Peace and Justice Post

By Ashfaq Yusufzai

An election meet by women of the Awami National Party, victorious in the Feb 18 polls Credit:Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

PESHAWAR, Mar 7 (IPS) – Saeeda Anwar is a 38-year-old Pakistani schoolteacher. She works in a school here in the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), but she is not allowed to exercise her franchise.

“My family is strictly against women voting. They don’t like us to vote. Although, I am allowed to work as a teacher because I give them all my salary,” she says of the male members of her family.

Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the NWFP. The Pakistan government has neither been able to implement modernising programmes nor Article 34 of the Pakistan Constitution (1973) that says ‘steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life’.

Here women are banned from participation and decision-making — a tribal feudalism almost as rigid as in adjacent Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is the men who decide who their women can talk to or whether they can go out of the house, also who their daughters should marry and when.

Yet, 15 women challenged political exclusion and contested the Feb. 18 polls to parliament and the national assembly from the NWFP. Not one won, and polling by women, both in the province and in the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), was once again the lowest in Pakistan.

Continued . . .

The New Yorker, Feb 25, 2008

Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.

by Paul Kramer

A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote.

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

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Peace broker, bank adviser and lecturer, now Blair plans to teach religion at Yale

Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Patrick Wintour , Guardian, via Palestinian Pundit

March 8, 2008 Not content with trying to bring peace to the Middle East – as well as advising an insurance company on the risks of climate change, a bank on crisis management and Rwanda on good governance – Tony Blair is to add another job to his portfolio: teaching God and politics at one of America’s most prestigious universities. Yale, the Ivy League alma mater of his good friend George Bush, confirmed yesterday that the former prime minister is to join the schools of management and divinity at the campus in New Haven, Connecticut, in the autumn. He will teach a course on faith and globalisation, looking at religion in the modern world. This will also be the theme of his Faith Foundation, which he is to launch in London before his Yale commitment starts. It is intended to promote understanding between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The deans of Yale’s management and divinity schools are discussing with Blair how much time he will spend on campus. A spokesman for Blair insisted yesterday that his position would not require him to spend extended periods in Connecticut. But even before yesterday’s announcement, his aides were expressing concern about his workload next year. Continued . . .

By RALPH NADER | Counterpunch, March 8 – 9, 2008

The world’s largest prison—Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of  them starving, sick and penniless—is receiving more sympathy and protest  by Israeli citizens, of widely impressive backgrounds, than is reported  in the U.S. press.

In contrast, the humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government  blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel and other necessities from  coming into this tiny enclave through international relief organizations  is received with predictable silence or callousness by members of  Congress, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The contrast invites more public attention and discussion.

Israel has militarily occupied Gaza for forty years. It pulled out its  colonials in 2005 but maintained an iron grip on the area  controlling  all access, including its airspace and territorial waters. Its F-16s and  helicopter gunships regularly shred more and more of the areas—public  works, its neighborhoods and inflict collective punishment on civilians  in violation of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the International Red Cross declares, citing treaties establishing  international humanitarian law, “Neither the civilian population as a  whole nor individual civilians may be attacked.”

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Telegraph, UK, March 8, 2008

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a “wee bit silly” for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

Full coverage of the US Elections 2008 David Trimble: Hillary Clinton mere “cheerleader” in Ireland   Hillary Clinton with the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness after their meeting in Washington last year                         “I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.” Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am. Continued . . .

The Independent, UK, March 8, 2008

Fifty years after historic march, protest camp at atomic weapons base is outlawed in a new blow to civil liberties

ABBIE TRAYLER-SMITH

Kate Hudson, the chairman of CND, with its vice-president, Walter Wolfgang, outside the nuclear base at Aldermaston

By Kim Sengupta

It survived six Tory governments, the end of the Cold War and the rise and fall of mass marches against the British nuclear deterrent. But after 50 years in which the tradition of peaceful demonstration has been maintained outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the New Labour era has finally done for one of the most famous symbols of protest in British political history.

Today would have seen the latest gathering of the band of women who have assembled on the second Saturday of each month since the 1980s to object to the continuing development of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent. Instead, following a High Court ruling this week, the protest tents are being removed, demonstrators are being threatened with arrest and “no camping” signs are being erected.

From being a symbol of the right to protest, Aldermaston has become the latest testament to the desire of successive New Labour governments to curtail the right to assemble, demonstrate and object to government policy.

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Reuters, March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush will veto legislation on Saturday banning U.S. intelligence agents from using waterboarding and other controversial interrogation methods, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said on Friday.

Last month, Congress sent Bush a broad intelligence authorization bill that contained new limits on CIA interrogation techniques, despite Bush administration warnings that such a measure would be rejected.

“The president will veto the intelligence authorization bill tomorrow,” Fratto told reporters.

The legislation was approved by the Senate and House of Representatives on partisan votes that did not indicate there was enough support in Congress to overturn Bush’s veto.

Waterboarding, in which suspects are subjected to simulated drowning, has been widely criticized by many members of Congress, human rights organizations and other countries.

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Egypt is building a 10-foot-high concrete wall along its border with Gaza to prevent any new breaches after Palestinian militants blasted through the barrier in January to escape a blockade of their territory, an official said.

The new wall replaces a mixed barbed-wire, iron and concrete barrier which was breached in several places when militants blew it open with explosives, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to talk to the media.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded across the open border unchecked for 12 days before Egypt managed to reseal it. They snapped up food, fuel and other goods made scarce in Gaza by an Israeli closure, imposed after Hamas violently seized control of the strip in June.

London Review of Books, March 6, 2008

Yonathan Mendel

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

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