Juan Cole is now as admired as Owen Lattimore

If I am honest with myself I have to admit that I am profoundly envious of Juan Cole. I have long admired his work. He writes richly documented scholarly works and he runs a blog in which he demonstrates every morning that he has already read everything in Arabic and Persian that was published that day. He must read and write in his sleep.
Yes, it’s envy: I only wish I could have done half as much fine work as he has, and that I could maintain an informed, up-to-the-moment commentary on even a small sector of the world comparable to his blog. But now he has now been elevated to an unparalleled level of scholarly greatness by the revelation that someone in the George W Bush administration tried to sabotage his career.
Few scholars ever get such an honor. The only other one so honored that I know of was someone else I have long admired, Owen Lattimore. Lattimore was the most eminent scholar on Chinese affairs in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote some of the greatest studies of all time on the influence of the frontier on social affairs. His Inner Asian Frontiers of China was one of the great works in a field now given a name, political ecology. He had a powerful influence on American foreign policy in his day, as he was Roosevelt’s adviser on East Asian affairs. But what distinguished him above many other worthy scholars of his time was Joseph McCarthy’s attack against him during the 1950s. McCarthy accused him of being a Communist sympathizer, “a top Russian spy.” At the moment of the attack Lattimore was en route to Afghanistan where he had been designated the new head of the United Nations Mission there. When he arrived in Kabul and read a telegram notifying him of McCarthy’s charges, he got back on the same plane and went home. In Washington he vigorously defended himself and when the hearings were over he published a book, Ordeal by Slander, written in three months, no doubt in a fit of anger.
So now it turns out that Juan Cole has been elevated to such a stature. Only in his case no one will admit to trying to dig up dirt against him. Yesterday’s New York Times only indicates that someone in the G W Bush administration was asking Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole. Who would that be? We know that the office of the Vice President was up to such shenanigans – that’s why Scooter Libby went to jail.
Whatever the situation it has now elevated Juan Cole into the class of most envied scholars. He is now on a par with Owen Lattimore.

Siddique on the corrosive power of politics on Pakistan's military

Abubakar Siddique of Radio Free Europe has a great statement of the problem with Pakistan's military: It has long been not only rich [holding land, many companies, large trust funds, investment funds, etc.] but also politically entrenched. The combination of wealth and political power is corrosive everywhere. Siddique describes the extant problem [see also Tariq Ali, "The color Khaki"]. RLC

Radio Free Europe: Feature article
Pakistan: Armed With Power, Perks, And Privileges
June 04, 2011
By Abubakar Siddique

It has been a turbulent month for the Pakistani military.

First came the May 2 killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, on Pakistani soil, by American commandos. The raid led to questions of how the Al-Qaeda leader could find a safe haven alongside Pakistan's elite military training academy, and how such a raid could be successfully carried out unbeknownst to the armed forces.

Then came the deadly insurgent attack on a naval base in Karachi on May 22-23, which took 16 hours to contain and which resulted in the death of at least 10 military personnel and four militants. Eyebrows were raised over how the armed services could fail to protect a key military installation.

Capping off the month was the kidnapping on May 29 of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad. His abduction in the capital came shortly after he had written an investigative piece alleging that the Karachi attack stemmed from a breakdown in secret negotiations between the navy and Al-Qaeda.

There have been allegations that journalist Syed Salim Shahzad was tortured and killed by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency.
Days after Shahzad warned that he had received threats because of his report, his tortured body was discovered far from the capital. Suspicions turned toward the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, considered an integral part of what Pakistanis refer to as the "military establishment."

Human rights campaigners and journalists are clamoring for investigations into Shahzad's death as well as reports he had been threatened by the ISI, which the intelligence agency denies.

An Old Debate Rekindled

It is far from open season on the military, which takes the lion's share of foreign aid, possesses enormous wealth, and has dominated political and economic life in Pakistan for decades.

But lawmakers, the media, and the public have now become emboldened enough to rekindle an old debate about the considerable perks and privileges enjoyed by the country's powerful military.

Why, they ask, are immense resources being used to prop up bloated security institutions while a growing and impoverished population is left wanting?

The grumbling can be expected to get louder in the coming days.

"There are a lot of questions about where the resources are going," says Islamabad-based author and journalist Zahid Hussain, who asks "whether the huge military budgets are properly utilized?

"There are also questions about the…military's own professionalism," he says. "Professionalism in dealing with this kind of situation. Particularly, there are questions about the army running other businesses and not concentrating on their professional duties."

These are the type of questions that Hussain has suffered personally for asking in the past.

In a 2002 article for "Newsweek" magazine, he documented how the Pakistani military had carved out a corporate and real-estate empire that gave the then-ruling generals enormous wealth, power, and advantages.

'Military Generals Play Golf All The Time'

In response, Hussain was banned for years from covering the press conferences of President General Pervez Musharraf, who held office from 1999-2008.

Others have suffered more for going against the grain in the nuclear-armed Islamic nation, which has been ruled by military dictators -- Musharraf being the last -- for more than 30 of the years since its founding in 1947.

Sixty-year-old Pakistani lawyer Asma Jahangir has spent most of her life campaigning for the rights of religious minorities and landless farm workers effectively bound to a life of modern-day slavery.

Her work has placed her in direct opposition to the military's dominance of the Pakistan's decision-making process. For this she has been imprisoned and placed under house arrest.

Peaceful demonstrations she has orchestrated have been met with harsh police violence, and her family's businesses have suffered as her patriotism has been questioned.

Nevertheless, Jahangir continues to be one of the most vocal public voices questioning the perks enjoyed by the military.

"These military generals play golf all the time," she said on a popular night-time talk show on May 26. "And then they talk about where they will get plots [of land]. Please tell me how a marriage hall can operate in a sensitive [military] installation such as the [naval base] that was attacked in Karachi recently. Have you heard this happening anywhere else?"

An Immense Economic Machine

Jahangir's comments have attracted angry press statements and letters to the editor from former senior military officers, as have more subdued criticisms lodged on other TV talk shows and newspaper columns.

It will take a lot more than public questioning to put a dent in the military's immense economic machine, however.

Under the country's annual budget released on June 3, the military gets a major slice of the pie -- about 25 percent. Healthcare and education, by contrast, receive only a sliver -- less than 5 percent combined.

. . . [For more, click on the title above]

Iranian government thugs beat a famous woman scholar, who collapsed of heart attack

Haleh Sahabi's death was not accidental but deliberate, by a regime that has been reduced to showing its true character. The story of her death as she mourns the death of her father is told by Hamed Dabashi, Al Jazeera, June 3, 2011.

Haleh Sahabi: Our Antigone in Tehran: Haleh Sahabi defied human law to defend moral, divine law; her life writing a heroic legend of the future. AlJazeera [6/3/11]
Haleh Sahabi, 54, was a distinguished Quranic hermeneutician, a religious comparatist, a women's rights scholar, and a committed activist to the cause of her people's civil liberties. Haleh Sahabi was sentenced to a two-year prison term after she had joined a rally in front of the Iranian parliament in the aftermath of the contested presidential election of 2009.

While serving her term in jail, Haleh Sahabi was informed of her father's impending death. He was the prominent Iranian dissident Ezzatollah Sahabi (1930-2011), a revered democracy activist, known and admired for his mild manner, open-minded generosity of spirit, a liberal demeanor, and a commitment to non-violent activism on a religious-nationalist platform for over half a century.

Haleh Sahabi was briefly allowed out of prison to be present for the final days of her father's life. Ezzatollah died, at the age of 81 on May 31, 2011. Millions of Iranians in and out of their homeland were saddened by his death, deeply grateful for his moderate and caring positions, even those who did not agree with him.

His funeral began on the following day, June 1, under tight security control, and - according to a number of reliable eyewitness accounts- including those of Ahmad Montazeri, the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, and Ahmad Sadr Haj Seyyed Javadi, an aging opposition politician - a band of organised plainclothes security forces began to disrupt the funeral, ridiculing and humiliating the attendants, and moved to snatch the body of the deceased from those who were carrying it for a proper burial.

Haleh Sahabi, leading the funeral, tried to prevent the disruption, while holding on to a picture of her father. The picture was violently taken away from her by a security agent and she was hit on her side. She fell to the ground in the scuffle and soon after died of a cardiac arrest.

The International campaign for Human Rights in Iran holds the plainclothes security forces responsible for Haleh Sahabi's death, and has called for an official investigation. "The shameful actions of government thugs in this incident reveal a deep contempt for traditions that belong to all Iranians, and they have resulted in a tragedy," said Hadi Ghaemi, spokesperson for the campaign. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace laureate, has declared Haleh Sahabi's death,"intentional murder".

[Click on the title for the whole article]

The ISI had been threatening the journalist that turned up dead and mutilated

Now it comes out that the ISI had threatened Saleem Shahzad, bureau chief of Asia Times Online, several times. He disappeared and his body showed up on May 31 badly mutilated. He was not only killed but tortured. Shahzad was of course a Pakistani citizen who of course should have been protected by the ISI; that the organization threatened him was reason for him to share some of the evidence with others who now have brought it into the open. Would we expect whoever did this to admit to have brutalized a journalist for not revealing his sources? It is no surprise that the ISI has denied it. RLC

04 Jun 2011, NewAgeIslam.Com
Why the ISI is Lying By Hameed Haroon
It has come to my notice that a spokesman of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) while speaking to the official national news agency in Islamabad yesterday has questioned the “baseless allegations” levelled by Human Rights Watch on the basis of an email from Saleem Shahzad, the bureau chief of the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online, in their possession. Shahzad was murdered three days ago near Islamabad after being abducted by unknown persons.
I wish to state on record that the email in the possession of Mr Ali Dayan, the monitor for Human Rights Watch (HRW) stationed in, Lahore Pakistan, is indeed one of the three identical emails sent by Mr Shahzad to HRW, his employers (Asia Times Online) and to his former employer, myself. I also wish to verify that allegations levied by HRW at the ISI are essentially in complete consonance with the contents of the slain journalist’s email.
In their denial issued Wednesday, an anonymous spokesman from the ISI has questioned the “baseless allegation” levelled against ISI by Mr Dayan of HRW. I wish to state on the record for the information of the officers involved in investigating journalist Saleem Shahzad’s gruesome murder that the late journalist confided to me and several others that he had received death threats from various officers of the ISI on at least three occasions in the past five years. Whatever the substance of these allegations, they form an integral part of Mr Shahzad’s last testimony. Mr Shahzad’s purpose in transmitting this information to three concerned colleagues in the media was not to defame the ISI but to avert a possible fulfillment of what he clearly perceived to be a death threat. The last threat which I refer to was recorded by Mr Shahzad by email with me, tersely phrased as “for the record”, at precisely 4:11am on October 18, 2010, wherein he recounted the details of his meetings at the ISI headquarters in Islamabad between the director general-media wing (ISI), Rear-Admiral Adnan Nazir, with the deputy director general of the media wing, Commodore Khalid Pervaiz, also being present.
The ostensible agenda for this meeting was the subject of Mr Shahzads’s story in Asia Times Online with respect to the Pakistan government freeing of senior Afghan Taliban commander, Mullah Baraadar. Mr Shahzad informed the senior officials that the story was leaked by an intelligence channel in Pakistan, and confirmed thereafter by the “most credible Taliban source”. The senior officials present suggested to Mr Shahzad that he officially deny the story, which he refused to do, terming the official’s demand as “impractical”.
The senior intelligence official was “curious” to identify the source of Mr Shahzad’s story claiming it to be a “shame” that such a leak should occur from the offices of a high profile intelligence service. Mr Shahzad additionally stated that the rear-admiral offered him some information, ostensibly “as a favour “ in the following words: “We have recently arrested a terrorist and have recovered a lot of data, diaries and other materials during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him. If I find your name on the list I will certainly let you know.” Mr Shahzad subsequently confirmed to me in a conversation that he not only interpreted this conversation as a veiled threat to his person, he also informed me that he let an official from the ISI know soon thereafter that he intended to share the content of this threat with his colleagues. ....
Source: The Indian Express URL: http://newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarOnTerror_1.aspx?ArticleID=4774

[For more click on the title above]

I realize that Manvendra Singh is an Indian criticizing a Pakistani organization, but he has described the real reason for this crime well:
Last Updated : 05 Jun 2011 10:53:28 AM IST

Saleem Shahzad was killed because his writings affected the image-building of an institution that is being devoured from within. His writings didn’t affect the image of the militants of Al-Qaeda or the various shades of the Taliban. The truth didn’t hurt them one bit. Rather it only exposed their infiltration of the armed forces, for which the militants groups are not in the least bit sorry. His writings irritated only the image-makers of the Pakistani military ‘establishment’. For their well-cultivated image of being in control of the destinies of the institutions as well as that of the country has taken a serious beating. . . . Establishments and governments don’t like the truth as news items, discussion points, power presentations etc. They know the truth well, but like it concealed from the public conversations.

[For the source, go to Establishment paranoia and Shahzad’s murder
http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/establishment-paranoia-and-shahzad%E2%80%99s-murder/281206.html

What the Syrian police did to a thirteen year old child.

Remember the pulverized body of the young man Emit Till? He was tortured and brutalized by a racist mob in the United States. In Syria it is the government that does such things -- even to children.

The brutal treatment of the Syrian people by their government reveals what it is: inhuman, brutal, unfeeling, bestial. Nothing reveals to the world what controls conditions in Syria better than the revelation of what Syrian police did to one of their 13-year old future citizens. From Al Jazeera.

Tortured and killed: Hamza al-Khateeb, age 13. The mutilation and death in custody of a 13-year-old child has sparked further furious protests in Syrian city of Daraa.
Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand 31 May 2011 AL JAZEERA

Hamza al-Khateeb used to love it when the rains came to his small corner of southern Syria, filling up the farmers' irrigation channels enough so that he and the other children could jump in and swim.
But the drought of the last few years had left the 13-year-old without the fun of his favourite pool.
Instead, he'd taken to raising homing pigeons, standing on the roof of his family's simple breeze-block home, craning his neck back to see the birds circling above the wide horizon of fields, where wheat and tomatoes were grown from the tough, scrubby soils.
Though not from a wealthy family himself, Hamza was always aware of others less fortunate than himself, said a cousin who spoke to Al Jazeera.
"He would often ask his parents for money to give to the poor. I remember once he wanted to give someone 100 Syrian Pounds ($2), and his family said it was too much. But Hamza said, 'I have a bed and food while that guy has nothing.' And so he persuaded his parents to give the poor man the 100."
In the hands of President Bashar al-Assad's security forces, however, Hamza found no such compassion, his humanity degraded to nothing more than a lump of flesh to beat, burn, torture and defile, until the screaming stopped at last.
Arrested during a protest in Saida, 10km east of Daraa, on April 29, Hamza's body was returned to his family on Tuesday 24th May, horribly mutilated.
The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned his corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: Lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face and knees, consistent with the use of electric shock devices and of being whipped with cable, both techniques of torture documented by Human Rights Watch as being used in Syrian prisons during the bloody three-month crackdown on protestors.
Hamza's eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly.

Hamza's mutilated, castrated corpse was riddled with bullet holes and burn marks [YouTube/SFP]
On Hamza's chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.
"Where are the human rights committees? Where is the International Criminal Court?" asks the voice of the man inspecting Hamza's body on a video uploaded to YouTube.
"A month had passed by with his family not knowing where he was, or if or when he would be released. He was released to his family as a corpse. Upon examining his body, the signs of torture are very clear."
[Click on the title above for a link to the source and access to the whole article.]

The murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad: Pakistan's intelligence service is implicated

Many journalists have been killed in Pakistan, so the murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad can be considered more of what we have seen there for so many years. It was only last year that Pakistan was declared the most dangerous country on earth for journalists. But what makes his murder so much more heinous is that he was last seen in the custody of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. This is an outfit that Shahzad’s research could never trust because he was trying to declare to the world what the ISI and other secretive elements of the government were doing. That he died in their hands reveals what they are: A brutal gang all their own; as some have said, “A state within a state.” Note that it was not enough to silence him; not enough to kill him: they had to brutalize him, pulverize his body. Such is in store for anyone who want to reveal what the ISI is doing.

Is the pen really mightier than the sword? I would hope so. I deeply admire the courage of many Pakistani journalists who continue to describe the world as they find it, in a country so threatening to those who would purvey the truth as they as they best can. It’s a dangerous place and what they do is a dangerous game. It is easy to criticize journalism, especially in retrospect, but at least such courageous people are out there, digging around to find out what is really happening, not just what those in power want tell the world in their own interest.

We grieve not only for Mr. Shahzad and his family, but also for the many other journalists who must be terrified by his murder. And we grieve for the Pakistani people. No one deserves the kind of government they have. I have despaired of writing one more time that Pakistan is the most dangerous place on earth. Its government is inept, weak, subject to the intimidating pressures of its own military-industrial complex, which is notoriously duplicitous. The Pakistani people don’t deserve such leadership, and yet they continue to be endlessly subjected to it; to a misinformed – no, a deliberately dis-informing – government.

And what hope is there for a realistic and fair solution to the Afghanistan war as long as this Pakistan regime has an influence on the issue?

Some links to recent reports:
Carlotta Gall in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/world/asia/01pakistan.html?_r=1&ref=carlottagall
Pakistani Journalist Who Covered Security and Terrorism Is Found Dead.
A well-known Pakistani journalist has been found dead after being abducted over the weekend in an upscale neighborhood here and receiving repeated threats from Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. … He disappeared Sunday evening in the center of this capital just two days after writing an article suggesting that a militant attack on the navy’s main base in Karachi on May 22 was carried out because the navy was trying to crack down on cells from Al Qaeda that had infiltrated the force. Pakistan’s armed forces, specifically the navy, have been highly embarrassed by the 16-hour battle that ensued at the base when six attackers climbed over a wall and blew up two American-made naval surveillance planes. Ten people were killed in the attack, and American and Chinese technicians working on the base only narrowly escaped injury as they were driven out through a hail of bullets. … Coming soon after the American raid on May 2 that killed Osama bin Laden, which caught the Pakistani Army and Air Force flat-footed, the attack on the naval base has shocked the entire country. The armed forces chiefs have been deeply angered by the humiliation they have suffered from both episodes, and in particular the many questions raised about their competence by Pakistan’s increasingly rambunctious news media. . . .

Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2011/06/20116124216513177.html
… Syed Saleem Shahzad had earlier told a rights activist he had been threatened by the country's intelligence agencies. He was found dead on Tuesday, and police said his body showed signs of torture. Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan representative for Human Rights Watch, said Shahzad had told him that he was under threat by Pakistan's military intelligence agency. "He told me he was being followed and that he is getting threatening telephone calls and that he is under intelligence surveillance," he told Reuters news agency. "We can't say for sure who has killed Saleem Shahzad. But what we can say for sure is that Saleem Shahzad was under serious threat from the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and Human Rights Watch has every reason to believe that that threat was credible." … His death underscores the dangers of reporting in Pakistan, which in 2010 was called the deadliest country for journalists.

Foreign Policy Online: http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/06/01/daily_brief_pakistani_journalist_found_tortured_murdered_0
Pakistani police yesterday found the body of kidnapped journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad in a canal in the Mandi Bahauddir area of Gujarat district southeast of the capital Islamabad, from where Shahzad had been kidnapped on his way to a TV interview nearly two days before (NYT, ET, Tel, LAT, BBC, Reuters, Daily Times, WSJ, AJE, AFP). Shahzad's body reportedly bore extensive signs of torture, including broken ribs and wounds to his face, abdomen and internal organs (AFP). He was buried today in Karachi, his hometown (AP). Suspicion for the kidnapping and killing has fallen on Pakistan's intelligence services, who according to Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dayan Hasan had threatened Shahzad as recently as last October (Post, Reuters, The News). Hasan told reporters Monday that he had been able to confirm through anonymous sources that Shahzad was in the custody of the intelligence services (NYT). Shahzad wrote a story Friday for the Asia Times alleging that al-Qaeda was responsible for last week's attack on a Pakistani naval base after Shahzad said navy officials refused to release sailors arrested for their alleged links to al-Qaeda.

North Korea as a concentration camp

The more we know about North Korea the more it looks like a concentration camp -- the whole country, a place where the government has for years sought to seal its population from all outside influences. It is hard to internalize how abusive the place is.

This is a country whose abuses of its own citizenry awaken images of Nazi "race science." The BBC says that North Korea is testing new chemical weapons on women and children. In fact, the families that fail to have pedigrees of fully obedient citizens for three generations have been used in such "scientific" tests. [See the following site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/3436701.stm]

Hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned without charge. It's not because they have committed a crime. It is because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime and so they are punished.
According to President Kim Jong Il, the bad blood and seed of any dissident must be rooted out down to three generations.
Forced labour and starvation rations ensure that prisoners do not escape. Those who try to are publicly executed.
…
Kwon Hyok, a former North Korean army intelligence officer, was also chief guard at "Prison Camp no. 22". For the first time on camera, he describes specially-made glass gas chambers used for human experimentation.

Another source on conditions in North Korea is a video that shows several thousand children starving on the streets, ignored and unprotected. [See the following site: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1875007335054132657#]

Also, the PBS News Hour recently aired a clip from a forthcoming film, Kimjungilia, that documents the horrors of life in North Korea. Here are some of the statements about conditions in the country, from that clip.

[W]hen I started forced labor [at the age of nine], I didn't have time for them [pet fish]. I didn't even have time to cry. Every day was so tiring. We worked so hard. I was so cold. You don't care about your pet fish when you're dying.
We never knew when we'd get beaten. There was constant fear.

Another speaker

… in 1994, we were having a very hard time. We would go to the mountains to pick roots. We ate grass from the fields and bark from the trees.

The experience of a young woman:

Narrator: There are an estimated 300,000 prisoners in the camps today. But even outside the camps, life is difficult. There are fears that food shortages could get as bad as they were in the mid-'90s, when Byeon Ok-soon was growing up.
… Byeon Ok-soon lived with her parents, three brothers, and sister in a northern town. The only source of food was the state-run distribution system. By the time she was 17 that system had collapsed.
BYEON OK-SOON (through translator): One day, I was with my father in the mountains. I got soaked with rain while we were foraging. After we finished I went home. My body started to burn and I fainted.
We had nothing to eat and we certainly couldn't buy medicine. So, they laid me to one side, waiting for me to die. I had typhoid fever and was in a coma.
NARRATOR: Ok-soon woke up from her coma in China. Her brother had carried her on his back across the Tumen River. He left her in the care of an old woman while he looked for work to pay for her medical treatment.
As the oldest brother, it was his duty to care for his parents and siblings. He took his duty very seriously.
BYEON OK-SOON (through translator): After he saved me in China, with our parents back in North Korea, my brother felt very tortured. He would get food and take it back to our parents. He was constantly sneaking back and forth.
When he realized the North Korean authorities were on to him, he decided to give himself up. If you give yourself up, you expect to receive a lighter sentence. That's what he thought. Instead, he was taken and publicly executed.

A former Captain in the military:

PARK MYUNG-HO, escaped North Korea (through translator): The military suffered, too. The state only supplied us with rice and salt. We had to get everything else ourselves.
NARRATOR: Park Myung-ho was a captain in the Korean People's Army. He served for 20 years. His father had also been a soldier.
PARK MYUNG-HO (through translator): These days, many officers desert. Even if you want to work, there are always supplies missing, making it impossible to do the job. But commanders go on issuing orders every day. You have to steal the supplies you need.
If you care at all, it is impossible not to express your frustration. Consequently, many are arrested. That's what drove me to escape. We decided to cross the 38th Parallel by boat. We evaded navy ships twice. Because our boat was small and theirs were big, we could see them first and get away.
Actually, the North Korean ships had no fuel. They couldn't start their engines and were under sail. When I saw all the trees on the mountains, I knew we were in South Korea.

Another man’s escape:

I came up with the idea of escaping. I knew we could get shot or electrocuted. All of a sudden, I was afraid. And then my friend said, "I don't think we can do it." But I couldn't give up. I had to escape. I practically dragged him. And then I slipped in the snow, so he ran ahead of me. When I saw the wired gates, I figured he was squeezing through the electric wires. So, I followed his lead and squeezed through, too. When I got up and looked behind me, I realized I was on the other side of the gates. And then I saw my friend was stuck and didn't move. He was still stuck in the wires. If I hadn't fallen, I would have been the first to squeeze through the electric wire. I would have been the one electrocuted.

Converging layers of hypocrisy in Bahrain's abuse of its own citizenry

In an op-ed piece in Al Jazeera ["The role of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain," 27 May 2011] Hamid Dabashi points out the many layers of hypocrisy that have converged in the treatment of demonstrators in Bahrain. His primary focus is Iran, but in the process of explaining Iran's perfidy he mentions that of several other countries that happen to be hostile to Iran.

"The Sunni royal family in Saudi Arabia," according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, "fears the growing influence of Shiite Iran in the Middle East, and is helping Bahrain's Sunni rulers retain power."

Also,

"the [UK] Ministry of Defence has now admitted that members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard sent into Bahrain may have received military training from the British Armed Forces in Saudi Arabia".

In the mean time Bahrain is the home of the US Fifth-Fleet,

"which makes "the great advocate of democracy" turn a blind eye to the murderous regime in Bahrain. . . "

Even though Iran's Shiite clerical regime might seem to support the Shiite demonstrations in Bahrain it is fully aware of the resemblance of those demonstrations to those of its own Shiite citizens it has repeatedly suppressed. The last thing the Iranians want is for those demonstrations to succeed.

The influence of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain is on the ruling regime: teaching it, by example, how viciously to quell a democratic revolt.

Saudi Arabia, Britain, the United States, Iran -- these countries for various and contrary reasons are supporting the Bahrain regime's abuses of its own people:

"The repression," Patrick Cockburn reports, "is across the board. Sometimes the masked security men who raid Shia villages at night also bulldoze Shia mosques and religious meeting places. At least 27 of these have so far been wrecked or destroyed, while anti-Shia and pro-government graffiti is often sprayed on any walls that survive." He further reports, "Nurses and doctors in a health system largely run by Shias have been beaten and arrested for treating protesters. Teachers and students are being detained. Some 1,000 professional people have been sacked and have lost their pensions. The one opposition newspaper has been closed. Bahraini students who joined protests abroad have had their funding withdrawn."

The Bahrain regime has even set about to silence all authentic reporting on what's going on inside the country.

"Bahraini authorities have begun an assault on local journalists working for international news agencies - with arrests, beatings and, apparently in one instance, electric shock."

States, whatever their claims, can be heartless when it comes to protecting their own interests. Even the U.S.; even Britain.

Dabashi's point is that the Bahraini regime is no better than that of Iran, as both repress their citizens with impunity.

[T]he Islamic Republic and Bahrain are in fact identical - not just in the majority of their population being Shia but in being ruled by two identically brutal and intolerant dictatorships. The Islamic Republic is frightened out of its wits by the Arab Spring, especially on its own back door, in Bahrain: for the more this Spring blooms and flowers the more it exposes the criminal atrocities of the Islamic Republic over the past thirty years, including, most recently, its own homegrown Green Movement - which one might in fact consider an early blooming of the Arab Spring.

[Click on the title above for a link to the whole piece.]

Abuse of Netanyahu's heckler

Below is an excerpt from Moral Low Ground's report on the treatment of a heckler of Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Compare this with my previous entry on the Syrian state's abuses of its own citizens. There is a difference: at least she wasn't shot; and there are reasonable constraints on the exercise of such abuse in this country. But this is no way to treat a heckler. RLC

Moral Low Ground 24th May 2011

Code Pink Activist Rae Abileah Attacked by AIPAC Thugs During Netanyahu D.C. Speech, then Arrested in Hospital. Rae Abileah, an activist from the anti-war group Code Pink, was assaulted by a group of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) thugs after she interrupted a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint session of the US Congress in Washington, DC earlier today.
According to The Raw Story, Abileah shouted “STOP ISRAELI WAR CRIMES!” and was then tackled by the AIPAC Zionists. She sustained injuries to her neck and shoulder and was taken to George Washington University Hospital for treatment. While there, she was placed under arrest for bravely standing up to Israeli crimes against humanity.
Abileah said she was “in great pain” but her ordeal was nothing “compared to the pain and suffering that Palestinians go through on a regular basis.”
“I have been to Gaza and the West Bank,” she said. “I have seen Palestinians’ homes bombed and bulldozed, I have talked to mothers whose children have been killed during the invasion of Gaza, I have seen the Jewish-only roads leading to ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank. This kind of occupation cannot continue… I feel obligated to rise up and speak out against these crimes being committed in my name and with my tax dollars.”
Bravo, Ms. Abileah. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And yet she was arrested, not the vile war criminal Netanyahu, who presides over one of the most despicably racist, colonialist states on earth? . . .

[Click on the title above for a link to the original article.]

Syria's betrayal of its own claims to legitimacy

What the regime in Syria has lost in legitimacy is unrecoverable. The reality of that loss can hardly be said more eloquently than in this Al Jazeera report by Hugh Macleod and an unnamed correspondent [probably in Syria]. RLC [Click on the title for a link to the source.]

Secret police are raiding hospitals to round up people who were injured during anti-government protests.
by Hugh Macleod and a special correspondent 24 May 2011

Fawaz al-Haraki had only minutes to live.

As the shots rang out, Abu Haidar and the other protesters ran for cover, grimly familiar with what to do when the mukhabberat (secret police) attacked.

But Fawaz fell, the blood soaking his trousers where the bullet from a Syrian secret policeman had torn into his leg.

It was Friday April 22 in the industrial city of Homs, famous for being the nation's main producer of jokes and cement.

Few are laughing for Homs or its dirty factory these days. Last Friday, 11-year-old Aiham al-Ahmad became the latest among dozens of people killed in Homs since the city rose up in some of the largest numbers yet seen to call for freedom and an end to the Assad family's 41-year-old dictatorship.

As the bullets sparked off the street around them, Abu Haidar and two other protesters hauled 42-year-old Fawaz into a car, desperate to get him to a doctor before his time ran out.

But Fawaz, growing pale under a blanket in the backseat of Abu Haider's car, was already a dead man: Killed not only by a bullet, but by the regime's decision – appearing, increasingly, to be systematic – to prevent injured protestors from receiving medical care.

From the moment he was shot until the moment he was buried in the ground, Fawaz's fate was not in the hands of the doctors, friends and family who wished to save him, but in the hands of secret policemen whose actions ensured that he died, and that as few people knew about it as possible.

Nowhere to go

"They have checkpoints everywhere and we knew they could stop the car at any moment, even if we were acting normally," said Abu Haidar, who has been a consistently reliable source for Al Jazeera's reporting from Homs since the uprising began.

He had good reason to be worried.

On that same Friday, three other cars ferrying wounded protestors from Homs disappeared after approaching a security checkpoint. One of the drivers, Raed Mehran, had been on the phone with Wissam Tarif, director of Insan, a Syrian human rights organisation, hanging up saying he was approaching a checkpoint.

Several weeks later, Tarif received news that four of the men in the cars had died while the others had been imprisoned.

"It is beyond arbitrary detention. It is people being kidnapped. In many cases injured people are being kidnapped and we do not know if any medical attention is provided or not," said Tarif.

In Jabla, on Syria's Mediterranean coast, the injured from an attack on April 24 couldn't even be bundled into a car, pinned down inside the Hamwi Mosque by snipers shooting anyone who moved outside.

"We can't even get to the pharmacy to get medicine because of the snipers on the roofs," said Dr Zakariya al-Akkad. "All I can do is try and stop the bleeding." He couldn't, and 17-year-old Ali Halabi, along with several others, died.

Abu Haidar and his team had managed to avoid the checkpoints, but didn't spot the plain clothes security men pulling up to them in the car behind. The security men opened fire.

. . . "We were driving really fast and trying to keep our heads down. There were bullets all around. We were risking our lives but also the life of Fawaz because when you are injured like that every moment is important," he said.

The car swerved down a back alley to escape the mukhabberat.

"It was complete chaos but we know the neighbourhood much better than the security so we managed to escape with our lives," said Abu Haidar.

Not so for the man they were trying to help: "Because we were forced to make that long journey, Fawaz bled to death."

Al Jazeera has also reported that security forces, including snipers on rooftops, prevented residents from assisting the dead and dying during the siege of Deraa.

Human Rights Watch documented cases of security forces preventing casualties reaching hospital and firing on protesters seeking to help the wounded in Harasta, a town 12km north-east of Damascus, and also in Deraa.

'They entered the hospital'

Even without the secret police attacking their car, Abu Haidar said his options for getting Fawaz to a doctor had already been drastically limited: "We were not willing to take him to the national hospital in Homs because we thought he would be arrested and kidnapped there."

In cases repeated in several different Syrian cities, Al Jazeera has been able to document raids on hospitals by members of the secret police who have snatched injured protestors from their beds and forced them, some on stretchers, into police vehicles where they are driven to what are suspected to be military hospitals.

On April 22, the same day Fawaz died, a young nurse was on duty in the emergency ward of a hospital in Duma, a town 15 km north-east of Damascus, where tens of thousands had been protesting against the regime.

It was her fifth consecutive Friday on call. Before the protests began, the emergency department would receive three or four people per day, usually from car accidents, she said. This Friday, as before, the hospital would admit 30 to 40 emergency cases, almost all of them gunshot wounds to the upper body.

"I was in the hospital between eight and nine in the evening when about 20 security men with Kalashnikovs entered the hospital and asked reception to give them the names of all patients submitted that day," the nurse told Al Jazeera, speaking on the condition that her identity and the name of the hospital not be revealed.

"We were afraid of them. They asked us to bring them all the wounded, not those who were just normally ill."

The doctors and nurses were made to escort all 30 injured protesters, some of them carried on stretchers, from their beds to the police vehicles.

"I remember a teenager who was injured in his arm. He was exhausted, but they put him in a car anyway and he was crying from the pain. But I couldn't do anything for him," said the nurse. "They told us they were taking them to the military and police hospitals to treat them under their observation."

On the same day, also in Duma, residents formed a human shield around the gates of the private-run Hamdan Hospital, trying to prevent secret police arresting the 25 injured protesters receiving treatment inside.

"This is the last way we have to protect our wounded from being kidnapped by the secret police," said a man who took part in the human shield, which he said broke up after security forces fired on it and then arrested several injured patients.

In two other suburbs of Damascus, Berze and Maadamiyeh, Al Jazeera spoke to local doctors who said they had resorted to treating injured protestors in private homes or make-shift field clinics after relatives reported loved ones going missing from hospitals.

Also on April 22, a 13-year-old boy from Maadamiyeh died from a gunshot wound, said a local doctor, after secret police beat his father as he tried to get his son to hospital in neighbouring Daraya.

On April 23, an eyewitness in Deraa described to Al Jazeera how he saw military and plain-clothes security officers kill five people around the state hospital before breaking in and carrying out the wounded on stretchers.

In Homs itself, a week after Fawaz died, members of a local tribe stood watch around the Al-Barr private hospital to try and protect wounded protestors from police raids.

On May 5, Homs residents again formed a human shield, this time around the main hospital in Bab al-Sebah, while last Friday three people were killed when security forces opened fire on locals trying to protect a hospital in Homs' Al-Waar neighbourhood.

"They prevent patients from being taken to hospital," said a doctor directly involved in treating patients under the custody of the secret police. "It is something horrible. We feel hate towards this security regime."

Treated or tortured?

Injured protestors in the custody of security forces also stand less chance of receiving adequate medical care, according to testimony from doctors speaking to Al Jazeera and human rights researchers.

"When we were treating patients from the protests the mukhaberrat said to us, 'You don't have to take care for these people, you have to care for the injured security men,'" the doctor who treated patients in police custody told Al Jazeera.

"As doctors we have our priorities, but the mukhaberrat don't accept our priorities. It's not like they say, 'We will kill you if you care for the patients,' but the doctors cannot say no to them. They are very afraid."

As Al Jazeera first reported last month, Syrian doctors have come under direct pressure not to treat injured protesters.

Insan, a leading Syrian human rights organisation, documented the case of Hussein Moutaz Issa, 23, who died in police custody after being arrested with a gunshot wound left untreated.

Issa was shot in his right shoulder by security forces while trying to escape door-to-door raids on homes in Madaya, 40 km northwest of Damascus, on April 28. He made it to a neighbour's house where several eyewitnesses, one of them with a medical background, told Insan they managed to stop the bleeding and the wound appeared non-fatal.

But later that night Issa was arrest and died in police custody, his body left at the main regional hospital in Zabadani. According to a doctor from the hospital who spoke to Insan, Issa had bled to death after receiving no medical attention.

"He was left without medical attention and bled to death," said the doctor. "This is homicide. I saw the body myself. This young man was not offered any medical attention."

Even more disturbingly, the body showed marks of torture.

"He was not even left to die in peace," said the doctor. "It seems that after he was captured he was severely beaten."

Issa's death prompted a massive funeral march carrying his body from Zabadani back to Madaya, with thousands of people chanting for the downfall of the regime.
In a graphic and disturbing video from May 19, residents of Deraa display the body of a man said to be 75-year-old Mohammed Hassan Zubi, who was shot in the neck but whose body also bore the scars of severe beating and other torture.

Laid to rest, not in peace

Shot when protesting for freedom, Fawaz Haraki bled to death, like many others, because the actions of Syrian security forces prevented him from receiving the medical attention he needed.

Yet even after his death, the secret police continued to impose their restrictions and repression.

According to Abu Haidar, who delivered the body to them, Fawaz's family were visited by secret police and forced to sign papers stating they would not bury Fawaz in the central Al Kateeb cemetery – now renamed Martyrs' cemetery – but instead on the outskirts of the city, in the Tal Al Nasser cemetery, where the authorities hoped few would gather.

It was a scheme the mukhaberrat was using elsewhere. Just hours after residents of Homs gathered to bury Fawaz, to the south, in the Damascus suburb of Berze, a small group of mourners gathered in the dead of night to bury seven-year-oldIsraa Younes, shot by security forces the day before.

Having snatched bodies from the streets of Berze, the secret police forced families of those shot to sign papers stating their loved ones had been killed by "armed gangs" before they would release the bodies for burial.

Families had also to agree to hold the funeral at night. The same practise took place in Duma, only there the protestors, according to the regime's paperwork, had been killed by "terrorists".
But Fawaz's funeral had the power of numbers. Born aloft by a procession of some 6,000 mourners, Fawaz's body was carried not to the outskirts of the city, but straight to the Martyrs' cemetery in central Homs, an act of defiance at the last, an assertion of rights in death which the regime had so systematically removed from his life, even in its last minutes.

Sober reflections on Doomsday in the Arctic Ocean

"The doomsday [scenario] would be competitive resource wars. As climate change gets worse, people will be pushed to get more resources to run their air conditioners and so forth. My prediction is that we are still going to be addicted to oil (when the main icecaps melt) and these resources are going to be extracted by the most powerful lot - which would include Russia, the US and China." Paul Wapner

The Doomsday scenario is a pathetic joke – but only up to a point. We can only pity those who believe they can predict the coming of Christ [a strange view for Christians who claim to believe the Bible, given that it clearly says that “no one knows” and “it is not for you to know”], but to scorn the trends for humanity on a finite earth whose resources are limited is equally foolish. The trajectories of many indicators are unpromising: population growth, unremitting demand for fossil fuels, persistent insurgencies demanding more access to the good things of life, the readiness of great powers to fight for control of resource-rich lands, melting icecaps, rising seas. These and other conditions in the contemporary world call for sober assessment of what’s ahead. How is the world to avoid a wholesale meltdown? This is no time to gloat over the folly of those who try to set a date for the end of the world.

Consider for instance the prospect of the opening of the Arctic Sea to international concourse along with access to possibly huge amounts of oil. Shouldn’t that be good news? Well, not as the various interested parties see it. Yesterday, the day that according to Harold Camping was supposed to be Doomsday, Chris Arsenault published in Al Jazeera a report on what the recent WikiLeaks reveal about the foreseeable future for the Arctic. [Click on the title above for a link to the source.]

WikiLeaks: A battle to 'carve up' the Arctic: Resource wars are possible as global warming melts polar ice - opening new areas to oil exploitation, cables indicate.
Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 21 May 2011

Energy experts estimate that the Arctic contains more than one fifth of the world's petroleum [GALLO/GETTY]
It is considered the final frontier for oil and gas exploitation, and secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks confirm that nations are battling to "carve up" the Arctic's vast resources.

"The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight."

Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice melting due to global warming will open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize.

Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre of world politics".

Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, have competing claims to the Arctic, a region about the size of Africa, comprising some six per cent of the Earth's surface.

'Resource wars'

"The WikiLeaks cables show us realpolitik in its rarest form," says Paul Wapner, director of the global environmental politics programme at American University in Washington. "Diplomats continue to think of this as a zero sum world. When they see exploitable resources, all things being equal, they are going to approach them through a competitive nation state system."

The cables come to light at a time when academics and activists fear resource scarcity, particularly over dwindling oil and drinking water supplies, could lead to new international conflicts.

Sir David King, the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, called the invasion of Iraq "the first of [this century's] resource wars", warning that "powerful nations will secure resources for their own people at the expense of others".

In 2007, Russia planted its flag 4,000 metres below the Arctic Ocean, in an attempt to claim that its continental shelf, the geological formation by which claims are measured, extends far into the frozen zone.
"Behind Russia's policy are two potential benefits accruing from global warming, the prospect for an [even seasonally] ice-free shipping route from Europe to Asia, and the estimated oil and gas wealth hidden beneath the Arctic sea floor," noted a 2009 cable articulating US beliefs.

Presently, the Russians are far ahead of the US and other Arctic countries to take advantage of what will happen offshore, says Bruce Forbes, a research professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland. "The cables confirm what we as scientists already know; [global warming means] the Arctic is not just this hinterland, as it is portrayed in the mainstream media."

In its 2010 Quadrennial Defence Review report, the Pentagon stated: "Climate change and energy are two issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment." . . .

[For more, click on the title above.]

Khalil Nouri's new article: An illustration of strategic change in Eurasian relations

A new article by Khalil Nouri in the HuffingtonPost illustrates how integrated are the issues in Afghanistan and the wider region of Central Asia. Locally the to-and-fro of negotiation is between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the interests of the respective parties actually include China, India, Russia, and of course the United States. Not much will happen without those and other parties engaging in the discussions. Afghanistan and its neighbors, once isolated and marginal to the current of world affairs, now commands a prominent place in world concerns. A civil war that is a surrogate international war; nuclear arsenals in the region; vitally needed reserves of gas, oil, and vital minerals; transport lines and pipelines that must remain open if the great populations centers of the world are to be supplied -- these issues force the interests of the Eurasian powers to converge in Central Asia.

But in a sense there is no "Central Asia" without the wider configuration of nations whose interests now clash in this region as well as a few key places elsewhere. The Indian Ocean, the Gulf, Iran, East Asia, eastern Africa -- these regions are likewise involved in the concerns of Central Asians.

I repeat myself on the pace of world change, but the process seems so awesome, as the emergence of new situations generates a plethora of unforeseeable possibilities. Crucial to this process is the ever-faster pace of technological development. The technologies of communication and transport are enabling social interchanges to trip relays of influence and interest all around the world, at an ever faster pace. New localities take on significances they have never had before, or at least not for a long time. This is the relevance of these developments for Central Asia. What was formerly marginal is now becoming more fully engaged with other places and peoples -- and in certain respects becoming inescapably crucial to whatever happens next. [For a link to the source of the Nouri article click on the title above.]

A Paradigm Shift on the Chessboard of the Afghan "Great Game"
Khalil Nouri.
HUFFPOST: Posted: 05/17/11 12:29 PM ET
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/khalil-nouri/afghanistan-pakistan_b_862292.html?view=print

Ever since Pakistan began lobbying against Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai's efforts to build a long-term strategic partnership with the U.S., urging him to look to Pakistan instead -- and its Chinese ally -- for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the Afghan economy, it was perceived to be Pakistan calling the shots for a new move on the chessboard of the Great Game.
However, despite how attractive that move may seem to them, it cannot come to fruition when few to even none of the players will consent to an all Afghan initiative; but in actuality, they are keeping the Afghan majority at bay from asserting their desire for such a plan. That said, this Pakistani rush to stack the deck in their favor in Afghanistan will fail due to the fact that there can only be one legitimate way to obtain stability in Afghanistan; through an all Afghan national ratification of a reconciliation process put forth for a genuine endgame to this decades-old grinding war in Afghanistan.
Subsequent to Pakistan's clandestine call in Kabul, the Kremlin announced a three-day official visit by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari to Russia at the invitation of President Dmitry Medvedev. This was scheduled ahead of Zardari's trip to Washington, which has already been postponed; and now seems quite unlikely to take place anytime in the near future. Meanwhile, Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasoul was immediately sent to Beijing for a quick rendezvous with his Chinese counterpart. And, thereafter, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi was due to arrive in Moscow last Thursday on an official visit.
It seems, by all appearances, that this quartet is attempting to make strides towards an effort to introduce a model initiative initially engineered by Pakistan's craving for a prime leadership status in Afghanistan's forthcoming endgame.
However, in the wake of the May 2 killing of Osama Bin Laden and the Great Game players' interlaced stopovers in Moscow and Beijing, along comes another keen contestant in the game, but a solitary one; the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must nowconsider steps to advance his partnership cajolement with Hamid Karzai in Kabul.
These interwoven trips are all a push for strategic positioning by the aforementioned Great Game playing quartet in a post U.S. troop drawdown environment starting in July 2011 and ending in 2014. It also boils down to acrimoniously preventing a long term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan, as the frontrunner to this antagonism, seeks to legitimize this notion where all parties have yet to give their endorsements. On the other hand, the underrepresented by majority, inept and weak government of Hamid Karzai who seems to have grown closer to Pakistan over the last year, cannot weather an outcome where all the key players have the decisive upper hand in this Great Game. Therefore, Karzai, whether he likes it or not, will have to abide by any outcome dictated to him by the major players. ....

[For more, click on the title above.]

Stratfor's analysis of the significance of the new "Visegrad Group": worth wondering about

George Friedman of Stratfor has drawn attention to a new pact between several eastern European states, which he takes to be an omen of things to come in Eurasian affairs. It may be one of several signs that the world is no longer what we have imagined. The proliferation of demonstrations in the Arab world; the death of Osama Bin Laden; the rising hostility with Pakistan [that is, the unmasking of the duplicity of its military leaders]; the faltering world economy; and now the formation of a "battle group" among four eastern European countries -- these events seem to indicate tectonic shifts in the configuration of powers in Eurasia. Worth following with some interest at least.

What seems evident, in any case, is how rapidly the relations among powers are changing, not only the ability of states to influence the course of affairs but also of non-state insurgent groups. For those of us who would like to plan for the future, it's hard to make sense of the course of affairs. But that makes the attempt all the more crucial. The world won't stop changing: if we think we understand what is going on we probably don't. We are always behind the curve; what we can surmise about our situation is just the best we can do at the moment.

That's why outfits like Stratfor can be a help. Even if their assessments are off the mark they at least help us reflect on a world in flux; they remind us that we cannot suppose that all is as has been. RLC
=========
Visegrad: A New European Military Force is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

Visegrad: A New European Military Force May 17, 2011 | 0859 GMT

By George Friedman

With the Palestinians demonstrating and the International Monetary Fund in turmoil, it would seem odd to focus this week on something called the Visegrad Group. But this is not a frivolous choice. What the Visegrad Group decided to do last week will, I think, resonate for years, long after the alleged attempted rape by Dominique Strauss-Kahn is forgotten and long before the Israeli-Palestinian issue is resolved. The obscurity of the decision to most people outside the region should not be allowed to obscure its importance.

The region is Europe — more precisely, the states that had been dominated by the Soviet Union. The Visegrad Group, or V4, consists of four countries — Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary — and is named after two 14th century meetings held in Visegrad Castle in present-day Hungary of leaders of the medieval kingdoms of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. The group was reconstituted in 1991 in post-Cold War Europe as the Visegrad Three (at that time, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one). The goal was to create a regional framework after the fall of Communism. This week the group took an interesting new turn.


On May 12, the Visegrad Group announced the formation of a “battle group” under the command of Poland. The battle group would be in place by 2016 as an independent force and would not be part of NATO command. In addition, starting in 2013, the four countries would begin military exercises together under the auspices of the NATO Response Force.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the primary focus of all of the Visegrad nations had been membership in the European Union and NATO. Their evaluation of their strategic position was threefold. First, they felt that the Russian threat had declined if not dissipated following the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, they felt that their economic future was with the European Union. Third, they believed that membership in NATO, with strong U.S. involvement, would protect their strategic interests. Of late, their analysis has clearly been shifting.

First, Russia has changed dramatically since the Yeltsin years. It has increased its power in the former Soviet sphere of influence substantially, and in 2008 it carried out an effective campaign against Georgia. Since then it has also extended its influence in other former Soviet states. The Visegrad members’ underlying fear of Russia, built on powerful historical recollection, has become more intense. They are both the front line to the former Soviet Union and the countries that have the least confidence that the Cold War is simply an old memory.

Second, the infatuation with Europe, while not gone, has frayed. The ongoing economic crisis, now focused again on Greece, has raised two questions: whether Europe as an entity is viable and whether the reforms proposed to stabilize Europe represent a solution for them or primarily for the Germans. It is not, by any means, that they have given up the desire to be Europeans, nor that they have completely lost faith in the European Union as an institution and an idea. Nevertheless, it would be unreasonable to expect that these countries would not be uneasy about the direction that Europe was taking. If one wants evidence, look no further than the unease with which Warsaw and Prague are deflecting questions about the eventual date of their entry into the Eurozone. Both are the strongest economies in Central Europe, and neither is enthusiastic about the euro.

Finally, there are severe questions as to whether NATO provides a genuine umbrella of security to the region and its members. The NATO strategic concept, which was drawn up in November 2010, generated substantial concern on two scores. First, there was the question of the degree of American commitment to the region, considering that the document sought to expand the alliance’s role in non-European theaters of operation. For example, the Americans pledged a total of one brigade to the defense of Poland in the event of a conflict, far below what Poland thought necessary to protect the North European Plain. Second, the general weakness of European militaries meant that, willingness aside, the ability of the Europeans to participate in defending the region was questionable. Certainly, events in Libya, where NATO had neither a singular political will nor the military participation of most of its members, had to raise doubts. It was not so much the wisdom of going to war but the inability to create a coherent strategy and deploy adequate resources that raised questions of whether NATO would be any more effective in protecting the Visegrad nations.

There is another consideration. Germany’s commitment to both NATO and the EU has been fraying. The Germans and the French split on the Libya question, with Germany finally conceding politically but unwilling to send forces. Libya might well be remembered less for the fate of Moammar Gadhafi than for the fact that this was the first significant strategic break between Germany and France in decades. German national strategy has been to remain closely aligned with France in order to create European solidarity and to avoid Franco-German tensions that had roiled Europe since 1871. This had been a centerpiece of German foreign policy, and it was suspended, at least temporarily.

The Germans obviously are struggling to shore up the European Union and questioning precisely how far they are prepared to go in doing so. There are strong political forces in Germany questioning the value of the EU to Germany, and with every new wave of financial crises requiring German money, that sentiment becomes stronger. In the meantime, German relations with Russia have become more important to Germany. Apart from German dependence on Russian energy, Germany has investment opportunities in Russia. The relationship with Russia is becoming more attractive to Germany at the same time that the relationship to NATO and the EU has become more problematic.

For all of the Visegrad countries, any sense of a growing German alienation from Europe and of a growing German-Russian economic relationship generates warning bells. Before the Belarusian elections there was hope in Poland that pro-Western elements would defeat the least unreformed regime in the former Soviet Union. This didn’t happen. Moreover, pro-Western elements have done nothing to solidify in Moldova or break the now pro-Russian government in Ukraine. Uncertainty about European institutions and NATO, coupled with uncertainty about Germany’s attention, has caused a strategic reconsideration — not to abandon NATO or the EU, of course, nor to confront the Russians, but to prepare for all eventualities.

It is in this context that the decision to form a Visegradian battle group must be viewed. Such an independent force, a concept generated by the European Union as a European defense plan, has not generated much enthusiasm or been widely implemented. The only truly robust example of an effective battle group is the Nordic Battle Group, but then that is not surprising. The Nordic countries share the same concerns as the Visegrad countries — the future course of Russian power, the cohesiveness of Europe and the commitment of the United States.

In the past, the Visegrad countries would have been loath to undertake anything that felt like a unilateral defense policy. Therefore, the decision to do this is significant in and of itself. It represents a sense of how these countries evaluate the status of NATO, the U.S. attention span, European coherence and Russian power. It is not the battle group itself that is significant but the strategic decision of these powers to form a sub-alliance, if you will, and begin taking responsibility for their own national security. It is not what they expected or wanted to do, but it is significant that they felt compelled to begin moving in this direction.

Just as significant is the willingness of Poland to lead this military formation and to take the lead in the grouping as a whole. Poland is the largest of these countries by far and in the least advantageous geographical position. The Poles are trapped between the Germans and the Russians. Historically, when Germany gets close to Russia, Poland tends to suffer. It is not at that extreme point yet, but the Poles do understand the possibilities. In July, the Poles will be assuming the EU presidency in one of the union’s six-month rotations. The Poles have made clear that one of their main priorities will be Europe’s military power. Obviously, little can happen in Europe in six months, but this clearly indicates where Poland’s focus is.

The militarization of the V4 runs counter to its original intent but is in keeping with the geopolitical trends in the region. Some will say this is over-reading on my part or an overreaction on the part of the V4, but it is neither. For the V4, the battle group is a modest response to emerging patterns in the region, which STRATFOR had outlined in its 2011 Annual Forecast. As for my reading, I regard the new patterns not as a minor diversion from the main pattern but as a definitive break in the patterns of the post-Cold War world. In my view, the post-Cold War world ended in 2008, with the financial crisis and the Russo-Georgian war. We are in a new era, as yet unnamed, and we are seeing the first breaks in the post-Cold War pattern.

I have argued in previous articles and books that there is a divergent interest between the European countries on the periphery of Russia and those farther west, particularly Germany. For the countries on the periphery, there is a perpetual sense of insecurity, generated not only by Russian power compared to their own but also by uncertainty as to whether the rest of Europe would be prepared to defend them in the event of Russian actions. The V4 and the other countries south of them are not as sanguine about Russian intentions as others farther away are. Perhaps they should be, but geopolitical realities drive consciousness and insecurity and distrust defines this region.

I had also argued that an alliance only of the four northernmost countries is insufficient. I used the concept “Intermarium,” which had first been raised after World War I by a Polish leader, Joseph Pilsudski, who understood that Germany and the Soviet Union would not be permanently weak and that Poland and the countries liberated from the Hapsburg Empire would have to be able to defend themselves and not have to rely on France or Britain.

Pilsudski proposed an alliance stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and encompassing the countries to the west of the Carpathians — Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In some formulations, this would include Yugoslavia, Finland and the Baltics. The point was that Poland had to have allies, that no one could predict German and Soviet strength and intentions, and that the French and English were too far away to help. The only help Poland could have would be an alliance of geography — countries with no choice.

It follows from this that the logical evolution here is the extension of the Visegrad coalition. At the May 12 defense ministers’ meeting, there was discussion of inviting Ukraine to join in. Twenty or even 10 years ago, that would have been a viable option. Ukraine had room to maneuver. But the very thing that makes the V4 battle group necessary — Russian power — limits what Ukraine can do. The Russians are prepared to give Ukraine substantial freedom to maneuver, but that does not include a military alliance with the Visegrad countries.

An alliance with Ukraine would provide significant strategic depth. It is unlikely to happen. That means that the alliance must stretch south, to include Romania and Bulgaria. The low-level tension between Hungary and Romania over the status of Hungarians in Romania makes that difficult, but if the Hungarians can live with the Slovaks, they can live with the Romanians. Ultimately, the interesting question is whether Turkey can be persuaded to participate in this, but that is a question far removed from Turkish thinking now. History will have to evolve quite a bit for this to take place. For now, the question is Romania and Bulgaria.

But the decision of the V4 to even propose a battle group commanded by Poles is one of those small events that I think will be regarded as a significant turning point. However we might try to trivialize it and place it in a familiar context, it doesn’t fit. It represents a new level of concern over an evolving reality — the power of Russia, the weakness of Europe and the fragmentation of NATO. This is the last thing the Visegrad countries wanted to do, but they have now done the last thing they wanted to do. That is what is significant.

Events in the Middle East and Europe’s economy are significant and of immediate importance. However, sometimes it is necessary to recognize things that are not significant yet but will be in 10 years. I believe this is one of those events. It is a punctuation mark in European history.

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Grenier on the indifference of the Arab world to the death of Bin Laden

In Al Jazeera [May 13, 2011] Robert L. Grenier has commented on the relative indifference of the Arab world to the death of Osama Bin Laden. I have copied below a portion of that statement that aptly describes the issues that have informed some of the public demonstrations in the Middle East. [Click on the title for a link to the whole article.]

From Al Jazeera

The end of one dream and the birth of another: The Arab Spring has empowered Muslims to create new forms of leadership - dictators and mass-murderers "need not apply".

. . .

Osama's resistance was outdated
No matter how steadfast the Sheikh may have seemed in resisting perceived western encroachment, no matter how sincere he may have been in pursuit of his twisted aims, it is difficult to muster great sympathy for a man so utterly misguided, whose takfiri legacy was to inspire the wanton murder of thousands of Muslims by other Muslims in East Africa, in Iraq, and in any number of other places extending from Morocco to Indonesia.
Even in South Asia ... - even there, one cannot find the groundswell of popular emotion one might have found had bin Laden been killed, say, in 2002.

Too much has happened since.
The response of the West to 9/11 and the explosion of regional militancy it has inspired has led, ultimately, to a degree of Muslim-on-Muslim violence heretofore unimaginable, employing the most alien and macabre of methods, in what was already a violent part of the world. Even the demonstrations of the usual suspects, from the Jamaat-e-Islami to Lashkar-e-Taiba, have had a ritual, self-serving quality - and their participants betray the dispirited knowledge that they can hope to generate little resonance in the population at large. Indeed, their public outpourings appear to have more to do with them than they do with genuine devotion to Osama.
It was the fate of bin Laden that, in the end, he would become to most in the Muslim world a sterile symbol of ineffectual resistance, fundamentally rejected by those whom he would presume to represent. There is no greater indictment of the legacy of bin Laden than that his appeal was based upon an overwhelming sense of Muslim weakness. It thus is fitting that he should meet his demise precisely when a new generation is rising up to forge a different path, one based on an overwhelming sense of popular strength.

There is precedent for this. I remember well the feeling in the Arab street in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and defied the calls of the West and of the international community to withdraw. I saw it from the streets of Algiers, where mass demonstrations built inexorably in size and vigour as momentum increased for a US-led attack on Saddam's Republican Guard. Those who surrounded the US embassy chanting pro-Saddam slogans surely had no illusions about the man: He was a thug and a known mass-murderer of his own people, whose greatest atrocities were yet to come. But then and there, the reality of the man counted for little. What mattered was the image, the symbol of a seemingly powerful Arab leader willing to stand up to the West.
Paper tigers
When, in the end, Saddam was overwhelmingly and ignominiously defeated, and his army revealed to be a paper tiger, one might have expected to see a popular explosion. In fact, we saw nothing of the kind. It is the singular fate of the personally discredited symbol to lose all popular support when his resistance is revealed to be a sham - and has come to an end. In the case of the Iraqi dictator, it was like air escaping from a balloon: As Saddam's legions fled northward in disorder, the headline of a popular newspaper in Algiers said it all: The End of the Dream. In the Arab street, there was a collective shrug, and everyone went back to what they were doing before.
In truth, the promise represented by Saddam Hussein was not a dream, but a nightmare. It should not be the fate of the Muslims to be "liberated" by mass-murderers, whether Saddam or Osama, whose contempt for the core beliefs and aspirations of most of those whom they pretended to lead was palpable.
Instead, and in spite of the many obstacles ahead, one can see in the middle distance a very different sort of liberation, one forged by and for the people themselves, based on models which exist within the Muslim world, and carrying the tangible hope of a future where the leaders are servants to the desires of the people, and not the other way around.

Pakistan's nuclear race

I have cried "Wolf!" so many times about Pakistan that it's not worth saying any more. How many times can you say, "This is dangerous!" and still have anyone pay attention?

Thankfully, Andrew Bust of Newsweek has said it so well that it has to be interesting. Pakistan's nuclear activity is another terrifying reality -- besides what is known about its duplicitous participation in the activities of the Taliban/Al Qaeda:

At a moment of unprecedented misgiving between Washington and Islamabad, new evidence suggests that Pakistan’s nuclear program is barreling ahead at a furious clip.
...
Pakistan is aggressively accelerating construction at the Khushab nuclear site, about 140 miles south of Islamabad. The images, analysts say, prove Pakistan will soon have a fourth operational reactor, greatly expanding plutonium production for its nuclear-weapons program.
...
It’s dangerous because Pakistan is also stockpiling fissile material, or bomb fuel. Since Islamabad can mine uranium on its own territory and has decades of enrichment know-how—beginning with the work of nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan—the potential for production is significant.
...
[An] official who works on nuclear issues told Newsweek that intelligence estimates suggest Pakistan has already developed enough fissile material to produce more than 100 warheads and manufacture between eight and 20 weapons a year. “There’s no question,” the official says, “it’s the fastest-growing program in the world.”
...
Nukes, after all, are a valuable political tool, ensuring continued economic aid from the United States and Europe. “Pakistan knows it can outstare” the West, says Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy. “It’s confident the West knows that Pakistan’s collapse is too big a price to pay, so the bailout is there in perpetuity. It’s the one thing we’ve been successful at.”

As many as 850 unarmed Syrians have been gunned down by their own government

The demonstrations of the ordinary people in Syria are awesome, for they have demonstrated exemplary courage and zeal for all the world to see. Their demonstrations have exposed the readiness of the Syrian government to crush its own citizenry. Already its troops haves gunned down more than 850 people in cold blood.

The Syrian regime has rarely exposed the violent and terrifying force by which it enforces the social order. For us as observers it is easy to be seduced by scenes of apparent order and social conviviality among the ordinary Syrians. The hard reality of life there is otherwise, for they know, and have known for generations, how disciplined and inhuman the repressive measures of their government can be. As in every country, a potential for violence shapes the course of every-day life, even if that violent potential is seldom exposed. What deserves our admiration is the readiness of the Syrian people, fully aware of what their government might do to them, to come out on the streets to demand a more responsive administration -- in the face of an army trained to shoot them down without mercy or remorse.

It is hard for us to internalize what is going on. Are the American people ready to pay such a price for the right to assemble freely, to collectively choose their own leaders, and establish more equitable rules of social administration?

Where will this bitter asymmetric struggle lead? In a dangerous game of cat and mouse, people demonstrate in one place only to flee when the army appears, while in the mean time demonstration break out in other places. For these civilians the risks are potentially mortal; for the military they are minimal.

Even so, for the government the stakes are momentous. How momentous is demonstrated in the extreme measures it has taken, murdering its own citizenry without shame. In the words of the ancient prophet:

"Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame ...; they do not even know how to blush." [JER 8:12]

Helpless as the rest of us are, we can only cry out against such cruel and inhuman brutality by a regime that has total power -- and pray that a resolution to such a clash of interests will soon be found.

[For a recent statement of the situation click on the title above.]

Murder in the family of a National Socialist Party leader

What alarms me about the murder of Jeff Hall by his son yesterday has little to do with the world as it is now constituted. The National Socialist Movement appears to be composed of fringe elements that seem unable to cope with a world careering ever faster into a jumble of new social connections and relations. For such people the emerging world defies all hope of maintaining a sense of significance and security like the social world that they suppose was once simpler and more orderly.

The murder exposes a family under stress. Jeff Hall himself had not been coping well with his world, and his son was apparently a casualty of the confusion that Jeff himself reflected. What worries me about such situations is what it reveals about how a society generally under stress might look like.

We all want to find reasons for our problems outside of ourselves; we need explanations for why our world is beyond us – and of course many of our problems are circumstantial, framed by situations outside of ourselves. When societies decay, marked by a collapse of the economy, people are inclined to look for scapegoats. The National Socialist Party of Jeff Hall is driven by the certainty that the races are different in character and ability and that the fundamental sources of social disorder are people who seem different from us. The "other" is threatening.

A line that struck me in the New York times report today was a statement by the head of the party, Jeff Schoep. Speaking to a crowd in New Jersey he said, “The government tells us we’re in recovery. Well yeah, if you’re a fat cat on Wall Street, if you’re some greedy Jew running a bank that got a whole bunch of kickbacks, maybe it is better. But not for us.” Fat cats, Wall Street, bankers, Jews – these "greedy" people are the reason ordinary people can't make it. The National Socialist Party is mouthing the same nonsense of generations past: why does it resonate with anyone today?

Clues exist for why anyone would take extreme measures, and so why some racist notions might resonate. The Guardian says that the domestic situation of this family was fraught with conflict and disorder, creating the “troubled” young man that killed his father.

[He] spent his early years hungry and living in squalor while his parents went through a divorce that included accusations of child abuse from both parties. … The child was removed from his mother Leticia Neal's home as a two-year-old, along with two siblings and two-step siblings. Social workers had reported that the children were often filthy and hungry, left in a house with no electricity or gas with maggots crawling on dishes and curdled milk in the babies' bottles. He was sent to live with his grandmother, because his father was on three three years' probation for drink driving. His father was eventually granted full custody in 2004.

The only relevance of this tragic story for a social scientist is what it intimates about how people behave when their world is a kilter. Jeff Hall and his first wife and his son were dealing with a world out of control, for which they appear to have been poorly equipped. We wonder how many people are similarly frustrated because they live in circumstances beyond their control and beyond their understanding. In such moments it is common for us to seek someone to blame, and thus someone to attack. In this case, for Jeff Hall object of attack was non-whites; for his son it was Jeff himself.

We live in a time when many are anxious about a fragile world economy, the American economy being a key part of it of course. What if the gridlock of congress fails to confront the real situation and the economy really turns down? [I know this might seem like an ugly unlikely scenario to some, but given what we have seen in Washington, what can we honestly look forward to?] In such a case, how would a collapsing economy look like in American society?

We have already seen how readily our political leaders use stressful situations to feed on people’s worst fears. Note how eagerly Donald Trump, wanting to be president, hunts for every possible excuse to define President Barak Obama as “the other.” He has fed the fears of those who claim that Obama is lying about his birth, about his faith, about his true intentions. Obama is the son of a Muslim father, of an African, educated in a Muslim society [4th grade]; he could even be a Black Muslim; he’s a socialist, even a communist. The only community in which such deniable insinuations of “the other” could catch hold is one under stress.

Thankfully, that is not America as it exists today. For the moment, Trump seems only to be pathetic figure: unsatisfied with wealth and fame, he still craves a source of respect. I pray that the kinds of devices he has used, deniable insinuations of race, will never again resonate in American society. And I pray for the Hall family, reeling now from yet another tragedy.

Discovering that "history" was myth in the Bangladesh war

Social science research often clashes with popular understandings. We tend to remember the stories that impress us, often for personal reasons. And societies tend to retain stories about the past that fit well with their own images of themselves. Actual events, social realities, are I suppose complex because human beings experience situations differently and remember them selectively. We internalize the significance of events through frames of reference already meaningful to us. And besides the natural tendency of human beings to simplify and gloss events there are always interests involved in what they choose to remember and talk about.
So the world needs serious research, empirically grounded examinations of social conditions and historical events as they can best be established. Sarmila Bose, a Bengali Indian historian, decided to examine in detail what took place during the bitter war of 1971 when Bangladesh [then known as "East Pakistan"] broke away from West Pakistan. Her book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, consists of the recollections of participants on both sides. She thought she knew the rough outlines of what happened, but the stories that people told her differed acutely from what she had grown up with. She did it as a research project, oblivious to the fire-storm that her book created even before it had appeared.

My aim was to record as much as possible of what seemed to be a much-commented-on but poorly documented conflict - and to humanise it, so that the war could be depicted in terms of the people who were caught up in it, and not just faceless statistics. I hoped that the detailed documentation of what happened at the human level on the ground would help to shed some light on the conflict as a whole.
The principal tool of my study was memories. I read all available memoirs and reminiscences, in both English and Bengali. But I also embarked on extensive fieldwork, finding and talking to people who were present at many particular incidents, whether as participants, victims or eye-witnesses. Crucially, I wanted to hear the stories from multiple sources, including people on different sides of the war, so as to get as balanced and well-rounded a reconstruction as possible.
As soon as I started to do systematic research on the 1971 war, I found that there was a problem with the story which I had grown up believing: from the evidence that emanated from the memories of all sides at the ground level, significant parts of the "dominant narrative" seem not to have been true. Many "facts" had been exaggerated, fabricated, distorted or concealed. Many people in responsible positions had repeated unsupported assertions without a thought; some people seemed to know that the nationalist mythologies were false and yet had done nothing to inform the public. I had thought I would be chronicling the details of the story of 1971 with which I had been brought up, but I found instead that there was a different story to be told.

[Click on the title above for a link to a review.]

Raymond Davis Affair and the Plot against Osama Bin Laden

My student Fahim has been saying all along that there was something strange about the Raymond Davis affair. No one really believed that the reason he shot the two men following him in Lahore on January 27 was because they were trying to rob him, as he claimed. There were more reasons to ask questions once it became known that the two men were with the ISI, Pakistan's notorious intelligence service. Fahim repeatedly said that there had to be something more to the affair than the public was being told.

If so, we may never know. Whatever the reason, Davis made sure that both of the men were dead -- he shot them in the back as they were fleeing and then went back to put more bullets into one of them who seemed still to be alive.

But now we may have an additional piece of relevant information: for many months the Americans were planning an attack on a location they supposed was Osama Bin Laden's hiding place. The raid on the Bin Laden compound was planned with utmost secrecy. Now that it has been pulled off, with impressive speed and efficiency, we wonder: Could Davis have been protecting information critical to the plot against Osama? Was that why he took such pains to exterminate his ISI pursuers?

We of course will never know. This is pure speculation. Even so, it is hard to deny Fahim's point: Davis was up to something important; his behavior makes little sense unless something else was at stake.

One issue is evidently beyond speculation, as many have noted: Pakistan's military should be embarrassed: They were either incompetent or in cahoots with Bin Laden, one or the other. It's hard not to believe that they were aware of his presence in their midst -- how could they not have been protecting him?

But whatever one might speculate, Fahim seems to have it right: Davis was protecting the critical plot to attack Osama Bin Laden.

Developments worth following recently

China struggling with inflation
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/business/global/18yuan.html?_r=1&hp

Illicit Church in China tries to buck Beijing
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/world/asia/18beijing.html?ref=global-home

Syrian Protests continue despite killings by police
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/world/middleeast/19syria.html?ref=middleeast

In Yemen protests contiue
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/world/middleeast/18yemen.html?ref=middleeast

women irate in Yemen
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/world/middleeast/17yemen.html?ref=middleeast

Pakistan and US struggle over drones
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/world/asia/18pakistan.html?ref=asia

Fariba Nawa's defense of wearing the Hijab
http://www.faribanawa.com/2003/05/15/my-veil-my-decision/

The underside of repression: Fear

Roger Cohen today describes the bunker that Muammar Qaddafi had built for himself because he knew – at least feared -- that the day would come when he would have to flee from his own people. So the bunker was made impregnable. Of course it is easy to surmise that that same fear animates the Syrian regime that had not shirked from shooting its own people – even shooting the troops that refuse to do it. Libya, Syria, Bahrain – these regimes, despite affectations of popularity among their citizens, in fact can no longer pretend to rule by popular acclaim. Likewise for the Chinese: All the pretenses of popularity during the Olympic Games have disappeared because they dare long allow public demonstrations of which they have no control – even a church service in Shanghai – for any uncontrolled gathering has the potential of exposing what virtually everyone inside and outside their regimes knows: that they hold power by force; they enforce their position through the exercise of violence or the fear of violence.

Here is part of what Cohen has to say about Qaddafi's hideout:

I descended 55 steps into the labyrinth of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s mind. The glow of cellphones and a feeble flashlight lit a passage into the darkness. A netherworld unfolded — bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, even saunas — linked by tunnels with six-inch-thick metal doors agape at their mouths. No expense had been spared on this lair.

“You see what the rat planned,” said Farage Mohamed, a manager in an oil pipe company, as he led the way to the base of an escape hatch that emerged deep in the gardens of this sprawling former Qaddafi villa in liberated eastern Libya. “It’s like Hitler’s Berlin bunker.”

So Qaddafi always thought this could happen, even 42 years into his rule. He feared someone might slice away the myths — Arab nationalist, African unifier, all-powerful non-president — and leave him, disrobed, a little man in a vast vault with nowhere left to go. In the twisted mind of the despot now derided here as “the man with the big hair,” his own demise was the tousle-coiffed specter that would not go away.

Strange, then, that the United States and Europe never thought this could happen — not to Qaddafi, or Mubarak, or Ben Ali, or any of the other murderous plunderers, some now gone, others slaughtering their own people, here in Libya, or in Syria, or Yemen. Policy was based on the mistaken belief that these leaders would last forever.

They were paranoid about their fates. We were convinced of their permanence.

Of course it was not just a conviction about their inevitability that drove U.S. policy toward these dictators. It was a cynical decision to place counterterrorism and security at the top of the agenda and human rights — in this case Arab rights — at the bottom. It was about Big Oil interests. And, to some degree, it was about the perception of what served the security of America’s closest regional ally, Israel.

[Click on the title above for a link to the original.]