Elsewhere today (386)
allAfrica:
Sudan Gets Tough On Kony Rebels
By Frank Nyakairu, Juba
The Monitor (Kampala) NEWS
August 21, 2006
THE President of South Sudan, Gen. Salva Kiir Mayardit, yesterday handed down another pre-condition for a cessation of hostilities to rebel leader Joseph Kony.
Kiir said the leader of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army must disclose his troop deployments in Sudan, DR Congo and Uganda to allow monitoring and management of the much sought after ceasefire.
The LRA declared a unilateral ceasefire on August 4 and called on Kampala to do the same. Kampala, however, rejected the call saying any cessation of hostilities had to be negotiated and carried out under the context of a comprehensive peace deal.
Speaking to Daily Monitor yesterday at Juba International Airport soon after he returned from Kampala, Kiir said; "Since LRA control no territory in Uganda, it would be difficult to monitor a ceasefire."
He said once the rebels agree to assemble in one area, they would make life easy. The President pledged that once a ceasefire is agreed, his Sudan People Liberation Army will act as a buffer force to ensure that UPDF doesn't attack the LRA rebels wherever they will be assembled. Kiir met President Museveni at State House, Kampala over the weekend.
"We have told them (LRA) that after declaring a unilateral cessation of hostilities, they must follow up and make their presence known, then we will use our forces to control UPDF. We told them 'They will not attack you (LRA) and we shall see how logistics can reach you and we call in other actors'," Kiir said soon after he arrived at Juba International Airport yesterday.
Talks resumed in the South Sudan capital Juba on Friday after being put off for a week to allow the LRA mourn one of their colleague Raska Lukwiya who was killed by the UPDF.
President Museveni told a press conference he addressed jointly with Kiir at State House, that the rebels must assemble in South Sudan as a pre-condition for a ceasefire. He said unless Kony embraces the new proposal, the UPDF will continue to attack them.
President Kiir said yesterday: "In the case of the LRA, there is no territory they control inside Uganda and so it is always very difficult to control and monitor a ceasefire. But if they were to surface and assemble in one area possibly in southern Sudan, this is when the government of Uganda will be able to cease attacks. What is happening is actually hunting," he said.
"We (Museveni and Kiir) discussed it (ceasefire) and he said there are no defined lines between the Uganda army and the LRA. If you have to declare a cessation of hostilities there must be a frontline which, if one crosses then that constitutes a violation," he said.
Mr Museveni said on Saturday, that Congo had allowed Ugandan forces to attack Kony's base in the north-east of the country should the ongoing peace talks between the two sides fail.
But sources say DR Congo wants Uganda to first pay up to $10 billion in compensation for the plunder of that country's natural resources and loss of life before the UPDF can be allowed in to flush out the rebels.
Meanwhile, the South African government says it has received no formal request for mediation in the peace process, the Department of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.
"We have been inundated with calls about whether South Africa has been asked to mediate in Uganda," departmental spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said. "We have received no formal request from the LRA rebels."
Copyright © 2006 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200608210074.html
allAfrica:
Joint Task Force Arrest 2,000 in Port Hacourt
By Ahamefula Ogbu, Port Harcourt
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
August 20, 2006
No fewer than 2,000 suspected militants were rounded up by the Joint Task Force which raided suspected hideouts of militants in an operation that started Friday night and ended in the early hours of yesterday.
The militants however gave what the army described as feeble resistance as they were taken by surprise.
Also items said to have been recovered by the combined team of Police, Army, Navy and Airforce included guns, ammunitions and explosives.
The source said this was a sign of the things to come and insisted that they had kept quiet for this long.
While confirming the raid, Major Sagir Musa, the Army Public Relat-ions Officer of the Amphibious Brigade in Port Harcourt said they found out that those who have been commiting crimes had their hideouts in the raided areas of Iloabuchi, Diobu and the notorious Njemanze streets.
"Following security reports that those behind most of the militant activities, robbery and other such criminal activities are residing in Diobu, a Joint Task Force decided to do what we call 'Cordon and Search'.
"We circled the area with armed military personnel while policemen and military police went to each house looking for explosives, guns and any dangerous weapon. It will be a continuous exercise", he explained.
Copyright © 2006 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200608210266.html
AlterNet:
The Loose Cannon of 9/11
By Michael Slenske, SMITH Magazine
Posted on August 21, 2006
It took two governors, four congressmen, three former White House officials and two special counsels two years to compile. They reviewed over two and half million pages of classified and declassified documents, consulted 1,200 sources in 10 countries, and spent over $15 million of the taxpayers' money in the process. And on July 22, 2004, the 9/11 Commission issued its final report on the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Is it possible that two twentysomethings from "a small hippie town that time forgot" could undermine that entire effort with $8,000 and a laptop?
Yes, if you ask ex-Army specialist Korey Rowe. The 23-year-old from Oneonta, New York returned home from two tours -- one to Afghanistan, the other to Iraq -- to help his best friends, Dylan Avery (director) and Jason Bermas (researcher), produce the sensational 80-minute, Web-based documentary "Loose Change," which seeks to establish the government's complicity in the terror attacks by addressing some very tough questions: Why wasn't Ground Zero treated like a crime scene? How did both towers "free-fall" to the ground "in 9.2 seconds" in just under two hours? And where are the black boxes from American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175?
While the film is admittedly flawed and draws on some dubious new media sources, including Wikipedia, it's inarguably sparked a new interest in the "9/11 Truth movement." Since its April 2005 debut online, "Loose Change" (the first and second edition) has received over 10 million viewings, it was just featured in the August issue of Vanity Fair, and the final cut of the film is expected to debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
"I've got four movie studios [including Paramount and Miramax] beating down my door to make the final cut," says Rowe, who's now got offices from California to London to handle his growing company. Last week SMITH caught up with Rowe -- who's been labeled everything from a traitor to a CIA operative in the past year -- to see how he went from protecting the Iraqi-Syrian border against Muslim insurgents to a self-described "conspiracy theorist" poised to take Hollywood (and the country) by storm.
MICHAEL SLENSKE: Do you work for the CIA?
KOREY ROWE: No, I do not work for the CIA.
SLENSKE: Just wanted to get that out of the way. What made you want to join the military?
ROWE: The fact that I was doing nothing. I was 18; I wasn't ready to go to college yet. I knew that if I went to college I wouldn't have spent too much time in class, I would have spent my time partying. I wouldn't have gotten done what I needed to do. It would have been a waste of my parents' money. So I decided it would probably be best if I joined the military -- this was pre-Sept. 11 -- Bush was in office, there wasn't a whole lot going on, I didn't foresee a war happening, I just thought it would be a good way to get out of town, man-up a little, and then move on with the rest of my life. Before I knew it, I just joined.
SLENSKE: Did you want to go to war?
ROWE: At first I did. I wanted to retaliate for Sept. 11. The government told me it was Osama bin Laden, the government told me he was hiding in caves in Afghanistan, they told me he had killed a bunch of innocent Americans, so at first I wanted to go over there and defend just like everyone else. It was the hooah thing to do at the time.
SLENSKE: What were you doing in Afghanistan?
ROWE: My primary MOS (military occupational specialty) was 11 Bravo, which is infantry, frontline infantry. I was carrying a gun, humping a lot of weight on my back. That was what I did in Afghanistan full time. I was at the Kandahar airfield, Bagram, and Khost. But in Afghanistan I really didn't do much. I was there for six months, pulled a lot of guard; I went on, I think, three missions. Never got any enemy contact, never got fired on. I watched it on my perimeter, a couple hundred meters out while someone else was getting shot at, but I never really got any action.
SLENSKE: And in Iraq?
ROWE: In Iraq I rode in the back of a truck from the southern tip, through the desert into Al-Hillah, took the battle of Al-Hillah, which was pretty crazy. It looked like a Vietnam movie. Then we moved further north into Baghdad, where we were in Medical City. I was stationed in an emergency room door for about a month and a half just watching these bodies of children and their families come in. Then I moved north into Mosul, swung west into Sinjar, on the Syrian-Turkey border where we had to watch for insurgents coming across the border.
SLENSKE: How did that experience change you?
ROWE: I went from being some kid who had no idea about anything in the military--I didn't even know what the infantry was when I joined, I just told them I wanted to shoot stuff and blow stuff up -- to being a communications specialist for my commander. That was really when I started to see the bigger picture -- when I started working for higher commanders -- seeing how things ran.
SLENSKE: When was the first time you heard from Dylan Avery about what he was doing with "Loose Change" back in New York?
ROWE: After I got back from Afghanistan, he started to talk about the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, and started letting me know about some of the information he had come across. It was between returning from Afghanistan and redeploying for Iraq that my mind started to click on. I was like, "Wait a minute -- I was in Afghanistan three months ago, and now I'm going to be in Iraq in four months. I've got to invade another country; where is this going?"
Then -- and I hate to say this -- I saw "Fahrenheit 911," which to me is a terrible movie. But a lot of it made sense in the pretext and military build-up to Afghanistan before we were actually attacked. When I walked out of that movie I was like, "Wow, that messed with my head." Right before I deployed for Iraq, I had the inclination that something was seriously wrong. But then it didn't matter because at that point I had to go. My unit needed me. I was the company RTO (radio telephone operator); I was running communications. It didn't matter what my personal beliefs were. I just had to go over and shut my mouth for another year.
SLENSKE: So why this film?
ROWE: "Loose Change" happened by accident. The whole thing started out as a fictional screenplay about me and Dylan and another friend of ours finding out 9/11 was an inside job. It started out as a comedic action film with us being chased by the FBI and all that. But when Dylan started researching the screenplay, he found out the attacks really were an inside job, so we made it into a documentary. I see myself as a person who's a buffer between conspiracy theorist and military informant, so I thought my help on "Loose Change" would make it a better quality piece, something more mainstream people who aren't into conspiracies could really watch and take in.
I call it the gateway drug because it can take someone totally green to the information -- who believed Muslims carried out 9/11, that the World Trade Center was brought down because of jet fuel, and that the Pentagon was hit by a plane -- you put them in front of this movie, and 80 minutes later they are going to question it at least. Bottom line: They're going to question it. It makes people think. It made me think, so I wanted to make other people think.
SLENSKE: When you got back from Iraq did you know you wanted to go work on the film?
ROWE: No, I went back to work. I was training. That's what you do. When you're not deployed, you're in the rear either fixing your gear or using your gear. I was stationed in Fort Campbell, Ky., the whole four years besides the time I was overseas. When you're back from overseas you get a month off, you clean your gear, and then go fight again.
SLENSKE: Didn't you ever stop and think, "Wait, Dylan is just a kid"?
ROWE: Yeah, several times. I thought, I'm in the military, I know stuff. But Dylan was way more informed than me. Like I said, I'm getting the Army Times, I'm getting the AFN, and now it's out. It's reported that the government spent millions of dollars spinning false articles to newspapers across the world. So who's to say the Armed Forces Network and the Army Times aren't chockfull of bullshit?
SLENSKE: How prevalent is that mindset in the Army?
ROWE: That they know what's going on?
SLENSKE: Yeah?
ROWE: It's 98 percent. It's a fantasy world those people live in. I mean it's really something. I call them infected. They can't come back to civilian life. They're like, "You can't get out of the Army, you ain't gonna get no job, you ain't gonna do nothing. You gonna work at Burger King. What are you gonna do at Burger King? You still wear a uniform; you still get a haircut at Burger King. So why don't you just stay in the Army, join up, sign again, get $6,000." If you don't reenlist, they just make you sit in a chair. They made me sit in a chair for a week. Sit in that chair until you reenlist. I just sat there. "You want me to sit in this chair," I said, "I'll sit in this chair for a month, because in a month I'm out of here."
SLENSKE: When you came back, was there anything that really bothered you about the American public?
ROWE: Yeah, their ability to believe the B.S. they see on TV. They're so in tune with their television and CNN and Fox News and the New York Post. They watch the news and the news reporter, whoever it is, forms an opinion for them. Take the release of the Pentagon video. CNN had been bashing conspiracies all day because people kept writing in about conspiracy theories. They build it up for two hours, then they show the video, then Jamie McIntyre, who we actually use in our video says, "All right, there's the plane, you can see it. There's the vapor trail, and there's the explosion. They only shoot in half-second frames; it's the only shot of the Pentagon. We'll be right back to cover more of this. This is undisputed proof that a plane hit the Pentagon."
They go to commercial, and instead of coming back and going to Flight 77, they go to "American Idol." They just implant the idea, there's Jamie McIntyre saying he sees a 757 flying into the Pentagon, and then they switch to "American Idol." So then when someone says there's no plane that hit the Pentagon, someone else can say, "That's not true; I watched CNN this afternoon. Jamie McIntyre saw the plane; he showed me." People believe anything because it's on CNN.
SLENSKE: What do you think about the Popular Mechanics cover story about "Debunking 9/11 Myths"?
ROWE: That's a good article. It covers some good information, but it directly takes away from some of the facts. It states that NATO scrambled planes at one time that could've intercepted the planes but couldn't because they couldn't reach them in time. That's bullshit. That article reports they only would've had to have flown at 24 percent of their full-blower, and an F15 flies at 1,800 mph. You're telling me when the first plane was hijacked at 8:20 a.m. until 9:45, when the plane was flown into the Pentagon, you're telling me that not one F-15 could be scrambled and taken down one of those planes. Not to mention the ("Debunking 9/11 Myths") piece stands on the Nova theory (the "Pancake Theory") that one floor collapsed on another floor creating a succession of collapses where the towers fell.
If that's true, you have a 75-story office building untouched by fuel, fire, any debris whatsoever. You have a 30-story chunk above that, which is also untouched. You have the 78th to 82nd floor, which is on fire. Think about that. You have a 70-something story office building, untouched, unscathed by fuel. You're going to tell me that the steel supposedly weakened, fell on one floor, on top of another floor, on top of another floor, for 78 floors, reaching the ground floor, and fell in 9.2 seconds. 9.2 seconds is the exact rate of freefall for a building that tall, which is 1,368 feet tall.
If you take Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies and you calculate the distance by the time it takes to fall, it's 9.2 seconds. That means that all those floors fell without any resistance from any of those untouched floors below it. It's completely impossible. Not only do you have to do that, you just have to watch the collapse of the towers. You can see the bombs going off. It is so obvious. It's an umbrella theory. You blow up the top to conceal what's going on beneath it.
SLENSKE: The "Blair Witch Project" also looked real to people who were in on the documentary preceding it. It totally worked. The first time you watch it, it grabs you. But "Loose Change" isn't meant to be fictional. It's a watchable film, but what do you expect people to do with it?
ROWE: What I encourage people to do is go out and research it themselves. We don't ever come out and say that everything we say is 100 percent. We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves -- the B52 (remarked to have flown into the Empire State Building), the use of Wikipedia, things like that. We left them in there so people will want to discredit us and go out and research the events yourself and come up with your own conclusions. That's our whole goal, to make Americans think. To wake up from the 16 amps of your television to watch something and get a passion in something again.
And that's what America has always been about. From the Vietnam protests … it's always been about a passion. And now we're trying to build that passion in people, to wake up, to stop watching television, to stop reading the crappy newspapers, and go online and find those declassified documents. Go find the scientists that aren't young filmmakers, but the ones after Steven E. Jones at BYU, who has steel from the World Trade Center and has conducted tests on the steel. And it's come to the point, over and over again, that what they (the 9-11 Commission) say can't be true. That it had to be brought down by controlled demolition. Our whole goal is to wake Americans up to do something about it.
SLENSKE: What do you say to people who'd say you're doing this to make a dollar?
ROWE: You should see my dilapidated house in upstate New York. I drive a Ford F-150 that has a tape player. We sell DVDs, we make money, but we just give the shit away because we don't want to be war profiteers. We're not about making money on the whole thing -- we're about getting information out. That's why we've turned down seven figures, more than once, from people looking to buy our film and put it in theaters -- because they don't care about it. They only see the moneymaking aspect of it.
We want to make sure it's handled correctly. That the movie gets out 100 percent accurate when it comes out in theaters, because it's obviously not now, and that it's projected in the right light so people aren't threatened by it. If we coordinate 500 theaters across the country to start playing it, it's going to start a wave. We're going to have a whole weekend of events on 9/11 just to raise awareness among New Yorkers so that we can try to get an independent investigation to look back into the facts that every news agency in the world has ignored. Americans are going to be pissed.
Michael Slenske writes the "Back Home From Iraq" column for SMITH Magazine.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40476/
Arab News:
Islamo-Fascism or Judeo-Fascism?
Randall B. (Nadeem) Hamud, Arab News
Monday, 21, August, 2006 (27, Rajab, 1427)
Since 9/11, President Bush has repeatedly assured the Islamic world that Muslims per se were not America’s enemy. However, on Aug. 7, 2006, he used the term “Islamo-fascism” to describe the “jihadist message.” Before then, the term had been bandied about mostly by neoconservative pundits interested in prosecuting their own pro-Israel agenda in the Middle East.
Muslim leaders across the US immediately registered loud complaints about the president’s choice of words. Equating Islam with fascism was at best hyperbole, and at worst an epithet aimed at tarnishing one of the world’s great religions. Four in ten Americans already harbor negative opinions about Islam.
Perhaps President Bush was stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment in the run up to the November elections.
The president would have been better advised to develop an understanding of fascism before he ascribed it to Islam. Had he done so, he would have quickly found that Islam and fascism are fundamentally incompatible.
The term “fascism” came into vogue in 1920s and 1930s to describe an ideology that had been born in reaction to Marxism and communism. Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy emphasized the importance of the state as an organic entity rather than as protector of individual rights. The state controlled all aspects of life. It exploited populist rhetoric, exalted heroic effort — especially war — to achieve past greatness, and exacted absolute loyalty to a single leader. And its ends always justified the means, no matter how murderous.
In Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s fascist counterpart, Adolf Hitler, took a more racist bent. Glorifying the Aryan nation-state and seeking to achieve a 1000-year reign (Reich) of Aryan world domination, Nazi Germany implemented a policy of conquering new lands, eradicating the local populations, and replacing them with Germans. The policy was known as lebensraum. Today it is called “ethnic cleansing.”
Can fascism, then, be applied to Islam? The simple answer is that it cannot. First and foremost, Islam recognizes no borders. The “state” cannot even be defined. Nor can the individual be required to supplicate himself or herself to any entity or person other than God. Islam means “submission” to God, not to some petty dictator. Islam does not force individuals to convert to its beliefs. And Islam does not condone the murder of innocents for any reason, including for the good of the “state.”
However, upon closer analysis, President Bush would have discovered that there exists in the world today one state where fascist elements combine with religious fervor to dictate state policies: Israel. First, Israel is a self-declared Jewish state. The acceptance of its existence and its Jewish identity is of paramount importance in Israeli society. Non-Jews who live in Israel can never hope to be full-fledged citizens because they are not Jewish. National identity cards define not only citizenship but also nationality, of which there are three: Jewish, Arab, and Druze. In a slap at its indigenous (pre-1967 borders) Arab population (one million strong), the Jewish state denies citizenship to the spouses of Israeli citizens who marry Arab residents of the West Bank or Gaza. Citizenship also will be denied to their offspring. And only those political parties which accept the “Zionist” character of the state may present candidates for the Israeli Parliament. This forecloses representation of a large percentage of the indigenous Arabs.
Moreover, fascism has deep historical roots in Israel’s formation and in certain of the political parties presently represented in its Parliament, the Knesset. Israel’s National Union Party is an admixture of the Molodet and Tkuma parties, which were progeny of the 1940s Herut, Zeev Jabotinsky’s political party that took its cues from fascism. Likewise, in 1940 Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed the Irgun Zvai Leumi-be-Yisrael (Lehi) terror group dedicated to killing anyone standing in the way of a homeland for Jews. Lehi even offered to team up with the Nazis during World War II in return for support for a new Jewish state to be administered along fascist lines.
Perhaps Albert Einstein and some other concerned Jewish leaders said it best in 1948 when they wrote a letter to the New York Times commenting upon the formation of the “Freedom Party” in Israel. The described the party as “closely akin . . . to the Nazi and fascist parties.” The party had been formed from the Irgun, described in the letter as a “right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.” Menachem Begin (a future prime minister of Israel) was the party leader.
Today, the National Union and its soul mate, Yisrael Beytenu, advocate the forced removal of Palestinian Arabs from Israel proper, from the Gaza Strip, and from the occupied West Bank. Following the classic modus operandi of lebensraum, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be annexed to form Greater Israel, which would then be populated by waves of Jewish settlers. To these contemporary Israeli political parties, the sanctity of the State of Israel, the merit of blood sacrifice for its benefit, and the use of military might in its expansion find Biblical justification in Exodus 17:14 and Numbers 14:45.
On a more practical level, since 1967 Israel’s military and security forces have inflicted on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank collective punishment, torture, destruction of economic infrastructure, and extrajudicial killings. Such actions are not unlike those practiced by the Nazi occupiers of 1940s Europe.
Obviously, then, unlike “Islamo-fascism,” the term “Judeo-fascism” has both historical and practical currency. However, the use of the term usually raises the hackles of a myriad of Jewish organizations because as Holocaust victims and survivors, Jews are not supposed to mimic the behavior of their own tormentors. Yet that is precisely what they have done in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Thirty-nine years of occupation have brutalized the occupiers and the occupied.
Yet, peace demands that the use of the term “Judeo-fascism” be minimized because of the inflammatory effect it has on any discussion of the fundamental issues that divide today’s Semitic peoples. The same is true of ersatz terms like “Islamo-fascism.” It is time for dialogue, not sound bites. Only in that way can both peoples revisit another Golden Age of mutual respect and accomplishment. In helping to achieve this task, President Bush has to learn to be a leader, not a follower.
— Randall B. (Nadeem) Hamud is an attorney at law based in San Diego, CA.E-mail to: rhamud@san.rr.com
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?
page=7§ion=0&article=76614&d=21&m=8&y=2006
Asia Times:
The new creative destruction
By Mark LeVine
Aug 22, 2006
If there is one question one could ask Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah today, it would be this: When did you begin planning for the reconstruction of south Lebanon? Before you kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on July 12, or only after it became clear how much of south Lebanon Israel was willing to destroy to "win" its war against you?
Either way, it was the latest master stroke in a string of decisions that have confounded Israel, the United States and the world at large. Indeed, while critics of the Israeli invasion claim - with increasing evidence - that Israel planned the attack well in advance (even with the support from the administration of US President George W Bush), it now appears that it was Hezbollah that suckered Israel into a war for which it had perfectly planned each component: the bait - the kidnapping of two soldiers; the military tactics - tunnels, missile barrages and advanced anti-tank weapons; and the post-fighting reconstruction - a large-scale effort that only Hezbollah, and not the feckless Lebanese government, is capable of undertaking.
Call it the new creative destruction; and the "new" Middle East it is creating will be very different than the one dreamed of by Bush administration planners and their allies in Israel.
The idea of "creative destruction" first was popularized by Austrian economist Rudolph Schumpeter more than half a century ago to describe how capitalism simultaneously destroys existing social systems and profits from the economic and social systems that take their place.
In the 1980s, US business "gurus" such as Tom Peters saw, with the revolutions in technology and production, and simultaneously the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the bipolar world it helped keep in order, not only the need to manage the chaos that was on the horizon, but the possibility to "thrive on" and profit from it immensely.
Neo-liberal globalizers and neo-conservatives, and ultimately the Bush administration, would latch on to creative destruction as a way of describing the process by which they hoped to create their new world orders.
For all who celebrated creative destruction, the United States was, in the words of neo-conservative philosopher and Bush adviser Michael Ledeen, "an awesome revolutionary force" for whom creative destruction was (and, we can assume, remains) "our middle name".
A similar faith in Israel's role in the Middle East was behind Shimon Peres' idea of a "New Middle East" in which Israel would be its cultural and economic engine. This is the vision on which the Oslo peace process was founded, and ultimately foundered.
But in keeping with this philosophy, the Israeli military thought that by destroying thousands of Lebanese lives and buildings it could take out Hezbollah, and in so doing create a new and more favorable regional balance of power. What it didn't count on was that Hezbollah was using the same principle of violence as the instigator of social and political change, only in reverse: each bombed-out building and lifeless baby created another opportunity for Hezbollah to show its patriotism, charity and efficiency.
Now, as Israeli soldiers begin withdrawing from Lebanon in what almost every Lebanese believes is defeat, Hezbollah fighters exchange their Kalashnikovs for hard hats and bulldozers, clearing away the rubble, handing out money, food and furniture to the homeless, and rebuilding the roads and buildings that the war they precipitated destroyed - all with an unlimited supply of funds from Israel's and America's main enemy and ultimate target of the war, Iran.
In short, Hezbollah has been able to eat its cake and have it too: it has stood up to the mighty Israel Defense Forces and either co-opted or cowed its domestic opposition (which collectively had more support than Hezbollah did before the war). Then, before anyone could criticize it for the magnitude of destruction its actions unleashed, it has begun a massive, well-funded rebuilding effort. If only the Bush administration had acted as astutely in Iraq.
What can the US and Israel learn from the past five weeks? Well, they've been pretty creative about destroying things, as a tour of Iraq, Lebanon or Gaza makes clear, and in the process unleashing waves of chaos that they assumed could be managed to their advantage.
But Nasrallah's strategy has shown him to be a true master of both sides of the creative-destruction equation. That is, he understands that creative destruction must create a viable system that gives people a stake in their future if the process is to be completed.
Because of this, if US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice really saw the birth pangs of a new Middle East, the baby they heralded is not America's or Israel's; it's Hezbollah's. Will the US still love it? Or will the US abandon it as if it's not its responsibility? These are hard lessons to swallow, but the US would do well to learn them, and quickly. America's adversaries already are.
Mark LeVine, PhD, is a professor in the department of history, University of California-Irvine.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH22Ak01.html
Asia Times:
Calling on Cambodia's Sihanouk
By Verghese Mathews
SINGAPORE - Ta Mok, a name familiar to a generation of Cambodians, died in Phnom Penh in the early hours of July 21. In detention since his capture in 1999, the much-feared one-legged former Khmer Rouge military commander died in a military hospital of complications resulting from a long history of high blood pressure, respiratory illness, cardio-vascular problems and tuberculosis.
While there were those who mourned his death, there were arguably legions who were both truly disappointed and deeply frustrated that Ta Mok had taken along with him to the hereafter many dark secrets of the three years, eight months and 20 days of the dreaded Khmer Rouge regime.
His untimely but not unexpected death is without doubt a great loss to the forthcoming Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He could surely have shed at least some light as to why the Khmer Rouge did what it did to its own people, what unfortunate alignment of the planets motivated its frenzied attempt to reinvent Cambodia, and why that exercise went so dreadfully wrong.
Ta Mok is not the only one to have cheated the tribunal of a primary source, of which it has a very limited number. The man accused of being most responsible for the crimes, Pol Pot, Brother No 1, died unceremoniously in suspicious circumstances on April 15, 1998 - at a time when Ta Mok had wrested control of the Khmer Rouge from him.
The loss of such a critical witness as Ta Mok should sound the clarion call to both the United Nations and the Cambodian government that the tribunal should not be delayed any longer and that every resource ought to be marshaled to accelerate the process.
Apart from the possible deaths of the remaining aging Khmer Rouge leaders, there is residual fear in certain circles that some if not most of them who live and move freely in Cambodia will quietly disappear from the country before the trial proper begins early next year. This is not an unlikely scenario.
Media reports last month, for example, that former head of state Khieu Samphan "had packed up his pickup truck in the middle of the night and left town" quickly gained currency and raised anxiety among those who continue to harbor doubts about the tribunal.
A subsequent explanation that Khieu Samphan was merely transporting a bed to his son's house killed further international media interest in the incident but failed to assuage the doubts of the cynics.
Viewed in this context of diminishing primary witnesses, the July 15 offer of former king Norodom Sihanouk, now referred to as Father King, to testify makes fascinating reading and is truly intriguing.
He declared on his website that he did not lack the courage to appear before the tribunal and again pointedly reminded everyone, "My family, my wife's family and many people who supported Norodom Sihanouk were tortured and killed by Pol Pot."
Will Sihanouk testify? It would be difficult for Sihanouk not to steal the limelight should he appear. Even his worst detractors will grudgingly admit that Sihanouk is an extremely astute politician who has been intimately involved with developments in his country for the past half-century. He is both enigmatic and extraordinary. He also knows how to capture attention.
An important point to note here is the firm belief in some quarters that Sihanouk is very serious, and that his was not a frivolous offer. Sihanouk is a man of history, and as he looks back at his colorful and eventful life, he may pause to admit that one of the most universally misunderstood and most trying periods of his life was when he, Queen Mother Norodom Monineath and the present king, Norodom Sihamoni, ended up as virtual prisoners in the palace during the Khmer Rouge rein.
It is entirely possible, or so the belief goes, that Sihanouk, in his sunset years, will view the tribunal, despite his previous criticism of it, as one of the very few remaining vehicles to put across his side of the story for future generations of Cambodians and for the international community.
There is a view that as he is no longer king and since constraints are fewer, he will be more forthright in open court. This is not being fair to Sihanouk. His track record here is clear. Even when he was king and there were numerous constraints, he never lacked in forthrightness.
On the contrary, what has always been uppermost in the minds of those who knew him, friends and detractors alike, was that no one was ever sure what Sihanouk would say. Even some of those who genuinely admire him admit that Sihanouk is indeed unpredictable and fearless - undoubtedly a potent combination.
Others have described him differently.
The highly respected political commentator Milton Osborne titled his book on Sihanouk Prince of Darkness, Prince of Light. In a review of the book, the equally respected Martin Stuart-Fox disagreed with that reference. He gently chided, "The title is an extravagant one. Sihanouk is neither a Prince of Darkness nor a Prince of Light. Such cosmological/eschatological overtones as these titles convey should not cloud our judgment. What Milton Osborne actually presents us with in this thoughtful and revealing book is a leader whose flaws of character contributed in no small measure to his country's tragic history."
There will be those who will disagree with that observation about Sihanouk but will wholeheartedly accept that the real tragedy of Cambodia was the Khmer Rouge.
Although Sihanouk is not required to appear, and ultimately may not, there is no denying that should he do so, his contributions would be invaluable. There is equally no denying that should he appear, there could well be anxiety among some people and within some capitals.
Verghese Mathews, former Singaporean ambassador to Cambodia, is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
(Copyright 2006 OpinionAsia.)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/HH22Ae01.html
Clarín: Israel descarta por el momento
retomar las negociaciones de paz con Siria
La aclaración fue formulada por el premier Ehud Olmert y su canciller Shimon Peres. Condicionaron el diálogo a que Damasco deje de apoyar a Hezbollah. Ambos hablaron después de que otro ministro israelí dijera que su Gobierno estaba dispuesto a hacer concesiones territoriales a cambio de una "paz real".
Clarín.com, 21.08.2006
Mientras sigue en pie la frágil tregua iniciada hace una semana en el sur del Líbano y después de que un ministro israelí asegurara que su Gobierno estaba dispuesto a hacer concesiones territoriales a Siria a cambio de una paz real, el premier Ehud Olmert y su canciller Shimon Peres salieron a aclarar que para el Ejecutivo de Jerusalén todavía no llegó el momento de reiniciar las negociaciones de paz con Damasco.
Jerusalén y Damasco están enfrentadas por los territorios de los altos del Golán, una meseta con importantes reservas de agua que Israel conquistó en 1967, durante la Guerra de los seis días, defendió de un intento sirio por recuperarlas en 1973, en la guerra de Ramadán o de Yom Kipur, y anexó en 1981. Además, Israel acusa a Siria como sostén de la guerrilla de Hezbollah, asentada en el sur del Líbano.
El ministro israelí de Seguridad Interior, Avi Dichter, había asegurado hoy en declaraciones a una radio militar que su país estaría dispuesto a retirarse de los altos del Golán y devolver esos territorios a Siria a cambio de "una paz real". Para sostener su posición, argumentó que se realizaron concesiones similares para lograr la paz con Jordania y Egipto, y resaltó que no se entregarían sin discusión los recursos acuíferos.
La declaración de Dichter provocó fuertes críticas dentro del propio gabinete israelí y algunos ministros del gobernante partido Kadima calificaron sus opiniones como "de aficionado". Y el primer ministro y el canciller salieron poco después a intentar aclarar la situación.
Olmert dijo que su gobierno sólo negociará con Siria cuando "deje de entregar armas y cohetes que matan israelíes", en referencia al soporte que Jerusalén asegura que Damasco presta a Hezbollah. Lo hizo, además, en un lugar particular, ya que habló en la ciudad de Kiriat Simona, donde impactaron unos 1.000 misiles de la guerrilla durante los recientes enfrentamientos.
Por su parte, Peres coincidió que todavía no ha "llegado la hora" para un diálogo con Siria, y exhortó a Damasco a que cuando desee "seriamente" retomar las negociaciones se los haga saber.
El reinicio del debate sobre las relaciones con Siria llega poco después de que Israel advirtiera que retomará sus operaciones militares en el Líbano si no se logra el desarme de Hezbollah. La tregua en la región lleva una semana y tanto Jerusalén como Beirut se acusaron mutuamente de haberla violado. Para la ONU, una reciente incursión israelí en el sur del Líbano resultó una violación al alto el fuego.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/08/21/um/m-01256613.htm
Guardian:
Enforcing the ceasefire
Leader
Monday August 21, 2006
Ceasefires can have more than one purpose but the primary one must always be to stop people fighting, which is why the UN secretary general was right to condemn Israel's unjustifiable incursion into Lebanon over the weekend. By speaking out firmly and quickly, to Israel's evident discomfort, Mr Annan laid out some much-needed boundaries as to what is and what is not acceptable in the current, dangerous interregnum between war and peace. Israel has tried to justify Saturday's raid on the village of Bodai, in the Bekaa valley, as a defensive move, permitted under the terms of UN resolution 1701. But by attempting to sustain hostilities Israel violated the resolution in the most elemental manner. It was an act properly condemned by the secretary general's office for endangering "the fragile calm" which has allowed reconstruction to begin.
There is no doubt that Hizbullah sees itself as the victor in the conflict and this in itself is a provocation to an Israeli government which is under pressure at home to show it can still protect its territory. As such, the Bekaa raid may have been a symbolic exception to a policy of compliance with the UN resolution, rather than a disturbing indication of flagrant breaches to come. Hizbullah, too, may well be testing the ceasefire, which calls for an arms embargo, by trying to re-equip. But if Israel has evidence of this, it should not take the law into its own hands. The proper course would have been to request action from the UN and the Lebanese government. Yesterday's clear statement from the Lebanese defence minister, Elias Murr, warning militias in southern Lebanon not to attack Israel, was a sign of continued Lebanese support for the UN process.
The problem is that no one - apart from the UN secretary general - is holding the ring yet. Talk of a 15,000-strong UN force remains just talk. France, which is taking the lead in Europe and commands the existing force in Lebanon, has only managed to send 49 engineers to the country, although 150 more set sail yesterday. That is well short of even the 3,500 troops the UN says it wants on the ground by the end of the month. Other EU states, such as Germany, need to do more. But so do other, primarily Muslim, countries. An international force which is made up only of European soldiers risks being portrayed by Israel as one sent to protect its borders. But the force's responsibilities under the ceasefire extend well beyond the suppression of Hizbullah, which anyway will only cooperate with the UN and the Lebanese army if it sees the peace process as even-handed. By acting precipitately in the Bekaa valley, Israel has made the UN's position much more difficult and only served to complicate the task of putting together an international force. UN member states who may have been prepared to volunteer may now fear becoming trapped between recalcitrant Hizbullah elements and freelance Israeli attempts to "enforce" the ceasefire through armed raids on Lebanese territory.
The risk now is that the UN, France and Germany may try to restrain Israel from any further action while Britain and the United States remain silent. Such an international split over the interpretation of the UN resolution will greatly weaken efforts to implement it, even if a force can be assembled. Unless the US is willing to restrain Israel from carrying out more raids, and make its view clear in public, it is unlikely other nations will want to expose their troops and the peacekeeping force may collapse through international inertia. This is a test of Tony Blair's influence over the US president and of whether his trust in Washington's goodwill has really sunk to the earthy levels suggested last week by John Prescott. It is also a test of whether Mr Blair can bring himself to speak out against Israeli breaches of the ceasefire, as Mr Annan did so promptly and properly at the weekend.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1854900,00.html
Guardian:
Israel and the US are still focused on the wrong issues
Every major political issue - Lebanon, Iraq, radicalism - links back to the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Rami G Khouri
Monday August 21, 2006
We have a very simple choice before us in the Middle East: we can get serious about working together to give the people of this region a chance to live normal lives in peace and security; or we can all act silly in the ways of provincial chieftains, as many public figures in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Israel and the US have done in recent days.
The chances of achieving a region-wide peace in the Middle East are slim to non existent right now, because the key non-Arab players are focusing on the wrong issues. They are trying to manage or eliminate the symptoms of our region's tensions instead of addressing the root causes. Hizbullah and Iran are among the best examples of this.
Israel and the US are obsessed with disarming Hizbullah and confronting Iran. But a quarter of a century ago neither of these issues existed. How Hizbullah and Iran became so problematic is worth recalling. Until 1979 Iran under the Shah was a close ally and friend of the US and Israel, and Hizbullah was not even born. What happened in the three decades from the mid-70s to today? Many things. The most consistent one was that we all allowed the Arab-Israeli conflict to fester unresolved. Its bitterness kept seeping out from its Palestine-Israel core to corrode many other dimensions of the region.
The constant clashes between Israel and Lebanon since the late 1960s derived heavily from the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict that started with the 1948 war. Since Iran's 1979 revolution Islamist revolutionary zeal has found effective expression in its close association with Hizbullah, which Iranian revolutionary guards were instrumental in establishing and training. Tehran's assistance to Hamas today follows a similar pattern. A non-Arab power such as Iran exploits the resentment against Israel and the US throughout the Arab world to make political inroads into Arab regions. If the Arab-Israeli conflict had been resolved decades ago, Iran would not have this opportunity.
Hizbullah has many people working backwards. While the American-Israeli effort to disarm Hizbullah aims mainly to protect Israel, the fact is that Hizbullah has developed its military capability primarily in response to a need to protect Lebanon from repeated Israeli attacks in the past four decades. (Lebanese calls to disarm Hizbullah are motivated more by a desire to prevent the party from bringing more ruin from Israeli attacks, or to prevent it from taking over the country's political system and aligning it with Syria and Iran.)
The way to end Hizbullah's status as the only non-state-armed group in Lebanon is to rewind the reel, and go to the heart of the problem that caused Hizbullah to develop its formidable military capabilities in the first place. If we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict in a fair manner, according to UN resolutions, we would eliminate two critical political forces that now nourish Hizbullah's armed defiance: the Israeli threat to Lebanon, and the ability of Syria and Iran to exploit the ongoing conflict with Israel by working through Lebanon.
Iran has its own reasons, including some valid ones, for developing a full nuclear fuel cycle, though the potential atomic weapons capability that derives from this is more problematic. Iran's political meddling in Lebanon and other Arab lands is another issue. Yet it is linked umbilically to the assertion of Islamist identity, Shia empowerment, anti-western defiance and domestic challenges to autocratic Arab regimes - four dynamics that have often been associated with, and exacerbated by, the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel's persistent attempts to secure its place in this region by military force have always generated a greater Arab will to fight it, now also supported by Iran. Local attempts to secure its borders - occupations, surrogate armies, cross-border attacks, separation walls, massive punishment and humiliation of civilian populations - have not worked for Israel, and only generate more determined and capable resistance, as with Hizbullah. Israel will also fail in its desire to subcontract its security to foreign or regional states, as it is attempting to do through the international force in south Lebanon, or by having Turkey prevent arms shipments to Hizbullah from Iran.
Every tough issue in this region - Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, terrorism, radicalism, armed resistance groups - is somehow linked to the consequences of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The politicians and government leaders who dominate this region, or engage it from western capitals, all look like rank amateurs or intemperate brutes as they flail at symptoms instead of grappling with the core issue that has seen this region spin off into ever greater circles of violence since the 1970s.
A comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement is achievable from the Arab side, to judge by the repeated offering of the 2002 Arab summit peace proposal. Israel and the US must quickly decide if they too can become sensible and work for a comprehensive peace as the most effective way to reduce and then reverse the cycles of resentment, radicalism and resistance that now define much of the Arab-Islamic Middle East.
· Rami G Khouri is the editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star
© 2006 Rami G Khouri/Agence Global
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1854638,00.html
Guardian: Unexploded cluster bombs
prompt fear and fury in returning refugees
Four dead as mine-clearing teams fear death toll from Israeli weapons could soar
Declan Walsh in Yahmour
Monday August 21, 2006
When the guns went silent in Aitta Shaab, a war-ravaged village close to the Israeli border, three children skipped through the rubble looking for a little fun.
Hurdling over lumps of crushed concrete and dodging spikes of twisted metal, Sukna, Hassan and Merwa, aged 10 to 12, paused before a curious object. Sukna picked it up. The terrifying blast flung her to the ground, thrusting metal shards into her liver. Hassan's abdomen was cut open. Merwa was hit in the leg and arm.
"We thought it was just a little ball," said Hassan with a hoarse whisper in the intensive care ward at Tyre's Jabal Amel hospital. In the next bed Sukna, a ventilator cupped to her mouth and a tangle of tubes from her arms, said even less.
Her mother watched anxiously. "The Israelis wanted to defeat Hizbullah," said Najah Saleh, 40. "But what did these children ever do to them?"
Israel may be pulling out of Lebanon but its soldiers leave behind a lethal legacy of this summer's 34-day war. The south is carpeted with unexploded cluster bombs, innocuous looking black canisters, barely larger than a torch battery, which pose a deadly threat to villagers stumbling back to their homes.
Mine-clearing teams scrambling across the region have logged 89 cluster bomb sites so far, and expect to find about 110 more. Meanwhile, casualties are being taken into hospital - four dead and 21 injured so far. Officials fear the toll could eventually stretch into the thousands.
"We already had a major landmine problem from previous Israeli invasions, but this is far worse," said Chris Clark of the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre in Tyre, standing before a map filled with flags indicating bomb sites.
Cluster bombs are permitted under international law, but UN and human rights officials claim Israel violated provisions forbidding their use in urban areas. "We're finding them in orange plantations, on streets, in cars, near hospitals - pretty much everywhere," Mr Clark said.
The bombs are ejected from artillery shells in mid-flight, showering a wide area with explosions that can kill within 10 metres (33ft). But up to a quarter fail to explode, creating minefields that kill civilians once the war is over. A decades-old campaign to ban them has failed.
Israel turned to cluster bombs in the last week of the war, apparently frustrated at the failure of conventional weapons to rout Hizbullah fighters from their foxholes. Mine-clearance teams are finding evidence pointing to their provenance: the US, the world's largest cluster bomb manufacturer, which gave Israel $2.2bn (£1.2bn) in military aid last year.
In Nabatiye, 15 people were injured in just one day along a bomb-strewn road. In Tibnin, 210 bombs were found around the town hospital. "That's about as inappropriate [a use of cluster bombs] as you can get," Mr Clark said.
In Yahmour, a hilly frontline village that has become a complex urban minefield, minesweepers from the UK-based Mine Action Group have cleared the main roads and some house entrances. But danger lurks everywhere. One elderly woman lost her leg in an explosion last Monday as she swept her yard.
Now holes pock the road, yellow tape appears around fields and houses, and residents tip-toe around the "grape bombs". Ilham Tarhini, 45, stood at her front door appealing for help. After returning from refuge in Syria three days ago she found tiny bomblets poking from the soil of her garden of olive trees. From where she was standing she could count eight: "I'm afraid to step into the streets."
But the most volatile payload sat in Jamil Zuhoor's living room. During the war an unexploded rocket packed with bomblets punched through his front wall, skidding to a halt before a chest of drawers. "I can't see us moving back in here for another year at least," he said, shutting the door of his shattered house.
The UN is appealing for money and minesweepers. With such help it hopes the worst-hit areas can be cleared within six months, Mr Clarke said. But until then residents live in fear.
Many share the blame equally between Israel and the US. "It's like we are living in a prison," said Aisa Hussain, 38, a Yahmour resident who has ordered his children to remain inside his house.
Strolling through the village he pointed to yet another tiny black canister perched under a tree. "You see what America is sending us," he said bitterly. "This is their idea of democracy."
Backstory
Cluster bombs were first used by the Germans in the second world war but have become a standard weapon for many countries, including Britain, France and Italy.
The most popular delivery device, the American-made M26 rocket, scatters 644 bomblets over 20,000 square metres. Under test conditions up to 23% of bomblets from the M26 failed to explode on impact. The United States keeps 370,000 such rockets in stock.
The M26 inflicted hundreds of civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003, says Human Rights Watch, over populated areas. The British army used M26s in the 1991 Gulf war
The US halted cluster bomb exports to Israel in 1982 after indiscriminate use against civilians but rescinded the ban in 1988. Belgium is the only country in the world that has banned cluster bombs.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1854714,00.html
Guardian:
Power and the people
Iran says it wants nuclear energy to fuel its economy. The US says it wants to build an 'Islamic bomb'. But what do Iranians think about the deepening crisis? Given rare access, Simon Tisdall spoke to people on the streets of Tehran - and to the men in charge of the country's nuclear programme
Simon Tisdall
Monday August 21, 2006
Tensions between Iran and the west have rarely been greater than they are today. On the one side, President George Bush has accused Iran of being behind the attack by Hizbullah on Israel that sparked the Lebanon war; and both the US and Britain say that Iran is bent on developing nuclear weapons. On the other, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has claimed that the Bush administration is trampling on the rights of Muslims throughout the world; the US is the "Global Arrogance" (the term which has replaced the "Great Satan" in the Iranian lexicon) in which Washington's plan for a "new Middle East" is simply a scheme to subjugate the region to US and commercial interests.
Just last week, an article by Seymour Hersh, the respected US investigative reporter, which claimed that the war against Iran's proxy Hizbullah was a premeditated US-directed warm-up for an attack on Iran itself, stoked fears in Tehran that a US air assault on its nuclear facilities, even regime change, are moving to the top of the agenda. Officials in Tehran worry that, after Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran is seen by Bush as "unfinished business" - and that, urged on by Israel, he is determined to destroy what both countries see as the looming threat of an "Islamic bomb". They hear Bush's talk of "Islamic fascists" - and wonder whether he will soon be gunning for them.
There is a way out. Tomorrow the Iranian government will present its long-awaited response to the west's last-ditch compromise offer on nuclear power. This package, belatedly backed by the US, offers Iran a range of incentives from implicit security, territorial guarantees and an end to sanctions, to new commercial and technological collaborations. But first, Bush insists, Iran must suspend all uranium enrichment operations, which Washington believes are connected to its attempts to acquire bomb-making capability.
So far, Iran has insisted that it will not accept any such pre-conditions. Officials say they are willing to resume negotiations with the west - but on equal terms. So when Ahmadinejad delivers Iran's formal reply at a Tehran press conference, the stage will be set for an epic clash that could reverberate across the Middle East and far beyond. So far, the story has mostly been reported from the outside, and from a western perspective. But what are the prospects for war and peace as seen from inside Iran? For the past two weeks the Guardian has been given unprecedented access to explore what ordinary Iranians think about the most pressing issue facing their country - and what some of the country's most powerful men believe will happen next.
'Diplomatic chess'
In a high-ceilinged, thick-carpeted inner sanctum of Iran's fortress-like Supreme National Security Council building in central Tehran, Ali Larijani patiently spells out the factors that will play a part in Iran's decision. The CIA would dearly love to penetrate inside these walls. Perhaps it already has; visitors' mobile phones and other electronic devices are confiscated.
Larijani is an important man in Iran. As secretary of the security council and chief nuclear negotiator, it is he, and his predecessor, Hassan Rowhani, who have by turns tantalised, teased and infuriated the west during three years of discussions on the nuclear dossier. Iran plays a long and astute negotiating game, which Larijani likens to "diplomatic chess". Officials say they learned at the feet of masters: the European powers who exploited Persia during the 19th century "Great Game". Britain is still referred to as the "Old Fox".
Larijani has a daunting reputation as the dour former head of state television whose programme schedules were both morally edifying and utterly tedious. His appointment by Ahmadinejad was seen in the west as representing an ominous shift towards recalcitrance. But in person he is charming and courteous.
"There are many reasons why Iran is seeking nuclear power," he says. "The history of our nuclear activity dates back 45 years to the time of the ex-shah's regime. But after the Islamic revolution, some western countries condemned Iran and cancelled their nuclear agreements with us. For example, the Americans had concluded an agreement for a research reactor in Tehran and also to provide the fuel. But they cancelled the agreement and did not give back the money. The Germans did the same. So the lesson was: we have to be self-sufficient, to provide fuel for ourselves."
He continues: "We don't see why we should stop the scientific research of our country. We understand why this is very sensitive. But they (the west) are categorising countries. Some countries can have access to high nuclear technology. The others are told they can produce fruit juice and pears! They say: 'Don't seek a nuclear bomb.' We don't have any objection to that. But unfortunately officials of some countries such as the UK say, 'We don't want you to have the knowledge for nuclear technology'. This is not logical. And we don't pay attention to this."
The Americans' contradictory impulses are to blame for the standoff, he says. "After September 11 2001, they faced a problem in Afghanistan. They requested assistance from Iran and we gave it. But after the problem ended in Afghanistan, they called us the 'axis of evil'. This paradox has always been their way. They want to kiss one side of our face, but at the same time they also want to slap the other side."
Iran is still willing to negotiate, Larijani concludes, but it will not give up its nuclear power programme. Nor will it yield to preconditions such as Bush's demand for an immediate suspension of uranium enrichment. "If they are going to seek an imposed agreement by putting pressure on us, we will not accept it. If the atmosphere is not proper, we may delay our reply. If you try to cultivate a flower in salty land, it does not grow."
For Larijani, the bottom line is respect. And the evident lack of it in Washington, magnified by loose talk of enforced regime change, is one of many reasons why Iran is going nuclear.
A changing society
Tehran is a city of elegant parks. And none is more serene than Saee Park, off Vali Asr Avenue, one of the capital's main thoroughfares. Known as the "lovers' park", it is where young and not-so-young couples sit at dusk beneath a canopy of fragrant chinar, cypress and pine trees, exchanging gossip and intimacies, sharing ice creams and swapping phone numbers.
According to Reza, 27, and his girlfriend, things are more easy-going socially than they were 10 years ago. They attribute the change to the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessor. Despite Ahmadinejad's conservative instincts, the new government has been unable to put the street culture genie back in the bottle, Reza says.
"There's more personal freedom. You don't get harassed like you used to. The young people are changing the older people's attitude. They have to accept it - they have no choice, so they go with the flow." And in a country of 70m, where two-thirds of the population is under 30, the trend appears irreversible.
The present hardline government is not popular among many inhabitants of Saee Park. They complain about its failure to expand and diversify an economy that is roughly 80% state-controlled. Younger people worry about careers and jobs, about the difficulties of foreign travel and internet censorship, about the lack of things to do and places to meet. Leila, 27, says she would like to go to parties, to clubs; she would like to sing. "But they won't allow female singers, did you know that? Female vocalists are banned. They say they are too alluring to men. Poor men! They have weak brains!"
Yussuf, 63, has a different perspective. "I was a metallurgist until I retired. I trained in the US during the Shah's time. I worked all my life. But now I have to take part-time jobs because my pension isn't enough. This government is no good, they're all no good." Yussuf has another complaint: the government is sending money to Hizbullah in Lebanon that would be better spent at home, he says. "First you must look after your own people."
His friend, Ali, agrees. He wants to know into whose pockets Iran's record oil revenue is going. "Some of them [the governing elite] are buying cars for $100,000. Think of that! Did they get that money by working?"
All the same, Ahmadinejad's personal brand of nationalist populism, typified by his defiant handling of the nuclear issue, has many admirers in Saee Park and beyond. "Why don't they just leave us alone and let us live under our own rules?" asks a 32-year-old engineer.
"Iran has the right to nuclear power," chanted a crowd in Ardabil, in northern Iran, last week. During a series of nine rallies addressed by Ahmadinejad, the sentiments expressed by ordinary people are the same. Western attempts to deny Iran nuclear technology are "an obvious attempt to keep us down, like they want to keep all the developing countries down," says Majid, a 30-year-old teacher in Tehran. "We don't want nuclear weapons. But we want to build our country. What's wrong with that?"
Iranians may be cut off from the modern western world in many ways, but they are well versed in the long history of western intervention in Persia. From the Treaty of Golestan in 1813, by which Russia took control of Iran's Caucasus territories, to the 1953 CIA-led coup that toppled Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, from the US embassy hostage siege to the Iran-Contra scandal, a tale of national subjugation and degradation forms the context in which Iran looks at the west. And Iranians hear, in derogatory western talk of "mad mullahs", an echo of a 19th-century British diplomat's sneering reference to "incomprehensible orientals". It smacks of disrespect.
And now, with Washington's neo-conservatives on one side and Ahmadinejad's neo-conservatives on the other, this mutual antagonism and misunderstanding is coming to a head. In some analyses, it has brought the two countries to the brink of military conflict. If the US attacks, experts say it is likely to take the form of "precision strikes" on the four main nuclear facilities and possibly Iranian armed forces and Revolutionary Guard bases, too. But Pentagon planners know Iran has the potential to retaliate, as the unexpected success of Hizbullah in Lebanon has shown. This week the US ambassador to Iraq highlighted what he said were Iranian attempts to push Shia militants into attacks on coalition forces in Iraq. And Baghdad is only one possible theatre for Iranian reprisals should the US pull the trigger.
Mohammad Saeidi is a practical man. Sidestepping the political, ideological and historical aspects of the nuclear dispute with the west, the vice-president of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation is focused on a set of problems that must be solved logically if the country and its people are to develop to their full potential. "The country's oil and gas reserves will last a maximum of another 25 or 30 years," he says. "Therefore we have to provide other resources."
About 7,000 people work in Iran's atomic establishment - principally in Tehran and at the Bushehr, Arak, Isfahan and Natanz complexes. Saeidi says there are plans to build 20 nuclear power stations in all, at a cost of $24-$25bn. The first, at Bushehr, built with Russian help, is expected to come on stream next year. Saeidi says that in going nuclear Iran is only following the example of other countries with growing populations and rising energy demand. Nuclear power is cheaper, and its raw component, naturally occurring uranium, is in plentiful supply in Iran's central deserts.
It is the cascade of 164 centrifuges constructed at Natanz that has drawn most international attention since Ahmadinejad announced last April that Iran had mastered the processes for uranium enrichment. It was Natanz that finally prompted the US to join with European negotiators in offering the compromise incentives package that is now on the table. But like Larijani, Saeidi stresses the research stage nature of this work - and the ongoing inspections of Natanz and other plants by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
To try to divert nuclear material for bomb-making purposes without the UN knowing would be "impossible", he says, and if a deal is struck, Tehran would be ready to reintroduce spot checks. But, in any case, bomb-making is not Iran's aim, Saeidi says - even if it had the capacity, which it does not. Overall, independent experts tend to agree that, at present, Iran does not have the wherewithal to build a nuclear weapon. But that does not mean it will not in future.
Saeidi denies that Iran kept its facilities at Natanz secret, as claimed in 2003 by the Bush administration. He says there was no legal necessity to notify the IAEA before nuclear material had entered the plant. "Natanz is a very large factory. You cannot hide it. It wasn't secret."
He also denies receiving help from Pakistan, now or in the past, despite a spate of disclosures concerning the proliferation network run by the Pakistani scientist, AQ Khan. "We don't have any relation to Pakistan on the nuclear issue. All the equipment and components we are using are made by Iranian companies and factories."
Needless to say, such statements are disputed by the US and other western governments who suspect that Iran may be running a hidden, parallel uranium enrichment programme using more advanced centrifuges. They worry it is also experimenting with plutonium reprocessing. But all such claims are met with a flat denial.
"We don't have any secret programme. We don't have any secrets," Saeidi says. Iran does not want the bomb, he and other officials insist; and it has no plans to build one. What it does want is a plentiful future supply of nuclear energy to fuel the rise of a new, more powerful nation - and in this ambition, it will brook no obstacles.
Ahmadinejad's vision
The man who could make all the difference is Ahmadinejad himself. He insists that Iran's intentions were not to make a bomb - "Iranians have mastered the complete cycle of uranium enrichment by themselves. But we will use it for peaceful purposes, for nuclear power. This is our right and no one can take this right away from us." But the man best known in the west for his desire to "wipe Israel off the map" and his questioning of the Holocaust, this blacksmith's son who rose to be mayor of Tehran before unexpectedly winning the presidency a year ago this month, is a controversial figure inside Iran, too. Many people, largely among the working class and in rural areas, adore him. Others, particularly among the intellectual elite of Tehran, fear his devout Islamic beliefs and his conservative political instincts will further isolate the country.
For Iran's president is a true believer. He maintains that the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah was besmirched and betrayed after the death of its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, by pragmatists and corrupt mercantilists, by pro-western compromisers and reformists. Ahmadinejad's famously humble lifestyle, emphasised by his rumpled jackets and unkempt beard, offers but one clue to the fundamentalist spirit that moves him. Tehranis say his vision is a return to the ideals of 1979, including a reinvigorated social conservatism, a revived popular piety, and a principled rejection of the Christian and Zionist "crusader" west.
Many political moderates, western diplomats and ordinary citizens say Ahmadinejad's vision is to turn the clock back to a more honest and more dutiful time. And what better way to demonstrate the uplifting virtues and potency of this religious retrenchment than defiance of the west over the nuclear issue? Here is a golden opportunity to re-affirm Iran's compromised independence and dignity - and restore both the international respect and the religious values that Ahjmadinejad believes the revolution has squandered since 1989. This is Ahmadinejad's chance.
It may be naive to believe that Iran's government, surrounded by nuclear-armed neighbours and directly threatened by the US, is not seeking to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. "The Americans have been seeking regime change in Iran ever since the victory of the revolution," say Larijani. Given such widespread convictions, and the example of several other countries that have built atomic weapons without facing serious penalties, Iran's leaders might be thought remiss in not seeking to arm themselves.
But more naive, perhaps, and potentially even more destabilising, is Ahmadinejad's apparent belief that by confronting the west over the nuclear issue, he can revive the purist, Khomeini-era ideal of fundamentalist Islamic revolution in a country that is changing rapidly. Most Iranians support the government's pursuit of nuclear power. But most oppose the intolerant theocracy that is Khomeini's legacy.
In his brilliant new book, Confronting Iran, Ali Ansari portrays the growing "secularisation" of Iranian society as an unstoppable force. "Fewer and fewer people show an interest in organised religion," he writes. And in Tehran the evidence of that is everywhere. Iran is a rich country, poorly run. Slowly but surely its people are demanding and obtaining change. Iran does seem destined once again to be a great regional power, but that destiny is likely to be attained despite its religious leadership - and despite the Bush administration's counter-productive bullying.
Ahmadinejad, the articulate champion of Iran's national rights, is a potent figure. But Ahmadinejad, the would-be visionary leader of a resurgent revolution awaiting the coming of the Hidden Imam, is living a dangerous illusion. And it is Iranians, not the US air force, who should be allowed to shatter his dream.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1854796,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Présidentielle :
un 2e tour nécessaire, trois morts à Kinshasa
RD CONGO - 21 août 2006 – AFP
Un second tour de l'élection présidentielle en République démocratique du Congo (RDC) devra départager le président Joseph Kabila et le vice-président Jean-Pierre Bemba, selon les résultats annoncés dimanche soir par la Commission électorale indépendante (CEI), alors que des tirs à Kinshasa ont fait au moins trois morts et une dizaine de blessés.
Le président sortant obtient 44,81% des voix contre 20,03% à M. Bemba, selon la CEI.
L'opposant historique Antoine Gizenga arrive en troisième position avec 13,06% des voix, suivi de Nzanga Mobutu (4,77%), le fils du dictateur zaïrois, et d'Oscar Kashala (3,46%), un médecin récemment revenu des Etats-Unis.
Le taux de participation à ce premier scrutin libre et pluraliste depuis plus de 40 ans dans l'ex-Zaïre est de 70,54%.
Ces résultats de la CEI doivent être validés par la Cour suprême de justice (CSJ), en charge du contentieux électoral.
Le secrétaire général de l'Onu, Kofi Annan, s'est félicité dimanche soir de l'annonce des résultats provisoires de l'élection présidentielle, estimant qu'elle constituait un "évènement historique" et marquait "une étape importante" dans le processus de paix du pays, ravagé par des années de guerre civile.
M. Annan "demande instamment à toutes les parties congolaises et aux candidats de respecter la loi électorale dans la résolution de tout contentieux lié aux processus électoral. Il les invite aussi à respecter le résultat final des élections dans un esprit de paix et de réconciliation, lorsqu'ils seront annoncés par la Commission électorale indépendante", selon le texte de la déclaration.
Selon un nouveau bilan établi à partir de sources policières, militaires et onusiennes, au moins trois personnes ont été tuées et une dizaine blessées dimanche soir à Kinshasa lors d'échanges de tirs nourris dans le centre de la capitale de République démocratique du Congo.
Un premier bilan faisait état d'un mort parmi les militaires affectés à la garde du vice-président Jean-Pierre Bemba.
En début de soirée, "un Japonais a été tué et cinq autres blessés devant la poste centrale" de Kinshasa, a-t-on indiqué de source policière, précisant que les blessés avaient été conduits dans un centre hospitalier privé de la capitale. L'identité des victimes et leur profession n'ont pas été précisées par la police.
Selon une source militaire occidentale, un militaire de la garde présidentielle a été tué au cours de l'échange de tirs qui a eu lieu près du siège du MLC et des locaux de chaînes de télévision privées de M. Bemba.
C'est au cours de ce même accrochage que le soldat de la garde du vice-président a été tué, selon des sources onusiennes.
Plusieurs blindés de l'armée congolaise ont pris position dans la ville, aux abords du siège du MLC, selon M. Musangana, et sur le grand boulevard de Kinshasa, selon un journaliste de l'AFP.
De son côté, la Monuc a déployé 13 blindés légers devant le siège de la CEI.
Le résultat annoncé par la Commission électorale est conforme aux prévisions des experts électoraux prédisant un second tour entre les deux ex-belligérants de la dernière guerre en RDC (1998-2003).
"Le camp Kabila accepte très mal la perspective d'un second tour. Un second tour, c'est l'inconnu, cela fait peur", a déclaré à l'AFP un expert électoral.
"Il est très difficile de dire qui tire et pourquoi les tirs ont commencé. Plusieurs versions circulent. On parle d'échauffourées avec des shégués (enfants des rues, ndlr), de provocation de militaires dont on ne sait pas s'ils sont affectés à la garde présidentielle ou à celle de Bemba", a indiqué à l'AFP une source proche de la direction de la police, sous couvert de l'anonymat.
Les tirs ont cessé vers 21H00 GMT mais la situation restait très tendue après près de trois heures d'échanges sporadiques de tirs dans différents quartiers du centre de la capitale.
Les résultats définitifs du premier tour devraient être proclamés par la Cour suprême de justice au plus tard le 31 août, après examen d'éventuels contentieux. La CEI a fixé au 29 octobre la date du second tour.
Plusieurs candidats qui arrivent en queue de peloton, ont déjà dénoncé des fraudes et irrégularités massives. De leur côté, les observateurs nationaux et internationaux, qui ont souligné le bon déroulement du scrutin, ont déploré des "défaillances" dans le processus de récolte et compilation des résultats.
L'élection présidentielle du 30 juillet, combinée avec des législatives à un seul tour, avait été placée sous la surveillance de près de 80.000 policiers, 17.600 Casques bleus de l'Onu et un millier de soldats européens, mandatés pour intervenir en cas de "troubles graves".
Ces scrutins, qui seront suivis d'élections provinciales et locales, doivent mettre un terme à la fragile transition politique, commencée en 2003 après une guerre régionale de près de cinq ans, qui a fait 300.000 morts directs et plus de 3 millions de morts indirects.
© Jeuneafrique.com 2006
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP55946prsidasahsn0
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Israel justificó a la ONU su ataque
LIBANO CONDENO LA INCURSION ISRAELI DURANTE LA TREGUA
Ehud Olmert le dijo a Kofi Annan que sus fuerzas militares no violaron el cese de fuego en el Líbano el sábado, sino que querían impedir el paso de armas desde Irán y Siria. El premier israelí además pidió a Italia que lidere las fuerzas internacionales para la paz.
Por Eric Silver*
Desde Jerusalén, Lunes, 21 de Agosto de 2006
Israel rechazó ayer las acusaciones de Kofi Annan, el secretario general de la ONU, de haber violado el sábado el alto el fuego con un ataque comando en un bastión de Hezbolá en el este del Líbano. Ehud Olmert, el primer ministro israelí, defendió el ataque durante un diálogo telefónico con Annan, al indicar que “tenía la intención de prevenir el reabastecimiento de nuevas armas y municiones para Hezbolá desde Siria e Irán”. La guerra de 34 días, que entró en una frágil calma el 14 de agosto, mató a 1183 libaneses y 157 israelíes. Fuad Siniora, el premier libanés, denunció ayer que Israel ha cometido un “crimen contra la humanidad” durante su ofensiva militar, aunque también indicó que “si los israelíes dan muestras de cordura, esto puede crear una oportunidad: transformar la calamidad sufrida por Líbano en una ocasión para avanzar hacia una paz real”.
“El secretario general está profundamente preocupado por la violación del cese de hostilidades por parte de Israel. Las violaciones de la Resolución 1701 del Consejo de Seguridad ponen en peligro la frágil calma alcanzada después de mucha negociación”, dijo Stephane Dujarric, un vocero de la ONU. Mark Regev, vocero del ministerio de Exteriores israelí, dio vuelta la acusación de violar el cese del fuego hacia Hezbolá y sus aliados. “De acuerdo a la resolución 1701, tienen prohibido rearmarse. La transferencia de armamento desde Siria a Hezbolá es una grave violación de la resolución. Ese es el incumplimiento, e Israel estaba respondiendo a eso”, indicó Regev.
El vocero israelí criticó asimismo a la comunidad internacional por su lentitud en desplegar una fuerza internacional para dar apoyo al ejército libanés en el sur del Líbano y en la frontera del Líbano con Siria. “Si esas fuerzas hubieran estado ahí y el embargo de armas hubiera sido reforzado, Israel no hubiera tenido razón de actuar.” Terje Roed-Larsen, el mediador de Medio Oriente de Annan, advirtió ayer que: “las cosas pueden salirse de control muy pronto, por eso es importante que todas las partes involucradas ejerzan las mayores restricciones para dar al Ejército libanés la posibilidad de desplegarse a lo largo de las fronteras del Líbano y permitir a la comunidad internacional aportar tropas”.
Francia y otras naciones europeas han sido reacias a comprometer contingentes sustanciales a la fuerza internacional, que se supone debe contar con un total de 15.000 tropas, hasta que su misión y reglas de combate estén claras. No quieren verse involucradas en una guerra de disparos con Hezbolá, o ser vistas como demasiado débiles para controlar un alto el fuego. Francia, que ha desilusionado a la ONU y sus aliados europeos al ofrecer solamente 200 tropas inmediatamente, llamó ayer a una reunión de la Unión Europea (UE) esta semana para coordinar la “solidaridad europea” para el Líbano.
Olmert repitió que Israel se oponía a que naciones musulmanas tomaran parte en la fuerza si no tenían relaciones diplomáticas con Israel. Además, el premier le pidió a su par de Italia, Romano Prodi, que ese país europeo lidere la fuerza internacional de paz. En la comunicación telefónica que Olmert mantuvo con Prodi, el premier israelí también le pidió que envíe tropas “de supervisión a los pasos de la frontera entre Siria y el Líbano”. El pedido israelí difiere de lo anunciado hasta ahora, que indicaba que sería Francia el país que encabezará la fuerza internacional de paz que se establecerá en el Líbano para hacer cumplir la resolución 1701.
Amir Peretz, el ministro de Defensa, dijo durante una reunión de gabinete ayer que Israel no debe permitir que el Ejército libanés, que comenzó a desplegarse al sur del río Litani la semana pasada, se establezca a menos de dos kilómetros de la frontera israelí antes que la fuerza internacional llegue al lugar. “De otra forma, esto abriría el camino para que regrese Hezbolá”, argumentó. Hasta ahora, ni a Israel ni a Hezbolá les entusiasma una reanudación de las hostilidades. “Israel no quiere que la tregua colapse. Pero el Consejo de Seguridad aceptó unánimemente nuestra posición de que un alto el fuego no puede ser explotado por Hezbolá para rearmarse y reagruparse”, dijo Peretz.
Elias Murr, el ministro de Defensa libanés, dijo que Hezbolá está comprometido con el cese de fuego. También advirtió a las otras milicias, sin nombrarlas pero presuntamente las palestinas, de atacar a Israel con cohetes. Por su parte, el jefe de Estado Mayor del Ejército israelí, Dan Halutz, dijo que el ejército de su país derrotó a Hezbolá “sólo por puntos”. “Podemos definitivamente decir que la guerra concluyó con una victoria israelí; en base a los resultados conseguidos, fue un triunfo por puntos y no por knock out”, señaló el jefe militar.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Virginia Scardamaglia.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-71788-2006-08-21.html
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De Brecht a Schumacher
Por Juan Sasturain
Lunes, 21 de Agosto de 2006
Dicen las encuestas que los alemanes de hoy casi no conocen a Bertolt Brecht. Ya nadie lo lee, sus obras casi no se representan en Alemania, algunos recuerdan haberlo leído en el colegio hace años y dicen que era un poco “deprimente”. Seguramente algo exageran –las encuestas, digo– pero en general debe ser así nomás. Porque es indudable que Brecht es un tipo incómodo; tanto para tenerlo enfrente como para suponer que se lo tiene al lado. Sobre todo en estos tiempos alisados a fuerza de mercado y alineamiento ideológico compulsivos. Además, su ninguneo no sólo sucede en Alemania: hace tiempo ya que Brecht no está de moda, no es cita y mención de referencia. Y lo fue, largamente, al menos hasta los setenta con todo; después, menos. La caída del Muro y del eufemístico “socialismo real” terminaron de hacer el trabajo.
En la revisión alevosamente interesada de aquel proceso, Brecht quedó pegado y con razón al stalinismo del indigesto régimen de la RDA –vivió en Berlín Este desde 1948 hasta su muerte, hace exactamente en estos días medio siglo– y no sólo eso: se ha hecho un lugar común denigrarlo como persona a partir de temas puntuales, sensibilidades propias de este tiempo. Sin ir más lejos, la alevosa utilización de sus ocasionales mujeres, que fueron varias, simultáneas y funcionales –se dice– a su capricho y necesidad intelectual. Un desalmado, dicen: un terrible hijo de puta, este Brecht.
Y puede que algo o bastante de eso haya, claro que sí. Pero matizado. No es como para adherir a panfletos repulsivos y torpes como el que le dedica en su capítulo de Intellectuals el miserable de Paul Johnson, pero sí cabe conceder que el hombre pasó por la vida dejando, entre otras cosas, el tendal de faldas. Debe haber sido insoportable. Pero es que lo fue en todos los órdenes: Brecht es absolutamente revulsivo pero sin la mínima concesión nihilista; su pragmatismo antirromántico limita con el cinismo, ya que es capaz de desarmar con aparente frialdad los más hermosos castillos sentimentales e ideológicos. Se dedicó a poner las cosas, siempre, en otro plano de análisis que el habitual. Precisamente, lo que deslumbra de Brecht es su capacidad increíble de ver los problemas desde un ángulo siempre diferente, distanciado, irónico, con la perspectiva que le daba una lucidez que trascendía largamente la ortodoxia marxista, las leyes de la dialéctica, las razones de Estado, las políticas del partido y cualquier otro catecismo propio de los regímenes y de las burocracias a los que adhería y que formalmente lo “representaban”. En fin: es alguien que dejó cuanto encontró, todo patas para arriba. Sólo tipos como Benjamin o Barthes –y no los escribas funcionales de derecha e izquierda– han descripto con la adecuada perspicacia su originalidad de pensamiento, palabra y obra.
A esta altura acaso haya llegado la hora de reivindicar, sin pudores y asumiendo sus contradicciones, algunos aspectos de su obra soslayados, opacados por los esplendores de la dramaturgia y el brillo de la teoría. Brecht fue, por un lado, un poeta extraordinario que utilizó las formas populares, subiendo a Villon al escenario del cabaret, juntando a los poetas chinos con la lucha de clases. Por otro, fue un cultor ejemplar del relato breve, del apólogo moral, esa especie de breviario de un marxista zen que son las Historias del señor Keuner. Así, aunque nadie pusiera en los escenarios del mundo Madre Coraje o Galileo Galilei, siempre quedaría la posibilidad de leer las reflexiones del señor K “Sobre los sistemas” o “El derecho a la debilidad”. Y ni hablar –para los que se lo saltearon en este aspecto– de la sutileza casi oriental de sus últimos, críticos poemas. Por ejemplo, en La solución, dice con imperturbable ironía: “Tras el alzamiento del 17 de junio / el secretario de la Unión de Escritores / mandó repartir panfletos en la avenida Stalin / en los que se leía que el pueblo / había perdido la confianza del gobierno / y que sólo redoblandoel trabajo / podría reconquistarla. ¿Pero no sería / más simple que el gobierno / disolviera al pueblo / y que eligiera otro?”. Y en el famoso El cambio de rueda: “Estoy sentado al borde de la carretera, / y el conductor cambia la rueda. / No me gusta el lugar de donde vengo. / No me gusta el lugar a donde voy. / ¿Por qué miro entonces el cambio de rueda / con impaciencia?”
Versos que hoy no podría firmar ni entender –entre otros famosos alemanes de estos unidireccionales, velocísimos tiempos– el incombustible Michael Schumacher.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-71777-2006-08-21.html
Página/12:
“La teoría revolucionaria abarca la vida cotidiana”
ENTREVISTA A MARTIN KOHAN
En su última novela, Museo de la revolución, reivindica “la enorme potencia ideológica” de Marx, Lenin y Trotsky.
Por Angel Berlanga
Lunes, 21 de Agosto de 2006
Carril uno: el joven militante trotskista Rubén Tesare viaja a fines de 1975 hacia un pequeño pueblito cordobés para contactar a un compañero que bajaría desde el monte tucumano para recibir un bolso; como no aparece a la cita, Tesare cumple la orden de su organización de aguardarlo un día más y desacata la indicación de pasar desapercibido cuando se engancha con una seductora pasajera con la que compartirá la habitación de un hotel.
Carril dos: veinte años después, un editor argentino contacta en México DF a Norma Rossi, una colega que se fue del país en los ’70 y conserva un cuaderno de reflexiones políticas del desaparecido Tesare; ella le va contando minuciosamente qué pasó con aquel militante en aquellas horas, lo que le hace pensar en la existencia de otro cuaderno, más íntimo.
Carril tres: Rossi le va leyendo a su interlocutor tramos de las reflexiones que dejó escritas sobre los textos revolucionarios de Marx, Engels, Lenin y Trotsky; estas lecturas al comienzo le resultan seductoras, pero con el correr de las páginas el editor querrá saber más sobre lo íntimo y menos sobre lo político, asunto que choca contra el empeño de ella por leerle en el auto, en el hotel, en el bar o hasta en la tumba del mismísimo Trotsky, análisis sobre el Manifiesto del Partido Comunista o La revolución traicionada, entre otros.
Por esos carriles marcha Museo de la Revolución, la novela que Martín Kohan acaba de publicar. Entrelazados como un continuo, porque el texto no está estructurado por capítulos ni recurre al recurso de la fragmentación, esos carriles proponen establecer conexiones entre idearios revolucionarios y épocas –las de los textos de los teóricos principales del comunismo, los ’70, los ’90, hoy– y también entre lo íntimo, la vida privada y lo político. Porque resulta que a Tesare sus compañeros le prohibieron, por razones de seguridad propias de una época que ya contenía los signos de la masacre que sobrevendría, que siguiera de novio con una militante montonera. “Como me interesaba construir una idea sobre la militancia en los ’70, en algún momento apareció esta cuestión de la interferencia de la política en la vida privada, esto de su postergación o sacrificio a favor de la lucha revolucionaria”, dice este narrador, ensayista y profesor universitario de teoría literaria, autor entre otros libros de las novelas Dos veces junio y Segundos afuera. “Me parece que esa podría ser una marca de época –dice Kohan–. Una mirada demasiado impregnada del estado de cosas del presente lleva a la objeción en cuanto a con qué derecho una organización interfería sobre el amor y las relaciones personales de un tipo; yo mismo puedo participar de eso, no sé si estaría en condiciones de dejar que un comité de disciplina se pronunciara sobre con quién salgo. Pero una decisión así en aquel contexto me parece legítima: si pensamos que la revolución era posible, la toma del poder y la liquidación de la propiedad privada, sería necesario predisponerse a acomodar la vida diaria a algún tipo de práctica política. Me parece que hay algo del imperio de la lógica en una práctica revolucionaria ligada en esas condiciones a la clandestinidad o al sigilo que lo vuelven válido. Era algo que quería poner en juego, más allá de lo que hoy primero aparece: el cuidado de sí, del ámbito familiar.”
–¿No le resulta propia de la naturaleza humana, casi, la molestia de su personaje ante una intervención de ese tipo en su vida amorosa?
–Posiblemente sí; eso contribuye a la verosimilitud del relato, también. Tesare actúa un poco por calentura y bronca; uno podría decir que es como puro despecho revolucionario. En términos estrictamente literarios, aposté mucho a la idea de “a cualquiera le puede pasar”: ¿quién no se enrolla con una mina que encara y es fácil? Pero al mismo tiempo que está la naturaleza humana, también está lo otro, lo que llamaríamos cultura, o disciplina. Porque el ser humano tampoco responde todo el tiempo a los impulsos de su naturaleza, por suerte. Yo le veo a esa calentura de Tesare un signo político, más que de virilidad; él, en cambio, pretende que eso puede ser un asunto puramente personal. Los textos teóricos de Lenin y Trotsky sobre la vida cotidiana que se citan en el libro son fenomenales e indican que una verdadera teorización revolucionaria abarca también la vida cotidiana. Trotsky, incluso, considera que hasta que no habite una transformación radical en el cotidiano la revolución como tal no ha terminado de instalarse, de producirse.
–¿Cuál fue el punto de partida para escribir la novela?
–Lo que primero escribí fue el cuaderno de Tesare, ese ensayo sobre los textos teóricos, no narrativos, de Marx, Engels, Lenin y Trotsky. Luego pensé en construirle a eso una trama, en cuáles serían las condiciones narrativas de posibilidad para que un ensayo así existiera. Y así pensé en este militante trotskysta, que es más un teórico que un hombre de acción. –¿Comparte los análisis teóricos de Tesare?
–El ensayo forma parte de mi imaginario. Es algo que yo escribiría. Desde mi experiencia, fue escrito con la misma intensidad que las partes narrativas. Me empezó a interesar qué imaginario textual hay en los revolucionarios sobre la revolución.
–Pasaron 30 años desde el golpe y unas cuantas cosas en el medio, caída del Muro incluida. ¿Observa vigente el ideario revolucionario?
–Mi voluntad es apuntar a un principio de vigencia de lo que se pone en juego. En mi escritura había un impulso de fascinación por la imaginación revolucionaria. Evidentemente, la atmósfera social y el estado de cosas es otro, y de ahí el pasaje entre el ’75 y el ’95, que me permitía jugar con eso: no casualmente decidí situarla durante el menemismo. La novela pone en juego otros dos planos: uno ha tenido que ver con la militancia revolucionaria en la Argentina en los ’70 y lo que viene de ahí en adelante, pero está la otra dimensión, la revolución rusa; y más allá de que después de la caída del Muro nos toca una etapa de melancolía, también hay una potencia épica de lo que fue la revolución triunfante. En las ideas de tiempos, repliegues, avances, presentes y futuros de Marx, Lenin y Trotsky hay una fuerza política e ideológica enorme. Desearía haber capturado algo, en mi novela, de esa vibración.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/4-3510-2006-08-21.html
The Independent:
Lebanon ceasefire under threat, UN warns
By Eric Silver in Jerusalem
Published: 21 August 2006
A high-ranking UN official has warned that the week-old truce in Lebanon could soon collapse. Terje Roed-Larsen, Mr Annan's Middle East trouble-shooter, who is visiting Beirut, said: "Things very easily can slide out of control. This is why it is so important that all parties concerned exercise utmost restraint in order to give the Lebanese Army the possibility of deploying along all borders of Lebanon, and also to allow the international community to provide troops."
The warning came after Israel rejected charges by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, that it had violated last week's ceasefire by carrying out a commando raid on a Hizbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon.
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, defended Saturday's raid during a telephone conversation with Mr Annan. He said it was "intended to prevent the resupply of new weapons and ammunition for Hizbollah" from Syria and Iran. The 34-day war, which ended in stalemate on 14 August, killed 1,183 Lebanese and 157 Israelis.
Stéphane Dujarric, a UN spokesman, said: "The secretary general is deeply concerned about a violation by the Israeli side of the cessation of hostilities. All such violations of Security Council Resolution 1701 endanger the fragile calm that was reached after much negotiation."
Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, turned the charge of violating the ceasefire back on Hizbollah and its allies. "According to Resolution 1701," he argued, "they are forbidden to rearm. Arms transfers from Syria to Hizbollah are a grave violation of the resolution. That is the breach, and Israel was responding to that."
He chastised the international community for being too slow to deploy an international force to augment the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon and on the Lebanese-Syrian border. "Had those forces been there and the arms embargo enforced, there would have been no reason for Israel to act," said Mr Regev.
France and other European nations have been reluctant to commit substantial contingents to the international force, which is supposed to total 15,000 troops, until its mission and rules of engagement are clarified.
France, which has disappointed the UN and its European allies by offering 200 troops immediately, called yesterday for an EU meeting this week to co-ordinate "European solidarity" for Lebanon. Mr Olmert repeated yesterday that Israel was opposed to Muslim nations taking part if they did not have diplomatic relations with Israel.
Amir Peretz, Israel's Defence Minister, said during a cabinet meeting yesterday that Israel must not allow the Lebanese Army, which began deploying south of the Litani river last week, to get within 2km of the Israeli border before the international force was in place. Otherwise, it would open the way for Hizbollah to return, he argued. Mr Regev said: " Israel doesn't want the truce to collapse. But the Security Council unanimously accepted our position that the ceasefire could not be exploited by Hizbollah to rearm and regroup."
Elias Murr, the Lebanese Defence Minister, said Hizbollah was committed to the ceasefire. He warned other, unnamed but presumably Palestinian, militias against rocket attacks on Israel. Such attacks, he contended, would only give Israel a pretext for renewing air strikes.
Israeli analysts believe Hizbollah needs time out to restore its fighters, its fortifications and its arsenal, all of which they say suffered more damage than the Shia militia admits. During the cabinet meeting, Israel's top military man, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz, conceded: "The feeling of the public is that it was not a knockout blow."
An Israeli colonel was killed and two other soldiers wounded during Saturday's raid on the village of Boudai in the Bekaa valley. Israeli reports claim their mission was not so much to destroy road links between Syria and Lebanon or new arms shipments, but to gather evidence that supplies had resumed in violation of the ceasefire. An army spokesman announced: "The goals of the operation were achieved in full."
According to Lebanese reports, three Hizbollah fighters were killed in the action.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1220650.ece
The Independent:
At least 51 killed in Egyptian train crash
Published: 21 August 2006
A passenger train sped into a northern Egypt railway station today and collided with a second train, killing 51 people and injuring 138.
Footage broadcast by state television showed the front part of one train crumpled in, while other train cars lay on their sides, or on the grass next to the train tracks, at the rail station in the town of Qalyoub, 12 miles north of the capital Cairo.
Egypt's official Middle East News Agency quoted Minister of Health Hatem el-Gabaly on the death toll.
The trains, both southbound and carrying commuters to the Egyptian capital, Cairo, originated in the Nile Delta towns of Mansoura and Benha.
The train from Mansoura was going at least 50 miles per hour when the collision occurred after it failed to abide by a stop signal outside Qalyoub train station, police sources said.
The driver of the Mansoura train was killed and the locomotive overturned, police said.
The incident occurred at approximately 7.45am local time, the governor of Qalyoub, Adly Hussein, told state TV.
At midday, civil defence, police and the military were searching for survivors and recovering bodies amid the crumpled and destroyed cars.
Shoes and blood-soaked clothing littered the station's platform. A man's lifeless and bloodied forearm with a watch was visible emerging from a crushed carriage.
Four carriages derailed and overturned in the crash.
A fire that broke out as a result of the incident was extinguished.
Egypt has a history of serious train accidents, which are usually blamed on poorly maintained equipment. Many of those incidents have occurred in the Nile Delta.
The most recent accident, in February, saw 20 people injured when two trains collided at a Nile Delta station.
Egypt's worst train disaster, in February 2002, killed 363 people, many of them heading home to the country's south for the Islamic calendar's most important holiday.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article1220735.ece
posted by attilav at 22:50
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