Author: Helena

L. Rozen on Israelis in Kurdistan

Laura Rozen has a great new investigative piece at Mother Jones about the very lucrative business and security activities undertaken in post-2003 Kurdistan by former Israeli Mossad head “Danny” Yatom and his Israeli-US dual-national associate Shlomi Michaels.
HT: Wired’s “Danger Room”.
Rozen describes Michaels thus,

    He was a former commando with Israel’s elite internal counterterrorism force, the Yamam; he had since become one of the middlemen who work the seams between the worlds of security, intelligence, and international business, along with a few more colorful sidelines including a private investigations/security business in Beverly Hills.. [H]is business partner was former Mossad head Danny Yatom. Before arriving in Washington, Michaels, a dual Israel-US citizen, ran a string of businesses in Beverly Hills… After 9/11 he left Los Angeles, alighting first in New York (where he taught counterterrorism for a semester at Columbia University) and then in DC, where he would soon launch a lucrative venture to cash in on the Iraq War and its aftermath.

Here were some of his activities:

    He helped introduce information in Washington that the United Nations’ Iraq oil-for-food scheme was riddled with corruption—a matter that became a key GOP talking point for promoting the war. Later Michaels helped the Kurds find Washington lobbyists (Rogers’ BGR) who would make the case that Kurdistan was owed some $4 billion in oil-for-food back payments. In June 2004, during his last days in Iraq, US Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer sent three US military helicopters loaded with $1.4 billion in 100-dollar bills to Kurdistan, according to the Los Angeles Times. The money helped finance Kurdish infrastructure and development contracts that Michaels and his business partners then contracted with the Kurdish government to build and secure…
    One Michaels/Yatom joint venture, Kudo AG (short for Kurdish Development Organization), registered in Switzerland, won a major contract to serve as the Kurdish government’s general contractor for the $300 million project to rebuild Irbil’s Hawler International Airport. According to an associate familiar with Michaels’ Kurdish ventures, the deal was structured such that Kudo (a joint venture between Michaels and Yatom and their Kurdish associate representing one of Kurdistan’s two ruling parties) was to get paid 20 percent of every contract awarded in the airport project. Though it’s not clear how much Kudo was ultimately paid, that ratio would have made its contract worth roughly $60 million. (Michaels declined to comment for this story.)
    Michaels also won a smaller contract with the Kurdish Minister of Interior to provide counterterrorism training and equipment; in 2004, Michaels brought several dozen Israeli ex-security officials as well as bomb-sniffing dogs, secure communications equipment, and other military gear into a camp in northern Iraq.

As Rozen tells it, Michaels and Yatom had some plans that didn’t work out. One was a 2004 offer to sell some alleged “evidence” about Saddam’s former WMD programs to the CIA for $1 million. The CIA, very sensibly, didn’t buy. Also, the two men’s plan to provide security services to the Kurdish Regional Government had to be curtailed after Turkey raised complaints– and the Israeli security services suddenly (a little late in the day?) ‘discovered’ laws that forbade Israeli nationals from entering Iraq Iraq without explicit permission or from dealing in defense equipment without the requisite license…

Continue reading “L. Rozen on Israelis in Kurdistan”

Red Queen Perino declares ‘Victory’ in Iraq

Just like the Red Queen in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, White House spokesperson Dana Perino is determined that words will mean what she wants them to mean!
Especially when it comes to declaring “victory” in Iraq.
Look at this exchange in today’s White House press briefing:

    Q: Can you remind us again why this agreement is not the timetable that the president fought so hard against? […]
    PERINO: This is a mutually agreed to agreement. [HC comment: As opposed to– ?] And that’s what one of the things that is different about an arbitrary date for withdrawal when you say you’re going to leave win or lose. We believe that the conditions are such now that we are able to celebrate the victory that we’ve had so far and establish…a strategic framework agreement.

HT to Ben of Think Progress. His post on the matter here even shows us that Perino was dressed for the part.

Logistical impasse for the US in Afghanistan?

Bernhardt of Moon of Alabama has a good short post up today on the huge logistics challenge involved in keeping the US/NATO forces in Afghanistan supplied.
He’s commenting on this fascinating report in today’s WaPo on the security problems the truck-based supply route through Pakistan has faced for many months now. The WaPo reporters write, “Before the Taliban raid and border closure last week, an average of 600 to 800 tractor-trailers moved through [the Pakistan-Afghanistan border crossing at] Torkham a day, according to Afghan customs officials.” That flow of traffic has frequently been reduced considerably, or choked off completely by anti-US or pro-Taliban forces acting inside Pakistan.
On Monday, the Pakistani army received orders to “shoot to kill” those attacking US convoys. Yesterday (Tuesday) the traffic flow resumed a little. But still Customs officials said they expected only around 200 trucks to pass through that day.
Bernhardt has a very handy link to a “Request for Info” issued by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) which is,

    conducting a market survey on industry capabilities and potential sources for inter-theater surface transportation of military cargo to/from various destinations in Afghanistan utilizing two possible options. The first option is to move cargo between Northern Europe and various destinations in Afghanistan through Caucus’ and Central Asia. The second option is to move cargo between CONUS and Afghanistan through Asia and Central Asia. In addition to the options above, the Government is also looking for other possible innovative routing and intermodal solutions which may include air transportation.

Do they look a little desperate there? “Looking for other possible innovative routing and intermodal solutions…”?
B has also very helpfully produced a rough map of what the “European” and “Asian” options for new supply lines might look like. The Asian option notably goes mainly through China before getting to Afghanistan through one or more of the other Stans.
(Check out Stratfor’s handy map of the two new links China is making to the rail network the Soviets built, back in the day, in all the Stans they controlled. China has also recently, as I noted here, won a contract with the Afghan government to, inter alia, build the country’s first-ever national north-south rail line, that will connect western China’s rail network with that of Pakistan, and through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.)
But China’s big new engineering projects in the region will come far too late to save the US/NATO troops trapped in Afghanistan at the end of extremely long and tortuous supply lines…
USTRANSCOM’s “Request for Info” seems based primarily on the US military’s desire not to be wholly dependent in Afghanistan on trans-Russian supply lines, and not to be dependent at all on the other, geographically very obvious route into Afghanistan, which would be to go in through Iran.
In Bernhardt’s post, he writes,

    A retreat from Iraq would relieve the U.S. from some costs. But to supply a soldier in Afghanistan might easily cost double or triple as much as supply for a soldier in Iraq. Has Obama thought about how he will finance that war?

I think his estimate of the relatively much higher cost of sustaining each soldier inside Afghanistan is quite correct. And this is a matter that the US Congress– holder of the war-making purse-strings, remember!– should take into full account, as well as the incoming President.
Meanwhile, as Don Bacon has documented so ably for us here, the political-strategic part of the war effort in Afghanistan has been going abysmally badly. It truly is time to look for an alternative to continued US dominance of the “stabilization” (or whatever) project there.
Time for the Security Council as a whole to consider a whole range of other, much less unilateralist, less “western”, and less heavily militarized approaches.

Specter, Tierney spearheading diplomatic engagement with Iran

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) are at the forefront of a bold new effort to pull US policy away from its belligerent stance towards Iran and to rally strong congressional support for President-elect Obama’s long-maintained preference for real diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic.
Yesterday, these two Congressional leaders and Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) all appeared at an event held on Capitol Hill to launch a new Experts’ Statement that spells out in broad terms how a new policy of diplomatic engagement could be pursued and that– equally importantly– dispells some of the key “myths” that, being widespread especially on Capitol Hill, have served until now to blunt congressional support for engagement with Iran.
These are the five steps the Experts’ Statement urges:

    1. Replace calls for regime change with a long-term strategy [that includes meaningful dialogue]
    2. Support human rights through effective, international means [as opposed to unilateral, US-only means that seem to aim at regime change]
    3. Allow Iran a place at the table – alongside other key states – in shaping the future of Iraq, Afghanistan and the region.
    4. Address the nuclear issue within the context of a broader U.S.-Iran opening [rather than by maintaining “peremptory preconditions on dialogue.”]
    5. Re-energize the Arab-Israeli peace process and act as an honest broker in that process [including, quite possibly, through “dealing, directly or indirectly, with Hamas and Hezbollah.”]

Among the 20 experts who issued the statement are veteran high-level diplomats Thomas Pickering and Jim Dobbins.*
At yesterday’s session, Dobbins appeared and talked very eloquently about the many helpful things the Iranian government did that enabled the early phases of the US war against the Taliban in 2001 to succeed. He knew– because he’d been completely involved in leading those efforts, including at the Bonn conference in December 2001.
Tierney and Specter also gave very effective and courageous presentations in support of the Experts’ Statement. Specter recalled that he has been a supporter of dialogue with Iran for a long time (“since long before Barack Obama became a U.S. Senator.”) Tierney stated outright that the policy of isolation and exclusion that the Bush administration has pursued toward Iran in recent years “has not worked,” and he quoted almost directly from the Experts’ Statement in several parts of his speech, expressing its sentiments as his own.
Carper was less impressive and courageous, doing much more to couch his words in terms that “all options must stay on the table”, etc etc. Still, he had agreed to host the gathering there in the Hart Senate Office Building, not far from his own office. And having it there did, of course, give the event and the Experts’ Statement additional standing among lawmakers.
This initiative has been extremely well timed. Though Obama has held fundamentally true to his insistence that, as President, he intends to undertake serious exploration of the possibilities for real diplomatic engagement with Iran, he will still require strong backing from Capitol Hill for this policy. And AIPAC, which has made the ratcheting up the level of threat, hysteria, and war-readiness against Iran the centerpiece of its advocacy for several years now, remains a very powerful player on Capitol Hill. Including, as we know, among the Democrats there…
So having Specter and Tierney so strongly on board the new “engage diplomatically with Iran” effort is extremely important. This is a movement that needs to continue to grow.
—
* Of course, it would be easier for this movement to grow if the “experts” whose names appeared on the statement were more gender-inclusive. Why only two women among the 20 people named as “validators” there? Why this ridiculous devaluing of the kind of contribution that a Nikki Keddie or a Farzaneh Milani– or a host of other distinguished women experts on Iran– could have brought to the project?

Australia’s thought-provoking Apology

Okay, I am merely nine months late in commenting on the breakthrough apology that Australian PM Kevin Rudd offered to the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands in the parliament in Canberra back on February 13. You can see video of Rudd delivering it here, and read the text here.
As a US citizen (and also, for my sins, a British citizen), reflecting on Rudd’s heroic– though of course not yet nearly “sufficient” act– makes me ask how long it will be until my government here in Washington issues some equivalent public apologies for past, very grave misdeeds.

    * For the many acts carried out against numerous Native American peoples– exactly analogous to deeds the Anglo-heritage Australians committed against the indigenous peoples of their lands;
    * For the barbaric acts carried out against African peoples ripped from their own countries, brought to our shores, and kept in a situation of enslavement that– unlike slavery systems known elsewhere in the world– was maintained intact throughout the generations;
    * For the unjustified wars of aggression our government has launched, both on this continent and far afield, right down to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Well, I said, “past” misdeeds. Some of our country’s misdeeds– including the occupation of Iraq and its maintaining of a completely unfair agricultural subsidy program that has ripped the livelihoods away from hundreds of millions of poor-country farmers — continue to this day.
In the case of continuing misdeeds, it is a good question whether we should focus more on stopping the misdeed or seeking a public apology– or even, as is preferable, some form of concrete reparation– for it.
My own strong preference is to focus first of all on stopping the misdeed. Apologies and other forms of “reckoning” can wait till later. But if we wait to end the commission of the misdeed then further considerable harm will have been done in the meantime…

Continue reading “Australia’s thought-provoking Apology”

Israel attacks Gaza, demonstrates it is still the ‘occupying power’

The Israeli military has sent ground forces deep into Gaza over the past two weeks, and has killed 17 Palestinians, and wounded uncounted others. In what even longtime Israeli flack Ron Ben-Yishai admits are retaliatory attacks, Palestinian rocketeers from Gaza have wounded an unknown number — presumed small– of residents of southern Israel, but killed none. This (highly asymmetrical) exchange of attacks has spread fear on both sides of the international border between Gaza and Israel.
In addition, the Israeli government recently tightened yet further the siege it has maintained around Gaza since the election nearly three years ago of a Hamas-dominated parliament in Gaza and the West Bank. The siege has contributed to the deaths of more than 200 Gaza Palestinians and has prevented the other 1.5 million residents of the Strip from leading anything like a normal life.
This BBC report tells us that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israeli PM Olmert in a recent phone call to lift the siege.
Yesterday, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Judge Navanethem Pillay, issued a hard-hitting statement calling for an immediate end to the blockade of Gaza. It said:

    “By function of this blockade, 1.5 million Palestinian men, women and children have been forcibly deprived of their most basic human rights for months… This is in direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law. It must end now.”

Here in the United States, apologists for the Israeli government have argued since 2005 that Israel “ended the occupation of the Gaza Strip” that year, and that therefore since then it has borne no continuing responsibility for the welfare of the Strip’s residents such as is required of any “foreign military occupying power” under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But since 2005, Israel has continued to maintain tight control over all avenues and channels through which the Gazans might have contact with the outside world, and it has maintained it still has a “right” to intervene militarily in Gaza whenever it chooses.
Those two aspects of Israel’s policy put the lie to its claim that it has “ended” the military occupation of the Gaza Strip that it has, actually, maintained continuously since June of 1967.
If Israel were not, in fact, the military occupier of this territory then either the blockade it has maintained around it or the repeated military actions it has mounted against it would be considered under international law as overt acts of war that would allow the legitimate (indigenous) government of Gaza to request any and all forms of international military aid to counter and suppress those hostile acts.
But few actors in the international community believe that the democratically elected administration in Gaza has this right. Indeed, the BBC report on the Gaza situation quotes an un-named an Israeli official as describing Israel’s latest ground-force incursion into Gaza as “a routine operation”, i.e. not an act of war as such.
Routine???
The people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan have had to live under the vagaries, aggressions, harsh repression, and downright dispossession that have marked Israel’s military occupation rule of these territories for 41.5 years now. It is time for all these military occupations to end.
Why, even the United States’ military occupation rule over Iraq is now scheduled to end at the end of 2011, after lasting less than eight years! How can the international community allow Israel’s rapacious and inhumane occupations to continue?

Urgent memo to Bush: Tell us honestly what this agreement with Iraq says

“All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.”
That’s the text of Article 24, para 1 of the the text of the agreement the US and Iraqi governments reached agreement on over the weekend, as published by Al-Sabah in Baghdad. Raed Jarrar sends us to this English-language translation of the whole Sabah text, which I’ve also uploaded here.)
So why do we not yet see the text of this important document on any of the US government’s many websites yet, or those of the US MSM?
And why did White House press flack Dana Perino today say that the deadline for withdrawal in the text is only “aspirational”? (HT: Ryan of Think Progress.)

Is Perino auditioning for a post-White House career as the Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass”? You know, the one who says that “Words mean only what I want them to mean”?
Memo to Bush: Tell us what this important agreement with the Baghdad government actually says!
Specifically, the translation that Raed gave us says in “Article 24, Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq” the following:

    Recognizing the improvement of the Iraqi security forces and their increased capabilities, and the fact that they are in charge of all security operations, and based on the strong relationship between the two sides, both sides have agreed on the following:
    1- All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.
    2- All U.S. combat forces must withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibility in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009
    3- All withdrawn U.S. combat troops in accordance to paragraph 2 [shall] regroup in installations and areas agreed upon located outside cities, towns, and villages. These installations and areas agreed upon will be specified by the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) before the date mentioned in paragraph 2 of this article.
    4- The U.S. recognizes Iraq’s sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time. The Iraqi government recognizes the United States’ sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time.
    5- Both sides agree on creating mechanisms and arrangements to reduce the U.S. forces levels within the specified time period, and both sides must agree on where these forces will be located.

Some Iranian support for the US-Iraq SOFA: Why?

Iranian judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi has been quoted by the state television’s website as expressing his approval of the decision the Iraqi cabinet made Sunday to approve the currently proposed US-Iraqi security agreements.
Raed Jarrar sends us to a translation of the latest text here. (I’ve re-uploaded that hard-to-access text here.)
Regarding the reaction from Tehran, AP tells us that Shahroudi said,

    “The Iraqi government has done very well regarding this… We hope the outcome of (the deal) will be in favor of Islam and Iraqi sovereignty.”

There has been some speculation that Iran’s clerical authorities have adopted this apparently cooperative posture as a gesture of goodwill to the US’s president-elect Barack Obama. Perhaps. But I suspect the stronger force driving this position has been an assessment by the Supreme Leader that having US forces tied down as sitting ducks in very-close-by Iraq through the end of 2011 is seen as a handy guarantor– at least for the next three years– that no-one in Washington will decide to attack Iran in this period.
I have thought for a while– along with Hossein Agha and others– that there’s a significant, possibly dominant, trend in Iran that is opposed to the calls so many of the rest of us around the world have made for a speedy and complete US withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (Most recently, see this October 28 post I wrote on JWN.)
The speed with which the main factions in the (heavily Tehran influenced) Iraqi government fell into line with the now-proposed SOFA was additional evidence of that. And now we have the quote from Shahroudi, as well.
Of course, the Iraqi government is a slightly different (and probably more easily influenceable) entity than the Iraqi parliament, which is probably more attuned to the nationalist Iraqi (and therefore both anti-US and anti-Tehran) trends in Iraqi society. And the SOFA agreement does still have to be ratified by the parliament in Iraq– even if Pres. Bush still claims it doesn’t need to be submitted for ratification by the elected Congress in Washington. (Go figure.)
The agreement is currently scheduled to be voted on by the Iraqi parliament on November 24. Let’s see what happens between now and then.
Regarding the reported substance of the agreement, I feel somewhat reassured that it apparently states that all US forces will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. I guess that was one of the non-trivial concessions PM Maliki won from the Americans on behalf of his nationalist constituency?
Specifically, according to Raed’s text, the agreement states in “Article 24: Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq” the following:

    Recognizing the improvement of the Iraqi security forces and their increased capabilities, and the fact that they are in charge of all security operations, and based on the strong relationship between the two sides, both sides have agreed on the following:
    1- All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.
    2- All U.S. combat forces must withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibility in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009
    3- All withdrawn U.S. combat troops in accordance to paragraph 2 [shall] regroup in installations and areas agreed upon located outside cities, towns, and villages. These installations and areas agreed upon will be specified by the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) before the date mentioned in paragraph 2 of this article.
    4- The U.S. recognizes Iraq’s sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time. The Iraqi government recognizes the United States’ sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time.
    5- Both sides agree on creating mechanisms and arrangements to reduce the U.S. forces levels within the specified time period, and both sides must agree on where these forces will be located.

As the text of an international agreement, this looks pretty solid to me. (Of course, the US has been known to abrogate or flat-out break numerous treaties in the past. Or, it may have its own, significantly different version of that prefatory text.)
This is not the speedy total withdrawal that so many of us in the antiwar movement have worked for, for so long. But it does have one striking advantage over the position Barack Obama has advocated for some time now: namely, it sets a date certain for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq; and as I read the prefatory sentence in Raed’s version– in both English and Arabic– it does not make this withdrawal “conditional” on anything the Iraqi government does.
Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, Moqtada al-Sadr remains opposed to this agreement. So we’ll have to wait and see what its fate is in the Iraqi parliament.
But our Senate here in the US should surely also be working to win the recognition of the outgoing Bush administration that it, too, has the right of ratification– or non-ratification– of this important international treaty?
Where is our democracy here in the US?

Prunier on Laurent Nkunda and the DRC crisis

The veteran French expert on central Africa Gerard Prunier has an excellent piece on Open Democracy today that pulls together a lot of the essential political background to the tragically re-ignited fighting in eastern D.R. Congo.
Prunier notes in particular the extremely belligerent and damaging role the RPF government in Rwanda has played in DRC for many years, including the on-again-off-again support it has given to the leader of the current big armed rebellion in eastern DRC, Gen. Laurent Nkunda.
At the end of his article, Prunier writes:

    Why do we see such zigzagging on Nkunda’s part? Mostly because there is not a single coherent policy in Kigali to either support or disown him. It depends on the fluctuation of the political atmosphere there… Since the well-organised electoral “victories” of the RPF [in Rwanda]… there is no Hutu opposition worth the name. Just mentioning such a term is labeled “divisionism” and can get you twenty years in jail. So the political game is played among Tutsi. And the Tutsi do not agree on how to deal with the Congo in general and with Laurent Nkunda in particular.
    Some, like President Kagame himself, want to put the past behind them, develop Rwanda along extremely modernistic lines and turn the country into the Singapore of Africa. But others do not believe in such a possibility and still see the Congo as a mineral mother-lode waiting to be exploited; they include some of Kagame’s closest associates such as the semi-exiled ambassador Kayumba Nyamwasa and army chief-of-staff James Kabarebe…
    The outcome of the United States presidential election on 4 November 2008 is an encouragement for the latter group. After all, it was the Africanists around Bill Clinton (who are now Barack Obama’s men and women) who supported the Kigali invasion of the DR Congo while it was Republican secretary of state Colin Powell who brought it to a halt in 2001. Have the Democrats changed their views on the region or do they still believe in the fiction that Rwanda only intervenes in the Congo in order to keep the ugly génocidaires at bay? In any case the situation in the DRC is now more serious than it has been at any point since the signature of the 2002 peace agreement.
    But does it actually mean the situation has returned to that of 1998, and the DR Congo is about to explode into another civil war? Probably not. Why? Because there are several fundamental differences:
    * Rwanda, even if it is involved, is involved at a marginal and contradictory level .
    * in 1998, pro-Kigali elements controlled large segments of the Forces Armées Congolaises (FAC), the then Congolese national army. The initial onslaught was carried out through an internal rebellion of the armed forces. Not so today. Nkunda controls only an army of unofficial militiamen
    * in 1998 the regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila was very weak, hardly legitimate and did not have any serious international support. Today his son Joseph Kabila is strongly supported by the internal community after overseeing a flawed but clearly democratic election
    * the Congolese economy was at the time in complete disarray while today it is only in poor shape, with possibilities of picking up
    * President Kagame could count on the almost unlimited sympathy of the world which felt guilty for its neglect during the genocide. Not so today. His moral credibility has been seriously damaged by the horrors his troops committed in the DR Congo during 1998-2002 and his political standing is increasingly being questioned, both by legal action going back to the genocide period (reflected in the French indictment and Frankfurt arrest) and by his electoral “triumphs” (which are a throwback to the worst days of fake African political unanimity)
    * the diplomatic context, reflected in the current visit to the region of the United Nations envoy (and Nigeria’s former president) Olusegun Obasanjo, is more favourable to negotiation
    * In 1998 there was no United Nations peacekeeping force in eastern DR Congo. If the international community decides to straighten out its act, Monuc could make the difference.

I am glad to see that even such a seasoned old pro as Prunier thinks there is some hope that MONUC might make a real difference to the situation in Congo. I certainly hope so. But I largely share the misgivings he expresses about the pro-RPF sympathies of those who seem likely to emerge as important figures in the next US administration.
Another very significant aspect of the present fighting in DRC is the fact that– as I had forgotten, but Prunier reminded me– Laurent Nkunda is an indicted war criminal, having been indicted by the DRC government for a 2002 incident in Kisangani in which more than 160 persons were summarily executed. (Prunier wrote, mistakenly, that Nkunda had been indicted by the ICC. But it is Nkunda’s chief of staff, Bosco Ntaganda, who has been indicted by the ICC.)
To a certain extent, then, the situation in eastern DRC might well mirror that in northern Uganda, where the issuing and pursuit of criminal indictments against leaders of insurgent forces makes the conclusion of a working peace agreement that much harder– if not, actually, impossible so long as the indictments are outstanding.
I could note, too, that the northern Uganda situation is very closely linked to that in eastern DRC, since the bulk of Joseph Kony’s Ugandan-insurgent force, the LRA, is currently holed up in the rain forests of northeastern DRC, just a few hundred kilometres north of the spot where Nkunda is creating his current havoc.
Bottom line on all the many conflicts roiling the central-Afircan interior these days: the governments and peoples involved and the powerful nations of the world all need to get together on a stabilization and socio-economic reconstruction plan for all these countries that aims at saving and improving the lives of their peoples, including through the provision of effective and accountable mechanisms to ensure public security, ending all the outstanding (and often inter-linked) conflicts in a “fair enough” way, and extensive investment in DDR activities.
Memo to the incoming Obama-ites: There is NO military “solution” to any of these conflicts! Don’t even think that supporting the continued militarization of central African societies will bring anything other than continued atrocities and carnage.

Gaza at crisis point

On Thursday, November 13, the UN agency UNRWA announced that because of Israel’s continued tight closure of the border with Gaza, it would have to stop the distribution of basic foodstuffs on which fully half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people have long been forced to rely.
The Gaza-Israel border has also, over the past ten days, seen an escalation of military action between the two sides. Between November 6 and 12, Israeli armed forces killed four Palestinians, injured seven more. Rockets launched by Hamas against Israel injured one elderly Israeli woman.
Of course, the armed actions by each side also sowed terror among the members of the communities targeted.
These armed actions by both sides seem to undermine the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire that went into operation between Israel and Hamas back in June– though not all observers agree about that (see below.)
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has continued to perpetuate the US-originated myth that what is happening between Israel and Gaza is only Palestinian armed action versus Israeli blocading. In that statement Ban quite ignored the fact that Israel has also been engaging in armed action along that border, and has thereby played its part in fueling the cycle of direct armed violence while it has also continued to perpetrate extreme ‘structural’ violence against all the Palestinians of Gaza.
Ban’s subservience to Washington on the Palestinian question still seems quite extreme. I did, however, note what might have been one small glimmer of hope: When he was in Egypt on November 8-9 he met with leading representative of the other three members of the “Quartet”: Russia’s foreign minister, the US Secretary of State; and no fewer than three leading representatives of the EU (Solana, Ferrero-Walodner, and Kouchner.) At the press conference the Quartet reps held after their meeting, it was Ban who got to read out their statement.
Does this mean that leadership within the Quartet is quietly passing from Washington to the UN? I certainly hope so! It wouldn’t be a day too late. Unlike the US, the UN has the full weight and legitimacy of the international community behind it in its actions towards the Middle East. Its work is fully based on international norms and is not biased towards any one country in the region.
Regarding the status of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire, meanwhile, Haaretz’s Amos Harel and Ami Issacharoff write in Sunday’s paper that:

    As things looked Saturday night, it seems Hamas can confidently tack on a few advantage points recently accumulated in its conflict with Israel in the Gaza Strip. The massive barrage of Qassam rockets (as well as, in recent days, Katyushas and Grads) completely removed from Palestinian discourse criticism of the organization, which recently left reconciliation talks with Fatah.
    Hamas has successfully conveyed the message that it has overpowered Israel and will soon be able to return to the cease-fire [tahadiyeh] from an advantageous position.
    On Saturday night, after 24 hours without rockets, it seems that chances are growing of the cease-fire going back into effect. Still, in light of similar estimates being proven false in recent days, it is still too early to determine whether Hamas will remain loyal to its word and impose discipline on its members and the smaller Palestinian factions.

For its part, the Chinese news agency Xinhua now carries a “news analysis” piece datelined Gaza November 16, that quotes a number of Palestinian analysts who judge,

    that the aim of the recent wave of fighting between Israel and Hamas following four months of complete calm, is to test each other’s power in case the truce, which expires on Dec. 19, was not extended.
    “I believe that both Hamas and Israel are interested in keeping the truce in the Gaza Strip because the last four months of clam had served both Hamas and Israel’s interests,” said Jamal Abu Halima, a Palestinian academic from Gaza.

I am intrigued to note the degree to which Xinhua has beefed up its English-language coverage of Middle East affairs in recent years. Check out their latest offerings on this portal page.
I take this as an indication that China’s CP rulers are investing quite a lot in trying to understand the region much better– as well to educate their own public about it, and to disseminate a made-in-China version of the news from the Middle East to a broader global public.
Sounds like a possible precursor to deeper diplomatic involvement in the affairs of the region, don’t you think? Let’s hope so. All the non-US members of the UN’s veto-wielding P-5 group need to start taking a lot more active responsibility for the peace of the whole Middle East.