NYT: the feat of the snipers who saved Captain Phillips from the Somali pirates
The hard part was not the distance, 75 feet, an easy range for an experienced sniper. Far more difficult were all the moving parts: the bobbing lifeboat, the rolling ship, hitting three targets simultaneously in darkness — and all without harming the hostage, Capt. Richard Phillips...
Several dozen members of the Seals had secretly boarded the Bainbridge on Saturday, having flown to the area, parachuted into the ocean and then climbed aboard inflatable boats they had dropped into the sea. The Navy would not say where they were based or if they were part of even more elite, clandestine military units that have historically been used for hostage rescues.
CSM: but what to do with the one that survived?
[T]he rise of savvy Somali pirates also presents an oceanic legal problem: no clear, practical legal regime exists for the world to capture and try pirates. And there's no reliable place to evaluate the evidence or hold them accountable for their crimes... In fact, most captured pirates, who are usually not kingpins anyway, are simply turned loose on or close to shore.
"The real issue is to create an international legal framework," US Coast Guard chief Adm. Thad Allen said this week. "What you really have to have is a coordinating mechanism that brings these pirates to court where they can be held accountable."
Currently, some legal experts in the US and Europe hope that the Kenyan court system will take up the call – with Mombasa acting as a kind of Hague international tribunal for pirate crimes. Britain, the US, and the European Union have signed memorandums of understanding with Nairobi in recent months. Legal action is underway in Kenya for several Somali pirates already turned over by the US and Germany, in a pre-trial phase being closely watched for its legal acuity.
CSM: the time for more non-kinetic methods?
Mr. Gates calls for "enlightened counter-measures" to bolster vulnerable states that harbor violent networks. And this week, after the rescue of the kidnapped Capt. Richard Phillips, he went further to say there is "no purely military" solution to Somalia "unless you get something on land that begins to change the equation for these kids."
Yes, kids. The pirates were 17 to 19 years old. While they were greedy for a $6 million ransom, they came from poverty and a clannish community resentful of the way that foreign ships have overfished and polluted Somalia's coastal waters.
Xinhua: or just dolphins?
NYT: US congressman almost struck by mortars on visit to Somalia (against administration's advice)
The congressman, a Democrat from Newark, was unhurt and it was unclear if insurgents who routinely shell the airport were trying to hit his plane or were simply unleashing another assault on the city’s main lifeline.
The Shabab, an Islamist insurgent group vying for control of the country, later took responsibility for the attack, Reuters reported.
WP: and another attempted attack, this one thwarted
NYT: in Afghanistan, from the welfare war to...?
Lieutenant Cheek, 25, is a platoon leader for Company C of the First Battalion, 26th Infantry. In nine months in one of Afghanistan’s more violent areas, the company has been a witness to a subtly changing war.
The company arrived after a ferocious battle and in a climate of political uncertainty about the degree of commitment to the war. But it has since been issued heavier fighting vehicles, seen another battalion reinforce its efforts in the region and fought what is essentially a holding mission to prepare for a large influx of American troops that President Obama has ordered to Afghanistan later this year.
This spring, as the pace of fighting has increased with warming weather, there have not been enough American soldiers here to clear Wanat of the insurgents openly living there. But there is a sense that soon the military could be able to break the stalemate of what some soldiers, sensing that Afghanistan had long been neglected in Washington, had taken to calling “the welfare war.”
NYT: creating local militias, Iraq-style
If the militias work in Wardak, the Americans say they want to replicate them throughout the country. So the experience in Wardak has been instructive, for what the Americans can accomplish and what they cannot...
The trouble came from the Pashtun enclave of Zayawalat, one of five large villages in Jalrez. The Americans setting up the guard force waited patiently, hoping to bring Zayawalat’s elders along. They agreed to a meeting with the elders, and then another and another. At a meeting last week, the fourth, the Pashtun elders said they would make a final decision and report back this week.
But when they showed up Monday morning, the elders said they still were not ready to give up their sons. “It’s not that the people in Zayawalat don’t support the government — they do,” said Hajii Janan, the leader of the Wardak provincial council, who presided over the meeting. “But, as you can see, people are under pressure.”
NYT: more claims of civilian deaths from NATO airstrikes
NYT: Pakistani president signs off on sharia law in Swat Valley
Mr. Zardari had delayed giving the agreement a national stamp of approval, saying that the militants should first demonstrate that they would abide by the cease-fire. He signed the measure under pressure from conservatives, even though little in the valley has changed...
The government now needs to press the militants by monitoring whether they hold up their end of the bargain to lay down their arms, Mr. Sherpao said... Critics of the deal worry that it could simply provide the militants with a new haven from which they can carry out attacks.
AJE: which has some Afghans worried about strengthening militants
NYT: attacks on Punjab signal a dangerous shift
The deadly assault in March in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, against the Sri Lankan cricket team, and the bombing last fall of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the national capital, were only the most spectacular examples of the joint campaign, they said.
Now police officials, local residents and analysts warn that if the government does not take decisive action, these dusty, impoverished fringes of Punjab could be the next areas facing the insurgency. American intelligence and counterterrorism officials also said they viewed the developments with alarm.
“I don’t think a lot of people understand the gravity of the issue,” said a senior police official in Punjab, who declined to be idenfitied because he was discussing threats to the state. “If you want to destabilize Pakistan, you have to destabilize Punjab.”...
The Punjabi militant groups have had links with the Taliban, who are mostly Pashtun tribesmen, since the 1980s. Some of the Punjabi groups are veterans of Pakistan’s state-sponsored insurgency against Indian forces in Kashmir. Others made targets of Shiites.
Under pressure from the United States, former President Pervez Musharraf cut back state support for the Punjabi groups. They either went underground or migrated to the tribal areas, where they deepened their ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
WSJ: Obama may keep secret some DoJ torture memos
Among the details in the still-classified memos is approval for a technique in which a prisoner's head could be struck against a wall as long as the head was being held and the force of the blow was controlled by the interrogator, according to people familiar with the memos. Another approved tactic was waterboarding, or simulated drowning.
People familiar with the matter said some senior intelligence advisers to the president raised fears that releasing the two most sensitive memos could cause the Obama administration to be alienated from the CIA's rank and file, as happened during the Bush administration when Porter Goss, who was unpopular among CIA officers, headed the agency...
The government faces a court deadline Thursday in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which sought the release of three 2005 memos issued by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under former President George W. Bush.
LAT: Lebanese drug traffickers responsible for deaths of 4 soldiers
Lebanese officials said gunmen, using small arms and a rocket-propelled grenade, fired on an army truck in a residential area of Baalbek, a city in the Bekaa Valley. Panicked people hid in their homes and paramedics rushed to remove the wounded.
Officials say the attack was revenge for the March 27 killing at an army checkpoint of a patriarch of the Jaafar clan, which is allegedly heavily involved in the trafficking of hashish and heroin. They predict a harsh response. By early evening, soldiers had raided the homes of the clan's late patriarch, local media reported.
LAT: Hezbollah a united military-political front with growing legitmacy (and public relations)
NYT: how US guns laws affect the illegal traffic to Mexico
Noting there are about 1,500 licensed gun dealers in the Houston area, he added: “You can come to Houston and go to a different gun store every day for several months and never alert any one.”... As a result, in some states along the Southwest border where firearms are lightly regulated, gun smugglers can evade detection for months or years. In Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, dealers can sell an unlimited number of rifles to anyone with a driver’s license and a clean criminal record without reporting the sales to the government. At gun shows in these states, there is even less regulation. Private sellers, unlike licensed dealers, are not obligated to record the buyer’s name, much less report the sale to the A.T.F...
But Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and chief executive of the National Rifle Association, said tightening gun laws in the United States would penalize only people who enjoy marksmanship and hunting, or who buy firearms for self-defense, without solving Mexico’s problem.
AP: Obama to appoint border czar
PCB: the drug war in (revealing) numbers
Bloomberg: Lehman Bros. has enough uranium to make a nuclear bomb
A supply of 500,000 pounds of yellowcake is just “slightly” less than the amount needed to make one bomb, or fuel one nuclear power reactor for a year, if the latest enrichment technologies are used, said Gennady Pshakin, an Obninsk, Russia-based nonproliferation expert.
NYT: Obama may allow Iran to continue nuclear program under early stages of international negotiations
A review of Iran policy that Mr. Obama ordered after taking office is still under way, and aides say it is not clear how long he would be willing to allow Iran to continue its fuel production, and at what pace. But European officials said there was general agreement that Iran would not accept the kind of immediate shutdown of its facilities that the Bush administration had demanded...
Administration officials declined to discuss details of their confidential deliberations, but said that any new American policy would ultimately require Iran to cease enrichment, as demanded by several United Nations Security Council resolutions.
LAT: North Korea pulls completely out of nuclear talks, says "never again"
LAT: Sri Lankan president orders halt to army offensive during New Year celebrations, giving civilians temporary relief
AJE: while rebels call for permanent, internationally-recognized ceasefire
NYT: conflict not over in Thailand, but "red shirts" protests are
The red shirts, as the protesters are known, draw their strength from the northern and northeastern regions of Thailand. Many are farmers and small-businessmen who portray themselves as battling an entrenched, unelected but influential elite, notably the judiciary, the military and the powerful advisers of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
A central grievance of the red shirts is that the will of the electorate has been repeatedly thwarted: three prime ministers since 2006 have been forced from office — one in a military coup in 2006 and two removed by the courts in highly politicized trials...
Many of the red shirts are followers of Thaksin Shinawatra, the charismatic prime minister ousted in the 2006 coup who is seen by the poor as their champion and by the elite as a threat. Convicted last year of abuse of power and facing other charges in Thailand, he now lives in exile. Mr. Thaksin’s position now appears weakened by the collapse of the protests.
NYT: China releases a national human rights action plan, in part to ease dissatisfaction with public security officials
The two-year plan promises the right to a fair trial, the right to participate in government decisions and the right to learn about and question government policies. It calls for measures to discourage torture, such as requiring interrogation rooms to be designed to physically separate interrogators from the accused, and for measures to protect detainees from other abuse, from inadequate sanitation to the denial of medical care.
There are also specific protections for children, women, senior citizens, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
Human rights activists applauded Beijing officials for showing an interest in the issue. But they cautioned that any implementation would require years of work by local, provincial and national government agencies, many of which have shown little interest in initiatives that may limit their power...
Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor who specializes in China’s legal system, said that the action plan was the result of growing worries in the Chinese leadership about public dissatisfaction with security forces and even outright hostility to police officers.
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lebanon. 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.
21 February 2009
bad liars [caught on satellite]
WP: bombing reflects, deepens sectarian rift in northwest Pakistan, kills at least 30
The suicide bombing, which turned a solemn [Shia] mourning procession into a scene of strewed limbs and bloody clothing, provoked a frenzy of retaliatory violence against local Sunnis, police and witnesses said. Dozens of Sunni-owned houses and shops were burned, and security forces imposed a curfew on the area.
BBC: how the cleavage has changed over time
In Pakistan, the focus of the sectarian violence has arguably changed. In the 1980s and 1990s the problem was acute in Karachi and in the province of Sindh.
AP: ...but it appears that the Taliban have agreed to a cease-fire
Slate: technology and warfare: Google Earth pinpoints a US drone base in Pakistan
The picture, together with a second picture of the same site taken sometime this year and posted on Google Earth, destroys much of the political advantage of the U.S. drones. The drones aren't supposed to be a U.S. military presence in Pakistan. They're unmanned, and until now, they were thought to be flown exclusively from the Afghan border. The satellite images, backed by expert analysis, prove otherwise. The drones are on Pakistani soil. And if the drones are there, so are the U.S. personnel who physically manage them.
BBC: militias in Paktia, Afghanistan
The insurgency has raged and grown in this part of the country. Paktia borders Pakistan and is a route for insurgents coming into the country. The Taleban and al-Qaeda have a growing presence here and clashes between them and government and foreign forces have escalated.
NYT: another US soldier found not guilty in killings of 2 New York National Guard soldiers
AJE: Abu Ghraib re-opens as "Baghdad Central Prison"
NPR: how many have died in Iraq since the start of the war?
"By orders of minister's office, we cannot talk about the real numbers of deaths," says a man who works at the Baghdad central morgue statistics office, where all the deaths that take place in Baghdad get recorded. He doesn't want his name used because he's been told by his superiors at the Ministry of Health that he is not allowed to talk to the media. "That's been the case since 2004. When press comes to the morgue, they are taken to our boss's office and we have never been allowed to meet with them."
NPR: Lebanon no longer requiring sect identification
WP: Calderón will not relent, despite demonstrations against militarization
Calderón, who has sent more than 45,000 troops to fight the cartels, said the military would remain on patrol until the government had control of the most violent parts of the country and civil authorities were fully able "to confront this evil."
Only then, he said, "will the army have completed its mission." Turf battles involving the drug traffickers, who are fighting the army, police and one another in order to secure billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, took the lives of more than 6,000 people in Mexico last year. The pace of killing has continued in 2009, with more than 650 dead, most in the violent border cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. In the past few days, a running gun battle between soldiers and gunmen through the streets of the northern city of Reynosa, captured live on television, left five people dead.
LAT: Ciudad Juárez police chief opts out after threats, though
BBC: photos of the violence indicate why
SDT: lessons from Colombia's drug war (via Adam Isacson)
The drug-trafficking operation in Mexico is different than in Colombia. While there is some marijuana and opium grown in Mexico, as well as methamphetamine manufacturing, the cartels aren't fighting over production. They are battling to control the smuggling routes used to move drugs, including Colombian cocaine, into the United States...
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland’s special envoy on German affairs and a former foreign minister, summed up Warsaw’s objections to Mrs Steinbach’s planned appointment. “It is as if the Vatican had decided to give the Holocaust-denying Bishop [Richard] Williamson the task of overseeing its relations with Israel,” he said.
NYT: Guantánamo complies with Geneva Conventions, according to Pentagon report
Slate: (other) prison growth in the US
The United States has a prison population like nowhere else. With one out of every 100 adults behind bars, our incarceration rate is the highest in the entire world. Our inmates—1.5 million in prison, with another 800,000 in jail—comprise one-third of the world's total. This is a surprisingly recent development. After barely budging for 50 years, our incarceration rate increased sevenfold (to 738 per 100,000 people) between 1978 and 2008.
BBC: Italy implements new rape law
The decree sets a mandatory life sentence for the rape of minors or attacks where the victim is killed.
++
Slate: Q: does decapitation have a special meaning in Islam?
A: Yes, but it's important in other cultures, too. [eg, Mexican drug gang violence above.]
++
Salon: Murakami accepts award in Israel
In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies...
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.
NYT: resisting North Korean propaganda by parody
The suicide bombing, which turned a solemn [Shia] mourning procession into a scene of strewed limbs and bloody clothing, provoked a frenzy of retaliatory violence against local Sunnis, police and witnesses said. Dozens of Sunni-owned houses and shops were burned, and security forces imposed a curfew on the area.
BBC: how the cleavage has changed over time
In Pakistan, the focus of the sectarian violence has arguably changed. In the 1980s and 1990s the problem was acute in Karachi and in the province of Sindh.
But tough policing - especially in Karachi - over this period meant that many militants were either killed or arrested.
Slate: more skepticism on the Swat Valley deal
...as respected journalist Ismail Khan notes in an article in today's Dawn, the country's most widely read English-language newspaper, the deal calls for Pakistan's secular criminal code to be observed, unless a council of sharia judges rules that some law or another is un-Islamic. The deal also calls for a halt in the fighting between the Pakistani army and the Taliban militias.
The key facts here are that, at the moment, there is no working judicial system of any sort in the Swat Valley—and that the Taliban militias have routed the numerically superior Pakistani army in their armed confrontations. So the deal imposes national secular authority even more than it legitimizes sharia justice. And given the balance of power, it's unclear why the Taliban would go along with that.
The deal was made not with "the Taliban" as a whole—the term implies a more cohesive entity than actually exists—but rather, specifically, with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, whom the Pakistanis arrested two years ago for leading jihadist raids across the border into Afghanistan. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up the struggle and to work for peace.
The hope is that he would strike a deal with his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, who is the deputy to a much more militant Taliban leader—or that, if he can't come to terms with his son-in-law, a wedge might be driven between various Islamist factions, peeling Sufi Muhammad and his followers away from the radicals and thus strengthening the hand of the central government.
This is why the deal is not only ill-fated but potentially disastrous: It reveals the severe weakness of the Pakistani state. The politicians pursued the deal only because the state cannot control its own territory. Unless Sufi Muhammad can convince his son-in-law to accept peace and obeisance to secular authority in exchange for a parcel of land where Islamic law carries some weight, the deal is more likely to convince the militant Taliban simply to press on for more favors still.AP: ...but it appears that the Taliban have agreed to a cease-fire
Slate: technology and warfare: Google Earth pinpoints a US drone base in Pakistan
The picture, together with a second picture of the same site taken sometime this year and posted on Google Earth, destroys much of the political advantage of the U.S. drones. The drones aren't supposed to be a U.S. military presence in Pakistan. They're unmanned, and until now, they were thought to be flown exclusively from the Afghan border. The satellite images, backed by expert analysis, prove otherwise. The drones are on Pakistani soil. And if the drones are there, so are the U.S. personnel who physically manage them.
BBC: militias in Paktia, Afghanistan
The insurgency has raged and grown in this part of the country. Paktia borders Pakistan and is a route for insurgents coming into the country. The Taleban and al-Qaeda have a growing presence here and clashes between them and government and foreign forces have escalated.
But Ahmadabad district is an exception, thanks to the gunmen of the Arbakai, a tribal militia that has protected this area and its people for centuries, making it something of a safe-haven from the violence all around.
They are a volunteer force of men and boys, armed with old rifles and true grit. They are part of a traditional code of conduct and honour called Pashtunwali.The tribal elder is Haji Gulam Khan. He tells us that the area is stable and that there is a good relationship between the people and the government.
He is in no doubt who to thank: "If it weren't for the Arbakai, this area would've been controlled by the Taleban or mafia groups."
AJE: US acknowledges 13 civilians killed in missile strike in Herat earlier this week
NYT: another US soldier found not guilty in killings of 2 New York National Guard soldiers
AJE: Abu Ghraib re-opens as "Baghdad Central Prison"
NPR: how many have died in Iraq since the start of the war?
"By orders of minister's office, we cannot talk about the real numbers of deaths," says a man who works at the Baghdad central morgue statistics office, where all the deaths that take place in Baghdad get recorded. He doesn't want his name used because he's been told by his superiors at the Ministry of Health that he is not allowed to talk to the media. "That's been the case since 2004. When press comes to the morgue, they are taken to our boss's office and we have never been allowed to meet with them."
The reason, he says, is because the number of deaths the morgue registers never corresponds with numbers from the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Interior.
"They do it on purpose," he says. "I would go home and look at the news. The ministry would say 10 people got killed all over Iraq, while I had received in that day more than 50 dead bodies just in Baghdad. It's always been like that — they would say one thingm but the reality was much worse."...
Dougherty [of Iraq Body Count] estimates at least 20,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during U.S. military operations.
The military and human rights groups often disagree over whether victims were civilians or insurgents.
Econ: Turks and (Iraqi) Kurds getting along better for the moment
Turkish officials, who used to dismiss Iraq’s Kurdish leaders as “tribal upstarts”, privately concede that part of the solution is to co-opt Iraq’s Kurds. In the past year Turkish intelligence men and diplomats have held secret talks with Nechirvan Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish region’s prime minister, to get the PKK to call off its fight, even as Turkish aircraft continue, with America’s blessing, to pound rebel strongholds near Iraq’s mountain border with Iran. One idea is that rebels untainted by violence might be coaxed home and their leaders offered cash inducements to move to any European country that would take them in.
NYT: Netanyahu invites Kadima and Labor parties to form moderate coalition
Mr. Netanyahu and Ms. Livni have agreed to meet Sunday, but the negotiations are likely to be tough. Ms. Livni, his chief rival for the premiership, has said she would rather go into opposition than serve as a fig leaf for a coalition of the right.
Mr. Barak, whose Labor Party fared badly in the elections, has already said he would head into the opposition.
To many here, it is increasingly likely that Mr. Netanyahu’s government will consist exclusively of parties from the right, which oppose a Palestinian state and favor expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, making it much harder for him to exercise his pragmatic penchant.
NPR: Saudi religious police facing more constraintsNPR: Lebanon no longer requiring sect identification
WP: Calderón will not relent, despite demonstrations against militarization
Calderón, who has sent more than 45,000 troops to fight the cartels, said the military would remain on patrol until the government had control of the most violent parts of the country and civil authorities were fully able "to confront this evil."
Only then, he said, "will the army have completed its mission." Turf battles involving the drug traffickers, who are fighting the army, police and one another in order to secure billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, took the lives of more than 6,000 people in Mexico last year. The pace of killing has continued in 2009, with more than 650 dead, most in the violent border cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. In the past few days, a running gun battle between soldiers and gunmen through the streets of the northern city of Reynosa, captured live on television, left five people dead.
LAT: Ciudad Juárez police chief opts out after threats, though
BBC: photos of the violence indicate why
SDT: lessons from Colombia's drug war (via Adam Isacson)
The drug-trafficking operation in Mexico is different than in Colombia. While there is some marijuana and opium grown in Mexico, as well as methamphetamine manufacturing, the cartels aren't fighting over production. They are battling to control the smuggling routes used to move drugs, including Colombian cocaine, into the United States...
The strategy of Mexico's leaders is to break the cartels into smaller pieces, as happened in Colombia, where local police in urban areas were better able to get a handle on street crime once the larger criminal organizations receded.
The assumption is that smaller drug operations would be better handled by state and local police, Shirk said. But it is not clear such a strategy will succeed, and institutional corruption presents a challenge...
But even if the Mexican government is successful in breaking up the big cartels, neither Mexican soldiers nor U.S. equipment and training are going to stop the demand for drugs, [former DEA regional director] Holifield said.
“The biggest lesson is for the U.S.,” he said. “And that is to stop using (drugs). Until that happens, nothing the U.S. does can prevent these people from doing this. There is absolutely no way to stop it.”
NPR: on top of that drug demand issue, US also arming Mexico, informally
The weapons and ammunition are being bought on the black market and at gun shows, but mostly from licensed dealers. Arizona and Texas make it especially easy to buy guns retail. Basically, any adult with a valid ID and no criminal record can buy as many as he or she wants...Authorities call the weapons smuggling trafico de la hormiga, or "ant traffic," because it's done in small steady shipments to avoid detection. And after all, the main mission of the customs service is not examining vehicles leaving the U.S....nearly 8,000 guns sold in America last year were traced to Mexico. That was more than double the number the year before.
Econ: Ortega as Somoza
WP: LTTE bomb Colombo, kill three and injure 48
The attack shows the apparent air power of the Tamil Tigers far from the northern war zone, where they are said to be boxed into a 34-square-mile sliver of the jungle, with government troops closing in.
AJE: riots claim lives in Bauchi, Nigeria
Several churches and mosques were set on fire in the violence on Saturday and at least 28 people were injured, but it was not immediately clear what triggered the unrest.
NYT: Latvian PM steps down, gov't dissolves over recession
BBC: 100,000 march in Dublin
Many are angry at plans to impose a pension levy on public sector workers.
Trade union organisers of the march said workers did not cause the economic crisis but were having to pay for it.
BBC: Bosnian Serbs ordered to pay for mosques destroyed between 1992-1995
Ind: German MP appointed to head new museum of expellees from Eastern Europe after WWII; Poland takes umbrageWladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland’s special envoy on German affairs and a former foreign minister, summed up Warsaw’s objections to Mrs Steinbach’s planned appointment. “It is as if the Vatican had decided to give the Holocaust-denying Bishop [Richard] Williamson the task of overseeing its relations with Israel,” he said.
NYT: Guantánamo complies with Geneva Conventions, according to Pentagon report
Slate: (other) prison growth in the US
The United States has a prison population like nowhere else. With one out of every 100 adults behind bars, our incarceration rate is the highest in the entire world. Our inmates—1.5 million in prison, with another 800,000 in jail—comprise one-third of the world's total. This is a surprisingly recent development. After barely budging for 50 years, our incarceration rate increased sevenfold (to 738 per 100,000 people) between 1978 and 2008.
BBC: Italy implements new rape law
The decree sets a mandatory life sentence for the rape of minors or attacks where the victim is killed.
It also establishes rules for citizen street patrols to be conducted by unarmed and unpaid volunteers.
The number of sexual assaults fell last year, but three high-profile rapes last weekend sparked national outrage.
Many recent rapes have been blamed on foreigners, especially Romanians. Violent attacks on immigrants have since been reported.
Police say a mob of around 20 masked men beat up four Romanians outside a kebab restaurant in Rome on Sunday in an apparent vigilante attack.
The government has pointed to official statistics saying immigrants committed as many as 35% of crimes in Italy in 2007.But analysts and opposition parties say many of these are related to breaches in immigration rules, and that foreigners have often been unfairly targeted amid a xenophobic backlash from right-wing politicians and the media.++
Slate: Q: does decapitation have a special meaning in Islam?
A: Yes, but it's important in other cultures, too. [eg, Mexican drug gang violence above.]
++
Salon: Murakami accepts award in Israel
In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies...
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.
NYT: resisting North Korean propaganda by parody
08 February 2009
selection and mutations [but the nation died]
AJE: campaigning in Israel
About 20 per cent of Israelis remain undecided on who they will vote for, polling organisations say, and the leading candidates in the election are focusing their efforts on winning them over.
Gdn: in Umm al-Fahm, conflict between far-right and Arab-Israelis
If Lieberman [head of the far-right Israel Our Homeland Party] has his way - and his party has surged ahead of Labour to push it to a humiliating fourth place - Umm al-Fahm may be transferred out of Israel into the Palestinian Authority, something its residents forcefully oppose in exchange for Israeli "villages", or settlements.
If confirmed—the final results are not expected for several weeks—Mr Maliki will be well placed to run for a second term in the general election due within a year. His success, though, did not reflect a trend towards voting along religious lines. Quite the opposite. The prime minister, who leads the Dawa Party, a Shia religious movement, seems to have benefited from his party’s decision to join with others to form the State of Law Coalition, which campaigned, in a non-religious way, on themes of national unity, law and order. Mr Maliki thus managed to profit from an apparent shift to secularism.
IHT: unlikely candidate, former Baathist, wins in Karbala
WP: how General Odierno shaped the surge
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."
Perhaps the most basic change is that suspects are presumed innocent, reversing the inquisitional system brought by Spanish colonizers. The arrested are no longer tossed straight into jail, but can remain free while prosecutors present evidence in hopes of winning an indictment.
Many residents question whether the reforms that include more rights for the accused may be to blame for a yearlong wave of killings in Chihuahua, especially in Ciudad Juarez. A little less than a year after the reforms debuted in the capital, lawmakers responded to public pressure and made more suspects subject to incarceration before appearing in court.
But killings tied to drug trafficking are federal offenses. Robberies, assaults and murders not linked to organized crime are handled in state courts.
LAT: witnesses are being killed in Colombian trial linked to former governor
Diaz, the reform-minded mayor of El Roble in northern Sucre state, had received death threats from paramilitary groups, and told [President] Uribe during a community meeting in February 2003 that he feared for his life.
The 47-year-old doctor had resisted the right-wing militias' efforts to take control of El Roble's treasury and health system for fear they would loot them, according to his son, Juan David.
Diaz had also denounced Arana at the 2003 meeting before Uribe, saying the then-governor backed paramilitary fighters.
Despite his warnings, two months later, in April, Diaz was kidnapped, tortured for five days and killed. The mayor had been on his way to a meeting supposedly to reconcile with Arana.
PCB: meanwhile, Uribe decries left-leaning leaders the 'intellectual bloc' of the FARC
CNN: ...as Colombians for Peace (the NGO organized by said leaders) negotiates release of politician kidnapped in 2002 by the FARC; he was the last politician held, though police officers and soldiers are still in captivity, as well as hundreds of civilians
BBC: reforms in Bolivia reveal regional divisions
There are two main areas where the opposition is likely to continue its fight.
The first is in Congress, where the ruling Movement to Socialism party (MAS) does not have a majority in the upper house.
Dominance by a single man or family was not uncommon in Brazil’s north-east. But it is fading away. The Sarney clan is becoming unusual. Mr Sarney’s daughter, Roseana, has been Maranhão’s governor and currently represents it in the Senate. His son was a minister in Brazil’s previous government. Other relatives are scattered in positions of authority in Maranhão’s courts and the civil service. One of his lieutenants, Edison Lobão, is Lula’s minister for mines and energy. When he took the job, Mr Lobão’s seat in the national Senate went to his son; his wife sits in the lower house. All three of Maranhão’s senators answer to Mr Sarney, as do his fellow senators from Amapá.
This control is aided by the Sarney family’s ownership of Maranhão’s biggest media company.
WP: economic downturn in Russia endangers immigrant laborers
Econ: the problem is likely under-reported, given the targeting of journalists
Both [human rights lawyer] Mr Markelov and [journalist] Ms Baburova were killed in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow. The next day, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies. Her death was part of a continuing battle between fascists and anti-fascists in Russia, which is seldom so plainly revealed to the outside world...
[Baburova] and her friends rightly identified fascism as the biggest and most pressing threat to her country. She swore to fight it. She sensed accurately the social kinship between Stalinism and fascism: the link between attempts to portray Stalin as a “successful manager”, and the current upsurge of nationalism.
BBC: Poland, the Round Table Talks and communism's fall
Twenty years ago, Poland's communist government did something without precedent - it sat down with the banned Solidarity trade union to try to defuse growing social unrest.
Ind: Burmese seeking opportunities risk enslavement
It appears that the businesswoman's potential customers are middlemen, probably Chinese. Through a translator, they discuss placing the men on boats in the South China Sea, trawling for tuna. First, they will be flown to a Chinese city. In echoes of the slave trade, she describes a selection process worthy of a livestock market. In a 21st-century twist, she does so with the aid of pictures on her laptop.
[Human Rights Watch] says that Ethiopian troops burned down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaign against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007. Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.
AJE: opposition in Madagascar undeterred by state violence
LAT: the accord in Zimbabwe and power sharing in general
Critics argue that African-brokered power-sharing deals such as those signed after Kenya's violent 2007 elections and Zimbabwe's disputed vote last year have set a precedent that leaders in Africa can cling to power when voted out, just by refusing to leave office.
They say bodies such as SADC [the Southern African Development Community] and the African Union have done little to protect democracy or stop violence and human rights abuses, tending to side with incumbent leaders such as the long-ruling Mugabe, whose regime has been accused of unleashing violence to stay in power and denying food to opposition villagers.
BBC: water vendors in Abuja
The urban poor in developing world cities including Abuja pay much more for their water than citizens of rich cities such as New York or Tokyo, precisely because the poor have to depend on private providers rather a piped municipal supply.
++
NYT: satirizing politics in Lebanon
Although direct political satire is virtually impossible in most of the Arab world, the impulse has long thrived in more oblique and private forms. “Basmat Watan” draws on the live comedy and song performances known as chansonières, which started in Beirut theaters in the early 1960s and continue today. For centuries before that, villagers here would gather to sing “zajal” — an indigenous form of poetry that is partly improvisatory, a kind of ancient Levantine rap.
About 20 per cent of Israelis remain undecided on who they will vote for, polling organisations say, and the leading candidates in the election are focusing their efforts on winning them over.
Gdn: in Umm al-Fahm, conflict between far-right and Arab-Israelis
If Lieberman [head of the far-right Israel Our Homeland Party] has his way - and his party has surged ahead of Labour to push it to a humiliating fourth place - Umm al-Fahm may be transferred out of Israel into the Palestinian Authority, something its residents forcefully oppose in exchange for Israeli "villages", or settlements.
Its young people may be required to serve in the army, which they currently resist as they consider that army is fighting their own people in the Palestinian Territories. They would, all in all, be required to demonstrate - in Lieberman's own words - their loyalty to the state, both ordinary people and politicians, in exchange for citizenship.
LAT: Livni works women, leftists for their vote
Gdn: and everyone goes clubbing for the youth vote in Tel Aviv
BBC: where a new party has emerged, advocating reform of the closed-list PR electoral system
"Every day he changes his dirty underwear... This is the way also he votes in elections - when there is a dirty government, he replaces it with a clean one.
"And when the second government is more dirty than the first, we swap them back."
With this sales pitch, Haisraelim, a new, single issue party has entered the political fray ahead of Israel's 10 February elections, pushing for a change in the electoral system...
While rockets from Gaza and potential nuclear bombs from Iran are looming large in the minds of Israeli voters, the party's leader, political science Professor Gideon Doron, says the voting system itself is a "threat to Israel's existence".
"We can't make peace and we can barely make war," he says, as he fields phone calls about election billboards.
Econ: parsing the election results in IraqIf confirmed—the final results are not expected for several weeks—Mr Maliki will be well placed to run for a second term in the general election due within a year. His success, though, did not reflect a trend towards voting along religious lines. Quite the opposite. The prime minister, who leads the Dawa Party, a Shia religious movement, seems to have benefited from his party’s decision to join with others to form the State of Law Coalition, which campaigned, in a non-religious way, on themes of national unity, law and order. Mr Maliki thus managed to profit from an apparent shift to secularism.
IHT: unlikely candidate, former Baathist, wins in Karbala
WP: how General Odierno shaped the surge
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."
So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.
Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
NYT: the state of Iraq, after the invasion, surge and elections (not so enlightening analysis)
WP: unclear why presence of mani/pedi salon for soldiers in Mosul not considered, for example
TAL: Americans talk to an Iraqi (part 1; part 2)
"I think people here want me to say yes, that things will get better, so you will feel better."
Reuters: Bush shoe-thrower trial set; if convicted, faces 15 years in prison
WSJ: the tedious and dangerous work sniffing out roadside bombs in Afghanistan
Perhaps the most basic change is that suspects are presumed innocent, reversing the inquisitional system brought by Spanish colonizers. The arrested are no longer tossed straight into jail, but can remain free while prosecutors present evidence in hopes of winning an indictment.
Many residents question whether the reforms that include more rights for the accused may be to blame for a yearlong wave of killings in Chihuahua, especially in Ciudad Juarez. A little less than a year after the reforms debuted in the capital, lawmakers responded to public pressure and made more suspects subject to incarceration before appearing in court.
But killings tied to drug trafficking are federal offenses. Robberies, assaults and murders not linked to organized crime are handled in state courts.
LAT: witnesses are being killed in Colombian trial linked to former governor
Diaz, the reform-minded mayor of El Roble in northern Sucre state, had received death threats from paramilitary groups, and told [President] Uribe during a community meeting in February 2003 that he feared for his life.
The 47-year-old doctor had resisted the right-wing militias' efforts to take control of El Roble's treasury and health system for fear they would loot them, according to his son, Juan David.
Diaz had also denounced Arana at the 2003 meeting before Uribe, saying the then-governor backed paramilitary fighters.
Despite his warnings, two months later, in April, Diaz was kidnapped, tortured for five days and killed. The mayor had been on his way to a meeting supposedly to reconcile with Arana.
PCB: meanwhile, Uribe decries left-leaning leaders the 'intellectual bloc' of the FARC
CNN: ...as Colombians for Peace (the NGO organized by said leaders) negotiates release of politician kidnapped in 2002 by the FARC; he was the last politician held, though police officers and soldiers are still in captivity, as well as hundreds of civilians
BBC: reforms in Bolivia reveal regional divisions
There are two main areas where the opposition is likely to continue its fight.
The first is in Congress, where the ruling Movement to Socialism party (MAS) does not have a majority in the upper house.
It is likely that more than 100 new laws will need to be passed to make the constitution operational. Some members of Podemos, the main opposition party in Congress, are bound to try to block them.
The second area is how the various levels of autonomy will work.
AJE: opposition mounts massive demonstration against Chavez's proposed constitutional reforms
WP: Jews raise concerns about anti-Semitic attacks and rhetoric
Dominance by a single man or family was not uncommon in Brazil’s north-east. But it is fading away. The Sarney clan is becoming unusual. Mr Sarney’s daughter, Roseana, has been Maranhão’s governor and currently represents it in the Senate. His son was a minister in Brazil’s previous government. Other relatives are scattered in positions of authority in Maranhão’s courts and the civil service. One of his lieutenants, Edison Lobão, is Lula’s minister for mines and energy. When he took the job, Mr Lobão’s seat in the national Senate went to his son; his wife sits in the lower house. All three of Maranhão’s senators answer to Mr Sarney, as do his fellow senators from Amapá.
This control is aided by the Sarney family’s ownership of Maranhão’s biggest media company.
WP: economic downturn in Russia endangers immigrant laborers
Econ: the problem is likely under-reported, given the targeting of journalists
Both [human rights lawyer] Mr Markelov and [journalist] Ms Baburova were killed in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow. The next day, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies. Her death was part of a continuing battle between fascists and anti-fascists in Russia, which is seldom so plainly revealed to the outside world...
[Baburova] and her friends rightly identified fascism as the biggest and most pressing threat to her country. She swore to fight it. She sensed accurately the social kinship between Stalinism and fascism: the link between attempts to portray Stalin as a “successful manager”, and the current upsurge of nationalism.
BBC: Poland, the Round Table Talks and communism's fall
Twenty years ago, Poland's communist government did something without precedent - it sat down with the banned Solidarity trade union to try to defuse growing social unrest.
What became known as the Round Table Talks led to the first multi-party elections in the Soviet bloc and a stunning victory by Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa, which heralded the collapse of communism across the eastern half of Europe.
NYT: the legacy of war in Bosnia
Today, the country known as Bosnia and Herzegovina has a new class of young entrepreneurs, a growing influx of tourists and new shopping malls selling everything from luxury ski equipment to mango bathing gel. But the country remains weighed down not just by a bloated bureaucracy, but also by a national brand inextricably linked with ethnic violence and an economy overly dependent on foreign aid.
BBC: technology and warfare: using cell phones to fight Maoists in India
The government in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has given free mobile phones to more than 200 village leaders to help fight Maoist rebels.
Police say the aim is to receive swift tip-offs about rebel movements...
Jharkhnd is under presidential rule, which ensures Delhi's direct control over its administration.
More than 6,000 people have died during the Maoists' 20-year fight for a communist state in parts of India.
The rebels say they are fighting for the rights of poor peasants and landless workers.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said the Maoist insurgency is the "single biggest threat" to India's security.
The rebels operate in 182 districts in India, mainly in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal.Ind: Burmese seeking opportunities risk enslavement
It appears that the businesswoman's potential customers are middlemen, probably Chinese. Through a translator, they discuss placing the men on boats in the South China Sea, trawling for tuna. First, they will be flown to a Chinese city. In echoes of the slave trade, she describes a selection process worthy of a livestock market. In a 21st-century twist, she does so with the aid of pictures on her laptop.
"We make them stand in the sun for one hour," she says. "In the middle of the day when it is very hot. We see how they manage, if they look uncomfortable." The group leans in to see the pictures on her computer. "We make them carry 20 kilos, like this," she continues, showing them photographs I cannot see. "For deep-sea fishing, they may need to carry very big fish for long distances across the ship."
Then comes the seasickness test. "We put them in here," the woman says, but I can't see the picture. I think it must be an enclosed truck or some sort of container on water. "Then we start to move them around. If they are sick or find it hard to breathe we don't select them. This is how we select the best bodies."
The group nods. The images of Burma's Rohingya boat people, fleeing oppression only to be allegedly abused and cast adrift by the Thai military, has drawn international attention to the plight of one of the world's most downtrodden people. The Muslim Rohingyas face particular persecution in military-ruled Burma, but throughout the country, impoverished men and women who see no future at home are embarking on risky journeys abroad in search of an income for their families.
Econ: HRW accuses Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ogaden[Human Rights Watch] says that Ethiopian troops burned down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaign against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007. Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.
AJE: opposition in Madagascar undeterred by state violence
LAT: the accord in Zimbabwe and power sharing in general
Critics argue that African-brokered power-sharing deals such as those signed after Kenya's violent 2007 elections and Zimbabwe's disputed vote last year have set a precedent that leaders in Africa can cling to power when voted out, just by refusing to leave office.
They say bodies such as SADC [the Southern African Development Community] and the African Union have done little to protect democracy or stop violence and human rights abuses, tending to side with incumbent leaders such as the long-ruling Mugabe, whose regime has been accused of unleashing violence to stay in power and denying food to opposition villagers.
BBC: water vendors in Abuja
The urban poor in developing world cities including Abuja pay much more for their water than citizens of rich cities such as New York or Tokyo, precisely because the poor have to depend on private providers rather a piped municipal supply.
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NYT: satirizing politics in Lebanon
Although direct political satire is virtually impossible in most of the Arab world, the impulse has long thrived in more oblique and private forms. “Basmat Watan” draws on the live comedy and song performances known as chansonières, which started in Beirut theaters in the early 1960s and continue today. For centuries before that, villagers here would gather to sing “zajal” — an indigenous form of poetry that is partly improvisatory, a kind of ancient Levantine rap.
The actors in “Basmat Watan” often break into zajals, which by tradition often include satire and plays on words. The name “Basmat Watan” is itself a play on words, with the sounds meaning both “The Smile of the Nation” and “But the Nation Died.”...
Mr. Bou-Gedeon becomes grim when asked about the role of comedy, and dramatic art in general, in Lebanon. Only shallow work is possible, he said, because the Lebanese are always trying to escape themselves.“Shakespeare said, ‘Show a mirror to the people,’ ” he said. “But people do not want to see themselves here. They want an image that is false, not the truth.”
Mr. Khalil, who cites Woody Allen and Mel Brooks as two of his chief influences, concedes that satire is not a very powerful weapon in a country where politics is still largely a matter of feudal allegiance. But he seems willing to settle for making people laugh.
LAT: celebrating Darwin, evolving faster than ever
As it happens, the pace of evolution has been speeding up -- not slowing down -- in the 40,000 years since our ancestors fanned out from Ethiopia to populate the globe.
And in the 5,000 to 10,000 years since agriculture triggered the growth of large societies, the pace has accelerated to 100 times historical levels.
"When there's more people, there are more mutations," [paleoanthropologist] Wolpoff said. "And when there are more mutations, there's more selection."
28 December 2008
(not so) novel incentives [using their heads]
WP: Israel continues to bomb Gaza; moves 6,500 reserve forces to border
"While Israel claims the vast majority of those killed [estimated over 280] were active in Hamas's military operations, Palestinian medical officials in Gaza say that women and children have also been among the dead."
CSM: tunnels are targeted
"Israeli helicopters and combat jets struck the Hamas' main prison compound in Gaza city and, in a simultaneous strike, pounded about 40 supply tunnels leading under the Egyptian border on Sunday. Israel said the tunnels are the main artery of Hamas' improved arsenal of missiles. Palestinians say the tunnels are the only route for imported consumer goods after an Israeli blockade sealed commercial crossings."
NYT: it's Hamas's fault, according to Israel (and the US)
Gdn: Arab states unconvinced
Gdn: photos of the destruction
CSM: UN peacekeeping in South Lebanon
CSM: military officers reluctant to engage in drug interdiction in Afghanistan
"NATO commanders in Afghanistan say they are holding back because of concerns over the legality of drug operations. But they may also be unwilling to conduct what is seen as a politically unpopular mission that could endanger their troops."
WP: CIA gains allies in Afghanistan with Viagra
"The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills...
While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations...
Not everyone in Afghanistan's hinterlands had heard of the drug, leading to some awkward encounters when Americans delicately attempted to explain its effects, taking care not to offend their hosts' religious sensitivities.
Such was the case with the 60-year-old chieftain who received the four pills from a U.S. operative. According to the retired operative who was there, the man was a clan leader in southern Afghanistan who had been wary of Americans -- neither supportive nor actively opposed.
The man had extensive knowledge of the region and his village controlled key passages through the area. U.S. forces needed his cooperation and worked hard to win it, the retired operative said. After a long conversation through an interpreter, the retired operator began to probe for ways to win the man's loyalty. A discussion of the man's family and many wives provided inspiration. Once it was established that the man was in good health, the pills were offered and accepted."
Slate: Kaplan says it's part of a plan, sort of
"The biggest problem is that the country's fate ultimately lies outside its borders. As long as Pakistan's northwest territories remain a lawless free-for-all, with Taliban and al-Qaida fighters crossing the border at will, Afghanistan will never be stable. And as long as Pakistan faces a threat from India to the east, its leaders will never deploy enough troops to quash the insurgents in the northwest territories."
WP: what's that, you say? Pakistan moves troops from Afghan to Indian border
"The Pakistani security official said the additional troops were deployed near the cities of Kasur and Sialkot in Punjab province as well as the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, a region that has been claimed by both countries since the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The official said the troops were removed from areas where insurgents were inactive because of the snowy winter...
Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, welcomed the government's decision to withdraw some troops from the tribal areas. "We will not attack the convoys of army withdrawing from tribal areas as it is a good development," he said, adding that the Taliban would help defend Pakistan against any aggression."
NYT: the Taliban takes opportunity for retribution
Four months ago, the people of the Pakistani mountain village of Shalbandi gained national repute after a village posse hunted down and killed six Taliban fighters who had tied up and killed eight local policemen. The posse displayed the Taliban corpses like trophies for other locals to see, and the village was celebrated as a courageous sign that the Taliban could be repelled.
On Sunday morning the Taliban struck back.
A suicide car bomber exploded at a school in Shalbandi that was serving as a polling place, as voters lined up to elect a representative to the national assembly. More than 30 people were killed and more than two dozen wounded, according to local political and security officials. Children and several policemen were among the dead...Shalbandi had received constant threats after the posse hunted down the Taliban. 'Disrupting elections is a general strategy for these elements,' Mr. Khattak [head of the Awami National Party in the province] said, 'but there was a reason for choosing this specific village.'..
...the efforts of villagers in northwest Pakistan have proved little deterrent to the Taliban, who continue to take over more territory despite major Pakistani military campaigns. In the latest sign of Taliban domination of Swat, militants announced last week that by Jan. 15 no girls would allowed to attend school in the valley."
CSM: voting mostly peaceful in Kashmir
"Instead of picking up a gun, Bashir, who asked that his real name not be used due to his political activities, has used text messages to create "flash mob" protests – instant rallies organized through cellphone messages – and posted videos on YouTube of unarmed protesters being shot, allegedly by Indian forces. Even as India and Pakistan rattle sabers after last month's massacre in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the 20-something's generation has helped Kashmir – the contested state at the heart of the two countries' enmity – take a historic step back from violence."
LAT: fissures and alliances in Basra as elections approach
"The last provincial elections, in 2005, sparked an ugly cycle of assassinations and political violence, in which most political parties were implicated. The next elections could either shatter or bolster the stability established since March, when Maliki ordered the Iraqi army and national police to crack down on armed groups...
As the election nears, Maliki is busy maneuvering. He has tapped local leaders to organize tribes in support of the central government. And under Maliki's direction, the national government has funded $100 million worth of reconstruction projects in Basra, bypassing the provincial council. The national government also has started paying unemployment benefits in the province...
But other factions also are maneuvering. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Maliki's main partner in the national government but also his party's main rival, wants Basra to serve as an anchor of a Shiite-majority nine-state federal region in the south. Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's followers wish to reclaim their influence in the port city, which they dominated before the springtime military offensive. The Al Fadila al Islamiya party of Gov. Mohammed Waeli wishes to hold on to privileges accrued in the last four years, notably its influence in the oil industry."
Reuters: US sends Ambassador to Libya for first time in 36 years
Chris Blattman: while SV was celebrating the season, there was a coup in Guinea
(alas, SV is more pessimistic about the relevance of the coup's lack of popular support)
BBC: generals move to consolidate power - and those people? fickle.
"The junta, which took over in a bloodless coup, has said it wishes to "reassure the international community" of its commitment to stamping out corruption and holding elections in 2010.
Its seizure of power was condemned internationally but Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has urged the world community to recognise the new leadership.
Correspondents say the coup appears to have been welcomed by many people within the country who were tired of despotic rule under the former president and his corrupt government."
Ind: Mauritanian president released from house arrest after August coup
NYT: white dispossessed farmers win ruling against Mugabe, but are unlikely to see enforcement
"The case is rooted in one of the most fraught issues facing not just Zimbabwe, but other nations in the region, especially South Africa: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule...
Zimbabwe’s handling of the land issue has had disastrous consequences. Since 2000, when Mr. Mugabe began encouraging the violent invasion of the country’s large, white-owned commercial farms — once the country’s largest employers — food production has collapsed, hunger has afflicted millions and the economy has never recovered.
Mr. Mugabe presents this redistribution as a triumph over greedy whites. But it set off a scramble for the best farms among the country’s ruling elite, who often had little knowledge or interest in farming, and became a potent source of patronage for Mr. Mugabe. His own relatives, as well as generals, judges, ministers and members of Parliament, were beneficiaries, farmer and human rights groups say.
By this year, the number of white-owned commercial farms dwindled to about 300 from 4,500. Even many of the remaining ones came under assault in this year’s bloodstained election season."
LAT: land is problematic in Kenya as well
BBC: war games in Mogadishu
NYT: post-war, less secular Bosnia
"Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common. Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state...
Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.
'The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,' said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.
'And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,' he said. 'We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.'...
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints."
BBC: elections set for Monday in Bangladesh
"For Bangladesh's eunuchs, river gypsies and prisoners, Monday's general elections will be a unique experience. It is the first time any will be allowed to vote.
But for the vast majority of the country's 81 million voters, the elections will mark a return to Bangladeshi politics as normal, after two years of emergency rule when an army-backed caretaker government tried to rewrite how things are done here."
NYT: Moro Islamic Liberation Front attacks kill 9 in the Philippines
"In recent months, fighting between the separatists and the government has killed dozens from each side and displaced more than half a million Filipinos from their homes. Tens of thousands are in refugee camps in several provinces.
Many Filipinos, particularly Christian politicians and local officials, opposed the agreement with the insurgents that would have created an enlarged Muslim autonomous region. The issue went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the pact was unconstitutional.
Since the agreement was rescinded in August, the government has been trying to repair the situation, and last week it announced a new negotiating panel in the hope that talks with the rebels could be restarted. But rebel leaders say any negotiations will have to resume where they left off: with the territorial agreement the Supreme Court found unconstitutional."
BBC: the Communist Party of the Philippines celebrates its 40th anniversary
"The CPP's armed wing, the New Peoples' Army (NPA), has an estimated 5,000 members and has been fighting the government since 1969 in one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies."
BBC: recovering from natural and human disaster in Aceh, Indonesia
war on drugs
WP: kidnapping of negotiator in Mexico draws attention to a trend
"Independent organizations say Mexico has one of the world's highest kidnapping rates, competing with Colombia, where kidnap crews tied to anti-government guerrillas perfected the art. About 70 abductions are officially reported each month in Mexico, although even the federal attorney general says the true number is far higher. Independent groups say about 500 people a month are abducted in Mexico. Many kidnap crews have been found to include police officers."
WP: Miss Sinaloa busted
"Zúñiga was arrested with a group of seven suspected gunmen and cartel associates, who were riding in a couple of trucks that got stopped at a military checkpoint around midnight Monday just outside the colonial city of Guadalajara. The headline in El Universal almost translates itself: 'Detienen a Miss Sinaloa y 7 narcos.'..The television news flashed back and forth between a beaming Miss Sinaloa clasping a bouquet of red roses and accepting her crown, and images of cartel violence, which has left more than 5,300 people dead this year."
LAT: what's a girl to do?: beauty queens become the girlfriends of capos in places like Sinaloa "This is where narco folklore started, with songs and icons that pay homage to gangsters, and where children want to grow up to be traffickers. How Sinaloa confronts its own divided soul offers insight on where the drug war may be going for Mexico, where more than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year...
Political pluralism in Mexico may have made room for more firebrands like [state legislator] Del Rincon, but it also fed a free-for-all among trafficking gangs, which began to splinter and compete.
'The state was no longer the referee, and so the traffickers had to referee among themselves,' Astorga said. And that was not going to be a well-mannered process...
That chaos might make some nostalgic for the old days, when a few Sinaloa dynasties dominated the drug trade, as they had for generations. Amado Carrillo Fuentes branched out from Sinaloa into Chihuahua in the 1980s and '90s and ran the Juarez drug network that made him one of the richest men on the planet, owner of a fleet of jets and vast real estate holdings the world over.
As the centralized system broke down, the Sinaloans met a new challenge: the Gulf cartel.
Based in the state of Tamaulipas, the Gulf gang was reputed to have ties with, and the protection of, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. After the arrest of its leader, Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf cartel became the first of the drug mafias to introduce a paramilitary army.
The narcotics ring recruited from Mexican and Guatemalan army special forces and formed the Zetas, ruthless hit men. The Zetas left one of their earliest calling cards in the town of Uruapan in Michoacan state in September 2006, when they tossed five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall...
Buscaglia warns against the "Afghanistan-ization" of Mexico, in which rival kingpins gradually take over different states.
"If one criminal organization takes over one state, and another criminal organization takes another, then you have the ingredients of civil war," Buscaglia [an expert on organized crime who advises Mexico's Congress] said. Mexico is not there yet, Buscaglia said, but that breakdown looms as a real danger."
LAT: violence is astronomical in Ciudad Juarez, home of the Juarez cartel and a quarter of all homicides in Mexico in 2008
"The killings here are carried out in a style best described as baroque, with bodies hung headless from bridges, stuffed upside down in giant stew pots, lined up next to a school's playing field. Often, they are accompanied by taunting, handwritten messages, the hit man's equivalent of an end-zone dance."
LAT: money laundering avoids crackdown
modern slavery
WP: enslavement of girls for domestic work in Togo
"The number of girls like Adiza, who leave their communities or even their countries to clean other people's houses, has surged in recent years, according to labor and human rights specialists. The girls in the maid trade, some as young as 5, often go unpaid, and their work in private homes means the abuses they suffer are out of public view."
Ind: and India
"Far from being trained in the skills of acupuncture, for two years she was forced to work as an unpaid domestic help in the home of the "doctor" supposed to be teaching her. She toiled from 5am to midnight, seven days a week. She was abused and mistreated. Almost certainly she was brought to Delhi by a professional trafficker; what is beyond doubt is that once she got here she lived the life of slave."
Harper's: the truly astounding Index dedicated to Mr. Bush
featuring: "Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069...Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3...Estimated number of juveniles whom the United States has detained as enemy combatants since 2002: 2,500"
LAT: on that last point, when can a child be held accountable as a combatant?
" 'Under international law, adults who recruit children for combat are to be prosecuted for that offense. But the children caught up in combat are to be protected, not prosecuted,' said Diane Marie Amann, a UC Davis law professor who observed the latest hearing in Khadr's case for the National Institute of Military Justice...Now 22, Khadr has spent almost a third of his life in U.S. custody. He was raised in a militant Muslim family and was surrounded in his teen years by holy warriors. His lawyers describe him as confused, immature and emotionally damaged."
++
Salon: best indie films of 2008
Salon: one that makes the list is Waltz of Bashir
"[The film] invents an ingenious new method of portraying the notoriously untrustworthy realm of memory, which is especially fraught when one is trying to dredge up memories one has worked hard to suppress for 25 years. By his own account, Folman remembered only bits and pieces from his wartime experience before making the film, and remembered them almost as a movie he had seen, or as things that had happened to someone else...
'I think there are a lot of ways to define war. One of them is definitely as a very bad acid trip, and I wanted the audience to go on this sort of trip.'...
...one of those events is the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, when Christian militias allied with Israel massacred hundreds or perhaps thousands of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps. It's such an explosive topic, with unresolved questions about how much the Israeli government and military knew, and how much responsibility they bore. Were you hesitant about addressing such a painful and loaded subject?
'No. I don't think the film brings any news with regard to what happened at Sabra and Shatila. There was a government committee that made an inquiry, and top generals were banned from office. Arik Sharon was banned from office as the minister of defense, even though he came back later as prime minister. I think everyone knows what happened in terms of, like, journalistic facts.
I was not interested in that at all, because I thought I had nothing new to say. I was interested in the common soldier, his point of view, and in the chronology of massacre. Meaning, when do you put all the facts you hear and see, and all the hints you get, into one frame that makes you realize there is a mass murder going on just around the corner? I was interested in that -- telling that story through the eyes of a simple soldier.' "
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WP: to take us out on a high note (or something), Dave Barry reviews notable events of 2008 in the US
"While Israel claims the vast majority of those killed [estimated over 280] were active in Hamas's military operations, Palestinian medical officials in Gaza say that women and children have also been among the dead."
CSM: tunnels are targeted
"Israeli helicopters and combat jets struck the Hamas' main prison compound in Gaza city and, in a simultaneous strike, pounded about 40 supply tunnels leading under the Egyptian border on Sunday. Israel said the tunnels are the main artery of Hamas' improved arsenal of missiles. Palestinians say the tunnels are the only route for imported consumer goods after an Israeli blockade sealed commercial crossings."
NYT: it's Hamas's fault, according to Israel (and the US)
Gdn: Arab states unconvinced
Gdn: photos of the destruction
CSM: UN peacekeeping in South Lebanon
CSM: military officers reluctant to engage in drug interdiction in Afghanistan
"NATO commanders in Afghanistan say they are holding back because of concerns over the legality of drug operations. But they may also be unwilling to conduct what is seen as a politically unpopular mission that could endanger their troops."
WP: CIA gains allies in Afghanistan with Viagra
"The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
Four blue pills. Viagra.
"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills...
While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations...
Not everyone in Afghanistan's hinterlands had heard of the drug, leading to some awkward encounters when Americans delicately attempted to explain its effects, taking care not to offend their hosts' religious sensitivities.
Such was the case with the 60-year-old chieftain who received the four pills from a U.S. operative. According to the retired operative who was there, the man was a clan leader in southern Afghanistan who had been wary of Americans -- neither supportive nor actively opposed.
The man had extensive knowledge of the region and his village controlled key passages through the area. U.S. forces needed his cooperation and worked hard to win it, the retired operative said. After a long conversation through an interpreter, the retired operator began to probe for ways to win the man's loyalty. A discussion of the man's family and many wives provided inspiration. Once it was established that the man was in good health, the pills were offered and accepted."
Slate: Kaplan says it's part of a plan, sort of
"The biggest problem is that the country's fate ultimately lies outside its borders. As long as Pakistan's northwest territories remain a lawless free-for-all, with Taliban and al-Qaida fighters crossing the border at will, Afghanistan will never be stable. And as long as Pakistan faces a threat from India to the east, its leaders will never deploy enough troops to quash the insurgents in the northwest territories."
WP: what's that, you say? Pakistan moves troops from Afghan to Indian border
"The Pakistani security official said the additional troops were deployed near the cities of Kasur and Sialkot in Punjab province as well as the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, a region that has been claimed by both countries since the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The official said the troops were removed from areas where insurgents were inactive because of the snowy winter...
Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, welcomed the government's decision to withdraw some troops from the tribal areas. "We will not attack the convoys of army withdrawing from tribal areas as it is a good development," he said, adding that the Taliban would help defend Pakistan against any aggression."
NYT: the Taliban takes opportunity for retribution
Four months ago, the people of the Pakistani mountain village of Shalbandi gained national repute after a village posse hunted down and killed six Taliban fighters who had tied up and killed eight local policemen. The posse displayed the Taliban corpses like trophies for other locals to see, and the village was celebrated as a courageous sign that the Taliban could be repelled.
On Sunday morning the Taliban struck back.
A suicide car bomber exploded at a school in Shalbandi that was serving as a polling place, as voters lined up to elect a representative to the national assembly. More than 30 people were killed and more than two dozen wounded, according to local political and security officials. Children and several policemen were among the dead...Shalbandi had received constant threats after the posse hunted down the Taliban. 'Disrupting elections is a general strategy for these elements,' Mr. Khattak [head of the Awami National Party in the province] said, 'but there was a reason for choosing this specific village.'..
...the efforts of villagers in northwest Pakistan have proved little deterrent to the Taliban, who continue to take over more territory despite major Pakistani military campaigns. In the latest sign of Taliban domination of Swat, militants announced last week that by Jan. 15 no girls would allowed to attend school in the valley."
CSM: voting mostly peaceful in Kashmir
"Instead of picking up a gun, Bashir, who asked that his real name not be used due to his political activities, has used text messages to create "flash mob" protests – instant rallies organized through cellphone messages – and posted videos on YouTube of unarmed protesters being shot, allegedly by Indian forces. Even as India and Pakistan rattle sabers after last month's massacre in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the 20-something's generation has helped Kashmir – the contested state at the heart of the two countries' enmity – take a historic step back from violence."
LAT: fissures and alliances in Basra as elections approach
"The last provincial elections, in 2005, sparked an ugly cycle of assassinations and political violence, in which most political parties were implicated. The next elections could either shatter or bolster the stability established since March, when Maliki ordered the Iraqi army and national police to crack down on armed groups...
As the election nears, Maliki is busy maneuvering. He has tapped local leaders to organize tribes in support of the central government. And under Maliki's direction, the national government has funded $100 million worth of reconstruction projects in Basra, bypassing the provincial council. The national government also has started paying unemployment benefits in the province...
But other factions also are maneuvering. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Maliki's main partner in the national government but also his party's main rival, wants Basra to serve as an anchor of a Shiite-majority nine-state federal region in the south. Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's followers wish to reclaim their influence in the port city, which they dominated before the springtime military offensive. The Al Fadila al Islamiya party of Gov. Mohammed Waeli wishes to hold on to privileges accrued in the last four years, notably its influence in the oil industry."
Reuters: US sends Ambassador to Libya for first time in 36 years
Chris Blattman: while SV was celebrating the season, there was a coup in Guinea
(alas, SV is more pessimistic about the relevance of the coup's lack of popular support)
BBC: generals move to consolidate power - and those people? fickle.
"The junta, which took over in a bloodless coup, has said it wishes to "reassure the international community" of its commitment to stamping out corruption and holding elections in 2010.
Its seizure of power was condemned internationally but Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has urged the world community to recognise the new leadership.
Correspondents say the coup appears to have been welcomed by many people within the country who were tired of despotic rule under the former president and his corrupt government."
Ind: Mauritanian president released from house arrest after August coup
NYT: white dispossessed farmers win ruling against Mugabe, but are unlikely to see enforcement
"The case is rooted in one of the most fraught issues facing not just Zimbabwe, but other nations in the region, especially South Africa: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule...
Zimbabwe’s handling of the land issue has had disastrous consequences. Since 2000, when Mr. Mugabe began encouraging the violent invasion of the country’s large, white-owned commercial farms — once the country’s largest employers — food production has collapsed, hunger has afflicted millions and the economy has never recovered.
Mr. Mugabe presents this redistribution as a triumph over greedy whites. But it set off a scramble for the best farms among the country’s ruling elite, who often had little knowledge or interest in farming, and became a potent source of patronage for Mr. Mugabe. His own relatives, as well as generals, judges, ministers and members of Parliament, were beneficiaries, farmer and human rights groups say.
By this year, the number of white-owned commercial farms dwindled to about 300 from 4,500. Even many of the remaining ones came under assault in this year’s bloodstained election season."
LAT: land is problematic in Kenya as well
BBC: war games in Mogadishu
NYT: post-war, less secular Bosnia
"Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common. Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state...
Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.
'The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,' said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.
'And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,' he said. 'We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.'...
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints."
BBC: elections set for Monday in Bangladesh
"For Bangladesh's eunuchs, river gypsies and prisoners, Monday's general elections will be a unique experience. It is the first time any will be allowed to vote.
But for the vast majority of the country's 81 million voters, the elections will mark a return to Bangladeshi politics as normal, after two years of emergency rule when an army-backed caretaker government tried to rewrite how things are done here."
NYT: Moro Islamic Liberation Front attacks kill 9 in the Philippines
"In recent months, fighting between the separatists and the government has killed dozens from each side and displaced more than half a million Filipinos from their homes. Tens of thousands are in refugee camps in several provinces.
Many Filipinos, particularly Christian politicians and local officials, opposed the agreement with the insurgents that would have created an enlarged Muslim autonomous region. The issue went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the pact was unconstitutional.
Since the agreement was rescinded in August, the government has been trying to repair the situation, and last week it announced a new negotiating panel in the hope that talks with the rebels could be restarted. But rebel leaders say any negotiations will have to resume where they left off: with the territorial agreement the Supreme Court found unconstitutional."
BBC: the Communist Party of the Philippines celebrates its 40th anniversary
"The CPP's armed wing, the New Peoples' Army (NPA), has an estimated 5,000 members and has been fighting the government since 1969 in one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies."
BBC: recovering from natural and human disaster in Aceh, Indonesia
war on drugs
WP: kidnapping of negotiator in Mexico draws attention to a trend
"Independent organizations say Mexico has one of the world's highest kidnapping rates, competing with Colombia, where kidnap crews tied to anti-government guerrillas perfected the art. About 70 abductions are officially reported each month in Mexico, although even the federal attorney general says the true number is far higher. Independent groups say about 500 people a month are abducted in Mexico. Many kidnap crews have been found to include police officers."
WP: Miss Sinaloa busted
"Zúñiga was arrested with a group of seven suspected gunmen and cartel associates, who were riding in a couple of trucks that got stopped at a military checkpoint around midnight Monday just outside the colonial city of Guadalajara. The headline in El Universal almost translates itself: 'Detienen a Miss Sinaloa y 7 narcos.'..The television news flashed back and forth between a beaming Miss Sinaloa clasping a bouquet of red roses and accepting her crown, and images of cartel violence, which has left more than 5,300 people dead this year."
LAT: what's a girl to do?: beauty queens become the girlfriends of capos in places like Sinaloa "This is where narco folklore started, with songs and icons that pay homage to gangsters, and where children want to grow up to be traffickers. How Sinaloa confronts its own divided soul offers insight on where the drug war may be going for Mexico, where more than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year...
Political pluralism in Mexico may have made room for more firebrands like [state legislator] Del Rincon, but it also fed a free-for-all among trafficking gangs, which began to splinter and compete.
'The state was no longer the referee, and so the traffickers had to referee among themselves,' Astorga said. And that was not going to be a well-mannered process...
That chaos might make some nostalgic for the old days, when a few Sinaloa dynasties dominated the drug trade, as they had for generations. Amado Carrillo Fuentes branched out from Sinaloa into Chihuahua in the 1980s and '90s and ran the Juarez drug network that made him one of the richest men on the planet, owner of a fleet of jets and vast real estate holdings the world over.
As the centralized system broke down, the Sinaloans met a new challenge: the Gulf cartel.
Based in the state of Tamaulipas, the Gulf gang was reputed to have ties with, and the protection of, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. After the arrest of its leader, Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf cartel became the first of the drug mafias to introduce a paramilitary army.
The narcotics ring recruited from Mexican and Guatemalan army special forces and formed the Zetas, ruthless hit men. The Zetas left one of their earliest calling cards in the town of Uruapan in Michoacan state in September 2006, when they tossed five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall...
Buscaglia warns against the "Afghanistan-ization" of Mexico, in which rival kingpins gradually take over different states.
"If one criminal organization takes over one state, and another criminal organization takes another, then you have the ingredients of civil war," Buscaglia [an expert on organized crime who advises Mexico's Congress] said. Mexico is not there yet, Buscaglia said, but that breakdown looms as a real danger."
LAT: violence is astronomical in Ciudad Juarez, home of the Juarez cartel and a quarter of all homicides in Mexico in 2008
"The killings here are carried out in a style best described as baroque, with bodies hung headless from bridges, stuffed upside down in giant stew pots, lined up next to a school's playing field. Often, they are accompanied by taunting, handwritten messages, the hit man's equivalent of an end-zone dance."
LAT: money laundering avoids crackdown
modern slavery
WP: enslavement of girls for domestic work in Togo
"The number of girls like Adiza, who leave their communities or even their countries to clean other people's houses, has surged in recent years, according to labor and human rights specialists. The girls in the maid trade, some as young as 5, often go unpaid, and their work in private homes means the abuses they suffer are out of public view."
Ind: and India
"Far from being trained in the skills of acupuncture, for two years she was forced to work as an unpaid domestic help in the home of the "doctor" supposed to be teaching her. She toiled from 5am to midnight, seven days a week. She was abused and mistreated. Almost certainly she was brought to Delhi by a professional trafficker; what is beyond doubt is that once she got here she lived the life of slave."
Harper's: the truly astounding Index dedicated to Mr. Bush
featuring: "Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069...Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3...Estimated number of juveniles whom the United States has detained as enemy combatants since 2002: 2,500"
LAT: on that last point, when can a child be held accountable as a combatant?
" 'Under international law, adults who recruit children for combat are to be prosecuted for that offense. But the children caught up in combat are to be protected, not prosecuted,' said Diane Marie Amann, a UC Davis law professor who observed the latest hearing in Khadr's case for the National Institute of Military Justice...Now 22, Khadr has spent almost a third of his life in U.S. custody. He was raised in a militant Muslim family and was surrounded in his teen years by holy warriors. His lawyers describe him as confused, immature and emotionally damaged."
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Salon: best indie films of 2008
Salon: one that makes the list is Waltz of Bashir
"[The film] invents an ingenious new method of portraying the notoriously untrustworthy realm of memory, which is especially fraught when one is trying to dredge up memories one has worked hard to suppress for 25 years. By his own account, Folman remembered only bits and pieces from his wartime experience before making the film, and remembered them almost as a movie he had seen, or as things that had happened to someone else...
'I think there are a lot of ways to define war. One of them is definitely as a very bad acid trip, and I wanted the audience to go on this sort of trip.'...
...one of those events is the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, when Christian militias allied with Israel massacred hundreds or perhaps thousands of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps. It's such an explosive topic, with unresolved questions about how much the Israeli government and military knew, and how much responsibility they bore. Were you hesitant about addressing such a painful and loaded subject?
'No. I don't think the film brings any news with regard to what happened at Sabra and Shatila. There was a government committee that made an inquiry, and top generals were banned from office. Arik Sharon was banned from office as the minister of defense, even though he came back later as prime minister. I think everyone knows what happened in terms of, like, journalistic facts.
I was not interested in that at all, because I thought I had nothing new to say. I was interested in the common soldier, his point of view, and in the chronology of massacre. Meaning, when do you put all the facts you hear and see, and all the hints you get, into one frame that makes you realize there is a mass murder going on just around the corner? I was interested in that -- telling that story through the eyes of a simple soldier.' "
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WP: to take us out on a high note (or something), Dave Barry reviews notable events of 2008 in the US
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