Peace and Justice Post

Al-Ahram, Issue No. 881, 24-30 January 2008

Violence and political assassinations are not the only reasons Pakistanis have had it with their government, writes Graham Usher in Rawalpindi

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On a rain-drenched road in Rawalpindi men, women and children stand patiently behind a truck. It’s a few kilometers from the park where Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was slain four weeks ago. And the street is covered in sodden party political paraphernalia proclaiming elections next month. But voting and Bhutto are the last things on these people’s minds. Like much of the country they are queuing for bread.

“A 20 kilo bag used to cost 250 Rupees; now it’s 295,” says Rashid Nabil, a sack of flour on his shoulder. “I have to buy one of these three times a month to feed the eight people in my family. I earn 4,000 Rupees a month. That’s a lot of your income to be spending on bread”.

He shifts the load from one shoulder to the next. “Whatever [Pakistan leader Pervez] Musharraf has done, he’s done for the army or for the rich, not for the poor. What’s the point of building new roads when you can’t feed the people?”

Pakistan is in the midst of its worst bread famine in 40 years. The shortage has been exacerbated by massive power and gas outages. Coupled with the pall cast by Bhutto’s assassination — and what seems an endless toll of political violence (the latest being the murder of 12 people by a suicide bomber at a Shia mosque in Peshawar on 17 January) — the mood among Pakistanis is as leaden as the winter sky.

Continued . . .

Arab News, January 27, 2008 Ben Dobbin, Associated Press

Arun Gandhi   ROCHESTER, New York, 27 January 2008 — Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson resigned from the peace institute he co-founded after condemnation of his comments that Israel and the Jews are the biggest players in a culture of violence that “is eventually going to destroy humanity.” Arun Gandhi, the fifth grandson of the revered pacifist, said on Friday that his comments, which were posted on an online forum, were meant “to generate a healthy discussion on the proliferation of violence.” “Instead, unintentionally, my words have resulted in pain, anger, confusion and embarrassment. I deeply regret these consequences,” Gandhi said. He apologized “for my poorly worded post,” saying he should not have implied that Israeli government policies reflected the views of all Jewish people. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, called it “shameful that a peace institute would be headed up by a bigot.” The board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence based at the University of Rochester accepted Gandhi’s offer on Thursday to step down as its president. Gandhi co-founded the institute with his wife, Sunanda, at Christian Brothers University in Memphis in 1991 and relocated it to the University of Rochester campus in June, a few months after her death. Gandhi was on a panel of scholars, writers and clergy who discuss a new topic weekly on The Washington Post’s “On Faith” page and his comments, posted Jan. 7, drew a torrent of criticism, much of it unfavorable. Describing Israel as “a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs,” Gandhi asked whether it would “not be better to befriend those who hate you?” “Apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept,” he wrote. “You don’t befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.” He wrote that the Jewish identity “has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of (how) a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. “The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful … The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger.” The school’s president, Joel Seligman, said in a statement that Gandhi’s resignation was appropriate and his remarks “did not reflect the core values” of the university or the institute.

WSWS, January 26, 2008

By Bill Van Auken

The United States is “ready, willing and able” to deploy American combat troops in Pakistan for joint military operations in the country’s troubled border region, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

The public statement about an American intervention in Pakistan appeared aimed at pressuring the regime of President Pervez Musharraf into accepting a more direct US role in the suppression of internal opposition, which is linked to the growing resistance to the American-led occupation of neighboring Afghanistan.

According to media reports, the Bush administration has conducted extensive top-level discussions on the crisis in Pakistan and drawn up plans for a US intervention in the wake of last month’s assassination of Pakistan Peoples Party leader and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The administration reportedly sees the political crisis in the aftermath of the political killing as an opportunity to expand its influence in the country.

Washington’s stepped-up pressure on Pakistan is developing in the context of increasing fighting between tribal forces and government troops in a region bordering Afghanistan. The government has reported that more than 200 fighters and 30 government soldiers have died during three weeks of violence in the South Waziristan region.

Continued . . .

Raw Story
AFP, January 26, 2008

George Habash, founder of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which he led for three decades, died on Saturday in a hospital of the Jordanian capital at the age of 82.The Palestinian ambassador to Jordan, Atallah Khairy, said Habash was hospitalised in Amman 10 days ago with heart problems and died shortly after 8 pm (1800 GMT).

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas paid tribute to Habash and ordered flags to be flown at half-mast for three days in the Palestinian territories.

“The death of this historic leader is a great loss for the Palestinian cause and for the Palestinian people for whom he fought for 60 years,” during which he lived in exile, Abbas said.

His family said Habash would be buried in Amman on Monday or Tuesday.

Habash stepped down as head of the Damascus-based PFLP in July 2000 after having led the leftist faction which is a key component of the Palestine Liberation Organisation for more than 30 years.

He had been living in Jordan, the homeland of his wife, after an illness forced his retirement from political life.

The PFLP under Habash had hijacked airliners to Jordan and he called for the overthrow of its monarchy in 1970 before the Black September clashes in which the Jordanian army expelled the PLO from the kingdom.

Habash argued that the hijackings were legitimate action against Israel as a means of shining the spotlight on the neglected Palestinian cause. The PFLP also attacked Israeli embassies and oil pipelines.

A charismatic but controversial figure, Habash was a fierce opponent of the policy of compromise of PLO chief Arafat, ruling out a normalisation of ties with the Jewish state and accusing him of making too many concessions.

He opposed Arafat’s 1993 Oslo autonomy deal and refused to return to the Palestinian territories after the launch of autonomy in 1994, while insisting on the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their former homes in Israel.

Habash’s own life was turned upside-down one day in July 1948, when he found himself caught up in a tide of thousands pouring down a dusty road as they fled the Israeli advance on his hometown.

He graduated from the American University of Beirut in 1951 as a paediatrician, and the next year he founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which aimed at unifying the whole Arab world to confront Israel.

At the same time he worked in a “people’s dispensary” in Amman until 1957 when he was forced to go underground as a result of his political activity, and moved to Damascus where he stayed from 1958 to 1963, before moving to Beirut.

He founded the PFLP, preaching “popular armed resistance,” in December 1967, six months after the Six-Day War which saw Israel seize east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Habash’s radicalism, and his denunciation of Arab regimes, put a price on his head, and not only in Israel. He was wanted in Jordan and at one time even imprisoned in Syria, although he managed to escape.

The PFLP formed the hard core of a “Rejection Front” based in Damascus.

Married, and the father of two daughters, Habash moved to the Syrian capital in 1982, when the Israeli invasion of Lebanon drove all Palestinian factions from Beirut where he had established his headquarters.

Habash was born in 1925 in the Palestinian town of Lydda, now in Israel and known as Lod, the son of a Greek Orthodox merchant family.

Boston.com, January 26, 2008

AN ISRAELI convoy of goods and peace activists will go today to Erez, Israel’s border with Gaza, and many Palestinians will be on the other side waiting. They will not see one another, but Palestinians will know there are Jews who condemn the siege inflicted on the tiny territory by Israel’s military establishment and want to see an end to the 40-year-old occupation.

Israel’s minister of justice, Haim Ramon, had pushed for cutting off Gaza’s “infrastructural oxygen” – water, electricity, and fuel – as a response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. Last Sunday, Ramon’s wish came true: Israel’s blockade forced Gaza’s only power plant to shut down, plunging 800,000 people into darkness. Food and humanitarian aid were also denied entry. Although international pressure forced Israel to let in some supplies two days later, and the situation further eased when Palestinians breached the border wall with Egypt, the worst may be yet to come.

Continued . . .

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, January 26 / 27, 2008

The Blockade of Gaza

By URI AVNERY

It looked like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.

It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet – to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place.

The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.

That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008.

* * *ONE MIGHT repeat the famous saying of the French statesman Boulay de la Meurthe, slightly amended: It is worse than a war crime, it is a blunder!

Months ago, the two Ehuds – Barak and Olmert – imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, and boasted about it. Lately they have tightened the deadly noose even more, so that hardly anything at all could be brought into the Strip. Last week they made the blockade absolute – no food, no medicines. Things reached a climax when they stopped the fuel, too. Large areas of Gaza remained without electricity – incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps for water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands remained without heating in the severe cold, unable to cook, running out of food.

Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic. That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily, the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning. Apart from that, the blockade remained total.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid act.

Continued . . .

RINF.com, January 26, 2008

Rights activists have staged demonstrations in London to denounce Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s ‘human rights abuses’.

The demonstration, organized by human rights group Amnesty International, came on Saturday at Downing Street, prior to a meeting between Musharraf and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday.

“British Prime Minister Gordon Brown should tell visiting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that free and fair elections will be impossible without the full restoration of Pakistan’s judiciary,” said Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch.

On November 3, 2007 Musharraf suspended Pakistan’s Constitution, fired much of the country’s senior judges and arrested thousands of opponents, most of whom were eventually released because of international pressure.

“An independent judiciary is vital for people to have an avenue to contest the results of this election conducted in an environment of bias and intimidation,” said Adams.

He urged Brown to press Musharraf to rescind these measures, set up an independent election commission and a neutral caretaker government to oversee elections.

SB/RE

Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the war in Iraq in the Bush administration who became World Bank president only to resign in a pay scandal, was named Thursday as head of a US government advisory panel.

The State Department announced Wolfowitz’s appointment as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s chairman of the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB).

ISAB, the department said, is “a source of independent insight, advice, and innovation on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, political-military issues, and international security and related aspects of public diplomacy.

“The ISAB provides analysis and insight into current issues-of-interest for the secretary on a regular basis,” according to a statement.

Wolfowitz has been serving as a visiting scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies development issues.

Wolfowitz, widely credited with raising Africa’s profile in the World Bank’s lending activities, agreed to leave his post on June 30 in the face of accusations he violated bank rules in arranging a promotion for his girlfriend, a bank employee.

Wolfowitz consistently argued that he had acted in good faith in the matter.

Under President George W. Bush, he served as deputy defense secretary where he was a proponent of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

In his decades of public service, he was also Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, US Ambassador to Indonesia, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs and Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State.

© 2008 Agence France Presse

Written by Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC)

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

A majority of Gaza citizens live in poverty and many are without running water. The Israeli government has declared a total war on Gaza, largely cutting electricity and fuel supplies and prohibiting basic products to enter, including food and medicines. Gaza is not a territory, but 1.4 million human beings, women, men and children. “Attacking Gaza” or “putting Gaza under siege” means targeting 1.4 million civilians. According to international law, this is a war crime; according to common sense, it is a crime against humanity. Such a crime cannot be justified by any excuse, and no reason whatsoever can allow a state, a government, or a person to commit it. The martyrdom of Gaza is based on a lie and a stupid assumption. The lie is the Israeli argument that justifies the siege against Gaza in order to quell the daily firing of Qassam rockets onto the town of Sderot. Yet the Qassams are a reaction to forty years of Israeli occupation, colonization and bloody repression, an occupation rendered even more cruel after the “disengagement,” initiated two years ago by Ariel Sharon. The assumption that this siege will help end the Hamas government is as absurd as that used by Israel to justify Operation Defensive Shield in 2002: in both cases, these assumptions strengthened the radicals at the expense of the so-called moderates, and not the other way round. The sole reason that 1.4 million human beings are under siege in the Gaza Strip is collective punishment for their refusal to surrender to the diktats of Washington and Tel Aviv. The women and men of Gaza are not only one of the proudest populations on earth, but also one that has known a unique combination of bloody repression and poverty. As painful as it may be, this combination is the secret of the Gazans’ stubbornness and steadfastness. Olmert and his advisers are gradually understanding that they will not provoke a capitulation from the Gaza population, and the only tool that remains is to punish the Palestinians for this. The Gazans are providing a rare example of resistance and heroism, and no one has the right to expect them to do more. The additional efforts that could ultimately bring about the end of their martyrdom have to come from the solidarity movement all over the world, including Israel. The coalition of Israeli anti-occupation movements is organizing, next Saturday, a convoy of support and solidarity. We hope that several hundred cars will participate from all the parts of Israel. We know well that our modest convoy will not change the material conditions of the Gaza population. Our goal is to send a strong message to the Israeli public: the siege on Gaza in a war crime and whoever is not protesting as strongly as possible is guilty of non-assistance to a people in danger. It is also a call for international the public opinion: demand from your respective governments that they stop their collaboration with the Israeli war crimes and the boycott of Gaza. Ehud Olmert and his ministers, General Gabi Ashkenazi and the members of the Israeli military High Command must all be charged by the International Court of Justice for their war crimes against the population of Gaza. The State of Israel must be sanctioned, not the victims of the Israeli colonial occupation!