu didn't like it much, his generals even less. When the invasion almost immediately turned into a rout, Thieu feared his generals might try to overthrow him.
Lt. General Hoang Xuan Lam commanded the only South Vietnamese troops tough enough to rescue the operation, but he was also the only general Thieu could depend on to block a coup in Saigon. He didn't want Lam's troops bogged down in Laos; he wanted them poised to rescue the "palace."
American planning, the shock-and-awe air ops of that moment, and pressure from the Pentagon simply couldn't prevail in the face of local politics on either side of the armed struggle. Former South Vietnamese Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, ever frustrated by how little "our" South Vietnamese followed his orders, once complained that when he told Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky something and Ky nodded yes, all it meant was that he understood what the Ambassador had just said, not that he would lift a finger to do it.
Those Pesky Proxies
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki hasn't exactly been rolling over for the White House recently either. He has demanded that American soldiers be subject to Iraqi courts, that Israeli attacks in Lebanon be stopped, and that the Bush administration send even more aid. In fact, so many of the Bush administration's manipulations in Iraq, including the financing of favorite candidates in elections and strong-arm pressure on the Iraqis to form a government more or less to our liking, have, for an old Vietnam hand, a painfully Yogi Berra-ish déjà vu all over again feel to them.
The Bush administration finds itself trapped in a contradiction even the United Nations has experienced: that democracy introduced by occupying forces is almost certain to prove undemocratic. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was fond of telling reporters that the United States was "neutral" in South Vietnamese elections. But the American embassy worked tirelessly to manipulate Vietnamese politics: trying to hand-pick electoral candidates, approving the disqualification of "neutralist" ones, sanctioning a presidential race with only one candidate ("one man, one vote, and the man is Thieu," I headlined that one), okaying the jailing of Thieu's most serious opponents because they advocated negotiating with the communists, and making sure the South Vietnamese police were fully equipped to "neutralize" any other opponents - especially from the South Vietnamese anti-war student movement. Eventually, with Vietnamization in ruins, the Nixon administration would pressure Thieu - with absolutely no success - to accept a "coalition government" so America could finally exit Vietnam with all due speed.
By 1970, a majority of Americans thought the Vietnam war was a mistake; almost exactly the same percentage now feels the same about Iraq. Back then, the White House clung for dear life to Vietnamization while Congress dithered. Now, the same holds true. Even the language - "Cut and Run," "Stay the Course" - remains largely the same, as the repetitive bankruptcy of the enterprise deadens even our linguistic life. As then, so now, the complications on the ground in Iraq seem insurmountable from the point of view of an administration and a Congress intent on maintaining what in the Vietnam era was called "credibility" and now has no name at all. George Orwell would have grasped what our politicians are going through: "...my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at..." is how he summed up his Burmese days.
Every now and then, as yet another grim Vietnam déjà vu rockets by me, I think back to Senator George Aiken, the flinty moderate Republican from Vermont (the John Murtha of that time), who, tiring in 1966 of endless hand-wringing from his colleagues about how to get out of Vietnam, told the assembled solons one day that it wasn't hard. All we had to do was declare victory, Aiken said, and fly the troops home. That would have been real "Vietnamization."
Judith Coburn covered the war in Indochina from 1970-73 for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Village Voice, and Pacifica Radio. She is working on a memoir about Vietnam and the 1960s.
Copyright 2006 Judith Coburn
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=107613
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