Peace and Justice Post

By Niall Green, wsws.org, 24 February 2011

Tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators took to the streets of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, this week. Defying government demands to end protests, amid vicious police attacks on crowds last week that left an estimated eight people dead and hundreds more wounded, crowds called for the fall of the regime and justice for slain protestors.

Manama’s Pearl Square has become the focal point of the protests in Bahrain, a tiny island kingdom in the Persian Gulf that is home to a major United States military base. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and his family rule the country with the support of Washington and the neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Police had brutally attacked sleeping demonstrators in the square in the early hours of Friday morning, firing teargas and shotguns, and beating men, women and children. Following the withdrawal of security forces from Pearl Square over the weekend, hundreds of people have re-established a protest camp there.

Monday’s demonstration was billed as the “march of loyalty to the martyrs,” in reference to those killed by the regime. Many chanted for the removal of the ruling dynasty, though the main object of popular rage is the prime minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman, the king’s uncle, who has headed the government since 1971.

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By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, Feb 24, 2011

“The unity of China was more important than the people of Tiananmen Square.”

“It’s impossible for the youth to follow anyone else. If not Gaddafi, who else would they follow? Somebody with a beard?”
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, February 22,

Talk about The King’s Speech; this was The African King of Kings’ Speech. A furious, delirious, possessed, prophet-as-psychopath Muammar Gaddafi may have improvised the ultimate lunatic rant to send chills down the spines of the Libyan people and the whole world – delivered right from the family house bombed by the United   States under president Ronald Reagan in 1986. His message: there will be blood.

What else is new? After all, Gaddafi is a master of the politics of fear. He threatened those opposing his 41-year rule with the death penalty; called them “greasy rats” and drug addicts; and victims of a conspiracy by foreigners, the US, al-Qaeda, Britain, Italy, satellite television and hallucinogenic drugs. He rallied his supporters to “cleanse” the nation “house by house”, inspired by his unsavory collection of deadly offspring. One could not help being reminded of the last days of Saddam Hussein before he was bombed by another US president, George W Bush. Abdulmoneim al-Honi, who resigned as Libya’s representative to the Arab League, says Gaddafi is barricaded at the Bab al-Azizia base. Only two other bases may be under his full control, al-Saadi and Sirte; “The rest of the country is controlled by the youth.” These are the ones Gaddafi calls “rats”. There’s no sign these democracy-addicted rodents will be intimidated, even with the prospect of facing – again – squadrons of MiG-23 jets, piloted by Ukrainian, Serbian and Pakistani mercenaries, and equipped with rockets and heavy machine guns. The stage is set for the final showdown. Continues >>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two U.S. citizens with diplomatic status were quietly withdrawn from Pakistan after being involved in a fatal car accident last month while trying to help Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor being held by Pakistani authorities on murder charges.

Two officials familiar with U.S. government activities in Pakistan said the two Americans who left the country worked for the CIA under contract as protective officers. This means they were employed as highly skilled bodyguards, like Davis, for CIA operations officers serving in Pakistan.

The two Americans who left Pakistan have not been otherwise identified by U.S. or Pakistani authorities. The CIA declined to comment.

According to a translated Pakistani police statement obtained by Reuters, the two Americans got into the car crash while trying to go to the aid of Davis, who U.S. sources say claims he shot dead two Pakistanis on a motorcycle when they tried to rob him at gunpoint as he was driving in Lahore.

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Militiamen loyal to Moammar Gaddafi clamped down in Tripoli, with the sound of gunfire ringing in the air, while protesters who control much of the eastern half of Libya claimed new gains in cities and towns closer to the heart of Gaddafi’s regime in the capital.

Protesters said they had taken over Misrata, which would be the largest city in the western half in the country to fall into their hands. Clashes broke out over the past two days in the town of Sabratha, west of the capital, where the army and militiamen were trying to put down protesters who overwhelmed security headquarters and government buildings, a news website close to the government reported.

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A French doctor working in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi told Le Point Magazine that over 2,000 people were killed in that city alone in the past days of fighting, AFP reported.

“From Tobruk to Darna, they carried out a real massacre… In total, I think there are more than 2,000 deaths,” he said.

The 60-year-old anesthetist who has been living in the Libyan city for over a year, said that one the first day of fighting in Benghazi, “out ambulances counted 75 bodies…200 on the second [day], then more than 500.” On the third day, he added, “I ran out of morphine and medications,” according to the report.

Two air force pilots jumped from parachutes from their Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jet and let it crash, rather than carry out orders to bomb Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, which is now in opposition hands, the website Quryna reported, citing an unidentified officer in the air force control room.

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Accounting for the Human Toll in Iraq

By MICHAEL BRENNER, Counterpunch, Feb 24, 2011

We are now in the 10th year of the first decade of the ‘war on terror.’ So the inevitable anniversary assessments are beginning to appear.  Iraq reappraisals specifically are back in vogue.  They favor the drawing of balance sheets.  Most will be skewed in an alchemic attempt to put the face of success on an unmitigated disaster.  Even a more tempered approach at calculating cost/benefits, though, leaves something missing – something of paramount importance.  It is the effects on Iraqis themselves.  Not Iraqis in the abstract, not as figures in a statistical tabulation of sects.  Rather, as flesh and blood and feeling persons.  Frankly, most of the discourse about Iraq from day one has had a disengaged quality to it.  That is the norm for dominant powers on the world stage, and for the seminar strategist.  That was not always the norm by which Americans referenced war and violence abroad in the 20th century when we truly believed in our proclaimed ideals.

To illuminate the point, here are some too readily slighted facts.  100,000 – 150,000 Iraqis are dead as the consequence of our invasion and occupation.  That is the conservative estimate.  Untold thousands are maimed and orphaned.  2 million are uprooted refugees in neighboring lands.  Another 2 million are displaced persons internally.  The availability of potable water and electricity is somewhat less than it was in February 2003.  The comparable numbers for the United States would be 1.1 – 1.6 million dead; an equal number infirmed; 22 million refugees eking out a precarious existence in Mexico and Canada; 22 million displaced persons within the country.  We did not do all the killing and maiming; we did most of the destruction of infrastructure.  To all these tragedies we are accessories before and during the fact.

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Demonstrators attend a protest rally in New Delhi February 23, 2011. Tens of thousands of trade unionists, including those from a group linked to ruling Congress party, march through the streets of the capital on Wednesday to protest food prices, piling pressure on a government already under fire over graft.

Credit: Reuters/B Mathur

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – At least 100,000 trade unionists marched through New Delhi on Wednesday in a protest against high food prices and unemployment, piling pressure on an administration under fire over corruption scandals.

The demonstration was the biggest in New Delhi in years and included members of a trade union linked to the ruling Congress party, reflecting disquiet within the party over food inflation which hit a high of over 18 percent last December.

It was also the latest in a wave of protests that have swept the world, ignited by a worldwide spike in food prices. But unlike the protests that have toppled autocratic leaders, there have been no calls to overthrow India’s democratic government.

“We have come here so that our voices reverberate inside the house (parliament) and they can see what pain the common man is going through,” said Akhil Samantray who had come from Orissa to take part in the march.

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A written statement submitted by the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organisation with general consultative status

ALRC, Feb 24, 2011

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) wishes to again bring the Human Rights Council’s attention to the widespread and endemic nature of the use of torture in Pakistan. The ALRC has raised this issue repeatedly with the HRC and the Commission on Human Rights before it, as well as the Special Procedures and the UPR process. International action concerning grave human rights abuses in Pakistan, including torture, forced disappearance and the like, remains elusive.

The recent situation in Egypt, in which violations of human rights perpetrated over prolonged periods have led to a historic popular uprising to overthrow the system of abuse, must bear lessons for the international community. No longer can the members of the Human Rights Council expect to continue with business as usual, trading in the rights of their citizens as expendable commodities to be haggled away for political gain as part of a diplomatic game in Geneva. As the battle to advance the enjoyment of human rights and democracy plays out on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, will the Human Rights Council find itself increasingly out of touch and isolated from a reality that demands progress and tangible change?

As the 2011 review of the Human Rights Council reaches its culmination, member-States must re-consider their misconstrued approaches that seek to limit the capacity of the international system to fulfil its role in upholding rights on the ground. The HRC must be able to go beyond the ritual expression of concern at flashpoint crises around the globe, which typically remain either too timid or go unheeded, and begin to tackle the fundamental components of the systems of human rights abuses that pervade the world. The fact that members of the HRC, such as Pakistan, can hold membership in the world’s apex rights body while endemic torture persists within their borders, shows how much progress is still required.

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Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, Feb 20, 2011

Last Friday the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning Israel’s continued expansion of settlements in the occupied territory of the West Bank. The resolution didn’t question Israel’s legitimacy, didn’t declare that “Zionism is racism,” and didn’t call for a boycott or sanctions. It just said that the settlements were illegal and that Israel should stop building them, and called for a peaceful, two-state solution with “secure and recognized borders. The measure was backed by over 120 countries, and 14 members of the security council voted in favor. True to form, only the United States voted no.

There was no strategic justification for this foolish step, because the resolution was in fact consistent with the official policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson. All of those presidents has understood that the settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace, and each has tried (albeit with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm) to get Israel to stop building them.

Yet even now, with the peace process and the two-state solution flat-lining, the Obama administration couldn’t bring itself to vote for a U.N. resolution that reflected the U.S. government’s own position on settlements. The transparently lame explanation given by U.S. officials was that the security council isn’t the right forum to address this issue. Instead, they claimed that the settlements issue ought to be dealt with in direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and that the security council should have nothing to say on the issue.

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Gunfire in the suburbs – and fear, hunger and rumour in the capital Thousands race for last tickets out of a city sinking into anarchy

Robert Fisk, with the first dispatch from Libya’s war-torn capital, reports

AP: A fire burns in a street in the Libyan capital Tripoli in the early hours of yesterday morning 

Up to 15,000 men, women and children besieged Tripoli’s international airport last night, shouting and screaming for seats on the few airliners still prepared to fly to Muammar Gaddafi’s rump state, paying Libyan police bribe after bribe to reach the ticket desks in a rain-soaked mob of hungry, desperate families. Many were trampled as Libyan security men savagely beat those who pushed their way to the front.

Among them were Gaddafi’s fellow Arabs, thousands of them Egyptians, some of whom had been living at the airport for two days without food or sanitation. The place stank of faeces and urine and fear. Yet a 45-minute visit into the city for a new airline ticket to another destination is the only chance to see Gaddafi’s capital if you are a “dog” of the international press.

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