Gdn: Bashir tells ICC to eat its warrant
He is accused of "masterminding and implementing" a counterinsurgency campaign designed to destroy the Fur, Marsalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, which were deemed supportive of a rebel uprising in Darfur in February 2003.
According to the ICC prosecution documents, Bashir's strategy caused 35,000 violent deaths.
But genocide is extremely difficult to prove, and even among human rights experts there is no consensus that it occurred in Darfur. Some analysts believe that the ICC will only push forward with the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Within Sudan, Bashir's indictment has increased the pressure on his ruling National Congress party, which faces an election this year. Senior ministers have warned that the ICC's action could trigger a rise in Islamic extremism, and attacks on foreigners in the country.
LAT: Salva Kiir, former SPLM leader, weighs in
[Q:] You just issued a statement that was very supportive of Bashir, calling him "Brother Bashir" and warning the international community against provoking chaos in Sudan. Does that mean you think the ICC case against Bashir is a mistake?
[Q:] The ICC case puts the SPLM in a tricky spot. Are you worried that if Bashir's government collapses, the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] could be at risk? At best, the ICC case will likely distract the government from implementing the final provisions of the peace deal.
[A:] It puts us in a very difficult situation as a country to have an indicted president who is not flexible in his movement. But we have said let us maintain the situation so that there are no clashes that will throw the whole country into chaos. The situation in Darfur can still be handled. And in southern Sudan, there is the CPA. Unless somebody is interested in taking people back to war, there is no connection between the ICC and peace in the south.
[Q:] Are you preparing militarily for possible violence?
[A:] I'm a soldier. I'm prepared.
BBC: Sudanese army deserter speaks out
Khalid, who is of black African origin, says he was forcibly recruited into President Omar al-Bashir's Sudanese army in late 2002.
He and several other men where he lived were taken to the headquarters of his regiment which was based near the north-western Darfur town of Fasher.
He admits to having taken part in seven different attacks on Darfur villages with the help of Janjaweed militia.
The first one was in the Korma area in December 2002 several months before the conflict in Darfur officially began.
He claims to have been extremely reluctant to carry out the savage orders he was given.
"When they asked me to rape the girl, I went and stood in front of her," he said.
"Tears came into my eyes. They said: 'You have to rape her. If you don't we will beat you.' I hesitated and they hit me with the butt of a rifle...
Before long, he said, he was ordered to join other brutal raids on Darfur villages.
I asked him what he was told to do with unarmed civilians who did not resist in any way.
"They told us, don't leave anybody, just kill everybody," he said.
"Even the children, if left behind in the huts, we had to kill them," he said. "People would cry and run from their huts.
"Many couldn't take all their children. If they had more than two they had to leave them behind. If you saw them you had to shoot and kill."
...
Khalid insists that he always fired over the heads of civilians and didn't kill anyone himself despite the orders he was given.
He says he could do this without his fellow soldiers noticing but he admits that there was no way he could avoid carrying out orders to torch peoples homes."I did take part," he admitted. "They forced me. We had no choice. If you didn't they would kill you."
Did anyone refuse?
"Two of my colleagues refused and they were shot dead."
I asked him how the Sudanese officers had justified killing unarmed civilians in cold blood. How they had explained the need to slaughter women, babies and children?
He replied: "They said they are the ones who take food and water to the rebels.
"They said that if we kill these people and burn their villages then the rebels will not have any supplies so they'll have to move out to the neighbouring country."
CSM: armed groups still competing for control of villages, and Darfuris continue to be displaced
[Mr. Hari] is one of 50,000 people displaced from the town of Muhajiriya in South Darfur after a rebel advance followed up by government and janjaweed reprisals in February.
More than 23,000 have trudged and trucked their way to the capital of North Darfur, filling already overstretched aid camps to the breaking point.
Thousands more have been arriving in Otash, on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur...
The town of Muhajiriya had been under the control of guerrillas loyal to Minni Minnawi, the only rebel leader to sign a 2006 peace deal with the government. However, a spate of defections and fighting saw the town switch to another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement in January amid weeks of deadly clashes.
That was the signal for the government forces to retake the town, which they did with the help of air support.
AJE: Karadzic, on trial in the Hague, refuses to enter pleaLast week, judges at The Hague tribunal in the Netherlands approved the prosecution's third amended indictment against Karadzic, which lists two genocide charges and nine of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
LAT: Stanisic, Milosevic's intelligence chief on trial at ICTY, was a CIA informant
For eight years, Stanisic was the CIA's main man in Belgrade. During secret meetings in boats and safe houses along the Sava River, he shared details on the inner workings of the Milosevic regime. He provided information on the locations of NATO hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for grave sites and helped the agency set up a network of secret bases in Bosnia.
At the same time, Stanisic was setting up death squads for Milosevic that carried out a genocidal campaign, according to prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which was established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993 to try those responsible for serious human rights violations in the Balkan wars.
Now facing a trial at The Hague that could send him to prison for life, Stanisic has called in a marker with his American allies. In an exceedingly rare move, the CIA has submitted a classified document to the court that lists Stanisic's contributions and attests to his helpful role. The document remains sealed, but its contents were described by sources to The Times.
The CIA's Lofgren, now retired, said the agency drafted the document to show "that this allegedly evil person did a whole lot of good." Lofgren, however, doesn't claim to disprove the allegations against Stanisic...
The chief prosecutor, Dermot Groome, says that Stanisic's actions to help the CIA and counter Milosevic only underscore the power he had. In his opening argument, Groome said that the "ability to save lives is tragically the very same authority and the very same ability that [Stanisic] used . . . to take lives."...
At the time, CIA Director John M. Deutch was trying to clean up the agency's image by cracking down on contacts with human rights violators. Years later, the "Deutch rules" were cited as a reason the agency hadn't done better penetrating groups such as Al Qaeda.
But Deutch had no problems with Stanisic. He invited the Serbian to CIA headquarters in 1996, and an itinerary of the visit indicates that Stanisic got a warm welcome.
The Serbian spy chief was taken to hear jazz at the Blues Alley club in Georgetown and driven to Maryland's eastern shore for a bird hunt. Deutch even presented Stanisic with a 1937 Parker shotgun, a classic weapon admired by collectors.
Deutch, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, declined to comment.
LAT: chronology of Stanisic's alleged activities
March 1992 to 1995: Special [paramilitary] units [created by Stanisic] allegedly "committed crimes in and attacked and took control of towns and villages in the municipalities of Bijeljina, Bosanski Samac, Doboj, Sanski Most, Zvornik." Simultaneously, Stanisic cooperates with CIA, providing information on Milosevic regime and conveying communications from the U.S. to his boss.
CSM: in Kosovo, rebel leader turned politician
Limaj's own story began when he was a student leader in the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had fallen, but Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's special status in Yugoslavia. The Albanian, 90 percent of the population, lived a second-class existence under brutal police-state repression – checkpoints, arbitrary killing, torture – as Serbs revived a deeply felt national myth of Kosovo as their spiritual heartland, something disallowed under Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Marshal Tito...
For a decade, Limaj and Kosovo waited as the political and spiritual leader of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, reacted to Serbian tactics with a Gandhian strategy of patience and nonviolence.
A tipping point for Kosovars arrived with the US-led Dayton peace deal on Bosnia.
"After Dayton, all our hopes and dreams fell," Limaj says. "That Milosevic could kill with impunity for years, then present himself as a man of peace ... this was totally depressing for us. There was no hope. We saw what he was doing here. It's true, if a normal person has choices, he would never choose war. But it was either leave Kosovo, or organize ourselves to resist."...
The former commander plays down his KLA hero status. But Limaj was the first to switch KLA tactics – characterized by guerrilla skirmishes in villages and hiding in the hills – by confronting Serb forces in the open. His units eventually held two main highways and sheltered 85,000 people, a hospital, and a radio station...
Limaj's time at The Hague remains a sensitive one. He was arrested for crimes while serving as KLA commander of the Llapushnik region. He denied guilt, but agreed to face charges. "As much as I didn't agree with the accusation, I felt it was our responsibility to respond," Limaj says. "So I said I would go to The Hague, and was sure justice would prevail."...
What Limaj took from Obama's "Audacity of Hope" was the new president's community organizing in Chicago. "He went house to house to understand the people, their hopes and dreams, so by the time he ran for president could speak to everybody."
That will be a task in Kosovo, still divided between Albanian and Serb. "Kosovo's intentions are humane… we don't want to harm or do damage to others… but allow everyone live together in a new state."
Ind: Guinea-Bissau president assassinated by soldiers
The country's 1.6 million people have endured years of instability since independence in 1974. This has been fuelled in recent years by the country's emergence as a key transit point in the smuggling of Latin American cocaine to Europe.
Vieira was a former military ruler who was ousted after a civil war in the 1990s and returned to power in a 2005 election.
He had been at odds with armed forces chief of staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai, who was killed in an attack on Sunday evening that also destroyed part of the military headquarters.
A security source said soldiers from Na Wai's Balante ethnic group led the attack on Vieira, who is from the smaller Papel community, and looted his home afterwards...
In January, the armed forces command said militiamen hired to protect Vieira had shot at Na Wai. The militia denied the shooting had been an assassination attempt but the miltiary nevertheless ordered the militia be disbanded.
The 400-strong force had been recruited as Vieira's personal bodyguard by the Interior Ministry after the president's house was targeted by heavy weapons late last year.
A policeman said soldiers loyal to Na Wai had freed people accused of that attack ahead of the president's death today.
According to the constitution, if the president dies, the speaker of parliament runs the country until new elections.
Following a bloody independence war, Guinea-Bissau's military has long been involved in politics. The military issued a statement on Monday saying that the situation was under control but it would respect democratic institutions.
AP: speaker of parliament now sworn in
CSM: some suspect link to drug trafficking
In recent years, Colombian drug cartels have begun flying small planes across the Atlantic, landing on tiny islands dotting the Guinean coastline. Since Guinea-Bissau has no navy to patrol its waters, the cartels were free to unload tons of cocaine destined for Europe. The drugs were then distributed to impoverished African migrants, who would carry the drugs north by boat to the shores of France, Italy, and Spain.
Government corruption, fed by poor government salaries at the bottom and uncertain political leadership at the top, means that Guinea Bissau has few tools to stop the drug trafficking...
"This recent set of killings can be explained [as] the action of the drug traffickers, who would not allow anything to get in the way or to obstruct their links with Europe," says David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, formerly known as Pretoria.
NYT: calm in the Congo?
wronging rights: maybe, but somehow doesn't seem sustainable
Econ: the Economist plays the optimist about Somalia (in the headline at least)
The battleground is Somalia’s centre and south, which has water and food. Everywhere the complex mix of clans and sub-clans is combustible. By contrast, the arid north, peopled largely by nomadic camel-herders, is fairly peaceful. Puntland, in the north-east, is semi-autonomous, but most of its people want to be part of a federal Somalia. It hosts some of the pirates, as well as people-traffickers, kidnappers and a fair number of jihadists. But its government has disarmed freewheeling militias and more or less keeps order.
The recently ousted previous Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, a Puntland warlord, has taken several hundred gunmen back north from Mogadishu and now seems more interested in his businesses, mainly in the town of Bossaso. Somaliland, a former British territory, has been fairly stable since it declared independence in 1991. If coming elections there go well, with voters using biometric identity cards, it may slowly start to win recognition from some African countries and others farther afield. It is not clear what Mr Ahmed thinks about independence for Somaliland. But nationalists and jihadists are violently against it, as is Puntland, which disputes a border zone with it.
What is clear is that no one controls the country, neither the government, nor the Shabab. But, certainly until Mr Ahmed’s arrival, the Shabab have been in the ascendant. Its system of 20 to 30 men per cell, each one locking into larger command structures when they take a town, is hard to crack.GQ: pirates still on patrol
Boosaaso is perfectly positioned near the mouth of the Red Sea, at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia, to supply this lawless corner of the world with all its contraband needs: guns, drugs, expired baby formula, counterfeit electronics, counterfeit dollars, even smuggled human beings. If it’s illegal and it makes money, then someone is trafficking in it here. When we arrived, the center of town was packed with people—money changers sitting sphinxlike in front of bricks of Somali shillings, waiting to convert pirate dollars into the filthy local notes; old men in skullcaps chewing camel steaks at dingy, whitewashed restaurants; boys hawking slices of watermelon from roadside carts. Several late-model Land Cruisers, trucks that cost at least $50,000, prowled the deeply rutted roads. As we moved through town, our driver jutted his finger toward a large white house with a steel gate. “C.I.A.,” he said. He may have been right. It was an open secret that the American government was working with notorious figures in northern Somalia to track Islamist terrorists. Not far from the center of town was a neighborhood called New Boosaaso, where just beyond a cluster of refugee huts made from bits of cloth and cardboard rose a colony of palatial new homes with huge walls surrounding them and satellite dishes on their roofs. Spectral figures tramped through the dust on the way to their hovels, and right next to them were some of the nicest houses I had seen anywhere in Somalia, where so many buildings have been reduced to piles of machine-gun-chewed bricks. I suspected that this was where the pirates lived...
[Pirate spokesman] Sugule seemed happy to chat. He talked for a while about the typical pirate diet—“rice, meat, bread, spaghetti—you know, normal human-being food”—and then he explained to us his notion of Somali piracy. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
Ind: Pakistan 'at war' after attack on Sri Lankan cricket players in Lahore
The spectacular military-style raid in Lahore bore marked similarities to the assault in Mumbai last year, which left 172 people dead. Pakistani officials suggested the Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the carnage in the Indian city, also carried out the attack in Lahore.
NYT: arrests have been made
Gdn: 3 Taliban factions said to have formed alliance
The Guardian has learned that three of the most powerful warlords in the region have settled their differences and come together under a grouping calling itself Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen, or Council of United Holy Warriors.
Nato officers fear that the new extremist partnership in Waziristan, Pakistan's tribal area, will significantly increase the cross-border influx of fighters and suicide bombers - a move that could undermine the US president's Afghanistan strategy before it is formulated...
The Pakistani Taliban movement was split between a powerful group led by the warlord Baitullah Mehsud and his bitter rivals, Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur. While Mehsud has targeted Pakistan itself in a campaign of violence and is accused of being behind the assassination of the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Nazir and Bahadur sent men to fight alongside other insurgents in Afghanistan.
CSM: villagers around Peshawar forming militias
In the town of Budaber, six miles from Peshawar's city center, Daud Khan makes sure his Kalashnikov is loaded before stepping into the dark street. As he walks out, seven young men join him, all armed.
Mr. Khan is a member of the nighttime civilian patrols that guard the streets and escort residents home. They usually work from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., the peak time for bomb attacks, a local says.
Do-it-yourself security teams are becoming a fixture in and around Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, as residents grow wary of the Taliban's growing presence – and doubtful of the government's ability to protect them. Some officials have backed the vigilantes, even supplied them with weapons, raising concerns they may fall into the wrong hands...
A city of more than 1.4 million people, Peshawar has long been known as a melting pot of Afghan and Pakistani cultures and a haven for musicians, artists, and intellectuals.
Gdn: registering voters in Afghanistan for August elections[The Independent Election Commission] is preparing for new presidential elections in August and its workers have just finished registering 4.5 million voters, visiting every district in the country without suffering a single casualty.
Zekria Barakzai, the deputy head of the commission, argues this extraordinary feat is explained by the IEC's softly-softly methods. Its officials do not arrive in a big cloud of dust and convoys of heavily armed men, even in the turbulent south.
"We organise security with the elders with the help of tribal leaders. We talk to them first," Barakzai said...
Karzai, with no previous experience of administration, has tried to run it from his mobile phone. As the Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid argues in his new book on the region (depressingly titled Descent into Chaos), the president has sought to project his power through deals with a network of strong personalities, warlords mostly, rather than building enduring institutions.
The one exception is the Afghan national army, which is more than 80,000-strong and involved in 90% of the military operations around the country. But the army cannot build roads, bring electricity or teach children. That requires a functioning and energetic government.
The British and French are working on a common approach to present to Obama before the Nato summit next month that would put more emphasis on local and traditional forms of government, and less on Kabul. The Americans are reluctant to give up on Karzai.
BBC: re-establishing order on Baghdad's roadsLaw and order broke down straight after the US-led invasion in March 2003.
For many Iraqis, "democracy" meant doing exactly what you felt like, when you felt like it - including behind the wheel of a car.
The few traffic police who dared remain on duty did not dare to stop drivers. It could be anyone at all in the driver's seat, and he'd certainly have a gun. Many traffic policemen lost their lives at the hands of militants, or were blown up by roadside bombs.
Slate: Obama's plan for troop withdrawal
CSM: US contractors leaving Iraq
NPR: US military closing prisons
"It seems to be hard to get this in the press, but last year we released 18,600 detainees. Only had 157 come back," [Brig. Gen. David Quantock] says.
Quantock credits that low rate of recidivism to the rehabilitation programs offered by the U.S. detention system, including education programs, health care, and religious discussions with moderate Islamic clerics.
He also says the system works because it separates the extremists from people who were not motivated by ideology.
"Most of our detainees were motivated primarily by two things — money, because they didn't have jobs, they needed to earn some money, or fear of retribution. I mean, if you're in a bad neighborhood, you join the local gang," he says.
As for the most dangerous inmates, Quantock says the U.S. is building a new prison in the northern town of Taji, which will eventually be turned over to the Iraqi government.
NYT: who won those elections, anyhow?
AP: charges filed against 1,000 border guards
NYT: privatizing security in India
Capsi, an industry trade group, estimates that India’s $2 billion private security sector will add a million employees this year, even as other industries lay off workers while the economy cools.
Already, it employs about 5 million people, 1.3 million more than India’s police and armed forces combined. In fact, with India’s official police stretched thin (there is one officer for every 1,000 people in India, less than half the United States average and one-tenth the average in China), security guards are moving from fetchers of tea at government offices and car washers at wealthy homes to becoming corporate India’s de facto police force...
Kammesh Baboo Rathore, a 28-year-old recruit, said that Terra Force was his third choice. “I tried the army and the police and didn’t get through” he said. “This is my next choice. I want to work for the nation and am enamored by the uniform.”
WP: getting through military checkpoints in Sri Lanka
The passengers quietly exited the bus and stood behind the razor wire, identification cards in hand. The men split off into one line. A far smaller number of women went into a separate row, some cradling sleeping babies.
But it was the women's line that took twice as long to navigate. That's because female officers rummaged through women's purses and bags before moving on to their breasts, even feeling the insides of their bras for explosives.
They didn't stop there. They patted down their groins and occasionally looked inside their underwear. Pregnant women routinely had their swollen bellies squeezed or prodded, just to make sure.
Women are often singled out for scrutiny because, in Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war, more than two-thirds of the Tamil Tiger suicide bombers have been women, according to experts from the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
AJE: 'scuffle' between opposition and ruling party in northern Malay stateLAT: Mexico sends more troops, federal police to Ciudad Juarez
The border city is in the throes of a vicious turf war between a local drug-smuggling organization and rivals from the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The feud, and the Mexican government's 2-year-old crackdown on organized crime, has sent killings soaring.
The city's police chief, Roberto Orduna Cruz, resigned almost two weeks ago after several of his officers were shot to death and anonymous signs appeared warning that an officer would be killed every 48 hours unless he stepped down.
Foreign Policy: is it really just crime? or a civil war?
The U.S. Department of State has its view of Mexico's problems: On Feb 20, it issued a travel alert to U.S. citizens, warning them about "small-unit combat," "large firefights," and "public shootouts during daylight hours" in Mexican cities along the U.S. border. According to the State Department, since January 2008 there have been 1,800 killings in Juárez, a border city with a population of 1.6 million.
Does Mexico have a really bad crime problem? Or is Mexico at war with itself and at risk of sudden societal collapse? To answer this question, we should look not just at quantitative measures of the violence (as grim as they are), but also qualitative factors...
...Mexico's struggle against the drug cartels seems more like a counterinsurgency campaign than a fight against crime. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cartels control 200 counties in Mexico, including much of the U.S. border; generate more than $10 billion in annual revenue; and can muster thousands of gunmen, including defectors from Mexico's Army Special Forces. With much of the police suborned, Calderón has now deployed the Army, exposing its soldiers to the same corruption. The outcome of this campaign remains unknown, as are its consequences for the United States.BBC: after worst year in four decades, FARC launches 'Plan Rebirth'
Last October, security forces captured several laptop computers and memory sticks that outline the new rebel strategy and the focus of Plan Rebirth, including:
- increase urban attacks
- wage a war of attrition on two fronts. The first is military, using homemade anti-personnel mines and snipers to increase army casualties and undermine morale and secondly economically by attacking infrastructure just as the global credit crisis begins to be felt in the country
- build up finances through extortion and drug-trafficking
- expend more effort on political indoctrination to counter growing desertion
- consolidate territorial control, particularly in the areas where drugs crops are grown
- launch a campaign of political work, both nationally and internationally, to recover lost ground and increase followers, particularly in urban areas
The Farc is certainly a leaner army now, down to perhaps 8,000 fighters from more than double that in 2002.
Finances have been hit along with morale. However, a leaner Farc may well turn out to be harder to hit.
Econ: the Yakuza is even feeling the squeeze“IN THE old days,” laments the retired mobster, with a broad smile, slicked hair and a heavily tattooed body, “the yakuza served a useful purpose in society to solve civil disputes and keep the streets clean.” He draws on his cigarette, the stub of an amputated little finger visible in his beefy hand. “Now”, he goes on, “it has lost its samurai spirit to moneymaking.”
Or perhaps, the yakuza—Japan’s organised-crime groups that date from the 17th century—are getting squeezed. For most of the post-war period they operated openly: tolerated by the public, used by politicians and protected by police. Crime will happen anyway, went the argument, so better to know whom to call when it crosses the line. In the 1950s ministers and industrialists relied on the mobsters and nationalist groups to quash unions and socialists. The gangs upheld classic Japanese virtues of manliness and loyalty—and paid for mistakes by slicing off one of their fingers in atonement.
NYT: Ukraine faces unrest over economic downturnIt is not hard to understand why world leaders are increasingly worried about the discontent and the financial crisis in Ukraine, which has 46 million people and a highly strategic location. A small country like Latvia or Iceland is one thing, but a collapse in Ukraine could wreck what little investor confidence is left in Eastern Europe, whose formerly robust economies are being badly strained.
It could also cause neighboring Russia, which has close ethnic and linguistic ties to eastern and southern Ukraine, to try to inject itself into the country’s affairs. What is more, the Kremlin would be able to hold up Ukraine as an example of what happens when former Soviet republics follow a Western model of free-market democracy.
Gdn: for first time in 29 years, nationalists lose election in Basque region
Econ: upcoming elections in Albania
LAT: US pledges to reduce nuclear weapons stockpile
NYT: US sends two envoys to Syria, in play to try to isolate Iran
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abu muquwama: civil war rivalries die hard
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