Peace and Justice Post

Message of Massacre Lives on for Palestinians

By Jonathan Cook| Counterpunch, Oct 30, 2008

In a conflict that has produced more than its share of suffering and tragedy, the name of Kafr Qassem lives on in infamy more than half a century after Israeli police gunned down 47 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, in the village.

This week Kafr Qassem’s inhabitants, joined by a handful of Israeli Jewish sympathisers, commemorated the anniversary of the deaths 52 years ago by marching to the cemetery where the victims were laid to rest.

They did so as the local media revisited the events, publishing testimonies from two former senior police officers who recalled the order from their commander to shoot all civilians breaking a last-minute curfew imposed on the village, which lies just inside Israel’s borders.

The two men, who were stationed at villages close to Kafr Qassem, suggested that, had they not personally disobeyed the order when confronted with Palestinians returning from work, the death toll would have been far higher.

Taking part in the annual march was one of the few survivors of the massacre. Saleh Khalil Issa is today 71, but back in 1956 he was an 18-year-old agricultural worker.

He remembered returning to the village on his bicycle, along with a dozen other workers, just after 5pm on 29 October 1956.

What he and the other villagers did not know was that earlier that day the Border Police, a special paramilitary unit that operates inside both Israel and the occupied territories, had agreed to set up checkpoints unannounced at the entrance to half a dozen Palestinian villages inside Israel.

The villages were selected because they lie close to the Green Line, the ceasefire line between Israel and Jordan, which was then occupying the West Bank, following the 1948 war.

At a briefing the commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki, ordered his men to shoot any civilian arriving home after 5pm.

Asked about the fate of women or children returning late, Malinki replied: “Without sentiment, the curfew applies to everyone.” Pressed on the point, he responded in Arabic: “Allah yarahmum [God have mercy on them]”, adding that this was the order from the brigade commander, Colonel Issachar Shadmi.

Mr Issa said that, when his group reached the village, they were stopped by three policemen. “They told us to get off our bikes and form a line. The commander asked where we were from. When we replied ‘Kafr Qassem’, he took three steps back and told his colleagues, ‘Cut them down!’”

Mr Issa, who was shot in the arm and leg, pretended to be dead among the bodies. He heard villagers’ cars arriving and the policemen ask the same question. Each new arrival was executed.

“Finally, I heard a bus arrive with female passengers, including young girls. I later learnt that there were 12 of them on board. They were forced to get out and shot too, though one survived like me.”

Mr Issa said the policemen checked to see if any of the victims were moving, and then fired more bullets at them. While the police officers were not watching, he crawled away and hid behind a tree. He was found the next morning and taken to a hospital in nearby Petah Tikva, along with 12 other injured.

Of the dead, seven were children and nine women, including one who was pregnant.

Mohammed Arabi, today 84, arrived at the same checkpoint later that evening. A tailor, he had spent the day in Tel Aviv buying materials and hitched a lift home in the back of a truck with 26 other villagers.

When the driver tried to drop 11 of them off just outside the village, they came under fire. The 11 jumped back into the truck, he said, and the driver sped up the hill towards the village.

“When we reached the entrance to the village, we saw bodies everywhere. The driver panicked, frightened to go back, but forced to drive over several corpses lying in the street to get away.”

A short distance ahead, however, a detachment of policemen stopped them. Mr Arabi overheard a debate between the policemen about whether to let them go home or take them to the eastern side of the village.

“I knew what was being suggested. The eastern side was the border with the West Bank. Palestinians were regularly shot on sight by the police for trying to cross into Israel. If we were killed there, it would look like we were infiltrators.”

The commander said he would follow behind the truck in his jeep and escort them to the village’s eastern entrance.

“We were saved by a shepherd who at that moment was driving a large flock of sheep into the village. The sheep separated us from the police, and the truck driver saw his chance. He drove off at top speed and escaped.

“He took us to his home and all 27 of us hid there for three days, too frightened to come out.”

Despite the appalling loss of life, Israel has been slow to come to terms with the massacre. Mr Issa and other villagers were repeatedly arrested in subsequent years as they tried to stage a commemoration.

On the insistence of the government, the plaque erected in the village square to commemorate the deaths refers to the event as a “tragedy” rather a “massacre”. No government official has ever attended the annual march.

Continued . . .

By Ali Gharib and Zainab Mineeia | Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Oct 31 (IPS) – With media and diplomatic attention focused on the international incident ignited by a U.S. cross-border raid from Iraq into Syrian territory last weekend, the Syrian government quietly handed down 30-month prison terms to a group of democracy activists on Wednesday.

Few took notice, although Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to immediately overturn the convictions and order the release of prisoners arrested during a crackdown on the Damascus Declaration movement in late 2007 and early 2008.

Forty activists who participated in a Damascus Declaration forum had been detained, although most were later released. In a 20-minute sentencing session, the 12 who were prosecuted and convicted were given stiff prison terms for allegedly attempting to promote gradual political change in the country.

“In a transparent bid to silence its critics, the government is jailing democracy activists for simply attending a meeting,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW. “The trial was a mere cover to legitimise the government’s repression of opposition groups and peaceful critics.”

But the best cover for the Syrian regime may have come from the U.S., Syria expert and Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis told IPS.

“The world is not concentrating on this; the world is concentrating on America’s violation of Syrian territory,” Landis told IPS, noting that even some of the U.S.’s allies have condemned the raid.

“America would normally be putting out a statement,” he said, “but no one cares about these guys because the world is focused on [the recent raid]. Everyone is focused on this international issue that America created.”

“These 12 democracy promoters are going to disappear into jail because there is chaos at the border. It punctuates the failure of the Freedom Agenda,” Landis added.

The activists were part of a coalition based around the Damascus Declaration, which formed the basis for a reform movement encouraging “internal support for peaceful, democratic change in Syria,” according to the HRW statement.

The Damascus Declaration, which was established in 2005, created a coalition comprised of opposition political parties and independent activists, including lawyers, doctors, writers and an artist.

The consolidation of Syria’s wildly varied opposition, represented by the Damascus Declaration, came at a time of relative weakness for the regime. Syria was part of U.S. President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” and a neighbouring Axis member, Iraq, had just been subject to a U.S. invasion aimed at regime change.

That weakness and, says Landis, emboldened by encouraging press from the world’s democracy movements, led the opposition to seek to organise and unify — aims largely accomplished by the Damascus Declaration, albeit ephemerally.

Despite a long record of prosecuting political activists who peacefully express their opinions, the Assad regime did not initially act forcefully against the Damascus Declaration.

But in 2006, when the members of the coalition banded together with Lebanese intellectuals and activists to call for better relations between the countries, Syrian authorities cracked down.

In May of 2007, a Syrian court handed down sentences to four activists, including prominent writer Michel Kilo and political activist Mahmud Issa, for allegedly “weakening national sentiment”.

The regime in Syria, like Iraq under former president Saddam Hussein, is ruled by the Arab Socialist Resurrection Baath Party. Bashar al-Assad, who took the helm after his father’s death in 2000, was confirmed as president by an unopposed referendum in 2001. His late father had ruled Syria for 30 years prior to his death.

Syria’s government under the Assads has a history of abuses and heavily limits basic freedoms such as expression, association and assembly through different laws including 45 years of an ongoing state of emergency.

Removing the state of emergency is a major part of the Damascus Declaration’s platform. The prisoners in the latest round of crackdowns include movement president Fida al-Hurani, former parliament member Riyadh Seif, and author Ali al-Abdullah.

Syrian security forces initially held the activists incommunicado for as long as 40 days. Eight of the 12 convicted told the investigative judge that State Security officials beat them during their interrogation and forced them to sign false statements “confessing” that they planned to take money from foreign countries in order to divide the country.

Al-Abdullah suffered an injury to his ear as a result of the beating he endured, said the HRW statement, and the court did not order any independent investigation regarding the allegations of ill-treatment.

They were charged with “spreading false information” and “belonging to a secret organisation promoting sectarian strife,” charges that they deny, according to Freedom House, a U.S. government-funded human rights watchdog.

During the trial, the activists confessed that they were involved in the Damascus Declaration, but pleaded not guilty and denied the charges against them.

Another detainee, Walid al-Bunni, a physician, told the court during his defence that “getting into the details of my defence is useless, but I will ask: what is the basis of the accusations?”

One of the lawyers for the activists told HRW that the defence team will likely appeal the sentence within the required 30 days. He summarised the judgment by saying “membership in the Damascus Declaration is now criminalised.”

Families of the detainees expressed their grief over the sentence. “We don’t know what to feel anymore. I don’t care if the sentence is for 2.5 years or 10 years. My husband should not be in jail in the first place,” said the wife of one of the detainees, according to HRW.

The crackdown on the Damascus Declaration after the initial inaction in 2005, said Landis, was a result of Assad’s newfound ability to rally people against activists.

In 2005, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had not yet descended into widespread violence and chaos. As disorder in Iraq increased with the bungled occupation, says Landis, dictatorships suddenly had an example of what collusion with Western interests would look like — especially when Western involvement was couched in terms of democracy promotion, known as Bush’s Freedom Agenda.

“Every Middle Eastern society is so fearful of the chaos and insecurity that could be visited upon them with the collapse of their government that they cling to their dictatorial regimes,” Landis told IPS. “It’s relegitimised dictatorship.”

By ISABEL KERSHNER | New York Times, Oct 30, 2008

JERUSALEM — A boatload of international campaigners challenged the Israeli blockade of Hamas-run Gaza on Wednesday and sailed into a small port there, the third such landing in two months.

Among the 27 activists and crew members of the vessel that sailed from Cyprus were Mairead Maguire, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who led a campaign against violence in Northern Ireland; Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian legislator from the West Bank; two Israeli citizens; and individuals from various countries including Britain, Italy and the United States.

The voyage, as was the last one, was organized under the auspices of the Free Gaza Movement, a Palestinian advocacy group based in El Cerrito, Calif.

In late August, the first two boats arrived together in Gaza despite Israeli threats to stop them. Israeli Foreign Ministry officials said at the time that there had been a last-minute decision to let the boats through to avoid a public relations debacle, and not to play into the hands of people they described as provocateurs.

This time, too, Israeli officials had stated that the boat would not be allowed to reach Gaza, yet it was allowed to proceed without hindrance.

“It was decided at the highest levels to allow them to enter,” said Yigal Palmor, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, without explanation.

Hamas, the Islamist group that took control of Gaza in June 2007, is classified as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union. Israel strictly limits the volume and type of goods entering the area by land, though the economic embargo has eased somewhat since a truce took effect in June.

Still, Israel maintains a policy of isolating the area. The authorities denied entry this week to 120 international academics and health professionals who had applied to attend a conference organized by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, which offers a range of local services and is supported by the World Health Organization and other international bodies. The conference focused on the state of mental health in Gaza in light of the blockade.

The international experts participated by video conference from Ramallah, in the West Bank.

Before dawn on Wednesday, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man in the village of Yamoun, near Jenin, in the northern West Bank. A spokesman for the Israeli military said that the man, Muhammad Abahreh, 67, had fired a hunting rifle at a force that was on a routine operation in the area, and that the soldiers had fired back.

Mr. Abahreh’s son, Taher, told news agencies that his father, a farmer, was guarding his livestock against rustlers in an enclosure just outside the village when he was shot in the dark.

Kashmir Watch

Srinagar, October 29: An extraordinary meeting was held at Muslim Conference head office Wazirbagh Srinagar today. The meeting was chaired by the acting chairman of Muslim conference Jahanager Gani Bhat along with other Hurriyat executives and senior leaders that include Bilal Gani Lone, Fazl Haq Querashi, Mukhtar Ahmad Waza, Musadiq Adil, Adv. Mohammad Ashraf Lone, Shabir Ahmad Dar, Abdul Rehman Bhat, Abdul Rashid Antoo and Gh. Mohammad Rather.

The leaders discussed the present situation of the Jammu Kashmir and said that “elections are no alternative to self-determination”.

In the meeting acting chairman Jammu Kashmir Peoples League Mukhtar Ahmad Waza has appealed the people of Kashmir to follow the programme of Hurriyat conference. He said that elections are nothing rather than a futile exercise and appealed to the world community and international human rights organizations to send their representatives to Kashmir to monitor Indian state terrorism which has escalated soon after the announcement of J&K polls. He said that  world leaders should put pressure on India to resolve the core issue of Kashmir in accordance with aspirations of Kashmiris.

Hurriyet leaders while condemning the arrest of pro-movement leaders and activists termed it a reflection of Indian government’s nervousness and unconstitutional act.

Posted on 29 Oct 2008 by Webmaster

Antiwar.com, Posted October 28, 2008

Ever since the Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali sparked its brief August war with Russia, both sides have claimed loudly and consistently that the other has committed war crimes. This has included over 3,000 complaints filed with the European Court of Human Rights regarding action in South Ossetia. The complaints have largely been shrugged off by the international community as politically motivated however.

Now the BBC has completed what it says is the “first unrestricted visit to South Ossetia by a foreign news organization since the conflict,” and has gathered considerable evidence of Georgian war crimes during the fighting. Among other things, Georgian tanks are accused of firing directly into apartment buildings and fleeing civilians were fired upon while trying to flee the fighting.

The deliberate targeting of civilians would violate the Geneva Conventions. The BBC also reports that the attacks inspired post-war “revenge” attacks against ethnic Georgian civilians in the region, many of whom have been chased from their homes by angry Ossetians.

The issue was raised with the Georgian government by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and Georgian President Saakashvili strongly denied the charges, adding “there were certainly war crimes committed, certainly not by us.”

Perplexingly, President Saakashvili described the destruction of villages which “were not Georgian villages” populated by ethnic Ossetians. The statement is confusing as the president has repeatedly claimed that the breakaway enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of Georgia while vowing to retake them to ensure the “unification of Georgia.”

Russia has recognized South Ossetia as independent and offered a guarantee to defend them against future Georgian attacks. The United States has condemned Russia and vowed to use its position on the UN Security Council to ensure that South Ossetia is never seen as independent in the eyes of the international community.

Related Stories

• Russia, Georgia to Hold Dueling Peace Talks as Planned Meeting Collapses
• Georgia Claims to Have Shot Down a Russian Drone
• Crimea Calls for Recognition of South Ossetia, Abkhazia as Enclaves Sign Russia Defense Deal
• Georgia’s “Evidence” of Russian Aggression Revealed

compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

Yahoo News

AFP/File – The UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for the 17th year in a row Wednesday to demand an end to …

UNITED NATIONS – The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution on Wednesday urging the United States to repeal its 47-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, which the country’s foreign minister vowed would never bring the Cuban people “to their knees.”

It was the 17th straight year that the General Assembly called for the embargo to be repealed “as soon as possible.”

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said he hopes the next U.S. president will respond to the international appeal.

But he said whatever the eventual decision, “I would like to reiterate that they shall never be able to bring the Cuban people to their knees.”

U.S. diplomat Ronald Godard said every country has the right to restrict trade. He said the embargo is justified because the Cuban government is undemocratic and restricts political and economic freedom.

The vote in the 192-member world body was 185 to 3, with 2 abstentions. The U.S., Israel and Palau voted “no” while Micronesia and the Marshall Islands abstained.

That was one more “yes” vote than last year’s vote of 184 to 4 with 1 abstention, and when the final vote flashed on the screen in the General Assembly chamber, there was loud applause.

The United States has no diplomatic relations with Cuba, lists the country as a state sponsor of terror and has long sought to isolate it through travel restrictions and a trade embargo. The embargo, imposed in 1962, has been tightened during President Bush‘s two terms.

Perez Roque blamed the sanctions for more than $93 billion in total economic damage over the decades.

But Godard told the General Assembly “the real reason the Cuban economy is in terrible condition and that so many Cubans remain mired in poverty is that Cuba’s regime continues to deny its people their basic human and economic rights.”

The American people, he said, remain the largest providers of humanitarian aid to the Cuban people, providing $240.5 million in private aid in 2007. The U.S. has increased assistance to non-governmental organizations to help address basic needs but Cuba rejected offers of U.S. aid following two devastating hurricanes, he said.

“We cannot accept alleged assistance from those who have intensified the blockade, sanctions and hostility against our people,” Perez Roque told the General Assembly.