Prime Minister says no truth to the rumors that Buddhist clergy attacked

Thu, Mar 8, 2018, 12:09 am SL Time, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.

Mar 07, Colombo: Sri Lanka Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on March 7, 2018 made a special statement to clarify the situation in the Kandy district said there is no truth in rumors that the Buddhist clergy is attacked and urged all communities including Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims to control the tense situation and provide maximum support to ensure a secure environment.
Prime Minister's statement:

I have also made a special statement in Parliament regarding the attack on a driver in Theldeniya area and the violent and disruptive acts committed at some places in the Kandy district after his death.

Currently, the emergency law has been imposed throughout the country and the police curfew that was imposed in the Kandy district was removed at 6am today.

Today, several business places in Katugastota and surrounding areas have been burned. According to the reports, a grenade in the possession of the unruly crowds in Ambatenna area had exploded. The Police are conducting investigations on these.

Law and order is in operation in other parts of the Kandy district.

Considering the situation, decisions have been made under the emergency regulations to re-impose the curfew in the Kandy district from 4 pm today.

Various rumors are being spread about the attacks on Buddhist clergy, but I declare that such incidents have not taken place.

Also, the armed forces, the Special Task Force and the Police have been deployed throughout the Kandy District. Major General Rukman Dias, commander of the Security Forces in the Central Province has been appointed to coordinate the activities of the tri forces and Police.

They have been instructed to be prepared to control any kind of tense situation. More troops have been deployed to the troubled areas.

Also, the social media networks have been temporarily blocked to control the dissemination of misleading, hateful, inflammatory and false propaganda to the public.

Since the curfew has been imposed in the Kandy district and the state of emergency is functioning throughout the country, I appeal to the public to act peacefully. Also, we call on all people to give your fullest support to safeguarding law and order in your areas.

I wish to say that the situation in other parts of the country is peaceful. I ask the public act responsibly and not to be fooled by false propaganda.

Also the government will take every possible strongest action against the individuals and groups engaged in such violent illegal acts and looting.

Therefore, I urge all communities including Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims to control this tense situation and provide maximum support to ensure a secure environment for all the people.

UN condemns incidents of communal violence in Sri Lanka 

2018-03-08

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Al-Hussein yesterday said he was alarmed by recent violent incidents in Sri Lanka and said he would encourage UN Member States to explore the use of universal jurisdiction in the absence of progress in accountability and transitional justice in Sri Lanka.

In his annual report and oral update to the 37th session of the Human Rights Council on the activities of his office and recent human rights developments, Prince Zeid said there should be no impunity, either for the incitement that led to the attacks, or the attacks themselves.

"In Sri Lanka, I am very alarmed by recurring and continuing episodes of mob violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Muslims, including the most recently in Ampara and in several locations in the Kandy District, leading to the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency for 10 days,” he said.

He said he has repeatedly urged the Sri Lanka Government to advance its implementation of the transitional justice agenda.

"I regret the absence of meaningful progress. It is urgent, for the sake of the victims, that progress be made on accountability and transitional justice. In the absence of such progress I would encourage Member States to explore the use of universal jurisdiction. The Council will be fully briefed in this regard on March 21,” he said. (Lahiru Pothmulla)

'Islamophobic narratives' inflame Sri Lanka communal tensions

Violent clashes between Buddhists and Muslims have forced Sri Lanka to impose a state of emergency. Despite the move, the government appears uncertain about how to respond to the violence, says analyst Alan Keenan.

Author Srinivas Mazumdaru (Interview)-Date 07.03.2018

The Sri Lankan government on Tuesday declared a state of emergency for 10 days to rein in the spread of communal violence after Buddhists and Muslims clashed in the Indian Ocean nation's central district of Kandy.   

On Wednesday, the government also shut down social messaging networks, including Facebook, to control the violence.

The unrest casts a spotlight on the underlying communal tensions in the South Asian country. In a DW interview, Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG), talks about the current volatile situation as well as the relations between Buddhists and Muslims in the country.

DW: What are the reasons behind this latest communal violence in the country?

Alan Keenan: There are many factors behind the recent upsurge of violence against Sri Lankan Muslims. The events of the last ten days have not been local-level "clashes" between Buddhists and Muslims, but organized and targeted attacks from national-level militant groups who are well-known and have made their intentions clear through traditional and social media.

The immediate cycle of violence began with the death on March 3 of a Sinhala Buddhist man in the central hill town of Teldeniya. He was attacked ten days earlier by four local Muslim men, who were promptly arrested and detained. The death sparked anger and some violence the next day by local Buddhists, 24 of whom were arrested and held by the police.

Keenan: 'The ongoing violence marks the resurgence of militant Buddhist groups that first emerged in 2012-14'

Demanding the release of these men, leaders of radical Buddhist groups converged on the town with hundreds of their supporters from other districts, who later began attacking mosques and Muslim businesses and homes. Even after yesterday's declaration of a state of emergency, violence continues against Muslims in the central hills area around the town of Kandy.

The violence this week came just days after a mosque and Muslim businesses were attacked in the southeastern town of Ampara. There are indications the attack was pre-planned and carried out mostly by Buddhist militants brought in from outside Ampara town, supported through rumors spread on social media. Government officials have acknowledged that the damage was aggravated by the slow response of the local police.

The ongoing violence marks the resurgence of militant Buddhist groups that first emerged in 2012-14 during and with the support of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government. Having ceased during the first two years of the current coalition government, attacks on Muslims began again over a six-week period in April and May 2017 and for two days in November 2017, with militants apparently emboldened by the government's failure to prosecute those responsible for violence and hate speech during the Rajapaksa regime.

Sri Lanka has grabbed international headlines in the past due to tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamils. But how do you describe the relations between Buddhists and Muslims in Sri Lanka?

Muslims, who make up almost 10 percent of Sri Lanka's population, live across the country among both Sinhalese (who make up 75 percent of the population and are overwhelmingly Buddhist) and Tamils (about 15 percent and mostly Hindu). Relations are mostly harmonious. At the same time, there are long-standing and deeply rooted fears among many Sinhalese that the Sinhala and Buddhist character of the nation is under threat and must be protected, even to the extent of using violence.

While the threat has previously been seen as coming from colonial rulers, and then Tamils, Muslims are now the primary worry for many Sinhalese.

Narratives of insecurity, fed by global Islamophobic tropes, present Muslims as violent extremists, as increasing their population so fast as to pose a threat to Sinhala Buddhist majority status, as misusing their economic power to weaken Sinhalese and as using underhand means to reduce Sinhalese Buddhist numbers through secretly planting contraceptives in food eaten and clothes worn by Sinhalese.

These fears and myths are widely promoted — along with calls for violence — through social media.

The fears are also regularly encouraged by some Sinhala business interests to weaken their Muslim competitors. These rivalries play out at the local level with regular appeals to Sinhala Buddhist consumers to boycott Muslim shops and with Muslim-owned businesses regularly targeted in anti-Muslim rioting. They also have a national character, with certain Sinhala business leaders widely believed to be key funders of Bodu Bala Sena and other militant groups.

'While the state of emergency appears to have helped reduce the violence, attacks have continued'

Criticisms of Muslims as gaining greater economic power through unfair means have particular resonance with Sinhalese facing economic difficulties, as the government struggles to control the cost of living and provide sustainable livelihoods, especially in rural areas and small towns.

How vulnerable are Sri Lankan Muslims to being drawn to extremism and radicalism?

Sri Lankan Muslims have been admirably restrained, disciplined and non-violent in their response to what is now five years of severe, sustained and often violent pressure. One can only hope that this continues to be the case, though continued violent provocations — and the failure of the police to protect Muslims — will test their patience. There has been no evidence of any violent extremism among Sri Lankan Muslims, other than a few clashes in years past between adherents of a more austere, reformist style of Islam and Muslims whose practices are considered to be Sufi-inflected.

Sri Lankan Muslims have grown more noticeably religious over the past 50 years, most visibly in the increasing numbers of women wearing hijab (headscarf), abaya (cloak) and in some cases nikab (veil), and men dressed in white religious robes and caps. The number of mosques has also noticeably increased. This has drawn greater prominence to Muslims as a visible "other" and led to some Buddhists to see them as an outside and threatening force, as distinct from earlier generations of Muslims with less noticeable religious attachments.

How has the Sri Lankan government tried to quell the tensions between Buddhists and Muslims and promote communal harmony?

The government has done very little to address either the underlying mistrust or misunderstandings between the two communities, or to rein in the small number of Buddhists who promote or use violence. Despite coming to power in January 2015 promising to end impunity for attacks on Muslims, there have been no proper investigations of past violence, and leaders of groups known to be involved in attacks on Muslims have not been prosecuted.

Despite recent statements from the president, prime minister and other officials that the law will be strictly enforced and those engaging in violence will be arrested, key organizers of the ongoing violence remain free. Some of these have posted on social media information to help target Muslims for attack. Police in a number of locations have been credibly accused of siding with the mobs.

While government leaders are not believed to be supporting the violence against Muslims, they appear to be afraid of taking action against the perpetrators, especially those Buddhist monks thought to be involved, for fear of alienating Sinhala Buddhist voters by appearing to favor Muslims. This fear has grown since the recent poor showing of government candidates in the February 10 local government elections, in which former President Rajapaksa led a successful campaign rooted in a strongly Sinhala Buddhist nationalist platform.

The increasingly deep divide between the president and the prime minister, who is battling to hold on to his job, appears to have further paralyzed the government.

'Sri Lankan Muslims have grown more noticeably religious over the past 50 years'

What steps could or should the government take to curb further communal violence?

The government needs to adopt a three-pronged strategy, beginning with enforcing the law, including against hate speech, and arresting and prosecuting offenders. While the state of emergency appears to have helped reduce the violence, attacks have continued. Should the government act decisively and explain the necessity of their actions to the Buddhist religious leadership and the general public, it is likely they can win the necessary support.

Over the mid-to-long term, the government must also work actively to correct the lies and disinformation about Muslims that are spread by radical Buddhist groups, especially on social media, such as the allegation that Muslim restaurants regularly put contraceptives in their food in order to sterilize their Buddhist customers and reduce their population.

The impact of such rumors and "fake news" could be significantly reduced if the government used its media and information channels to combat them. Finally, over the long term, but beginning now, the government needs to more actively promote a pluralist vision of Sri Lanka, in which the country belongs to all communities equally while still protecting the country's unique Sinhala and Buddhist culture.

How do you see the security and communal situation evolving in the country in the coming weeks? Will the Sri Lankan government be able to bring the situation under control?

The continued failure to make arrests of well-known Buddhist agitators and the instigators of recent attacks is not encouraging, and despite the state of emergency, the government still appears uncertain about how to respond to the violence. The chaos and infighting that has characterized the coalition government's response to their defeat in the local government elections has continued and contributed to a sense of weakness that has been seized on by militant Buddhists groups. Strong, decisive and coherent action is needed if Sri Lanka is to prevent a new and potentially crippling round of communal conflict.

Alan Keenan is Sri Lanka project director at the International Crisis Group (ICG) in London.

The interview was conducted by Srinivas Mazumdaru.

Republicans finally reveal their red line for Trump

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned that President Trump's broad aluminum and steel tariffs could "send the economy in the wrong direction." (The Washington Post)

By Dana Milbank Opinion writer March 6 at 7:43 PM

What would it take for Republicans to turn against Donald Trump?

Now, finally, we know.

For nearly three years, Republican lawmakers have stood with Trump, offering only isolated protest, through all manner of outrage. Disparaging Mexican immigrants. Videotaped boasts about sexually assaulting women. Alleging that his predecessor put a wiretap on him. Falsely claiming mass­ive voter fraud. Racism directed at a federal judge. The firing of James B. Comey. Talk of women bleeding. A payoff to a porn actress over an alleged affair. A defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville. Support for Senate candidate Roy Moore despite allegations of child molestation. The guilty pleas of Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates and the indictment of Paul Manafort. The botched travel ban and bungled repeal of Obamacare. Insulting Britain and other allies. Attacks on the FBI and judiciary and attempts to fire the attorney general. Talk of African “shithole” countries. Questions about his mental stability. The lethargic hurricane response in Puerto Rico. The stream of staff firings and resignations and personal and ethical scandals, most recently Tuesday’s finding that Kellyanne Conway twice violated the Hatch Act.

Republican lawmakers were, by and large, okay with all that. But now Trump has at last gone too far. He has proposed tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum. And the Republican Party is in an all-out revolt.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) fielded four questions at a news conference Tuesday morning and answered the same way four times: with a warning about the “unintended consequences” of Trump’s proposed tariffs.


President Trump was already expressing concern about the practices of America’s trade partners decades before he ran in the 2016 election. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) spoke Tuesday afternoon of “a high level of concern” and fear that “this could metastasize into a larger trade war.”

The No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn (Tex.), warned about “jeopardi­zing the economy.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), usually a Trump cheerleader, warned that it would be a “real mistake.”

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (Tex.) urgedTrump to “weigh carefully” what he’s doing.

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) suggested a “scalpel not a sledgehammer.”

Rep. Kevin Yoder (Kan.), at a hearing Tuesday, warned Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that “retaliatory measures are already occurring.”

Rep. Jackie Walorski (Ind.) wrote to Trump to say a manufacturer in her district called off an expansion because of the threatened tariffs.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) went to the Senate floor to warn that “tariffs are big taxes” and said a company in Tennessee suspended a planned expansion because of the tariff threat. He read into the record a Wall Street Journal editorial calling the tariffs Trump’s “biggest policy blunder.”

The Republican criticism poured forth, from Sens. Mike Lee (Utah), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Rand Paul (Ky.), from Reps. David Young (Iowa), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), and even from new Fed Chairman Jerome H. Powell.

And it isn’t just criticism. GOP lawmakers are considering action, even though options are limited: attempting to block the tariffs with veto-proof legislation or as part of a must-pass bill, or denying Trump fast-track trade negotiating authority when it comes up for renewal. Republicans have nudged Trump in their direction before, on taxes and immigration. But never before has there been a full-scale rebellion.

The conventional analysis is that Republican lawmakers bend to Trump because he has the support of the party’s base. But that calculus does not apply here. The base is with Trump — a Pew Research Center poll last year found only 36 percent of Republicans have a positive view of trade agreements — but lawmakers are defying him anyway.

This, then, shows the extent to which the congressional GOP, despite Trump’s populist talk, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America under Trump. Republicans are with Trump most of the time (that is, when he is cutting regulations and taxes on corporations and the wealthy) but against him on the rare occasions he is opposed by industry, or at least all industry that doesn’t make steel and aluminum.

These lawmakers know where their bread is buttered, and they must keep corporate contributors happy. Perhaps they also recognize that the economy is in a precarious state. Trump himself called it a bubble, and that bubble has been pumped up further with debt-financed tax cuts and spending stimulus. A trade war, or even a trade skirmish, could be most deflating.

This is why Republican lawmakers look the other way when presented with Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct, racial provocations, conflicts of interest, cowboy diplomacy and assaults on the rule of law. But slapping a tariff on foreign metals? That crosses the line.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Israel’s systematic violence against Palestinian women

A Bedouin woman watches as Israeli bulldozers destroy her shelter in the village of al-Araqib, August 2010. The village has been razed more than 100 times.Oren ZivActiveStills

Gregory Shupak- 7 March 2018

Crucial to Israeli colonialism is an attempt at the destruction of Palestinian society. This is part of a bid to secure demographic majority over non-Jewish people across all of historic Palestine and maximal control over the territory and its resources.

Pursuing these goals necessarily involves hindering Palestinians’ ability to raise their next generation and to sustain, educate and care for themselves and each other.

The institutionalized destruction of Palestinian women’s lives has thus been an essential feature of the Israeli project. And as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, and in a time of the #MeToo movement, it is important to remember how Israel has systematically carried out violence against Palestinian women, undercut their healthcare, and undermined their socio-economic conditions.

In this regard, Israeli settler-colonialism can be seen as intrinsically anti-feminist and a form of gendered violence.

Routine violence

Israeli violence against Palestinian women is routine. The United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur on violence against women notes that the “establishments and expansion of settlements has been accompanied by an increase in settlers’ violence against Palestinians, including women and girls.”

The Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, a Palestinian organization, gathered statements from women who describe being “scared to leave their houses alone after experiences of [attacks by Israeli settlers] during both day and night.”

The group also collected testimony from 100 Palestinian women living in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and found that when Israeli governments illegally settle Israelis in East Jerusalem and Palestinians protest, “women frequently report an increase in Israeli police brutality including nighttime raids on family homes and the arrest of young men and minors.”

Palestinian women who have been detained report being subject to torture or ill treatment or both, as noted by the UN special rapporteur: “Beatings, insults, threats and sexual harassment were reported to be common practices as well as intrusive body searches, which often occur before and after court hearings or during the night as punitive measures.”

Israeli violence against Palestinian women is also frequently fatal and on a large scale. During Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 offensive against Gaza, 110 Palestinian women were killed. During Israel’s summer 2014 assault on the territory, Israel massacred 230 women.

Targeting healthcare

Base violence is just one of the weapons being deployed against Palestinian women. Targeting Palestinians’ access to healthcare and reducing its quality, both in Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, is another.

The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women issued a recent report finding that Palestinian women and girls residing in Israel “continue to register poor health outcomes, particularly infant and maternal mortality.”

The rate of infant mortality among Palestinian citizens of Israel is 6.4 per 1,000 live births, almost three times higher than it is among Jewish Israelis. Last month Israel’s high court took steps likely to worsen this problem by rejecting a petition demanding the reopening of a mother-infant health clinic serving some 1,500 people in two Palestinian communities in Israel.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, meanwhile, has outlined a variety of mechanisms through which Israel undermines Palestinian healthcare in the West Bank and Gaza.

These include Israeli control of the Palestinian Authority’s budget, including its health budget, and limiting the free movement of patients, medical personnel, ambulances and medications between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as within the West Bank.

Such practices contribute to Palestinian women having worse health outcomes than their Israeli counterparts. Maternal mortality in the West Bank and Gaza is four times higher than in Israel. Life expectancy of Israeli women is on average 10 years longer than it is for Palestinian women.

Moreover, Palestinian women in the West Bank live under the omnipresent threat of having their homes demolished or of being evicted. This, according to the UN’s special rapporteur, has a “severe psychological impact” on women, “causing anxiety and leading to depression.”

Israeli military forces regularly carry out night raids in the West Bank. The special rapporteur describes these as “psychological violence” against Palestinian women to the extent that they “experience severe sleeping disorders, severe stress issues and depression.”

Meanwhile, at the checkpoints Israel has established throughout the West Bank, Israeli soldiers have blocked pregnant Palestinian women on their way to hospital to give birth.

In Gaza, health care is inadequate because of the Israeli blockade. Patients in need are at the mercy of the Israeli military to grant them a permit for travel, which is often delayed or denied.

In 2016, for instance, the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling reports that 1,726 such permits were denied and 8,242 were delayed so long that they did not receive a response in time for their medical appointments.

These restrictions are “arbitrary,” according to the center, and “target seriously ill women who pose no threat [to Israel] … For women – mothers, wives and daughters – the burden these restrictions place on them and their families is unbearable.”

Israel’s large-scale military assaults on Gaza have further undermined women’s health there.
According to UNESCO’s Commission on the Status of Women, Israel’s 2014 attack left healthcare centers damaged, without sufficient medical equipment and supplies, and healthcare providers unable to properly meet the needs of women and girls requiring sexual and reproductive health services.

During the Israeli attack, UNESCO reports, “more than 45,000 pregnant Palestinian women were deprived of access to basic reproductive health services, and approximately 5,000 of them gave birth in extremely poor conditions.”

Destroying potential

Similar problems exist with Palestinian women’s education and employment.

The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has expressed its “concern about the systemic discrimination experienced by national minorities” living in Israel, specifically Palestinian women and girls. The committee notes that Palestinian women and girls have unequal access to education – as do their ultra-Orthodox Jewish counterparts – which leads to higher dropout rates and poor outcomes in higher education.

According to the scholar Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud, “Israeli state policies toward Palestinian women workers [living in Israel] have been central to their marginalization in production and employment.”
Daoud points out that the “severe shortage” of daycare centers in Palestinian areas prevents Palestinian women from entering the labor market, noting that only 25 government-supported daycare centers operate in Palestinian areas in Israel whereas 16,000 operate in Jewish areas.

In the West Bank, the violence, vandalism and property destruction that Israeli soldiers and settlers carry out“overburdens women with increased responsibilities, including financial ones, for members of their family.”

In a study of the Israeli-occupied Jordan Valley, an area of the West Bank largely populated by Bedouin Palestinians, the rights group Al-Haq notes that Palestinian women are especially “vulnerable to the impacts of Israel’s unlawful measures in the region, which have had direct adverse impacts on their standard of living and on the various roles and responsibilities they undertake.”

For example, the organization points out that in 2015 and 2016 Israel demolished 240 Palestinian houses, tents, animal sheds, stores and poultry farms in the Jordan Valley, displacing 647 Palestinians.

These measures, Al-Haq says, resulted in “devastating consequences” for Palestinian women and deprived them of their right to an adequate standard of living.

Al-Haq adds that Israel’s discriminatory planning and zoning regime systematically denies Palestinian communities building permits so Palestinian women and their families in the Jordan Valley “are forced to live with little to no privacy, in overcrowded, unsanitary and uninhabitable environments.”

These poor living conditions affect “the livelihoods of women and children and their access to basic services and facilities, including water and sanitation, healthcare and education.”

Al-Haq interviewed women in al-Qilt al-Foqa, a community in the southern Jordan Valley, about the acts of violence Israeli settlers routinely commit, often under the protection of Israeli soldiers. The organization statesthat “women expressed anxiety about living in a constant state of psychological distress from fear of potential settler attacks on the community.”

This anxiety, Al-Haq adds, “stems from both experiencing and witnessing incidents of violence that in the past posed a serious threat to the lives of the women, children and other family members.”

Al-Haq finds that “the right of Palestinian women to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, including to sexual and reproductive freedom, is severely undermined by Israeli practices in the Jordan Valley, including demolitions, denials of road constructions, and restrictions on access to healthcare services and facilities.”

In Gaza, UNESCO reports, food insecurity among women-headed households is 51 percent while in the male-headed households in which most women live, it stands at 58 percent.

UNESCO attributes this problem to Israel’s closure of the Strip. The report notes that food insecurity worsened after Israel’s summer 2014 assault because it increased the number of displaced Palestinians in Gaza, made it harder for the population to access their livelihoods, and increased unemployment rates. UNESCO says that it expects this situation to “contribute to a deterioration of the nutritional status of women and children.”

As the “primary caregivers in Gaza, women are faced with acute challenges in coping with the large number of families with members killed or injured, the long-term impact of damaged infrastructure and reduced services,” UNESCO states.

Systematic and deliberate

Israel’s oppression of and violence against Palestinian women is pervasive and occurs at every level of their lives. It can only be seen as systematic.

The Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling describes the Palestinian women of Jerusalem as a “community deliberately and systematically placed under enormous physical and psychological pressure by the prevailing authority with an apparent intention of making not only day-to-day life unbearable, but destroying any hope in a brighter future.”

The World Health Organization finds that Israel’s measures as an occupying power are “designed to expel [Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip] and prevent them from reaching their agricultural land and property. This has a devastating effect on the health of inhabitants, particularly women (and especially women who are pregnant), children and the aged.”

Israel’s settler-colonial policies undermine Palestinian women’s abilities to live full, secure lives, and to contribute to building communities capable of flourishing in the present and in future generations.
On this International Women’s Day, one way to support the global emancipation of women is to support the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Dr. Gregory Shupak teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media, can be ordered from OR Books.

Israel approves 'loyalty' law to revoke residency of Jerusalem's Palestinians

Minister of interior will have absolute authority to revoke residence permits from Palestinians on the ground of 'breach of allegiance'

A permanent residence permit that Palestinians in East Jerusalem hold as an ID card (Screengrab)

Wednesday 7 March 2018

The Israeli Knesset on Wednesday approved a law that gives the interior ministry the authority to revoke permanent residence permits from Palestinians in Jerusalem on the grounds of a "breach of allegiance."

The amendment to the "Entry into Israel Law 1952" will also nullify the Israeli Supreme Court's ability to rule against any such decision made by the interior ministry. 

According to the Knesset's official website, Israeli MKs proposed the law after the Supreme Court in September overturned the ministry's decision to revoke the permanent residence permits of four Jerusalemite Palestinians - three elected parliamentarians from Hamas, and a former minister.

Criticising the amendment, MK Dov Boris Khenin of the Joint List party said that "this is bad and dangerous legislation... Israel's decision to annex East Jerusalem contradicts international law. The residents of East Jerusalem live there not because they chose to be Israelis but because it is their home."

He said the law wants to impose an obligation of allegiance on people who do not have any loyalty to Israel.

The law does not elaborate on what a "breach of allegiance" might entail. 

MK Jamal Zahalka of the Balad part said: "You [Israelis] entered East Jerusalem and you have to leave it. This law is a crime. The real law should be the entry of the police and the Israeli authorities into East Jerusalem, and in order to enter there, you will need a passport and visas."

Since 1967, there has been a campaign to empty East Jerusalem of its Palestinian residents

- MK Issawi Frej 

Almost 300,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem hold permanent residence permits issued by the Israeli Ministry of Interior, and the "Entry into Israel Law" is the primary law that regulates IDs, birth and death certificates, marriage registration and issues travel documents.

Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hold residency permits and legal documents issued by the Palestinian Authority. 

Issuing documents by the PA is done through coordination with Israel, according to the Oslo Accords of 1993. Israel controls the border terminals and has the final say over who is allowed to get a residency permit from the Palestinian Authority.

Israel’s demographic attempts to change Jerusalem date back to 1967, when it occupied and annexed East Jerusalem, combining the large Palestinian population there with West Jerusalem’s Jewish population.

MK Issawi Frej said: "Since 1967, there has been a campaign to empty East Jerusalem of its Palestinian residents."

"[There have been] 30 amendments since the enactment of the Entry into Israel law [in 1952] and every amendment is aimed at removing more Arabs from East Jerusalem."

Although few Palestinians in Jerusalem have taken or been allowed Israeli citizenship, and almost none vote in municipal elections, Israel fears their growing numerical weight in the city, where they comprise nearly 40 percent of the city’s total population.

Since 1967, Israel has revoked the residency permits of more than 14,000 Palestinians, forcing them to leave Jerusalem.

Damascus intensifies Ghouta assault in bid to cut rebel enclave in half

Tom Perry, Angus McDowall-MARCH 7, 2018

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian government forces bombarded eastern Ghouta anew on Wednesday in an effort to slice the rebel enclave in two, intensifying a campaign to deal the opposition its biggest defeat since 2016.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said pro-Syrian government forces had managed to bring the strip of territory linking the north and south of what remains of rebel-held eastern Ghouta within firing range, effectively bisecting the densely populated region on the outskirts of Damascus.

There was no immediate confirmation of this from the rebels or Syrian government.

The Syrian government onslaught on eastern Ghouta, which began more than two weeks ago, has become one of the fiercest campaigns of a war now entering its eighth year, with bombardment killing hundreds of people.

Live footage broadcast by Syrian state TV from the outskirts of the town of Mesraba earlier on Wednesday showed enormous clouds of smoke rising into the sky. The sounds of explosions and jets could be heard.

A state TV correspondent said militant defences in the town were being struck by “preparatory fire” in advance of a planned infantry assault. “Mesraba is under heavy attack today,” said Khalil Aybour, a member of an opposition council in Ghouta.

Capturing Mesraba would be a major step towards severing the northern half of Ghouta, including its biggest town Douma, from the southern part. Government forces have seized more than 50 percent of the territory so far.

On Wednesday pro-government forces advanced, taking the small town of Beit Sawa to Misraba’s south, a Hezbollah-run media unit said. The Observatory said this advance deeper into the centre of the enclave enabled them to bring the remaining north-south link within firing range.

Civilians have been fleeing frontline areas into Douma and hiding in cellars, with aid workers saying many children had told them they had not seen daylight in 20 days. [L5N1QP5D5]

“It’s bad in the basement, but it’s better than the bombing,” Adnan, 30, a Douma resident who has been sheltering below ground with his wife and two-year-old daughter together with 10 other families, told Reuters by telephone.

The United Nations says 400,000 people are trapped in the towns and villages of the eastern Ghouta, under government siege for years and already running out of food and medicine before the assault. An aid convoy reached the area this week but government officials had stripped out most medical supplies.

The United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator in Syria. Ali al-Za’tari, asked the government to commit to a ceasefire on Thursday to allow more aid in.

AT LEAST 850 CIVILIANS KILLED

Russia, President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally, has offered rebels safe passage out with their families and personal weapons. The proposal echoes previous agreements under which insurgents, in the face of military defeat, were permitted to withdraw to opposition-held areas along the Turkish border.

A boy stands on the rubble of a damaged building at the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, Syria March 5, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh

The Observatory said that at least 850 civilians have been killed by government bombing and shelling in this offensive, with 45 killed on Wednesday.

The Observatory said an extra 700 pro-government militia fighters had arrived at the front as reinforcements to join the operation.

The U.N. Security Council called on Wednesday for its Feb. 24 resolution demanding a 30-day ceasefire across Syria to be implemented and it voiced concern about the country’s humanitarian plight, the council president said.

Netherlands U.N. Ambassador Karel van Oosterom was speaking after the Council was briefed behind closed doors on the situation in Syria at the request of Britain and France.

Despite the ceasefire resolution, Moscow and Damascus have not halted the campaign to retake eastern Ghouta, arguing that the fighters they are striking are members of banned terrorist groups unprotected by the truce.

Russia’s defence ministry said some rebels wanted to accept the proposal to evacuate. So far rebels have dismissed it in public. The military spokesman for one of the main eastern Ghouta rebel groups said rebels would defend the territory and there were no negotiations over a withdrawal.

“The factions of Ghouta and their fighters and its people are holding onto their land and will defend it,” Hamza Birqdar of Jaish al-Islam told Reuters in a text message sent overnight.

The opposition says such evacuation agreements amount to a policy of demographic change by which Assad has forcibly displaced those who oppose him.

In an interview on state TV, a Syrian army colonel expressed confidence Ghouta would fall quickly, saying the people there would return to the “state’s embrace ... very, very, very soon”.

German Politics: The Limbo Is Over

With a new term for Merkel, Germany and Europe can breathe a sigh of relief.

By Holger Schmieding, March 5, 2018

Germany’s center-left SPD has agreed to join chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU in another “grand coalition.”

SPD members endorsed the draft coalition deal which party leaders had struck four weeks ago with a 66% majority, a bigger margin than expected. This bodes well for the stability of the new government.

The Bundestag is scheduled to re-elect Merkel for her fourth term on March 14th. After almost six months of limbo, Germany will thus have a regular government again in time for the EU summit on March 22-23.

While the SPD has yet to officially nominate its six ministers for the government, the current mayor of Hamburg, Olaf Scholz, looks set to be the new finance minister.

Although many of the SPD rank-and-file may have preferred to renew their party in opposition, the fear that the SPD might drop even well below last September’s dismal 20.5% in potential new elections probably tilted the balance strongly towards a “yes.”

The fact that the SPD has secured the finance ministry for itself in the envisaged new coalition may also have helped.

The result of the SPD vote was somewhat closer than it had been in 2013 when a 76% majority of SPD members had approved a much less controversial coalition with Merkel. Sunday’s result also strengthens the SPD’s two top leaders, Olaf Scholz and the designated new party boss Andrea Nahles.

Will Merkel stay on for a full term until autumn 2021?

Probably yes, at least for almost a full term. Agreeing on a post-election coalition has been more difficult than ever before in German post-war history. With little love lost between the CDU/CSU and SPD, the risk that their coalition may fall apart prematurely is real.

Nonetheless, Germans value stability. Whoever breaks the coalition may be punished by voters at the next opportunity. As a result, CDU/CSU and SPD are likely to stay in their pragmatic arrangement for a full term although the SPD has reserved the right to review the coalition agreement mid-term.

Merkel herself has repeatedly stressed that she had campaigned to stay on as chancellor for a full term. While she may possibly anoint a successor and yield office a little ahead of the next regular election in the autumn of 2021, she probably will not step down mid-term.

What happens after this term?

Merkel is unlikely to run again in 2021. She has now promoted a few younger and rising CDU politicians (Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Jens Spahn, Julia Klöckner) to visible national roles who might be potential candidates to succeed her in a few years.

Politically, “grand coalitions” between tend to strengthen the smaller opposition parties, including the fringes such as the right-wing AfD (currently at 13-15% in opinion polls). Judging by experience, including that of the CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition that Merkel had led in her last term, both major parties may lose votes again in 2021.

However, whether that rule will really hold in 2021 is an open question. Both parties will be led by new leaders for the 2021 election. Experience around the Western world in the last few years has demonstrated the decisive impact which charismatic new leaders can make (think France’s Emmanuel Macron and Austria’s Sebastian Kurz).

If CDU/CSU or SPD run with somebody in 2021 who convinces voters, they may still win rather than lose the next German election.

Will German policies change significantly?

No, not much. By and large, Germany will continue along the path which the same CDU/CSU-SPD coalition under Chancellor Merkel had taken in the last four years already.

In addition, for many issues concerning Europe, migration and taxes, the CDU/CSU-SPD coalition will need the supports of some Greens in the upper house of parliament (Bundesrat), as was the case in the last few years.

Broadly speaking, German policies will remain driven by a consensus between most mainstream parties. That limits the scope for sudden policy shifts.

On European issues, we do not expect the likely transition to Olaf Scholz (SPD) as new German finance minister to make a decisive difference. The current mayor of Hamburg is seen as a safe pair of hands on the more conservative side of his party. He has vowed to maintain the “black zero”, that is a small budget surplus at the federal level.

Expect modest progress on Europe

Mr. Scholz will be highly visible and play a significant role in European negotiations. But as was the case with Wolfgang Schäuble, Merkel will ultimately call the shots. The German position will not soften by more than the conservative parts of Merkel’s CDU/CSU can accept. Offers of more German money will remain tied to tough conditions.

A major increase in powers for the European Commission and/or the European parliament looks unlikely, especially as Martin Schulz (former head of the European parliament) had to resign as SPD leader three weeks ago.

Instead, expect modest progress towards a banking union (such as the ESM turning into the final backstop in case that a major bank needs to be wound down) and some steps towards a building up a joint deposit insurance in the eurozone over time. We also look for progress on non-economic issues such as defence.

At home, key policies of the new government will be a modest increase in government spending while maintaining a small fiscal surplus (“black zero”), small tax cuts (partial abolition of the “solidarity surcharge” to the income tax).

Unfortunately, Germany is also heading for further small-scale reversals of the labour market and health-care reforms of the years around 2004 that had turned the country from the “sick man of Europe” into the continent’s major growth engine.

At the behest of the SPD, the new government intends to remove the cap on employer contributions to the health care schemes for their employees, tighten the rules for temporary work contracts and make some pension entitlements more generous.

Can German afford more “GroKo” policies?

At full employment and in the midst of a cyclical upturn, Germany can easily afford these policies for a while. The modest damage to the country’s supply potential may only become visible in the wake of the next cyclical downturn.

With a somewhat less flexible labour market and higher non-wage labour costs to fund the mandatory pension, health-care and nursing care schemes, German companies may be more reluctant to raise employment in the next cyclical recovery than they are at the moment.

In the coming decade, Germany will likely fall back from its position close to the top towards the middle of the European growth league, while France may surge close to the top thanks to the Macron reforms.

Baathism Caused the Chaos in Iraq and Syria

The United States invaded the Levant 15 years ago – but the region’s scorched-earth ideology has kept the fire burning.

A burning mural of Saddam Hussein in Kirkuk on April 11, 2003. (Patrick Barth/Getty Images) 

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN-

 MARCH 7, 2018, 9:17 AM
The United States intervened militarily in Iraq in 2003, 15 years ago this month, and the result was war and chaos. But the United States did not intervene in Syria in 2011 when the regime there was challenged, and the result was still war and chaos. Though the media has interpreted the past decade and a half of armed conflict in the Levant exclusively through the failure of U.S. policy, the fact that the policy in Syria was 180-degrees different from the one in Iraq and yet the result was the same indicates that there has to be a deeper, more fundamental force at work in both countries that journalists and historians must acknowledge.

That deeper force is the legacy of Baathism. A toxic mix of secular Arab nationalism and Eastern Bloc-style socialism that dominated Syria and Iraq for decades since the 1960s, it made the regimes of the al-Assad family in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq completely unique in the Arab world. Baathism, more than George W. Bush or Barack Obama, is the father of the violent Hobbesian nightmare that has devastated the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau in the early 21st century.

As a rule, the more abstract and totalizing the ideology, the more blood that follows in its wake. That’s because once a leader is toppled or challenged, such ideologies provide for no intermediary layers of civil society — between the regime at the top and the tribe and extended family at the bottom — to hold a country together. In 1998 in Beirut, three years before 9/11, I interviewed the public intellectual Elias Khoury who told me regarding Iraq and Syria, “these regimes have succeeded in destroying not only their societies but any alternatives to themselves. Because no alternative can survive, the choice may be between total control and total chaos.”

Khoury’s clairvoyance rested on the knowledge that Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein had used their many decades in power to build elaborate moukhabarat (security service) structures that only masqueraded as states. Their people remained subjects, not citizens; and ethnic and sectarian contradictions lay bottled-up, ready to explode, rather than be assuaged by healthy economic and political development. Beneath the carapaces of tyranny lay utter voids.

At the root of this complete failure to forge vibrant, secular identities spanning ethnic and sectarian lines in Syria and Iraq was Baathist ideology, something far more lethal and suffocating than what obtained in the basically ordinary, bourgeois tyrannies of Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Arab world. Places like Egypt and Tunisia constitute age-old clusters of civilization, which have been states in one form or another since antiquity, and with robust identities to go with it; whereas Iraq and Syria were merely vague geographical expressions, with much weaker histories as states, and thus they required more extreme forms of brutality to hold them together. And in that effort, Baathism supplied the ideological adhesive.

Baathism was hammered out before and during World War II by two members of the Damascene middle class, one Christian and the other Muslim: Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar, who were attracted to the heady ideologies swirling around Europe that they had picked up as students in France in the early 1930s. What emerged was a concoction of Arab nationalism, the Marxism that both Aflaq and Bitar had become enamored with, and German theories of an idealized blood-and-soil identity that were prevalent among the Nazis at the time. What the French scholar Olivier Roy writes about the half-educated Islamic fundamentalists of today applies as well to the secular Baathists: Because their own societies had ignored these bookish sons of the lower and middle classes, they resented their own status and dreamt of a revolution that would wipe away the Arab bourgeoisie altogether, in return for heavily mobilized, overly centralized states with a proletarian mindset. And by the early 1960s, it was people such as Aflaq and Bitar, not the members of the traditional merchant classes in Damascus and Baghdad — nor the Ottoman- and European mandate-era elites with their easygoing notions of governance — who gained the ears of rising military officers and activists like the elder Assad and Saddam Hussein.

Alas, the consequence of Baathism’s steamy and abstract ideas, whose intellectual meaning began to evaporate once they directly encountered the largely illiterate and traditional societies of the Levant, was merely sterile police states built on repression, some economic development, and the manipulation of sect and clan. While in Iraq, under Sunni rule, Baathism evolved eventually into an anti-Shiite philosophy, in Syria under Alawite rule it became in effect anti-Sunni; it was anti-Kurd in both countries, whatever its stated pretensions. Baathism was in practice an intensified-disease variant of Arab nationalism, which itself would be later overwhelmed by the forces of Islamist radicalism.

Of course, within Baathism there were always regional differences. Iraq under Saddam, where people didn’t even dare whisper about the regime in their homes, was far more repressive than Syria under the elder Assad, where dissent was allowed, as long as it was never public. As a journalist from the 1970s to the 1990s, I periodically visited Syria and traveled the country by bus, meeting people everywhere, without need of an escort.

But in Iraq, following a day trip from Baghdad south to Najaf in 1984, I was warned in the strongest terms never to attempt that again, and when I did travel in northern Iraq two years later I could do so only with an escort, after my passport had been temporarily taken from me by the regime authorities. In Iraq in the 1980s, I had to hand my news copy to an official behind a thick glass window, who would punch it out on a telex machine to my editors. In Syria I could go into any post office and send out my copy unsupervised.

Iraq was like a vast prison yard lit up by high-wattage lamps. To wit, Saddam required Iraqi society to be always on a war footing. After fighting Iran for a decade in the 1980s, he invaded Kuwait in 1990. That invasion would in a pathological sense constitute the beginning of the bloody finale of Baathism, invented at the Sorbonne six decades earlier.

And that is why I am uncertain that the Iraqi Baathists would have survived the Arab spring of 2011 unscathed had the United States left Saddam in power 15 years ago this month. Because sectarian and ethnic lines among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds were always more sharply drawn in Iraq than even in Syria, and because of the particular intensity and bestiality of Saddam’s regime, the slightest puncture in the ruling facade (given ongoing sanctions and further destruction of the economy) would have shattered the whole state structure quicker than in Syria.

It is certainly true that the concept of “resistance” is central to Baathism, and so Saddam would have fought on, no matter the odds, and might well have survived in some nominal form — but not without a vast loss of life and a comparable weakening of the state. Thus, clerical Iran would still have emerged as dominant in Mesopotamia, even without an American invasion. For a respite in this situation, we will have to await an internal upheaval inside Iran itself. There is little the United States can do on its own to salvage it.

The expansion of Iranian influence to the Mediterranean that has followed in the past 15 years is as much a consequence of the corrosive societal effect of Baathism as of the decisions of U.S. presidents. Iraq’s only hope after the American invasion was for the quick emergence, or installment, of another military dictator, this time along the lines of a Hosni Mubarak like in Egypt or a Pervez Musharraf like in Pakistan, Westernized pragmatists far less brutal than Saddam. But given how Saddam and Baathist ideology had so deformed Iraqi society, even that possibility would have been a long shot.

The damage that Baathist ideology did to Syria, though milder than in Iraq, was still sufficiently severe that chaos ensued once the regime was critically challenged. After 21 changes of government in its first 24 years of independence, a coup brought the elder Assad to power in 1970. Soviet-bloc security advisors, with their torture and surveillance techniques, helped achieve stability, but Assad did nothing with it. Rather than convert subjects to citizens and build a sense of a patria to unite all the country’s many disparate groups — Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, Armenian, Arab Christian — he merely resorted to sterile repression (albeit a lighter form than Saddam’s).

What Syria required back then was enlightened dictatorship, something akin to what Habib Bourguiba was offering in Tunisia and the kings in Morocco and Jordan were offering in their own countries. But because of his own minority status as an Alawite, Assad was too insecure for that. Alas, Baathism, its ideological pretensions notwithstanding, lacked the inherent perceived legitimacy of Arab monarchies which were thus able to provide their peoples with a sufficient dose of freedom — freedom which, in turn, allowed for a measure of civil society that the Baathist regimes lacked. Syria, thus, came apart when the regime of Assad’s son faced serious protests. Could the United States have stopped the carnage had it intervened soon after 2011? That remains an unknowable.

None of this is an attempt to escape the consequences of the Iraq invasion, which I supported. The Iraq War was clearly not worth the cost of 4,500 or so American dead and tens of thousands of seriously wounded — casualties that have devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of loved ones in the United States, to say nothing of the far more numerous Iraqi dead. And yet my support for the war arose from my vivid personal experiences of repression in Saddam’s Iraq in the 1980s, which I could only compare to Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, where I had also worked during that decade, and whose regime also constituted a toxic brew of socialism and national fascism. If Romania could recover following Ceausescu, I believed that Iraq somehow could, too. I should have remembered better after 9/11 what Khoury had told me.

Khoury had emphasized that Baathist rule was so total that it created no alternative to itself, so that Baathists were needed, at least at the lower levels, to run Iraq after Saddam was toppled. This was something the occupation authorities should have realized, just as Western and Soviet occupiers understood they would have to forgive lower-level Nazis in order to run Germany after Hitler was toppled. Of course, this lesson was forgotten in Iraq.

But it might yet be applied in Syria, where the functionaries now manning Bashar al-Assad’s regime would have to continue in their jobs, even in the unlikely possibility that the younger Assad is ever removed. For if Assad is ever toppled, Damascus — still at peace, more-or-less — could turn into a writhing, bloody charnel house just like Aleppo, Mosul, and Baghdad became following the collapse of Baathist rule in those cities. Whatever the West does in Syria, we better have a detailed plan in advance for what comes afterward. Remember that Romania recovered with only a few days of anarchy after Ceausescu fell only because a more moderate wing of the Communist Party effectively took power in a transition phase lasting several years before real democracy would emerge there.

America’s mistakes in Iraq and perhaps in Syria have been legion, but at the same time we should also realize that the United States, whether at its best, or at its worst like in Iraq, is not omnipotent. For example, a political transformation of even a subtle kind inside Iran, the regional hegemon, will have a greater impact on the region than anything America has done or will do. In the same spirit, it was Baathism, first and foremost, that provided the political and social foundation for Iraqi and Syrian anarchy, not our action or inaction. Of course, the very consequences of how Baathism had left a complete abyss underneath the facade of Saddam’s tyranny should have been foremost in Americans’ minds before we invaded.

But it was the triumphalism resulting from U.S. victories over the other totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century — over Nazism in 1945 and communism in 1989 — that lay at the root of its hubris in Iraq in 2003. For if American intervention could heal Nazi Germany after 1945 and dramatically improve formerly communist Yugoslavia in the 1990s, nothing was off-limits, or so it seemed. Thus, the dissolution of Iraq was a culmination of sorts: It revealed the utter emptiness of Baathist ideology on the one hand and the end of American imperial-like, unipolar dominance on the other. And as Iraq crumbled into bloody mayhem in the years following the U.S. invasion, the 20th century in the true historical sense finally came to an end.