Helena – Page 228 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

CSM reporter kidnapped, Iraq

I just saw this report about a young Christian Science Monitor reporter called Jill Caroll being kidnapped in Baghdad.
I am just hoping and praying that she and the translator kidnaped along with her are both okay.
So very many people are being quite illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq today– and threatened, many of them, with physical mistreatment or even annihilation.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell anyone who might know the people who’re holding Jill Carroll a little about the Christian Science Monitor that they might not know.
The newspaper was founded as a regular daily newspaper around 100 years ago by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, a courageous American woman who founded a new branch of Christian belief called Christian Science. The paper is still owned and operated by the Christian Science church, but it functions just like a regular newspaper in the secular world, with the exception that a portion of one page is given over to “today’s religious article.”
The church is not involved in any attempt to “convert” Iraqis or any other Middle Easterners to the faith. Many of the reporters working for the paper are not even members of the C.S. church; some of them are. All of them are good, professional journalists.
I have worked with the newspaper in one way or another since 1976, and have written a regular column for them since 1990. (As regular JWN readers will know, I am not a Christian Scientist, but a member of another Christian church, the Quakers.) One of the things I admire about the paper is the fact that, being owned by a church, it is the only major US national daily that is not subject to commercial pressures by advertisers– a factor that in the case of several other papers and broadcast media has caused journalists to modify their reporting of facts that might be detrimental to Israel. Journalists working for the CSM can describe things as they honestly see them. The CSM has also, throughout the decades, built up a strong record of giving broad and thoughtful coverage to issues in the developing countries.
No-one in Iraq or elsewhere ever deserves to be detained illegally. But it seems particularly tragic– in Jill Carroll’s case, as in that of the four CPT abductees– that western people who are making a serious, peaceful, and respectful attempt to build bridges of understanding with all communities in Iraq should be kidnapped and held in this way.
Please! Can the people holding these abductees find a way to release them all in safety?

Hamas ready to take responsibility?

This, from AP is interesting:

I don’t have time to hunt down the original source (described as a posting on Hamas’s own website) or put in much background here. But until now Hamas has sustained a policy of seeking only strong representation in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), rather than explicitly to govern.
However, the implosion of Fateh and the rest of the current PA (see e.g. here) means that there is a real crisis of governance in Palestinian society that is harming every community in the occupied territories. Any political organization that takes itself seriously and that has some governing capabilities would have to step forward and express readiness to do so.
Zahar is the head of Hamas in Gaza but not the overall head of the movement. Still, his word is extremely weighty.
It will be interesting to see how Israel and the US respond to this. Elections are still scheduled for January 25. Of course, there may well be those in the Israeli right wing who would seek to use the present crisis-ridden circumstances on both sides of the “Green Line” as a pretext for escalation.

Iraq: government “within weeks”??

Percipient as ever (irony alert there), “Uncle” Jalal Talabani, still the President of Iraq, predicted today that a new government could be formed in his country “within weeks”.
This is all so very reminiscent of what happened after the election of January of last year. Back then it took 88 days between election day and the day on which a new “government” arising from those elections was sworn in.
Those 88 days were marked by terrible, terrible waves of violence in the country. And the administration that was then sworn in was able to solve none of the country’s problems and meet pitifully few of its people’s needs.
I pray to God the same thing is not going to happen this time around, too. But Talabani’s announcement of just how long he thinks government formation might take is really depressing. And of course, just like after the January 2005 election, this time too the violence has been escalating badly.
This Hayat article quotes un-named “diplomats” as saying they expect it will not take three months to cobble together the new government this time, as it did last time…
It also quotes British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying that the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq is “a matter of months”. Also this,

He added that the British troops “will remain as long as the Iraqi government wants them to remain… and we hope in practice that we can withdraw our troops in stages, on our own responsibility, not from Basra in the first instance but from from other governorates. We need to coordinate this withdrawal with the Iraqiswhen they confirm that their troops have become ready to carry all the responsibility in these districts. It is a matter of months, and we are here to liberate Iraq, not exercize imperialism here.” And Straw stressed that the future Iraqi government should be “truly a government of national unity rather than being [a government of] only one party.”

How very kind– one might even say “liberating”– of Minister Straw to tell the Iraqis what kind of a government they should or should not have.

Evo Morales and new waves in Latin America

Over the past 500 years, colonizing powers of European heritage have used their military might to impose their will on all continents of the world, committing countless large-scale crimes of humanity against the indigenous peoples of those other lands.How wonderful, therefore, that 513 years after Christopher Columbus’s flotilla arrived off the coast of the Americas, in Bolivia an indigenous person, head of an indigenous-based political movement, has been elected President.
I know I should have written about Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) before now.
Dominic Tweedie kindly sent me this link, which is to the text (in English) of an important address Evo made on December 24. In it, he builds on his own remarkable experience of organizing the people of his home district, and says:

Evo’s inauguration later this month is bound to be a huge fiesta for all his supporters. They include many of the deeply impoverished indigeños and indigeñas of Bolivia, a country that actually has a lot of natural-resources wealth. But even before being inaugurated, Evo has been making a “victory lap” to various countries around the world, including Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, France (where he now is), and South Africa. In all these countries he is able to meet both both heads of government and representatives of popular movements with whom he has already built ties through his involvement over past years in various counter-globalization movements.
Evo’s election, which was achieved on a fairly strongly anti-Washington platform, reminds us that Washington’s influence in Latin America has been waning for quite some time– and most particularly since 9/11. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Peter Hakim, the President of a DC-based organization called the Inter-American Dialogue, writes:

Continue reading “Evo Morales and new waves in Latin America”

Bring in the Security Council?

Suddenly, the Middle East is facing three very grave crises, each of which threatens international peace and security and all of which have the potential to reverberate very seriously against each other. I believe the UN Security Council should be called into a special session to see what it can do to prevent a downward spiral in the region that would be disastrous for the whole world.
The region’s three crises are these:
Iraq:
The elections-plus-stabilization process that the US designed for the country back in 2004 has resulted in the holding last month of a nationwide election– but that election further strengthened the country’s main sectarian/ethnic sub-groups and has thus far led to an impasse in the formation of a national government. This impasse has not been static. It has seen a horrendous recrudescence of violence. Today alone, 125 Iraqis were killed. Meanwhile, the US just started signaling that it takes no longterm responsibility for the welfare of the country. Under these circumstances, the international community needs to step in– to give Iraq’s factions the assurances they might need as they work toward forming their own government, and to make sure that all Iraq’s neighbors are on board a sensible stabilization plan that takes their fears, sensitivities– and capacity for helpful action– into full consideration.
Washington has amply demonstrated that it can achieve neither of these tasks. The UN is far from a perfect body. But no other body has the global legitimacy to step into this situation.
Israel-Palestine:
The peace talks between the parties that the “Road Map” process mandated have not happened and now look further than ever from happening. Events inside both Israel and Palestine over the past 18 months– and more especially, the past two weeks– show there is no hope whatsoever to revive the Road Map (which is anyway running more than 18 months behind its schedule at this point.) process. The UN, which was a party to the Road Map but which retains its own interests and principles in the matter of Palestine, needs to take urgent action– here too– to provide ressurance to very nervous local parties; to broker a workable final-status peace agreement; and to find constructive ways of involving all neighbors in this.
Iran and nuclear developments:
The Iranian government is led by an incendiary and pugnacious elected leader; he and his broad network of domestic backers and allies have decided to take their country along a path of nuclear development that– while it is still not illegal under the NPT– nevertheless causes great concern to many in the international community. But international diplomats who have more or less “accepted” that Israel, India, and Pakistan can stand outside the NPT with impunity are in a weak position to do anything effective to rein in Iran’s programs. Meanwhile, several in Israel have opnely called for military action to “destroy” Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Even if this plan were militarily feasible (which is doubtful), the political fallout from such an attack would be cataclysmic at the world level. In order to defuse the nuclear tensions in the region, the UN Security Council needs to produce a workable plan for the creation of a “Mideast and South Asia Zone Free of All WMDs.”
Why the UN?
As noted above the UN is, and is widely seen as, a highly imperfect organization. However, in all these three arenas, only the UN has the international legitimacy that’s needed to implement effective plans for de-escalation, stabilization, and the urgent holding of negotiations over long-term solutions. The US, which until now has sought to monopolize decisionmaking with regard to both Iraq and Palestine, is currently facing a serious crisis of political leadership at home and has found its military and political resources quite unequal to the task of longterm stabilization in Iraq.
I write this with no illusions that the Security Council can find any quick or simple solutions to the crises in these three arenas. But all the nations of the world have an interest in preventing any further escalations of violence in this very sensitive and explosive region. And it is time, surely, for the Security Council as a whole to remind its American permanent member that (1) it is not only the US that has interests in the Middle East, and (2) the UN as a whole has capabilities to help defuse and de-escalate the tensions in this region that are considerably broader and potentially far more effective than those currently in Washington’s hands.
In 1956, it was Washington that– working with the Security Council– took action to reassert UN principles and capabilities in the midst of a crisis that had been caused by the unauthorized military actions taken in the Middle East (the invasion of Egypt) by two Permanent Members– Britain and France– along with Israel.
In 2003, when the US decided almost unilaterally (though with support from the Britain and a few other countries) to invade Iraq, its position in world affairs was so strong that other Security Council members felt they could do little to resist or reverse Washington’s decision. Similarly, with Washington’s continued funding and other support for Israel over many years, despite Israel’s pursuit of illegal colonial projects in occupied lands. But now, Washington has shown that in both those places, its favored approach has failed to bring peace or longterm stability. Worse than that, the outcome of Washington’s actions in each arena has been to incubate a situation of grave crisis that threatens international peace and security.
So now, as in 1956, surely the Security Council as a whole needs to step in, to reassert the rights, principles, and interest of the international community in these explosive arenas. I can’t figure who else could do it.

Some recent Hayat pieces

Y’all know I write periodic columns for al-Hayat. I frequently don’t see them when they come out in Arabic, because I make a bee-line for the news pages and find them hard enough to get through that I have little energy left for the opinion pages…
Hayat has, I have to say, a truly terrible English-language website. (Guys, you want to hire me as a consultant to help bring it into the 21st century??) Including, it has no news at all. Only some very sporadically presented pieces of opinion.
I just found three of my own pieces on there, in two different places on the site (?), in the original English. Here they are:

Iraq between Germany and South Africa

Iran, the Bush administration, and the Middle East

Avoiding Regional Wars in the Gulf and Mashreq

I can’t find one that I sent them on December 12, titled “Iraq changes America.” But given the chaotic state of their site, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
If any kind reader could send me the URLs for any of my other 2005 pieces, in English or especially Arabic, I would be really grateful.

Riverbend on Iraqi hyper-inflation

Go read Riverbend’s post of Wednesday on daily life for Baghdadis in the aftermath of the “wonderful” election that Prez Bush has been gushing so much about, recently. It is all worth reading– what a fine, fine writer she is.
It ends thus:

I think the courage and humorous spirit of this young woman– even in the midst of adversity that most westerners can barely even imagine– are a real beacon of hope. For Iraq and for the all of us. The very best of luck to you in 2006, dear Riverbend.

Thinking about the post-Sharon

Sharon hasn’t even (as far as I know) died yet and some people are already writing the kinds of rosy-tinted things about him that are usually reserved for obituaries. How about this, from AP’s Steven Gutkin in Jerusalem?

threatening momentum for a deal with the Palestinians

So far as I know, up until Sharon had his stroke there was almost zero momentum for a deal with the Palestinians. What there was (possibly) momentum for was a further unilateral step by Sharon’s new Kadima Party that might cede some control over some small areas of the West Bank to the Palestinians in “return” for Israel winning greater international support for its seizure of East Jerusalem and many other significant parts of the West Bank.
If Sharon had been headed toward “a deal with the Palestinians” there were many, many things he could have done to negotiate/coordinate with them both last year’s Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the other supplementary negotiations that were supposed to follow on from that (like the Gaza-WB link.)
He did not. Philosophically as well as in practice his very strong preference has always been for forceful unilateral action that imposes his own personal preferences on all other parties, whether Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, or other.
Sharon is still alive, and his family and supporters must all be wracked with worry over his fate. So personally, I think it’s inappropriate to go into too many details of the man’s long record as a military and political leader. It’s not obituary time yet. Also, any obituary, when written, will require an assessment of all his activities from the 1950s on, and not just of the two intriguing decisions he made in the past 26 months: to pull all Israeli ground presences out of Gaza, and then to break from Likud and found Kadima.
Also, I don’t agree with that assessment above that Sharon’s exit from active political life will necessarily strengthen Israeli hardliners. As we saw last summer, a large majority of Jewish Israelis clearly supported the decision to pull the settlers out of Gaza, and there is also a clear majority who favor further significant Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank. Israeli hardliners do have an advantage over the “left” in terms of ideological/political clarity (aka rigidity), and some possible advantage in terms of organization. But if the leaders on the left can muster a clear and realistic approach to peacemaking then they have a good chance of being able to mobilize the country’s many, many supporters of a decent and realistic approach to peacemaking.
The position of the US government and the rest of the international community will be crucial in helping to determine whether it is the Israeli moderates or the hardliners who emerge stronger from the collapse of the (thus far highly “personalized”) Sharonist center. It is extremely unhelpful for anyone in the international arena to be fatalistic about any “inevitability” of the empowerment of the hardliners.
In this regard the US government is not just “one more” representative of the international community. It is the sole outside power that has supported Sharon’s positions against the Palestinians through thick and thin over recent years. Now, Washington will be forced to make some huge further choices regarding Palestine. Let’s hope it makes them in a wise and foresighted way, and not in a way that stokes further violence by anyone… and that includes the Israeli hawks both in and outside the security forces.

Israel/Palestine: leadership crises and the risk of escalation

So, Sharon had a cerebral hemorrhage today… and in Palestine the humiliating concrete barricade that has kept the Palestinians of Gaza separated from those of their countrymen who live in Egypt was breached by out-of-control elements from one of Fateh’s rapidly proliferating lunatic fringes.
Both these events– Sharon’s expected absence from active politics for at least the next few weeks and perhaps forever, and the continuing implosion of Abu Mazen’s Fateh movement (as described in more detail here)– have thrown the Palestinian-Israeli theater into a state of great uncertainty and risk.
Less than two months ago, Sharon upset the complex jigsaw of Israeli party politics by quitting Likud, and set up his own new, highly personalized party, Kadima. In his absence from politics, daily governance of Israel (presumably including of its armed forces) will be under the control of acting premier Ehud Olmert, a reasonably moderate and level-headed man.
But will Olmert be able to ride herd on hawks in the security apparatus in the same way Sharon was able to, when he chose? That’s the first question.
The second is whether the Palestinian election scheduled for January 25 will go ahead… Or if not, what?
The third is how on earth can rapid escalations of violence between Israelis and Palestinians be headed off over the next few weeks?
The fourth, and most burning issue is how can a hopeful, authoritative and far-reaching peace negotiation be started and concluded between these two very fearful, very jumpy national groups amid conditions of such intense political uncertainty– both in their area and also in the region more broadly?
I wish Sharon well as a person. I hope he pulls through this physical crisis. (Though I disagree with the hyperbole engaged in by one Palestinian commentator, Ghazi al-Saadi, who reportedly gushed that Sharon has been “”the first Israeli leader who stopped claiming Israel had a right to all of the Palestinians’ land.” Untrue. Yitzhak Rabin pioneered that position in modern times– and lost his life for it a decade ago.)
But the crisis now engulfing these two peoples is much, much broader than just the fate of that one man, Sharon, or of the infant party he had launched.
… Wow, yet another element has been added to W’s “perfect storm”. Violence, unpredictability, and a real risk of massive escalations in Israel/Palestine, posing a challenge to the Prez at the same time as all the other challenges pouring in on him from inside the US, and from the Persian Gulf…
I think we all need to pray for calm, sanity, inter-human recognition,and the choosing of de-escalatory, nonviolent paths.

Scandals engulf the Republican Party

The US ruling party is currently facing a “perfect storm” of scandals, the reach of which continues to expand.
There are at least three major scandals now exploding all over the party’s leadership. Sometimes it almost feels hard to tell them apart. (Oh, maybe that’s because they are indeed all linked, in multiple, very nefarious ways.)
The latest one to come to some sort of amazing fruition is the Jack Abramoff scandal. Abramoff, a powerful “lobbyist” who’s very well connected to the Republican leadership (and also, as Juan Cole has duly reminded us, to some of the sleaziest, most violent elements in the Israeli settler movement) yesterday pled guilty on three counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials. As a part of these “guilty pleas”, Abramoff had to promise to pay at least $25 million in restitution to clients whom he has bilked, and was told he’d get a prison sentence of around 9.5-11 years (instead of the 30-plus years he could, apparently, face if convicted after a contested case.)
Abramoff also, even more significantly, promised to tell prosecutors all he knew about possibly illegal actions taken by others– and these are widely predicted to include a number of influential members of Congress including the man who is still formally the #2 Republican in the House of Representatives (though he is currently ‘resting” from that position): Tom DeLay.
So far, only one member of Congress, a medium-important Ohio Republican called Robert Ney, has been referred to in Abramoff-related court papers. But Alice Fisher, the head of the Justice department’s ciriminal division yesterday told the media:

The second scandal brewing close to the surface of national politics is the indictment that a grand jury in the court system in Texas issued last September— separately– against Tom DeLay, on charges of conspiring with two political associates to violate state campaign finance law. That case proceeds.
And the third scandal still brewing is the continuing possibility of further indictments– including, quite possibly, one against Karl Rove– in the whole “Valerie Plame” leak episode, regarding which Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is continuing his work. (In my judgment, Rove and DeLay are the joint lynchpins of the still-continuing Republican conspiracy against democracy and accountable government in America.)
All three of these scandals are expected to come to a head between now and August. Did I mention that this year is a year for key congressional elections? No wonder that President Bush’s advisors (who still include Rove) have told him he needs to ~~cut and run from his disastrous and unpopular project in Iraq~~, oops sorry, I mean “undertake a wise and measured strategic redeployment in Iraq” if the Republican Party is to have any chance at all of hanging onto power in the elections this November.
… Usual caveat here: namely, this very bad news for the GOP would be very much better news for the US citizenry and the world if our country had anything like a normal opposition party ready and eager to take advantage of it. We don’t. Indeed, in the prosecutions of members of Congress and their staff-people that are expected to follow from Abramoff’s tip-offs, there is no indication at all that they won’t also include some officials from the Democratic Party.
This interesting article in today’s WaPo gives some helpful background about the whole phenomenon of the work of “lobbyists” in Washington — i.e., basically, buying and suborning the votes of our elected representatives. It notes,

So far, the public has not identified corruption as solely a Republican problem. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in November asked Americans whether they thought Democrats or Republicans were better on ethical matters; 16 percent said Democrats, 12 percent said Republicans, and 71 percent said there was not much difference between the parties.

If I were asked that question, I think I’d say the Democrats were “better”– but only by the thinnest of all possible margins, and only very unevenly better, at all.