Sunday, September 23, 2018

Imran may turn blind eye to blasphemy law and persecution of Ahmadiyyas

Saturday, 22 September 2018

There are clear signs that Pakistan’s freshly minted Prime Minister, Imran Khan, will make a sincere effort to reduce corruption and maladministration in the domestic sphere. In foreign affairs he is likely to make a brave attempt to mend fences with arch rival India and put ties with the US on a realistic footing.

But there are also unmistakable signs that Imran will go soft on Islamist radicals; turn a blind eye to their depredations; and what is worse, do their bidding without a whimper putting aside his personal liberal preferences only to remain in power.

“Tolerance” of religious and sectarian “intolerance” has become a basic requirement for capturing and retaining power in Pakistan thanks to the Islamisation of the country in the 1980s by the military dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

In other words, Prime Minister Imran Khan is likely to ignore or brush under the carpet, acts of discrimination, persecution and violence perpetrated against the “Ahmadiyyas”, who are considered “heretic” by the majority Sunni Muslims. The Ahmadiyyas do not subscribe to the belief that Prophet Mohammad is the last prophet or the last direct messenger of God. The Ahmadiyyas consider their late 19th Century founder-leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a “subordinate prophet” or a Mahdi, a concept which mainstream Muslims consider totally un-Islamic.

Case of Dr. Atif Mian

The case of the appointment and the subsequent rejection of Dr. Atif Mian is illustrative. The 43 year old Princeton economist, considered as being among the top 25 young economists in the world, was appointed member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC). But when Sunni Muslim clerics used the social media to stir up opposition to Dr. Mian because he is an Ahmadiyya who had also propagated the faith, Imran got him to quit.

Two other EAC members, Dr. Asim Ijaz Khwaja from the Harvard Kennedy School and Dr. Imran Rasul, a Professor of Economics at University College, London, quit in solidarity with Dr. Mian.

But this was of no avail because the opponents of Dr. Mian were enormously strong. The Tehreek-e-Labbaik, a new right wing outfit, had threatened a public protest. A petition was filed in the Islamabad High Court challenging his appointment. Call attention notices were submitted both in the National Assembly and the Senate against Atif Mian’s nomination. The call attention notice in the National Assembly was submitted by Maulana Asadur Rehman, son of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman and, in the Senate, it was moved by Maulana Ataur Rehman, the brother of the JUI-F chief.

MPs belonging to the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal and even liberals and secular nationalists, put their signatures on the notice in the Senate. The Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP), however, did not support the move. Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N) also said it did not support the notice though some of its MPs had signed the motion.

Imran told a TV channel that he was not aware of Dr. Mian’s opposition to the belief that Mohammad was the final prophet and that he went only by the fact that he was in the top 25 economists in the world.

With Imran washing his hands off the appointment of Dr. Mian, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry’s earlier claim that “Pakistan belongs as much to minorities as it does to the majority,” sounded hollow.

Blasphemy law

During the election campaign, Imran had obliquely and cautiously spoken against the draconian Blasphemy law, which could attract a death sentence. According to the Lahore-based Centre for Social Justice, 1,472 people were charged under the blasphemy law between 1987 and 2016. As per available records, 730 of these were Muslims, 501 were Ahmadiyyas, 205 were Christians and 26 were Hindus. Offenses under Blasphemy law, as applicable to the Ahmadiyyas, include wearing an Islamic slogan on a shirt; planning to build an Ahmadiyya mosque in Lahore; and distributing Ahmadiyya literature in a public place. Under Pakistani law, Ahmadiyyas are forbidden from calling themselves “Muslims” or using Islamic symbols in their religious practices. It is said that to get a Pakistani passport, an Ahmadiyya has to declare that he is not a Muslim and that the founder-leader of his sect was an imposter.

History of persecution

The Ahmadiyas have been persecuted since the sect was founded in 1889, but persecution was sporadic till about 1973. Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister and one of the top leaders of the movement to establish the Islamic state of Pakistan, was an Ahmadiyya, Sir Mohammad Zafarullah Khan (1893-1985). He held high posts in the country’s judiciary and brought laurels for Pakistan in the UN and as the President of the International Court of Justice. Dr. Abdus Salam (1926-1996), the lone Pakistani winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, was an Ahmadiyya.

During the movement to establish Pakistan, nobody in the Muslim League objected to the support given by non-Muslims like Justice Alvin Robert Cornelius, a Catholic Anglo-Indian judge from Allahabad in India, and an Ahmadiyya like Sir Zafarullah Khan. But things changed in the 1970s, perhaps due to Islamisation riding on the back of Arab petro dollars.

As a result of the increasing acceptance of extremist ideas, Dr. Abdus Salam did not get his due in Pakistan till 2016, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif named a Mathematics Institute after him. Justice Cornelius, who drafted the Pakistan Resolution of 1940, was disillusioned with Pakistan eventually.

In 1974, a wave of anti-Ahmadiyya disturbances spread across Pakistan, forcing parliament to amend the constitution to define the term “Muslim”. The amendment listed groups that were deemed to be “non-Muslim”. The Ahmadiyyas were classified as “non-Muslims”.

10 years later, in 1984, five ordinances which targeted religious minorities were promulgated. These were: a law against blasphemy; a law punishing the defilement of the Quran; and a law to prohibit insults to the wives, family, or companions of the Prophet of Islam. Two laws specifically curbed the activities of the Ahmadiyas.

In 26 April 1984, military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Ordinance XX struck a big blow at the Ahmadiyyas by prohibiting them from “indirectly or directly posing as Muslims.” Thus, the Ahmadiyyas could no longer profess their faith, either orally or in writing.

The police destroyed Ahmadiyyas’ translations of, and commentaries on, the Quran, and banned their publications. The Ahmadiyyas were barred from using Islamic terminology on their wedding invitations. Ahmadiyya funeral prayers were banned. The display of the Kalima (“there is no god but Allah, Mohammed is Allah’s prophet”), the principal creed of Muslims, on Ahmadiyya gravestones was prohibited.

In addition, Ordinance XX prohibited Ahmadiyyas from propagating their faith, building mosques, or making the call for prayer. “In short, virtually any public act of worship or devotion by an Ahmadiya could be treated as a criminal offense,” the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.

On 28 May 2010, extremist Islamist militants attacked two Ahmadiyya mosques in Lahore with guns, grenades, and suicide bombs, killing 94 people and injuring well over a hundred. Twenty-seven people were killed at the Baitul Nur Mosque in Model Town, Lahore. 67 were killed at the Darul Zikr mosque in the suburb of Garhi Shahu. The Punjabi Taliban, an affiliate of the Pakistani Taliban, called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The police routinely ignore banners seeking “death to the Qadiayanis” (as Ahmadmiyas are popularly known). “The government’s failure to address religious persecution by Islamist groups effectively enables such atrocities,” commented Ali Dayan Hasan, Senior South Asia Researcher at HRW.

Extremist Islamic organisations like Sunni Tehrik, Tehrik-e-Tahafaz-e-Naomoos-e-Risalat, Khatm-e-Nabuwat and other groups, acting under the Taliban’s umbrella, have a free run of Pakistan. No wonder Dr. Atif Mian’s economic expertise, sorely needed to end Pakistan’s balance of payments crisis, has been sacrificed at the altar of religious extremism.

Has the PA punished prisoners’ families to please Trump?

Hazem Abu Kmail and five of his children protesting at the premises of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza City. Abu Kmail’s wife, the children’s mother, has been in Israeli detention since 2015. (Photo / Mohamad

Asad)

Mohamad AsadThe Electronic Intifada

Rami Almeghari-21 September 2018

It’s hard to care for children as a single, unemployed parent. It’s almost impossible when official financial assistance is suddenly slashed in half.

This is what happened to Hazem Abu Kmail and his seven children. Since March, Abu Kmail, his four daughters and three sons have been hit by an apparent Palestinian Authority decision – officially denied – to cut allowances for Gaza families of prisoners associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad held in Israeli jails.

The PA has officially denied yielding to pressure from Israel and the US to end what are stipends to help support the families of prisoners where typically the main breadwinner has been incarcerated.

At a weekly protest at the premises of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza City where Abu Kmail and some dozen other families are protesting the conditions their loved ones are held in, Abu Kmail explained to The Electronic Intifada how the reduction in the PA stipend he receives has affected him.

In 2015, Abu Kmail’s wife, Nisreen Hassan, was detained by the Israeli military and charged with spying for militant groups by taking photos of Israeli military sites. She was arrested, according to Abu Kmail, after being summoned to the Erez checkpoint ostensibly in order to take possession of some official paperwork.

Both he and Hassan have denied the allegations.

Since then and until March, Abu Kmail, an otherwise impoverished street hawker, relied on a regular monthly allowance of around $850 provided by the PA. Over the past several months, however, this amount has been reduced by half for some families, he and others charge.

Pressure

PA payments to families of prisoners have been under increasing scrutiny as the US administration of Donald Trump seeks to pile pressure on the Palestinians, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and ending funding of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.

Palestinians consider those arrested for resisting Israel’s occupation, violently or otherwise, to be political prisoners. And as of August, prisoner rights organization Addameer put the total number of political prisoners in Israeli detention at 5,781.

Israel calls them security prisoners, however, and both Israel and the US charge that PA payments in support of their relatives – “terrorists and their families,” in the words of Benjamin Netanyahu – amount to a reward.

In March, the US passed the so-called Taylor Force Act – named after an American who was killed in a knife attack in Jaffa in 2016 – as part of a large budget bill. The act will see the US cut aid to the PA – with some exceptions including for the PA’s budget which supports security coordination with Israel in the West Bank – over stipends it grants the families of prisoners.

In July, Israel similarly passed a bill that allows it to deduct the amount Israel has determined the PA pays these families. Israel has set that number at some $333 million.

The PA says it is refusing to end the stipends, however. In July, Mahmoud Abbas, PA leader, said he was adamant that the stipends would continue: “Even if we only have a penny left, we will give it to the martyrs, the prisoners and their families.”

Yet families of Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners in Gaza saw their stipends halved in March, according to Islam Abdo, an official with Gaza’s ministry of detainee affairs. Only the families of prisoners from factions in the Palestine Liberation Organization – Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and others – still receive their full stipends in Gaza, said Abdo.

These allowances should be delivered to families of all detainees without regard to political affiliations, Abdo told The Electronic Intifada.

A breach of all norms

According to Abdo and Hassan Abedrabo, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs in Gaza, the families of some 140 prisoners are affected, all the families of Hamas and Islamic Jihad detainees from Gaza.

According to the ministry of detainee affairs, there are currently 350 Palestinian detainees from Gaza in Israeli detention.

Abedrabo told The Electronic Intifada that his department was trying to get to the bottom of the issue with the PA administration in Ramallah.

“We believe that the issue is political and we are very concerned that all detainees, irrespective of their political affiliations, should be kept away from any political controversies or the current political split.”

The PA government spokesperson in Ramallah referred this reporter to the finance ministry from which, despite repeated attempts, no comment could be drawn.

Some analysts denounced the move as an attempt by the PA in Ramallah to extract concessions from Hamas in Gaza.

“This is a flagrant breach of all norms,” said Adnan Abu Amer, head of the political science department at Ummah University in Gaza. “Hamas is not going to succumb. On the contrary, the measures will likely undermine the legitimacy of the PA itself since the measures inflict serious financial harm on many households in Gaza, among them families of those freedom fighters.”

Whatever the political reality, some families are clearly suffering as a result.

“Since I began receiving half the normal allowance, I have been saddled with debts of more than [$500],” said Abu Kmail, who said he was now struggling to clothe his children.

Peace and dignity

Ruwaida, widow of Tayseer Alareer, with two of their children at their home in the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City. (Photo / Mohamad Asad)
Mohamad AsadThe Electronic Intifada

“During the last Eid [a traditional time of gift giving], I was unable to buy new clothes for my kids. Had it not been for my wife’s lawyer [a Palestinian citizen of Israel] helping out, they would have had nothing for the holidays.”

It is not just families of prisoners that worry about the consequences of the financial pressure being brought to bear on the PA. Others who rely on PA stipends are deeply concerned even if they have yet to see any effect on their income.

The family of Tayseer Alareer, from the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City, has been receiving a monthly allowance of some $700 since he was killed in 2001.

Alareer was shot by Israeli occupation forces while tending his land near the boundary with Israel and left his widow, Ruwaida, as the sole provider for four children.

“Throughout the past many years, with no relative able to support, I have been taking the role of family head,” Ruwaida said. “We have been getting by with the help of the monthly allowance. It allows us some sort of dignity.”

The allowance has only covered living costs, however. During Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2014, whole areas of Shujaiya were destroyed, including the house of the Alareer family. And while the building itself was rebuilt with international support, she had to furnish her home herself.

With growing children and unforeseen costs, the budget is straining and Ruwaida is watching the Israeli and US financial pressure on the PA with growing alarm.

“Last month, I had to pay about $150 for the graduation ceremony of my daughter,” Ruwaida told The Electronic Intifada. “I have been doing my best to spend on my children. Every day there are costs for food and bills. And though I am bitter at being widowed in this way, I have never taught my sons to take revenge. I only want them to live in peace and dignity.”

The PLO-linked Association for the Wounded and Martyrs’ Families in Gaza City told The Electronic Intifada that the PA is doing its best to withstand US and Israeli financial pressure.

“The Palestinian Authority has rejected this pressure and declared that all monthly allowances provided to families of those killed or injured, will continue to flow. This is a moral and national obligation by the PA towards those victims of an Israeli military occupation,” Mohammad Jouda al-Nahhal, director of the organization, told The Electronic Intifada.

Al-Nahhal confirmed that all such families will continue to receive their monthly allowances regularly without any delay.

But Saleh Abdel Ati, Gaza head of the Masarat Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies, said the PA was lying if it claimed that all families of prisoners were still receiving their full monthly stipends.

“Several detainees of those affected by the cuts are in touch with me personally,” Abdel Ati told The Electronic Intifada.

“The Palestinian Authority should not bow to either American or Israeli pressure with respect to funds for Palestinian martyrs or detainees. Those people have sacrificed their lives on the path of freedom. Palestinian laws honor them.”

And punishing relatives, said Abu Kmail, will only cause more problems.

“Depriving people of dignity will only anger and frustrate them. The Great March of Return protests show just how desperate people in Gaza have become.”

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in Gaza.

Oslo, 25 years on: Peace in tatters!

2018-09-21

Shalom, Salaam, peace: Twenty-five years ago, these words reverberated in the White House lawn and were flashed across the front pages of newspapers worldwide, as the adversaries became partners of peace to sign what was then hailed as the peace deal of the century.

On September 13, 1993, President Bill Clinton facilitated a handshake between Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat after they placed their signatures on an agreement which was reached after painstaking secret talks facilitated by Norway. Peace at last in the Middle East, thought the peace-loving people, heaving a sigh of relief.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall enter the Kingdom of God: The land that witnessed Jesus Christ proclaim these words would no longer see bloodshed, peace zealots thought and wondered whether the time had come to beat swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruninghooks and whether the era had dawned when a nation would not lift up sword against another nation.

Alas! A quarter century later, the Oslo deal exists largely on paper. Even before the white paper on which the agreement was typed turned yellow, the agreement suffered blow after blow. Within years, the much hailed Oslo deal was dumped in the dustbin of history by hardliners opposed to peace; by the arms dealers who profit from wars, by the Zionists who dream of setting up an exclusively Jewish state in the whole of Palestine by expelling all the non-Jews; and by the American neoconservatives who are hand-in-glove with the Zionist lobby.

Jurists may insist that Pacta sunt servanda or agreements must be kept, but who cares when hardline and peace-allergic Israeli regimes are given protection by the world’s mightiest nation, the United States of America. Encouraged by the continuous US support, the Zionist nation commits war crimes and walks free among the civilised nations. Washington’s mollycoddling of Israel undermines the US Constitution which is nourished by the founders’ ideals of justice, peace and morality. The US action is tantamount to aiding and abetting Goliath to oppress a helpless people crying for freedom and condemned to statelessness.

If Israel had adhered to the Oslo deal in spirit and letter, a Palestinian state would have been set up in five years. In 1979, that is 14 years before the Oslo deal was signed, Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David agreement, in terms of which, Israel was expected to take measures to end its occupation of Palestine. If Israel had not observed the Camp David agreement in the breach, a Palestinian state would have long become a reality, US President Jimmy Carter who facilitated the Camp David talks, later observed in his book, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’.

In terms of the Oslo deal, which gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Rabin, Shimon Peres who was the then Israeli foreign Minister, and Arafat, the occupied West Bank was to be divided into Zones A,B and C. Israel was to pull out completely from the Gaza Strip and the Zone A. The security of the Zone B was to be the joint responsibility of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to be set up, while Israel would be in charge of the security of the Zone C until a final agreement was reached. In terms of the Oslo deal, the thorny issues such as the final status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees’ right to return, the Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian lands, and the borders of the two states were to be discussed within five years. The arrangement gave Israel 80 percent of the control in the West Bank, while the Palestinian got a glorified local authority called the Palestinian Authority.

The Oslo deal was conceived at a time when the Palestinians were at a point of despair. They were battered in whichever country they had found refuge –in Jordan, they were butchered and in Lebanon, they were massacred. By 1987 Palestinian youths were sick and tired of being labelled as terrorists for launching a freedom struggle, just as many liberation movements had done during the fight against European colonialism. They began an uprising – called Intifada in Arabic – in December 1987. It lasted until the 1991 Madrid Conference, which, for the first time, brought a Palestinian delegation stuffed into a Jordanian delegation face to face with an Israeli delegation. The Intifada -- during which 1,500 Palestinians, including some 300 children, died -- spurred the Oslo-mediated secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, while adding pressure on world powers to intensify diplomatic efforts to find a solution.

During this crucial period, Arafat and the PLO denounced terrorism and recognised Israel’s right to exist, key conditions Israel and the US had placed for direct talks.
Rabin was a willing partner for peace and wanted to give peace a chance. Arafat appeared pragm

atic and agreed to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, as had been recognised by the United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.
But the peace haters scuttled the deal. Four months after the deal, a Zionist extremist massacred worshippers at the Hebron mosque which houses the grave of Abraham, the father of both the Arabs and the Jews. Despite this blow, the peace process led to the September 28, 1995 Taba agreement, also known as Oslo II Accord. Months later, the peace process suffered its biggest blow. On November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish hardliner.

His death only increased the resolve of the peace lovers to push the peace process forward. President Clinton made hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sit with Arafat and sign the Wye River Agreement in 1998. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush set up the Middle East Peace Quartet comprising the US, Russia, the European Union and the UN to salvage the peace process. In the meantime, Arafat died in November 2004, allegedly after he was exposed to radioactive polonium poisoning.

President Barack Obama made valiant efforts to beat the odds and revive the peace process. But Israel’s intransigence and the shrewdness of placing more conditions and pushing the goal post further each time the Palestinians reach it prevented any resurrection of the peace process.

In the present US President Donald Trump, Israeli hardliners have found a willing peace killer. Trump has undone decades of hard work that went into the peace process. In May this year, he recognised Jerusalem as the undisputed capital of Israel in violation of international law and last month he stopped US humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian refugees. Till Trump is ousted, the peace process will remain comatose.

Iran says response to terrorist attack on military parade will be 'crushing'

President Hassan Rouhani claimed US-backed rivals were accountable for the attack, which killed at least 29 people

Iranian president says military parade attackers will be brought to justice – video

Saeed Kamali Dehghan @SaeedKD-Sun 23 Sep 2018

Iran has vowed a crushing response to Saturday’s terrorist attack on a military parade that killed at least 29 people, including conscripts and children, as it accused its US-backed regional rivals of incubating insurgent separatist groups.

In the deadliest terrorist attack Iran has seen in years, four assailants disguised in military uniforms opened fire when military personnel were marching in front of a viewing platform in the southwestern city of Ahvaz.

The attack took the lives of soldiers, many of whom were on their two-year obligatory military service, as well as civilians, including children and a veteran of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war who was killed in his wheelchair. There are conflicting reports about the death of one journalist.

Iranian soldiers jump over a hedge at a street as they run for cover during the terrorist attack. Photograph: Morteza Jaberian/EPA

One image from the aftermath of the attack that went viral online showed a soldier carrying a wounded young boy away from the scene. The four-year-old, identified as Mohammad-Taha Eghdami, later died in hospital – his dead body was shown on state TV on Sunday.

“It is perfectly clear to us who were behind the attack and what their affiliation is,” Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said on Sunday before travelling to New York for the UN general assembly.

Rouhani did not single out a specific country, but other officials have pointed their finger at Saudi Arabia, Iran’s arch-enemy, which Tehran accuses of hosting and aiding separatist and sectarian groups. Ahvaz, the capital of Shia-majority Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, is home to the country’s Sunni Arab minority.

“Those who keep repeating their bogus stance on advocating human rights must be held accountable; all those small mercenary countries in the region which the US backs and provokes,” added Rouhani.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Saturday that “this crime is a continuation of the plots of the regional states that are puppets of the United States, and their goal is to create insecurity in our dear country,” according to a statement posted on his official website.

The attack was immediately claimed by an Arab nationalist separatist group called the Patriotic Arab Democratic Movement in Ahvaz. Its spokesperson told the London-based exiled TV network Iran International that the attack was aimed at “the Revolutionary Guards and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic”. Iran’s state news agency said the group was “Saudi-affiliated”. Later on Saturday, Islamic State (Isis), also claimed responsibility.

Soldiers and families run from Saturday’s attack in Ahvaz. Photograph: Fatemeh Rahimavian/AP

On Saturday night, Iran summoned the UK envoy over the conduct of Iran International, which is run by a company owned by a Saudi national, because it gave airtime to the spokesperson of the group behind Saturday’s terrorist attack. Iran’s ambassador to the UK announced he would lodge a complaint with the regulator, Ofcom.

Tehran’s foreign ministry summoned UK, Dutch and Danish envoys over “Iran’s strong protests over their respective countries’ hosting of some members of the terrorist group”, officials said. Iran urged Denmark and the Netherlands to extradite the terrorist attack’s “perpetrators and their accomplices” to stand trial, the state news agency said. The spokesperson of the separatist group that took responsibility for the terrorist attack gave TV interviews from Denmark.

Iran’s objection to the Netherlands appears to stem from the fact that a number of Arab secessionists live there. Last November, Iranian Arab secessionist Ahmad Mola Nissi was shot dead in The Hague in a suspected political killing.

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a postdoctoral research fellow in modern Iranian history at University of Oxford, said Iranians had been furious on social media over a perceived double standard in western media coverage of “what Iranians overwhelmingly see as a terrorist attack, with the sole aim of sowing fear and ethnic divisions”.

“It comes after decades of vilification in which Iranians are often depicted as the agents of terrorism, or are expected to ‘prove’ themselves as ‘good’ Middle Easterners deserving of international sympathy and empathy,” he said.

“The fact that Iranians are under severe economic pressure at home, and regularly demonised by the Trump administration in concert with a longer-standing history of grievances in which the west can be seen as turning a blind eye, are surely key to understanding a lot of the popular anger we’re seeing on social media about alleged double standards.”

A number of Arab media close to Saudi Arabia portrayed it as merely a legitimate attack targeting military officials, including members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards. Al Wesal TV, a Saudi-based Sunni Islamic educational channel encouraging Shia Muslims to convert to Sunni Islam, wrongly referred to the Iranian city as “occupied Ahvaz”.

The state-run Press TV published an article headlined “Reactions to attack: How West sees it differently”, protesting that some western media were giving scant coverage, dropping the term “terrorist attack” despite civilian casualties, or portraying it as a merely an attack on military personnel.

Western diplomats in Tehran, including the British, German and Austrian ambassadors, condemned what they said was a terrorist attack. The US state department said “the United States condemns all acts of terrorism and the loss of any innocent lives”.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said Iranian leaders should look closer to home. Asked about Rouhani’s comments, Haley told CNN: “He needs to look at his own base to figure out where that’s coming from. He can blame us all he wants. The thing he’s got to do is look at the mirror.”

The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, echoed this. “When you have a security incident at home, blaming others is an enormous mistake,” he told Fox News.

Topics

The Coming Crime Wars

Future conflicts will mostly be waged by drug cartels, mafia groups, gangs, and terrorists. It is time to rethink our rules of engagement.

Community police patrol the hills in Carrizalillo, Guerrero state, one of Mexico’s most dangerous, crime-ridden regions, on March 24. (Pedro Pardo/AFP/Getty Images)

By Robert Muggah, John P. Sullivan-September 21, 2018,

Wars are on the rebound. There are twice as many civil conflicts today, for example, as there were in 2001. And the number of nonstate armed groups participating in the bloodshed is multiplying. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), roughly half of today’s wars involve between three and nine opposing groups. Just over 20 percent involve more than 10 competing blocs. In a handful, including ongoing conflicts in Libya and Syria, hundreds of armed groups vie for control. For the most part, these warring factions are themselves highly fragmented, and today’s warriors are just as likely to be affiliated with drug cartels, mafia groups, criminal gangs, militias, and terrorist organizations as with armies or organized rebel factions.

This cocktail of criminality, extremism, and insurrection is sowing havoc in parts of Central and South America, sub-Saharan and North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Not surprisingly, these conflicts are defying conventional international responses, such as formal cease-fire negotiations, peace agreements, and peacekeeping operations. And diplomats, military planners, and relief workers are unsure how best to respond. The problem, it seems, is that while the insecurity generated by these new wars is real, there is still no common lexicon or legal framework for dealing with them.

Situated at the intersection of organized crime and outright war, they raise tricky legal, operational, and ethical questions about how to intervene, who should be involved, and the requisite safeguards to protect civilians.

Mexico is on the front lines of today’s metastasizing crime wars. Public authorities there estimate that 40 percent of the country is subject to chronic insecurity, with homicidal violence, disappearances, and population displacement at all-time highs. States such as Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz are paralyzed by extreme organized violence, as routine discoveries of mass graves attest. Since former President Felipe Calderón ratcheted up the country’s war on drugs in 2006, violent competition among the Mexican military, police, cartels, and criminal factions has left at least 200,000 dead. There were more than 29,000 murders in 2017, but 2018 is set to see even more—perhaps the most ever. In Guerrero alone, more than 2,500 people were killed last year, many of them victims of clashes between 20 autodefensas (self-defense militias) and 18 criminal outfits. Owing to endemic violence and the government’s slow retreat from crime-ridden areas, some towns are now run by parallel governments made up of criminalized political and administrative structures. In what are increasingly labeled “narco-cities,” the entire political and economic apparatus exists to perpetuate a drug economy.

In Brazil, meanwhile large portions of some of the country’s biggest cities are under the control of competing drug trafficking factions and militias.

Some 1,000 low-income communities, roughly 20 percent of Rio de Janeiro, for example, are controlled by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends), or Terceiro Comando Puro (Third Pure Command). São Paulo, meanwhile, is purportedly entirely under the authority of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, or PCC). And in smaller cities across north and northeastern Brazil, gangs and militias are starting to battle for dominion in the favelas. Already, they effectively administer state prisons. Some vigilantes have started to try their hands at politics and are running for office, while others seek to influence elections through buying and selling votes. Organized and interpersonal violence killed almost 64,000 Brazilians in 2017, much of it concentrated among poorer black youth. The mayhem has also triggered repeated federal military interventions.

Making matters worse, Latin American armed groups are going transnational. Some of Brazil’s gangs, for example, are expanding their reach beyond Brazil. The PCC, now Latin America’s most infamous drug faction, has operations in at least seven countries across South America. Groups hatched in the United States, the MS-13 and Barrio 18, have made El Salvador one of the world’s most violent countries measured by homicide rate. And the Colombian city of Medellín’s fragmented cartels, criminal gangs, rebel groups, and paramilitary organizations have metastasized from Mexico to Argentina. Likewise, outside of the Americas, in metropolises such as Cape Town, Lagos, and Karachi, gangs recruit child soldiers to fight their battles and service booming cross-border trade in drugs, minerals, and trafficked people.

Today’s crime wars hark back to a pre-Westphalian era of perpetual conflict involving feudal kingdoms and marauding bandits.

This partly explains why the norms developed to regulate armed conflict between modern states don’t really apply.

In the classical view, criminal groups (such as mafias, gangs, and cartels) are not political actors formally capable of waging war. This means they can’t be treated as enemy combatants, nor can they be tried for war crimes. Yet, increasingly, such groups do advance tangible political objectives, from the election of corrupted politicians to the creation of autonomous religious states. What is more, they routinely govern, control territory, provide aid and social goods, and tax and extort money from the populations under their control. They also often collude with corrupt soldiers, police, prison guards, and customs officials to expand their rule. Put succinctly, cartels and gangs may not necessarily aim to displace recognized governments, but the net result of their activities is that they do.
Further, whereas the human cost of typical gang or mafia activity may be contained, the death and destruction that result from today’s crime wars are not. Millions of refugees and internally displaced persons have fled these gray-zone conflicts. But many of those who are dislocated are stuck in limbo, with most of them having been refused asylum, which—as codified in international refugee law, international humanitarian law, and by the International Criminal Court—is typically granted to people fleeing international and civil wars. Governments have typically been reluctant to recognize the dislocated as war refugees, because it would grant legitimacy to the crime wars. Yet with all the civilians killed and maimed, mayors and journalists attacked, families forced to flee genocide and disappearances, the violence generated by crime wars is indistinguishable from that generated by traditional war.

Crime wars are not going away, which is why the United Nations, its member states, and the international humanitarian community should clarify whether high-intensity crime is a purely domestic problem to be dealt with by policing and criminal justice (as argued by Carlos Iván Fuentes of the U.N. Office of Legal Affairs, as well as Paul Rexton Kan and Phil Williams of the U.S. Army War College and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for International Security Studies,
respectively) or a criminal insurgency (as Christian Vianna de Azevedo, from Brazil’s Federal Police, and other scholars would have it). And if there is consensus on the latter view, armed interventions will have to adhere to the host of protections contained in international humanitarian law.

Whatever the answer, it is certainly worth debating appropriate rules of engagement. Given that some cartels and gangs front well-armed and disciplined soldiers, improvised infantry fighting vehicles, top-of-the-line communications and surveillance networks, and military-grade weapons (such as rocket-propelled grenades and antipersonnel mines), as well as use high-intensity tactics (including ambushes and attacks on police and military forces), the threat cannot be wished away.

And even if a definition of crime wars is sorted out, observers still need to make distinctions among today’s belligerents. The key to determining what kinds of laws such groups are subject to will be their official status—whether they are designated as rebels, gangsters, or terrorists; how their organization is structured; and the intensity of their violent interactions. Generally, clear territorial control and a high intensity of fighting could bump a group up to the point where it would have to comply with international humanitarian law under Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions’ Additional Protocol II.

To take just a few cases, as the Geneva Academy noted in The War Report 2017, armed gang violence in Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico is of particular concern. In all three cases, “armed gangs often use heavy weaponry, and some control sizeable territory and have the ability to conduct military operations, while the military is frequently involved in their repression,” a summary of the report states. “The number of civilian casualties linked to gang violence and state responses to this violence, might also exceed those of major current armed conflicts.” The Colombian and Mexican cases, according to the report, should constitute “non-international armed conflicts.” This does not necessarily mean that domestic or international military intervention is required, since civil policing is still a viable option in many situations, but it would bind states to the norms of international jurisprudence. By contrast, the situation in El Salvador does not rise to the level of war, since the MS-13 and Barrio 18 are less organized.

This new breed of crime conflicts involving cartels, gangs, and militia is challenging established norms about what is, and what isn’t, war.

Rio de Janeiro, Port-au-Prince, Medellín, Mexico City, Karachi, and other settings it labels as “situations of violence.” But a more comprehensive approach is needed, one that is upgraded to today’s realities. If the world fails to see crime wars as wars, the humanitarian and political cost of them will only rise.

Robert Muggah is the founder of the Igarapé Institute and SecDev Group.

John P. Sullivan served as a lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He is an instructor in the Safe Communities Institute at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, an El Centro senior fellow at Small Wars Journal, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Global Observatory of Transnational Criminal Networks.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

THE NATIONAL QUESTION AND DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE IN THE NORTH – JAVID YUSUF

22/09/2018

During the time of Sri Lanka’s ‘Civil War’, there were regular interventions by Human Rights (HR) activists on the sidelines of the United Nations Human Rights Council sessions. Foreign Ministry officials as well as others such as the Attorney General had to travel to Geneva to present the Sri Lanka Government’s case.

Today, the situation has changed somewhat, with pro LTTE sections of the Tamil Diaspora (TD) and Sinhala hardline groups regularly locking horns, whenever the UNHRC meets on what, on the face of it, looks like a series of unproductive clashes. The vocal TD that attends these sessions, keep leveling the allegation of genocide against the Sinhalese community, while the Sinhala groups keep trying to disprove the pro LTTE lobby’s claim, that the North and East are the traditional homelands of the Tamil people.

Neither of these efforts help take forward the process of resolving the national question. Instead, it is a dissipation of energy on matters that are at variance with the facts or, irrelevant to the core issues.

The issue of genocide

By no stretch of imagination can it be said there have been any attempts at genocide of the Tamils by either the Sri Lanka State or, the Sinhala community, before, during or after the armed conflict. This is not to deny that the Tamil community did undergo untold suffering, ranging from HR violations, discriminatory practices and even excesses committed by the armed forces during the conflict.

The actions that came closest to attracting the label of genocide was the forcible eviction of Muslims from the North by the LTTE in 1990. But it would be inaccurate to describe even such actions by the LTTE as genocidal in nature. A more accurate description would be to call it ethnic cleansing. The campaign against the Rohingyas in Myanmar, on the other hand, would more accurately fit into the definition of genocide.

The use of inaccurate terminology in pursuing one’s cause has multiple negative effects. Such inaccuracies, in fact, contribute to further distancing the Sinhalese from the Tamils, because fair-minded Sinhalese would naturally be peeved by such accusations, which are not based on facts. It would provoke Sinhala hardliners to become more rigid in their positions and, in turn, throw back further allegations against the Tamils.

The traditional homelands

A discussion on whether the North and East are the traditional homelands of the Tamils or not, is not of much significance, in the context of the substantial number of Muslims and Sinhalese currently living in the East. While it may be factually true that the Tamils of the North and East have lived in these two Provinces for a long time, it does not give them any exclusive ownership to the North and East.

In fact, the contrary is true. The Muslims and Sinhalese have co-existed with the Tamils in the East as equal citizens, until the divisive call for a merger of the North and East, as well as the conflict, caused a breakdown in the trust between the communities. What the Tamils are concerned about is the fear of the demography of the East being changed by State sponsored colonisation, which has caused anxiety among Muslims as well.

Clearly, this problem can easily be resolved in a manner that is fair and acceptable to all 3 communities, if the search for a solution is embarked upon with an open and flexible approach, and a problem solving mindset.
Sanity must prevail in any discussion on any proposed reforms, leading up to a resolution of the National problem. The Tamil community must realize that, if slow progress is currently being made on Constitutional Reforms (CR), it is not because of an unwillingness on the part of the national leadership in the South, but because of the opposition by the Sinhala hardliners who find the bogey of Tamil separatism a useful slogan to create insecurity among the Sinhalese, with a view to advancing their own political fortunes.

Flexibility displayed by the TNA

Fortunately, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) led by R. Sampanthan have realized this home truth and are doggedly staying the course and engaging with the Government in the CR process.

For its part, the Sinhala polity has to acknowledge the flexibility displayed by the TNA in resolving this contentious issue. The TNA Leader has repeated, ad nauseum, that he is prepared to accept a solution which ensures that Sri Lanka will be an undivided, indivisible and united country and is acceptable to all the communities — the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. It is up to the political leadership to flesh out a solution that gives meaning to this formula, so forcefully articulated by Mr Sampanthan.

The Government, for its part, must pursue the CR process with vigour, undeterred by the critics who see (or pretend to see) Tamil separatism behind every bush. The detractors opposed to the CR process make various allegations that it is an international conspiracy, an NGO plot, TD pressure and so on. They dared not make such allegations when a national dialogue on the subject led by the late Ven. Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera was ongoing in the country, prior to his demise.

The slogans of genocide and betrayal being articulated in some sections of the Tamil polity, also highlight the importance of re-establishing a democratic discourse within the Tamil community. The LTTE legacy of branding anyone who disagreed with them as traitors, has continued to haunt Tamil society in the North. This is similar to the Sinhala hardliners who find it easy to label anyone with differing views as traitors or sellouts.

The North has to increase the democratic space available for discussion and create an environment that celebrates the diversity of views necessary for progress. Such conditions must be created now. Only then will the Tamil polity be ready to exercise any powers that may be devolved, as a result of the CR process.

It is axiomatic that the devolution of powers alone will not address the aspirations of the Tamil community, and ensure dignity and justice for its people. Such a reform will only facilitate the realisation of such a goal.Whether it will succeed will depend upon a robust democratic engagement among the different actors in the Tamil community. If the groundwork for such an environment is not created now, it may result in a repeat of the disastrous experience that the Tamil community had to face under the EPRLF-led North Eastern Provincial Council (NEPC) that came into existence in 1987, following the Indo-Lanka Agreement.

Disastrous experience

The various indignities and harassment at the hands of the NEP Government that the Tamil community had to undergo, if repeated, will only serve to discredit any scheme of devolution that may be put in place.

It may, therefore, be an opportune time for civil society in the North to take the lead in creating a culture of democracy, preceding any political reforms that may be implemented. Organisations such as the University Teachers for HR and Sri Lanka Democracy Forum which valiantly espoused democratic values, despite adverse conditions during the conflict, can team up with like minded groups and work towards such an objective.

(javidyusuf@gmail.com ) / Sunday Times

Shielding Wijegunaratne Amounts To Abuse Of Power & An Assault On Democracy!

By Veluppillai Thangavelu –SEPTEMBER 21, 2018

Veluppillai Thangavelu

A fuming President Sirisena summoned a special cabinet meeting just two days after the regular cabinet meeting held on Tuesday, September 11, 2018. On that day the Cabinet adopted a 77-page draft Counter-Terrorism Law presented by Foreign Affairs and Development Assignments Minister Tilak Marapana. This Bill, when passed by parliament, will replace the current Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1978 which vests the police with broad powers to search, arrest, and detain suspects. It was first enacted as a temporary law in 1979 under J. R. Jayewardene presidency, and then made permanent in 1982.

This is one of the assurances Sri Lanka gave to UNHRC in terms of Resolution 30/1 of October 01, 2015 titled Promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka. The following are some of the key commitments the Government of Sri Lanka undertook to implement within a time frame.

(1) To undertake a comprehensive approach to dealing with the past, incorporating the full range of judicial and non-judicial measures; also the proposal by the Government to establish a commission for truth, justice, reconciliation and non-recurrence, an office of missing persons and an office for reparations;

(2) To uphold the rule of law and to build confidence in the people of all communities of Sri Lanka in the justice system, notes with appreciation the proposal of the Government of Sri Lanka to establish a judicial mechanism with a special counsel to investigate allegations of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law, as applicable; affirms that a credible justice process should include independent judicial and prosecutorial institutions led by individuals known for their integrity and impartiality; and also affirms in this regard the importance of participation in a Sri Lankan judicial mechanism, including the special counsel’s office, of Commonwealth and other foreign judges, defence lawyers and authorized prosecutors and investigators.

(3) To accelerate the return of land to its rightful civilian owners, and to undertake further efforts to tackle the considerable work that lies ahead in the areas of land use and ownership, in particular the ending of military involvement in civilian activities, the resumption of livelihoods and the restoration of normality to civilian life, and stresses the importance of the full participation of local populations, including representatives of civil society and minorities, in these efforts;

(4) To a political settlement by taking the necessary constitutional measures, encourages the Government’s efforts to fulfil its commitments on the devolution of political authority, which is integral to reconciliation and the full enjoyment of human rights by all members of its population; and also encourages the Government to ensure that all Provincial Councils are able to operate effectively, in accordance with the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka;

(5) To sign and ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances without delay, to criminalise enforced disappearances and to begin issuing Certificates of Absence to the families of the missing as a temporary measure of relief.

Although some progress has been made to comply with Resolution 30/1, the Government has been dragging its feet over the above commitments. The Government has not done anything about (2) above. An independent investigation into war crimes committed during the war is a pre-requisite for genuine reconciliation. However, the President has taken the stand that the army has not committed war crimes and no member of the armed forces will be put on trial courts with foreign judges.