Elsewhere Today 465
Aljazeera:
Bhutto blocked from Pakistan rally
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 09, 2007
13:53 MECCA TIME, 10:53 GMT
Pakistani police have blocked Benazir Bhutto from attending a rally against emergency rule.
Police had earlier surrounded the Islamabad home of Bhutto, a former prime minister and the leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), placing her under "virtual house arrest" on Friday.
Al Jazeera's James Bays in Islamabad said Bhutto attempted to break through the police barricades in a white vehicle but made no headway.
The former prime minister had planned to defy a ban on public gatherings and address a rally in nearby Rawalpindi.
"Do not raise hands on women. You are Muslims. This is un-Islamic," she shouted at police who blocked her.
"I want to tell you to have courage because this battle is against dictatorship and it will be won by the people," she told her supporters, before returning to her home.
Bays said that Pakistani officials were saying there was a possibility Bhutto would be allowed to leave her home on Saturday.
Police also arrested at least 30 workers from her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) outside her Islamabad home as she tried to leave.
Rawalpindi violence
Hundreds of her supporters had gathered in Rawalpindi, setting fire to tires in the streets and hurling stones at police, who responded with tear gas shells from an armoured personnel carrier.
Dozens were reportedly arrested.
PPP leaders claimed police have arrested 5,000 of its supporters since
Wednesday to head off the major rally.
"It is a massive crackdown on our party," Raja Javed Ashraf, a PPP legislator, said.
Attiya Inayatullah, who chairs the party's foreign affairs committee and is a member of Musharraf's PML-Q party, told Al Jazeera from Lahore that "no-one" had the right to violate the law regarding protests.
"It is in the interest of all political elements in this country that we move to a peaceful election, a national election ... rather than protesting," she said.
Javed Iqbal Cheema, spokesman for the interior ministry, said authorities had stopped the rally for "security concerns" because suicide bombers had gathered in Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
However Bhutto said the police should arrest the bombers.
"I don't want Pakistan to become Iraq. I have to save you, I am not afraid of death because it is in the hands of God," she said.
The Pakistani government deployed 6,000 police officers in Rawalpindi to prevent the planned rally against the state of emergency imposed by Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, last week.
Suicide blast
Meanwhile in Peshawar, north-west of Pakistan, a suicide blast at the home of a Pakistani government minister killed four people, state-run Pakistan television said.
Amir Muqam, minister of political affairs, was unhurt in the blast.
"The bomber wanted to kill me, he came into my residence and clearly I was the target," Muqam told AFP news agency.
"I am not scared. I have survived two attacks in the past."
Police had earlier broken up a protest against emergency rule in the city.
Elections
On Thursday, Musharraf said elections would be held before February 15 and reiterated he would step down as chief of the country's army while maintaining the presidency.
National elections had originally been scheduled for January but appeared in jeopardy after Musharraf imposed emergency rule on Saturday, citing rising tribal fighting.
Unrest began in Pakistan after Musharraf's attempt to oust the country's chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, led to protests.
The judge was later reinstated but then sacked and placed under house arrest following the Pakistani president's imposition of emergency rule.
Bhutto returned to Pakistan following years of exile last month, however her welcome convoy in the southern city of Karachi was hit by two suicide bomb attacks, killing at least 135 people.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7193EA83-A4A3-4BA8-8667-07A8F24D9649.htm
AllAfrica: Niger Delta, Internal Security,
Energy Take Priority in 2008 Budget
Nigeria First (Abuja) NEWS
8 November 2007
President Umar Musa Yar'Adua on Thursday November 8 presented the 2008 Appropriation Bill to a Joint Session of the National Assembly, which placed emphasis on the development and security of the Niger Delta region, as well as improved funding of national security, energy and education sectors.
The President presented a budget proposal of over N4.5trillion in the Appropriation Bill, his first in office, to a full session of the Senate and House of Representatives which had Senate President David Mark and House Speaker Hon Dimeji Bankole presiding.
Reading his budget speech, President Yar'Adua said the collective challenge before the nation was to translate the micro-economic gains recorded in the last five years into tangible improvements in the living standards of Nigerians.
The 2008 budget proposals represent an increase of 5.5% over that of the previous year.
The President said the budget aims at improving security in the Niger Delta region, power, national security and transport.
Key Sectoral Allocation:
* NDDC N69.9b (as against N24b in 2007)
* National Security N444b, representing 20% of total budget (an increase of 6.5% over 2007)
* Education N210b (13% of 2008 budget)
* Energy N139b
* Agriculture and Water Resources N121b (7% of budget)
* Transport N94b
Assumptions and targets of 2008 Budget:
* Oil price at $53.83 per barrel
* Crude oil production of 2.45mbd
* Joint Venture cash calls of $4.97b
* Gross Domestic Product growth rate of 11%
* Inflation rate of 8.5%
* Exchange rate of N117 to $1
The President also used the occasion to inform the National Assembly that he has signed the Fiscal Responsibility Bill and spoke glowingly of the cordial relationship existing between the Executive and Legislative arms of Government.
Copyright © 2007 Nigeria First. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200711081122.html
AlterNet:
The Bush Administration Plans to Blame You for Iraq
By William Astore, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on November 9, 2007
The world's finest military launches a highly coordinated shock-and-awe attack that shows enormous initial progress. There's talk of the victorious troops being home for Christmas. But the war unexpectedly drags on. As fighting persists into a third, and then a fourth year, voices are heard calling for negotiations, even "peace without victory." Dismissing such peaceniks and critics as defeatists, a conservative and expansionist regime - led by a figurehead who often resorts to simplistic slogans and his Machiavellian sidekick who is considered the brains behind the throne - calls for one last surge to victory. Unbeknownst to the people on the home front, however, this duo has already prepared a seductive and self-exculpatory myth in case the surge fails.
The United States in 2007? No, Wilhelmine Germany in 1917 and 1918, as its military dictators, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his loyal second, General Erich Ludendorff, pushed Germany toward defeat and revolution in a relentless pursuit of victory in World War I. Having failed with their surge strategy on the Western Front in 1918, they nevertheless succeeded in deploying a stab-in-the-back myth, or Dolchstoßlegende, that shifted blame for defeat from themselves and Rightist politicians to Social Democrats and others allegedly responsible for losing the war by their failure to support the troops at home.
The German Army knew it was militarily defeated in 1918. But this was an inconvenient truth for Hindenburg and the Right, so they crafted a new "truth": that the troops were "unvanquished in the field." So powerful did these words become that they would be engraved in stone on many a German war memorial.
It's a myth we ourselves are familiar with. As South Vietnam was collapsing in 1975, Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., speaking to a North Vietnamese counterpart, claimed the U.S. military had never lost a battle in Vietnam. Perhaps so, the NVA colonel replied, "but it is also irrelevant." Summers recounts his conversation approvingly, without irony, in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. For him, even if we lost the war, our Army proved itself "unbeatable."
Though Summers' premise was - and remains - dangerously misleading, it reassured the true believers who ran, and continue to run, our military. Those military men who were less convinced of our "unbeatable" stature tended to keep their own counsel. Their self-censorship, coupled with wider institutional self-deception, effectively opened the door to exculpatory myths.
A New American Stab-in-the-Back?
Warnings about a new stab-in-the-back myth may seem premature or overheated at this moment in the Iraq War. Yet, if the history of the original version of this myth is any guide, the opposite is true. They are timely precisely because the Dolchstoßlegende was not a post-war concoction, but an explanation cunningly, even cynically, hatched by Rightists in Germany before the failure of the desperate, final "victory offensive" of 1918 became fully apparent. Although Hindenburg's dramatic testimony in November 1919 - a full year after the armistice that ended the war - popularized the myth in Germany, it caught fire precisely because the tinder had been laid to dry two years earlier.
It may seem farfetched to compare a Prussian military dictatorship and its self-serving lies to the current Bush administration. Yet I'm not the first person to express concern about the emergence of our very own Iraqi Dolchstoßlegende. Back in 2004, Matthew Yglesias first brought up the possibility. Last year, in Harper's Magazine, Kevin Baker detailed the history of the stab-in-the-back, suggesting that Bush's Iraqi version was already beginning to germinate early in 2005, when news from Iraq turned definitively sour. And this October, in The Nation, Eric Alterman warned that the Bush administration was already busily sowing the seeds of this myth. Other Iraqi myth-trackers have included Gary Kamiya at Salon.com, and Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith at Commondreams.org. Just this August, Thomas Ricks, Washington Post columnist and author of the bestselling book, Fiasco, worried publicly about whether the military itself wasn't already embracing elements of the myth whose specific betrayers would include "weasely politicians" (are there any other kind?) and a "media who undercut us by focusing on the negative."
Is an American version of this myth really emerging then? Let's listen in on a recent Jim Lehrer interview with Senator John McCain, who, while officially convinced that the President's surge plan in Iraq was working, couldn't seem to help talking about how we might yet lose. His remarks quickly took a disturbing turn as he pointed out that our Achilles' heel in Iraq is... well, we the people of the United States and our growing impatience with the war. And the historical analogy he employed was Vietnam, the catalyst for the deployment of the previous American Dolchstoßlegende.
While the Vietnam War was disastrous, McCain conceded, our military had - he argued - turned the tide after the enemy's Tet Offensive in 1968 and the replacement of Gen. William Westmoreland with Gen. Creighton Abrams as commander of our forces there. Precisely at that tipping-point moment, he insisted, the American people, their patience exhausted, had lost their will to win. For McCain, there really was a light at the end of that Vietnamese tunnel - the military saw it, yet the American people, blinded by bad news, never did.
In today's Iraq - again the McCain version - Gen. David Petraeus is the new Abrams, finally the right general for the job. And his new tactic of protecting the Iraqi people, thereby winning their hearts and minds, is working. Victory beckons at the end of the "long, hard path" (that evidently has replaced the Vietnamese tunnel), unless the American people run out of patience, as they did back in the late 1960s.
McCain is no Hindenburg. Yet his almost automatic displacement of ultimate responsibility from the Bush administration and the military to the American people indicates the traction the stab-in-the-back myth has already gained in mainstream politics. For the moment, with hope for some kind of victory, however defined, not quite vanquished in official circles, our latest dagger-myth remains sheathed, its murderous power as yet unwielded.
Then again, perhaps that's not quite the case, even now. In The Empire Strikes Back, young Luke Skywalker asks Yoda, his wizened Jedi Master, whether the dark side of the Force is stronger than the good. No, Yoda replies, just "easier, quicker, more seductive" - an accurate description of the dark power of the stab-in-the-back myth. Politicians sense its future power and alter their positions accordingly. For example, no leading presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, dares to be labeled "defeatist" by calling for a major withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2008. Exceptions like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, or even Bill Richardson only prove the rule - with support in the low single-digits, they risk little in bucking the odds.
Fear of being labeled "the enemy within" is already silently reshaping our politics as even decorated combat veterans like Congressman (and retired Marine Corps colonel) John Murtha are not immune from being smeared for criticizing the President's war. Politicians recognize that, in a campaign, it's well-nigh impossible to overcome charges of weakness and pusillanimity. Senator Hillary Clinton senses that she may be unelectable unless she argues for us to continue to fight the good fight in Iraq, albeit more intelligently. In fact, if you're looking for significant changes in troop levels or strategy there, better hunker in for Inauguration Day 2009 - and then prepare to wait some more.
Of Myths and Accountability
McCain's comments did echo a Clausewitzian truth. In warfare, the people's will is an indispensable component of a nation's warfighting "trinity" (that also includes the government and the military). It's exceedingly difficult to prevail in a major war, if a leg of this triad is hobbled. By choosing not to mobilize the people's will, by telling us to go about our normal lives as others were fighting and dying in our name, the Bush administration actually hobbled its own long-term efforts. Now, they are getting ready to claim that it was all our fault. We were the ones who lost our patience and will to victory. This is rather like the boy who killed his father and mother, only to throw himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.
Back in 2002-2003, with an all-volunteer military, a new Blitzkrieg strategy, and believing God to be on their side, it appears Bush and Company initially assumed that broader calls for support and sacrifice were militarily unnecessary - and unnecessarily perilous politically. Now, despite dramatic setbacks over the last four years, they still refuse to mobilize our national will. Their refusal reminds me of the tagline of those old Miller Lite beer commercials: Everything you always wanted in a war, and less - as in less (or even no) sacrifices.
So let me be clear: If we lose in Iraq, the American people will not be to blame. We cannot be accused of lacking a will that was never wanted or called upon to begin with. Yet the stab-in-the-back myth gains credibility precisely because so few high-level people either in government or the military are being held accountable for failures in Iraq.
In World War II, Thomas Ricks reminds us, our military relieved seventeen division commanders and four corps commanders of duty. With the possible exception of Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski of Abu Ghraib infamy, has any senior officer been relieved for cause in Iraq? Since none apparently has, does this mean that, unlike the spineless American people, they have all performed well?
To cite just one typical case, Major General Kenneth Hunzeker served as the commanding general, Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, from October 2006 to July 2007 in Iraq. Surely, this was a tough job, especially for a man with no proficiency in Arabic. Yet, by all accounts, Iraqi police units to this day remain remarkably corrupt, militia-ridden, and undependable. Does this mean Hunzeker failed? Apparently not, since he was promoted to lieutenant general and given a coveted corps command. Interestingly, his most recent official biography fails to mention his time in Iraq leading the police assistance team. Even if Hunzeker was indeed the best man for the job, what kind of progress could have been possible in a ten-month tour of duty? By the time Hunzeker learned a few painful lessons, he was already jetting to Germany and command of V Corps.
If no one is held accountable for failed policies, if, in fact, those closest to the failures are showered with honors - as was, for instance, L. Paul Bremer III, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad for the President from May 2003 to June 2004 - it becomes easier to shift blame to anyone (or everyone). Here, German precedents are again compelling. Because the German people were never told they were losing World War I, even as their Army was collapsing in July and August 1918, they were unprepared for the psychological blow of defeat - and so, all-too-willing to accept the lie that the collapse was due to the enemy within.
This is not to say that today's military has been silent. To cite three examples, retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez recently criticized the surge strategy and called the Iraq war "a nightmare with no end in sight." Another perspective came from 12 Army captains formerly stationed in Iraq, who, writing in the Washington Post, also rejected the surge and called for rapid withdrawal as the best of a series of bad options. Finally, seven NCOs in the elite 82d Airborne Division (and then still in Iraq) offered graphic illustrations (on the op-ed page of the New York Times) of the one-step-forward, two-steps-back nature of "progress" on the ground in Iraq.
Think of these as three military perspectives on a disastrous war. But even they can serve as only a partial antidote to the myth that some kind of victory is inevitable as long as we, the American people, remain supinely supportive of administration policy.
Blaming You
Given the right post-war conditions, the myth of the stab-in-the-back can facilitate the rise of reactionary regimes and score-settling via long knives - just ask Germans under Hitler in 1934. It also serves to exonerate a military of its blunders and blind spots, empowering it and its commanders to launch redemptive, expansionist adventures that turn disastrous precisely because previous lessons of defeat were never faced, let alone absorbed or embraced.
Thus, the German military's collapse in World War I and the Dolchstoß myth that followed enabled the even greater disaster of World War II. Is it possible that our own version of this, associated with Vietnam, enabled an even greater disaster in Iraq? And, if so, what could the next version of the stab-in-the-back bring in its wake?
Only time will tell. But consider yourself warned. If we lose Iraq, you're to blame.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/67354/
Asia Times:
New crises sap Bush's 'war on terror'
By Jim Lobe
Nov 10, 2007
WASHINGTON - Just as the White House claims it has finally turned the corner in what it defines as the "central front" in the "war on terror" - Iraq - it has found itself desperately trying to contain new crises on the war's periphery stretching east to Pakistan, west to Turkey and south to the Horn of Africa.
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's latest "coup" last weekend, combined with the continuing threat of a Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan and the looming probability of war between US-backed Ethiopia and Eritrea, have added to the growing impression that Washington has ever more become hostage to forces and personalities far beyond its control or understanding.
The fact that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was reduced to making urgent telephone appeals to heads of state to heed Washington's wishes - in Turkey's case not to invade Kurdistan; in Musharraf's not to declare a state of emergency - has only underlined just how impotent and unprepared the world's sole superpower appears to have become.
Worse, if events turn out badly, these crises could deal devastating setbacks to Washington's hopes of bolstering "moderate" forces against its perceived enemies, be they Sunni jihadis or the allegedly Tehran-led "axis" of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The latest events come amid a lack of concrete progress on the Israel-Palestinian peace process, the ongoing political impasse in Lebanon, and still-mounting tensions between Iran and the US.
For some veteran observers, the current rash of crises recalls the situation of 1979-80 when the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Islamist uprising in Saudi Arabia, the execution by Pakistan's military regime of former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the bloody, superpower-fueled Ogaden war between Somalia and Ethiopia formed what was then called the "arc of crisis" that persuaded president Jimmy Carter to launch a major build-up in Washington's military presence from the Red Sea to the Gulf.
But "the situation we face today is much more difficult," one former senior State Department official told Inter Press Service this week. "Back then, we didn't have 200,000 US troops fighting on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan; nor did we have the anti-Americanism that now pervades the entire region. And, frankly, to deal with all this, we don't even have the regional expertise in the government that we had in 1979."
Of the three new crises, the situation along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan most directly threatens the administration's efforts to stabilize Iraq.
Senior US officials are hoping that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit to Washington on Monday, during which President George W Bush promised to boost its intelligence cooperation with Ankara in its fight against Iraq-based Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) guerrillas, will give him enough political capital back home to ward off calls by hawkish military commanders and opposition parties to cross the border in force, at least until the winter snows trap the PKK in its bases in the Qandil mountains.
The stakes are very high. Most analysts believe that a major Turkish incursion, if it occurs, will likely spur resistance by Iraqi Kurdish militias, the peshmerga, on which Washington depends both to keep northern Iraq secure and stable and to provide the most reliable recruits for Iraq's new, US-trained army.
At the same time, Turkey is a "moderate" predominantly Muslim nation and a close North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, which not only contributes troops to NATO's peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan, but also provides access to Incirlik air base on which the US military relies heavily for resupplying its forces in Iraq.
In other words, Washington can ill afford a major clash between Turkey and Kurdish forces in Kurdistan lest it risk losing an ally whose help is considered virtually indispensable to stabilizing Iraq.
But Erdogan's delegation left Washington this week clearly dissatisfied with Bush's new commitments, and, as the Turks have warned, another lethal PKK raid, such as the one that took the lives of 20 soldiers last month, could force his hand.
While fending off a Turkish invasion is critical to US efforts in Iraq, the stakes raised by Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan - which, according to most terrorism experts in Washington, has been the true "central front" in the anti-terror struggle since al-Qaeda and the Taliban were pushed out of Afghanistan and into the frontier areas of its eastern neighbor in late 2001 - are higher yet.
Washington, which has provided Musharraf and his military with some US$15 billion in official and covert aid over the past six years to encourage their cooperation in Afghanistan and the larger "war on terror", has become increasingly disillusioned with their performance over the past year.
The US-inspired plan that Musharraf share power with his "moderate" civilian opposition, notably former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, appears to be in tatters following the declaration of emergency powers.
On Friday, Pakistani police confined Bhutto to her house in Islamabad and arrested thousands of her supporters who had planned to stage a mass rally against Musharraf.
And in the frontier tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan, Musharraf, despite sending in troops, has been unable to enforce the government's writ. According to a recent US intelligence estimate, senior al-Qaeda leaders have largely reconstituted their central-command network here and the Taliban have gained both a safe haven and an endless supply of recruits.
"Now we have the worst of all possible worlds," noted the chairman of a key congressional foreign affairs committee, Gary Ackerman, on Wednesday.
"Our ally is an isolated and deeply resented leader who is less popular with his own people than Osama bin Laden; who instead of arresting the terrorists who pose an existential threat to his regime, if not to the country, is arresting the very people with whom he could have worked to generate the political support necessary to rid Pakistan of extremists."
Unable to prevent Musharraf's coup, the administration, including Bush himself, is now pressing him hard to comply as soon as possible with his previous pledges to resign as army chief and permit free elections that would presumably result in Bhutto's election as prime minister.
But even if Musharraf does this - as he promised again on Thursay, saying that polls would be held before mid-February - it remains unclear whether the damage can be undone. Any remaining confidence in Musharraf in Washington, let alone in Pakistan, is evaporating. Washington has reportedly begun discreetly contacting other generals about the possibility of replacing him, a move that itself carries risks of greater instability and hence opportunities for radical Islamists to advance their position in the Muslim world's only nuclear state.
Compared to both Kurdistan and Pakistan, events in the Horn of Africa appear very remote. But, in a stark warning issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG) this week, that front in Washington's "war on terror" - where Ethiopia has acted as Washington's regional enforcer - has also come under increasingly urgent threat.
Ethiopia and Eritrea, which Washington recently threatened to declare a state sponsor of international terrorism, have engaged in a military build-up of "alarming proportions" along the same border where they fought a bloody war from 1998 to 2000, according to the ICG.
Both Ethiopia and the Bush administration have been infuriated by Eritrea's alleged support for Somalia's Islamic Courts Union that was ousted from power in Mogadishu and other parts of the country by an invasion of Addis Ababa's powerful, US-backed military 11 months ago. The Ethiopians have since been bogged down in an increasingly bloody occupation that many analysts have compared to the US occupation of Iraq.
Absent urgent international, and especially US, efforts to stop it, war could break out "within weeks", according to ICG president Gareth Evans. "There will be no easy military solution if that happens. We are looking at a protracted conflict on Eritrean soil, destabilization of Ethiopia, and a horrible new humanitarian crisis."
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak04.html
Clarín: Crisis en Pakistán: arrestaron a
la líder opositora y EE.UU. exige su liberación
La policía rodeó el domicilio de la ex primera ministra Benazir Bhutto y le impidió la salida en dos oportunidades. La Casa Blanca, en tanto, reclamó que se le devuelva la "libertad de movimiento" y que sean liberados "todos los detenidos". Esta mañana hubo nuevas detenciones de opositores.
Por: Clarín.com
09.11.2007
La líder de la oposición Benazir Bhutto fue puesta el viernes bajo arresto domiciliario por la policía, que cercó el frente de su casa de Islamabad, capital del país, con alambre de púa y arrestó a miles de sus partidarios para impedir una protesta contra el estado de emergencia en Pakistán.
La ex primera ministra intentó salir en su automóvil en dos oportunidades, pero la policía bloqueó su camino con un vehículo armado.
En tanto, la Casa Blanca urgió al gobierno de Pervez Musharraf, su aliado en la lucha contra el terrorismo, a liberar de inmediato a Bhutto. En un comunicado, el Consejo de Seguridad Nacional, que depende directamente de la Casa Blanca, reclamó que "se devuelva la libertad de movimiento a la antigua primera ministra y a otros miembros de su partido, así como que sean liberados todos los detenidos".
Un portavoz del gobierno paquistaní aseguró que Bhutto quedará en libertad antes del sábado.
La ex primera ministra estaba planeando desacatar la prohibición de realizar manifestaciones públicas y tenía previsto pronunciar un discurso en una protesta en la vecina población de Rawalpindi, donde la policía utilizó gases lacrimógenos y bastones para dispersar a cientos de manifestantes. Hubo decenas de arrestos.
Por otra parte, esta mañana cuatro personas murieron en un ataque suicida de extremistas religiosos contra la casa del ministro de asuntos políticos Amir Mugam en la ciudad de Peshawar, en el noroeste del país, informó la Policía.
El ministro, un estrecho aliado del dictador Musharraf, resultó ileso. Este ataque dejó en evidencia que los extremistas religiosos representan una amenaza en Pakistán. De hecho, ese fue el argumento utilizado por el gobierno paquistaní para declarar el último sábado el estado de excepción. Sin embargo, desde entonces se han producido cientos de detenciones de opositores moderados, abogados, activistas laicos, así como fotógrafos y periodistas.
(Fuente: agencias)
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/11/09/um/m-01536966.htm
Guardian: We can best stop terror
by civil, not military, means
Initiatives that nurture all our human relationships defeat the appeal of those who cultivate hatred and violence between groups
Amartya Sen
Friday November 9, 2007
Increased prevalence of terrorism and political violence in the contemporary world has led to many initiatives in recent years aimed at removing the scourge. Military efforts to secure peace have been rapidly deployed, with better informed justification in some cases than in others. Yet group violence through systematic instigation is not exclusively, nor primarily, a military challenge. It is fostered in our divisive world through capturing people's minds and loyalties, and through exploiting the allegiance of those who are wholly or partly persuaded. Some recruits are "inspired" into joining movements for promoting violence against targeted groups, but a much larger number of influenced people do not take part. They can nevertheless hugely contribute to generating a political climate in which the most peaceful of people come to tolerate the most egregious acts of intolerance and brutality on some hazily perceived grounds of self-defence, or retaliation, against the identified "enemy".
The Commonwealth Commission report Civil Paths to Peace, published today, focuses particularly on causes and ways of preventing the terrorism and cultivated violence that have been in the ascendancy for some years, and afflict or threaten the lives of billions in Commonwealth countries and the rest of the world. The report does not argue that military initiatives are never justified, but does argue that when they are based on wrong information or weak reasoning, or inadequately linked to civil measures, they can generate immensely counterproductive results. Systematic civil initiatives, at the national as well as global level, are essential for successfully confronting organised violence and terrorism.
Central to the civil approach is the recognition of the need to overcome the influence of confused and flammable readings of human relations that generate group-specific disaffection and hatred. Even though all human beings have many affiliations, with many distinct patterns of sharing (including the important commonality of a shared human identity), these multiple identities are systematically downplayed in the cultivation of group violence, which proceeds through privileging exactly one affiliation as a person's "real identity", thereby seeing people in an imagined confrontation against each other across a single line of prioritised divisiveness.
Indeed, even the gigantic violence of the first world war, which made so many Europeans act as willing participants in an unnecessary war, drew on singularly prioritising the identity of nationality, ignoring all else. Today, the divisiveness of a singled-out priority is increasingly based on the championing of religious - rather than national - identity, ignoring all other affiliations. The cultivation of such confrontational incitement, often aimed against the west, actually receives implicit support in the west from the increased popularity of classifying the population of the world almost exclusively by religion, or by membership of "civilisations", defined primarily in terms of religion (supplemented by the thesis that different civilisations are prone to "clash" with each other).
But human beings, with a variety of concerns and affiliations shared in many different and complex ways, need not be constantly at loggerheads. If the institutional changes needed for pursuing civil paths to peace call for clarity of thought, they also demand, as the commission report discusses, organised policies and institutional initiatives with the reach and versatility to help, rather than hinder, the understanding of the richness of human relations.
Breadth of reach is crucial here. Even the well-meaning but excessively narrow approach of concentrating single-mindedly on the "dialogue between religions" (much championed right now) can seriously undermine other civil engagements, linked with language, literature, cultural functions, national politics, and social interactions that help to resist the exploitation of religious differences, which very often begins by undermining all other affiliations. The diversity of civil society engagements needs support, not supplanting.
Cultivation of disrespect and hostility can be resisted through various means, including the working of the media, flourishing of participatory politics, expansion of inclusive and broad-based educational activities, and other means of generating mutual respect and understanding. Civil paths to peace also demand the removal of gross economic inequalities, social humiliations and political disenfranchisement, which can contribute to generating confrontation and hostility. Purely economic measures of inequality do not bring out the social dimension of the inequality involved. For example, when the people in the bottom groups in terms of income have different non-economic characteristics, in terms of race (such as being black rather than white), or immigration status (such as being recent arrivals rather than older residents), then the significance of the economic inequality is substantially magnified by its "coupling" with other divisions, linked with non-economic identity groups.
The focus on the civil paths to peace does not ignore, in any way, the basic fact that terrorism and homicide, no matter how generated, are criminal activities that call for effective security measures. No serious analysis of group violence can fail to begin with that basic understanding. But the analysis cannot end there, since many social, economic and political initiatives can be undertaken to confront and defeat the appeal on which the fomenters of violence and terrorism draw to recruit active foot soldiers and passive sympathisers.
The Commonwealth has survived and flourished, despite the hostilities associated with our colonial history. There has been no absence of problems, but we must not underestimate the successes we have had, particularly through replacing the bitter confrontation of the ruler and the rebel with widespread cooperation between independent people.
That success has been possible through the use of a number of far-sighted guiding principles, centred particularly on a multilateral approach. The commission argues that those principles have continuing relevance today for the future of the Commonwealth - and also for the world as a whole. In this sense, Civil Paths to Peace is a modest attempt to present a Commonwealth-based understanding of the civil demands for world peace.
· Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in Economics, is the Thomas W Lamont University Professor at Harvard; he chaired the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding, which publishes its report Civil Paths to Peace today
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2208072,00.html
il manifesto:
L'ipocrisia sui migranti
Rossana Rossanda
La spallata alla maggioranza che ha tentato l'opposizione - ma, si dice, anche il sindaco di Roma e segretario del Pd Walter Veltroni, dal quale gradiremmo una smentita - in seguito all'assassinio commesso da un rumeno a Tor di Quinto, sembra destinata a non passare. Nell'incontro tra il presidente del consiglio Prodi, il ministro degli interni Amato e il ministro Ferrero di Rifondazione, il decreto d'emergenza del 1 novembre, che andrà domani in commissione al senato, dovrebbe essere emendato. Esso modificava, non senza mezzucci da azzeccagarbugli, il decreto del 6 febbraio 2007 sull'ingresso e il soggiorno dei nuovi cittadini comunitari (in pratica le nuove entrate dall'Est) enfatizzando le modalità di rifiuto del loro ingresso o soggiorno, e le procedure di una eventuale espulsione. Prima si poteva espellere qualcuno per disordini che mettessero «a repentaglio la sicurezza dello Stato», dal 1 novembre bastava mettere in causa la sicurezza pubblica in generale. Aumentava dunque in modo sterminato l'arbitrarietà del provvedimento.
Su richiesta di Rifondazione, il decreto della settimana scorsa sarebbe emendato in modo da non violare i principi elementari del diritto. Non sarà bellissimo - riguardando comunque una «limitazione» al diritto dei cittadini comunitari di spostarsi e stare nella Ue dove gli pare, salvo andare in galera per avere commesso un crimine, come noi tutti - ma non dovrebbe essere ripugnante. Il negoziato durerà, probabilmente, fino a un attimo prima che la commissione entri in ciascun articolo, ma il governo sembra disponibile a rientrare nei limiti indicati sul manifesto dal giudice Ippolito. Vedremo.
Ammesso che vada così, due grosse questioni restano sospese. La prima è la gravità del raid della polizia contro il baraccamento romeno, piccolo e non sanguinoso ma crudele pogrom contro l'etnia dell'assassino, gente che non c'entrava per niente, che giornali e tv hanno diffuso con enfasi come giusta risposta a un'opinione pubblica spaventata. È un atto di cui, riteniamo, il ministro degli interni deve essere chiamato a rispondere e ad assicurare che non si ripeta.
La seconda è la reticenza e contradditorietà della politica europea in tema di immigrazione. È certo che la flebile crescita, il precariato crescente e l'aumento del costo della vita rendono non semplice l'accoglienza di una forte immigrazione in Italia. Essa si inserisce al nord, meno al centro e poco, o nulla, al sud. La direttiva europea del 2004 confessa sfacciatamente che la libera circolazione dei cittadini comunitari è un «diritto primario del mercato del lavoro» invece che dei lavoratori in carne ed ossa. Devono essere stati distratti i deputati europei che l'hanno approvata. Se il soggetto di diritto è il mercato perché non erigere muri come negli Stati uniti? Non basta che, come due settimane fa, affoghino in prossimità delle nostre coste decine di infelici, dei quali non sapremo mai con esattezza numero e nome? Quando hanno deciso l'allargamento dell'Unione europea alla Romania, che cosa hanno pensato coloro che ci governano da Bruxelles sul che fare per i molti che sarebbero affluiti da quelle lande? Sull'accoglienza zero, ma possibilità di rifiutare il soggiorno a chi rischia di pesare troppo sulla assistenza pubblica dello stato «ospitante». Come se chi tentasse di trovare un lavoro in Italia nel suo paese ce l'avesse già. L'ipocrisia è davvero un po' eccessiva.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/08-Novembre-2007/art20.html
Jeune Afrique: 12 morts, le cadavre
d'un soldat éthiopien traîné dans la rue
SOMALIE - 8 novembre 2007 - par AFP
Cinq soldats éthiopiens et sept civils ont été tués jeudi dans des combats à Mogadiscio, où le cadavre d'un soldat éthiopien a été exhibé et traîné dans les rues par une centaine de personnes, a-t-on appris auprès d'habitants de la capitale somalienne.
Plus de 100 civils ont piétiné et craché sur le corps du soldat éthiopien, qui a été traîné sur plusieurs kilomètres entre les quartiers de Suqaholaha et de Barubah, a constaté un correspondant de l'AFP.
"Nous combattrons les colonisateurs éthiopiens et nous les tuerons ainsi", "A bas l'Ethiopie, Allah est le plus grand", ont scandé les participants, traînant le corps couvert de blessures du soldat éthiopien, qui ne portait qu'un pantalon de treillis, les pieds attachés par des fils téléphoniques.
Il avait été tué plus tôt dans la journée, au cours d'un affrontement dans le quartier de Suqaholaha, au cours duquel un autre soldat éthiopien et un civil ont été tués, selon des habitants.
"Après les combats, les forces éthiopiennes sont venues ramasser le corps d'un des leurs, tué devant ma porte", a raconté un témoin, Ali Nur Yayah. Selon lui, quatre civils ont également été blessés.
Trois soldats éthiopiens ont ensuite été tués, lorsque des centaines de soldats ont pénétré à Barubah, pour récupérer le cadavre de leur camarade, déclenchant un affrontement avec des insurgés dirigés par des islamistes, ont indiqué des résidents du quartier.
Six civils ont aussi été tués dans les combats, selon eux. "Ils tentaient de fuir l'affrontement quand un obus a heurté le kiosque où ils s'étaient réfugiés", a raconté à l'AFP Muhamoud Gobe.
Le 2 novembre, des insurgés islamistes avaient déjà exhibé à Mogadiscio les corps de trois soldats éthiopiens, selon eux, tués dans des accrochages.
De telles scènes constituent une réminiscence tragique d'octobre 1993, quand les corps de soldats américains participant à une opération de maintien de la paix sous l'égide de l'ONU avaient été traînés à travers les rues de Mogadiscio par une foule de Somaliens en colère.
Dix-huit soldats américains et plusieurs milliers de Somaliens avaient été tués au cours de plus de 18 heures d'affrontement, après la chute de deux hélicoptères, bataille immortalisée sur le grand écran dans le film "Black Hawk Down" (la chute du Faucon noir), du réalisateur britannique Ridley Scott.
Le chef de l'opposition somalienne à dominante islamiste, cheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a lancé jeudi un nouvel appel au combat contre "l'occupation éthiopienne" en Somalie, où l'armée d'Addis Abeba soutient le gouvernement de transition.
Fin décembre 2006-début janvier 2007, l'armée éthiopienne est intervenue aux côtés des forces du gouvernement de transition somalien, lui permettant de mettre en déroute les forces des tribunaux islamiques.
Depuis, les insurgés, parmi lesquels des miliciens islamistes, mènent des attaques quasi-quotidiennes dans la capitale.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP45537mortseurals0
Mail & Guardian:
Day-to-day Darfur
David Smith
08 November 2007
The real Darfur: residents of the Zamzam refugee camp live lives in stark contrast to the foreign peacekeeping forces who still enjoy many of the West’s luxuries. (Photograph: AP)
Darfur has been falling off the radar a bit over the past few weeks. The child-adoption scandal in neighbouring Chad and the potential implosion of the peace deal between Khartoum and South Sudan pushed the troubled region off the front pages.
The dearth of coverage of the subject doesn’t mean that there has been an improvement. In fact, the situation is worse now than at the beginning of the year. Yes, there are peace talks under way in Libya, but they are under way without the participation of some of the most important players. The two largest rebel groups in Darfur are refusing to take part. Among other things, they want a renegotiation of the terms for the talks and they want the talks moved from Libya to more neutral ground.
It is difficult for most people to imagine what a place that some describe as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is like. Darfur is big. It is part of the biggest country in Africa and Darfur alone is about the size of Botswana. Like Botswana, all parts of Darfur are not alike. The north is desert on the southern edge of the Sahara and home to few people, most of them nomads. Moving south, sand gives way to scrub that eventually gives way to bush and cultivated land. Some of the best citrus found in Khartoum markets grows in Darfur.
At the moment, there is a fragile layer of green covering much of central Darfur. It doesn’t last for very long, but it’s the rainy season, a wet season with about half the intensity of the wet season in Limpopo.
Prior to 1994, all of Darfur consisted of one state, but the government in Khartoum divided the region into three parts to ensure that there would not be a majority from the Fur ethnic group in any one state. Prior to separation, the state capital was El Fasher. El Fasher has now been relegated to the reduced status of capital of North Darfur. The states of West and South Darfur have their regional administrations located in El Geneina and Nyala respectively.
Darfur is overwhelmingly rural, however, the cities, especially Nyala, contain an infrastructure that is the envy of its neighbours next door in Chad and the Central African Republic. The largest towns across those borders, Abeche in Chad and Birao in the CAR have neither tarred roads nor a regular supply of electricity. Nyala boasts both, along with an international airport with regularly scheduled flights to the Middle East as well as a sporadic train service to Khartoum. Admittedly it is not much in Southern African terms, but it is the best infrastructure in the region.
With the number of foreigners rising dramatically as the African Union mission merges into the new hybrid operation with the United Nations, Darfur’s towns are experiencing the usual sort of growth that accompanies the arrival of expatriates at peacekeeping missions. Restaurants serving pizza, Indian curries and Lebanese shish-taouk are popping up as new houses are being built to take advantage of rents that are paid in dollars.
But don’t be fooled into believing that Darfur is experiencing an economic boom that is providing a better life for all — far from it. Darfuris don’t get to taste the pizzas coming out of the ovens in El Fasher unless they’ve managed to win the lottery and get one of the relatively lucrative UN or NGO jobs available. Life is tough even in times of peace; making a living off the land in Darfur is not unlike convincing the soil in the Northern Cape to yield fruit. Sadly, there has been no peace over the past five years. More than two million Darfuris have had their homes and possessions destroyed and live in camps either in Darfur or across the border in Chad. Armed attacks by government forces, government sponsored forces and rebel groups have increased in recent months. Peacekeepers and humanitarian workers are increasingly among the casualties.
Last year a peace agreement was signed in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to try to bring an end to the fighting and terror. It didn’t work. Some of the main players in the conflict refused to sign. Darfuris are still waiting for any sign that the government will make good on its commitment to provide security, compensate people who lost their homes, and create the conditions that would allow them to return home. This has not happened.
Expectations are high in Darfur that the hybrid mission, the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAmid), will have the clout to force a peaceful solution to the Darfur crisis. UNAmid can and certainly will help, but it can only help to enforce a peace process that the main protagonists have agreed on.
There hasn’t been much evidence to suggest that security, compensation and the ability to go home are imminent for the people of Darfur. The government of Sudan and the main rebel groups are still jockeying for position, and until they have found some sort of common ground, UNAmid’s most important role will be as Darfur’s top employer.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=324372&area=/insight/insight__africa/
Mother Jones:
Crisis in Pakistan
A former U.S. government official in the region addresses president Pervez Musharraf's state of emergency and the country's subsequent unrest.
[A frequent traveler to the region, the interviewee asked to be identified only as a former U.S. official.]
Laura Rozen
November 05 , 2007
Mother Jones: Are we witnessing with Musharraf a Shah of Iran-type situation?
Former U.S. Official: It is not a Shah of Iran-type situation. Not yet. Despite the circle jerk of journalists who say the crazies will take over the country and have nuclear weapons, they won't do that yet. It is absolutely known within our government that Musharraf and the army have a very solid system of nuclear control.
When things were moving kind of okay, Musharraf did this big anticipated shuffle on the first of October of senior military positions. He appointed the intelligence chief to be vice chief of the Army staff, and then Musharraf was to take off his uniform on November 15. He expected the approval of the Supreme Court to be elected [Musharraf was reelected as president on October 6], and then the vice chief of the Army staff [Ashfaq Kiyani] was to take the job of chief of the Army staff.
What one has to watch for now is if there is enough conflict in the streets, and the Pakistan Army is asked to square off against people of Pakistan. The Pakistan army has historically been fed up with this. It is a real army–an army with a real adversary; it is not like some Third World banana republic militaries. The army [might] then say, we can't do this, and that will be the end of Musharraf.
MJ: What do you think of the new head of the army [Ashfaq Kiyani]?
Official: He is probably one of the finer officers. He went to the Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, [Kansas].
Don't forget Pelosi and company [Congress] shut off military-to-military contact with Pakistan for 10 years. It just started again a few years ago. One of best thing American troops can do is have these guys [Pakistani soldiers] come over. It is better than having them sitting around madrassas. You want them to be doing their jump training at Ft. Benning [Georgia].
The guy who commands the 10 Corps of the Pakistani military in Rawalpindi, Lieutenant General Tariq Majeed, is all important. Whenever anybody has to move, when the military has to move, you have to have that.
MJ: Who arranged that Musharraf would allow back Benazir Bhutto in a suggested future power-transfer arrangement?
Official: They started it and we jumped in. Musharraf and his party knew he was coming to the end of the line where he had to do something. Then we [the U.S.] got involved, and the media. We love Bhutto more than anything. She played Lacrosse at Harvard. She then went to Oxford and was on the debating team. She has [public relations firm] Burson-Marsteller representing her. [Burson-Marsteller partner] Mark Penn went to Harvard. He's doing Hillary [Clinton]. We love her so much, she gets viewed back there as our Chalabi.
MJ: What do you think of Bhutto?
Official: She is the daughter of a feudal lord with a political party, the Pakistan People's Party. She had with Musharraf this kind of agreement that she comes back to Pakistan not as the prime minister, but that she comes back with this American backing and media adoration. It makes it look like maybe her party could get a majority. She starts to believe her own press. Every exile I ever worked with is out of touch with his or her own country.
MJ: Who is her constituency?
Official: The people who like to fantasize that this change will take care of their needs. It looks like she was shoved down the throat of Pakistanis by the U.S. But that is not really the case. We overdid it at the worst possible moment: In the delicacy of the negotiations, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte came to Islamabad a month ago; Rice is on the phone. This was just before Bhutto came back. Probably it was coincidental, but that is not what it looks like in a country of 160 million people, more than half of who can't read. So Bhutto is viewed as America's person, as the new Chalabi.
MJ: Explain the recent events, and Musharraf declaring emergency rule.
Official: The reality is that America is so hated in Pakistan and by the Pashtun people, and this is the key thing. There are 15 million Pashtuns on the Pakistani side of the border drawn by the British, and 15 million on the other side. They hate us. They are either your best friend or your worst enemy. And we've gone to being their worst enemy, in part because we are whacking them in great numbers on the other side of the border–a border they don't recognize.
You have a huge issue. A whole big piece of Pakistan is going to total, outright hatred of America, and the government of Pakistan is under serious threat now. Not just in the FATA [federally administered tribal areas], which have always been outside of government control, but moving into the Swat Valley, a beautiful tourist area, which is now under great stress. There is a lot of fighting going on there. Outside of the tribal areas, suicide bombers in Karachi are going after Benazir [Bhutto]; in one week, a suicide bomber also went off a quarter-mile from Musharraf's headquarters. Then suicide bombers attacked a squadron of Pakistani military commanders and pilots at Sarghoda Air Force base in Punjab Pakistan. Sixteen fighters were killed. That's like attacking Andrews Air Force base.
This is a huge deal, all of this stuff. Plus the Judiciary: Musharraf fired the Supreme Court chief justice; it had become a very activist court. The trouble was he was advised by a former attorney general whom he had to fire to sack the chief justice. That set something off. In a country where, among a very small percentage of elites, everything looks good and the economy is great there is still an amount of unrest. And the lawyers went out on the street, and the Supreme Court ruled to reinstate the chief justice.
We always insisted on everyone having democratic elections. They did that in two provinces, and the MMA party, an amalgam of two Islamist parties, won. Imagine what the Bush crowd would do. It has already put the constitution in abeyance.
You have to go back to, why do they hate us? Like it or not, we came into Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance and our enemies seem to be the Pashtuns, and when we go after an enemy we do it without regard. The British and Germans are getting very nervous to be around us. We lay waste. We create 10,000 more enemies every time we unleash air strikes. And we are doing more air strikes than we are ground stuff. It is causing great strain in NATO.
The point is we are turning the Pashtun people in Afghanistan and Pakistan into enemies. Congress says in all its legislation if it is to give any money to Pakistan, that Pakistan has to prove they are doing all they can to prevent infiltration of bad people. Pakistanis at a certain point say, "Stop. You have NATO and the U.S. army in Afghanistan. Why don't you seal your side of the border? You know why? You fucking can't."
We have to make it simple. There are 30 million Pashtuns, 15 million of them in Pakistan. Just open a channel. Start talking to them. You will never be able to kill [the militants] fast enough.
Laura Rozen is the National Security Correspondent for Mother Jones' Washington, D.C. bureau.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2007/11/crisis-in-pakistan.html
New Statesman:
The politics of fear
A legislative programme that contains many laudable goals will instead be dominated by authoritarianism, says our political editor - plus cross-party reaction to the Queen's Speech
Martin Bright
Published 08 November 2007
Another Queen's Speech, another anti-terrorist crackdown. This year's Counter-Terrorism Bill follows last year's Terrorism Act and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. There are only so many ways of saying the same thing. With each new wave of legislation, only the date gives a clear indication of which law is which.
In 2001, in its report on the new Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act, the Commons home affairs select committee wrote that "this country has more anti-terrorism legislation on its statute books than any other developed democracy". Since then, a further three pieces of substantial legislation have been passed in this area; this new bill will make it four. The latest proposed measures will allow the questioning of suspects after they have been charged. Ministers are also considering increasing the length of time a suspect can be detained without charge beyond the present 28 days. Memories are short, but as the government talks once again of increasing this period of detention, it is worth remembering that when Labour came to power in 1997, the period of detention without charge was just 48 hours - only in exceptional cases could the home secretary grant an extension of up to five days.
Most of the criticism of Gordon Brown's first legislative programme has been wholly unjustified. The drive to build more affordable homes, the raising of the educational leaving age and the extension of flexible working to include the parents of older children all add up to the beginnings of a progressive vision.
But on security, the government's policy has been consistently illiberal and Brown has signalled his intention to continue where Tony Blair left off. On the weekend before the Queen's Speech, I attended a conference held by Progress, new Labour's most cheerleading fringe group, where I spoke at a meeting entitled "Beyond the Politics of Fear: How Does Labour Win the Security Debate?" It struck me that Labour already believes it has won the security debate, a feeling reinforced by the new legislation.
In the court of public opinion - or so the new Labour argument goes - no anti-terrorism measure is too harsh, no curtailment of liberty too far-reaching, just so long as most people believe it is not happening to them. At the same time, the Conservative Party's decision to defend ancient liberties in the face of legislation such as control orders, the extension of detention without trial and ID cards is seen as an open goal for a Labour government that has never been afraid to flex its authoritarian muscles. This leaves us in the strange position where we have the Tories, the Law Lords and most of liberal Britain on one side and the Labour Party and the Daily Mail on the other.
There is some evidence of a shift of tone under Brown - but the softer language of the new Home Secretary and the excision of the phrase "war on terror" from the ministerial lexicon means little when the government is so determined to revise the internment legislation. In the chopped logic of this government, there is no security debate. The last election was won on the present security agenda and the belief is strong that the government has an authoritarian mandate.
It is easy to forget that this government was indulging in the politics of fear long before the events of 7 July 2005; indeed long before 11 September 2001. The direction of travel was indicated by the very first piece of anti-terrorism legislation to be brought in - the Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act 1998. It was this piece of legislation that fundamentally shifted this country's philosophy towards the terrorist threat by making it an offence "to conspire to commit terrorist acts abroad". This ensured that Britain became dependent on other countries' definition of what it was to be a terrorist in order to counter the domestic threat. Our domestic policy became yoked to the demands of foreign policy. The most glaring example of the inconsistency of this policy came when Libya was brought in from the cold. At a stroke, Islamist dissidents of the Gaddafi regime became al-Qaeda terrorists.
What followed was an obsession with foreign terrorist sleeper cells. Thousands of hours of police time and vast sums of public money were wasted on pursuing terror suspects from North Africa against whom there was no serious evidence of terrorist activity. As we now know, to tragic cost, we were looking in completely the wrong direction - the deadliest threat was home-grown.
On the pretext of "the war on terror", fundamental liberties have been swept aside. The Terrorism Act 2000 extended detention without charge to seven days. A year later the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act brought in detention without trial for foreign terror suspects. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 extended the period a suspect could be kept without charge to 14 days. When the Law Lords ruled that holding foreign suspects without trial was unlawful, the government used the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act to introduce "control orders", which restricted the movement of terror suspects using electronic technology and curfews.
Labour's first piece of anti-terrorist legislation was a reaction to the Omagh bombing of 1998, and although the threat has switched from Irish republicanism to Islamist nihilism, the pattern of atrocity followed by crackdown has been maintained. It is interesting to contrast this with the reaction to the Brighton bombing of 1984, in which the IRA targeted the Conservative cabinet at the party conference.
As Simon Jenkins pointed out in his recent book, Thatcher and Sons, the then prime minister did not respond by announcing a new raft of legislation, but by requesting that Marks & Spencer open early to allow survivors to replace clothes lost in the blast. As an admirer of Lady Thatcher, it is a model of leadership Gordon Brown would do well to follow. Faced by the present Islamist threat, a truly courageous government would have held its nerve and refused to allow our fundamental liberties to be whittled away by the men of violence.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200711080012
Página/12:
Señal de paz de Musharraf
ANUNCIO QUE EN FEBRERO HABRA COMICIOS EN PAKISTAN
El dictador de la nación nuclear prometió que el estado de emergencia –vigente desde el sábado– terminará antes de febrero y que dejará el mando del ejército. Estados Unidos, aliado en la lucha antiterrorista, estuvo satisfecho, pero la oposición no.
Por Ana Gabriela Rojas y Yolanda Monge *
Viernes, 09 de Noviembre de 2007
Nueva Delhi y Washington
El presidente de Pakistán, el general Pervez Musharraf, anunció ayer que las elecciones legislativas se celebrarán antes del 15 de febrero –inicialmente planeadas para enero–, que el estado de excepción terminará pronto y que dejará el mando del ejército. Estas promesas llegaron tan sólo pocas horas después de que el presidente de EE.UU., George W. Bush, quien considera al general un indispensable aliado, se lo pidiera en una llamada telefónica con un “mensaje muy sencillo, muy fácil de entender”.
Los comicios habían quedado suspendidos desde el sábado pasado, cuando el general dictó el estado de excepción y descabezó al Tribunal Supremo, justificándolo como una medida necesaria en la lucha contra el terrorismo. Sin embargo, gran parte de los paquistaníes cree que el verdadero motivo es que Musharraf dio un autogolpe de Estado para perpetuarse en el poder, porque los magistrados iban a declarar inconstitucional su reelección por no haber dejado su puesto como jefe del ejército.
Para el presidente, “no hay duda de que las elecciones se celebrarán lo antes posible, antes del 15 de febrero”, después de que se hayan disuelto todas las asambleas para realizar al mismo tiempo las elecciones a nivel nacional y provincial. Por otra parte, el fiscal general Malik Mohammed Qayyum predijo que la medida de excepción será derogada en uno o dos meses, dependiendo de cómo evolucione la situación de la ley y el orden, aclaró.
En tanto, John Negroponte, el número dos del Departamento de Estado norteamericano, reconoció ayer que la administración no piensa utilizar medidas de presión para obligar a Musharraf a retrotraer el estado de excepción. Negroponte admitió en el Capitolio que Musharraf decidió el estado de emergencia ignorando el punto de vista de Estados Unidos. “Le manifestamos una y otra vez nuestra oposición, pero no siguió nuestro consejo”, dijo el funcionario. “Musharraf ha sido indispensable en la lucha global contra el terrorismo, tan indispensable que los extremistas y los radicales han intentado asesinarlo en múltiples ocasiones”, declaró el subsecretario. “Dicho esto, no cabe ninguna duda de que los estadounidenses tenemos mucho en juego en Pakistán”, advirtió, dando a entender que Washington no prepara ningún cambio en Pakistán.
Negroponte hizo las declaraciones ante el Comité de Exteriores de la Cámara de Representantes, controlado por los demócratas, en un momento en que ésta se está planteando revisar la ayuda para aquel país tras la declaración de la ley marcial y la represión política. El Congreso busca cómo aplicar cierto castigo a Musharraf sin herir la sensibilidad de un aliado vital para EE.UU.
Sin embargo, para la ex primera ministra Benazir Bhutto, el anuncio de Musharraf no ha sido suficiente. “Queremos una fecha precisa para las elecciones y una fecha de jubilación. Estas afirmaciones son vagas”, dijo. El partido de Bhutto –el Partido Popular de Pakistán (PPP)– tiene prevista para hoy una manifestación en Rawalpindi, la antigua capital y sede de los cuarteles generales del ejército. “Sabemos de los riesgos de la marcha: podemos ser arrestados o atacados por terroristas, como ya lo ha sido la señora Bhutto el pasado 18 de octubre (ella salió ilesa, pero murieron 140 personas), aunque eso no nos va a detener”, afirmó vía telefónica desde Islamabad el ex senador y portavoz del partido, Farhatulá Babar. Para gran parte de los analistas, Bhutto ha pactado ya con Musharraf, con la presión de EE.UU., para ser primera ministra.
Sin embargo, entre 400 y 800 miembros del PPP han sido arrestados ayer por la noche, informó el partido, después de la ofensiva lanzada por el gobierno paquistaní. En cambio, las autoridades confirmaron el arresto de sólo 140 militantes del PPP. La presión aumentó después de que la líder política liberal instase a protestar el miércoles por la noche contra el estado de excepción. Hasta entonces, la ex primera ministra se había contentado con reclamar el respeto del calendario electoral, porque desde hacía meses negociaba con Musharraf un reparto de poder con motivo de las legislativas.
Por cuarto día, las protestas registradas ayer en Islamabad y Lahore volvieron a ser reprimidas con dureza por la policía. En Karachi, al sur del país, las autoridades acusaron de sedición a tres políticos y un sindicalista por haber criticado el estado de excepción en sus discursos. La sedición es un delito que puede implicar la pena de muerte en Pakistán.
* De El País de Madrid. Especial para Página/12.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-94366-2007-11-09.html
The Independent: The little girl who wanted
a pair of shoes: suicide highlights poverty in Philippines
By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent
Published: 09 November 2007
All she wanted was a bicycle, a pair of new shoes and to be able to finish her schooling. But her family was dirt poor, and eventually the 12-year-old Filipina girl grew so demoralised that she hanged herself.
Mariannet Amper left a letter under her pillow describing her failed hopes and aspirations. Her family also found a diary in which she described the privations of a life with no money in Davao City, on southern Mindanao island.
They are among millions of people living in poverty in the Philippines, a country where the gap between haves and have-nots is wide. Mariannet's father, a construction worker, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that he had been out of work for several months. Her mother works part-time in a noodle factory, earning less than a dollar a day, and takes in laundry.
The night before she killed herself with a nylon rope in their modest hut, which has no electricity or running water, Mariannet had asked her father, Isabelo, for 100 pesos (about £1) for a school project. But he had no money. The next day, he managed to get a 1,000-pesos cash advance for some building work on a chapel. But when he got home to tell her, his daughter was already dead.
"I suspect she did it because of our situation," he told the newspaper.
The letter found under her pillow was addressed to a television programme, I Just Wish, which grants viewers' wishes. In it, Mariannet wrote: "I wish for new shoes, a bag and jobs for my mother and my father. My dad does not have a job and my mum just gets laundry jobs." She added: "I would like to finish my schooling and I would very much like to buy a new bike."
In her diary, Mariannet wrote that she had not attended school for a month. Her parents said she had actually been absent for three days. But they had not had money for her food or transport. In one entry, the girl wrote: "We were not able to hear Mass because we did not have fare and my father had a fever. So my mum and I just washed clothes (for money)."
In the Philippines, nearly 14 per cent of the 87 million population lives on less than a dollar a day, despite government claims that the economy is booming.
President Gloria Arroyo told a business forum yesterday that her economic reforms were bearing fruit. "The common people are now feeling the benefits of a growing economy," she said, announcing that an extra one billion pesos would be given to "hunger mitigation programmes".
In a recent survey, the Social Weather Stations institute found that about nine million Filipino families regarded themselves as poor. Most live in the south of the country. Many of them said they had experienced "severe hunger" in the past three months.
The Global Call for Action Against Poverty, a coalition of anti- poverty groups, said its own research showed that economic growth was not trickling down to the people who needed it.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3143286.ece
The Nation:
Musharraf's Emergency
by GRAHAM USHER
[from the November 26, 2007 issue]
Islamabad
President-General Pervez Musharraf gave two reasons for suspending Pakistan's Constitution for the second time in eight years. One was a rising tide of Islamic militancy. The other was an "interfering" judiciary that was making governance and the army's "war on terror" impossible. He was lying on both counts.
True, Pakistan is under threat from a retrograde Islam. A native "Pakistan" Taliban now rules the tribal regions of Waziristan, backed by foreign militants linked to Al Qaeda. And North West Frontier Province districts like Swat are being overrun by radical clerics. But these insurgencies have been simmering since July, when commandos prized Islamabad's Red Mosque from Islamic radicals and Musharraf broke a cease-fire with the Taliban in Waziristan. On neither occasion did he invoke special powers. He already had them. Similarly, Musharraf has been riled by "judicial activism" ever since he was forced by a mass, lawyer-led campaign to restore Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as Chief Justice in July. The General had sacked him in March, wary that Chaudhry might rule unconstitutional a second presidential term. Since his reinstatement, the Justice has issued rulings against the government, but none could be construed as a cause for martial law. What drew Musharraf's sword was his fear that the Supreme Court would agree with petitions before it that his October re-election was invalid. "The Constitution is clear," says Aitzaz Ahsan, who represented the petitioners. "No person can contest political office while in military service."
Musharraf chose to impose martial law to ensure his survival, coating it in a sugar of "Islamic extremism" and a "politicized judiciary." Will Pakistanis swallow it? Many lawyers say they won't. Since the emergency, hundreds have taken to the streets, hoping their protest will snowball like the movement to reinstate Chaudhry. It's going to be a much tougher fight this time around. In the first few days of martial law some 2,000 were detained, mainly civil society activists. The independent and electronic media have been gagged, and the Supreme Court has been purged. In the days after the decree, the opposition parties were conspicuous by their reticence, as were the masses. "The lawyers need support," says analyst Tarik Fatemi. "This is not just a battle for the judiciary. It's a fight for Pakistan's soul."
Benazir Bhutto wears the soul of Pakistan like a sequined gown. In October she returned to a mass and bloody reception in Karachi, courtesy of a power-sharing deal with Musharraf. On November 7 she arrived in Islamabad, denouncing the dictatorship. She said that for there to be a peaceful resolution of the crisis, Musharraf would have to restore the Constitution, step down as army chief and hold elections, as planned, in January. Otherwise she would raise the immense street power of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) against the emergency, first at a rally in Rawalpindi and then in a "long march" from Lahore.
These demands are echoed in Washington and London, where they were minted. For the Bush Administration especially, Musharraf's resort to martial law is a foreign policy failure on an almost Iraqi scale. Since 9/11, when Musharraf changed sides in the "war on terror," US strategy has been predicated on a simple premise: only a dictator, backed by the army, can pursue that fight in Pakistan. A democratic government might be swayed by public opinion, which is opposed to NATO in Afghanistan and the hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal regions.
For a while the policy worked, more or less: Musharraf kept a lid on domestic dissent in the name of "enlightened moderation" and offered up a steady supply of Al Qaeda and Taliban scalps. Then came the Chief Justice imbroglio of last spring and the realization that the emperor had no populist clothes. And neither had the army. Washington reached for Bhutto. Again, the premise was simple: in return for amnesty on corruption charges-and a seat in government-she and the PPP would lend Musharraf the civilian legitimacy he lacked. "It's a loveless marriage, so the General can combat terrorists and the lady can play democracy," said journalist and historian Ahmed Rashid.
Musharraf's emergency threatens to rend that marriage apart. Washington could reverse it by using its huge financial clout-running at hundreds of millions in military aid a year-to bring the General to heel. Bhutto's three conditions are America's terms for reconciliation. But, make no mistake, they are not about ousting the dictator from Pakistan's politics. They are America's way of keeping him and the army in power. Even so, it's not clear if the General will play ball. Insiders say he prefers the certainty of army command to the vagaries of civilian presidency. In any case, he feels the judiciary is out to get him.
Martial law, or martial law-lite, is not a solution for most Pakistanis. When polled, they are clear: force has to be used against those who spread religion by violence, but development, education and democracy are necessary for those who don't. In all cases, it should be an elected civilian government that decides, not the army or Washington. One thing is certain: Islamic militancy is not born from an overactive judiciary, whatever Musharraf says. It grows from state failure. There is no greater admission of state failure than martial law-and few American foreign policy foul-ups greater than Pakistan.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/usher
ZNet | Africa:
Say No to Africom
by Danny Glover and Nicole C. Lee;
The Nation; November 08, 2007
With little scrutiny from Democrats in Congress and nary a whimper of protest from the liberal establishment, the United States will soon establish permanent military bases in sub-Saharan Africa. An alarming step forward in the militarization of the African continent, the US Africa Command (Africom) will oversee all US military and security interests throughout the region, excluding Egypt. Africom is set to launch by September 2008 and the Senate recently confirmed Gen. William "Kip" Ward as its first commander.
General Ward told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Africom would first seek "African solutions to African problems." His testimony made Africom sound like a magnanimous effort for the good of the African people. In truth Africom is a dangerous continuation of US military expansion around the globe. Such foreign- policy priorities, as well as the use of weapons of war to combat terrorist threats on the African continent, will not achieve national security. Africom will only inflame threats against the United States, make Africa even more dependent on external powers and delay responsible African solutions to continental security issues.
The US militarization of Africa is further rationalized by George W. Bush's claims that Africom "will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa" and promote the "goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth." Yet the Bush Administration fails to mention that securing and controlling African wealth and natural resources is key to US trade interests, which face growing competition from China. Transnational corporations rely on Africa for petroleum, uranium and diamonds-to name some of the continent's bounty. West Africa currently provides 15 percent of crude oil imports to the United States, and that figure is expected to rise to 25 percent by 2015.
Policy-makers seem to have forgotten the legacy of US intervention in Africa. During the cold war, African nations were used as pawns in postcolonial proxy wars, an experience that had a devastating impact on African democracy, peace and development. In the past Washington has aided reactionary African factions that have carried out atrocities against civilians. An increased US military presence in Africa will likely follow this pattern of extracting resources while aiding factions in some of their bloodiest conflicts, thus further destabilizing the region.
Misguided unilateral US military policy to "bring peace and security to the people of Africa" has, in fact, led to inflamed local conflicts, destabilization of entire regions, billions of wasted dollars and the unnecessary deaths of US soldiers. The US bombing of Somalia in January-an attempt to eradicate alleged Islamic extremists in the Horn of Africa-resulted in the mass killing of civilians and the forced exodus of refugees into neighboring nations. What evidence suggests Africom will be an exception?
In contrast, Africa has demonstrated the capacity to stabilize volatile situations on its own. For example, in 1990 the Economic Community of West African States set up an armed Monitoring Group (Ecomog) in response to the civil war in Liberia. At their height, Ecomog forces in Liberia numbered 12,000, and it was these forces-not US or UN troops-that kept Liberia from disintegrating. In another mission, Ecomog forces were instrumental in repelling rebels from Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown.
There are a range of initiatives that can be taken by the US government and civil society to provide development and security assistance to Africa that do not include a US military presence. Foremost, policy toward Africa must be rooted in the principles of African self-determination and sovereignty. The legitimate and urgent development and security concerns of African countries cannot be fixed by dependence on the United States or any other foreign power. Instead of military strategies, African countries need immediate debt cancellation, fair trade policies and increased development assistance that respects indigenous approaches to building sustainable communities. Civil wars, genocide and terrorist threats can and must be confronted by a well-equipped African Union military command.
American policy-makers should be mindful that South Africa, whose citizens overthrew the US-supported apartheid regime, opposes Africom. In addition, Nigeria and the fourteen-nation Southern African Development Community resist Africom. These forces should be joined by other African governments and citizens around the world, to develop Africa's own strong, effective and timely security capacities. Progressive US-Africa policy organizations and related civil society groups have not been sufficiently organized to bring this critical issue before the people of the United States. It is urgent that we persuade progressive US legislators to stop the militarization of aid to Africa and to help ensure Africa's rise to responsible self- determination.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=14232
posted by attilav at 18:51
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