Saturday, February 24, 2007
"I Want To Be Free": 9-Year-Old Canadian Citizen Pleads From Texas Immigration Jail
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Majid and his nine-year old son Kevin are Iranian immigrants currently being held at the Hutto detention center. They’ve been forcibly detained since their plane was forced made an emergency landing in Puerto Rico as they made their way to Canada. Kevin says: “I want to be free. I want go to outside. I want to go home to Canada.” [includes rush transcript]
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We are also joined on the phone by an Iranian immigrant named Majid from inside the Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas. He, his wife and nine-year-old son Kevin have been held at the center for the past 19 days.
Majid, Iranian immigrant detained at Hutto detention center.
Kevin, Majid’s nine-year old son.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to break in for one minute, because we have just gotten a call from the Hutto detention facility. We're joined on the phone by an Iranian immigrant named Majid, from inside the Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas. He, his wife, his nine-year-old son Kevin have been held at the center for the past nineteen days. Majid, your story is quite a remarkable one. Can you tell us how you ended up at this Texas jail?
MAJID: Hello. Thanks for taking my call. I was on my way to go to Toronto, Canada, and my plane was -- after three hours in the flight, somebody died on the plane and had an emergency landing to Costa Rica. After that, they said everybody should come out. After that, we went out. Immigration, they said you need to have American visa. We had no American visa. And they hold us over there --
AMY GOODMAN: Now, just to be clear, you were never planning to end up in the United States, is that right? You were flying to Canada, but another passenger on the plane had a heart attack, and so you guys had a forced landing in Puerto Rico, and when you had to come out of the plane, while he was taken off the plane, that's when they took you?
MAJID: Yes. This happened, yes -- was a Canadian Zoom Airline, and our ticket was direct from Guyana to Toronto. And this happened. They hold us -- my son is Canadian -- hold child is nine-and-a-half years old, and they put us in detention in Puerto Rico. And from Monday to Friday, I was in the jail in Puerto Rico between criminal people, and my wife and son was other place. We had no news from each other from Monday morning until Friday at noon, until we see each other in a Puerto Rico airport. After that, they brought us here to Hutto Detention Center, and here we are in same part, but different room. My wife and my son is room, but it’s totally inside the room, uncovered toilet. My son has asthma, and he’s very bad and still comes here. It’s very horrible here. And we are in very bad situation. We need help. We need the people help me --
JUAN GONZALEZ: Majid, in other words, basically, what reason did they give you for holding you if you never intended to enter the United States at all? What reason did they give for locking you up?
MAJID: Because they said, “You have an American visa?” That's why you have to stay here. Just plane was waiting one hour for us, but they didn't let us pass. A few officers came. They said Immigration officers -- six, seven -- they said, “We’re going to send you, but let us make decision.” After that, they called the police chief. He came there. He said, “Let me think five minutes.” After five minutes, he came, he said, “I’m going to send you to Canada, but I’m afraid to lose my job. But usually we have to send with your plane, but we keep you here. America is much better than Canada. Here you have safer place. We send you to hotel, and after a few days, you're going to be free.” But they broke their promise. That's why they keep us here, and we have very bad situation here.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Do you know whether any other passengers on your plane were also detained in the same way, or was your family the only one, as far as you can tell?
MAJID: Only my family. No other passenger.
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to say to our listeners and viewers, we are not giving your full name, we’re not showing your face at your request. You did apply for political asylum in Canada in the past when you lived there for ten years. You were ultimately denied, sent back to Iran. And what happened when you were sent back to Iran, you and your wife?
MAJID: Yes. In December 2005, we sent to Iran, whole family, when my Canadian son born. And all documents -- the immigration officer gave all our documents to the captain of plane. After that, in Italy, we went with the Alitalia Airline. In Italy, police came to plane. They took us to [inaudible] room in the transit of Italy, and after that, again, they put us in the plane and give all documents to the captain of Alitalia again. We went to Iran, and in Iran, the plane’s captain said, “You have to sit until the police come to take you.” All passengers went out, and four Iranian secret police came in the plane, and he got all documents from the captain, and they took us in the airport in the secret police office. We were there for a few hours, four or five hours, in the same room.
After that, they separate us. They took me to other place, unknown place. I was in Iran a small cell for six months, and lots of torture and hitting. Now I have physical problem and knee problem and lots of things. And they took my wife to other prison, where we have no news from each other. And for six months, my wife was one year and one month in the prison, and she [inaudible] -- after she was free she [inaudible] the child, and because they [inaudible] him, and she was [inaudible] two, three time in the jail. And it's a very bad situation. But we had no news from each other. They told my wife, because your husband, you have to cooperate with us.
AMY GOODMAN: They said they killed you?
MAJID: Yeah, they a few times told. One time they told her, “He's in coma.” The other time, they said, “Already he was killed.” And, you know, many times they play with her. After one month, they free her in the street at nighttime. They did with me, too, after six months, a lot of torture. And this one, they free me in the street out of the town with closed eyes. And I didn't see anybody, but they took me in daytime some day in winter -- you know, they take my pants off to put in very cold water. They already broke the ice, they put in the water, and they hit me every day, hitting me.
And when I came out, I was less than thirty kilograms, my weight. And my wife was different, six months was under psychologist’s medication over that. And after free, I should register two times a week, every Sunday and Thursday. And when I took -- they took us over there, they took me over there again. One week, they put me in detention, and the other time, again three days. And after that, one guard told me, “I’m going to help you.” After that, he called me, said, “OK, your future is very dangerous. You have to leave. Otherwise, you are in big trouble. I don't know what will happen to you and your family.” That's why we decided and we escaped from there.
AMY GOODMAN: And you tried to go to Canada. Can you put your son Kevin on? He's standing next to you, nine years old?
MAJID: Yes. Just hold on, please?
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you. We're talking to Majid and Kevin in the Hutto Detention Center that’s run by the Corrections Corporation of America in Taylor, Texas.
KEVIN: Hello.
AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Kevin. How are you?
KEVIN: Not good.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us the situation you're in right now and what you want to happen right now?
KEVIN: Excuse me, I didn't hear you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe where you are right now?
KEVIN: I’m in US jail right now.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Kevin, where are you staying at night? Are you with your parents, or are they locking you up separately?
KEVIN: I’m with my parents, but we’re in separate rooms.
JUAN GONZALEZ: In separate rooms?
KEVIN: Yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And are they letting you -- are you getting any kind of education, or are you just sitting in your cell all day?
KEVIN: We’re sitting in the cell all day.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you want to do now, Kevin?
KEVIN: I want to be free. I want to go outside, and I want to go to school. I want to be in my homeland: Canada.
AMY GOODMAN: You want to go home to Canada?
KEVIN: What?
AMY GOODMAN: You want to go home to Canada?
KEVIN: Yeah. My home is in Canada.
AMY GOODMAN: Were you with your parents in Iran?
KEVIN: My parents -- what?
AMY GOODMAN: Were you with your mother and father in Iran?
KEVIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were coming on the plane?
KEVIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What are the people telling you? Can you go to Canada?
KEVIN: Hmm?
AMY GOODMAN: What are the guards telling you? Will they release you?
KEVIN: I forgot what they were saying, but they told us some stuff. I forgot what they were saying to us.
JUAN GONZALEZ: How are the other children there? Are you spending time with any of the other children?
KEVIN: No.
AMY GOODMAN: They don't let you spend time with the other children?
KEVIN: No. I’m sleeping beside the washroom, and I can't -- and I’m upstairs. I can't go to the washroom all the time. And there's a lot of smell coming out from the washroom. And the food is garbage. And the school is very bad. I can't learn anything good. And I have asthma, and I got sick in here. I can't stay here anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin, you said you're sleeping next to the bathroom?
KEVIN: Yeah. And it's not a separate room. It's right beside the bed. And I’m sleeping beside the wall, and my back gets sick and it hurts.
AMY GOODMAN: How is your mother?
KEVIN: My mother is sick.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin, can you put your father back on the phone?
KEVIN: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin is nine years old. He's a Canadian citizen, came from Iran with his parents. They were flying over the United States, when the plane had to land in Puerto Rico because a passenger had a heart attack, and when they landed, the Majid family -- we're not using their real name -- was taken off the flight. Majid, have you talked to the Canadian consulate, and what is your hope when you get to Canada, if you get to Canada?
MAJID: Yeah, on Monday, they came here. They said -- they come here, and we spoke to each other. They mostly asked my wife and Kevin, “What's your food, and what kind of food they give you? Are you in same room with family?” My son said no, because he said, I was told -- “All your family in one room?” -- he said, “No, we are in separate room, and the toilet is inside, the uncovered toilet, in the room.” And only they said [inaudible] said, “You’re going to help us?” They said, “We don't know. You have to speak with your lawyer.” After that, just regarding information, my son’s birth certificate information, and they left. And two days ago, I tried to call them in consul, and no response, because he was to be phone. I tried again, but I couldn't reach him. No more information I have.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Majid, now, do you have a lawyer who is helping you? And do you have a scheduled hearing anytime in the future on your case?
MAJID: Yeah. I have lawyers that’s from immigration clinic here. They’re students. They’re working. They are very good people. And no hearing. Two or three time, I requested for hearing, but no response so far in the past seventeen, eighteen days here. No response. We don't know what's going to happen for us.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you want to stay in the United States?
MAJID: You know, we escaped from Iran, OK? We escaped to be safe and free with my family. But our plan was in Canada. And I don't know, they keep us here. Anyway, we want safe and free, Canada or US. If Canada give us a visa, we go there; we go to US, if here, we’ll stay here.
AMY GOODMAN: Why are you afraid to use your full name or to show your face?
MAJID: Because everybody knows the Iran. The Iran’s -- like this, we are in very bad situation, because I don't trust here immigration, because the first time they said lots of things to us, but they broke their promise. They said you're going to happen this, this, but now they said we're going to deported. OK, maybe we deported. And we are like this. We are in 100% in danger. If our whole full name goes, it's 200% in danger, because especially United States -- if you go from other country, you have less risk with government. If you go from United States, because they said “US is our enemy,” they said, Iranian authorities says, OK? But that's why we are in more and more trouble if we go back, because they will say, “Why you go to US and this happen?”
AMY GOODMAN: Joshua Bardavid is an attorney that we are sitting with in the New York studio. When you listen to this story, what are your thoughts?
JOSHUA BARDAVID: Unfortunately, this is -- what he is experiencing is a very common experience. It is the reflexive use of detention for asylum seekers. The Majid family, they’re survivors -- from what he’s describing, he’s a survivor of torture. He was detained in Iran. He is seeking freedom, in this case, in Canada, arrives in the United States and is placed back in detention. The re-traumatizing effects of being placed back in detention cannot be underestimated. You have a child who is sleeping in what was a jail cell for a maximum-security prison that has been converted, but they still leave the exposed toilet, you know, sitting in the middle of their room. There's no privacy. With other children, he's in a room separate from his parents. Now, but the door may be not locked at night, but that door is certainly shut, and it’s a steel heavy door. They are placed in a prison. There's no doubt that this is a prison. And what is particularly troubling about this is that this was designed for the purpose of holding families, yet they made a conscious decision to maintain the facility as a prison, to leave the barbed wire, to leave the doors, to leave the environment as a prison.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the issue -- I don't know if you've found with other of your clients -- given the fact that you do have young children like this, you’d think there would be some kind of process for expedited hearing to find out -- have an immigration judge review the case, but they've been there now, what, more than two weeks now.
JOSHUA BARDAVID: Yeah, that's definitely another troubling aspect. In order to sentence somebody in the United States to two weeks in jail, you would need to have guilt proved beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of your peers. In order for the Majit family to spend an additional two weeks in jail, it simply could take an administrative delay. This is one of the problems.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the role of these private prison companies. The Hutto facility is run by CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America. In fact, the jail is named after CCA’s cofounder, T. Don Hutto. I want to play a comment made by William Andrews, the chair of the CCA board, during a conference call with investors two weeks ago.
WILLIAM ANDREWS: I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that these facilities that are being reported in the paper of ICE are in any way substandard. In fact, they are above standard, and the reports come from special interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. And, you know, we welcome anybody to visit our facilities. And the family facility, particularly, at T. Don Hutto is almost like a home.
AMY GOODMAN: That was William Andrews, the chair of the board of the Corrections Corporation of America, describing the conditions at the Hutto jail as “almost like a home.” Michelle Brane in Washington, D.C., your response?
MICHELLE BRANE: Well, as I mentioned already, and has been made very clear by your other guests, it is very clearly a prison that is being used to house inmates, and it has no resemblance to a home. I mean, there’s sofas. There are plastic sofas and TVs, but that’s about it. And one of the things that's very disturbing about this model that they’re using is that there are alternatives. As I mentioned before, there are pre-hearing release programs that could be used.
There’s a whole range of ways to ensure that people appear for hearings, that they don't abscond and that enforcement of our immigration laws can be accomplished without resorting to these drastic measures. And that's one of the things that we've really been stressing in the report, is that, you know, as you've heard from the responses, in the White House response and the ICE response to our report, and to other complaints about the Hutto facility, they are presenting it as an alternative of either a facility like this or complete separation, into different buildings and different centers, of entire families. And there is a wide range of other alternatives in between those two.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. I also want to thank Majid and Kevin. And we will certainly continue to cover their story and update you on the situation. For one brief moment, because they called in in the middle of you describing your own clients, if you could briefly finish, Joshua, and then we're going to go to Raymondville, to something that is, well, a tent city, a prison camp for immigrants in the tip of Texas. But very briefly.
JOSHUA BARDAVID: Well, my clients now, the Hazahza family, who are being held in Haskell, which is a county facility and is a maximum-security facility, this is an entire family that again is being separated in this center in extremely harsh conditions, that includes isolation of a seventeen-year-old, who has now turned eighteen, but at the time he was seventeen when he was placed in solitary confinement. You have the -- there is physical threats. There is strip searches as a common tool of discipline. And it is a prison. And this is an ongoing problem with intermingling immigration detainees with criminal violent offenders in the United States.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, again, the reason for their detention is they’re -- are they asylum seekers?
JOSHUA BARDAVID: They were asylum seekers. They lost their asylum hearing, but the US government has been unable to remove them, so they do not know what to do with them, so they placed them in this facility.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Joshua Bardavid, for joining us.
Friday, February 23, 2007
The Russia Mouse: Red Blogger Risisng
Russian blogs are flourishing as alternative media and strengthening an emerging civil society. Will they create informed communities and affect the coming elections?
Russia's Blogosphere
Anna G. Arutunyan
Anna G. Arutunyan
The Nation
February 23, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Anna G. Arutunyan - The Nation
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]
February 23, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Anna G. Arutunyan - The Nation
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]
Walk into a typical Moscow newsroom and chances are good that half the people in your field of vision will be logged on to Zhivoi Zhurnal, the Russian incarnation of the American blog-hosting service LiveJournal. But these journalists aren't just slacking off. In a country still searching, sometimes desperately, for the trappings of a civil society, they are navigating what promises to be its launchpad.
In Western media, blogs in developing countries are often portrayed as a counterweight to state censorship. Not here. From organizing flash mobs that poke fun at the rudeness of Moscow's babushkas to making or breaking political pundits' careers, bloggers are becoming a lively alternative to mainstream media. The question is whether the site represents an electronic upgrade of the traditional political discourse that once flourished in Soviet-era kitchens or an entirely new platform for grassroots organizing.
The Russian-language community on Zhivoi Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short, got off to a typically Russian and intellectualized start in early 2001, when Roman Leibov, a literary scholar and social critic, launched the first Russian-language blog. His initial entry: "Let's try this in Russian. What a funny little thing..." Today, of a total of 12 million users on LiveJournal, some 700,000 post in Cyrillic, making them second only to English speakers. ZheZhe is no longer the only blog service, but according to a study by the Yandex search engine, it is still by far the most popular.
LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick first visited Moscow last October when his company, Six Apart, announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP-Fabrik, which would service the enormous Cyrillic sector. What struck him was the social magnitude of ZheZhe and the serious content of its journal entries. In America, "LiveJournal is lots of people writing to ten people [each, and] reading each other," he told me. In ZheZhe this is magnified into thousands of readers. What for Americans is an electronic diary accessible to a few chosen acquaintances became, for Russians, a platform for forging thousands of interconnected virtual "friends." And Fitzpatrick believes it has potential as a tool for activism. "I really appreciate what it is as a political platform."
Anatoly Vorobey, a Russian programmer who blogs in English and Russian out of his home in Jerusalem, worked on the LiveJournal team while being one of its best-read bloggers. For him, a big part of ZheZhe's uniqueness is in the math. "Even a user who doesn't have a thousand friends, he still, on average, reads fifty to sixty people -- more than an American user," he told me. "Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of people, and that leads to the unique media sphere that we are witnessing today."
While there is more to ZheZhe than its politicized blogs, their scope and centralization make them a force to be reckoned with.
"In a country where the parliamentary speaker says that Parliament is not the place for political discussion, it's natural that you get a phenomenon like politicized ZheZhe," said Ilya Yashin, leader of the liberal Yabloko party's opposition youth movement.
Thousands-strong street protests -- organized by Yashin, among others, using ZheZhe -- are just the start. A more telling incident was that of Alexandra Ivannikova, a woman accused of killing an Armenian cabdriver who was allegedly trying to rape her. In a campaign organized on ZheZhe, right-wing organizations flocked to her defense, sparking a heated debate on illegal immigration, ultranationalism and the right to bear arms (Ivannikova's weapon was a kitchen knife). She was unexpectedly cleared of all charges in a retrial. Today, those on both sides of the Ivannikova issue admit that it showed how powerful ZheZhe could be as a grassroots tool.
Konstantin Krylov, a nationalist ideologue who frequently makes Yandex's top ten list of Russia's most popular bloggers, called ZheZhe the chief instrument in rallying some 3,000 people for the Russian March 2006 in Moscow last November. The demonstration was seen by some as evidence of the growing threat of ultranationalism, while others viewed it as a viable opposition force to the government.
"In Russia, one of our chief challenges is building a civil society," Krylov said, "a horizontal system of connection between people, which can mobilize them at the right moment in the interests of society." And there is evidence that ZheZhe is already doing this. In December, for instance, an obscure religion news site reported that an Orthodox priest and his family perished in a fire in a dilapidated Tver village -- allegedly the victims of drunks against whom the priest had launched a campaign. After a few ZheZhe repostings, the news went national. Where larger national events are concerned, like the Kondopoga ethnic riots in September, ZheZhe serves a more complex function. By incorporating on-the-spot witness accounts with emotional reaction and collective comment, ZheZhe allows its readers to identify more readily with the story's subjects.
With Russia's parliamentary and presidential elections slated for December 2007 and March 2008, respectively, a burning question is what impact, if any, will ZheZhe have. Despite a delicious urban legend that many prominent political blogs have a secret government editor who directs the content, most experts dismiss the possibility of direct government involvement. But the more likely rumor claims that some influential political bloggers are no strangers to kickbacks from the government or other powerful interests. Some bloggers close to the government admitted that in order to insure that certain news is spun a certain way, or that certain items get leaked, money does change hands. (No one would give any examples for the record.) Ivan Zassoursky, a marketing director at SUP-Fabrik and a media expert, speculates, "Can you give someone money to organize a demonstration? Sure you can. So why can't you give someone money to write something on ZheZhe?"
Whatever the extent of ZheZhe's real political impact--and many bloggers dismiss the scope of its involvement--its structure shows that there is a lot more at work here than simply circumventing state censorship. In that sense, it's interesting to compare Russia's blogosphere to bloggers in Egypt. Shohdy Naguib Surur, a Moscow-based Egyptian dissident and on-off webmaster of Al Ahram Weekly, says the differences in the online community in Russia and Egypt are striking. First of all, there are fewer people with access to the Internet in the Arab world. Secondly, in Russia, "we had our glasnost already." What ZheZhe seems to illustrate is that a crucial aspect of civil society is not just the freedom to report on what you see but the ability to get people inspired enough to react. Russians are already notorious for their centuries-old communal spirit -- or sobornost. ZheZhe might be one of the technologies that will finally get them to act on it.
Anna G. Arutunyan is a freelance writer and editor at the Moscow News.
Copyright © 2007 Anna G. Arutunyanv - The Nation
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Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Riverbend: A Rape in Iraq
Baghdad Burning... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Maliki's Reaction...
As expected, Al Maliki is claiming the rape allegations are all lies. Apparently, his people simply asked the officers if they raped Sabrine Al Janabi and they said no. I'm so glad that's been cleared up.
"Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Makiki moved quickly to try to defuse a scandal after a Sunni woman said she was raped by three officers of the Shiite-dominated police.
"Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Makiki moved quickly to try to defuse a scandal after a Sunni woman said she was raped by three officers of the Shiite-dominated police.
"After the allegations have been proven to be false, the prime minister has ordered that the officers accused be rewarded," it said without elaborating."
I hate the media and I hate the Iraqi government for turning this atrocity into another Sunni-Shia debacle- like it matters whether Sabrine is Sunni or Shia or Arab or Kurd (the Al Janabi tribe is composed of both Sunnis and Shia). Maliki did not only turn the woman into a liar, he is rewarding the officers she accused. It's outrageous and maddening.
No Iraqi woman under the circumstances- under any circumstances- would publicly, falsely claim she was raped. There are just too many risks. There is the risk of being shunned socially. There is the risk of beginning an endless chain of retaliations and revenge killings between tribes. There is the shame of coming out publicly and talking about a subject so taboo, she and her husband are not only risking their reputations by telling this story, they are risking their lives.
No one would lie about something like this simply to undermine the Baghdad security operation. That can be done simply by calculating the dozens of dead this last week. Or by writing about the mass detentions of innocents, or how people are once again burying their valuables so that Iraqi and American troops don't steal them.
It was less than 14 hours between Sabrine's claims and Maliki's rewarding the people she accused. In 14 hours, Maliki not only established their innocence, but turned them into his own personal heroes. I wonder if Maliki would entrust the safety his own wife and daughter to these men.
This is meant to discourage other prisoners, especially women, from coming forward and making claims against Iraqi and American forces. Maliki is the stupidest man alive (well, after Bush of course…) if he believes his arrogance and callous handling of the situation will work to dismiss it from the minds of Iraqis. By doing what he is doing, he's making it more clear than ever that under his rule, under his government, vigilante justice is the only way to go. Why leave it to the security forces and police? Simply hire a militia or gang to get revenge. If he doesn't get some justice for her, her tribe will be forced to... And the Janabat (the Al Janabis) are a force to be reckoned with.
Maliki could at least pretend the rape of a young Iraqi woman is still an outrage in todays Iraq...
The Rape of Sabrine...
It takes a lot to get the energy and resolution to blog lately. I guess it’s mainly because just thinking about the state of Iraq leaves me drained and depressed. But I had to write tonight.
As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.
She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.
I wonder what excuse they used when they took her. It’s most likely she’s one of the thousands of people they round up under the general headline of ‘terrorist suspect’. She might have been one of those subtitles you read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya, “13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces.” The men who raped her are those same security forces Bush and Condi are so proud of- you know- the ones the Americans trained. It’s a chapter right out of the book that documents American occupation in Iraq: the chapter that will tell the story of 14-year-old Abeer who was raped, killed and burned with her little sister and parents.
They abducted her from her house in an area in southern Baghdad called Hai Al Amil. No- it wasn’t a gang. It was Iraqi peace keeping or security forces- the ones trained by Americans? You know them. She was brutally gang-raped and is now telling the story. Half her face is covered for security reasons or reasons of privacy. I translated what she said below.
“I told him, ‘I don’t have anything [I did not do anything].’ He said, 'You don’t have anything?’ One of them threw me on the ground and my head hit the tiles. He did what he did- I mean he raped me. The second one came and raped me. The third one also raped me. [Pause- sobbing] I begged them and cried, and one of them covered my mouth. [Unclear, crying] Another one of them came and said, 'Are you finished? We also want our turn.' So they answered, ‘No, an American committee came.’ They took me to the judge.
Anchorwoman: Sabrine Al Janabi said that one of the security forces videotaped/photographed her and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rape. Another officer raped her after she saw the investigative judge.
As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.
She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.
I wonder what excuse they used when they took her. It’s most likely she’s one of the thousands of people they round up under the general headline of ‘terrorist suspect’. She might have been one of those subtitles you read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya, “13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces.” The men who raped her are those same security forces Bush and Condi are so proud of- you know- the ones the Americans trained. It’s a chapter right out of the book that documents American occupation in Iraq: the chapter that will tell the story of 14-year-old Abeer who was raped, killed and burned with her little sister and parents.
They abducted her from her house in an area in southern Baghdad called Hai Al Amil. No- it wasn’t a gang. It was Iraqi peace keeping or security forces- the ones trained by Americans? You know them. She was brutally gang-raped and is now telling the story. Half her face is covered for security reasons or reasons of privacy. I translated what she said below.
“I told him, ‘I don’t have anything [I did not do anything].’ He said, 'You don’t have anything?’ One of them threw me on the ground and my head hit the tiles. He did what he did- I mean he raped me. The second one came and raped me. The third one also raped me. [Pause- sobbing] I begged them and cried, and one of them covered my mouth. [Unclear, crying] Another one of them came and said, 'Are you finished? We also want our turn.' So they answered, ‘No, an American committee came.’ They took me to the judge.Anchorwoman: Sabrine Al Janabi said that one of the security forces videotaped/photographed her and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rape. Another officer raped her after she saw the investigative judge.
Sabrine continuing:
“One of them, he said… I told him, ‘Please- by your father and mother- let me go.’ He said, ‘No, no- by my mother’s soul I’ll let you go- but on one condition, you give me one single thing.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘[I want] to rape you.’ I told him, ‘No- I can’t.’ So he took me to a room with a weapon… It had a weapon, a Klashnikov, a small bed [Unclear], he sat me on it. So [the officer came] and told him, ‘Leave her to me.’ I swore to him on the Quran, I told him, ‘By the light of the Prophet I don’t do such things…’ He said, ‘You don’t do such things?’ I said, ‘Yes’.
“One of them, he said… I told him, ‘Please- by your father and mother- let me go.’ He said, ‘No, no- by my mother’s soul I’ll let you go- but on one condition, you give me one single thing.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘[I want] to rape you.’ I told him, ‘No- I can’t.’ So he took me to a room with a weapon… It had a weapon, a Klashnikov, a small bed [Unclear], he sat me on it. So [the officer came] and told him, ‘Leave her to me.’ I swore to him on the Quran, I told him, ‘By the light of the Prophet I don’t do such things…’ He said, ‘You don’t do such things?’ I said, ‘Yes’.
[Crying] He picked up a black hose, like a pipe. He hit me on the thigh. [Crying] I told him, ‘What do you want from me? Do you want me to tell you rape me? But I can’t… I’m not one of those ***** [Prostitutes] I don’t do such things.’ So he said to me, ‘We take what we want and what we don’t want we kill. That’s that.’ [Sobbing] I can’t anymore… please, I can’t finish.”
I look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.
She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbor I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt…
Humanitarian organizations are warning that three Iraqi women are to be executed next month. The women are Wassan Talib, Zainab Fadhil and Liqa Omar Muhammad. They are being accused of 'terrorism', i.e. having ties to the Iraqi resistance. It could mean they are relatives of people suspected of being in the resistance. Or it could mean they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of them gave birth in the prison. I wonder what kind of torture they've endured. Let no one say Iraqi women didn't get at least SOME equality under the American occupation- we are now equally as likely to get executed.
And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.
Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.
Hypocrisy and Impunity Still Rule U. S. Policy
Polls show deep distrust and dislike growing among Arabs and Muslims about the United States, and for Arabs and Muslims among the American populace. Meanwhile the Bush administration persists in verbalizing neocolonial and self-serving clichés, and worse.
Hypocrisy and Impunity Still Cloud U.S. - Islamic Relations
Rami G. Khouri
Agence Global
February 20, 2007
Rami G. Khouri
Agence Global
February 20, 2007
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
[Republished at GRBlog with AG permission]
[Republished at GRBlog with AG permission]
DOHA, Qatar -- It is no surprise that at the annual meeting of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum here in Doha, sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the State of Qatar, the focus of discussion returns repeatedly to American policies throughout the Middle East. The heart of U.S.-Islamic World relations is the discord over the Middle East, but that issue also clouds wider perceptions of the United States around the entire Islamic world.
At this annual gathering of some 200 distinguished personalities from all walks of life, we experience two related phenomena: We reap the wisdom of scholars, analysts and pollsters who chart for us the broad trends -- mostly deterioration -- in American-Islamic perceptions, and simultaneously we get to watch Americans and Arabs show with their words why these two communities continue to express mutual hostility and fear.
The dynamic is uneven, but now mutual. For years the United States has used its military and diplomatic power to pursue its aims in the region, overthrowing regimes and trying to rearrange the political and social landscape. In September 2001, a band of killers from the Arab world attacked the United States, and Washington responded with armed fury. It waged a “global war on terror” that has achieved a few measurable successes, but sparked many more currents of concern and resistance around the Islamic and Arab worlds.
The statistical data from many reputable pollsters is consistent. One recent American survey of the Arab world (University of Maryland with Zogby International) shows that 78 percent of Arabs have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of the United States, while 72 percent of Arabs polled see the United States as the biggest state threat to them. A global survey of 40 Islamic communities by the American Gallup organization shows that Muslims admire American technology, freedom and democracy, but want more “respect” from Americans. Not surprisingly, the poll found that 57 percent of Americans, when asked what they admired most about Muslim societies, said “nothing” or “I don’t know.”
This is not a foundation for a mutually constructive relationship, and it shows very clearly every time Americans and Arabs/Muslims gather to talk, as happened in Doha last weekend. Private discussions among those who view themselves as adversaries or even fear each other tend to be useful, frank and satisfying; the public debate, however, verges ever more negatively on the insulting and the catastrophic. You only need listen to American officials speak publicly at such gatherings to understand why nearly four out of five Arabs have an unfavorable view of the United States and its policies.
Last year the inimitable Karen Hughes, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, gave a talk that could have won a prize for naïveté, arrogance, poor preaching, and insult all rolled into one. This year, the task of further lowering Arab-Islamic esteem of the U.S. government fell to Ambassador David Satterfield, the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the U.S. Department of State.
The gist of his remarks was that the U.S. public and government have limited patience in Iraq, and it is up to Iraqis now to take change of their future by acting in a national rather than a sectarian fashion. He noted correctly that Iraq now represents a potential strategic threat to the entire region in the form of sectarian conflict, while saying that the United States could act mainly as a “catalyst” from now on as Iraqis took charge of their destiny. He also said that the challenge to Iraq and others comes from those terrorists and insurgents “who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence” -- as if the United States primarily used Tootsie Rolls and iPods, not weapons, in its occupation of Iraq.
The potential destruction that might be unleashed around the Middle East -- and possibly the world -- from the unilateral American decision to go to war in Iraq is only now starting to become clear, as Satterfield noted. For the United States to say that its patience is limited and it can be a catalyst at best in the face of the furies and destruction it has unleashed by its war in Iraq is precisely the sort of neocolonial, self-serving double standard that causes so many people around the world to fear and resist it.
The issue of responsibility, impunity and accountability is rising higher on the list of priorities of people around the world who wish to end this cycle of fear and war that seems to define the United States and much of the Arab-Islamic world. Saddam Hussein and his Baathist thugs were finally held accountable and killed. Similar judicial processes, but with more legitimacy, are underway in Lebanon and Sudan.
One wonders: Are only Arabs and Muslims to be held accountable for their brutality and crimes? Or is it possible to ask that those in the United States, the UK, Israel, and other lands who have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people also be held accountable to world public opinion and the rule of law? Only then can we hope to slow down and perhaps stop this terrible cycle of perpetual tyranny and war in our region, which is now closely associated with a penchant for mutual disdain and distrust among ordinary Americans, Arabs and Muslims.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, The American Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mark Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and Immanuel Wallerstein
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Tsar Putin
In this summary of the latest developments in Russia's political scene, less than a year from national elections (and just more than a year for the election of Putin's successor) Jean-Marie Chauvier details the spectrum of political forces and the domestic, regional, and international issues that swirl through Putin's Russia.
[This advisory includes a sidebar Kremlin "who's who." (217 words)]
[This advisory includes a sidebar Kremlin "who's who." (217 words)]
Tsar Putin’s Russia
Jean-Marie Chauvier
Le Monde diplomatique
February 18, 2007
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]
Jean-Marie Chauvier
Le Monde diplomatique
February 18, 2007
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]
The headline news is that Russia’s gross domestic product is now back to its 1990 level. After the depression of the 1990s, there have been six years of sustained growth at an annual average of 6%. After Russia’s oil bonanza came successes in metallurgy, aluminium, armaments and agribusiness; there has also been a sharp rise in domestic consumption, the repayment of Russia’s foreign debt, and huge increases in education and health-care spending in the past five years. To everyone’s surprise, some Russian firms are now transnational players in the global market.
The upturn is not yet assured: There is more poverty and less equality than in Soviet days. Russia needs investment to overcome its weaknesses: loss of capital and of expertise, obsolete infrastructures, a widening technology gap with other industrialised countries, declining life expectancy and a decreasing birth-rate. Even so, economist Jacques Sapir saw 2006 as a year of strategic reorientation, with a new industrial policy based on a realisation that the economy cannot continue to depend entirely on gas and oil revenues. This means more state intervention, against the advice of international organisations and of Russian neoliberals, who are arguing over the use of a $80bn stabilisation fund.
The United States secretary of defence, Robert Gates, thinks that President Vladimir Putin’s aim is to restore Russia to its former great power status and to revive national pride. According to opinion polls, Putin has 70%-80% of the people behind him, especially the prosperous middle classes and the highest-paid workers. Lilia Ovtcharova of the Independent Institute for Social Policy reports that wages are now 80% of their 1989 level in real terms and that consumption is up by an average 167%. These figures do not reflect social differences. Poverty may be diminishing but it is still endemic and inequalities are greater than ever, especially as market forces have swept away the Soviet safety net. So the net result of 15 years of transition is due for a rigorous review, particularly in the light of the vast, hidden, informal economy and society.
President Putin is not Hugo Chávez or Evo Morales. Despite the declared wishes of the majority, he has not questioned the privatisations of the 1990s, and he has not re-nationalised key sectors with the intention of establishing a social market economy. Only those robber oligarchs with political ambitions have been prosecuted.
Faced with the choice of ultra-liberalism or state control, Putin opted for a compromise that would reassure the new owners and the West: Restore the sovereign powers of the state, bring the oligarchs to heel and let the market economy take its course.
How to power this growth?
What development will power this growth? Leonid Grigoriev, president of the Institute of Energy and Finance, said: “To double GDP without modernising the economy is not much of an achievement. Many people, especially the young and members of the business community, are aware that we now have a half-developed country, with raw materials and huge social inequalities. The past 15 years have been wasted in the field of scientific advances. The well-educated and trained post-war generation is approaching retirement. Investment began again five years ago but it accounts for less than 20% of GDP and represents only 33% of the capital invested in 1990.”
There was a major turning-point at the beginning of Putin’s second term in 2003, when he handed control of the crucial hydrocarbons sector to selected state undertakings. The sector had partly recovered from the oligarchs, who had acquired their holdings at knockdown prices during the privatisations of the Yeltsin era. Putin’s move to protect strategic assets does not preclude opening them to foreign capital; but, given the offensive mounted by the public energy monopolies Gazprom and Transneft, it is intended to block a U.S. policy, instituted in 1991, aimed at diminishing Russian power. This policy was the purpose of NATO enlargement and the establishment of alternative energy supply routes to replace the Russian networks.
Another of Putin’s aims is to recreate a common Euro-Asian economic area, possibly including a European-Russian partnership. This Kremlin strategy, stalled in South Caucasus, has had some success in Ukraine, where 60% of the population are against joining NATO; and, in Kazakhstan, and Belarus, which will have to abandon its outdated regime and open up to Russian capital. Moscow is also developing cooperation with China, India and the Muslim world. Putin has expressed serious concern (in a speech on 8 November at the inauguration of a Russian military intelligence centre) over the international situation, the unilateral actions of the United States, new strategic weapons systems that require “an appropriate response” and foreign support for “acts of terrorism” in Russia.
Much of the media soon came up with an easy explanation for a series of assassinations in autumn 2006: The Kremlin was getting rid of its enemies. When the story turned out to be more complicated, it ceased to be front page news. The Russian press, however, is still unravelling the tangled tale. Observers have noted several strange coincidences. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated on 7 October, Putin’s birthday, when he was in Germany on a visit of importance for Euro-Russian relations. Alexander Litvinenko, the former Federal Security Service agent and boon companion of oligarch Boris Berezovsky, was poisoned on 23 November, during the Russo-European summit at Helsinki.
Other murders struck at the centre of power: Andrei Kozlov, killed on 13 September, was vice-president of the Central Bank, and Alexander Plokhin, assassinated in October, was a director of the Foreign Trade Bank. Both were involved in activities at the heart of Putin’s strategy: Kozlov in the fight against organised crime, Plokhin in European aviation. Yegor Gaidar, founding father of the Russian reforms, was taken seriously ill in Dublin on 23 November, an illness which he considers to be part of the same campaign.
Who would gain from a coup?
Anatoly Chubais thinks there is a real possibility of a coup directed against the Kremlin (and its relations with the West) and blames Berezovsky: A suggestion echoed elsewhere. Who stands to gain? Certainly not Putin. Italian expert Giulietto Chiesa thinks the attacks represent a clear attempt to discredit and incriminate Russia. He believes this is in the interests of certain circles in Russia and the European Union, and of some members of the Bush administration.
There has been evidence of diminishing democracy since 1993 (including the use of tanks against parliament) but it has only recently received any critical attention. The West, silent during the wars in Chechnya, suddenly found its voice when the private oil consortium Yukos was taken over in 2003. According to a report that received little press coverage, Yukos had planned a merger with Sibneft and was arranging, in collaboration with Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco, for a massive investment of U.S. capital in the Siberian oilfields on the eve of the Iraq war.
The Yukos takeover was the first step towards renationalisation of energy, to the detriment of certain closely connected Russian and foreign interests. Putin rejected the Chilean-style course recommended by his economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, who resigned in 2005, protesting that Russia had changed and was no longer a free country.
At the anti-Russian Vilnius summit in May 2006, U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, denounced what has been called an “authoritarian drift” in Russia. The country is now 102 out of 130 in the economic freedom rankings, top of the list in the Transparency International global corruption reports, and 147 out of 168, lower than Sudan or Zimbabwe, in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom rankings. It is true that radio, television and the popular papers have been taken over by the state; but the quality papers remain neoliberal, since until recently they were partly controlled by Berezovsky, who has just left the famous Kommersant group, spearhead of the 1990s market ideology. In the same spirit, the government is keeping both Russian and foreign NGOs under tighter control.
This is “soft authoritarianism,” according to Gaidar, for whom the Putin era falls into two distinct phases: 2000-2002 was a period of reforms, with relatively independent parliament and media, under the influence of powerful and influential business organisations; 2003-2004 saw the introduction of a “decorative and directed” democracy, in which governors and presidents of republics were appointed, not elected.
Garry Kasparov is more outspoken. He considers that Putin has effectively restored the Soviet system and achieved Gorbachev’s dream of an authoritarian state with limited reforms. He sees Putin as Mussolini in Moscow. Lev Ponomarev, leader of the Movement for Human Rights, thinks there may even be a far-right coup.
The anniversary of the 1917 revolution is still celebrated on 7 November, but unofficially. The traditional communist parade was banned in 2006, and demonstrators from Gennady Zhuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) had to make their way along the pavement to their authorised meeting-place under heavy police surveillance. There were about 10,000, mostly elderly, who were joined by groups of young radicals from the Young Communists, the Red Youth Vanguard and Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik party. According to the polls, the Bolshevik revolution is becoming more popular with the young.
A new ‘day of national unity’
Putin introduced a new holiday, the day of national unity, on 4 November, in place of the traditional celebrations on 7 November. Representatives of the Church and the Russian diaspora, including Prince Dmitry Romanov, a descendant of the dynasty expelled in 1917, gathered in the Kremlin on 4 November. Putin claimed that this was the first celebration of an event from the pre-Soviet era, the liberation of the Kremlin from Polish occupation on 4 November 1612, the end of the “time of troubles” (1598-1612) and the prelude to the accession of Mikhail I, first of the Romanovs, in 1613. It is an odd choice of symbol, suggesting that Russia needs to be liberated again from an occupier and another time of troubles -- perhaps even given another tsar.
The far-right have a different idea of liberation. On 4 November 2005, they shouted “Russia for the Russians” and “Sieg Heil” and gave the Nazi salute. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, was outraged, said never again, and banned the “Russian march” planned for the 2006 holiday; 8,000 police were sent to clear the few marchers who had gathered outside railway and metro stations.
The far-right includes Alexander Belov’s Movement against Illegal Immigration, Alexander Sevastianov’s National Power Party of Russia, the Slav Union (which proudly sports its Russian acronym, SS), and Russian National Unity, which was ordered not to carry swastikas. Some Orthodox religious groups, not recognised by the church, plus some Cossack groups, support the far right. It has another supporter in Dmitry Rogozin, leader of the nationalist party Rodina (Motherland), a pluralist coalition formed in 2003, but subsequently deserted by those leftwing members who found it too xenophobic. There is also Alexander Prokhanov, editor of the weekly Zavtra, and an influential writer associated with the European new right. Prokhanov has called for the Azerbaijani “mafia” (at most 3,000 people) to be expelled.
There are thought to be about 50,000 far right sympathisers and “skinheads” among Russia’s 143 million people. The often-murderous activities and violence of this minority and their rabble-rousing, anti-immigrant propaganda is disturbing. According to a source close to the Kremlin, though, half the 4 November demonstrators were in fact agents of the security services. Some senior police officers are inclined, like their czarist predecessors, to use or encourage popular movements to quell “revolutionary terrorists”.
The November celebrations signalled a revival of patriotism. The CPRF and its National Patriotic Union profess nostalgia for the USSR but they are being overtaken by a new generation. This has experienced the sudden advent of capitalism in previously blighted regions, developed its own survival strategies and is looking for scapegoats.
Bridge between Europe and Asia
The anti-Caucasian riots in Kondopoga in Karelia in September 2006 were a shock, awakening fears of a racist pogrom. An investigation by the political commentator Maxim Grigoriev suggested that the causes were actually social rather than ethnic. Local people were concerned about poverty (24%), crime (19%), unemployment (16%), terrorism (13%), education, health-care and housing (13%), and administrative corruption (9%). Only 2% expressed concern about conflicts between different nationalities.
These conflicts still attracted the most media attention because, according to Izvestia, it is easy to view all the other problems as a national question. The authorities also want to make room in business for the local population. Under cover of modernisation, they are imposing a new sharing of the wholesale and retail markets that were formerly dominated by Caucasians. However the security services habitually associate the presence of ethnic, non-Russian groups in markets with crime.
How are fresh outbreaks of xenophobia to be avoided, given the recent expulsion of hundreds of Georgians? Putin still officially claims that Russia is a multinational, multi-denominational federation. Yet the demands of territorial integrity and Moscow’s geopolitical interests are an excuse for increasingly brutal anti-terrorist operations: Chechnya is the first and worst example.
The president of Tatarstan, Mintimer Chaimiev, warned that there was a danger of nationalist extremism in a country where a fifth of the population is Muslim. He said the risk in such a multinational country was serious and it was essential to react to the least sign of chauvinism. The former Russian prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, confirmed that Russian Muslims are not immigrants, as they are in most western countries, but natives.
Primakov said the co-existence in Russia of a native Christian majority and a native Muslim minority, combining their separate cultures to form an original community, is unique. Therefore Russia was the bridge between Europe and Asia. Will Russia’s new identity be rossiskaya (Russian in the civil and multinational sense) or russkaya (in the ethnic and exclusive sense)? The question remains open. The prospect of mass immigration makes it more important.
Last November United Russia, the centre-right party which hopes to win an absolute majority, held its congress in Yekaterinburg. Its leader, Boris Gryzlov, called it the “ruling party” and predicted that it would remain in power for 20 years. He said he would adopt an ideology based on a “neoliberal-conservative consensus” and the “rule of democracy”; in fact, a disparate union in favour of the presidential majority.
‘Geopolitical disaster’
In a speech to the Federal Assembly in April 2005, Putin presented an analysis of the post-Soviet transition that had caused uproar in the West. He said: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century. Tens of millions of our citizens and countrymen found themselves outside Russian territory. The epidemic of disintegration spread to Russia: Savings were devalued, the old ideas destroyed, institutions broken up or hastily reformed. The country’s integrity was violated by terrorist action and the subsequent capitulation at Khasavyurt [the 1996 ceasefire confirming the victory of the Chechen rebels]. Groups of oligarchs, which controlled the flow of information, served only their own corporate interests. Widespread poverty was accepted as normal. All this against a background of economic collapse, financial instability, and social paralysis."
This analysis is thought to reveal a spirit of power (derjavnost). The ideologue behind it, Vladislav Surkov, has no time for the people who would like to make Russia into an ethnographic nature reserve. For him, the rule of democracy means justice for everyone and justice for Russia in the world. He rejects the idea of a Soviet- or North Korean-style closed society and is also opposed to the idea that Russia should become a source of raw materials for multinationals.
He violently disagrees with the offshore aristocracy, whom he blames for draining the economy dry; $800bn-$1,000bn of capital has been siphoned off and quietly transferred to 60,000 offshore Russian companies. The Russian tycoons, unlike their U.S. counterparts, are not attached to their country. Surkov claims that they live abroad and educate their children there; they manage their estates in Russia like old-style plantations.
At the Union of Right Forces (SPS) annual conference in December, the new party leaders, Leonid Guzman and Nikita Belykh, were optimistic and said they were on course to establish capitalism in Russia and continue the 1990s reforms in the interests of all its citizens (15). But the SPS and the other liberal party, Yabloko, have not held any seats in the Duma since the 2003 elections. The key government posts are held by moderate liberals, German Gref in the department of economic development and trade and Alexei Kudrin at the ministry of finance.
The SPS foundation, Liberal Russia, met last November, in a bank. The flower of the democratic and human rights intelligentsia were there: Ludmilla Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group; Alexei Simonov of the Glasnost Foundation; historian Yuri Afanasiev, former leader of the pro-Yeltsin organisation, Democratic Russia; sociologists Tatiana Zaslavskaya, moving spirit of perestroika, Lev Gudkov and Mark Urnov; political commentators Igor Kliamkin and Tatiana Kutkovetz; physicist Georgy Satarov, president of the Indem Foundation, which has links with U.S. foundations, and champions the battle against corruption; and economists Yevgeny Yasin and Andrei Illarionov. The bookshop displayed copies of works by local authors and by two foreign authors: the U.S. economist Milton Friedman and the philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek.
Sorcerer’s apprentice
Satarov explained that the 5% of people at the top had a decisive influence on the rest of the population, but the neoliberals were unfortunately no longer part of that upper echelon. He said there was a revival of traditional Russian authoritarianism; the aggression and the tendency to look for outside enemies was a reflex reaction of the authoritarian mindset to a situation beyond its control, a reaction that the leaders exploited to unleash a powerful wave of anti-neoliberalism. Satarov said that Putin, in taking this course, was playing the sorcerer’s apprentice, gambling on the inert force of Soviet internationalism and risking being swept away.
The neoliberals are also critical of the general drift of Russia foreign policy: the detachment over the “democratic” war in Iraq, the tolerance of Iran and Syria, the betrayal of Israel (inviting Hamas to Moscow), the complicity with socialist Hugo Chávez and other anti-U.S. leaders.
Garry Kasparov’s Orangists -- more radical democrats -- are determined to take action. A strange group has formed round his United Civil Front, including young liberals from Grigori Yavlinsky’s Yabloko party; national bolsheviks (natsboly) and Stalinists from Viktor Anpilov’s Working Russia party; and humanitarian NGOs associated with the All-Russia Civil Congress. Members of the neoliberal right and assorted leftwing movements are banding together to oppose the Putin government. Some 2,000 of them took part in demonstrations last December.
At a forum, Another Russia, held in the margins of the G8 summit in August 2006, and generously funded by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, this alliance of right and leftwingers went so far as to suggest that Russia should not be in the big powers’ club at all. Kasparov claimed that it was politically impossible for Russia to belong to the G8 because, unlike the other members, it was not a democracy. Nor did it meet the economic criteria for membership, because it was far from having the neoliberal, transparent system adopted by the other countries. The Russian state constantly extended its role in all areas. The forum was honoured by a visit from the U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the British ambassador, Tony Brenton, an active supporter of the dissidents.
Cold war on the West
According to Illarionov, Putin had declared cold war on the West, although he ought to have accepted vice-president Cheney’s offer of friendship and strategic partnership at Vilnius, and acknowledged the benevolent role of the U.S. foundations in the former Soviet Union.
The Russian neoliberals believe that those now in power could not see that the western system of government was essentially democratic and the Russian system autocratic. The western countries had never concealed the fact that their purpose in promoting democracy was to secure their national interests; it amounted to the same thing. Democracy was not only the best means of development; it guaranteed peace and security for the democratic alliance of states.
Regional elections will take place this March, followed by parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2008. The forces favourable to Putin are likely to win. Their opponents in Russia and the West are likely to contest the results. Berezovsky has said that the present regime will never allow fair elections and there is only one solution -- seize power by force. This advocate of “democratic revolution” now lives in London, where he has been granted political asylum.
There is an unknown factor. Two-thirds of Russians would like Putin to seek a third term, but this is barred under the constitution. However it is difficult to imagine the Moscow scene without him, especially as his possible successors are unfamiliar. There is speculation about what post the “founding father of stabilisation” might take next: the chairmanship of United Russia or Gazprom have been proposed.
What policy would he pursue, faced with the challenges of the demographic crisis, membership of the World Trade Organisation, and life after oil runs out? The union supporting the presidential majority still lacks direction and a real social project. What will become of the crew when the captain no longer holds the tiller? There is no assurance of a peaceful handover. Various factors could change the picture: tensions with the West, US adventures to bring democracy to the greater Middle East, possible conflict in South Caucasus, post-George Bush Washington. The features of the regime and its place in the world will slowly take shape: A second new Russia is in the making. -- Translated by Barbara Wilson
Jean-Marie Chauvier is a journalist and the author of URSS, une société en mouvement (Editions de l’Aube, La Tour d’Aigues, 1988).
© 2007 Jean-Marie Chauvier - Le Monde diplomatique
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Released: 18 February 2007
Word Count: 3,606
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The Cast of Characters in the Kremlin
Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation
Mikhail Fradkov, prime minister
German Gref *, minister of economic development and trade
Boris Gryzlov*, chairman of the state Duma and the ruling party, United Russia;
Sergei Ivanov*, minister of defence
Alexei Kudrin*, minister of finance
Sergei Lavrov, minister of foreign affairs
Dmitry Medvedev*, first deputy chairman, chairman of the board of the 51% state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom
Igor Sechin*, chairman of the state oil company, Rosneft
Vladislav Surkov, ideologist of sovereign democracy
Neoliberals in power and in opposition
Yegor Gaidar**, moving spirit behind the reforms and founding father of the 1992 shock therapy
Anatoly Chubais**, moving spirit behind the privatisations under Boris Yeltsin and chief executive of the state-owned electricity monopoly
The pro-western radical liberal opposition
Boris Berezovsky, deposed oligarch, based in London, active in Russia and Ukraine
Andrei Illarionov, former adviser to Putin, and the US Cato Institute
Garry Kasparov, United Civil Front, Another Russia
Mikhail Kassianov, former prime minister under Putin
Georgy Satarov, All-Russia Civil Congress, Indem foundation (associated with the Soros, Ford and MacArthur foundations)
* Often cited as possible presidential candidates. Medvedev, Gref and Kudrin are reputed to be neoliberals; Gryzlov, Ivanov and Sechin are nationalists.
** Members of the neoliberal opposition party, the Union of Right Forces.
© 2007 Le Monde diplomatique
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Released: 18 February 2007
Word Count: 217
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Word Count: 3,606
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Saturday, February 17, 2007
Brzezinski’s warnings of war against Iran
Barry Grey in Washington DC
Feb 3, 2007
Feb 3, 2007
The major national newspapers and most broadcast outlets failed even to report Thursday’s stunning testimony by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is among the most prominent figures within the US foreign policy establishment. He delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the policy of the Bush administration was leading inevitably to a military confrontation with Iran which would have disastrous consequences for US imperialism.
Most significant and disturbing was Brzezinski’s suggestion that the Bush administration might manufacture a pretext to justify a military attack on Iran. Presenting what he called a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iraq,” Brzezinski laid out the following series of events: “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in, quote/unquote, ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran...” [Emphasis added].
Thus Brzezinski opined that a US military attack on Iran would be an aggressive action, presented as though it were a defensive response to alleged Iranian provocations, and came close to suggesting, without explicitly stating as much, that the White House was capable of manufacturing or allowing a terrorist attack within the US to provide a casus belli for war.
It is self-evident that such testimony at an open congressional hearing from someone with decades of experience in the US foreign policy establishment and the closest ties to the military and intelligence apparatus is not only newsworthy, but of the most immense and grave import. Any objective and conscientious newspaper or news channel would consider it an obligation to inform the public of such a development.
Yet neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post carried so much as a news brief on Brzezinski’s testimony in their Friday editions. Nor did USA Today or the Wall Street Journal. All of these publications, of course, have well-staffed Washington bureaus and regularly cover congressional hearingsespecially those dealing with such burning political questions as the war in Iraq.
There is no innocent explanation for their decision to suppress this story. The Washington Post on Thursday published a large page-two column and photo on Henry Kissinger’s appearance the previous day before the same Senate committee. The former secretary of state under Richard Nixon gave testimony that was generally supportive of the Bush administration’s war policy.
Moreover, the Post’s web edition carried an Associated Press report on Brzezinski’s appearance. That article introduced subtle but significant changes to Brzezinski’s speculative scenario of the road to war with Iran which had the effect of underplaying the sharpness and urgency of Brzezinski’s critique of the Bush administration. It omitted the suggestion that a terrorist attack within the US could become the justification for war, and it removed the quotation marks from Brzezinski’s talk of a “defensive” war against Iran.
The World Socialist Web Site on Friday telephoned the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to ask for an explanation for their failure to report Brzezinski’s testimony. None of the newspapers returned our calls.
As for the television news outlets, the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS showed a clip of Brzezinski laying out his war scenario before the Senate committee, without making any comment. “NBC Nightly News” ignored the story entirely.
The suppression of this damning critique of the Iraq war, the conspiratorial methods of the Bush administration, and its drive to an even wider war in the Middle East is one more demonstration of the corrupt and reactionary character of the American mass media. It indicates that the establishment media is preparing once again, as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, to serve as a sounding board for the administration’s war propaganda and lies.
source:
http://www.wsws.org/
articles/2007/feb2007/brze-f03.shtml
Iraq's Diaspora
The Iraqi refugee crisis heaps more shame on George Bush and Tony Blair, strains the societies of Syria and Jordan, and refugee relief requires enormous support from the West, and from the rich Middle East countries.
Iraq’s Refugee Scandal
Patrick Seale
Agence Global
February 17, 2007
Patrick Seale
Agence Global
February 17, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]
U.S. President George W. Bush and his British ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, have a great deal on their conscience. They do not deserve to remain in office, or even to sleep soundly at night. If there were any justice in this world, they would have to answer for their crimes before a court.
Not only did their foolhardy and illegal invasion of March 2003 smash the Iraq state, dealing a fatal blow to the geopolitical balance of the region, but their continued occupation has spread fear, chaos and instability throughout the Middle East, sparking a vicious Sunni-Shi‘i civil war, and provoking the greatest refugee crisis since the exodus of Palestinians from their homeland after the creation of Israel in 1948.
Some experts believe that the Iraqi refugee crisis is even worse than the unfolding tragedy in Sudan’s province of Darfur, where an estimated 200,000 people have died and two million have been displaced by attacks on their villages by government-backed militias.
The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has reported that the war in Iraq has caused the biggest displacement of people in the Middle East in recent history.
The Iraqi figures are so great as to be only approximate. It is thought that two million Iraqis have already fled their country; U.N. agencies expect another million to follow them into exile in 2007. A further two million Iraqis have been internally displaced by ethnic cleansing -- a cruel process that is far from over. These people are in urgent need of help and protection.
No one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the war and in the descent into hell which has followed: Estimates range from 250,000 to 650,000. What is clear is that sectarian violence is claiming about 1,000 lives each week. Antonio Guterres, head of the UNHCR, has described the situation a humanitarian disaster.
A political settlement in Iraq to end the killing, the ethnic cleansing and the flight of refugees must now be an urgent priority for the international community. But President Bush is still in a state of denial. He refuses to recognise the seriousness of the refugee crisis, as this would mean acknowledging that his policies have failed.
As for Tony Blair, by making the fatal error of joining Bush’s war as his junior partner, he has destroyed his own reputation and robbed his country of an independent foreign policy.
The European Union has pledged $13 million as a contribution to the refugee crisis, and Sweden has donated $2m. Britain has so far given nothing. Antonio Guterres is trying to raise $60m in emergency funds. As the Financial Times pointed out earlier this month, this is the equivalent of what the Pentagon spends every five hours on its occupation of Iraq.
The United States has spent about $600bn on its calamitous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has so far pledged the miserly sum of $9m for a world-wide resettlement and relief programme for Iraqi refugees!
Its wars have caused unimaginable hardship to millions, but it has so far admitted only 463 Iraqis to the United States since 2003, although it has now promised to admit another 7000.
Bush continues to believe in a military 'victory’ over the insurgents and is sending more troops to Iraq in the hope of stabilising the situation in Baghdad. This may bring some short-term relief, but few observers think this strategy can be successful.
It is time -- indeed it is long overdue -- for the countries must immediately affected by the Iraqi crisis to take matters into their own hands. Syria, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States should overcome their quarrels and rivalries and insist on the convening of an international conference to hammer out an agreement between Iraq’s warring factions, thus providing the conditions for a speedy U.S. withdrawal.
The poison from a disintegrating Iraq cannot be allowed to infect the whole region. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two regional heavyweights, have a special responsibility to bring the Iraq war to a close on the basis of an honourable compromise between all the parties to the conflict.
Syria and Jordan are the immediate victims of the flood of Iraqi refugees. They have literally been overwhelmed and, in the view of UN experts, have now reached saturation point. Once again the figures are approximate, but each country is thought to have taken in about one million Iraqis -- with more coming over the borders every day.
Food prices have soared, rents have risen sharply together with the price of real estate. Public services are at breaking point. It is estimated that 30 per cent of Iraqi children in Syria are not attending school, because schools are already grossly overcrowded.
The first Iraqis to flee to Syria and Jordan were the rich and the highly educated -- doctors, lawyers, university professors, prosperous businessmen and their families. They have been followed by the poor who are fleeing for their lives.
"We cannot continue like this," Abd al-Hamid Ouali, the UNHCR representative in Syria, was reported as saying. "The situation is terrible, but we are obliged to do something."
The rich Arab states should donate generously to the UNHCR, Syria and Jordan deserve help, while the United States and Britain should be shamed into paying for the destruction and human misery they have caused.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale
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Released: 17 February 2007
Word Count: 885
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Word Count: 870
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Friday, February 16, 2007
Pakistan: Between Afghanistan and a Hard Place
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1560000/images/_1561275_musharraf_afp300.jpg
Pakistan faces presidential, national and provincial elections this year, and strongman president Pervez Musharraf is consolidating his support and trying to reach accommodation with Islamist groups. Jean-Luc Racine describes Pakistan's domestic and regional politics, as the country answers to the United States and Kabul with regard to Afghanistan and the Taliban, and answers to India with regard to Kashmir.
Pakistan: Trying to Please Everybody
Jean-Luc Racine
Le Monde diplomatique
February 16, 2007
February 16, 2007
Pakistan's voters will choose a new president, national parliament and provincial assemblies this year. There are doubts about how the three ballots will be conducted, and the process also raises longstanding and fundamental questions about the relationship between the military regime and the parliamentary opposition. If General Pervez Musharraf is re-elected as president, perhaps it is time for him to shed his uniform and rehabilitate the democratic opposition and its exiled leaders.
Some opposition MPs are Islamists who provide a constitutional front for radical armed Islamists, in league with the military, but targeted by Musharraf, who has persistently called for “enlightened moderation” in the service of a “progressive, dynamic Islamic state”. Could this relationship between the mullahs and the army develop? Its complexity is increased by the involvement of radical Pakistani Islamists in Kashmir and in the tribal areas on the Afghanistan border where the Taliban are regaining ground.
The deteriorating situation in the western coastal province of Baluchistan demonstrates the central government’s difficulties in dealing with inequalities between provinces; and in reconciling internal affairs with wider regional issues such as the international gas pipeline projects, involving Iran and Afghanistan; or the new port at Gwadar, intended to be China’s gateway to the Indian Ocean.
The shadow of the United States falls over all this. It constantly praises Musharraf’s key role in the war on terror; it also presses him to do more against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Musharraf, and many of those around him, argue the necessity of not separating civil and military power precisely because Pakistan faces all these internal and external challenges. They insist that the president is the man to deal with the situation and the army is the only body capable of effective action. This view also finds favour among foreign political leaders. But some Pakistani liberals, anti-Islamist supporters of real parliamentary democracy, view the military regime as part of the problem, not as a potential solution. These are major challenges.
Jihad in Afghanistan
During the 1980s, the Afghan war against Soviet occupation and the Kashmiri rising against India allowed Pakistan to develop an active regional policy intended to prevent it from being squeezed between India and Afghanistan. As a frontline state against the Soviet Union, Pakistan allowed the United States to give effective support to the mujahideen. After the Soviet defeat in 1989 the mujahideen tore themselves apart and Pakistan’s influence was not decisive; Pakistan supported the Pashtun Gulbaddin Hekmatyar against Ahmed Shah Massud’s pro-Indian Tajiks. The rise of the Taliban after 1994 offered fresh opportunities. At the same time, Pakistani jihadists were fighting in Indian Kashmir, boosting the insurrection and bogging down much of the Indian army in a dirty war.
After 9/11 Musharraf soon understood the stakes in Afghanistan and saw the risks of refusing the deal offered by the Bush administration. He abandoned the Taliban (which refused to expel or hand over Osama bin Laden) and signed up to the war on terror. He shuffled his top brass, denounced extremism and arrested hundreds of al-Qaida militants including, in 2003, such senior figures as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who had planned 9/11.
George Bush promoted Pakistan to the rank of “major non-NATO ally” in 2004. But the US administration wanted more than just Pakistan tracking down Bin Laden and Muhammad Omar. Both the United States and Afghan president Hamid Karzai, blamed the setbacks of Operation Enduring Freedom on the porosity of the long, mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Musharraf decided in 2004 to send troops to South Waziristan, an agency in the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) along the Afghan border. Guerrilla fighting ensued between the army, which lost 800 out of 80,000 men, and militias -- Afghan Taliban, neo-Taliban from Pakistani tribes, and international al-Qaida combatants. The government reached agreements with the local tribal chiefs in South Waziristan in 2004 and 2005, and in North Waziristan in 2006, but these did not stop the fighting. The dispute with Kabul intensified because of infiltration from Pakistan’s tribal zones and Baluchistan into Agfhanistan. The US army noted this deterioration and the advance of the Taliban in southeast Afghanistan at the expense of NATO forces.
On the Pakistan side of the border, the rebelliousness and radicalisation of the FATA became a major preoccupation. Caught between US pressure and anti-US public opinion, the government had to pay for its repressive policies in the tribal areas. Its largely ineffectual and occasionally controversial operations included an air raid that killed 80 people in a madrasa in the Bajaur agency on 30 October 2006, the day that a deal was due. Nine days later a revenge suicide bombing on a barracks in the Northwest Frontier Province, outside the FATA, killed 35 recruits.
Negotiations with the tribal chiefs often required the mediation of the Islamist parties, and especially Jamaat-e-Ulema-e Islam (JUI, Assembly of Islamic Clergy), led by Fazlur Rehman, the opposition leader in parliament and an open supporter of the Taliban. The use of force against Pakistan’s citizens has tarnished the government’s image, without successfully ending the ongoing Talibanisation of the FATA. There are fears that this process could extend to the Northwest Frontier Province, which is at present governed by the Islamists of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA, United Action Forum).
Another tribal problem
Despite differences, the problem here is also essentially tribal. Baluchistan provides a large proportion of Pakistan’s gas supply and believes that it is being exploited by the central government and the wealthy province of Punjab. Baluchistan is the largest and least populated of Pakistan’s provinces, and has gone through a series of crises since independence, including the suppression of several insurgencies (1958-60, 1973-77).
The first phase of the construction of the deep-sea port at Gwadar and the stationing of more numbers of troops in the province have worsened the frustration of the Baluch autonomist movements, which now enjoy the support of important tribal leaders who previously upheld the political status quo.
In August 2006, government forces killed Akbar Khan Bugti, a rebellious former governor of Baluchistan. This pyrrhic victory radicalised both insurgents (including the Baluch Liberation Army) and local political parties that support greater autonomy. The Baluch problem is undermining major projects -- the port at Gwadar (where Chinese engineers have been kidnapped) and the gas pipeline linking Iran to India via Pakistan -- that could boost Pakistan’s economy.
‘Proxy war’ in Kashmir
At first Musharraf mishandled relations with India. By precipitating the Kargil conflict in 1999, on the line of control that separates Indian-and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, he ended talks between the two governments. Although limited, this was the first war between two states that had recently acquired nuclear weapons. Later, for 10 long months following the failure of the Agra summit in July 2001 and the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi in December 2002, the threat of war loomed again.
In a historic speech in January 2002, Musharraf condemned jihad. But he had no intention of undoing the painstaking preparations made by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to intervene in Indian Kashmir. These involved Lashkar-e-Taiba, the armed wing of the powerful Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (renamed Jamaat ud Dawa after it was banned) and Jaish-e-Muhammad. Although Indian forces were mobilised in response, the threat of nuclear confrontation deterred them from open conflict.
Pakistan was running out of room to manoeuvre. The 9/11 attacks gave the Indian government an excuse to denounce the proxy war waged by Pakistan in Kashmir using cross-border terrorism. It was clear that India could find no military solution after almost 15 years of insurrection in Kashmir. Musharraf began making concessions in 2003, by announcing that Pakistan had left aside United Nations resolutions calling for the Kashmir issue to be settled by referendum, and by agreeing to composite talks that would put all issues dividing India and Pakistan on the table beside the central issue of Kashmir.
This, on top of the government’s enlistment on the side of the United States, was the final straw for some jihadists linked to al-Qaida and supported by some junior officers. In December 2003, Musharraf barely escaped two assassination attempts. Rigidly structured talks began with India in February 2004, and were declared irreversible in 2005.
But no quick legally agreed solution can be expected on the Kashmir issue. India might agree to ratify the status quo by allowing Pakistan to hold the areas that it occupies; but it rejects any settlement that would place all or part of the Srinagar valley under Pakistan’s control or double mandate. Pakistan has called for flexibility on both sides, but still refuses to recognise the line of control inherited from the wars of 1948, 1965 and 1971.
Possible avenues include greater autonomy for Indian Kashmir; withdrawal of the jihadists, then of troops; opening the line of control to road traffic; and even joint consultative bodies. Discreet negotiations have taken place with the Kashmiri separatists from the Hurriyat (freedom) Conference, and even with some Kashmiri combatants from Hizbul Mujaheddin. The bomb attacks on Mumbai trains in which 180 people died in July 2006 showed that although terrorist pressures can influence the dialogue between India and Pakistan, they can no longer halt it.
Extremism isn’t just for export
While India continues to drag its heels, Musharraf has made a series of proposals on Kashmir. His enthusiasm is not enough to dispel persistent suspicions in India, the United States and Afghanistan about the deep-rooted relationship between the military leadership, the ISI, and extremist groups. Musharraf made his personal convictions clear when he denounced “bigots and obscurantists” who give Islam and Pakistan a “bad image.” But it is less certain that he has the political will or capacity to root out extremism.
The desire to preserve some margin for manoeuvre over Kashmir and Afghanistan may explain why jihadist forces are kept in check without being eradicated. It may also explain why the Pakistani government, suspicious of the increasing Indian presence in Afghanistan, may welcome Taliban pressure. Extremism is not just for export: Radical Islam has long spun its web at the heart of Pakistan.
Specific manifestations include the extremist Sunni militias’ campaigns against the Shia minority, which has included attacks on places of worship; effectively autonomous preaching networks calling for jihad in Kashmir; armed groups whose leaders used to be able to connect with al-Qaida through Afghanistan; and, since the U-turn of 2001, domestic terrorist attacks on targets both foreign (the Karachi attack on French naval engineers in 2003; the execution of journalist Daniel Pearl) and military (Musharraf has long been designated as a target by al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri).
The relationship between the army, political Islamists and extremists is complicated. During the 2002 elections the government suppressed and divided the parliamentary opposition parties (Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League and Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s party). But in the process the government opened the way for the Islamists of the MMA, which it had favoured but which now sits with the opposition.
A key component of the MMA, Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), remains firm on Kashmir; another, the JUI, although more flexible on this issue, has maintained its links with the Taliban. The MMA governs the Northwest Frontier Province and is a member, beside the pro-Musharraf faction of the Muslim League, of the ruling coalition in Baluchistan.
The JI and JUI both preach an austere, backward-looking Islam that rejects any liberalisation of the law. Musharraf has backed off several times on this issue; finally, in November 2006, he secured the passage of a Women’s Protection Bill, which transfers trials for rape from the jurisdiction of the Islamic courts, where the offence must be confirmed by four male witnesses, to regular criminal courts. This half-measure failed to end the repressive system established by the Hudood Ordinance, introduced by the former military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1979.
‘The poor man’s Ataturk’
Opinions vary on armed Islamism and the relationship between the army and the mullahs. Some accuse Musharraf of compromise and double-dealing: He bans extremist groups then allows them to re-form; he preaches enlightened moderation but does nothing to reform the madrasas; and he has reached an accommodation with the MMA. Others claim that to overestimate the influence of radical Islam allows the military to present itself as the only possible defence against extremists in the continuing war on terror.
Another school of thought argues that extremism will continue and even increase until the army and its leader, “a master of half-measures and the poor man’s Ataturk," take a firm stand. Others believe that only Musharraf, with the support of the military leadership, can extricate Pakistan gradually from the structural contradictions that have beset it for the past 25 years.
In July 2006, a group of key figures, including generals from the army reserve, called upon Musharraf to give up his uniform if he sought re-election, and to separate military and civilian power. He is unlikely to take this advice, since as long as he remains head of the military hierarchy he controls a pillar of power: the Corps Commanders’ Conference.
Musharraf has managed to split the major political forces that governed Pakistan between 1988 and 1999. He achieved this by seducing a significant proportion of the Muslim League; a few Pakistan People’s party MPs; and the Muttahida Quami Movement that represents the Mohajirs (Pakistan citizens who migrated from India at the time of partition in 1947) and is powerful in the southeastern Sindh province. This is a coalition of convenience and has not significantly eroded the parliamentary opposition.
A ‘charter of democracy’
A pluralist press can make its voice heard. In exile, former sworn enemies Bhutto and Sharif signed a “charter of democracy” in May 2006. Even if it defeated Musharraf, the opposition would still have to come to terms with the army. There have been repeated rumours and denials that Musharraf might strike a deal with Bhutto or even Rehman, dividing Islamist opposition in parliament.
In December, Musharraf announced that the presidential race would be held before legislative elections. This sent a clear signal that he hopes to be re-elected by the current parliament and provincial representatives; and that he is unwilling to place his political future in the hands of new assemblies. The regime has raised the major questions posed by the regional situation and by the need for a paradigm shift, and this has been debated in the press. There is a danger that during the electoral campaign they will be overshadowed by a pragmatism that would confirm the army’s powers and privileges.
There is a worsening disparity between an economy that grew by an annual average of 7% between 2004 and 2006 and an uncertain political status quo. The population recently passed 160 million; pressing social issues are being ignored. As public education collapses, and health and development are starved of funds, economic growth finances defence expenditure, which has risen to 20% of the total budget.
Pakistan’s military, technocratic and social elite live in a different world from the ordinary citizen. Social indicators have risen slowly since 2000 in literacy, education and vaccination rates. Yet the World Bank, in its 2006 report on Pakistan, pointed out that in many respects “social indicators still lag behind countries with comparable per capita incomes,” particularly in rural areas.
Even if the opposition did achieve power, it would not radically change a policy of active liberalisation which, according to the report, “has failed to achieve social progress commensurate with its economic growth.” -- Translated by Donald Hounam
Jean-Luc Racine is director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; he is co-editor of Pakistan:Contours of State and Society (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2002) and author of Cachemire: Au péril de la guerre (Autrement, Paris, 2002).
© 2007 Jean-Luc Racine - Le Monde diplomatique
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Released: 16 February 2007
Word Count: 2,569
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