coluichedubita: Elsewhere Today 478

Aljazeera:
Nasrallah: Hezbollah ready to fight

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2008
18:03 MECCA TIME, 15:03 GMT

The secretary-general of Hezbollah has said that his movement is ready for open warfare with Israel, in a speech to supporters mourning the death of a senior commander.

Accusing Israel of killing Imad Moghniyeh in a car bomb blast in the Syrian capital late on Tuesday, Hassan Nasrallah said on Thursday that it had "crossed the borders".

"With this murder, its timing, location and method - Zionists [Israel] if you want this kind of open war, let the whole world listen: Let this war be open," he said.

He also said that Hezbollah fighters had started preparing for the next war immediately after the end of the 2006 war with Israel.

Speaking in a videotaped message to supporters at the funeral service for Moghniyeh in southern Beirut, Nasrallah said: "Like all human beings we have a sacred right to defend ourselves.

"We will do all that it takes to defend our country and people."

The speech by Nasrallah, who is in hiding after the July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, came shortly after an event in the capital to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister.

Security was tight in the capital as thousands of people gathered for the two separate rallies, which highlighted the deep divisions in the country.

Leaders in the pro-government March 14 bloc had supporters in the al-Hariri commemoration to show their rejection of alleged Syrian efforts to regain influence in Lebanon.

Hezbollah, which is supported by Syria and Iran, has led an opposition political bloc against March 14 for the past three years.

Nasrallah vow

Moghniyeh, who was accused by the US of planning attacks on Western targets during the Lebanese civil war, was killed in by car bomb blast in Damascus on Tuesday evening.

Hezbollah has accused Israel of killing Moghniyeh, while Syria, a supporter of Hezbollah, branded the attack a "cowardly and terrorist act".

Nasrallah blamed Israel directly for Moghniyeh's death, and said that the July 2006 war with Israel was continuing, although not on a military level.

"The July war is still continuing - until now, no ceasefire has been proclaimed. This war is continuing at the political level, at the media level, at the financial and material level, at the security level," he said.

"It is supported by the same countries that supported Israel in the July war. This is why [Moghniyeh] was assassinated."

Nasrallah said that the death of Moghniyeh would only strengthen the resistance against Israel.

"Mughniyeh's blood will lead to the elimination of Israel. These words are not an emotional reaction," he said.

Israel has ordered its military, embassies and Jewish institutions around the world to increase security measures in case of revenge attacks, Israeli officials said on Thursday, on condition of anonymity.

Syria blamed

Earlier on Thursday, thousands of people attended a rally to mark the third anniversary of al-Hariri's death.

They carried Lebanese flags and photographs of al-Hariri and other politicians and political figures killed in attacks blamed on Syria.

Al-Hariri was killed in a car bombing on Beirut's seafront in 2005, sparking mass protests and the withdrawal of Syrian troops after 29 years.

Syria denies any links to a series of killings across Lebanon in the past three years.

"In 2005 you took to the streets to force them out. In 2008 you must do the same so that they don't come back," read messages on billboards around Beirut.

In a speech to the rally, Saad al-Hariri, the former prime minister's son and the parliamentary leader of the ruling bloc, said that three years ago forces tried to "assassinate Lebanon".

"Here you are today, gathering once again, responding to the call of freedom, sovereignty and independence," he told the crowd.

Schools and universities were ordered to shut on Thursday, while most businesses were set to close as the government declared a holiday.

Staying at home

Concerns that the two events could spark unrest between opposing political supporters prompted foreign embassies to urge their citizens to observe extreme caution and avoid travel in Beirut.

Al Jazeera's Rula Amin in Beirut said that many Lebanese would welcome the fact that it was raining, hoping that it would keep the turnout at the rallies low and reduce the chances of violence.

"Many people are staying at home, worried and just hoping that today passes without any problems," she said.

"The point that March 14 wants to make here is that they still have support and are willing to fight if necessary."

The day of mourning for both the March 14 ruling bloc and its opponent Hezbollah comes amid continuing differences in Lebanese politics.

There has been a power vacuum in Lebanon since November, with opposing political factions failing to agree on a new president and the distribution of key cabinet portfolios.

Al-Hariri called for the parliamentary vote to confirm General Michel Suleiman as president, which has been postponed 14 times, to go ahead.

"We want a president for the republic," he told the rally.

Israeli denial

The Israeli prime minister's office denied allegations that it had played any role in Moghniyeh's killing.

"Israel rejects the attempts of terror elements to attribute to Israel any involvement in this incident," Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement on Wednesday.

Iran also accused Israel of carrying out the attack.

However, the US welcomed Moghniyeh's killing, saying that he had been responsible for many deaths.

"The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost," Sean McCormack, the US state department spokesman, said on Wednesday.

Also known as Hajj Radhwan, Moghniyeh was widely suspected of being behind a wave of Western hostage-taking in Lebanon in the 1980s, claims denied by Hezbollah.

According to the US and the West, he was a "top terrorist" and was involved in the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in April 1983.

The US also claims he was involved in the killing of hundreds of US marines and French paratroopers in simultaneous truck bomb attacks in October 1983.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7B35F189-3CF2-4EFE-8281-ED0C49B61B88.htm

AllAfrica:
New Earthquake Hits Lake Kivu

allAfrica.com NEWS
14 February 2008

An earthquake hit the Lake Kivu region today and was reported to have brought down houses and injured people.

Monitoring carried out by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) indicated that the quake measured 5.4 on the Richter scale and that its epicentre was 25 km north of Bukavu. It follows a bigger earthquake 11 days ago, which killed nearly 40 people in the region.

Agence France Presse today reported the mayor of Bukavu, Guillaume Bonga, as saying the earthquake has caused panic:

"A lot of people left their homes during the night," he said. "Some houses have collapsed and there are injuries, but I do not yet have the details," said mayor of Bukavu, the provincial capital."

The region is part of the East African Rift System, which stretches from Ethiopia in the north to the Zambezi River in the south. It is, according to the USGS "a rare example of an active continental rift zone, where a continental plate is attempting to split into two plates which are moving away from one another."

Copyright © 2008 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200802140388.html

AlterNet: Maude Barlow:
The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on February 14, 2008

From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the scope of the world's water woes. Her newest book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, details her discoveries around the globe about our diminishing water resources, the increasing privatization trend and the grassroots groups that are fighting back against corporate theft, government mismanagement and a changing climate.

If you want to know where the water is running low (including 36 U.S. states), why we haven't been able to protect it and what we can do to ensure everyone has the right to water, Barlow's book is an essential read. It is part science, part policy and part impassioned call. And the information in Blue Covenant couldn't come from a more reliable source. Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which is instrumental in the international community in working for the right to water for all people. She also authored Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World's Water with Tony Clarke. And she's the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (known as the "Alternative Nobel") for her global water justice work.

She took a moment to talk to AlterNet in between the Canadian and U.S. legs of a book tour for Blue Covenant. (Barlow just kicked off her U.S. tour; for a list of tour stops and dates, click here).

Tara Lohan: This year in the U.S. there has been a whole lot press about the drought in Atlanta and the Southeast, and I think for a lot of people in the U.S. it is the first they are hearing about drought, but the crisis here in North America is really pretty extreme isn't it?

Maude Barlow: It really is, and it kind of surprises me when I hear people, for instance in Atlanta say, "We didn't know it was coming." I don't know how that could be possible, and I do have to say that I blame our political leaders. I don't understand how they could not have been reading what I've been reading and what anyone who is watching this has been reading.

I remember attending a conference in Boise, Idaho, three years ago and hearing a lot of scientists get up and say, "Read my lips, this isn't a drought, this is permanent drying out." We are overpumping the Ogallala, Lake Powell and Lake Meade. The back up systems are now being depleted. This is by no means a drought ...

The thing that I'm trying to establish with the first chapter, which is called "Where Has All the Water Gone," is that what we learned in grade five about the hydrologic cycle being a closed, fixed cycle that could never be interrupted and could never go anywhere, is not true. They weren't lying to us, but they weren't aware of the human capacity to destroy it, and the reality is that we've interrupted the hydrologic cycle in many parts of the world and the American Southwest is one of them.

TL: How is this happening?

MB: By farming in deserts and taking up water from aquifers or watersheds. Or by urbanizing - massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff - vegetation and grass - so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

We are massively polluting surface water, so that the water may be there, but we can't use it. And we are also mining groundwater faster than it can be replenished by nature, which means we are not allowing the cycle to renew itself. The Ogallala aquifer is one example of massive overpumping. There are bore wells in the Lake Michigan shore that go as deep into the ground as Chicago skyscrapers go into the ground and they are sucking groundwater that should be feeding the lake so hard that they are pulling up lake water now, and they are reversing the flow of water in Lake Michigan for the first time.

We are interrupting the natural cycle. And another thing we are doing is something called virtual water trade. That is where you send water out of the watershed in the form of products or agriculture. You've used the water to produce something and then you export it, and about 20 percent of water used in the world is exported out of watershed in this way, because so much of our economy is about export. In the U.S. you are sending about one-third of your water out of watersheds - it is not sustainable.

This is not a cyclical drought. We are actually creating hot stains, as I and some scientists call them, around the world. These are parts of the world that are running out of water and will be, or are, in crisis. Which means that millions more people will be without water. I argue that this is one of the causes of global warming. We usually hear water being a result of climate change, and it is, particularly with the melting of the glaciers. But our abuse, mismanagement and treatment of water is actually one of the causes, and we have not placed that analysis at the center of our thinking about climate change and environmental destruction, and until we do, we are only addressing half the question.

I do blame in a very big way, the political leadership in most of our countries for having failed to heed the call of scientists and ecologists and water managers who've been telling us for years now there is a crisis coming - there are 36 states in the U.S. in some form of water stress, from serious to severe. Thirty-six states! Most Americans don't know this - why is this not part of people's everyday concerns? That is what I'm hoping this book will help do.

TL: Do you think governments, like the U.S. or Canada, have any kind of a contingency plan?

MB: No. There are people in the U.S. who believe Canada is the contingency plant. Or Northeast water or Alaska water. So, moving water is one of the contingency plans, likely by pipeline. You could also ship it by tanker. Other than that, no. And not only are there no backup plans, but there is not even an understanding that you've got to stop increasing the demand on water. In the U.S., people are moving into the very area of the country that has no water - a huge migration is taking place to to the American Southwest where they're building more golf courses.

I just read about a new water theme park in Arizona that will have waves so big you can have serious surfers, like real surfing in the desert. There is just this lack of understanding about how nature works, how the hydrologic cycle needs to be protected and how watersheds need to be protected, and when you start playing god by moving this stuff around like this we are just creating this massive crisis. There is not enough water for the demands being made on it in the American Southwest.

TL: You said 36 states in the U.S. are water stressed - what does that actually mean for the people who live there?

MB: Well, in a dire case, literally running out of water. In many other cases, the predictions are that the demand will increase seriously and they've got to start planning. I quote in the book that the demand in Florida is growing so much and overpumping is happening so much that there are actually sink holes opening up and swallowing homes and streets and sometimes whole shopping centers. It is called subsidence. Mexico City is sinking in on itself because all the water under the city has been taken out and now they are going farther afield pumping water.

It can go from that kind of crisis, or as in some communities in the Midwest, you face having no water to the Chicago area, where the demand is going to grow hugely, and therefore the demand will be on the Great Lakes, which are already in trouble. There are four trillion liters taken out of the Great Lakes every single day and believe me, nature is not putting a trillion gallons back in. It is not rocket science that we are not allowing nature to refill and replenish. And now there are new demands on the Great Lakes because communities and industries off the basin are now demanding access to it.

TL: You mentioned global warming earlier, and I just want to come back to that for a moment. Are we approaching climate change in the wrong way by not recognizing its connection to water?

MB: Yes.

TL: So what should we be doing?

MB: Well, we have to put it into the equation. I've found that some politicians are actually using global warming as an excuse not to do anything, and I'll give you an example. It is the polar opposite of the Bush administration, which is that global warming doesn't exist. In Australia, which thankfully has gone through a government change, they are disengaging the water from the countryside and letting farmers sell it through brokers, they are disrupting streams and aquifers. They are draining the wetlands. They are privatizing. They are doing all sorts of things wrong, including overusing and polluting it, and so on. And what did the prime minister say? "It's got nothing to do with anything we're doing; it's global warming, and it blew here from away - we didn't even create it."

I think global warming is becoming a little bit of a catch all for some governments to do nothing or to put off a solution to other things until they find a solution to global warming, and there is no excuse. Right now we have got to stop the abuse of water. The single most important thing that we can do for global warming, aside from stopping the overpumping of greenhouse gas emissions, but the twin to that is to retain water in watersheds. Because the hydrologic cycle is what cools the temperature.

Global warming can be averted through a great extent if we could maintain watersheds and maintain the cycle in its purest form. That means keeping green spaces, building green rings around urban centers - everything from parks and gardens - stop polluting, stop overmining groundwater and retain water in watersheds, which means we have to live more sustainably, we have to grow our food differently, we have to stop believing in unlimited growth and more stuff and more competition, and all of that.

I find that global warming is such a crisis that we won't do anything on any other front because all our attention is going there. I think we are terribly missing the boat on this, and I'm very interested in getting a debate going on this in the climate-change community so that when people are talking about the causes of climate change, our drying up of the earth from below will be considered as serious a cause as the trapping of heat from greenhouse gas emissions. It is not only part of the analysis we are missing, but part of the solution.

TL: That is interesting. I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it from that angle.

MB: Nobody.

I'm working with a group of scientists in Slovakia and a few other places, voices in the wilderness, but when you start putting it together, honestly, it makes such sense. I mean if you start to look at the growth of deserts - in the last 30 years we've doubled the growth of deserts in the world, and it will double again in 20 years. Well, if you are creating deserts and you've got heat rising from the earth with urban heat islands, the inability for the hydrologic cycle to be maintained because of urbanization, it makes a lot of sense. Of course that is all exacerbated by melting glaciers and the lowering of the ice packs, which protects from evaporation. It is kind of a deadly combination. I spoke at a conference about this recently in London, England, and was received by people from the climate change world, really, really well, and I thought "This is a good sign."

TL: You spent a lot of time in this book, and also in Blue Gold, talking about privatization. Can you talk a little about why we should be concerned about it?

MB: Well, as water dwindles in the world and available fresh water is becoming more scarce, the demand is growing, water is becoming a commodity, it is becoming valuable to those who want to put a price on it, which is why I called the first book Blue Gold. And this blue gold is attracting private sector interest in many, many ways, and there is a private sector interest coming together to control every level of water, from when we take it out of the ground, bottle it, to how we deliver it, to wastewater treatment, and now the biggest and newest is water reuse and recycling. That sounds benign at first, but when you really start to look at it, really it is about big, big corporations like GE, Dow Chemical, Proctor & Gamble getting into the ownership, control, and recycling of dirty water, which because there are billions of dollars at stake, in my opinion, becomes a disincentive to protect source water. And you can start to understand why governments, in collusion with these companies, are starting to spend millions of dollars on cleanup technology but will not enforce rules to stop pollution in the first place.

And then we have desalination. There are 30 desal plants planned for California alone. They are now talking about nuclear-powered desalination. They are talking about building those plants as we speak. The people in the anti-nuclear movement had better dust off and come back because it is all coming back with desalination. And then there is nanotechnology, which they want to be totally deregulated. I've got a great quote in the book where this guy says, "We are going to do to water what we did to telecommunications in the 1990s," which is total deregulation. They want governments out of the business of water.

I have a whole section in the book on how water has become such a hot commodity. When I wrote Blue Gold there was no water being exchanged on the Stock Exchange, now there are over a dozen indexes just for trading water. It has become a multi-multibillion-dollar industry just overnight. A lot of it is this water reuse - it is the fast-growing section of the water industry. I argue that there is a race going on over who's going to control water, whether it will be seen as a public commons, a public trust, and part of our collective heritage that also belongs to the earth - or whether it will be controlled by private corporations, and I don't know who will win.

TL: But it is not all bad news.

MB: No, we are making good inroads in the bottled water area - a lot of universities, high schools, are having drives to reject bottled water. We're getting restaurants now taking the challenge up to not serve bottled water, and we're getting people to take a pledge not to drink bottled water.

There has been a huge fight back from the big utility companies, particularly in the global south, to the extent that Suez has basically announced it is going to leave Latin America because people are so furious with them, which has been the result of fabulous grass-roots activism. So, it is not that this is a done deal, but most of the our governments are supportive of these private-sector incursions.

It is all about technology and not about lifestyle and alternative ways and decreasing growth and stuff - they are saying we are not going to challenge the model, it is unlimited growth, continued competition, continued economical globalization, continued privatization, continued deregulation - we'll just continue to find ways to clean up the mess as we go along.

TL: Water is not just an environmental issue, but a national security issue, you discovered with this book.

MB: Yes, water has become an issue of national security in the U.S. Six years ago I couldn't find any inkling at the national level - the Pentagon or White House - of a coming water crisis, either globally or in the U.S. But in the last, two to three years, this has been hugely changed. There is now a consortium advising the Bush administration and the Pentagon - it is called Global Water Futures. It is made up of this think tank called the Center for International Studies and Sandia Laboratories. Then I dug deeper and found it is being contracted out to be run by Lockheed Martin. And this consortium involves Coke and Proctor & Gamble and others. So you finally have the U.S. government saying, "Holy crap, we're in trouble here, you can't be a super power if you don't have energy and water." Now they've got this advisory body that not only has this think tank and the corporate side too, and the high technology side, and the military side. It becomes very clear what you are dealing with.

TL: Can you talk more about the grass-roots resistance to all of this?

MB: The thing that is so stunning, especially in the global south, is that when you are dealing with water, you are dealing with life and death. For a lot of people it is like, "Well, we didn't know what to do when they privatized our education or shut down our public hospitals - but water is different." They are willing to go the wall for it - as one person said to me, "You may as well kill me with a bullet as dirty water." People just take a stand and are determined they are not going to compromise.

We took the time as a movement ... whenever anybody always asks me how to build a campaign, I always include these steps. We took the time to find language that we all jointly agreed on - that water is not a commodity, that it belongs to the earth and all species, it is a public trust and human right, and so on. We've taken the time to work this out so that if you ask any of us around the world, you are going to hear the same kind of language. There is a trust that we have built in this shared philosophy and shared vision.

TL: How is it that you've managed to create such as worldwide message and come together?

MB: Part of the origin was when I wrote a report for the International Forum on Globalization back in 1999. It was called Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply. It took off, and a bunch of people from around the world started reading it. We got it translated into many, many languages, and I started hearing from people saying, "I thought this was personal and we were fighting this particular company in our community, and we didn't know that this was a global fight."

So, to my knowledge, that was the first analysis, and that morphed into the book. I started traveling and meeting people and Food & Water Watch got set up in the U.S. And then there was meeting people in Europe who were fighting big water companies, coming together at the big World Water Forum and bringing folks together from the global south to challenge what we call the "lords of water." And, of course, technology has been incredible. You don't have to have a computer in every house - you just have to have somebody on the other end who has the capacity to receive this information.

TL: What else do we need to be doing?

MB: We need laws. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Legislation won't change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless." We need legislation at every level of our government. It is all well for grass-roots people to do all their wonderful work - but they shouldn't have to do all the work. We need laws at every level, from municipal up to state to national to international, that protect water ecologically on one hand and protect the notion of a human right and right of the earth, and not a commodity, and that is so fundamental.

That is why I call the book "blue covenant" - we need a covenant of three parts - from humans to the earth to stop destroying the lifeblood of the earth, from the rich to the poor (global north to the south) for water justice, not charity - justice. Water should be a fundamental right for all generations, and no one should be allowed to sell it for profit. We want this right up to the United Nations. It is a struggle at every level. But we just keep going. The fight back around the world is claiming space, but we have to have the weight of law behind us. We have to make, as a society, decisions about what matters. And if we believe that people shouldn't die because they can't afford water, then we have to bring things to bear to make that happen - we have to change things. If the World Bank has money to give to Suez or Veolia, they've got the money to give to a public agency.

TL: So are you hopeful we can move change in the right direction?

MB: I'm always hopeful - it is part of my job. I consider hope to be a moral imperative, and I also don't think you have any right to go around alarming people with these facts unless you are also prepared to talk about what needs to be done, and success stories, and be hopeful. I am very very hopeful that we can collectively do this.

If I'm worried - it is about the exponential abuse of water - can we catch this and stop it fast enough?

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/76819/

Arab News:
Hezbollah No. 2 Assassinated

Ibrahim Salek, Arab News
Thursday 14 February 2008 (07 Safar 1429)

BEIRUT, 14 February 2008 — Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Imad Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in the Syrian capital Damascus late on Tuesday. The hugely popular Lebanese group immediately blamed Israel for assassinating Mughniyeh who headed Hezbollah’s special operations unit.

Syrian state television reported that one person died in the bombing without identifying the victim but Hezbollah confirmed early yesterday that it was Mughniyeh.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television interrupted its normal programming to broadcast Qur’anic verses to mark the commander’s death.

Residents of Mughniyeh’s home village of Tair Debba, some five kilometers east of the Lebanese coastal town of Tyre, gathered in the street to listen to radio and television reports of his death. “We heard that he had been killed in a car bombing in Syria,” village chief Hussein Saad told reporters, adding that he had declared three days of mourning.

Hezbollah announced that Mughniyeh’s funeral service would be held today.

Witnesses in Damascus said that the bomb went off in a car park in the newly completed residential neighborhood of Kfar Suseh just before midnight on Tuesday. The rear of the Mitsubishi Pajero was entirely blown out by the force of the blast. After the explosion, police prevented journalists from getting close to the scene to see if there had been casualties. The windows of nearby buildings were blown out and four cars were also damaged.

The legendary fighter, who was in his late 40s, had long been on a list of people Israel wanted to kill or apprehend. The United States had offered a reward of $5 million for his capture. Mughniyeh was implicated in the 1983 bombings of the US Embassy and US Marine and French peacekeeping barracks in Beirut, which killed over 350 people, as well as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.

“After a life full of jihad, sacrifices and accomplishments, Mughniyeh died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists,” said Hezbollah, which successfully fought a 34-day war in 2006 with the Jewish state. The war was allegedly triggered by a Hezbollah cross-border raid in which two Israeli soldiers were captured. According to Israeli intelligence assessments, Mughniyeh was involved in masterminding that raid.

Israel accuses Mughniyeh of planning the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 87 people and of involvement in a 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital that killed 28.

“He was not only being targeted by Israel, but also by the Americans and many others,” said former Mossad head Danny Yatom. “He was one of the terrorists with the largest number of intelligence agencies and states chasing him.”

Mughniyeh had been a very tough target to track, he said, describing his death as a severe blow to Hezbollah. “He behaved with extreme caution for many years. It was impossible even to obtain his picture. He never appeared or spoke to the media. His identity was hidden. His steps were hidden, and that was the reason it was difficult to get to him for so many years.”

Hamas and Iran joined Hezbollah in accusing Israel of assassinating Mughniyeh, saying it was a new example of Zionist gangsterism.

Sami Abu Zuhri, the Hamas spokesman, called on Arabs and Muslims to “face up to this Zionist octopus whose crimes are now passing beyond the Palestinian territories to touch the Arab and Islamic world.”

Iran described it as an act of state terrorism. “This measure is the result and another prominent example of organized state terrorism by the Zionist regime (Israel),” IRNA quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Ali Hosseini as saying.

He praised Mughniyeh, saying his life would constitute “a golden page in the popular struggle against Zionist aggressors and occupiers.”

In Washington, however, the United States applauded Mughniyeh’s killing. “The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass-murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. “One way or another he was brought to justice.”

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine accused Mossad of being behind the killing. “Mughniyeh was assassinated by the Zionist Mossad ... which was aware of the important status of the martyr and the privileged role he played in the jihad,” it said in a statement issued in Damascus. “The Zionist murderers and their agents should know that the resistance will respond by aiming its bullets and its explosives at the leaders of Zionist terrorism and their agents,” the statement added.

Mughniyeh was thought to be the commander of Islamic Jihad, a group that emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s and was believed to have links with Hezbollah. Islamic Jihad members kidnapped several Western hostages, including Americans, in Beirut in the mid-1980s.

The group killed a few of its captives and exchanged others for US weapons to Iran in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Among those tortured and killed was William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Lebanon.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office denied that Israel was behind the killing. “Israel rejects any attempt by terrorist organizations to attribute to it any implication in this affair,” a statement from his office said. “We have nothing else to add.”

Israel rarely confirms or denies its involvement in assassinations abroad. In 1992, its helicopters killed Sayyed Abbas Moussawi, who preceded Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as Hezbollah’s leader.

Mughniyeh’s brother was killed in a car bomb in Beirut in 1994. Reports at the time suggested Imad had been the target.

Israeli Environment Minister Gideon Ezra, a former director of Israel’s domestic security agency Shin Beth, welcomed the news, calling Mughniyeh “Lebanon’s Carlos.” That was a reference to “Carlos the Jackal,” a legendary Venezuelan fighter responsible for many attacks in the 1980s, who is now serving a life sentence in a French prison.

“I hope that every terrorist knows that he will eventually be caught, and I am glad that this has happened to Moughniyah. And I hope that whoever did this receives the congratulations he is due,” said Ezra.

Mughniyeh’s assassination comes as Lebanon is mired in its worst political crisis since the 1975-90 Civil War. The country has been without a president since November when pro-Syrian head of state Emile Lahoud stepped down with no successor in place amid deadlock between the Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition.

Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=106740&d=14&m=2&y=2008

Asia Times:
Death of Hezbollah kingpin: A war awaits

By Ehsan Ahrari
Feb 15, 2008

Those who live by the sword must die by the sword. Imad Mughniyeh must have known the adage, and now he, like all of his alleged victims, has met a violent death, of all places, in Syria, where he was hiding because that was perceived to be the safest place for him.

The 45-year-old Mughniyeh was said to be one of Hezbollah's top security strategists and high on America's list of wanted "terrorists". His last reported public appearance was at his brother Fuad's funeral in 1994 in Beirut.

Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in Damascus on Tuesday in an up-market district that houses an Iranian school, a police station and a Syrian intelligence office, Hezbollah announced on Wednesday.

Hezbollah immediately accused Israel of assassinating Mughniyeh, who led the group's security network during the 1975-90 civil war in Lebanon. He was reportedly targeted by the Israelis for many years, while the Americans had a US$5 million award for information leading to his arrest.

"After a life full of jihad, sacrifices and accomplishments ... Hajj Imad Mughniyeh ... died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists," Hezbollah said. "The martyr had been a target for Zionists for 20 years."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office responded in a brief statement, "Israel rejects the attempts of terror elements to attribute to Israel any involvement."

The United States was explicit in expressing satisfaction at his death. According to State Department's spokesman Sean McCormack, "The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost. One way or another, he was brought to justice."

Among other acts, Mughniyeh had been accused of involvement in the 1983 bombings of the US Embassy and US Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, which killed more than 350 people, as well as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon during the 1980s.

The world may be a better place, but the chances of another outbreak of violence between Hezbollah and Israel have escalated by more than a few notches.

Mughniyeh had a shady background throughout his adult existence. He was born in poverty, but no one knows for sure whether in Lebanon or Iran. It is unlikely it will ever become known who is responsible for his death, but that is of the least consequence.

What is important is that, even though the Hezbollah-Israeli hot war of July-August 2006 is officially over, that war continues. Israel cannot get over the fact that its conventional deterrence - that pretty much established to the Arab world, through the 1967 and 1973 wars, that the Israeli armed forces were invincible - was seriously jeopardized in 2006. The best-equipped forces in the Middle East could not eradicate Hezbollah.

After the ceasefire, neither Hezbollah nor the Israelis has ceased preparations for the next skirmish, except that the next round is likely to be bloodier and more destructive than the one in 2006.

Not too many authoritative volumes can be expected to be written on the Hezbollah-Israeli war of 2006; however, persons of Mughniyeh's background must have played a crucial role in it - he was Hezbollah's head of special operations. In that capacity, he must have had a role in the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers that ignited the war.

To understand the significance of Mughniyeh to Hezbollah, the following comment is pertinent. It was made to Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post by Ali Hassan Khalil, who is a member Parliament with Amal, another Shi'ite Muslim group allied with Hezbollah, "This is a loss of a major pillar in resistance work. He was an expert at making victories and building fighting capacities against Israel. He played an essential role in all resistance activities, especially the last war."

Mughniyeh undoubtedly also played an unpublicized but important role in the ongoing behind-the-scenes tug-and-pull between the Israeli, Iranian and Syrian intelligence forces. He had become a major figure in Hezbollah's shadowy military apparatus, and a central pro-Iranian figure. In that capacity, he was important both operationally as well as strategically.

He also had long-standing ties to Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network.

Unfortunately, the death of one violent man, more often than not, leads to even more violence. The streets of Damascus - where Mughniyeh was killed - and Beirut - where he had lived - are already abuzz with talk of vengeance.

Translated into the language of high politics, this means that the chances of an outbreak of violence between Hezbollah and Israel are high. Syria and Iran - the real players in this fight - are not about to take on the Israel. But Damascus knows that Israel is itching to get even with Hezbollah. Similarly, Tehran knows that both the US and Israel are eagerly looking for an opportunity to neutralize its nuclear option.

In the high-powered calculations of nation-states - especially major regional actors, which Iran, Syria and Israel are - the promotion of their strategic interests are much too vital to be sacrificed by risking wars. Entities like Hezbollah, on the contrary, are eminently expendable.

"Small wars" -a la the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel - are also acceptable, even though they contain the risk of escalating into a major war. Not many people wish to hear this, but in those calculations, even a high level of "collateral damage" (another bureaucratic and dehumanizing phrase that serves as a euphemism for civilian death) is "acceptable", as long as those who lose their lives are not Iranians, Syrians or Israelis.

Aside from a possible outbreak of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel related to Mughniyeh's death, another option for Syria and Iran might be to destabilize Lebanon.

That option is least risky in the sense that it would not necessarily lead to a war between Israel and Syria, but it would keep both the US and Israel more focused on Lebanon, rather than on either Iran or Syria. Lebanon is likely to suffer the consequences of the games that are being played between Iran, Syria and Israel.

Lebanon's civilians have never chosen to live by the sword. However, one miserable consequence of being a Lebanese is that someone else is determining that they must die by the sword.

Ehsan Ahrari is professor of Security Studies (Counterterrorism) at the Asia-Pacific Center of Security Studies. Views expressed in this essay are strictly private and do not reflect those of the APCSS, the United States Pacific Command, or any other agency of the US government.

Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JB15Ak02.html

Clarín:
ENTREVISTA

"Me siento un hombre vivo que aún quiere ver lo que está pasando en el mundo."

Fotoperiodista en cinco guerras y autor de innumerables retratos de personalidades históricas, el suizo René Burri conversó con Ñ y desgranó detalles de la carrera que lo convirtió en una leyenda viva de la imagen. Luego se inaguró, en el Centro Cultural Borges de Buenos Aires, una gran muestra suya.

Por: Andrés Hax
13.02.2008

Es asombroso ver a René Burri parado solo en el lobby del Centro Cultural Borges. Está ajustando un cartel como si fuera el mero asistente del curador. Dentro de unos minutos estará rodeado de fotógrafos, periodistas, diplomáticos y admiradores, a quienes dará una larga y amena visita guiada de su muestra, recién inaugurada, que repasa toda su carrera como fotógrafo de la legendaria agencia Magnum. Allí están los retratos íntimos del Che y de Picasso; imágenes de sus viajes por el mundo entero; su fotoperiodismo de guerra y sus frescas e hipnóticas instantáneas callejeras. Uno tiene la extraña sensación, al ver la muestra, de que ya conoce todas las imágenes. Es que ya son parte de la memoria colectiva del siglo XX. Y son parte de la definición del siglo XX. Tal vez en quinientos años la humanidad las mire como hoy miramos los vitrales de las catedrales medievales o los frescos del Renacimiento. Son a la vez productos y testigos de un momento de la civilización.

Es asombroso ver a Burri en persona, allí en la sala del Borges, solo con su bufanda larga y su sombrero Panamá. Asombra por su humildad y su entusiasmo. Cuando lo acosamos para hacerle una breve videoentrevista contesta sonriente: "Sí, claro, vení. ¿Has visto las fotos? Vení que te muestro." Después, hablando distendido, le da su cámara al reportero para que la tenga en su mano. Me dice, señalando la pantalla detrás de la Leica: "Mirá esa foto. Es la primera que saque en mi vida." Es Winston Churchill, parado faraónicamente sobre una carroza. La sacó cuando tenía 13 años.

Dice un cliché que los genios son como niños. Que en realidad lo que les pasa es que nunca se olvidaron de cómo jugar. En el caso de Burri se ve y no es un cliché. Cuando lo interrumpe una periodista para hacerle una nota y, nerviosa, le cuesta arrancar, él levanta su Leica y la retrata. Delante de su foto inmortal del Che con un Habano, Burri se pone a jugar prendiéndose un Habano e imitando la pose del comandante. Cuando habla de sus fotos es con una soltura e informalidad que le hace olvidar a uno que está delante de una leyenda viva.
Lo que sigue es la trascripción al español de la entrevista que se puede ver en este mismo sitio en inglés.

Esta parte de la muestra se llama Utopía y Destrucción. Usted ha sido uno de los espectadores privilegiados del siglo XX. ¿Piensa que la humanidad está yendo más hacía la destrucción o hacia la utopía?

Por el momento me parece que el énfasis está demasiado en la destrucción. El mundo es amplio y aún se puede hacer algo para salvarnos del gran desastre..., si hubiera más gente más razonable intentando resolver los problemas de nuestro mundo. Aparte de esto, de las cosas de las cuales fui testigo (me haya gustado serlo o no), aún soy optimista por que la opción que tenemos es la humanidad. Yo he visto lo peor y lo mejor. Entonces, tengamos esperanza y vayamos para delante.

¿Cómo convive con la fotografía cotidianamente? ¿Siempre está con la cámara encima? ¿Siempre mira el mundo como fotógrafo?

Sí. Pero hay más en la vida que la fotografía. Cuando era joven no sabía qué hacer de mi vida: sabía lo que no quería hacer. Pero tuve que hacer muchas cosas para aprender en qué dirección ir. Estudié arte, porque de niño siempre dibujaba. Entonces mis padres pensaron que sería pintor o diseñador gráfico. Y al fin terminé en la sección fotográfica de la escuela de arte, no pensando en la fotografía sino en en el cine. Quise hacer cine. Que lo hice por un rato. Pero después me di cuenta de que, como cuando era chico, viendo películas de Mickey Mouse y de los rusos y Orson Welles, uno pensaba que iba a hacer películas como ésas. Pero uno se da cuenta de que no es tan fácil lograrlo.

Entonces, por fin, tras recibirme, tenía un poco de dinero y me compré una Leica. Y se convirtió en mi tercer ojo. Y no es que fuera tanto más fácil que hacer cine, pero no tenía que depender de otras personas para hacer las cosas. En ese momento para hacer una película necesitabas un equipo de gente, necesitabas mucho soporte. Ahora —como estás haciendo vos ahora con esa Sony— podés hacer cine en tu casa. La tecnología ha avanzado tanto.

Pero, volviendo al punto inicial, hemos progresado, pero no es suficiente. Aún hacen falta el cerebro, el ojo, el corazón, y los pies. ¡Ahora puedes fotografiar a mis pies!

¿Considera que la fotografía digital es una transformación completa de la fotografía, o es un paso más en su evolución?

Creo que lo será. Acá tengo una cámara digital donde puedo cargar cuatrocientas o quinientas imágenes. En los viejos tiempos tenía que ir cargando mis películas y mis cámaras. Entonces, eso es algo.

¿Y siente alguna nostalgia por lo viejo?

Por el momento tengo tantas cosas hechas... Mirá, el problema es: ¿Vamos a tener papel fotográfico? ¿No habrá más Kodachrome [diapositivas]. Ya no se revelan más. Toda la industria ha cambiado por estas invenciones. El problema será —y esto no es mi problema, sino el de las futuras generaciones— es: ¿cómo vamos a conservar todo esto?

¿Hay una posibilidad de que estos archivos digitales no sobrevivan cien años?

Está bien, pero eso es problema de ustedes. Me siento un poco culpable usando esta cámara. Pero aún para mí es el mismo mirar, y clickear con mi ojo. Y sentir, no tanto como fotógrafo, sino como un hombre que aún está vivo y aún quiere ver lo que está pasando en el mundo.

Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/02/13/01606739.html

Guardian: Hizbullah leader
vows to wage 'open war' on Israel

Mark Tran, James Sturcke and agencies
Thursday February 14 2008

Hizbullah's leader today vowed to wage "open war" against Israeli targets around the world after accusing Israel of assassinating the organisation's militant commander, Imad Mughniyeh.

Hassan Nasrallah said Israel, which has denied carrying out the killing in the Syrian capital Damascus, had acted "outside the natural battlefield".

"You have crossed the borders," Nasrallah said in a fiery eulogy at Mughniyeh's funeral in south Beirut. "With this murder, its timing, location and method - Zionists, if you want this kind of open war, let the whole world listen: let this war be open."

"Like all human beings we have a sacred right to defend ourselves," said Nasrallah, speaking in a videotaped message broadcast over a giant screen at the ceremony. "We will do all that takes to defend our country and people."

Nasrallah went into hiding in 2006, fearing a possible assassination attempt and making only three public appearances since the summer war that year with Israel.

Mughniyeh, the alleged mastermind of a series of terrorist atrocities which killed hundreds of people in Lebanon and overseas, died in a car bombing on Tuesday.

Nasrallah warned that Israel's killing of Mughniyeh was a "very big folly" which Israel will eventually pay for.

"Mughniyeh's blood will lead to the elimination of Israel. These words are not an emotional reaction," he said, drawing roars from the crowd which raised fists into the air.

In heavy rain, supporters of Hizbullah turned out for the funeral of its top commander.

Mughniyeh was on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists, and the US state department had offered a $5m (£2.5m) reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

He was indicted in the US for his role in planning the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a US Navy diver was killed.

He was also accused of carrying out or directing a series of attacks, including suicide bombings of the US Marines barracks and two embassy compounds in Beirut in the 1980s.

Israel has instructed embassies and Jewish institutions around the world to be on heightened alert in case of revenge attacks, and its army has stepped up security on the border with Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories.

The Hizbullah-linked newspaper As-Safir said Nasrallah had quickly appointed a replacement for Mughniyeh as head of the secretive "Jihadi Council", but did not identify the replacement.

Amid fears of street violence, the US embassy encouraged American citizens in Lebanon to limit all but essential travel. Across Beirut, businesses and shops put off popular Valentine's Day celebrations for later in the week.

Meanwhile, thousands of anti-Hizbullah supporters poured into Beirut's Martyrs' Square for the third anniversary of the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

They waved Lebanese flags and carried pictures of Hariri and party banners. Crowds paid their respects at his grave site next to the downtown square as his brother, Shafik, unveiled a statue of the dead leader at the spot where he was killed, a few hundred metres away on a seaside boulevard.

A flame was lit and a taped message broadcast from Hariri's widow, Nazek, who lives in Paris, urging against "falling into hatred" and calling for "unity to save the country".

Hariri's supporters blame Syria for killing the prominent politician in a suicide truck bombing in Beirut three years ago and for a series of bombings and assassinations since. Hariri's assassination triggered ignited mass protests and international pressure that forced Syria to withdraw its army from Lebanon after 29 years.

The anti-Syrian parliamentary majority had hoped a massive show of popular support on the anniversary would force the Hizbullah-led opposition to compromise in a 15-month political stalemate that has paralysed the country.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/14/lebanon.israelandthepalestinians

Internazionale:
False buone notizie

I risultati dei sondaggi condotti in Afghanistan e in Iraq non dovrebbero essere ignorati

Noam Chomsky
Internazionale 730, 7 febbraio 2008

L'esercito di occupazione statunitense in Iraq (chiamato eufemisticamente Forza multinazionale) fa regolarmente dei sondaggi tra gli iracheni. Il rapporto pubblicato nel dicembre 2007, che presenta i risultati di un'indagine condotta su alcuni gruppi campione, è stato insolitamente ottimista.

Secondo il rapporto, il sondaggio "ha smentito" l'idea che "la riconciliazione nazionale è impossibile e nessuno ci conta". È emerso, invece, che "tutti i gruppi campione erano moderatamente ottimisti" e che "tra gruppi diversi di iracheni c'erano molti più punti in comune che differenze".

La scoperta delle opinioni comuni tra gli iracheni che vivono in zone diverse del paese "è una buona notizia, secondo l'analisi dei risultati fatta dai militari", scrive Karen DeYoung sul Washington Post. Il rapporto individua anche quali sono queste opinioni comuni.

Per citare DeYoung: "Gli iracheni di tutti i gruppi etnici e religiosi pensano che l'invasione militare americana sia la fonte principale dei loro violenti contrasti, e considerano il ritiro delle 'forze di occupazione' l'unico modo per ritrovare l'unità nazionale".

Il rapporto dimentica di citare un'altra buona notizia: sembra che gli iracheni condividano i più alti valori americani, stabiliti dal tribunale di Norimberga, e in particolare il principio secondo cui l'aggressione ("l'invasione del territorio di uno stato da parte delle forze armate di un altro") sarebbe il "crimine internazionale supremo", che "differisce dagli altri crimini di guerra soltanto perché contiene in sé il male di tutti gli altri".

Gli Stati Uniti invece, e con loro tutto l'occidente, hanno ripudiato gli alti princìpi stabiliti a Norimberga: un'interessante indicazione della vera essenza del famoso scontro di civiltà. Un'altra buona notizia è stata data dal generale David Petraeus, comandante delle forze statunitensi in Iraq, e dall'ambasciatore americano a Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, durante lo straordinario spettacolo messo in scena l'11 settembre 2007.

Forse siamo cinici a pensare che, scegliendo quella data, si volessero rievocare le accuse lanciate da Bush sui legami di Saddam Hussein con Osama bin Laden e che, quindi, fosse un modo per ribadire che "il crimine internazionale supremo" è stato commesso per difendere il mondo dal terrorismo.

Petraeus e Crocker hanno fornito delle cifre per dimostrare che il governo iracheno sta rapidamente accelerando la ricostruzione e ha già speso un quarto dei finanziamenti stanziati. Davvero una buon notizia. Peccato che poi sia stata smentita dalla ragioneria generale degli Stati Uniti: la cifra spesa realmente è un sesto di quella sbandierata da Petraeus e Crocker, e la metà di quella dell'anno precedente.

Un'altra buona notizia è la diminuzione della violenza settaria, dovuta in parte al successo della sanguinosa pulizia etnica che, secondo gli iracheni, è stata provocata dall'invasione: indubbiamente adesso ci sono meno obiettivi per la violenza settaria.

Ma il fatto che sia diminuita dipende anche dal sostegno dato da Washington ai gruppi tribali impegnati a stanare i membri di Al Qaeda in Iraq, e dall'aumento delle truppe statunitensi nel paese. È possibile che la strategia di Petraeus funzioni come quella dei russi in Cecenia, dove oggi, secondo il New York Times, gli scontri sono "limitati e sporadici e Grozny è in piena ricostruzione" dopo essere stata ridotta in macerie dai russi.

È possibile, ma non molto probabile, perché la nascita di tanti eserciti dei signori della guerra potrebbe portare a una violenza settaria ancora maggiore, che si aggiungerà al crimine supremo dell'aggressione.

Gli iracheni non sono i soli a credere alla riconciliazione nazionale. Una società di sondaggi canadese ha scoperto che gli afgani hanno fiducia nel futuro e sono favorevoli alla presenza dei soldati stranieri nel loro paese. Naturalmente la buona notizia è finita subito su tutti i giornali.

Entrando nel dettaglio, si scopre però che solo il 20 per cento "pensa che appena le truppe straniere se ne andranno torneranno al potere i taliban". Tre quarti sono favorevoli a un negoziato tra il governo filostatunitense di Karzai e i taliban, e più della metà è favorevole a un governo di coalizione.

Possiamo quindi ragionevolmente supporre che la popolazione sia favorevole alla presenza straniera per via degli aiuti umanitari e del sostegno alla ricostruzione.

Naturalmente, si potrebbero sollevare molti dubbi sulla validità dei sondaggi condotti in un paese sotto occupazione militare. Ma i risultati degli studi condotti in Iraq e in Afghanistan confermano quelli precedenti, e non dovrebbero essere ignorati.

Dopo questa valanga di buone notizie da tutta la regione, i candidati alla presidenza statunitense, i funzionari del governo e i commentatori stanno cominciando a discutere più seriamente sulle possibili scelte degli Stati Uniti in Iraq. Ma manca sempre una voce: quella degli iracheni. Le loro opinioni comuni sono note, come lo erano in passato.

A loro però non è permesso decidere quello che vogliono fare più di quanto non sia concesso a un bambino. Solo i conquistatori hanno questo diritto. Forse anche questo dovrebbe insegnarci qualcosa sullo scontro di civiltà.

Internazionale viale Regina Margherita, 294 - 00198 Roma
tel +39 06 4417 301 • fax +39 06 4425 2718 • email posta@internazionale.it
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http://www.internazionale.it/firme/articolo.php?id=18298

Jeune Afrique: La mission de l'Eufor plus délicate
depuis la bataille de N'Djamena

TCHAD - 13 février 2008 - par AFP

La force européenne Eufor a repris son déploiement dans l'est du Tchad mais sa mission semble plus délicate depuis la violente bataille de N'Djamena entre l'armée et les rebelles qui ont tenté de prendre le pouvoir.

Le déploiement de l'Eufor, chargée de sécuriser les réfugiés du Darfour, au Tchad et en Centrafrique, a repris mardi après onze jours d'interruption due à l'offensive rebelle contre le président Idriss Deby Itno, avec l'atterrissage à Abéché, dans l'est du Tchad, d'un Hercules C-130 transportant du matériel et du personnel.

L'armée irlandaise a indiqué à Dublin que cinquante membres du corps d'élite irlandais "Army Ranger Wing" arriveront au Tchad le 21 février, et 400 autres soldats mi-mars.

"Le cadre de l'opération n'a pas changé, les objectifs non plus", a affirmé mercredi à l'AFP le chef de l'Eufor sur le terrain, le général français Jean-Philippe Ganascia.

Pourtant, si les règles de l'Eufor n'ont pas changé, le soutien décisif fourni au président Deby dans la bataille de N'Djamena par l'armée française a fortement déplu aux rebelles qui, traditionnellement, sont actifs dans la zone de déploiement de l'Eufor.

"Les forces de la résistance nationale confirment l'implication des forces françaises dans les derniers combats de N'Djamena, contrairement aux déclarations du ministère de la Défense français", a affirmé le 8 février leur porte-parole Abderaman Koulamallah.

"Cette implication ne s'est pas simplement limitée à la fourniture de munitions, mais à une participation active des soldats français", a ajouté le porte-parole, avant de menacer : "Par cet acte, la France met inutilement en danger la vie de ses propres ressortissants pour sauver un régime à bout de souffle et décadent".

Selon des sources militaires, les rebelles se trouvent actuellement dans le sud-est du pays et se sont scindés en deux colonnes.

Mais ils sont traditionnellement actifs dans toute la zone frontalière avec le Soudan dans laquelle les 3.700 hommes, dont 2.100 Français, que doit compter l'Eufor seront déployés.
Pour le général Ganascia, l'Eufor n'a pas mandat pour intervenir vis-à-vis des rebelles.

"Si nous avions été déployés, nous n'aurions pas bougé" au passage des rebelles en route vers N'Djamena, confirme-t-il.

"Notre mandat est de protéger les civils. J'ai toutes les règles d'engagement pour appliquer la force quand ce sera nécessaire", ajoute-t-il.

Et de répéter que l'Eufor, bien que sous commandement militaire français sur le terrain, n'a rien à voir avec la force française Epervier présente au Tchad.

"Pendant les événements (les combats), je n'ai eu aucun contact avec Epervier ni avec l'ambassade de France", ajoute le général.

Cette confusion entre l'Eufor et l'armée française a été accentuée par la déclaration du président Deby qui, le 6 février, trois jours après avoir repoussé les rebelles dans la capitale, a appelé au "déploiement rapide de l'Eufor", précisant que, si son déploiement avait été déjà effectué, "cela nous aurait bien aidé".

La bataille de N'Djamena, en mettant au grand jour l'accord de coopération technique et militaire entre la France et le Tchad, a eu aussi des répercussions politiques au sein de l'Union européenne dont 14 pays vont être engagés dans l'Eufor.

Le chancelier autrichien Alfred Gusenbauer a déclaré que "si l'un des pays membres de l'Eufor prenait (...) part aux combats en mettant des troupes à disposition d'une des parties, l'UE devrait reconsidérer l'engagement de l'Eufor".

D'autre part, le gouvernement tchadien a ouvert une enquête après la disparition de leur domicile de N'Djamena de trois importants dirigeants de l'opposition dans la foulée des combats des 2 et 3 février.

L'enquête intervient après des pressions de la communauté internationale, notamment des pays européens dont la France.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP63338lamisanemaj0

Mail & Guardian:
Fresh tremor shakes quake-hit eastern DRC

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
14 February 2008

A second big earthquake in less than two weeks brought down houses and left at least 60 people injured in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda on Thursday, officials said.

The quake measured 5,5 on the Richter scale, according to monitors, the biggest since the 6,1-magnitude quake in the Central African Great Lakes region that killed at least 45 people and left thousands homeless on February 3.

There were more than 44 injured in Bukavu, capital of the DRC's Sud-Kivu province, and at least 15 injured in neighbouring Rwanda, including a woman in the capital, Kigali, medical sources said.

Panicked residents rushed from their homes after the main quake, which the Goma Vulcanology Observatory said struck at 4.07am (2.07am GMT). Its epicentre was about 25km north of Bukavu.

"The tremor provoked a lot of panic. A lot of people left their homes during the night. Some houses have collapsed and there are injuries," said Guillaume Bonga, mayor of Bukavu, the provincial capital.

"We already have 44 injured counted in Bukavu, 31 of them in the Bagira district, the hardest hit," said Rick Shamavu, head of emergency medical services in the province. "This is a provisional toll. We are still going round the town."

The mayor of Rwanda's Rusizi district said that 14 people had been badly injured there and scores were made homeless.

Rwandan Prime Minister Bernard Makuza said on Radio Rwanda that $9,8-million had been made available to help earthquake victims.

"Eleven tremors were felt during the night in Bukavu, but seismic activity has been much bigger than that: in 24 hours, 200 aftershocks were registered," said Dieudonne Wafula, a geophysicist from the Goma Vulcanology Observatory.

Wafula was in Bukavu, but Goma is the main town in Nord-Kivu province and lies near active volcanoes. The latest big earthquake in the region brought down a number of buildings that had already been structurally damaged on February 3.

Many Bukavu residents told an Agence France-Presse correspondent in town they were reluctant to return home while the ground was still being shaken. This month's earlier disaster struck when hundreds of people were at Sunday-morning church services.

More than 12 000 quake victims in Sud-Kivu have already received emergency help from United Nations agencies, according to the UN, which estimates the number of homes and public buildings damaged on February 3 at 3 465.

Sapa-AFP

© Guardian News & Media Ltd 2008

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=332325&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

Mother Jones:
Guantanamo's Dirty Secrets

News Analysis: Mysterious Camp 7, bounty-hunted detainees, and teenagers; inside one lawyer's defense.

By Celia Perry
February 12, 2008

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that it has charged six Guantanamo detainees with involvement in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The infamous detention facility was also in the news last week when its top commander, Rear Admiral Mark Buzby, confirmed in an interview with the Associated Press that there is a secret area inside Guantanamo Bay known as Camp 7— where key al Qaeda suspects are housed. This announcement was not news to International Red Cross inspectors, who have toured the mysterious camp (but whose findings remain confidential), nor to the detainees' attorneys. One of those attorneys is Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 75 Guantanamo detainees. "There are so many things that come to light that are actually blindingly obvious all along," he says. "And [Camp 7] is a good example….It's yet another secret of that place leaking out."

In fact, there are myriad secrets within the confines of the barbed-wire fences of Guantanamo. They remain hidden from the public's view, but they are well known to those who have defended detainees there since the United States Supreme Court granted lawyers such access in 2004. The job of these defense attorneys is to expose the truth, about their clients, and about the detention center. "There's [nothing] that you know about Guantanamo that hasn't come out through the lawyers," says Stafford Smith, 48, who travels to Cuba every two months, from his home outside London.

But this job becomes very difficult when those in charge are consistently changing the ways in which they describe what goes on at the prison. "The military is constantly making statements that are downright false because they've redefined the language," explains Stafford Smith. "It is a way of looking people in the eye and lying, but having some pretense that you're not."

Nowhere is this issue more evident than in the situation surrounding some 60 juveniles who have been held at Guantanamo. In April 2003 then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers admitted that children as young as 13 were being held at the prison, but qualified, "They're not on a Little League team anywhere. They're on a major league team, and it's a terrorist team." After three juveniles were released from the camp in January of 2004, Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Commander Barbara Burfeind told the BBC, "We don't plan on detaining juveniles at Guantanamo further," but Stafford Smith calls Burfeind's statement "absolute rubbish." He should know; he represents two of the juveniles who are still being detained: Mohammed El Gharani, now 21, and Omar Khadr, 22,who have been in Guantanamo since they were minors. The military, Stafford Smith says, has simply changed the definition of the term "juvenile." "In their minds…[it] means someone who is under the age of 16 today, whereas legally the term juvenile as recognized by the United States Supreme Court and every international body in the world means that you were under 18 [when] you committed whatever offense you [allegedly] committed."

El Gharani was just 14 in 2001 when Pakistani authorities seized him and sold him to the United States for a bounty. Bounties like the one used to nab El Gharani are far from rare in the war on terror; in fact, they're something that most Guantanamo detainees have in common. "Virtually everyone—well not everyone, but a large majority of the prisoners in Guantanamo—was sold to the United States for bounties," says Stafford Smith. In the months after 9/11, bounty leaflets were publicly distributed throughout Pakistan. One read, "Get wealth and power beyond your dreams. Help the Anti-Taliban Forces rid Afghanistan of murderers and terrorists." It worked. General Pervez Musharraf boasted in his 2006 memoir In the Line of Fire, "We have played cat and mouse with [al Qaeda]. We have captured 689 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars." $5,000 is still the going rate for snitching on a suspected terrorist there. And this a hard incentive for many to pass up; based on Pakistan's per-capita GDP this payoff is equivalent to $250,000 in the United States. "Look around and tell me who you would be prepared to snitch on for a quarter of a million dollars if all you had to do was say, 'I saw him in Tora Bora,'" says Stafford Smith.

He continues, "And there's a terrible inevitability to this cycle of torture once you begin down that route. Imagine I sell you out and I say I saw you at Tora Bora…You say I wasn't in Tora Bora. But [United States officials] think you were so they start applying the enhanced interrogation techniques on you. It's not very long before you say, 'Alright I was in Tora Bora.' But they didn't think they were torturing an innocent person to get an innocent person to confess falsely; they thought you were guilty. So when you do confess, they think, 'Ah ha, she's guilty!' And at that point you've got a one-way ticket to Guantanamo."

Bounties are one of many strategies that yield unreliable results; as is subjecting mentally ill detainees to harsh interrogation techniques leading to false confessions. Another one of Stafford Smith's clients, a Moroccan father of two who immigrated to England in the 1980's, Ahmed Errachidi, was committed for bipolar disorder long before the war on terror began. But he too was sold by Pakistan to United States authorities and eventually flown to Guantanamo. Stafford Smith recounts, "They're interrogating him and they ask him, 'Are you a foot soldier for Bin Laden?' Well he's psychotic at the time, so he says 'No, no I'm not a foot soldier for Bin Laden. I'm Bin Laden's general.' So they…announced publicly in the media that they had the general of al Qaeda—the leader of the military wing of al Qaeda." Errachidi also told his interrogators that a large snowball would soon envelop the earth, but that wasn't reported at any press conference. Last May, five years after he was seized, Errachidi was set free, when it was established that he was working as a cook at the Westbury Hotel in London at the time the United States government alleged he was training with al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Other Guantanamo detainees aren't mentally ill from the get-go—but they became that way during detainment. Binyam Mohamed, who was arrested in Pakistan on a visa violation and then turned over to United States authorities, has developed a habit of smearing feces onto the walls of his cell. Stafford Smith says it's because he "suffered torture that really should have been left in the Middle Ages." On July 21, 2002, nearly two years before being transported to Guantanamo, he was flown on a CIA plane to Morocco where his captors took a razor blade to his genitals. Now, officials at Guantanamo claim he soils his cell as an act of defiance, but Stafford Smith believes it's the result of trauma. "Instead of treating him, they turn the water off in his cell as punishment which merely exacerbates the health problem. And the most recent thing they've done just last week is they've announced that if he doesn't clean his cell up they'll ban lawyers from visiting him."

At a press conference in September of 2006, President Bush quoted a European delegate who, after visiting the facility, called it a "'a model prison' where people are treated better than in prisons in his own country." But Stafford Smith couldn't disagree more. "I have spent 24 years doing death penalty cases in the deep South. I've been to most of the worst prisons there and Guantanamo is worse than any death row in America," he said. Since prisoners first arrived at Guantanamo on January 11, 2002, the International Red Cross has condemned the indefinite detention of prisoners there, and the United Nations has found that techniques used at Guantanamo "amount to degrading treatment in violation of the [Geneva Conventions]" and recommended that it be closed "without further delay." Just last month, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen said it should be shut down because it's damaging to the world's opinion of the United States, yet 275 detainees remain there. Why, in the face of international scorn and persistent pressure, have the detainees not been released or moved to a prison in the United States? "Among the people in power, there is an awful lot of ignorance of not knowing what's really happening there," says Stafford Smith. "I think they really believe that the people in Guantanamo are all bad guys and they shouldn't have any legal rights. I don't think they're just keeping Guantanamo there for the hell of it, I think they believe in it."

But with 501 people released from Guantanamo so far, there have been no fewer than 501 mistakes—failures of policy, philosophy, and implementation. Of those 501 former detainees, 35 have been Stafford Smith's clients, but he doesn't attribute his success to the sympathetic nature of the cases he's taken on—he doesn't hand pick his clients. "It's because the whole process is such a catastrophe," he explains. "The success we have had is because the Bush administration has done terrible things and should never have done them. It's a matter of justice winning out."

Celia Perry is an assistant editor at Mother Jones.

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.

© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/news_analysis/2008/02/guantanamos-dirty-secrets.html

New Statesman:
Bringing down the new Berlin Walls

John Pilger
Published 14 February 2008

The last thing the west wants is to dismantle the barriers separating "us" from "them". They are vital for justifying invasion, plunder and nuclear proliferation.

The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon's master plan of walling in the population and stealing their land and resources has all but succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off, the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

"[Sharon's] fate for us," wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, "was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today - that is what he had in store for us and he nearly achieved it."

Israel's and America's experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it. There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the "international community" whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as "disputed" and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as "Hamas militants" who "refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist" when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the Palestinians' right to exist.

"What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public," wrote Uri Avnery, a founder of Gush Sha lom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January, "is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week . . . Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak to Hamas . . . It is more important to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media co-operate with this pretence." Hamas long ago offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the "reality" of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Abou treika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the words "Sympathise with Gaza" in English and Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world expressed their support for him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika's yellow card said: "It is actions like his that bring many walls down, walls of silence, walls in our minds."

In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush regime's despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the Republican nominee for president, wants a "hundred-year war". That the leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a black man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is both female and black. Look into the murky world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto, a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama's chief whisperers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and almost anything that matters, including the following announcement, perhaps the most important of the century: "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction." Inviting incredulity, these words may require more than one reading. They come from a statement written by five of the west's top military leaders, an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the club known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke countries that have weapons of mass destruction - with the exclusion, that is, of the west's nuclear arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because "the west's values and way of life are under threat".

Where is this threat coming from? "Over there," say the generals.

Where? In "the brutal world".

An identifiable target

On 21 January, a day prior to the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that "the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]" is over. The reason he gave was that "the international community" (basically, the west) was facing "serious challenges". One of these challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no programme to build them, according to America's National Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown's Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal at a cost believed to be as much as £25bn. What Brown was doing was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth, provides compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war has now moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as "Apocalypse Soon". Thus, the wall dismantled by young Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating this new "nuclear threat". The effect of the Iraq invasion, says a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a "sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks".

Behold Nato's instant "brutal world".

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates "us" from "them". This is described today as a great divide of religions or "a clash of civilisations", which are false concepts, propagated in western scholarship and journalism to provide what Edward Said called "the other" - an identifiable target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more than 500 years ago when the privileges of "discovery and conquest" were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed of according to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the "integration of countries into the global free-market community", the terms of which, noted the New York Times, "require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and wiring of other nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever before".

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even "promoting democracy in Iraq", according to BBC executives responsible for responding to sceptical members of the public. That "we" in the west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and resources of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is taught as serious scholarship in the economics departments of leading universities. This is neoliberalism - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. "Rather than acknowledging," wrote Chalmers Johnson, "that free trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation for developmental failure - namely, culture."

What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended, violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of what they call "the left". At the same time, opponents of the new papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against Hugo Chávez. Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears deflect authentic critiques of Chá vez's Venezuela and prepare the ground for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave New World, might have written: "Oppo sition is apostasy. Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred." If the people of Gaza can disobey all three, why can't we?

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/200802140027

Página/12:
Una muerte que pone trabas a la verdad

MURIO EN UN ATENTADO UNO DE LOS ACUSADOS POR LOS ATAQUES A LA AMIA Y EMBAJADA DE ISRAEL

Imad Mughnieh, ex jefe militar de Hezbolá, era el único libanés que figuraba en la lista de los pedidos de captura cursados a través de Interpol por los dos ataques terroristas cometidos en la Argentina. Hezbolá acusó por la muerte a Israel, que desmintió haber tenido participación en el atentado contra Mughnieh.

Por Raúl Kollmann
Jueves, 14 de Febrero de 2008

El ex jefe militar de la organización libanesa proiraní Hezbolá, Imad Mughnieh, murió en la noche del martes a raíz de un atentado cometido mediante una bomba colocada en su camioneta Mitsubishi. Aparentemente, el dispositivo explotó cuando el dirigente de Hezbolá se subió al vehículo en una playa de estacionamiento del barrio residencial de Kfar Susseh, en Damasco. Anoche, Siria dio cuenta de la muerte de Mughnieh en forma oficial, Hezbolá lo reivindicó como un mártir “asesinado por Israel” y se anunció el entierro para hoy en Beirut. Mughnieh era el único libanés que figuraba en la lista de los pedidos de captura, con alerta roja, cursados a través de Interpol, por los dos atentados perpetrados en la Argentina, el de la Embajada de Israel y el de la AMIA. El resto de la nómina de buscados son ex y actuales funcionarios iraníes. Nunca hubo ninguna evidencia de que Mughnieh haya estado en la Argentina o en la Triple Frontera o que haya hecho o recibido alguna llamada relacionada con los atentados, por lo que las pruebas en su contra hubieran resultado endebles en un juicio.

Las imputaciones contra Mughnieh surgen de testimonios de opositores iraníes que dicen haber escuchado que otras personas no identificadas mencionaron a Mughnieh como “jefe del grupo operativo que tuvo a cargo la ejecución del ataque contra la AMIA”. Más clara parece su participación en el secuestro de un avión de la norteamericana TWA, de dos aeronaves kuwaitíes, la ejecución de dos rehenes y de un agente de la CIA. Por ello se le decía Carlos El Libanés o Carlos El Iraní, en paralelo a Carlos, El Chacal, Ilich Ramírez, el venezolano al que se le adjudicaron numerosos atentados en los años ’70.

Los voceros del primer ministro israelí, Ehud Olmert, desmintieron ayer haber tenido participación en el ataque en el que murió Mughnieh, aunque tanto el desmentido como la acusación contra Israel estaban cantados. El Carlos libanés era un hombre buscado por Estados Unidos e Israel desde hace más de veinte años y, en realidad, su última aparición comprobada fue en 1994, en el funeral de su hermano Fuad, a quien también mataron con un coche bomba. Los Mughnieh eran originarios de Tair Debba, una aldea libanesa ubicada a cinco kilómetros de la ciudad de Tiro, pero es poco lo que se sabe de Imad. Algunos dicen que tenía 45 años, otros 49, hay versiones que indican que se hizo numerosas operaciones de cirugía estética, existen contadas fotografías de él e incluso hay dudas de que las tomas sean realmente de Mughnieh.

Ni Hezbolá ni Siria dieron datos concretos sobre el atentado del martes a las 23. Un fotógrafo de la agencia AFP dio cuenta de que la camioneta Mitsubishi quedó totalmente destruida en la parte trasera y que el estallido se produjo cuando el vehículo estaba en una playa de estacionamiento. Se dice que hubo un muerto más, aunque no está claro si se trata de un acompañante de Mughnieh o de una persona que pasaba en forma ocasional.

En el comunicado oficial de Hezbolá hay una referencia que llama la atención. La organización dice que Mughnieh participó de la guerra contra Israel de julio de 2006. Las versiones indicaban que el Carlos libanés estaba retirado en Damasco desde mediados de los ’90 y que mantenía un enfrentamiento con el líder de Hezbolá, Hassan Nasrallah, más orientado a la construcción política del movimiento y al ingreso del Partido de Dios al Parlamento libanés. De todas maneras, se trata de versiones que nunca se confirmaron y cuya base era el hecho de que Mughnieh no tuvo ninguna aparición pública en los últimos trece años.

El cuerpo de Mughnieh ya estaba ayer en un hospital de Beirut, donde esta tarde se hará el funeral, justamente en un día crítico para el Líbano. Hoy se cumplen tres años del asesinato del ex primer ministro Rafik Hariri y habrá una gigantesca movilización convocada por el gobierno prooccidental y otras manifestaciones protagonizadas por la oposición que lidera Hezbolá. Al finalizar el día, el entierro se convertirá en otro acto contra el gobierno, Israel y Estados Unidos.

Respecto de la participación de Mughnieh en los atentados de Buenos Aires, el fiscal Alberto Nisman cita al testigo con identidad reservada identificado como A y que sería un ex funcionario iraní. A sostiene que Mughnieh estuvo en la Triple Frontera en 1992 y que llegó a Buenos Aires en julio de 1994, cuando se perpetró el atentado contra la AMIA. Según A, Mughnieh arribó en los primeros días de julio y se fue después del ataque contra la mutual judía. Nada de esto se pudo sostener con pruebas, o sea que no existe evidencia del nombre que habría usado Mughnieh, su fecha de llegada y de partida, el medio por el que entró o salió ni dónde se escondió en Buenos Aires.

En la orden de captura dictada por el juez Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, tras un extenso dictamen de Nisman, se dice que Imad Fayez Mughnieh “por entonces jefe de Seguridad Especial y líder de la organización terrorista Hezbolá, habría conformado el grupo operativo que tuvo a su cargo la ejecución del ataque a la sede de la AMIA” y que “quien le habría asignado su rol de ideólogo y planificador del ataque desde la faz estrictamente operativa ha sido Alí Fallahjian, en su calidad de jefe del Servicio Secreto iraní y como encargado de la dirección delineada y consentida en la reunión del máximo nivel de la dirigencia de Irán, en Pashad, en noviembre de 1993”. Tanto Nisman como Canicoba Corral citan como prueba los testimonios “de oídas” de los opositores exiliados en Europa, integrantes del Consejo Nacional de Resistencia Iraní, que serían al régimen de Teherán lo que son los opositores cubanos de Miami al gobierno de Fidel Castro, o sea enemigos furiosos.

También la Corte Suprema le adjudicó responsabilidad a Mughnieh en el atentado contra la Embajada de Israel. Las evidencias son aún más endebles. Dice la Corte: “El ataque fue organizado y llevado a cabo por el grupo terrorista denominado Jihad Islámica, brazo armado del Hezbolá. De allí se deriva el estado de sospecha sobre Mughnieh, por ser uno de los miembros más destacados del aparato de Seguridad Central según la información disponible de inteligencia”.

Lo cierto es que Mughnieh podría haber tenido que ver con los atentados de Buenos Aires, pero difícilmente el Tribunal Oral en lo Criminal Federal número 3, que es el que ya juzgó la primera parte del caso AMIA, lo hubiera condenado con las pruebas del expediente y sobre la base de testigos que no vieron ni estuvieron presentes, sino que les habrían contado cómo fueron las cosas personas que no identifican. Ese tipo de testigos ya fueron relativizados por ese tribunal, que dijo que “el testigo de oídas declarará sobre lo que oyó sobre el hecho, pero no sobre el hecho mismo y en definitiva resulta insuficiente para acreditar el hecho”.

Mughnieh parece haberse especializado en otras actividades terroristas: secuestro de aviones y personas, incluyendo varios homicidios a sangre fría. El resto de su accionar estuvo centrado en el escenario de Medio Oriente. Es que salvo lo dicho por el testigo A, no existen otros testimonios de que haya actuado fuera de Siria, Irán y el Líbano. Lo cierto es que fue, hasta el martes, uno de los prófugos más buscados por norteamericanos e israelíes, al punto que, desde el secuestro del avión de TWA, existía una recompensa de cinco millones de dólares por su cabeza.

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Página/12:
Una aterradora autoconfianza

Por Robert Fisk *
Jueves, 14 de Febrero de 2008

No eran los ojos que miraban fijos, ni la forma en que tomó una manzana delante de mí y la cortó cuidadosamente. Era el sacudón de manos vicioso, el apretón de acero que hicieron doler mis dedos. “Imad Mughnieh”, dijo, como para demostrar que no estaba huyendo, no tenía miedo de usar su nombre real. Sí, dijo, era un “miembro de la Jihad Islámica –yo sabía muy bien que era el líder de la organización que había organizado el secuestro de tantos rehenes occidentales en Beirut–, pero estaba en Teherán, en el piso alto de un hotel de lujo. A salvo de sus enemigos una vez más, eso es lo que pensó cuando se trepó a su auto en Damasco el martes por la noche.

Mughnieh era un enemigo de Estados Unidos, un enemigo de Israel: la negación de responsabilidad de este último por la bomba que lo mató será vista por sus partidarios como un mero juego lingüístico y él conocía los riesgos. Su hermano había sido asesinado en Beirut con una bomba destinada a él y su odio por el jefe de la CIA en Beirut, muerto por la Jihad Islámica después de su secuestro en 1984, era suficiente prueba de la guerra de Mougnieh con Estados Unidos. William Buckley de la CIA fue secuestrado, me dijo Mougnieh, porque estaba controlando el gobierno libanés proestadounidense del presidente Amin Gemayel, cuyo ejército había capturado a miles de musulmanes, civiles y hombres de la milicia, algunos de los cuales fueron torturados a muerte.

Yo había ido a ver a Mougnieh para pedir la libertad de mi gran amigo y colega Terry Anderson, el jefe de la oficina de Associated Press en Beirut, secuestrado en 1985 y mantenido durante casi siete años en habitaciones selladas y celdas subterráneas. Mougnieh trató de tranquilizarme. “Créame, Robert, lo tratamos mejor de lo que se trata usted mismo.” Tuve escalofríos. No lo creí. Había escuchado ese lenguaje antes. Como respetaban a los inocentes a los que tan cruelmente habían privado de su libertad, la misma libertad que exigían para sus propios amigos y partidarios.

Quizá Mougnieh presintió esto. Cuando le pregunté por Terry –esto fue en octubre de 1991, un mes antes de que fuera liberado–, Mougnieh me miró fijamente. Sus ojos nunca se apartaron de mi rostro salvo cuando quería discutir una frase con sus amigos en la misma habitación. Iniciaba sus comentarios con las primeras palabras del Corán, de la misma forma en que lo hacían los mensajes y videos de los rehenes de la Jihad Islámica. Este era el hombre que había capturado a Terry y que me hubiera capturado a mí si los ocupantes de los autos como tiburones que deambulaban por la Corniche de Beirut me hubieran agarrado. Era totalmente inflexible.

“Tomar a gente inocente como rehenes está mal”, admitió ante mi asombro. “Es una maldad. Pero es una elección y no queda otra. Es una reacción a una situación que se nos ha impuesto –si quiere preguntar sobre la existencia de gente inocente entre los rehenes, entonces esta pregunta no debería hacerse a nosotros solamente, cuanto Israel secuestró y encarceló a 5000 civiles libaneses en el sur del Líbano en el campo Ansar.” Israel en realidad había encarcelado a estos hombres en Ansar después de su invasión en 1982. Amnesty International había condenado las condiciones bajo las cuales fueron capturados. “La mayoría de la gente en Ansar era inocente”, añadió Mougnieh –no definió inocente– “y esto sin mencionar a la invasión misma y la matanza de tanta gente”.

Mougnieh, libanés de nacimiento, era un hombre de una aterradora autoconfianza, de absoluta fe en sí mismo, algo que compartía con Osama bin Laden y –hablemos francamente– con el presidente George W. Bush. Se decía que la Jihad Islámica torturaba a sus enemigos. También lo hace Al Qaida. Y también, como todos sabemos, lo hace el ejército de Bush. Mougnieh –y nuevamente deberíamos hablar abiertamente sobre esto– era una importante figura valorada y respetada en el aparto de seguridad de Irán. La “Jihad Islámica” era un satélite del Hezbolá libanés, un antiguo Hezbolá no reformado cuyo liderazgo querría ahora olvidar –y aun negar–- su asociación con secuestros. En ese sentido, Mougnieh era un hombre del pasado, jubilado en Damasco, más a salvo ahí para los iraníes que encerrado en una habitación de hotel de Teherán.

Pero allá en sus días como un oficial de inteligencia era un hombre poderoso. Por el sufrimiento que le había causado a Terry yo debería odiarlo. Pero no lo odiaba. Durante nuestra conversación, de pronto se enojaba, golpeando su puño derecho furioso mientras condenaba a Estados Unidos por su apoyo a Israel y por derribar a tiros a un avión civil Airbus iraní sobre el golfo en 1988. Yo había visto este tipo de furia antes, en los cementerios y en las tumbas masivas. Si se había aliado con Irán, su pasión era genuina.

Rogué por Terry nuevamente. ¿No podía sentir compasión por mi amigo? Otra vez sus ojos estaban fijos en mí. “Por supuesto, sería muy fácil encontrar la respuesta a esta pregunta si usted hubiera sido la madre o la mujer de uno de los rehenes en Khian (la prisión de tortura de Israel en el sur del Líbano) o la madre o la mujer de Terry Anderson. Mis sentimientos hacia el dolor mental de Terry Anderson son los mismos que mis sentimientos hacia la madre o la mujer de Terry Anderson.” Amnesty también había condenado las torturas en Khian.

Ahora Mougnieh estaba haciendo el rol más famoso de todas las novelas estadounidenses: el “enemigo número uno” de Estados Unidos. Este país no estaría llorando si Israel hubiera matado a Mougnieh ayer. Estados Unidos quería a Mougnieh muerto o vivo –y por las razones de siempre–. No menor fue su actuación en el secuestro del vuelo de TWA 847 de Atenas a Roma en junio de 1985. Mougnieh era uno de los hombres armados a bordo y exigió la liberación de 17 miembros de la Jihad islámica encarcelados en Kuwait y de 753 prisioneros chiítas libaneses presos en Israel.

Después de volar sobre el Mediterráneo, el avión –casi todos los pasajeros eran estadounidenses– eventualmente aterrizó en Beirut donde un estadounidense, Robert Stetham, fue cruelmente golpeado en la cara y en el cuerpo antes de que le dispararan en la cabeza y luego tirado desde el avión frente a las cámaras del mundo. Vi su cuerpo en el hospital American University, el rostro gris, tirado al lado de una gorda mujer palestina que había muerto en una batalla entre los milicianos chiítas y la OLP.

Los hombres armados chiítas musulmanes leales a Nabih Berri –hoy vocero del Parlamento prosirio del Líbano– atacaron el avión, metieron a la mayoría de los secuestradores y de los pasajeros en vehículos y partieron rápidamente hacia los suburbios del sur de Beirut. Todos los pasajeros fueron liberados, pero Mougnieh y sus camaradas fueron llevados secretamente a Damasco –sólo para reaparecer al comando de un avión kuwaití secuestrado con exigencias similares y con un asesinato igualmente brutal: el de un oficial de la brigada de bomberos de Kuwait en el aeropuerto de Nicosia–.

Quien a hierro mata, dicen, a hierro muere.

De ahí el ataque con bomba en Damasco, no lejos de una escuela iraní, cerca de un local de la oficina de inteligencia siria, explosivos bajo el propio auto de Mougnieh y un cuerpo arrastrado del vehículo por policías.

* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhère.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar| Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/subnotas/98907-31291-2008-02-14.html

Página/12:
La gran sopa del Pacífico

Por Juan Gelman
Jueves, 14 de Febrero de 2008

Es de desechos de plástico, flota en el Océano Pacífico, se extiende desde la costa de California, pasa Hawai, llega casi al Japón y tiene una superficie que duplica el territorio continental de EE.UU. Esta “Gran mancha de basura del Pacífico” –así la llaman– fue descubierta en 1997 y por mera casualidad. El ex marino y oceanógrafo estadounidense Charles Moore partió de Los Angeles con su yate para participar en una carrera en Hawai, tenía prisa, evitó las rutas más frecuentadas y el atajo lo llevó al descubrimiento. Navegó contra una selva de botellas y restos de plástico día tras día durante una semana. Su asombro y su disgusto fueron tales que vendió todas sus empresas, se convirtió en un activista de la preservación del océano y creó la Fundación Algalita de Investigaciones Marinas (AMRF, por sus siglas en inglés). No se conocen otros casos de herederos de grandes fortunas petroleras que hayan incurrido en semejante actitud.

Charles Moore opina que alrededor de 100 millones de toneladas de desechos de plástico flotan en la región. Markus Eriksen, investigador de AMRF, declaró recientemente: “La gente pensaba que era un isla de basura plástica sobre la que casi se podía caminar. No es así. Es como una sopa de plástico”. Que suele convertir a las playas de Hawai en un sucio vertedero. La mayor parte de esos residuos no proviene –como antes– de los buques que surcan las aguas del Pacífico. Sus principales abastecedores moran en tierra firme. Producen 60 mil millones de toneladas de plástico cada año y los residuos de su materia prima son tan livianos que pueden ser arrastrados por los vientos y mantenerse en la superficie de las aguas. Se estima que constituyen el 90 por ciento de los desperdicios que padece el norte del Pacífico central; flotan y recorren largas distancias a lomo de las corrientes marinas. No sin consecuencias contrarias a la biodiversidad del medio.

La AMRF señala en un informe que las partículas de plástico afectan al menos a 267 especies marinas en todo el mundo, incluyendo al 86 por ciento de todas las clases de tortugas, al 44 por ciento de las especies de aves y al 43 por ciento de las especies de mamíferos del mar (www.algalita.org, 9-4-07). Aves y mamíferos marinos confunden las partículas con huevos de pescado. Un ejemplo: el 40 por ciento de los pichones de albatros del atolón hawaiano de Midway muere prematuramente por esa confusión. En el estómago de algunos mamíferos se han encontrado jeringas, encendedores, cepillos de dientes y otros objetos que creyeron alimento. Aún no se conoce a fondo el impacto de la diseminación de plásticos en los ecosistemas marinos y se ignora cuánto tiempo debe transcurrir antes de que esas partículas se biodegraden. Probablemente siglos.

La basura se acumula sin pausa en las aguas norteñas del Pacífico central: se multiplicó por tres en una década y en las costas del Japón se decuplica cada 2 o 3 años (www.plasticdebris.org, 2005). En esa región del océano hay seis vórtices de convergencia sometidos a una elevada presión atmosférica. Las corrientes marinas son débiles allí y el total de las partículas de plástico pesa seis veces más que el plancton de esos lugares (Los Angeles Times, 2-8-06). Plancton que, como otros invertebrados marinos, también ingiere plástico para su desgracia y la ajena. Las partículas flotantes transportan además organismos marinos que emigran y esa mezcla biótica los convierte en especies depredadoras que también amenazan la biodiversidad del medio. En las costas de la Florida han aparecido dos especies de esa índole que avanzan hacia las aguas del Caribe.

Un estudio del Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente (Pnuma) concluye que más de un millón de aves y más de 100.000 mamíferos marinos mueren cada año por la ingestión de desechos plásticos. El problema es grave: para lograr mayor flexibilidad, duración y resistencia al calor del material, se agrega a la materia prima aditivos y sustancias que convierten a los desperdicios en una suerte de esponjas químicas que absorben hidrocarbonos y pesticidas. Existe el peligro de que por esa vía ingresen a la cadena alimentaria humana. “Lo que entra en el océano entra en esos animales y llega al plato de comida. Así de simple”, sentenció el Dr. Eriksen.

De fuentes territoriales llega al océano el 80 por ciento de las partículas de plástico (Pnuma, 1995), la mayoría de los cuales no se puede quitar del agua en razón de su pequeñez y abundancia. La solución del problema consistiría en reciclar en tierra los restos de plástico antes de que se internen en el mar, pero actualmente sólo se procesa del 3 al 5 por ciento del desecho. Más de dos tercios de la superficie terrestre están cubiertos por océanos y mares interconectados. El problema es global.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar| Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-98883-2008-02-14.html

The Independent: Bloody end of man
who made kidnapping a weapon of war

Robert Fisk
Thursday, 14 February 2008

It wasn't the staring eyes, nor the way he picked up an apple in front of me and cut it open with such careful deliberation. It was the vice-like handshake, the steely grip that made my fingers hurt. "Imad Mougnieh," he said, as if to show he wasn't on the run, wasn't afraid to use his real name.

Yes, he said, he was a "member of Islamic Jihad" – I knew very well he was the leader of the organisation, that he had arranged the kidnapping of so many Western hostages in Beirut – but he was in Tehran, in the upper floor of a luxury hotel. Safe from his enemies – but then again, that's probably what he thought when he climbed into his car in Damascus on Tuesday night.

Mougnieh was an enemy of America, an enemy of Israel; the latter's denial of responsibility for the car bomb that killed him will be seen by his supporters as a mere linguistic sleight of hand, and he knew the risks. His brother was assassinated in Beirut by a bomb meant for him and his own loathing for the CIA station chief in Beirut, done to death by Islamic Jihad after his 1984 abduction, was proof enough of Mougnieh's war with the United States.

William Buckley of the CIA was kidnapped, Mougnieh told me, because he was controlling the then pro-American Lebanese government of President Amin Gemayel, whose army had been seizing thousands of Muslims, civilians and militiamen, some of whom were tortured to death.

I had gone to see Mougnieh to plead for the release of my close friend and colleague Terry Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief of the Associated Press, kidnapped in 1985 and subsequently held for almost seven years in sealed rooms and underground dungeons.

Mougnieh tried to reassure me. "Believe me, Mr Robert, we treat him better even than you treat yourself." I shuddered. I didn't believe that. I had heard this language before. How they respected the innocents they had so cruelly deprived of freedom, the very freedom they demanded for their own friends and supporters.

Maybe Mougnieh sensed that. When I asked about Terry – this was in October 1991, a month before he was released – Mougnieh cast those staring eyes upon me. They never left my face unless he wished to discuss a phrase or a sentence with his friends in the same room.

He prefaced his remarks with the opening words of the Koran – just as Islamic Jihad's hostage messages and videotapes did. This was the man who had taken Terry and who would have taken me had the occupants of the shark-like cars that haunted the Beirut Corniche grabbed hold of me. He was utterly uncompromising.

"Taking innocent people as hostages is wrong," he admitted to my astonishment. "It is an evil. But it is a choice and there is no other option. It is a reaction to a situation that has been imposed on us – if you want to ask about the existence of some innocent people among the hostages, then this question should not be posed to us alone, when Israel kidnapped and imprisoned 5,000 Lebanese civilians in the south of Lebanon in the Ansar camp."

Israel had indeed imprisoned those men at Ansar after its 1982 invasion. Amnesty International had condemned the conditions under which they were held. "Most of the people in Ansar were innocent," Mougnieh added – he did not define innocent – "and this is not even to mention the invasion itself and the killing of many people."

Mougnieh, Lebanese by birth, was a man of frightening self-confidence, of absolute self-belief, something he shared with Osama bin Laden and – let us speak frankly about this – with President George W Bush. Islamic Jihad, it was said, tortured its enemies. So does al-Qa'ida. And so, as we all now know, does Mr Bush's army.

Mougnieh – and again we should speak openly about this – was a valued, respected and senior figure in Iran's security apparatus. "Islamic Jihad" was a satellite of the Lebanese Hizbollah, the old un-reformed Hizbollah, whose leadership would now like to forget – even deny – its association with abductions. In that sense, Mougnieh was a man of the past, pensioned off in Damascus, safer for the Iranians there rather than cosseted in a Tehran hotel room.

But back in his days as an intelligence officer, he was a powerful man. Because of the suffering he had caused Terry, I should have hated him. But I did not hate him.

In the course of our conversation, he would become angry, stabbing his right fist in fury as he condemned America for its support for Israel and for shooting down an Iranian Airbus civilian airliner over the Gulf in 1988. I had seen this kind of fury before, at cemeteries and at mass graves. If he had allied himself with Iran, his passion was genuine.

I pleaded for Terry again. Could he not feel compassion for my friend? Again, his eyes never left me. "Of course, it would be very easy to find the answer to this question if you had been the mother or the wife of one of the hostages in Khiam [Israel's torture prison in southern Lebanon] or the mother or wife of Terry Anderson. My feelings towards the mental pain of Terry Anderson are the same as my feelings towards the Lebanese hostages in Khiam – or the mother or wife of Terry Anderson." Amnesty had also condemned the tortures at Khiam.

By now, Mougnieh was already playing that most famous role in all US soap operas: America's "number one enemy". The US would not have been weeping if Israel did kill Mougnieh yesterday. America wanted Mougnieh dead or alive – and for all the usual reasons.

Not least was his involvement in the hijacking of TWA flight 847 from Athens to Rome in June 1985. Mougnieh was one of the gunmen on board and demanded the release of 17 Islamic Jihad members imprisoned in Kuwait and 753 Lebanese Shia prisoners held in Israel.

After wandering around the Mediterranean, the aircraft – almost all the passengers were American – eventually came to rest in Beirut where an American, Robert Stetham, was viciously clubbed over the face and body before being shot in the head and thrown from the plane in front of the world's cameras.

I saw his body in the American University Hospital, grey-faced, hair tousled, lying next to a plump Palestinian woman who had just been shot in a gun battle between Shia militiamen and the PLO.

Shia Muslim Amal gunmen loyal to Nabih Berri – today, Lebanon's pro-Syrian Speaker of Parliament – stormed the aircraft, hustled the hijackers and most of the passengers into vehicles and sped off into Beirut's southern suburbs. All the passengers were released, but Mougnieh and his comrades were secreted off to Damascus – only to re-emerge in command of a hijacked Kuwaiti jet with similar demands and with an equally brutal assassination; that of a Kuwaiti fire brigade official at Nicosia airport.

Live by the sword, as they say, and you die by the sword.

Thus to the bomb attack in Damascus, not far from an Iranian school, close to a local Syrian intelligence office, explosives under Mougnieh's own car and a body dragged from the vehicle by policemen.

©independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/
robert-fisk-bloody-end-of-man-who-made-kidnapping-a-weapon-of-war-782031.html

ZNet:
Money and Power Shift East

By Ignacio Ramonet
Source: Le Monde Diplomatique
February, 13 2008

Will the US Federal Reserve’s announcement of a substantial cut in interest rates avert a recession in the United States and banish the spectre of a worldwide crash? Many experts think it will. At worst, they think the growth rate may slow down. Other observers in the capitalist camp are very worried. In France, Jacques Attali foresees a crash on Wall Street, home of the New York stock exchange and ultimate guarantor of the loan pyramid (1), and Michel Rocard is convinced that a world crisis is imminent and that the system is about to explode (2).

There are many signs of alarm. There is a renewed interest in gold reserves and a rush to buy — the price of gold rose by 32% in 2007. All the major economic institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, predict lower growth worldwide.

This all started when the internet bubble burst in 2001. To rescue investors, the then US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan decided to promote the property market by introducing a policy of very low interest rates, and reducing financial charges. This gave financial intermediaries and property dealers an incentive to persuade more people to invest in bricks and mortar. Hence the system of subprimes, high-risk variable-rate mortgage loans for low-income families or those with poor credit. But in 2005 the Federal Reserve raised the base rates — those it had just reduced. This threw the whole system out of gear and the effects hit the international banking system in August 2007.

With three million US families facing insolvency and debts totalling $200bn, some major credit institutions ran out of funds. To cover themselves against this contingency, they had sold some questionable debts on to other banks. The banks put the debts into speculative investment funds, and the funds passed them on to banks all over the world. So the crisis spread and rapidly engulfed the entire banking system.

Major financial institutions, including Citigroup and Merrill Lynch in the US, Northern Rock in Britain, Swiss Re and UBS in Switzerland and Société Générale in France, incurred huge losses and suspect there are more to come. To limit the damage, many had to accept funds from sovereign sources controlled by southern powers or oil-rich regimes.

The real extent of the damage is not yet clear. The central banks in the US, Europe, the UK, Switzerland and Japan have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy since August 2007, but confidence was not restored. The crisis spread from the financial sector to the rest of the economy. Several factors — a rapid drop in house prices in the US, the UK, Ireland and Spain, the fall in the dollar, the credit squeeze — point to a decline in growth. Add to this the increase in the price of oil, raw materials and food products. All the ingredients for a crisis that will last for some time, the greatest crisis since the structure of the world economy has been based on globalisation.

The outcome depends on whether the Asian economies can take over from the US as the driving force. Another sign, perhaps, that the West is in decline and that the centre of the world economy is about to shift from the US to China. The crisis may mark the end of an era.

(1) L’Express, Paris, 13 December 2007.
(2) Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 13 December 2007.

Translated by Barbara Wilson

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16502

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

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