Peace and Justice Post

The latest US drone strike against North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan is amongst the deadliest in recent memory, with at least 41 people killed and other, unconfirmed sources speculating the toll may be upwards of 80.

Making matters worse, this strike isn’t coming with the usual pretense of everyone slain being a “suspected militant.” Rather, the attack struck a tribal jirga (official meeting) for the Madda Khel tribe, in the town of Datta Khel.

The casualties from the attack included six tribal elders who were overseeing the jirga, which was apparently to discuss the ownership of mineral rights, a number of children who were brought by their families to the gathering, and several members of a pro-government militia the tribe helped organize.

The US has been striking houses and vehicles in Datta Khel and elsewhere in North Waziristan for years, and such a large gathering must have seemed an appealing target. The fact that the gathering had nothing to do with militants, however, points again to just how little information they have about their targets before launching missiles at them.

by Gareth Porter and Shah Noori, CommonDreams.org, March 17, 2011

WASHINGTON/KABUL – The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.

The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed. (AFP/Shah Marai) The report also failed to apply the same humanitarian law standard for defining a civilian to its reporting on SOF raids that it applied to its accounting for Taliban assassinations.

The Mar. 9 report, produced by the Human Rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) jointly with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said a total of 80 civilians were killed in “search and seizure operations” by “Pro-Government Forces” in 2010.

But AIHRC Commissioner Nader Nadery told IPS the figure represented only the number of civilian deaths in night raids in the 13 incidents involving SOF units that the Commission had been able to investigate thoroughly.

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Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Ewen MacAskill in Washington

The Guardian, March 16, 2011

Jamaat-e-Islami party supporters hold a protest against the release of Raymond Davis, in Karachi. Photograph: Fareed Khan/AP

document id: ALRC-COS-16-21-2011

An Oral Statement to the 16th Session of the UN Human Rights Council from the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organization in general consultative status

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) would, at the outset, like to express its deepest sympathy and solidarity with the people of Japan.

The ALRC is gravely concerned by Sri Lanka’s perilous plunge into autocracy. Increasing religious violence against minorities, as witnessed in Indonesia concerning Ahmadiyyas, and Pakistan concerning Christians and those opposing the archaic and flawed blasphemy law, is also greatly disturbing. The assassination on March 2, of Mr. Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Religious Minorities, exactly two months after that of former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, shows the extent to which such violence is tolerated, and promoted through impunity, in Pakistan.

The case of human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaipaijit, who was forcibly disappeared seven years ago in Thailand, is emblematic of challenges in the region. On March 11, 2011, the Criminal Court acquitted the five alleged perpetrators in this case, exposing a system of impunity. The verdict ruled that Somchai’s wife, Anghkana, who addressed this Council just last week, and her children, cannot be joint-plaintiffs, preventing them from seeking justice. The defendants were all acquitted because of the lack of legislation specifically prohibiting enforced disappearance and because evidence of Somchai’s death was not possible. In cases of disappearance, the person’s death or injury can, by definition, not be ascertained.

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Amnesty International, 16 March 2011

Bahraini protesters today told Amnesty International of bloody scenes on the streets as government security forces stepped up their violent crackdown on demonstrations and blocked access to hospitals.

At least six people were reportedly killed in the capital Manama amid continuing protests as the army used tanks to flatten the peaceful protest camps set up in recent weeks to demand reform in the Gulf state.

Government forces also surrounded hospitals and attacked doctors trying to help the wounded.

“The distressing reports and images coming out of Bahrain today provide further evidence that the authorities are using lethal and other excessive force to crush protests, with reckless disregard for human life,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Director.

“Wounded protesters have also been prevented from accessing medical attention by government forces.. The Bahraini authorities must immediately put a stop to this bloodshed.”

Security forces attacked the mainly Shi’a protest camp at Manama’s Pearl Roundabout camp early on Wednesday.

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On March 11-13, a small conference of around 200 gathered on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia with potential significance extending far beyond its modest attendance.  This was the national membership meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group founded in San Francisco in 1996 that, in the wake of the siege of Gaza in late 2008, has aggressively grown into a national organization with 27 local chapters and seven full time staff.

The meeting and its discussions were closed to the press (though this writer was in attendance), but this only highlights the newsworthiness of the meeting in itself.  Late last year, the Anti-Defamation League named JVP on a list it released of the “Top Ten Anti-Israel Groups in America,” and since then well-known members of the group have in some cases been met with violence or threats of violence, particularly on the west coast, and lesser forms of intimidation from various Jewish community leaders.

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By Richard Falk, Information Clearing House, March 16, 2011

After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there was in the West, especially the United States, a short triumphal moment, crediting American science and military prowess with bringing victory over Japan and the avoidance of what was anticipated at the time to be a long and bloody conquest of the Japanese homeland. This official narrative of the devastating attacks on these Japanese cities has been contested by numerous reputable historians who argued that Japan had conveyed its readiness to surrender well before the bombs had been dropped, that the U.S. Government needed to launch the attacks to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that it had this super-weapon at its disposal, and that the attacks would help establish American supremacy in the Pacific without any need to share power with Moscow. But whatever historical interpretation is believed, the horror and indecency of the attacks is beyond controversy. This use of atomic bombs against defenseless densely populated cities remains the greatest single act of state terror in human history, and had it been committed by the losers in World War II surely the perpetrators would have been held criminally accountable and the weaponry forever prohibited. But history gives the winners in big wars considerable latitude to shape the future according to their own wishes, sometimes for the better, often for the worse.

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Michael Munger, Reason.com,  March 14, 2011

Watching recent events in Egypt I have had a sense of both surreal distance and of personal connection. Distance because it is hard to imagine that American “friend” Hosni Mubarak, recipient of more than $45 billion of U.S. military and economic aid, has finally been called out for his acts of brutal repression. Connection because one of the people Mubarak imprisoned was my brother-in-law.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an Egyptian academic sociologist and democracy activist. He is also married to my step-sister Barbara. In 2000 Saad was arrested by the national police, and charged by the Mubarak regime with embezzlement and defaming Egypt’s image.

What Saad had actually done was to obtain a large academic grant from the European Union and spend it on research. He also publicly asked when Egypt was going to have free and fair elections. In response, Saad was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. Given the state of Egyptian prisons, and Saad’s physical condition and age, it could have been a death sentence. He was finally released three years later.

I remember talking to Saad after he got out. His view of the American role was heartbreaking. Democracy activists in Egypt, and throughout the Middle East, had to distance themselves from America, he said. U.S. support for Mubarak was tarnishing America’s image, just as Mubarak himself was tarnishing Egypt’s image. How did we get to that point?

The answer is that American foreign policy seems to rest on a simple premise: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Except it’s not simple. It’s a blatant double standard. Our attitude seems to be, “Sure, that dictator is a murderous thug, but he’s our murderous thug”

Letting our enemies choose our friends is also dangerous. The U.S. supplied the rockets that the mujahedeen used to attack Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. Now we call the mujahedeen the Taliban, and they kill Americans. We also propped up Saddam Hussein and a host of other brutes who started out as docile U.S. puppets.

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“And if there is any conspiracy, it is one between Qaddafi and the West to slow down, even quash, the Arab revolt. To the extent that Qaddafi succeeds, he sends a message to all the other threatened despots of the region that harsh repression rather than concessions is the way to go.”

Immanuel Wallesrstein, Commentary No. 301, Mar. 15, 2011

There is so much hypocrisy and so much confused analysis about what is going on in Libya that one hardly knows where to begin. The most neglected aspect of the situation is the deep division in the world left. Several left Latin American states, and most notably Venezuela, are fulsome in their support of Colonel Qaddafi. But the spokespersons of the world left in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and indeed North America, decidedly don’t agree.

Hugo Chavez’s analysis seems to focus primarily, indeed exclusively, on the fact that the United States and western Europe have been issuing threats and condemnations of the Qaddafi regime. Qaddafi, Chavez, and some others insist that the western world wishes to invade Libya and “steal” Libya’s oil. The whole analysis misses entirely what has been happening, and reflects badly on Chavez’s judgment – and indeed on his reputation with the rest of the world left.

First of all, for the last decade and up to a few weeks ago, Qaddafi had nothing but good press in the western world. He was trying in every way to prove that he was in no way a supporter of “terrorism” and wished only to be fully integrated into the geopolitical and world-economic mainstream. Libya and the western world have been entering into one profitable arrangement after another. It is hard for me to see Qaddafi as a hero of the world anti-imperialist movement, at least in the last decade.

The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya. The public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi stance is meeting resistance within France.

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