Peace and Justice Post

Khaleej Times, November 29, 2007

LONDON – A Saudi gang rape victim who was sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes was scolded by judges while police repeatedly dismissed her claims, she said in testimony published on Thursday.

The 19-year-old girl described the rape itself — including the fact that one of her attackers photographed her — and her struggle to eat or sleep in its immediate aftermath to the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

She was attacked at knifepoint by seven men after she was found in a car with a male companion who was not a relative, in breach of strict Saudi law, and was initially sentenced last year to 90 lashes for being with the man.

Following her appeal, the court ordered her punishment should be increased to the current sentence, a decision which has attracted wide international condemnation from human rights groups to the White House.

According to the testimony published in Britain’s The Independent newspaper, once the girl’s husband found out about the gang rape, he told the police and appealed for the rapists to be arrested, to which a police officer said: “You go find them and investigate.”

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Toronto Star | November 24, 2007

The paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero show Americans torturing Iraqis at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Tim Harper
Washington Bureau

The man doing the waterboarding is a strangely disengaged torturer, representing either cool professionalism or emotionless evil.

The abusers are portrayed as army boots on the back of the abused, latex gloves on a naked body.

They are represented by a stream of urine that starts off canvas or invisible hands holding snarling dogs with their teeth bared.

The abused are hooded or blindfolded, naked or in women’s underwear, bloody, anguished, their bodies bloated and overdrawn in almost iconic Christian poses.

This is the work of 75-year-old Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who has taken oils, charcoal, watercolours and his anger at the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and produced a series of 79 works that evoke the brutality and inhumanity of the torture that was revealed to the world in 2004.

The works first shocked audiences in Europe.

Now they are hanging in a museum in the U.S. capital, a handful of subway stops from the White House.

A visit to the exhibit is a punch to the stomach.

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by Susan Abulhawa / Dissident Voice, November 28th, 2007

In the 80s, we gave up 78% of our homeland to try to pick up the pieces of our lives on the remaining 22% of Palestine. This was, and remains, the only true (brave or otherwise) concession ever made in the so-called ‘Middle East Conflict.” Next came Camp David, then Madrid, then Oslo, then another Camp David, Taba, Wye, (deep breath) Sharm el Sheikh, the Disengagement, the Road Map. Through it all, Israel continued to divide, carve out, confiscate and settle that 22%. They scattered us into a diaspora, shut down our schools, bombed damn near every inch of the West Bank and Gaza, herded us into ghettos, set up checkpoints all around us and employed every tool of imperialism, times ten, to get rid of or subjugate us as a cheap labor force.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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