KHARTOUM — A bipartisan group of 38 Congressmen urged United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice to work for imposing sanctions against the Sudanese government because of its failure to allow humanitarian access to the Two Areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile.
On 4 August the mediation announced that Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement North (SPLM-N) have reached an agreement to provide civilians in the rebel held areas with humanitarian assistance.
However until now the operation has not begun as the Sudanese government and tripartite committee, of UN agencies, Arab League and African Union, continue to hold meetings over its implementation.
The rebel SPLM-N called for an international operation from South Sudan or Ethiopia but the demand is rejected by Khartoum. Senior members of the SPLM-N rebels were recently in Washington and urged Congressmen to act on Sudan’s humanitarian crisis.
In their letter of 21 September, the lawmakers said they were concerned by the humanitarian crisis in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan reminding them that some 650,000 people have already been displaced or severely affected by the conflict in these border states.
After praising Resolution 2046 and the threat to impose sanctions if its dispositions are not met, the Congressmen state that “the Security Council’s principled position must be enforced in order to be credible. Accountability is key when lives hang in the balance.”
The UN Security Council is to meet next week to assess the whole process including the talks between Khartoum government and rebels.
In a statement issued on 21 September, the 15 member council said it was gravely concerned about the worsening humanitarian situation in the states.
“The members of the Council once again stressed the urgency of immediately delivering humanitarian relief supplies to the affected civilian populations, so as to avoid any further suffering or loss of life,” the statement said.
They further urged the two parties to “begin direct talks, urgently agree to and implement a cessation of hostilities, and create a conducive environment for further progress on political and security issues.”
In Khartoum the Sudanese humanitarian commissioner Suleiman Abdel-Rahman told the official SUNA that they had reports that an aircraft belonging to a foreign aid group landed in the rebel-held town of Kauda without permission from the Sudanese government.
He also said that humanitarian assistance was recently delivered to the rebel-held areas through an unspecified neighbouring state or air drop operations.
September 23, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | African Union, Blue Nile, South Kordofan, South Sudan, SPLM-N, Sudan, Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement, United Nations |
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TEHRAN – The US denied entry visas to two Iranian ministers and other members of the delegation accompanying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.
The US State Department refrained from issuing visas for 20 officials of the 160 people for whom the Iranian government had demanded entry visas two months ago.
The US didn’t issue visas for two deputies of Iranian President’s Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashayee as well as two ministers of President Ahmadinejad’s cabinet.
The US has several times denied entry visa to Iranian officials for UN General Assembly meetings, showing the necessity for a change in the venue of the meetings of the world body, which requires attendance of the representatives of all the world states.
Ahmadinejad and his accompanying delegation left Tehran for New York at the head of a delegation today in a bid to attend a UN General Assembly meeting and hold talks with senior heads of state who will participate in the meeting.
Over 150 security officers will guarantee President Ahmadinejad’s security during his stay in New York.
President Ahmadinejad will address the UN General Assembly which is due to start on September 25. Since taking office, Ahmadinejad has attended all annual UN General Assembly meetings.
This year Ahmadinejad will also attend the meeting as the rotating president of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
He also is also scheduled to attend bilateral talks with several of his counterparts on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting.
Ahmadinejad is also set to meet American university students, artists, intellectuals and elites despite the ongoing efforts made by the pro-Zionist lobbies to prevent direct link between American people and the Iranian president.
He has also accepted the interview requests made by several news networks, including CNN, CBS and Russia Today (RT).
President Ahmadinejad has, thus far, visited New York seven times to attend the annual UN General Assembly meetings since he ascended to power in 2005. But this time, he will attend the meeting not just as Iran’s President, but as leader of the 120-nation NAM.
This will be Ahmadinejad’s last visit to attend a UN General Assembly meeting as Iran’s president since he will step down presidency in the next 10 months at the end of his second term in office.
Ahmadinejad’s visits to New York to attend the UN General Assembly meetings have become a source of concern for the US officials ever since his 2007 visit led to a landmark speech at the Columbia University on the sidelines of the 62nd annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
He gave an outstanding speech about the US, Israel and the existence of the Holocaust when he visited the campus in 2007 for a talk, and he was given repeated applause by thousands of the audience who filled the campus site and the nearby streets up to Broadway.
September 23, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Ahmadinejad, Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, UN General Assembly, United Nations, United Nations General Assembly, United States |
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UN Special Rapporteur – US Nuclear Testing Continues to Violate Human Rights in the Marshall Islands
September 13, 2012 was a historic day at the United Nations and in the Marshall Islands. On this date, in this seventh decade of the nuclear age, the UN Human Rights Council considered the environmental and human rights impacts resulting from the radioactive and toxic substances in nuclear fallout.
And, for the first time in the history of the United Nations, Marshallese citizens stood before a United Nations Council in defense of the human rights of their communities, with survivor testimony on United States nuclear weapons fallout, environment, health and human rights consequences, and the ramifications of continuing failure to achieve environmentally sound management and disposal of the hazardous substances and toxic wastes resulting from US military activities in the Pacific Proving Grounds.
This moment was generated as a result of the work of Mr. Calin Georgescu, Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and waste, who presented the report of his mission to the Marshall Islands and the United States and his findings and recommendations on the human rights consequences of nuclear contamination.
In his visit the Marshall Islands in March 2012, Mr. Georgescu reported that the communities affected by nuclear testing over sixty years ago in the Marshall Islands are still adversely affected by the radiation and near-irreversible environmental contamination from US weapons tests. In his report, the Special Rapporteur noted that these injuries had been most recently confirmed in the 2008-2009 President’s Cancer Panel which recommended that the US “honor and make payments according to the judgments of the Marshall Islands Tribunal”. Yet, for these and other reasons, the Marshallese have yet to find durable solutions to the dislocation to their indigenous ways of life.
As residents of a United Nations designated trust territory governed by the United States, the Marshallese people endured the loss of traditionally-held land and marine resources without negotiation or compensation; were exposed to fallout contamination compromising the environmental health of individuals, communities, and an entire nation; suffered through the documentation of health hazards through a decades-long medical research program that included human radiation experimentation; and, when negotiating the terms of independence in free association with the United States, were severely hampered by the US refusal to fully disclose the full extent of military activities, including the scientific documentation of the environmental and health impacts of serving as the Pacific Proving Ground for weapons of mass destruction
In his visit the Marshall Islands in March 2012, Mr. Georgescu reported that the communities affected by nuclear testing over sixty years ago in the Marshall Islands are still adversely affected by the radiation and near-irreversible environmental contamination from US weapons tests. The Marshallese have yet to find durable solutions to the dislocation to their indigenous ways of life.
Observing that prior efforts to provide redress had been limited in scope and scale, and recognizing that reparation should ideally be restoration of what has been lost, the Special Rapporteur noted that in this case what has been lost is a healthy environment that sustains a viable and culturally distinct way of life. Thus, the principle goal of reparation requires a comprehensive approach for securing the rehabilitation and long-term sustainable development of the Marshallese people. He recommended the immediate development of a national and regional plan for attending to the many ulcerating issues identified in his report, similar to the initiatives undertaken for the benefit of affected-populations by States that historically carried out and continue to carry-out nuclear testing programmes. And outlined an array of specific recommendations which collective represent a framework by which truth, justice, and reparation might achieved through actions involving the Government, the United States, the UN and its specialized agencies and institutions, and members of the international community.
Responding to the Special Rapporteur’s report, Marshall Islands Minister of Foreign Affairs Phillip H. Muller acknowledged that efforts been undertaken by the United States to address the impacts of its nuclear weapons testing program, though “much more remains to be done to address the past, present, and future such impacts on the basic human rights of our Marshallese communities… Adjudicated claims of property loss and personal injury remain unfulfilled… Two UN resolutions on nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands remain the only instances in which the UN ever explicitly authorized the testing of nuclear weapons. Adopted in 1954 and 1956 in rejection of our petitions to halt the testing, those resolutions made specific assurances of fairness, justice and respect for human rights, which have never been met. This continued denial of justice to our people is completely unacceptable.” “This report,” Minister Muller observed, “tells the world that the Marshall Islands is entitled to know the truth, to be treated with dignity, and to have all those human rights which should never have been lost.” The Marshall Islands welcomed the Rapporteur’s recommendations and urged the United States and the international community to do likewise.
The United States response, delivered by State Department Counselor Arselan Suleman, appreciated the opportunity for constructive and open dialogue on the issues and agreed to continued assistance, while reiterating their objection as to the validity of the Special Rapporteur’s major findings. “The United States feels strongly that nuclear testing is not, fundamentally, an issue of ‘management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes.’ Particularly when described in terms of ‘improper’ or ‘environmentally sound’ management.” The US disagreed with a number of assertions of human rights law within this report, and disagreed that there is a continuing obligation by the international community to encourage a “final and just resolution” of the issue. The United States position is that it has “acknowledged and acted responsibly upon the negative effects of the nuclear testing” as evidenced by “the full and final settlement of all claims related to the testing contained in the 1986 Compact of Free Association.” Citing expenditures of $600 million to date for various technical problems, including $150 million to settle all nuclear claims, the United States assured the United Nations that “Experts and scientists from across the U.S. Government will continue their decades long engagement in the Marshall Islands to address the issues that arose from our nuclear testing.”
In the ensuing dialogue between nations, institutions, and non-governmental organizations, speakers recognized the continued presence of radioactive contaminants in the Marshall Islands and reaffirmed the existence of a special responsibility by the United States towards the people of the Marshall Islands, and the need for continuing and increased levels of bilateral cooperation. They also called for radioactive waste, environmental contamination, and related human rights issues of nuclear militarism to be adequately addressed bilaterally and through the United Nations system.
Algeria said this report confirms unequivocally the cause and effect relationship between nuclear testing and violation of the right to health, damage to the environment and the displacement of populations and confirms the right of affected populations to an effective remedy. While recognizing that each situation has its own peculiarities, my delegation would like to know if the lessons and recommendations presented in the report of the visit can be extended to other situations of nuclear tests in the world?
Australia said that it had joined with other Pacific Leaders at the Pacific Island Forum in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, in August 2012 in reaffirming recognition of the special circumstances pertaining to the continued presence of radioactive contaminants in the Marshall Islands. Australia welcomed the report of the Special Rapporteur as a contribution to stimulating dialogue between the parties in the spirit of understanding and reconciliation for the benefit of the Marshallese people.
Cuba said that the United States has a responsibility and a debt to the people of the Marshall Islands, which has suffered and continues to suffer the harmful consequences of U.S. nuclear testing program in the territory. They believe, like many other countries, the United States must provide adequate compensation to the victims of their actions to restore their dignity, contribute to the resettlement of displaced populations displaced by the product of radioactive contaminants and also to revive the economic productivity and human development in the affected areas. The negative implications for the enjoyment of fundamental human rights such as food and health should be reversed immediately.
New Zealand, speaking on behalf of the Cook Islands, Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, said during the Forum’s meeting last month in the Cook Islands, leaders had recognized the special circumstances pertaining to the continued presence of radioactive contaminants in the Marshall Islands and reaffirmed the existence of a special responsibility by the United States towards the people of the Marshall Islands. They also called for the issues to be adequately addressed through the United Nations system.
Maldives took note of the first report submitted to the Council by the Special Rapporteur on hazardous substances and said that the effect of nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands must be examined from several aspects, such as its impact on the health of the population and the environment. The support of the international community in this regard was very much needed because many small island States were struggling with multifaceted challenges and did not have the capacity to deal with such adverse impacts on the environment.
Malaysia agreed with the recommendations of the Special Rapporteur for a just and lasting solution to the continuing plight and suffering of the Marshallese People due to the effects of nuclear testing. They asked the Special Rapporteur to clarify whether that obligation rests on the international community, which had placed the Marshall Islands under trusteeship, or the relevant State actor, in its capacity as trustee, which had conducted the nuclear tests.
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation said that the compensation and remediation provided by the United States for the nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands had been insufficient to fully attend to the healthcare and socio-economic needs of the Marshallese people. The international community, the United States and the Government of the Marshall Islands must develop long-term strategic measures to address the effects of the nuclear testing programme and provide adequate redress to the citizens of the Marshall Islands.
Physicians for Social Responsibility provided an eyewitness account of the nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands by the United States by Jeban Riklon, who had lived on Rongelap Atoll, where no one knew that the United States had planned to test the Bravo bomb on that day and did not know that precautionary measures should have been taken. The population had been evacuated by the United States only two days later and brought into a military encampment and enrolled in Project 4.1 to study the effects of radiation on human beings.
Cultural Survival also provided an eyewitness account of the nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands by the United States by Lemeyo Abon, President of the ERUB (damaged, broken) association of Marshallese nuclear survivors. Ms. Abon described the explosion of the bomb Bravo on Bikini Atoll, just 180 km upwind from Rongelap Atoll where she had lived. The immensely painful consequences were felt even today, with birth of babies with missing limbs and other congenital defects.
In the General Debate, an additional statement was made by Cultural Survival/ Iju in Ean club by Abacca Anjain-Maddison, to reiterate the Marshallese civil society delegation’s endorsement and appreciation of the recommendations of the Special Rapporteur and they look to the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Human Rights Council to work collaboratively with all parties to move the recommendations into action. Concern was also expressed that “the ultimatum of the United States to force the Rongelap community to return to a contaminated environment will represent a new level in human rights abuses perpetuated by the US against the Marshallese.”
In his response to comments, Special Rapporteur Calin Georgescu addressed the US position that consideration his of contamination from nuclear weapons testing was not included in his mandate, stating that “the long history of nuclear weapons testing on the Marshall Islands has produced a significant amount of nuclear radioactive waste which is indubitably toxic in nature and less health and continue to have several impacts to the ability of the Marshallese people to enjoy the full scope of their human rights.” With regards to the question of liability, the Rapportuer stated “I completely support that the international community has to be involved in this process; it is not only bilateral aspects.”
The UN report concludes with significant, wide-ranging recommendations to address the ulcerating legacy of nuclear militarism in the Marshall Islands.
The Marshall Islands should request the assistance of relevant UN agencies and bilateral partners to;
- Improve water, sanitation and waste management, health and education infrastructure, and to carry out independent, comprehensive radiological surveys of the entire nation similar to those conducted by the IAEA on testing sites in other countries.
- Strengthen health infrastructure to address concerns of the whole population.
- Turn Marshall Islands biodegenerative environment and health history into asset by taking the lead in hosting and fostering collaborative partnerships to develop and implement innovative approaches to monitoring, assessing, and caring for a contaminated environment, human health and well-being.
The United States should;
- Continue to support the Marshall Islands in efforts to protect the environment and safeguard the health of its people.
- Support Marshall Islands efforts to conduct a comprehensive survey and mapping of the radiogenic and other toxic substances remaining in the terrestrial and marine environment from US military activity in that nation.
- Continue to provide assistance and the means to secure, contain and remediate hazardous sites.
- Provide full funding for the Nuclear Claims Tribunal to award adequate compensation for past and future claims, and exploring other forms of reparation.
- Adopt a presumptive approach to groups currently excluded from the special healthcare programmes created by the US to assist survivors of nuclear testing.
And, given the role of the United Nations in establishing the strategic trusteeship of the United States, the international community should;
- Recognize and act upon its ongoing obligation to encourage a final and just resolution for the Marshallese people.
- Support bilateral and multilateral action to assist the Marshall Islands in its efforts to regain use of traditional lands, including the knowledge and means to identify, assess, remediate and restore a sustainable way of life.
- Invest and participate in collaborative partnerships to develop and deploy technologies and methods to monitor and remediate environmental hazards and reduce health.
- Support nationally-owned and nationally-led development plans and strategies.
- Mitigate the effects of climate change.
- Monitor, secure and remove nuclear wastes on a scale and standard comparable to the clean-up of domestic testing sites in the United States, as part of an international response to nuclear legacy issues.
In his informal remarks during the informal panel Human Rights Impact of Nuclear Testing (organized by Reaching Critical Will and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), Mr. Georgescu acknowledged that his recommendations are ambitious and in a world where so many other issues compete for attention a full measure of reparation may be difficult to secure. Yet, he pointed out, it is these other competing issues that make attention to the Marshallese situation so urgent. The failure to fully protect the health and well-being of the Marshallese nation, and the failure to fully and adequately respond to the environmental health disaster resulting from nuclear testing and fallout, has generated an ever-expanding array of rights-abusive conditions that are persistent, pervasive, and alter the very fabric of life.
The urgent need to act is echoed in Lemeyo Abon’s testimony:
“We have a saying jej bok non won ke jemake which means ‘if not us, who?’ We have to act now, we have to let peace prevail, this is our time for the future of our children and grandchildren. I urge this council and the members of the United Nations to take action to not only help us help ourselves, but to make sure that such miseries do not occur ever again.”
As Jeban Riklon noted in his statement to the Human Rights Council, “I am especially happy to be here because it is my right, as a human, to voice and make a plea before this Council for what we have been going through for many years.” After so many decades of silent anguish where Marshallese complaints have been too often been ignored or dismissed, this report, the testimony of Marshallese elders, and the response by assembled nations represents an essential element of reparation. A small measure of dignity has been restored.
For further information:
The report of the Special Rapporteur on the human rights obligations related to environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and waste Addendum 1 – Mission to the Marshall Islands and the United States of America (AHRC/21/48/Add.1)
Addendum 2 – Mission to the Marshall Islands: comments by the State on the report of the Special Rapporteur (A/HRC/21/48/Add.2)
Full video of the Special Rapporteur report on his Mission to the Marshall Islands and the United States begins at 03:36. Webcast of individual comments is also available.
Three parallel events were sponsored by civil society to inform the Human Rights Council on the human rights implications of nuclear militarism in the Marshall Islands, and the consequential damages of a flawed radiation health science; human environmental rights conditions resulting from the military use of deleted uranium in Iraq; and a comparative consideration of experience and response to human rights impact of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, and Australia. Organizers and cosponsors for NGO panels and speakers included Center for Political Ecology, Reaching Critical Will/Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Center for Political Ecology, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Union of Arab Jurists/European Radiation Risk Committee, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Cultural Survival. For additional information on presentations and the underlying issues, contact:
Barbara Rose Johnston, Center for Political Ecology, bjohnston@igc.org
Beatrice Will, Reaching Critical Will/WILPF, beatrice@reachingcriticalwill.org
Chris Busby, European Radiation Rsik Committee, christo@greenaudit.org
Naji Haraj, Union of Arab Jurists harajnaji@yahoo.com
Rick Wayman, Nucelar Age Peace Foundation rwayman@napf.org
BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology. She is the co-author of The Consequential Dangers of Nuclear War: the Rongelap Report. Her most recent book, Water, Cultural Diversity and Global Environmental Change: Emerging Trends, Sustainable Futures? was copublished by UNESCO/Springer in 2012. She is currently assisting the Special Rapporteur’s efforts to document the human rights consequences of nuclear militarism in the Marshall Islands, and supporting advocacy efforts to bring Marshallese citizens to Geneva so their own voices can be heard. Contact her at: bjohnston@igc.org.
September 17, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Calin Georgescu, Marshall Islands, Nuclear weapons testing, Pacific Proving Ground, Phillip H. Muller, United Nations, United States |
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Ankara – Turkey’s intervention in Syria has been an act of unprecedented folly. Not since the republic was established in 1923 – not even when the military was in charge – has a Turkish government sought ‘regime change’ in another country. In sponsoring armed groups seeking to destroy the Syrian government, the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’ appears to be committing serious violations of international law. While the focus has to remain on the prime victims of their intervention, the Syrian people, it is also the case that more than a year later the policy has not worked for Turkey and is blowing up in the face of its architects, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
International Law
Article 2 (1) of the UN Charter (1945) states that the organization is based on the ‘sovereign equality of all its Members’. Article 2 (3) states that all members ‘shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered’. Article 2 (4) required all members to refrain in their international relations ‘from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’. Article 2 (7) states that ‘nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisprudence of any state’. Chapter 7 of the charter grants the Security Council the right to take action but only in cases of a threat to peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression. ‘Peace’ here is clearly intended to mean international peace and not the disruption of domestic peace by domestic disorder.
In 1965 the sovereign rights of the state were further affirmed in General Assembly Resolution 2131 (XX), entitled Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty, passed on December 21 by a vote of 109-0. Three of the core principles are adumbrated below:
1. No State has the right to intervene directly or indirectly for any reason whatever in the internal and external affairs of any State. Consequently armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic and cultural elements are condemned.
2. No State may use or encourage the use of economic, political or any other type of measures to coerce another State in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights or to secure from its advantages of any kind. Also no State shall organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities directed towards the violent overthrow of the regime of another State or interfere in civil strife in another State.
The fact that powerful states bully the weak and frequently violate their sovereign rights is no excuse for Turkey to do the same. The question of whether the Justice and Development Party government is violating Turkey’s own laws is another issue, already raised in the Turkish media and by opposition politicians.
Disarray
None of this would matter so much if Turkey’s policy had worked out. Bashar would have gone in a few months and the Turkish Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister would be hailed for their foresight and courage but now it is they who are on the hot plate. Bashar is still in power and the army – the foot soldiers mostly Sunni Muslims – has not broken up on sectarian lines. The armed protégés of the outside governments are steadily being contained and driven out of the towns and the cities they have infiltrated. Fighting continues but external support for the armed groups seems to be waning. The US was already losing its appetite for direct intervention under the aegis of NATO and in the wake of the murder of the US ambassador to Tripoli by the very people whom the US used as auxiliaries to destroy the Libyan Jamahiriya and its founder, it can be ruled out altogether and not only because of fear of the Russian and Chinese reaction. Finally the US is taking a clear look at the people likely to inherit in Syria if Assad goes and it does not like what it sees.
The recent statement of a ‘rebel commander’ in Aleppo that 70 per cent of the population remains loyal to the government probably means that 90 to 95 per cent support the government and not just in Aleppo, where local Christians have been forming armed groups to defend themselves. It is only another strand of western involvement in Syria that politicians who wear their Christianity on their sleeve in Washington and London have completely ignored the evidence of the killing and intimidation of Syrian Christians. Only the Vatican has spoken out. Only recently have the sponsors of the armed groups – with the notable exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar – begun looking askance at the savagery of the crimes they are committing, including the massacre of civilians and soldiers, rape, kidnapping and the murder of anyone identified as a ‘regime loyalist’, including police, postal workers, university professors and journalists. In Aleppo they stood their captives against a wall and riddled them with machine gun fire. Later they ‘executed’ 20 bound and gagged Syrian soldiers. In Al Bab – near Aleppo – they murdered postal workers before pitching their bodies from the roof of their building on to the steps below. In Homs the FSA’s Faruq Brigade maintained a special squad whose job it was to cut the throats of the group’s captives. Others have their heads cut off. All of this is justified by the crimes committed or alleged to have been committed by the ‘regime’. Any lines of demarcation between these groups have all but disappeared. There is tacit cooperation between all of them. There is no reason why any sane Syrian would want these people in their midst, especially as many are not even their countrymen but salafis/jihadis/takfiris – Pakistanis, Iraqis, Turks, Saudis, Chechens and Libyans – paid by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Their role in the armed opposition has become increasingly dominant.
US Target
Syria has been in the gun sights of the US administration for decades. The country’s modern history bulges with attempts to disable it through assassination, attempts to overthrow the government, armed attack and occupation and most recently sanctions: no wonder Syria has become a byword for the mukharabat state. In the past two decades the calibration of the anti-Syrian policy has been in the hands of the neoconservatives. The Middle East was their prime target and Israel their prime beneficiary. The national security strategy announced by the George W. Bush administration was effectively a neoconservative writ for attacking other states if and when the US wanted, with Muslim countries top of the list. The rule book – beginning with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia – was tossed out the window. After the invasion of Afghanistan the governments of seven states were set up for destruction: Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Iran, not necessarily in that order. Out of the ruins a new Middle East was to be born.
The strategy has been extended to include a wide range of activities befitting a ‘hyper’ state powerful enough to operate outside the law, including ‘extra judicial’ executions and drone attacks that have killed countless numbers of civilians as well as a handful of Islamic militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. Osama bin Laden could have been arrested and put on trial but was shot dead in front of his wives and children. This was not an ‘extra judicial’ execution because there is no such thing. For an execution to be legal it must have been preceded by prosecution, trial and conviction but now prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner have all been rolled into one. Osama might have been responsible for murders but he also was murdered. The use of ‘extra judicial’ execution is no more than media apologetics for crime.
Heads of state are no more exempted from the law of the gun than anyone else but there was a time when they were removed covertly. Now it is done right out in the open. The Reagan administration’s failed attempt to murder Muammar al Qadhafi in the 1980s was finally followed by success last year. The oracular statement of Hillary Clinton in Tripoli a few days before his murder that ‘we’ are looking forward to the Libyan leader’s capture or killing was thus fulfilled. It will be remembered that she celebrated the occasion with a joke. The assassination of the US ambassador to Libya was a different matter altogether: she said it left her heartbroken – a technical impossibility, some would say, reminiscent of the old jazz line – ‘something beats in his chest/but it’s just a pump at best’. Certainly she has never been known to utter a word of regret, remorse or apology for the women and children who have been killed by US drone attacks in various countries. Her heart seems quite intact as far as they are concerned.
Clinton’s purpose-driven morality blows around like a weathervane in a high wind but she is no more than the symptom of an ugly moment in history which has produced Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition and torture, the massacre of civilians on the ground and from the air in Baghdad, the urinating on the bodies of their victims by US soldiers in Afghanistan, and even the trophy mutilation of their bodies. One cannot be separated from the other. Reinforcing the systemic place of these crimes, very rarely has anyone even been rapped on the wrist for them.
Overshadowing them all, of course, is the genocidal assault on Iraq, beginning in 1991, and continuing through more than a decade of sanctions and the second war of 2003, but not even for these most terrible crimes has anyone who committed them or was ultimately responsible for them been punished. Clinton and Obama arrived late but added Libya to the pile of corpses and in any case have adhered to the policies set by their neoconservative predecessors.
In this new overtly lawless world, Bashar al Assad is a prime target for assassination. Very possibly he was expected to be at the meeting targeted for bombing by the so-called Free Syrian Army in Damascus a few weeks ago. Usually governments feel obliged to abhor terrorism, especially when directed against the members of other governments, but this time the spokesman for the US State Department more or less said that the victims – the Defence Minister and two other senior figures in Assad’s inner circle – had it coming. Responsibility for this attack was claimed by Riad al Assad, the commander of the FSA who remarked: ‘God willing this will be the end of the regime. Hopefully Bashar will be next’. Mr Assad lives in southeastern Turkey under the protection of the Turkish state. The question is rhetorical but still has to be asked: has Turkey really reached the stage where its government gives sanctuary to a man who openly admits to organizing terrorist outrages in the capital city of another country and is looking forward to the murder of its head of state? The FSA leader’s fervent hope was later echoed in the assertion by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius’ remark that Bashar does not deserve to be on this earth. In the world we used to have this would have been called incitement to murder.
Prolonging Violence
Under the UN Charter it is incumbent on all members to seek the peaceful resolution of conflicts that threaten international order. In Syria the US government and its allies have done the reverse. Through their intervention they have created a situation that threatens international order. In pursuit of their own agenda they have supported armed groups, imposed sanctions and agitated against the Syrian government through the UN Security Council and the Arab League.
Far from trying to bring the violence to an end they have prolonged it in the hope that it will eventually bring down the government in Damascus. They have blocked every attempt at a settlement that does not involve the precondition of ‘regime change’. Kofi Annan’s ceasefire could not work because the ‘friends’ were not prepared to compel the armed groups to lay down their arms at the same time as the Syrian army did. Having learned its lesson in Homs, where the tanks were pulled off the streets, only for the ‘rebels’ to take advantage of their withdrawal to reclaim lost positions, the Syrian government is not going to play this game again.
Further back, Saudi Arabia and Qatar torpedoed the Arab League monitors’ mission the moment it became clear it would come up with findings not to their liking. Its report was suppressed as was, more recently, the report resulting from the on-the-ground inquiry into the Houla massacre by the UN Supervisory Mission in Syria (UNSMS). It reached the UN Secretary-General’s office but not the Security Council and the mission’s mandate was terminated soon afterwards. The mission’s commander, Lieut-General Robert Mood, spoke at a press conference of conflicting evidence and it has to be assumed this was the reason for the report being buried. No solution has been allowed by the US that includes the participation of Iran. China and Russia have their own motives for supporting the government in Damascus but their position of opposition to outside intervention and support for negotiations without preconditions at least stands on firm moral and legal grounds. The main Syrian domestic opposition groups have now put forward an initiative for a negotiated settlement starting with the army and all armed factions laying down their weapons simultaneously. Having so far blocked every attempt at a settlement that does not meet their terms, will the ‘Friends of the Syrian People’ allow it to work?
Zero Problems?
In the campaign against Syria – or the Syrian ‘regime’ as the ‘friends’ would insist – Turkey’s role has been central. Until the beginning of last year the Turkish government had pursued policies of ‘soft power’ and ‘zero problems’ around all of Turkey’s borders. It now suits supporters of the government’s position to argue that the ‘zero problems’ policy had failed, when all the evidence suggests that it had been a resounding success. Outstanding issues were resolved, new trade agreements signed and borders opened up. Relations with the two countries with which Turkey has had the most difficult relationship – Syria and Iran – had never been better. The ‘zero problems’ policy will stand as Foreign Minister Davutoglu’s greatest achievement: its destruction will stand as his greatest failure.
Libya marked the beginning of Turkey’s policy turnaround. Erdogan initially responded by saying that military intervention anywhere in the Middle East would be a disaster but with a western triumph inevitable Turkey climbed on board. The spectacle thus arose of a government selling itself on its Muslim credentials coming in behind yet another western attack on yet another Muslim country. With Libya finished – another functional state turned into a dysfunctional state – the western-gulf state alliance then turned its attention to Syria. Erdogan and Davutoglu abruptly dropped their attempts to persuade Bashar al Assad to accept their advice (apparently to negotiate with the Muslim Brotherhood and even to bring it into government) and turned on him. The ‘brother’ of a few months before was now the worst man in the world.
The crisis broke when the two men were already fashioning an enlarged regional and global role for Turkey drawing strength from the connections of the Ottoman past and building on Erdogan’s popular standing across the Arab world following his blistering criticism of Israel. In what critics described as ‘neo Ottomanism’, the two men saw Turkey as a regional leader, role model and servant, as Davutoglu put it a few months ago. A new Middle East was being formed and they positioned themselves on the crest of the wave of reform, albeit in a very selective way because they had little or nothing to say about the need for change in the Gulf states.
Out of Touch
Had Erdogan and Davutoglu been properly advised, had they been more alert, more tuned in to the realities of the Middle East, they would have known that Bashar would not soon be gone. They would have known that he is popular with many Syrians and is seen by them as the best hope for reform. They would have known that confrontation with Syria would undermine relations with Iraq and Iran, as well as putting Turkey at odds with Russia and China. They would have known that these two powers would never allow a repeat of Libya and they might have guessed that the Kurds would take the opportunity of turmoil in Syria to strengthen their own position. They presumed to speak for the Syrian people when not even now is there any evidence that the ‘Syrian people’ in the mass support whom they support. The clearest evidence of what they want remains the referendum of February, when more than half the people on the electoral roll voted to remove the Baath party as the central pillar of society and state and bring in a multiparty system. Of course the changes did not go far enough: after half a century of authoritarian rule, the mukhabarat state was never going to be transformed overnight but what was on offer was certainly better than the mayhem sweeping across Syria with the encouragement of governments that have done nothing but harm to Arab interests over the last two centuries.
Cost of Conflict
The costs of Turkey’s confrontation with Syria have been great. An effective regional policy has been wrecked in favor of policy incoherence. The Kurds have taken advantage of the turmoil, with the PKK escalating its attacks and the Syrian Kurds tightening their grip on the region just south of the border, raising alarm in Ankara at the possibility of a Syrian Kurdish enclave being added to the nucleus of a future ‘Greater Kurdistan’. Bashar is being blamed when it is clear that the Syrian army is stretched to the limit and no longer capable of policing the border as before.
The Iraqi Kurds have been sucked into the vortex of this conflict, with Massoud Barzani convening a meeting of the Syrian Kurds – including a faction closely linked to the PKK – and advising them to settle their differences in the common interest and take what they can. Because of the close political and trade links established with the northern Iraqi Kurdish governorate – at the expense of relations with the actual government of the country – Erdogan was infuriated at Barzani’s endorsement of actions seen as inimical to Turkey’s security interests. Rubbing salt into Iraq’s wounded pride, Davutoglu chose the middle of this crisis to visit the contested city of Kirkuk.
In the southeast sanctions have killed off the cross-border trade with Syria that was the livelihood of merchants and traders in Hatay and Gaziantep provinces. The population of Hatay is more than 50 per cent Alevi and still connected to Alawis across the border by family ties. The Turkish Alevis are strongly opposed to their government’s policies and do not want the ‘refugees’ (formally the ‘guests’ of the Turkish government), the bearded jihadis or the agents of foreign governments in their midst. They see Bashar as the head of a secular regime which is the best guarantor of minority rights and they regard the prospect of a Muslim Brotherhood-type government of the kind apparently favored by Erdogan with absolute anathema. Their reaction to the situation has not been helped by Erdogan’s intermittent political point scoring at Alawi expense. The focus on Hatay revives the question of how the province came to be a Turkish possession in the first place: breaking the terms of its mandate over Syria, the French government handed the region to Turkey in 1938 as a placatory measure before the onset of the Second World War. As for the Turkish people in the mass, the most recent poll indicates that the majority do not support military intervention in Syria. Whether they are aware of how deeply their country already is involved is another matter.
Tens of thousands of Syrians are now pouring out of their country to seek refuge in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. They are another consequence of the decision to prolong the fighting in Syria rather than help end it. Here it should be remembered that Syria took in half a million Palestinian refugees in 1948 and more than a million Iraqis after the US-led invasion of 2003 created the greatest refugee tragedy in the Middle East since 1948. Now it is Iraq that is taking in Syrian refugees. Refugees of a different category in Syria include the families of the 100,000 Syrians who were driven off the Golan Heights by Israeli forces in 1967.
Although everyone in the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’ is playing their part, the role of Saudi Arabia and Qatar – the paymasters – is especially pernicious because it is based on a sectarian reordering of the Middle East, with Shi’ism dammed behind a wall of Sunni governments. Saudi Arabia is one of the most reactionary states in the world, not just the Middle East. Qatar is a liberal version of Saudi Arabia but still has no political parties, no parliament, no unions and a system of indentured foreign labor that has been likened to slavery and even bears the same name as that given to the columns of slaves trudging across Africa in the 19th century (the kafil, the name of the wooden collar yoking the slaves together.)
The unprecedented domestic success of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party government has now been followed by unprecedented folly in foreign affairs. It needs to get out of this mess without delay, a conclusion that has undoubtedly already been reached within the party. Turkey needs to get back to where it was and begin the process of repairing the damage done to relations with near neighbors, beginning with Iraq and Iran because it will be a long time before relations with Syria can be returned to an even keel. The whole Syrian venture will have to be wound down. The SNC will have to be abandoned (but it has been a waste of time and money from the beginning anyway) and the commander of the FSA asked to seek lodgings elsewhere. Whatever the support being given to the armed men it will have to be dried up. This is going to create further complications but they will have to be faced. There will be loss of face but that is a problem for the individual politicians and advisers concerned: the interests of the country are the central issue and in any case, loss of face does not even begin to compare with the loss of more lives that will be the only result of persevering with a policy that has failed.
– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
September 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Aleppo, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Sovereignty, Syria, Turkiye, United Nations |
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Introduction
Iran chaired, hosted and led the recently rejuvenated Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Teheran, attended by delegates from 120 countries, including 31 heads of state and 29 foreign secretaries of state. Even the United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, notorious mouthpiece of Washington, felt obligated to address, a forum attended by two-thirds of the member countries of the UN, despite State Department and Israeli objections.
Any objective evaluation of the meeting, its venue, the attendance, resolutions and political impact leads to one paramount conclusion: the NAM meeting was a strategic diplomatic victory for Iran and a major defeat for the US, Israel and the European Union. The entire US-Israeli-EU diplomatic and propaganda effort to isolate and stigmatize Iran, especially over the past decade, was shredded.
The Politics of Attendance
Attendance by representatives of 120 countries demonstrates that Iran is not a ‘pariah state’; it is an accepted member of the international community.The presence of 60 heads of state and foreign secretaries demonstrates that Iran is considered a noteworthy and significant political actor, not a “terrorist state” to be isolated and shunned. The proceedings, debates and discussions among and between the delegates and Iranian leaders convinced those attending that Teheran gives primacy to reasonable dialogue in resolving international conflicts.
Both in terms of form and content the NAM meeting highlighted the superiority of Iran’s diplomacy over and against Washington’s bellicose posturing and improvised diversionary tactics. The fact that the meeting took place in Teheran, that Iran was elected chair, that a major part of the NAM agenda and subsequent resolutions coincided with Iran’s democratic foreign policy, highlights Washington’s policy failures and its isolation on issues of major concern to the larger international community. Pandering to the domestic Zionist power configuration has a high cost in the sphere of international politics.
NAM Resolutions: Iran versus Washington – Israel
The centerpiece of US and Israeli strategic policy has been to claim that Iran’s nuclear program including the enrichment of uranium, are a threat to world peace and in particular to Israel and the Gulf states. The NAM meeting repudiated that position, affirming Iran’s right to develop a peaceful nuclear program including the enrichment of uranium. NAM rejected western sanctions against Iran and other countries. In fact many of the leading members, including India, brought delegations of business executives in pursuit of new economic contracts.
NAM declared its support for a nuclear free Middle East and called for an independent Palestinian state based on 1969 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, in total repudiation of Washington’s unconditional support of the nuclear armed Jewish state.
NAM rejected Egyptian Prime Minister Morsi’s proposal to support the Western backed armed mercenaries invading Syria, major blow to Washington’s effort to secure international support for regime change. NAM unanimously approved several resolutions which affirmed its anti-imperialist principles in direct opposition to US imperial positions: it rejected the US blockade of Cuba; it affirmed Argentine sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands (dubbed the ‘Falklands’ by Anglo-American pundits); it opposed the Paraguayan coup; it supported Ecuador in its dispute with Great Britain on asylum for Assange; it selected Venezuela as the site for the next NAM meeting; it rejected terrorism in all of its forms and modalities, including the state sponsored variant.
Western Propaganda Media: Self Serving Diversions
The resounding diplomatic successes of the Iranian hosts of the NAM meeting were countered by a mass media blitz directed at diverting attention to relatively marginal events. The Financial and New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post featured a speech by Egyptian Prime Minister Morsi calling for NAM support for the Western backed armed mercenaries invading Syria. The media omitted mentioning that no delegation took up his proposal. NAM not only ignored Morsi but unanimously approved a resolution opposing western intervention and affirming the right of self-determination, clearly applicable to the case of Syria.
While NAM defended Iran’s right to develop its peaceful nuclear program, the mass media publicized a dubious “report” authored by US favorite, Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) questioning Iran’s compliance with his directives. Not surprisingly the report by Amano carried no weight in the deliberations of the 130 delegates, given his notoriety as a front-man for Israeli and US pro-war propaganda.
Overall the mass media deliberately ignored or underplayed the resolutions, dialogue and democratic procedures of the NAM meeting in an effort to cover up the enormous political gulf between the US, Israel, the EU and the vast majority of the international community.
Political Impact of the NAM Conference
NAM seriously undermined the images of the Mid-East conflicts which US policymakers and their acolytes in the EU and Gulf States project: the political reality, which came out of the meetings emphasized that it is the US. Israel and the EU who are outside the mainstream international community. It is the US and EU who lack political allies in the pursuit of colonial wars. It is the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Washington’s policies of ‘regime change’ in Syria and Iran which lack allies. Its Iran’s peaceful nuclear program which has legitimacy not Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The Iranian leadership gained prestige via its openness to international dialogue. In contrast its regional Gulf adversaries, who rely on multi-billion dollar US arms purchases and military bases were denigrated and discredited.
The Iranian proposals to reform the United Nations to make it more democratic and responsive to emerging countries and less a tool of US-EU policymakers resonated throughout the conference. The emphasis on free trade, was manifest in the large economic delegations who attended eager to sign agreements in defiance of US-Israel-EU sanctions.
Conclusion
Temporarily the NAM conference may have lessened the threat of a military attack against Iran, at least by the US and the EU – by demonstrating the political cost of alienating two thirds of the UN Assembly. Nevertheless by demonstrating Israel’s total isolation, (and truly pariah status in the international community), NAM may have heightened the pathological paranoia of the Israeli leadership and hastened its move toward a catastrophic war.
The follow-up of the NAM resolutions requires a permanent organization, a minimum coordinating secretariat to ensure compliance and rapid responses to crises. Otherwise the good intentions and positive moves toward peace via dialogue will be inconsequential.
The mobilization of the NAM members in the UN General Assembly is crucial to withstand the blackmail, bribes, threats and corruption which are used by the Western powers to secure majorities on crucial votes regarding US sanctions, coups and military intervention. Trade, investment and cultural boycotts of Israel should be promoted and enforced, until the Jewish State ends its occupation of Palestine. Clearly Iran, as the newly elected leader of NAM, has a major role to play in ensuring that the Tehran meeting of 2012 becomes the basis for a revitalization of the Movement. Iran can play a constructive leadership role providing it continues to promote a plural collective format based on common anti-imperialist principles.
September 6, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Solidarity and Activism | Ban Ki-moon, European Union, International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran, Middle East, Non-Aligned Movement, United Nations |
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Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei called on the United Nations to assume a more decisive role in creating a nuclear-free Middle East.
During the meeting he held with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his accompanying delegation in Tehran on Wednesday, Ayatollah Khamenei pointed to nuclear disarmament as the common concern for all of humanity.
He highlighted, “The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates its stance on a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, and the UN should make serious efforts to allay the concerns with regard to nuclear arms.”
Imam Khamenei warned about the ongoing attempts made by the United States and some world powers to equip “Israel” with more nuclear weapons, noting that the issue “constitutes an extreme danger for the region and the UN is expected to adopt measures in this respect.”
Moreover, Imam Khamenei criticized the “defective structure” of the UN and regretted how “the world’s most bullying powers, who possess nuclear weapons and have used them before, have dominated the Security Council.”
Referring to the US-engineered allegations against Iran’s nuclear energy program Imam Khamenei stated “The Americans are fully aware that Iran does not seek nuclear weapons and [they are] merely looking for a pretext.”
Imam Khamenei condemned US and “Israeli” attempts to launch cyber attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities and criticized the IAEA over its inaction with regard to such aggressive measures.
Ayatollah Khamenei also criticized the United Nations for its inaction toward the US military threats against Iran, reminding that the world body “was expected to promptly counter the threat.”
Addressing the Syrian unrest, Leader of the Islamic Revolution described the crisis as a “very bitter issue” which has been taking a heavy toll on the “innocent people of the country.”
“Based on its religious teachings and beliefs, the Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to make every effort to solve the Syrian crisis,” the Leader added.
Ayatollah Khamenei deplored the arming of the Syrian insurgents by foreign elements and perpetuation of a “proxy war” against the Syrian government by certain countries as the major obstacle in the way of settling the Syrian crisis.
August 30, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Ali Khamenei, Iran, Middle East, United Nations |
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As tends to happen whenever Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivers a speech, especially one in commemoration of Al-Quds Day that explicitly rejects the ideology of Zionism and condemns the Israeli government for its inherently discriminatory, exclusivist, and ethnocentric policies and actions, all hell broke loose after the Iranian President addressed a large crowd at Tehran University on Friday.
“The existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to all humanity,” Ahmadinejad said, adding that “confronting the existence of the fabricated Zionist regime is in fact protecting the rights and dignity of all human beings.”
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the remarks as “offensive and inflammatory.” The European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who is leading nuclear negotiations with Iran, also denounced Ahmadinejad’s speech as “outrageous and hateful.”
Naturally, Ahmadinejad’s words also sparked the usual shock and horror from the usual people, the same people who still insist that (1) Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and (2) believe that such a comment constituted a direct threat of military action against the superpower-backed, nuclear-armed state of Israel.
Without delving into the persistent myths and deliberate falsehoods surrounding that particular talking point (one that has been sufficiently debunked countless times though obviously never seems to cut through the hasbara) or seeking to justify anything said by Ahmadinejad, a few things should be noted:
First: While Associated Press described Ahmadinejad’s comment as “one of his sharpest attacks yet against the Jewish state,” which seemed to indicate that this is the first time such language has been used, they failed to point out that Ahmadinejad has used this exact same phrase before.
After Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at a “National and Islamic Solidarity for the Future of Palestine” conference in February 2010, Ha’aretz reported he had said that “the existence of ‘the Zionist regime’ is an insult to humanity, according to Iranian news agency IRNA.”
Later that year, he said the very same thing.
Second (and more important): The “insult to humanity” phrase was not coined by the Iranian President to describe a political power structure defined by demographic engineering, colonialism, racism, and violence.
For example, a December 11, 1979 editorial in California’s Lodi News-Sentinel stated clearly, “Apartheid is an insult to humanity” and “must be ended.”
But the phrase has far deeper roots – roots with which the UN Secretary-General himself should be well acquainted.
A joint declaration by 20 Asian and African countries issued to the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on October 1, 1963 called upon the agency to reject the membership of South Africa due to its racist and discriminatory regime of Apartheid. It noted “with grave concern that the South African Government continues stubbornly to disregard all United Nations and Security Council resolutions and to maintain its apartheid policies in defiance of the United Nations General Assembly, of the Security, and consequently of the IAEA Statute.”
The declaration stated:
1. We condemn categorically the apartheid policies of the Government of South Africa, based on racial superiority, as immoral and inhuman;
2. We deprecate most strongly the South African Government’s irresponsible flouting of world opinion by its persistent refusal to put an end to its racial policies;
3. The apartheid policies of the Government of South Africa are a flagrant violation of the principles of the United Nations Charter, as well as being an insult to humanity.
The very first International Conference on Human Rights, held by the UN in (get this) Tehran from April 22 to May 13, 1968, “condemned the brutal and inhuman practice of apartheid,” “deplore[d] the Government of South Africa’s continuous insult to humanity,” and “declare[d] that the policy of apartheid or other similar evils are a crime against humanity.”
On February 15, 1995, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights adopted a resolution praising the end of “the era of apartheid in South Africa” which also reaffirmed that “apartheid and apartheid-like practices are an insult to humanity…”
The UN General Assembly has repeatedly reaffirmed “that the conclusion of an internal convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid would be an important contribution to the struggle against apartheid, racism, economic exploitation, colonial domination and foreign occupation” and, more specifically, the UN has affirmed time and again that “the inalienable rights of all peoples, and in particular… the Palestinian people, to freedom, equality and self-determination, and the legitimacy of their struggles to restore those rights.”
No one can accuse Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of having any affinity whatsoever for Zionism or the government of Israel. Clearly he believes that Israel practices its own form of Apartheid against the Palestinian people. And he is not alone.
In April 1976, just two months before the Soweto Uprising, South African Prime Minister (and known former Nazi sympathizer) John Vorster took an official state visit to Israel, where he was hosted by Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin. A number of friendship pacts and bilateral economic, military and nuclear agreements were signed. At a banquet held in Vorster’s honor, Rabin hailed “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence” and praised Vorster as a champion of freedom. Both Israel and South Africa, Rabin said, faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.”
Vorster lamented that both South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of Western civilization. Only a few months later, an official South African Government document reinforced this shared predicament: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”
Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general from 1993 to 1996, has written that following the Six Day War in June 1967,
We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one ‑ progressive, liberal ‑ in Israel; and the other ‑ cruel, injurious ‑ in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture.
That oppressive regime exists to this day.
Avraham Burg, Israel’s Knesset Speaker from 1999 to 2003 and former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, has long determined that “Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy,” insisting the only way to maintain total Jewish control over all of historic Palestine would be to “abandon democracy” and “institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages.” He has also called Israel “the last colonial occupier in the Western world.”
Yossi Sarid, who served as a member of the Knesset between 1974 and 2006, has written of Israel’s “segregation policy” that “what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid.”
Yossi Paritzky, former Knesset and Cabinet minister, writing about the systematic institutionalization and legalization of racial and religious discrimination in Israel, stated that Israel does not act like a democracy in which “all citizens regardless of race, religious, gender or origin are entitled to equality.” Rather, by implementing more and more discriminatory laws that treat Palestinians as second-class citizens, “Israel decided to be like apartheid‑era South Africa, and some will say even worse countries that no longer exist.”
Shulamit Aloni, another former Knesset and Cabinet member, has written that “the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.”
In 2008, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel released its annual human rights report which found that the dynamic between settlers, soldiers and native Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was “reminiscent, in many and increasing ways, of the apartheid regime in South Africa.”
Ehud Olmert, when he was Prime Minister, told a Knesset committee meeting, “For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep‑seated and intolerable” and repeatedly warned that if “we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”
Ehud Barak has admitted that “[a]s long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Shlomo Gazit, former member of Palmach, an elite unit of the Haganah, wrote in Ha’aretz that “in the present situation, unfortunately, there is no equal treatment for Jews and Arabs when it comes to law enforcement. The legal system that enforces the law in a discriminatory way on the basis of national identity, is actually maintaining an apartheid regime.”
Last summer, Knesset minister Ahmed Tibi told the Jerusalem Post that “keeping the status quo will deepen apartheid in Israel as it did in South Africa,” while Gabriela Shalev, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, told The Los Angeles Times last year that, in terms of public opinion of Israel, “I have the feeling that we are seen more like South Africa once was.”
Council on Foreign Relations member Stephen Roberts, after returning from a trip to Israel and the West Bank, wrote in The Nation that “Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with body-ravaging coils of razor wire.”
In April 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu’s own nephew, Jonathan Ben Artzi wrote that Israel’s “policies of segregation and discrimination that ravaged (and still ravage) my country and the occupied Palestinian territories” undoubtedly fit the definition of Apartheid.
Linguist, cultural anthropologist, and Hebrew University professor David Shulman wrote in May 2012 in The New York Review of Books that there already exists “a single state between the Jordan River and the sea” controlled by Israel and which fits the definition of an “ethnocracy.” He continues,
Those who recoil at the term “apartheid” are invited to offer a better one; but note that one of the main architects of this system, Ariel Sharon, himself reportedly adopted South African terminology, referring to the noncontiguous Palestinian enclaves he envisaged for the West Bank as “Bantustans.”
These Palestinian Bantustans now exist, and no one should pretend that they’re anything remotely like a “solution” to Israel’s Palestinian problem. Someday, as happened in South Africa, this system will inevitably break down.
Whether those who get hysterical over Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric agree with the above assessments – all of which were made by prominent Israeli and Jewish politicians, officials, and academics – is irrelevant. It’s clear that Ahmadinejad himself would agree.
Consequently, his reference to Israel (which he sees as an Apartheid state) as an “insult to humanity” (which repeats the same verbiage used repeatedly by the United Nations itself) appears to be far less inflammatory then the outrage that followed would suggest.
August 19, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Ahmadinejad, Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, United Nations, Zionist entity |
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The United Nations Security Council has decided not to extend the body’s observer mission in Syria, setting up a civilian liaison office instead. Russia called for the Syria Action Group to meet in New York on Friday in response.
The Council’s members have agreed to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s proposal to establish a liaison office in Damascus, France’s UN Ambassador Gerard Araud announced on Thursday following a Security Council meeting.
The new body will include military advisers to the head of the office on military affairs, as well as civil affairs and human rights components.
The exact size of the office is yet to be determined, but it will be significantly smaller than the current UN observer mission, peacekeeping department chief Edmond Mulet said.
“We are already identifying some staff already working there that will be willing to continue working in Damascus under this new office,” Mulet stated.
According to Mulet, the Syrian government has already given its agreement for the UN liaison office in Damascus.
Mulet also said he expected the new UN-Arab League Syrian envoy to be announced “very soon.” The new envoy will fill the shoes of Kofi Annan, who has announced his resignation effective August 31, noting that the conflict was spiraling out of control and that the Syrian government, rebels and incessantly-bickering Security Council members were to blame.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Annan said Syrian authorities have backed former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran UN diplomat who had previously served as the UN’s representative for Afghanistan and Iraq, as the new UN Syrian envoy. Several UN diplomats said Brahimi has already accepted the post, but with an altered mandate and title. Brahimi also reportedly conditioned his acceptance on “strong support” from the Security Council.
Currently there are 101 military observers and 72 civilian staff working in Syria’s UN observer mission. The last observer is to leave the country by August 24, but the observers will stop all their duties after August 19, when the mandate ends.
Meanwhile, Moscow has invited the members of the Syria Action Group to meet in New York on Friday.
The purpose of the meeting is to ensure that the group’s members are committed to the consensus document signed in Geneva in June, Russian envoy to the UN Vitaly Churkin said.
“Foreign ministers of countries, members of the action group, agreed to certain things and they need to do those things,” Churkin stated.
The meeting will take place at 11 am somewhere at the UN headquarters, he added.
August 16, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Syria, United Nations, United Nations Security Council |
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The Bahraini Freedom Movement issued a statement Friday in which it described the Russian demand in the Security Council as an “unprecedented development.”
“Russia has asked the UN Security Council to debate the case of Bahrain where a popular revolution has been taking place for the past 18 months. This reflects the new direction of Russian policies in the Middle East following two decades of downward opportunities following the fragmentation of the former Soviet Union. Earlier, the Chinese representative at UNSC had said that its double standards in dealing with the Arab Spring revolutions had damaged its impartiality,” the statement read.
“The internationalization of the Bahraini revolution will be a blow to the Al-khalifa and Al-Saud policies as they attempt to destroy the Bahraini revolution with shear state terrorism. The American and British military and security support of the despotic rulers of Bahrain is causing unease on the international scene especially after the recent flare up of the Syrian situation,” it added.
Turning to the Bahraini revolution, the Movement said that “among the recent deaths by chemical gases is a fetus in his mother’s womb. Atiyya Hassan Jassim Al Nakal of Sitra has confirmed that his wife had suffered a miscarriage following the inhalation by the mother of excessive amounts of chemical gases and tear gas. His family has been devastated. More than fifty citizens have lost their lives as a result of excessive use of chemical gases by the Al-khalifa and Al-Saud forces occupying the country.”
“Another detained human rights activist is Zainab Al Khawja who was arrested last week for protesting at a roundabout. Amnesty International has called for her immediate release. It said: In the past nine months Zainab Al-Khawaja has been arrested and released several times. She has been put on trial several times for “illegal gathering” and “insulting officials.” She is still facing three more trials,” it stated.
“Meanwhile the revolution has gained momentum in recent weeks following intensification by the regime of its barbaric attacks on civilian areas. About thirty demonstrations every day and night in almost all neighborhoods are taking place. The routine has become standard. The youth would gather at a place and would march followed by women procession. Few minutes later they would be attacked by overwhelming forces using chemical gases and tear gas canisters. A fracas would often ensue, and confrontations would continue for hours. While the troops would fire large amounts of lethal gases, shotguns and rubber bullets the youth would try to stop the attackers using petrol bottles to defend their own homes,” it noted.
“It is now clear that no settlement is possible between the people and the ruling family and the only way out is for the Al-khalifa to go,” the statement concluded.
August 11, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Al Khalifa family, Al-Manar, Arab Spring, Bahrain, Middle East, Russia, United Nations |
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Israeli Mayor of occupied Jerusalem, Nir Bakat, approved the demolition of two structures built by the United Nations (UN) as temporary emergency shelter for Palestinian families after Israel demolished their homes.
Israel strongly condemned the erection of the emergency shelters in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina. Israel accused the UN of overstepping its bounds and asserted that the trailer homes are illegal and should be demolished according to reports in the Israeli dailies Ha’aretz and The Jerusalem Post as well as the Palestine News Network.
Maxwell Gaylard, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories defended the agencies actions as emergency humanitarian assistance provided when the Palestinian families turned to the UN agency for help.
Gaylard echoed the concerns of other human rights groups in the area and noted that Palestinians in East Jerusalem apply for housing permits but do not receive them. He added, “Where else could we put [the shelters]? We are helping the Palestinians on land that is theirs. Beit Hanina is occupied Palestinian territory.”
Other officials at the agency noted that they did not require a permit for building because in addition to being build on Palestinian land, they are only an emergency solution, are not connected to utilities, and do not have foundations.
An Israeli spokeswoman said in a statement, “Israel is not a banana republic, but a state of law and order. The UN can help to advance the residents’ quality of life in keeping with the law and we hope the construction violation at the site is not in accordance with the UN.”
The shelters have the UN agency’s logo on them along with the flags of the donor countries of Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Spain, The Netherlands and Ireland. Israeli officials claimed that the flags were only there to embarrass Israel in these countries as it destroys their donations.
If Israel is embarrassed by people outside of its borders watching as they demolish emergency housing for families, perhaps they should reassess their decision to do so.
August 9, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Beit Hanina, International Middle East Media Center, Israel, Jerusalem, United Nations |
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On Tuesday Khaled Mesmar, head of the Political Committee of the Palestinian National Council, reported that an official statement issued by Washington had been received demanding that if another membership bid was put to the United Nations, then all financial aid to the Palestine Liberation Office in Washington would be cut.
Mesmar stated that the threat was issued officially via the American Administration envoy which visited Ramallah recently and met with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
The initial bid for membership was blocked in September 2011 when the UN Security Council was put under pressure by the American delegation not to vote for it.
Mesmar reported that the Palestinian leadership would withold its UN bid for statehood if Israel stopped building settlements and released the Palestinian prisoners that were detained before the Oslo’s agreement of the 1993.
Illegal settlements have been the major obstacle to all negotiations. Despite settlements being illegal under the fourth Geneva convention and being in defiance of UN resolutions and the world court, Israel refuses to halt their construction, making negotiations impossible.
The US is demanding that the Palestinian Authority resumes talks without pre-conditions. Mesmar stated that rather than the halting of settlement construction being a Palestinian pre-condition, it is a commitment that Israel must undertake in accordance with the rule of law.
The importance of a fresh UN bid has taken on huge significance since last October, when UNESCO voted to admit Palestine as its newest member. The US immediately cut off all aid to UNESCO. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee referred to the vote which passed with a 107 to 14 majority, as “reckless and anti-Israel”
July 11, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | International Middle East Media Center, Obama, Palestine, United Nations |
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Special envoy Kofi Annan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad met on Monday and agreed to initiate another ceasefire plan between the government and the opposition. The following is an account of what was said at the meeting.
The meeting between Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the international envoy to Syria Kofi Annan on Monday began with the usual pleasantries. They were joined by the [Head of the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria] General Robert Mood and Annan’s political advisor Martin Griffith.
The international envoy began by indicating that he had followed the recent media appearances by the Syrian president, from the German television to the Turkish Cumhuriyet newspaper.
“It seems, Mr. President, that you are intensifying your media appearances in this period,” he remarked.
“This is true for two reasons. First, I am someone who prefers action and then words. Second, we noticed an extensive blackout of the facts in addition to the distortion and misrepresentation of many matters. So I saw it as my duty to speak,” Assad replied, smiling.
Annan understood. He replied saying he completely understands the difference between the events on the ground and the prevailing image that reflects the imagined scenarios of several agendas and impressions.
Annan then turned to the officially prepared statement: “Mr. President, I felt it was my duty following the conference we held in Geneva and a few days before my briefing the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on July 20 and 21, to come to you, meet with you, and present what we have achieved and what should be followed-up,” Annan said.
It was obvious from the introduction that Annan deliberately left out Friday’s opposition “Friends of the Syrian People” Paris conference and the escalation in rhetoric during and after that meeting.
He even went further, seizing the opportunity of his and the UN’s repeated commitment to his six-point peace initiative to stress to the Syrian president that the outcome of the Geneva convention was out of concern for this initiative, and nothing else.
“No doubt, Mr. President, you know that what happened in Geneva is different from some of the interpretations and explanations, which sought to add issues that had nothing to do with the conference or distorted its decisions,” he added. Annan’s remarkable position seems identical to the Russian stance on Western perspectives that followed the meeting.
Annan then spoke about the situation on the ground and the international monitoring mission in Syria. He pointed out the tragic situation in some regions and the need to practically achieve the essence of his mission, namely the second point concerning cessation of violence.
Assad responded by saying he is fully aware and responsive to the situation. He then presented his guest with a brief presentation of his mission since 12 April 2012. He explained how the ceasefire was reached and respected by the official armed forces for 24 hours, before it was broken by the armed insurgents, as noted in the international observers’ reports. While Assad was explaining, chief observer Mood nodded in agreement several times.
Annan listened to his host’s message, concluding that the truth of the matter confirms the need to work on a ceasefire, since the volatile situation began to spill outside Syria. Then he named Lebanon as a worrying arena for the repercussions of the Syrian situation.
“Let us try again and put a specific mechanism for a ceasefire starting from one of the more volatile regions, then move to the next,” Annan suggested. Again, Assad was completely responsive.
“We are a state, a government, and official authorities. Therefore, if you agree with us and we gave our word to abide by the ceasefire, we will be responsible for this and you can refer to us for implementation. But who will you negotiate with on the other side?” Assad asked his guests.
Annan replied, aided by Mood. They explained that the international observers, during their mission, were able to conduct a semi-comprehensive survey of armed groups active in those areas.
“We now know the main groups at least and we know those who are responsible for them. It is true that they do not have a unified command or clear structure. But we know the key people. Therefore we believe we could work with them step by step,” they said.
In this context, it was clear that the international officials had classified the side opposing the Syrian regime as an “armed opposition.” This was later indicated in Annan’s official press release.
On this point, Annan was reminded that the insurgents were the ones who aborted several similar attempts, especially in Homs.
“Some time ago, your observers witnessed attempts by some fighters to leave al-Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs to surrender themselves and their weapons. But other fighters stopped them from doing so. Your observers also witnessed how armed fighters blocked the attempt to rescue some of the residents trapped in al-Dayyan and al-Hamidiya neighborhoods in Homs,” they were told. This was confirmed by Griffith who had observed these events.
The international officials did not deny their hosts’ words. “Nevertheless, due to the current situation, let us try again. Our observers will reach an agreement with the armed groups in any area where we choose to work. In return, we want you to make a goodwill gesture at any of the mutually agreed starting points. Your gesture would be for a unilateral ceasefire from your side, a short time before the mutual deadline. Even if it is for four hours, for example,” Annan suggested.
Here, Annan was reminded that the ceasefire proposed in his six-point initiative is related to putting an end to the arming, financing, and weapons smuggling. Annan was listening to this sensitive point without reacting, until he was interrupted by a direct question.
“What do you think of what the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said two days ago [Sunday], when she called on the armed groups to launch an assault on the government’s forces? Is such a position consistent with the substance of your mission?” Annan was asked.
After a few seconds of silence, he replied saying, “Of course not. These are dangerous words. But let us try. Let us agree on this mechanism and proceed to try to implement it on the ground, step by step.”
As for the possible time-frame for such an operation, the two sides discussed several ideas, opinions, and suggestions. They concluded by agreeing on a preliminary deadline of three months, beginning from the first step to be implemented in the plan. In the meantime, both sides will work on releasing a joint statement of progress, once every two weeks.
Annan moved from the situation on the field to discuss the question of a national dialogue between the government and the opposition. “If we moved ahead in resolving the security issue and reached the dialogue phase, can you name your representative in this process to negotiate with the opposition, as a sort of liaison officer to follow the second part of the UN’s mission?” he asked.
Assad smiled and immediately replied, “We had decided on this before you asked us. Since the formation of the current government, we named someone to be in charge of the issue. He will be our representative in this process. He is the National Reconciliation Minister Dr. Ali Haidar.”
Annan inquired about Haidar and was told by Assad that he had been chosen for several reasons. “First, he is not from the loyalist camp. He is actually from the opposition. He is also the head of a party known for its honesty in Syria and abroad. Third, he was hurt during the bloody events. His son was killed by the insurgents but he ignored his wound and accepted the mission towards a genuine national reconciliation,” Assad said.
Annan acknowledged Assad’s explanation, but added that “we would have preferred if you named someone who is close to you and who would be in direct contact with you to follow-up on the dialogue process.”
Assad smiled again, saying that “Dr. Haidar and I sat next to each other all through my university years when I studied ophthalmology. Do you need someone closer than this?”
“In any case,” he continued, “I think your problem will be on the other side, not ours. Will you be able to name someone who represents the opposition?” Annan could not hold his laughter. He seconded Assad’s words and added, “I completely understand this difficulty. I saw them at the last conference in Cairo.”
The formal meeting concluded, but there was still time for some closing remarks. Getting ready to leave, Annan asked his host, “How long do you think this crisis will continue?”
“As long as the […] regime funds it,” Assad replied. But Annan was not surprised by the answer. “Do you think they are behind all the funding?” he inquired.
“They are behind many things that happen in our region. They believe they will be able to lead the whole Arab world today and in the future,” Assad said.
The international envoy concluded by remarking, “But it seems to me that they lack the population needed for such an ambition.” This made everyone laugh.
July 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | al-Akhbar, Annan, Bashar al-Assad, Kofi Annan, Syria, United Nations |
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