History > 2011 > USA > International (XVIII)

Israel and the Apartheid Slander

October 31, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD J. GOLDSTONE

THE Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure. The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.

I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system, under which human beings characterized as black had no rights to vote, hold political office, use “white” toilets or beaches, marry whites, live in whites-only areas or even be there without a “pass.” Blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. “White” hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.

In assessing the accusation that Israel pursues apartheid policies, which are by definition primarily about race or ethnicity, it is important first to distinguish between the situations in Israel, where Arabs are citizens, and in West Bank areas that remain under Israeli control in the absence of a peace agreement.

In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.

To be sure, there is more de facto separation between Jewish and Arab populations than Israelis should accept. Much of it is chosen by the communities themselves. Some results from discrimination. But it is not apartheid, which consciously enshrines separation as an ideal. In Israel, equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal; inequities are often successfully challenged in court.

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.

But until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed. As things stand, attacks from one side are met by counterattacks from the other. And the deep disputes, claims and counterclaims are only hardened when the offensive analogy of “apartheid” is invoked.

Those seeking to promote the myth of Israeli apartheid often point to clashes between heavily armed Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank, or the building of what they call an “apartheid wall” and disparate treatment on West Bank roads. While such images may appear to invite a superficial comparison, it is disingenuous to use them to distort the reality. The security barrier was built to stop unrelenting terrorist attacks; while it has inflicted great hardship in places, the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the state in many cases to reroute it to minimize unreasonable hardship. Road restrictions get more intrusive after violent attacks and are ameliorated when the threat is reduced.

Of course, the Palestinian people have national aspirations and human rights that all must respect. But those who conflate the situations in Israel and the West Bank and liken both to the old South Africa do a disservice to all who hope for justice and peace.

Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and the West Bank cannot be simplified to a narrative of Jewish discrimination. There is hostility and suspicion on both sides. Israel, unique among democracies, has been in a state of war with many of its neighbors who refuse to accept its existence. Even some Israeli Arabs, because they are citizens of Israel, have at times come under suspicion from other Arabs as a result of that longstanding enmity.

The mutual recognition and protection of the human dignity of all people is indispensable to bringing an end to hatred and anger. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.

 

Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court,
led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-9.

    Israel and the Apartheid Slander, NYT, 31.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/opinion/israel-and-the-apartheid-slander.htm

40 Killed Across Syria

in Deadliest Friday Demonstrations

Since May

October 28, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian security forces killed at least 40 people on Friday during antigovernment demonstrations across the country, according to human rights activists, as the government of President Bashar al-Assad intensified a brutal military crackdown that has failed over eight months to extinguish a popular uprising.

Most of the deaths occurred in central Syria, the most restive region in the country, with 21 people killed in Homs and 14 in Hama. Both cities are at the front line of the uprising against the leadership of Mr. Assad and have witnessed mass destruction, arrests and killings since demonstrations broke out. Over all, the United Nations estimates that 3,000 people have been killed since demonstrations began.

The large number of people killed, the most on any Friday since May 6, when 36 demonstrators were shot dead, demonstrated the government’s rejection of international pressure to end the violence, and a determination to rely exclusively on force to silence the sustained challenge to four decades of Assad family rule. Friday — the day of prayer and rest for Muslims — has become the day of protest across Syria, and the Arab world, since the outbreak of popular calls for change.

“They are killing intentionally; they are killing to send a message that they are still in control,” said Omar Idlibi, an activist with the Local Coordination Committees, who lives in Lebanon. “They are committing political suicide. The killings won’t solve the crisis but could lead to international intervention.”

Protesters who took to the streets after noon prayers repeated an earlier demand for protection from the international community in demonstrations labeled “Friday of no-fly zone.”

A United Nations-mandated no-fly zone over Libya — and a sustained bombing campaign by NATO — helped bring down the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Although many Syrian opposition leaders refuse any military intervention, protesters have been pleading for several weeks during their demonstrations for the international community to intervene.

The Syrian National Council, the most prominent opposition gathering, has also called for international protection, though it did not explicitly call for a military intervention.

Along with the street protests, a group of military defectors calling itself the Free Syrian Army has been trying to organize an armed insurgency against the government. With its leaders in camps in Turkey, the group has taken responsibility for several attacks against Syrian security forces. “We call on the international community to impose a no-fly zone so that the Free Syrian Army can function with greater freedom,” a post read on a Facebook page that says it is the official page of the “Syrian revolution.”

In Homs, activists said that security forces loyal to the government attacked the city and villages surrounding it, shooting randomly at people. Mohammad, an activist reached by phone, said that armed troops turned a train station into a military base, shooting at anyone who approached it. A resident who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal said armed men also roamed some streets in the city on motorbikes, firing at people.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a watchdog group operating in exile, said that around 20,000 people marched in the neighborhood of Balaa in Homs, calling for the ouster of Mr. Assad.

Activists with the Local Coordination Committees also said that three people were killed in the southern town of Dara’a and two in the town of Saraqeb in the northwestern province of Idlib, near Turkey.

Security forces also arrested 40 people who were demonstrating in the neighborhood of Barzeh in Damascus, which has remained largely quiet since the uprising started.

Activists also reported clashes between army troops and defectors in Hama.

In Qusayr, a village on the Lebanese-Syrian border, activists reported hearing heavy gunfire and at least five loud explosions when security forces tried to break up crowds of demonstrators coming out of mosques.

Troops also raided a town in the northwest called Kafruma, arresting 13 people, including a woman and her 12-year-old son.

 

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

    40 Killed Across Syria in Deadliest Friday Demonstrations Since May, NYT, 28.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/world/middleeast/40-killed-in-syria-in-deadliest-friday-protests-since-may.html

George L. Sherry,

Envoy and Well-Known Voice at U.N., Dies at 87

October 26, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

George L. Sherry, a former United Nations official who helped calm crises around the world — a role that evolved from his time as the leading rapid-fire translator of speeches by Russian diplomats in the organization’s early days — died in Manhattan on Friday. He was 87.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Vivien Sherry Greenberg, said.

In the years just after the founding of the United Nations in 1945, when speeches from the lectern of the General Assembly and the Security Council were widely broadcast beyond the earphones of the diplomats on the floor, Mr. Sherry became known as the English-speaking voice of Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet delegate.

“Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Y. Vishinsky spoke yesterday in tones that were in quick succession impassioned, angry, sarcastic, sardonic, pleading and furious,” The New York Times reported on Sept. 19, 1947. “And the English translation came through the walkie-talkie sets in the General Assembly in tones that were just as impassioned, angry, sarcastic, sardonic, pleading and furious.”

It was Mr. Sherry who matched that 92-minute speech, a good deal of it delivered extemporaneously. (He would later translate speeches by Soviet officials like Anastas I. Mikoyan and Andrei A. Gromyko.)

At the time a 24-year-old graduate of City College in New York, Mr. Sherry would go on to a four-decade career at the United Nations, rising to assistant secretary general for special political affairs. For most of his career he worked beside two highly respected under secretary generals, Ralph J. Bunche and Sir Brian Urquhart, helping to organize mediation and peacekeeping missions.

In 1963, Mr. Sherry helped negotiate the entry of United Nations troops into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, effectively ending a long war of secession in Katanga Province. A year later, he served as senior political adviser for peacekeeping forces in the Turkish-Greek struggle over Cyprus. When the second Indian-Pakistan war over Kashmir broke out in the fall of 1965, he was a member of the observation mission there. And in 1982, he was one of two Americans assigned to the task force created by Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to help bring an end to the Falklands war.

Mr. Sherry was director of the special political affairs department from 1978 until he was promoted to assistant secretary general in 1984. On Wednesday, Sir Brian called him an “indispensable member” of the team.

After retiring in 1985, Mr. Sherry became a professor of international studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founding director of the college’s United Nations program, which brings students to New York to work as interns.

George Leon Sherry was born in Poland on Jan. 5, 1924, the only child of Leon and Henrietta Shershevsky. (The family, of Russian descent, changed its name after immigrating to the United States in 1939.) By the time he was 15, George spoke Russian, English, French and Romanian.

Besides his daughter, Mr. Sherry is survived by his wife of 64 years, the former Doris Harf, and one grandchild.

After graduating from City College in 1944, Mr. Sherry worked as a reporter for The Times while also earning master’s degrees in comparative literature and political science from Columbia. He became an editor for United Nations publications in 1946, and turned his language skills into a surprisingly high-profile stint as an interpreter.

A 1962 article about Mr. Sherry in The New Yorker touched on his time translating Mr. Vishinsky in the late 1940s: “Although Sherry spoke with an almost aggressively American accent, the audience so easily identified the voice with the Russian fulminations that the secretary general himself” — Trygve Lie at the time — “started receiving letters that urged him to fire the Communist twin.”

In fact, Mr. Sherry had been the editor of an anti-Communist newspaper at City College.

    George L. Sherry, Envoy and Well-Known Voice at U.N., Dies at 87, NYT, 26.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/George-Sherry-Voice-at-United-Nations-Dies-at-87.html

U.S. Ambassador to Syria

Leaves Damascus Amid Threats to Safety

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Robert S. Ford, the American ambassador to Damascus who has emerged as an outspoken critic of Syria’s crackdown on a seven-month uprising, has left the country after receiving what American officials called threats to his safety.

The departure Saturday was the latest turn in the tumultuous tenure of Mr. Ford, whose visits to restive cities like Hama and attendance of a funeral for a slain activist made him a visible and controversial figure. Since the uprising erupted in March, he has stayed vocal in his criticism of government repression, taking to his Facebook page and the embassy’s web site to castigate the government or offer his version of events there.

Haynes Mahoney, the newly arrived embassy’s charge d’affaires, said Monday no date was set for Mr. Ford’s return, and he cautioned that his departure did not mean the American government had withdrawn Mr. Ford from the post. Though it was a matter of terminology, such a step would have signaled a dramatic if symbolic deterioration in already troubled relations. Mr. Mahoney will act in Mr. Ford’s place while he is gone.

“We’re focusing particularly on the incitement in the media, an incitement campaign, I should say, conducted by the Syrian regime, which we hope will stop,” he said by phone. “At this point we can’t really say when he will return. I hope it will be soon. But it will depend on our assessment of the incitement and the security situation.”

Mr. Mahoney declined to specify the threats, though Mr. Ford has been subjected to sharp criticism in both government media and al-Dunia, a television station that relentlessly hews to the official line. Though satellite channels are broadcast in Syria, state media still wield great influence with supporters of President Bashar al-Assad.

“As long as the ambassador believes that diplomacy is the art of instigation against national regimes, he should anticipate unpleasant treatment,” declared a column earlier this month in Al Baath, which serves as a mouthpiece of the government.

Mr. Ford, a seasoned diplomat and Arabic speaker who filled a post this year that had been vacant since 2005, traveled to Hama in July, when government forces had withdrawn from the city and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands had convened. The visit apparently infuriated the government and, weeks later, a released prisoner said that interrogators had sought the names of Syrians seen in videos escorting Mr. Ford’s car.

In September, dozens of pro-government Syrians attempted to assault Mr. Ford’s delegation, attacking its motorcade as it traveled to a meeting with Hassan Abdul-Azim, an opposition figure in Damascus. Crowds then tried to break into an office where the meeting was being held, trapping Mr. Ford and others there for 90 minutes.

“Syria’s problems come not from foreign interference but from intolerance - the same kind of intolerance we saw in front of Abdul-Azim’s office,” Mr. Ford wrote afterward on the embassy’s web site, recounting his version of the attack. “Unfortunately, those problems now are growing worse and more violent.”

The White House said then it had no plans to remove Mr. Ford for his safety.

The assault was the second on American diplomats since the uprising began. In July, after his visit to Hama, government supporters attacked the embassy’s compound. They also attempted to break into Mr. Ford’s nearby residence but were unable to enter.

The role of diplomats and embassies has emerged as another arena of the Syrian uprising and crackdown, whose toll the United Nations has put at more than 3,000. In July, the State Department summoned the Syrian ambassador in the United States, Imad Moustapha, over reports that the embassy was carrying out surveillance on Syrian dissidents. Syrian officials, meanwhile, have criticized European governments for failing to protect their embassies from attacks by protesters in Germany and Switzerland.

“If they don’t provide security to our missions, we will treat them the same way,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem told a news conference this month.

Mr. Ford’s criticism has made for one of the more unusual roles in recent years of an American ambassador in the Arab world, where resentment of United States policy runs deep, especially over American support for Israel. It has stood in contrast to the relative silence of the embassy in Bahrain, a key American ally, whose government carried out an unrelenting crackdown on the country’s Shiite majority. But he has won praise in Washington and elsewhere for what Senator John Kerry, in Mr. Ford’s confirmation hearing earlier this month, called his decision to “speak truth to power.”

 

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.

    U.S. Ambassador to Syria Leaves Damascus Amid Threats to Safety, NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/middleeast/
    us-ambassador-to-syria-leaves-damascus-amid-threats-to-safety.html

Moderate Islamist Party Claims Victory in Tunisia

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TUNIS — A moderate Islamic party appeared to emerge as the big winner in Tunisia on Monday as preliminary results leaked out in the voting for an assembly to draft a constitution and shape a new government in this small North African country, where a revolution in January inspired uprisings across the Arab world.

The party, Ennahda, won at least 30 percent of the votes cast on Sunday, and party officials told a news conference the party had come out ahead in nearly every voting district. Ali Laredi, a top official of the party, said it expected to receive possibly more than 50 percent when the final results are tallied.

Calling his party “the most modernist” Islamic political movement in the Arab world — meaning the most committed to principles of democracy and pluralism — Mr. Laredi predicted that it would now “lead the way” for others around the region.

Ennahda officials were already beginning discussions to form a unity government with the four or five other more liberal parties that were expected to get representation in the constituent assembly, which is to draft the constitution.

Millions of Tunisians cast votes on Sunday in the election, which was widely watched as the possible pioneer for votes in Egypt and Libya, where longtime autocrats were felled by uprisings energized by the Tunisia revolution.

There had been some expectation that Ennahda would to win at least a plurality of seats in the assembly. The party’s leaders had vowed to create another kind of new model for the Arab world, one reconciling Islamic principles with Western-style democracy.

Final results were expected to be computed within days. In the meantime, those still struggling through the postrevolutionary uncertainty of places like Libya and Egypt watched Tunisia “with a kind of envy,” said Samer Soliman, a professor at the American University in Cairo and an Egyptian political activist.

Libyans and Egyptians acknowledge that Tunisia was not only the first but also the easiest of the Arab revolutions, because of its relatively small, homogenous, educated population and because of the willingness of the Tunisian military to relinquish power. The success of Tunisia offers inspiration, but perhaps few answers, for Egyptians or Libyans who hope to follow in its footsteps.

Libya’s interim leaders on Sunday proclaimed their revolution a success and laid out an ambitious timetable for the election of their own constituent assembly. But they have yet to solve the problem of unifying the loosely organized brigades of anti-Qaddafi fighters under the control of an interim authority to govern Libya until then, much less lay the groundwork for elections.

And with Egypt a little more than a month away from a vote for a new Parliament, its interim military rulers have so far balked at adopting many of the election procedures that enabled Tunisia’s election to proceed smoothly. Among them are inking voters’ fingers to ensure people vote only once, transparent ballot boxes, a single election day rather than staggered polls, and weeks of voter education before the balloting. Also, in Egypt, the interim military rulers have not agreed to relinquish any of the army’s power over either the next Parliament or a planned constitutional panel.

For Tunisians, though, the scenes at the polls on Sunday — a turnout far above expectations, orderly lines stretching around blocks, satisfied smiles at blue-inked fingers — already seemed to wipe away 10 months of anxiety and protests over the future of the revolution that ousted Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. For the first time in their history, many Tunisians said, they expected an honest count of their ballots to determine the country’s future.

“Today is the day of independence,” said Amin Ganhouba, 30, a technician. “Today we got our freedom, and our dignity, from the simple act of voting.”

In a statement issued after the polls closed on Sunday, President Obama congratulated Tunisians for “the first democratic elections to take place in the country that changed the course of history and began the Arab Spring.”

Many people expressed faith that the act of voting itself would change Tunisia for the better, no matter who won. Some argued that democracy would make public officials more accountable. “The people in power know that we are keeping a watchful eye,” said Kamel Abdel, 45, a high school philosophy teacher voting in the crowded slum of Tadamon.

Others predicted an almost magical transformation. “There is going to be social justice, freedom, democracy, and they are going to tackle the unemployment issue,” Mohamed Fezai, a jobless 30-year-old college graduate, declared confidently.

At least one woman celebrated a vote she cast at random. Beaming with pride, Fatima Toumi, 52, an illiterate homemaker, said that she had done her civic duty, but did not know which party’s box she had checked. “Whoever I pick doesn’t matter,” she said. “I hope it will improve the situation of Tunisia’s youth.”

About 25 percent of Tunisians are illiterate, a lower rate than many countries in the area, and several voters said they expressed their choice by marking the box next to the logo of the party they favored: a star and bird for the Islamic party, or an olive tree for a liberal rival.

Some people declined to vote. Sitting in a cafe in Sousse, Mr. Ben Ali’s home town, Saber Kaddour, 44, a coffee wholesaler, argued that voters were too caught up in politics to think about the issues. “Everything is disguised, and people think they understand what is going on, but they don’t,” he said. He predicted chaos after the results were announced, with the losing party taking to the streets in protest.

“But that is not democracy,” the cafe’s owner, Nedra Elkhechime, replied earnestly. “Even if you lose, you have to accept it.”

In interviews this week along Tunisia’s affluent coast and in its impoverished interior, most voters said their biggest concerns were the economy, jobs, and finding candidates with integrity.

In Tadamon, the poor neighborhood, several voters said they were repulsed by a party that tried to tell them it would lower the price of bread and other staples, or the tycoon whose newly founded party brought a rap singer to a rally in a ploy for votes. But some said they appreciated that Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party, gave away sheep for poor people to sacrifice for the feast at the end of Ramadan. Nasreddin Mnai, a 22-year-old student, called it evidence that “they are going to help the poor people.”

Ennahda had a long history of opposition to the dictatorship before Mr. Ben Ali’s persecution eviscerated it in the 1990s, and its leaders have said that they hope to establish a durable, pluralistic democracy that will protect the rights of individuals and minorities regardless of who is in power. They often cite the model of Turkey, a secular democracy now governed by a party with an Islamic identity.

At stops across the country in the final days of the campaign, Ennahda’s founder, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, stepped up his religious appeals. “When you go into the polls, God’s presence will be there with you,” he said at a rally in the impoverished city of Kasserine. “God wants you to vote for the party that will protect your faith.”

But at every stop, Mr. Ghannouchi and others from Ennahda repeated their commitment to women’s rights, including equality in education and employment and the freedom to adopt or reject Islamic dress, like women’s head scarves.

Ennahda supporters, though, were divided over how much regulation of personal morality the party should seek to impose. Some agreed that women ought to be able to reject the veil, and that Tunisians should be able to buy alcohol — widely available here now — despite an Islamic prohibition.

“We don’t want the Islamists to attack the secularists, or vice versa,” said Belhsan Menzi, 31, an Ennahda supporter waiting to vote in Tadamon.

But his friend Lotfi Nasri, 35, said he expected Ennahda to make sure Tunisians complied with Islamic moral codes, including rules about alcohol and head scarves. If Ennahda wins power, he said, Tunisia “will be more of an Islamic country.”

Others said they expected it to do more to restrict profanity or blasphemy in the popular culture.

The uprising that unseated Mr. Ben Ali began when a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in the impoverished inland town of Sidi Bouzid to protest his lack of opportunity and the disrespect of the police.

On Sunday, his mother, Manoubia Bouazizi, 53, told Reuters that the elections were “a moment of victory for my son, who died defending dignity and liberty.”

 

Hend Hasassi contributed reporting.

    Moderate Islamist Party Claims Victory in Tunisia, NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/africa/
    ennahda-moderate-islamic-party-makes-strong-showing-in-tunisia-vote.html

Libya’s Interim Leaders to Investigate Qaddafi Killing

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and RICK GLADSTONE

BENGHAZI, Libya — The head of Libya’s interim government announced the creation of a formal committee of inquiry on Monday to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the country’s former leader, while in the custody of his captors after he fled his final refuge last week.

In his announcement, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, chairman of the Transitional National Council, acknowledged that pressure from foreign powers and rights groups — including some that supported the rebellion against Colonel Qaddafi's rule — had prompted the decision to investigate how Colonel Qaddafi wound up dead with a bullet to the head. Mr. Abdel-Jalil referred to "demands of the international community" for an investigation.

But it was unclear from Mr. Abdel-Jalil's announcement how much authority the committee would have to pursue an investigation and whether anyone might be held accountable. He also suggested that anti-Qaddafi fighters may not have been the ones who killed him, hinting that the fatal bullets might even have come from Colonel Qaddafi's own supporters. That suggestion is sharply at odds with the video evidence that has surfaced of Colonel Qaddafi's death.

Grisly footage that circulated widely after Colonel Qaddafi's capture establish that he was killed shortly after fighters seized him last Thursday, following a NATO airstrike on a Qaddafi-armed convoy leaving Surt, his hometown, where he had spent two months as a fugitive following the fall of Tripoli, the capital. One of his feared sons, Muatassim, also was captured in Surt and killed, apparently while in custody.

The videos showed victorious fighters manhandling Colonel Qaddafi, who appeared bleeding and distressed but conscious, after they pulled him from a large drainage pipe where he had hidden after the NATO assault destroyed part of his convoy. Subsequent video shows his abused corpse, with at least one bullet wound to his head.

Transitional National Council members have also said Colonel Qaddafi was killed during a gunfight between his captors and Qaddafi loyalists in Surt. But the testimony of the videos casts doubt on that explanation.

“In response to international calls, we have started to put in place a commission tasked with investigating the circumstances of Muammar Qaddafi’s death in the clash with his circle as he was being captured,” Mr. Abdel-Jalil told journalists in the eastern city of Benghazi, the birthplace of the revolution that ousted Colonel Qaddafi in late August.

On Sunday, Mr. Abdel-Jalil formally proclaimed to thousands of revelers in Benghazi that the revolution was officially over. The announcement laid the basis for elections and a new government within 20 months, but left unanswered the enormous challenge confronting the interim leaders over how to disarm and unify the brigades of anti-Qaddafi fighters who brought him down and are a law unto themselves. Mr. Abdel-Jalil also suggested that Islam would be the legal basis for the new state.

While Libyans nationwide have been celebrating Colonel Qaddafi’s death, Mr. Abdel-Jalil also said many were disappointed that he would not stand trial for the crimes committed during his brutal 42-year tenure.

In offering his possible new explanation for how Colonel Qaddafi may have died at the hands of his own disciples, Mr. Abdel-Jalil suggested they feared he would implicate them in his litany of atrocities if he had survived and gone to trial.

“Let us question who has the interest in the fact that Qaddafi will not be tried,” he said. “Libyans want to try him for what he did to them, with executions, imprisonment and corruption. Free Libyans wanted to keep Qaddafi in prison and humiliate him as long as possible. Those who wanted him killed were those who were loyal to him or had played a role under him. His death was in their benefit.”

The new theory appeared to be an attempt to deflect sharp international questions about the government's handling of Colonel Qaddafi's final moments.

There was no immediate comment on Mr. Abdel-Jalil’s announcement from the brigade of fighters from the port city of Misurata credited with capturing both Colonel Qaddafi and his son and bringing their bodies to Misurata. The city suffered enormously from attacks by Colonel Qaddafi’s military forces during the height of the revolution.

Authorities in Misurata have put the corpses of both Colonel Qaddafi and his son on public display in a cold-storage meat locker while they have argued over where and when to bury them. As of Monday evening, there was no resolution.

Reuters reported from Misurata that both corpses were beginning to darken and decompose, and that guards were distributing surgical face masks to visitors to help minimize the smell. By late Monday, the news agency said, the guards had stopped all public viewing, and there was speculation they would be buried Tuesday in an undisclosed location.

In Surt, new evidence was emerging Monday that anti-Qaddafi fighters had committed widespread reprisal killings in the aftermath of Colonel Qaddafi’s death. Dozens of bodies lay outside a Surt hotel, where the monikers of at least 10 anti-Qaddafi militias were scrawled on walls. The hands of many were bound, and they appeared to have been executed with a shot to the head. A number of homes were also burning, apparently pillaged by Colonel Qaddafi’s foes.

Over the weekend, another Qaddafi son, Seif al-Islam, who remains at large, issued a vow from an undisclosed location to avenge his father. “We continue our resistance,” he said in an audio message broadcast by Al Arrai, a Syrian television station that had also broadcast Colonel Qaddafi’s screeds against his enemies while he was a fugitive.

“I’m in Libya, alive, free and intend to go to the very end and exact revenge,” the audio message said. “I say go to hell, you rats and NATO behind you. This is our country, we live in it, and we die in it and we are continuing the struggle.”

Mr. Abdel-Jalil was flanked at the news conference here by officers of the former rebels, and much of it involved reassurances that the needs of the veterans would be met in the new Libya.

"Most of the fighters have not received their salaries yet," the leader complained at the outset. "With God's grace their reward will be great from God," he said.

The heavy emphasis on the fighting men who helped bring down Colonel Qaddafi was an acknowledgment of the sway these armed factions still hold in a country bristling with weapons and starting from scratch. There were also suggestions at the news conference that veterans would now play an unspecified leading role in the country.

As in his speech on Sunday, Mr. Abdel-Jalil made no mention of NATO's contribution, nor that of the United States, to the defeat of Colonel Qaddafi. The theme was that of a homegrown victory and of a nation now free to choose its own path, regardless of international desires.

That notion was emphasized in renewed mentions of the need to establish Islam as a foundation for the new Libya. Mr. Abdel-Jalil said, in an echo of the theme from his Sunday remarks, that "The Koran is the higher constitution for all Muslims."

But he also deliberately sought to reassure audiences abroad. In response to a question from a reporter, he said that "we as Libyans are Muslims, but we are moderate Muslims."

Adam Nossiter reported from Benghazi, Libya, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Kareem Fahim contribute reporting from Surt, Libya.

    Libya’s Interim Leaders to Investigate Qaddafi Killing, NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/middleeast/libyas-interim-leaders-to-investigate-qaddafi-killing.html

Death of Qaddafi Revives Opposition, and Hope, in Syria

October 21, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi reverberated across Syria on Friday, reviving protests that had begun to stall and focusing attention on a newly organized, unarmed opposition group seeking to challenge the Assad family’s four decades of rule.

With an ordinary name and ambitious task, the Syrian National Council, announced in Istanbul this month, has begun trying to emulate the success of Libya’s opposition leadership, closing ranks in the most concerted attempt yet to forge an alternative to President Bashar al-Assad and courting international support that proved so crucial in Libya.

“The focus of the world will now turn to Syria,” Samir Nachar, an activist from Aleppo and leader of the group, said Friday. “It’s Syria’s turn to receive attention.”

But the challenges before this effort remain vast, many of them the same issues that have beset the uprising in Syria since it began seven months ago. A gulf still separates the opposition in exile and at home, and rivalries and ideological disputes compromise their work. As important, Europe and the United States have proven reluctant to give the council the recognition that they quickly provided the opposition in Libya.

Perhaps most challenging is a debate that has overshadowed many of its discussions — what kind of international intervention it will seek, as unlikely as the prospect may be now, in trying to end Mr. Assad’s rule. Not even activists these days believe that protests alone, however big, are enough to topple the government.

“Libya’s model will be tempting,” said Louay Hussein, a prominent opposition figure in Damascus, the capital, though a critic of the council itself.

Protests erupted across Syria on Friday, and at least anecdotally, activists called them bigger than in past weeks, and just as bloody. Security forces killed at least 24 people. Colonel Qaddafi’s death offered a bloody lesson in an autocrat’s fate, and became a theme on Facebook pages, Twitter and in the demonstrations themselves. “Qaddafi is gone, your turn is coming, Bashar,” one banner read.

“Let us be next,” went a chant.

One slogan played on a song of Um Kalthoum, an Egyptian diva of another era: “Qaddafi sings to Bashar: I’m getting bored as I wait for you.”

“Today we are walking on the same path as Libya,” said a 25-year-old protester in Barzah, near Damascus, who gave his name as Basil. He called for “armed resistance.”

But the protesters face a government that acts emboldened today, waving the prospect of a victory at its supporters. Until Friday, protests had waned, not least because so many protesters are in jail. Even the most ardent critics of Mr. Assad now talk of a struggle of months, and perhaps years, when they had once predicted weeks.

Last week, with a mass pro-government rally in Damascus, the leadership underlined its support in Syria’s largest cities and among minorities that seem more fearful than ever of Mr. Assad’s fall. In a bit of bluster, Syria’s foreign minister warned of retaliation against any country that recognized the opposition, though leaving imprecise what it could do.

The protest movement itself has become more complicated, with an armed rebellion emerging forcefully in central Syria and some peaceful protesters acknowledging they have lost momentum and morale. Several council leaders suggested that the push to close ranks came as much from abroad as inside Syria, where complaints had grown over what some demonstrators saw as endless bickering abroad.

“The revolution on the ground clearly reached a critical point whereby it had given everything it could give in terms of results through peaceful means,” said Bassma Koudmani, a prominent Syrian dissident and a key figure on the council. The opposition group, she added, was the antidote to “the impossibility of any breakthrough.”

Even critics are impressed by the group’s ability over more than three months of negotiations to band together disparate constituencies across a landscape where the Assad family has so extinguished politics that not even the ruling Baath Party really has a much of a say. The council was announced in Istanbul on Oct. 2, after what Yaser Tabbara, an lawyer in Chicago and council member, called “incredibly intense negotiations.”

“We’re getting closer to staking a common ground,” Mr. Nachar said.

Though not all the members are yet named — a sign of lingering disputes — the council organized itself into a body of 230 representatives, with a smaller secretariat of 29 people and an executive committee of 7. The executive committee counts among its members a Muslim Brotherhood leader, a figure from the Assyrian minority, and a Syrian academic in France, in addition to Mr. Nachar.

Burhan Ghalioun, the academic in Paris, has emerged as its spokesman.

Mr. Ghalioun is “not particularly charismatic, nor has he staked out any political platform, but he tends to be seen as clean, meaning consistent in his positions over the year, and independent inasmuch as he earns a living and has no known affiliations,” said an analyst based in Damascus, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of reprisal.

No other opposition movement in the Arab revolts faces the challenges that Syria’s does. The government has ensured that no Tahrir Square has emerged to focus dissent. With most journalists barred, Syria is bereft of the coverage that helped drive Tunisia’s uprising in the early days. Unlike Libya, there is no open border, nor a city like Benghazi where the opposition can organize. Most difficult is the makeup of Syria itself — sizable minorities whose fears of an aftermath the government has relentlessly stoked.

Unlike with Libya, Western officials have called the council’s formation a positive step but offered little more. “I think we will have to find out a bit more yet,” said Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief. (So far, only Libya’s new government has recognized the council as the representative of Syria’s people.)

An Obama administration official was especially critical, saying the council had lobbied the international community more than Syrians themselves, particularly the Christian and Alawite minorities. The official declined to refer to the council as the opposition, but rather as “oppositionists,” in reflection of the body’s embryonic nature.

“It’s a right step, but we’re still skeptical basically,” the official in Washington said. “We’re far from a real body that fully represents the Syrian people.”

Within the opposition, some worry about the disproportionate power of Islamists, namely the Muslim Brotherhood, especially given its lack of any organizational presence inside Syria. Others suggest Turkey may seek to corral the opposition, and some activists were opposed to holding the meeting in Istanbul. Though Turkish officials have sought to place themselves broadly on the side of change in the Arab world, they have deep relations with Islamist movements in Egypt, Tunisia and the Palestinian territories.

While Mr. Ghalioun has said the council opposes the intervention of NATO, even if it is not on the table, others have endorsed what they call international protection of protesters, an admittedly ambiguous position, or no-fly zones or havens along Syria’s borders. Inside Syria, some dissidents still caution against the overthrow of Mr. Assad — fearing civil war — and instead endorse gradual reform.

And though this month has witnessed one of the biggest Kurdish demonstrations, the community has yet to forcefully enter the fray on the opposition’s side.

“Things are still very blurred,” said Abdel-Basit Hammo, a Kurdish activist.

Some analysts say the opposition’s biggest challenge in the coming months is to elaborate precisely its vision for a future Syria, beyond a set of principles. Mr. Assad’s government is remarkable for its lack of any ideology; fear of chaos drives much of its support. Most slogans at last week’s pro-government protest paid tribute to the remnants of Mr. Assad’s personality cult, itself diminished by the viciousness of the crackdown.

“The key is whether they can offer a real alternative,” said Nadim Houry, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Beirut. “If they do, they would be setting the agenda, regardless of whether they are in Damascus or not. This is where their true power lies today, if they can set the agenda and define what tomorrow’s Syria will look like.”

    Death of Qaddafi Revives Opposition, and Hope, in Syria, NYT, 21.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/qaddafis-death-stirs-new-protests-and-hope-in-syria.html

U.N. Panel Calls for Inquiry Into Qaddafi’s Death

October 21, 2011
The New York Times
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE

GENEVA — The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Friday for an inquiry into the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi amid conflicting accounts of how the Libyan dictator met his end and video that appeared to show him alive after his capture.

“We believe there is a need for investigation to see whether he was killed in fighting or some form of execution,” Rupert Colville, the spokesman for Navi Pillay, the human rights commissioner, told reporters in Geneva.

Libya’s interim prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, said that Colonel Qaddafi was wounded but still alive when he was captured and put on a truck in the town of Surt on Thursday. The vehicle was caught in cross-fire between Qaddafi loyalists and the attacking forces, Mr. Jibril said, and Colonel Qaddafi was struck in the head by a bullet, dying shortly before reaching a hospital.

But video and photographs that appeared on the Internet soon after Colonel Qaddafi was captured show him alive and propped between his captors, while others showed the body of the deposed leader being dragged by a crowd, covered in blood and apparently dead.

The existence of videos showing Colonel Qaddafi first alive and then dead was “very disturbing,” Mr. Colville said. “We really do need some clarity.”

Mr. Colville said the thousands of victims of Colonel Qaddafi’s tyrannical rule also deserved to see proper judicial procedures that bring to the light the truth of what occurred under the dictator’s 42-year rule, end the culture of impunity that existed and provide reparations for victims. It is “imperative,” he said, that Libya’s new rulers do everything possible to calm the situation.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Colville said that the independent Commission of Inquiry for Libya, set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council, would likely look into Colonel Qaddafi’s death. “This obviously falls squarely within their mandate,” he said. The commission is led by Judge Philippe Kirsch, the former president of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

“In the laws of war there is an obvious difference between someone killed in combat or crossfire, or a captive being executed or summarily shot down,” he said.

 

Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris.

    U.N. Panel Calls for Inquiry Into Qaddafi’s Death, NYT, 21.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/un-panel-calls-for-inquiry-into-qaddafis-death.html

Speaking for Qaddafi, Then Denouncing Him

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

On Thursday morning, when word reached New York from Libya that Muammar el-Qaddafi had taken a turn for the worse, a man in the Libyan mission to the United Nations on East 48th Street reflected on the moment.

“This was the best possible outcome,” said Ibrahim O. Dabbashi, Libya’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. “From the beginning, I said he would commit suicide or be killed. You can see now that it was inevitable.”

That outcome was not always so apparent, certainly not eight months ago, when Mr. Dabbashi took a daring leap.

A week into the protests, after scores of people had been shot by Libyan security forces from helicopters and by snipers, one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, gave a bellicose televised address, declaring that Libya would not be like Egypt or Tunisia because his father had the power of loyalty: “The armed forces are with him. Tens of thousands are heading here to be with him. We will fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.”

That morning, a Sunday, Mr. Dabbashi called the diplomatic staff at the mission into his office.

“There were 12 diplomats,” Mr. Dabbashi, 61, said. “I told them my intention, basically, the statement that I was going to make. I asked if anyone there wanted to join me. It was a personal decision, with some risks.”

Even outside the bland-sounding, coded language of diplomacy, where every word is measured, his proposed statement was bold.

In it, Mr. Dabbashi called Colonel Qaddafi a genocidal criminal, and said his son’s remarks were “a declaration of war against the Libyan people.” Apologizing to the international community, he called on the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone to prevent arms and mercenaries from reaching the capital, Tripoli, and asked for safe passage for humanitarian aid to hospitals.

And he bluntly renounced the government that had sent him — and his colleagues — to New York. “We state clearly that the Libyan mission is a mission for the Libyan people,” the statement said. “It is not for the regime.”

It concluded by calling on all Libyan diplomatic representatives around the world “to stand with their people and condemn the crimes that are being committed against their people.”

The meeting did not last long. “All of them said they were going to join me and took my statement as their own statement,” Mr. Dabbashi said.

The following day, accompanied by his dozen colleagues, some of whom appeared quite nervous, he spoke to reporters in the lobby of the mission, a high-rise building just east of Second Avenue that has been sealed off from the world for decades. A day later, the Libyan ambassador to the United States resigned; all over the world, a cascade of Libyan foreign servants renounced Colonel Qaddafi.

Whatever personal calculations may have been involved, their departures brought rare and resonant eloquence to their pleas for action. In New York, there was housekeeping to be done. A big oil portrait of Colonel Qaddafi in flowing robes, sitting on a horse, was taken out of the mission’s lobby. The flag of his regime was removed from a pole outside the building, replaced by one that had been used before Colonel Qaddafi came to power.

Although the world watched in horror as the regime slaughtered the protesters, there was little done by the international community until March, when others finally responded to Mr. Dabbashi’s call for a no-fly zone. With the support of the United States, NATO began flying bombing missions. While Colonel Qaddafi had status as a leading global terrorist in the 1980s, he eventually bought his way out of trouble by paying more than $2 billion in claims to families of those killed in the Lockerbie crash of Pan Am Flight 103.

In fact, documents found in his headquarters appear to show he was enlisted by President George W. Bush’s administration to interrogate suspects under a rendition program. The careers of Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi provide at least one lesson: When it comes to tyrants, the United States rents, but does not buy.

As the Qaddafi regime teetered, relatives of Mr. Dabbashi in Libya were hounded by security forces. He learned on March 1 that they were looking for a daughter who was living in Libya. “My daughter, who has two babies, was moving from one house to another until the 13th of July,” Mr. Dabbashi said.

The police put the mission under a 24-hour watch. “We were told that he had sent terrorists to assassinate several of us,” Mr. Dabbashi said. “I wasn’t really thinking about the risks. The people in Libya were bearing the risks.”

    Speaking for Qaddafi, Then Denouncing Him, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/nyregion/speaking-for-qaddafi-then-denouncing-him.html

As Autocrats Are Toppled, Their Fates Grow More Extreme

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CAIRO — With Arab despots toppling at an unprecedented pace since January, a range of options for the final curtain have been tested, with Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, typically, making the most dramatic exit with his gory death on Thursday.

“Qaddafism was a kind of cult,” Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor, said in describing the last stand in Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, Surt, as the act of fanatics. “They drank the Kool-Aid, and they were determined to die. It is their truth against the evil world.”

Even before the uprisings, of course, Saddam Hussein had vowed to fight to the death. But the Iraqi strongman ended up hiding underground, in a six-foot spider hole, and was eventually hanged in 2006 after a trial, however predetermined the outcome.

Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the first president who was forced out by popular outrage this year, back in January, chose exile in Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family will take virtually any Muslim. (Remember Idi Amin of Uganda?) But it is a difficult option for someone accustomed to being the center of attention; Mr. Ben Ali has not been heard from since.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt chose to stand and fight in the courts. But he now risks being remembered mostly for lying on a stretcher in a metal cage, all part of his defense that he is too sick to suffer the indignity of a trial.

Among the remaining Arab Spring autocrats under siege, Presidents Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen are struggling to hold on to power. Mr. Assad first tried a feint about concessions, but soon abandoned any pretense of compromise, and his security forces have killed at least 3,000 demonstrators. Mr. Saleh nearly left office in a bomb attack, but survived with severe burns and sought treatment in Saudi Arabia.

It is not clear what lesson, if any, either man will take from Colonel Qaddafi’s fall and death.

His demise did not unroll exactly as anticipated, even if he kept vowing to fight to the death. Jerky videotape provided a few gruesome details showing Colonel Qaddafi, blood-soaked and disheveled.

Many expected that he would spend years cruising Libya’s vast desert in a flotilla of black sport utility vehicles, directing a sputtering counterrevolution from afar.

“It would have been more consistent with the way people viewed him to have found him in Niger or on the border, going in and out,” said Rob Malley, the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group.

There is no greater glory in Islam than dying for a righteous cause, as a “martyr,” gaining direct access to heaven.

The scholars at Al Azhar, the ancient seat of Sunni Muslim learning in Cairo, anticipated that Mr. Qaddafi or his acolytes would try to claim that mantle, so they rolled out a fatwa this month saying he would get no such honor. A martyr dies defending his religion and his nation, the religious fiat explained.

No doubt some of his surviving family members and most dedicated followers will still label him a martyr. But many expect that the darker legacy of his one-man rule will be remembered long after his manner of dying fades.

“I think that Qaddafi’s history is so black that it is very difficult to give him any honorable connotations because of his death,” said Mohamed el-Kheshen, a law professor at Cairo University.

The mood on the streets of Cairo, like in Tripoli, Libya, and many other Arab cities, was celebratory, with cars honking long into the night. Twitter and Facebook were crowded with high-speed commentary rejoicing in his death, with a weak undertow of regret that Colonel Qaddafi would never face the kind of trial that he had used to humiliate so many.

Libya “deprived us of what would have been the funniest trial in history with the star Moammar Qaddafi,” one person wrote on Twitter. A less restrained comment was from Nawara Negm, an Egyptian activist: “Thank God, killing is the least that should be done to you Qaddafi, a killer and a dog.”

One of the most popular links on the Web showed a cartoon with a man holding a red can of paint, having just smeared giant X’s over portraits of Mr. Ben Ali, Mr. Mubarak and Colonel Qaddafi. The next two on the wall, Presidents Saleh and Assad, look down with expressions of shock and fear as the man with the paint — who is labeled “ash-shab,” or the people — approaches.

Walid al-Tabtabai, a member of the Kuwaiti Parliament, wrote on Twitter: “Ben Ali fled, Mubarak was imprisoned, Saleh was burnt and Qaddafi was killed; notice that the fate of dictators gets worse every time. I wonder what gloomy fate awaits the criminal Bashar?”

There were questions on whether Mr. Qaddafi’s death would encourage Mr. Assad, Mr. Saleh and other autocrats to use greater force against their people or to pull back.

“For Arab dictators, it shows that for the amount of pressure they place on their people, there will be an equal and opposite reaction, and they cannot hold on forever,” said Yuseff Assad, an expert on Libya and an early supporter of the uprising.

Despite the tendency to lump together all Arab dictators, they are unique in their circumstances, and Colonel Qaddafi perhaps the most singular of all, in that he stuck around long enough to alienate just about everyone. (He could not, for example, muster enough friends to stave off the internationally sanctioned, if contentious, NATO bombing campaign.)

If Mr. Qaddafi is missed and mourned anywhere, it will be in Africa, where he bought friends far and wide. In Bamako, the capital of Mali, a new campus of government buildings bears Colonel Qaddafi’s name, and all the fancy hotels advertise their Libyan ownership with giant green neon signs on the upper floors.

Ultimately, though, many think that the real legacy of Mr. Qaddafi’s fall — and of those who preceded him and those sure to follow — is that the Arab people have changed.

“The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world,” said Professor Cole of the University of Michigan. “People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”

 

Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.

    As Autocrats Are Toppled, Their Fates Grow More Extreme, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/qaddafis-death-and-the-lessons-of-the-arab-spring.html

Qaddafi’s Death Places Focus on Arab Spring’s ‘Hard Road’

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TUNIS — Like the flight of Tunisia’s dictator or the trial of Egypt’s, the capture of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Thursday afternoon captivated the Arab world, giving a renewed sense of power and possibility. But the photographs of his bloody corpse that circulated just moments later on cellphones and television screens quickly tempered that exhilaration with a reminder of the many still-unresolved conflicts that the Arab Spring has also unleashed.

“This isn’t justice,” Mustafa Haid, 32, a Syrian activist, said as he watched Al Jazeera’s broadcast in a Beirut office. Colonel Qaddafi should have been put on trial, his crimes investigated, Libya reconciled to trust in the law, he said, as though he still hoped better from the regional uprising that began with peaceful displays of national unity in Tunis and Cairo.

Across the region, Colonel Qaddafi’s bloody end has brought home the growing awareness of the challenges that lie ahead: the balancing of vengeance against justice, impatience for jobs against the slow pace of economic recovery, fidelity to Islam against tolerance for minorities, and the need for stability against the drive to tear down of the pillars of old governments.

“For all of us, it is a hard road, because our battle is against ourselves,” said Ahmed Ounaies, a former Tunisian ambassador who served briefly as minister of foreign affairs after the ouster of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “We have to listen to our values, our aspirations, our present, against all the past that we have lived. It is a hard test, and success is not assured.”

Libya’s path is in many ways the most tortuous of the North African revolutions. When Colonel Qaddafi came to power 42 years ago, Libya was divided among three loosely confederated provinces and dozens of insular tribes. He forged Libya into a single nation built around his own bizarre cult of personality. He did not build any national institutions; he insisted that Libya was a direct democracy of people’s committees with no need for a government — that might challenge his power.

Even after he fled from Tripoli, the quest to capture him served as a glue holding together the loose confederation of local brigades that toppled his government. The provisional government in Benghazi, unable to resolve a contest among various power centers over government positions, put off a promised reshuffling until after the capture of Colonel Qaddafi’s last stronghold and hide-out, Surt, which means they are due to resume that work now.

“Libya is going to have a terrible time,” said Lisa Anderson, a political scientist who studies Libya.

“For a long time, what knit them together was a kind of morbid fascination with Qaddafi, and until now everybody felt that until they saw his body that he almost might come back, like a vampire,” said Ms. Anderson, who is the president of the American University in Cairo. But when the euphoria dies down, “they don’t have a credible institution in the entire country,” she said. “They don’t have anything that knits them together.”

Tunisia, poised to hold its first free elections on Sunday, may be the Arab state best positioned for a successful transition to a liberal democracy. Among factors in its favor are its relatively small, homogenous population of about 12 million, comparatively high levels of education, a large middle class, an apolitical military, a moderate Islamist movement and a long history of a unified national identity.

But with the removal of Mr. Ben Ali’s strong hand, the Tunisian elite has been bitterly divided by many of the questions soon to confront Libya, especially the role of Islam in their new society, law and government. In the final days of the election campaign, the biggest secular-liberal party has pledged to try to build a governing coalition that excludes the Islamists, while the leader of the Islamists said his party members would “take to the streets” if they deem the election stolen.

Nor has either Tunisia or Egypt resolved the frustrations of the legions of jobless youths who enlisted in the revolts for reasons of bread and butter, not civil liberties. In the hard-pressed southern Tunisian town of Kasserine, for example, many say that they are so disillusioned with the lack of change — lack of jobs — since the revolution that they no longer plan to vote. “They want me to vote so they can get a seat?” said Mabrouka Nbarki, 43, whose 17-year-old son was one of the dozens of young people killed in Kasserine during the revolt.

“Why would I vote?” she said, weeping. “There is no point.”

Her 7-year-old son, she said, had dreamed of growing up to be a policeman so that he could bring to justice whoever shot his older brother. But the younger son died of a fever; his mother blames heartbreak.

Egypt, in addition to far greater poverty and illiteracy, is also wrestling with deep sectarian tensions. Its Islamist movement is divided among factions eager to incorporate Islamic moral codes into the civil law and others committed to liberal tolerance. The open debate over the country’s future has added to tensions with its Coptic Christian minority, who make up about 10 percent of the population.

Then there is the mixed blessing of Egypt’s military. While it provided the kind of national structure for a change of government that Libya lacked, its continued hold on power since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak has led many to question whether the correct term is “revolution” or “coup.” Most political players believe the military is seeking some guarantees of its autonomy and influence under the next civilian government.

“People who saw the benefits of this at the beginning are starting to see the costs,” said Ms. Anderson of the American University in Cairo. “Everyone will have to decide how much of those costs they can bear, including the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.”

Still, the military appeared to be engaged in a gradual negotiation toward “a more civilian kind of government,” she said, adding, “Nobody ever gave up power without a negotiation.”

Some in the region now say they hope that the success of the Libyan insurrection in toppling Colonel Qaddafi without the aid of an institution like the Egyptian military, and by force of arms rather than moral suasion, could reinvigorate activists in violent struggles elsewhere, especially Syria and Yemen.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Yemen, with its weak state, splintered national army, and strong tribal affiliations, may be the region’s closest analogy to Libya — without oil, said Paul Sullivan, a Georgetown political scientist.

“The brutality of the Assad regime in Syria and the Saleh regime in Yemen is still being felt,” he said. “But with the demise of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the light at the end of the tunnel is a lot less dim.”

Or, he added, Libya may yet follow Yemen to chaos. “Libya still has its chance of becoming a failed state,” he said.

Still, Mr. Ounaies, the former Tunisian ambassador, argued that in some ways Colonel Qaddafi’s government had prepared the Libyan people to avoid that fate. “Now they are very well-trained not to accept the rule of one unique leader or party,” he said.

“And this experience of liberations from inside is itself an experience of national union and integration,” he said. “Though martyrdom, through sacrifice, through heroism, they have built up a strong union, a strong Libya, and that is very important for the building of a nation.”

 

Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Heba Afify from Cairo.

    Qaddafi’s Death Places Focus on Arab Spring’s ‘Hard Road’, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/qaddafis-bloody-end-points-to-difficulties-ahead.html

For Obama, Some Vindication of Approach to War

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — For President Obama, the image of a bloodied Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi offers vindication, however harrowing, of his intervention in Libya, where a reluctant commander in chief put strict limits on American military engagement and let NATO allies take the lead in backing the rebels.

Mr. Obama’s carefully calibrated response infuriated critics on the right and left, who blamed him either for ceding American leadership in a foreign conflict or for blundering into another Arab land without an exit strategy.

But with Colonel Qaddafi joining the lengthening list of tyrants and terrorists dispatched during the Obama presidency, even critics conceded a success for Mr. Obama’s approach to war — one that relies on collective, rather than unilateral, action; on surgical strikes rather than massive troop deployments.

“I think the administration deserves great credit,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview on CNN. “Obviously, I had different ideas on the tactical side, but the world is a better place.”

Mr. McCain had called for the United States to impose a no-fly zone over Libya in the early days of the rebellion, and to use heavier air power against the Qaddafi forces once the NATO operation began — measures that Mr. McCain said he still believed would have brought down the dictator far sooner.

The president rebuffed those calls, deciding on a more cautious strategy that depended on marshaling the support of NATO allies and Libya’s Arab neighbors, and shifting much of the burden of the air campaign to Britain and France. It was a strategy suited to a country weary of war and strapped for cash.

“Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives, and our NATO mission will soon come to an end,” Mr. Obama said in a Rose Garden address that served as a muted victory lap. “We’ve demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century.”

Mr. Obama drew a link between Colonel Qaddafi’s downfall and the killings of Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda, saying they show the “strength of American leadership across the world.” But it is a very different kind of leadership than that exercised by President George W. Bush or other presidents.

The strategy was summed up trenchantly by an unnamed Obama adviser, who described it in an article in The New Yorker magazine as “leading from behind,” a turn of phrase seized on by critics like Mr. McCain.

“It’s time to set aside the snide interpretations of ‘leading from behind,’ and simply call it leading,” said David Rothkopf, a foreign policy expert who wrote a history of the National Security Council. “This was the kind of multilateral, affordable, effective endeavor that any foreign policy initiative aspires to.”

Even so, Mr. Obama is not likely to get any lasting political credit for the success of the Libyan rebellion — just as he received only a fleeting bounce in the polls after the commando raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan.

The Republican presidential candidates certainly did not rush to credit Mr. Obama. Eric Fehrnstrom, an aide to Mitt Romney, said in a statement that Colonel Qaddafi’s death “brings to an end a brutal chapter in Libya’s history, but that does not validate the president’s approach to Libya. The credit goes to the people of Libya.”

Later, after a campaign appearance in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Mr. Romney was asked whether the president deserved some credit. “Yes, yes, absolutely,” he said, before disappearing through a back door.

Mr. Obama, his aides say, has long tried to balance a willingness to intervene in cases of mass atrocities with a reluctance to be drawn into large-scale combat. Last week, for example, he ordered 100 armed military advisers to Uganda, where they will help regional forces fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, a renegade group that has raped and murdered villagers in central Africa.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama reiterated that he decided to intervene in Libya after Colonel Qaddafi’s “forces started going city to city, town by town to brutalize men, women and children.” But he also made a point of noting that the United States was winding down the Iraq war and turning over security in Afghanistan to the Afghans.

Left unsaid was another central element of Mr. Obama’s war-fighting strategy: a shadowy string of drone bases, where the United States sends out unmanned aircraft to hunt suspected terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Qaeda propagandist, who was killed last month in Yemen.

“Nobody could have predicted that in a six-month period, you’d see the deaths of Muammar Qaddafi, Osama bin Laden and Anwar Awlaki,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “But it flows directly out of the decisions the president has made since the beginning of his administration.”

Sticking to limited operations like Libya also makes sense at a time when the White House is seeking to cut at least $400 billion out of the Pentagon budget. “The whole thing cost $1 billion,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s a rounding error.”

The problem for Mr. Obama, analysts said, is that Libya is not much of a template for other conflicts.

In Bahrain, for example, strategic considerations and Saudi Arabia’s resistance constrain American options. In Syria, Russia and China have blocked efforts to ratchet up pressure on President Bashar al-Assad, partly out of anger with what they view as a military mission in Libya that exceeded its writ.

“In Syria, which is the linchpin of the Middle East, what happened in Libya cannot be replicated,” said Martin S. Indyk, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “There is no international consensus; on the contrary, there is an international divide.”

    For Obama, Some Vindication of Approach to War, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/qaddafis-death-is-latest-victory-for-new-us-approach-to-war.html

In Tripoli, Blaring Horns and Shouts of Joy

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By OMAR ABULQASIM ALKIKLI

Tripoli, Libya

I WAS walking down one of this city’s largest thoroughfares on Thursday with my eldest son, 17-year old Hyyan, after the news — at that point, still unconfirmed — broke that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had been killed.

We heard the sounds of different firearms exploding around us as people celebrated. Hyyan provided commentary in the authoritative tones of an expert: “that’s an R.P.G., that’s a 14.5 mm., that’s a 24.” We chuckled when we heard the sound of a rifle amid the heavier artillery — in Libya, the rifle is hardly considered to be a serious weapon anymore.

Hyyan had been living with his maternal grandparents in nearby Zawiyah in August when the revolutionaries entered the town and the Qaddafi forces began their indiscriminate shelling, and it became impossible to get him home for a while. He had a difficult time then, falling asleep and awakening to the sound of gunfire. Eventually, he learned the skill of distinguishing the sounds that the different weapons made; he’s probably better at that than at telling apart the voices of his relatives and friends.

From the beginning, he had wanted to volunteer and go off to fight with the revolutionaries, but I persuaded him not to, arguing that he was still a minor and, moreover, untrained. However, faced with his insistence and my own fears that he would run off to join the revolutionary forces behind my back, I acquiesced to a middle ground, and let him join our neighborhood’s military council to guard the area. Now, walking down the street, he regretted not having brought his Kalashnikov with him, and not being able to join in the joyous celebration.

Before we began walking, Hyyan and I had been sitting outside a small coffee shop in the Zawiyat Dahmani neighborhood, close to the center of town. Joy had been spreading across the city with the news that Surt had been liberated, and suddenly, the shout went up that Muammar el-Qaddafi was dead, and the chants of celebration and praise to God grew louder.

Hyyan and I were initially skeptical, worried that the rumor would prove to be unfounded, as had happened with earlier news about the capture of some of Colonel Qaddafi’s adult children. I went into the coffee shop to watch the television. Al Jazeera was attributing the news to one of its sources, but it was still unconfirmed. Then I heard a man shout into his cellphone, “The dog’s dead! The dog’s dead!” I approached one of the young men celebrating raucously outside the coffee shop and told him that I was afraid the news wasn’t true. He replied that he hoped that it was, then added that it was more important that Surt had been liberated, because that was what really meant that Libya was free.

Hyyan and I got into our car and drove off. The streets were packed, and the air was electric with the energy of victory that springs from the sound of cars’ horns and shouts of joy and “Allahu Akbar” coming from the throats of men, women and children. The red, green and black independence flags were waved by people on the sidewalks and gripped by taut arms that emerged from car windows. As we approached downtown, the traffic got worse; some streets were completely blocked. Revolutionary volunteers and policemen were directing traffic with flags and victory signs.

When we finally found a place to park, we got out and I was able to walk and get a better look at the street.

Cars passed us, carrying passengers who themselves were carried on the waves of a powerful joy. On the back of a pickup truck, a group of young men sang and clapped, one of them wearing a terrible wig, a symbol of Colonel Qaddafi’s famously wild haircut, which had given him the disparaging nickname Abu Shafshufa (father of the fuzzy hair). Another young man, in Algeria Square, held up a large portrait of Colonel Qaddafi in traditional women’s clothes. A beautiful young girl in modern dress stuck her slim torso out of the back window of a car driven by a woman, with two other women also inside — and called to a young man standing on the sidewalk, probably a family member, to join them.

In Martyrs’ Square, the crowd was larger, and the gunfire louder and more frequent. Hyyan told me not to go in, worried that I would be overcome by the crowd and the stench of gunfire. I heard a voice calling my name, and looked around to find a young revolutionary whom I knew. We exchanged greetings and congratulated each other, and spoke briefly about our hopes and concerns for the future.

Then Hyyan and I got back in the car and started to drive home. We passed a young revolutionary who asked me to turn on my orange blinkers — I noticed most of the cars had done so, too — as a sign of celebration. A woman was distributing sweets to all the drivers. All along the Wall Road that goes around Tripoli (said to be named for the wall the Italians erected to keep Libyan nationalist fighters out of the city), many people stood chanting “Allahu Akbar,” and spraying the cars with orange blossom water, a custom traditionally reserved for weddings. One of the young men shouted as he showered us: “A new life! A new life!”

 

Omar Abulqasim Alkikli is a writer and a former political prisoner. This essay was translated by Ghenwa Hayek from the Arabic.

    In Tripoli, Blaring Horns and Shouts of Joy, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/opinion/in-tripoli-jubilation-at-qaddafis-death.html

Colonel Qaddafi’s End

October 20, 2011
The New York Times

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya died as he lived — violently. We sympathize with the Libyans who suffered for so long at the hands of the ruthless dictator and are glad he can no longer hurt them. But a gruesome video broadcast on Al Jazeera — apparently showing him being dragged, beaten and then, perhaps, shot to death by armed men — is deeply troubling, if it is real.

Libyans must resist further reprisals and channel their passion into building a united, free and productive country. If not, they risk even more chaos and suffering.

Colonel Qaddafi could have chosen a different ending. After the Arab Spring reached Libya in February and rebel forces — backed by NATO air power — moved against him, European and African leaders tried to negotiate his exit but were rejected.

When his government was toppled two months ago, he refused to give in. He fled to his hometown of Surt and rallied his supporters to keep fighting — even when it was clear that all that would happen would be more death and destruction. The rebels finally took full control of the city on Thursday.

Leaders of the Transitional National Council, the interim government, have promised to build a democracy in a country that has never had one. There is an enormous amount of work to be done and no time to waste.

Mahmoud Jibril, the interim prime minister, should make clear that the worst of Qaddafi’s henchmen will either be turned over to the Hague — Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, one of the colonel’s sons who is under indictment there, is said to have been captured — or given a fair trial in Libya. Those who have not committed grievous crimes should be encouraged to join in building a new Libya.

The government must move quickly to create a civilian-led army and police force to provide order and security. It must persuade powerful regional militias to disband or come under central government control and secure thousands of weapons — including shoulder-launched missiles — that have gone missing. It needs to get the oil industry back on line and start building a functioning judicial system.

Mr. Jibril has said that with Colonel Qaddafi’s death the country can start preparing for its first real elections, for a national council, within eight months. The process of registering candidates and voters must be transparent. It would be wise to expand the interim council to include former Qaddafi loyalists and women as a sign that all Libyans will be part of this new undertaking.

Earlier this week, on a visit to Tripoli, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States will provide $40 million immediately to help Libya secure weapons. It is also offering to help, care for the war wounded and train civil society groups. Britain and France have also promised help. More than money — thanks to oil, Libya is wealthy — Libya will need sustained technical advice and full-time engagement.

This was always the Libyan people’s fight. But the United States and Europe were also victims of Qaddafi’s terrorism and can feel relief and satisfaction in the supporting role they played in ending his horror. Now they have to help and goad Libyans into building a stable and peaceful democracy.

    Colonel Qaddafi’s End, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/opinion/colonel-qaddafis-end.html

An Erratic Leader, Brutal and Defiant to the End

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the erratic, provocative dictator who ruled Libya for 42 years, crushing opponents at home while cultivating the wardrobe and looks befitting an aging rock star, met a violent and vengeful death Thursday in the hands of the Libyan forces that drove him from power.

In death, as in life, his circumstances proved startling, with jerky video images showing him captured, bloody and disheveled, but alive. A separate clip showed his half-naked torso, with eyes staring vacantly and what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the head, as jubilant fighters fired into the air. In a third video, posted on YouTube, excited fighters hovered around his lifeless-looking body, posing for photographs and yanking his limp head up and down by the hair.

Throughout his rule, Colonel Qaddafi, 69, sanctioned spasms of grisly violence and frequent bedlam, even as he sought to leverage his nation’s oil wealth into an outsize role on the world stage.

He embraced a string of titles: “the brother leader,” “the guide to the era of the masses,” “the king of kings of Africa” and — his most preferred — “the leader of the revolution.”

But the labels pinned on him by others tended to stick the most. President Ronald Reagan called him “the mad dog of the Middle East.” President Anwar el-Sadat of neighboring Egypt pronounced him “the crazy Libyan.”

As his dominion over Libya crumbled with surprising speed, Colonel Qaddafi refused to countenance the fact that most Libyans despised him. He placed blame for the uprising on foreign intervention — a United Nations Security Council resolution intended to defend civilians became the contentious basis for NATO airstrikes on his troops.

“I tell the coward crusaders: I live in a place where you can’t get me,” he taunted defiantly after the uprising against his rule started in February. “I live in the hearts of millions.”

That attitude endured to the end. In one of his last speeches, made weeks after Tripoli fell and he was a fugitive, he exhorted Libyans to defeat the uprising.

“The people of Libya, the true Libyans, will never accept invasion and colonization,” he said in remarks broadcast by a Syrian television station because he had lost control of Libya’s airwaves. “We will fight for our freedom, and we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.”

Colonel Qaddafi was a 27-year-old junior officer when he led the bloodless coup that deposed Libya’s monarch in 1969. Soon afterward, he began styling himself a desert nomad philosopher. He received dignitaries in his signature sprawling white tent, which he erected wherever he went: Rome, Paris and, after much controversy, New York, on a Westchester estate in 2009. Inside, its quilted walls might be printed with motifs like palm trees and camels, or embroidered with his sayings.

Colonel Qaddafi declared that his political system of permanent revolution would sweep away capitalism and socialism. But he hedged his bets by financing and arming a cornucopia of violent organizations, including the Irish Republican Army and African guerrilla groups, and he became an international pariah after his government was linked to terrorist attacks, particularly the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.

After the American-led invasion of Iraq, Colonel Qaddafi announced that Libya was abandoning its pursuit of unconventional weapons, including a covert nascent nuclear program, ushering in a new era of relations with the West. But in Libya, he ruled through an ever smaller circle of advisers, including his sons, destroying any institution that might challenge him.

By the time he was done, Libya had no parliament, no unified military command, no political parties, no unions, no civil society and no nongovernmental organizations. His ministries were hollow, with the notable exception of the state oil company.

A Tight Grip on Power

Eight years into his rule, he renamed the country the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Jamahiriya. (Jamahiriya was his Arabic translation for a state of the masses.) “In the era of the masses, power is in the hands of the people themselves and leaders disappear forever,” he wrote in The Green Book, a three-volume political tract that was required reading in every school.

For decades, Libyans noted dryly that he did not seem to be disappearing any time soon; he became the longest-serving Arab or African leader. Yet he always presented himself as beloved guide and chief clairvoyant, rather than ruler. Indeed, he seethed when a popular uprising inspired by similar revolutions next door in Tunisia and Egypt first sought to drive him from power.

“I am a glory that Libya cannot forgo and the Libyan people cannot forgo, nor the Arab nation, nor the Islamic nation, nor Africa, nor Latin America, nor all the nations that desire freedom and human dignity and resist tyranny!” Colonel Qaddafi shouted in February. “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution!”

It was a typically belligerent and random harangue. He vowed to fight to his last drop of blood.

“This is my country!” he roared as he shook his fist and pounded the lectern. “Muammar is not a president to quit his post. Muammar is the leader of the revolution until the end of time!”

He blamed all manner of bogeymen — including the United States, operatives of Al Qaeda and youths “fueled by milk and Nescafé spiked with hallucinogenic drugs.” But he also made it clear that he was ready to hunt all the “rats” to eliminate anyone who participated. “Everything will burn,” he vowed.

At least once a decade, Colonel Qaddafi fomented shocking violence that terrorized Libyans.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he eliminated even mild critics through public trials and executions. Kangaroo courts were staged on soccer fields or basketball courts, where the accused were interrogated, often urinating in fear as they begged for their lives. The events were televised to make sure that no Libyan missed the point.

The bodies of one group of students hanged in downtown Tripoli’s main square were left there to rot for a week, opposition figures said, and traffic was rerouted to force cars to pass by.

In the 1990s, faced with growing Islamist opposition, Colonel Qaddafi bombed towns in eastern Libya, and his henchmen were widely believed to have opened fire on prisoners in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, killing about 1,200.

“Qaddafi’s ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way,” said Hisham Matar, the author of “In the Country of Men,” a novel depicting the devastation of life under Colonel Qaddafi. “He deliberately tried to create a campaign that would terrorize the population, that would traumatize them to such an extent that they would never think of expressing their thoughts politically or socially.”

Colonel Qaddafi survived countless coup and assassination attempts and cracked down harshly afterward, alienating important Libyan tribes. He imported soldiers from his misadventures in places like Sudan, Chad and Liberia, transforming Libya’s ragtag militias into what he styled as his African or Islamic legions.

Muammar el-Qaddafi was born to illiterate Bedouin parents in a tent just inland from the coastal town of Surt in 1942. (Some sources give the date as June 7.) His father herded camels and sheep. One grandfather was killed in the 1911 Italian invasion to colonize Libya.

His parents scrimped for his education, first with a local cleric and then secondary school. He began to idolize President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who preached Arab unity and socialism after deposing the king in a 1952 coup. He showed enough promise to enter the Royal Military Academy at Benghazi, in eastern Libya, and in 1966 was sent to England for a course on military communications. He learned English.

On Sept. 1, 1969, he led young officers in seizing the government in just a few hours while King Idris was abroad. They dissolved Parliament and set up a 12-member Revolutionary Command Council to rule Libya, mirroring Mr. Nasser’s Egypt. He was promoted to colonel and armed forces commander. Egypt was his blueprint, and he proclaimed that the newly named Libyan Arab Republic would advance under the Arab nationalist slogan “Socialism, unity and freedom.”

Yet in a country where the deposed king, Idris, had come from a long line of religious figures, Colonel Qaddafi felt compelled to shore up his Islamic credentials. He banned alcohol and closed bars, nightclubs and casinos. He outlawed teaching English in public schools. Traffic signs and advertisements not in Arabic were painted over.

Decades later, only one nightclub had opened in Tripoli, in a nondescript building plastered with revolutionary slogans and displaying the mandatory picture of the leader, who seemed to stare down from every wall in Libya.

Colonel Qaddafi claimed that Mr. Nasser had declared him his son, and in the early years of his rule, he set about trying to win his idol’s approval by modernizing Libya and trying, in vain, to unite it with other Arab countries. He expelled American and British military bases, then nationalized the property of Italian settlers and a small Jewish community. He railed against Israel.

He also vowed to eliminate Libya’s tribes, worried that they were too powerful, even though Libya’s urbanizing population had been moving away from them for some time.

Libya had been desperately poor until oil was discovered in 1959. A decade later, Libyans had touched little of their wealth.

The 1969 coup changed that. The new Libyan government forced the major oil companies to cede majority stakes in exchange for continued access to the country’s oil fields, and it demanded a greater share of the profits. The pattern was emulated across the oil-producing states, profoundly changing their relationship with the oil giants.

With the increased revenue, Colonel Qaddafi set about building roads, hospitals, schools and housing. And Libyans, who had suffered during the Italian occupation before World War II, were allowed to celebrate an anticolonial, Arab-nationalist sentiment that had been bottled up under the monarchy, said Prof. Ali Ahmida, an expert at the University of New England.

Life expectancy, which averaged 51 years in 1969, is now over 74. Literacy leapt to 88 percent. Per capita annual income grew to above $12,000 in recent years, though the figure is markedly lower than that found in many oil-rich countries. Yet Colonel Qaddafi warned his people that the oil would not last.

“Petroleum societies are lazy everywhere,” he observed. “People are used to having more money and want everything available. This revolution wants to change this life and to promote production and work, to produce everything by our hands. But the people are lazy.”

The Guiding Philosophy

The mercurial changes in policy and personality that kept Libyans off balance began in earnest with the three volumes of his Green Book, published from 1976 to 1979. (Green, he explained, was for both Islam and agriculture.) The book offered his “third universal theory” to improve on capitalism and socialism, and elevated the mundane to the allegedly profound, condemning sports like boxing as barbarism and pointing out that men and women are different because women menstruate.

Colonel Qaddafi also introduced Orwellian revolutionary committees in every neighborhood to purge the country of the ideologically unsound, calling it “people power.” He began foisting social experiments on Libyans.

Once he demanded that all Libyans raise chickens to promote self-sufficiency, even deducting the costs of cages from their wages. “It made no sense to raise chickens in apartments,” said Mansour O. El-Kikhia, a Qaddafi biographer at the University of Texas and a member of an opposition family. “People slaughtered the chickens, ate them and used the cages as dish racks.”

Colonel Qaddafi said women were not equal to men, but he exhibited them as a symbol of the success of the Libyan revolution. None had a higher profile than his phalanx of female bodyguards, in camouflage fatigues, red nail polish and high-heeled sandals, and carrying submachine guns.

To consolidate his power, Colonel Qaddafi tried to eliminate or isolate all of the 11 other members of the original Revolutionary Command Council. Strikes or unauthorized news reports resulted in prison sentences, and illegal political activity was punishable by death. Western books were burned, and private enterprise was banned. Libyan intelligence agents engaged in all manner of skulduggery, reaching overseas to kidnap and assassinate opponents.

He vowed to turn Libya into an agriculture powerhouse through the Great Man-Made River, a grandiose $20 billion project to pump water from aquifers underneath the Sahara and send it over 1,200 miles to the coast through a gargantuan pipeline.

Meanwhile he was cementing Libya’s rogue-state status by bankrolling terrorist and guerrilla organizations, including Abu Nidal, the radical Palestinian organization, and the violent Red Army Faction in Europe. At least a dozen coups or coup attempts in Africa were traced to his backing. That set him on a collision course with the West.

In the early 1980s, President Reagan closed the Libyan Embassy in Washington, suspended oil imports and shot down two Libyan fighters after Colonel Qaddafi tried to extend Libya’s territorial waters across the Gulf of Sidra.

In London in 1984, gunshots from the Libyan Embassy killed a police officer and wounded 11 demonstrators. In 1986, Libyan agents were linked to the bombing of a disco in West Berlin, killing two American service members and a Turkish woman and wounding 200 people.

President Reagan retaliated 10 days later by bombing targets in Libya, including Colonel Qaddafi’s residence in his compound at the Bab al-Aziziya barracks in Tripoli.

He preserved the wreckage of the house as a symbol of American treachery and, in front of it, installed a sculpture of a giant fist crushing an American jet fighter. It became his preferred stage for major events; his major speech during the 2011 uprising was delivered from the first floor.

During the ’80s, Colonel Qaddafi also invaded Chad after encroaching on its border for years. Chad finally defeated the effort in 1987 with French and American military aid.

The Lockerbie Bombing

In 1988, in the deadliest terrorist act linked to Libya, 259 people aboard Pan Am Flight 103 died when the plane exploded in midair over Lockerbie. The falling wreckage killed 11 people on the ground. Libyan agents were also believed to have been behind the explosion of a French passenger jet over Niger in 1989, killing 170 people.

Nearly a decade of international isolation started in 1992, after Libya refused to hand over two suspects indicted by the United States and Britain in the Lockerbie bombing. France also sought four suspects in the Niger bombing, among them Abdullah Senussi, a brother-in-law of Colonel Qaddafi’s and the head of external intelligence. He was convicted in absentia.

The United Nations imposed economic sanctions, and when his fellow Arabs enforced them, Colonel Qaddafi turned away from the Arab world. He began his quest to become leader of Africa, coming closest in title, at least, in 2009, when he was named the chairman of the African Union for a year.

In 1999, Libya finally handed over two Lockerbie suspects for trial in The Hague under Scottish law and reached a financial settlement with the French. One suspect was acquitted but another, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in a Scottish jail. When the government released him in 2009, on the grounds that he was terminally ill, the outcry was swift. The British were accused of trying to curry favor with Tripoli for oil and arms deals.

The international sanctions against Libya were lifted in 2003 after it accepted responsibility for the bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of victims in the Lockerbie bombing and in other attacks.

The Libyans did not admit guilt, however. They made it clear that they were simply taking a practical step toward restoring ties with the West. But when Judge Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the justice minister, defected during the uprising in February 2011, he told a Swedish newspaper that he had proof that Colonel Qaddafi had ordered the operation.

Tripoli truly began to emerge from the cold after the September 2001 attacks against the United States. Colonel Qaddafi condemned them and shared Libya’s intelligence on Al Qaeda with Washington. Libya had been the first country to demand an international arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden.

Colonel Qaddafi also said he would destroy his weapons stockpile. President George W. Bush said Libya’s decision demonstrated the success of the invasion of Iraq, in that it had persuaded a rogue state to abandon its menacing ways, although Libya had made a similar overture years before and many experts did not consider its programs threatening.

Nevertheless, Britain and the United States re-established diplomatic relations. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a parade of world leaders to Colonel Qaddafi’s tent seeking trade deals. Ms. Rice was the first American secretary of state to visit since 1953.

Before the visit, Colonel Qaddafi was effusive about Ms. Rice. “I support my darling black African woman,” he said on the network Al Jazeera, adding: “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza — I love her very much.”

State Department cables released by WikiLeaks suggested that there was another woman who had won Colonel Qaddafi’s affection, and confidence — a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse, described as the senior member of a posse of nurses around him.

The cables described him as a hypochondriac who feared flying over water and who often fasted twice a week. He followed horse racing, loved flamenco dancing and added “king of culture” to his myriad titles, the cables said.

Around 1995 he published a collection of short stories and essays called “The Village, the City, the Suicide of the Astronaut and Other Stories.” It later came out in Britain as “Escape to Hell and Other Stories.” As a reviewer in the British newspaper The Guardian put it: “There are no characters, no twists, no subtle illuminations; indeed, there is precious little narrative. Instead, you get surreal rants and bizarre streams of consciousness obviously unmolested by the hand of any editor.”

Colonel Qaddafi married at least twice. His oldest son, Mohammed, from his first marriage, became a businessman and the agent for foreign companies working in Libya.

Seven other children — six sons and a daughter — came from his marriage to Safia Farkash, a former nurse. Seif al-Islam, the oldest son, had been the face of modern Libya, establishing an international charity and forever pledging that political reform was just around the corner. His moderate reputation evaporated with the uprising after he vowed that Libya would flow with blood. He was later indicted by the International Criminal Court, accused of crimes against humanity during the uprising.

Among Seif’s brothers, Muatassim, Hannibal and Khamis were military officers who commanded their own brigades. Muatassim headed the National Security Council but was also known for carousing in hot spots like the Caribbean island of St. Bart’s, where he was reported to have paid singers, including Mariah Carey, $1 million each for appearing at his holiday parties. Libyan television showed what it called his lifeless body on a gurney Thursday.

Hannibal gained notoriety for beating his wife and servants in luxurious European hotels. After he was arrested in Switzerland in 2008, Colonel Qaddafi broke off diplomatic relations and held two Swiss businessmen hostage.

The anti-Qaddafi forces said they killed Khamis, once head of the feared Khamis Brigade guarding Tripoli, in August as he and his bodyguards tried to break through a rebel checkpoint.

Another son, Saadi, a military officer, had been a professional soccer player who was allowed onto Italian teams more for the publicity than for his skills. The seventh son, Seif al-Arab, was believed killed in an air raid, with his brothers acting as pall bearers.

The daughter, Aisha, gained attention as a lawyer after she offered to join Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team.

Colonel Qaddafi was also believed to have adopted two children: Hanna and Milad, a nephew.

Mohammed, Hannibal and Aisha all fled to neighboring Algeria, while Saadi was given refuge in Niger to the south. The were conflicting reports Thursday over whether Seif al-Islam had been captured or killed.

As the circle around Colonel Qaddafi shrank, his sons increasingly became his advisers, but it was never clear if he had anointed any of them as his successor. He was believed to play one off against the other, granting and then withholding favor.

As Colonel Qaddafi grew older, the trim, handsome officer with short black hair gave way to someone more flamboyant. Brocade and medals festooned his military uniforms, as if he were some Gilbert & Sullivan admiral, while his black curls grew long and unruly. After he adopted Africa as his cause, he favored African robes in a riot of colors.

His long effort to eliminate the government left Libya in a shambles, its sagging infrastructure belying its oil wealth. That fact never seemed to bother Colonel Qaddafi. “Once he was in a position to sustain himself, the fact that nothing improved in Libya was something he did not notice,” said Lisa Anderson, the president of the American University in Cairo.

He was “notoriously mercurial,” a cable obtained through WikiLeaks said, a man who “avoids making eye contact” during meetings and thinks nothing of “long, uncomfortable periods of silence.” He would sometimes show up hours late for a state banquet honoring an African head of state, then sit in a far corner before bolting away. African leaders accepted this behavior in exchange for a check for a million dollars or two, diplomats said.

Capricious Dictates

After he put his worst years of sponsoring terrorism behind him, the West and the rest of the Arab world tended to treat him as comic opera, though he could still outrage, as he did in 2009, when, appearing for the first time before the United Nations General Assembly, he spoke for some 90 minutes instead of his allotted 15 and seemed to tear a copy of the charter, condemning the Security Council as a feudal organization.

When scores of children in a Benghazi hospital developed AIDS, most likely because of unsanitary conditions, Colonel Qaddafi accused the C.I.A. of developing the virus that caused it and of sending a group of Bulgarian nurses to spread it in Libya. The nurses were arrested, tortured, tried and sentenced to death before eventually being freed.

He never tired of pushing his idea for an Israeli-Palestinian solution, a unified country called “Isratine” in which both Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights as soon as all Palestinian refugees were allowed to return. The proposal elicited derision from other Arab leaders or senior officials.

At home, though, Libyans suffered under his dictates. He switched from the standard Muslim calendar to one marking the years since the Prophet Muhammad’s death, only to decide later that the birth year was a more auspicious place to start. Event organizers threw up their hands and reverted to the Western calendar. He also decided to rename the months. February was Lights. August was Hannibal.

Given the conceit that “popular committees” — and not Colonel Qaddafi himself — ran the country, everyone was required to attend committee sessions called at random once or twice a year to discuss an agenda “suggested” by the grand guide. Every single office — schools, government ministries, airlines, shops — had to shut for days, sometimes weeks. Scofflaws risked fines.

Colonel Qaddafi once declared that that any money over $3,000 in anyone’s bank account was excessive and should revert to the state. Another time he lifted a ban on sport utility vehicles, then changed his mind a few months later, forcing everyone who had bought one to hide it.

Libyans grumbled that they had no idea what had happened to their oil money; the official news agency said the country earned $32 billion in 2010 alone. When prices were low or Libya was under sanctions during most of the 1980s and ’90s, the nearly one million people on the public payroll never got a pay raise; experts calculated that most lived on $300 to $400 per month.

The general disarray was another way of ensuring that no one developed the confidence and connections to try to overthrow him. Libyans lived constantly on edge. “It is an awful feeling when you don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring,” said Dr. Kikhia, the biographer. “People don’t work — they cannot make a decision at any level.”

Colonel Qaddafi saw his rule as a never-ending quest, without ever defining the objective. “The state of Libya was a state of constant revolution, which suggests there was no goal,” said Mr. Matar, the novelist. “It was all false; it was a way to keep them all occupied.”

When revolutions succeeded in two Arab neighbors, deposing the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, Colonel Qaddafi was among the only leaders in the region to speak out publicly. The people had been swayed by foreign plots, he maintained. He tried to warn his people that Tunisians now lived in fear of being killed at home or on the streets. But few Tunisians died.

His first speech after the Libyan uprising erupted proved a classic Qaddafi moment, mocked by the outside world while accompanying a grueling civil war at home. He vowed to hunt down the insurgents “house by house and alley by alley.” The unusual Libyan word for alley — “zenga zenga” — was turned into a jingle, with various young women belly dancing to it in YouTube videos.

Even as Libyans died, Colonel Qaddafi demanded recognition that he alone had made them relevant.

“In the past, Libyans lacked an identity,” Colonel Qaddafi roared in the February speech. “When you said Libyan, they would tell you Libya, Liberia, Lebanon — they didn’t know Libya! But today you say Libya, they say Libya — Qaddafi, Libya — the revolution!”

    An Erratic Leader, Brutal and Defiant to the End, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/qaddafi-killed-as-hometown-falls-to-libyan-rebels.html

Violent End to an Era as Qaddafi Dies in Libya

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM, ANTHONY SHADID and RICK GLADSTONE

This article is by Kareem Fahim, Anthony Shadid and Rick Gladstone.

MISURATA, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s last moments Thursday were as violent as the uprising that overthrew him.

In a cellphone video that went viral on the Internet, the deposed Libyan leader is seen splayed on the hood of a truck and then stumbling amid a frenzied crowd, seemingly begging for mercy. He is next seen on the ground, with fighters grabbing his hair. Blood pours down his head, drenching his golden brown khakis, as the crowd shouts, “God is great!”

Colonel Qaddafi’s body was shown in later photographs, with bullet holes apparently fired into his head at what forensic experts said was close range, raising the possibility that he was executed by anti-Qaddafi fighters.

The official version of events offered by Libya’s new leaders — that Colonel Qaddafi was killed in a cross-fire — did not appear to be supported by the photographs and videos that streamed over the Internet all day long, raising questions about the government’s control of the militias in a country that has been divided into competing regions and factions.

The conflicting accounts about how he was killed seemed to reflect an instability that could trouble Libya long after the euphoria fades about the demise of Colonel Qaddafi, who ruled Libya for nearly 42 years and is the first of the autocrats to be killed in the Arab Spring uprisings.

At the same time, the flood of good news for the former rebels prompted a collective sigh of relief and quieted talk of rivalries, as strangers congratulated one another in the streets.

For weeks, as the fight for Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown and final redoubt in the eight-month conflict, reached a bloody climax, NATO forces and Libyan fighters had watched for an attempt by his armed loyalists to flee and seek safety elsewhere. Soon after dawn, they did, leaving urban bunkers in the Mediterranean town and heading west, said a senior Western official in Europe knowledgeable about NATO’s operations in Libya.

Around 8:30 a.m. local time, a convoy slipped out of a fortified compound in Surt, the scene of one of the civil war’s bloodiest and longest battles and a city that was on the verge of falling to Colonel Qaddafi’s opponents.

Before the convoy had traveled two miles, NATO officials said, it was set upon by an American Predator drone and a French warplane. With the attack the convoy “was stopped from progressing as it sought to flee Surt but was not destroyed,” Defense Minister Gérard Longuet of France said.

Only two vehicles in the convoy were hit, neither carrying Colonel Qaddafi, a Western official said. But the rest of the convoy was forced to detour and scatter. Anti-Qaddafi fighters rapidly descended on the scene, telling Reuters they saw people fleeing through some nearby woods and gave pursuit.

A field leader in Surt, who gave his name to Al Jazeera television as Mohammed al-Laith, said that Colonel Qaddafi fled from a Jeep in the convoy and dived into a large drainage pipe. After a gun battle backed by his guards, he emerged. Mr. Laith told Al Jazeera that the former Libyan leader had a Kalashnikov in one hand, a pistol in the other.

“What’s happening?” he quoted him as asking as he came out.

The video on Al Jazeera shows Colonel Qaddafi wounded, but clearly alive. The network quoted a fighter saying that he had begged for help. “Show me mercy!” he was said to have cried. There was little of that, in the video at least.

One fighter is seen pulling his hair, and others beat his limp body. Two fighters interviewed by Al Jazeera said someone had struck his head with a gun butt.

Omran Shaaban, 21, a Misurata fighter who claimed to have been the first, along with a friend, to find Colonel Qaddafi, said he was already wounded in the head and chest and bleeding in the drainage pipe and then whisked away to an ambulance. Precisely how he died after that, Mr. Shaaban said, was unclear.

By all accounts, he was then taken in an ambulance to Misurata, a coastal town to the west that fought perhaps the most ferocious battle against Colonel Qaddafi’s government and whose fighters still celebrate their reputation for martial prowess.

Holly Pickett, a freelance photojournalist working in Surt, reported in a Twitter feed that she had seen Colonel Qaddafi’s body in an ambulance headed for Misurata, along with 10 fighters inside with him. It was unclear from her posts whether he was dead. “From the side door, I could see a bare chest with bullet wound and a bloody hand. He was wearing gold-colored pants,” she said in one post.

Within an hour of the news of Colonel Qaddafi’s death, Libyans were celebrating. “We have been waiting for this moment for a long time,” Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the Transitional National Council, the interim government, said. “Muammar Qaddafi is dead.” He was speaking at a news conference in Tripoli. Mahmoud Shammam, the council’s chief spokesman, called it “the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial. It seems God has some other wish."

At least one of Colonel Qaddafi’s feared sons, Muatassim, was also killed on Thursday, Libyan officials said, and there were unconfirmed reports that another, Seif al-Islam, had been captured or wounded.

The Arab Twittersphere lighted up with gleeful comments, many of them hinting at a similar fate awaiting other Arab dictators who have sought to crush popular uprisings — most notably President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. One of them, also referring to former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, read: “Ben Ali escaped, Mubarak is in jail, Qaddafi was killed. Which fate do you prefer, Ali Abdullah Saleh? You can consult with Bashar.” Another was more direct: “Bashar al-Assad, how do you feel today?”

No videos or photos appeared to show Colonel Qaddafi alive after the ambulance spirited him away from Surt, though there was a debate over who exactly was responsible for his death. NATO never claimed the airstrike killed him, and some officials of the Transitional National Council made clear he died at their own hands.

A reporter accompanying Ali Tarhouni, the interim government’s oil and finance minister, who visited Misurata to view the body, saw Colonel Qaddafi splayed out on a mattress in the reception room of a private home, shirtless, with bullet wounds in the chest and temple and blood on his arms and hair. Three medical officials arrived, presumably to conduct more forensic tests. News agencies quoted a spokesman for the council in Benghazi as saying a doctor had examined Colonel Qaddafi’s corpse in Misurata and found he had been shot in the head and abdomen. The shot to the head was visible in photos that followed.

A remarkable feature of the Arab revolts is the degree to which almost every incident is documented, usually by cellphone camera images. They are almost instantly fed to the Internet and satellite channels, or ferried by e-mail.

A flurry of images followed Colonel Qaddafi’s death. In one, broadcast by Al Jazeera, his body is half-naked, bleeding on the pavement. Even more dramatic is a video posted on YouTube. Celebrating fighters surround his corpse, which appears to have been washed. Clearly visible is a gunshot wound to his forehead.

A forensic pathologist in New York, Dr. Michael Baden, said in observing the photos that there were as many as two bullet wounds and possibly four in Colonel Qaddafi’s head. From what he saw, he believed the shots were fired at fairly close range.

“It looks more like an execution than something that happened during a struggle,” said Dr. Baden, a former New York City medical examiner. “Two pretty identical-looking wounds like that would have been hard to do from a distance.”

Late into the night, Libyans celebrated Colonel Qaddafi’s death, as did some elsewhere in the Arab world, seeing it as a lesson to autocrats in Yemen and Syria. “It is a historic moment,” said Abdel Hafez Ghoga, a spokesman for the Transitional National Council. “It is the end of tyranny and dictatorship. Qaddafi has met his fate."

Western leaders who helped the anti-Qaddafi fighters throughout the conflict also hailed Colonel Qaddafi’s demise.

“We can definitely say that the Qaddafi regime has come to an end,” President Obama said. “The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted, and with this enormous promise the Libyan people now have a great responsibility to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship.”

But occasionally voiced in the Middle East was unease at the violence of the moment, the fact that a bloody revolution ended with yet more bloodshed. “It’s not acceptable to kill a person without trying him,” said Louay Hussein, a Syrian opposition figure in Damascus. “I prefer to see the tyrant behind bars.”

 

Kareem Fahim reported from Misurata and Tripoli, Libya; Anthony Shadid from Beirut, Lebanon; and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Denise Grady and J. David Goodman from New York; and Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Robert F. Worth from Washington.

    Violent End to an Era as Qaddafi Dies in Libya, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/qaddafi-is-killed-as-libyan-forces-take-surt.html

After Making Capture in Pipe, Displaying the Trophies of War

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

MISURATA, Libya — They had the ultimate trophies of the revolution: the colonel’s golden gun, his satellite phone, his brown scarf and one black boot.

A small group of fighters from Misurata, the vanguard of the force attacking Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s former hometown and final hide-out, Surt, said they had stumbled upon him hiding in a drainage pipe. He was bleeding from his head and chest, but he was well enough to speak, with his trademark indignation.

“When he saw us, he said, ‘What’s happening?’ Those were the words that he spoke,” said Omran Shaaban, a 21-year-old Misurata fighter who said he and a friend were the first men in their unit to find the colonel.

On Thursday night, Mr. Shaaban, a student wearing a brown leather jacket, and his colleagues celebrated their victory in the local council meeting room here, hugging one another and passing around the colonel’s prized last possessions. It was a windfall of spoils for the young men, who have lived only half as long as Colonel Qaddafi ruled Libya, and for Misurata, the Mediterranean port city that is their hometown.

Misurata suffered grievously under a long siege by Colonel Qaddafi’s troops in the spring. It responded with rage, sending out its battle-hardened fighters, first to capture Tripoli and, on Thursday, Surt. As the bodies of the colonel and his son Muatassim were displayed for onlookers here in private homes on Thursday night, it struck many Misuratans as a fitting end, providing a measure of comfort to a brutalized city — and a bargaining chip for its place in a post-Qaddafi Libyan government.

“Misurata will sleep very happily tonight,” said Dr. Suleiman Fortia, a member of the Transitional National Council from the city.

At the house where Muatassim Qaddafi’s body was being displayed, a man who had come to see put it more simply. “Thank God that we caught him,” he said.

It remained to be seen whether Misurata’s achievement would soothe resentments against the city that are lingering from the war. Its fighters threw their weight around in Tripoli and were enthusiastic looters of vanquished loyalist cities. Traveling to Misurata in recent weeks practically required a visa. Their neighbors in the city of Tawerga, accused of fighting in support of Colonel Qaddafi, fled their city in August having been told by the Misuratans that they should not return.

The early battles of the uprising forged a formidable fighting force. Misurata’s rebels became known for their relative skill in urban combat and their convoys of black pickup trucks with heavy weapons mounted in the back. When Tripoli fell, it was the Misurata fighters who led the storming of Bab al-Aziziya, the colonel’s fortified compound and a symbol of the regime’s power.

Misurata’s leaders have pushed for a leading role in the constellation of former rebel forces that have made rival claims to control Libya’s armed forces, and they insisted at one time that the prime minister be from Misurata.

Dr. Fortia tried on Thursday to be conciliatory. “It was teamwork,” he said. “But we deserve the cup.”

The Misurata fighters who caught Colonel Qaddafi set out at about 10 a.m. on Thursday to support the final assault on Surt, according to Munir Senussi, 21, one of the fighters. “We used the coast road,” he said. “We were told it was empty.” But instead, they found the remains of a convoy that had been hit by a NATO airstrike. “We started to hit them with heavy weapons,” he said. “We had no idea Qaddafi was there.”

Mr. Shaaban, the soldier who said he had found the colonel, said that he and the other fighters jumped on him, but he insisted that Colonel Qaddafi’s mortal wounds were already visible. The bodies of other men were near the drainage pipe, he said, but none of them were the colonel’s sons.

Colonel Qaddafi was carrying what Mr. Shaaban described as a sack of magic charms. He had a silver pistol in his hand, and in a bag, the fighters found the golden gun.

On Thursday night, Mr. Shaaban looked around at his friends, young men caked in dirt or blood but smiling, congratulating one another on a job well done. “Bring the gun!” Mr. Shaaban said.

Amid the other souvenirs of war, the big prize was Colonel Qaddafi’s body, shuttled around Misurata on Thursday, moved at least once when the crowds gathering to see it grew too large. By the late evening, the body had come to rest in the reception room of a pink villa. Scuffles broke out at the door as local military leaders came to take a look and snap pictures.

He had what appeared to be a small wound just below his chest and what looked like a gunshot wound to his left temple. His face was clean, but his arms were caked with blood. Several visitors tugged at his signature locks.

The exact circumstances of Colonel Qaddafi’s death were not known. But the fighters toyed with his body, banging the head up and down, flashing the victory sign. “This was the opportunity of my life,” said the owner of one house to which the bodies were taken, who refused to give his name. “If I die tomorrow, I’m happy.”

Ali Tarhouni, the interim government’s finance and oil minister, came to Misurata to confirm the colonel’s death on behalf of the cabinet. Mr. Tarhouni had met Colonel Qaddafi when he was a student. “He didn’t look very powerful,” he said, after seeing the body.

“I was looking at the corpse,” Mr. Tarhouni said, “and thinking of all the comrades and friends who spent decades fighting him, that didn’t live to see this day.”

 

Suliman Alzway contributed reporting from Misurata.

    After Making Capture in Pipe, Displaying the Trophies of War, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/brutalized-libyan-city-rejoices-with-gruesome-trophies-of-war.html

Qaddafi Is Dead, Libyan Officials Say

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and RICK GLADSTONE

TRIPOLI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who fled into hiding after rebels toppled his regime two months ago in the Arab Spring’s most tumultuous uprising, was killed Thursday as fighters battling the vestiges of his loyalist forces wrested control of his hometown of Surt, the interim government announced.

Al Jazeera television showed what it said was Colonel Qaddafi’s corpse lying on the ground, with a bloodied face, lifeless open eyes and an apparent gunshot wound to the side of the head, as jubilant fighters fired automatic weapons in the air. The images punctuated an emphatic and violent ending to his four decades as a ruthless and bombastic autocrat who had basked in his reputation as the self-styled king of kings of Africa.

“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Qaddafi has been killed,” Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the interim government, told a news conference in Tripoli.

Libyans rejoiced as news of his death spread. Car horns blared in Tripoli and in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the rebellion against Colonel Qaddafi began in February, as residents poured into the streets to celebrate.

Mahmoud Shammam, the chief spokesman of the Transitional National Council, the interim government that replaced Colonel Qaddafi’s regime after he fled Tripoli in late August, said: "This is the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial. It seems God has some other wish."

Abdul Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the Tripoli military council, said on Al Jazeera that anti-Qaddafi forces had Colonel Qaddafi’s body and were transporting it to an undisclosed location. Al Jazeera also quoted another unidentified official of the Transitional National Council as saying Mussa Ibrahim, the former spokesman of Colonel Qaddafi, had been captured near Surt.

There were unconfirmed reports that one of Colonel Qaddafi’s feared sons, Muatassim, had been captured or killed with his father. But the whereabouts of another son, Seif al-Islam, who has also been on the run since the fall of Tripoli, remained unclear.

It was also not clear precisely how Colonel Qaddafi died. Mohamed Benrasali, a member of the national council’s Tripoli Stabilization Committee, said fighters from Misurata who were deployed in Surt told him that Colonel Qaddafi was captured alive in a car leaving Surt. He was badly injured, with wounds in his head and both legs, Mr. Benrasali said, and died soon after.

Colonel Qaddafi had defied repeated attempts to corner and capture him, taunting his enemies with audio broadcasts denouncing the rebel forces that felled him as stooges of NATO, which conducted a bombing campaign against his military during the uprising under the auspices of a Security Council mandate to protect Libyan civilians.

There were unconfirmed reports that Colonel Qaddafi may have been wounded when NATO warplanes tstruck a convoy trying to spirit him away from Surt. NATO officials in Brussels declined to comment on the reports.

Libya’s interim leaders had said they believed that some Qaddafi family members including the colonel himself and some of his sons had been hiding in Surt or in Bani Walid, another loyalist bastion that the anti-Qaddafi forces captured earlier this week.

There was no immediate comment on the news of his death from the Obama administration, a major supporter of the rebel forces that ousted him. Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, traveling with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Afghanistan, said the department was aware of the reports “on the capture or killing of Muammar Qaddafi.”

At the European Union headquarters in Brussels, President Herman Van Rompuy said Colonel Qaddafi’s death “marks the end of an era of despotism,” Agence France-Presse reported.

Officials of the post-Qaddafi government had said that the death or capture of Colonel Qaddafi would allow them to declare the country liberated and in control of its borders, and to start a process that would lead to a general election for a national council within eight months.

Libyan fighters said earlier on Thursday that they had routed the last remaining forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi from Surt, ending weeks of fierce fighting in that Mediterranean enclave east of Tripoli.

A military spokesman for the interim government, Abdel Rahman Busin, said, “Surt is fully liberated.”

The battle for Surt was supposed to have been a postscript to the Libyan conflict, but for weeks soldiers loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, fiercely defended the city, first weathering NATO airstrikes and then repeated assaults by anti-Qaddafi fighters. Former rebel leaders were caught off guard by the depth of the divisions in western Libya, where the colonel’s policy of playing favorites and stoking rivalries has resulted in a series of violent confrontations.

Surt emerged as the stage for one of the war’s bloodiest fights, killing and injuring scores on both sides, decimating the city and leading to fears that the weak transitional leaders would not be able to unify the country.

The battle turned nearly two weeks ago, when the anti-Qaddafi fighters laid siege to an enormous convention center that the pro-Qaddafi troops had used as a base.

The interim leaders had claimed that the ongoing fighting had prevented them from focusing on other pressing concerns, including the proliferation of armed militias that answered to no central authority.

 

Kareem Fahim reported from Tripoli and Rick Gladstone from New York. Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and J. David Goodman from New York.

    Qaddafi Is Dead, Libyan Officials Say, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/libyan-fighters-say-qaddafi-stronghold-has-fallen.html

Clinton Issues Blunt Warning to Pakistan

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Setting the stage for a high-level diplomatic showdown, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bluntly warned Pakistan’s leaders on Thursday that they would face serious consequences if they continued to tolerate safe havens for extremist organizations that have crossed the border to attack Americans and Afghans.

“There’s no place to go any longer,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to Pakistan’s leadership, in some of the Obama administration’s most pointed language to date. “The terrorists are on both sides” of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. “They are killing both peoples,” she said.

“No one should be in any way mistaken about allowing this to continue without paying a very big price,” Mrs. Clinton said, without specifying what that might be.

She spoke before leaving for Pakistan for what is certain to be a tense visit by an unusually powerful American delegation sent to demand greater Pakistani cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda and other extremists groups.

Mrs. Clinton will be joined by the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, and the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, who stepped down as the senior military commander in Afghanistan this year.

Senior administration officials have described the delegation as an effort by the administration to display a united front to a Pakistani government that appears increasingly suspicious toward — if not openly hostile to — American policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While those officials suggested that they hoped to persuade the Pakistanis to cooperate, Mrs. Clinton’s remarks here in Afghanistan’s capital suggested the delegation would deliver a much sharper warning as well.

Her remarks underscored the fact that the war in Afghanistan — along with the hopes for a smooth American withdrawal by 2014 — has become fully intertwined with Pakistan’s own insurgents, some of whom have the support of the country’s security services.

That has brought the relationship with Pakistan to a new low following a year of tensions — from the arrest of a C.I.A. officer, to the secret raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, to the attack on the American Embassy here last month, which General Dempsey’s predecessor, Adm. Mike Mullen, blamed on elements within Pakistan’s top spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.

Mrs. Clinton, appearing with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, said that Pakistan could “either be helping or hindering” efforts to find both a military and a political resolution to the war here. It is now, she said, “a time for clarity.”

“We will be delivering a very clear message to the government of Pakistan and to the people of Pakistan because they too have suffered,” she said, beneath a canopy of trees at the presidential palace here. “They have suffered at the hand of the same kind of terrorists. So there should be no support and no safe haven anywhere for people who kill innocent men, women and children.”

Mr. Karzai, who has repeatedly accused Pakistan of interference in Afghanistan, echoed her remarks, saying that Pakistan has long harbored enemies of his government, including the Taliban, whose leadership fled there after the American invasion in 2001.

While the Obama administration has pressed Afghanistan to seek reconciliation with some elements of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai said on Thursday that that would not be possible without the positive involvement of Pakistan.

“We believe that the Taliban to a very, very great extent — to a very, very great extent — are controlled by establishments in Pakistan, stay in Pakistan, have their headquarters in Pakistan, launch attacks from Pakistan,” he said.

Tentative and still-fruitless efforts to lure the Taliban into a peace process were dealt a severe setback when a man purporting to be a peace envoy killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former president, using a bomb hidden in his turban.

The assassination, shortly after a carefully planned attack on the American Embassy last month, raised doubts about how many, if any, members of the Taliban are interested in a peace agreement.

Mrs. Clinton met Mr. Rabbani’s son, Salahuddin, at a meeting with Afghan lawmakers, officials and advocates at the American Embassy here on Thursday morning, expressing her condolences even as she encouraged a continuation of the efforts he began. “He was a brave man, trying to do the right thing,” she told him.

“We will make sure we continue his vision,” Mr. Rabbani replied.

    Clinton Issues Blunt Warning to Pakistan, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/asia/clinton-issues-blunt-warning-to-pakistan.html

Imagined in America

October 18, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Hong Kong

After spending last week talking with Hong Kong entrepreneurs about a bill, just passed by the U.S. Senate, to clear the way for tariffs on Chinese exports to America if China doesn’t revalue its currency, there are three things I have to say. One, I really hope the people pushing this bill do not give up. Two, I really hope the people pushing this bill do not succeed. And, three, I really hope no one thinks this legislation will make any sustainable dent in our unemployment problem, which requires much more radical rethinking.

I support this legislation in theory because China needs a wake-up call. I know, China never responds to in-your-face pressure — not immediately. But it began revaluing its currency upward in 2005, the last time the Senate brandished a big stick. The fact is, China’s strategy of using low wages and a cheap currency to build up an enormous export-led growth engine — while using its huge market to lure and compel companies to transfer their next-generation technology to China as well — is now hurting both sides.

China is spending tons of money manipulating its currency downward and, in the process, creating domestic inflation and a real estate bubble, which is weakening its competiveness. Meanwhile, it is hair-raising to hear stories in Hong Kong about the number of American companies feeling the need to transfer advanced technology to China under pressure from Beijing officials — and being afraid to complain to Washington about unfair trade practices. Yes, China’s leaders, fearing unemployment, will revalue their currency at their own pace. But if pushing this bill even marginally slows the pace of American firms shifting operations here, and gives others more time to adapt, it will be worth it.

But, Lord in heaven, do not let the House pass this bill. That would trigger a trade war in the middle of our Great Recession. We tried that in 1930. It didn’t end well. Worse, today it would distract us from thinking about the real issue: How do we adjust our labor market to the simultaneous intensification of globalization and the I.T. revolution, the biggest thing happening in the world today? The intensification of globalization means more parts of any product or service can be produced anywhere, and the intensification of the I.T. revolution means more parts of any product or service can be created by machines and software.

I am typing this column on a Dell laptop that says “Made in China” on the bottom. In fact, it was assembled in China — but the design, memory board, screen, casing and dozens of other parts were all made in other countries. And while the machine says “Made in China,” the lion’s share of its value and profit goes to the firm that conceived the idea and orchestrated that supply chain — Dell Inc. in Texas.

We are never going to get those labor-intensive assembly jobs back from China — the wage differentials are far too great, no matter how much China revalues its currency. We need to focus on multiplying more people at the high-value ideation and orchestration end of the supply chain, and in the manufacturing processes where one person can be highly productive, and well paid, by operating multiple machines. We need to focus on “Imagined in America” and “Orchestrated From America” and “Made in America by a smart worker using a phalanx of smarter robots.” In total value terms, America still manufactures almost as much as China. We just do it with far fewer people, which is why we need more start-ups.

But we also need to stop thinking that a middle class can be sustained only by factory jobs. Thirty years ago, Hong Kong was a manufacturing center. Now its economy is 97 percent services. It has adjusted so well that this year the Hong Kong government is giving a bonus of $775 to each of its residents. One reason is that Hong Kong has transformed itself into a huge tourist center that last year received 36 million visitors — 23 million from China. Their hotel stays, dining and jewelry purchases are driving prosperity here. The U.S. Commerce Department says 801,000 Mainland Chinese visited the U.S. last year, adding $5 billion to the U.S. economy. More Chinese want to come, but, for security reasons, visas are hard to obtain. If we let in as many Chinese tourists as Hong Kong, it would inject more than $115 billion into what is a highly unionized U.S. hotel, restaurant, gaming and tourism industry.

Another idea officials here offer is that the United States invites Chinese firms to invest in toll bridges, toll roads, and rail systems across the United States, in partnership with American companies. They could build them, and operate them for a set number of years, until their investment pays out, and then transfer them to full U.S. ownership. It may be the only way we can rebuild our infrastructure.

Yes, China manipulates its currency and market access. But the reason we are so vulnerable is that we have no leverage. We don’t save; we overconsume; we don’t plan; and we have not invested enough in infrastructure and education. Dealing with a superpower like China without leverage? Let me know how that works out for you.

    Imagined in America, NYT, 18.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/opinion/imagined-in-america.html

U.S. Debated Cyberwarfare in Attack Plan on Libya

October 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — Just before the American-led strikes against Libya in March, the Obama administration intensely debated whether to open the mission with a new kind of warfare: a cyberoffensive to disrupt and even disable the Qaddafi government’s air-defense system, which threatened allied warplanes.

While the exact techniques under consideration remain classified, the goal would have been to break through the firewalls of the Libyan government’s computer networks to sever military communications links and prevent the early-warning radars from gathering information and relaying it to missile batteries aiming at NATO warplanes.

But administration officials and even some military officers balked, fearing that it might set a precedent for other nations, in particular Russia or China, to carry out such offensives of their own, and questioning whether the attack could be mounted on such short notice. They were also unable to resolve whether the president had the power to proceed with such an attack without informing Congress.

In the end, American officials rejected cyberwarfare and used conventional aircraft, cruise missiles and drones to strike the Libyan air-defense missiles and radars used by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government.

This previously undisclosed debate among a small circle of advisers demonstrates that cyberoffensives are a growing form of warfare. The question the United States faces is whether and when to cross the threshold into overt cyberattacks.

Last year, a Stuxnet computer worm apparently wiped out a part of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and delayed its ability to produce nuclear fuel. Although no entity has acknowledged being the source of the poisonous code, some evidence suggests that the virus was an American-Israeli project. And the Pentagon and military contractors regularly repel attacks on their computer networks — many coming from China and Russia.

The Obama administration is revving up the nation’s digital capabilities, while publicly emphasizing only its efforts to defend vital government, military and public infrastructure networks.

“We don’t want to be the ones who break the glass on this new kind of warfare,” said James Andrew Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he specializes in technology and national security.

That reluctance peaked during planning for the opening salvos of the Libya mission, and it was repeated on a smaller scale several weeks later, when military planners suggested a far narrower computer-network attack to prevent Pakistani radars from spotting helicopters carrying Navy Seal commandos on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2.

Again, officials decided against it. Instead, specially modified, radar-evading Black Hawk helicopters ferried the strike team, and a still-secret stealthy surveillance drone was deployed.

“These cybercapabilities are still like the Ferrari that you keep in the garage and only take out for the big race and not just for a run around town, unless nothing else can get you there,” said one Obama administration official briefed on the discussions.

The debate about a potential cyberattack against Libya was described by more than a half-dozen officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified planning.

In the days ahead of the American-led airstrikes to take down Libya’s integrated air-defense system, a more serious debate considered the military effectiveness — and potential legal complications — of using cyberattacks to blind Libyan radars and missiles.

“They were seriously considered because they could cripple Libya’s air defense and lower the risk to pilots, but it just didn’t pan out,” said a senior Defense Department official.

After a discussion described as thorough and never vituperative, the cyberwarfare proposals were rejected before they reached the senior political levels of the White House.

Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the military’s Africa Command, which led the two-week American air campaign against Libya until NATO assumed full control of the operation on March 31, would not comment on any proposed cyberattacks. In an interview, he said only that “no capability that I ever asked for was denied.”

Senior officials said one of the central reasons a cyberoffensive was rejected for Libya was that it might not have been ready for use in time, given that the rebel city of Benghazi was on the verge of being overrun by government forces.

While popular fiction and films depict cyberattacks as easy to mount — only a few computer keystrokes needed — in reality it takes significant digital snooping to identify potential entry points and susceptible nodes in a linked network of communications systems, radars and missiles like that operated by the Libyan government, and then to write and insert the proper poisonous codes.

“It’s the cyberequivalent of fumbling around in the dark until you find the doorknob,” Mr. Lewis said. “It takes time to find the vulnerabilities. Where is the thing that I can exploit to disrupt the network?”

Had the computer-network attack gone ahead, administration officials said they were confident it could have been confined to Libyan networks and offered high promise of disrupting the regime’s integrated air-defense system.

One unresolved concern was whether ordering a cyberattack on Libya might create domestic legal restrictions on war-making by the executive branch without Congressional permission. One question was whether the War Powers Resolution — which requires the executive to formally report to lawmakers when it has introduced forces into “hostilities” and sets a 60-day limit on such deployments if Congress does not authorize them to continue — would be required for an attack purely in cyberspace.

The War Powers Resolution, a Vietnam-era law enacted over President Richard M. Nixon’s veto, does not define “hostilities.” In describing its actions to Congress and the American people, the White House argued that its use of conventional forces in the Libyan intervention fell short of the level of hostilities requiring Congressional permission under either the Constitution or the resolution, citing the lack of ground forces and the supporting role the United States was playing in a multilateral effort to fulfill a United Nations resolution. Some officials also expressed concern about revealing American technological capabilities to potential enemies for what seemed like a relatively minor security threat to the United States.

In the end, Libya’s air-defense network was dangerous but not exceptionally robust. American surveillance identified its locations, and it was degraded through conventional attacks.

 

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

    U.S. Debated Cyberwarfare in Attack Plan on Libya, NYT, 17.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/world/africa/cyber-warfare-against-libya-was-debated-by-us.html

To Isolate Iran, U.S. Presses Inspectors on Nuclear Data

October 15, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology. The president’s push is part of a larger American effort to further isolate and increase pressure on Iran after accusing it of a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States.

If the United Nations’ watchdog group agrees to publicize the evidence, including new data from recent months, it would almost certainly revive a debate that has been dormant during the Arab Spring about how aggressively the United States and its allies, including Israel, should move to halt Iran’s suspected weapons program.

Over the longer term, several senior Obama administration officials said in interviews, they are mulling a ban on financial transactions with Iran’s central bank — a move that has been opposed by China and other Asian nations. Also being considered is an expansion of the ban on the purchase of petroleum products sold by companies controlled by the country’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Revolutionary Guards are also believed to oversee the military side of the nuclear program, and they are the parent of the Quds Force, which Washington has accused of directing the assassination plot.

The proposed sanctions come as administration officials confront skepticism around the world about their allegations that Iran was behind the plot and limited options about what they can do — as well as growing pressure from Republicans and some Democrats in Congress to take tougher action against Iran, with the central bank and the oil industry high on lawmakers’ lists.

All of the proposed sanctions carry with them considerable political and economic risks. Yukiya Amano, the cautious director general of the United Nations group, the International Atomic Energy Agency, talked publicly in September about publishing some of the most delicate data suggesting Iran worked on nuclear triggers and warheads. But officials who have spoken with him say he is concerned that his inspectors could be ejected from Iran, shutting the best, though narrow, window into its nuclear activities.

Similarly, China and Russia, among other major Iranian trading partners, have resisted further oil and financial sanctions, saying the goal of isolating Iran is a poor strategy. Even inside the Obama administration, some officials say they fear any crackdown on Iranian oil exports could drive up oil prices when the United States and European economies are weak. As one senior official put it, “You don’t want to tip the U.S. into a downturn just to punish the Iranians.”

Senior administration officials, who would not speak publicly about internal negotiations over the sanctions, say no recommendation on acting against the central bank has gone to Mr. Obama, who vowed last week to make sure Iran would face the “toughest sanctions” for what he said was its role in the sensational scheme to hire a Mexican drug cartel to kill the Saudi envoy.

The decision to press the International Atomic Energy Agency was brewing even before the plot against the Saudi ambassador was discovered, but that discovery prompted the White House to pursue a full-court, public press of the agency to release the sensitive intelligence.

Officials familiar with the evidence say it creates extraordinarily uncomfortable questions for the Iranians to answer, but does not definitively point to the construction of a weapon. Instead, it details work on individual technologies essential for designing and detonating a nuclear device, including how to turn uranium into bomb fuel, how to cast conventional explosives in a shape that can set off a nuclear blast, and how to make detonators, generate neutrons to spur a chain reaction, measure detonation waves and make nose cones for missiles.

Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Saturday that “the United States believes that a comprehensive assessment would be invaluable for the international community in its consideration of Iran’s nuclear program and what to do about it.” Iran has declared that all of the documents suggesting work on how to create a weapon that could fit atop an Iranian missile are “fabrications” intended to justify an attack. The country has been the target of covert attacks, including the assassinations of some nuclear scientists and a computer worm that disabled some of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

The Obama administration, since coming to office, has never publicly presented detailed evidence to back up its claim that Iran is driving toward a weapon or creating the technology to assemble one quickly, should it need it. But it has discussed the evidence widely with allies.

In part the administration has hesitated to discuss the evidence because, after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, any American evidence is considered suspect. Widespread questions about the plot against the Saudis last week underscored how deep those suspicions run.

But Iran is a different kind of case. Inspectors visit regularly, measuring Iran’s output of uranium, including recent production of the material, enriched to 20 percent purity, that takes it far closer to the kind of fuel needed for a weapon. Iran said recently that it would produce more of the 20 percent enriched material than it needs for a small medical research reactor, which prompted new concerns that it is building a stockpile that could be converted to weapons use.

“They sought to hide their enrichment activity for years, and their covert facility at Qum, which the president revealed in 2009,” a top adviser to Mr. Obama, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the topic, said Friday. “They continue to enrich at 20 percent, and the rationale for doing so is demonstrably false.”

In June, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Tidewater Middle East, a company linked to the Revolutionary Guards that operates strategic container ports through which the Guards and the Quds Force have moved weapons, administration officials said. Last week, the Treasury levied sanctions on an Iranian carrier, Mahan Air, which officials said ferried weapons for the Quds Force.

A Treasury ban on transactions with the Central Bank of Iran would be powerful because any third country that did business with the central bank would be cut off from the American financial system.

“We are looking very actively at the possibility of designating the central bank of Iran, as well as taking other actions in response to this plot,” David S. Cohen, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, told the Senate Banking Committee. “We’re looking quite intensively at how to ratchet up the pressure.”

The administration is also weighing whether to designate elements of the Revolutionary Guards that control Iran’s oil exports, effectively banning purchases of fuel from Iran. Another option would be to require companies that sell refined fuel to the United States to certify that the fuel contains no Iranian crude oil.

But American allies like Japan and South Korea buy large amounts of oil from Iran, paying their bills through the central bank since most Iranian commercial banks are off-limits. China relies less on the central bank for its purchases but is also a large buyer of Iranian oil.

Cutting off Iran’s oil exports would have unpredictable effects on prices, officials said, with even a brief shock posing an economic threat. Iran would find new customers and would probably try to sell fuel to middlemen, who would resell it. But, officials said, the real impact was unknown.

    To Isolate Iran, U.S. Presses Inspectors on Nuclear Data, NYT, 15.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/white-house-says-data-shows-iran-push-on-nuclear-arms.html

Obama Says Facts Support Accusation of Iranian Plot

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama vowed on Thursday to push for what he called the “toughest sanctions” against Iran, saying that the United States had strong evidence that Iranian officials were complicit in an alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

In his first public remarks on the assassination scheme, Mr. Obama sought to counter skepticism about whether Iran’s Islamic government directed an Iranian-American car salesman to engage with a Mexican drug cartel to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States and carry out other attacks. Mr. Obama insisted that American officials “know that he had direct links, was paid by, and directed by individuals in the Iranian government.”

“Now those facts are there for all to see,” Mr. Obama said. “We would not be bringing forward a case unless we knew exactly how to support all the allegations that are contained in the indictment.”

The president did not lay out any specific new sanctions against Iran; his administration is considering a number of measures, but has limited leverage and would have to muster international support to impose anything with real teeth.

While Mr. Obama made his remarks during a news conference in the White House East Room with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, the State Department said that United States officials had been in direct contact with the government of Iran over the accusations.

The State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, would provide no details. But Thursday night a White House official said the contact had been made by the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, who gave a letter to her Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Khazaee.

In her remarks about the alleged plot, Ms. Nuland said: “When you look at these details, it seems like something out of a movie. But as you begin to give more detail on what we knew and when we knew it and how we knew it, it has credibility.”

Mr. Obama said that the administration had reached out to allies and the international community to build support. “We’ve laid the facts before them,” he said. “And we believe that after people have analyzed them, there will not be a dispute that this is in fact what happened.”

The president got some support from some allied governments on Thursday. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told reporters at a news conference in Vienna that “this dastardly act reflects the policies of Iran.” The Saudi government has not yet decided whether to withdraw its ambassador from Tehran in protest, he said.

In London, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the House of Commons that the suspected plot “would appear to constitute a major escalation in Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism outside its borders,” British news agencies reported. He added that the British government was “in close touch with the U.S. authorities and will work to agree an international response, along with the U.S., the rest of the E.U. and Saudi Arabia.”

Iran escalated its rebuttal of the American charges, saying the claims about the alleged plot were so ludicrous that even politicians and the media in the United States were expressing skepticism about them.

Iran’s state-run media was dominated on Thursday by rejections of the American charges. The foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, called the charges part of a “new propaganda campaign.” The official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as saying: “Repeating stupid and useless methods by hopeless Western policy makers to create Iranophobia will not be fruitful and they will fail again.”

While Mr. Obama echoed assertions by other administration officials that Iranian officials were complicit in the alleged plot, he did not go as far as some officials did on Wednesday when they told reporters that they had concluded that the operation had been discussed at the highest levels of the Iranian government.

Appearing next to the South Korean president, Mr. Lee, who was in Washington for a state visit, Mr. Obama promised to “apply the toughest sanctions and continue to mobilize the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and pays a price for this kind of behavior.” He said that all options were on the table — a diplomatic signal that he would not rule out military strikes — but administration officials privately say it is highly unlikely that the United States would respond with force.

Instead, the administration will try to persuade Russia, China, Europe and India to endorse tougher sanctions against Tehran. Thus far, the United States has prodded its international partners to put in place limited sanctions against Iranian officials involved in the country’s nuclear program, as part of the international effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

But that strategy has, so far, had limited success, with Russia and China in particular wary about going too far in a direction that officials say could hurt commercial interests in those countries.

The United States does virtually no business with Iran, and that leaves American officials with few meaningful options for unilateral action. Some lawmakers in the United States are calling for Mr. Obama to try to increase pressure on Iran by punishing Russian and Chinese companies that do business with Iran’s energy industry. But the administration has resisted such a move, which would undoubtedly deeply anger Moscow and Beijing.

White House officials said they were still weighing what additional sanctions they would push for in light of the alleged plot. One possibility, administration officials said, would be to target Iran’s central bank. But that likely would provoke resistance because it would entangle other countries or entities that do business with the central bank. Another possibility would be to focus on members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who are involved in the country’s oil industry. But that could affect global oil markets.

Standing next to Mr. Obama in the White House East Room Thursday, Mr. Lee gave him a measured vote of confidence on the suspected plot.

“We were deeply shocked when we read the reports on the attempt to harm the Saudi envoy here in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Lee said. “I and the Korean people strongly condemn all forms of terrorism.”

 

Artin Afkhami contributed reporting from Boston, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Obama Says Facts Support Accusation of Iranian Plot, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/obama-calls-for-iran-sanctions-following-alleged-plot.html

Iran Scoffs at U.S. Account of Alleged Assassination Plot

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE

The government of Iran on Thursday escalated its rebuttal of American criminal charges that it was behind a murder conspiracy in Washington, calling the claims that Iranian agents had plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador with the help of a Mexican drug gang so ludicrous that even politicians and press in the United States were expressing skepticism about such a scheme.

The latest rejoinder added to the response of Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his subordinates, who said on Wednesday that the suspected plot was concocted in Washington to distract Americans from their own traumatic economic problems, highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

At the same time, however, Saudi Arabia, which is deeply suspicious of Iran, suggested that it accepted the American accusations as fact, and Britain said it was taking the accusations seriously. The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, told reporters at a news conference in Vienna that “this dastardly act reflects the policies of Iran.” The Saudi government has not yet decided whether to withdraw its ambassador from Tehran in protest, he said.

In London, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the House of Commons that the suspected plot “would appear to constitute a major escalation in Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism outside its borders,” British news agencies reported. He added that the British government was “in close touch with the U.S. authorities and will work to agree an international response, along with the U.S., the rest of the E.U. and Saudi Arabia.”

On Wednesday, France, which has taken a hard line toward Iran and its nuclear program, also appeared to accept the American accusations without a hint of skepticism. "France considers this an extremely serious issue and a scandalous violation of international law,” said the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bernard Valero. He said France was in close contact with Washington on the matter, and as for Iran, "we expect the planners and those responsible to explain themselves.”

The foreign policy chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, was more cautious in her appraisal of the charges pending more information about the evidence. Nonetheless, Ms. Ashton said she viewed the charges "with grave concern.”

The charges, announced in Washington on Tuesday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., asserted that officials in the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had conspired to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States by hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million. The main suspects were identified as Mansour J. Arbabsiar, a naturalized American citizen of Iranian descent from Corpus Christi, Tex., who has been taken into custody, and Gholam Shakuri, described by the Justice Department as a member of the Quds Force, who is at large and believed to be in Iran.

Mr. Holder said American investigators believed that high-level officials in the Iranian government “were responsible for this plot.”

President Obama, making his first public comments on the accusations Thursday, did not go quite as far. But at a news conference with the visiting president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, in Washington, Mr. Obama said in response to a question about Iran: “We believe that even if at the highest levels there was not detailed operational knowledge, there has to be accountability.”

On Wednesday, Obama administration officials sought to counter skepticism from outside experts on Iran and from some foreign leaders about the logic of such a plot, arguing that evidence such as bank transfers and intercepted telephone calls substantiated it. Some Iran experts nonetheless said it made little sense that the Quds Force, a highly skilled organization, would plot an attack in such a risky and amateurish way.

Seizing on this theme, Iran’s state-run media was dominated on Thursday by rejections of the American charges. Press TV, an English-language news web site controlled by the Iranian government, quoted the foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, calling the charges part of a “new propaganda campaign.” The official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ali Ahani, the deputy foreign minister, saying that “the absurd and conspiratorial scenario was made so immaturely that even political circles and media of the U.S. and its allies were suspicious about it.”

He called the charges an attempt to “weaken Iran’s increasingly strengthening position in the region.”

On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry of Iran complained angrily to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which has monitored United States interests in Iran since diplomatic relations were severed in 1980 . The ministry said it summoned the Swiss ambassador to convey its outrage over the American charges in person and to warn “against the repetition of such politically motivated allegations.”

Ayatollah Khamenei predicted what he called the demise of American capitalism and corporate favoritism. Press TV quoted the ayatollah saying in a speech that “the corrupted capitalist system shows no mercy to any nation, including the American people.”

The ayatollah also commended the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, Washington and other American cities, calling them a consequence of “the prevalence of top-level corruption, poverty and social inequality in America.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Artin Afkhami from Boston

and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

    Iran Scoffs at U.S. Account of Alleged Assassination Plot, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world/
    middleeast/iran-broadens-counter-rhetoric-on-alleged-plot-calling-it-a-joke.html

U.S. Talks Tough to Iran, but Holds Off on Harsher Moves

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Despite issuing harsh calls for Tehran to be held to account, the Obama administration does not plan to shift its policy of pressure on the Iranian government after disrupting what officials said was a plot to assassinate a Saudi Arabian envoy in Washington, administration officials said on Wednesday.

The combination of tough talk and cautious action underscores the administration’s limited options toward a hostile government with which the United States has had little contact for more than three decades.

While the United States has mounted an intense diplomatic effort with its allies and other countries to condemn Iran, it has limited its punitive measures to imposing sanctions on an Iranian airline and five senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who are accused of having links to the men accused in the plot.

More dramatic responses — like military action or a blockade of Iran’s oil industry — are unlikely because of resistance from Russia and China, concerns about destabilizing a region already convulsed by turmoil, and fears of driving up oil prices and rattling the global economy.

The White House has not ruled out additional sanctions or taking action at the United Nations, where the American ambassador, Susan E. Rice, briefed members on Wednesday about the details of the investigation. Administration officials said they believed there was potential for intensifying pressure on Tehran, though they did not offer details.

“There’s sufficient space to continue enlarging that pressure with like-minded partners without jeopardizing the base line of unity in the international community,” Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, said in a telephone interview.

Whether the administration can do enough to satisfy a growing chorus of hawks on Capitol Hill is not clear. In an interview on Wednesday, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida and chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called on the administration to be much tougher.

“There are a lot of steps that we can immediately take that would serve as a wake-up call to the international community,” said Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, adding that the United States should expel Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations and shut down its interest section in Washington. She also suggested taking aim at Russian and Chinese companies and individuals that do business with Iran’s energy industry.

Ms. Ros-Lehtinen is sponsoring legislation in the House that would make it harder for Mr. Obama — or any American president — to waive sanctions passed by Congress on the grounds that the measures would damage American national interests.

If Ms. Ros-Lehtinen’s measure becomes law, Mr. Obama could be forced to take action against Iran’s oil and gas industry, even if he deemed that such steps could hurt the economy, alienate allies or otherwise harm the United States. Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said her bill had more than 300 signatories, and that news of the accusations had garnered additional supporters.

Separately, Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, took to the Senate floor on Wednesday evening to also call for stronger sanctions against Iran.

The administration has resisted such calls because it would almost surely lose what guarded support it has received from Russia and China for its sanctions program against Iran, which is supported by the United Nations Security Council.

“If they start to do what those people on the right want them to do, they’re going to lose what they’ve got now,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

At a time when Europe is in a debt crisis and the United States is teetering on the edge of another recession, administration officials say they are reluctant to take steps that would drive up oil prices and disrupt global markets.

Some analysts noted that the campaign of pressure had already done considerable damage to Iran’s economy.

“Iran’s economic ties with Europe have been essentially severed, its leadership role in the region is being challenged by Turkey, its ties with Russia are tense,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council of Foreign Relations. “It is a country that is experiencing quite a bit of isolation, and even ostracism.”

If anything, the allegations have given the Treasury Department the chance to pursue its sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the United States says has seized control over large parts of the Iranian economy. Officials said they would use the details of the investigation to discourage countries like Turkey, Russia and China, which still do business with elements of the Guard Corps.

“We want to go to Ankara or Moscow or Beijing and say, ‘These are who these guys are; they hired a Mexican drug cartel to kill a Saudi ambassador. You can’t allow these guys into your country, or do business with them,’ ” said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly.

For now, the administration is devoting much of its energy to mobilizing an international front to further isolate Iran. The State Department called in the diplomatic corps for briefing, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton worked the phones to rally Russia, Mexico and other crucial countries to condemn Iran. “This kind of reckless act undermines international norms and the international system. Iran must be held accountable for its actions,” Mrs. Clinton said at a Washington conference.

At the United Nations, Ms. Rice was joined in her briefings by her Saudi counterparts as well as by experts from the Justice Department and other agencies. The United States had no immediate plan to ask the Security Council to take any action, diplomats said. Although the council sometimes issues statements about terrorist attacks, doing so in an individual case would be highly unusual.

Several countries, while noting that they had no reason to doubt the allegations, said they were eager to ask questions. “It looks rather bizarre, but I am not an expert,” Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, said before he was briefed.

 

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington,

and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    U.S. Talks Tough to Iran, but Holds Off on Harsher Moves, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/politics/us-increases-pressure-on-iran-but-holds-off-on-sanctions.html

U.S. Challenged to Explain

Accusations of Iran Plot in the Face of Skepticism

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday sought to reconcile what it said was solid evidence of an Iranian plot to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States with a wave of puzzlement and skepticism from some foreign leaders and outside experts.

Senior American officials themselves were struggling to explain why the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, would orchestrate such a risky attack in so amateurish a manner.

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, would not go further than to say the plot “clearly involved senior levels of the Quds Force.” But other American officials, armed with evidence such as bank transfers and intercepted telephone calls and with knowledge of how the covert unit operated in the past, said they believed that Iran’s senior leaders were likely complicit in the plot.

“It would be our assessment that this kind of operation would have been discussed at the highest levels of the regime,” said a senior American official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the government’s analysis.

American officials offered no specific evidence linking the plot to Iran’s most senior leaders. But they said it was inconceivable in Iran’s hierarchy that the leader of the shadowy Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, was not directly involved, and that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was not aware of such a plan.

Iran’s leaders marshaled a furious formal rejection Wednesday of the American accusations, calling the case a cynical fabrication meant to vilify Iran and distract Americans from their severe economic problems. A senior member of Iran’s Parliament, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said he had “no doubt this is a new American-Zionist plot to divert the public opinion from the crisis Obama is grappling with.”

United States officials said they were exploring several theories why the Quds Force, which supplies and trains insurgents around the world, would plot an attack in Washington against a close adviser to the Saudi king, relying on an Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas who, they said, thought he was hiring assassins from a Mexican drug gang.

The officials said the plot might indicate a shift to a more combative Iranian foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia and the United States. The United States has brought international pressure on Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran and Saudi Arabia have long waged proxy battles for influence in the Muslim world.

“The Iranians watch the Saudis roll tanks in Bahrain, and they see a key ally in Syria going down, so they step up the Quds Force,” one senior administration official said. He referred to Saudi military assistance to the Sunni monarchy of Bahrain, whose majority population shares the Shia Islam of Iran.

Iran has many trusted networks in the Middle East and has often used the Lebanese militants of Hezbollah as a proxy. But it has far fewer agents in the United States, which might have forced it to look to a far riskier proxy for the plot, officials said.

American investigators have speculated that the Iranian-American accused in the scheme, Mansour J. Arbabsiar, who lived in Texas on the Mexico border, may have convinced a cousin, a senior Quds official, that he could recruit a member of one of Mexico’s notorious drug cartels to carry out the killing.

One provocative theory that American officials are considering is that the assassination was intended as retaliation for the killing of several Iranian nuclear scientists during the past two years. Those deaths are widely believed to have been the work of Israel, with tacit American approval, to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon.

In a protest letter denying the American charges late Tuesday, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, referred pointedly to the assassination campaign. “Iran has been a victim of terrorism,” he wrote, “a clear recent example of which is the assassination of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years carried out by the Zionist regime and supported by the United States.”

An American official said of Iranian officials that “certainly their publicly expressed anger at the death of some of their scientists could have been part of their calculation.” But the official said the United States government had no specific evidence to support that theory.

Juan Zarate, a deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism in the Bush administration, said that if the upper echelons of the Quds Force had approved the operation, it also must have been approved by Ayatollah Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or both.

If that was the case, he said, it crossed what he called a “red line,” bringing to American soil a proxy sectarian war between Shiites and Sunnis that Iran has been fighting with Saudi Arabia for influence in the region in places like Syria and Bahrain.

But Mr. Zarate and senior American officials said the assassination plan did not have the hallmarks of a Quds operation. “It was very extreme and very odd, but it was also very sloppy,” Mr. Zarate said. “If you look at what they have done historically, they can put operatives on their targets and execute. They usually don’t outsource, but keep things inside a trusted network.”

One problem for President Obama and his administration is that since American intelligence claims about Iraq’s illicit weapons proved false in 2003, assertions by the United States about its adversaries have routinely faced skepticism from other countries.

“Of course, that is in people’s heads. Everyone is extremely skeptical about U.S. intelligence revelations,” said Volker Perthes, an Iran expert who is the director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

There may indeed have been a plot, Mr. Perthes said. “I don’t regard it as impossible but rather improbable,” he said.

If the Iranian leadership authorized such a plot, he said, that would mark “a major escalation against the United States, of the kind that hasn’t happened since the Iranian Revolution.” It would be “almost an act of war,” and Washington “must react in a different way than it has so far.”

Alain Frachon, a Le Monde columnist and a former Washington correspondent, said that “we can expect anything from a regime as split and divided as the Iranian regime is,” adding that “one group among them is probably capable of launching such an operation to embarrass the others.”

While the United States’ history with Iraq might color the European reaction, Mr. Frachon said, he is “not sure you’ll find the same amount of skepticism in Paris as there was with W.M.D. In the case of Iraq, it was easier to assess, but Iran is much more opaque, and people are willing to expect anything from a divided regime.”

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris, Jo Becker from New York, and Anthony Shadid from Beirut, Lebanon.

    U.S. Challenged to Explain Accusations of Iran Plot in the Face of Skepticism, NYT, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/iran-sees-terror-plot-accusation-as-diversion-from-wall-street-protests.html

Congress Ends 5-Year Standoff

on Trade Deals in Rare Accord

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Congress passed three long-awaited free trade agreements on Wednesday, ending a political standoff that has stretched across two presidencies. The move offered a rare moment of bipartisan accord at a time when Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided over the role that government ought to play in reviving the sputtering economy.

The approval of the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama is a victory for President Obama and proponents of the view that foreign trade can drive America’s economic growth in the face of rising protectionist sentiment in both political parties. They are the first trade agreements to pass Congress since Democrats broke a decade of Republican control in 2007.

All three agreements cleared both chambers with overwhelming Republican support just one day after Senate Republicans prevented action on Mr. Obama’s jobs bill.

The passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small. A federal agency estimated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “negligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent.

The House voted to pass the Colombia measure, the most controversial of the three deals because of concerns about the treatment of unions in that country, 262 to 167; the Panama measure passed 300 to 129, and the agreement concerning South Korea passed 278 to 151. The votes reflected a clear partisan divide, with many Democrats voting against the president. In the Senate, the Colombia measure passed 66 to 33, the Panama bill succeeded 77 to 22 and the South Korea measure passed 83 to 15. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, voted against all three measures.

The House also passed a measure to expand a benefits program for workers who lose jobs to foreign competition by a vote of 307 to 122. The benefits program, a must-have for labor unions, passed with strong Democratic support. The Senate previously approved the measure.

Proponents of the trade deals, including Mr. Obama, Republican leaders and centrist Democrats, predict that they will reduce prices for American consumers and increase foreign sales of American goods and services, providing a much-needed jolt to the sluggish economy.

“At long last, we are going to do something important for the country on a bipartisan basis,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.

However, Mr. Obama’s support for the measures has angered important parts of his political base, including trade unions, which fear job losses to foreign competition. Many Democrats took to the House floor Wednesday to speak in opposition to the deals.

“What I am seeing firsthand is devastation that these free trade agreements can do to our communities,” said Representative Mike Michaud, a Maine Democrat who once worked in a paper mill.

Both chambers raced to approve the deals before a joint Congressional session Thursday with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak.

The revival of support for the deals, originally negotiated by the Bush administration five years ago, comes at a paradoxical political moment, when both conservative Republicans and the Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken antitrade positions, albeit for different reasons. In a debate among Republican presidential candidates Tuesday night, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, accused China of manipulating the value of its currency to flood the United states with cheap goods, while populist sentiment on the left opposes the trade agreements because of the potential for American job losses.

Mr. Obama cited similar concerns in criticizing the agreements during the 2008 presidential campaign, but he later embraced the deals as a key part of his agenda to revive the economy. To win Democratic support, the White House reopened negotiations with the three countries to make changes demanded by industry groups and unions, and insisted that the expansion of benefits for displaced workers be tied to passage of the trade agreements.

The benefits program was expanded in 2009 to include workers in service industries as well as manufacturing. The compromise negotiated this summer between the White House, House Republicans and Senate Democrats preserves most of the funding for the program.

Increased protections for American automakers in the South Korea deal won the support of traditional opponents of trade deals, including some Midwestern Democrats and the United Automobile Workers union. But scores of Democrats opposed the deal with Colombia, because they said it did not do enough to address the murders of dozens of union organizers in that country.

“Trade agreements should not be measured solely on how many tons of goods move across the border,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat.

Economists generally predict that free trade agreements, which eliminate tariffs and other policies aimed at protecting domestic manufacturers, benefit all participating nations by creating a larger common market, increasing sales and reducing prices. But such deals also create clear losers, as workers lose well-paid jobs to foreign competition.

The White House and Republican leaders said that the three agreements would provide a big boost to the lagging American economy and put people back to work.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hailed the deals Wednesday as an important victory for American foreign policy. And she said she expected that the South Korea pact alone would create 70,000 American jobs. “By opening new markets to American exports and attracting new investments to American communities, our economic statecraft is creating jobs and spurring growth here at home,” Ms. Clinton said at a Washington event.

But the United States International Trade Commission, a federal agency that analyzed the deals in 2007, reported that that economic impact would be minimal because the three countries combined represent a relatively small market for American goods and services.

The modest projected increase in demand will come mostly from South Korea, the world’s 14th-largest economy, which will join a short list of developed nations that have free trade pacts with the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, Israel and Singapore.

The commission predicted that American farmers would benefit most, because of increased demand for dairy products and beef, pork and poultry. Conversely, it predicted that the pacts would eliminate some manufacturing jobs, particularly in the textile industry.

Opponents, including textile companies, said that the deals would harm the economy by undermining the nation’s industrial base. They argued that South Korean companies would benefit much more than American companies because they were gaining access to a much larger market.

These are the first deals to pass Congress since the approval of an agreement with Peru in 2007. The Bush administration had won approval for trade agreements with 14 countries before the Democrats regained Congress in 2008, but it was then unable to gain traction.

“It’s been five years in the making, but we are finally here,” said Representative Lynn Jenkins, a Kansas Republican, in a speech urging passage of the agreements.

    Congress Ends 5-Year Standoff on Trade Deals in Rare Accord, NYT, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/business/trade-bills-near-final-chapter.html

U.S. Accuses Iranians of Plotting to Kill Saudi Envoy

October 11, 2011
The New York Times
By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Federal authorities foiled a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States and to bomb a Saudi embassy, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a news conference on Tuesday.

Mr. Holder said the plot began with a meeting in Mexico in May, “the first of a series that would result in an international conspiracy by elements of the Iranian government” to pay $1.5 million to murder the ambassador on United States soil.

The men accused of plotting the attacks were Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri, according to court documents filed in federal court in Manhattan. The Justice Department said the men were originally from Iran. He said the men were connected to the secretive Quds Force, a division of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that has carried out operations in other countries. He said that money in support of the plot was transferred through a bank in New York, but that the men had not yet obtained any explosives.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Mr. Shakuri, a member of the Quds force, remained at large. Mr. Arbabsiar, a naturalized American citizen, was arrested on Sept. 29. There is “no basis to believe that any other co-conspirators are present in the U.S.,” Mr. Holder said.

“In addition to holding these individual conspirators accountable for their alleged role in this plot, the United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions,” Mr. Holder said.

A senior administration official said on Tuesday that the Treasury Department planned to announce new sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is already the target of heavy sanctions for its role in overseeing Iran’s nuclear program. The new sanctions will single out five senior leaders of the Guards Corps and the Quds force, the official said.

Iran reacted immediately to the accusations by the Justice Department, dismissing them as fabrications. The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said the charges were part of “a new propaganda campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Details offered by the Justice Department painted a picture of a dizzying international plot involving Mexican drug cartels, murder-for-hire and large sums of money being transferred from unknown locations.

The department said in the criminal complaint filed on Tuesday that beginning in the spring of this year, Mr. Arbabsiar conspired with Mr. Shakuri to plot the assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. According to the complaint, other conspirators based in Iran were aware of and approved the plan, which involved hiring men connected to a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the killing.

The complaint says that the men hired by the two accused plotters were in fact confidential sources of the Drug Enforcement Agency. The men were later asked by the accused plotters whether they were knowledgeable in bomb-making, the complaint said, adding that Mr. Arbabsiar “was interested in, among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia.”

The government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. “So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,” he said, “and no one was actually in ever in any danger.”

According the complaint, Mr. Arbabsiar attempted to reassure the two federal informants that they would be paid if they carried out the assassination: “This is politics,” he told them, saying that the money was not coming from an individual but from a government. “It’s not like, eh, personal . . . this is politics.”

Elsewhere in the complaint, Mr. Arbabsiar is said to have told the men that the assassination was the most important element of the plot, and should be carried out even if it would cause a large number of casualties: “They want that guy done, if the hundred go with him.”

After arresting Mr. Arbabsiar, law enforcement officials had him make telephone calls to Mr. Shakuri in Iran that were monitored. During those calls, the complaint says, Mr. Shakuri urged Mr. Arbabsiar to carry out the plan as a quickly as possible.

The complaint accuses the two men of conspiracy to murder a foreign official; conspiracy to engage in foreign travel and use interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire; conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, specifically explosives; and conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism.The complaint did not specify which Saudi embassy was the target of the plot. Some news-agency reports suggested that it was the Saudi embassy in Washington, while ABC News, citing unnamed officials, reported that it was the Saudi embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and that Israeli embassies in Washington and Buenos Aires also were targets.

Mr. Holder said the Mexican government was instrumental in the investigation.

A spokesman for the National Security Council said that the plot had first been brought to President Obama’s attention earlier this year.

“The President was first briefed on this issue in June and directed his Administration to provide all necessary support to this investigation,” he said in a statement. “The disruption of this plot is a significant achievement by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and the president is enormously grateful for their exceptional work in this instance and countless others.”

At the White House, President Obama’s senior national security aides held a two-and-a-half hour meeting on Tuesday morning to discuss how the United States should respond to the planned attacks. Mr. Obama thanked the F.B.I. and other law enforcement authorities for their work in disrupting the plot.

“We’re going to work with allies and partners to send Iran a message: we don’t tolerate the targeting of foreign diplomats on our soil,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A major variable in the response, officials said, is how Saudi Arabia might react. The White House national security advisor, Thomas E. Donilon, informed King Abdullah of the plot two weeks ago, in a three-hour meeting held in Saudi Arabia.

On Tuesday, Abdullah Alshamri, a Saudi official in Riyadh, predicted that the disclosure would send Iranian-Saudi relations to “their lowest point yet.” Though the Saudi government had yet to take any steps, Mr. Alshamri suggested that a diplomatic row was inevitable.

“We’re expecting from our government a serious and tough reaction, to give a message to the Iranians that enough is enough,” he said in a telephone interview. “If we keep our diplomatic ties with the Iranians, they will think we are weak, and they will keep trying to attack us.”

Mr. Alshamri said the plot that the Justice Department said it had broken up was only the latest Iranian attempt to attack Saudi diplomats.

“This is their hobby,” he said. “Iran has no respect for international law.”

Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut and Mark Landler from Washington.

    U.S. Accuses Iranians of Plotting to Kill Saudi Envoy, NYT, 11.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/us/us-accuses-iranians-of-plotting-to-kill-saudi-envoy.html

Sanctions Pose Growing Threat to Syria’s Assad

October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian economy is buckling under the pressure of sanctions by the West and a continuing popular uprising, posing a growing challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s government as the pain is felt deeply by nearly every layer of Syrian society.

With Syria’s currency weakening, its recession expanding, its tourism industry wrecked and international sanctions affecting most essential sectors, the International Monetary Fund now expects Syria’s economy to shrink this year, by at least 2 percent.

Through nearly seven months of protests and a brutal crackdown that has killed more than 2,900 people, Mr. Assad and his political supporters have demonstrated a cohesiveness that has surprised even his critics. Differences that may exist have stayed inside a ruling clique that draws on Mr. Assad’s own clan and sect, and the security services have yet to fracture.

But analysts in the region and officials in Turkey and the United States say the faltering economy presents a double blow to a government that had once relied on its economic successes as a crucial source of legitimacy. As many Syrians, poor and rich, feel the effects of the revolt in their daily lives, a sense of desperation is echoed in the streets, even in Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s two largest cities and economic centers.

Analysts also point out that Syria could use sanctions to rally its people against a common threat.

While neither has risen up like other Syrian cities, complaints are growing, and American and Turkish officials say they believe that the merchant elite in both cities will eventually turn against Mr. Assad.

“I can no longer afford to buy anything for my family,” said Ibrahim Nimr, an economic analyst based in Damascus, the capital. “I am not making any more money. I am facing difficulties, and I don’t know what to do.”

A businessman in Damascus, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said: “People are not buying anything they don’t need these days. Just barely the necessities.”

American and Turkish officials say that a collapse is not imminent and that the government can probably survive through the end of the year. But they now believe it is possible that the toll of the sanctions and protests could bring down Mr. Assad in 6 to 18 months.

“We’re all waiting for the thing that will crack them,” an Obama administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “And it will be the economy that will wake everybody up, both those who support him, and Assad and his circle.”

Revenues from oil and gas exports, which account for up to a third of state revenues and are the single biggest source of foreign currency, will dry up at the beginning of November, when a European Union ban on imports will fully come into force.

The unrest has paralyzed the tourism industry, which brings in $7.7 billion a year. Several hotels in Damascus said they did not have any bookings for now or anytime in the future, and some hotel owners said that they closed down in the summer because they could no longer afford to pay salaries and bills.

An owner of a small candy shop in Souk al-Hamidiyeh, an old market in the heart of Damascus, said that he had not seen a single tourist since March, when the uprising against Mr. Assad began.

“And it doesn’t look like we will see tourists anytime soon,” the owner added.

Dik al-Jin, one of the oldest restaurants and the most popular site for weddings and parties in Homs, a city in central Syria where the uprising has the semblance of a civil war, also shut down because of a lack of customers, soon after the demonstrations broke out.

But uncertainties persist over the international strategy to put pressure on the Syrian economy. American and European officials have debated whether the sanctions will end up hurting average Syrians more than the leadership. Some analysts have contended that the government may try to paint itself as a victim and court support by casting the sanctions as a contest of “us against them.”

Indeed, in the 1990s in Iraq, which was hit by comprehensive sanctions, popular anger was often directed at the United Nations and the West, not the government of Saddam Hussein.

For now, and in spite of the fraying economy, the government seems buoyed by a sense of confidence over having blunted some of the mass protests this summer in cities like Hama and Deir al-Zour. Syrian officials also have faced sanctions before, only to weather them and seek to rehabilitate themselves once conditions in the region shift. Syrian officials also received a lift when China and Russia vetoed a resolution in the United Nations Security Council that condemned the violent oppression of antigovernment demonstrators last week.

“I do agree that they’re more confident now than before,” the American official said.

In recent months, Syrian officials in the Ministry of Economy and Trade and the Ministry of Finance have dismissed in published remarks the effects of sanctions on the economy and foreign currency reserves. In September, Mohammad al-Jleilati, the finance minister, said that the country had $18 billion in foreign currency reserves, enough to secure imports for two years. Though most experts disputed the figure, they added that given the lack of transparency, it was hard to determine the amount.

But the economic impact appears greater than in past crises, and officials in Turkey, once a crucial trading partner with Syria, are preparing to impose their own sanctions. The Syrian government’s own figures underline a waning sense of faith in the economy.

Recent statistics published by the Syrian Investment Agency, a state-run firm that oversees investment in Syria’s infrastructure, transportation and agriculture sectors, pointed to a decrease in consumer and investor confidence. The agency reported that 131 licenses for private investment projects were issued in the first half of the year, a decrease of 40 percent compared with the first six months of last year.

Assets in Syria’s five largest banks dropped by nearly 17 percent in the first half of 2011, while deposits in Lebanese banks operating in Syria were down by 20 percent from 2010, according to a report released by Lebanon’s Byblos Bank.

So far, Syrian officials, who appear to be bewildered by the uprising and how to cope with it, have announced a series of measures that most experts say are likely to deepen the crisis. Among these steps was a decision last month to ban imports of many consumer goods to protect Syria’s foreign currency reserves. The step created such a domestic and regional uproar over price increases that the government revoked it a week later.

Another decision was approving a budget of $26.53 billion, a 58 percent increase over last year’s budget and the highest in Syria’s history.

“Where are they going to bring that money from?” asked Nabil Sukkar, a former World Bank official who now runs an independent research institute based in Damascus. “That is a big question mark. We now have less revenues. No one outside is going to help us. We have reserves, but they are being drawn down.”

There were unconfirmed reports from inside Syria that employees in some public institutions were asked to contribute the equivalent of $10 every month to a special fund that goes to the government.

For years, Mr. Assad portrayed himself as a modernizer, and a newfound consumerism in Damascus and Aleppo seemed to mark a break with the drearier years associated with his father’s three decades of rule. In April, only a month after the uprising started, the International Monetary Fund forecast growth rates of 3 percent for 2011 and 5.1 percent for 2012.

“We were on our way to move toward a strong economy,” said an economic expert based in Damascus, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “We started seeing an increase in foreign and local investments. The momentum was on until we were hit by crisis. Unfortunately, I am very pessimistic.”

Anthony Shadid and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

    Sanctions Pose Growing Threat to Syria’s Assad, NYT, 10.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/world/middleeast/sanctions-pose-growing-threat-to-syrias-president-assad.html

Church Protests in Cairo Turn Deadly

October 9, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — A demonstration by Christians angry about a recent attack on a church touched off a night of violent protests here against the military council now ruling Egypt, leaving 24 people dead and more than 200 wounded in the worst spasm of violence since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February.

The sectarian protest appeared to catch fire because it was aimed squarely at the military council that has ruled Egypt since the revolution, at a moment when the military’s latest delay in turning over power has led to a spike in public distrust of its authority.

When the clashes broke out, some Muslims ran into the streets to help defend the Christians against the police, while others said they had come out to help the army quell the protests in the name of stability, turning what started as a march about a church into a chaotic battle over military rule and Egypt’s future.

Nada el-Shazly, 27, who was wearing a surgical mask to deflect the tear gas, said she came out because she heard state television urge “honest Egyptians” to turn out to protect the soldiers from Christian protesters, even though she knew some of her fellow Muslims had marched with the Christians to protest the military’s continued hold on power.

“Muslims get what is happening,” she said. The military, she said, was “trying to start a civil war.”

Thousands filled the streets of downtown, many armed with rocks, clubs or machetes. Witnesses said several protesters were crushed under military vehicles and the Health Ministry said that about 20 were undergoing surgery for bullet wounds.

Protesters responding to the news reportedly took to the streets in Alexandria as well.

The protest took place against a backdrop of escalating tensions between Muslims and Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population. Christians had joined the pro-democracy protests in large numbers, hoping for the protections of a pluralistic, democratic state, but a surge in power of Islamists has raised fears of how much tolerance majority rule will allow.

But the most common refrain of the protests on Sunday was, “The people want to bring down the field marshal,” adapting the signature chant of the revolution to call for the resignation of the military’s top officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.

“Muslims and Christians are one hand,” some chanted.

The military and riot police, on the other hand, appeared at some points to be working in tandem with Muslims who were lashing out at the Coptic Christians. As security forces cleared the streets around 10 p.m., police officers in riot gear marched back and forth through the streets of downtown alongside a swarm of hundreds of men armed with clubs and stones chanting, “The people want to bring down the Christians,” and, later, “Islamic, Islamic.”

“Until when are we going to live in this terror?” asked a Christian demonstrator who gave his name only as John. “This is not the issue of Muslim and Christian, this is the issue of the freedom that we demanded and can’t find.”

By the end of the night, as clouds of tear gas floated through the dark streets and the crosses carried by the original Christian demonstrators had disappeared, it became increasingly difficult to tell who was fighting whom.

At one point, groups of riot police officers were seen beating Muslim protesters, who were shouting, in Arabic, “God is Great!” while a few yards away other Muslims were breaking pavement into rocks to hurl in the direction of a group of Christians.

“It is chaos,” said Omar el-Shamy, a Muslim student who had spent much of the revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and returned again to help support the Christians against the military. “I was standing with a group of people and suddenly they were chanting with the army! I don’t know what is going on.”

State television announced a curfew in downtown Cairo beginning at 2 a.m., and the civilian cabinet, which serves under the military council, said that a committee headed by Prime Minister Essam Sharaf was meeting to address the crisis. The cabinet said it would not allow any interference with “national unity” or “the path of the democratic transition,” noting that a first step, the registration of parliamentary candidates for elections Nov. 28, will begin Wednesday.

“What’s happening is not sectarian tension,” Mr. Sharaf said in a telephone interview with state television. “It is an escalating plan for the fall and fragmentation of the state. There’s a feeling of a conspiracy theory to keep Egypt from having the elections that will lead it to democracy.”

Echoing the Mubarak government’s propaganda, he added, “There are hidden hands involved and we will not leave them."

Public patience with both street protests and military rule has grown increasingly thin. The military, initially celebrated as the savior of the revolution for ushering Mr. Mubarak out the door, has become a subject of public ire both for its failure to establish stability and for its repeated deferrals of its pledged exit from power.

In a timetable laid out last week, the military’s top officers said they expected to finish parliamentary elections by March but wait for the subsequent drafting and ratification of a constitution before holding a presidential election. That schedule could leave the military as an all-powerful chief executive for another two years or more. Newspapers and talk shows, once cowed by the military’s threats to censor any perceived insult, have begin openly debating whether the military will follow through on its commitments to democracy.

Where previous Christian demonstrations here appealed to the military for protection against radical Islamists, Sunday’s demonstration began from the start as a protest against the military’s stewardship of the government.

Christians who marched from the neighborhood of Shubra to the radio and television building to protest the partial dismantling of a church near the southern city of Aswan, said that they scuffled at least three times with neighbors who did not want them to pass.

But the violence did not escalate until they joined another demonstration at the radio and television headquarters around 6 p.m. Demonstrators and plainclothes security forces began throwing rocks at each other.

State news media reported that at least three security officers had died in attacks by Christian protesters, though those accounts could not be confirmed. The protesters did not appear to be armed and they insisted they were peaceful until they were attacked.

In retaliation, military vehicles began driving into protesters, killing at least six, including one with a crushed skull, several witnesses said. Some said they saw more than 15 mangled bodies. Photographs said to depict some of them circulated online.

Father Ephraim Magdy, a priest fleeing the tear gas, said he saw soldiers fire live bullets at protesters, and showed a journalist two bullet shells. “It is up to the military to explain what happened, but I see it as persecution,” he said. “I felt that they were monsters. It’s impossible for them to be Egyptians, let alone members of the army that protected the revolution.”

Heba Afify contributed reporting.

    Church Protests in Cairo Turn Deadly, NYT, 9.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/world/middleeast/deadly-protests-over-church-attack-in-cairo.html

Obama Obliquely Warns Pakistan

About Long-Term Relations

October 6, 2011
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE

President Obama cast some doubt on the long-term relationship between the United States and Pakistan on Thursday, saying his administration was concerned about the Pakistani government’s commitment to American interests because of ties between anti-American militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s own intelligence agents.

At a news conference in Washington focused mostly on the American economy, Mr. Obama said he was thankful for cooperation from Pakistan, which has allowed the United States to use drones to strike at Qaeda cells ensconced along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. But he also obliquely criticized Pakistan over its position regarding Afghanistan, where efforts to stabilize the country and wind down the American-led war have been frustrated by what American and Afghan officials have described Pakistan’s support for insurgent groups, including the Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network.

“I think that they have hedged their bets in terms of what Afghanistan would look like,” Mr. Obama said. “And part of hedging their bets is having interactions with some of the unsavory characters who they think might end up regaining power in Afghanistan after coalition forces have left.”

The United States would “constantly evaluate” Pakistan’s cooperation, Mr. Obama said. He added: “But there’s no doubt that, you know, we’re not going to feel comfortable with a long-term strategic relationship with Pakistan if we don’t think that they’re mindful of our interests as well.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks seemed to call into question whether the United States could continue supplying Pakistan with billions of dollars in military and civilian aid, as it has since 9/11, if its intelligence service could not be persuaded to drop its support for militant groups long used as proxies against India and Afghanistan.

Asked if he would be willing to cut off aid to Pakistan, recently ravaged by flooding, Mr. Obama hesitated, however. The United States had a “great desire to help the Pakistani people strengthen their own society and their own government,” he said. “And so you know, I’d be hesitant to punish flood victims in Pakistan because of poor decisions by their intelligence services.”

His remarks came against a backdrop of already heightened American tensions with Pakistan, since Adm. Mike Mullen, the just-retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate panel last month that the Haqqani network, a potent part of the insurgency battling American forces in Afghanistan, was a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s spy agency. Admiral Mullen also accused the agency of supporting an attack by Haqqani militants on the United States Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Mr. Obama said “what we’ve tried to persuade Pakistan of is that it is in their interest to have a stable Afghanistan, that they should not be feeling threatened by a stable, independent Afghanistan. We’ve tried to get conversations between Afghans and Pakistanis going more effectively than they have been in the past. But we’ve still got more work to do.”

    Obama Obliquely Warns Pakistan About Long-Term Relations, NYT, 6.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/obama-obliquely-warns-pakistan-about-long-term-relations.html

Syria Uprising Deaths Exceed 2,900, U.N. Says

October 6, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon −The United Nations human rights office said in a report issued on Thursday that at least 2,900 people have been killed in Syria since pro-democracy protests began there in mid-March.

The announcement came as activists in Syria said that at least 12 people were killed during clashes between armed men loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad and soldiers who deserted their ranks, in the northern province of Idlib, near the Turkish border.

There have been signs in recent weeks that the Syria uprising, which started as a peaceful movement inspired by events in Egypt and Tunisia that toppled governments there, is increasingly becoming an armed struggle, as protesters resist the government's harsh crackdown.

The United Nations’ previous total of deaths in the Syria uprising was 2,700.

President Assad's government, which generally denies reports of human rights abuses, has characterized the uprising as a foreign-backed insurrection led by thugs and has said it has no choice but to restore law and order.

    Syria Uprising Deaths Exceed 2,900, U.N. Says, NYT, 6.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/middleeast/syria-uprising-deaths-exceed-2900-un-says.html

Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?

October 5, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For decades, Palestinian leaders sometimes seemed to be their own people’s worst enemies.

Palestinian radicals antagonized the West, and, when militant leaders turned to hijackings and rockets, they undermined the Palestinian cause around the world. They empowered Israeli settlers and hard-liners, while eviscerating Israeli doves.

These days, the world has been turned upside down. Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.

Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future. Mr. Netanyahu’s latest misstep came after the Obama administration humiliated itself by making a full-court diplomatic press to block Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. At a time when President Obama had a few other things on his plate — averting a global economic meltdown, for example — the United States frittered good will by threatening to veto the Palestinian statehood that everybody claims to favor.

With that diplomatic fight at the United Nations under way, Israel last week announced plans for 1,100 new housing units in a part of Jerusalem outside its pre-1967 borders. Instead of showing appreciation to President Obama, Mr. Netanyahu thumbed him in the eye.

O.K., I foresee a torrent of angry responses. I realize that many insist that Jerusalem must all belong to Israel in any peace deal anyway, so new settlements there don’t count. But, if that’s your position, then you can kiss any peace deal goodbye. Every negotiator knows the framework of a peace agreement — 1967 borders with land swaps, Jerusalem as the capital of both Israeli and Palestinian states, only a token right of return — and insistence on a completely Israeli Jerusalem simply means no peace agreement ever.

Former President Bill Clinton said squarely in September that Mr. Netanyahu is to blame for the failure of the Middle East peace process. A background factor, Mr. Clinton noted correctly, is the demographic and political change within Israeli society, which has made the country more conservative when it comes to border and land issues.

Granted, Mr. Netanyahu is far from the only obstacle to peace. The Palestinians are divided, with Hamas controlling Gaza. And Hamas not only represses its own people but also managed to devastate the peace movement in Israel. That’s the saddest thing about the Middle East: hard-liners like Hamas empower hard-liners like Mr. Netanyahu.

We’re facing a dangerous period in the Middle East. Most Palestinians seem to feel as though the Oslo peace process has fizzled, and Israelis seem to agree, with two-thirds saying in a recent poll published in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that there is no chance of peace with Palestinians — ever.

The Palestinians’ best hope would be a major grass-roots movement of nonviolent peaceful resistance aimed at illegal West Bank settlements, led by women and inspired by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A growing number of Palestinians are taking up variants of that model, although they sometimes ruin it by defining nonviolence to include stone-throwing and by giving the leading role to hotheaded young men.

The Israel Defense Forces can deal with suicide bombers and rockets fired by Hezbollah. I’m not sure that they can defeat Palestinian women blocking roads to illegal settlements and willing to endure tear gas and clubbing — with videos promptly posted on YouTube.

Mr. Netanyahu has also undermined Israeli security by burning bridges with Israel’s most important friend in the region, Turkey. Now there is also the risk of clashes in the Mediterranean between Israeli and Turkish naval vessels. That’s one reason Defense Secretary Leon Panetta scolded the Israeli government a few days ago for isolating itself diplomatically.

So where do we go from here? If a peace deal is not forthcoming soon, and if Israel continues its occupation, then Israel should give the vote in Israeli elections to all Palestinians in the areas it controls. If Jews in the West Bank can vote, then Palestinians there should be able to as well.

That’s what democracy means: people have the right to vote on the government that controls their lives. Some of my Israeli friends will think I’m unfair and harsh, applying double standards by focusing on Israeli shortcomings while paying less attention to those of other countries in the region. Fair enough: I plead guilty. I apply higher standards to a close American ally like Israel that is a huge recipient of American aid.

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk — or drive a diplomatic course that leaves their nation veering away from any hope of peace. Today, Israel’s leaders sometimes seem to be that country’s worst enemies, and it’s an act of friendship to point that out.

    Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?, NYT, 5.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/kristof-is-israel-its-own-worst-enemy.html

The Wrong Way to Deal With China

October 4, 2011
The New York Times

China is undeniably manipulating its currency. Countries around the world, including the United States, are losing jobs because their manufacturing industries cannot compete with artificially cheap Chinese goods. For the good of the world economy, and its own long-term economic development, China should stop.

Still, a Senate bill, with strong bipartisan support, to punish countries that manipulate their currencies is a bad idea. It could do even more damage to the American economy if — as is all too likely — China decides to retaliate.

Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat of New York, declared that the legislation “is a clear, unwavering message from both parties to China’s leaders — the jig is up; it’s time to stop gaming the system or face severe consequences.” Talk of payback is playing well with his colleagues. On Monday, 79 senators — 47 Democrats, 31 Republicans and 1 independent — voted to initiate debate.

Growing trade with China over the past two decades has been one of the leading causes of the decline of manufacturing employment. The United States would likely add jobs over time if the renminbi was allowed to rise more significantly. Some high-technology industries, like the nascent American solar-panel business, would be a lot more competitive against their Chinese rivals. But many of the low-wage businesses lost to Chinese competition — like toys and textiles — will never come back.

Stiff retaliatory tariffs or other punishments are also very unlikely to persuade Beijing to swiftly abandon a policy that has been at the core of its economic strategy for two decades. Instead, it could add an explosive new conflict to an already heavy list of bilateral frictions.

The Senate bill is intended to limit the executive branch’s discretion. It would require the Treasury Department to identify countries whose currencies were grossly misaligned — with China everyone’s favorite culprit. If Beijing persisted, Washington would be required — with a delimited presidential waiver — to stop spending federal dollars on Chinese goods, and consider the renminbi’s undervaluation in antidumping cases against Chinese imports. The Treasury Department would also be required to ask the Federal Reserve to consider acting in currency markets to counteract the undervaluation of China’s currency. And the bill would increase the pressure on the Commerce Department to impose tariffs on undervalued Chinese products.

Given Beijing’s history of meeting fire with fire, many experts fear that China would retaliate on other fronts, like dragging its feet on customs inspections of American imports, opening new antidumping investigations against American goods or slowing its promised efforts to halt the stealing of American intellectual property. Beijing might even slow the renminbi’s current rise against the dollar, which translates into an appreciation rate of some 10 percent per year, after taking Chinese inflation into account.

The Obama administration has been pressing Beijing on the broad range of economic relations. It has won some important cases at the World Trade Organization. But it could do more to challenge other illegal policies, like China’s ban on the export of rare earth materials used in high-tech industries.

It could more explicitly link China’s bid for a bilateral investment agreement with the United States and a designation as a “market economy” at the W.T.O. to improvements in Chinese policies. It should press the European Union, Brazil and others to increase the rhetorical heat. China’s undervalued currency hurts them, too.

Beijing is not immune to pressure. But the Senate bill is too blunt an instrument.

    The Wrong Way to Deal With China, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/opinion/the-wrong-way-to-deal-with-china.html

Hanan Porat, Jewish Settlement Leader, Dies at 67

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Hanan Porat, who helped turn Israel’s religious settler movement into a powerful force through the establishment of Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, died on Tuesday at his childhood kibbutz, which he had re-established. He was 67.

In a statement confirming his death, of cancer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Mr. Porat had “dedicated his life to building up the land of Israel, and to educating generations of students about religious Zionism and loving the land of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Mr. Porat, who was a rabbi, faded from the public spotlight in recent years as he sought treatment for cancer. But in his prime, in the 1970s and ’80s, when the Israeli right began its political ascent, he was a fiery advocate of hard-line Zionism, cutting a handsome figure with a mane of thick dark hair topped by a knitted yarmulke.

He served in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from 1981 to 1984 and again from 1988 to 1999, representing a range of religious right-wing parties, including Tehiya, which he helped found in reaction to Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, and the National Religious Party.

A fervent advocate of Jewish power across the biblical land of Israel, Mr. Porat helped found Gush Emunim, which means “the bloc of the faithful” and which led the religious settler movement for years. Founded in 1974, the organization asserts that God had promised the West Bank to the Jewish people and that it was their duty to settle it.

He also played a crucial role in building a Jewish settlement in the heart of the West Bank Palestinian city of Hebron, where the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried.

Mr. Porat was a child of the kibbutz Kfar Etzion, which is on land that was later won by Jordan during Israel’s 1948 war of independence. He re-established the community after the 1967 Middle East war, when the land was conquered by Israel.

Today, about 600,000 Israeli Jews live on land captured in the 1967 war. A central goal of settler activists like Mr. Porat was to prevent any other state from being set up between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Those settlements remain among the biggest obstacles to creating a Palestinian state.

The Etzion bloc is one of the large West Bank settlement blocs that Israel wants to keep in any deal with a future Palestinian state. One reason many Israelis consider it theirs by right is that it had been settled by Jews before 1948.

Mr. Porat opposed the removal of Jews from any land in exchange for peace with Israel’s neighbors. In the early 1980s, he fought the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and the removal of its Israeli settlers. In 2005, he opposed the withdrawal from Gaza, writing a special prayer against it and urging young settlers there to resist their evacuation by the Israeli Army.

“He who lends a hand in uprooting settlements,” he said, “hurts not only the settlers themselves but the Jewish legacy and the prayers of generations as well.”

Mr. Netanyahu said he “first met Hanan almost 40 years ago and was immediately impressed by his Zionist fervor and his deep commitment to restoring the Jewish people to its land.”

“This fervor did not lessen and accompanied him until his last day,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

Mr. Porat is survived by his wife, four children and a number of grandchildren.

    Hanan Porat, Jewish Settlement Leader, Dies at 67, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/middleeast/hanan-porat-jewish-settlement-leader-dies-at-67.html

U.N. Resolution on Syria Blocked by Russia and China

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

UNITED NATIONS — Months of wrangling at the Security Council over a resolution condemning Syria collapsed on Tuesday after Russia and China vetoed a measure that contained a weak reference to the possibility of sanctions against Damascus.

Nine nations, including the United States and its Western allies, voted for the measure, while Brazil, India, South Africa and Lebanon abstained.

Russia, whose main ally in the Middle East is Syria, had said it would not accept a resolution that included even a hint of sanctions. The wording had been heavily watered down in the hope of averting the veto.

“This does not support a move toward democracy that we have seen in the Arab Spring,” Gerard Araud, the French ambassador, said after the vote, noting that some members of the Council would try again to get a resolution approved.

The resolution was a diplomatic failure for the West in its attempt to pressure the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The American ambassador, Susan E. Rice, gave one of her most bellicose speeches in the Council chamber, accusing opponents of the measure of seeking to continue arms sales to Syria.

“During this season of change, the people of the Middle East can now see clearly which nations have chosen to ignore their calls for democracy and instead prop up desperate, cruel dictators,” she said.

The resolution demanded the immediate end to all violence in Syria and accountability for those deemed responsible for it. It also called for a new political process to be conducted in an environment “free from violence, fear, intimidation and extremism.” It encouraged the opposition to take part.

The resolution condemned “grave and systematic” human rights violations in Syria, listing among other things “arbitrary executions, excessive use of force and the killing and persecution of protesters.” All Syrians should be granted fundamental human rights, including freedom of expression and assembly, as and all political prisoners should be released, it said.

The resolution, which was proposed by four European members of the Security Council — Britain, France, Germany and Portugal — in cooperation with the United States, was diluted in hopes of inducing Russian support.

An explicit threat of sanctions, which supporters contended would give the resolution teeth, was replaced with language that discussed the possibility of considering them.

The first version said the Security Council would review Syria’s compliance with the resolution in 15 days and “adopt targeted measures, including sanctions,” if it had not complied.

The revised version voted on Tuesday extended the deadline to 30 days and stated that the Council would “consider its options,” including unspecified “measures” under the article in the United Nations Charter that is used to enact sanctions.

The United States argued privately that the Europeans had made too many concessions, diplomats said, but in the end it supported the measure. The Russians had proposed wording that equated the violence fomented by both sides, which the Western nations rejected.

Other dilutions included the removal of a demand that Syria allow an investigation team from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to enter the country.

Russia and the other so-called BRICS nations — Brazil, India, China and South Africa — objected to the idea of sanctions, arguing that the Security Council’s resolution on Libya had been twisted to encompass a NATO war against the Libyan government and saying they were determined not to repeat that.

But Western diplomats accused those opposed to sanctions of using that argument as a smokescreen to disguise their protection of the Assad government.

In explaining why Russia rejected the resolution, Vitaly Churkin, the nation’s ambassador, said, “This approach is against the peaceful solution of the crisis on the basis of a Syrian national dialogue.” He said Russia opposed sanctions against Syria, or any other form of pressure that might increase violence there, particularly because many Syrians do not support the antigovernment movement.

“What we see is a policy of regime change,” he added, although he also insisted that Russia wanted Mr. Assad to enact promised reforms.

Mr. Churkin and other opponents of the measure said it did not take into account the violence directed by extremists against the government in Syria. Most Western nations dismiss as propaganda the Syrian government’s claim that foreign-backed extremists, rather than a popular uprising, are the source of the violence in the country.

The resolution on Libya approved by the Council in the spring was intended to protect civilians, Mr. Churkin said. But he contended that it was used instead as an excuse to fuel a civil war, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing civilian targets like television stations and oil facilities. The Chinese ambassador echoed those sentiments.

Ms. Rice, the American envoy, described the United States as “outraged” by the failure of the Council to pass the resolution. She dismissed the comparison to the Council’s resolution on Libya as a “cheap ruse” by countries that want to continue to sell arms to Syria, and she derided the idea that the Syrian government just needed more time to carry out reforms.

“This is not, as some would like to pretend, a Western issue,” she told reporters after the vote. “We had countries all over the world supporting this resolution today, and we have countries throughout the region who’ve been very clear that the brutality of the Assad regime has to end and that the behavior of the regime is absolutely intolerable. ”

Bashar Jaafari, the Syrian envoy, hailed the failure of the resolution, saying Western powers were using humanitarian issues as a pretext to try to weaken Syria and allow Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

Negotiations over some sort of message to Syria had stalled for months in the face of opposition from Russia and the others, but the mounting toll in the violence over antigovernment protests finally prompted a revived effort. Until now, the Council had issued only two weaker statements condemning the violence, which erupted seven months ago.

    U.N. Resolution on Syria Blocked by Russia and China, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/middleeast/russia-and-china-block-united-nations-resolution-on-syria.html

Facing Backlash,

Syria Revokes Week-Old Ban on Imports of Consumer Goods

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government on Tuesday revoked a recent decision to ban imports of most consumer goods, a move that had sent prices soaring and provoked outrage among a business elite that has until now backed the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad in his nearly seven-month contest with anti-government activists.

The revocation was just one in a string of developments on a tumultuous day for Syria. The United Nations Security Council voted Tuesday on a resolution calling for an end to violence there and suggesting the possibility of sanctions; the resolution failed after Russia and China vetoed it.

Meanwhile, Turkey said it would begin military maneuvers along its border with Syria this week. Though previously announced, the location of the exercise near the border seemed a move by an increasingly assertive Turkey to bring more pressure on Damascus.

“Now they’re really banging the gavel,” an Obama administration official said of the Turkish announcement. “They’re suddenly moving very fast.”

Analysts said that the ban imposed last week on imported merchandise, which included cars, household appliances and even food items, underscored a deep sense of anxiety among the authorities as Syria faces some of its most dangerous political unrest in four decades of dictatorship. Officials said it was needed to protect foreign currency reserves.

Analysts said the ban had been ordered without any study of the potential effects on the Syrian market or on Syria’s trade agreements with neighboring countries. Some economists in Syria said the import ban and its reversal were indicators that the Syrian leadership remained uncertain in the face of the uprising and its ramifications for the Syrian economy.

“The ruling caused a domestic uproar that was very important,” said Nabil Sukkar, a former senior economist at the World Bank who now leads the Syrian Consulting Bureau for Development and Investment, based in Damascus. “They realized that they can’t do that because it will lead to soaring prices, smuggling, unemployment and harm the credibility of the reforms.”

The United States and the European Union have imposed strict economic sanctions on Syria, including an embargo on its crude oil, over its brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests, in which 2,700 people have been killed, according to the United Nations.

The uprising, which started in mid-March, has devastated Syria’s economy. The International Monetary Fund predicted that growth might shrink by 2 percent this year, given a decline in investment and losses in tourism which, with oil, provide Syria with much of its foreign currency.

“There is no work, no customers,” said a salesman at an art gallery in Bab Touma, a Christian neighborhood in Damascus. “It has been a really bad season.”

Analysts said the Syrian government would now take other steps to protect its foreign reserves, which Finance Minister Mohammad al-Jleilati recently estimated at $18 billion — enough to cover the country’s imports for two years. Some economists dismissed that figure as inflated.

It was not immediately clear why Syria would impose such a ban if it had two years’ worth of reserves on hand. The measure was announced by the economy minister, Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar, on Sept. 26. He said that it was temporary and precautionary, but that it was necessary to protect foreign currency reserves, a main indicator of the government’s stability.

The Obama administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity following diplomatic protocol, contended that despite the reversal, “the damage has already been done.” The official said inflation had tripled and smuggling had surged since the decision was made, unsettling the business elite in Syria, which has largely sided with the government.

The “well-to-do are completely dismayed with Assad,” the American official said. “They don’t think he knows what he’s doing. Inflation has gone up. He can’t fix it.”

Turkey remains a wild card in the developments in Syria. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once one of Mr. Assad’s closest allies, has said he will no longer communicate with the Syrian president, after Mr. Assad repeatedly misled Mr. Erdogan and other Turkish officials about his intentions. Turkish officials have said they will impose sanctions soon, possibly by this week, potentially deepening Syria’s economic woes. Particularly in Aleppo, near the Turkish border, Turkey has fostered economic ties.

At the Security Council, nine nations, including the United States and its Western allies, voted for the measure condemning Syria, while Brazil, India, South Africa and Lebanon abstained. Russia, whose main ally in the Middle East is Syria, had said that it would not accept a resolution that included even a hint of sanctions.

The American ambassador, Susan E. Rice, accused opponents of the resolution of seeking to continue arms sales to Syria. “During this season of change, the people of the Middle East can now see clearly which nations have chosen to ignore their calls for democracy and instead prop up desperate, cruel dictators,” Ms. Rice said.

 

Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut,

and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    Facing Backlash, Syria Revokes Week-Old Ban on Imports of Consumer Goods, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/middleeast/syria-revokes-ban-on-imports.html

Back to School in Libya, and Struggling to Adjust

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

TRIPOLI, Libya — The classrooms at the Dawn of Freedom middle school were empty. Teachers shuffled around aimlessly outside or gossiped in the halls. A small group of bored teenagers sat in the theater and hatched a plan to coax their classmates back.

The revolution was the problem, they figured. Just weeks after the liberation of Tripoli, their neighborhood, Abu Salim, remained a bastion of support for Libya’s deposed leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The loyalists’ children — including teenagers who were recruited or had volunteered for military service — had little interest in learning the history of the uprising or the new national anthem, their friends said

The solution was fliers, said Osama Mohamed, a 15-year-old who wore a brown blazer and led the teenage committee. “They will say: ‘To the children of Libya. Please come back to school. We want to move Libya forward.’ ”

As the country totters on the precipice of change, Libya’s challenges were starkly apparent in Tripoli’s schools, particularly here in Abu Salim. In recent weeks, educators, filled with a new school year’s customary hope and dread, opened their doors to a confusing new reality. To undo the colonel’s rigid, dogmatic curriculum, the teachers were guided only by a thin pamphlet of instructions given to them by officials of the temporary government.

Neighborhoods like Abu Salim, where the civil war’s wounds are still raw, faced the stiffest test. Last week, the neighborhood’s divisions weighed on the few students who returned to newly reopened schools and their teachers, on the lookout for looming social problems even as they focused on urgent everyday needs.

Teachers, regardless of their sympathies, were asked to brush white paint over the former government’s propaganda. Counselors whose only role had been to take attendance prepared themselves to deal with young fighters returning from the front. School principals devised ways to repair walls pierced by artillery shells.

And they threw up their hands at the Qaddafi-era etchings inscribed by students in dozens of desks: “God and Muammar and Libya and that’s all,” read one, the most popular slogan of the colonel’s supporters. “Down, down Sarkozy,” written on one desk, signaled a student’s opposition to the rebels’ foreign backers.

The adjustment was easier in other parts of town, like Tajoura, which was solidly anti-Qaddafi. Students in those areas returned to school in greater numbers. But Abu Salim was the scene of fierce fighting during the battle for Tripoli, and school administrators say parents might simply be scared to let their children leave the house.

In addition, schools in Tripoli are focusing until January on reviewing existing lessons, not new curriculums, to allow schools in other parts of the country that closed during the war to catch up.

On the first day of school on Saturday, according to the principal, Mohammed Melek, more than 100 students came to the Anniversary of the Revenge High School, the name recognizing Colonel Qaddafi’s expulsion of Italians in 1970. Shards of glass from windows shattered by a NATO bombing littered a classroom floor. A green flag sitting on a teacher’s desk had not been removed.

“We’re trying to do our jobs as if things are normal,” Mr. Melek said.

He said that teachers were preparing a curriculum that would include instruction on a new constitution, the fall of the previous government and lessons designed to “raise the morale of students.”

“We need to plant in them the love of the country, the spirit of reconciliation and forgetting the past,” Mr. Melek said.

But a student, Mahmoud Najem, 17, contradicted Mr. Melek, saying only a handful of students had actually shown up. “I think most of the boys want Qaddafi,” he said, talking about an impoverished neighborhood where the old government had tried to buy loyalty with cars and cash gifts. That largess, however, was not extended to schools like this one, with a shabby playground and broken desks.

Teachers at primary schools were more optimistic about the year ahead. On the edge of Abu Salim, teachers at the Abdulrahman bin Aouf elementary school ignored local divisions and dived into the history of the most recent revolution with noticeable enthusiasm.

On a playground, a stack of Green Books smoldered after being set on fire. In a classroom, a teacher with a soaring voice delivered a lecture on the significance of Feb. 17, the day Libyans consider the start of their latest revolution, which had its roots in protests outside the Italian Consulate in Benghazi in 2006.

The young students, befuddled or bored, stared back blankly, so the teacher led them in a song.

A math teacher, Souad Abdulla, said: “We cannot ignore 42 years. We have to teach the children what happened so they appreciate how the 17th of February happened.”

Down the road, there were signs of a backlash to the revolutionary zeal. The Sayyida Zeinab school was also full of the new green, red and black flags, draped on walls and waved in the hallways by teenage girls. A teacher, Karima Ramadan, said the display hid a more complicated reality.

Children had refused to sing the new national anthem, and someone had torn the school’s official new flag. Other teachers slapped her during an argument about politics, Ms. Ramadan said, adding that she opposed the previous government.

“They are very poor, and they’re still loyal to him,” Ms. Ramadan said, referring to Colonel Qaddafi. “I don’t understand.”

Abdullah al-Ashtar, a local official working with the schools, said he understood how the gloating by revolutionaries might anger other students but added, “We don’t want to kill that joy.”

Instead, Mr. Ashtar said, school officials would bring students together for discussions, and teachers would be encouraged to reach out to children in pro-Qaddafi families. “We’re trying to reform them,” he said. “Not push them away.”

For the time being, he said, the colonel’s loyalists would have to “keep it in their hearts.”

He expected there would be some confusion.

“We had principals who were mostly pro-Qaddafi,” Mr. Ashtar said. “Some were volunteers in the fight. Schools were turned into arms depots. So many schools were destroyed.” Even the names of the schools were a problem, with many named after Colonel Qaddafi’s 1969 coup. Other old names, like Dawn of Freedom, would still work, he said.

Many of the books would have to go. Rabia Schwa, who has taught history and geography at Sayyida Zeinab since 1986, leafed through the history textbook, as other teachers gathered similar books into plastic bags destined for the garbage.

“The leader of the revolution,” Ms. Schwa read from a page. “The great revolution,” she read on another. “We couldn’t change this. Our students were usually confused. We can keep the geography books, maybe.”

Zohra al-Tayef, a counselor at Dawn of Freedom, said teachers would have to undo years of efforts by the former government to sow divisions between tribes and regions. “No one should say I come from here, or there,” she said. “We are Libyans now.”

Even as she spoke of guiding the children, she admitted to her own difficulties coping with the changes around her.

“May God let the right side win,” she said, adding, “We don’t even know what the right side is.”

 

Suliman Alzway contributed reporting.

    Back to School in Libya, and Struggling to Adjust, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/africa/in-a-changed-libya-schools-face-new-challenges.html

Interim Tunisian Leader With Ties to Old Ruler

Defends a Gradual Path

October 3, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TUNIS — As the country that kicked off the Arab Spring prepares for its first free election this month, Tunisia’s transitional prime minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, has some advice for his counterparts in Egypt, Libya or other former Arab autocracies dealing with impatient public demands unleashed by the revolutions.

“When someone is hungry asking for food, you only give him what he needs,” Mr. Essebsi said, describing his go-slow approach to meeting protesters’ demands for jobs and freedoms. “You don’t give him more, or else he might die, so we offer a step-by-step approach.”

Mr. Essebsi, 84, was picked as prime minister in February because during a long career as an official of the Tunisian dictatorship he built a record of trying to change the system from within. But as interim leader he found himself obliged to deal with continuous eruptions of protests demanding jobs, wages and immediate retribution against members of the former ruling elite.

He said he often let the protesters express themselves — but sometimes found the need to crack down.

Mr. Essebsi said it was a choice between yielding to chaos, or loosening the grip gradually, defending his occasional reliance on riot police and tear gas to keep order. His approach has won him broad support but also led a few activists to compare him to the ousted dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

“Sometimes the proponents of freedom have demands that go beyond logic,” he said, “and it is more difficult to protect freedom from the proponents of freedom themselves than from the enemies.”

Mr. Essebsi spoke during an hour-and-a-half interview in an ornately tiled parlor in the centuries-old complex known as Tunis’s casbah, on the eve of a visit this week to the White House and weeks before the election, on Oct. 23, of a new constituent assembly that will govern Tunisia while drafting a new constitution. It promises to be the first free and fair election of the Arab Spring, offering him the historic chance to hand over power in a peaceful, democratic transition — a rare event in the history of the region.

“It is a duty and an honor,” he said.

But sounding at times like a political candidate just beginning a new campaign, he also acknowledged that he was not yet ready to retire and hoped for a continued role in the new government — perhaps as its prime minister.

“Why not?” he asked. “When you are a politician, it means to work for the benefit of the country, not to stay home. In politics, it ends only when one dies.”

For Mr. Essebsi, politics began in the early 1950s under French colonial rule. He was a young lawyer representing members of the independence movement around Habib Bourguiba, who in 1956 became Tunisia’s first president. Mr. Essebsi served him as an adviser, interior minister, defense minister and ambassador to Paris. After Mr. Ben Ali’s 1987 bloodless coup, Mr. Essebsi served in Tunisia’s rubber-stamp Parliament until 1994.

But he was known since the 1970s as a voice within the ruling elite pushing for more democracy. That combination of experience and relative liberalism is what earned him the job of interim prime minister after Mr. Ben Ali fled on Jan. 14 and mounting street protests forced the sitting prime minister to resign soon after.

Mr. Essebsi’s supporters say he exemplifies the intertwined Western and Arab influences distinctive to Tunisia and its modern founding father, Mr. Bourguiba. Mr. Essebsi often quotes the Koran from memory, his admirers note, but until recently his family owned a wine store. (Alcohol is prohibited in Islam. Mr. Essebsi could not be reached for comment on this point, but his spokesman said he had never seen him drink alcohol.)

Some activists, though, call him “a new Ben Ali” who has failed to deliver fast enough on the revolution’s promises of new jobs and dignity.

“The only ones who have legitimacy are those who struggled for change before Jan. 14 and are still struggling,” said Assia Haj Salem, a lawyer who helped organize a recent protest.

“If he stays in the coming government, I will assassinate him and declare that I did,” she said. “He is rejected by the people.”

Mr. Essebsi has responded to the continuing protests and occasional violence in the capital and around the country by alternately pushing back and giving in. When a former Ben Ali justice minister was released from prison around the same time that a wealthy family ally fled the country in August, thousands took to the streets of Tunis and other cities to demand legal action, if not a new revolution.

Police used tear gas to break up the protests. But they also re-arrested the former justice minister, who Mr. Essebsi said remained behind bars.

In early September, as protests and violence continued, Mr. Essebsi announced a broad security crackdown, including authorizing the Interior Ministry to ban meetings deemed to threaten stability and to put individuals under house arrest.

He also banned the police trade unions, accusing them of statements making “insinuations to insurgency.” While 97 percent of the police were “honest men,” he said, 3 percent were “monkeys.” (As a former interior minister, he should know, he said in the interview.)

Hundreds of angry police officers demonstrated the next day outside his office in the casbah. A few passers-by took his side and reportedly threw bananas at the officers. But a vice prime minister quietly told the officers that Mr. Essebsi intended to ban only unauthorized unions, not the existing ones, regaining their support, Montasser el-Matieri, a spokesman for the police union, said last week in an interview.

Through it all, many observers say, Tunisia appears to have stayed on track — especially in comparison with the muddle after the season’s second Arab revolution, in Egypt, where the interim military government is still ironing out a complicated multistage plan that could delay full civilian control until 2014.

After a gradual process of street protests, official accommodations and the inclusion of new voices in the interim government, Mr. Essebsi had established enough credibility that by June he was able to persuade the public and the parties to accept a postponement in the election for technical reasons from its originally scheduled date in July to Oct. 23. Even Tunisia’s Islamists, who had the most to lose because of their head start in organizing, accepted the deferral.

An independent commission to oversee the transition had included a growing number of political groups, who recently agreed together on a one-year deadline for the constituent assembly in order to limit its power. Another independent commission is investigating crimes by officials and allies of the Ben Ali government, with a mandate to recommend prosecutions and publicize its findings. And to begin rectifying the notoriously brutal police force left by the Ben Ali government, Mr. Essebsi has appointed a second interior minister, to study steps toward reform.

Tunisians remain angry about soaring unemployment, especially among college graduates, and an economic growth rate flattened by the revolutions here and in neighboring Libya, Mr. Essebsi said. But their protests are tempered by “respect,” he said, giving himself some of the credit.

For a successful transition, “the major element is that these countries have to be led by someone who is trustworthy, who has the confidence of the people,” Mr. Essebsi said, adding that when he assumed office the protesters who had occupied the casbah square for weeks agreed to leave voluntarily, without police coercion.

“If the people trust their leaders, they will wait.”

 

Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.

    Interim Tunisian Leader With Ties to Old Ruler Defends a Gradual Path, NYT, 3.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/world/africa/tunisias-interim-leader-essebsi-defends-gradualist-path.html

Mosque Set on Fire in Northern Israel

October 3, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — A mosque in an Arab village in the Galilee, northern Israel, was set on fire in the early hours of Monday morning in what police said was an arson attack, and its walls were defaced with Hebrew graffiti. The perpetrators were widely suspected of being Jewish extremists.

The fire caused “serious damage” to the mosque in the village of Tuba-Zangariya, according to Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman.

Later Monday, about 200 villagers began to march from the village along the main road toward Rosh Pina, a Jewish town. Mr. Rosenfeld said the police used tear gas to disperse the protesters after some threw stones at police officers and burned tires on the road.

There have been a number of similar arson attacks on mosques in West Bank villages in recent months, part of a campaign known as “price tag” in which radical settlers exact a price from local Palestinians or from the Israeli security forces for any action taken against their settlement enterprise.

This time, too, an outside wall of the burned mosque was scrawled with the Hebrew words for “Price Tag” and “Revenge.” The word “Palmer” also appeared there, a reference to a Jewish settler, Asher Palmer, 25, who was killed along with his baby son when their car overturned on a West Bank road last month. The police said that the crash occurred after Mr. Palmer was struck in the head by a stone, and that they believe it was thrown by Palestinians.

But the latest mosque burning occurred inside Israel. Jews and Arabs live in a patchwork of villages and towns in the Galilee, where calm has prevailed for years. The last major disturbances occurred in 2000, when Israeli Arabs rioted along with Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem at the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. Israeli police officers shot and killed 13 Israeli Arab citizens.

Arab citizens make up some 20 percent of Israel’s population of more than 7.5 million.

Israeli leaders condemned the arson attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the images from the burned mosque were “shocking” and had “no place in the state of Israel.”

The defense minister, Ehud Barak, said that the “criminals” who carried out the deed wanted to upset Jewish-Arab relations.

The president of Israel, Shimon Peres, and the country’s chief rabbis were planning to visit the mosque in Tuba-Zangariya on Monday evening in a show of solidarity, along with clerics from other faiths.

No arrests were made in the first 12 hours after the fire, according to the police. There have been no charges so far in the previous cases of arson against mosques in the West Bank.

    Mosque Set on Fire in Northern Israel, NYT, 3.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/world/middleeast/mosque-set-on-fire-in-northern-israel.html