ISLAMABAD
| Fri May 27, 2011
1:06am EDT
Reuters
By Arshad Mohammed
ISLAMABAD
(Reuters) - The United States said on Friday that Pakistan has failed to grasp
just how much more it must do to quash Islamist militancy, as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad amid tense relations over the killing of
Osama bin Laden.
The discovery of the al Qaeda leader in a garrison town just 50 km (30 miles)
away from the capital, Islamabad, on May 2 raised fresh doubts about Pakistan's
reliability as a partner in the U.S.-led war on militancy.
"They have cooperated; we have always wanted more," a U.S. official told
reporters traveling on Clinton's plane ahead of the surprise visit.
"They have actually, from their perspective, done a lot. What they have never
really grasped is how much more they have to do in order to protect themselves
and, from our point of view, protect our interests and assist us in ways that
are going to facilitate our transition in Afghanistan."
The Pakistan government welcomed the death of bin Laden but was outraged and
embarrassed by the secret Navy SEALs raid in the town of Abbottabad, where bin
Laden had lived for years, as a breach of its sovereignty.
It was the latest in a series of incidents, from U.S. drone attacks inside
Pakistan to the arrest of a CIA contractor for killing two Pakistanis that have
strained ties.
There has also been scant evidence of Islamist militancy abating despite
billions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Thursday, a suicide car bomber killed 27 people outside a police station in the
northwestern town of Hangu, and last weekend a group of militants stormed a
heavily guarded naval base in the city of Karachi and fought a 16-hour pitched
battle with hundreds of soldiers.
These attacks have raised fresh doubts about Pakistan's ability to quell
militancy and protect its nuclear arsenal.
Clinton and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen were due to meet
President Asif Ali Zardari as well as Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani and the
head of the ISI spy agency, Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha.
CIA TEAM
TO SCOUR BIN LADEN HIDEOUT
In the latest sign of deepening distrust between Washington and Islamabad,
Pakistan has told the United States to halve the number of military trainers
stationed in the country.
However, the U.S. official said Washington had seen some signs of improved
Pakistani cooperation, including the return of the tail section of a helicopter
that crashed during the night-time raid in Abbottabad and access to bin Laden's
wives.
In a further apparent move to reduce tensions, Pakistani authorities have agreed
to allow the CIA to send a forensic team to scour the former hide-out of bin
Laden for new clues.
A U.S. official in Washington, who asked for anonymity while discussing
sensitive information, said the forensic experts would look for evidence hidden
in walls or buried under floors, but there was no guarantee they would find
anything.
Many U.S. lawmakers, skeptical that Pakistani officials did not know of bin
Laden's presence, want to cut U.S. aid to Pakistan, which the White House views
as vital to counter-terrorism and to hopes of stabilizing neighboring
Afghanistan.
Just a day before coming to Pakistan, Clinton said working with Pakistan was a
strategic necessity for the United States, even as she pressed Islamabad to act
more decisively to counter terrorism.
She praised Pakistan as a "good partner" in global efforts to fight terrorism,
though she acknowledged that the two countries have disagreed on how hard to
fight al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban fighters and other militants.
"We do have a set of expectations that we are looking for the Pakistani
government to meet but I want to underscore, in conclusion, that it is not as
though they have been on the sidelines," she told a news conference in Paris
Thursday.
"They have been actively engaged in their own bitter fight with these terrorist
extremists."
(Writing by
Zeeshan Haider: Editing by Alistair Scrutton and John Chalmers)
Only a
few minutes after President Obama finished his carefully balanced speech on the
Middle East last week, Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers began
twisting his words to suggest that he was calling for an epochal abandonment of
Israel.
“President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus,” said Mitt Romney. Tim
Pawlenty wrongly said Mr. Obama had called for Israel to return to its 1967
borders, which he called “a disaster waiting to happen.” Rick Santorum said Mr.
Obama “just put Israel’s very existence in more peril.”
Others went even further. Representative Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, a
former presidential candidate, said Mr. Obama had “betrayed Israel.” The worst
line came from Representative Allen West of Florida, who somehow believes Mr.
Obama wants to keep Jews away from the Western Wall and wants to see “the
beginning of the end as we know it for the Jewish state.”
Some Democrats were also piling on, evidently afraid Republicans will paint them
as anti-Israel. It was not helpful when Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader,
said that no one outside of the talks should urge the terms of negotiation,
clearly repudiating the president’s attempts to do just that. Steny Hoyer, the
House minority whip, and other Democrats have made similar statements.
Pandering on Israel in the hopes of winning Jewish support is hardly a new
phenomenon in American politics, but there is something unusually dishonest
about this fusillade. Most Republicans know full well that Mr. Obama is not
calling on Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders. He said those borders, which
define the West Bank and Gaza, would be the starting point for talks about land
swaps.
Do the president’s critics even agree on the need for a Palestinian state next
to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says he does? It is
not clear that several of the Republicans would go as far as the prime minister,
who at least noted that Mr. Obama does not want to return to the 1967 lines. But
even those who do should admit that two-state proposals have always been along
the lines sketched out by the president.
In 2007, for example, Mr. Romney told The Jerusalem Post that his administration
would “actively work toward a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
What could the outline of that solution be if not the one Mr. Obama mentioned?
Mr. Romney doesn’t address that question in his speeches. It is one thing to
make noise on the campaign trail. It is quite another to lead a quest for peace.
This is the time for bold ideas to salvage Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not seize it. In his address to
Congress, he showed — once again — that he has no serious appetite for the kind
of compromises that are the only way to forge a two-state solution and guarantee
both Palestinians their long-denied state and Israel’s long-term security.
President Obama showed more rhetorical initiative when he spoke, but he doesn’t
appear to have a strategy for reviving negotiations. Mahmoud Abbas, the
president of the Palestinian Authority, is refusing to come back to the table
and is apparently betting his people’s future on a misguided deal with Hamas and
symbolic gestures.
This is more than just a wasted opportunity. Continued stalemate feeds
extremism. And there is a deadline looming: Absent negotiations, Palestinians
plan to ask the United Nations in September to recognize their state. The
measure won’t get them what they want, and the United States will veto it when
it gets to the Security Council. But the exercise will further isolate Israel
and Washington.
President Obama vowed to revive the peace process but checked out when Mr.
Netanyahu rejected his demand for a settlement freeze and Mr. Abbas refused to
negotiate without it. Mr. Obama got back in the game last week. In a speech on
the Arab Spring, he goaded allies, including Israel, to take political risks for
peaceful change.
What drew the most attention was his call for negotiations on a Palestinian
state based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders — with mutually agreed land swaps. The
idea has been the basis of all negotiations for more than a decade, including
those backed by President George W. Bush.
Mr. Netanyahu immediately insisted that Israel would never return to the
“indefensible” pre-1967 boundaries. Playing to his conservative base at home,
and on Capitol Hill, he ignored the second half of Mr. Obama’s statement about
“mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for
both states.”
Pretty much everyone but the hardest liners — on both sides — assumes that in a
peace deal Israel will retain many of its West Bank settlements and compensate
Palestinians with other land. On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged as much,
saying that “in any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements
will end up beyond Israel’s borders.”
His aides had raised hopes that Mr. Netanyahu would offer new ideas to revive
talks, but there was really nothing new there. He insisted that Jerusalem “will
never again be divided” and Israel’s Army would remain along the Jordan River.
And while he basked in Congress’s standing ovations, Ethan Bronner reported in
The Times that in Israel the trip was judged a diplomatic failure. The Israeli
newspaper Haaretz said Mr. Netanyahu’s “same old messages” proved the country
“deserves a different leader.” Palestinians dismissed the visit and said they
would focus on nonviolent protests leading to September.
So what happens now? More drift and recriminations, unless Mr. Obama comes up
with a plan to get the parties into serious talks. We see no hint that he is
working toward one. We are told that he has no immediate plans to appoint a new
envoy to replace George Mitchell, who resigned, or to send Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton to the region. Negotiations will become even harder once
the unity government with Hamas is formed and it gets closer to September. Time
is running out.
Reuters
journalist Suleiman al-Khalidi, a Jordanian citizen, was arrested by Syrian
security police when covering the uprising against Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad. In the following story, he recounts his treatment at the hands of the
Syrian intelligence services and the scenes of torture he witnessed around him
during four days of confinement.
Like other foreign correspondents, he was subsequently expelled from Syria. He
now reports on the continuing unrest from Amman.
The item is accompanied by an account by correspondent Yara Bayoumy of others'
experiences of abuse in Syrian prisons.
By Suleiman al-Khalidi
AMMAN (Reuters) - The young man was dangling upside down, white, foaming saliva
dripping from his mouth. His groans sounded more bestial than human.
It was one of many fleeting images of human degradation I witnessed during four
days as an unwilling guest of Syrian intelligence, when I was detained in
Damascus after reporting on protests in the southern Syrian city of Deraa.
Within minutes of my arrest I was inside a building of the intelligence services
-- known, as elsewhere in the Arab world, simply as the "Mukhabarat." I was
still in the heart of bustling Damascus, but had been transported into a macabre
parallel world of darkness, beatings and intimidation.
I caught sight of the man hanging by his feet as one of the jailers escorted me
to the interrogation room for questioning.
"Look down," the jailer shouted as I took in the scene.
Inside an interrogation room, they made me kneel and pulled what I could just
make out as a car tyre over my arms.
My reporting from Deraa, where protests against President Bashar al-Assad had
broken out in March, had apparently not endeared me to my hosts, who accused me
of being a spy.
The formal reason Syrian authorities gave Reuters for my detention was that I
lacked the proper work permits.
That I was an established journalist working for Reuters, going about my
professional business, was not an argument to men whose livelihood depends on
breaking human dignity.
"So, you cheap American agent!," the interrogator shouted.
"You have come to report destruction and mayhem. You animal, you are coming to
insult Syria, you dog."
From outside the room I could hear the rattling of chains and hysterical cries
that echo in my mind to this day. My interrogators worked professionally and
tirelessly to keep me on edge at every step of the questioning process over
several days.
"Shut up, you bastard. You and your types are vultures who want to turn Syria
into another Libya," said another interrogator, who kept yelling: "Confess,
liar!"
ARREST IN
THE STREET
I had crossed the border from Jordan, where I have reported for Reuters for
nearly two decades, on March 18, as unrest was first breaking out in Deraa. I
spent most of the next 10 days reporting from that city. Inspired by the fall of
Arab dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, the protests rapidly escalated into a grave
challenge to the Assad family's 40-year rule.
I was arrested on March 29 in Damascus as I went to meet someone in an old
district of the capital. Two plain clothes security men approached me and told
me not to resist as they held my arms and then marched me into a hairdresser's
until an ordinary-looking white car came to take me to the Mukhabarat.
Interrogators showed particular interest in two aspects of my reporting -- the
fact that I had written about watching protesters burn images of late President
Hafez al-Assad, father of the incumbent, and hearing chants attacking Maher
al-Assad, brother of Bashar and commander of the Republican Guard.
Iron busts of Assad the father and portraits of the current president adorn the
corridors and offices in buildings of the state security apparatus, part of a
family personality cult recognizable to students of authoritarian rule the world
over.
DEMONSTRATION OF METHODS
I felt my hosts wanted to give me, as a foreign journalist, a demonstration of
the methods they use on Syrians. To brace myself for what might yet come and
save myself from total breakdown, I tried to fix my mind on old childhood
memories.
These mental games helped me avoid thinking of my young twins and wife back home
in Amman, who had no way of knowing where I was, or even whether I was still
alive.
The questioning lasted eight hours until midnight on my first day of detention.
Mostly I was blindfolded, but the blindfold was removed for a few minutes.
That allowed me -- despite orders to keep my head down so that my interrogators
should remain out of view -- to see a hooded man screaming in pain in front of
me.
When they told him to take down his pants, I could see his swollen genitals,
tied tight with a plastic cable.
"I have nothing to tell, but I am neither a traitor and activist. I am just a
trader," said the man, who said he was from Idlib province in the north west of
Syria.
To my horror, a masked man took a pair of wires from a household power socket
and gave him electric shocks to the head.
At other moments, my questioners could be charming, but would quickly switch to
ruthless mode in what looked like an orchestrated performance to wear me down.
"We will make you forget who you are," one of them threatened as I was beaten
for the sixth time on my face.
I could not see what hit me. It felt like fists.
Twice in detention I was whipped on the shoulder, leaving bruises that stayed a
week.
During intervals in the corridor, with my back against the wall and my hands in
the air, I stood on display as at least a dozen security men jostled me and
hurled abuse.
And yet humanity could appear at the unlikeliest moments.
At one point, the interrogator who was screaming at me that I was a dog (a
particular insult to Arabs) took a call on his mobile phone. His tone became
immediately warm and affectionate: "Of course, my dear, I'll get you whatever
you want," he said, switching from professional torturer to indulgent father.
SCREAMS
AND COCKROACHES
For long periods, I lay on a mattress in a windowless cell, lit by a small neon
light, as cockroaches scurried around.
Occasional screams reminded me of where I was and what might happen. I was kept
in solitary confinement and my jailers gave me a piece of dry bread or a potato
and a tomato twice a day.
When I wanted to go to the toilet, I would knock on the door of my cell. A
jailer would then appear, though it could take over an hour to have my request
met.
I thought of the thousands of people in Syrian prisons, and how they endured
solitary confinement and constant degradation, many for decades. I thought of
Russians I had read about in Siberian exile, and about the meaning of freedom,
for Syrians and for other Arabs living under autocrats across the region.
I was not the first person there in the cell, of course. One of my unknown
predecessors had carved an inscription on the wall, apparently with his
fingernails.
"God against the oppressor," it read.
My mind went back to the events in Deraa -- the thousands of youngsters clapping
in unison, shouting "Freedom," and the expressions on the faces of the women,
children and old men who came out to the streets to watch in a mixture of
disbelief and euphoria, an electrifying spirit of defiance.
I saw how decades of fear sown in the hearts and minds of people was crumbling
as hundreds of bare-chested young men braved bullets fired by security men and
snipers from rooftops. I will never forget the bodies of men shot in the head or
chest, carried through the blood-spattered streets of Deraa, and dozens of shoes
left on the streets by youths running from gunfire.
EXPELLED
Then on the fourth day of detention, my hosts came to move me, putting me in a
car that whisked me to what turned out to be the intelligence headquarters
several blocks away in Damascus.
It was a huge complex, with hundreds of plain-clothes security men in the
courtyard outside, all with grim faces.
"Search every inch of him," said one man as two others dragged me toward the
basement.
I spent two hours in a cell where I reflected on how I would cope with
imprisonment in the months ahead.
Then I was brought into a room nearby. To my bewilderment an urbane man with an
air of authority told me: "We are sending you back to Jordan."
I realized later, from looking at pictures in the media, that this had been
Major General Ali Mamluk, the director of Syrian State Security himself, a man
whose subordinates hold thousands of Syrians in similar jails across the
country.
He said my reporting from Deraa had been inaccurate and had damaged the image of
Syria.
Within hours I crossed the border and was back home, where I learned that
Jordan's royal family had worked for my release and spared me from a longer and
more grueling fate. Other Reuters journalists were also expelled, some also
after detention, and now Syria is effectively barred to most foreign media.
Nearly two months later, time has helped me absorb the impact of those four
days, to the extent that I can record the experiences in writing. But I am
haunted by the human cost of the Arab uprisings for people seeking the sort of
freedoms which others elsewhere in the world take for granted.
LONDON |
Wed May 25, 2011
3:53pm EDT
Reuters
By Steve Holland and Jeff Mason
LONDON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Wednesday declared the U.S.-European
alliance as vital as ever and said it must use its influence to push for
democratic reforms in the Middle East.
Obama outlined a manifesto for responding to the "Arab Spring" uprisings as he
became the first U.S. president to address both houses of the British parliament
in Westminster Hall, whose walls are steeped in 1,000 years of history.
"Ultimately, freedom must be won by the people themselves, not imposed from
without. But we can and must stand with those who so struggle," he said.
His speech was aimed at reassuring Europe, where there is some sense that the
United States is turning its attention elsewhere in the face of fierce
diplomatic challenges from Asia and the Arab world.
In a speech anchoring his four-nation European trip, Obama said it was up to the
United States, Britain and their European allies to lead at a time when the
world was being tested by economic turmoil, Arab revolutions, Islamic militants,
climate change and efforts to spread nuclear weapons.
It is a message he will carry Thursday to Deauville, France, where leaders of
the Group of Eight powers meet.
The audience at Westminster Hall, which has been used for coronation banquets
and the lying-in-state of deceased monarchs, included former prime ministers
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Major and even American actor Tom Hanks.
All applauded when Obama, who had played up his Irish roots in Ireland earlier
in the week, said it was an honor "for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a
cook in the British Army to stand before you as president of the United States."
Obama rejected those who say the time of American and European influence around
the world has passed as the likes of China, Brazil and India claim a bigger
place on the world stage.
"That argument is wrong," he said. "The time for our leadership is now ... Our
alliance will remain indispensable to the goal of a century that is more
peaceful, more prosperous and more just."
Obama and his wife Michelle enjoyed a final round of pomp by hosting a dinner in
honor of Queen Elizabeth and attended by such luminaries as "Harry Potter"
author J.K. Rowling, actor Colin Firth of "The King's Speech" and soccer star
David Beckham.
A public opinion survey by Britain's Channel 4 News found Britons split over the
future of its "special relationship" with America. Forty-two percent of those
surveyed said the relationship should continue, and 39 percent said it should
end.
"BROADER
PARTNERS NEEDED"
Robin Niblett, director of the foreign policy think tank Chatham House, told
Reuters that the priorities Obama had listed at Westminster Hall "are going to
require a broader set of partners than were in this chamber."
At home, critics have accused Obama of responding too slowly to developments in
the Arab world and contributing to a stalemate in Libya, where leader Muammar
Gaddafi is showing no sign of yielding to a rebellion.
With some wondering why he has not applied similar pressure to President Bashar
al-Assad to stop a bloody crackdown in Syria, Obama said: "We cannot stop every
injustice."
Obama, who is under pressure at home not to engage in another foreign military
entanglement, cautioned that it would take time for the uprisings in a string of
nations from Egypt to Syria to play themselves out.
"It will be years before these revolutions reach their conclusion, and there
will be difficult days along the way. Power rarely gives up without a fight," he
said.
Eager to begin removing some U.S. troops from Afghanistan in July, Obama said
the United States was now preparing to turn a corner there and that, during the
transition period, "we will pursue a lasting peace with those who break from al
Qaeda and respect the Afghan constitution."
Earlier, at a joint news conference, Obama and British Prime Minister David
Cameron predicted that Gaddafi would ultimately leave power. Cameron did not
deny French reports that Britain is considering using attack helicopters
alongside France against Libyan targets to increase the heat on Gaddafi.
"We will be looking at all the options for turning up that pressure," he said
when asked about the helicopters.
(Additional
reporting by Adrian Croft and Keith Weir)
LONDON/TRIPOLI | Wed May 25, 2011
12:46pm EDT
Reuters
By Matt Falloon and Joseph Logan
LONDON/TRIPOLI (Reuters) - President Barack Obama warned Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi on Wednesday there would be 'no let up' in pressure on him to go,
following a second successive night of heavy NATO bombing in Tripoli.
Six loud explosions rocked Tripoli late on Tuesday within 10 minutes, following
powerful strikes 24 hours earlier, including one on Gaddafi's compound that
Libyan officials said killed 19 people.
Obama told a London news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron he
could not predict when Gaddafi, who is fighting a three-month-old insurgency,
might be forced to go.
"I absolutely agree that given the progress that has been made over the last
several weeks that Gaddafi and his regime need to understand that there will not
be a let-up in the pressure that we are applying."
"We have built enough momentum that as long as we sustain the course that we are
on that he is ultimately going to step down," he said. "Ultimately this is going
to be a slow, steady process in which we are able to wear down the regime."
Fighting between Gaddafi's forces and rebels has reached a stalemate, despite
two months of NATO aerial support under a U.N. mandate intended to protect
civilians. Gaddafi denies his troops target civilians and says rebels are
criminals, religious extremists and members of al Qaeda.
Strikes drove back Gaddafi forces shortly after he pledged "no pity, no mercy"
to rebels in their stronghold of Benghazi. Rebels have since proved unable to
achieve any breakthrough against better-trained and equipped government troops.
Cameron echoed Obama's calls for the departure of Gaddafi, who denies targeting
civilians and portrays the disparate rebel groups as religious extremists,
mercenaries and criminals serving Western schemes to seize Libya's oil.
"I believe we should be turning up that pressure and on Britain's part we will
be looking at all the options of turning up that pressure," he said.
Such pressure will not include NATO troops, Obama said.
"We cannot put boots in the ground in Libya," he said. "There are going to be
some inherent limitations to our air strikes in Libya."
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday the NATO bombing should
achieve its objectives within months.
France said this week it would deploy attack helicopters to ensure more precise
attacks against Gaddafi forces embedded among the civilian population of Libyan
cities. Britain said on Tuesday it was considering doing the same.
HEAVY
BOMBING IN LIBYA
In the second day of heavy NATO bombing of Tripoli, the alliance hit a vehicle
storage bunker, a missile storage and maintenance site and a command-
and-control site on the outskirts of Tripoli, a NATO official said. Government
targets around the Western rebel outpost of Misrata had also been hit.
Libyan news agency Jana says NATO hit a telecommunications station in Zlitan
overnight, causing "material and human casualties losses" west of Misrata.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague dismissed fears that Western states were
being drawn into an Iraq-style conflict.
"It's very different from Iraq because of course in the case of Iraq there were
very large numbers of ground forces deployed from Western nations," Hague told
BBC Radio.
Diplomatic activity is intensifying. G8 world powers will discuss ways to break
the impasse this week, with some expecting Russia to propose a mediation plan to
the meeting.
South African President Jacob Zuma announced he would visit Tripoli next week
for talks with Gaddafi in his capacity as a member of the African Union
high-level panel for the resolution of the conflict in Libya,.
Zuma headed an African Union mission to Tripoli in April but the bid to halt the
civil war collapsed within hours. The AU does not have a good track record in
brokering peace deals, having failed recently to end conflicts or disputes in
Somalia, Madagascar and Ivory Coast.
Unlike France, Italy and Qatar, the United States has not established formal
diplomatic ties with the rebels. Jordan said on Tuesday it recognized the rebel
council as a legitimate representative of Libya's people and planned to open an
office in Benghazi.
The United States bolstered the credentials of the Benghazi-based rebel National
Transitional Council as a potential government-in-waiting on Tuesday when a U.S.
envoy invited it to set up a representative office in Washington.
(Reporting
by Joseph Logan in Tripoli, David Brunnstrom in Brussels, Hamid Ould Ahmed in
Algiers, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Mohammed Abbas in Misrata, Sherine El
Madany in Benghazi, Nick Vinocur in Paris; writing by Ralph Boulton; editing by
Alison Williams)
RAMALLAH,
West Bank | Wed May 25, 2011
10:41am EDT
Reuters
By Ali Sawafta
RAMALLAH,
West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel was
offering "nothing we can build on" for peace and that without progress he will
seek U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood in September.
He told the Palestine Liberation Organization on Wednesday that Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the United States Congress on Tuesday
"travelled far from peace," dictating solutions before negotiations even begin.
Abbas told the Palestine Liberation Organization Netanyahu's speech to the
United States Congress on Tuesday "travelled far from peace," dictating
solutions before negotiations even begin.
He said he would consult Arab states at the weekend about U.S. President Barack
Obama's latest ideas for restarting the peace process and Netanyahu's negative
response to them.
"We said in the past and we still say that our choice is negotiation,
negotiation and nothing but negotiation. But if nothing happens by September we
will go (to the U.N. to ask for recognition by its 192 member states)," Abbas
said.
"Our aim is not to isolate (Israel) or to de-legitimise it. It is not an act of
terror and not a unilateral act."
Abbas's plan to seek U.N. recognition was criticised by both Netanyahu and Obama
in speeches in Washington last week.
In a major policy speech, however, Obama said a future Palestinian state should
be based on the borders as they existed on the eve of the 1967 Middle East, with
land swaps mutually agreed with Israel.
Netanyahu swiftly rejected the proposal saying it would leave Israel with
"indefensible" borders. But Abbas described the idea as "a foundation with which
we can deal positively."
Palestinians and Israelis alike saw little prospect of a fresh start to stalled
peace talks arising from Netanyahu's speech, despite its enthusiastic reception
by Congress.
Netanyahu had pleased core supporters while offering nothing new, in the
assessment of most Israeli commentators.
He won standing ovations for extolling Israel's democracy and military
self-reliance while rejecting any Palestinian state based on Israel's pre-1967
borders.
He ruled out dividing Jerusalem and urged Palestinian Abbas to "tear up" last
month's pact with the Islamist Hamas movement, promising to be "generous" with
West Bank land if Abbas would make peace. But he pledged to keep control of the
Jordan Valley.
Palestinians said it was a familiar offer of "leftovers" that could not divert
them from seeking majority United Nations recognition of Palestinian statehood
at the General Assembly.
Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh said Netanyahu's speech revealed "the real
face of the occupation ... the real face of arrogance backed by the Americans."
"We must quit this illusion called negotiation," he said.
INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT FOR OBAMA
Obama, currently on a visit to Europe, has won international support for the
principles he set out in a major policy speech last week to revive the moribund
Mideast peace process.
Israel's daily Maariv published a poll showing about 57 percent of voters
believe Netanyahu should have supported Obama's initiative, rather than opposing
the president.
But the poll also showed Netanyahu was still Israel's most popular political
leader.
"Netanyahu knows very well that the conditions that he set yesterday for a peace
process are a complete non-starter," wrote Maariv's Ben Caspit.
"There is no Palestinian in the world who will accept them, there is no Arab
state in the world that will support them, there is not a single person in
Europe who will take them seriously, and they will only make Barack Obama
angry."
(Reporting
by Ali Sawafta and Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Douglas Hamilton and Tom Perry;
editing by Matthew Jones)
Anti-Americanism rife in Pakistan army institution: Wikileaks
ISLAMABAD |
Wed May 25, 2011
3:25am EDT
Reuters
By Zeeshan Haider
ISLAMABAD
(Reuters) - Officers received training biased against the United States at a
prestigious Pakistan army institution, according to Wikileaks, underscoring
concerns that anti-Americanism in the country's powerful military is growing
amid strains with Washington.
A U.S. diplomatic cable said the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne
Patterson found officers at the National Defense University (NDU) were "naive
and biased" against the United States, a key ally which gives Pakistan billions
of dollars of aid to help fight Islamist militants.
Fears the military could be harboring Islamist militant sympathizers have grown
since U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden this month in a Pakistani
garrison town, where the al Qaeda leader had probably lived for several years.
Pakistan's military also controls the country's nuclear arms, and a series of
attacks against military installations has heightened fears about the safety of
these weapons.
"The elite of this crop of colonels and brigadiers are receiving biased NDU
training with no chance to hear alternative views of the U.S.," the Wikileaks
cable, which was published in the Dawn newspaper, quoted Patterson as saying.
"Given the bias of the instructors, we also believe it would be beneficial to
initiate an exchange program for instructors."
Some of the officers believed the CIA was in charge of the U.S. media, the
report said.
Anti-Americanism runs high among much of Pakistan's mainly Muslim population but
it has deepened after bin Laden's killing in a secret U.S. raid which many
Pakistanis see as breach of their sovereignty.
Patterson said the United States must target a "lost generation" of military
officers who missed training programs in the United States after Washington
slapped sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s for its nuclear program.
The cables also documented the account of a U.S. army officer, Col. Michael
Schleicher, who attended a course at NDU and corroborated the views expressed by
Patterson.
"The senior level instructors had misperception about U.S. policies and culture
and infused the lectures with these suspicions, while the students share these
misconceptions with their superiors despite having children who attended
universities in the U.S. or London," the cables quoted Schleicher as saying.
Hamayoun Khan, a teacher at NDU, however denied that anti-Americanism was being
taught at the university.
"I haven't seen bias which she has mentioned here," he said.
Dawn said dozens of cables from U.S. embassies around the world also showed that
the United States continued to intensely monitor Pakistan's nuclear and missiles
programs.
In 2008, the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Nancy
McEldowney, detailed her discussions with Turkish authorities about the U.S.
desire to see action taken against suspicious shipments to Pakistan.
U.S. officials, according to the cable, "urged the GOT (government of Turkey) to
contact the governments of Japan and Panama to request the shipment be diverted
to another port and returned the shipper."
Pakistan's nuclear program came under increasing international scrutiny after
the 2004 confessions of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb,
about his involvement in sales of nuclear secrets to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
The government pardoned Khan but put him under house arrest. A court in 2009
ordered his release.
WASHINGTON
| Tue May 24, 2011
7:23pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeffrey Heller
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said explicitly for the
first time on Tuesday he was prepared to give up some settlements for peace, but
he laid out familiar demands unlikely to draw the Palestinians back to the
negotiating table.
Treated to standing ovations from lawmakers just days after strained talks with
President Barack Obama, Netanyahu said he was ready for "painful compromises."
But Palestinians swiftly rejected his list of conditions as unacceptable.
The right-wing Israeli leader's speech to Congress capped a turbulent five-day
visit to Washington that laid bare his differences with Obama on how to revive
the moribund peace process and raised little hope for getting new talks off the
ground any time soon.
Though Netanyahu recognized in the clearest terms yet that Israel would have to
abandon some Jewish settlements built in the occupied West Bank, he also
insisted that others would be annexed under any future agreement.
"I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historical peace," he
said, echoing a pledge in a speech to Israel's parliament on May 15 in which he
hinted at a readiness for territorial compromise but with strings attached.
"Now this is not easy for me. It's not easy because I recognize that in a
genuine peace we will be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish
homeland," he said, referring to the occupied West Bank.
But Netanyahu offered no concrete concessions and instead set strict limits on
what Israel would accept.
His frequent standing ovations from the joint meeting of Congress, a bastion of
support for Israel, was a pointed message to Obama that pushing Israel too hard
could carry political risks as he seeks re-election in 2012.
Netanyahu's speech came after a testy exchange last week with Obama over the
contours of a future Palestine and Netanyahu used it to reiterate his demands
ahead of any talks.
The conditions Netanyahu laid out included Palestinian recognition of Israel as
the homeland of the Jewish people and the scrapping of Western-backed
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' unity accord with the Islamist movement
Hamas.
But in an explicit recognition of what a peace deal would entail, he said: "In
any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond
Israel's borders. The precise delineation of those borders must be negotiated."
While Netanyahu was well aware Palestinians were opposed to his terms, he hopes
to show the United States and Europe he is serious as Israel seeks to head off a
Palestinian bid to win U.N. recognition of statehood in September.
'COMPROMISE
MUST REFLECT DRAMATIC CHANGES'
Netanyahu said any "compromise must reflect the dramatic demographic changes
that have occurred," referring to Israel's construction of hundreds of
settlements on land Palestinians want for a state.
Repeating a message he delivered consistently during his visit, Netanyahu said
"Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967," narrow lines
from before Israel captured the West Bank in a war 44 years ago.
Obama drew Israeli anger when he said on Thursday a Palestinian state in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip should largely be drawn along the pre-June 1967
frontiers.
A frosty meeting with Netanyahu followed at the White House on Friday when the
Israeli leader, with Obama sitting at his side, rejected those borders.
The White House offered a low-key response to Netanyahu's speech. Ben Rhodes, a
deputy national security adviser, said in London that the Israeli leader had
"reaffirmed the strength of the U.S.-Israeli relationship" and had "pointed to
the importance of peace." Obama is visiting London.
Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Abbas, said Netanyahu's vision for ending the
conflict put "more obstacles" in front of the Middle East peace process.
"What came in Netanyahu's speech will not lead to peace," Rdainah said in the
West Bank city of Ramallah, rejecting Netanyahu's call to hold onto swaths of
West Bank land including East Jerusalem, where Palestinians want their capital.
Hani Masry, a Palestinian analyst said Netanyahu "wants the Palestinians to give
up everything and get a state of leftovers."
On the other side, settler leaders and members from Netanyahu's own Likud party
also voiced their objections, but with no diplomatic breakthrough in sight, his
ruling coalition did not seem to be in jeopardy.
Netanyahu's address was greeted warmly by congressional leaders. Some Israelis
pointed to that reception as a success while others thought he had not offered
enough to break the diplomatic deadlock.
"What he's offering I don't think you would find even the most moderate
Palestinians would buy into," David Newman, an Israeli political scientist,
said. "He's offering a truncated West Bank. He wants to leave as many
settlements as possible."
(Additional
reporting by Susan Cornwell and John McGowan; Writing by Matt Spetalnick;
Editing by Bill Trott and Cynthia Osterman)
SANAA |
Tue May 24, 2011
2:02pm EDT
Reuters
By Mohammed Ghobari and Mohamed Sudam
SANAA
(Reuters) - Yemeni loyalist forces fought street battles with guards from a
powerful tribal federation whose leader has sided with protesters demanding an
end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule, witnesses said Tuesday.
The opposition warned that such attacks by loyalists, which residents said
targeted the mansion of tribal leader Sadiq al-Ahmar, could spark a civil war.
At least nine people were killed in the clashes, which dimmed prospects for a
political solution to a transition of power tussle following a nearly
four-month-old revolt inspired by protests that swept aside the leaders of Egypt
and Tunisia.
"The clashes were violent. The sound of machinegun and mortar fire could be
heard everywhere. I saw smoke rising from the entrance of the interior
ministry," one witness told Reuters.
Nine people were killed and 30 wounded "because of the aggression launched by
the Ahmars and their gangs," an official told the Defense Ministry website,
without giving details.
The clashes followed the collapse Sunday of a transition deal mediated by Gulf
neighbors that Saleh was to have signed that would have given him immunity from
prosecution.
The shooting, in the sandbagged streets surrounding a fortified mansion
belonging to the wealthy and politically powerful al-Ahmar clan, pitted loyalist
forces against guards of Sadiq al-Ahmar, head of the Hashed tribal federation
from which Saleh also hails.
"The attack on (Ahmar's) house ... is a symptom of the hysteria experienced by
President Saleh and his entourage and their insistence on engulfing the country
in a civil war," the opposition coalition said in a statement.
Several mediators, including a security police head, were injured in the attack
on the house, an opposition leader said.
Ahmar's house and the adjacent residence which belongs to a relative, another
tribal leader, were damaged in the attacks, residents said.
Four tribal guards were killed, and six other people were wounded, an opposition
leader said. Fighting in the same area of the capital Monday killed seven
people, among them a bystander, a police officer and five tribal gunmen.
The government accused Ahmar's men of igniting the clashes Monday by firing on a
school and the headquarters of state news agency Saba. Ahmar's office said
government forces opened fire when his guards prevented them from entering a
school where Ahmar said Saleh loyalists were stockpiling weapons.
Early Tuesday, tribal mediators were holding talks in the Ahmar house to try to
bring an end to the fighting, a source in Ahmar's office said. But the
government said the mediation had not brought a resolution.
"The al-Ahmar sons and their gang turned on the mediation and fired rockets and
bullets heavily on government installations and citizens' homes," the defense
ministry said.
GULF
INITIATIVE AWAITS 'POSITIVE SIGNS'
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) bloc of Yemen's wealthy oil-exporting
neighbors that spearheaded the transition deal, which Saleh has three times
rebuffed at the last minute, later said it was suspending it due to a "lack of
suitable conditions."
In Riyadh, Abdullatif al-Zayani, the GCC's secretary-general, called for an
immediate end to the fighting and suggested he could relaunch his mediation
efforts.
"I'm always ready to visit (Yemen) if the visit will help the interests of the
Yemeni people," he told reporters.
The pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat daily said that Saudi Arabia was still hoping the
deal could be signed at the "earliest opportunity." A Saudi foreign ministry
spokesman could not be reached for comment.
The United States and Saudi Arabia, both targets of foiled attacks by a wing of
al Qaeda based in Yemen, are keen to end the Yemeni stalemate and avert a spread
of anarchy that could give the global militant network more room to operate.
Saleh, playing on Western fears of chaos, blamed the opposition for the deal's
collapse and said that if a civil war erupted "they will be responsible for it
and the bloodshed."
While Saleh has backed out of previous deals aimed at easing him out of power,
Sunday's turnabout appeared to be among the most forceful, coming after loyalist
gunmen trapped Western and Arab diplomats in the United Arab Emirates embassy
for hours.
Factbox: Israel's terms for a Palestinian peace deal
Tue May
24, 2011
1:43pm EDT
Reuters
(Reuters)
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the Congress on Tuesday,
reiterated Israel's conditions for a peace accord with the Palestinians.
Here are the core terms, as well as previous Palestinian responses:
* Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
-- Israel was founded along the lines of a 1947 U.N. plan for the ethnic
partition of then British-ruled Palestine, which Arabs rejected. Several wars
on, Israel says peace requires Palestinians accept its Jewish character while
Israelis, in turn, recognize the new Palestinian nation-state. The Palestinians
rule this out, saying both that it is not their business to endorse the identity
of another country and that they fear for the rights of Israel's Arab minority.
Israel's Jewish self-determination also helps it argue that it does not have to
admit Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war of its founding, and millions of
their descendants.
* Israel will not return to the "indefensible boundaries" of 1967, the future
Palestinian state must be demilitarized, there should be a long-term Israeli
army presence along the Jordan River.
-- Palestinians say peace must be based on the 1967 boundaries and they will not
accept any Israeli presence in their future state. It is unclear how or if the
Palestinian Islamists who hold sway in the Gaza Strip could be disarmed.
* Israel rejects the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees.
-- With their descendants, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian displaced in
1948 now number in their millions, and Israel says admitting them would amount
to demographic suicide for the Jewish state. It says the Arabs were at fault for
the war and that refugees should settle in the future Palestinian state or
elsewhere. The Palestinians say the right of return is inalienable and insist
Israel accept responsibility for the refugees' plight and negotiate over a wider
resettlement and compensation deal.
* Israel keeps Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.
-- Successive Israeli governments have expressed willingness to dismantle remote
settlements in the occupied territory to make way for a Palestinian state, while
annexing major clusters near the West Bank boundary. While willing to discuss
land-swaps, the Palestinians have recoiled at agreeing to more sweeping Israeli
territorial demands from the outset, especially before it is clear what they
would get in return.
* Jerusalem remain Israel's "undivided capital."
-- Israel annexed East Jerusalem, captured, along with the West Bank, in the
1967 Middle East war, and calls the holy city its eternal and indivisible
capital. This claim has not been recognized internationally, and the
Palestinians want East Jerusalem as capital of their future state. That would
include the walled Old City, which houses major Muslim, Jewish and Christian
shrines.
At
least 1,100 civilians killed in Syria uprising: group
AMMAN |
Tue May 24, 2011
11:08am EDT
Reuters
AMMAN
(Reuters) - Syrian troops and security forces have killed at least 1,100
civilians in their two-month campaign to crush pro-democracy demonstrations,
Syrian human rights organization Sawasiah said Tuesday.
Sawasiah said it had the names of the 1,100 people who it reported were killed
mostly in the southern Hauran Plain region, where the uprising erupted on March
18.
The death toll rose sharply after street protests grew in number and spread out
from the south, prompting a military crackdown, Sawasiah said.
The rights organization, founded by jailed human rights lawyer Mohannad
al-Hassani, said it had reports of another 200 civilians deaths, but did not
have names.
Syrian authorities have blamed most of the killings on "armed saboteur groups"
backed by Islamists and outside powers who they say have killed more than 120
soldiers and police.
Rights campaigners say some soldiers have been shot by security agents for
refusing to fire on civilians.
Syria has barred most international media since the protests broke out two
months ago, making it difficult to verify accounts of the violence.
Mubarak and Sons Face Trial for Killing of Egypt Protesters
May 24,
2011
The New York Times
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
The
former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, and his two sons will be tried for
murder in connection with the deaths of protesters during the 18-day revolt that
lead to his ouster three months ago as well as corruption during his time in
office, Egypt’s top prosecutor said Tuesday.
The announcement fulfilled an important demand of protesters who had called for
large-scale demonstrations in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square later this week in
favor of a trial and against the country’s emergency law.
Mr. Mubarak, along with his sons, Gamal and Alaa, will face charges including
“intentional murder, attempted killing of some demonstrators” as well as “misuse
of influence and deliberately wasting public funds and unlawfully making private
financial gains and profits,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement, The
Associated Press reported. The Egyptian Health Ministry has said that more than
800 people were killed during uprising.
The three have been held in police custody since April, facing questions about
corruption and abuse of power during Mr. Mubarak’s three-decade rule. The sons
were immediately jailed in Cairo’s Tora Prison, while Mr. Mubarak, 83, was in
police custody at a hospital in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik after a
heart attack. He is currently awaiting transfer to the prison.
DUBLIN |
Mon May 23, 2011
3:11pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeff Mason and Padraic Halpin
DUBLIN
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama declared solidarity between the United States
and economically struggling Ireland with a symbolic gulp of beer and a rousing
speech, telling a huge Dublin crowd on Monday: "Your best days are still ahead."
Beginning a four-nation European tour with a celebration of his Irish roots,
Obama came to Ireland as what one man called a "long-lost cousin."
Crowds packed the streets for both a stirring speech in Dublin and a visit to
the tiny village of Moneygall, where an ancestor of Obama's lived before moving
to the United States.
Introduced by Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny as "the American Dream come home,"
Obama told the throng in central Dublin: "My name is Barack Obama, of the
Moneygall Obamas."
For Ireland, Obama's arrival, and the visit of Britain's Queen Elizabeth last
week, are a welcome distraction from the global attention paid to its financial
woes and the ensuing international bailout.
Obama was also due to visit Britain, France and Poland on a week-long trip whose
agenda includes talks on issues as Afghanistan and Pakistan after the killing of
Osama bin Laden, the world economy and the "Arab spring" uprisings.
AUSTERITY
Ireland's economic slump has led to a debt crisis and drastic government
spending cuts. Apart from lifting the spirits of the Irish, the visit looked set
to provide some powerful images back home for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
He brought back the signature phrase from his 2008 presidential campaign, "Yes
we can," but said it in Gaelic.
"This little country that inspires the biggest things -- your best days are
still ahead," Obama said.
"And Ireland, if anyone ever says otherwise ... remember that, whatever
hardships winter can bring, springtime is always just around the corner and, if
they keep on arguing with you, just respond with a simple creed, 'Is feidir
linn', Yes we can."
At O'Neill's pub in Dublin, revelers cheered and some chanted "USA! USA!" as the
president emerged on stage for his speech.
"I think it will give the country a great lift, the kind of lift we desperately
need," said Jennifer Kearney, a mother of two who brought her two daughters aged
13 and 15 into Dublin's city center for the event.
In Moneygall, Obama hoisted a glass of Guinness stout at Ollie Hayes's pub as
fiddle music played, and his wife Michelle pulled pints at the bar.
Thousands of rain-drenched people lined the village's one street, festooned with
American flags, and roared with delight as the motorcade rolled in.
The sleepy village of 300 was the birthplace of Obama's great-great-great
grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, a shoemaker who left in 1850 to begin a new life
in the United States.
This makes Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and Irish-American mother, one of
37 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry.
LONG-LOST
COUSIN
"I'm here to see Obama ... our long-lost cousin," said Moneygall resident Rob
Lewis, 28.
Inside the pub, which was lined with framed photos of Obama, the president met
Henry Healy, a 24-year-old distant cousin. He joked with the bartender to make
sure the Guinness had settled properly before he and Michelle took sips.
"I don't want to mess this up," he said before saluting the bar with a "Slainte"
-- Irish for 'cheers' -- and a long gulp.
"You look a little like my grandfather," he said to one of the men inside.
Back out on the street, three babies were handed over a security barricade for
pictures to be taken with Obama, and women hugged and kissed him under the
watchful eye of his security detail.
Moneygall is capitalizing on its famous connection, selling everything from
Obama fridge magnets to Obama plastic lighters.
T-shirts with slogans such as "What's the craic, Barack?" ("How are things?
What's going on?") and "Is feidir linn" are top-sellers.
Irish radio offers frequent airings of the popular song "There's no one as Irish
as Barack Obama," playing on a surname that almost sounds typically Irish.
"We're a tiny nation of 4 million people so it's a lovely gesture him coming
over. Given that we've had the queen as well it's been a momentous week. It's a
lift for Ireland," said Susannah Moore of Dublin.
Obama was forced to leave for London for the next stop of his trip on Monday
night rather than Tuesday due to a new volcanic ash cloud from Iceland.
(Additional
reporting by Carmel Crimmins, Conor Humphries and Roisin Maguire; Writing by
Steve Holland; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
WASHINGTON | Sun May 22, 2011
10:10pm EDT
Reuters
By Matt Spetalnick and Caren Bohan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Sunday eased Israeli anger over
his new Middle East peace proposals when he made clear that the Jewish state
would likely be able to negotiate keeping some settlements in any final deal
with the Palestinians.
Obama repeated his view that long-stalled peace talks should start on the basis
of the Israel's 1967 borders, an assertion that had infuriated Israeli leaders,
exposed a rift between the two allies and raised further doubts about peace
prospects.
But Obama's speech to Washington's most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group on
Sunday seemed to soothe some tensions over Obama's endorsement three days
earlier of a longstanding Palestinian demand on the borders of their future
state.
Obama stressed that he expected the two sides to eventually reach an accord that
included land swaps that would take into account the "new demographic realities
on the ground," signaling that Israel should be allowed to keep some Jewish
settlements built on occupied land.
The speech to Israel's staunchest U.S. supporters followed a testy encounter at
the White House on Friday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stunned his hosts
by warning Obama against seeking peace "based on illusions" as he vowed Israel
would never pull back to old borders he regarded as "indefensible."
But the right-wing Israeli leader quickly expressed his appreciation for Obama's
remarks on Sunday, saying in a statement, "I am determined to work together with
President Obama to find ways to resume the peace negotiations."
It could still take some time, however, for Obama and Netanyahu to overcome the
latest strains in an already-fraught relationship that some analysts say is just
as much a hindrance to reviving the moribund peace process as policy
differences.
Netanyahu resisted offering any concessions in his Oval Office talks on Friday.
Obama's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) also
served as a reminder his peace formula could cost him support among Jewish and
pro-Israel voters and donors as he runs for re-election in 2012. Some
prospective Republican presidential challengers have already accused him of
betraying Israel, Washington's closest ally in the region.
ACKNOWLEDGES DIFFERENCES
"Even while we may at times disagree, as friends sometimes will, the bonds
between the United States and Israel are unbreakable, and the commitment of the
United States to the security of Israel is ironclad," Obama said to loud
applause.
But Obama sometimes met stony silence from the AIPAC audience and at one point
drew a smattering of boos.
Israeli officials were pleased, however, to hear Obama again reject a
Palestinian plan to seek U.N. recognition of statehood in September and condemn
a recent reconciliation deal between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas
Islamists. But he also pressed Israel to "make the hard choices" for peace.
An aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said: "We appreciate President
Obama's stated position regarding a state on the 1967 borders, it is a step in
the right direction."
On Sunday, Obama reiterated the "principles" he outlined on Thursday in a speech
on Middle East upheaval, but introduced new phrasing that assuaged some of
Netanyahu's concerns.
At issue is Obama's embrace of a long-sought goal by the Palestinians: that the
state they seek in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip should largely be drawn
along lines that existed before the 1967 war in which Israel captured those
territories and East Jerusalem.
The proposal would call for negotiated land swaps for Israel to retain some
large settlements in the West Bank.
Obama chided those who he said had "misrepresented" his position, a slap at
Netanyahu, who had seized on the notion that he was being asked to return to
1967 lines while ignoring the president's stipulation there would be land
exchanges.
"By definition, it means that the parties themselves - Israelis and Palestinians
-- will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June
4, 1967. That's what mutually agreed upon swaps means," Obama said.
"It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken
place over the last forty-four years. ... to take account of those changes
including the new demographic realities on the ground."
IN LINE
WITH BUSH PROMISES
Obama's new wording was more in line with guarantees by former President George
W. Bush in 2004 saying it was "unrealistic" for Israel to return to old borders
and suggesting it may keep settlement blocs under any peace pact.
A senior U.S. official insisted however, that even though "people are trying to
suggest that he felt he had to clarify something he said on Thursday, he did no
such thing."
Despite that, Obama's stress on 1967 borders put the United States formally on
record as endorsing the old boundaries as a starting point, something it had
only embraced privately.
Obama's aim was to draw Palestinians back to the table and head off their U.N.
statehood drive, but the Palestinians signaled they would not be deterred.
Obama, leaving on a European tour later on Sunday, planned to try to convince
European leaders not to support a unilateral statehood bid.
U.S.-brokered talks collapsed late last year when Netanyahu refused to extend a
moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank and the Palestinians walked
away.
Netanyahu is expected to be feted when he addresses AIPAC on Monday and then
speaks to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday where he will have a chance to rally
support for his stance.
While Obama won the Jewish vote overwhelmingly in 2008, some prominent Jewish
Americans were rethinking their support for his re-election after this week's
events.
Some Israelis have never felt entirely comfortable with Obama, unnerved by his
early attempts to reach out to Iran and his support for Arab revolutions that
have unsettled Israel.
(Additional
reporting by Jeffrey Heller and Jasmin Melvin; Editing by Jackie Frank)
WASHINGTON — President Obama, speaking on Sunday to the nation’s foremost
pro-Israel lobbying group, repeated his call for Palestinian statehood based on
Israel’s pre-1967 borders adjusted for land swaps, issuing a challenge to the
Israeli government to “make the hard choices that are necessary to protect a
Jewish and democratic state for which so many generations have sacrificed.”
’In his remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the president,
while offering praise for the relationship with Israel, did not walk back from
his speech on Thursday, which had infuriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel. Rather, the president took indirect aim at Mr. Netanyahu, first by
repeating what the Israeli prime minister so objected to — the phrase pre-1967
borders — and then by challenging those whom he said had “misrepresented” his
position.
“Let me repeat what I actually said on Thursday,” Mr. Obama said in firm tones
at one point, “not what I was reported to have said.”
“I said that the United States believes that negotiations should result in two
states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and
permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine
should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and
recognized borders are established for both states.”
The president emphasized the “mutually agreed swaps,” then went into an
elaboration of what he believes that means. Mr. Netanyahu, in his critique of
Mr. Obama’s remarks, had ignored the “mutually agreed swaps” part of the
president’s proposal.
“Since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what
“1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” means,” Mr. Obama said. “By definition,
it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will
negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.
It is a well known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a
generation. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that
have taken place over the last 44 years.”
“There was nothing particularly original in my proposal,” he said. “This basic
framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the
parties, including previous U.S. administrations.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s furious reaction last week to what many administration officials
viewed as a modest compromise from the more dramatic all-encompassing American
peace plan that some of Mr. Obama’s advisers had been advocating, infuriated the
White House. In particular, administration officials were angry by Mr.
Netanyahu’s lecturing tone during statements the two leaders gave on Friday.
American officials were also irritated by Mr. Netanyahu statement directly after
Mr. Obama’s speech that used the phrase “expects to hear” in saying that Mr.
Netanyahu expected to hear certain assurances from Mr. Obama during their
meeting.
Mr. Obama also assured the group that the administration was steadfast in its
“opposition to any attempt to de-legitimize the state of Israel,” but he warned
that Israel would face growing isolation without a credible Middle East peace
process.
Sunday’s audience, which had been quiet, cheered Mr. Obama, although the cheers
were far more muted than the standing ovation they had given at other points of
Mr. Obama’s speech, like when he talked about Iran and when he reiterated that
his opposition to a looming United Nations vote on Palestinian statehood.
“I know very well that the easy thing to do, particularly for a president
preparing for re-election, is to avoid any controversy,” Mr. Obama said. “I
don’t need Rahm” — former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — “to tell me that.”
But, Mr. Obama added, “as I said to Prime Minister Netanyahu, I believe that the
current situation in the Middle East does not allow for procrastination. I also
believe that real friends talk openly and honestly with one another.”
Others close to the administration have also pushed back against the notion that
Mr. Obama was signaling a major shift in American policy on Thursday. “No, he
wasn’t,” said his newly departed special envoy to the Middle East, George
Mitchell, when asked that question on Sunday.
“The president didn’t say that Israel has to go back to the ’67 lines,” Mr.
Mitchell said on ABC’s “This Week”. “He said ‘with agreed swaps.’ Those are
significant.”
Mr. Mitchell went on: “ ‘Agreed’ means through negotiations; both parties must
agree. There’s not going to be a border unless Israel agrees to it, and we know
they won’t agree unless their security needs are satisfied.”
It was a quietly delivered speech that lasted 20 minutes, and at the end, the
packed hall of at the Washington Convention Center stood up for Mr. Obama and
clapped — some even cheered. There were no boos or hisses, as some of the
president’s allies had feared.
Mr. Obama’s arrival on stage, before a backdrop collage that meshed fragments of
the Israeli and American flags, was met with loud applause. But that was at
least partly because it followed an introduction by Lee Rosenberg, the group’s
president, that ended with a guaranteed applause line: “Thank you, Mr.
President, for ridding the world of Osama bin Laden.”
RABAT/CASABLANCA | Sun May 22, 2011
7:40pm EDT
Reuters
By Adam Tanner and Souhail Karam
RABAT/CASABLANCA (Reuters) - Moroccan police beat protesters who defied a ban on
demonstrations across the country on Sunday, leading to arrests and dozens of
injuries, some of them life threatening, witnesses said.
The violence appears to signal a tougher government line against the protest
movement, which has become more defiant after festive demonstrations starting in
February, but has yet to attract mass public support.
Some protesters are also becoming more outspoken about criticizing King Mohammed
but the demonstrations have failed to match the scale of those in several other
Arab countries.
Much of the anger was directed at the Makhzen, Morocco's royal court. "Protest
is a legal right, why is the Makhzen afraid?" crowds in Casablanca chanted.
"Makhzen get out. Down with despotism."
A Reuters correspondent saw seven riot police attacking one bearded man in his
30s, repeatedly hitting his head and body, causing severe bleeding.
"We have been called here to preserve order because of this unauthorized
protest," said a senior police officer on the scene who declined to give his
name.
In Fes, three leading members of the city's protest movement were in "very
critical condition," said demonstrator Fathallah al-Hamdani. Injured were also
reported in Tangier and elsewhere.
No one was available at the Interior Ministry to comment on the protesters'
reports.
Protesters wanted to camp in front of the parliament in Rabat, but authorities
were anxious to avoid a repeat of the events in Cairo earlier this year when
protesters occupying Tahrir Square eventually helped to topple the government.
In major cities, police armed with batons and shields moved people off the
streets wherever they gathered. Protesters broke off into smaller groups, often
with police chasing behind.
One protest leader in Rabat who had already been beaten a week ago suffered
severe concussion on Sunday, said protester Jalal Makhfi.
Some human rights activists were beaten in front of police headquarters where
they had tried to win the release of 13 members of the AMDH human rights group,
said Khadija Riyadi, another member of the group.
Demonstrators said police beat dozens in Casablanca.
"We are standing together for dignity," one protest leaflet said. "We are
against despotism, against corruption. We are for dignity, freedom, democracy
and social justice."
PROTESTS
GATHERING FORCE
Long seen as a relatively moderate and stable state, Morocco has experienced
increasing unrest this year inspired by successful uprisings in Tunisia and
Egypt.
In recent months, protesters seeking more democratic rights and economic
benefits have held several nationwide protests in the country of 32 million,
resulting in at least six deaths.
On Friday, a group of jobless graduates worked their way through a crowd to near
the king after he led Friday prayers and chanted "Your majesty, we want jobs."
State television cut off a live broadcast as the slogans began.
The outburst was considered a daring breach of protocol in a country where the
king's portrait adorns many shops and public spaces and many treat him with
reverence. The king is also the commander of the faithful, the leader of
Moroccan Muslims who is said to descend from the Prophet Mohammed.
The royal family has ruled Morocco since the 17th century and survived both
French colonial rule and independence.
Morocco has the lowest per capita GDP in the Maghreb region that also includes
Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. Many live in poverty and nearly half of the
population is illiterate.
In response to the public protests, the king announced in March that he would
amend the constitution to allow more democratic rights. A commission is due to
announce a draft constitution next month.
AMMAN |
Sun May 22, 2011
1:33pm EDT
Reuters
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN
(Reuters) - Thousands of Syrians attending the funerals of pro-democracy
protesters called on Sunday for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad,
witnesses said, in the latest outburst against his rule.
"The people want the overthrow of the regime," mourners chanted as they streamed
out of the Big Mosque in the Damascus suburb of Saqba, according to one of the
witnesses.
The slogan echoed the rallying cry of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt this year
which swept out two of the most entrenched rulers in the Arab world.
Assad has largely dismissed the protests as part of a foreign-backed conspiracy
to sow sectarian strife in Syria.
Syrian authorities blame most of the upheaval on "armed saboteur groups," backed
by Islamists and foreign powers, who they say have killed more than 120 soldiers
and police.
On Sunday, witnesses said mourners at Nour Mosque in the central city of Homs
shouted "Leave, leave," at the funeral of six out of 11 people that rights
groups said were killed by security services on Saturday.
"The shooting was in cold blood. People were streaming peacefully out of the
cemetery," a resident of Homs said.
In Saqba, a witness told Reuters by phone that mourners also chanted the name of
"Martyr Ziad al-Qadi," reportedly killed when security forces fired live rounds
at a demonstration in the suburb on Saturday.
"A large demonstration (on Saturday) calling for the overthrow of the regime had
been going on since the afternoon. It felt like the whole of Saqba took to the
streets. Security forces entered in the evening and started firing," he said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, said it had
the names of 863 civilians who had been killed in shootings by security forces
since the pro-democracy uprising erupted 10 weeks ago.
U.S.
CRITICISM
Syria has barred most international media since the protests broke out two
months ago, making it difficult to verify accounts of the violence.
Activists and demonstrators have posted videos on social media websites
purporting to show unarmed protesters coming under fire.
The United States had been trying to patch up relations with Assad to wean him
off an anti-Israel alliance with Iran, but reports of the crackdown have turned
Washington against the Syrian leader.
Washington told Assad on Thursday to lead a transformation to democracy or step
aside.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement that "the Assad regime remains the
source of instability as it foments violence by meeting peaceful protests with
deadly force and mass arrests."
Syria's state news agency said on Saturday that armed groups killed 17 people on
Friday in the provinces of Idlib and Homs.
It said the interior ministry had instructed the police "not to shoot, to
preserve the lives of civilians," and blamed the violence on the armed groups.
The unrest has posed a grave challenge to Assad's rule.
In response, he has lifted a 48-year state of emergency and issued a decree to
grant citizenship to stateless Kurds. He also sent tanks to several cities to
stamp out protests, witnesses said.
Kurdish leaders said that the decree has not been implemented.
Rights campaigners said that the lifting of emergency law has not put an end to
beatings, torture and arbitrary arrests, with over 10,000 Syrians detained since
the uprising erupted in the southern city of Deraa on March 18.
Scores of people were arrested on Sunday in the province of Idlib and in the
southern Hauran Plain, they said.
"The president can still try to redeem himself by doing what a few leaders in
Eastern Europe did, which is leading immediate transformation to a democracy and
entering fair elections if he wants," opposition figure Walid al-Bunni said.
May 21,
2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER
MAJDAL
SHAMS, Golan Heights — Until the Internet came to this Druze village in the
Israeli-controlled Golan Heights in late 1990s, residents used to go to an area
known as the shouting hill and use megaphones to communicate with relatives
across the fence in the motherland, Syria.
From the vantage point of Majdal Shams, a Syrian village peeps out from behind a
hillside across the valley. Damascus is 40 minutes away by car.
It was at this point a week ago that about 100 Palestinians living in Syria
breached the border fence and crowded into Majdal Shams in a protest to mark the
anniversary of Israel’s creation and the plight of the Palestinian refugees who
demand a right to return. Four people were killed here when Israeli troops
opened fire in the border area, shattering a calm of more than three decades and
putting an international spotlight on this usually sleepy village near Mount
Hermon.
But for the roughly 20,000 Arabs of the Druze religious sect who live in Majdal
Shams and in nearby villages, this is Syrian territory — even though Israel has
occupied this strategic plateau since the 1967 war and has extended Israeli law
here. In the two months since the outbreak of the uprising in Syria, the Druze
of the Golan have been preoccupied with, and divided by, events on the other
side of the fence.
Modern communications have made contact with relatives much easier, yet have
done little to make an already convoluted reality any less complicated.
Here, fierce loyalty to Syria is mixed with fear of the government led by Bashar
al-Assad in Damascus, and residents have conflicted feelings about the relative
freedoms they enjoy under the Israeli occupier.
“We cannot talk politics with our relatives on Skype, by phone or on the Net,”
said Salman Fakherldeen , 56, a human-rights advocate at Al-Marsad, the Arab
Center for Human Rights in the Golan, in Majdal Shams. “You do not need to be
too clever to understand why.”
One of a few residents here who is willing to speak openly in support of the
uprising in Syria, Shefa Abu Jabal, 25, has been helping disseminate news of the
protests and their brutal suppression, working through social networking sites
where none of the commenters uses their real names.
A graduate of Haifa University in northern Israel, where she studied law and
communications, Ms. Abu Jabal said that no more than 15 people in the Golan
Heights were involved in the effort. Because Israel is an open society, she
said, “We have access to all Web sites.” But she added that pro-Assad “stalkers”
on Twitter have accused the activists of being Israeli spies.
Residents say that the majority of the Golan Heights’ Druze are split between
those who support the government of President Assad and those who do not want to
get involved.
The reasons for supporting Mr. Assad include the knowledge that everything that
happens in the Golan quickly finds its way to the authorities in Damascus, fear
for the hundreds of thousands of Druze inside Syria and worries about what may
happen to them if the current leadership is replaced by the Sunni Muslim
Brotherhood.
The Druze, who practice a largely secret religion that is often described as an
offshoot of Ismaili Islam, have not fared badly under the Assads, who belong to
another minority sect, the Alawites. Another incentive for not opposing the
regime is that up to 800 students from the Golan Heights are studying in Syrian
universities free of charge. About 20 students returned home recently under a
special arrangement because of the troubles in Syria.
In many cases, people’s true political positions remain as inscrutable as some
of their religious beliefs.
At most, people here say, 10 percent of the Golan Druze openly identify with the
protesters in Syria. In this conservative society, they risk being ostracized.
Many here say they are against the violence and bloodshed, but some, echoing the
official line in Damascus, say that Islamic extremists from other countries are
to blame.
In mid-April, residents held a small, silent gathering in the Majdal Shams
square in solidarity with the protesters. “We did not say anything,” Ms. Abu
Jabal said, “but we held signs.”
Supporters of the Assad government held a larger demonstration in Buqata, a
village nearby. After a Druze soldier in the Syrian Army was killed in Homs, his
relatives in Masada, another Golan village, held a memorial.
Less than 10 percent of the Golan Druze have chosen to take Israeli citizenship.
Many say that their sense of belonging to Syria, even after more than 40 years
of Israeli rule, is not a question of choice. They say they are Syrian,
whichever side they are on.
“Politics do not concern us,” said Nayef al-Din, a shopkeeper in Masada. “We are
Syrians, whoever is in charge.”
“We are in Syria now,” said Ata Farahat, 39, who works for a local television
production company in Majdal Shams and is a strong supporter of Mr. Assad’s. “We
have lived our whole life in Syria.”
The production company provides stories and footage from the Golan mostly for
Syrian television stations, but also for some Israeli channels.
Mr. Farahat studied in Damascus from 1995 to 2002. He said he was arrested by
the Israeli authorities on his return because of his political activities as a
student and was jailed for a year. After working for Syrian television, he said,
he spent another three years in an Israeli prison, charged with contact with
enemy agents, and was released a few months ago.
His colleague, the journalist Hamad Awidat, 28, another supporter of Mr.
Assad’s, studied information technology in Syria, then went to Tel Aviv
University to study software engineering. Mr. Awidat has an Israeli travel
document that states his place of birth as Israel and his nationality as
“undefined.”
Syrians Are Fatally Shot at Funeral for Protesters
May 21,
2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — Syrian security forces fired at mourners in the central city of Homs
during a funeral procession on Saturday for eight protesters who died the
previous day, killing at least five people and wounding several others,
witnesses and human rights activists said.
The fresh round of violence came as the death toll from Friday’s protests
reached 44, according to the Syrian National Organization for Human Rights. More
than half of the victims on Friday died in Idlib Province, where tanks had been
deployed on Friday as part of the attempt to crush antigovernment protests by
sending troops into restive towns and cities. The bloodshed on Saturday followed
the pattern in recent weeks in Syria, in which killings on Fridays — the Muslim
holy day, when some of the largest demonstrations of the Arab Spring have been
held — have led to more protests and deaths.
One witness said the shooting began as mourners were chanting “Rest in peace,
martyr, we will continue on the same path” as well as “The people want to topple
the regime” and “Freedom, freedom.”
“A lot of people were injured. There was blood everywhere,” said the witness,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They were firing at us directly.”
Ammar Qurabi, who leads the Syrian human rights group, said he too had been told
that the shooting began as the funeral turned into a protest. “The neighborhood
is now under fire and completely surrounded,” he said.
Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has blamed the protests against his
11-year-old rule on armed Islamist groups. The government said Saturday that
Islamist militants had killed 17 people, including civilians, police and
security forces, in Idlib and Homs, the city that is emerging as a locus of the
challenge to Mr. Assad’s authority, on Friday.
The Syrian state news agency, Sana, said the killings occurred after armed
groups exploited specific instructions given to security forces “not to shoot,
to preserve the lives of civilians.” The agency did not provide details on how
the deaths occurred. Human rights activists said that nearly 900 people had been
killed in the past nine weeks in the Syrian uprising and that 10,000 protesters
and activists were in jail.
The United States has begun taking a harder stand against Mr. Assad. The Obama
administration imposed sanctions on Mr. Assad last week, and the president used
some of his strongest language yet to denounce the crackdown, saying Syria’s
leader should lead a transition to democracy or “get out of the way.”
Promise of Arab Uprisings Is Threatened by Divisions
May 21,
2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a
few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many
because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of
citizenship.
But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt,
fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has
threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have
vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era.
From the fetid alleys of Imbaba, the Cairo neighborhood where Muslims and
Christians have fought street battles, to the Syrian countryside, where a
particularly deadly crackdown has raised fears of sectarian score-settling, the
question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or
withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s
variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?
The old examples have been largely of failure: the rule of strongmen in Egypt,
Syria, Libya and Yemen; a fragile equilibrium of fractious communities in
Lebanon and Iraq; the repressive paternalism of the Persian Gulf, where oil
revenues are used to buy loyalty.
“I think the revolutions in a way, in a distant way, are hoping to retrieve”
this sense of national identity, said Sadiq al-Azm, a prominent Syrian
intellectual living in Beirut.
“The costs otherwise would be disintegration, strife and civil war,” Mr. Azm
said. “And this was very clear in Iraq.”
In an arc of revolts and revolution, that idea of a broader citizenship is being
tested as the enforced silence of repression gives way to the cacophony of
diversity. Security and stability were the justification that strongmen in the
Arab world offered for repression, often with the sanction of the United States;
the essence of the protests in the Arab Spring is that people can imagine an
alternative.
But even activists admit that the region so far has no model that enshrines
diversity and tolerance without breaking down along more divisive identities.
In Tunisia, a relatively homogenous country with a well-educated population,
fault lines have emerged between the secular-minded coasts and the more
religious and traditional inland.
The tensions shook the nascent revolution there this month when a former interim
interior minister, Farhat Rajhi, suggested in an online interview that the
coastal elite, long dominant in the government, would never accept an electoral
victory by Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, which draws most of its support
inland.
“Politics was in the hands of the people of the coast since the start of
Tunisia,” Mr. Rajhi said. “If the situation is reversed now, they are not ready
to give up ruling.” He warned that Tunisian officials from the old government
were preparing a military coup if the Islamists won elections in July. “If
Ennahda rules, there will be a military regime.”
In response, protesters poured back out into the streets of Tunis for four days
of demonstrations calling for a new revolution. The police beat them back with
batons and tear gas, arrested more than 200 protesters and imposed a curfew on
the city.
In Cairo, the sense of national identity that surged at the moment of revolution
— when hundreds of thousands of people of all faiths celebrated in Tahrir Square
with chants of “Hold your head high, you are an Egyptian”— has given way to a
week of religious violence pitting the Coptic Christian minority against their
Muslim neighbors, reflecting long-smoldering tensions that an authoritarian
state may have muted, or let fester.
At a rally this month in Tahrir Square to call for unity, Coptic Christians were
conspicuously absent, thousands of them gathering nearby for a rally of their
own. And even among some Muslims at the unity rally, suspicions were pronounced.
“As Muslims, our sheiks are always telling us to be good to Christians, but we
don’t think that is happening on the other side,” said Ibrahim Sakr, 56, a
chemistry professor, who asserted that Copts, who make up about 10 percent of
the population, still consider themselves “the original” Egyptians because their
presence predates Islam.
In Libya, supporters of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi acknowledge that his government
banks on fears of clan rivalries and possible partition to stay in power in a
country with deep regional differences.
Officials say that the large extended clans of the west that contribute most of
the soldiers to Colonel Qaddafi’s forces will never accept any revolution
arising from the east, no matter what promises the rebels make about universal
citizenship in a democratic Libya with its capital still in the western city of
Tripoli.
The rebels say the revolution can forge a new identity.
“Qaddafi looks at Libya as west and east and north and south,” said Jadella
Shalwee, a Libyan from Tobruk who visited Tahrir Square last weekend in a
pilgrimage of sorts. “But this revolt has canceled all that. This is about a new
beginning,” he said, contending that Colonel Qaddafi’s only supporters were “his
cousins and his family.”
“Fear” is what Gamal Abdel Gawad, the director of the Ahram Center for Political
and Strategic Studies in Cairo, called it — the way that autocrats win support
because people “are even more scared of their fellow citizens.”
Nowhere is that perhaps truer than in Syria, with a sweeping revolt against four
decades of rule by one family and a worsening of tensions among a Sunni Muslim
majority and minorities of Christians and heterodox Muslims, the Alawites.
Mohsen, a young Alawite in Syria, recounted a slogan that he believes, rightly
or not, was chanted at some of the protests there: “Christians to Beirut and the
Alawites to the coffin.”
“Every week that passes,” he lamented, speaking by telephone from Damascus, the
Syrian capital, “the worse the sectarian feelings get.”
The example of Iraq comes up often in conversations in Damascus, as does the
civil war in Lebanon. The departure of Jews, who once formed a vibrant community
in Syria, remains part of the collective memory, illustrating the tenuousness of
diversity. Syria’s ostensibly secular government, having always relied on
Alawite strength, denounces the prospect of sectarian differences while, its
critics say, fanning the flames. The oft-voiced formula is, by now, familiar:
after us, the deluge.
“My Alawite friends want me to support the regime, and they feel if it’s gone,
our community will be finished,” said Mohsen, the young Alawite in Damascus, who
asked that only his first name be used because he feared reprisal. “My Sunni
friends want me to be against the regime, but I feel conflicted. We want
freedom, but freedom with stability and security.”
That he used the mantra of years of Arab authoritarianism suggested that people
still, in the words of one human rights activist, remain “hostage to the lack of
possibilities” in states that, with few exceptions, have failed to come up with
a sense of self that transcends the many divides.
“This started becoming a self-fulfilling myth,” said Mr. Azm, the Syrian
intellectual.
“It was either our martial law or the martial law of the Islamists,” he added.
“The third option was to divide the country into ethnicities, sects and so on.”
Despite a wave of repression, crackdown and civil war, hope and optimism still
pervade the region, even in places like Syria, the setting of one of the most
withering waves of violence. There, residents often speak of a wall of fear
crumbling. Across the Arab world, there is a renewed sense of a collective
destiny that echoes the headiest days of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s
and perhaps even transcends it.
President Obama, in his speech on Thursday about the changes in the Arab world,
spoke directly to that feeling. “Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious
sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from
somebody else. But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of
repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore.”
But no less pronounced are the old fears of zero-sum power, where one side wins
and the other inevitably loses. From a Coptic Christian in Cairo to an Alawite
farmer in Syria, discussions about the future are posed in terms of survival.
Differences in Lebanon, a country that celebrates and laments the diversity of
its 18 religious communities, are so pronounced that even soccer teams have a
sectarian affiliation.
In Beirut, wrecked by a war over the country’s identity and so far sheltered
from the gusts of change, activists have staged a small sit-in for two months to
call for something different, in a plea that resonates across the Arab world.
The Square of Change, the protesters there have nicknamed it, and their demand
is blunt: Citizenship that unites, not divides.
“We are not ‘we’ yet,” complained Tony Daoud, one of the activists. “What do we
mean when we say ‘we’? ‘We’ as what? As a religion, as a sect, as human beings?”
Anthony Shadid reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Heba
Afify contributed reporting from Cairo, and an employee of The New York Times
from Damascus, Syria.
ISLAMABAD
| Sat May 21, 2011
2:16am EDT
Reuters
By Michael Georgy
ISLAMABAD
(Reuters) - U.S. special forces were embedded with Pakistani troops on
intelligence-gathering missions by the summer of 2009, confidential American
diplomatic cables showed, a revelation that could hurt the Pakistani military's
public image.
The disclosure comes a day after another set of cables showed that Pakistan's
powerful army chief not only tacitly agreed to the covert U.S. drone campaign
against militants, but asked for "continuous Predator coverage" of the tribal
areas by these aircraft. The army denied the contents.
The local Dawn newspaper, which said it obtained the secret dispatches from
WikiLeaks, said they reveal that U.S. special forces were deployed with
Pakistani troops in joint operations in Pakistan by September of 2009.
"Through these embeds, we are assisting the Pakistanis collect and coordinate
existing intelligence assets, the cables quoted then American ambassador to
Pakistan Anne Patterson as saying.
Pakistan's powerful military faced rare criticism after a secret U.S. special
forces raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not far from the capital
Islamabad this month.
The infuriated army said the assault, which has severely strained ties between
the two countries, was a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty. But Pakistanis
lashed out at the country's generals because they did not know about the raid.
Several cables showed the United States was eager to embed American troops with
Pakistani soldiers, Dawn reported.
Patterson wrote in November of 2009 of the possibility that "operations in the
northern FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) may provide additional
opportunities to embed US Special Operations Forces ... ".
FATA is seen as a global hub for militants, including al Qaeda and Afghan
militant factions who cross the border and attack U.S.-led NATO forces and
Afghan troops.
By September 2009, plans for the joint intelligence activities had been expanded
to include army headquarters, according to the cables.
"Pakistan has begun to accept intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
support from the US military for COIN (counterinsurgency) operations," Patterson
wrote.
"In addition � intelligence fusion centers" had been established "at the
headquarters of Frontier Corps and the 11th Corps and we expect at additional
sites, including GHQ and the 12th Corps in Balochistan."
Pakistani military officials were not immediately available for comment on the
cables.
The presence of U.S. trainers in Pakistan has been publicly acknowledged, but
such joint operations have not.
Anti-American sentiment runs high in Pakistan, partly because of the drone
strikes on militants, which are seen as a violation of sovereignty and have
killed civilians.
DRONES
According to cables published by Dawn on Friday, Pakistan's chief of army staff
General Ashfaq Kayani asked Admiral William J. Fallon, then commander of U.S.
Central Command, for increased surveillance and round-the-clock Predator
coverage over North and South Waziristan, strongholds for Taliban militants.
The Pakistan Army denied the contents of those cables.
Pakistanis are frustrated by their government's inability to subdue al
Qaeda-linked homegrown Taliban militants, who seem to stage suicide bombings at
will despite a series of military offensives on their strongholds.
Pakistan has come under further U.S. pressure to crack down harder on militancy
since it was discovered bin Laden was living in a garrison town not far from
intelligence headquarters.
Cooperation between Islamabad and Washington is needed to stabilize neighboring
Afghanistan.
"Previously, the Pakistani military leadership adamantly opposed letting us
embed our special operations personnel with their military forces. The recent
approval by GHQ � appears to represent a sea change in Pakistani thinking, said
a 2009 U.S. cable carried by Dawn.
"These deployments are highly politically sensitive � Should receive any
coverage in the Pakistani or U.S. media, the Pakistani military will likely stop
making requests for such assistance."
NATO
says Libya airstrikes cripple Gaddafi's forces
TRIPOLI/BRUSSELS | Fri May 20, 2011
7:34pm EDT
Reuters
By Joseph Logan and David Brunnstrom
TRIPOLI/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO's bombing campaign in Libya has crippled the
government's ability to attack rebels fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi and
effectively forced the leader into hiding, the alliance said on Friday.
NATO took command of a U.N.-authorized mission nearly two months ago to stop
Gaddafi's forces attacking civilians, and Western governments including the
United States, Britain and France are under pressure to show results.
Ambassadors of the 28 NATO states who met this week are confident the mission is
making "steady and tangible progress," said NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero,
adding that the campaign had relieved pressure on rebel-held towns.
"NATO nations and partners agree we have taken the initiative. We have the
momentum," she told a briefing in Brussels.
"Our mission remains unchanged -- we will prevent attacks and threats against
civilians until the threat is removed. The evidence shows we are doing just
that," she said, adding that NATO had helped relieve the siege on the port city
of Misrata.
Three months into an uprising against Gaddafi's four-decade rule, rebels control
the east and pockets in the west including Misrata. The conflict has reached a
stalemate as rebel attempts to advance on Tripoli have stalled.
Tripoli calls the rebels criminals and al Qaeda militants and says NATO's
bombing is armed aggression by Western nations bent on grabbing Libya's oil.
Libyan state television showed footage on Thursday of Gaddafi. But NATO military
spokesman Wing Commander Mike Bracken said in Brussels that strikes on
command-and-control centers Tripoli had limited Gaddafi's ability control his
forces.
"It has also constrained his freedom of movement." Bracken said. "Effectively he
has gone into hiding."
In a sign of international discord over the campaign, Russia stepped up its
criticism of NATO. A foreign ministry statement accused NATO of killing
civilians and destroying infrastructure.
Rebels and government forces battled in an area called Ryna around 10 km (6
miles) east of Zintan, a town in the contested Western Mountains region.
A Reuters reporter in the center of Zintan heard artillery rounds and
anti-aircraft gunfire. A rebel spokesman in the town, Juma Ibrahim, said it
appeared pro-government forces were trying to advance and were firing tank
rounds and heavy guns.
MISSILES
HIT LIBYAN SHIPS
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday that Gaddafi's downfall was
inevitable. The administration says it will not put U.S. soldiers on the ground
in Libya.
Instead, the Pentagon said it has shipped the rebels military food rations and
will soon provide other forms of non-lethal aid including uniforms, tents and
protective vests.
In an escalation of the campaign, NATO said it sank eight Libyan warships and
intercepted the oil tanker Jupiter, saying it believed the fuel would be used
for military purposes.
Libyan officials took journalists late on Thursday to Tripoli's port, where a
small ship spewed smoke and flames. Missiles hit six boats, said port general
manager Mohammad Ahmad Rashed. Five were coastguard vessels and one was a navy
ship but all had been under repair since before the fighting began.
By targeting shipping, NATO is enforcing a blockade against civilians, Rashed
said. Journalists taken back to the port on Friday saw three badly damaged
vessels, one partly submerged.
"We had been told if those ships moved they would be destroyed so they were
docked here," said Amran al-Ferjani, chief of the Libyan coastguard.
A series of apparent high-level defections suggest Gaddafi is struggling to hold
his inner circle together.
Tripoli says its top oil official, Shokri Ghanem, is on an official visit to
Europe but rebel and Tunisian sources say he has defected and his name was on a
list for a flight to Vienna.
(Additional
reporting by David Brunnstrom in Brussels, Matt Robinson in Zintan, Phil Stewart
and David Alexander in Washington, Alissa de Carbonnel and Steve Gutterman in
Moscow and Isabel Coles in Cairo; Writing by Matthew Bigg, Editing by David
Stamp)
WASHINGTON | Fri May 20, 2011
7:25pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeffrey Heller and Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly told
President Barack Obama on Friday his vision of how to achieve Middle East peace
was unrealistic, exposing a deep divide that could doom any U.S. bid to revive
peace talks.
In an unusually sharp rebuke to Israel's closest ally, Netanyahu insisted Israel
would never pull back to its 1967 borders -- which would mean big concessions of
occupied land -- that Obama had said should be the basis for negotiations on
creating a Palestinian state.
"Peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle East
reality," an unsmiling Netanyahu said as Obama listened intently beside him in
the Oval Office after they met for talks.
Netanyahu insisted that Israel was willing to make compromises for peace, but
made clear he had major differences with Washington over how to advance the
long-stalled peace process.
Netanyahu's resistance raises the question of how hard Obama will push for
concessions he is unlikely to get, and whether the vision the U.S. leader laid
out on Thursday to resolve the decades-old conflict will ever get off the
ground.
Despite assurances of friendship by both leaders, this week's events also
appeared to herald tense months ahead for U.S.-Israeli relations, even as the
Arab world goes through political tumult and Palestinians prepare a unilateral
bid this fall to seek U.N. General Assembly recognition for statehood.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Obama said he reiterated to Netanyahu
the peace "principles" he offered on Thursday in a policy speech on the Middle
East upheaval.
The goal, he said, "has to be a secure Israeli state, a Jewish state, living
side by side in peace and security with a contiguous, functioning and effective
Palestinian state.
Obama on Thursday embraced a long-sought goal by the Palestinians: that the
state they seek in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip should largely be drawn
along lines that existed before the 1967 war in which Israel captured those
territories and East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu, who heads a right-leaning coalition, responded with what amounted to
a history lecture about the vulnerability to attack that Israel faced with the
old borders. "We can't go back to those indefensible lines," he said.
Picking a fight with Israel could be politically risky for Obama at home as he
seeks re-election in 2012.
CRISIS IN
RELATIONS
The brewing crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations dimmed even further the prospect
for resuming peace talks that collapsed late last year when Palestinians walked
away in a dispute over Israeli settlement building in the West Bank.
Obama and Netanyahu, meanwhile, appear to have reached an impasse after two and
a half years of rocky relations. The Obama White House was angered when
Netanyahu refused a U.S. demand to halt building Jewish settlements in the West
Bank.
Some Israelis have never felt entirely comfortable with Obama, unnerved by his
early attempts to reach out to Iran and his support for popular Arab revolutions
that have unsettled Israel.
In a pointed comment clearly aimed at Obama's new approach to the long-running
conflict, Netanyahu said: "The only peace that will endure is one that is based
on reality, on unshakable facts."
Netanyahu, Israeli officials said, was determined to push back hard because the
reference to 1967 borders was a red flag that would attract more international
pressure on Israel for concessions. A senior Israeli official said Netanyahu
felt he had to speak bluntly so he would be "heard around the world."
"There is a feeling that Washington does not understand the reality, doesn't
understand what we face," an official on board the plane taking Netanyahu to
Washington told reporters.
Despite that, Obama's first declaration of his stance on the contested issue of
borders could help ease doubts in the Arab world about his commitment to acting
as an even-handed broker and boost his outreach to the region. Another failed
peace effort, however, could fuel further frustration.
In line with Netanyahu's stance, Obama voiced opposition to the Palestinian plan
to seek U.N. recognition of statehood in September in the absence of renewed
peace talks.
The Democratic president has quickly come under fire from Republican critics,
who accuse him of betraying Israel, the closest U.S. ally in the region. Pushing
Netanyahu could alienate U.S. supporters of Israel as Obama seeks re-election.
Obama may get a chilly reception in a speech to an influential pro-Israel
lobbying group on Sunday. Netanyahu is expected to be feted when he addresses
the same audience on Monday and then the U.S. Congress on Tuesday.
MARKERS
FOR COMPROMISE
Obama, in his speech on Thursday, laid down his clearest markers yet on the
compromises he believes Israel and the Palestinians must make to resolve a
conflict that has long been seen as a source of Middle East tension.
But he did not present a formal U.S. peace plan or any timetable for a deal he
once promised to clinch by September.
In Thursday's speech, Obama said: "We believe the borders of Israel and
Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps" of land.
While this has long been the private view in Washington, Obama went further than
U.S. officials have in the recent past.
Agreed swaps would allow Israel to keep settlements in the West Bank in return
for giving the Palestinians other land.
Going into the talks, Netanyahu said he wanted to hear Obama reaffirming
commitments made to Israel in 2004 by then-President George W. Bush suggesting
that it may keep some large settlement blocs as part of any peace pact.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Friday that Obama had said nothing that
"contradicts those letters."
Obama on Thursday also delivered a message to the Palestinians that they would
have to answer "some very difficult questions" about a reconciliation deal with
Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza and which the United States regards as
a terrorist group.
(Additional reporting by Alister Bull, Patricia Zengerle, Jeff Mason, Allyn
Fisher-Ilan,
Ori Lewis and Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Paul Simao)
AMMAN | Fri
May 20, 2011
1:58pm EDT
Reutes
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN
(Reuters) - Syrian security forces shot dead at least 30 demonstrators on Friday
during protests that broke out across the country in defiance of a military
crackdown which has killed hundreds of people, a rights activist said.
Other activists reported demonstrations across Syria, from Banias and Latakia on
the Mediterranean coast to the oil producing region of Deir al-Zor, Qamishli in
the Kurdish east and the Hauran Plain in the south, one day after the United
States told President Bashar al-Assad to reform or step down.
Syria has barred most international media since the protests broke out two
months ago, making it impossible to verify independently accounts from activists
and officials.
"No dialogue with tanks," said banners carried by Kurdish protesters who shouted
"azadi," the Kurdish word for freedom, rejecting promises by the authorities for
a national dialogue, a witness said.
Protests erupted in Damascus suburbs and the capital's Barzeh district, where
two witnesses said security forces fired at protesters and chased them in the
streets.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, said at
least 831 civilians had been killed since the uprising against autocratic rule
erupted in the southern city of Deraa nine weeks ago. It said at least 10,000
people had been arrested, including hundreds across Syria on Friday.
Some protesters were calling for freedom, activists said, while others called
for "the overthrow of the regime," the slogan of uprisings which toppled leaders
in Egypt and Tunisia.
OBAMA
SPEECH
Human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouna said 12 people were killed in the town of
Maaret al-Numan, south of Syria's second city Aleppo. Tanks had entered the town
earlier in the day to disperse protesters.
She said another 11 were killed in the central city of Homs.
She said seven others were killed in Deraa, Latakia, the Damascus suburbs and
Hama, where Assad's father, the late president Hafez al-Assad, sent the military
to crush an armed Islamist uprising in the 1980s.
Amateur video uploaded by activists, who said it was filmed in Homs, showed
scores of marchers scattering as gunfire erupted. A police car was left burning
in the street.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had names of at least 21
protesters killed on Friday.
The United States, which has condemned the crackdown as barbaric, imposed
targeted sanctions against Assad this week and President Barack Obama said on
Thursday Syria must move away from "the path of murder and mass arrest."
"The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to
democracy," Obama said. "President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that
transition or get out of the way."
Despite strong words from the White House, the West has so far taken only small
steps to isolate Assad when compared to its bombing campaign against Libya's
leader Muammar Gaddafi, also accused of killing protesters.
The two-month uprising has posed the gravest challenge to Assad's rule. In
response, he has lifted a 48-year state of emergency and granted citizenship to
stateless Kurds, but also sent tanks to several cities to suppress the protests.
RALLYING
POINT
The main weekly Muslim prayers on Fridays are a rallying point for protesters
because they offer the only opportunity for large gatherings, and have seen the
worst death tolls in unrest.
Syrian authorities blame most of the violence on armed groups, backed by
Islamists and outside powers, who they say have killed more than 120 soldiers
and police. They have recently suggested they believe the protests have peaked.
Activists reported shooting in Banias and the Damascus suburb of Saqba on
Friday. Both were subjected to security sweeps earlier this month aimed at
crushing dissent.
A witness said security forces fired teargas on protesters in the city of Hama,
where around 20,000 people had gathered in two separate areas. Security forces
also used teargas to disperse around 1,000 protesters in the town of Tel just
north of Damascus, another witness said.
Since the protests first broke out in March, they have spread across southern
towns, coastal cities, Damascus suburbs and Homs. The two main cities of
Damascus and Aleppo have remained relatively quiet.
Western powers, fearing instability across the Middle East if Syria undergoes a
dramatic upheaval, at first made only muted criticisms of Assad's actions, but
then stepped up their condemnation and imposed sanctions on leading Syrian
figures.
The U.S. Treasury Department said it would freeze any assets owned by Syrian
officials that fell within U.S. jurisdiction, and bar U.S. individuals and
companies from dealing with them.
The sanctions also applied to Syria's vice president, prime minister, interior
and defense ministers, the head of military intelligence and director of the
political security branch, but it was unclear which assets, if any, would be
blocked.
An EU diplomat said the European Union was also likely to extend its sanctions
on Syria next week to include Assad.
Damascus condemned the sanctions, saying they targeted the Syrian people and
served Israel's interests.
"The sanctions have not and will not affect Syria's independent will," an
official source was quoted as saying on state television on Thursday.
(Writing by
Dominic Evans; Editing by Alison Williams)
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama has endorsed a long-standing Palestinian
demand that the borders of any future state of Palestine be based on the lines
prevailing before the 1967 war, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu headed for talks with Obama in
Washington on Friday saying a Palestinian state configured that way could leave
Israel "indefensible."
Obama's stress on 1967 borders went further than before in offering principles
for resolving the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians and put the United
States formally on record as endorsing the historical borders as a starting
point.
But he stopped short of presenting a formal U.S. peace plan or suggesting how
talks should resume.
Following are facts touching on the borders bequeathed by the 1948 war
surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.
* The 1967 borders echoed the "Green Line" of demarcation set out by a 1949
armistice between Israel and its Arab neighbors -- Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and
Syria -- ending the war over the establishment of the Jewish state. For 18
years, this line had divided Israel from other parts of former Mandate
Palestine, namely the West Bank, administered by Jordan, and Gaza, controlled by
Egypt. It had not become a formal international border owing to the lack of an
Israeli-Arab peace accord. Jordan also administered the eastern half of
Jerusalem including its Old City, holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians.
* In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel captured the West Bank, East
Jerusalem and Gaza. Israel kept the West Bank and Gaza under military occupation
and allowed settlements by Jews who regarded both territories and East Jerusalem
as part of biblical Eretz Israel (Land of Israel). It annexed East Jerusalem in
a move not recognized internationally.
* In 1993, the Palestinians who constitute the vast majority of the population
in the occupied territories signed interim peace deals with Israel giving them
limited self-rule. But the accords did not curb expansion of fortified Jewish
settlements, increasingly dimming prospects for the contiguous state sought by
Palestinians under any final peace agreement.
* In 2005, Israel's then-prime minister Ariel Sharon withdrew troops and
settlers from Gaza, which is now controlled by the Palestinian Islamist group
Hamas.
* The United States has in recent years backed Israel's view that any future
peace deal would require a re-assessment of borders and take into account
"realities on the ground," seen as a reference to Israeli settlements.
* Settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now number more than 500,000.
They can travel freely over the old Green Line to and from Israel, unlike
Palestinians, whose movements are restricted by Israeli army checkpoints and
bases that keep settlements sealed off from nearby Palestinian cities and towns.
* In the past decade Israel has built a network of razor-wire fences,
interspersed with towering walls, to separate it from the Palestinians. The
barrier's purpose is preventing entry by Palestinian militants, particularly
suicide bombers, from the West Bank. Palestinians say it is a unilateral land
grab since its course often strays from the Green Line to take in West Bank
settlements that Israel sees as inseparable from the Jewish state under any
future peace accord.
* The World Court deems the settlements illegal, a ruling Israel rejects. The
United States and European Union have viewed settlements as obstacles to peace
and urged their cessation.
* The Western-backed Palestinian Authority created under interim peace deals,
and now headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, wants a state covering all of the
pre-June 1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
* Hamas and other Islamist militants do not recognize the old Green Line for
purposes of defining borders with Israel, instead rejecting the Jewish state's
very existence and calling for a Palestinian state covering all of old Mandate
Palestine.
* In 2002, a Saudi-initiated Arab League proposal called for peace with Israel
based on an Israeli withdrawal to the June 1967 borders. Israel dismissed the
proposal.
* In a speech on Thursday, Obama said: "We believe the borders of Israel and
Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps" of land.
This had long been the private view in Washington. But Obama went further than
past U.S. presidents by explicitly stating it as U.S. policy rather than simply
acknowledging it as a Palestinian hope, and dropping any reference to the future
status of Israeli settlements.
* Netanyahu spurned Obama's call, saying: "The viability of a Palestinian state
cannot come at the expense of Israel's existence." Netanyahu said he expected
"to hear a reaffirmation from Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004"
-- an allusion to a letter by then-president George W. Bush suggesting the
Jewish state may keep big settlement blocs as part of any peace pact. "Those
commitments relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines,"
Netanyahu added.
* Israeli governments of all stripes have insisted that Jerusalem is the Jewish
state's eternal, indivisible capital.
(Writing by
Mark Heinrich; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Bill Trott)
Obama,
Netanyahu meet amid crisis in U.S.-Israel ties
WASHINGTON
| Fri May 20, 2011
1:40pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeffrey Heller and Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
Friday as a new U.S. push for Middle East peace opened one of the deepest
divides in years in relations between the United States and close ally Israel.
Netanyahu arrived at the White House a day after Obama endorsed a long-standing
Palestinian demand on the borders of its future state, drawing an angry response
from Israel that he was out of the touch with the reality of the long-running
conflict.
Obama embraced the Palestinian view that the state they seek in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza Strip should largely be drawn along lines that existed before
the 1967 war in which Israel captured those territories and East Jerusalem.
The right-wing Netanyahu, who has had strained relations with Obama, reacted by
saying that this could leave Israel with borders that were "indefensible."
The brewing crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations dimmed even further the prospect
for resuming peace talks that collapsed late last year when Palestinians walked
away in a dispute over Israeli settlement building in the West Bank.
"There is a feeling that Washington does not understand the reality, doesn't
understand what we face," an official on board the plane taking Netanyahu to
Washington told reporters.
Asked why he gave such a strong rebuttal to Obama's remarks in a policy speech
on Middle East political upheaval, Netanyahu told reporters on board his plane:
"There are things that can't be swept under the carpet."
Israel also has underlined its position by announcing the approval of plans to
build 1,550 housing units in two Jewish settlements on annexed West Bank land
around Jerusalem.
Obama's first outright declaration of his stance on the contested issue of
borders could help ease doubts in the Arab world about his commitment to acting
as an even-handed broker.
But in line with Netanyahu's stance, Obama voiced opposition to a Palestinian
plan to seek U.N. recognition of statehood in September in the absence of
renewed peace talks.
The Democratic president quickly came under fire from Republican critics, who
accused him of betraying Israel, the closest U.S. ally in the region. Pushing
Netanyahu risks alienating the Jewish state's base of support among the U.S.
public and in Congress as Obama seeks re-election in 2012.
ARAB DOUBTS
Obama, in his speech on Thursday, laid down his clearest markers yet on the
compromises he believes Israel and the Palestinians must make to resolve a
conflict that has long been seen as source of Middle East tension.
But he did not present a formal U.S. peace plan or any timetable for a deal he
had once promised to clinch by September.
A round of talks brokered by Washington at Obama's initiative collapsed last
year when Netanyahu refused to extend a moratorium on Jewish settlement building
in the occupied West Bank and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to
carry on negotiations.
Israeli officials appeared especially taken aback by Obama's blunt language,
including criticism of "settlement activity" and continued occupation of Arab
lands.
"The viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of Israel's
existence," Netanyahu said earlier.
He said he expected to hear "a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S.
commitments made to Israel in 2004" -- an allusion to a letter by then-president
George W. Bush suggesting the Jewish state may keep big settlement blocs under a
peace pact.
Despite the tensions, Obama carved out three hours for Netanyahu on Friday,
including a working lunch.
HISTORY OF
TENSION
In March last year, Israel angered Washington when an announcement of plans to
build hundreds of dwellings in a settlement was made during a visit by Vice
President Joe Biden.
Shortly afterward, Netanyahu was left cooling his heels while Obama went to the
White House residence for dinner with his family, widely seen in Israel as a
snub.
In Thursday's speech, Obama said: "We believe the borders of Israel and
Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps" of land.
While this has long been the private view in Washington, Obama went further than
U.S. officials have gone in the recent past, when they described such a solution
as a Palestinian aspiration but did not embrace it as their own.
Agreed swaps would allow Israel to keep settlements in the West Bank in return
for giving the Palestinians other land.
Some Israeli commentators said Netanyahu might have hinted at some room for
maneuver on the issue in a speech to parliament, the Knesset, on Monday.
They said his insistence that Israel must retain "the settlement blocs," the
first time he has used that phrase, could suggest a willingness to evacuate
small, isolated settlements.
To reassure Israelis, Obama recommitted to Israel's security and said any future
Palestinian state must be "non-militarized," something Netanyahu has demanded.
But he warned Israel: "The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be
fulfilled with permanent occupation."
Obama also delivered messages that will be hard for the Palestinians to swallow,
suggesting that they have a lot of explaining to do about a reconciliation deal
with Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza, which the United States regards
as a terrorist group.
Abbas welcomed Obama's efforts to renew negotiations, and made plans to convene
an "emergency" session of Palestinian and Arab officials to weigh further steps,
a senior aide said.
But he did not comment on Obama's firm rejection of a Palestinian drive to seek
recognition of their statehood at the annual meeting of the U.N. General
Assembly in September.
(Additional
reporting by Jeffrey Heller, Allyn Fisher-Ilan,
Ori Lewis and Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Bill Trott)
Analysis: Obama struggles to be heard in Arab ferment
BEIRUT |
Fri May 20, 2011
12:41pm EDT
Reuters
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
BEIRUT
(Reuters) - In an Arab world engulfed in political tumult and, in many cases,
economic distress, U.S. President Barack Obama's words can seem lofty, but limp.
"By the time we found (Osama) bin Laden, al Qaeda's agenda had come to be seen
by the vast majority of the region as a dead end, and the people of the Middle
East and North Africa had taken their future into their own hands," Obama
declared.
Many Arabs might feel a U.S. agenda that for decades took little account of
their own aspirations was also a cul de sac.
The United States, as Obama acknowledged in his speech on the Middle East and
North Africa, did not initiate the popular unrest sweeping the region, and its
response has wavered.
The fall of entrenched leaders in Egypt and Tunisia this year, and challenges to
others in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain, have upset a status quo in which
perceived U.S. national interests often outweighed declared democratic ideals.
Obama delivered a ringing pro-democracy speech in Cairo two years ago, but then
lost credibility with many Arabs by continuing to back their autocratic rulers,
while pursuing longstanding U.S. efforts to protect Israel, thwart Iran's
nuclear drive, combat terrorism and secure oil supplies.
Now he wants to get ahead of the curve -- but perhaps not too far, Thursday's
carefully calibrated address suggests.
The United States, he promised, would uphold its familiar policies, "with the
firm belief that America's interests are not hostile to people's hopes," but
would also change tack by speaking to "the broader aspirations of ordinary
people."
Such words should be music to the ears of many Arabs desperate to get rid of
rulers who have denied them freedom and dignity, while enriching themselves and
their cronies.
Yet past experience of U.S. policy in the Middle East, along with Obama's
difficulties in wrenching it into new directions, has nurtured skepticism that
things will change now.
"Obama says U.S. core interests align with Arab hopes. Well, why didn't they
align for five decades?" tweeted Shadi Hamid, director of the Brookings Doha
Center in Qatar.
The turmoil of the "Arab spring," which threatens to unseat America's friends
and foes alike, has exposed inconsistencies not just in the policies of the
United States and its European allies, but also those of Iran and any number of
Arab countries.
CHARGES OF
HYPOCRISY
Obama, while berating Iran's intolerance of dissent at home, sought to stifle
charges of hypocrisy by acknowledging that U.S. allies such as Yemen and Bahrain
had also repressed protesters.
He called on Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, once viewed as an important
ally against al Qaeda, to transfer power, but urged the rulers of Bahrain, home
to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, only to free jailed opposition leaders and hold a
dialogue.
And he skipped any mention of oil giant Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy which
outlaws all public dissent and which sent troops to help crush the pro-democracy
movement in Bahrain.
On Syria, Obama suggested that President Bashar al-Assad, who has used tanks,
gunfire and mass arrests to smash opponents of his 11-year rule, could yet lead
a "transition to democracy."
This looks implausible. Obama may further harden his line on Assad after
imposing sanctions on him and his aides this week. His hesitancy to demand the
Syrian leader's exit may reflect the worries of U.S. allies nearby about chaos
if Assad goes.
Jon Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, said Syria's neighbors -- which include Israel, Jordan, Lebanon,
Iraq and Turkey -- wanted to see "evolution rather than revolution" there,
unlike in Libya, scene of a NATO military intervention. "The neighbors of Libya
would very much like to see Muammar Gaddafi gone," he said.
Arabs, always quick to pounce on double standards, at least the Western variety,
will also question Obama's stated sympathy for Arabs who seek freedom, recalling
decades of U.S. acquiescence in Israel's grip on Palestinians under occupation.
Obama's failure to make Israel comply with his earlier demand for a halt to West
Bank settlement building perhaps inflicted the worst damage to his credibility
in Arab eyes.
Few believe Obama has the power to broker peace, even if he has now stated
openly the principle underpinning years of U.S. diplomacy -- that an
Israeli-Palestinian deal must be based on the borders prior to the 1967 war,
with agreed land swaps.
More broadly, the spontaneous Arab revolts and the confusion they appear to have
created in Washington have pointed up the limits to the power of America, trying
to extricate its military from Iraq, and still painfully embroiled in
Afghanistan.
"I don't get why anyone is listening to Obama's speech," Amira Khalil, a
23-year-old graduate of the American University in Cairo, wrote on Facebook.
"It's obvious that this one man alone has no control or significance in the
Middle East."
(Additional
reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington,
Dina Zayed in Cairo and Andrew Hammond in Dubai; Editing in Andrew Heavens)
WASHINGTON
| Fri May 20, 2011
12:15pm EDT
Reuters
By Patricia Zengerle
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on
Thursday to lead a transition to democracy or step aside, but stopped short of
demanding his departure over a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
"The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to
democracy. President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get
out of the way," Obama said in a speech spelling out U.S. policy toward the
rapidly changing Middle East and North Africa.
After joining a NATO military intervention to stop Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi's forces from attacking civilians seeking his overthrow, Obama has been
under pressure to do more about Syria. But his administration does not want to
risk getting the United States, already fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
into another war in a Muslim country.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there was no pressure in the
international community to take more aggressive steps in Syria.
"There's no appetite for that. ... There's no willingness. We haven't had any of
the kind of pressure that we saw building from our European NATO allies, from
the Arab League and others, to do what has been done in Libya," Clinton said in
a CBS News interview.
Asked why Obama would not say Assad needs to go, Clinton responded: "Assad has
said a lot of things that you didn't hear from other leaders in the region about
the kind of changes he would like to see. That may all be out the window, or he
may have one last chance."
The United States, and Syria's neighbors, which include Israel, Iraq and Turkey,
are also extremely wary of the chaos that could ensue if there is not a peaceful
transition of power in the country of 23 million.
Washington took one step on Wednesday by moving to freeze U.S. assets of Assad
and top aides, the first time the Obama administration had targeted Assad
personally with sanctions.
'THE PATH
OF MURDER'
Obama's speech on Thursday pushed the response further and raised the question
of whether the West eventually would seek Assad's overthrow.
"The Syrian regime has chosen the path of murder and the mass arrests of its
citizens," Obama said, hailing popular unrest sweeping the Middle East and North
Africa as a "historic opportunity" to deepen U.S. ties to the broader region and
ease suspicions of its policies.
Obama said Syria has followed the lead of its ally, the U.S. antagonist Iran,
and sought Tehran's assistance "in the tactics of suppression." But he indicated
Washington was still willing to work with Assad if he would talk to his
political opponents.
"We (Washington) have many allies among Syria's neighbors and they fear the
chaos that would follow the fall of Bashar al-Assad and they would like to see
evolution rather than revolution," said Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
By contrast, "the neighbors of Libya would very much like to see Muammar Gaddafi
gone," he added.
Syrian activists say at least 700 civilians have been killed in two months of
clashes between government forces and protesters seeking to end Assad's 11-year
rule, which followed decades of iron-fisted control by his father.
Syrian authorities say the total is far lower, and that dozens of security
forces have also been killed. But the Assad family's control of the country
appears shakier than it has been in 30 years.
Obama listed demands for Damascus, saying it must stop shooting demonstrators
and allow peaceful protests; release political prisoners and stop unjust
arrests; allow human rights monitors access to cities that have seen protests
and violence; and start a "serious dialogue" leading toward a democratic
transition.
"Otherwise, President Assad and his regime will continue to be challenged from
within and will continue to be isolated abroad," he said.
Obama's administration had sought to increase U.S. engagement with Damascus, in
hopes that it could entice Syria away from Iran's sphere of influence.
South
African photographer missing in Libya believed dead
LONDON/JOHANNESBURG | Fri May 20, 2011
9:39am EDT
Reuters
By Tim Castle and Marius Bosch
LONDON/JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African freelance photographer missing
in Libya since April is believed dead after being shot in the stomach and
abandoned in the desert by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, his family said
Friday.
Anton Hammerl, 41, who also had Austrian nationality and lived in London, was
hit in the stomach after coming under fire on April 5, family friend Bronwyn
Friedlander said in London.
South Africa and Austria criticized Gaddafi's government on Friday with Pretoria
saying Libya had misled it about Hammerl and the ruling ANC also accused Tripoli
of dishonesty.
Two American journalists and a Spanish photographer who were with Hammerl were
taken captive by forces loyal to the Libyan leader. They could not report what
had happened until their release in Tripoli Wednesday.
According to the released journalists, Hammerl was left behind bleeding while
they were taken away by Gaddafi forces, Friedlander said.
"His injuries were such that he could not have survived without medical
attention," she said.
"Anton was shot by Gaddafi's forces in an extremely remote location in the
Libyan desert," the Hammerl family said in a statement on Facebook.
The American reporters, James Foley and Clare Gillis, spoke by telephone with
Hammerl's wife Penny Sukhraj in London late on Thursday.
The attack took place on the outskirts of the eastern oil town of Brega when the
journalists were fired on by pro-Gaddafi troops in two Libyan military trucks,
Foley and Gillis said in an interview published on the GlobalPost website.
BRUTAL
ACTION
Austria's Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said in a statement Libya failed
to provide any helpful information despite repeated requests.
"This brutal action by Gaddafi's soldiers is a shocking example of the dangers
that journalists in particular face in conflict situations. Freedom of the press
is especially important in just these situations," Spindelegger said.
South African President Jacob Zuma has been criticized for not bringing up the
issue of Hammerl with Gaddafi on a visit to Tripoli last month.
South Africa's foreign ministry, which said this month it had proof Hammerl was
still alive, said Friday the Libyan government had misled it about the
photographer.
"We kept getting reassured at the highest level that he was alive until his
colleagues were released and shared the information...," International Relations
Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane told reporters Friday.
A senior ministry official who asked not to be named said: "She accused them of
lying."
South Africa's ANC said it was incensed at the use of deadly force against
civilians and the media.
"We are gravely incensed by the senseless and indiscriminate use of deadly force
against innocent civilians and members of the media by the Libyan government ...
We are particularly disappointed by the dishonesty of the Libyan government,
which assured our government that our citizen was alive and in custody," the ANC
said in a statement.
Hammerl, who had three young children, had lived in Britain for five years. His
family had hoped he was still alive in captivity after he went missing in April,
and had run a campaign for his release.
"From the moment Anton disappeared in Libya we have lived in hope as the Libyan
officials assured us that they had Anton," his family said in a statement.
"It is intolerably cruel that Gaddafi loyalists have known Anton's fate all
along and chose to cover it up."
Last month two photojournalists -- Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tim Hetherington
and Getty photographer Chris Hondros -- were killed after coming under fire in
the besieged Libyan town of Misrata.
(Additional
reporting by Michael Shields in Vienna; Editing by Maria Golovnina)
BENGHAZI,
Libya — In recent days, after weeks of delays and closed-door meetings, rebel
leaders here have announced a slate of new appointments, including a defense
chief and a minister for reconstruction and infrastructure. They have added
members to a national council, to represent areas in southern, central and
western Libya, all in an effort to bolster the revolution, better represent the
country as a whole and — in the event that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi bolts — make
civil war unlikely, the rebel leaders explained.
But one group has been lost in the reshuffling — women. While the fledgling
rebel government has more than doubled in size, women now occupy just 2 of the
40 or so positions in the leadership. A woman had been expected to be named to
be education minister, but after a number of candidates were passed over or
refused the job, a man is now expected to take over the ministry.
For a revolutionary movement that was started by women — the female relatives of
men killed in one of Colonel Qaddafi’s jails — their exclusion at the highest
levels is alienating longtime democracy activists and has added to concerns
about decision-making in the three-month-old movement, which seems to grow more
inscrutable by the day.
“We are having a problem now,” said Hana el-Gallal, a prominent human rights
lawyer who was said to be a candidate for the education position. “In the old
regime we didn’t have any voice in the economic and political sector. Now, in
these two sectors we don’t have any presence.”
Enas Eldrasy, a 23-year-old radiation therapist, recently quit her job working
for the national council, in part because she said she was relegated to busy
work. “When the revolution started, women had a big role,” she said. “Now, it’s
dissolved, it’s disappeared. I don’t know why.”
Salwa Bugaighis, a lawyer who took an early leading role in the revolution,
said: “We want more. I think it’s important to be in the place where they make
the decisions.”
Other women say they are not overly concerned about the lack of women in
leadership roles, saying that the governing structures are temporary and reflect
the rush to keep the rebel areas from descending into chaos.
“I’m not at all worried,” said Molly Tarhuni, an independent analyst in Benghazi
who is studying the rebel movement.
“This is so temporary and transitional. I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s
microcosmic of what will happen in the future. I think women are going to play
an immense role.”
Amina Megheirbi, who runs a group called Tawasul that provides training and
other services for young people and women, said: “We want people who are
qualified. The revolution was led by women. I’m sure we will have an important
role.”
Libyan women already face growing dangers. Public health officials say they have
received evidence that scores of women were raped by soldiers in Colonel
Qaddafi’s forces, and though several organizations are mobilizing teams to help
the rape victims, the effort remains fractured and without central leadership.
The war is also leading to increased incidents of domestic violence, doctors
say.
Some women also admitted to worries that progress they had made in recent
decades could be undone. Despite Colonel Qaddafi’s violent suppression of
political dissent, women made strides under his rule, entering secondary schools
and universities in large numbers. Many became doctors, lawyers and judges, and
several women also held senior government positions.
Their concerns have spurred calls for a greater voice. At a conference in
Benghazi this week, where speakers discussed the role of women in the
revolution, several people mentioned the example of Eman al-Obeidy, who burst
into a hotel full of journalists in March to tell her story of being raped by
Qaddafi militiamen. “We will not be silent,” one speaker said. But most of the
talk at the conference revolved around the more pressing issues of the war
against Colonel Qaddafi and the need to support the men fighting on the front
lines. For mothers, there was advice: don’t raise another dictator.
One of the speakers, Muna Sahli, a university professor, said the conference,
which was aimed at housewives, was intended to lay the base for democracy in a
society that had been closed and monitored by the government for decades. “We
are preparing women, to accept the other, to raise children, to understand their
role in a democratic society,” she said. “Lots of women are still at home.
Political work is not confined to taking a position in the country.”
And she and others said that despite setbacks, women — including gynecologists,
economists and judges — were still driving the revolution. “There is such a
willingness to push to the forefront, by a groundswell of female activists
getting things done,” Ms. Tarhuni said. The majority of active initiatives are
being done by women.”
Some have blamed the realities of war in a conservative society for the lack of
female leaders. Fawzia Bariun, a professor of Arabic at the University of
Michigan who declined the education post because she could not leave her family
and job in the United States, said that she and others asked Mustapha Abdul
Jalil, the leader of the national council, why women were not better
represented. They were told that men in smaller, conservative areas of the
country were unlikely to send women to Benghazi by themselves. “From one side I
look at it as dealing with reality,” said Dr. Bariun. “From another side I see
that women will have to request more representatives.” As the national council
continues to add permanent members, several people said that more women would be
among them.
Still, the process of selecting representatives remains invisible to the public.
The daily council meetings are private, and there is no public record of the
proceedings.
Ms. Gallal, the human rights lawyer, who said she now planned to start a women’s
rights group, said she “had no idea” how decisions about executive appointments
were made. Women, she said, would have to carve out positions by themselves.
“It’s time for us to be presented more equally,” she said. “The person who
leaves a vacuum pays a price.”
WASHINGTON
| Thu May 19, 2011
4:11pm EDT
Reuters
By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Thursday threw his weight behind the
tumultuous drive for democratic change in the Arab world and presented his most
detailed vision yet on the path to elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Obama, in his much-anticipated "Arab spring" speech, hailed popular unrest
sweeping the Middle East as a "historic opportunity" and said promoting reform
was his administration's top priority for a region caught up in unprecedented
upheaval.
He also ratcheted up pressure on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, saying for the
first time that he must stop a brutal crackdown or "get out of the way," and
prodded U.S. allies Yemen and Bahrain as well for democratic transformation.
Obama's bid to reset ties with a skeptical Arab world was aimed at countering
criticism over an uneven response to the region's uprisings that threaten both
U.S. friends and foes and his failure to advance Israeli-Palestinian
peacemaking.
His blunt language toward U.S. ally Israel about the need to find an end to its
occupation of Arab land could complicate his talks on Friday with Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while easing Arab doubts of his commitment to
even-handed U.S. mediation.
"The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent
occupation," Obama told an audience of U.S. and foreign diplomats at the State
Department in Washington.
Most of Obama's speech focused on the unrest convulsing the Arab world, though
he did not abandon his approach of balancing support for democratic aspirations
with a desire to preserve longtime partnerships seen as crucial to fighting al
Qaeda, containing Iran and securing vital oil supplies.
"The people have risen up to demand their basic human rights. Two leaders have
stepped aside. More may follow," he said.
Seizing on a decades-old conflict long seen as a key catalyst of Middle East
tensions, Obama went further than he has before in offering principles for
resolving a stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians.
But he stopped short of presenting a formal U.S. peace plan -- an omission that
could disappoint many in the Arab world -- after having failed to make progress
on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office in 2009.
Among the parameters he laid down was that any agreement creating a state of
Palestine must be based on borders that existed before Israel captured the West
Bank in a 1967 Arab-Israel war but "with mutually agreed swaps" of land.
Though not a U.S. policy shift in itself, Obama's insistence on that point --
plus his criticism of continued Israeli "settlement activity" -- sends a message
to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that that Washington expects the
Jewish state to make concessions.
Obama will host Netanyahu, who has had strained relations with the U.S.
president, at the White House on Friday, with the prospects for progress on
peace moves considered dim.
COMMITMENT
TO ISRAEL
Obama also reaffirmed an unshakable commitment to Israel's security and
condemned what he called "symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United
Nations," referring to the Palestinians plan to seek General Assembly
recognition for statehood in September.
But he acknowledged that a new reconciliation deal between the Palestinian
Authority and the Islamist group Hamas raised "legitimate questions" for Israel,
which has condemned the accord as blocking any new peace talks.
"I recognize how hard this will be. Suspicion and hostility has been passed on
for generations, and at times it has hardened," Obama said. "But I'm convinced
that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rather look to the future
than be trapped in the past."
Struggling to regain the initiative in a week of intense Middle East diplomacy,
Obama seized an opportunity to reach out to the Arab world following the death
of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Navy SEAL commandos.
"We have dealt al Qaeda a huge blow by killing its leader," Obama said. "Bin
Laden was not a martyr, he was a mass murderer ... Bin Laden and his murderous
vision won some adherents but even before his death al Qaeda was losing its
struggle for relevance."
Seeking to back democratic reform with economic incentives, Obama announced
billions of dollars in aid for Egypt and Tunisia to bolster their political
transitions after revolts toppled autocratic leaders.
Obama's speech was his first major attempt to put the anti-government protests
that have swept the Middle East in the context of U.S. national interests.
"Their voices tell us that change cannot be denied," Obama said.
He has scrambled to keep pace with still-unfolding events that have ousted
long-time leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, threatened those in Yemen and Bahrain
and engulfed Libya in civil war where the United States and other powers
unleashed a bombing campaign.
(Additional
reporting by Jeff Mason, Steve Holland and Andrew Quinn;
editing by Laura MacInnis and Mohammad Zargham)
WASHNGTON/AMMAN | Wed May 18, 2011
1:45pm EDT
Reuters
By Arshad Mohammed and Khaled Yacoub Oweis
WASHNGTON/AMMAN (Reuters) - Washington imposed sanctions on Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad for human rights abuses on Wednesday in a dramatic escalation of
pressure on Syria to cease its brutal crackdown on protesters.
Assad had been partly rehabilitated in the West over the last three years but
Western powers have condemned his use of force to quell protests against his 11
years in power.
Targeting Assad personally with sanctions, which the United States and European
Union have so far avoided, is a significant slap at Damascus and raises
questions about whether Washington and the West may ultimately seek Assad's
removal from power.
Human rights groups say at least 700 civilians have been killed in two months of
clashes between government forces and protesters seeking an end of Assad's rule.
The move, announced by the Treasury Department, freezes any assets of the Syrian
officials that are in the United States or otherwise fall within U.S.
jurisdiction and it generally bars U.S. individuals and companies from dealing
with them.
In addition to Assad, it said the sanctions would target Vice President Farouq
al-Shara, Prime Minister Adel Safar, Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim
al-Shaar, Defense Minister Ali Habib as well as Abdul Fatah Qudsiya, the head of
Syrian military intelligence, and Mohammed Dib Zaitoun, director of the
political security directorate.
Switzerland said on Wednesday it would impose travel bans on 13 top Syrian
officials -- not including Assad himself -- and freeze any of their assets held
in Swiss banks, matching a decision by the European Union last week.
Syrian authorities blame most of the violence on armed groups backed by
Islamists and outside powers, saying they have also killed more than 120
soldiers and police.
TANKS SHELL
SYRIAN TOWN FOR 4TH DAY
In Syria, tanks shelled a border town for the fourth day on Wednesday in the
latest targeted military campaign to crush demonstrations.
Troops went into Tel Kelakh on Saturday, a day after a demonstration there
demanded "the overthrow of the regime," the slogan of revolutions that toppled
Arab leaders in Egypt and Tunisia and challenged others across the Middle East.
"We're still without water, electricity or communications," a resident of Tel
Kelakh said, speaking by satellite phone.
He said the army was storming houses and making arrests, but withdrawing from
neighborhoods after the raids. In a sign that the army was coming under fire in
the town, he said some families "are resisting, preferring death to
humiliation."
A witness on the Lebanese side of the border said heavy gunfire could be heard
from Tel Kelakh.
Assad told a delegation from the Damascus district of Midan that security forces
had made mistakes handling the protests, al Watan newspaper said on Wednesday.
One delegate said Assad had told them that 4,000 police would receive training
"to prevent these excesses" being repeated, it said.
Syria has barred most international media from operating in the country, making
it hard to verify reports from activists and officials.
Prominent human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouna said the army and security forces
have killed at least 27 civilians since the army moved into Tel Kelakh.
The state news agency SANA quoted a military source saying eight soldiers had
been killed on Tuesday in Tel Kelakh and in the southern rural Deraa province
where protests first broke out exactly two months ago.
It said five of the dead were killed when an "armed terrorist group" fired on a
security forces patrol near Tel Kelakh, which is close to Lebanon's northern
border.
The Tel Kelakh resident said artillery and heavy machinegun fire hit the main
road leading to Lebanon overnight, as well as the Abraj neighborhood inhabited
by minority Turkmen and Kurds.
"Most residents of Tel Kelakh have fled. Some remaining people tried to escape
to Lebanon yesterday but the shelling has been too heavy," the resident said.
"Abraj residents have issued a call to (Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip) Erdogan
to help them. But it is like the drowning hanging on to a straw."
(Additional
reporting by Andrew Quinn in Washington, Nazih Siddiq in Wadi Khaled, Lebanon;
writing by Yara Bayoumy in Beirut; Editing by Maria Golovnina)
Strauss-Kahn case raises issue of diplomat abuse in U.S.
ATLANTA |
Wed May 18, 2011
12:49pm EDT
Reuters
By Brian Grow
ATLANTA
(Reuters) - The case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an extreme example of
alleged sexual assault by an elite member of the international community. But
the charges against him also shine a light on how diplomats and international
officials have been accused of abusing maids or nannies in the United States,
and have largely escaped prosecution.
Foreign diplomats have been the subject of at least 11 civil lawsuits and one
criminal prosecution related to abuse of domestic workers in the last five
years, according to a Reuters review of U.S. federal court records. The
allegations range from slave-like work conditions to rape, and the vast majority
of the diplomats in these cases avoided prison terms and financial penalties.
Strauss-Kahn, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, was
charged on Sunday with sexually assaulting a hotel maid. He does not have full
diplomatic immunity, but IMF rules grant him immunity limited to acts performed
in his "official capacity." He was denied bail Monday and sent to jail in New
York. He did not enter a plea, and his lawyer said he intends to plead not
guilty.
A common theme in many of the incidents involving alleged abuse of maids and
nannies is the elevated legal status of the foreign officials, which some
experts say can lead to an improper sense of superiority and make them believe
they are unaccountable. Also, most of the alleged victims come from countries
where women have few rights, making them easy prey. "In short, diplomatic
immunity means diplomatic impunity," says Mark Lagon, former head of the U.S.
State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Even when judges in the United States have ruled against diplomats, the
officials have recourse to another option most other defendants do not: They can
simply leave the country.
And in many cases, despite pleas from the State Department for action,
government officials in the diplomats' home countries do not pursue sanctions.
"There's no accountability," said Janie Chuang, an assistant professor at the
Washington College of Law at American University in Washington. "You can totally
get away with it."
The IMF said its immunity provisions are not applicable in Strauss-Kahn's case
because he was visiting New York on personal business. Had he been able to leave
the United States and fly to his native France, his fate likely would have
turned on a different issue -- extradition. The two countries do not have an
extradition treaty, and there is some troubled recent history between the United
States and France.
"Two words: Roman Polanski," said Martina Vandenberg, a partner with law firm
Jenner & Block in Washington and an expert in abuse cases involving foreign
diplomats. She was referring to Polish-French film director Roman Polanski, who
has avoided prosecution in the United States for more than 20 years on charges
of having sex with a minor.
FORESHADOWING STRAUSS-KAHN
In July, 2008, a lawsuit was filed against an attache in the Embassy of Kuwait,
Brig. Gen. Ahmed Al Naser, and his family, parts of which foreshadowed the
allegations against Strauss-Kahn. Their former maid, Regina Leo, an Indian
immigrant, alleged that she was forced to work as much as 18 hours per day and
was sexually abused. According to court documents, on one occasion in 2005, Leo
said that Al Naser "forcibly embraced and pinned (Leo), twisting her arm to
control her, and then began kissing and fondling her ... Despite (Leo's)
resistance, (Al Naser) forced himself upon her and raped her."
Al Naser did not respond to the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington,
and is believed to have left the United States. He could not be reached, and a
spokesman for the Embassy of Kuwait declined to comment, citing the ongoing
litigation.
Another case, filed in April 2007 by a Tanzanian maid against Alan Mzengi, a
minister-counselor at the Tanzanian Embassy, and his wife, Stella, helped spark
an inquiry into alleged abuse by foreign diplomats in the United States. A July,
2008, study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 42 employees
of foreign diplomats alleged they had been abused. The actual number was
probably higher, the GAO found, because domestic workers are often fearful of
reporting abuse.
The maid in the Tanzanian case, Zipora Mazengo, alleged that the Mzengis held
her as "a virtual prisoner in their residence, stripping her of her passport,
refusing to permit her to leave the house unaccompanied." According to the suit,
which was filed in federal court in Washington, they paid her nothing for four
years and forced her to work in their catering business. She claimed she escaped
after making a desperate plea for help to a customer of the catering business,
who provided cab fare.
A U.S. magistrate judge awarded Mazengo more than $1 million in back pay and
attorneys' fees. Alan Mzengi moved to cancel the award, arguing "it was not
necessary to respond because he was a diplomat" with immunity under the Vienna
Convention. In April 2008, a federal judge denied the motion in part, finding
that the Mzengis' catering business was exempt from diplomatic immunity. But
instead of paying the award, the Mzengis left the country.
A December 2009 State Department cable made available by Wiki Leaks, and
provided to Reuters by a third party, shows the U.S. government has asked the
Tanzanian government to investigate the case. "While payment of the lost wages
to Ms. Mazengo is our first priority, we also hope that any diplomat who has
treated his domestic staff in such an abusive manner would face appropriate
sanction upon his return home," the cable said. In an e-mail, a State Department
official said discussions with the Tanzanian government are ongoing. The
Tanzanian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
The State Department has said it plans to get tough on alleged abuse of domestic
workers by foreign diplomats. "Whether they're diplomats or national emissaries
of whatever kind, we all must be accountable for the treatment of the people
that we employ," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a speech on February
1 to the Interagency Taskforce to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
EXEMPTION
FROM IMMUNITY
The Vienna Convention, ratified by the United States in 1972, contains an
exemption from immunity for "action relating to any professional or commercial
activity exercised by the diplomatic agent in the receiving State outside his
official functions." But that exemption did not protect Araceli Montuya, a
former maid in the household of Lebanese Ambassador Antoine Chedid. On April 26,
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington threw out a case in which
Montuya alleged that Chedid and his wife underpaid and verbally abused her. The
judge's decision relied, in part, on a State Department filing in a separate
case, which found that when diplomats hire domestic workers, "they are not
engaging in 'commercial activity' as that term is used in the Diplomatic
Relations Convention."
In a rare criminal case that began as an FBI investigation into alleged domestic
worker abuse, a World Bank economist from Tanzania -- who, like Strauss-Kahn,
qualifies for only limited immunity related to official duties -- pleaded guilty
in March, 2010, to two counts of making false statements. The economist, Anne
Margreth Bakilana, hired a Tanzanian woman, Sophia Kiwanuka, to work in her home
in Falls Church, Virginia, and improperly withheld Kiwanuka's wages and
threatened to send her back to Tanzania, according to court records. Unaware
that she had been taped by Kiwanuka at the request of the FBI, Bakilana then
lied to federal investigators about her statements. She was sentenced to two
years probation and fined $9,400. A civil case is ongoing in federal court in
Washington. Jonathan Simms, an attorney for Bakilana, said he believed she was
not longer in the United States. A World Bank spokesperson did not respond to a
request for comment.
Domestic workers continue to allege abuse by foreign diplomats. On March 25,
four former cooks and housekeepers for Essa Mohammed Al Manai, a senior Qatari
diplomat, filed a civil lawsuit alleging they were paid less than 70 cents per
hour and "forced to work around the clock" at Al Manai's six-bedroom home in
Bethesda, Maryland. The suit also claimed that Al Manai sexually assaulted one
of the women.
Al Manai could not be reached for comment, and the Embassy of Qatar did not
respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by
Brian Grow; Editing by Amy Stevens and Eddie Evans)
BEIRUT |
Wed May 18, 2011
8:32am EDT
Reuters
By Mariam Karouny
BEIRUT
(Reuters) - Syria's minority Christians are watching the protests sweeping their
country with trepidation, fearing their religious freedom could be threatened if
President Bashar al-Assad's autocratic but secular rule is overthrown.
Sunni Muslims form a majority in Syria, but under four decades of rule by
Assad's minority Alawites the country's varied religious groups have enjoyed the
right to practice their faith.
Calls for Muslim prayers ring out alongside church bells in Damascus, where the
apostle Paul started his ministry and Christians have worshipped for two
millennia.
But for many Syrian Christians, the flight of their brethren from sectarian
conflict in neighboring Iraq and recent attacks on Christians in Egypt have
highlighted the dangers they fear they will face if Assad succumbs to the wave
of uprisings sweeping the Arab world.
"Definitely the Christians in Syria support Bashar al-Assad. They hope that this
storm will not spread," Yohana Ibrahim, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of
Aleppo, told Reuters.
Protests erupted in Syria two months ago, triggered by anger and frustration at
widespread corruption and lack of freedom in the country ruled with an iron fist
by the Assad family for nearly half a century.
Although some Christians may be participating in the protests, church
institutions have not supported them.
Christians contacted by Reuters said they backed calls for reform but not the
demands for "regime change," which they said could fragment Syria and give the
upper hand possibly to Islamist groups that would deny them religious freedom.
"The Christians in Syria -- whether Orthodox, Armenians, Maronites, Anglicans,
Assyrians or Catholics -- consider themselves first (Syrian) citizens, the sons
of the land," said Habib Afram, president of the Syriac League.
"The general atmosphere from the churches' positions and from Christian figures
is fixed on stability and security because religious freedom is absolutely
guaranteed in Syria," he said.
"RULED BY
THE MILITARY OR THE TURBAN"
Syria's Christian community is believed to make up around six percent of the
population, down from 10 percent at the middle of the last century.
Christians have equal rights -- and the same restriction on political freedom --
as Muslims, apart from a constitutional stipulation that the president must be a
Muslim.
"Our ethnicity or language may not be recognized and we are not allowed to form
a party, but this is the case of all Syrians," a church source said, adding that
the choice for minorities in the Middle East was "to be ruled by the military or
the turban of a cleric."
In a region where minorities face growing challenges, and where tensions between
Sunni Muslims and Shi'ite Muslims are on the rise, Syria still feels like a
refuge to many Christians.
Iraqi Christians have frequently been targeted in violence which followed the
U.S. invasion in 2003. Fifty two people were killed in an assault on a Baghdad
cathedral last October.
In Egypt, where a popular uprising overthrew strongman Hosni Mubarak in
February, 12 people died in a Cairo suburb last week in fighting sparked by
rumors that Christians had abducted a woman who converted to Islam.
"The change that came at the hand of the American army in Iraq did not protect
the Christians and the change that came from the people in Egypt could not
protect the Christians," the source said.
"Minorities are paying the price in these revolutions."
Some Christians detect the same sectarianism in chants at recent Syrian
protests.
Samer Lahham, who runs ecumenical relations at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate
in Damascus, said the fact that protests have broken out mainly after weekly
Muslim prayers -- which offer a rare chance for Syrians to gather legally -- had
lent a "religious identity" to the demonstrations.
"Christians cannot be part of such action, although they support tangible
reformations at different levels, slowly but steadily," he said. "They fear the
hidden plan is to transform Syria into a religious system governed by those
who... do not have the culture of accepting the other," said Lahham.
Assad's father, Hafez, crushed an armed uprising by Islamists belonging to the
Muslim Brotherhood group in the early 1980s. Islamic influence has spread in
society since then, as elsewhere in the Middle East, with the government seeking
to co-opt moderate Muslim leaders.
Ibrahim said that the churches are not encouraging people to take part in
demonstrations nor to be involved in acts seen hostile to Assad's rule.
"In every speech we talk about awareness and that we should be vigilant to stay
away from what could affect our presence."
"We have the same views (as protesters) against corruption and bribery, and with
reforms but all of these demands should not lead me to participate in ruining my
home and destroying my country," Ibrahim said.
"I can guarantee that 80 percent of the people come to the church to hear what
the church say about (protests), and they commit (to its position)," the
archbishop added.
It should be no surprise that the ferment in the Arab world has touched the
Palestinians, whose promised two-state solution is no closer than ever. On
Sunday, the anniversary of Israel’s creation, thousands marching from Syria,
Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank breached Israel’s borders and confronted Israeli
troops. More than a dozen people were killed; scores were injured.
According to The Times’s Ethan Bronner, the protests were coordinated via social
media, but they also appeared to have support from Lebanon and President Bashar
al-Assad of Syria, who is eager to divert attention from his crackdown on
pro-democracy demonstrators.
Israel must defend its territory. But the protests and the casualties might have
been avoided if credible peace negotiations were under way. Since President
Obama took office, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have had just three weeks of
direct talks. Last week, George Mitchell, Mr. Obama’s Middle East envoy, quit.
There is blame all around: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is
scheduled to meet with Mr. Obama at the White House on Friday, has shown little
interest in negotiations and has used the regional turmoil as one more excuse to
hunker down. Arab leaders haven’t given him much incentive to compromise.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority wants a deal but seemed to
give up after Mr. Obama couldn’t deliver a promised settlement freeze.
President Obama has done far too little to break the stalemate. As he prepares
to give a speech on Thursday on the Arab Spring, the White House signaled that
he is unlikely to offer any new initiative to revive peace talks.
Frankly, we do not see how Mr. Obama can talk persuasively about transformation
in the Arab world without showing Palestinians a peaceful way forward. It is
time for Mr. Obama, alone or with crucial allies, to put a map and a deal on the
table. The two sides will not break the impasse by themselves.
This is a singular moment of great opportunity and challenge in the Arab world.
The United States and other democracies cannot dictate the outcome but must
invest maximum effort and creativity to help shape it. There is no
one-size-fits-all doctrine for dealing with disparate countries. The United
States and its allies are right to balance values and strategic interests.
Still Mr. Obama can use the speech to articulate principles that Arab countries
should follow as a condition of Western economic and political support:
democratic elections, free markets, peaceful relations with neighboring states —
including Israel — rights for women and minorities, the rule of law.
He should press American allies to lay out similar principles when the Group of
8 industrialized nations meets this month in France and back them up with clear
offers of support. The United States and its allies must help Tunisia and Egypt
— their struggles have inspired the region — weather severe economic problems,
providing debt relief, trade and access to international financial institutions.
Civil society groups need support.
President Obama raised great hopes in 2009 when he spoke in Cairo about “a new
beginning” with the Muslim world. The glow has faded. He has another chance this
week to bolster this country’s image and to help support democratic change in
the region. Reviving the peace process must be part of that effort. The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict wasn’t central to protests in Egypt, Libya or
Syria. But as Mr. Assad proved, it is still a far too potent weapon for
autocrats and extremists.
With due respect to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National
Authority (“The Long Overdue Palestinian State,” Op-Ed, May 17), let’s not
rewrite history in an effort to shift blame.
The Palestinians rejected statehood in 1947 and instead supported an Arab war to
exterminate the Jewish state. The Palestinians rejected another golden
opportunity for statehood in the 2000 Camp David peace talks, instead opting for
“intifada.”
The Fatah faction that Mr. Abbas leads has now joined a “unity” alliance with
Hamas, the same terrorist organization that dedicates itself in its charter to
the destruction of Israel.
Yet Mr. Abbas asserts, “The State of Palestine intends to be a peace-loving
nation, committed to human rights, democracy, the rule of law.” He adds that
“once admitted to the United Nations, our state stands ready to negotiate all
core issues of the conflict with Israel.” If you buy that one, I’ve got some
unicorns for sale.
Mr. Abbas, don’t ask for a state based on the promise that Palestinians will
negotiate the terms for peace some day in the future. Your alliance with Hamas
speaks far louder than your words.
JOHN C. LANDA Jr.
Houston, May 17, 2011
To the Editor:
While I fully support Mahmoud Abbas in his “call on all friendly, peace-loving
nations to join us in realizing our national aspirations by recognizing the
State of Palestine on the 1967 border,” I take issue with his use of history as
justification.
Historians will never agree on what really happened between 1947 and 1948, and
arguing over it only perpetuates mistrust and bad feelings between Arabs and
Jews. The sense of victimhood on all sides is our biggest obstacle to progress.
After 63 years, it no longer matters who is to blame for our predicament. It
only matters that today Palestinians feel disenfranchised and oppressed, and
Israelis feel embattled and isolated. What we all need is reconciliation, trust
and cooperation. The real struggle is not between Arabs and Jews, left and
right, or oppressors and oppressed, but between courage and fear.
DAVID P. SCHWARTZ
Director of Resource Development
The Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development
Raanana , Israel, May 17, 2011
To the Editor:
While reading the Op-Ed article by Mahmoud Abbas, juxtaposed with the article
outlining Benjamin Netanyahu’s anticipated message to President Obama and
Congress this week and next (“Israel Leader Outlines Points of Negotiation
Before U.S. Trip,” news article, May 17), I was struck by the fact that Mr.
Abbas outlines a plan for Palestinian statehood that abides by international
law, while Mr. Netanyahu defends continuing the occupation of Jerusalem and
maintaining settlements in the West Bank, both of which are against
international law.
While I support a home for the Jewish people if it is defined within the 1967
borders, what Mr. Netanyahu is offering is nothing but a continuation of the
illegal occupation of 44 years. By clinging to this hard-line position, he is
jeopardizing any prospects for peace for Israel and the Palestinians.
I hope that President Obama and Congress will join the world community in
demanding justice for the Palestinian people and security for both nations.
HANAN WATSON
New York, May 17, 2011
To the Editor:
Mahmoud Abbas writes: “In November 1947, the General Assembly made its
recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist
forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the
future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.”
Excuse me?
As reported by The New York Times on May 17, 1948: “The invasion armies of five
Arab nations hammered away with air and artillery attacks today at outlying
Jewish settlements in Palestine.”
A careful review of the history of that time demonstrates unequivocally that
Israel was invaded on all fronts by five Arab nations in an effort to destroy
Israel, the United Nations partition plan notwithstanding. “Intervened” my foot.
Mr. Abbas rewrites history. He is not a serious partner for negotiations.
SHELDON M. FINKELSTEIN
Newark, May 17, 2011
To the Editor:
Given the history of expulsions, persecutions and genocide that our ancestors
endured in Christian Europe, we Jews should be among the loudest supporters of
Palestinian statehood. Do we really expect the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and
their descendants to forgo their “right of return” after 60-plus years, when
Israel claimed a Jewish “right of return” after 2,000 years?
Unfortunately, many American Jewish organizations have long supported whatever
policy emanated out of Israel.
It is not only a Palestinian state that is long overdue, as the Palestinian
leader Mahmoud Abbas rightly claims, but also a declaration of independence by
American Jews that we will no longer be silent supporters of the Israeli
policies of occupation that so clearly violate not only common sense, but also
the ethical values of Judaism.
JACOB BENDER
New York, May 17, 2011
To the Editor:
How heartening that Mahmoud Abbas declares that the State of Palestine that he
hopes for will be a “peace-loving nation.” Now his task is to somehow square
that with his embrace of Hamas, solemnly pledged to Israel’s destruction, as a
partner in the formation of such a state’s government.
Mr. Abbas’s words remind me of another declaration of hope for “peace for our
time” — by Neville Chamberlain in 1938.
(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York, May 17, 2011
WASHINGTON
| Tue May 17, 2011
5:14pm EDT
Reuters
By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Tuesday it was "more vital than ever"
to seek to revive long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, even as
political upheaval convulses much of the broader Middle East.
Speaking after talks with Jordan's King Abdullah at the start of a week of
intense diplomacy, Obama pledged to keep pressing for a two-state solution to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite his failure so far to break the
impasse.
But Obama, who wants to reconnect with an Arab world showing signs of
frustration with his approach to the restive region, offered no new ideas for
advancing the peace process.
The president plans to deliver a major policy speech on the "Arab spring" on
Thursday, meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday and address
an influential pro-Israel lobbying group on Sunday.
With the Jordanian monarch sitting at his side in the Oval Office, Obama
suggested that unrest sweeping the Middle East offered a chance for Israel and
the Palestinians to seek progress toward resolving their own decades-old
dispute.
"Despite the many changes -- or perhaps because of the many changes that have
taken place in the region -- it's more vital than ever that both Israelis and
Palestinians find a way to ... begin negotiating a process whereby they can
create two states living side by side in peace and security," he told reporters.
Obama is struggling to counter Arab perceptions of an uneven U.S. response to a
wave of popular uprisings and disarray in his Israeli-Palestinian peace
strategy. He hopes to use the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, which for now has
boosted his standing at home and abroad, as a chance to reach out to a large
Arab audience.
MIDEAST
UNREST
Obama and Abdullah also sought common ground on the unrest that has gripped the
Arab world, toppling autocratic U.S. allies in Egypt and Tunisia and engulfing
Libya in civil war.
Jordan has faced protests demanding curbs on the king's powers but not nearly of
the magnitude confronting neighbors Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. He replied in
March by sacking his unpopular prime minister and promising constitutional
changes.
Trying to show that reforms by Washington's autocratic Arab allies will not go
unrewarded, Obama praised Abdullah and pledged to help Jordan with fresh U.S.
economic and food aid.
But Washington also ratcheted up pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
threatening further sanctions over his violent crackdown. Human rights activists
have criticized Obama for not taking tougher action against Syria, a U.S. foe.
Obama has taken a cautious line, expressing support for democratic aspirations
in the region while trying to avoid upsetting longtime partnerships seen as
crucial to fighting al Qaeda, containing Iran and securing vital oil supplies.
The king, a U.S. ally and key player in past peace drives, made clear he wanted
a renewed push by Obama. Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab states with peace
treaties with Israel.
"We will continue to partner (with Jordan) to try to encourage an equitable and
just solution to a problem that has been nagging the region for many, many
years," Obama said.
But Obama, whose attempts to broker a peace deal have yielded little since he
took office, has no plans to roll out a new initiative during the latest
diplomatic flurry, aides say.
Many Israelis are already unsettled over the implications for the Jewish state
from unrest in the broader Middle East, and a new reconciliation deal between
the mainstream Palestinian Fatah faction and its rival, the Islamist Hamas
movement, has raised further doubts about peace prospects.
Netanyahu said on Monday a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas --
which Israel and the United States brand a terrorist group --- could not be a
peace partner.
The risk for Obama is that pushing Israel for concessions could alienate the
Jewish state's base of support among the U.S. public and in Congress as he seeks
re-election in 2012.
Obama, speaking later at a White House reception marking Jewish American
Heritage Month, reaffirmed "unshakable support and commitment" to Israel.
But in the absence of progress on the diplomatic track, the Palestinians are
threatening to seek the U.N. General Assembly's blessing for a Palestinian state
in September, a path that alarms Israel and is opposed by Washington.
Deadly clashes on Israel's borders on Sunday underscored the depth of Arab anger
over the conflict. The resignation of Obama's Middle East envoy, George
Mitchell, raises further doubts about peace prospects.
(Reporting by
Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Peter Cooney)
AMMAN |
Tue May 17, 2011
12:32pm EDT
Reuters
By Suleiman al-Khalidi
AMMAN
(Reuters) - The West warned of more pressure on Syria on Tuesday if a crackdown
against pro-democracy protests continues, hours after tanks stormed a city in
the south, cradle of an uprising against Baathist rule.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that both the European Union and the
United States -- which have already slapped sanctions on a number of senior
Syrian officials but not on President Bashar al-Assad -- were planning more
steps.
"We will be taking additional steps in the days ahead," Clinton said, saying she
agreed with European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who told
reporters that the time for Syria to make changes was now.
Rights activists say a crackdown to crush a two-month wave of protests against
Assad has killed at least 700 civilians.
Syrian tanks moved into a southern city in the Hauran Plain on Tuesday after
encircling it for three weeks, activists said.
Soldiers fired machineguns in the air as tanks and armored personnel carriers
entered Nawa, a city of 80,000 people 60 km (40 miles) north of the southern
town of Deraa, according to activists from the region.
"The troops are now combing neighborhoods in Nawa and arresting scores of men,"
one activist said.
In Deraa, tanks remained in the streets after the old quarter was shelled into
submission last month and residents gave accounts of mass graves which the
authorities denied.
The southern towns of Inkhil and Jassem remained also besieged, rights
campaigners said, adding that mass arrests continued in the Hauran Plain and
other regions of Syria.
Assad had been partly rehabilitated in the West in the last three years, but the
use of force to quell dissent in the last two months has reversed that trend.
The United States had condemned the crackdown as "barbaric."
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday France and Britain were
close to getting nine votes for a resolution on Syria at the U.N. Security
Council, but Russia and China were threatening to use their veto.
Half of Kuwait's 50 lawmakers urged the Gulf Arab state on Tuesday to cut ties
with Syria and expel its ambassador in protest at the violence to crush the
protests.
Villagers near Deraa have found two separate graves containing up to 26 bodies,
residents said on Tuesday, but Syrian authorities dismissed such reports as part
of "campaign of incitement" that targeted the country.
Four residents told Reuters that villagers had contacted the local civil defense
after noticing two mounds of earth in wheatfields just outside Deraa's old city
district. Under the mounds were 22 to 26 decomposed corpses, they said.
Their reports could not be verified because authorities have barred most
international media from operating in Syria.
Since Assad sent tanks into Deraa three weeks ago, the army has moved into
several other protest centers in the south, around the capital Damascus and on
the Mediterranean coast.
The government blames most of the violence on armed groups backed by Islamists
and outside powers, saying they have also killed more than 120 soldiers and
police.
Soldiers moved on Saturday into the town of Tel Kelakh, close to Lebanon's
northern border.
Human rights campaigners said scores of people had been arrested since Monday
and that Assad's forces were firing at several neighborhoods in the city of
30,000 people.
Citing witnesses, the Local Coordination Committees, an activists' group, said
several people were killed in Tuesday's offensive, adding to 12 civilians
already killed by army shelling, shooting and sniper fire in the last three
days.
A Reuters correspondent on the Lebanese side of the border heard shooting and
could see smoke rising from the village of Arida, which lies between Tel Kelakh
and the border.
"They destroyed the houses, they cut electricity and water. The wounded are
dying in our hands and the dead are strewn on the streets," a Tel Kelakh
resident told Reuters by telephone.
She said she was hiding in a basement with seven families.
State news agency SANA said security forces clashed with "wanted armed terrorist
members" in Tel Kelakh on Monday, killing several and capturing others, and
seizing weapons, ammunition and military uniform. Fifteen members of the
security forces were wounded, it quoted a military source as saying.
In her stone house just a few meters inside Lebanese land, Umm Fatima said she
had sent her nine children to the nearby village of Wadi Khaled for safety.
"All night and day, there's gunfire. I'm so scared it will reach our homes -- I
don't dare leave my home," she said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there were also mass arrests in the
cities of Homs, Deir al-Zor and Latakia, which security forces had "robbed of
normality."
Assad has tried a mixture of reform and repression to stem the protests,
inspired by uprisings across the Arab world.
Authorities say he intends to launch national dialogue talks, a gesture rejected
by opposition leaders and the main activists' protest group who say security
forces must first stop shooting protesters and political prisoners must be
freed.
The Facebook page Syria Revolution 2011 called for a general strike across Syria
on Wednesday.
(Additional
reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Wadi Khaled, Lebanon, and Khaled Yacoub Oweis in
Amman; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Diana Abdallah)
AMMAN |
Tue May 17, 2011
1:27am EDT
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Suleiman al-Khalidi
AMMAN
(Reuters) - Syrian villagers pulled 13 bodies from a mass grave near the
southern city of Deraa on Monday, residents said, and thousands joined a
night-time march in a Damascus suburb demanding the overthrow of the government.
Deraa residents say hundreds of people have been missing since tanks and
soldiers moved in last month to crush the cradle of opposition to President
Bashar al-Assad's 11-year rule.
They said villagers digging in farmland in the outskirts of the city uncovered
the decomposed bodies of Abdullah Abdul Aziz Aba Zaid, 62, and four of his
children.
The villagers also found the bodies of a woman, a child and six men, all
unidentified, residents said. It was not clear when they died, but Deraa
residents say dozens of civilians were killed during the military assault on the
city's old quarter.
Syrian and international rights groups say Syrian forces have killed at least
700 civilians across the country since the first protests broke out in Deraa on
March 18.
The report on the mass grave could not be confirmed independently.
Thousands of demonstrators marched through the Damascus suburb of Saqba on
Monday night at the funeral of Ahmad Ataya, who died of wounds inflicted when
security forces fired at a pro-democracy rally in the capital last month.
A witness said the demonstrators marched at night to avoid the tough security
measures that are in force during the day. It was the biggest protest in the
Damascus outskirts since a security crackdown three weeks ago.
Authorities have blamed most of the violence during the wave of protests on
armed groups backed by Islamists and outside powers, who they say have killed
more than 120 members of the security forces.
Witnesses in Deraa said tanks were still positioned at main city junctions and
in the outskirts, but authorities had shortened the curfew by three hours,
allowing people out on the streets until 5.00 pm (10 a.m. EDT).
The official Syrian news agency said Assad met a delegation from Deraa and they
discussed the "positive atmosphere there as a result of cooperation between the
residents and the army."
TANKS
DEPLOY NEAR BORDER
Further north, at least 15 tanks deployed around Arida, near the border town of
Tel Kelakh which troops entered on Saturday after protests erupted against
Assad, and their arrival prompted dozens of families to flee into neighboring
Lebanon.
An activists' protest group said at least seven civilians were killed in Tel
Kelakh on Sunday when troops shelled the town and sniper fire killed one
civilian on Monday, raising the death toll in the army's assault since Saturday
to 12.
The Syrian state news agency said five soldiers were killed in confrontations
with armed groups in Tel Kalakh.
One resident reported intermittent shelling of Tel Kelakh and bursts of
machinegun fire on Monday, but the army appeared not to have advanced beyond the
outskirts.
"Tel Kelakh is a ghost town. There are no doctors. Pharmacies are shut. Snipers
are on the roof of the main hospital. Phones, water and electricity are cut,"
Mohammad al-Dandashi told Reuters from the town by satellite phone.
A few families from Hilat, another border village, streamed into Lebanon on
Monday as did two wounded civilians from Tel Kelakh who were seeking medical
care, family members said.
LEBANESE
ARMY REINFORCES BORDER
For the past two months Syrian soldiers and police have been trying to quell
demonstrations across the country calling for Assad's overthrow.
They have tended to crack down on a flashpoint area for several days, using tank
and rifle fire and mass arrests to subdue it, and then move on to another area.
Troops backed by armor have now deployed in or around towns and villages across
the southern Hauran plain, the central province of Homs and areas near the
coast. Security forces have also tightened their grip on Damascus and its
suburbs.
The Lebanese army said it had sent reinforcements to the border, set up
checkpoints and started intensive patrols to prevent "infiltration activities on
both sides."
International media organizations are largely banned from Syria, making it
difficult to verify accounts of events there.
Assad, who trained as an ophthalmologist, has used a mixture of repression and
promises of reform to stem the protests, which were inspired by uprisings across
the Arab world.
The United States and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions on
Syrian officials and condemned the violence used to suppress dissent.
Authorities said Assad intended to launch national dialogue talks, an offer
rejected by opposition leaders and the main activists' protest group, who say
security forces must first stop shooting protesters and political prisoners must
be freed.
(Additional
reporting by Nazih Siddiq in Wadi Khaled, Lebanon;
editing by
Tim Pearce)
