Peace and Justice Post

By Medea Benjamin, AlterNet. Posted November 29, 2007.

The heroes in Pakistan aren’t returning former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — it’s the Supreme Court and High Court judges who stopped Musharraf’s assault on the Constitution.

The heroes in today’s Pakistan are not the returning former prime ministers — Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — but the Supreme Court and High Court judges who refused to accept Gen. Musharraf’s emergency law putting the Constitution in abeyance. When asked to take a new oath pledging to uphold his “Provisional Constitutional Order,” they simply said no. While politicians Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are making deals with Musharraf to get back into power, these judges are putting principle over power. They may have lost their seats on the bench, but they have won the hearts of millions of Pakistanis.

Keep reading . . .

David Batty and agencies
Wednesday November 28, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Afghans load a casket of a victim of the Jalalabad air strike into an ambulance. Photograph: Rafiq Shirzad/Reuters

US forces mistakenly killed at least a dozen road construction workers in air strikes in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said today.As many as 14 engineers and labourers were killed in the incident on Monday in Nuristan province, which officials blamed on faulty intelligence, possibly fed out by the Taliban.

The workers, who had been contracted by the US military to build a road in the mountainous province, were sleeping in their tents when they were killed, according to Sayed Noorullah Jalili, director of the road construction company Amerifa.

“All of our poor workers have been killed,” Jalili said. “I don’t think the Americans were targeting our people. I’m sure it’s the enemy of the Afghans who gave the Americans this wrong information.”

The company has asked the US military to investigate the information that led to the air strike, Jalili said.

The Nuristan governor, Tamim Nuristani, said US troops had been tipped off that a feared local Taliban commander was in the area but they hit the wrong target.

The US-led coalition said it was investigating the incident. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed it had conducted air strikes against Taliban fighters in the area, but did not say when.

“ISAF was engaged in Nurgaram and Du Ab districts, and in those places we used air strikes against [Taliban],” said the ISAF spokesman, Brigadier General Carlos Branco. “The situation is not clear at all at this stage. We are carrying out the investigation and trying to get a clear picture.”

The incident is likely to fuel Afghan resentment at the presence of international forces. Earlier this year, foreign troops came under scathing criticism for conducting air strikes based on poor intelligence that caused a number of civilian casualties.

Afghanistan has seen a steady rise in violence over the past two years since the Taliban renewed its attempt to overthrow the pro-western Afghan government and eject more than 50,000 foreign troops.

Online Journal, November 26, 2007

It is being described as a “merry-go-round” peace process, because it keeps going round and round with actors going on and off, but doesn’t lead anywhere. It has new faces all the time but it does not move on substance.

The latest peace conference on the Middle East due to be held in Annapolis on 27 November is seen as another brave but diluted attempt to put the peace process, which has been on a life support machine for the last seven years, back on track.

Annapolis is sort of a last ditch attempt by the Bush administration to tell the world, and probably the Arabs and the Palestinians especially, ‘we are trying, we are trying, but its is up to you guys, including of course the Israelis to sit together and sort out your differences.’

For the Bush administration Annapolis is a face-saving attempt to tell the Arabs to support US policy in Iraq, as if they really need to. Privately Washington knows the Arab world has long become the careless sick man of Europe, but argues a little pandering now and then would not do any harm.

It sends public blessings to the Israelis to carry on their business-as-usual with the Palestinians, while embroiling them in a continuous hand-shaking formula that means much political-speak but no practical action on the ground.

Keep reading . . .

Times of India, 28 Nov 2007

Chidanand Rajghatta

WASHINGTON: From Pakistan’s man-on-the-street to stratospheric analysts at international think-tanks, it has long been said the perpetually embattled country is governed by three As – Army, Allah, and America.

But on a long Thanksgiving weekend during which the United States feasted itself to distraction, another A quietly took centerstage ahead of the troika of Pakistan’s patrons.

Saudi Arabia has always been Pakistan’s great benefactor, as much as long-time ally China and the vice-regal United States. But where Beijing and Washington have given Pakistan arms, nuclear weapons, and assorted goods, Saudis have provided Islamabad with ideological and religious underpinning, not to speak of loads of money and plenty of free oil.

Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia moved to protect its investment in Pakistan, taking over a key role in the country’s transformational politics and edging out its own patron, the United States. By forcing the return of exiled former prime minister Nawaz Sharif to Pakistan, the Saudi monarchy seemingly cocked a snook at Washington, which is backing Sharif’s arch-rival Benazir Bhutto and engineering her political marriage with military ruler Pervez Musharraf.

Keep reading . . .

Published on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 by Foreign Policy Focus

by Stephen Zunes

There’s little reason to hope for a breakthrough at the Middle East peace summit in Annapolis, unless there is a fundamental shift in U.S. policy in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there’s little evidence to suggest such a change is forthcoming.

Indeed, Yossi Beilin, the Israeli Knesset member and former cabinet official who served as one of the major architects of the Oslo Accords, called for the conference to be canceled, fearing that it will only be “an empty summit that will only attract Arab ambassadors and not decision-makers alongside an Israeli leadership that prefers [appeasing Israeli hardliners] over a breakthrough to peace.” As a result, he argues that the meeting is doomed to fail and, as a result, would “weaken the Palestinian camp, strengthen Hamas and cause violence.”

Keep reading . . .

Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy In Focus, November 27, 2007

In 1805, the French army out maneuvered, outsmarted, and outfought the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz. Three years later it would flounder against a rag-tag collection of Spanish guerrillas.

In 1967, it took six days for the Israeli army to smash Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and seize the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 2006, a Shiite militia fought the mightiest army in the Middle East to a bloody standstill in Lebanon.

In 1991, it took four days of ground combat for the United States to crush Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War. U.S. losses were 148 dead and 647 wounded. After more than five years of war in Iraq, U.S. losses are approaching 4,000, with over 50,000 wounded; 2007 is already the deadliest year of the war for the United States.

In each case, a great army won a decisive victory only to see that victory canceled out by what T.E. Lawrence once called the “algebra of occupation.” Writing about the British occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in World War I, Lawrence put his finger on the formula that has doomed virtually every military force that has tried to quell a restive population.

Keep reading . . .

AlterNet,

By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group. Posted November 28, 2007.

As the disaster in Iraq continues, the forgotten country of Afghanistan is on the
verge of becoming another widespread human rights disaster.

Winter approaches, and as many as 400,000 Afghans face starvation. The trouble is not an insufficient supply of food. There is no way to get food to those who need it.

Attacks on aid workers and the hijacking of food convoys — the United Nations’ main feeding program says it has lost about 100,000 tons of food to attacks by insurgents and criminals so far this year — have made it all but impossible to transport supplies along the main road connecting vast stretches of the country between Kandahar in the south and Herat in the west.

Nothing exposes a hollow promise like the prospect of mass starvation. By now, six years after the United States and its Western allies launched military operations to avenge the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and free Afghanistan from the grip of the Taliban, humanitarian workers surely should not be forced to give up on feeding the desperate. But this is only one measure of our catastrophic failure.

Keep reading . . .

Asia Times online, November 28, 2007

By Dahr Jamail

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” – Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and attacks by the US military have only killed “militants”, “criminals”, “suspected insurgents”, “IED [improvised explosive device] emplacers”, “anti-American fighters”, “terrorists”, “military age males”, “armed men”, “extremists” or “al-Qaeda”.

The pattern for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the early years of the occupation to today. Take a helicopter attack on October 23 of this year near the village of Djila, north of Samarra. The US military claimed it had killed 11 among “a group of men planting a roadside bomb”.

Only later did a military spokesperson acknowledge that at least six of the dead were civilians. Local residents claimed that those killed were farmers, that there were children among them, and that the number of dead was greater than 11.

Keep reading . . .

Dictatorship Watch, November 27, 2007

Islamabad (PTI): Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is expected to end the emergency and restore the Constitution soon but he will not reinstate the deposed judges of the Supreme Court, two of his close aides have said.

Attorney General Malik Qayyum and former Railway Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, both considered close to Musharraf, said the President may lift the emergency, withdraw the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) and restore the Constitution within a few days, but he will never accept the opposition’s demand to reinstate deposed judges.

Musharraf is ready to accept every demand of the opposition parties, except the reinstatement of sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar M Chaudhry and other judges of the pre-emergency apex court, Qayyum and Ahmed told ‘The News’.

Ahmed said restoring the judiciary is impossible for Musharraf now as it was the “only problem” for him.

Qayyum said: “It is impossible now as the present Supreme Court has made it clear in its verdict in the case against imposition of emergency and promulgation of PCO that the judges who didn’t take oath under the PCO are no longer judges. The President couldn’t go against the orders of Supreme Court.”

Asked if the demands of former Premier Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) for restoration of the Constitution and ending emergency also meant the reinstatement of the judges, Qayyum said “no.”

“Even when the Constitution will be restored and emergency will be lifted, the deposed judges could not be restored as it will be against the November 23 verdict of the present Supreme Court,” he said.

International Bar Association, November 27, 2007

The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) today condemned the continuing arrest and detention of lawyers in Pakistan, despite the Government’s claims that it was easing emergency rule.

‘It was claimed that the deposed Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, had been released from house arrest,’ said Dr Phillip Tahmindjis, IBA Programme Lawyer. ‘However, when lawyers went to see him at his home last Tuesday they were prevented by the police from doing so and one of them, Athar Minallah, was later arrested without charge.’

Many lawyers remain in custody in Pakistan, including the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan.

‘It appears to be more than a mere coincidence that Mr Minallah and Mr Ahsan have both been critical of the government,’ Dr Tahmindjis added. ‘Mr Ahsan was one of the Chief Justice’s defence counsel.’

The IBAHRI is monitoring the situation to ascertain whether lawyers who supported the Chief Justice in their professional capacity are being particularly targeted.

For further information/expanded commentary, please contact:

Romana St Matthew – Daniel

Press Office
International Bar Association

10th Floor
1 Stephen Street
London W1T 1AT
United Kingdom

Direct Line: +44 (0)20 7691 6837

Switchboard: + 44 (0)20 7691 6868

Fax: + 44 (0)20 7691 6544

E-mail: romana.daniel@int-bar.org

Website: http://www.ibanet.org