NYT: Sri Lankan government says it will stop using heavy weapons, artillery and air strikes in order to protect civilians...
In what appeared to be a concession to the visiting United Nations humanitarian coordinator, John Holmes, and foreign governments critical of the continued military offensive, a statement from President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s office said “combat operations have reached their conclusion.” The statement said military forces would “confine their attempts to rescuing civilians who are held hostage.”
But there was no sign on Monday that the government was backing away from its demand for a full surrender, after dismissing a unilateral cease-fire declared Sunday by the rebels... With only several hundred Tiger fighters remaining in a four-square-mile strip of territory, the government says it is close to ending the 25-year-old conflict. But Sri Lanka is coming under enormous international pressure to stop the fighting for the sake of the estimated 50,000 trapped civilians.
Gdn: ...but doesn't follow through
LAT: Q + A: how are conditions for those still trapped?
Dangerous if not outright deadly. The Red Cross has said the situation is "nothing short of catastrophic" for those in the tiny enclave. Food, water and medical care are in short supply, the agency says. That is to say nothing of the fighting.
Reuters: Egyptian efforts target Gaza tunnels
"Tunnel business has dropped to 20 percent of what it was before the war on Gaza because of Israeli destruction and the stepped-up security campaign by Egypt," said Abu Abdallah. The Egyptian effort was "more effective" than Israeli bombs, he said. They not only blow up the tunnels but also stop contraband goods reaching Egyptian cities near Gaza.
Accused in the past of turning a blind eye to the smuggling operations, Egypt is cooperating along with United States help in a bid to stop the contraband, which Israel says includes rockets that Gaza militants use against Israel. Since the Islamists seized control of Gaza in 2007, ousting forces of the Fatah movement of Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel has completely blocked the entry of cement and steel, which it says Hamas will use for military purposes.
LAT: Obama plan to allow aid for a unified Palestinian government which includes Hamas
But the administration has asked Congress for minor changes in U.S. law that would permit aid to continue flowing to Palestinians in the event Hamas-backed officials become part of a unified Palestinian government.
The aid measures may never come into play. Power-sharing negotiations between Hamas and its rival, the U.S.-backed Fatah faction, appear deadlocked. The two have been bitterly divided since 2007, when Hamas drove Fatah out of the Gaza Strip. Fatah controls only the West Bank...
U.S. officials insist that the new proposal doesn't amount to recognizing or aiding Hamas. Under law, any U.S. aid would require that the Palestinian government meet three long-standing criteria: recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and agreeing to follow past Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
Hamas as an organization doesn't meet those criteria. However, if the rival Palestinian factions manage to reach a power-sharing deal, the Obama administration wants to be able to provide aid as long as the Hamas-backed members of the government -- if not Hamas itself -- meet the three criteria.
NYT: torture and accountability: lessons from Israel
Until the court’s decision, Israel, like the Bush administration, had insisted that its methods of torment permitted in interrogating detainees were not “torture,” and therefore were not in violation of international and national law prohibiting the use of torture. Those methods included violent shaking, shackling prisoners to a low and tilted stool, covering their heads with urine-drenched hoods, and sleep deprivation... Israel’s official euphemism, “a moderate measure of physical pressure,” was a touch more honest than the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But the intent was the same.
Israel’s other line of defense, equally familiar, was that the country was embroiled in a “war on terrorism” (that was years before President George W. Bush used the term) and therefore could not deal gently with a Palestinian who may know of a — literally — ticking bomb.
FP: timeline of US torture, since 9/11
EmptyWheel(via Andrew Sullivan): and docs released in the last few weeks
LAT: the birth and slow death of the Sons of Iraq
The divergent fates of these two former Sunni insurgents highlight the major unknown about the intentions of Iraq's Shiite-led government: Is it reaching out to former Sunni insurgents such as Abu Azzam in the true spirit of "national reconciliation," or in hopes of splintering the movement?
And will the government's campaign against men such as Abu Maarouf succeed in snuffing out potential rivals? Or is it planting seeds for a long-term Sunni revolt?
The crackdown also points to a significant change in the U.S. forces' onetime policy of nurturing and protecting the Sons of Iraq. As the Iraqi government has arrested some of the movement's leaders, forced others into exile and failed to deliver jobs for rank-and-file fighters, the Americans have regularly deferred to Baghdad's wishes as they hand over responsibility for the country's security.
LAT: Iraqi government claims raid violated security pact with US
CSM: British court acquits only suspects ever tried in connection with 7/7 London bombings
The investigation into the July 7 plot is the largest criminal investigation in British history. Over the course of tens of thousands of man-hours, officers have taken 18,450 statements and produced 37,000 exhibits and 19,400 documents.
But, Mr. Gohel says: "What we are seeing repeatedly now is that the threshold for quality and quantity of evidence acquired is set so high it is almost impossible to obtain successful prosecutions unless there is irrefutable evidence, including a smoking gun and dead bodies, and the perpetrators being filmed in the act."
Gdn: Pakistani air strikes, troops fight Taliban expansion near Swat Valley
Fighter jets and helicopter gunships launched attacks on Taliban positions in Buner today in a dramatic expansion of a military operation to halt the march of extremists out of the Taliban-controlled Swat valley... Buner, a small mountainous district tucked into north-western Pakistan, was the centre of world concerns last week when Taliban militants overran the district, ransacking foreign aid agency offices and occupying government buildings.
Although the offensive posed no direct danger to Islamabad, the proximity of the advance to the capital stoked American worries that, as Hillary Clinton put it, Pakistan posed a "mortal threat" to world security. Under immense domestic and international pressure the military launched an operation in Lower Dir district on Sunday, attacking Taliban positions with gunships and artillery.
NYT: leading Taliban's main negotiator to break off talks with the government...
Under the February peace agreement, the government agreed to the imposition of Shariah courts and both sides agreed to stop fighting. The military has ceased operations in the Swat Valley, but Taliban militants have insisted they will remain armed until the Islamic courts are set up and functioning.
Government officials said they would continue to try to hold the Swat peace agreement together, but have demanded that militants cease their activities in several districts adjoining Swat and lay down their weapons. Several provincial officials have expressed growing frustration with Mr. Muhammad and his failure to make the militants abide by the agreement.
AJE: ...and flight of up to 50,000 civilians
LAT: Swat Valley conflict as demonstrative of Pakistan's identity crisis?
Although they have different reasons for leaving, those who have lived through the last few years in Swat say they have experienced firsthand what passes for peace, Taliban-style, and fear the worst as militants gain more influence across the region.
A former tourist destination, the Swat Valley is now ground zero in Pakistan's identity crisis... Many here and abroad fear the rising tide of extremism in Swat could foretell changes in an overwhelmingly Muslim society that has been largely secular and open.
CSM: new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan: "cash and jobs instead of guns"
Others say agencies such as the Peace and Reconciliation Commission are part of the problem. Since 2005, the commission claims to have reconciled with nearly 4,000 fighters. It has lost track of most of these, however. Some critics charge that many of the surrendered were never with the insurgency or lied about surrendering to get a payment...
In many cases, the commission is unable to provide the jobs it promised to those fighters who genuinely want to reconcile, analysts say. Mr. Muzdja believes the government and the Americans must revamp the reconciliation program by making it more transparent and accountable.
LAT: Karzai to amend Afghani law basically permitting rape
The law, which sparked an international outcry after it was signed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse. It also regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home alone...
Though the law would apply only to the country's Shiite Muslims, who make up about 20% of Afghanistan's 30 million people, many fear its passage marks a return to Taliban-style oppression of women.
LAT: 7 police officers dead in Tijuana drug violence
NYT: intrigue of assassination plot highlights tensions in Bolivia
But the episode, with its dash of Balkan intrigue, remains far from an open-and-shut case of right versus left. Instead, it falls somewhere in that gray area of Bolivian politics, in which Mr. Morales’s claims of destabilization plots, now a regular feature of his government, and his opponents’ counterclaims that such plots are shams contribute to growing tensions between the central government and the rebellious lowlands...
Indeed, the mystery of the case revolves largely around this enigmatic figure, believed to be the group’s leader... Mr. [Eduardo] Rozsa Flores went further in the interview, saying his goal was not toppling Mr. Morales, but achieving autonomy for Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s wealthiest department, or province. Envisioning a clash with La Paz over this issue, he nonchalantly described his goal as “declaring independence and creating a new country.”
NYT: thousands imprisoned and hundreds dead as China seeks to weed out Falun Gong
CSM: vigilantes fight back against pirates in Somalia
Showing posts with label Gaza Egypt Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaza Egypt Israel. Show all posts
01 March 2009
weapon of choice [change or continuity]
WP: Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, last enemy combatant held in the US, to face trial after seven years in captivity
Marri could face up to 15 years in prison on allegations of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists. The Qatar native journeyed to Illinois, purportedly to begin work on a master's degree, a day before terrorist strikes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
Marri's legal status had been closely watched in part because human rights advocates used him as a test case before the Supreme Court. They hope to repudiate a policy that allowed the government to indefinitely detain legal U.S. residents suspected of conspiring with al-Qaeda without charging them with a crime...
The indictment covers only two pages, although Marri's defense team will press government lawyers to fill in more details about their case in the months ahead.
NYT: ...which the Obama administration is arguing should put an end to a Supreme Court case, a move criticized by some
Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, noted that winning at the Supreme Court would affirm extraordinarily broad detention powers for a president — “a position they might not have wanted to take in the first place,” he said.
But losing would also put the government in a difficult spot, said Stewart Baker, a former Bush administration official in the Department of Homeland Security. The administration may be leery of broad detention power but might still want to use it in the most extreme cases. “Hanging on to the possibility of using this theory in a new and different emergency,” he said, “is the sort of thing that prudent government lawyers are inclined to do.”
New Yorker: what to do with new enemy combatants?
A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.
One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)... [I]n October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.” This new system, he wrote, would give the government the “ability to temporarily detain a dangerous individual,” including in situations where “a criminal trial has failed.” There are hundreds of legal variations that could be considered, he said. In 2007, Katyal published a related essay, co-written with Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. The essay argued that preventive detention, overseen by a congressionally authorized national-security court, was necessary to insure the “sensible” treatment of classified evidence, and to protect secret “sources and methods” of gathering intelligence. In his Web post, Katyal wrote, “I support such a security court.”
FP: "Abu Ghraib's Extreme Makeover"
NYT: Obama reveals plan for phased Iraq withdrawal
The plan will withdraw most of the 142,000 troops now in Iraq by the summer of next year, leaving 35,000 to 50,000 to train and advise Iraqi security forces, hunt terrorist cells and protect American civilian and military personnel. Those “transitional forces” will leave by 2011 in accordance with a strategic agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush before he left office.
“Let me say this as plainly as I can,” Mr. Obama said. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”
LAT: the withdrawal plan for dummies
NYT: the budget and the war
[A January report] from the Congressional Budget Office estimat[ed] how much the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts would cost from 2010 through 2019 under two assumptions. In one, the number of troops deployed in the two countries draws down fairly quickly, to about 30,000 by 2011. In the other, levels drop to 75,000 by 2013. Both cases represent a huge reduction from the roughly 180,000 troops there now. But the difference in the cost is breathtaking: the office estimates that Congress would have to appropriate $388 billion for the case of a quick withdrawal and more than double, $867 billion, for the slower one.
Because of the huge range of possible costs, and because the logistics of withdrawal are complicated and expensive, “the basic elements of that estimate are still unresolved,” said John M. Spratt Jr., a South Carolina Democrat who is the House Budget Committee chairman and a House Armed Services Committee member...
President Obama may find it hard to keep the withdrawal to a prescribed timetable, and even if he can, the savings may be a drop in the bucket economically. But if he keeps the bands playing and strikes the right note in his speeches, he just may have a chance to persuade Americans that the end of a long war means better times are on the way.
CSM: so with all this talk about withdrawal, what's the insurgency up to these days?
Ongoing violence in outlying provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh indicates that although violence has fallen and some normalcy is returning to Baghdad, the fringes of Iraq – the rural towns, farming villages, and desert outposts – have become the new fronts in the fight against the insurgent threat as extremists have fled cities and are hiding in the country's remote corners...
Still, while fighting insurgents outside major cities has often proved something of a "whack-a-mole" scenario, US forces here say they're finally beginning to make progress thanks in large part to increasingly capable Iraqi security forces and an emboldened local population...
Now after US forces clear an area, the Iraqi Army, police, or neighborhood watch groups known as Sons of Iraq set up checkpoints along the road to ensure that insurgents don't return. While roadside bombs and harassment of the local population continue, US forces say the situation has dramatically improved.
NYT: IEDs increasingly a threat in Afghanistan
More than 175 American and allied troops were killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan last year, more than twice as many as the year before, and American commanders say the 17,000 extra troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama last week will offer additional targets...
Senior military officers say Afghanistan’s topography and primitive infrastructure play to the insurgents’ advantage. Unlike Iraq, where more of the streets are paved, Afghanistan has a network of undeveloped roads where it is far easier to lay traps...
The improvised bombs — buried in roads, packed into cars or bicycles and hidden in trash cans or animal carcasses — are made from materials readily available in war zones, whether abandoned bombs, construction explosives or fertilizer. They are the weapon of choice for an insurgency: cheap and easy to build, but hard to detect and counter.
The Pentagon created the counter-I.E.D. organization in 2006, and its budget has ranged from $3.5 billion to $4.4 billion annually, but that does not include costs for armored vehicles and other systems. In part because new jamming technology has foiled some weapons triggered remotely by cellphones or garage-door openers, insurgents in Afghanistan are turning to more primitive methods, using wire or even rope as the trigger.
LAT: Afghan president to move up elections from August date...
NYT: ...as US training for Afghans using Russian helicopters reveals the challenges both behind and ahead
The program, which is projected to cost American taxpayers $5 billion into 2016, is aimed at giving Afghanistan the ability to defend itself from the skies and one day allowing the Americans to leave. But for now it reflects all the problems of getting Afghan forces to stand on their own...
Americans have in the past been taught to fly MI-17s, mostly for military exercises to teach them how to counter enemy aircraft. (The MI-17 is used all over the world, including by Iran and North Korea.) The Afghan program is modeled after an earlier American effort to build up the Iraqi Air Force, which also includes some MI-17s. But the Russian helicopters, which make up the bulk of the Afghan fleet, have an ironic resonance in a country where in the 1980s the United States supplied guerrillas with Stinger missiles to shoot Soviet helicopters down.
These days, the American pilots encounter some resentment from the Afghans who have been flying the Russian helicopters for decades — Colonel Bakhtullah has been a pilot since 1981 — and wonder why they must take instruction from Americans who just learned to fly the helicopters in a four-week course at Fort Bliss, Tex. The Americans say that the Afghans have not had a real air force since the Russians left two decades ago, and that they were often improperly trained in the first place.
NYT: cease-fire in Pakistan's Swat Valley
LAT: but none in sight in Islamabad
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may well be the most popular politician in Pakistan. So the Supreme Court's decision Wednesday banning him from holding elective office has set the stage for what could be a bitter showdown between his backers and the already shaky government of President Asif Ali Zardari...
Analysts characterized Wednesday's court ruling as a drawing of battle lines between Zardari's Pakistan People's Party and its onetime ally, Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N. The two parties teamed up last February to take on Musharraf, soundly defeating his party in parliamentary elections and ousting him from office six months later. But having gained power, they fell out with each other...
The prospect of a resurgent Sharif, who has the loyalty of many religious conservatives, may make some officials in Washington nervous. Zardari's government is considered much more Western-friendly, whereas Sharif, as prime minister in the 1990s, defied U.S. admonitions and presided over Pakistan's first nuclear test.
LAT: India brings charges against suspected Mumbai "smiling assassin," as Pakistan seeks domestic trials
Authorities on Wednesday filed charges of murder and "waging war" on India against who they say is the lone known surviving gunman in the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 170 people in November... The others charged include two suspected Pakistani soldiers and Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says was behind the attacks, as well as senior Lashkar members Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Zarar Shah and Abu Hamza.
LAT: paramilitary mutiny in Bangladesh leaves 76 dead, 72 missing
The dispute reportedly erupted Wednesday inside the Dhaka headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles paramilitary force during a meeting between junior members and their superiors, who are with the nation's army...
Bangladesh, an impoverished Muslim-majority nation with a population of 153 million, has a history of coups and of deep-seated corruption. The country ranks 147th out of 180 nations on watchdog Transparency International's corruption perception index.
Analysts say resentment has run deep among the Rifles for years because they are paid less than the military and must take orders from army officers. In addition to higher pay, leaders of the rebellion demanded that they be allowed to participate in lucrative United Nations peacekeeping operations.
WP: now back to the barracks, although the problem is far from over
The government decided at a late night Cabinet meeting Saturday to form a special tribunal to try those behind the mutiny, ruling party spokesman Syed Ashraful Islam said. Islam said initial evidence suggested the guards who rebelled may have had outside assistance. He did not elaborate...
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who took office in January, sought to act decisively and quash questions about stability in the poor South Asian nation during the first major challenge her administration has faced. Hasina ended the revolt in two days by persuading the guards to surrender Thursday with promises of an amnesty coupled with threats of military force.
NYT: US training Palestinian security forces in the West Bank
Some 1,600 have been through American-financed courses in Jordan. In coordination with Israeli defense officials, Palestinian troops and police officers have taken over much of the patrolling in the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and parts of Hebron.
Last month, as Israel carried out a war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, some in the Muslim world called on the West Bank to stage a violent uprising in protest. But while there were demonstrations, no such uprising occurred, partly because the Palestinian Authority troops maintained tight order.
All the while, these state-of-the-art facilities were being built, employing hundreds of Palestinian workers. The Presidential Guard College here has been functioning for several weeks, while the National Security Force Operations Camp elsewhere in Jericho will open at the end of next month. Along with police training facilities here supported by the European Union, they represent a new phase in the security plan: sophisticated training under Palestinian command has begun in Palestinian territory.
WP: Syria-based Hamas leader slips into Gaza in midst of discussions with Fatah...
Hamas' leadership is divided between the Gaza Strip, which the group rules, and its top officials living in Damascus. Abu Marzouk is number two in the Hamas hierarchy. He was born in Gaza and grew up in a refugee camp in the southern part of the strip, but hasn't been back in several decades. The purpose of his visit was unknown. Hamas denied he entered Gaza and Abu Marzouk's Gaza relatives say they had not seen him.
Hamas leadership has been holding talks in Cairo seeking reconciliation with its Fatah rival. Both sides are working toward forming a unity government but have been unable to bridge their gaps...
On Monday, international donors will meet in Egypt for a conference on Gaza's reconstruction. The Palestinians are seeking $2.8 billion. Solana said Saturday the donor money will be sent to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, bypassing Hamas' Gaza leadership.
LAT: ...the success of which is important to leaders in the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt
A key question to be answered as negotiations proceed in the coming weeks is how much Hamas is willing to relax its tight political control over Gaza or modify its militant stance against Israel in return for an arrangement easing the flow of reconstruction aid to the enclave's 1.5 million people...
Reconciliation would serve both groups' aims and perhaps remove a major obstacle to rebuilding Gaza: an Israeli blockade backed by Egypt that has kept the enclave's borders all but sealed since Hamas took over Gaza. Without open borders, heavy construction materials cannot enter the strip.
Egypt has pushed hard to bring Hamas and Fatah together, hoping to restore a Palestinian Authority role in policing Gaza's borders. That would enable Egypt to reopen its crossing with Gaza without violating a border control agreement with Israel.
More broadly, a rapprochement of the Palestinian rivals would help revive Egypt's shaken position as a regional power and an influential voice in the Middle East.
AJE: meanwhile, rockets keep flowing into Israel from Gaza
AJE: and an Israeli order to demolish homes in Jerusalem leads to debilitating West Bank strike
A general strike to protest against Israel's plans to evict 1,500 Palestinians from their homes in the Silwan district of Jerusalem has paralysed much of the occupied West Bank. Shops and schools were closed and the streets were deserted as the strike was observed on Saturday...
Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital and has annexed the Arab east of the city. Some 500,000 Israelis live there in settlements. Under international law, east Jerusalem is considered to be occupied and the city has not been recognised by world powers as the Israeli capital.
WP: Hariri assassination trial to start in the Netherlands
Despite the start of proceedings in the Netherlands, it is still not known who will be accused in the suicide truck bombing that killed [former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri and 22 other people on a seaside street in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.
Also unknown is the most politically explosive question _ whether the proceedings will implicate Syria's government, which many Lebanese believe was behind the murder of a man who broke with Syria to oppose its long military dominance of Lebanon. Syria has denied involvement.
Most likely the first defendants before the court will be four pro-Syria generals who led Lebanon's police, intelligence service and an elite army unit at the time of the assassination. They are the only people in custody, though they have not been formally charged.
LAT: United Arab Emirates hosts massive arms fair for the region
NYT: new leader brings new strategy to violent Russian republic of Ingushetia
The new president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, has ordered security barriers removed from most government offices, reasoning that authorities should not need protection from their own people. He rents a modest house from a retired state prosecutor, expressing some discomfort with the gold-domed presidential palace.
And in a region where criticism of the government has been all but forbidden, Mr. Yevkurov seems to be soliciting it. In his first 100 days in office, he met at least seven times, three times in private, with a human rights activist who dogged his predecessor, and he established a telephone line for citizens to air their grievances.
Whether this new approach can bring Ingushetia under control is another question — and a crucial one for Russia. Soon it will be spring, marking a new season of war between armed Ingush militants and the federal forces struggling to control them. Left to deteriorate, Ingushetia could become another Chechnya, spreading chaos on Russia’s southern border.
NYT: Kosovo war crimes trial finds 5 Serbs guilty, minus wartime president Milan Milutinovic
Citing their reasons for acquitting Mr. Milutinovic, the judges said that in practice “it was Milosevic, sometimes termed the Supreme Commander, who exercised actual command authority” over Serbian troops and security police officers in 1999.
The judges convicted the five others for their roles in “a broad campaign of violence directed against the Kosovo Albanian population,” which at the time made up 90 percent of Kosovo. They said Serbia had initiated a state-organized campaign to keep control over Kosovo through deporting or forcibly transferring a large part of the population of about two million.
NYT: Bosnian Serb leaders threaten secession, highlighting tensions
Bosnian Serb officials, Western diplomats and the police said the crisis began last week when the country’s state police agency sent a report to the State Prosecutor’s Office with allegations involving the Serb Republic’s prime minister, Milorad Dodik.
The case outlined in the State Investigation and Protection Agency report related to corruption, fraud and misuse of finances involving several important government contracts in the Bosnian Serb Republic. They included allegations concerning a $146 million government building in Banja Luka...
Mr. Dodik expressed indignation last weekend, saying he was the victim of a witch hunt aimed at undermining him and the Bosnian Serb Republic. “Even the little faith I had in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now lost due to this farce with the criminal charges against me,” he said last week. “They have made this country pointless.”
WP: Rwandan army withdraws from month-long joint military offensive with DR Congo, despite unclear success
The operation has merely scattered the 6,000 or so Hutu rebels belonging to the FDLR farther west. Only one rebel leader -- a spokesman -- has been captured, while two dozen others, including some wanted for participating in the genocide, remain in the bush or are in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa or Europe. The task of disarming the rebels is now up to the infamously inept Congolese army, which once collaborated with the Hutu rebels, and an overstretched U.N. peacekeeping force.
Human rights groups warn that the FDLR could regroup within weeks and launch reprisal attacks against villagers as it seeks to retake lost ground that includes the lucrative mineral mines it has controlled for years...
Although the 17,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force was largely left out of the operation, it is now rushing to secure strategic areas that the Rwandan troops cleared of rebels before they return. The peacekeepers are also supposed to assist the Congolese army as it continues to hunt down rebels -- many of whom are now in small pockets of 20 and 30 -- across the dense forests of eastern Congo.
BBC: Hutu rebels retaking Congolese territory already?
CSM: UN tribunal convicts three RUF commanders for crimes against humanity, including amputation, murder, enlistment of child soldiers and sexual slavery...
But the ripples of the international tribunal's decision on Wednesday in Freetown, Sierra Leone – finding rebel leaders Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon, and Augustine Gbao guilty on more than a dozen counts each of crimes against humanity – are already reaching around the continent and the world. Coming just a week before the expected arrest warrant for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, and in the middle of the ongoing trial of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, this trial sets a very tough tone about the consequences of cruelty in wartime.
WP: ...in the first forced-marriage conviction in an international court of law
CSM: Sudan's Bashir ups diplomacy in bid to stall ICC warrant ruling
[W]hile Bashir may actually have the numbers on his side, with much of the developing world voicing concern that the ICC has overreached its mandate, the ICC is showing no signs of relenting.
"The only alternative the judge can look at is to stagger or to postpone the decision to issue an arrest warrant," says Godfrey Musila, a legal expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, South Africa (formerly known as Pretoria). "What Sudan is doing is trying to get enough diplomatic voices on its side, but the idea is not to affect the decision of whether to issue an arrest warrant or not, but when to do it."
Coming just a week after the Khartoum government signed a "confidence-building" agreement to start talks with the key Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, Bashir's diplomatic roadshow is a clear last-minute dash to stall the inevitable.
BBC: clashes in southern Sudan between army and militias in Malakal
WP: Somali government and major insurgent group agree to a cease-fire
Some of the worst fighting in Mogadishu has taken place in recent weeks. Islamist insurgents battled government and African Union troops for two consecutive days this week and the independent Elman Human Rights Organization said at least 49 civilians were killed... The Islamic Party opposes the presence of AU troops in Somalia and has vowed to fight them until they leave the Horn of Africa nation.
FP: still, what on earth to do with Somalia?
The hardest challenge of all might be simply preventing the worst-case scenario. Among the best suggestions I’ve heard is to play to Somalia’s strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based governments in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack together to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that coordinated, say, currency issues or antipiracy efforts, but did not sideline local leaders...
A more radical idea is to have the United Nations take over the government and administer Somalia with an East Timor-style mandate. Because Somalia has already been an independent country, this option might be too much for Somalis to stomach. To make it work, the United Nations would need to delegate authority to clan leaders who have measurable clout on the ground. Either way, the diplomats should be working with the moneylords more and the warlords less.
But the problem with Somalia is that after 18 years of chaos, with so many people killed, with so many gun-toting men rising up and then getting cut down, it is exceedingly difficult to identify who the country’s real leaders are, if they exist at all.
GQ: leaders may be difficult to find, but pirates are out, commanding attention
With their black scarves covering their faces and submachine guns slung over their arms, Somalia’s pirates are the real Jack Sparrows of the twenty-first century, minus the eyeliner. One young woman who lives near Boosaaso bragged about going to a pirate wedding that lasted two days. A band was flown in from neighboring Djibouti. There was nonstop dancing and an endless supply of goat meat. “They drive the best cars, they throw the best parties,” she gushed. “We all want to marry them.” She claimed that her own pirate boyfriend had just given her a small gift—$350,000 in cash. For young Somali men, pirate life is becoming too much to resist. Fishermen all along the coast have traded in their ragged fishing nets for rocket-propelled grenades.
NYT: Kenya having a hard time, one year after violent protests
Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear...
On Wednesday, United Nations officials called for the country’s police chief and attorney general to resign after a United Nations investigation revealed that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads. One of the Kenyan whistle-blowers himself was shot to death after providing detailed evidence...
The only thing Kenya’s ruling class seems to agree on is refusing to pay most of its taxes, even though Kenyan politicians are already among the highest paid in the world, a stunning fact in one of the world’s poorest countries...
Kenya’s legendary safari business, an engine of the economy, has not bounced back either. Tourist arrivals were down about 35 percent in 2008 compared with 2007, leading to thousands of layoffs and a steady stream of unemployed youths marching back to the already teeming slums.
WP: worrying explosion at Guinnea-Bissau armed forces HQ wounds three
CSM: grim conditions for displaced Sri Lankans
NYT: Tigers offer truce, which government rejects...
With their guerrilla fighters pinned down by Sri Lankan troops in a small patch of jungle, ethnic Tamil separatists announced Monday that they were willing to accept an internationally brokered cease-fire, although they said they would not surrender their weapons as part of any truce...
In January 2008, the government pulled out of a cease-fire agreement that had been brokered by Norway in 2002, saying the rebels had used the period of the truce to rearm and regroup. Government leaders vowed to crush the rebels within the year.
Government troops have cornered the principal group of rebel fighters in a small strip of land on the country’s northeastern coast. The government says the Tamil Tigers, fighting from their last remaining enclave, now control less than about 33 square miles.
AJE: ...arguing it's days from winning
WP: North Korea claims US overstepping boundaries along demilitarized zone, while preparing to test-fire long-range missile
CSM: Chinese government seeks to close troublesome human rights firm
LAT: Mexico to send 5,000 more troops to Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said the added troops would give the military a higher profile by taking control of police functions, including street patrols. Currently, soldiers tend highway checkpoints, guard crime scenes and take part in special operations, such as house searches.
The city is without a police chief. Roberto Orduña Cruz quit last week after several officers were slain and someone posted threats saying more would be killed unless he stepped down...
A little more than 2,000 soldiers and 425 federal police officers are assigned to Juarez in addition to local police, army spokesman Enrique Torres said. He said the reinforcements could begin to arrive in two weeks.
Newsweek: explosion of private security in Brazil reflects international trend
Gardênia Azul, a flatland slum in the scruffy west end of Rio de Janeiro, isn't much to look at. But don't tell that to Juliana. She moved there from Cidade de Deus (City of God)... At least in Gardênia there were no teenagers with Kalashnikovs or vendors hawking cocaine in the street. To Juliana, a manicurist with a four-year-old son, those things matter. "We can walk the streets any time of day or night," she says. "I feel safe."
In Gardênia Azul safety is relative, and comes at a price... No one is fond of the militia, which is often the corrupt twin of legitimate law enforcement with rogue cops acting as judge, jury and occasionally executioner. (Juliana won't soon forget her neighbor's 16-year-old, who was shot dead for smoking marijuana, his body dumped in the main square.) But to millions of people trying to get by in some of the meanest streets in the hemisphere, life involves hedging your bets by grabbing at whatever safety net you can...
Analysts estimate that policing is a $100 billion to $200 billion global business and a growth industry in the developing world. In Russia, private cops outnumber regular ones by 10 to 1. So ubiquitous are they in South Africa, militias are even tasked with guarding regular police stations. Private security generates an estimated million jobs a year in India. Even Uganda has 20,000 private police on the streets, as many as Iraq had in 2006, at the height of the war.
CSM: Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines masters the art of kidnapping, reaps some $1.5 million in ransom annually
WP: change of policy at Baltimore police made even more problematic by weak role of local media
In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman -- a refugee from the Bush administration -- came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone. (Similar policies have been established by several other police departments in the United States as well as by the FBI.)
Anthony Guglielmi, the department's director of public affairs, informed Baltimoreans that, henceforth, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld would decide unilaterally whether citizens would know the names of those who had used their weapons on civilians. If they did something illegal or unwarranted -- in the commissioner's judgment -- they would be named. Otherwise, the Baltimore department would no longer regard the decision to shoot someone as the sort of responsibility for which officers might be required to stand before the public.
Marri could face up to 15 years in prison on allegations of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists. The Qatar native journeyed to Illinois, purportedly to begin work on a master's degree, a day before terrorist strikes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
Marri's legal status had been closely watched in part because human rights advocates used him as a test case before the Supreme Court. They hope to repudiate a policy that allowed the government to indefinitely detain legal U.S. residents suspected of conspiring with al-Qaeda without charging them with a crime...
The indictment covers only two pages, although Marri's defense team will press government lawyers to fill in more details about their case in the months ahead.
NYT: ...which the Obama administration is arguing should put an end to a Supreme Court case, a move criticized by some
Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, noted that winning at the Supreme Court would affirm extraordinarily broad detention powers for a president — “a position they might not have wanted to take in the first place,” he said.
But losing would also put the government in a difficult spot, said Stewart Baker, a former Bush administration official in the Department of Homeland Security. The administration may be leery of broad detention power but might still want to use it in the most extreme cases. “Hanging on to the possibility of using this theory in a new and different emergency,” he said, “is the sort of thing that prudent government lawyers are inclined to do.”
New Yorker: what to do with new enemy combatants?
A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.
One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)... [I]n October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.” This new system, he wrote, would give the government the “ability to temporarily detain a dangerous individual,” including in situations where “a criminal trial has failed.” There are hundreds of legal variations that could be considered, he said. In 2007, Katyal published a related essay, co-written with Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. The essay argued that preventive detention, overseen by a congressionally authorized national-security court, was necessary to insure the “sensible” treatment of classified evidence, and to protect secret “sources and methods” of gathering intelligence. In his Web post, Katyal wrote, “I support such a security court.”
FP: "Abu Ghraib's Extreme Makeover"
NYT: Obama reveals plan for phased Iraq withdrawal
The plan will withdraw most of the 142,000 troops now in Iraq by the summer of next year, leaving 35,000 to 50,000 to train and advise Iraqi security forces, hunt terrorist cells and protect American civilian and military personnel. Those “transitional forces” will leave by 2011 in accordance with a strategic agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush before he left office.
“Let me say this as plainly as I can,” Mr. Obama said. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”
LAT: the withdrawal plan for dummies
NYT: the budget and the war
[A January report] from the Congressional Budget Office estimat[ed] how much the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts would cost from 2010 through 2019 under two assumptions. In one, the number of troops deployed in the two countries draws down fairly quickly, to about 30,000 by 2011. In the other, levels drop to 75,000 by 2013. Both cases represent a huge reduction from the roughly 180,000 troops there now. But the difference in the cost is breathtaking: the office estimates that Congress would have to appropriate $388 billion for the case of a quick withdrawal and more than double, $867 billion, for the slower one.
Because of the huge range of possible costs, and because the logistics of withdrawal are complicated and expensive, “the basic elements of that estimate are still unresolved,” said John M. Spratt Jr., a South Carolina Democrat who is the House Budget Committee chairman and a House Armed Services Committee member...
President Obama may find it hard to keep the withdrawal to a prescribed timetable, and even if he can, the savings may be a drop in the bucket economically. But if he keeps the bands playing and strikes the right note in his speeches, he just may have a chance to persuade Americans that the end of a long war means better times are on the way.
CSM: so with all this talk about withdrawal, what's the insurgency up to these days?
Ongoing violence in outlying provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh indicates that although violence has fallen and some normalcy is returning to Baghdad, the fringes of Iraq – the rural towns, farming villages, and desert outposts – have become the new fronts in the fight against the insurgent threat as extremists have fled cities and are hiding in the country's remote corners...
Still, while fighting insurgents outside major cities has often proved something of a "whack-a-mole" scenario, US forces here say they're finally beginning to make progress thanks in large part to increasingly capable Iraqi security forces and an emboldened local population...
Now after US forces clear an area, the Iraqi Army, police, or neighborhood watch groups known as Sons of Iraq set up checkpoints along the road to ensure that insurgents don't return. While roadside bombs and harassment of the local population continue, US forces say the situation has dramatically improved.
NYT: IEDs increasingly a threat in Afghanistan
More than 175 American and allied troops were killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan last year, more than twice as many as the year before, and American commanders say the 17,000 extra troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama last week will offer additional targets...
Senior military officers say Afghanistan’s topography and primitive infrastructure play to the insurgents’ advantage. Unlike Iraq, where more of the streets are paved, Afghanistan has a network of undeveloped roads where it is far easier to lay traps...
The improvised bombs — buried in roads, packed into cars or bicycles and hidden in trash cans or animal carcasses — are made from materials readily available in war zones, whether abandoned bombs, construction explosives or fertilizer. They are the weapon of choice for an insurgency: cheap and easy to build, but hard to detect and counter.
The Pentagon created the counter-I.E.D. organization in 2006, and its budget has ranged from $3.5 billion to $4.4 billion annually, but that does not include costs for armored vehicles and other systems. In part because new jamming technology has foiled some weapons triggered remotely by cellphones or garage-door openers, insurgents in Afghanistan are turning to more primitive methods, using wire or even rope as the trigger.
LAT: Afghan president to move up elections from August date...
NYT: ...as US training for Afghans using Russian helicopters reveals the challenges both behind and ahead
The program, which is projected to cost American taxpayers $5 billion into 2016, is aimed at giving Afghanistan the ability to defend itself from the skies and one day allowing the Americans to leave. But for now it reflects all the problems of getting Afghan forces to stand on their own...
Americans have in the past been taught to fly MI-17s, mostly for military exercises to teach them how to counter enemy aircraft. (The MI-17 is used all over the world, including by Iran and North Korea.) The Afghan program is modeled after an earlier American effort to build up the Iraqi Air Force, which also includes some MI-17s. But the Russian helicopters, which make up the bulk of the Afghan fleet, have an ironic resonance in a country where in the 1980s the United States supplied guerrillas with Stinger missiles to shoot Soviet helicopters down.
These days, the American pilots encounter some resentment from the Afghans who have been flying the Russian helicopters for decades — Colonel Bakhtullah has been a pilot since 1981 — and wonder why they must take instruction from Americans who just learned to fly the helicopters in a four-week course at Fort Bliss, Tex. The Americans say that the Afghans have not had a real air force since the Russians left two decades ago, and that they were often improperly trained in the first place.
NYT: cease-fire in Pakistan's Swat Valley
LAT: but none in sight in Islamabad
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may well be the most popular politician in Pakistan. So the Supreme Court's decision Wednesday banning him from holding elective office has set the stage for what could be a bitter showdown between his backers and the already shaky government of President Asif Ali Zardari...
Analysts characterized Wednesday's court ruling as a drawing of battle lines between Zardari's Pakistan People's Party and its onetime ally, Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N. The two parties teamed up last February to take on Musharraf, soundly defeating his party in parliamentary elections and ousting him from office six months later. But having gained power, they fell out with each other...
The prospect of a resurgent Sharif, who has the loyalty of many religious conservatives, may make some officials in Washington nervous. Zardari's government is considered much more Western-friendly, whereas Sharif, as prime minister in the 1990s, defied U.S. admonitions and presided over Pakistan's first nuclear test.
LAT: India brings charges against suspected Mumbai "smiling assassin," as Pakistan seeks domestic trials
Authorities on Wednesday filed charges of murder and "waging war" on India against who they say is the lone known surviving gunman in the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 170 people in November... The others charged include two suspected Pakistani soldiers and Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says was behind the attacks, as well as senior Lashkar members Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Zarar Shah and Abu Hamza.
LAT: paramilitary mutiny in Bangladesh leaves 76 dead, 72 missing
The dispute reportedly erupted Wednesday inside the Dhaka headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles paramilitary force during a meeting between junior members and their superiors, who are with the nation's army...
Bangladesh, an impoverished Muslim-majority nation with a population of 153 million, has a history of coups and of deep-seated corruption. The country ranks 147th out of 180 nations on watchdog Transparency International's corruption perception index.
Analysts say resentment has run deep among the Rifles for years because they are paid less than the military and must take orders from army officers. In addition to higher pay, leaders of the rebellion demanded that they be allowed to participate in lucrative United Nations peacekeeping operations.
WP: now back to the barracks, although the problem is far from over
The government decided at a late night Cabinet meeting Saturday to form a special tribunal to try those behind the mutiny, ruling party spokesman Syed Ashraful Islam said. Islam said initial evidence suggested the guards who rebelled may have had outside assistance. He did not elaborate...
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who took office in January, sought to act decisively and quash questions about stability in the poor South Asian nation during the first major challenge her administration has faced. Hasina ended the revolt in two days by persuading the guards to surrender Thursday with promises of an amnesty coupled with threats of military force.
NYT: US training Palestinian security forces in the West Bank
Some 1,600 have been through American-financed courses in Jordan. In coordination with Israeli defense officials, Palestinian troops and police officers have taken over much of the patrolling in the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and parts of Hebron.
Last month, as Israel carried out a war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, some in the Muslim world called on the West Bank to stage a violent uprising in protest. But while there were demonstrations, no such uprising occurred, partly because the Palestinian Authority troops maintained tight order.
All the while, these state-of-the-art facilities were being built, employing hundreds of Palestinian workers. The Presidential Guard College here has been functioning for several weeks, while the National Security Force Operations Camp elsewhere in Jericho will open at the end of next month. Along with police training facilities here supported by the European Union, they represent a new phase in the security plan: sophisticated training under Palestinian command has begun in Palestinian territory.
WP: Syria-based Hamas leader slips into Gaza in midst of discussions with Fatah...
Hamas' leadership is divided between the Gaza Strip, which the group rules, and its top officials living in Damascus. Abu Marzouk is number two in the Hamas hierarchy. He was born in Gaza and grew up in a refugee camp in the southern part of the strip, but hasn't been back in several decades. The purpose of his visit was unknown. Hamas denied he entered Gaza and Abu Marzouk's Gaza relatives say they had not seen him.
Hamas leadership has been holding talks in Cairo seeking reconciliation with its Fatah rival. Both sides are working toward forming a unity government but have been unable to bridge their gaps...
On Monday, international donors will meet in Egypt for a conference on Gaza's reconstruction. The Palestinians are seeking $2.8 billion. Solana said Saturday the donor money will be sent to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, bypassing Hamas' Gaza leadership.
LAT: ...the success of which is important to leaders in the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt
A key question to be answered as negotiations proceed in the coming weeks is how much Hamas is willing to relax its tight political control over Gaza or modify its militant stance against Israel in return for an arrangement easing the flow of reconstruction aid to the enclave's 1.5 million people...
Reconciliation would serve both groups' aims and perhaps remove a major obstacle to rebuilding Gaza: an Israeli blockade backed by Egypt that has kept the enclave's borders all but sealed since Hamas took over Gaza. Without open borders, heavy construction materials cannot enter the strip.
Egypt has pushed hard to bring Hamas and Fatah together, hoping to restore a Palestinian Authority role in policing Gaza's borders. That would enable Egypt to reopen its crossing with Gaza without violating a border control agreement with Israel.
More broadly, a rapprochement of the Palestinian rivals would help revive Egypt's shaken position as a regional power and an influential voice in the Middle East.
AJE: meanwhile, rockets keep flowing into Israel from Gaza
AJE: and an Israeli order to demolish homes in Jerusalem leads to debilitating West Bank strike
A general strike to protest against Israel's plans to evict 1,500 Palestinians from their homes in the Silwan district of Jerusalem has paralysed much of the occupied West Bank. Shops and schools were closed and the streets were deserted as the strike was observed on Saturday...
Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital and has annexed the Arab east of the city. Some 500,000 Israelis live there in settlements. Under international law, east Jerusalem is considered to be occupied and the city has not been recognised by world powers as the Israeli capital.
WP: Hariri assassination trial to start in the Netherlands
Despite the start of proceedings in the Netherlands, it is still not known who will be accused in the suicide truck bombing that killed [former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri and 22 other people on a seaside street in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.
Also unknown is the most politically explosive question _ whether the proceedings will implicate Syria's government, which many Lebanese believe was behind the murder of a man who broke with Syria to oppose its long military dominance of Lebanon. Syria has denied involvement.
Most likely the first defendants before the court will be four pro-Syria generals who led Lebanon's police, intelligence service and an elite army unit at the time of the assassination. They are the only people in custody, though they have not been formally charged.
LAT: United Arab Emirates hosts massive arms fair for the region
NYT: new leader brings new strategy to violent Russian republic of Ingushetia
The new president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, has ordered security barriers removed from most government offices, reasoning that authorities should not need protection from their own people. He rents a modest house from a retired state prosecutor, expressing some discomfort with the gold-domed presidential palace.
And in a region where criticism of the government has been all but forbidden, Mr. Yevkurov seems to be soliciting it. In his first 100 days in office, he met at least seven times, three times in private, with a human rights activist who dogged his predecessor, and he established a telephone line for citizens to air their grievances.
Whether this new approach can bring Ingushetia under control is another question — and a crucial one for Russia. Soon it will be spring, marking a new season of war between armed Ingush militants and the federal forces struggling to control them. Left to deteriorate, Ingushetia could become another Chechnya, spreading chaos on Russia’s southern border.
NYT: Kosovo war crimes trial finds 5 Serbs guilty, minus wartime president Milan Milutinovic
Citing their reasons for acquitting Mr. Milutinovic, the judges said that in practice “it was Milosevic, sometimes termed the Supreme Commander, who exercised actual command authority” over Serbian troops and security police officers in 1999.
The judges convicted the five others for their roles in “a broad campaign of violence directed against the Kosovo Albanian population,” which at the time made up 90 percent of Kosovo. They said Serbia had initiated a state-organized campaign to keep control over Kosovo through deporting or forcibly transferring a large part of the population of about two million.
NYT: Bosnian Serb leaders threaten secession, highlighting tensions
Bosnian Serb officials, Western diplomats and the police said the crisis began last week when the country’s state police agency sent a report to the State Prosecutor’s Office with allegations involving the Serb Republic’s prime minister, Milorad Dodik.
The case outlined in the State Investigation and Protection Agency report related to corruption, fraud and misuse of finances involving several important government contracts in the Bosnian Serb Republic. They included allegations concerning a $146 million government building in Banja Luka...
Mr. Dodik expressed indignation last weekend, saying he was the victim of a witch hunt aimed at undermining him and the Bosnian Serb Republic. “Even the little faith I had in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now lost due to this farce with the criminal charges against me,” he said last week. “They have made this country pointless.”
WP: Rwandan army withdraws from month-long joint military offensive with DR Congo, despite unclear success
The operation has merely scattered the 6,000 or so Hutu rebels belonging to the FDLR farther west. Only one rebel leader -- a spokesman -- has been captured, while two dozen others, including some wanted for participating in the genocide, remain in the bush or are in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa or Europe. The task of disarming the rebels is now up to the infamously inept Congolese army, which once collaborated with the Hutu rebels, and an overstretched U.N. peacekeeping force.
Human rights groups warn that the FDLR could regroup within weeks and launch reprisal attacks against villagers as it seeks to retake lost ground that includes the lucrative mineral mines it has controlled for years...
Although the 17,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force was largely left out of the operation, it is now rushing to secure strategic areas that the Rwandan troops cleared of rebels before they return. The peacekeepers are also supposed to assist the Congolese army as it continues to hunt down rebels -- many of whom are now in small pockets of 20 and 30 -- across the dense forests of eastern Congo.
BBC: Hutu rebels retaking Congolese territory already?
CSM: UN tribunal convicts three RUF commanders for crimes against humanity, including amputation, murder, enlistment of child soldiers and sexual slavery...
But the ripples of the international tribunal's decision on Wednesday in Freetown, Sierra Leone – finding rebel leaders Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon, and Augustine Gbao guilty on more than a dozen counts each of crimes against humanity – are already reaching around the continent and the world. Coming just a week before the expected arrest warrant for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, and in the middle of the ongoing trial of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, this trial sets a very tough tone about the consequences of cruelty in wartime.
WP: ...in the first forced-marriage conviction in an international court of law
CSM: Sudan's Bashir ups diplomacy in bid to stall ICC warrant ruling
[W]hile Bashir may actually have the numbers on his side, with much of the developing world voicing concern that the ICC has overreached its mandate, the ICC is showing no signs of relenting.
"The only alternative the judge can look at is to stagger or to postpone the decision to issue an arrest warrant," says Godfrey Musila, a legal expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, South Africa (formerly known as Pretoria). "What Sudan is doing is trying to get enough diplomatic voices on its side, but the idea is not to affect the decision of whether to issue an arrest warrant or not, but when to do it."
Coming just a week after the Khartoum government signed a "confidence-building" agreement to start talks with the key Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, Bashir's diplomatic roadshow is a clear last-minute dash to stall the inevitable.
BBC: clashes in southern Sudan between army and militias in Malakal
WP: Somali government and major insurgent group agree to a cease-fire
Some of the worst fighting in Mogadishu has taken place in recent weeks. Islamist insurgents battled government and African Union troops for two consecutive days this week and the independent Elman Human Rights Organization said at least 49 civilians were killed... The Islamic Party opposes the presence of AU troops in Somalia and has vowed to fight them until they leave the Horn of Africa nation.
FP: still, what on earth to do with Somalia?
The hardest challenge of all might be simply preventing the worst-case scenario. Among the best suggestions I’ve heard is to play to Somalia’s strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based governments in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack together to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that coordinated, say, currency issues or antipiracy efforts, but did not sideline local leaders...
A more radical idea is to have the United Nations take over the government and administer Somalia with an East Timor-style mandate. Because Somalia has already been an independent country, this option might be too much for Somalis to stomach. To make it work, the United Nations would need to delegate authority to clan leaders who have measurable clout on the ground. Either way, the diplomats should be working with the moneylords more and the warlords less.
But the problem with Somalia is that after 18 years of chaos, with so many people killed, with so many gun-toting men rising up and then getting cut down, it is exceedingly difficult to identify who the country’s real leaders are, if they exist at all.
GQ: leaders may be difficult to find, but pirates are out, commanding attention
With their black scarves covering their faces and submachine guns slung over their arms, Somalia’s pirates are the real Jack Sparrows of the twenty-first century, minus the eyeliner. One young woman who lives near Boosaaso bragged about going to a pirate wedding that lasted two days. A band was flown in from neighboring Djibouti. There was nonstop dancing and an endless supply of goat meat. “They drive the best cars, they throw the best parties,” she gushed. “We all want to marry them.” She claimed that her own pirate boyfriend had just given her a small gift—$350,000 in cash. For young Somali men, pirate life is becoming too much to resist. Fishermen all along the coast have traded in their ragged fishing nets for rocket-propelled grenades.
NYT: Kenya having a hard time, one year after violent protests
Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear...
On Wednesday, United Nations officials called for the country’s police chief and attorney general to resign after a United Nations investigation revealed that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads. One of the Kenyan whistle-blowers himself was shot to death after providing detailed evidence...
The only thing Kenya’s ruling class seems to agree on is refusing to pay most of its taxes, even though Kenyan politicians are already among the highest paid in the world, a stunning fact in one of the world’s poorest countries...
Kenya’s legendary safari business, an engine of the economy, has not bounced back either. Tourist arrivals were down about 35 percent in 2008 compared with 2007, leading to thousands of layoffs and a steady stream of unemployed youths marching back to the already teeming slums.
WP: worrying explosion at Guinnea-Bissau armed forces HQ wounds three
CSM: grim conditions for displaced Sri Lankans
NYT: Tigers offer truce, which government rejects...
With their guerrilla fighters pinned down by Sri Lankan troops in a small patch of jungle, ethnic Tamil separatists announced Monday that they were willing to accept an internationally brokered cease-fire, although they said they would not surrender their weapons as part of any truce...
In January 2008, the government pulled out of a cease-fire agreement that had been brokered by Norway in 2002, saying the rebels had used the period of the truce to rearm and regroup. Government leaders vowed to crush the rebels within the year.
Government troops have cornered the principal group of rebel fighters in a small strip of land on the country’s northeastern coast. The government says the Tamil Tigers, fighting from their last remaining enclave, now control less than about 33 square miles.
AJE: ...arguing it's days from winning
WP: North Korea claims US overstepping boundaries along demilitarized zone, while preparing to test-fire long-range missile
CSM: Chinese government seeks to close troublesome human rights firm
LAT: Mexico to send 5,000 more troops to Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said the added troops would give the military a higher profile by taking control of police functions, including street patrols. Currently, soldiers tend highway checkpoints, guard crime scenes and take part in special operations, such as house searches.
The city is without a police chief. Roberto Orduña Cruz quit last week after several officers were slain and someone posted threats saying more would be killed unless he stepped down...
A little more than 2,000 soldiers and 425 federal police officers are assigned to Juarez in addition to local police, army spokesman Enrique Torres said. He said the reinforcements could begin to arrive in two weeks.
Newsweek: explosion of private security in Brazil reflects international trend
Gardênia Azul, a flatland slum in the scruffy west end of Rio de Janeiro, isn't much to look at. But don't tell that to Juliana. She moved there from Cidade de Deus (City of God)... At least in Gardênia there were no teenagers with Kalashnikovs or vendors hawking cocaine in the street. To Juliana, a manicurist with a four-year-old son, those things matter. "We can walk the streets any time of day or night," she says. "I feel safe."
In Gardênia Azul safety is relative, and comes at a price... No one is fond of the militia, which is often the corrupt twin of legitimate law enforcement with rogue cops acting as judge, jury and occasionally executioner. (Juliana won't soon forget her neighbor's 16-year-old, who was shot dead for smoking marijuana, his body dumped in the main square.) But to millions of people trying to get by in some of the meanest streets in the hemisphere, life involves hedging your bets by grabbing at whatever safety net you can...
Analysts estimate that policing is a $100 billion to $200 billion global business and a growth industry in the developing world. In Russia, private cops outnumber regular ones by 10 to 1. So ubiquitous are they in South Africa, militias are even tasked with guarding regular police stations. Private security generates an estimated million jobs a year in India. Even Uganda has 20,000 private police on the streets, as many as Iraq had in 2006, at the height of the war.
CSM: Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines masters the art of kidnapping, reaps some $1.5 million in ransom annually
WP: change of policy at Baltimore police made even more problematic by weak role of local media
In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman -- a refugee from the Bush administration -- came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone. (Similar policies have been established by several other police departments in the United States as well as by the FBI.)
Anthony Guglielmi, the department's director of public affairs, informed Baltimoreans that, henceforth, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld would decide unilaterally whether citizens would know the names of those who had used their weapons on civilians. If they did something illegal or unwarranted -- in the commissioner's judgment -- they would be named. Otherwise, the Baltimore department would no longer regard the decision to shoot someone as the sort of responsibility for which officers might be required to stand before the public.
10 February 2009
mortars were fired [those pesky local citizens]
NYT: Taliban in southern Pakistani city of Quetta a special concern for the US
The Taliban operations in Quetta are different from operations in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan that have until now been the main setting for American unease. But as the United States prepares to pour as many as 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, military and intelligence officials say the effort could be futile unless there is a concerted effort to kill or capture Taliban leaders in Quetta and cut the group’s supply lines into Afghanistan.
From Quetta, Taliban leaders including Mullah Muhammad Omar, a reclusive, one-eyed cleric, guide commanders in southern Afghanistan, raise money from wealthy Persian Gulf donors and deliver guns and fresh fighters to the battlefield, according to Obama administration and military officials...
The Taliban leaders have operated from Quetta for several years, but the increasing violence in southern Afghanistan suggests that the flow of arms, fighters and money there from the Pakistani sanctuary may be increasing.
NYT: US missile strikes in Pakistan, which have continued under Obama, major cause of resentment
BBC: 14 killed in mortar attack in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province
Militants effectively control large swathes of the region and the army is engaged in an operation to try to remove them... Local citizens were adamant that the mortar had been fired by the military. However, a military spokesman denied this.
"At least 13 civilians were killed when militants fired a mortar shell from Mirwali," the spokesman said. "It hit a house at Abbas Chowk near Darra Adam Khel... One soldier was also martyred, after which security forces responded and engaged the militants' positions."
LAT: Polish hostage killed by Pakistani militants, in video given to media
WP: Britain and the US both have Afghanistan-Pakistan envoys now
Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, who was once quoted as saying the military effort there was doomed to failure, was given a new job Monday _ tackling those problems that afflict both Afghanistan and its troubled neighbor, Pakistan... The spokesman, Michael Ellam, said Cowper-Coles would work in tandem with Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan appointed by President Barack Obama last month.
An Oxford-educated diplomat, Cowper-Coles has a reputation for frank talk that has occasionally embarrassed his bosses... More recently, a French newspaper quoted the then-ambassador to Kabul as saying the country might best be "governed by an acceptable dictator"...
NYT: revenge killing of Taliban members in eastern Afghanistan
On Saturday, something typical happened in eastern Afghanistan: Two Taliban guerrillas assassinated a top local politician. But on Sunday, something very unusual occurred, according to witnesses and Afghan intelligence officials.
Hundreds of people from around the district of Dara-e-Noor joined with the local police to corner the Taliban assassins. A firefight broke out. Eventually the wounded Taliban were captured. But instead of turning them over to the authorities, the villagers trussed the men to a tree and punched and kicked them to death.
Revenge killings are not unusual in Afghanistan; when the Taliban executed murder suspects in Kabul before the American invasion, they would shout, “In revenge, there is life!”
But such killings against the feared Taliban are relatively rare. The episode in Dara-e-Noor represented an uncommon response from local villagers, one motivated at least in part by an angry fear that Afghanistan’s deeply corrupt judicial system would turn the killers loose.
NYT: 2 NATO soldiers killed in suicide attack
BBC: poll shows Afghans increasingly pessimistic about their country
The approval rating for the central government in Kabul is still high - but is steadily falling... When people were asked what poses the biggest danger to the country, most said the Taleban. That has not changed in recent years - although the focus on the Taleban is slowly increasing and fewer people now see drug traffickers as the biggest threat.
There are some positives. Many people said everyday life had improved. Sixty-five per cent said the availability of clean water was somewhat good or very good, compared with 58% in 2005. Access to a supply of electricity has also increased slightly.
LAT: female suicide bomber kills 28 in Sri Lanka at processing center for the displaced
Beate Arnestad, a Norwegian filmmaker who made a 2007 documentary on two female Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, said those she met had been part of the Tigers for most of their lives, having been kidnapped, handed over to the group or run away to the join the group at a young age.
The young women had known little but conflict for most of their lives, Arnestad said, and were highly obedient to their commanders, who strictly controlled the information they received. She said she found them extremely fit, dedicated, intelligent and very proud of being part of the elite Black Tigers suicide squad. Arnestad said they would have been overachievers in a more conventional environment.
Gdn: the Red Cross evacuates 240 sick and wounded displaced
The patients had fled the last functioning hospital in the war zone in Puthukkudiyiruppu last week after it came under repeated artillery barrages that killed several patients. The Red Cross and government doctors set up a makeshift medical facility in an abandoned community centre and a school, Wijesinghe said. However, the area was shelled on Monday, she added...
In recent days, the military has reported an increasing flow of civilians out of the war zone. More than 1,000 civilians fled today , and 6,599 reportedly crossed yesterday, even as a female bomber killed 19 soldiers and 10 civilians at an army checkpoint. The government earlier said the blast had killed 20 soldiers and eight civilians.
NYT: but an estimated 250,000 civilians still trapped
On Monday, some 800 civilians had crossed the front lines and were being searched by soldiers before being sent to camps farther afield. The bomber detonated her explosives as she was being searched, said Gen. Udaya Nanayakkara, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan military. Sri Lankan television showed images of bodies, including that of a child, being carried away from the site of the attack.
The military would now change its procedures for processing civilians fleeing the fighting, General Nanayakkara said. “We’ll have to check civilians one by one,” he said. “It’s going to take more time.”
NYT: Palestine stops paying for Gaza wounded in Israeli hospitals
“We already pay $7 million a month to Israeli hospitals,” [Palestinian health minister, Fathi Abu Moghli] said in a telephone interview. “Since the first day of the Gaza aggression, I said that I will not send to my occupier my injured people in order for him to make propaganda at my expense, and then pay him for it.”
An Israeli clinic set up with great fanfare on the Israeli-Gaza border the day the war ended, Jan. 18, has already closed, since both Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority essentially boycotted it. The Palestinian Authority pays for much of its citizens’ care in Israel from its budget.
Israel has long pointed to its medical care of Palestinians as an example of its advanced skills and humanitarianism. Palestinians generally are eager to gain the benefit, but are also resentful. As relations have chilled, each side has accused the other of political manipulation.
Gdn: some Rafah tunnels back in business
But while the sandy border is marked with many large craters, the damage caused to the tunnels was, in many cases, repaired within days. Already some are operating again and new tunnels are being dug under the close eye of Hamas officials, who walk from one tent to the next clutching their walkie-talkies.
The smugglers believe their tunnels were simply too deep to be badly damaged, even by the heavy 500lb or one-tonne bombs dropped by Israeli F-16s. In most cases, the serious damage was only to the entrances to the tunnels, which were soon uncovered again by the Palestinians using bulldozers and then rebuilt. It may be that the focus of the Israeli attacks was on the weapons tunnels, which are closely guarded by Hamas and other armed groups and not open to public view.
NYT: Egyptians detain Gaza protester
For two days the authorities denied that he was being held. Then on Sunday, at 10 p.m., a security official at the American University in Cairo, where Mr. Rizk studies, was able to confirm his arrest to his family...
Now, according to the accounts of five eyewitnesses to Mr. Rizk’s arrest, and interviews with his parents, his sisters, human rights lawyers and some of his professors, it appears that the Egyptian authorities have turned to the country’s emergency law to silence criticism of its Gaza policy. The law, adopted to combat terrorism after President Anwar el-Sadat was gunned down in 1981, allows the government to detain people without charge and effectively eliminates any right to due process.
The government acknowledges holding about 1,800 prisoners without charge under the emergency law, but human rights groups say the number could be closer to 10,000. The law is routinely used against members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated social and political movement. Dozens of Brotherhood followers have been arrested since the start of the Gaza conflict...
The group [that Phillip was with, Popular Committee in Solidarity With the Palestinian People] met Friday morning and took a bus north from Cairo to the Qalyubiya governate, an hour away. The demonstrators walked for about two hours, waving Palestinian flags and talking with local residents.
NYT: Israel strikes Gaza targets, bans Palestinians from entering Israel ahead of parliamentary election
CSM: cease-fire discussions a domestic political issue for Israel
Less than 48 hours before parliamentary elections here, the drive to reach a lasting cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel following their 22-day war is taking on new urgency.
If a deal isn't in place when Israelis go to the polls Tuesday, the ruling Kadima Party could take a significant hit. The centrist party led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is already in second place in polls behind the hawkish Likud party, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing politician who was prime minister from 1996 to 1999. Ms. Livni and Mr. Netanyahu are the two main contenders for the country's new premiership.
But the left-leaning Labor Party, headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, could lose the most political ground as a result of the war – which came to an inconclusive halt Jan. 18 after both sides declared unilateral cease-fires – as many Israelis blame the "peaceniks" for not dealing with Hamas rockets on southern Israel much sooner.
BBC: Israeli elections Q and A
BBC: al-Qaeda Tunisia bombers in French court (minus Khalid Sheikh Mohammed)
A French court has sentenced a German convert to Islam to 18 years over an attack on a Tunisian synagogue that killed 21 people in 2002. Christian Ganczarski, who prosecutors believed had links with al-Qaeda, was arrested in France in 2003.
The court also sentenced Walid Nouar, the brother of the suicide bomber, to 12 years for his part in the attack on the synagogue in Djerba. Both men denied the charges and are expected to appeal against the verdict... French prosecutors believe it was organised by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US - who is being held at the Guantanamo detention centre.
LAT: Obama invokes "state secrets" in case against Boeing subsidiary for rendition flights
Douglas Letter, representing the Department of Justice, told a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the Obama administration's position was "exactly" the same as that of the Bush White House, which argued the lawsuit would reveal government secrets and threaten national security.
The case was "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials of the new administration," said Letter, who was also involved in the case under President Bush. He said the judges would understand the government's stance once they read a classified affidavit explaining its claim of so-called state secrets privilege.
The ACLU lawsuit was filed against a transportation services company that helped the CIA move the men to places of interrogation as part of the "extraordinary rendition" program. The government intervened on behalf of Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Co., which the lawsuit said filed flight plans, devised itineraries and obtained landing permits for the jets that carried the men to places where they could be interrogated under torture.
A federal trial judge ruled last year that the government had properly invoked its state secrets privilege and dismissed the suit. The American Civil Liberties Union appealed that dismissal to the 9th Circuit, arguing that the men should be given the opportunity to prove their case without classified material...
Salon: more on state secrets, from Glenn Greenwald
Nobody -- not the ACLU or anyone else -- argues that the State Secrets privilege is inherently invalid... What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration's version of the States Secret privilege -- just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out -- was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn't be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security. That is the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ -- because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny -- and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).
Gdn: the lawyer of one of the parties to the case, the last British citizen still held at Guantánamo, says his release is urgent
NYT: federal court orders California to reduce prison overcrowding
Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety. The panel said that without such a plan, conditions would continue to deteriorate and inmates might regularly die of suicide or lack of proper care...
Federal judges have already ruled that the state’s failure to provide medical and mental health care is killing at least one inmate every month and has subjected inmates to cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
In their ruling on Monday, the judges ruled that reducing overcrowding was the only way to reform the prison health care system and encouraged plaintiffs’ and state lawyers to negotiate a way to cut the prison population. The judges also indicated that they would mandate a prison population cap of about 120 percent to 145 percent of the state’s designed capacity.
Gdn: Mugabe fails to release imprisoned opposition activists as promised
Doctors' affidavits seen by the Guardian reveal a pattern of torture of many of the 30 political and human rights activists held by the state for months. Nine of the prisoners seen by doctors were subjected to simulated drowning, being hung by their wrists in handcuffs and beaten, and high-voltage electric shocks...
Some were to be taken to hospital last Friday and then quietly freed by a judge in order for the regime to save face. Eight were to appear in court yesterday on the understanding they would be freed. But none of the detainees were produced after the prisons commissioner, Major-General Paradzai Zimondi, refused to hand them over...
The MDC is interpreting [Major-General Paradzai] Zimondi's intervention as evidence that the JOC [Joint Operations Command] intends to subvert the power-sharing administration by continuing the violence and intimidation against Tsvangirai's officials and supporters.
OSI: child soldier who recanted testimony in Lubunga ICC trial testifies again
In an unusual move, presiding Judge Adrian Fulford allowed the boy to tell his story without any prompting or interruptions by the prosecution or defense. All unnecessary court officers were removed from the room and the witness was shielded from defendant Lubanga’s direct view...
The beatings the children received the day they were kidnapped, Dieumerci said, only worsened once they arrived at the camp. The recruits were flogged with pieces of wood for even the most minor of offenses, including sickness or exhaustion, he said. They were also flogged if they could not complete a training exercise, misplaced their weapon, or tried to escape...
He was kept as a prisoner in yet another training camp until his father was able to pay for his freedom. After that, he went through a demobilization process with a humanitarian aid group.
Xinhua: a focus on reconciliation amidst mortar fire for new Somali president
President Ahmed, who arrived in Mogadishu on Saturday for the first time since his election on Jan. 31, held "consultative talks" with ministers in the caretaker government, security chiefs and local religious and clan leaders...
"We asked the president to keep on talking with those opposed to his government and accommodate everyone into the peace and he accepted it," Ahmed Diriye, spokesman for Hawiye clan elders who led the delegation of religious and clan elders in Mogadishu, told Xinhua.
Diriye said the president also accepted their offer of mediation between the government and the opposition, adding that the elders would try to get the consent of the opposition leaders for their mediation role...
On Saturday, a number of mortar shells were fired at the Presidential Palace in Mogadishu as the president was holding talks with officials at his residence, but no one was reportedly hurt .
Unlike previously, the Somali security forces and the African Union peacekeeping forces guarding the palace did not respond to the attacks after the president ordered them not to, the presidential spokesman said.
NYT: 4 US soldiers killed by car bomb in Mosul
Mosul, capital of Ninevah Province, remains one of the most violent places in Iraq. American soldiers are waging a counterinsurgency campaign there against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia , a homegrown Sunni extremist group which American intelligence officials say is foreign-led. Mosul is the last urban strong hold of the group; in other provinces they are hiding in rural or mountainous areas. Mosul also has been riven by tensions between Sunni Arabs and Kurds, with the two groups competing for power.
NYT: dealing with guns in the now-calm city of Karbala
The gun laws in Iraq have evolved over the last few years. During the height of the sectarian killing, both American and Iraqi soldiers allowed families one Kalashnikov or other weapon for their protection. In reality, families often kept many more weapons, tucked away in closets, buried in their yards or hidden under floorboards.
Over the last year, as the security in the country has stabilized, there has been an attempt to enforce stricter gun laws. Technically, every Iraqi citizen carrying a weapon is supposed to have a permit, although, of course, many Iraqis have held onto their weapons without permission.
NYT: ETA suspected of Madrid bombing
A car bomb that authorities believe was planted by Basque militant group ETA exploded early Monday near a trade fair complex in northeast Madrid. The blast blew out windows of nearby office buildings and sent up a plume of dark smoke, but there were no injuries.
If ETA was behind the bombing, it would be the first attack by the group in Madrid since a huge car bomb killed two people at Barajas International Airport in Madrid in December 2006.
The Taliban operations in Quetta are different from operations in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan that have until now been the main setting for American unease. But as the United States prepares to pour as many as 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, military and intelligence officials say the effort could be futile unless there is a concerted effort to kill or capture Taliban leaders in Quetta and cut the group’s supply lines into Afghanistan.
From Quetta, Taliban leaders including Mullah Muhammad Omar, a reclusive, one-eyed cleric, guide commanders in southern Afghanistan, raise money from wealthy Persian Gulf donors and deliver guns and fresh fighters to the battlefield, according to Obama administration and military officials...
The Taliban leaders have operated from Quetta for several years, but the increasing violence in southern Afghanistan suggests that the flow of arms, fighters and money there from the Pakistani sanctuary may be increasing.
NYT: US missile strikes in Pakistan, which have continued under Obama, major cause of resentment
BBC: 14 killed in mortar attack in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province
Militants effectively control large swathes of the region and the army is engaged in an operation to try to remove them... Local citizens were adamant that the mortar had been fired by the military. However, a military spokesman denied this.
"At least 13 civilians were killed when militants fired a mortar shell from Mirwali," the spokesman said. "It hit a house at Abbas Chowk near Darra Adam Khel... One soldier was also martyred, after which security forces responded and engaged the militants' positions."
LAT: Polish hostage killed by Pakistani militants, in video given to media
WP: Britain and the US both have Afghanistan-Pakistan envoys now
Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, who was once quoted as saying the military effort there was doomed to failure, was given a new job Monday _ tackling those problems that afflict both Afghanistan and its troubled neighbor, Pakistan... The spokesman, Michael Ellam, said Cowper-Coles would work in tandem with Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan appointed by President Barack Obama last month.
An Oxford-educated diplomat, Cowper-Coles has a reputation for frank talk that has occasionally embarrassed his bosses... More recently, a French newspaper quoted the then-ambassador to Kabul as saying the country might best be "governed by an acceptable dictator"...
NYT: revenge killing of Taliban members in eastern Afghanistan
On Saturday, something typical happened in eastern Afghanistan: Two Taliban guerrillas assassinated a top local politician. But on Sunday, something very unusual occurred, according to witnesses and Afghan intelligence officials.
Hundreds of people from around the district of Dara-e-Noor joined with the local police to corner the Taliban assassins. A firefight broke out. Eventually the wounded Taliban were captured. But instead of turning them over to the authorities, the villagers trussed the men to a tree and punched and kicked them to death.
Revenge killings are not unusual in Afghanistan; when the Taliban executed murder suspects in Kabul before the American invasion, they would shout, “In revenge, there is life!”
But such killings against the feared Taliban are relatively rare. The episode in Dara-e-Noor represented an uncommon response from local villagers, one motivated at least in part by an angry fear that Afghanistan’s deeply corrupt judicial system would turn the killers loose.
NYT: 2 NATO soldiers killed in suicide attack
BBC: poll shows Afghans increasingly pessimistic about their country
The approval rating for the central government in Kabul is still high - but is steadily falling... When people were asked what poses the biggest danger to the country, most said the Taleban. That has not changed in recent years - although the focus on the Taleban is slowly increasing and fewer people now see drug traffickers as the biggest threat.
There are some positives. Many people said everyday life had improved. Sixty-five per cent said the availability of clean water was somewhat good or very good, compared with 58% in 2005. Access to a supply of electricity has also increased slightly.
LAT: female suicide bomber kills 28 in Sri Lanka at processing center for the displaced
Beate Arnestad, a Norwegian filmmaker who made a 2007 documentary on two female Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, said those she met had been part of the Tigers for most of their lives, having been kidnapped, handed over to the group or run away to the join the group at a young age.
The young women had known little but conflict for most of their lives, Arnestad said, and were highly obedient to their commanders, who strictly controlled the information they received. She said she found them extremely fit, dedicated, intelligent and very proud of being part of the elite Black Tigers suicide squad. Arnestad said they would have been overachievers in a more conventional environment.
Gdn: the Red Cross evacuates 240 sick and wounded displaced
The patients had fled the last functioning hospital in the war zone in Puthukkudiyiruppu last week after it came under repeated artillery barrages that killed several patients. The Red Cross and government doctors set up a makeshift medical facility in an abandoned community centre and a school, Wijesinghe said. However, the area was shelled on Monday, she added...
In recent days, the military has reported an increasing flow of civilians out of the war zone. More than 1,000 civilians fled today , and 6,599 reportedly crossed yesterday, even as a female bomber killed 19 soldiers and 10 civilians at an army checkpoint. The government earlier said the blast had killed 20 soldiers and eight civilians.
NYT: but an estimated 250,000 civilians still trapped
On Monday, some 800 civilians had crossed the front lines and were being searched by soldiers before being sent to camps farther afield. The bomber detonated her explosives as she was being searched, said Gen. Udaya Nanayakkara, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan military. Sri Lankan television showed images of bodies, including that of a child, being carried away from the site of the attack.
The military would now change its procedures for processing civilians fleeing the fighting, General Nanayakkara said. “We’ll have to check civilians one by one,” he said. “It’s going to take more time.”
NYT: Palestine stops paying for Gaza wounded in Israeli hospitals
“We already pay $7 million a month to Israeli hospitals,” [Palestinian health minister, Fathi Abu Moghli] said in a telephone interview. “Since the first day of the Gaza aggression, I said that I will not send to my occupier my injured people in order for him to make propaganda at my expense, and then pay him for it.”
An Israeli clinic set up with great fanfare on the Israeli-Gaza border the day the war ended, Jan. 18, has already closed, since both Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority essentially boycotted it. The Palestinian Authority pays for much of its citizens’ care in Israel from its budget.
Israel has long pointed to its medical care of Palestinians as an example of its advanced skills and humanitarianism. Palestinians generally are eager to gain the benefit, but are also resentful. As relations have chilled, each side has accused the other of political manipulation.
Gdn: some Rafah tunnels back in business
But while the sandy border is marked with many large craters, the damage caused to the tunnels was, in many cases, repaired within days. Already some are operating again and new tunnels are being dug under the close eye of Hamas officials, who walk from one tent to the next clutching their walkie-talkies.
The smugglers believe their tunnels were simply too deep to be badly damaged, even by the heavy 500lb or one-tonne bombs dropped by Israeli F-16s. In most cases, the serious damage was only to the entrances to the tunnels, which were soon uncovered again by the Palestinians using bulldozers and then rebuilt. It may be that the focus of the Israeli attacks was on the weapons tunnels, which are closely guarded by Hamas and other armed groups and not open to public view.
NYT: Egyptians detain Gaza protester
For two days the authorities denied that he was being held. Then on Sunday, at 10 p.m., a security official at the American University in Cairo, where Mr. Rizk studies, was able to confirm his arrest to his family...
Now, according to the accounts of five eyewitnesses to Mr. Rizk’s arrest, and interviews with his parents, his sisters, human rights lawyers and some of his professors, it appears that the Egyptian authorities have turned to the country’s emergency law to silence criticism of its Gaza policy. The law, adopted to combat terrorism after President Anwar el-Sadat was gunned down in 1981, allows the government to detain people without charge and effectively eliminates any right to due process.
The government acknowledges holding about 1,800 prisoners without charge under the emergency law, but human rights groups say the number could be closer to 10,000. The law is routinely used against members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated social and political movement. Dozens of Brotherhood followers have been arrested since the start of the Gaza conflict...
The group [that Phillip was with, Popular Committee in Solidarity With the Palestinian People] met Friday morning and took a bus north from Cairo to the Qalyubiya governate, an hour away. The demonstrators walked for about two hours, waving Palestinian flags and talking with local residents.
NYT: Israel strikes Gaza targets, bans Palestinians from entering Israel ahead of parliamentary election
CSM: cease-fire discussions a domestic political issue for Israel
Less than 48 hours before parliamentary elections here, the drive to reach a lasting cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel following their 22-day war is taking on new urgency.
If a deal isn't in place when Israelis go to the polls Tuesday, the ruling Kadima Party could take a significant hit. The centrist party led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is already in second place in polls behind the hawkish Likud party, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing politician who was prime minister from 1996 to 1999. Ms. Livni and Mr. Netanyahu are the two main contenders for the country's new premiership.
But the left-leaning Labor Party, headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, could lose the most political ground as a result of the war – which came to an inconclusive halt Jan. 18 after both sides declared unilateral cease-fires – as many Israelis blame the "peaceniks" for not dealing with Hamas rockets on southern Israel much sooner.
BBC: Israeli elections Q and A
BBC: al-Qaeda Tunisia bombers in French court (minus Khalid Sheikh Mohammed)
A French court has sentenced a German convert to Islam to 18 years over an attack on a Tunisian synagogue that killed 21 people in 2002. Christian Ganczarski, who prosecutors believed had links with al-Qaeda, was arrested in France in 2003.
The court also sentenced Walid Nouar, the brother of the suicide bomber, to 12 years for his part in the attack on the synagogue in Djerba. Both men denied the charges and are expected to appeal against the verdict... French prosecutors believe it was organised by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US - who is being held at the Guantanamo detention centre.
LAT: Obama invokes "state secrets" in case against Boeing subsidiary for rendition flights
Douglas Letter, representing the Department of Justice, told a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the Obama administration's position was "exactly" the same as that of the Bush White House, which argued the lawsuit would reveal government secrets and threaten national security.
The case was "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials of the new administration," said Letter, who was also involved in the case under President Bush. He said the judges would understand the government's stance once they read a classified affidavit explaining its claim of so-called state secrets privilege.
The ACLU lawsuit was filed against a transportation services company that helped the CIA move the men to places of interrogation as part of the "extraordinary rendition" program. The government intervened on behalf of Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Co., which the lawsuit said filed flight plans, devised itineraries and obtained landing permits for the jets that carried the men to places where they could be interrogated under torture.
A federal trial judge ruled last year that the government had properly invoked its state secrets privilege and dismissed the suit. The American Civil Liberties Union appealed that dismissal to the 9th Circuit, arguing that the men should be given the opportunity to prove their case without classified material...
Salon: more on state secrets, from Glenn Greenwald
Nobody -- not the ACLU or anyone else -- argues that the State Secrets privilege is inherently invalid... What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration's version of the States Secret privilege -- just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out -- was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn't be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security. That is the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ -- because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny -- and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).
Gdn: the lawyer of one of the parties to the case, the last British citizen still held at Guantánamo, says his release is urgent
NYT: federal court orders California to reduce prison overcrowding
Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety. The panel said that without such a plan, conditions would continue to deteriorate and inmates might regularly die of suicide or lack of proper care...
Federal judges have already ruled that the state’s failure to provide medical and mental health care is killing at least one inmate every month and has subjected inmates to cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
In their ruling on Monday, the judges ruled that reducing overcrowding was the only way to reform the prison health care system and encouraged plaintiffs’ and state lawyers to negotiate a way to cut the prison population. The judges also indicated that they would mandate a prison population cap of about 120 percent to 145 percent of the state’s designed capacity.
Gdn: Mugabe fails to release imprisoned opposition activists as promised
Doctors' affidavits seen by the Guardian reveal a pattern of torture of many of the 30 political and human rights activists held by the state for months. Nine of the prisoners seen by doctors were subjected to simulated drowning, being hung by their wrists in handcuffs and beaten, and high-voltage electric shocks...
Some were to be taken to hospital last Friday and then quietly freed by a judge in order for the regime to save face. Eight were to appear in court yesterday on the understanding they would be freed. But none of the detainees were produced after the prisons commissioner, Major-General Paradzai Zimondi, refused to hand them over...
The MDC is interpreting [Major-General Paradzai] Zimondi's intervention as evidence that the JOC [Joint Operations Command] intends to subvert the power-sharing administration by continuing the violence and intimidation against Tsvangirai's officials and supporters.
OSI: child soldier who recanted testimony in Lubunga ICC trial testifies again
In an unusual move, presiding Judge Adrian Fulford allowed the boy to tell his story without any prompting or interruptions by the prosecution or defense. All unnecessary court officers were removed from the room and the witness was shielded from defendant Lubanga’s direct view...
The beatings the children received the day they were kidnapped, Dieumerci said, only worsened once they arrived at the camp. The recruits were flogged with pieces of wood for even the most minor of offenses, including sickness or exhaustion, he said. They were also flogged if they could not complete a training exercise, misplaced their weapon, or tried to escape...
He was kept as a prisoner in yet another training camp until his father was able to pay for his freedom. After that, he went through a demobilization process with a humanitarian aid group.
Xinhua: a focus on reconciliation amidst mortar fire for new Somali president
President Ahmed, who arrived in Mogadishu on Saturday for the first time since his election on Jan. 31, held "consultative talks" with ministers in the caretaker government, security chiefs and local religious and clan leaders...
"We asked the president to keep on talking with those opposed to his government and accommodate everyone into the peace and he accepted it," Ahmed Diriye, spokesman for Hawiye clan elders who led the delegation of religious and clan elders in Mogadishu, told Xinhua.
Diriye said the president also accepted their offer of mediation between the government and the opposition, adding that the elders would try to get the consent of the opposition leaders for their mediation role...
On Saturday, a number of mortar shells were fired at the Presidential Palace in Mogadishu as the president was holding talks with officials at his residence, but no one was reportedly hurt .
Unlike previously, the Somali security forces and the African Union peacekeeping forces guarding the palace did not respond to the attacks after the president ordered them not to, the presidential spokesman said.
NYT: 4 US soldiers killed by car bomb in Mosul
Mosul, capital of Ninevah Province, remains one of the most violent places in Iraq. American soldiers are waging a counterinsurgency campaign there against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia , a homegrown Sunni extremist group which American intelligence officials say is foreign-led. Mosul is the last urban strong hold of the group; in other provinces they are hiding in rural or mountainous areas. Mosul also has been riven by tensions between Sunni Arabs and Kurds, with the two groups competing for power.
NYT: dealing with guns in the now-calm city of Karbala
The gun laws in Iraq have evolved over the last few years. During the height of the sectarian killing, both American and Iraqi soldiers allowed families one Kalashnikov or other weapon for their protection. In reality, families often kept many more weapons, tucked away in closets, buried in their yards or hidden under floorboards.
Over the last year, as the security in the country has stabilized, there has been an attempt to enforce stricter gun laws. Technically, every Iraqi citizen carrying a weapon is supposed to have a permit, although, of course, many Iraqis have held onto their weapons without permission.
NYT: ETA suspected of Madrid bombing
A car bomb that authorities believe was planted by Basque militant group ETA exploded early Monday near a trade fair complex in northeast Madrid. The blast blew out windows of nearby office buildings and sent up a plume of dark smoke, but there were no injuries.
If ETA was behind the bombing, it would be the first attack by the group in Madrid since a huge car bomb killed two people at Barajas International Airport in Madrid in December 2006.
03 February 2009
mandate to protect [something will be happening here]
BBC: Colombian guerrillas release four hostages...
A helicopter collected the three police officers and a soldier from a pre-arranged spot in the jungle and flew them to Villavicencio, east of Bogota. They were the first captives to be unilaterally released by the rebels in almost a year. The Farc have suffered recent setbacks as the government drives them further into mountain and jungle areas. They have said they intend to free two politicians in the coming days.
The four were greeted by supporters waving flowers after they landed in Villavicencio. They had been among 28 "political hostages" held by the group, which wants to use them to secure the release of some of their own jailed members.
CSM: ...in a new political strategy?
In a combination of miscalculations and Colombian military successes, the rebels lost some of their top leaders in 2008. FARC founder Manuel Marulanda died, apparently of natural causes. FARC Cmdr. Raul Reyes was killed during a Colombian raid on his camp in Ecuador. Dozens of other FARC commanders and key guards deserted or were captured. The biggest blow came in July. Colombian intelligence officers duped the rebels into handing over their most prized hostages – French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three American defense contractors, along with 10 Colombian police and military officers.
But while the FARC has been hurt by those setbacks and by the sustained military and intelligence operations over the past six years, the FARC are estimated to still have nearly 10,000 fighters. A car bomb killed two people in the southwestern city of Cali Sunday night, following a smaller bomb blast in Bogotá last Tuesday that killed two people. The attacks may be rebel messages that they can still strike Colombian cities...
The latest hostage releases, however, could signal a shift in FARC strategy, says Gérson Arias of the Ideas para La Paz, a Colombian think tank... "They may have finally realized that it is politically counterproductive to hold civilians," Mr. Arias says.
NYT: Brazilian riot police occupy Sao Paulo slum in largest operation since 2006
Hundreds of riot police occupied one of Sao Paulo's biggest slums Tuesday following a night of shootouts and car burnings that saw three police officers shot in street combat with bands of young men.
Youths angry over the police killing of a suspect set vehicles and tires ablaze to blockade the streets of the Paraisopolis slum and looted cars and businesses, Sao Paulo's public safety department said in a statement.
Officers invaded the slum firing rubber bullets and lobbing tear gas, leading to overnight clashes in the sprawling hillside slum where some 80,000 people live in squat brick and block homes along narrow alleys. It sits next to some of Sao Paulo's richest neighborhoods...
Authorities were investigating whether the violence was ordered by the First Capital Command, a notorious gang that controls most of the drug trade in Sao Paulo's numerous slums.
The police show of force included officers toting automatic weapons and shotguns while using armored cars to plow through the debris. It was the biggest operation of its kind in South America's largest city since 2006.
NYT: marijuana "king crop" of Mexican cartels
Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust — and brazen — than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.
But these are not the only new tactics: the cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said... Despite the fact that the authorities are discovering more marijuana production inside the United States, most of the cartels’ leadership remains in Mexico and, for now, so does most of the violence...
“The violence has left a large contingent of police on this side of the border,” Sheriff Estrada said. “The killing will stop when somebody dominates. When somebody takes control.”
NYT: Miss Sinaloa, arrested in Mexico in December on suspicion of trafficking, released
Laura Zúñiga, 23, the reigning Miss Sinaloa, was detained along with seven men at a military checkpoint near Guadalajara in December. The police found assault rifles and more than $55,000 in cash in the luxury vehicles they had been driving...
Prosecutors believe that her boyfriend is Ángel García Urquiza, a leader of the Juárez drug cartel who was with her at the police checkpoint. Mr. Urquiza and the other men arrested remain in a federal detention center.
NYT: artillery attacks hit hospital, pediatric ward, in Sri Lanka; government threatens to expel foreigners "sympathetic" to rebels
As the Sri Lankan military continued to push into a small corner of the island controlled by separatist guerrillas, three separate artillery attacks on Sunday struck a hospital overflowing with wounded patients, the last of them hitting a ward of women and children, according to international agencies and health workers. At least nine people were killed and 20 were wounded and the dead were still being counted Monday morning...
It was impossible to ascertain whether the shelling came from the military or the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The hospital is located in a small wedge of land still controlled by the Tamil Tigers in the island’s northeast...
Meanwhile, a senior government official threatened to expel foreign diplomats, aid agencies and journalists who appeared to be sympathetic to the rebels by, for instance, broadcasting images of civilian casualties.
BBC: key international donors encourage Tigers to disarm
The BBC's Ethirajan Anbarasan in Colombo says this is the first time the influential quartet [the US, EU, Japan and Norway, chairs of the Tokyo Conference on Reconstruction and Development of Sri Lanka] has issued such an appeal to the Tamil Tigers. It is also the first international acknowledgement that the rebels may be near to defeat. In a joint statement, the quartet expressed "great concern" for the plight of civilians.
They urged the rebels to "discuss with the government of Sri Lanka the modalities for ending hostilities, including the laying down of arms, renunciation of violence, acceptance of the government of Sri Lanka's offer of amnesty; and participating as a political party in a process to achieve a just and lasting political solution"...
The Sri Lankan government has previously ruled out any ceasefire and has vowed to crush the rebels. The Tigers have said they will not lay down their arms until they have a "guarantee of living with freedom and dignity and sovereignty".
BBC: analysis of Tigers' reduced military capacity
NYT: Iran launches satellite that could be used for weapons
NYT: ...while North Korea prepares long-range missile for launch
North Korea has launched missiles in the past to win political or economic concessions. In recent weeks, it has said that its military had assumed an “all-out confrontational posture” and that it had scrapped all nonaggression pacts with South Korea...
The object is believed to be a Taepodong-2 missile, Yonhap said. The missile is designed to fly at least 4,200 miles, far enough to reach North America, and carry a payload of 1,400 to 2,200 pounds, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.
NYT: Palestinian militants fire long-range rocket into Israel
Tensions and tit-for-tat attacks have spiraled since Jan. 27 , when Palestinian militants detonated a bomb that killed an Israeli soldier patrolling the border.
On Sunday, Palestinian militants fired at least four rockets and a shower of mortar shells from Gaza into Israeli territory, wounding two soldiers and a civilian. The Israeli Air Force responded with a nighttime bombing raid on Gaza. On Monday, militants fired two mortar shells from southern Gaza at Israel and Israel carried out an airstrike against what the military said were members of the launching squad as they tried to flee in a vehicle...
Though small Palestinian militant groups have taken responsibility for the recent fire, even in defiance of Hamas, Israel has said it will hold Hamas responsible for any violations of the calm.
BBC: ...Israel attacks Rafah tunnels in response...
Israel had warned of a harsh response to any further rocket fire from Gaza after the long-range Grad rocket hit Ashkelon on Tuesday. It was the first attack on Israel involving a Grad rocket since the ceasefires. Other rockets and mortars have been launched from Gaza, however, and Israel has bombed targets in the narrow coastal territory...
"I suggest Hamas doesn't fool around with us," said Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak. "The air force is operating in Gaza as we speak. We promised calm in the south and we will keep our promise."
Residents of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, said they received telephone calls from the Israeli military warning them to leave their homes ahead of the air raid.
BBC: ...and limits al-Jazeera's reach inside Israel, in response to Qatar trade dispute
Israeli officials say they are taking measures to restrict the work of the Arabic television network, al-Jazeera, inside Israel. It follows a decision last month by al-Jazeera's owners, the state of Qatar, to cut trade ties with Israel.
The work visas of some al-Jazeera employees based in Israel will not be renewed, according to reports.
Al-Jazeera's journalists will have limited access to Israeli news conferences and briefings.
AP: Hamas leaders in Egypt to discuss long-term truce with Israel
The Hamas delegation, which includes officials from its exiled leadership in Syria, will be briefed by the Egyptians about their separate meetings with the Israelis. Hamas and Israel do not negotiate directly.
Abu Zuhri, who spoke from Damascus in an interview on Al-Jazeera television, again said the group would not negotiate the release of a captured Israeli soldier held in Gaza as part of a cease-fire deal. Sgt. Gilad Schalit was captured in 2006 by Hamas-allied militants.
He also said talk of Hamas ending efforts to arm itself was out of the question. "We are a resistance movement and an occupied people and it is our right to possess weapons," Abu Zuhri said.
NYT: newly trained Palestinian security forces introduced in contested West Bank city
Hebron, the West Bank’s most explosive city, with a combustible mix of hard-line Jewish settlers and Palestinian militants from Hamas and other groups, is undergoing a shake-up through the introduction of hundreds of Palestinian security officers who over the past month have stopped car thefts, foiled drug deals and arrested scores of Hamas gunmen, even seizing explosives and suicide belts. They have also focused on quality-of-life issues like fighting clans and the sales of outdated food and medicine by criminal gangs.
The Palestinian commander, Brig. Gen. Sameh al-Sifi, has dubbed the deployment Homeland Rising. And while that may seem a lofty name for a law-and-order operation, he has a point. The injection of the newly trained security forces into Israeli-occupied Hebron is, both sides agree, a significant step if there is ever to be a Palestinian state...
This is the second phase of a plan to install in the West Bank a Palestinian security force sponsored by the United States and trained by Jordan. The first, begun in May in the northern area of Jenin, has been widely praised. But Jenin was selected as a pilot partly because it has neither Hamas nor Jewish settlers in any significant numbers. Yet here too the deployment is going better than expected.
“Some of the communities and neighborhoods in Hebron haven’t seen a policeman since 1967,” noted Dov Schwartz, aide to Gen. Keith Dayton, the United States security coordinator in the West Bank. “People have turned over criminals, drug dealers and militants. This isn’t some temporary crackdown. It is a sustained and determined effort.”
BBC: Palestinian Authority seeks ICC investigations into war crimes
The PA hopes recognition of the court's jurisdiction will allow it to investigate allegations. Israel does not recognise the ICC's jurisdiction.
The ICC's founding statute says only states can recognise its jurisdiction.
Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said it could take some time to decide whether the Palestinian Authority was legally able to make this move. The court has made public a letter from Palestinian Justice Minister Ali Khashan recognising the authority of the ICC - the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. "My work now is to analyse if this is in accordance with the law," Mr Moreno-Ocampo said.
Human rights groups have called for international investigation of alleged war crimes during the conflict by both Israeli forces and Hamas militants.
CSM: ...but Israel more worried about European trials under "universal jurisdiction"
[I]nstead of international tribunals or the Israeli justice system, the main venue for the cases is expected to be European domestic courts that cite a legal approach known as "universal jurisdiction" that allows for the trial of cases of heinous acts, torture, or war crimes that allegedly occur outside their own borders.
Israelis consider the threats part of an ongoing political witch hunt. Palestinians and humanitarian activists, on the other hand, see the domestic courts as the only forum to argue whether war crimes were committed...
Just last week, a Spanish judge announced an investigation, sparking tension between Israel and Spain, and spurring more speculation in Israel of war crimes efforts...
In her debut address as the US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice called on Israel to investigate the behavior of its military in the recent Gaza war and accused Hamas of its own violations for firing rockets at Israeli towns and working out of civilian areas.
An Israeli investigation is unlikely given the conviction by most Israelis that the Israel military did its best to limit injury to civilians. Israel and the US say Hamas has broken international law by shooting rockets at towns and cities and using Palestinian civilian areas as a base.
Ironically, Israel was one of the first countries to invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction when its court system asserted its right to try Nazi chief Adolph Eichmann for crimes against humanity and war crimes during World War II.
NYT: Taliban suicide bomber kills 21 Afghani police
The attacker struck in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, a mountainous area where the government’s authority is being contested by the Taliban. Oruzgan is the birthplace of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement...
In 2007, about 140 suicide bombers struck in Afghanistan; in 2008, the number dropped to about 80. As security has tightened against suicide attackers, the Taliban has turned to roadside bombs; in 2008, the number of attacks was double that in 2007.
NYT: Taliban attacks major bridge near Khyber Pass, causing suspension of NATO supply routes
NYT: new supply routes probably not through Kyrgyzstan, as the government denies US continued use of base
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, said during a trip to Central Asia last month that Manas air base would be key to plans to boost U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan by up to 30,000 soldiers in the coming months... The United States set up the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan and a base in neighboring Uzbekistan after the September 2001 terror attacks, to back operations in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan expelled U.S. troops from the base on its territory in 2005 in a dispute over human rights issues, leaving Manas as the only U.S. military facility in the immediate region.
CSM: instead, Uzbekistan routes likely
NYT: UNHCR official kidnapped in normally calm Quetta, Pakistan
High-profile kidnappings and other attacks have become more routine in Pakistan, particularly in Peshawar, the hub of the northwestern Pakistani frontier, which has experienced a spate of attacks on diplomats and Westerners in recent months...
A Pakistani security official in Quetta said he believed the abduction had probably been carried out either by the Taliban, which have a presence in the city, or by a group seeking a ransom. The official described the abduction as the first kidnapping of a Westerner in the city in recent memory, and he said it appeared to be modeled on the recent abductions in Peshawar.
Baluchistan, not far from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, has seen a low-level insurgency led by nationalists who are demanding more autonomy and a greater share of the province’s natural resources. At the same time, the Taliban have also maintained a presence in several districts of the province, especially in the areas near the border with Afghanistan.
BBC: Pakistan military claims 16 Taliban killed in Swat Valley offensive
The military launched its offensive last week in response to a public outcry over the Taleban's growing strength in Swat. The clash is the latest in an operation against an increasingly powerful Taleban insurgency in Swat. The militants have tightened their hold on the scenic valley, banning girls' education, setting up their own courts and executing those they oppose, sometimes beheading their victims.
Last week the military launched a fresh offensive against the Taleban with the army chief and the government vowing to restore state authority in Swat. But locals say the army action is often indiscriminate and officials report that women and children are among the dead from Sunday's fighting.
Reuters: ...amidst claims of civilian exodus
"Thousands of people are migrating from the areas of fighting because of the military operations and the militants' use of civilians as human shields," the valley's top administrator, Shaukat Khan Yousafzai, told Reuters.
"One of my officials said his village has a population of 25,000 people and almost 80 percent had left ... People are angry and disappointed," he said.
The people leaving Swat are joining several hundred thousand other villagers who have fled fighting elsewhere in the northwest, in particular the Bajaur region on the Afghan border.
BBC: Pakistani diplomat, citing government investigation, says Mumbai attacks not planned in Pakistan
BBC: Kashmir protests over jailed separatist leaders
Overall violence has fallen significantly across Indian-administered Kashmir since Delhi and Islamabad began peace talks in 2004. However the peace process has been abeyance since November's attack in Mumbai (Bombay) which killed at least 179 people and which India blamed on Pakistan.
BBC: 15 Indian policemen killed by Maoist rebels in western state of Maharashtra
The policemen were ambushed in a jungle near a village in the east of the state, described as a rebel stronghold, on Sunday...
Senior police official AN Roy told the AFP news agency that the clash happened in an area, where there had been regular battles with the Maoists in the past.
"The patrolling party was ambushed by the Naxalites [as the rebels are called in India] and 15 of our men died. The encounter went on for nearly one and a half to two hours," he said. "Our people also fired, killing and injuring some Naxalites."
This was the worst rebel attack in the state, he said. Reports said that the rebels had fled with some police weapons and a mortar shell.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said the Maoist insurgency is the "single biggest threat" to India's security.
WP: Christopher Hill named US ambassador to Iraq
Hill is a consummate dealmaker, but he does not speak Arabic, and his expertise lies in Europe and Northeast Asia. He was ambassador to Poland, Macedonia and South Korea and also was a top negotiator to the Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s...
Over the course of four years, Hill was largely responsible for dramatically shifting the Bush administration's policies on North Korea, despite opposition from Vice President Cheney, who opposed making what he considered concessions to the North Korean government. Hill struck a deal with North Korea and then, step by step, persuaded Pyongyang to halt its nuclear reactor and begin to disable it... In Seoul, he broke with diplomatic precedent -- and charmed the South Korean public -- by repeatedly visiting universities and other hotbeds of anti-Americanism to give speeches and have debates. He established an online chat room and personally answered questions from Koreans under the name "ambassador."
Hill's mentor in the 1990s was Richard C. Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador who was recently named special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Holbrooke described Hill as "brilliant, fearless and argumentative" in his book on the Dayton negotiations.
NYT: preliminary results in Basra and Mosul show support for Prime Minister al-Maliki's parliamentary slate
In two crucial but very different parts of Iraq — here in strategic Basra in the south and still violent Mosul in the north — people voted in provincial elections for similar aims: security and a centralized state strong enough to fend off those who seek to divide it...
“We are witnessing the revival of Iraqi nationalism,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center, based in Dubai. “This has unified Iraqis against a number of threats.”
Mr. Alani said it was no surprise that this trend appeared to be most pronounced in the early voting results in Basra and Mosul, which he called “historic front lines.” These two cities and their surrounding regions, along with Baghdad in the center, were cobbled together in 1926 from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire to create Iraq. In the 1980s, Basra bore the brunt of the Iraq-Iran war. Mosul, with its long-troubled relations with Kurds, was the launching pad for Mr. Hussein’s atrocities against the rebellious Kurds during the same time in the adjacent Kurdistan region.
BBC: recruiter of women suicide bombers detained in Iraq, as US starts releasing Iraqi detainees under security pact
The US said it was scheduled to release up to 1,500 detainees each month, according to a statement quoted by Associated Press news agency. The US still holds about 15,000 detainees in Iraq, and the agreement - which came into force last month - states that all should be released in an orderly manner, or transferred to Iraqi custody...
Iraqi militants have increasingly used women to carry out suicide attacks, hiding explosives under their clothes as they are less likely to be searched than men. In the video [confession], which was shown to journalists in Baghdad, the woman said she had prepared the women for suicide before sending them for terror training at insurgent bases.
She said she had to speak to one elderly woman several times before persuading her to blow herself up at a bus station. She said it also took two weeks to recruit another woman who was a teacher and had problems with her husband and his family, according to the confession.
The new recruit eventually attacked members of government-backed Sunni groups in Diyala, Samira Jassim said.
BBC: major parties in European Parliament urge EU member states to accept Guantánamo detainees
The Christian Democrat, Socialist and Liberal blocs said they wanted states to accept prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear they might be mistreated.
"Europe cannot stand back and shrug its shoulders," said the Liberal bloc's leader, Graham Watson, during a debate...
Last week, EU foreign ministers said they wanted to help on humanitarian grounds, but could not act until the US demonstrated the prisoners did not pose a credible security risk.
Albania is the only country to have so far accepted Guantanamo detainees on humanitarian grounds, taking in five members of China's Uighur ethnic minority in 2006.
CSM: how will conditions change for Guantánamo detainees under Obama?
How conditions might change for the 245 detainees at Guantánamo is unclear, legal analysts say. Potential issues critics cite include use of solitary confinement, forced feeding of hunger strikers, access to books and religious materials, and communications with family members...
Not all detainees at Guantánamo are entitled to the full protections of the Geneva accords, legal experts note. Suspected war criminals or those charged with crimes can be held under more restrictive conditions, including solitary confinement. A detainee deemed a threat to others can be segregated.
What is less clear is whether most detainees are entitled to more social contact with their fellow prisoners.
NYT: Australia concludes largest terrorism trial in history, Muslim cleric sentenced to 15 years
The seven men were arrested in November 2005 after an undercover police operation found they were plotting to attack landmarks in their home city of Melbourne.
The men were convicted last September under legislation introduced in Australia following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Victoria State Supreme Court sentenced Mr. [Abdul Nacer] Benbrika to 15 years in prison for intentionally directing the activities of a terrorist organization, seven years for intentionally being a member of a terrorist organization and five years for possessing a compact disc connected with the preparation of a terrorist act. He was the first person to be convicted of leading a terrorist group inside Australia.
BBC: newly elected Somali president asks for "military aid"
The president did not specify if he was talking about extra AU peacekeepers, a UN mission, or another force.
Somali foreign ministry permanent secretary official Mohammed Jama told the BBC the president had spoken to the AU about "extremists who will abuse the peace process". "We are asking the international community to assist," he added...
He was elected president last Friday as part of a UN-brokered plan to try to form a unity government and bring peace to Somalia for the first time since 1991. But the hardline Islamist militia al-Shabab, which took advantage of Ethiopia's pull-out to boost its control of the south, accuses him of selling out to the West.
CSM: election of moderate Islamist doesn't mean they can hold on to power
The Ethiopian peacekeepers have withdrawn from Somalia and the radical Islamist militia called Al Shabab is rapidly moving in to take control of the war-battered country.
Perhaps the only thing standing in Al Shabab's way is an unlikely enemy: an army of citizens and clerics who are fighting to preserve what's left of the Somalia that they have known for generations. Western experts call them moderate Islamists; they call themselves Ahlu Sunna wa Jamaa.
Compared with the highly trained, well-funded Al Shabab, which took the transitional capital of Baidoa last week, Ahlu Sunna is poorly armed, but popular. And although the moderate Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was elected president of Somalia by a transitional parliament last week, Ahlu Sunna knows that its time is running out.
NYT: roadside bomb explodes in Mogadishu, AU peacekeepers accused of killing civilians in response fire
At least 20 people were killed and dozens wounded after a roadside bomb exploded in Mogadishu on Monday and African Union forces fired back in response, Somali officials said.
The blast, which African Union officials said was a remotely detonated landmine, hit an African Union peacekeeper truck near one of the African Union bases in Mogadishu, Somalia’s war-ravaged capital.
How many people died and exactly what caused the deaths — the explosion or the African Union soldiers’ response or both — remained in dispute late Monday.
AP: al Shabab leader calls for holy war against peacekeepers
NYT: Sudanese government asks UN peacekeepers to leave rebel town in anticipation of military attack
The request, which represents a challenge to the United Nations’ effort to prevent fighting in Darfur, is the first time the Sudanese have asked international peacekeepers to vacate a specific place in the troubled region.
Josephine Guerrero, a spokeswoman for the United Nations mission, which is known as Unamid, said the request concerned the town of Muhajiriya in southern Darfur, with a population of about 30,000.
That is where Sudan wants to begin an offensive against rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement, a group that is known to have occasionally received Chadian support and that has held the town since mid-January, said Akuei Bona Malwal, Sudan’s ambassador to the African Union...
Ms. Guerrero said the peacekeeping force would like to remain in place.“Our mandate is to provide protection to civilians and we would like to continue doing that,” she said.
BBC: ...but they're not leaving
WP: joint Congo-Rwanda military operation could create "civilian bloodbath"
On paper, the Congolese-Rwandan operation aims to disarm an estimated 6,500 Rwandan Hutu militiamen who fled into eastern Congo after the 1994 Rwandan genocide and have wreaked havoc ever since.
The operation is part of the wide-ranging military, political and economic deal between Congo and Rwanda, which represents a significant rapprochement between the two countries and offers the prospect of finally sorting out a conflict that by some estimates has killed 5 million people over the past decade.
As part of the deal, Rwanda agreed to pull the plug on its proxy, rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, whose advance across eastern Congo last year displaced at least 250,000 people and posed a serious political threat to President Joseph Kabila.
Congo, in turn, agreed to allow Rwandan troops in to fight the Hutu militias, whose leaders allegedly participated in the genocide and are now entrenched in lucrative mining businesses in the east. Rwanda also has enormous economic interests in eastern Congo.
In villages across these green hills, however, there are signs that the joint operation will be messy and brutal. Human rights groups have warned that the operation could easily degenerate into a bloodbath for civilians...
CSM: militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta call off cease-fire
CSM: how to salvage a power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe
NYT: farmers riot, clash with police in Greek port city
The farmers sailed to the Greek mainland on Monday and tried to drive tractors and other farm vehicles to the capital to push demands for government aid and tax breaks following a harsh winter and a drop in commodity prices . Three people were injured in Monday’s clashes, and more farmers arrived in Piraeus on Tuesday to support the protest, news reports said.
In a separate episode on Tuesday, three hooded attackers fired shots and threw a hand grenade at a police station in a district of western Athens, the police said. No injuries were reported. The episode recalled events last month in which a riot policeman was shot and seriously wounded in central Athens in an attack blamed on a militant group called Revolutionary Struggle.
Social unrest is growing in Greece as the center-right government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis struggles to restore its credibility after student riots in December.
BBC: Athens police station attacked
Investigators said they suspected the left-wing group Revolutionary Struggle was behind the pre-dawn attack. Last month, the group claimed it was responsible for shooting and seriously wounding a policeman in central Athens.
Revolutionary Struggle said it was a response to the fatal shooting of a teenager by police in December, which sparked the worst riots in Greece for decades.The policeman who shot 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos has been charged with murder.
A police spokesman said at least three assailants were involved in the attack on the police station in Korydallos. Two were armed with automatic weapons while the other threw the grenade.
A helicopter collected the three police officers and a soldier from a pre-arranged spot in the jungle and flew them to Villavicencio, east of Bogota. They were the first captives to be unilaterally released by the rebels in almost a year. The Farc have suffered recent setbacks as the government drives them further into mountain and jungle areas. They have said they intend to free two politicians in the coming days.
The four were greeted by supporters waving flowers after they landed in Villavicencio. They had been among 28 "political hostages" held by the group, which wants to use them to secure the release of some of their own jailed members.
CSM: ...in a new political strategy?
In a combination of miscalculations and Colombian military successes, the rebels lost some of their top leaders in 2008. FARC founder Manuel Marulanda died, apparently of natural causes. FARC Cmdr. Raul Reyes was killed during a Colombian raid on his camp in Ecuador. Dozens of other FARC commanders and key guards deserted or were captured. The biggest blow came in July. Colombian intelligence officers duped the rebels into handing over their most prized hostages – French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three American defense contractors, along with 10 Colombian police and military officers.
But while the FARC has been hurt by those setbacks and by the sustained military and intelligence operations over the past six years, the FARC are estimated to still have nearly 10,000 fighters. A car bomb killed two people in the southwestern city of Cali Sunday night, following a smaller bomb blast in Bogotá last Tuesday that killed two people. The attacks may be rebel messages that they can still strike Colombian cities...
The latest hostage releases, however, could signal a shift in FARC strategy, says Gérson Arias of the Ideas para La Paz, a Colombian think tank... "They may have finally realized that it is politically counterproductive to hold civilians," Mr. Arias says.
NYT: Brazilian riot police occupy Sao Paulo slum in largest operation since 2006
Hundreds of riot police occupied one of Sao Paulo's biggest slums Tuesday following a night of shootouts and car burnings that saw three police officers shot in street combat with bands of young men.
Youths angry over the police killing of a suspect set vehicles and tires ablaze to blockade the streets of the Paraisopolis slum and looted cars and businesses, Sao Paulo's public safety department said in a statement.
Officers invaded the slum firing rubber bullets and lobbing tear gas, leading to overnight clashes in the sprawling hillside slum where some 80,000 people live in squat brick and block homes along narrow alleys. It sits next to some of Sao Paulo's richest neighborhoods...
Authorities were investigating whether the violence was ordered by the First Capital Command, a notorious gang that controls most of the drug trade in Sao Paulo's numerous slums.
The police show of force included officers toting automatic weapons and shotguns while using armored cars to plow through the debris. It was the biggest operation of its kind in South America's largest city since 2006.
NYT: marijuana "king crop" of Mexican cartels
Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust — and brazen — than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.
But these are not the only new tactics: the cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said... Despite the fact that the authorities are discovering more marijuana production inside the United States, most of the cartels’ leadership remains in Mexico and, for now, so does most of the violence...
“The violence has left a large contingent of police on this side of the border,” Sheriff Estrada said. “The killing will stop when somebody dominates. When somebody takes control.”
NYT: Miss Sinaloa, arrested in Mexico in December on suspicion of trafficking, released
Laura Zúñiga, 23, the reigning Miss Sinaloa, was detained along with seven men at a military checkpoint near Guadalajara in December. The police found assault rifles and more than $55,000 in cash in the luxury vehicles they had been driving...
Prosecutors believe that her boyfriend is Ángel García Urquiza, a leader of the Juárez drug cartel who was with her at the police checkpoint. Mr. Urquiza and the other men arrested remain in a federal detention center.
NYT: artillery attacks hit hospital, pediatric ward, in Sri Lanka; government threatens to expel foreigners "sympathetic" to rebels
As the Sri Lankan military continued to push into a small corner of the island controlled by separatist guerrillas, three separate artillery attacks on Sunday struck a hospital overflowing with wounded patients, the last of them hitting a ward of women and children, according to international agencies and health workers. At least nine people were killed and 20 were wounded and the dead were still being counted Monday morning...
It was impossible to ascertain whether the shelling came from the military or the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The hospital is located in a small wedge of land still controlled by the Tamil Tigers in the island’s northeast...
Meanwhile, a senior government official threatened to expel foreign diplomats, aid agencies and journalists who appeared to be sympathetic to the rebels by, for instance, broadcasting images of civilian casualties.
BBC: key international donors encourage Tigers to disarm
The BBC's Ethirajan Anbarasan in Colombo says this is the first time the influential quartet [the US, EU, Japan and Norway, chairs of the Tokyo Conference on Reconstruction and Development of Sri Lanka] has issued such an appeal to the Tamil Tigers. It is also the first international acknowledgement that the rebels may be near to defeat. In a joint statement, the quartet expressed "great concern" for the plight of civilians.
They urged the rebels to "discuss with the government of Sri Lanka the modalities for ending hostilities, including the laying down of arms, renunciation of violence, acceptance of the government of Sri Lanka's offer of amnesty; and participating as a political party in a process to achieve a just and lasting political solution"...
The Sri Lankan government has previously ruled out any ceasefire and has vowed to crush the rebels. The Tigers have said they will not lay down their arms until they have a "guarantee of living with freedom and dignity and sovereignty".
BBC: analysis of Tigers' reduced military capacity
NYT: Iran launches satellite that could be used for weapons
NYT: ...while North Korea prepares long-range missile for launch
North Korea has launched missiles in the past to win political or economic concessions. In recent weeks, it has said that its military had assumed an “all-out confrontational posture” and that it had scrapped all nonaggression pacts with South Korea...
The object is believed to be a Taepodong-2 missile, Yonhap said. The missile is designed to fly at least 4,200 miles, far enough to reach North America, and carry a payload of 1,400 to 2,200 pounds, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.
NYT: Palestinian militants fire long-range rocket into Israel
Tensions and tit-for-tat attacks have spiraled since Jan. 27 , when Palestinian militants detonated a bomb that killed an Israeli soldier patrolling the border.
On Sunday, Palestinian militants fired at least four rockets and a shower of mortar shells from Gaza into Israeli territory, wounding two soldiers and a civilian. The Israeli Air Force responded with a nighttime bombing raid on Gaza. On Monday, militants fired two mortar shells from southern Gaza at Israel and Israel carried out an airstrike against what the military said were members of the launching squad as they tried to flee in a vehicle...
Though small Palestinian militant groups have taken responsibility for the recent fire, even in defiance of Hamas, Israel has said it will hold Hamas responsible for any violations of the calm.
BBC: ...Israel attacks Rafah tunnels in response...
Israel had warned of a harsh response to any further rocket fire from Gaza after the long-range Grad rocket hit Ashkelon on Tuesday. It was the first attack on Israel involving a Grad rocket since the ceasefires. Other rockets and mortars have been launched from Gaza, however, and Israel has bombed targets in the narrow coastal territory...
"I suggest Hamas doesn't fool around with us," said Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak. "The air force is operating in Gaza as we speak. We promised calm in the south and we will keep our promise."
Residents of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, said they received telephone calls from the Israeli military warning them to leave their homes ahead of the air raid.
BBC: ...and limits al-Jazeera's reach inside Israel, in response to Qatar trade dispute
Israeli officials say they are taking measures to restrict the work of the Arabic television network, al-Jazeera, inside Israel. It follows a decision last month by al-Jazeera's owners, the state of Qatar, to cut trade ties with Israel.
The work visas of some al-Jazeera employees based in Israel will not be renewed, according to reports.
Al-Jazeera's journalists will have limited access to Israeli news conferences and briefings.
AP: Hamas leaders in Egypt to discuss long-term truce with Israel
The Hamas delegation, which includes officials from its exiled leadership in Syria, will be briefed by the Egyptians about their separate meetings with the Israelis. Hamas and Israel do not negotiate directly.
Abu Zuhri, who spoke from Damascus in an interview on Al-Jazeera television, again said the group would not negotiate the release of a captured Israeli soldier held in Gaza as part of a cease-fire deal. Sgt. Gilad Schalit was captured in 2006 by Hamas-allied militants.
He also said talk of Hamas ending efforts to arm itself was out of the question. "We are a resistance movement and an occupied people and it is our right to possess weapons," Abu Zuhri said.
NYT: newly trained Palestinian security forces introduced in contested West Bank city
Hebron, the West Bank’s most explosive city, with a combustible mix of hard-line Jewish settlers and Palestinian militants from Hamas and other groups, is undergoing a shake-up through the introduction of hundreds of Palestinian security officers who over the past month have stopped car thefts, foiled drug deals and arrested scores of Hamas gunmen, even seizing explosives and suicide belts. They have also focused on quality-of-life issues like fighting clans and the sales of outdated food and medicine by criminal gangs.
The Palestinian commander, Brig. Gen. Sameh al-Sifi, has dubbed the deployment Homeland Rising. And while that may seem a lofty name for a law-and-order operation, he has a point. The injection of the newly trained security forces into Israeli-occupied Hebron is, both sides agree, a significant step if there is ever to be a Palestinian state...
This is the second phase of a plan to install in the West Bank a Palestinian security force sponsored by the United States and trained by Jordan. The first, begun in May in the northern area of Jenin, has been widely praised. But Jenin was selected as a pilot partly because it has neither Hamas nor Jewish settlers in any significant numbers. Yet here too the deployment is going better than expected.
“Some of the communities and neighborhoods in Hebron haven’t seen a policeman since 1967,” noted Dov Schwartz, aide to Gen. Keith Dayton, the United States security coordinator in the West Bank. “People have turned over criminals, drug dealers and militants. This isn’t some temporary crackdown. It is a sustained and determined effort.”
BBC: Palestinian Authority seeks ICC investigations into war crimes
The PA hopes recognition of the court's jurisdiction will allow it to investigate allegations. Israel does not recognise the ICC's jurisdiction.
The ICC's founding statute says only states can recognise its jurisdiction.
Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said it could take some time to decide whether the Palestinian Authority was legally able to make this move. The court has made public a letter from Palestinian Justice Minister Ali Khashan recognising the authority of the ICC - the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. "My work now is to analyse if this is in accordance with the law," Mr Moreno-Ocampo said.
Human rights groups have called for international investigation of alleged war crimes during the conflict by both Israeli forces and Hamas militants.
CSM: ...but Israel more worried about European trials under "universal jurisdiction"
[I]nstead of international tribunals or the Israeli justice system, the main venue for the cases is expected to be European domestic courts that cite a legal approach known as "universal jurisdiction" that allows for the trial of cases of heinous acts, torture, or war crimes that allegedly occur outside their own borders.
Israelis consider the threats part of an ongoing political witch hunt. Palestinians and humanitarian activists, on the other hand, see the domestic courts as the only forum to argue whether war crimes were committed...
Just last week, a Spanish judge announced an investigation, sparking tension between Israel and Spain, and spurring more speculation in Israel of war crimes efforts...
In her debut address as the US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice called on Israel to investigate the behavior of its military in the recent Gaza war and accused Hamas of its own violations for firing rockets at Israeli towns and working out of civilian areas.
An Israeli investigation is unlikely given the conviction by most Israelis that the Israel military did its best to limit injury to civilians. Israel and the US say Hamas has broken international law by shooting rockets at towns and cities and using Palestinian civilian areas as a base.
Ironically, Israel was one of the first countries to invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction when its court system asserted its right to try Nazi chief Adolph Eichmann for crimes against humanity and war crimes during World War II.
NYT: Taliban suicide bomber kills 21 Afghani police
The attacker struck in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, a mountainous area where the government’s authority is being contested by the Taliban. Oruzgan is the birthplace of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement...
In 2007, about 140 suicide bombers struck in Afghanistan; in 2008, the number dropped to about 80. As security has tightened against suicide attackers, the Taliban has turned to roadside bombs; in 2008, the number of attacks was double that in 2007.
NYT: Taliban attacks major bridge near Khyber Pass, causing suspension of NATO supply routes
NYT: new supply routes probably not through Kyrgyzstan, as the government denies US continued use of base
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, said during a trip to Central Asia last month that Manas air base would be key to plans to boost U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan by up to 30,000 soldiers in the coming months... The United States set up the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan and a base in neighboring Uzbekistan after the September 2001 terror attacks, to back operations in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan expelled U.S. troops from the base on its territory in 2005 in a dispute over human rights issues, leaving Manas as the only U.S. military facility in the immediate region.
CSM: instead, Uzbekistan routes likely
NYT: UNHCR official kidnapped in normally calm Quetta, Pakistan
High-profile kidnappings and other attacks have become more routine in Pakistan, particularly in Peshawar, the hub of the northwestern Pakistani frontier, which has experienced a spate of attacks on diplomats and Westerners in recent months...
A Pakistani security official in Quetta said he believed the abduction had probably been carried out either by the Taliban, which have a presence in the city, or by a group seeking a ransom. The official described the abduction as the first kidnapping of a Westerner in the city in recent memory, and he said it appeared to be modeled on the recent abductions in Peshawar.
Baluchistan, not far from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, has seen a low-level insurgency led by nationalists who are demanding more autonomy and a greater share of the province’s natural resources. At the same time, the Taliban have also maintained a presence in several districts of the province, especially in the areas near the border with Afghanistan.
BBC: Pakistan military claims 16 Taliban killed in Swat Valley offensive
The military launched its offensive last week in response to a public outcry over the Taleban's growing strength in Swat. The clash is the latest in an operation against an increasingly powerful Taleban insurgency in Swat. The militants have tightened their hold on the scenic valley, banning girls' education, setting up their own courts and executing those they oppose, sometimes beheading their victims.
Last week the military launched a fresh offensive against the Taleban with the army chief and the government vowing to restore state authority in Swat. But locals say the army action is often indiscriminate and officials report that women and children are among the dead from Sunday's fighting.
Reuters: ...amidst claims of civilian exodus
"Thousands of people are migrating from the areas of fighting because of the military operations and the militants' use of civilians as human shields," the valley's top administrator, Shaukat Khan Yousafzai, told Reuters.
"One of my officials said his village has a population of 25,000 people and almost 80 percent had left ... People are angry and disappointed," he said.
The people leaving Swat are joining several hundred thousand other villagers who have fled fighting elsewhere in the northwest, in particular the Bajaur region on the Afghan border.
BBC: Pakistani diplomat, citing government investigation, says Mumbai attacks not planned in Pakistan
BBC: Kashmir protests over jailed separatist leaders
Overall violence has fallen significantly across Indian-administered Kashmir since Delhi and Islamabad began peace talks in 2004. However the peace process has been abeyance since November's attack in Mumbai (Bombay) which killed at least 179 people and which India blamed on Pakistan.
BBC: 15 Indian policemen killed by Maoist rebels in western state of Maharashtra
The policemen were ambushed in a jungle near a village in the east of the state, described as a rebel stronghold, on Sunday...
Senior police official AN Roy told the AFP news agency that the clash happened in an area, where there had been regular battles with the Maoists in the past.
"The patrolling party was ambushed by the Naxalites [as the rebels are called in India] and 15 of our men died. The encounter went on for nearly one and a half to two hours," he said. "Our people also fired, killing and injuring some Naxalites."
This was the worst rebel attack in the state, he said. Reports said that the rebels had fled with some police weapons and a mortar shell.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said the Maoist insurgency is the "single biggest threat" to India's security.
WP: Christopher Hill named US ambassador to Iraq
Hill is a consummate dealmaker, but he does not speak Arabic, and his expertise lies in Europe and Northeast Asia. He was ambassador to Poland, Macedonia and South Korea and also was a top negotiator to the Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s...
Over the course of four years, Hill was largely responsible for dramatically shifting the Bush administration's policies on North Korea, despite opposition from Vice President Cheney, who opposed making what he considered concessions to the North Korean government. Hill struck a deal with North Korea and then, step by step, persuaded Pyongyang to halt its nuclear reactor and begin to disable it... In Seoul, he broke with diplomatic precedent -- and charmed the South Korean public -- by repeatedly visiting universities and other hotbeds of anti-Americanism to give speeches and have debates. He established an online chat room and personally answered questions from Koreans under the name "ambassador."
Hill's mentor in the 1990s was Richard C. Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador who was recently named special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Holbrooke described Hill as "brilliant, fearless and argumentative" in his book on the Dayton negotiations.
NYT: preliminary results in Basra and Mosul show support for Prime Minister al-Maliki's parliamentary slate
In two crucial but very different parts of Iraq — here in strategic Basra in the south and still violent Mosul in the north — people voted in provincial elections for similar aims: security and a centralized state strong enough to fend off those who seek to divide it...
“We are witnessing the revival of Iraqi nationalism,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center, based in Dubai. “This has unified Iraqis against a number of threats.”
Mr. Alani said it was no surprise that this trend appeared to be most pronounced in the early voting results in Basra and Mosul, which he called “historic front lines.” These two cities and their surrounding regions, along with Baghdad in the center, were cobbled together in 1926 from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire to create Iraq. In the 1980s, Basra bore the brunt of the Iraq-Iran war. Mosul, with its long-troubled relations with Kurds, was the launching pad for Mr. Hussein’s atrocities against the rebellious Kurds during the same time in the adjacent Kurdistan region.
BBC: recruiter of women suicide bombers detained in Iraq, as US starts releasing Iraqi detainees under security pact
The US said it was scheduled to release up to 1,500 detainees each month, according to a statement quoted by Associated Press news agency. The US still holds about 15,000 detainees in Iraq, and the agreement - which came into force last month - states that all should be released in an orderly manner, or transferred to Iraqi custody...
Iraqi militants have increasingly used women to carry out suicide attacks, hiding explosives under their clothes as they are less likely to be searched than men. In the video [confession], which was shown to journalists in Baghdad, the woman said she had prepared the women for suicide before sending them for terror training at insurgent bases.
She said she had to speak to one elderly woman several times before persuading her to blow herself up at a bus station. She said it also took two weeks to recruit another woman who was a teacher and had problems with her husband and his family, according to the confession.
The new recruit eventually attacked members of government-backed Sunni groups in Diyala, Samira Jassim said.
BBC: major parties in European Parliament urge EU member states to accept Guantánamo detainees
The Christian Democrat, Socialist and Liberal blocs said they wanted states to accept prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear they might be mistreated.
"Europe cannot stand back and shrug its shoulders," said the Liberal bloc's leader, Graham Watson, during a debate...
Last week, EU foreign ministers said they wanted to help on humanitarian grounds, but could not act until the US demonstrated the prisoners did not pose a credible security risk.
Albania is the only country to have so far accepted Guantanamo detainees on humanitarian grounds, taking in five members of China's Uighur ethnic minority in 2006.
CSM: how will conditions change for Guantánamo detainees under Obama?
How conditions might change for the 245 detainees at Guantánamo is unclear, legal analysts say. Potential issues critics cite include use of solitary confinement, forced feeding of hunger strikers, access to books and religious materials, and communications with family members...
Not all detainees at Guantánamo are entitled to the full protections of the Geneva accords, legal experts note. Suspected war criminals or those charged with crimes can be held under more restrictive conditions, including solitary confinement. A detainee deemed a threat to others can be segregated.
What is less clear is whether most detainees are entitled to more social contact with their fellow prisoners.
NYT: Australia concludes largest terrorism trial in history, Muslim cleric sentenced to 15 years
The seven men were arrested in November 2005 after an undercover police operation found they were plotting to attack landmarks in their home city of Melbourne.
The men were convicted last September under legislation introduced in Australia following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Victoria State Supreme Court sentenced Mr. [Abdul Nacer] Benbrika to 15 years in prison for intentionally directing the activities of a terrorist organization, seven years for intentionally being a member of a terrorist organization and five years for possessing a compact disc connected with the preparation of a terrorist act. He was the first person to be convicted of leading a terrorist group inside Australia.
BBC: newly elected Somali president asks for "military aid"
The president did not specify if he was talking about extra AU peacekeepers, a UN mission, or another force.
Somali foreign ministry permanent secretary official Mohammed Jama told the BBC the president had spoken to the AU about "extremists who will abuse the peace process". "We are asking the international community to assist," he added...
He was elected president last Friday as part of a UN-brokered plan to try to form a unity government and bring peace to Somalia for the first time since 1991. But the hardline Islamist militia al-Shabab, which took advantage of Ethiopia's pull-out to boost its control of the south, accuses him of selling out to the West.
CSM: election of moderate Islamist doesn't mean they can hold on to power
The Ethiopian peacekeepers have withdrawn from Somalia and the radical Islamist militia called Al Shabab is rapidly moving in to take control of the war-battered country.
Perhaps the only thing standing in Al Shabab's way is an unlikely enemy: an army of citizens and clerics who are fighting to preserve what's left of the Somalia that they have known for generations. Western experts call them moderate Islamists; they call themselves Ahlu Sunna wa Jamaa.
Compared with the highly trained, well-funded Al Shabab, which took the transitional capital of Baidoa last week, Ahlu Sunna is poorly armed, but popular. And although the moderate Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was elected president of Somalia by a transitional parliament last week, Ahlu Sunna knows that its time is running out.
NYT: roadside bomb explodes in Mogadishu, AU peacekeepers accused of killing civilians in response fire
At least 20 people were killed and dozens wounded after a roadside bomb exploded in Mogadishu on Monday and African Union forces fired back in response, Somali officials said.
The blast, which African Union officials said was a remotely detonated landmine, hit an African Union peacekeeper truck near one of the African Union bases in Mogadishu, Somalia’s war-ravaged capital.
How many people died and exactly what caused the deaths — the explosion or the African Union soldiers’ response or both — remained in dispute late Monday.
AP: al Shabab leader calls for holy war against peacekeepers
NYT: Sudanese government asks UN peacekeepers to leave rebel town in anticipation of military attack
The request, which represents a challenge to the United Nations’ effort to prevent fighting in Darfur, is the first time the Sudanese have asked international peacekeepers to vacate a specific place in the troubled region.
Josephine Guerrero, a spokeswoman for the United Nations mission, which is known as Unamid, said the request concerned the town of Muhajiriya in southern Darfur, with a population of about 30,000.
That is where Sudan wants to begin an offensive against rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement, a group that is known to have occasionally received Chadian support and that has held the town since mid-January, said Akuei Bona Malwal, Sudan’s ambassador to the African Union...
Ms. Guerrero said the peacekeeping force would like to remain in place.“Our mandate is to provide protection to civilians and we would like to continue doing that,” she said.
BBC: ...but they're not leaving
WP: joint Congo-Rwanda military operation could create "civilian bloodbath"
On paper, the Congolese-Rwandan operation aims to disarm an estimated 6,500 Rwandan Hutu militiamen who fled into eastern Congo after the 1994 Rwandan genocide and have wreaked havoc ever since.
The operation is part of the wide-ranging military, political and economic deal between Congo and Rwanda, which represents a significant rapprochement between the two countries and offers the prospect of finally sorting out a conflict that by some estimates has killed 5 million people over the past decade.
As part of the deal, Rwanda agreed to pull the plug on its proxy, rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, whose advance across eastern Congo last year displaced at least 250,000 people and posed a serious political threat to President Joseph Kabila.
Congo, in turn, agreed to allow Rwandan troops in to fight the Hutu militias, whose leaders allegedly participated in the genocide and are now entrenched in lucrative mining businesses in the east. Rwanda also has enormous economic interests in eastern Congo.
In villages across these green hills, however, there are signs that the joint operation will be messy and brutal. Human rights groups have warned that the operation could easily degenerate into a bloodbath for civilians...
CSM: militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta call off cease-fire
CSM: how to salvage a power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe
NYT: farmers riot, clash with police in Greek port city
The farmers sailed to the Greek mainland on Monday and tried to drive tractors and other farm vehicles to the capital to push demands for government aid and tax breaks following a harsh winter and a drop in commodity prices . Three people were injured in Monday’s clashes, and more farmers arrived in Piraeus on Tuesday to support the protest, news reports said.
In a separate episode on Tuesday, three hooded attackers fired shots and threw a hand grenade at a police station in a district of western Athens, the police said. No injuries were reported. The episode recalled events last month in which a riot policeman was shot and seriously wounded in central Athens in an attack blamed on a militant group called Revolutionary Struggle.
Social unrest is growing in Greece as the center-right government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis struggles to restore its credibility after student riots in December.
BBC: Athens police station attacked
Investigators said they suspected the left-wing group Revolutionary Struggle was behind the pre-dawn attack. Last month, the group claimed it was responsible for shooting and seriously wounding a policeman in central Athens.
Revolutionary Struggle said it was a response to the fatal shooting of a teenager by police in December, which sparked the worst riots in Greece for decades.The policeman who shot 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos has been charged with murder.
A police spokesman said at least three assailants were involved in the attack on the police station in Korydallos. Two were armed with automatic weapons while the other threw the grenade.
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