Category: Uncategorized

The Catholic Church has described as “unfortunate” the decision to drop corruption charges against Jacob Zuma, the man widely expected to win the South African presidential election on April 22.
South Africa’s chief prosecutor, Mokotedi Mpshe, announced on Monday that charges against Zuma were being dropped after phone-tap evidence showed there had been political interference in the investigation and it was “neither possible nor desirable” to prosecute Zuma.
The decision by National Prosecution Authority (NPA) threw Zuma’s supporters into celebration but also drew sharp criticism from around the country.
Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, Archbishop of Durban and spokesman for the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC), termed the decision unfortunate.
“The NPA decision not to proceed with the prosecution of Mr. Jacob Zuma has denied both Mr. Zuma and the country the chance to establish his innocence or guilt once-and-for-all through the normal process of a court of law, the cardinal said.
“However, in the interests of peace, healing and reconciliation, we appeal to all parties involved to use this unfortunate situation as an opportunity to commit themselves to good governance, with the expected accountability and transparency. It is crucial that all in position of responsibility learn from this episode to shun corruption in all its forms.”
Zuma, 66, the leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, has been in and out of court over the last four years. In 2005, his close associate Schabir Shaik was found guilty of fraud and corruption in connection with an multi-billion dollar arms deal. President Thabo Mbeki sacked him as deputy president.
Zuma was later charged with corruption and then the HIV-positive daughter of a family friend accused him of rape. He was acquitted of the rape charges in 2006.
Zuma sparked further controversy when he claimed that he knew the woman wanted to have sex with him and that it was against his Zulu culture to turn down a woman. He also said that he did not use a condom but took a shower to “protect” against HIV infection. At the time, he was head of South Africa’s Aids council.
The ANC elected Zuma as party president in December 2007. Within days, prosecutors brought new charges of corruption, racketeering and tax evasion against him.
Read More

By Riyaz Wani

Srinagar In a rare rapprochement, Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims — including separatists — met here on Tuesday in an attempt to open a dialogue and come to grips with the baggage of the past two decades.
Though some-hard-hitting opinions were expressed, the discussion never crossed the line into hostility. While the leader of Kashmir Sangharsh Samiti, Sanjay Tickoo, talked about the suffering of the Pandit community, Muslims in the audience said the Pandits were indifferent towards the difficulties of Muslims in the Valley. JKLF supremo Yasin Malik, while acknowledging that the Pandits had been hit hard by the situation prevailing in the Valley, said, “The affluent Pandits living in Delhi and other parts of India are not interested in returning to the Valley. They don’t even want the return of the poor Pandits living in tents in Jammu,” Malik said. “There is a huge vested interest which is now rooted in the tragedy of the community.”
The scene for the debate was an exhibition of pictures showing the plunder of Pandit properties and religious places in Valley over the past two decades. Tickoo said the Muslims termed Pandits as traitors and collaborators of the government and hence wanted them out of the Valley. “You (Muslims) say it was Governor Jagmohan who sent us out of the Valley as the violence broke out in 1990. But what about the thousands who had stayed back even then?” Tickoo asked. “They fled after the massacre of 23 Pandits in Wandhama. Now there are no more than 3,000 Pandits in Valley”.

Read more

(Submitted by Rohila Pritam)

Ottawa’s democracy promoters target Venezuela
by Anthony Fenton

Canada’s foreign policy, as that country which is closer geographically, economically, and militarily with the US than any other, has long been circumscribed by the whims of the world’s lone Superpower.
Part of the ‘hidden wiring’ of the US-Canada relationship is premised on the belief that there is a role for Canada in places where the US carries a lot of counter-productive baggage. New records obtained by The Dominion show just how actively intertwined Canada’s foreign policy is with the US-led ‘democracy’ promotion project in Venezuela.
Successive Canadian governments, beginning with Paul Martin’s Liberals and increasing under Harper’s Tory minorities, have pushed full steam ahead with efforts to expand Canada’s democracy promotion efforts globally. Canadian leadership in the regime change and military occupation of Haiti (2004-present) gave rise to a renewed emphasis on the region as an emerging regional power, which carries on under Harper.
Democracy promotion is seldom discussed in the Canadian public sphere, even while it has been the subject of a multitude of federal level conferences, reports, and parliamentary hearings over the last five years. Over that same time, Canada has increasingly been integrating its instruments of democracy promotion with those of the US.
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama quietly pledged to increase funding for the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), despite scaling back the rhetoric used to describe continuing US aims to promote global, Western-style democracy. Obama has already fulfilled this pledge.
His Omnibus Appropriations Act allocates $115 million for NED’s operations, increasing by $35 million the amount requested by Bush for 2009. All told, the requested 2009 budget for US democracy programs is the highest ever at $1.72 billion. By contrast, Canada spent upwards of $650 million on democracy promotion in 2008.
The NED was formed in 1983 as a new tool to advance US foreign policy and business interests around the world. Nominally independent, NED receives the majority of its budget from Congress, and each of its grants must be approved by the US State Department.
“One of the NED’s first major successes…was helping to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,” writes journalist Bart Jones in his authoritative biography of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. According to Jones, a couple of decades later “the NED was rapidly infiltrating [Venezuelan] society in a way reminiscent of the Nicaragua experience.” Channelling money and resources to opposition NGOs has been a prime strategy of the NED in Venezuela.
Following a short-lived coup d’etat against Chavez in April 2002, Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger and investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood obtained a treasure trove of documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These documents, released in conjunction with Golinger’s 2004 book, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, exposed NED’s active role in the attempted subversion of Venezuela’s democracy.
Read More

by Sonja Karkar

Sometimes one just needs to see with one’s own eyes what is possible and
what is not. But even then, it can be difficult to really make anything out
of the morass of lines and shadings on maps that attempt to document
Israel’s complex bureaucratic nightmare of land divisions, allocations,
closed zones, Palestinian areas, checkpoints, the Wall trajectory, and
future Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian West Bank under its military
occupation.

Le Monde Diplomatique, the French monthly magazine for world affairs offers
a series of strange maps in its 2009 edition of the Atlas du Monde
diplomatique and has one called “An Inverted World” on page 129 which
imagines the Palestinian West Bank as an actual archipelago. Strange indeed because the West Bank is in fact landlocked. However, it clearly illustrates how the Palestinian areas are divided and separated by Israeli settlements, checkpoints and barriers and how impossible the facts on the ground are for any kind of viable state for the Palestinians.

Produced below is the map showing a completely fragmented West Bank surrounded by water followed by an actual map of the West Bank as it appears within Israel. The difficulties the Palestinians face in moving from one city, town or village to another because of the endless checkpoints, poor roads, the Wall and the “no-go” areas become at once starkly obvious when one has to imagine navigating these obstacles by boat. Lest anyone think this would be a kind of pleasure cruise, they need to bear in mind that the distance between many of the towns is only around 30 kms, the sort of distances we don’t even think about when we travel to work or school, go shopping or visiting friends. For the Palestinians, the simplest outing can take all day, if they are even allowed through at all.

Gaza is worse. When Israel was dropping bombs on the Palestinians earlier this year, there was no safe haven to which they could run. Israel does not allow the inhabitants of Gaza out of its barricaded confines, not even by sea. The Palestinians were sitting ducks under Israel’s constant bombardments while the world sat back and watched as if Gaza was some amphitheatre with the Palestinians, the gladiatorial amusement. Not only are the not allowed out of Gaza, almost nothing is allowed in. The list of supplies prohibited from entering Gaza vary from day to day, but when even a staple like pasta is proscribed and not a singe building material has been allowed in since Israel’s 22-day blitz

Gisha – Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement in Israel commissioned a film by the director of the award-winning “Waltz with Bashir”, Yoni Goodman to show just what it is like being caged inside Gaza. It is a 90-second animated film called “Closed Zone” and is enormously powerful in its depiction of the Palestinian condition – the humiliations and the hopelessness – as Israel carries out a painfully slow ethnic cleansing. A press release
VIDEO LINK

The growing belief in a one-state solution

by Nadia Hijab

Ehud Olmert’s nightmare is at hand. Not only does the former Israeli prime minister now really have to fight those corruption charges. He also faces the realization of his fears that the Palestinians might give up on a two-state solution in favor of a struggle for equal rights that would mean, as he put it, the “end of the Jewish state.”

Yo, Ehud, that struggle is a growing movement, and it isn’t a threat to Jews – on the contrary, Jews are very much a part of it.

Just last weekend in Boston, American and/or Israeli Jews accounted for nearly a third of the 29 speakers at a conference organized by TARI (Trans Arab Research Institute) with the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts.

This is the second major public conference on how to achieve a single democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis. The first was held in London in November, and a third is slated for Toronto in June.

In a sign of the one-state movement’s persistence, the conference was over-subscribed weeks before it was held; dozens were turned away because the hall only seated 500 people. Those who got in remained glued to their seats as one intense presenter followed another, in spite of limited time for questions and, on day two, no lunch. For my part, I remain agnostic. As I said in my remarks at the conference, both states must provide equality for all their citizens – Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, women or men, whatever their ethnicity. And, by the way, this isn’t currently the case in either the established Israeli state or the putative Palestinian state.

In other words, even if two states are established, Israel cannot continue to be a state that privileges its Jewish citizens over its non-Jewish citizens. So either one or two states would mean the end of a Jewish state – although not of the state of Israel.

Besides, I believe other vital challenges face the Palestinians, including how to keep Palestinians physically on the land of Palestine, and how to effectively and non-violently challenge a leadership that represents at best a quarter of the Palestinian people so as to prevent the abrogation of Palestinian rights.

I share the view of policy analyst Phyllis Bennis who warned at the conference that the United States might seek to impose a mini-state with minimal sovereignty and rights.

That’s why my talk focused on an analysis of the sources of non-violent power available to the Palestinian people, including economic, moral, cultural, legal, and political power.

One important fact (simple but of utmost importance) was reiterated by several Palestinians – from the occupied territories, from within Israel, and in exile. They said loud and clear that working for the one-state solution means working with Israeli Jews. As acting TARI chair Hani Faris put it, “The idea of one state cannot fly without a Palestinian wing and a Jewish wing.”

Read more

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama and European leaders arrived in France today ahead of a key NATO summit to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the alliance. Obama will visit Germany today, as well, which is also playing host to the summit.
The French city of Strasbourg is under security lockdown, with 25,000 police on patrol following a day of clashes between protesters and riot police. Three hundred people were arrested, and a German press photographer was hospitalized after being hit in the stomach by a police rubber bullet. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have descended on Strasbourg and the German towns of Kehl and Baden Baden to protest the summit. France has temporarily reinstated border controls with Germany to restrict access to protesters.
The focus of the summit will be Afghanistan, where 70,000 troops, mostly under NATO command, are at war. President Obama will use the talks to enlist support for his escalation of the war. Obama has sent 21,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, is considering deploying 10,000 more.
Meanwhile, Taliban militants in Pakistan marked the start of the two-day summit by destroying a fleet of nine parked NATO vehicles in transit for Afghanistan.
Last week, President Obama defended his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The world cannot afford the price that will come due if Afghanistan slides back into chaos or al-Qaeda operates unchecked. We have a shared responsibility to act, not because we seek to project power for its own sake, but because our own peace and security depends on it. And what’s at stake at this time is not just our own security; it’s the very idea that free nations can come together on behalf of our common security.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about Afghanistan, NATO and the state of US economic and military power in the world today, we’re joined by one of the world’s most astute thinkers and most important intellectuals of our time: linguist, philosopher, social critic, political dissident, Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky is a prolific author and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just down the road from here, where he taught for over half a century. Among his many dozens of books are Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs; The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo; Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians; Manufacturing Consent; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies; and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. There’s a great collection of his work, just out now, edited by Anthony Arnove, called The Essential Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky, welcome to Democracy Now!
NOAM CHOMSKY: Very glad to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to be with you here in Massachusetts in the studio, instead of talking to you on the phone at home.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s start with what’s happening with this NATO summit celebrating sixty years, France rejoining after more than four decades. Your analysis?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the obvious question is why bother celebrating NATO at all? In fact, why does it exist? It’s twenty years now, almost, since the Berlin Wall fell. NATO was constructed on the—with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?
Well, in fact, the answers are interesting. Mikhail Gorbachev made an—agreed, made a remarkable concession at that time to the United States. NATO’s essentially run by the United States. He offered to allow a reunited Germany to join NATO, a hostile military alliance—

Read more

Durban [South Africa} police constable Kwesi Matenjwa confesses – on the morning of Saturday, 1 November – how “the great white shark”, City Manager Michael Sutcliffe, ordered his unit to evict (without alternative accommodation) 47 desperate people, mostly from the Eastern DRC. The area from which residents of Albert Park fled has witnessed four million casualties in a civil war over resources, as warlords – funded by corporations such as Anglo American (as Human Rights Watch discovered) – loot and pillage for coltan (used in our cellphones) and other minerals, making it unsafe for return. The refugees are also victims of the May 2008 Durban xenophobia and of a confrontation with Sutcliffe at City Hall in July. CCS has produced a photo exhibition by Oliver Meth and colleagues on their plight, displayed in the UKZN library. Sutcliffe accused the refugees – mainly women and children – of being involved in “crime”, offering no evidence. But Matenjwa explained that a political rally on 4 November and the 2010 World Cup were the real reasons police tore down plastic shelters and confiscated refugee belongings – including vital immigration papers – without warning. In the process of their attempted eviction, the refugees’ human rights were “drowned”, Matenjwa admitted, a not uncommon occurrence for a Durban metro police force that regularly shoots to kill. The refugees vow to remain in Albert Park until they have a chance at dignity.

Read more

By Farooq Sulehria

Fidel Castro finds beards a practical advantage: “You don’t have to shave every day. If you multiply the fifteen minutes you spend shaving every day by the number of days in a year, you’ll see that you devote almost 5,500 minutes to shaving. An eight-hour workday consists of 480 minutes, so if you don’t shave you gain about ten days a year that you can devote to work, to reading, to sports or to whatever you like.”

But having a beard is more than saving time. Cuban revolutionaries let their beards grow out also as a symbol of the Cuban revolution. Castro describes how it happened: “We didn’t have any razor blades, or straight razors. When we found ourselves in the middle of the wilderness, up in the Sierra, everybody just let their beards and hair grow, and that turned into a kind of badge of identity. For the campesinos and everybody else, for the press, for the reporters we were ‘los barbudos’ – ‘the bearded ones.’ The positive side was that in order for a spy to infiltrate us, he had to start preparing months ahead — he’d have to have a six-month’s beard growth, you see. So the beards served as a badge of identification, and as protection, until it finally became a symbol of the guerilla fighter. Later, with the triumph of the Revolution, we kept our beards to preserve the symbolism.”

But such symbolism is blasphemy in the newly founded “Emirate of Swat,” the north of Pakistan or Pakistani Tribal Areas practically governed by the Taliban Movement of Pakistan (TTM). There centuries-old Buddhist sites are being dynamited while the beard is mandatory. The standard-obligatory size is 7 cm. A man who shaves is fined Rs. 500 and twenty lashes in public. The mandatory beard in Swat or Tribal Areas (better renamed Troubled Areas) is not an attempt to gain ten days that can be in turn devoted to work or reading. Neither reading nor work is a priority in the “Emirate of Swat.” Schools are regularly blown up to save future generations from such an indulgence as reading. Work has been brought to a grinding halt so that the faithful can devote all their time to prayer.

Terrorism, assassinations, executions

Over the past forty years there have been more than 3,500 deaths in Cuba from terrorist attacks. Almost 2,000 more have been injured for life. These terrorist acts are mostly planned in Florida by groups like Alpha 66 and Omega 7. They are funded by the USA while some $68.2 million have been sent to Cuban “dissidents.” NGOs such as the National Endowment Fund and USAID pay journalists across the globe to spread disinformation about Cuba. Almost 600 plans were hatched to finish off Castro. Cuba, in turn, has never ever sponsored any terrorist activity against the USA.

In fact, Cuba even invited George Bush to Havana for a debate! Castro promised to fill the Plaza de la Revolucion with people and put up loudspeakers throughout in the county so that Bush or any other leader could convince the Cuban people. As far as the American people are concerned, Cuba’s policy, according to Castro, is: “Never has the Revolution blamed the American people, although at a certain point a vast majority of American citizens were persuaded that everything that was said against Cuba was true, that we were a threat to the security of the United Sates, and so on and so on. Cuba welcomes Americans with the greatest of respect and with no insults or affronts whatsoever.”

But in Pakistan, Americans, and even their infidel European cousins, better stay away. The Taliban made an example of Daniel Pearl (and the European Piotr Stancza), demonstrating the risk involved in visiting. To widely circulate their message, the confessional beards filmed the butchery inflicted on Daniel Pearl and posted it on Jihadist sites.

The beards twice bombed the US Consulate in Karachi (on 28 February 2003 and again on 2 March 2006). They attacked the Pak-American Cultural Centre and the residence of Consul General’s in Karachi (on May 26, 2004). The US Consulate’s Principal Officer, Lynne Tracy, was ambushed in Peshawar. After the recent attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, even South Asians are advised to think before they dare visit. The Chinese, having their engineers and technicians kidnapped, learnt their lesson to keep their distance.

Laws of war

In their guerilla struggle, the Cubans committed neither assassinations nor terrorism. No attempt was made on the life of Cuban dictator General Batista. “No war is ever won through terrorism. It’s that simple”, says Castro. His reasoning is that if you employ terrorism, you earn the opposition, hatred and rejection of those whom you need in order to win the war. But also “there are principles that are elementary in war and politics. Those who fell prisoner or surrendered were respected.” To those accusing Cuban revolutionaries of violating human rights, Castro responds: “I defy you to find a single case of execution; I defy you to find a single case of torture.”

During fifteen years of guerilla struggle, not a single person was assassinated. “Let people name a single prisoner, throughout that whole fifteen years, who was executed by Cuban forces. Not a single one! [Find one] and I will shut my mouth for the rest of my life,” Castro asserted. The Cuban guerillas shared their medical supplies, despite their scarcity, with their enemy’s wounded.

Read more

Geographers used to gather intelligence?

By Cyril Mychalejko
and Ramor Ryan

War was God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” once wrote Ambrose Bierce, an American journalist and social critic. Today, a University of Kansas (KU) professor may be using geography to teach Americans war.
Dr. Jerome Dobson, a geography professor and president of the American Geographical Society (AGS), sent out a one-and-a-half page white paper sometime in late 2004-early 2005 to the Department of Defense and civilian agencies looking for funding to promote a $125 million “academic” project that would send geographers to countries all over the globe to conduct fieldwork.
“The greatest shortfall in foreign intelligence facing the nation is precisely the kind of understanding that geographers gain through field experience, and there’s no reason that it has to be classified information,” wrote Dobson. “The best and cheapest way the government could get most of this intelligence would be to fund AGS to run a foreign fieldwork grant program covering every nation on earth.”
This fieldwork program, named the Bowman Expeditions, was enthusiastically received by Dr. Geoffrey Demarest, a former Lieutenant Colonel and current Latin America specialist at the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO). The FMSO is a research center housed at Fort Leavenworth, about 50 miles down the road from KU. According to its website, FMSO “conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world.” Demarest, a School of the Americas graduate who served multiple assignments in Latin America during his 23-year military career, has written extensively about counterinsurgency and believes mapping and property rights are necessary tools to advance U.S. security strategies, such as with Plan Colombia. He helped secure a $500,000 grant to partially fund México Indígena, the first Bowman Expedition, which until recently has been quietly mapping indigenous lands in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Read more

By James Traub

TO ENTER the office where Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, conducts his business, you head down a long corridor toward two wax statues of exceptionally tall soldiers, each in a long, white tunic with a glittering column of buttons. On closer inspection, these turn out to be actual humans who have been trained in the arts of immobility. The office they guard, though large, is not especially opulent or stupefying by the standards of such places. President Zardari met me just inside the doorway, then seated himself facing a widescreen TV displaying an image of fish swimming in a deep blue sea. His party spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, and his presidential spokesman, Farahnaz Ispahani, sat facing him, almost as rigid as the soldiers. Zardari is famous for straying off message and saying odd things or jumbling facts and figures. He is also famous for blaming his aides when things go wrong — and things have been going wrong quite a lot lately. Zardari’s aides didn’t want him to talk to me. Now they were tensely waiting for a mishap.

The president himself, natty in a navy suit, his black hair brilliantined to a sheen, was the very picture of ease. Zardari beamed when we talked about New York, where he often lived between 2004, when he was released from prison after eight years, and late 2007, when he returned to Pakistan not long after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by terrorists. For all that painful recent history, Zardari is a suave and charming man with a sly grin, and he gives the impression of thoroughly enjoying what must be among the world’s least desirable jobs. Zardari had just been through the most dangerous weeks of his six months in office. He dissolved the government in Punjab, Pakistan’s dominant state, and called out the police to stop the country’s lawyers and leading opposition party from holding a “long march” to demand the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been sacked, along with most of the high judiciary, by Zardari’s predecessor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Zardari defused the situation only by allowing Chaudhry’s return to office and giving in to other demands that he had previously and repeatedly rejected.

Yet, despite this spectacular reversal, the president was not in a remotely penitent state of mind over his handling of the protests against him. “Whoever killed my wife was seeking the Balkanization of Pakistan,” he told me. “There is a view that I saved Pakistan then” — by calling for calm at a perilous moment — “and there is a view that by making this decision I saved Pakistan again.” There had been, he said, a very real threat of a terrorist attack on the marchers on their way to Islamabad. That is why his government invoked a statute dating back to the British raj in order to authorize the police to arrest protesters and prevent the march from forming. I pointed out that Benazir Bhutto faced a far more specific threat and was outraged when General Musharraf kept her from speaking on the pretext of protecting her. The president didn’t miss a beat. “And therefore,” he rejoined, “we moved to the other side”: that is, he reversed his order to the police, and permitted the protesters’ march, just before giving in to their demands altogether.

Zardari has a special talent for maneuvering himself out of the tight spots he gets himself into. But the Pakistani people have grown weary of his artful dodging. Zardari’s poll numbers are dreadful. More important, he has given little sustained attention to the country’s overwhelming problems — including, of course, the Islamist extremism that, for the Obama administration, has made Pakistan quite possibly the most important, and worrisome, country in the world. Zardari has bought himself more time, but for Pakistan itself, the clock is ticking louder and louder.

When I arrived in Islamabad on March 10, the long march was set to begin in two days and had come to feel like a storm gathering force at sea — one that might peter out before it hit land or turn into a Category 4 hurricane. In a country where democracy feels as flimsy as a wooden shack, the foreboding was very real. “Our condition is much more fragile than it was in the 1990s,” Samina Ahmed, the International Crisis Group’s longtime Pakistan analyst, told me. (The I.C.G. is a sponsor of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, where I am the policy director.) The Taliban and other extremists had, she estimated, placed half the country beyond the control of security forces. The government had recently ceded control over the Swat Valley, 100 miles from the nation’s capital, to the extremists.

Pakistan feels as if it’s falling apart. Last fall the country barely avoided bankruptcy. The tribal areas, which border on Afghanistan, remain a vast Taliban sanctuary and redoubt. The giant province of Baluchistan, though far more accessible, is racked by a Baluchi separatist rebellion, while American officials view Quetta, Baluchistan’s capital, as Taliban HQ. American policy has arguably made the situation even worse, for the Predator-drone attacks along the border, though effective, drive the Taliban eastward, deeper into Pakistan. And the strategy has been only reinforcing hostility to the United States among ordinary Pakistanis.

Pakistan has made itself the supreme conundrum of American foreign policy. During the campaign, Obama often said that the heart of the terrorist threat was not Iraq but Afghanistan and Pakistan, and once in office he had senior policy makers undertake an array of reviews designed to coordinate policy in the region. They seem to have narrowed the target area even further, to the Pakistani frontier. “For the American people,” Obama announced on March 27, “this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world.” Some officials see Pakistan as a volcano that, should it blow, would send an inconceivable amount of poisonous ash raining down on the world around it. David Kilcullen, a key adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander, recently asserted that “within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state,” a calamity that, given the country’s size, strategic location and nuclear stockpile, would “dwarf” all other current crises.

And amid all that, Pakistan’s president appeared to be playing with fire. Zardari was setting his security forces on peaceful demonstrators, just as his authoritarian predecessor, General Musharraf, did — against members of Zardari’s own political party — several years earlier. The government crackdown, designed to prevent the marchers from reaching the capital, began on March 11. The police swept through the homes of opposition-party leaders, lawmakers, activists, “miscreants” and ordinary party workers. Many leading officials were already underground, but hundreds of arrests were made. By the 12th, the first day of the march, much of the country was glued to the television, where swarms of heavily armed policemen could be seen knocking down protesters and dragging them off to the paddy wagons. Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the main opposition party, saw the protests as the “prelude to a revolution,” while Rehman Malik, a key Zardari adviser, accused Sharif of “sedition.”
The posturing and hyperbole would have been comical if the stakes weren’t so high. Although in Pakistan, it’s true, the stakes always feel high.

Read more
(Submitted by a reader)

By Hanna Kawas

Voice of Palestine, Canada
3 April 2009

Thank you for writing the article “Airwaves of hope” (1) that
featured my volunteer work on Voice of Palestine. Your reporting was generally positive and accurate except where you state: “But Kawas, who says he acknowledges the right of Israel to exist as a state, …”. I believe either you misunderstood what I told you, or the insertion of this statement was an editorial decision not to offend the pro-Israel propaganda machine.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain why such a statement is unfair, offensive and upsetting to me and to the vast majority of Palestinians.

1. Israel as a state was build on stolen Palestinian land and as a result of the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the Palestinian people from their homeland. In the process of the establishment of the state of Israel over four hundred Palestinian towns and villages were wiped out from the map of the world (2)and two thirds of the Palestinian people were ethnically cleansed from their homeland and have never been allowed to return to their home. (3)

2. Israel as a state is an apartheid supremacist state where Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, that constitute 20% of the Israeli population, are treated as second-class citizens. Calls continue to this day to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Palestinian people from their homeland, and the current Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is a prime example. Israel is not a state for all of its citizens, and offers privileges based solely on religious affiliation.

3. The Zionist movement that built the state of Israel is a settler colonialist ideology that was never happy with the usurpation of just 78% of historic Palestine. It is an expansionist movement that continues to this day to steal more Palestinian land and build new illegal Jewish only settlements on this land, something the new Israeli government is set to not only maintain but also aggressively increase.

4. The state of Israel has never adopted a constitution nor defined its borders. As a result of this omission, Israeli borders keep expanding. From the 56% of Palestine the UN Partition Plan allotted to a “Jewish State” to now all of Palestine plus other Arab lands.

So the fair and logical question is: Do you want me to recognize the rape and dismemberment of my country Palestine? Do you want me to recognize the thief who stole my land and murdered my people? Do you want me to recognize a racist apartheid state that to this day does not allow me to go back home to live, nor be buried in my homeland where I was born? Do you want me to recognize a state with elastic borders that keeps committing injustices and war crimes on daily basis?

During your interview with me, we were talking about a solution to the conflict and this is where, I believe, your misunderstanding has risen. I am sure the space and political limitations on your article contributed to that, so let me repeat what I did say and what I believe in.

I believe that there will never be peace or recognition, not
tomorrow and not even in another sixty-one years, unless justice prevails. That means that first Israeli Jews should recognize the injustice that befell the Palestinian people in 1947/48, and second, pledge and work to rectify these injustices.

I believe that Israeli racist laws should be dismantled as
discrimination between Jew and non-Jew is institutionalized in Israeli laws and infrastructure. An example of this is the Israeli law of return, which applies to any Jew in the world (Israeli or not) while the same law does not apply to Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship because they happen to be Muslims or Christians. Without recognizing the inherent inequalities of such laws and reversing them there can be no peace with justice.

I believe that discrimination of any kind is not conducive to
reconciliation. Discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation in land ownership is neither democratic nor ethical. For example, 93 per cent of the land in Israel, mostly stolen from Palestinians, is controlled by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and its affiliates and is reserved by law for Jewish citizens only, something that is being challenged right now even in Israeli courts.

Another manifestation of the injustices of the ethnic cleansing of 1947/48 is the creation of the Palestinian refugees. There are around six million Palestinian refugees and their descendents are crying out for justice and for UN resolutions regarding the Palestinian refugees to be implemented. Without the acknowledgement of the individual and collective rights of the Palestinian refugees, including their right of return and to compensation, there can be no mutual recognition or reconciliation.

Here is what I do recognize now at this moment in history.

As I stated before I recognize the inalienable historic human and
national rights of the Arab Palestinian people in historic Palestine.

I recognize the fact that 60% of Israeli Jews are actually Arab Jews (Sephardim). They should be welcomed to live in any Arab country if they so choose and they are entitled to equal rights and privileges in any Arab country, especially in Palestine.

I recognize that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are now native to historic Palestine (Israel/Palestine). At least three generations of Israeli Jews were born on the land since the original sin of 1947/48. They should not carry the guilt of their Zionist settler parents who committed the original sin and the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but they are responsible for their own actions.

We have entered the 21st century. Peace anywhere in the world, and
especially in the Middle East, will never be achieved if we have states that give privileges to one group over another, based on religion or ethnicity or gender. This is an outdated concept that will only hold all of us back from achieving true reconciliation.

Finally, only after the conditions of equality, decency and morality are met, and after a referendum to decide on the name of the country among the citizens of the land of Israel/Palestine, only then could I say I recognize Israel if that name is chosen by the majority of the people of Palestine/Israel.

Would we have asked the South African blacks to recognize Apartheid, before we took note of the legitimacy of their struggle? Would we have asked the French resistance to recognize the Vichy government and the Nazi regime before we acknowledged the credibility of their goals? No, and it is grossly unfair to tell Palestinians that they must recognize the state that is building an annexation wall on their land and massacring civilians in Gaza, before those same Palestinians will be allowed to have a say in their future. Only with justice, freedom and equality for all will there be peace in historic Palestine, the Holy Land, and accordingly on earth.

Footnotes:
(1) Canadian Immigrant Article citation
(2) Book citation
(3) Zmag article