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US deal ‘wrecks Middle East peace’

By Conal Urquhart

Tel Aviv, Israel, Aug. 23— The US was yesterday accused by Palestinian leaders of destroying hopes for peace in the Middle East by giving its covert support to Israel’s expansion of controversial settlements in the West Bank.

American officials are privately admitting they have abandoned their demands that Israel freeze settlement activity, and have given Jerusalem tacit permission to build thousands of new homes on the disputed land.

Palestinians fear that the expansion of settlements will make it impossible to establish a viable state on the land Israel took from Jordan in the 1967 war.

Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister, said the US position would destroy the peace process, and Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, said America’s unilateral redrawing of the road map was “a very grave development.”

Publicly, the US still upholds the road map, which calls for a freeze on all settlement activity, including natural growth. But the administration, partly out of frustration with Yasser Arafat, has adopted a position more sympathetic to Israel.

The US has effectively endorsed the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s view of the division of the West Bank. Sharon believes Israel should pull out of Gaza and keep the large settlement blocks such as Ariel, Gush Etzion and Ma’ale Adumim.

The first indication of a shift in US policy happened in March when President George W. Bush and Sharon exchanged letters. The Israeli leader said he planned to withdraw from settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank and Bush replied that the US recognized that the Israeli population centers (the large settlements) in the West Bank would remain Israeli and would not become part of a Palestinian state.

Then in a series of meetings between Israeli and US officials, particularly Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s adviser, maps were drawn indicating where construction could take place.

The latest sign of a significant move came last week when Israel invited tenders to build more than 1,000 homes in the West Bank. The White House did not criticize the announcement.

A western diplomat said yesterday: “The road map calls for a freeze in all settlement activity. End of story.

“The Israelis have never accepted that and the US has tacitly agreed that their position has validity and has shown that limited building is permissible.”

According to another European diplomat, the change in US policy is a “huge shift.”

“In these meetings the US has indicated areas where Israel cannot build. Israel has taken that to mean it is permissible to build in other areas. The US is effectively deciding how the West Bank will look in the future. It’s a huge shift in policy,” he added.

Jeff Halper, an Israeli political activist who specializes in Israel’s control of the Palestinian territories, said: “Effectively a new road map has been drawn between the US and Israel which the United Nations, the European Union and Russia do not agree with.”

A spokesman for the British embassy in Tel Aviv would not comment on the change. “Our policy is that we support the road map,” he said.

The European diplomat said the EU was “institutionally annoyed” at being excluded from discussions, but individual countries had not reacted angrily to the change.

The US-Israeli deals once again leave the Palestinians out of the negotiation process. Qureia said he was waiting for confirmation of the shift in US policy, adding that he would be shocked if it were true. “I can’t believe that America is now saying that settlement expansion is alright,” he said. “This will destroy the peace process.”

The road map was launched last year and President Bush said he would “ride herd” to make sure both parties honored their commitments.

By August the ceasefire had ended, but all parties continued to hold up the road map as the blueprint for peace. Over the last year, Israel has embarked on a large building program in the West Bank.

Peace Now, an Israeli pressure group that monitors the settlements, said a minimum of 3,700 homes were being built in the West Bank.

The Israeli housing ministry has invited tenders for another 1,600 homes and infrastructure works are under way for a new settlement that will link Ma’ale Adumim with east Jerusalem.

According to the European diplomat, the change in US policy stems from frustration with Mr Arafat and the Palestinians in not reforming the Palestinian Authority and preventing violence.

The administration is also furious with the Palestinians for not arresting those responsible for the killing of three American security guards in Gaza earlier this year.

The European diplomat said: “Bush took the position that until the Palestinians get serious about security there was no point in addressing them.”

Israeli officials insist that the construction is all part of prior agreements.

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the US and an adviser to Mr Sharon on foreign affairs, said that the road map was not breached by the West Bank construction, which was in line with previous agreements.

“The new construction also does not negate the road map because our understanding, and also that of the US I think, was that it was performance based.

“Therefore the Israeli commitments would fall into place when the Palestinians stopped terror, which they have not done,” he said.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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Credibility of Afghan vote threatened by violence, fraud
UN staff calling for pullout

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Aug. 23 (AGR)— With battle-scarred Iraq in shambles, the United States is now trying to showcase war-ravaged Afghanistan as a potentially vibrant multiparty democracy on the road to political success.

But United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and several experts on Afghanistan are warning that the credibility of the upcoming elections could be in doubt unless there is a significant improvement in security for the millions of Afghans who have registered to vote.

“The security situation in Afghanistan is volatile, having seriously deteriorated in certain parts of the country,” said Annan in a 20-page report due to be discussed by the UN Security Council this week.

On Aug. 19, two bombs went off at a UN voter registration office in Farah City, Afghanistan, injuring six Afghan police, setting vehicles ablaze and shattering windows, the latest in a string of attacks in which twelve election workers have been killed.

The next day, the UN staff union called for the United Nations to withdraw all its personnel from Afghanistan as the country has become too dangerous to work in. The union said staff should leave the country until new security measures had been introduced because UN personnel were likely to become targets in the run-up to elections.

After several postponements — prompted mostly by security concerns and lack of voter registrations — the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul decided to hold presidential elections on Oct. 9 and parliamentary elections in April 2005.

“To ensure the conditions for free and fair elections, however, a net increase in international security assistance remains indispensable,” says Annan’s report.

But Afghan experts say that despite that plea, increased security may not be forthcoming because of the reluctance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to risk its troops in an increasingly hostile environment characterized by roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

NATO is a military alliance of 26 European nations, the United States, and Canada.

“Kofi Annan, Hamid Karzai, and most of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been pleading with NATO to expand the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for the past two years, but to no avail,” says Mark Sedra, a research associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) where he leads a project that monitors and analyzes security in Afghanistan.

The ISAF has about 6,500 NATO troops in Afghanistan, mostly from Germany and Canada.

The United States has about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, but they are primarily concerned with hunting down fighters of the former ruling Taliban regime and members of the al-Qaida terrorist network of Osama bin Laden in the southern mountainous regions of the country. The Bush administration provides no troops to ISAF.

“Frankly speaking, the present environment in Afghanistan is not conducive for free and fair elections,” Sedra said, pointing out that intimidation will be rampant, as it was during a meeting of various tribal and ethnic groups, called the Loya Jirgas, held in 2002.

Jim Ingalls, founding director of the Afghan Women’s Mission who is currently working on a book about US policy in Afghanistan, said that Annan’s report is not an exaggeration — security in Afghanistan is worse than ever since the period of 1992-1996, before the Taliban took power.

“It may be even worse than that,” he said. “There are too many examples to mention. Just recently Ismael Khan, one of the warlords, almost lost the province of Herat to another warlord Amanullah Khan, who was only forced to back down when US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and US warplanes made an appearance,” added Ingalls.

Another indication of serious insecurity, he said, was the decision of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF or Doctors Without Borders) to pull out of Afghanistan last month, after 24 years of service.

“I’m also concerned about the quality of the elections themselves. While there are 17 candidates for president, most are either warlords or are too afraid to take any real stand against the warlords to make much difference to the political climate. That was documented in Annan’s report,” Ingalls added.

Added Sedra, “a free and fair election cannot be held in Afghanistan as long as the major political parties maintain independent, well-armed militias.”

He also warned that a contested election result could lead to widespread violence. “Now that it has become apparent that the election will be closer than anyone anticipated, the prospect of post-election violence is very real.”

And with evidence mounting of plans for widespread vote-rigging, US experts say the controversy could emerge as a serious liability for US President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.

After voter registration centers closed across Afghanistan last weekend, election officials acknowledged the number of voting cards issued far exceeded the estimated number of eligible voters — and that the illegal practice of multiple registrations is widespread. United Nations officials overseeing the elections admit that more than 10 million voting cards have been issued — surpassing the estimated 9.8 million eligible voters.

In separate interviews, Afghanis told reporters it was easy to obtain more than one card. One man who registered six times, using his real name and photograph, said UN election workers asked him only once if he had previously registered. A woman said her nephew had been approached at school numerous times to sell his laminated voting card and that she knows a woman who obtained 40 cards while cloaked in a burqa.

Mustafa Durani, country representative for the International Republican Institute in Kabul, believes more than 1 million Afghans have registered twice. But he shrugs it off.

“Illegal things happen,” said Durani, whose Washington-based group is associated with the US Republican Party.

Soldiers kill civilians at checkpoint

US soldiers sprayed a pickup truck with bullets after it failed to stop at a roadblock, killing two women and a man, and critically wounding two other people, the latest in a string of civilian deaths at the hands of US forces.

The shooting occurred on Aug. 21 on a road in Ghazni province when the pickup truck ran through a joint US-Afghan military checkpoint, the US military said. Soldiers searched the pickup but did not find any weapons.

“I’m sure that the Americans, like they did after all the other incidents, will say it was a mistake and a misunderstanding, but that is no longer an acceptable excuse for us,” said Abdul Shakoor, a 22-year-old telecommunications worker in Kabul.

Local leaders have repeatedly complained of heavy-handed tactics by US forces, especially during searches that sometimes involve air power and take place in the dead of night.

In one incident, a US air attack in a Ghazni village on Dec. 6, 2003 killed nine children. The military later apologized.

Sources: Associated Press, BBC, Inter Press Service, Toronto Star

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Indian women press for end to draconian army powers

By Ranjit Devraj

New Delhi, India, Aug. 19 (IPS)— Credit must go to women if the insurgency-hit north-eastern Indian state of Manipur, bordering Burma, finally gets rid of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act or AFSPA, imposed a quarter of a century ago.

Already the women, protesting for more than a month now, have compelled the provincial government to lift AFSPA, against the wishes of New Delhi, in the state capital of Imphal. But the hated law remains in operation in the rest of Manipur and in the neighboring states of Assam and Nagaland.

The special powers act gives security forces wide scope to shoot suspected militants on sight with virtual immunity from independent legal inquiry.

It was the AFSPA that enabled the paramilitary Assam Rifles to formally arrest 30-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi from her home on July 10 on mere suspicion that she was a member of the banned People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Devi’s stunned parents were then issued a memo stating that she was being arrested as required by the Supreme Court. But hours later her abused and bullet ridden body was found dumped in Maring, a village outside Imphal.

Since then Imphal has been in flames. On July 15, the rest of the country was shocked by television images of a group of 12 women stripping naked in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters outside the historic Kangla Fort and carrying placards that said “Rape us the way you did Manorama.”

“We will continue the agitation until the AFSPA is repealed from the state,” declared Ramani Devi, secretary of the powerful All- Manipur Women’s Social Promotion and Development Samaj.

And the bets are that the women of Manipur, who have behind them a long history of resolutely resisting high-handedness from authorities, will once again win out.

Exactly a century ago Manipuri women collectively resisted an unfair levy on rice imposed by the British colonial government and followed it up in 1913 by another agitation to end forced labour that is still practiced in neighboring Burma.

Dec. 12 is a state holiday in Manipur in commemoration of Nupi Lan (women’s war) in 1939 when women, agitating against the export of rice from the state in spite of local shortages, surrounded the British administrative offices at the Kangla Fort.

Although many of the women were badly wounded by bayonet-wielding troops, from the Assam Rifles, they refused to lift their siege until given assurances that the export of rice from the Imphal valley would be stopped.

In more recent times, Manipuri women have organized themselves as Meira Paibis (torch bearers), where they present themselves with burning torches which in turn are held aloft wherever they feel that their rights as women and mothers are affected.

In Manipur, often called India’s Ireland, only the Meira Paibis have the moral authority to carry their torches in protest against whichever side -- armed forces or militant groups -- might have gone too far in their abuses.

The Meira Paibis have also taken on alcohol and drug abuse and intervened in family disputes or anything that threatens the social fabric in Manipur -- whose citizens are not only caught between insurgents and armed forces but also in heroin trafficking rings over the Burmese border.

But these days it is the Indian Armed Forces’ sweeping powers under AFSPA that is at the receiving end of the group’s outrage.

“We thought initially that the Supreme Court order requiring that the arresting authority issue memos was fair. But this has not stopped custodial killings and Manorama’s case is only the latest in a series,” Thokchom Rani, 72-year-old Meira Paibi leader told reporters in Imphal, last week.

Rani said while she was not opposed to the army taking on the PLA or a bewildering array of other insurgent groups, she viewed attacks on innocent civilians, especially women, differently.

Alarmed by the fact that the group’s action seems to be gaining momentum due to widespread support, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patel announced Aug. 17 that the central government was prepared to sit down for talks “without preconditions.”

Opinion is also growing against the AFSPA which, according to Rakesh Shukla, a well known Supreme Court advocate, is “unconstitutional and impermissible in a democratic polity.”

The AFSPA is derived from colonial law but is worse in that it even gives a corporal in the army the right to open fire or use force to the extent of causing death “if he is of the opinion that it is necessary to do so for the maintenance of public order.” Various commissions of inquiry have substantiated charges of rape, arson, and cold-blooded murder by soldiers during operations such as the one in Mokokchung in neighboring Nagaland in 1994 and another near Kohima in the state in 1995.

Chandramani Singh, who served earlier as deputy chief minister of Manipur and currently leads the opposition in the State Assembly told IPS the AFSPA had failed to suppress insurgency in the state and had “actually proved counter productive as it has caused insurgency-related activities to increase.”