Peace and Justice Post

Pakistan’s mullahs and muftis have managed to blur the line between what God says and what they say

Mohammad Hanif, The Guardian, March 3, 2011

Two months ago, after Governor Salmaan Taseer’s murder and the jubilant support for the policeman who killed him, religious scholars in Pakistan told us that since common people don’t know enough about religion they should leave it to those who do – basically anyone with a beard.

Everyone thought it made a cruel kind of sense. So everyone decided to shut up: the Pakistan Peoples party (PPP) government because it wanted to cling to power, liberals in the media because they didn’t want to be the next Taseer. The move to amend the blasphemy law was shelved.

It was an unprecedented victory for Pakistan’s mullah minority. They had told a very noisy and diverse people to shut up and they heard back nothing but silence. After Pakistan’s only Christian federal minister, Shahbaz Bhatti – the bravest man in Islamabad – was murdered on Tuesday, they were back on TV, this time condemning the killing, claiming it was a conspiracy against them, against Islam and against Pakistan. The same folk who had celebrated one murder and told us how not to get murdered were wallowing in self pity.

Continues >>

In his article entitled ‘‘Till September: The PA’s Meaningless Deadlines’’, dated February 26, Ramzy Baroud fails to present the real picture of the Palestinian situation today.

Characterizing the Palestinian leadership as a ‘‘self designated Palestinian leadership in the West Bank’’, Mr. Baroud wittingly ignores some facts while distorting others. In fact, it was Hamas that has refused until this day to sign the Egyptian-brokered reconciliation agreement.   The so-called “Palestine papers” have not revealed a single official agreement or document that offers concessions.  Rather, the majority of the documents were internal draft summaries of meetings taken in shorthand and intended for personal use only.

Continues >>

WASHINGTON – J Street, the Washington-based “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” advocacy group, drew a large crowd to its annual conference this year despite criticism over its controversial calls for the Barack Obama administration not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.

Palestinian protesters hold a banner during a rally against Israeli settlements. (AFP/Abbas Momani) In the end, the administration vetoed the resolution, but the controversy appeared to have had no negative effect on the organisation’s turnout for the just-ended conference, which had 2,400 participants – 900 more than last year – and over 500 students participating.

Over 50 members of Congress were in attendance and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a surprise appearance to honour Kathleen Peratis, vice chair of the J Street Education Fund and the recipient of the group’s Tzedek V’Shalom award.

With pro-democracy revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya dominating the headlines over the past week, uncertainty about the shifting geopolitics in the region was a recurring theme in the remarks delivered by J Street leadership, panelists and an Obama administration senior Middle East adviser.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, told attendees, “We know in our hearts that it’s not just the status quo in the Arab world that is bound to change, it is the status quo between Israel and the Palestinian people that has to change as well,” at the conference’s kickoff on Saturday night.

Continues >>

Gathafi’s troops appear poorly armed, under-trained as Libyan leader had concentrated power in elite Tripoli-based brigade.

Middle East Online, March 3, 2011

By Danny Kemp – CAIRO

‘The rest of the army is history’ Libyan strongman Moamer Gathafi is relying on militias, mercenaries and Soviet-era airpower to prop up his regime as he tries to fight back against rebels in the east, analysts said. A bid by Gathafi loyalists to retake the eastern oil port of Brega has thrown the spotlight on the relative strengths of the regime’s forces and the ragtag opposition army. On paper, Gathafi has 115,000 troops and militiamen but most are poorly armed and under-trained because for years Gathafi has concentrated power in an elite Tripoli-based brigade led by one of his sons. Coupled with thousands of African mercenaries being hired for up to $2,000 (1,435 euros) a day, the militias are his only real hope of resisting the challenge to his 41-year rule. “There is an army within an army. There are special brigades that are run by his most trusted people. The rest of the army is history,” Saad Djebbar, a London-based Libya analyst and lawyer, said. In 2010, Libya’s armed forces had a nominal strength of 76,000, most of them conscripts, according to The Military Balance, a survey published by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in Britain. But Gathafi knows the perils that a strong military can pose to an unpopular ruler, having seized power himself as a young colonel in 1969 in a coup that toppled King Idris. Continues >>

As well as being charged with “aiding the enemy,” Manning has also been charged with “five counts of theft of public property or records, two counts of computer fraud, eight counts of transmitting defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, and a count of wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy … Five additional charges are for violating Army computer security regulations.”

According to the Guardian, “Pentagon and military officials say some of the classified information released by WikiLeaks contained the names of informants and others who had cooperated with the US military in Afghanistan, endangering their lives. According to the officials, the US military attempted to contact many of those named and take them into US bases for their own protection. Military officials told NBC News that a small number of them have still have not been found, with one official quoted as saying: ‘We didn’t get them all.’”

Continues >>

Western military action against Gaddafi risks spreading the conflict and undermining the democratic movement

Seumas Milne, The Guardian, March 2, 2011

It’s as if the bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan had been a bad dream. The liberal interventionists are back. As insurrection and repression has split Libya in two and the death toll has mounted, the old Bush-and-Blair battle-cries have returned to haunt us.

The same western leaders who happily armed and did business with the Gaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international criminal court the United States won’t recognise.

While American and British politicians have ramped up talk of a no-fly zone, US warships have been sent to the Mediterranean, a stockpile of chemical weapons has been duly discovered, special forces have been in action, Italy has ditched a non-aggression treaty with Tripoli and a full-scale western military intervention in yet another Arab country is suddenly a serious prospect.

Continues >>

“Just one-fifth of Pakistan`s military spending would be sufficient to finance the universal primary education.” – File Photo 

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan, with one of the world`s largest out-of-school population, about 7.3 million, spends over seven times as much on arms as on primary schools, says a report of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

The discrepancy between primary education and military expenditure is so large that just one-fifth of Pakistan`s military spending would be sufficient to finance the universal primary education, asserts the `Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2011` published on Tuesday.

It said that diversion of national resources to the military and loss of government revenue meant that armed conflict shifted the responsibility for education financing from government to households. The report called on national governments and donors to urgently review the potential for converting unproductive spending on weapons into productive investment in schools.

The 1999-2008 period which was marked by high economic growth, real growth in education spending was higher than the rates of economic growth. The total public expenditure on education as percentage of GNP was 2.9 per cent in 2008, compared to 2.6 per cent in 1999.

The report says that the impact of armed conflict on education has been widely neglected. This hidden crisis is reinforcing poverty, undermining economic growth and holding back the progress of nations. In Pakistan, some 600,000 children in three districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were reported in 2009 to have missed one year or more of school because of conflict and displacement.

Continues >>

As several revolts shook recently big part of Arab world, as Hosni Mubarak stepped down and the leaders of Bahrain and Libya could not think about anything better than to order bloody crack down against their own people, the world (read Western governments, media and academia) were watching with increasing doze of discomfort.

Protests seem to be engulfing almost all countries in the region from Morocco and Tunis to Jordan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Staunch ally of the West – Saudis – feel suddenly ‘vulnerable’, even ‘encircled’. No wonder – millions of the poor from all over the region are now marching and fighting for social justice or for justice in general. And there is hardly a place in the world with more striking inequalities than in this kingdom based on Wahabi conservative Islam, historically close ally of British imperialism. As is well known, Saudi Arabia is bathing in oil – that dark liquid which is both blessing and curse – enriching elites while helping to maintain apartheid between the natives and exploited migrant workers.

For decades, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt (or more precisely their rulers and ‘elites’) – all of them served Western interests with zeal and efficiency. Now they are expecting helping hand, support in this complex and ‘dangerous times’.

While the White House was sending conflicting reports to its allies, well-disciplined mass media and academia rose immediately to the challenge and invented ‘the best role model for the Arab world’ – Indonesia.

Continues >>

The overt age of grand empires gave way to the age of covert imperial hegemony, but now the edifice is crumbling.

At least, overtly, there has been no talk from either Washington or Tel Aviv – the governments with most to lose as the Egyptian revolution unfolds – of military intervention. Such restraint is more expressive of geopolitical sanity than postcolonial morality, but still it enables some measure of change to take place that unsettles, temporarily at least, the established political order.

And yet, by means seen and unseen, external actors, especially the United States, with a distinct American blend of presumed imperial and paternal prerogatives are seeking to shape and limit the outcome of this extraordinary uprising of the Egyptian people, long held in subsidised bondage by the cruel and corrupt Mubarak dictatorship. What is the most defining feature of this American-led diplomacy-from-without is the seeming propriety of managing the turmoil, so that the regime survives and the demonstrators return to what is perversely being called “normalcy”.

I find most astonishing that President Obama so openly claimed the authority to instruct the Mubarak regime about how it was supposed to respond to the revolutionary uprising. I am not surprised at the effort, and would be surprised by its absence – but merely by the lack of any sign of imperial shyness in a world order that is supposedly built around the legitimacy of self-determination, national sovereignty, and democracy.

And almost as surprising, is the failure of Mubarak to pretend in public that such interference in the guise of guidance is unacceptable – even if, behind closed doors, he listens submissively and acts accordingly. This geopolitical theatre performance of master and servant suggests the persistence of the colonial mentality on the part of both coloniser – and their national collaborators.

Continues >>

The tide of revolutions that rocked Tunisia and Egypt has stirred uprisings from Morocco to Libya, but it hasn’t been limited to the Middle East. In places as far south as Cameroon, as far east as China, and even westward to the budget demonstrations in Wisconsin and Europe, people are demanding reform.

Members of Women of Zimbabwe Arise, WOZA, march through the streets of Harare. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

There’s more to these uprisings than the now-familiar images of fresh-faced youth tweeting away despots, too. Revolutionary sparks have emerged in regions often viewed as too fractious, too apathetic, or too uncivilized to rise up.

So has there been a convergence of pro-democracy ideals around the world, particularly in the Global South? Or have localized grievances been swept into a romantic zeitgeist of reform? What’s clear is that the movements are both unique and related. Though the protesters are remarkably diverse in their backgrounds and goals, they’re tied to the project of broadening the very definition of democratic change.

Continues >>