Elsewhere Today 447

Aljazeera:
France: Prepare for war with Iran

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2007
7:43 MECCA TIME, 4:43 GMT

The French foreign minister has said the world needs to prepare for the possibility of war against Iran over its nuclear programme.

Bernard Kouchner said in an interview broadcast on French television and radio: "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war."

He also said France wanted the European Union to back new sanctions against Iran, outside of the UN Security Council, to pressure Tehran to give up its nuclear ambitions.

Iranian leaders have insisted Tehran only wants to use nuclear technology to produce electricity.

Following Kouchner's remarks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reiterated his commitment to developing atomic energy.

"Of course we will not step back," said Ahmadinejad in an interview with Jam-e Jam, Iran's Farsi language international television channel, in response to a question by a viewer.

"The West are talking about imposing sanctions on us. But they cannot do this," he said.

Sayed Mohammed Mirandi, a political analyst at Tehran university, told Al Jazeera: "Most doubt that there will be any military conflict because the US is in enough trouble as it is in Iraq."

"The new French government seems to be taking the place of the former British government ... acting as Bush's poodle."

Military plans

Iran has yet to comply with repeated UN demands that it suspend uranium enrichment and other sensitive work that could potentially be used in producing weapons.

"We must negotiate right to the end [with Iran]," the French minister said, but underlined that if Tehran possessed an atomic weapon, it would represent "a real danger for the whole world".

Calling the nuclear stand-off "the greatest crisis" of present times, Kouchner said: "We will not accept that the bomb is manufactured ..." and hinted that military plans were being developed.

"We are trying to put in place plans which are the privilege of chiefs of staff and that is not for tomorrow," he said, but stressed any attack on Iran was far from taking place.

"It is normal for us to plan" for any eventuality.

He also said leading French companies such as Total and Gaz de France had been urged not to undertake new work or contracts in Iran.

"We have decided to ... prepare ourselves for possible sanctions outside the UN sanctions and which would be European sanctions.

"Our German friends proposed it. We discussed it a few days ago," Kouchner said.

Sarkozy speech

The five permanent Security Council members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the US - plus Germany are due to meet to discuss a new draft UN resolution on sanctions against Iran on September 21 in Washington.

Kouchner's comments follow a similar statement by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

He said last month in his first major foreign policy speech since taking office that a diplomatic push by the world's powers was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran".

Kouchner, went to Iraq last month to raise France's profile there and smooth over relations with Washington after disagreeing with the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.

Sarkozy is seen as taking a tougher line on Iran than his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, and is also seen as being far more friendly to the US.

The US has said it has not ruled out using military strikes against Iran and Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said on Sunday that "all options are on the table".

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/97755432-04B2-4703-90B0-C38A1DD6683F.htm

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AllAfrica:
Opposition Takes Power

allAfrica.com NEWS
17 September 2007

Sierra Leone's opposition All People's Congress (APC) has taken power by winning both presidential and parliamentary elections.

National Electoral Commission officials have confirmed that the APC's candidate, Ernest Bai Koroma, has prevailed in the country's presidential election, agencies reported today.

Reports from the BBC and Reuters quoted the commission as saying Koroma had won 54.6 percent of the vote, against Vice-President Solomon Berewa's 45.4 percent.

The APC won the parliamentary election last month. Koroma received the highest number of votes in the first round of presidential balloting, but not enough to secure election in one round. He and Berewa, the candidate of the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party, faced off in a second round on September 8.

Berewa was the chosen successor of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, who is stepping down after serving the maximum two terms as head of state. He went into the race the favourite.

Koroma has never held elective office. He was resoundingly beaten by Kabbah in the last election in 2002. However, he is seen by observers as having benefited from the government's failure to deliver social services. The APC made substantial gains in local government elections in 2004.

Copyright © 2007 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200709170675.html

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AllAfrica:
FG Reviews Oil Laws, 2007 Bid Round

By Hector Igbikiowubo, Vienna
Vanguard (Lagos) NEWS
17 September 2007

THE Federal Government has commenced the review of all petroleum laws, including the Petroleum Act of 1969 as well as the 2007 bidding round.

Minister of State for Energy (Petroleum), Mr. Odein Ajumogobia (SAN), in an interview with Vanguard in Vienna, Austria, said that about 117 laws affecting the oil and gas industry would be reviewed towards the restructuring of the oil and gas sector.

"A lot needs to be done. First of all, we need to review all the laws that affect the industry. There are 117 as at the last count - they have to be reviewed," he explained, adding that the exercise did not necessarily mean that all the laws would be amended.

"The main law, of course, is the Petroleum Act of 1969 and will have to be amended in a significant manner to take into account these changes," he said.

Ajumogobia explained that the time line set by the President was indicative of the urgency the entire exercise required, stressing that the benefits of doing so far outweighed any difficulties or challenges that might be encountered.

"I do believe that everyone sees the merits of the proposals. It's been in the pipeline for seven years. There are very few people I think will oppose it because the merits of it are so compelling."

He pointed out that the National Oil Company of Angola which joined OPEC during the conference in Abuja, already possesses assets which far outstrip that of NNPC. "It is hard to believe. But it is obvious that they are operating it in an efficient and commercial-like manner and I think if Nigeria takes that step, we will grow by leaps and bounds in a very short time."

Ajumogobia said one of the major defects in the current structure of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was that it didn't allow for efficient and proper cost control.

"But I think the structure is important. I say that because if you have an incorporated entity that is required to account to its stakeholders for profit, for example, then the full organisational approach and attitude of the people running the entity will be very different from a structure that doesn't keep an account for a return.

I mean how much profit has the NNPC made?" he queried, adding: "Nobody is watching cost, nobody is looking at whether we do well or we don't do well. I think that by itself will make a difference between what we are planning to do and what we have been doing in the past. Let's look at the local content initiative for instance, that is an initiative that was driven by Mr. Funsho Kupolokun, the immediate past Group Managing Director of the corporation. That shouldn't be his business. His is to make profits.

That should be policy that is driven by the minister. NNPC was involved in everything like regulation and asset management. But if you separate these various functions and let the corporation drive its commercial function, I think we will see a difference."

In the downstream sector, the minister said that the challenge was to ensure that fuel gets to Nigerians at a sustainable manner. He said that government's position was to avoid a situation where the country would continue to experience epileptic supply.

"Sometimes you have periods of long fuel queues and at other times products are available. The challenge is to ensure that it is available at all times. It is a challenge really because some of it is related to dilapidated infrastructure and all sorts of things. It is to look at what the problems are, where the bottlenecks are and to try and address them in a sustainable way," he said.

Govt to review 2007 licensing round

On the 2007 oil blocks bid round, Ajumogobia said the President had directed the ministry to review the exercise in the light of complaints of lack of transparency which trailed the exercise.

"We have been asked to review the exercise because there have been a lot of complaints about the exercise. We have to look at what has been done and I think at the end of the day we want to ensure that best practices are applicable and to learn from the past." he disclosed.

Copyright © 2007 Vanguard. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200709170008.html

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AlterNet: Iraq Death Toll Rivals
Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 17, 2007

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces - al-Anbar and Karbala - were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.

The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.

These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century - the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq - the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community" has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions, there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism - the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.

But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally - we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage." It's also factually incorrect - as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.

Like the earlier study in the Lancet - one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results - this new research is already being dismissed out of hand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on several studies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, has had trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):

[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year, which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.

1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000 - and is usually given as less than 20,000 - that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around. Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.

If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having an illicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.

With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraq war will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62728/

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Asia Times:
Withdrawal the solution to the mess

Tariq Ali, historian and filmmaker
INTERVIEW
Sep 18, 2007

LAHORE, Pakistan - Eminent writer, historian and filmmaker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. While a student at Oxford University, he became involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam. That was the beginning of a long career in the literary arts and in peace activism that has earned him iconic status.

Ali's book The Leopard and the Fox, released this year, was originally written as the script for a television drama commissioned in 1985 by the British Broadcasting Corp that depicted the circumstances that led to the hanging of Pakistan's first elected prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. The book explains how the BBC was compelled to withdraw the three-part series because Pakistan's then military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, was a key ally of the West in the war to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

When Inter Press Service correspondent Aoun Abbas Sahi interviewed Ali, who was in Pakistan recently, the writer, known for his incisive political commentaries, explained why he believed US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan was doomed to fail from the start - because of the Iran factor.

Inter Press Service: Who, according to you, is the main beneficiary of the US-led "war on terror"?

Tariq Ali: Undoubtedly Iran. But then the Americans could not have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and without Iran's support. This is what no one likes talking about. Had the Iranians said, if you take Iraq we will fight you, the occupation probably would not have taken place. But the Iranians, who regarded the Taliban and Saddam Hussein as enemies, kept silent.

The Americans thought, because the Iranians supported them before they went in, things would be fine. But the Iranians were opportunists. They had their own agenda and defended their own state interests - just as the US defends its interests. These interests are now clashing, and so the US is threatening Iran.

IPS: Do you think that the US will now launch a war against Iran?

TA: I do not believe that the US can launch a new war on Iran because they haven't the troops. Second, if they do that they will be fighting the Iranians on three fronts - Iraq, Afghanistan and in Iran itself. So I think it is very unlikely that a war against Iran will happen.

IPS: In Afghanistan, US-led NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] forces are blaming the Taliban for an increase in violence.

TA: I do not believe that big powers occupying small countries can solve any problem, even with good intentions. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan created a mess which the Americans fully exploited. That is why the American intervention - cooperation freedom, as they call it - always makes me laugh. It has been a disaster.

They have set up a puppet regime. They have poured in money to sustain this puppet regime. You have large-scale corruption in the country. Recent figures given by the United Nations say that the drug trade is the worst it has ever been in the south of the country, especially in Helmand, a province controlled by British troops. So what changed in Afghanistan?

You have a thin layer of politicians implanted there by the West with no real base in the country. And then you have the old American habit of shooting from the hip, dropping bombs from the air, indiscriminately killing people right, left and the center. The result is increased resistance. I don't like the Taliban, but if people in Afghanistan see the Taliban fighting the guys who are bombing and killing, they get attracted. It's very simple.

IPS: You think the resistance against US forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistan Army in the adjacent tribal areas is justified?

TA: People in Pakistan who support the occupation of Afghanistan should ask themselves whether they favor Pakistan being occupied just because many people in the West regard Pakistan as a failed state. I think one has to look at alternatives other than Western occupation. In my opinion, and I will argue this in public, the only way out of this mess is to first get all Western troops to withdraw.

A regional summit including Pakistan, India, Russia and Iran could then be organized to discuss a joint deal to stabilize Afghanistan as a federation. That is the way to proceed - take regional initiatives and deny the US any excuse to interfere. Otherwise this mess will carry on.

IPS: The situation in Iraq is getting worse with every passing day.

TA: That is now accepted by every serious politician in America. It's a total and complete disaster. Before they went into Iraq, some of us tried to warn them that there would be a big resistance. For the first few years the resistance was essentially fought by former units of the Iraqi Army which dispersed and went into the countryside. They had set up military dumps because they knew what was going to happen.

Second, you have new groups, many of them from the Sunni areas, fighting the American army. And then you have a situation where the Shi'ite resistance led by Muqtada al-Sadr controls large parts of southern Iraq.

IPS: How important is the role of the al-Qaeda in this scenario of strong resistance against Western forces, both in Afghanistan and Iraq?

TA: Al-Qaeda utilizes American mistakes and disasters. It grows as a result of these mistakes because the only solution is political, not military. Al-Qaeda, instead of being reduced in size, has grown because of American military adventures abroad. You cannot defeat people just by killing. It's not the case that all the groups in Afghanistan fighting under the Taliban umbrella are supporters of al-Qaeda. The Taliban [themselves are] divided and split on this question.

IPS: Are you in favor of a world without nuclear weapons?

TA: I have always been against the nuclear weapons. I have to be blunt, but I do not believe that the US should determine who has and who does not have nuclear weapons. If France and Britain, tiny countries, can have nuclear weapons, why not India, Pakistan or Iran? Israel is permitted nuclear weapons but not Iran. Ideally, no one should have nuclear weapons. But many people actually believe the only way they can defend themselves and prevent wars is to have them. Many countries also think that acquiring nuclear weapons is the only way to stop the US attacking them.

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II18Ak05.html

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Guardian:
UN nuclear boss warns warmongers over Iran

Heed lessons from Iraq, ElBaradei says
French foreign minister says world must brace for war
Iranian president talks of peace with US

Peter Walker, Mark Tran and agencies
Monday September 17, 2007

The head of the UN's nuclear agency today warned against increasing "hype" towards war with Iran, saying countries should heed the lessons of the build-up to the Iraq conflict.

The strongly worded comments by Mohamed ElBaradei, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), follow a warning by the French foreign minister that the world should brace itself for a possible war with Iran.

"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," Bernard Kouchner told French TV and radio.

While talks over Iran's controversial nuclear programme should continue "right to the end", Mr Kouchner said, an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose "a real danger for the whole world". Under President Nicolas Sarkozy, France has taken a much harsher line towards Iran than under Jacques Chirac.

In a perceived riposte to the comments, Mr ElBaradei urged caution. "We need to be cool," he told reporters at the IAEA's annual conference in Vienna. "We need not to hype the issue".

"I would not talk about any use of force," he said. "There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 70,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."

One of the major arguments put forward by the US and UK for invading Iraq in 2003 was that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms. None have been found.

The comments come at a time of heightened tension between Iran and the US, which has stepped up accusations of Iranian support for Shia militias targeting US forces in Iraq.

Washington is also seeking a third round of UN sanctions against Iran over its refusal to stop uranium enrichment, and has accused the country of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has rejected those charges, saying its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, including generating electricity.

At today's meeting in Vienna, Iran's vice-president warned the US and others against provoking a confrontation.

Western nations had "proved that you cannot tolerate the addition of independent states and developing countries to the ongoing movement of those seeking to achieve ownership of modern technology", said Reza Aghazadeh, who also heads Iran's nuclear agency.

"The great nation of Iran has recorded your discriminatory behaviour and performance in its memory and will not forget," he was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.

Separately, however, the country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said he wanted peace and friendship with Washington, despite mounting speculation over possible US strikes.

"Our message to the American nation is a message of peace, friendship, brotherhood and respect for humans," the official IRNA news agency quoted Mr Ahmadinejad as saying on the state-owned Jame Jam television network yesterday.

Mr Ahmadinejad also called on the US to leave Iraq, saying its presence was proof that Washington wanted to plunder Iraqi resources.

An Israeli air strike against a mystery site in northern Syria last week fuelled speculation that the sortie had been a dry run for a US-Israeli attack on Syria and Iran.

The Israeli government imposed a news blackout on the September 6 raid, but leaks to foreign newspapers said eight Israeli F-15 bombers attacked what was believed to be a nuclear installation in Syria.

If the reports are true, it would be Israel's most audacious air strike since the 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2171099,00.html

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Jeune Afrique: Des notables touareg demandent
aux ex-rebelles "de calmer le jeu" et de respecter la trêve

MALI - 15 septembre 2007 - par AFP

Un petit groupe d'élus et notables touareg de la région de Kidal (nord-est) est parti à la rencontre du groupe d'ex-rebelles touareg qui a rompu vendredi une trêve avec les autorités maliennes en attaquant des positions de l'armée dans le nord.

"Trois élus et notables de la région de Kidal ont quitté hier (vendredi) soir Kidal pour rencontrer dans le désert Ibrahim Ag Bahanga (le chef du groupe armé) pour lui demander de "calmer le jeu", et de respecter la trêve en cours", a déclaré samedi une source au gouvernorat de Kidal.

Les trois hommes sont Al Ghabas Ag Intalla, député et fils du chef d'une tribu touareg, Aladi Ag Alla, ex-dirigeant rebelle touareg dans les années 1960 et Bayène Ag Ahawali, ancien maire de Kidal et actuel secrétaire à la communication des ex-rebelles de "l'Alliance démocratique pour le Changement du 23 mai".

Il s'agit d'une "initiative personnelle de natifs de la région pour contribuer à la préservation de la paix", selon la même source.

Par ailleurs, un ex-mouvement armé des populations sonrhaï (noires) de la région de Gao (nord), qui combattait la rébellion touareg dans les années 1990, a lancé une campagne de sensibilisation pour "consolider la paix" dans la région.

"Nous voulons tout faire pour maintenir la paix sociale. Les événements de 1990 ont divisé les populations civiles des différentes communautés. Nous ne voulons plus que cela se répète", a assuré Barasi Touré, un des anciens chefs du mouvement armé "Ganda Koy".

Les hommes d'Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, ex-rebelle touareg en rupture de ban, avaient attaqué vendredi des positions de l'armée malienne autour de Tinzaouatène (frontière algérienne) avant d'être repoussés.

Avec cette attaque, Ag Bahanga "rompt la trêve qu'il s'était engagé à respecter par l'intermédiaire de Iyad Ag Ghaly", chef du mouvement de l'ex-rébellion touareg qui avait "entrepris des démarches d'apaisement à son endroit", a déclaré vendredi le ministère de la Défense dans un communiqué.

Le gouvernement malien a envoyé des renforts vendredi dans les environs de Tinzaouatène, mais aucun affrontement armé n'a été rapporté samedi dans la zone, selon des sources locales contactées par l'AFP.

De son côté, le médiateur Iyad ag Ghaly a rencontré vendredi le président malien Amadou Toumani Touré. Aucune déclaration n'a été faite à l'issue de l'entretien.

Les hommes de Ag Bahanga ont enlevé les 26 et 27 août une cinquantaine de personnes -militaires et civils- dans les environs de Tinzaouatène, alors que le mouvement officiel des ex-rebelles touareg s'était engagé à renoncer à la lutte armée avec la signature d'accords de paix en juillet 2006..

Environ 20 otages ont depuis officiellement recouvré la liberté grâce à l'intervention de l'armée, à une évasion ou à une remise en liberté. Quelque 30 personnes, selon l'armée, "au moins 35" selon leurs ravisseurs, demeureraient détenues.

Les assaillants observaient depuis le 31 août une trêve, s'engageant à ne plus attaquer l'armée régulière ni procéder à des enlèvements dans le cadre d'une médiation de Iyad Ag Ghaly, chef de l'Alliance démocratique du 23 mai 2006 pour le changement.

Ils ont rompu cette trêve le 12 septembre, en tirant sur un avion militaire américain venu ravitailler l'armée régulière, isolée dans ces contrées désertiques servant à d'intenses trafics entre le Maghreb et l'Afrique subsaharienne.

Après avoir miné la route reliant Tinzaouatène au sud du pays, compliquant l'acheminement de renforts, ils tenteraient maintenant de prendre le contrôle de toute la région, selon des sources locales.

D'anciens rebelles touaregs maliens ont de leur côté annoncé avoir apporté leur soutien à l'armée à Tinzaouatène, refusant de suivre Ibrahim Ag Bahanga.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP42357desnoevrtal0

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Mail & Guardian:
Be prepared for betrayal in Darfur

Julian Borger
17 September 2007

The former commander of the failed United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda on Sunday warned the newly appointed head of a similar force in Darfur that he faced "long odds" against success and predicted he would be betrayed by the very officials and governments meant to be backing the mission.

In an open letter Roméo Dallaire, now a Canadian senator, advised Martin Agwai, the Nigerian general given the task of stopping the bloodshed in Darfur, to demand a clear chain of command, a broad mandate, proper resources and a rapid deployment. He also cautioned him to watch his back.

"You can anticipate being let down by everyone on whom you depend for support, be that troops, funding, logistics or political engagement," Dallaire wrote. "Bear in mind that whoever fails you will, in the end, be the most active in blaming you for whatever goes wrong."

The outspoken letter was delivered on a Global Day for Darfur, involving protests in 30 countries focusing attention on the crisis in the west Sudanese province where an estimated 200 000 people have been killed and 2,5-million have been forced from their homes.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday promised technical support for the mission of General Agwai, who leads the 26 000-strong joint UN and African Union force, Unamid, set up following a Security Council resolution in July. Brown told the BBC he wanted Unamid to be in Darfur before the end of the year, or earlier.

On Sunday China announced it planned to send 315 personnel to help prepare for Unamid's arrival. African states have said they will provide the bulk of the 20 000 soldiers and 6 000 police but there is still considerable uncertainty over which countries will provide equipment and infrastructure.

Deployment of the full force is expected to run into next year.

Calling the Darfur crisis "one of the great tragedies of our time" Brown said that if the Sudanese government failed to play its role in bringing peace to the region, and in allowing the Unamid deployment, it would face further sanctions. Peace talks with Darfur rebels are planned for late October in Tripoli. The Sudanese President, Omar al-Bashir, has pledged that the government will observe a ceasefire during negotiations.

The Unamid force is an experimental hybrid, and the division of responsibilities between the UN and AU is as yet vague.

Dallaire's first piece of advice for General Agwai is that he should insist his political bosses in the UN and the AU sort out the chain of command; he will also need to "prevent intervention from Khartoum", predicted to try to dilute Unamid's powers to protect civilians. "This is a daunting mandate, and you enter into this mission facing long odds," Dallaire said. "The intentions of the regime in Khartoum toward an effective, impartial implementation of the Unamid mandate are deeply uncertain."

But the retired general's sharpest words question the political resolve of the UN and AU, which he says should be held to account for any lack of support when the new force is deployed. "Only by shining a spotlight on those failures in every possible way can you mobilise the attention necessary to get the action you need," is the advice he offers General Agwai.

Dallaire's warnings are relevant given his experience in Rwanda in 1994. His calls for reinforcements to help his UN force stop the genocide there were rejected by the Security Council. He was discharged from the Canadian army in 2000 suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. He tried to take his life several times but recovered and became a prominent human rights advocate.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/
breaking_news__africa/&articleid=319432

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Página/12:
El fin del absoluto

Por Leonardo Moledo
Lunes, 17 de Septiembre de 2007

Cuando Newton construyó el universo para beneficio y disfrute de los doscientos años siguientes, y para que todas las ciencias tuvieran como ideal parecerse a lo que él había hecho, dejó pendiente (o quizá se le escapó) algo que venía desde las épocas de Aristóteles.

En efecto, para Newton había un espacio inmóvil y en reposo absoluto, que poco más tarde los científicos se encargaron de llenar de éter, una sustancia impalpable, intocable, atravesable, inodora, insípida, pero que llegó a figurar en la tabla de elementos de Lavoisier.

El éter tenía una función indelegable; ni más ni menos, servir de soporte para que vibrara la luz, cuando (a pesar de Newton y su autoridad) se impuso la teoría ondulatoria de la luz de Young y Fresnel, y que en el siglo de Newton habían adelantado Huygens y el infaltable Hooke, siempre a pasos de la verdad, siempre con su genio listo, y que no goza de mayor fama debido al odio sin medida que le profesó Newton.

El éter, pues, estaba en reposo absoluto en un espacio total que también estaba en reposo absoluto; noten amigos, el éter había sido ni más ni menos que un invento de Aristóteles que llenaba el espacio supralunar, formaba las esferas, el sol, la luna y las estrellas y todo lo formable por encima de la órbita de la luna.

Claro que los científicos de los siglos XVII, XVIII y XIX no llegaron a tanto; para ellos la misión del éter era quedarse quietecito, y dejar que la luz vagara por él.

Pero, pero... El éter tenía extrañas propiedades: por un lado debía quedarse quietecito y ser impalpable e impermeable, y por el otro debía poder ser atravesado por los planetas en sus órbitas sin perturbaciones. Aquí había problemas, y Stokes elaboró una teoría del éter en la que éste se comportaba a veces como un sólido cuando era necesario. Las hipótesis ad hoc siempre están listas cuando hacen falta.

El éter del siglo XIX era una exquisita sustancia que nadie había visto, que no se podía “captar” sino por sus propiedades, como el alcahesto de Van Helmont, ese disolvente universal que transformaba cualquier sustancia en agua primitiva (“¿y en qué vasija lo guardaremos entonces?”, decían algunos, ya que la disolvería inmediatamente).

Y además, dos científicos norteamericanos tuvieron la mala idea de medir la velocidad del éter cuando, rauda, la Tierra lo atravesaba. Calculaban estos buenos señores (Michelson y Morley, para más datos) que un rayo de luz debería ser retrasado por el chorro de éter que nuestro buen planeta dejaría en su raudo viajar por los cielos etéreos.

No me voy a poner a describir el aparato que usaron porque da bastante trabajo, pero lo cierto es que ni Michelson ni Morley encontraron rastros de éter ni de chorro de éter ni de retraso de la luz, aunque el experimento se repitió una y otra vez.

El éter peligraba, desde ya, y con el éter ese absoluto que venía desde el bueno de Aristóteles, que lo explicó todo, y todo lo explicó mal, a pesar de lo cual es uno de los genios científicos más grandes que hayamos conocido (bueno, hayamos conocido no, que existieron, ya que no creo que ningún lector de Página/12 tenga tal privilegio).

Y entonces, en 1905, Einstein publicó la Teoría de la Relatividad y asestó al éter un golpe mortal en la primera página, y lo despachó con una sola frase: “La idea de un éter en reposo absoluto se mostrará superflua”. Y en cuento al espacio en reposo absoluto de Newton: “Puesto que la idea que se va a desarrollar aquí no requerirá de un espacio absoluto dotado de propiedades especiales”.

Adiós al éter y al espacio absoluto que, una vez aceptada la teoría, fueron a parar al desván de las cosas viejas. Adiós pues al éter y al espacio absoluto, que quedaron para los nostálgicos y para algunos giros del lenguaje. Adiós a ese resto aristotélico (y reconozcámoslo, inofensivo) filtrado en la gran teoría de Newton. La batalla había sido ganada y el absoluto vencido. La humanidad con toda su ciencia y su altanería, quedaba sola en un ¿espacio? donde nada era firme y seguro. Cualquier rastro de absoluto aristotélico desapareció para siempre.

Pero, pero. Resulta que también en la teoría de las relatividad se filtra algo del absoluto por la ventana: la velocidad de la luz, idéntica para todos los observadores, y la forma de las leyes de la física, absolutas en cualquier lugar del universo.

¿Será mejor que exista algo de lo cual agarrarse, o será mejor que nos encontremos solos y perdidos en un universo donde nada, pero nada es seguro?

¿Quién puede saberlo?

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91524-2007-09-17.html

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The Independent:
It is the death of history

Special investigation by Robert Fisk
Published: 17 September 2007

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.

Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein's regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared "one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

"They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.

"Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection."

Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.

"There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What's new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.

"Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There's been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It's like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake."

Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament – and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham – it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.

Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working. Fifteen hundred years later – in what has become known as "the age of the deluge" – Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay bricks were used as money orders – the world's first cheques – the depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of slaves.

US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this "beggars belief". In an analysis of the city, she says: "The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region."

Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but Professor Bahrani, says: "The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April 2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006."

The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.

Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in the south who desperately – but vainly – tried to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent "the disaster we are all witnessing and observing".

In 2006, he says: "We recruited 200 police officers because we were trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites have been inventoried.

"Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some order until money restrictions within the government meant that we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before the religious parties took over southern Iraq."

Last year, Dr Hamdani's antiquities department received notice from the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites. The new landlord would "dig" the archaeological site, dissolve the "old mud brick" to form the new one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.

Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: "His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and regained his position. The mud-brick factories are 'frozen projects', but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the different religious parties can answer, since they approve these projects."

Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested – with the help of Western troops – several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.

The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared. "It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world," Ms Farchakh says.

The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq's historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.

The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists' report says: "They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting."

After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to excavate and what they could find.

Ms Farchakh adds: "The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from."

A land with fields of ancient pottery

By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist

Iraq's rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the "cradle of civilisation" is nothing more than desert land with "fields" of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil fields, because this is "their land". Because life in the desert is hard and because they have been "forgotten" by all the governments, their "revenge" for this reality is to monitor, and take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that's half the monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider their "looting" activities to be part of a normal working day.

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2970762.ece

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ZNet | Israel/Palestine:
Sabra And Shatila

On massacres, atrocities and holocausts

by Sonja Karkar
Women for Palestine; September 16, 2007

The Massacre

It happened twenty-five years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.

Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children - more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses - doctors, nurses, journalists - who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.

Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]

People tortured. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted flesh from the power shocks that had convulsed their bodies before their hearts gave out, the electric wires still tied around their lifeless limbs

People with gouged out eye sockets. Faces unrecognisable with the gaping holes that had plunged them into darkness before their lives were thankfully ended.

Women raped. Not once - but two, three, four times – horribly violated, their legs shamelessly ripped apart with not even the cover of clothing to preserve their dignity at the moment of death.

Children dynamited alive. So many body parts ripped from their tiny torsos, so hard to know to whom they belonged - just mounds of bloodied limbs amongst the tousled heads of children in pools of blood.

Families executed. Blood, blood and more blood sprayed on the walls of homes where whole families had been axed to death in a frenzy or lined up for a more orderly execution.

There were also journalists who were there in the aftermath and who had equally gruesome stories to tell, none of which made the sort of screaming front page headlines that should have caused lawmakers to demand immediate answers. What they saw led them to write shell-shocked accounts that have vanished now into the archives, but are no less disturbing now. These accounts too need to be individually absorbed, lest they be lumped together as just the collective dead rather than the systematic torture and killing of individual, innocent human beings.

Women gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. [2] The headless body of a baby in diapers lying next to two dead women. [3] An infant, its tiny legs streaked with blood, shot in the back by a single bullet. [4] Slaughtered babies, their bodies blackened as they decomposed, tossed into rubbish heaps together with Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey. [5] An old man castrated, with flies thick upon his torn intestines. [6] Children with their throats slashed. [7] Mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat - young boys all shot at point-blank range. [8]

And most numbing of all are the recollections of the survivors whose experiences were so shockingly traumatic that to recall them must have been painful beyond all imaginings. One survivor, Nohad Srour, 35 said:

“I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and she was yelling “Mama! Mama!” then suddenly nothing. I looked at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked at the man who shot us. I’ll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I pretended to be dead.”[9]

The statistics of those killed vary, but even according to the Israeli military, the official count was 700 people killed while Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk put the figure at 3,500. [10] The Palestinian Red Crescent Society put the number killed at over 2,000.[11] Regardless of the numbers, they would not and could not mitigate what are clear crimes against humanity.

Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who had been one of the first on the scene, said:

“Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila.”[12]

Twenty-five years later it is no different.

The political developments

What happened must be set against the background of a Lebanon that had been invaded by the Israeli army only months earlier, supposedly in ‘retaliation’ for the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London on 4 June 1982. Israel attributed the attempt to Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) then resident in Beirut. In reality, it was a rival militant group headed by Abu Nidal. Israel wanted to oust the PLO from Lebanon altogether and on 6 June 1982, Israel began its devastating assault on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population in the southern part of Lebanon. Lebanese government casualty figures numbered the dead at around 19,000 with some 30,000 wounded, but these numbers are hardly accurate because of the mass graves and other bodies lost in the rubble. [13]

By 1 September, a cease-fire had been mediated by United States envoy Philip Habib, and Arafat and his men surrendered their weapons and were evacuated from Beirut with guarantees by the US that the civilians left behind in the camps would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping force. That guarantee was not kept and the vacuum then created, paved the way for the atrocities that followed.

As soon as the peacekeeping force was withdrawn, the then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon moved to root out some “2,000 terrorists” he claimed were still hiding in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. After totally surrounding the refugee camps with tanks and soldiers, Sharon ordered the shelling of the camps and the bombardment continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening of 15 September leaving the “mopping-up” of the camps to the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia, known as the Phalangists. The next day, the Phalangists - armed and trained by the Israeli army - entered the camps and proceeded to massacre the unarmed civilians while Sharon and his men watched the entire operations. More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was no lull in the 36 hours of killings and illuminated the area with flares at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that no civilian could escape the terror that had been unleashed.

Inquiries, charges and off scot-free

Although Israel’s Kahan Commission of Inquiry did not find any Israeli directly responsible, it did find that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for “not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre” before sending the Phalangists into the camps. It, therefore, lamely recommended that the Israeli prime minister consider removing him from office. [14] Sharon resigned but remained as Minister without portfolio and joined two parliamentary commissions on defence and Lebanese affairs. There is no doubt, as Chomsky points out “that the inquiry was not intended for people who have a prejudice in favour of truth and honesty”, but it certainly gained support for Israel in the US Congress and among the public. [15] It took an International Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride to find that Israel was “directly responsible” because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power. [16] Yet, despite the UN describing the heinous operation as a “criminal massacre” and declaring it an act of genocide [17], no one was prosecuted.

It was not until 2001 that a law suit was filed in Belgium by the survivors of the massacre and relatives of the victims against Sharon alleging his personal responsibility. However, the court did not allow for “universal jurisdiction” - a principle which was intended to remove safe havens for war criminals and allow their prosecution across states. The case was won on appeal and the trial allowed to proceed, but without Sharon who by then was prime minister of Israel and had immunity. US interference led to the Belgian Parliament gutting the universal jurisdiction law and by the time the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague the following year, the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre could no longer be tried because its terms of reference did not allow it to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide pre-dating 1 July 2002. Neither Sharon nor those who carried out the massacres have ever been punished for their horrendous crimes.

The bigger picture

The length of time since these acts were carried out should be no impediment to exposing the truth. More than 60 years after the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Europe, the world still mourns and remembers and erects monuments and museums to that violent holocaust. How they are done, to whom they are done and to how many does not make the crimes any more or less heinous. They can never be justified even on the strength of one state’s rationale that another people ought to be punished, or worse still, are simply inferior or worthless beings. It should lead all of us to question on whose judgment are such decisions made and how can we possibly justify such crimes at all?

The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other massacres of 1948, those who survived have joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967 and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the killing is still going on today. Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed, the displaced and the discarded - a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society and its people.

This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, twenty-five years on.


Footnotes:

[1] Dr Ang Swee Chai, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, Grafton Books, London, 1989

[2] James MacManus, Guardian, 20 September 1982

[3] Loren Jenkins, Washington Post, 20 September 1982

[4] Elaine Carey, Daily Mail, 20 September 1982

[5] Robert Fisk, “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War”, London: Oxford University Press, 1990 [6] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[7] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[8] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[9] Lebanese Daily Star, 16 September 1998

[10] Amnon Kapeliouk, “Sabra & Chatila – Inquiry into a Massacre”, November 1982

[11] Schiff and Ya’ari,, Israel’s Lebanon War, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984,

[12] Robert Fisk, Fifteen Years After the Bloodbath, The World turns its Back, shaml.org, 1997 [13] Noam Chomsky, “The Fatal Triangle” South End Press, Cambridge MA, p.221

[14] The Complete Kahan Commission Report, Princeton, Karz Cohl, 1983, p. 125 (Hereafter, the Kahan Commission Report). [15] Chomsky, ibid. p.406

[16] The Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon, Sean MacBride, 1983 (referred to as the International Commission of Inquiry or MacBride report) [17] United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 16 December 1982

[18] MacBride report, ibid. p.179

Related link:
CUATRO HORAS EN CHATILA/Quattro ore a Shatila

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=13787