History > 2012 > USA > International (IX)
Islamists’ Harsh Justice
Is on the Rise in North Mali
December 27, 2012
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER
BAMAKO, Mali — Moctar Touré was strapped to a chair,
blindfolded, his right hand bound tight to the armrest with a rubber tube. A
doctor came and administered a shot. Then Mr. Touré’s own brother wielded a
knife, the kind used to slaughter sheep, and methodically carried out the
sentence.
“I myself cut off my brother’s hand,” said Aliou Touré, a police chief in the
Islamist-held north of this divided nation. “We had no choice but to practice
the justice of God.”
Such amputations are designed to shock — residents are often summoned to watch —
and even as the world makes plans to recapture northern Mali by force, the
Islamists who control it show no qualms about carrying them out.
After the United Nations Security Council authorized a military campaign to
retake the region last week, Islamists in Gao, Mr. Touré’s town, cut the hands
off two more people accused of being thieves the very next day, a leading local
official said, describing it as a brazen response to the United Nations
resolution. Then the Islamists, undeterred by the international threats against
them, warned reporters that eight others “will soon share the same fate.”
This harsh application of Shariah law, with people accused of being thieves
sometimes having their feet amputated as well, has occurred at least 14 times
since the Islamist takeover last spring, not including the recent vow of more to
come, according to Human Rights Watch and independent observers.
But those are just the known cases, and dozens of other residents have been
publicly flogged with camel-hair whips or tree branches for offenses like
smoking, or even for playing music on the radio. Several were whipped in Gao on
Monday for smoking in public, an official said, while others said that anything
other than Koranic verses were proscribed as cellphone ringtones. A jaunty tune
is punishable by flogging.
At least one case of the most severe punishment — stoning to death — was carried
out in the town of Aguelhok in July against a couple accused of having children
out of wedlock.
Trials are often rudimentary. A dozen or so jihadi judges sitting in a circle on
floor mats pronounce judgment, according to former Malian officials in the
north. Hearings, judgment and sentence are usually carried out rapidly, on the
same day.
“They do it among themselves, in closed session,” said Abdou Sidibé, a
parliamentary deputy from Gao, now in exile here in the capital, Bamako. “These
people who have come among us have imposed their justice,” he said. “It comes
from nowhere.”
The jihadists are even attempting to sell the former criminal courts building in
Gao, Mr. Sidibé said, because they no longer have any use for it. In Timbuktu,
justice is dispensed from a room in a former hotel.
Many of the amputation victims have now drifted down to Bamako, in the south,
which despite suffering from its own political volatility has become a haven for
tens of thousands fleeing harsh conditions in the north, including the forced
recruitment of child soldiers by the Islamists.
Moctar Touré, 25, and Souleymane Traoré, 25, both spoke haltingly and stared
into the distance, remembering life before the moments that turned their worlds
upside down and made them, as they felt, useless. They gently cradled the
rounded stumps that now serve as arms, wondering what would come next.
The two young men had been truck drivers before Gao was overrun last spring.
Both were accused of stealing guns; both said they merely acted out of patriotic
feeling for the now-divided Malian state, with the intention of helping it
regain the north.
In September, Mr. Traoré said, he was summoned from his jail cell after three
months of a brutal prison term in which he was often fed nothing. Acquaintances
had denounced him to the Islamist police; he was stealing the extremists’
weapons at night, he said, and burying them in the sand by the Niger River.
As ten other prisoners watched, he was ordered to sit in a chair, and his arms
were tightly bound to it. With a razor, one of his jailers traced a circle on
his forearm. “It pains me to even think about it,” he said, looking down,
cradling his head in his remaining hand.
Mr. Touré’s brother, Aliou, the police chief, sawed off his hand. It took three
minutes. Mr. Traoré said he passed out.
“I said nothing. I let them do it,” he said.
Moctar Touré had his hand amputated several weeks later. He said it took 30
minutes, though he fainted in the process, awakening in the hospital bed where
the Islamists had placed him afterward.
Mr. Touré said his brother had insisted that the sentence be carried out.
“They asked my own brother three times if that was the sentence,” Mr. Touré
said. “He’s the commissioner of police in Gao, and he wants to die a martyr,”
Mr. Touré said quietly. “He joined up with the Islamists when they came to Gao.”
Aliou Touré, reached by telephone in the Sahara, said the decision was a simple
one.
“He stole nine times,” he said of his brother. “He’s my own brother. God told us
to do it. God created my brother. God created me. You must read the Koran to see
that what I say is true. This is in the Koran. That’s why we do it.”
Moctar Touré had a different story. The Islamists had pressed him into joining
their militia, he said, but the training was brutal and Mr. Touré quit. One day
they saw him carrying some guns, and they accused him of wanting to subvert the
new order. He was jailed.
Sweat streamed down Mr. Touré’s forehead as he recalled the terrible memories,
sitting on a bench at a busy bus station here, 600 miles from Gao.
The Islamists had called out five prisoners that morning; four were to be
witnesses. They took them all to an unused customs post at the edge of Gao, and
Mr. Touré was ordered to wash himself. The Islamists told him what his sentence
was to be.
“I was helpless,” he said. “I was completely tied up.”
Now, Mr. Touré spends his days hanging out at the bus station near a cousin’s
house. Mr. Traoré hopes to learn a new trade, given that “I can’t be a driver
anymore,” he said.
Mr. Touré, for his part, is in despair. “I have no idea what I am going to do,”
he said. “I’m completely lost. Night and day, I ask myself, ‘What is going to
happen?’ Nobody has helped me.”
The people in Gao have protested the amputations several times, according to
Human Rights Watch, even halting them once by throwing stones at the Islamic
police and blocking the entrance to the main square.
“To come to Gao and inflict these sentences they call Islamic, I say it is
illegal,” said Abderrahmane Oumarou, a communal councilor there, reached by
telephone after last week’s amputations.
As for the Islamists’ justice, “I don’t give credit to their accusations,” Mr.
Oumarou said. “You can’t replace Malian justice.”
Mr. Oumarou said the Islamists had been busy lately writing “Allahu akbar,” or
“God is great,” in Arabic on the former Malian administrative buildings in Gao.
“Their accusations are false,” he said. “They said weapons were stolen. But
these are lies.”
Islamists’ Harsh Justice Is on the Rise in
North Mali, NYT, 27.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/world/africa/islamists-harsh-justice-on-rise-in-northern-mali.html
High-Ranking Syrian General Defects
in New Blow to
Assad
December 26, 2012
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE
Syria’s embattled leadership suffered a new setback on
Wednesday with the publicly broadcast defection of its military police chief,
the highest-ranking officer to abandon President Bashar al-Assad since the
uprising against him began nearly two years ago.
The defector, Maj. Gen. Abdul Azia Jassem al-Shallal, announced his move in a
video broadcast by Al Arabiya, saying that he had taken the step because of what
he called the Syrian military’s deviation from “its fundamental mission to
protect the nation and transformation into gangs of killing and destruction.”
Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab broadcaster heavily critical of the Syrian
government, said General Shallal had made the video on Tuesday somewhere on the
Turkish-Syrian border, implying that he was now inside Turkey, where other
Syrian military defectors have sought refuge in the conflict. Many have
regrouped there to join the Free Syrian Army, the main insurgent force fighting
Mr. Assad.
Reading from a prepared statement while sitting at a desk, dressed in a
camouflage uniform with red epaulets, the general did not specify in his message
when he had decided to defect but said that he had been “waiting for the right
circumstances to do so.” He also said “there are other high-ranking officers who
want to defect, but the situation is not suitable for them to declare
defection.”
General Shallal’s statement came as Syrian insurgents were claiming new
territorial gains against Mr. Assad in the northern and central parts of the
country and as a special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League was
visiting Damascus as part of an effort to reach a political settlement that
would halt the conflict, the most violent of the Arab Spring revolutions that
began in the winter of 2010-2011. More than 40,000 people have been killed since
protests against Mr. Assad began in March 2011.
There has been speculation that the special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, presented
Mr. Assad with proposals for relinquishing his authority and possibly leaving
the country. But Mr. Assad, whose Alawite minority has ruled Syria for more than
four decades, has consistently said he will not leave the country, even as his
control over it seems to be slipping further away.
Dozens of lower-ranking Syrian military officers and hundreds of soldiers have
fled Syria over the past two years, but General Shallal, the head of the
military police division of the Syrian Army, is the highest-ranking military
defector so far. He outranked Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a boyhood friend of Mr.
Assad’s, who fled last July. General Tlass is now believed to be living in
France.
Among civilians who have abandoned Mr. Assad, the highest-ranking defector so
far has been the prime minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, who fled to Jordan on Aug.
6. In the past few weeks, unconfirmed reports also have abounded about the
possible defection of Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, a
smooth-talking English speaker who had numerous foreign contacts and who
disappeared from public view in early December. The Lebanese television channel
Al Manar, which is sympathetic to Mr. Assad, said Mr. Makdissi had been fired.
The Guardian reported this week that Mr. Makdissi had fled to the United States
and was cooperating with American intelligence. Officials in Washington have not
responded to requests for comment on that report.
In Lebanon, Syria’s interior minister, Mohammed al-Shaar, who had been
recovering at a Beirut hospital from wounds said to have been received in a Dec.
12 suicide bombing attack outside his offices in Damascus, was on his way back
to the Syrian capital on Wednesday. The Associated Press quoted Beirut airport
officials as saying the minister flew home on a private jet.
High-Ranking Syrian General Defects in New
Blow to Assad, NYT, 26.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/world/middleeast/syrian-general-defects-in-a-public-broadcast.html
Kerry Named for the Role of a Lifetime
December 21, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — With a patrician bearing, nearly three decades of
service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a highly decorated combat
career in the Vietnam War, even a father who was a diplomat, John Kerry is the
very picture of a secretary of state.
“In a sense, John’s entire life has prepared him for this role,” President Obama
said on Friday at the White House, as he nominated Mr. Kerry to replace Hillary
Rodham Clinton, the first step in filling out a national security team for his
second term.
Mr. Obama praised Mr. Kerry, 69, a Massachusetts Democrat, for having been
immersed in “every major foreign-policy debate for nearly 30 years.”
But though Mr. Kerry would bring even deeper experience to the job than Mrs.
Clinton did, his appointment is likely to further centralize policy decisions in
the White House, where for the past four years the president and a small circle
of advisers have kept a tight grip on issues like Iran’s nuclear program, China,
Pakistan, and the winding down of the war in Afghanistan.
“There’s every reason to believe that we’re going to have a very White
House-centric foreign policy,” said David J. Rothkopf, the chief executive of
the Foreign Policy Group. “Kerry is going to have to show his loyalty and
willingness to work within the Obama system.”
In contrast to Mrs. Clinton, whom Mr. Obama named to his cabinet after they
competed against each other in the 2008 presidential primaries, Mr. Kerry has
been a loyal supporter of the Obama administration, guiding an arms-reduction
treaty with Russia to ratification in the Senate and playing diplomatic
troubleshooter for the White House in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan.
He has also figured at critical moments in Mr. Obama’s career. At the 2004
Democratic National Convention that nominated him for president, Mr. Kerry gave
the keynote speaking slot to Mr. Obama, then a little-known Illinois state
senator, catapulting him to national prominence. In early 2008, Mr. Kerry
endorsed him over Mrs. Clinton, and this fall he played the role of Mitt Romney
in mock debates — sessions that by some accounts put the president’s teeth on
edge.
“Nothing brings two people closer together than weeks of debate prep,” said Mr.
Obama on Friday, looking at a grinning Mr. Kerry. “John, I’m looking forward to
working with you instead of debating you.”
However lavish Mr. Obama’s praise, his instinctive choice for secretary of state
was Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, who withdrew her name
from consideration after Republicans threatened to block her nomination because
of statements she made after the lethal attack on the American Mission in
Benghazi, Libya.
Mr. Obama, his aides said, likes Ms. Rice’s blunt style and is in sync with her
view of foreign policy, which places a premium on aggressively defending human
rights.
As a result, Ms. Rice, who is staying in her post, remains a candidate for a
major foreign-policy post in the second term, according to administration
officials. Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, is expected to stay
on for a year or so, but Ms. Rice could be named to his job.
If she were to move into the White House, analysts said, that would pose a test
for Mr. Kerry, given her access to Mr. Obama and their shared views on many
foreign policy issues.
“The easiest model to see developing is one in which Kerry is on the road a lot,
interfacing with foreign leaders, but the decision-making is done at the White
House,” said Elliott Abrams, who held foreign-policy posts in the
administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Mr. Obama expressed confidence that Mr. Kerry would be confirmed by his Senate
colleagues, a prediction that seemed safe, given that at a recent news
conference, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, one of Ms. Rice’s
fiercest critics, jokingly referred to Mr. Kerry as “Mr. Secretary.”
Mrs. Clinton has not announced her resignation, but she has made it clear she
would not stay beyond a single term. Because she is recovering from a
concussion, she did not appear at the midday announcement. Mr. Obama said that
he spoke to her on Friday morning, and reported that she was “in good spirits.”
In a statement, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Kerry was a leader of the “highest
caliber,” who had advocated on behalf of diplomacy and development in Congress.
Mr. Kerry is working with her to adopt the recommendations of a recent report
that harshly criticized the State Department for lapses in security in Benghazi,
she said. The Benghazi attack, analysts said, underscored the management
challenge for a longtime senator like Mr. Kerry in taking over a sprawling
worldwide bureaucracy. Former aides to Mr. Kerry point out that he did oversee a
huge, if temporary, campaign operation in 2004, which, though criticized for
tactical missteps, was not viewed as poorly managed.
Although Mr. Kerry is not a global celebrity like Mrs. Clinton, his background
as a presidential nominee and his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations
Committee have made him well known abroad, accustomed to meeting monarchs and
presidents.
In October 2009, he was viewed as instrumental in persuading President Hamid
Karzai of Afghanistan to accept the need for a runoff election. Mr. Kerry spent
20 hours over five days with Mr. Karzai, telling him over dinner and in long
walks in the garden of the presidential palace in Kabul of his own frustrations
at the ballot box in 2004.
“I told him, ‘Sometimes there are tough things,’ ” Mr. Kerry said in an
interview at the time.
Before Syria exploded in violence, Mr. Kerry met several times with its
president, Bashar al-Assad, hoping to draw him into a more constructive role in
the Middle East. His failed effort at engagement may elicit some tough questions
from Mr. McCain and other Senate hawks.
As a senator, Mr. Kerry compiled a strong record on climate change, and
environmental groups issued enthusiastic responses to his nomination. But Mr.
Obama, pressed at a recent news conference, said climate change would take a
back seat to the economy, at least for now.
For Mr. Kerry, exerting influence internally is likely to be the greatest
challenge of the job he has long coveted. Friends and former aides predicted he
would carve out a role, just as Mrs. Clinton did.
“John was someone who from an early age dreamed of being president,” said Jim
Gomes, a former chief of staff to Mr. Kerry. “As someone who grew up in a
Foreign Service family, who testified before Senate Foreign Relations after
coming home from Vietnam and who wanted to serve on Foreign Relations, this is a
pretty terrific Plan B.”
Kerry Named for the Role of a Lifetime,
NYT, 21.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/politics/kerry-is-pick-for-secretary-of-state-official-says.html
Syria Unleashes Cluster Bombs on Town, Punishing
Civilians
December 20, 2012
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS
MAREA, Syria — The plane came in from the southeast late in
the afternoon, releasing its weapons in a single pass. Within seconds, scores of
finned bomblets struck and exploded on the homes and narrow streets of this
small Syrian town.
After the screams and the desperate gathering of the victims, the staff at the
local Freedom Hospital counted 4 dead and 23 wounded. All were civilians,
doctors and residents said.
Many forms of violence and hardship have befallen Syria’s people as the
country’s civil war has escalated this year. But the Syrian government’s attack
here on Dec. 12 pointed to one of the war’s irrefutable patterns: the deliberate
targeting of civilians by President Bashar al-Assad’s military, in this case
with a weapon that is impossible to use precisely.
Syrians on both sides in this fight have suffered from the bloodshed and
sectarian furies given dark license by the war. The victims of the cluster bomb
attacks describe the tactic as collective punishment, a mass reprisal against
populations that are with the rebels.
The munitions in question — Soviet-era PTAB-2.5Ms — were designed decades ago by
Communist engineers to destroy battlefield formations of Western armored
vehicles and tanks. They are ejected in dense bunches from free-falling
dispensers dropped from aircraft. The bomblets then scatter and descend
nose-down to land and explode almost at once over a wide area, often hundreds of
yards across.
Marea stands along an agricultural plain, surrounded for miles by empty fields.
Even at night, or in bad weather, it cannot be mistaken for anything but what it
is — the densely packed collection of small businesses, offices and homes that
together form a town.
Two journalists from The New York Times were traveling toward Marea as the
attack occurred and arrived not long after the exploding bomblets had rippled
across its neighborhoods.
Blood pooled on the street, including beside a water-collection point at an
intersection where Nabhan al-Haji, 18, was killed.
Another victim, Ahmad Najjar Asmail, had been riding a motorcycle when a
submunition landed beside him. He was decapitated. Ramy Naser, 15, was also
fatally wounded.
The hospital was crowded with patients. Many more were en route to hospitals in
Turkey.
The use of cluster munitions is banned by much of the world, although Syria,
like the United States, is not party to that international convention. In the
detached parlance of military planners, they are also sometimes referred to as
area weapons — ordnance with effects that cover a sprawling amount of ground.
In the attack on Marea, at least three dispensers, each containing 42 bomblets
slightly smaller than a one-liter bottle and packed with a high-explosive shaped
charge, were dropped squarely onto neighborhoods and homes.
Two funerals began as the sun set, the latest in a town that rose early against
Syria’s government, and has been one of the seats of defiance.
One homeowner, Ali Farouh, showed the place where a PTAB-2.5M struck an exterior
wall on his patio. His young son held up bits of shrapnel.
“Bashar is a horse,” Mr. Farouh said, almost spitting with disgust as he said
the president’s name. “He is a donkey.”
An examination of the area by daylight found the signature signs of an
air-delivered cluster munitions attack, including unexploded PTAB-2.5M
submunitions, the tail sections and fins of three dispensers and three main
dispenser bodies.
One resident also displayed the nearly intact remains of an ATK-EB mechanical
time fuse associated with the same dispensers. Fragments of the submunitions’
fins were in abundance. An interior spacer and dispenser nose plate were also
found.
Throughout the town, many of the narrow, telltale craters made by shaped charges
could be seen. Some cut deep holes through asphalt into the dirt below, almost
like a drill.
It was not immediately clear why Marea was attacked, although many residents
ascribed motives that mix collective punishment with revenge.
The town is the home of Abdulkader al-Saleh, a prominent rebel field commander
in the Aleppo region. Mr. Saleh, charismatic and lean, is locally known with
near reverence as Haji Marea, and is celebrated by his townspeople for his mix
of battlefield savvy, courage and luck. This month, just days before the cluster
attack on his hometown, he was named a leader in the reorganized Free Syrian
Army, as many rebels call themselves.
Residents said Marea’s recent history, and its indelible connection to the
commander it produced, has earned it a high place on Mr. Assad’s list of
targets.
“The regime especially hates us,” said Yasser al-Haji, an activist who lost a
cousin in the attack.
No one disputes that Marea has repeatedly been attacked by some of the Assad
government’s most frightening weapons. On Thursday, residents reported being hit
by cruise missiles, perhaps Scuds, which they said landed just north of the town
with tremendous, earth-heaving explosions.
In the case of the cluster munitions attack, one of the submunitions did strike
a building being used by the rebels — a school where some of Haji Marea’s
fighters are based. It blasted a small hole in the concrete roof and sprayed
bits of concrete and shrapnel into the room below, which was empty.
Several fighters, who were meeting in the next room as the jet screamed overhead
— and the sole bomblet, out of more than 100, hit their building — chuckled at
their near miss. But they were enraged by the attack.
They spoke of the government’s escalation of weapons throughout the year — from
mortars, tanks and artillery to helicopter gunships, then to fixed-wing attack
jets. Since summer, Mr. Assad’s military has used cluster munitions repeatedly,
and recently began using incendiary cluster munitions, too. This month, Syrian
activists and officials in Washington said the government had ratcheted up the
pressure with one of the last unused weapons left in its stock — cruise
missiles, with conventional warheads. Analysts who have watched the gradual
escalations said the Assad government has followed a “boil-the-frog-slowly”
strategy.
With the incremental escalations, they say, Mr. Assad has prevented the West
from finding cause to enter the war, as NATO did against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi
of Libya after he rolled out almost all of his military’s full might at the
war’s outset.
One fighter, who gave his name as Mustafa, said that Mr. Assad had little left
that he had not used. The fighter said he expected no restraint.
“In the coming days, he’ll use the chemicals and he’ll destroy everything,” he
said. “And will burn the people, and kill all the people — children, women, old
men, the elders.”
Mr. Assad, Mustafa said, “just needs to kill.”
Syria Unleashes Cluster Bombs on Town,
Punishing Civilians, NYT, 20.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/world/middleeast/
syria-uses-cluster-bombs-to-attack-as-many-civilians-as-possible.html
China
Calls for ‘No Delay’ on Gun Controls in U.S.
December
15, 2012
11:31 pm
The New York Times
By MARK MCDONALD
HONG KONG -
The state news agency in China, the official voice of the government, has called
for the United States to quickly adopt stricter gun controls in the aftermath of
the shooting rampage in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20
schoolchildren.
According to the state medical examiner who was overseeing autopsies of the
children, all of them had been hit multiple times. At least one child had been
shot 11 times.
All of the children were in the first grade.
"Their blood and tears demand no delay for U.S. gun control," said the news
agency, Xinhua, which listed a series of shootings this year in the United
States.
"However, this time, the public feels somewhat tired and helpless," the
commentary said. "The past six months have seen enough shooting rampages in the
United States."
China suffered its own school tragedy on Friday - a man stabbed 22 children at a
village elementary school in Henan Province. An 85-year-old woman also was
stabbed.
There were no fatalities, although Xinhua reported that some of the children had
had their fingers and ears cut off. The attacker, a 36-year-old man, was
reportedly in custody. There was no immediate explanation for his possible
motives.
On Sunday, the Web site China Smack compiled a range of comments on Sina Weibo,
the Twitter-like service in China. One said: "They should issue a bulletproof
vest to every American elementary school student as their school uniform."
Another comment related to President Obama fighting back tears while addressing
the nation on Friday:
In the face of Henan children suffering harm, did our country's leaders shed a
tear!? Why is it that when this kind of incident happens, they always pretend to
be deaf and mute!? I'm not saying that our leaders have to be like Obama
shedding tears, but can we at least be like others in facing the incident?
Instead of the mainstream media not even covering it, hiding it, attempting to
avoid it every time the country has a "special incident."
China experienced a spate of attacks on schoolchildren in 2010, with almost 20
deaths and more than 50 injuries. In the fourth of the assaults, a crazed man
beat five toddlers with a hammer, then set himself on fire while holding two
youngsters.
In another of those attacks in 2010, Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed and killed
eight primary school students in Fujian Province. Five weeks later, after a
quick trial, he was executed.
My colleague Michael Wines reported at the time: "Some news reports stated that
Mr. Zheng had mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence
existed. Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither
medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used."
"Most of the attackers have been mentally disturbed men involved in personal
disputes or unable to adjust to the rapid pace of social change in China," The
Associated Press reported Saturday, adding that the rampages pointed to "grave
weaknesses in the antiquated Chinese medical system's ability to diagnose and
treat psychiatric illness."
Private ownership of guns - whether pistols, rifles or shotguns - is almost
unheard of in China. Handgun permits are sometimes (but rarely) given to people
living in remote areas for protection against wild animals.
The Chinese school assaults were carried out with knives, kitchen cleavers or
hammers, the usual weapons of choice in mass attacks in China. As a precaution
before the recent Communist Party Congress in Beijing, the sale of knives was
banned in the central area of the capital.
Dr. Ding Xueliang, a sociologist at the University of Science and Technology in
Hong Kong, speaking about the Chinese tragedy on Friday, told CNN that "the huge
difference between this case and the U.S. is not the suspect, nor the situation,
but the simple fact he did not have an effective weapon.
"In terms of the U.S., there's much easier availability of killing instruments -
rifles, machine guns, explosives - than in nearly every other developed
country."
In a blog on the Web site of The New Yorker, the magazine's China correspondent,
Evan Osnos, wrote:
It takes a lot to make China's government - beset, as it is, by corruption and
opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests - look good, by
comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we've done it.
When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of
them concluded, as one did that, "from the look of it, there's no difference
between a 'developed' country and a 'developing' country. And there's no such
thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and
China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!"
Japan, too, has a near-total ban on private gun ownership, and the infrequent
mass attacks there - which included a tragic rampage at a primary school in
2001- typically have involved knives.
"Almost no one in Japan owns a gun," said Max Fisher, writing in The Atlantic in
July. "Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and
maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country's infamous, mafia-like
Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news
stories."
In 2006, Japan had two gun-related homicides. "And when that number jumped to 22
in 2007," Mr. Fisher said, "it became a national scandal."
"East Asia, despite its universally restrictive domestic gun policies, hosts
some of the world's largest firearm exporters and emerging industry giants:
China, South Korea and Japan," according to GunPolicy.org, a comprehensive
global database maintained by the Sydney School of Public Health at the
University of Sydney.
In recent weeks, Chinese police officials in Jiangsu Province seized more than
6,000 illegal guns from two underground workshops and warehouses; a retired
prison guard in Hong Kong was jailed for 18 months for keeping an arsenal of
guns, silencers, grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his
public-housing apartment; and 17 suspected gun smugglers went on trial in
Shanghai as part of a joint investigation with U.S. law enforcement officials.
In the Shanghai case, more than 100 semiautomatic handguns, rifles, shotguns and
gun parts were express-mailed to China from the United States. One of the
masterminds on the American end was Staff Sgt. Joseph Debose, 30, a soldier with
a Special Forces National Guard unit in North Carolina. He pleaded guilty to
federal charges in September.
"The defendant traded the honor of his position in the National Guard for the
money he received for smuggling arms to China," said Loretta E. Lynch, U.S.
Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. "In blatant disregard for
everything he was sworn to uphold, the defendant placed numerous firearms into a
black market pipeline from the United States to China."
What's your view? Would the United States do well to emulate China and Japan,
with their comprehensive bans on guns? Or is America a special case because of
its Constitutional protections of gun ownership? And apropos of the Fujian
attack described above, would you support similarly speedy trials and the death
penalty for mass murderers of children?
China Calls for ‘No Delay’ on Gun Controls in U.S., NYT, 15.12.2012,
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/china-calls-for-no-delay-on-gun-controls-in-u-s/
Egypt: The Next India or the Next Pakistan?
December
15, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I WANT to
discuss Egypt today, but first a small news item that you may have missed.
Three weeks ago, the prime minister of India appointed Syed Asif Ibrahim as the
new director of India’s Intelligence Bureau, its domestic intelligence-gathering
agency. Ibrahim is a Muslim. India is a predominantly Hindu country, but it is
also the world’s third-largest Muslim nation. India’s greatest security threat
today comes from violent Muslim extremists. For India to appoint a Muslim to be
the chief of the country’s intelligence service is a big, big deal. But it’s
also part of an evolution of empowering minorities. India’s prime minister and
its army chief of staff today are both Sikhs, and India’s foreign minister and
chief justice of the Supreme Court are both Muslims. It would be like Egypt
appointing a Coptic Christian to be its army chief of staff.
“Preposterous,” you say.
Well, yes, that’s true today. But if it is still true in a decade or two, then
we’ll know that democracy in Egypt failed. We will know that Egypt went the
route of Pakistan and not India. That is, rather than becoming a democratic
country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became
a Muslim country where the military and the Muslim Brotherhood fed off each
other so both could remain in power indefinitely and “the people” were again
spectators. Whether Egypt turns out more like Pakistan or India will impact the
future of democracy in the whole Arab world.
Sure, India still has its governance problems and its Muslims still face
discrimination. Nevertheless, “democracy matters,” argues Tufail Ahmad, the
Indian Muslim who directs the South Asia Studies Project at the Middle East
Media Research Institute, because “it is democracy in India that has, over six
decades, gradually broken down primordial barriers — such as caste, tribe and
religion — and in doing so opened the way for all different sectors of Indian
society to rise through their own merits, which is exactly what Ibrahim did.”
And it is six decades of tyranny in Egypt that has left it a deeply divided
country, where large segments do not know or trust one another, and where
conspiracy theories abound. All of Egypt today needs to go on a weekend retreat
with a facilitator and reflect on one question: How did India, another former
British colony, get to be the way it is (Hindu culture aside)?
The first answer is time. India has had decades of operating democracy, and,
before independence, struggling for democracy. Egypt has had less than two
years. Egypt’s political terrain was frozen and monopolized for decades — the
same decades that political leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru to
Manmohan Singh “were building an exceptionally diverse, cacophonous, but
impressively flexible and accommodating system,” notes the Stanford University
democracy expert Larry Diamond, the author of “The Spirit of Democracy: The
Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World.”
Also, the dominant political party in India when it overthrew its colonial
overlord “was probably the most multiethnic, inclusive and democratically minded
political party to fight for independence in any 20th-century colony — the
Indian National Congress,” said Diamond. While the dominant party when Egypt
overthrew Hosni Mubarak’s tyranny, the Muslim Brotherhood, “was a religiously
exclusivist party with deeply authoritarian roots that had only recently been
evolving toward something more open and pluralistic.”
Moreover, adds Diamond, compare the philosophies and political heirs of Mahatma
Gandhi and Sayyid Qutb, the guiding light of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Nehru was
not a saint, but he sought to preserve a spirit of tolerance and consensus, and
to respect the rules,” notes Diamond. He also prized education. By contrast,
added Diamond, “the hard-line Muslim Brotherhood leaders, who have been in the
driver’s seat since Egypt started moving toward elections, have driven away the
moderates from within their party, seized emergency powers, beaten their rivals
in the streets, and now are seeking to ram a constitution that lacks consensus
down the throats of a large segment of Egyptian society that feels excluded and
aggrieved.”
Then there is the military. Unlike in Pakistan, India’s postindependence leaders
separated the military from politics. Unfortunately, in Egypt after the 1952
coup, Gamel Abdel Nasser brought the military into politics and all of his
successors, right up to Mubarak, kept it there and were sustained by both the
military and its intelligence services. Once Mubarak fell, and the new
Brotherhood leaders pushed the army back to its barracks, Egypt’s generals
clearly felt that they had to cut a deal to protect the huge web of economic
interests they had built. “Their deep complicity in the old order led them to be
compromised by the new order,” said Diamond. “Now they are not able to act as a
restraining influence.”
Yes, democracy matters. But the ruling Muslim Brotherhood needs to understand
that democracy is so much more than just winning an election. It is nurturing a
culture of inclusion, and of peaceful dialogue, where respect for leaders is
earned by surprising opponents with compromises rather than dictates. The Noble
Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen has long argued that it was India’s
civilizational history of dialogue and argumentation that disposed it well to
the formal institutions of democracy. More than anything, Egypt now needs to
develop that kind of culture of dialogue, of peaceful and respectful arguing —
it was totally suppressed under Mubarak — rather than rock-throwing, boycotting,
conspiracy-mongering and waiting for America to denounce one side or the other,
which has characterized too much of the postrevolutionary political scene.
Elections without that culture are like a computer without software. It just
doesn’t work.
Egypt: The Next India or the Next Pakistan?, NYT, 15.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/friedman-egypt-the-next-india-or-the-next-pakista-.html
Tibet Is Burning
December 12, 2012
The New York Times
By XU ZHIYONG
Beijing
AROUND noon on Feb. 19, an 18-year-old named Nangdrol set himself on fire near
the Zamthang Monastery in the northeast Tibetan town of Barma. In a note left
behind, he wrote, “I am going to set myself on fire for the benefit of all
Tibetans.” Referring to China’s ethnic Han majority as “devils,” he added, “It
is impossible to live under their evil law, impossible to bear this torture that
leaves no scars.”
Over the last three years, close to 100 Tibetan monks and laypeople have set
themselves on fire; 30 people did so between Nov. 4 and Dec. 3. The Chinese
government is seeking to halt this wave of self-immolations by detaining
Tibetans it accuses of being instigators. Meanwhile, the scarless torture
continues.
I first visited China’s far west 21 years ago with college friends. Back then it
at least looked peaceful, but now, sad news arrives daily. When I returned in
October, a young monk invited me to visit his monastery. Passing a checkpoint
where a red banner read, “Stability Maintenance Calls for Fast Response to
Emergencies,” he told me how he hated the sight of armed soldiers.
Because a road was closed for construction, I had to wait until evening to hitch
a ride to Barma, where Nangdrol had lived, about 30 miles away. I was the third
passenger in the car; the other two were young Tibetans.
“Are you Buddhist followers?” I asked them. One of them showed me a pendant
portrait of the Dalai Lama that he pulled out from his chest. “He is our true
Holiness,” he said.
“Have you heard about the self-immolations? Like, burning oneself?” I asked
tentatively, finally broaching the topic. They knew about it.
“Pardon me, but do you hate the Hans?” I asked them because Nangdrol had used
the term “Han devils” in his suicide note. They’d heard about Nangdrol. When I
told them I was there to visit Nangdrol’s parents to express my sadness, they
told me more.
They said they’d been to the site, as hundreds of Tibetans had. People had set
up white tents at the intersection where he died. “He is our hero,” one said.
It was dark when we arrived in Barma. At a lamppost, one of my fellow passengers
asked a man for directions but was waved off. At a crossroads, he asked two men
on motorcycles and an argument broke out. A monk came to the window to examine
me.
“Sorry,” my fellow passenger said, “they scolded me for taking you here.” A
minivan approached. Two men jumped out of it and upbraided him indignantly. Fear
and hostility shrouded the place like night.
“We are Tibetans,” he said all of a sudden as we left Barma in silence to spend
the night in a nearby town. “We are Buddhists, but we can’t go to Lhasa without
a permit.” Years ago, you could see many Tibetans on their pilgrimage to Lhasa,
but not anymore.
The next day, I returned to Barma. I asked a young monk, on his way to fetch
water, about Nangdrol. He took me to a hall where a middle-aged monk sat
cross-legged in a corner. Since I didn’t have Nangdrol’s photo with me, he said
he couldn’t help me.
A teenage monk asked several of his peers but got no answers. Passers-by shook
their heads. At a construction site, no one had heard about him either. In the
town’s elementary school I asked an armed soldier guarding the gate. I’d read
that Nangdrol was a student. The soldier suggested that I check out the nearby
compound where a Chinese flag flew, but people told me the town had no secondary
school.
The road back from Barma was open only from noon to 1 p.m. I had to leave. Along
a creek, a row of poplars basked in the golden sun, and a group of young monks
in crimson robes were holding a class. Reluctantly, I climbed into a cab. I had
been to many places over the years but never felt so lost.
I stopped the driver a mile or so down the road when we passed by a village on a
slope. After my repeated pleadings, the roadside shop owner gave me directions
to Nangdrol’s home. Up on the slope, an old couple pointed to the house.
It was a small mud-plastered house enclosed in mud-brick walls, and five tall
sutra streamers flew on one side of the property. The iron gate was locked.
A middle-aged woman with a boy, passing by, said she had known Nangdrol. His
parents now live on a faraway cattle farm, she said. The day of his death, she
told me, he wore new clothes, and he was freshly bathed, with a fresh haircut.
He asked people whether he was handsome.
I didn’t know how else to express my sorrow. I asked the woman to give 500 yuan
(about $80) to Nangdrol’s parents, letting them know that a Han Chinese man had
come to pay his respects.
I am sorry we Han Chinese have been silent as Nangdrol and his fellow Tibetans
are dying for freedom. We are victims ourselves, living in estrangement,
infighting, hatred and destruction. We share this land. It’s our shared home,
our shared responsibility, our shared dream — and it will be our shared
deliverance.
Xu Zhiyong, a lawyer and human rights advocate, is a founder of
Gongmeng,
the Open Constitution Initiative.
This essay was translated from the Chinese by Yaxue Cao.
Tibet Is Burning, NYT, 12.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/opinion/tibet-is-burning.html
Syria Uses Scud Missiles in New Effort to Push Back Rebels
December 12, 2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have resorted
to firing ballistic missiles at rebel fighters inside Syria, Obama
administration officials said Wednesday, escalating a nearly two-year-old civil
war as the government struggles to slow the momentum of a gaining insurgency.
Administration officials said that over the last week, Assad forces for the
first time had fired at least six Soviet-designed Scud missiles in the latest
bid to push back rebels who have consistently chipped away at the government’s
military superiority.
In a conflict that has already killed more than 40,000 Syrians, the government
has been forced to augment its reliance on troops with artillery, then air power
and now missiles as the rebels have taken over military bases and closed in on
the capital, Damascus. The escalation has not changed Washington’s decision to
avoid military intervention in Syria — as long as chemical weapons are not used
— but it did prompt a rebuke.
“As the regime becomes more and more desperate, we see it resorting to increased
lethality and more vicious weapons moving forward, and we have in recent days
seen missiles deployed,” said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman.
President Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red
line,” implying that it might lead to an American military response.
Mr. Assad’s decision to fire Scuds — not known for their precision — inside his
own country appears directly related to the rebel ability to take command of
military bases and seize antiaircraft weapons. The Scuds have been fired since
Monday from the An Nasiriyah Air Base, north of Damascus, according to American
officials familiar with the classified intelligence reports about the attacks.
The target was the Sheikh Suleiman base north of Aleppo, which rebel forces had
occupied.
The development may also represent a calculation by the Syrian leadership that
it can resort to such lethal weapons without the fear of international
intervention, partly because Washington had set its tolerance threshold at the
use of chemical weapons. Mr. Obama has never suggested that the United States
would take action to stop attacks against Syrian rebels and civilians with
conventional weapons, no matter how severe.
“This may be another example of the unintended consequence of the red line the
administration has drawn with regard to chemical weapons,” said Joseph Holliday,
a former Army intelligence officer and a senior analyst at the Institute for the
Study of War, a nongovernmental research group. “Assad views every weapon short
of chemicals as fair game.”
The disclosure about the Scuds came as representatives of more than 100 nations
gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco, for a conference intended to give a political
lift to the Syrian opposition, which is formally known as the National Coalition
of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. And it came amid an increase in
violence in Syria, including reports of a new massacre of about 100 Alawites,
Mr. Assad’s sect, and a large bombing in the capital.
Mr. Obama, in an interview on Tuesday with ABC News, formally recognized the
coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.
William Burns, the deputy secretary of state who led the American team to the
Morocco gathering, said Wednesday that he had invited opposition leaders to
Washington, including Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, the coalition leader.
Mr. Khatib, however, took issue with a decision by the Obama administration to
classify Al Nusra Front — one of several armed groups fighting Mr. Assad — as a
foreign terrorist organization.
“The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the
Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider,” Mr.
Khatib said. “We can differ with parties that adopt political ideas and visions
different from ours. But we ensure that the goal of all rebels is the fall of
the regime.”
Obama administration officials have said that the Nusra Front is an offshoot of
Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that has sought to foment sectarian
violence there and topple the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
“All of us have seen what Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to do to threaten the social
fabric of Iraq,” Mr. Burns said at a news conference. “And that’s not a future
that the vast majority of Syrians want to see, and it’s certainly not a future
that the international community supports.”
Mr. Burns spoke after a declaration recognizing the new coalition as the
legitimate representative of the Syrian people was adopted at the Morocco
gathering. It also called on Mr. Assad to “stand aside” to permit a “sustainable
political transition.”
In Damascus on Wednesday, a car bomb and two other explosives went off outside
the Interior Ministry headquarters — known as the House of Justice — in Kafar
Souseh, on the southern outskirts, Syrian state news media reported. Two
Lebanese television channels that favor the Syrian government reported that
there had been casualties. One channel, Mayadin, reported that the interior
minister, Mohammad al-Shaar, had been wounded, but other accounts said he had
escaped unharmed.
An activist in Damascus, Abu Qays, said Syrian security forces had sealed off
Shami Hospital, a central Damascus facility used by Syria’s elite, in a possible
indication of high-profile casualties in the blasts.
But it was the Scud attacks that caught the attention of American intelligence
experts. Scuds are capable of carrying chemical weapons, though American
officials emphasized that conventional warheads, not poison gas, had been used
in the recent strikes.
NATO recently approved the deployment of American, Dutch and Germany Patriot
antimissile batteries to Turkey, a neighbor of Syria that has become one of Mr.
Assad’s most ardent rivals, to protect against a possible Syrian missile attack.
The Patriot batteries have not yet arrived in Turkey, and it may take weeks for
them to get there.
An American official said that the Syrian brigade that controls and operates the
Scuds was an all-Alawite team. “There’s tremendous sensitivity about that weapon
system, so Assad keeps it in the hands of his most trusted agents,” he said.
It is not clear whether all of the Scuds struck the base they were aimed at or
what casualties they might have caused. But there was military logic to the
move, experts said.
“The Assad regime has consistently escalated its use of force whenever the
rebels’ strength has presented a significant challenge to the regime,” Mr.
Holliday said.
“In January 2012, the regime started to use artillery because the rebels learned
how to defend against regime ground forces,” he added. “The regime started using
its air power in June because the rebels had gained control of the countryside.
Now that the rebels have begun to defeat Assad’s air force and overrun his
bases, it shouldn’t be surprising that the regime is responding with Scuds.”
Reporting was contributed by Mark Landler from Washington;
Aida Alami from Marrakesh, Morocco; Alan Cowell from London;
Anne Barnard, Hwaida Saad and Hania Mourtada from Beirut,
Lebanon;
and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Syria Uses Scud Missiles in New Effort to
Push Back Rebels, NYT, 12.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/world/middleeast/syria-war-developments-assad.html
American Tariffs, Bangladeshi Deaths
December 11, 2012
The New York Times
By SANCHITA B. SAXENA
Berkeley, Calif.
THE fire that killed 112 workers at a garment factory in the suburbs of
Bangladesh’s capital last month was a stark reminder of the human costs of
producing and consuming cheap clothes.
While American officials have condemned poor safety conditions at the factory
and have urged the Bangladeshi government to raise wages and improve working
conditions, the United States can do much more: It should bring down high
tariffs on imports from Bangladesh and other Asian countries, which put pressure
on contractors there to scrimp on labor standards in order to stay competitive.
The United States imported more than $4 billion worth of apparel and textiles
from Bangladesh last year. So it has an interest in giving the country’s garment
industry some financial room with which to improve conditions for the three
million employees, most of them female, who work in the industry.
Monitoring systems have, in many cases, achieved progress at the higher levels
of the industry: the contractors that deal directly with American retailers. But
oversight is lax, and conditions particularly dire, in factories run by
subcontractors, like the Tazreen Fashions factory, the site of the deadly blaze
on Nov. 24.
A bill introduced in Congress in 2009 by Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat
of Washington, could have improved the situation by including Bangladesh,
Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka on the list of developing
countries, like Mexico, that receive duty-free access to the American market as
a result of free-trade agreements. But the bill never even made it to committee,
and Bangladesh still faces a cost squeeze that is ultimately felt most acutely
on those lowest on the production chain, especially the lowest-paying
subcontractors, among whom corruption is endemic. It takes its greatest toll on
workers.
The distortions created by the current trade policy are striking. In the United
States federal fiscal year that ended in September 2011, Bangladesh exported
$5.10 billion in goods to the United States, of which less than 10 percent were
eligible for exemption from import duties. On the rest, Bangladesh had to pay at
least 15.3 percent in tariffs. The tariffs were equivalent to imposing a $4.61
tax on every person in Bangladesh, a country with a per-capita annual income of
$770.
This year, according to news accounts, Bangladesh will have paid more than $600
million annually in American tariffs, even as the United States Agency for
International Development said it was committed to $200 million in development
aid to Bangladesh. Of course, no free trade legislation is controversy-free. One
argument against reducing restrictions on Bangladeshi imports is that it might
hurt even poorer countries, in sub-Saharan Africa, that enjoy duty-free access
under a 2000 law, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. But studies have shown
that extending duty-free access to South Asian goods would have negligible
costs, yield huge benefits for Bangladesh’s economy and have minimal negative
impact on African exports.
Bangladesh’s government and industries have a moral duty to prevent catastrophes
like the November fire from ever occurring again. They need to insist that
factory operators meet safety standards, that inspections are conducted honestly
and that recommendations are enforced.
But leveling the playing field of international trade could advance all of these
goals. International brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, H&M, Target and Walmart
demand low prices and fast turnaround. In that context, high tariffs work
against the goals of fair-labor standards and factory safety.
In the fire’s aftermath, it’s tempting to focus only on local corruption and lax
labor standards. But there have been positive changes in recent years; labor
groups, businesses, nongovernmental organizations and even some international
buyers have formed coalitions to improve safety at many factories. In a survey I
conducted of garment workers at established factories, 62 percent said labor
conditions had improved.
But for improvements in workers’ well-being to have lasting effect, tariffs on
exports to the United States, the world’s largest consumer market, must be
eased.
Sanchita B. Saxena is a political scientist and associate
director
of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley.
American Tariffs, Bangladeshi Deaths, NYT,
11.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/opinion/american-tariffs-bangladeshi-deaths.html
North Koreans Launch Rocket in Defiant Act
December 11, 2012
The New York Times
By CHOE SANG-HUN and DAVID E. SANGER
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea launched a long-range rocket
on Wednesday morning that appeared to reach as far as the Philippines, an
apparent success for the country’s young and untested new leader, Kim Jong-un,
and a step toward the nation’s goal of mastering the technology needed to build
an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, said it had detected the
launching and tracked the missile — a Galaxy-3 rocket, called the Unha-3 by the
North — as its first stage appeared to fall into the Yellow Sea and the second
stage into the Philippine Sea.
“Initial indications are that the missile deployed an object that appeared to
achieve orbit,” Norad said. “At no time was the missile or the resultant debris
a threat to North America.”
But the timing of the launching appeared to take American officials by surprise.
Just an hour or two before blastoff from the Sohae Satellite Launching Station
in Tongchang-ri on North Korea’s western coast, near China, American officials
at a holiday reception at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Washington said
they thought the North Koreans had run into technical problems that could take
them weeks to resolve.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said the rocket succeeded in
the ostensible goal of putting an earth-observation satellite named
Kwangmyongsong-3, or Shining Star-3, into orbit, and celebrations by members of
the North Korean media were reported.
Although the launching was driven in part by domestic considerations, analysts
said it carried far-reaching foreign relations implications, coming as leaders
in Washington and Beijing — as well as those soon to be chosen in Tokyo and
Seoul — try to form a new way of coping with North Korea after two decades of
largely fruitless attempts to end its nuclear and missile ambitions.
For President Obama, the launching deepened the complexity of dealing with the
new North Korean government, after four years in which promises of engagement,
then threats of deeper sanctions, have done nothing to modify the country’s
behavior. A statement from the White House by Tommy Vietor, the National
Security Council spokesman, called the launch a “a highly provocative act that
threatens regional security, directly violates United Nations Security Council
Resolutions 1718 and 1874, contravenes North Korea’s international obligations,
and undermines the global nonproliferation regime.”
The launching also appeared to dash the hopes of some analysts that Mr. Kim
might soften North Korea’s confrontational stance. It showed him instead as
intent on bolstering his father’s main legacy of nuclear weapons and long-range
missile programs to justify his own hereditary rule.
For Mr. Kim, barely a year in office, the launching was important in three
respects. Its apparent success, after a test of the same rocket failed
spectacularly seconds after takeoff in April, demonstrated what one American
intelligence official called “a more professional operation” to diagnose and
solve rocket-design problems similar to those the United States encountered in
the 1960s. He built credibility with the powerful North Korean military, whose
ranks he purged in recent months, replacing some top leaders with his own
loyalists.
He also advertised that the country, despite its backwardness and isolation,
could master a missile technology that it has previously marketed to Iran,
Pakistan and others. Some American officials, who have privately warned of
increased missile cooperation between Iran and North Korea over the past year,
have argued that the North Korean test would benefit Iran as much as North
Korea.
The North has a long way to go before it can threaten neighboring countries, and
perhaps one day the West Coast of the United States, with a nuclear-armed
missile. It has yet to develop a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop its
missile, experts say, and it has not tested a re-entry vehicle that can
withstand the heat of the atmosphere. Nor is it clear that the country knows how
to aim a missile with much accuracy.
“What’s important here is the symbolism, especially if the test seems reasonably
successful,” said Victor D. Cha, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington. “It’s not as if the U.S. can describe them
anymore as a bunch of crazies who could never get anywhere with their
technology. And it ends the argument that Kim Jong-un might be a young,
progressive reformer who is determined to take the country in a new direction.”
The missile capabilities of a country as opaque as North Korea are notoriously
hard to assess. United States and South Korean officials have said that all of
the North’s four multiple-stage rockets previously launched have exploded in
midair or failed in their stated goal of thrusting a satellite into orbit.
Nonetheless, during a visit to China early in 2011, Robert M. Gates, then Mr.
Obama’s defense secretary, said that North Korea was within five years of being
able to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic
missile.
The range of Wednesday’s test would fall far short of that goal, but suggests
that the North has learned much about how to launch multistage rockets.
North Korea insisted it was exercising its right to peaceful activity in space.
But this is the third time the North has provoked the Obama administration —
and, to some degree, its patron the Chinese — in four years.
The country’s nuclear test in 2009 was intended to show that it had the
capability to set off a nuclear explosion, though there is no evidence yet that
its arsenal of a half-dozen to a dozen nuclear weapons could be deliverable
outside North Korea. Then, in 2010, it showed a visiting Stanford scientist a
uranium-enrichment plant that American intelligence services had missed.
The message was that the North now had a second pathway to building a bomb; all
its weapons so far have been made from reprocessed plutonium from nuclear
plants. At the time that the North revealed the plant, the Obama administration
said it would consult with allies about an appropriate response, but the North
suffered few consequences. It may be betting that the rocket launching draws a
similar response.
Imposing sanctions on the North would be difficult. It has long been one of the
most sanctioned countries on earth. While a further crackdown on offshore
banking is possible, the North Koreans have no oil of their own to shut off.
China could send a message by halting some deliveries to the North.
Wednesday’s unusual wintertime rocket launching came five days before the
one-year anniversary of the death of Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, on Dec. 17,
which his son is trying to mark with a fanfare aimed at showcasing his dynasty’s
achievement in empowering the small and impoverished nation. Some experts
believe another nuclear test blast cannot be far off.
The defiance Mr. Kim showed with his latest launch alarmed the region, which is
going through sensitive changes of leadership. It came four days before the Dec.
16 lower-house election in Japan, where right-wing leaders have been gaining
political leverage, thanks partly to North Korean threats. The provocation also
presented an early test for candidates for the Dec. 19 presidential election in
South Korea, all of whom have called for dialogue with the North.
“Regardless what the international community says about it, this successful
launching boosts Kim Jong-un’s posture by turning him into a fox in a hen house
in Northeast Asia,” said Lee Byong-chul, senior fellow at the Institute for
Peace and Cooperation. “It paints South Korea, Japan and the United States into
a corner because it shows that the North’s technology is advancing.”
The launching is also expected to move Japan further toward the right as
tensions over the country’s territorial disputes with neighboring countries
remain high, Mr. Lee said.
Mr. Kim needed to redeem his April humiliation not only among his country’s
enemies, who he feared would not take him as a worthy foe, but also among his
people, who have grown disenchanted with his government’s inability to resolve
the prolonged economic crisis, South Korean officials and analysts said.
Since he took power, Mr. Kim has tried to cement his authority with what
analysts described as halfhearted economic reforms among some farms and
factories, highlighting the perceived threats from the country’s external
enemies, and, most recently, raising the specter of a reign of terror through
talk of “squashing rebellious elements” at home. A series of top generals have
recently been fired or demoted.
In a statement in October, North Korea’s National Defense Commission said that
when “midranking policy makers from the United States, National Security Council
and C.I.A. recently met with us in official and unofficial settings,” they tried
to assure the North that Washington had no “hostile” intent. “But the reality
clearly showed that the messages we received from the United States were lies,”
it said, citing the United States’ agreement to let South Korea nearly triple
the reach of its ballistic missiles, putting all of the North within its range.
The Washington-Seoul missile deal was to help South Korea better deter North
Korea’s expanding missile capabilities. But North Korea called the deal a
hostile move and said it now felt freer to test “long-range missiles for
military purposes.”
Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, and David E. Sanger from
Washington.
North Koreans Launch Rocket in Defiant Act,
NYT, 11.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/world/asia/north-korea-launches-rocket-defying-likely-sanctions.html
Can God Save Egypt?
December 11, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Cairo
When you fly along the Mediterranean today, what do you see below? To the north,
you look down at a European supranational state system — the European Union —
that is cracking up. And to the south, you look down at an Arab nation state
system that is cracking up. It’s an unnerving combination, and it’s all the more
reason for the U.S. to get its economic house in order and be a rock of global
stability, because, I fear, the situation on the Arab side of the Mediterranean
is about to get worse. Egypt, the anchor of the whole Arab world, is embarked on
a dangerous descent toward prolonged civil strife, unless a modus vivendi can be
found between President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and his growing
opposition. If Syria and Egypt both unravel at once, this whole region will be
destabilized. That’s why a billboard on the road to the Pyramids said it all:
“God save Egypt.”
Having watched a young, veiled, Egyptian female reporter tear into a Muslim
Brotherhood official the other day over the group’s recent autocratic and
abusive behavior, I can assure you that the fight here is not between more
religious and less religious Egyptians. What has brought hundreds of thousands
of Egyptians back into the streets, many of them first-time protesters, is the
fear that autocracy is returning to Egypt under the guise of Islam. The real
fight here is about freedom, not religion.
The decisions by President Morsi to unilaterally issue a constitutional decree
that shielded him from judicial oversight (he has since rescinded most of it
after huge protests) and then to rush the completion of a new, highly imperfect,
Constitution and demand that it be voted on in a national referendum on
Saturday, without sufficient public debate, have rekindled fears that Egyptians
have replaced one autocracy, led by Hosni Mubarak, with another, led by the
Muslim Brotherhood.
Morsi and the other Muslim Brotherhood leaders were late comers to the 2011
Tahrir Square revolution that ended six decades of military rule here. And
because they were focused only on exploiting it for their own ends, they have
grossly underestimated the deep, mostly youth-led yearning for the freedom to
realize their full potential that erupted in Tahrir — and it has not gone away.
Whenever anyone asked me what I saw in Tahrir Square during that original
revolution, I told them I saw a tiger that had been living in a 5-by-8 cage for
60 years get released. And there are three things I can tell you about the
tiger: 1) Tiger is never going back in that cage; 2) Do not try to ride tiger
for your own narrow purposes or party because this tiger only serves Egypt as a
whole; 3) Tiger only eats beef. He has been fed every dog food lie in the Arabic
language for 60 years, so don’t try doing it again.
First, the Egyptian Army underestimated the tiger, and tried to get it back in
the cage. Now the Muslim Brothers are. Ahmed Hassan, 26, is one of the original
Tahrir rebels. He comes from the poor Shubra el-Kheima neighborhood, where his
mother sold vegetables. I think he spoke for many of his generation when he told
me the other day: “We all had faith that Morsi would be the one who would
fulfill our dreams and take Egypt where we wanted it to go. The problem [now] is
that not only has he abandoned our dream, he has gone against it. ... They took
our dream and implanted their own. I am a Muslim, but I think with my own mind.
But [the Muslim Brothers] follow orders from their Supreme Guide. ... Half of me
is heartbroken, and half of me is happy today. The part that is heartbroken is
because I am aware that we are entering a stage that could be a real blood bath.
And the part that is happy is because people who were completely apathetic
before have now woken up and joined us.”
What’s wrong with Morsi’s new draft constitution? On the surface, it is not some
Taliban document. While the writing was dominated by Islamists, professional
jurists had their input. Unfortunately, argues Mona Zulficar, a lawyer and an
expert on the constitution, while it enshrines most basic rights, it also says
they must be balanced by vague religious, social and moral values, some of which
will be defined by clerical authorities. This language opens loopholes, she
said, that could enable conservative judges to restrict “women’s rights, freedom
of religion, freedom of opinion and the press and the rights of the child,”
particularly young girls. Or, as Dan Brumberg, a Middle East expert at the U.S.
Institute of Peace, put it, the draft constitution could end up guaranteeing
“freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech.”
The wild street demonstrations here — for and against the constitution — tell me
one thing: If it is just jammed through by Morsi, Egypt will be building its new
democracy on a deep fault line. It will never be stable. Egypt is thousands of
years old. It can take six more months to get its new constitution right.
God is not going to save Egypt. It will be saved only if the opposition here
respects that the Muslim Brotherhood won the election fairly — and resists its
excesses not with boycotts (or dreams of a coup) but with better ideas that win
the public to the opposition’s side. And it will be saved only if Morsi respects
that elections are not winner-take-all, especially in a society that is still
defining its new identity, and stops grabbing authority and starts earning it.
Otherwise, it will be all fall down.
Can God Save Egypt?, NYT, 11.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/opinion/friedman-can-god-save-egypt.html
U.S. Will Grant Recognition to Syrian Rebels, Obama Says
December 11, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER, MICHAEL R. GORDON and ANNE BARNARD
WASHINGTON — President Obama said Tuesday that the United
States would formally recognize a coalition of Syrian opposition groups as that
country’s legitimate representative, in an attempt to intensify the pressure on
President Bashar al-Assad to give up his nearly two-year bloody struggle to stay
in power.
Mr. Obama’s announcement, in an interview with Barbara Walters of ABC News on
the eve of a meeting in Morocco of the Syrian opposition leaders and their
supporters, was widely expected.
But it marks a new phase of American engagement in a bitter conflict that has
claimed at least 40,000 lives, threatened to destabilize the broader Middle East
and defied all outside attempts to end it. The United States had for much of the
civil war largely sat on the sidelines, only recently moving more energetically
as it appeared the opposition fighters were beginning to gain momentum — and
radical Islamists were playing a growing role.
Experts and many Syrians, including rebels, say the move may well be too little,
too late. They note that it is not at all clear if this group will be able to
coalesce into a viable leadership, if it has any influence over the fighters
waging war with the government or if it can roll back widespread anger at the
United States.
“The recognition is designed as a political shot in the arm for the opposition,”
said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow and Syrian expert at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. “But it’s happening in the context of resentment
among the Syrian opposition, especially armed elements, of the White House’s
lack of assistance during the Syrian people’s hour of need. This is especially
true among armed groups.”
The announcement puts Washington’s political imprimatur on a once-disparate band
of opposition groups, which have begun to coalesce under pressure from the
United States and its allies, to develop what American officials say is a
credible transitional plan to govern Syria if Mr. Assad is forced out.
Moreover, it draws an even sharper line between those elements of the opposition
that the United States champions and those it rejects. The Obama administration
coupled its recognition with the designation hours earlier of a militant Syrian
rebel group, the Nusra Front, as a foreign terrorist organization, affiliated
with Al Qaeda.
“Not everybody who is participating on the ground in fighting Assad are people
that we are comfortable with,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on the ABC program
“20/20.” “There are some who I think have adopted an extremist agenda, an
anti-U.S. agenda.”
But Mr. Obama praised the opposition, known formally as the National Coalition
of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, for what he said was its
inclusiveness, its openness to various ethnic and religious groups, and its ties
to local councils involved in the fighting against Mr. Assad’s security forces.
“At this point we have a well-organized-enough coalition — opposition coalition
that is representative — that we can recognize them as the legitimate
representative of Syrian people,” he said.
The United States is not the first to make this step. Britain, France, Turkey
and the Gulf Cooperation Council have also recognized the Syrian opposition
group. But experts note that the support has done nothing to change the military
equation inside Syria, where Mr. Assad has stubbornly clung to power despite
gains by rebel fighters. Mr. Assad continues to rely on air power and artillery
to pummel rebel positions even as fighting has spread into his stronghold of
Damascus.
Mr. Obama notably did not commit himself to providing arms to the rebels or to
supporting them militarily with airstrikes or the establishment of a no-fly
zone, a stance that has led to a rise of anti-American sentiment among many of
the rebels.
That is the kind of half-step that has led to mounting frustration in Syria,
peaking this week with the blacklisting of the Nusra Front. Far from isolating
the group, interviews with Syrian rebels and activists show, it has for now
appeared to do the opposite. It has united a broad spectrum of the opposition —
from Islamist fighters to liberal and nonviolent activists who fervently oppose
them — in anger and exasperation with the United States.
The United States has played an active role behind the scenes in shaping the
opposition, insisting that it be broadened and made more inclusive. But until
Mr. Obama’s announcement, the United States had held off on formally recognizing
the opposition, asserting that it wanted to use the lure of recognition to
encourage the rebel leaders to flesh out their political structure and fill
important posts.
In recent weeks, the coalition has been developing a series of committees on
humanitarian assistance, education, health, judicial matters and security
issues. It has not, however, been able so far to agree on a prime minister or a
cabinet even after extensive negotiations.
And the coalition is still unlikely to be viewed as a legitimate representative
by the many Syrians still supporting the government or by many fighters who have
little connection to the exile opposition.
While last week coalition members suggested that choosing a prime minister was
important for persuading the United States to offer recognition, American
officials said the White House had decided that the opposition had made
sufficient progress for now. The American hope is that the opposition, in
conjunction with local councils that are being formed in Syria, can help govern
areas that have been wrested from Mr. Assad’s control, provide public services
like law enforcement and utilities and perhaps even channel humanitarian
assistance. Alluding to this role, Mr. Obama said that the opposition would
“have some responsibilities to carry out.”
But Mr. Obama’s move does not go so far as to confer on the opposition the legal
authority of a state. It does not, for example, recognize the opposition’s right
to have access to Syrian government funds, take over the Syrian Embassy in
Washington or enter into binding diplomatic commitments.
It is also unclear to what extent the move might influence the situation inside
Syria, where the pace of the fighting has intensified. A senior American
official who is attending the meeting in Morocco said Tuesday that none of the
rebel military commanders from the Free Syrian Army would be attending the
meeting on Wednesday.
“There are people here who definitely coordinate with armed groups, with the
Free Syrian Army,” he said. “That is not to say they are giving instructions to
it; they do not,” he said. “It is not to say that they are telling it what to do
or what to say in the international field; they are not. In a sense, the Free
Syrian Army is a separate organization.”
The widespread dissatisfaction among rebel groups — and the broader population —
raises the possibility that now, just as the United States is stepping up
efforts to steer the outcome in Syria, it may already be too late.
More than 100 antigovernment organizations and fighting battalions have called
online for demonstrations on Friday under the slogan, “No to American
intervention — we are all Jabhet al-Nusra,” a reference to the Nusra Front’s
Arabic name.
“Anti-American sentiment is growing, because the Americans are messing up in
bigger ways lately,” said Nabil al-Amir, an official spokesman for the rebel
military council for Damascus and its suburbs, one of the committees that the
United States and its allies are trying to coax into a unified rebel command.
With every step to correct earlier mistakes, he said, “they make a bigger mess.”
Liberals activists blame American inaction for giving jihadists a leading role
in the conflict. Rival rebel groups have declared solidarity with the Nusra
Front, and Islamists have congratulated it on its new distinction. And seemingly
everyone accuses the United States of hypocrisy for not slapping the terrorist
label on Mr. Assad, whose forces have killed far more civilians than any rebel
group.
The United States on Tuesday issued a more complete justification for
blacklisting the Nusra Front, saying that the group has killed Syrian civilians
in more than 40 suicide bombings.
And it announced a new wrinkle: It is also blacklisting pro-government militias
accused of killing civilians as part of “the Assad regime’s campaign of terror
and violence.”
The militias, a Treasury Department statement said, would include what it called
the shabiha and Jaish al-Sha’bi, or the People’s Army, which it said was created
with the help of Mr. Assad’s allies Iran and the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah
and modeled on Iran’s Basij militia.
The Treasury Department singled out a shabiha leader, Ayman Jaber, as well as
two other shabiha members, including Mahir al-Asad, who was accused along with
Mr. Jaber of planning an attack on the United States Embassy in 2011. Apart from
these designations, it may be hard to define who exactly is blacklisted under
the heading of “shabiha,” which is not the name of an organization but a
catchall term for pro-government gangs.
Mark Landler and Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington,
and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.
Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.
U.S. Will Grant Recognition to Syrian
Rebels, Obama Says, NYT, 11.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/world/middleeast/united-states-involvement-in-syria.html
Al Qaeda in Syria
December 10, 2012
The New York Times
The presence of rebel fighters in Syria that were trained and
supported by Al Qaeda poses a serious problem for the United States and Western
allies. The Nusra Front, an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, has become one of the
most effective forces fighting against President Bashar al-Assad.
The fear is that the group could hijack the revolution and emerge as the
dominant force in Syria after Mr. Assad is ousted from power. Obama
administration officials have been increasingly frank about this threat, along
with the possibility that sectarian conflicts among the country’s Sunni,
Alawite, Christian and other groups may well rage on after Assad.
There are no easy answers, and no one believes that Washington, or any external
power, can dictate the outcome. But President Obama still needs to provide a
clearer picture of how he plans to use American influence in dealing with the
jihadi threat and the endgame in Syria.
Mr. Obama has blacklisted the Nusra Front as a terrorist organization, which
would make it illegal for Americans to have financial dealings with it. It makes
sense to isolate the group and try to dry up its resources, but the designation
by itself isn’t sufficient. American officials have to make a case directly to
the countries or actors that are believed to be most responsible, either
directly or as a conduit, for the weapons and other assistance to the Nusra
Front: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. However much they may
want to see Mr. Assad fall, they play a deadly game in empowering any affiliate
of Al Qaeda, which though weakened, is dedicated to global jihad and the violent
overthrow of Sunni monarchies.
The problem is that many Syrian rebel groups work closely with the Nusra Front
precisely because its skilled fighters have been so effective at storming
fortified Syrian positions and leading other battalions to capture military
bases and oil fields.
Some say the terrorist designation could backfire by pitting the United States
against the rebel forces. Others have argued that one way to marginalize the
jihadi groups is for the United States to arm the moderate and secular rebel
groups or even establish a no-fly zone that would forcibly ground the Syrian Air
Force.
But the situation in Syria is extremely complicated, and President Obama’s
caution in resisting military intervention is the right approach. As we saw in
Iraq and Afghanistan, even after committing tens of thousands of troops,
America’s ability to affect the course and outcome of armed conflict is
decidedly limited.
Against the backdrop of war, the United Nations, the United States and some
European officials are still promoting a negotiated deal to limit the bloodshed.
Even if the warring sides were willing to abandon the fight, any deal would
require Russian support, but talks between American and Russian officials over
the weekend gave no sign that Moscow is prepared to abandon Mr. Assad.
Al Qaeda in Syria, NYT, 10.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/opinion/al-qaeda-in-syria.html
Morsi’s Opponents Describe Abuse by President’s Allies
December 10, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Morsi
captured, detained and beat dozens of his political opponents last week, holding
them for hours with their hands bound on the pavement outside the presidential
palace while pressuring them to confess that they had accepted money to use
violence in protests against him.
“It was torment for us,” said Yehia Negm, 42, a former diplomat with a badly
bruised face and rope marks on his wrists. He said he was among a group of about
50, including four minors, who were held on the pavement overnight. In front of
cameras, “they accused me of being a traitor, or conspiring against the country,
of being paid to carry weapons and set fires,” he said in an interview. “I
thought I would die.”
The abuses, during a night of street fighting between Islamists and their
opponents, have become clear through an accumulation of video and victim
testimonies that are now hurting the credibility of Mr. Morsi and his allies as
they push forward to this weekend’s referendum on an Islamist-backed draft
constitution.
To critics of Islamists, the episode on Wednesday recalled the tactics of the
ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, who often saw a conspiracy of “hidden hands”
behind his domestic opposition and deployed plainclothes thugs acting outside
the law to punish those who challenged him. The difference is that the current
enforcers are driven by the self-righteousness of their religious ideology,
rather than money.
It is impossible to know how much Mr. Morsi, a leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s political arm, knew about the Islamists’ vigilante justice. But
human rights advocates say the detentions raised troubling questions about
statements made by the president during his nationally televised address on
Thursday. In it, Mr. Morsi appears to have cited confessions obtained by his
Islamist supporters, the advocates said, when he promised that confessions under
interrogation would show that protesters outside his palace acknowledged ties to
his political opposition and had taken money to commit violence.
Khaled el-Qazzaz, a spokesman for Mr. Morsi, said Monday that he had ordered an
investigation into the reported abuses and asked the prosecutor to bring charges
against any involved. He said that Mr. Morsi was referring only to confessions
obtained by the police, not by his supporters.
But human rights lawyers involved in the cases of the roughly 130 people who
ended up in police custody Wednesday night, all or most of them delivered by the
Islamists, say the police obtained no confessions. “His statement was completely
bogus,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher on policing at Egyptian
Initiative on Personal Rights, whose lawyers were on hand about an hour after
the speech when prosecutors released all the detainees without charges. “There
were no confessions; they were all just simply beaten up,” he said. “There was
no case at all, and they were released the next day.”
Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood said the group opposed such vigilante
justice and did not organize the detentions. And in at least one case one victim
said a senior figure of the group rescued her from captivity. But the officials
also acknowledged that some of their senior leadership was on the scene at the
time. They said some of their members took part in the detentions, along with
more hard-line Islamists.
Gehad el-Haddad, a senior Brotherhood official, defended the group’s decision to
call on its members and other Islamist supporters of the president to defend the
palace from a potential attack by the protesters. He said Mr. Morsi could not
rely on the police force left over from Mr. Mubarak’s government. By keeping the
protesters from trying to storm the palace walls, Mr. Haddad contended, the
Brotherhood and the president’s supporters had prevented a bloodier conflict
with the armed presidential guard. “We will protect the sovereignty of the state
at any cost.”
Both sides that night were violent, and the use of force by the Brotherhood’s
opponents appears to have been deadlier, though that is hard to corroborate
given the fog of the moment. Brotherhood leaders have named eight members of
their organization who died that night. Mr. Haddad said one friend who was next
to him was shot in the neck and died in the street. Although one journalist is
in a coma from wounds received during the battle, human rights advocates say
they do not yet know of any deaths on the opposition side.
But some contend that the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group, provoked
the violence by summoning supporters and other Islamists to defend the palace
from a planned protest.
“God willing, members of the Freedom and Justice Party will be on the front
line,” Essam el-Erian of the party, affiliated with the Brotherhood, wrote in an
Internet message to supporters.
Later, when the battle began, he declared on the Brotherhood’s television
network, “This is the opportunity to arrest them and reveal the third party
which is behind the shooting of live ammunition, and the killing of protesters.”
After nightfall, thousands of Islamists and their secular opponents battled over
several blocks with volleys of rocks and gasoline bombs punctuated by occasional
shotgun blasts. The riot police were on hand throughout, but did little to
intervene.
Mr. Haddad, who was behind the Islamist lines, said the detentions began after
Brotherhood leaders ordered their members to build and push forward a makeshift
barrier to clear a space in front of the palace. “They realized that there were
thugs on our side with knives and actual shotguns, shooting sideways,” he said,
describing attackers who came from the opposition.
“These were some of the guys who got the massive beatings. When one of them was
caught, everyone around them, who had been fighting for hours, would just start
bashing them,” he said, asserting that Brotherhood leaders had tried to
intervene.
A few captives were women. Ola Shahba, a well-known activist with a socialist
party, was captured by a group of the president’s supporters when she tried to
retreat from a collapsing battle line. Her captors began beating her, she said.
Then they removed her hood and helmet and realized she was a woman, and she was
groped as well.
“I didn’t imagine I could be harassed by a group affiliated with political
Islam,” she said in an interview with the talk show host Yousry Fouda, one eye
black and blue, and her neck ringed with bruises. “What embassy do you meet in
and receive money from?” her attackers demanded to know, she said.
She was held in an empty police booth by a group of Brotherhood members and more
hard-line Islamists, she said, and Ahmed Sobei, a more senior Brotherhood
official, tried to persuade them to release her, both said.
“At that point we couldn’t get people out,” Mr. Sobei said in an interview.
“They were a mix, from here and there. If they were just Muslim Brotherhood, we
would’ve gotten her out since the first moment. I would’ve been able to get her
out right away.”
“Did they beat people up? Yes, they did, but there were thugs there as well,” he
said. “Thugs infiltrated both sides. It was impossible to tell who’s on which
side.”
Ramy Sabry, a friend captured with Ms. Shahba, said he was held in a gatehouse
by the presidential palace with a crowd that grew to nearly 50, according to an
interview with Human Rights Watch for a report in progress.
“There were several members of the Brotherhood” among his captors, he said. “I
knew they were Brotherhood because I heard them saying that they had spoken to
Brotherhood leaders on the phone.”
Mina Philip, an engineer whose shirt was stripped off when he was beaten, said
his captors called him “an infidel, a secular, a paid thug.”
“They kept asking, ‘Who paid you?’ ” he said.
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.
Morsi’s Opponents Describe Abuse by
President’s Allies, NYT, 10.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/world/middleeast/allies-of-egypts-morsi-beat-protesters-outside-palace.html
Inventing Democracy
December 9, 2012
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER
JOHANNESBURG
This is a great vantage point for watching the Arab world struggle to tailor
itself a set of new democracies. It is nearly a generation since South Africa
assembled its warring peoples and wrote what is certainly the most progressive
constitution in Africa, perhaps on the planet. It prescribes all the safeguards
of a democratic, humane and inclusive society. Its experience should be a
shining model for the aspiring democracies at the other end of the continent as
they fabricate basic laws and institutions.
I wish I could say the lessons from here are easy. But it is becoming clearer by
the day that a glorious constitution carries you only so far if its values have
not taken root in the culture.
So South Africa has an exquisite balance of powers on paper — but is, in effect,
a one-party state, riddled with corruption. It has a serious independent
judiciary — but is now contemplating loopholes to let tribal courts practice
South Africa’s version of Shariah. This country was years ahead of the United
States in recognizing the rights of homosexuals, including same-sex marriage —
yet there is no openly gay leader in the ruling African National Congress, and
lesbians have been targets of punitive rape and murder. It has a vibrant,
diverse press — and a president who keeps trying to muzzle it.
As a witness to its birth, I would not say the thrill of South Africa’s
democracy is altogether gone. South Africans are resilient, blessed with
tourist-alluring beauty and abundant natural wealth; there is a growing black
middle class and a robust civil society. And 18 years is still young. But I
imagine that some days the news — if it penetrates the fog that I’m told
enshrouds the 94-year-old Nelson Mandela — must break his heart.
In the course of a reporting trip for a forthcoming article, I’ve been asking
some of the authors and guardians of South African democracy what advice they
would offer to an Egypt, a Libya, a Tunisia and other places that are struggling
to emerge from various forms of oppressive rule. Here’s how I’d sum up the best
suggestions.
Take your time, talk to everyone and don’t be too proud to borrow.
For South Africa, there were five exhausting years — from the first talks,
through statements of principle and interim versions — before its democratic
Constitution went into force. The negotiating included 19 parties, factions and
tribes, a huge public comment effort and copious study of the experiences of
countries around the globe.
“We were shameless,” said Nicholas Haysom, a legal adviser to President Mandela
in the ’90s who now works for the United Nations. “We looked at everyone. We
took jurisprudence from Canada. We took power-sharing from Germany. We took
constitutional principles from Namibia. The true exercise of sovereignty is in
how one adapts these institutions to your own country, not in confining one’s
imagination to one’s own limited constitutional traditions and experiences.”
Not everyone has that kind of patience. Egypt’s constitution-writing assembly,
stampeded by President Morsi’s Islamist majority, has spawned a mess of
boycotts, street clashes and confusion where consensus and legitimacy are
desperately needed. (Iraq, stampeded by President George W. Bush’s desire to
demonstrate the flowering of freedom, had a similar farce when it rushed its
version of democracy.)
Peace before justice.
South Africa set out to heal the deep wounds of a ferociously cruel regime by
creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Those who tortured and killed
for any cause could, by fully disclosing their offenses, win an amnesty. The
result was not invariably full truth or full reconciliation, but by and large it
worked. Alex Boraine, who ran the commission under the flag of its revered
chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has spent the ensuing years traveling to
other countries that want to copy the South African model.
Often, his advice is: not so fast. In some cultures the urge for vengeance is
too strong to be curtailed by confession. Efforts to emulate South Africa, he
said, have been pretty successful in Peru and Mauritius, but failed in Guatemala
and Liberia. He expects that much of the Middle East is too raw for a truth
commission. But he advises new democracies that there are other ways to slow the
cycle of revenge, build confidence and secure a stable foundation for a new
order. For example, should Syria’s opposition succeed, Boraine said, there will
be a clamor to take President Bashar al-Assad before an international criminal
court. “Another view would be: give him safe passage to Moscow. It’s not fair.
it’s not just. But you’ve got to start somewhere, to stop the killing.”
Activist judges are not so bad.
South Africa’s Constitution is in several respects more liberal than South
African public opinion. Because the drafters included admirers of Western
liberal democracies, and because they emerged from a regime that treated its
citizens as essentially chattel, the Constitution is expansive in bestowing
rights. It prohibits discrimination based not only on race and gender, but also
on “sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, color, sexual
orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language
and birth.” The Constitutional Court has been similarly expansive in its
interpretation of this language. The court outlawed capital punishment in 1995
and ruled in 2005 that gays and lesbians are entitled to marry. Neither of those
outcomes would likely survive a popular referendum, even today. (South Africa,
white and black, is socially conservative.) If proposed laws expanding
government secrecy and empowering tribal justice pass the legislature, the high
court will be the last line of defense. In America we disparage “activist
judges,” but the willingness of South African courts to be assertive on matters
of rights seems to have won the judiciary tremendous respect and moved this
fledgling society toward greater tolerance. President Morsi, take note.
... Up to a point.
The relatively high esteem accorded the courts and the increasingly widespread
disdain for the other branches of government have made South Africa’s courts the
destination for disputes that have no business there: should Johannesburg
install electronic tollgates on a stretch of highway? How many days should the
Parliament be allowed to wait before voting on a no-confidence motion?
“People use these lawsuits as a substitute for political engagement,” said
Steven Friedman, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy here.
Politicians will never become good at their jobs if courts take their place.
Make citizens.
The curse of many transitional states is that they have no cohesive sense of
nationhood, no common sense of purpose or responsibility. Instead of Iraqis or
Syrians or Afghans or Egyptians, you have Sunnis and Shiites and Copts, Alawites
and Kurds, Pashtuns and Tajiks. A generation past liberation, South Africa has
had inspiring moments of unity, but it still has not fully coalesced. A new
survey finds that fewer than 1 in 10 adults — and even fewer young people —
identify themselves as “South Africans first,” over language, race or ethnic
group. The country’s many peoples are equal under the law, but in some ways as
“apart” as under apartheid.
Mamphela Ramphele, a wise and nonpartisan anti-apartheid activist and academic,
attributes this in part to the sense of impotence that infected South Africans —
and not just blacks — under the bleak tyranny of apartheid. And it is partly
due, she says, to the cynicism generated by pervasive corruption under the
African National Congress government. She has launched a new movement aimed at
awakening a sense of citizenship, including through some institutional reforms,
such as having most members of Parliament accountable to specific districts
rather than answerable only to the ruling party. Freedom, she would advise the
founders of new democracies, has to be won over and over.
“South Africans liberated themselves,” she told me, “and now they must do it
again.”
Bill Keller, an Op-Ed columnist,
was The Times’s Johannesburg bureau chief, 1992-95.
Inventing Democracy, NYT, 9.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/keller-inventing-democracy.html
The Full Israeli Experience
December 8, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Tel Aviv
THESE were the main regional news headlines in The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday:
“Home Front Command simulates missile strike during drill.” Egypt’s President
“Morsi opts for safety as police battle protestors.” In Syria, “Fight spills
over into Lebanon.” “Darkness at noon for fearful Damascus residents.” “Tunisian
Islamists, leftists clash after jobs protests.” “NATO warns Syria not to use
chemical weapons.” And my personal favorite: “ ‘Come back and bring a lot of
people with you’ — Tourism Ministry offers tour operators the full Israeli
experience.”
Ah, yes, “the full Israeli experience.”
The full Israeli experience today is a living political science experiment. How
does a country deal with failed or failing state authority on four of its
borders — Gaza, South Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Desert of Egypt — each of
which is now crawling with nonstate actors nested among civilians and armed with
rockets. How should Israel and its friends think about this “Israeli experience”
and connect it with the ever-present question of Israeli-Palestinian peace?
For starters, if you want to run for office in Israel, or be taken seriously
here as either a journalist or a diplomat, there is an unspoken question in the
mind of virtually every Israeli that you need to answer correctly: “Do you
understand what neighborhood I’m living in?” If Israelis smell that you don’t,
their ears will close to you. It is one reason the Europeans in general, and the
European left in particular, have so little influence here.
The central political divide in Israel today is over the follow-up to this core
question: If you appreciate that Israel lives in a neighborhood where there is
no mercy for the weak, how should we expect Israel to act?
There are two major schools of thought here. One, led by Prime Minister Bibi
Netanyahu, comprises the “Ideological Hawks,” who, to the question, “Do you know
what neighborhood I am living in?” tell Israelis and the world, “It is so much
worse than you think!” Bibi goes out of his way to highlight every possible
threat to Israel and essentially makes the case that nothing Israel does has
ever or can ever alter the immutable Arab hatred of the Jewish state or the
Hobbesian character of the neighborhood. Netanyahu is not without supporting
evidence. Israel withdraws from both South Lebanon and Gaza and still gets hit
with rockets. But this group is called the “ideological” hawks because most of
them also advocate Israel’s retaining permanent control of the West Bank and
Jerusalem for religious-nationalist reasons. So it’s impossible to know where
their strategic logic for holding territory stops and their
religious-nationalist dreams start — and that muddies their case with the world.
The other major school of thought here, call it the “Yitzhak Rabin school,” was
best described by the writer Leon Wieseltier as the “bastards for peace.”
Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister and war hero, started exactly where
Bibi did: This is a dangerous neighborhood, and a Jewish state is not welcome
here. But Rabin didn’t stop there. He also believed that Israel was very
powerful and, therefore, should judiciously use its strength to try to avoid
becoming a garrison state, fated to rule over several million Palestinians
forever. Israel’s “bastards for peace” believe that it’s incumbent on every
Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli
creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace
so that it is not forever fighting an inside war and an outside war. At best,
the Palestinians might surprise them. At worst, Israel would have the moral high
ground in a permanent struggle.
Today, alas, not only is the Israeli peace camp dead, but the most effective
Israeli “bastard for peace,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak, is retiring. As I sat
with Barak in his office the other day, he shared with me his parting advice to
Israel’s next and sure-to-be-far-right government.
Huge political forces, with deep roots, are now playing out around Israel,
particularly the rise of political Islam, said Barak. “We have to learn to
accept it and see both sides of it and try to make it better. I am worried about
our tendency to adopt a fatalistic, pessimistic perception of history. Because,
once you adopt it, you are relieved from the responsibility to see the better
aspects and seize the opportunities” when they arise.
If Israel just assumes that it’s only a matter of time before the moderate
Palestinian leaders in the West Bank fall and Hamas takes over, “why try
anything?” added Barak. “And, therefore, you lose sight of the opportunities and
the will to seize opportunities. ... I know that you can’t say when leaders
raise this kind of pessimism that it is all just invented. It is not all
invented, and you would be stupid if you did not look [at it] with open eyes.
But it is a major risk that you will not notice that you become enslaved by this
pessimism in a way that will paralyze you from understanding that you can shape
it. The world is full of risks, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a
responsibility to do something about it — within your limits and the limits of
realism — and avoid self-fulfilling prophecies that are extremely dangerous
here.”
The Full Israeli Experience, NYT,
8.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-full-israeli-experience.html
Backing Off Added Powers, Egypt’s Leader Presses Vote
December 8, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Struggling to quell violent protests that have
threatened to derail a referendum on an Islamist-backed draft constitution,
President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt moved Saturday to appease his opponents with a
package of concessions hours after state news media reported that he was moving
toward imposing a form of martial law to secure the streets and allow the vote.
Mr. Morsi did not budge on a critical demand of the opposition: that he postpone
the referendum set for next Saturday to allow a thorough overhaul of the
proposed charter, which liberal groups say has inadequate protection of
individual rights and provisions that could someday give Muslim religious
authorities new influence.
But in a midnight news conference, his prime minister said Mr. Morsi was
offering concessions that he had appeared to dismiss out of hand a few days
before. The president rescinded most of his sweeping Nov. 22 decree that
temporarily elevated his decisions above judicial review and drew tens of
thousands of protesters into the streets calling for his downfall. He also
offered a convoluted arrangement for the factions to negotiate constitutional
amendments this week that would be added to the charter after the vote.
Taken together, the announcements, rolled out over a confusing day, appeared to
indicate the president’s determination to do whatever it takes to get to the
referendum, which his Islamist supporters say will lay the foundation of a new
democracy and a return to stability.
Amid growing concerns among his advisers that the Interior Ministry might be
unable to secure either the polls or the institutions of government in the face
of renewed violent protests, the state media reported early Saturday that he
would soon order the armed forces to keep order and authorize its solders to
arrest civilians.
In recent days, mobs have attacked more than two dozen Muslim Brotherhood
offices and ransacked the group’s headquarters, and more than seven people have
died in street fighting between Islamists and their opponents.
As of early Sunday, Mr. Morsi had not yet formally issued an order calling out
the military, raising the possibility that the announcement was intended as a
warning to tell his opponents their protests would not derail the vote.
The moves on Saturday offered little hope of fully resolving the standoff, in
part because opposition leaders had ruled out — even before his concessions were
announced — any rushed attempt at a compromise just days before the referendum.
“No mind would accept dialogue at gunpoint,” said Mohamed Abu El Ghar, an
opposition leader, alluding to previously floated ideas about last-minute talks
for constitutional amendments.
Nor did Mr. Morsi’s Islamist allies expect his proposals to succeed. Many said
they had concluded that much of the secular opposition was primarily interested
in obstructing the transition to democracy at all costs, to try to block the
Islamists from winning elections. Instead, some of the president’s supporters
privately relished the bind they believed Mr. Morsi had built for the opposition
by giving in to some demands, forcing their secular opponents to admit they are
afraid to take their case to the ballot box.
For now, the military appears to back Mr. Morsi. Soon after the state newspaper
Al Ahram suggested the president would impose martial law, a military spokesman
read a statement over state television that echoed Mr. Morsi’s own speeches.
The military “realizes its national responsibility for maintaining the supreme
interests of the nation and securing and protecting the vital targets, public
institutions and the interests of the innocent citizens,” the spokesman said,
warning of “divisions that threaten the State of Egypt.”
“Dialogue is the best and sole way to reach consensus that achieves the
interests of the nation and the citizens,” he added. “Anything other than that
puts us in a dark tunnel with drastic consequences, which is something that we
will not allow.”
If Mr. Morsi goes through with the plan, it would represent a historic role
reversal. For six decades, Egypt’s military-backed authoritarian presidents used
martial law to hold on to power and to jail Islamists like Mr. Morsi, a former
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. It would also come just four months after he
managed to pry power out of the hands of the country’s top generals, who had
seized control when Hosni Mubarak was ousted last year and then held on to it
for three months after Mr. Morsi’s election.
The announcement of impending martial law marked the steepest escalation yet in
the political battle between Egypt’s new Islamist leaders and their secular
opponents over the draft constitution.
Mr. Morsi said he issued the Nov. 22 decree that set off the crisis to prevent
the Mubarak-era courts from dissolving the constitutional assembly and upending
the transition to democracy. The terms of his concession were ill-defined; the
new decree Mr. Morsi issued Saturday night said he retained the limited
authority to issue “constitutional declarations” protecting the draft charter
that judges could not overturn. Although the plan for martial law outlined in Al
Ahram would not fully suspend civil law, it would nonetheless have the effect of
suspending legal rights by empowering soldiers under the control of the defense
minister to try civilians in military courts.
Calling in the army could overcome the danger of protests or violence that might
disrupt the referendum and the parliamentary election to follow. But resorting
to the military to secure the vote could also undermine Mr. Morsi’s hopes that a
strong showing for the constitution would be seen as a sign of national
consensus that could help end the political crisis.
Brotherhood officials cheered the military’s statements, noting they closely
resembled the president’s own speeches about a “national dialogue” and moving
forward toward democracy.
But Moataz Abdel-Fattah, a former adviser to Egypt’s transitional prime minister
who is close to Defense Minister Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, said that the military
also sought to make clear it was not joining either camp.
“The military is saying, ‘Do not let things get so bad that we have to
intervene,’ ” Mr. Abdel-Fattah said. “In the short term it is good for President
Morsi, but in the long run they are also saying, ‘We belong to the people, and
not Mr. Morsi or his opponents.’ ”
After taking office, Mr. Morsi spent months courting the generals, sometimes
earning the derision of liberal activists for his public flattery of their role.
And the constitution his supporters eventually drew up included protections of
the military’s autonomy and privileges within the Egyptian government, despite
the protests of the same activists.
Those provisions suggested an understanding between the military and Mr. Morsi
that may now allow him to call on the generals’ help.
Under the president’s planned martial law order, Al Ahram said, the military
would return to its barracks after parliamentary elections, which are expected
to take place two months after the referendum if the constitution is approved.
If the military does secure the polls, that would appear to undermine the
opposition’s argument that the latest unrest had all but ruled out this week’s
referendum.
“Under the present circumstance, how can you conduct a referendum or an election
when chaos is reigning and you have protests everywhere?” Amr Moussa, a former
foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak and now an opposition leader, asked in an
interview Saturday.
Backing Off Added Powers, Egypt’s Leader
Presses Vote, NYT, 8.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/world/middleeast/egypt-protests.html
Syria Rebels Tied to Al Qaeda Play Key Role in War
December 8, 2012
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO, ANNE BARNARD and HWAIDA SAAD
BAGHDAD — The lone Syrian rebel group with an explicit stamp
of approval from Al Qaeda has become one of the uprising’s most effective
fighting forces, posing a stark challenge to the United States and other
countries that want to support the rebels but not Islamic extremists.
Money flows to the group, the Nusra Front, from like-minded donors abroad. Its
fighters, a small minority of the rebels, have the boldness and skill to storm
fortified positions and lead other battalions to capture military bases and oil
fields. As their successes mount, they gather more weapons and attract more
fighters.
The group is a direct offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Iraqi officials and former
Iraqi insurgents say, which has contributed veteran fighters and weapons.
“This is just a simple way of returning the favor to our Syrian brothers that
fought with us on the lands of Iraq,” said a veteran of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who
said he helped lead the Nusra Front’s efforts in Syria.
The United States, sensing that time may be running out for Syria’s president,
Bashar al-Assad, hopes to isolate the group to prevent it from inheriting Syria
or fighting on after Mr. Assad’s fall to pursue its goal of an Islamic state.
As the United States pushes the Syrian opposition to organize a viable
alternative government, it plans to blacklist the Nusra Front as a terrorist
organization, making it illegal for Americans to have financial dealings with
the group and most likely prompting similar sanctions from Europe. The hope is
to remove one of the biggest obstacles to increasing Western support for the
rebellion: the fear that money and arms could flow to a jihadi group that could
further destabilize Syria and harm Western interests.
When rebel commanders met Friday in Turkey to form a unified command structure
at the behest of the United States and its allies, jihadi groups were not
invited.
The Nusra Front’s ally, Al Qaeda in Iraq, is the Sunni insurgent group that
killed numerous American troops in Iraq and sowed widespread sectarian strife
with suicide bombings against Shiites and other religious and ideological
opponents. The Iraqi group played an active role in founding the Nusra Front and
provides it with money, expertise and fighters, said Maj. Faisal al-Issawi, an
Iraqi security official who tracks jihadi activities in Iraq’s Anbar Province.
But blacklisting the Nusra Front could backfire. It would pit the United States
against some of the best fighters in the insurgency that it aims to support.
While some Syrian rebels fear the group’s growing power, others work closely
with it and admire it — or, at least, its military achievements — and are loath
to end their cooperation.
Leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit rebel umbrella group that the
United States seeks to bolster, expressed exasperation that the United States,
which has refused to provide weapons throughout the conflict that has killed
more than 40,000 people, is now opposing a group they see as a vital ally.
The Nusra Front “defends civilians in Syria, whereas America didn’t do
anything,” said Mosaab Abu Qatada, a rebel spokesman. “They stand by and watch;
they look at the blood and the crimes and brag. Then they say that Nusra Front
are terrorists."
He added, “America just wants a pretext to intervene in Syrian affairs after the
revolution.”
The United States has been reluctant to supply weapons to rebels that could end
up in the hands of anti-Western jihadis, as did weapons that Qatar supplied to
Libyan rebels with American approval. Critics of the Obama administration’s
Syria policy counter that its failure to support the rebels helped create the
opening that Islamic militants have seized in Syria.
The Nusra Front’s appeals to Syrian fighters seem to be working.
At a recent meeting in Damascus, Abu Hussein al-Afghani, a veteran of
insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, addressed frustrated young rebels.
They lacked money, weapons and training, so they listened attentively.
He told them he was a leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now working with a Qaeda
branch in Syria, and by joining him, they could make their mark. One fighter
recalled his resonant question: “Who is hearing your voice today?”
On Friday, demonstrators in several Syrian cities raised banners with slogans
like, “No to American intervention, for we are all Jebhat al-Nusra,” referring
to the group’s full name, Ansar al-Jebhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham, or Supporters
of the Front for Victory of the People of Syria. One rebel battalion, the Ahrar,
or Free Men, asked on its Facebook page why the United States did not blacklist
Mr. Assad’s “terrorist” militias.
Another jihadist faction, the Sahaba Army in the Levant, even congratulated the
group on the “great honor” of being deemed terrorists by the United States.
Even antigovernment activists who are wary of the group — some deride it as “the
Taliban” — said the blacklisting would be ineffective and worsen strife within
the uprising. To isolate the group, they say, the United States should support
mainstream rebel military councils and Syrian civil society, like the committees
that have sprung up to run rebel-held villages.
The Nusra Front is far from the only fighting group that embraces a strict
interpretation of Islam. Many battalions have adopted religious slogans, dress
and practices, in what some rebels and activists call a pragmatic shift to curry
favor with Islamist donors in Persian Gulf countries. One activist said he had a
fighter friend with a fondness for Johnnie Walker Black who is now sporting a
beard to fit in.
Not all religiously driven rebel groups embrace the Qaeda vision of global
jihad, the International Crisis Group said in a recent report. Some have
criticized the Nusra Front as serving the interests of the Assad government,
which seeks to paint its opposition as terrorists and foreigners.
The Nusra Front is the only Syrian rebel group explicitly endorsed by Al Qaeda
in online forums, the report said.
The group gained prominence with suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo in
early 2012 that targeted government buildings but caused heavy civilian
casualties. It was the first Syrian insurgent organization to claim
responsibility for suicide and car bomb attacks that killed civilians.
Many of its members — Syrians, Iraqis and a few from other countries —fought in
Iraq, where the Syrian government helped funnel jihadis to battle the American
occupation.
In Iraq’s Diyala Province, a former member of Al Qaeda in Iraq said that a
leader and many members of the group were fighting in Syria under the Nusra
Front’s banner. An Iraqi security official there said they travel through Iraqi
Kurdistan and Turkey to Syria.
“They are well trained mentally and militarily,” Major Issawi, the official in
Anbar, said. “They are so excited about the fighting in Syria. They see Syria as
a dream coming true.”
Syrian fighters also have Iraq experience. Abu Hussein, a commander of the
Tawhid and Jihad brigade, which is not slated for American blacklisting and has
taken a leading role in many battles, said he fought with Al Qaeda in Iraq for
six years.
“I decided to return to Syria because our people need me,” he said, adding that
his group was attracting secular young men because it could provide ammunition,
training and medical care that non-jihadist groups could not.
A 35-year-old Syrian musician who gave his name as Hakam said he decided to join
an Islamist fighting group because he saw how well it planned and fought and
“how determined and professional they are.”
He said that he had rarely prayed and had been a drummer in a casino — he
apologized for mentioning the word, which had become distasteful to him — but
that now he was pious and newly disciplined. He said that the group’s goal was
an Islamic state in Syria ruled by strict Sunni Muslims, and that it would fight
any secular government.
“Our mission won’t end after the fall of the regime,” he said.
Some Syrians have complained of Nusra fighters trying to impose religious
strictures on others. But Brian Fishman, a fellow at the Combating Terrorism
Center at West Point, said that the Nusra Front appeared to have learned from
the mistakes of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which alienated Iraqis with its sectarian
attacks and grisly beheading videos.
The Nusra Front appears to be refraining from attacking other Syrian groups,
with the exception of clashes with Kurds in the north, where some rebels believe
a major Kurdish militia sides with the government.
Thamir al-Sadi, an Iraqi from Diyala who joined the regular Free Syrian Army,
said that would change, predicting infighting after Mr. Assad’s fall.
“After the fall of Bashar there will be so many battles between these groups,”
he said. “All the groups will unite against al-Nusra. They are like a snake that
is spreading its poison.”
Tim Arango reported from Baghdad, and Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad from Beirut,
Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada from Beirut; Duraid Adnan
and Yasir Ghazi from Baghdad; employees of The New York Times from Mosul, Iraq,
and the provinces of Anbar and Diyala; and Michael R. Gordon from Dublin.
Syria Rebels Tied to Al Qaeda Play Key Role
in War, NYT, 8.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/world/middleeast/syrian-rebels-tied-to-al-qaeda-play-key-role-in-war.html
U.S. Shifting Its Warning on Syria’s Chemical Arms
December 6, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — When President Obama first warned Syria’s leader,
President Bashar al-Assad, that even making moves toward using chemical weapons
would cross a “red line” that might force the United States to drop its
reluctance to intervene in the country’s civil war, Mr. Obama took an expansive
view of where he drew that boundary.
“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling
into the hands of the wrong people,” he said at an Aug. 20 news conference. He
added: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons
moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”
But in the past week, amid intelligence reports that some precursor chemicals
have been mixed for possible use as weapons, Mr. Obama’s “red line” appears to
have shifted. His warning against “moving” weapons has disappeared from his
public pronouncements, as well as those of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton. The new warning is that if Mr. Assad makes use of those weapons,
presumably against his own people or his neighbors, he will face unspecified
consequences.
It is a veiled threat that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta repeated Thursday:
“The president of the United States has made very clear that there will be
consequences, there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible
mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people.”
The White House says the president has not changed his position at all — it is
all in the definition of the word “moving.”
Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Thursday
that “ ‘moving around’ means proliferation,” as in allowing extremist groups
like Hezbollah, which has training camps near the weapons sites, to obtain the
material.
Such shifts are nothing new in global standoffs; the Israelis have moved their
lines more than a half-dozen times in recent years when talking about how close
they would allow Iran to get toward the capacity to build a nuclear weapon
before taking action.
But for Mr. Obama, the change in wording reflects the difficult politics and
logistics of acting pre-emptively against Mr. Assad. No American president has
talked more about the need to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction,
and to lock down existing stockpiles. And no president has insisted more
publicly that this is a time for the United States to exit wars in the Middle
East, not enter new ones.
“We’re kind of boxed in,” an administration official said this week as
intelligence agencies in the United States and its allies were trying to figure
out the worrisome activity at one or two of the three dozen sites where Syria’s
chemical weapons are stockpiled. “There’s an issue of presidential credibility
here,” the official said. “But our options are quite limited.”
The chief limitation, American and Israeli officials say, is that chemical
weapons sites cannot be safely bombed. “That could create the exact situation we
are trying to avoid,” said one senior American military official, who like
several others interviewed would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Making things worse, many of the storage sites are near the border with Jordan,
raising the possibility that any plume of chemicals created by an attack could
drift over the territory of an American ally. Putting troops on the ground has
never been a serious option, American officials say.
But the Israelis clearly take the concept of pre-emptive strikes seriously. They
conducted one against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, and
another, against a North Korean-built reactor in the Syrian desert, in September
2007.
“I don’t think we’d act again unless we thought Hezbollah might get their hands
on these weapons,” said one senior Israeli official. “But we’ve proven that we
are willing to do it, and probably more willing than the Americans.”
When Mr. Obama warned against moving chemical weapons, administration officials
said he did not mean shifting the weapons from one site to another, which has
happened several times, but preparing them for use.
But in recent days, that is exactly what intelligence agencies fear has
happened. American officials have detected that Syrian troops have mixed small
amounts of precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, at one or two
storage sites — though there is no indication that Mr. Assad, whose troops are
under fierce assault from rebel forces, is ready to order the use of his
arsenal.
Mr. Panetta said Thursday that the administration was “very concerned, very
concerned” that as the opposition fighters close in on Damascus, the Syrian
capital, the Assad government might actually use a chemical weapon. Over the
past four decades, Syria has amassed one of the largest undeclared stockpiles of
chemicals in the world, including huge supplies of mustard gas, sarin nerve
agent and cyanide, according to unclassified reports by the C.I.A.
U.S. Shifting Its Warning on Syria’s
Chemical Arms, NYT, 6.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/world/middleeast/syrias-chemical-weapons-moves-lead-us-to-be-flexible.html
Egypt’s Agony
December 6, 2012
The New York Times
The revolution in Egypt is in danger of being lost in a spasm
of violence, power grabs and bad judgments. The top aides to President Mohamed
Morsi of Egypt were in Washington this week to promote their country as a new
democratic model for the Arab world. But it was Mr. Morsi’s dictatorial edict
placing himself above the law last month that ignited this crisis.
By Thursday, street fighting between Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and their
secular opponents left at least six dead and 450 wounded, tanks blocked Cairo’s
streets and the special presidential guard took up positions around his palace.
Nine officials have resigned from the Morsi administration in protest over the
bloodshed and his handling of the turmoil.
On Thursday night, Mr. Morsi further deepened the crisis by accusing some
protesters for the opposition of siding with remnants of the old Mubarak regime.
He again refused to rescind the decree giving him near absolute powers and
insisted on going forward with a referendum on Dec. 15 on a disputed draft
constitution over the objections of the secular opposition and the Coptic
Christian Church.
There is little doubt that some sectors of the opposition, which has been
divided and feckless, want to restore the old autocratic order. Those elements
have been quick to exploit tensions with violence and fear of the Muslim
Brotherhood, which Mr. Morsi once helped lead and whose Freedom and Justice
Party dominates the government. But other members of the opposition want to
build a pluralistic society where freedoms and the voice of all the people are
respected.
The draft constitution would fulfill some central demands of the revolution by
ending the all-powerful presidency, strengthening Parliament and banning torture
and detention without trial. Demands by ultraconservative Salafis for
puritanical moral codes were rejected.
But it would give Egypt’s generals much of the power and privilege they had
during the Mubarak era. According to Human Rights Watch, constitutional articles
that give the state power to protect “the true nature of the Egyptian family”
and “ethics and morals and public order” could be interpreted to limit
fundamental rights. The charter is weak on women’s rights, omitting any
reference to banning discrimination based on sex but permitting the state a role
in balancing “a woman’s obligations toward the family and public work” — an area
where it should have no right to interfere.
While one article protects freedom of expression, others ban insulting prophets
and “the individual person” and may make it hard to reform laws that have
allowed the prosecution of government critics, the human rights group said.
Another article limits the right to practice religion to Muslims, Christians and
Jews, thus discriminating against Shiites, Bahias and others.
There were also very troubling problems with the process of its creation.
Secular and Coptic Christian members walked out of the assembly that wrote the
constitution, charging that the group was stacked with Islamists. After that,
the assembly quickly approved the constitution and Mr. Morsi sped up the
referendum date by several months. He said he had to assert far-reaching powers
and pre-empt a Mubarak-appointed court from dissolving the assembly and
thwarting the democratic transition.
Many Egyptians are deeply skeptical of the Muslim Brotherhood and its vision for
the country. Mr. Morsi should have worked much harder to bring opposition
figures into his government, ensure the Constitutional Assembly was fully
representative and that there was broad consensus for the constitution before
the referendum was set.
At this point, the only way forward for dialogue is if Mr. Morsi delays the
referendum and rescinds his decree. Neither he nor his opponents can afford to
let this dangerous and self-defeating confrontation continue.
Egypt’s Agony, NYT, 6.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/opinion/egypts-agony.html
Morsi Defends Wide Authority as Turmoil Rises in Egypt
December 6, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Egypt descended deeper into political turmoil on
Thursday as the embattled president, Mohamed Morsi, blamed an outbreak of
violence on a “fifth column” and vowed to proceed with a referendum on an
Islamist-backed constitution that has prompted deadly street battles between his
supporters and their opponents.
As the tanks and armored vehicles of the elite presidential guard ringed the
palace, Mr. Morsi gave a nationally televised address offering only a hint of
compromise, while standing firmly by his plan for a Dec. 15 constitutional
referendum. His opponents quickly rejected, even mocked, his speech and called
for new protests on Friday.
Many said the speech had echoes of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, who always
saw “hidden hands” behind public unrest. Mr. Morsi said that corrupt
beneficiaries of Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy had been “hiring thugs and giving out
firearms, and the time has come for them to be punished and penalized by the
law.” He added, “It is my duty to defend the homeland.”
Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke a day after the
growing antagonism between his supporters and the secular opposition had spilled
out into the worst outbreak of violence between political factions here since
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup six decades ago. By the time the fighting ended, six
people were dead and hundreds were wounded.
The violence also led to resignations that rocked the government, as advisers,
party members and the head of the commission overseeing the planned vote on a
new constitution stepped down, citing the bloodshed.
Mr. Morsi also received a phone call from President Obama, who expressed his
“deep concern” about the deaths and injuries overnight, the White House said in
a statement.
“The president emphasized that all political leaders in Egypt should make clear
to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the statement said,
chastising both Mr. Morsi and the opposition leaders for failing to urge their
supporters to pull back during the fight.
Prospects of a political solution also seemed a casualty, as both sides
effectively refused to back down on core demands.
The opposition leadership refused to negotiate until Mr. Morsi withdrew a decree
that put his judgments beyond judicial review until the referendum — which he
refused to do. And it demanded that the referendum be canceled, which he also
refused.
The hostilities have threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the
constitutional referendum with concerns about political coercion. The
feasibility of holding the vote also appears uncertain amid attacks on
Brotherhood offices around the country and open street fighting in the shadow of
the presidential palace.
Though Mr. Morsi spoke of opening a door for dialogue and compromise, leaders of
the political opposition and the thousands of protesters surrounding his palace
dismissed his conspiratorial saber rattling as an echo of Mr. Mubarak. And his
tone, after a night many here view as a national tragedy, seemed only to widen
the gulf between his Islamist supporters and their secular opponents over his
efforts to push through the referendum on an Islamist-backed charter approved
over the objections of other factions and the Coptic Christian church.
Outside the palace, demonstrators huddled around car radios to listen to Mr.
Morsi’s words and mocked his attempts to blame outside infiltrators for the
violence, which began when thousands of his Islamist supporters rousted an
opposition sit-in.
“So we are the ones who attacked him, the ones who attacked the sit-in?” one
protester asked sarcastically. “So we are the ones with the swords and weapons
and money?” asked another.
Some left for the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, where a mob had broken
in, looted offices, and made a bonfire out of the belongings of the group’s
spiritual leader — until riot police officers chased them away with tear gas.
“I never thought I would say this, but even Mubarak was more savvy when he spoke
in a time of crisis,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian
Initiative for Personal Rights.
The director of state broadcasting resigned Thursday, as did Rafik Habib, a
Christian who was the vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and
Justice Party and the party’s favorite example of its commitment to tolerance
and pluralism. Their departures followed an announcement Wednesday by Zaghoul
el-Balshi, the new general secretary of the commission overseeing the planned
constitutional referendum, that he was quitting. “I will not participate in a
referendum that spills Egyptian blood,” Mr. Balshi said.
Mr. Morsi’s speech, previously set for 6 p.m. here and delayed for several
hours, was his first attempt to address both the night of deadly violence and
the underlying crisis set off by his Nov. 22 decree putting his own edicts above
the review of any court until the ratification of a new constitution. He had
said he needed those powers to protect the constitutional assembly and planned
referendum. He has also said he wanted to head off interference by a
counterrevolutionary conspiracy of corrupt businessmen and foreign enemies,
cynical opposition leaders willing to derail democracy rather than let Islamists
win elections, and the Mubarak-appointed judges who had already dissolved an
earlier assembly and the democratically elected Parliament.
Each side of the political battle is now convinced that it faces an imminent
coup. Secular groups believe Mr. Morsi is forcing through a constitution that
will ultimately allow Islamist groups and religious leaders to wield new power.
And the demands to stop the referendum have convinced Islamists that their
secular opponents seek to abort the new democracy.
Advisers to Mr. Morsi say he has sought for days to find a way to reach out to
his critics and resolve the building tension. In his speech, he offered to
withdraw an article of his recent decree whose Orwellian language giving him
ill-defined powers to protect the revolution had unnerved his opponents. He
invited opposition and youth leaders to join him for a meeting at his palace at
12:30 p.m. on Saturday to try to hammer out some compromise, suggesting certain
elements of the draft charter might be revised. And he declared that even if the
constitution failed he would relinquish his emergency powers at the referendum
on Dec. 15.
But opposition leaders dismissed his offers as all but meaningless. Their main
objection to Mr. Morsi’s decree is the more essential article removing the
judicial check on his power. They said that his proposed dialogue would take
place on the first day of overseas voting on the new constitution, giving the
meeting little chance of changing the text or the schedule. And the text of the
draft constitution, if approved as expected, would already end his emergency
powers.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former diplomat now acting as coordinator of the secular
opposition, said Mr. Morsi’s refusal to postpone the referendum until there was
consensus on a new constitution had “closed the door to any dialogue.” He argued
that the Morsi government’s failure to stop the previous night’s bloodshed had
“made the authority lose its legitimacy.”
Nadine Sherif of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies said in a
statement: “President Morsi had a choice to either bring the country together or
tear it apart. Today it seems clear that he has made his decision and civil war
seems looming.”
In its own statement on the night’s clashes, the Muslim Brotherhood said its
members had demonstrated peacefully but had come under attack by “crowds of
thugs, armed with all kinds of firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, tear gas,
rocks, as well as a sniper in the area.”
The group named five of its own members who it said had been killed in the
fighting. The health ministry put the total death toll at six, suggesting that
according to the Brotherhood’s calculations it sustained far more casualties
than its opponents.
“The zenith of the conspiracy was the attempt to storm the presidential palace
and occupy it, bringing down the system and its legitimacy,” the group said, an
attack thwarted only by the sacrifice of the five Brotherhood members “who gave
their lives and their blood to protect the revolution and the popular will.”
Two employees of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Morsi Defends Wide Authority as Turmoil
Rises in Egypt, NYT, 6.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/world/middleeast/egypt-islamists-secular-opponents-clashes.html
Blood Is Shed
as Egyptian President’s Backers and Rivals Battle in Cairo
December 5, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Angry mobs of Islamists battled secular protesters
with fists, rocks and firebombs in the streets around the presidential palace
for hours Wednesday night in the first major outbreak of violence between
political factions here since the revolt against then-President Hosni Mubarak
began nearly two years ago.
Three senior advisers to Mr. Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first
freely elected president, resigned during the clashes, blaming him for the
bloodshed, and his prime minister implored both sides to pull back in order to
make room for “dialogue.”
The scale of the clashes, in an affluent neighborhood just outside Mr. Morsi’s
office in the presidential palace, raised the first doubts about Mr. Morsi’s
attempt to hold a referendum on Dec. 15 to approve a draft constitution approved
by his Islamist allies over the objections of his secular opposition and the
Coptic Christian Church.
Periodic gunshots could be heard at the front lines of the fight, and secular
protesters displayed birdshot wounds and pellets. But it could not be determined
whether the riot police or Islamists or the opposition had fired the guns.
Many in both camps brandished makeshift clubs, and on the secular side a few
carried knives. By 3:30 a.m. Thursday, at least four people had died, according
to the Ministry of Health, and more than 350 were injured in the fighting. Each
side claimed that one of its own had been killed, spurring the fighting.
Thousands joined the battle on each side. The riot police initially tried to
fight off or break up the crowds with tear gas, but by about 9:30 p.m.
Wednesday, the security forces had all but withdrawn. They continued to try to
separate the two sides across one boulevard but stayed out of the battle that
raged on all around.
In a city square on the Islamist side of the battle lines, a loudspeaker on the
top of a moving car blared out exhortations that the fight was about more than
politics or Mr. Morsi.
“This is not a fight for an individual, this is not a fight for President
Morsi,” the speaker declared. “We are fighting for God’s law, against the
secularists and liberals.”
Protesters reportedly set fire to Muslim Brotherhood political offices in the
cities of Suez and Ismailia.
Even after two years of periodic battles between protesters and police,
Egyptians said they were shocked and alarmed by the spectacle of fellow citizens
drawing blood over matters of ideology or political power.
“It is Egyptian fighting Egyptian,” said Mohamed Abu Shukka, 23, who was blocked
from entering his apartment building and shaking his head.
Distrust and animosity between Islamists and their secular opponents have mired
the outcome of Egypt’s promised transition to democracy in debates about the
legitimacy of the new government and its new leaders’ commitment to the rule of
law.
The clashes followed two weeks of sporadic violence around the country since Mr.
Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, seized temporary
powers beyond the review of any court, removing the last check on his authority
until ratification of the new constitution.
Mr. Morsi has said he needed the expanded powers to block a conspiracy by
corrupt businessmen, Mubarak-appointed judges and opposition leaders to thwart
Egypt’s transition to a constitutional democracy. Some opponents, Mr. Morsi’s
advisers say, would sacrifice democracy to stop the Islamists from winning
elections.
Mr. Morsi’s secular critics have accused Mr. Morsi and the Islamists of seeking
to establish a new dictatorship, in part by ramming through a rushed
constitution that they charge could ultimately give new power over society to
Muslim scholars and Islamists groups. And each side’s actions have confirmed the
other’s fears.
As Wednesday’s clashes began, Vice President Mahmoud Mekke offered a compromise
that seemed to go nowhere. Mr. Mekke proposed that both sides agree in advance
on a package of amendments to the text of the draft constitution to build more
support for it before the Dec. 15 vote.
“All the political forces objecting to some articles in the constitution are
welcome to provide suggestions or concepts about the articles,” he said,
suggesting that through “calm dialogue” both sides could agree on revisions that
would be approved by the future Parliament after ratification.
The vice president, however, did not suggest any means to overcome the lack of
trust in the Islamist leaders among the secular opposition, or how to persuade
liberals to back down from their vow not to negotiate until Mr. Morsi
relinquishes the temporary expansion of his powers and cancels the referendum.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former United Nations diplomat, was chosen Wednesday as
coordinator for the newly unified secular opposition. He urged Mr. Morsi and his
allies to “see what is happening in the Egyptian street, the division, the
polarization. This is something that leads us to violence and worse.”
“The ball is in his court,” Mr. Mr. ElBaradei said at a news conference in which
he threatened a general strike or other action to try to stop the referendum.
“Bullying will not yield any results for this country.”
“The people of Egypt will be gathering everywhere,” he added. “We will not
finish this battle for our freedom and dignity until we are victorious.”
Mr. Morsi did not respond to the clashes. His party, founded by the Muslim
Brotherhood, said it held Mr. ElBaradei and other secular leaders responsible
for any violence.
The Brotherhood issued its own statement defending the need for Mr. Morsi’s
actions to fight off “treacherous plots” against Egypt’s nascent democracy.
“We are confident that the Egyptian people who made this great revolution that
impressed the whole world will not abandon democracy or their revolution,” the
group said, “and must support the president they chose freely for the first time
in history.”
The Islamists also struck the first blow on Wednesday, in retaliation for a
secular demonstration the previous night. Tens of thousands of secular
protesters had marched on the presidential palace Tuesday night, and perhaps 100
had set up tents to begin a sit-in just outside the palace walls. Though mostly
peaceful, there were isolated episodes of violence, including the looting of a
guard house, and protesters had written graffiti insulting Mr. Morsi on the
palace walls.
In response, a new Islamist coalition, including the Muslim Brotherhood and
several ultraconservative groups, issued a statement denouncing the protesters’
“disgusting practices,” and accusing them of “violence or sabotage.” The groups
warned that “the alert masses of the Egyptian people are capable of defending
legitimacy and defending the gains of their glorious revolution.” They called
their own demonstration for Wednesday afternoon outside of the palace.
When thousands of Islamists began arriving at the tent camp around 4 p.m., a
tense standoff quickly turned into a rout as they chased the secular protesters,
tearing down their tents and beating those who resisted, according to witnesses
and videos. “They came from all sides and they punished us,” said Mohamed
Ismail, 28, a coffee shop clerk who was among the protesters. “I got slapped on
the face and the back of my head.”
Mohamed Ali, 34, a carpenter and one of the Islamists who uprooted the tents,
claimed they had found alcohol, marijuana and treats like apples and other fruit
inside. He said they had come to defend democracy and Mr. Morsi’s authority. “He
should be supported by anyone who supports democracy,” Mr. Ali said.
A few hours later, large groups of secular protesters began to arrive, and Mr.
Ali said they had pelted the Islamists with rocks and empty water bottles. “We
acted in self-defense,” he said.
It was uncertain how many of the Islamists belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood
and how many to other, more hard-line groups, or to no group at all.
Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.
Blood Is Shed as Egyptian President’s
Backers and Rivals Battle in Cairo, NYT, 5.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/middleeast/islamists-and-secular-protesters-clash-violently-in-cairo.html
U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’
Hands
December 5, 2012
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its
blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American
officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the
weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and
foreign diplomats.
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the
uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four
Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in
September.
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the
consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that
have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened
militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since
the fall of the Qaddafi government.
The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration considers
whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are
flowing in from Qatar and other countries.
The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began
shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer
encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But
they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the
Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.
The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya
during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms
shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in
spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to
Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer
to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a
former Defense Department official.
The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States
demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the
Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while
avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the
United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may
play out in ways that conflict with American interests.
“To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you have to
have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser who is now
dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, part of
Johns Hopkins University. “If you rely on a country that doesn’t have those
things, you are really flying blind. When you have an intermediary, you are
going to lose control.”
He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments if the
United States had resisted them, but other current and former administration
officials said Washington had little leverage at times over Qatari officials.
“They march to their own drummer,” said a former senior State Department
official. The White House and State Department declined to comment.
During the frantic early months of the Libyan rebellion, various players
motivated by politics or profit — including an American arms dealer who proposed
weapons transfers in an e-mail exchange with a United States emissary later
killed in Benghazi — sought to aid those trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi.
But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller scale,
the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President Obama
complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not
coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American officials
said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed transparency
about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior administration
official who had been briefed on the matter.
About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan
transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that
the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new
leadership, according to several American officials. They, like nearly a dozen
current and former White House, diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign
officials, would speak only on the condition of anonymity for this article.
The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for by
Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said. Qatar is
believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including machine guns,
automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded reimbursement from
Libya’s new government. Some of the arms since have been moved from Libya to
militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have
imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense
Department official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several
American and foreign officials and arms traders.
Although NATO provided air support that proved critical for the Libyan rebels,
the Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a ground war, which
officials feared could lead the United States into another quagmire in the
Middle East.
As a result, the White House largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab
Emirates, two small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the United
States. Qatar, a tiny nation whose natural gas reserves have made it enormously
wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in the Arab world. Since
2011, with dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa coming under siege,
Qatar has given arms and money to various opposition and militant groups,
chiefly Sunni Islamists, in hopes of cementing alliances with the new
governments. Officials from Qatar and the emirates would not comment.
After discussions among members of the National Security Council, the Obama
administration backed the arms shipments from both countries, according to two
former administration officials briefed on the talks.
American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached the Obama
administration during the early months of the Libyan uprising, asking for
permission to ship American-built weapons that the United States had supplied
for the emirates’ use. The administration rejected that request, but instead
urged the emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be traced to the
United States.
“The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,” said one former
official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.”
For its part, Qatar supplied weapons made outside the United States, including
French- and Russian-designed arms, according to people familiar with the
shipments.
But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the emirates
could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around Libya had to be
alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms
into Libya from Qatar and the emirates, American officials said.
Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting,
officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments dominated
at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the interagency panel
consisting of the second-highest ranking officials in major agencies involved in
national security. “There was a lot of concern that the Qatar weapons were going
to Islamist groups,” one official recalled.
The Qataris provided weapons, money and training to various rebel groups in
Libya. One militia that received aid was controlled by Adel Hakim Belhaj, then
leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was held by the C.I.A. in 2004
and is now considered a moderate politician in Libya. It is unclear which other
militants received the aid.
“Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said the former defense official. The
Qataris, the official added, are “supposedly good allies, but the Islamists they
support are not in our interest.”
No evidence has surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah, an extremist
group blamed for the Benghazi attack.
The case of Marc Turi, the American arms merchant who had sought to provide
weapons to Libya, demonstrates other challenges the United States faced in
dealing with Libya. A dealer who lives in both Arizona and Abu Dhabi in the
United Arab Emirates, Mr. Turi sells small arms to buyers in the Middle East and
Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of Russian-designed weapons in Eastern
Europe.
In March 2011, just as the Libyan civil war was intensifying, Mr. Turi realized
that Libya could be a lucrative new market, and applied to the State Department
for a license to provide weapons to the rebels there, according to e-mails and
other documents he has provided. (American citizens are required to obtain
United States approval for any international arms sales.)
He also e-mailed J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative to the
Libyan rebel alliance. The diplomat said he would “share” Mr. Turi’s proposal
with colleagues in Washington, according to e-mails provided by Mr. Turi. Mr.
Stevens, who became the United States ambassador to Libya, was one of the four
Americans killed in the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11.
Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011.
Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to ship
arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his application was
approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his intent was to get weapons to
Qatar and that what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was
between them.”
Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents from the
Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say he remains under
investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The Justice Department would
not comment.
Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his
proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama
administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no
controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he
said.
David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from
Cairo.
U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell
Into Jihadis’ Hands, NYT, 5.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/
weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html
Flow of Arms to Syria Through Iraq Persists, to U.S.
Dismay
December 1, 2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON, ERIC SCHMITT and TIM ARANGO.
WASHINGTON — The American effort to stem the flow of Iranian
arms to Syria has faltered because of Iraq’s reluctance to inspect aircraft
carrying the weapons through its airspace, American officials say.
The shipments have persisted at a critical time for President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria, who has come under increasing military pressure from rebel fighters. The
air corridor over Iraq has emerged as a main supply route for weapons, including
rockets, antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenade and mortars.
Iran has an enormous stake in Syria, which is its staunchest Arab ally and has
also provided a channel for Iran’s support to the Lebanese Islamist movement
Hezbollah.
To the disappointment of the Obama administration, American efforts to persuade
the Iraqis to randomly inspect the flights have been largely unsuccessful.
Adding to American concerns, Western intelligence officials say they are picking
up new signs of activity at sites in Syria that are used to store chemical
weapons. The officials are uncertain whether Syrian forces might be preparing to
use the weapons in a last-ditch effort to save the government, or simply sending
a warning to the West about the implications of providing more help to the
Syrian rebels.
“It’s in some ways similar to what they’ve done before,” a senior American
official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence
matters. “But they’re doing some things that suggest they intend to use the
weapons. It’s not just moving stuff around. These are different kind of
activities.”
The official said, however, that the Syrians had not carried out the most
blatant steps toward using the chemical weapons, such as preparing them to be
fired by artillery batteries or loaded in bombs to be dropped from warplanes.
Regarding the arms shipments, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton secured
a commitment from Iraq’s foreign minister in September that Iraq would inspect
flights from Iran to Syria. But the Iraqis have inspected only two, most
recently on Oct. 27. No weapons were found, but one of the two planes that
landed in Iraq for inspection was on its way back to Iran after delivering its
cargo in Syria.
Adding to the United States’ frustrations, Iran appears to have been tipped off
by Iraqi officials as to when inspections would be conducted, American officials
say, citing classified reports by American intelligence analysts.
Iran’s continued efforts to aid the Syrian government were described in
interviews with a dozen American administration, military and Congressional
officials, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
“The abuse of Iraqi airspace by Iran continues to be a concern,” an American
official said. “We urge Iraq to be diligent and consistent in fulfilling its
international obligations and commitments, either by continuing to require
flights over Iraqi territory en route to Syria from Iran to land for inspection
or by denying overflight requests for Iranian aircraft going to Syria.”
Iraqi officials insist that they oppose the ferrying of arms through Iraq’s
airspace. They also cite claims by Iran that it is merely delivering
humanitarian aid, and they call the American charges unfounded.
“We wouldn’t be able to convince them, even if we searched all the airplanes,
because they have prejudged the situation,” Ali al-Musawi, the spokesman for
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, said of the American concerns. “Our
policy is that we will not allow the transfer of arms to Syria.”
Mr. Musawi acknowledged that one of the planes was not inspected until it was
returning from Damascus, but said it was a simple error, not a deliberate effort
to help the Iranians. “Mistakes sometimes occur,” he said.
But one former Iraqi official, who asked not to be identified because he feared
retaliation by the Iraqi government, said that some officials in Baghdad had
been doing the bare minimum to placate the United States and were in fact
sympathetic to the Iranian efforts in Syria.
The Iranian flights present challenges for the Obama administration, which has
been reluctant to provide arms to the Syrian rebels or to establish a no-fly
zone over Syria for fear of becoming entangled in the conflict. They also
illustrate the limits of the administration’s influence with the Maliki
government and point to divergent foreign-policy calculations in Washington and
in Baghdad.
While Iraq’s actions clearly benefit Iran, a Shiite country with close ties to
many Iraqi officials, Mr. Maliki may have his own reasons to tolerate the
flights.
Mr. Maliki, American officials say, is worried that if Mr. Assad falls from
power it may embolden Sunni and Kurdish forces in the region, including in Iraq,
which could present challenges to his Shiite-dominated government.
Iran’s support for Syria is vital to the Assad government, American officials
said. In addition to flying arms and ammunition to Syria, Iran’s paramilitary
Quds Force is sending trainers and advisers, sometimes disguised as religious
pilgrims, tourists and businessmen, the officials say.
Iran’s flights of arms to Syria drew the concern of American officials soon
after the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq last December. Iraq lacks an
air force and is unable to enforce control of its own airspace, and Iran took
advantage by ferrying arms to Syria.
Under American pressure, Iraqi officials persuaded the Iranians to hold off on
the flights as Iraq prepared to host the Arab summit in Baghdad in March. Soon
after the meeting, President Obama, in an April 3 call to Mr. Maliki,
underscored that the flights should not continue.
But after a bombing in Damascus in July that killed ranking members of Mr.
Assad’s government, the Iranian flights resumed. Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr. raised American concerns over the flights in an Aug. 17 phone call with Mr.
Maliki. So did Denis McDonough, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser,
who met with Mr. Maliki in Baghdad in October.
When Mr. McDonough raised concerns over the inspection of the plane that was on
its way back to Iran, Mr. Maliki responded that he was not aware that the
inspection had been carried out that way, according to one account of the
meeting by an American official. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council
declined to comment.
There is evidence of collusion between Iranian and Iraqi officials on the
inspections, according to American intelligence assessments. In one instance,
according to an American intelligence report, Qassim Suleimani, the leader of
Iran’s Quds Force, ordered that a flight to Syria carry only humanitarian goods.
An Iraqi inspection occurred soon after, when the plane was asked to land in
Iraq on Oct. 27.
Much of the American intelligence community’s concerns about possible collusion
has focused on Hadi al-Amiri, Iraq’s minister of transportation, who is believed
to be close to the Iranians and was among the Iraqi traveling party when Mr.
Maliki visited Washington last year. Mr. Amiri said: “This is untrue. We are an
independent country and our stance is clear. We will search whichever plane we
want, whenever we want. We will not take orders.”
Nasir Bender, the head of civil aviation in Iraq, said there was no indication
that Iraqi officials had tipped off the Iranians. “We have orders to search any
plane that we feel is suspicious, but the ones we have searched were only
carrying medical supplies and clothing,” he said, adding that the Iraqis had
inspected only two Iranian flights because of the cost of fuel. “We can’t search
every plane because there are so many heading to Syria,” he said. “It would be a
big waste of money. Each plane we take down we must refill with fuel.”
In one instance in late October, however, an Iranian flight ignored an Iraqi
request that it land, according to American intelligence assessments, presumably
because the Iranians did not want its cargo to be inspected.
Iraq’s attitude toward the Iranian flights has drawn the concern of lawmakers on
Capitol Hill, including Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who has
been mentioned as a possible secretary of state in Mr. Obama’s second term.
“If so many people have entreated the government to stop and that doesn’t seem
to be having an impact,” Mr. Kerry said in September, “that sort of alarms me a
little bit and seems to send a signal to me maybe we should make some of our
assistance or some of our support contingent on some kind of appropriate
response.”
The activity at the Syrian chemical weapons sites, described by American,
European and Israeli officials, poses an additional challenge for the West. The
senior American official confirmed on Saturday that in the past two or three
days, United States and allied intelligence have detected that the Syrian
military was carrying out some kind of activities with some of its chemical
stockpiles.
Since the crisis began in Syria, the United States and its allies have stepped
up electronic eavesdropping and other surveillance activities of the sites.
Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington,
and Tim Arango from Baghdad. David E. Sanger contributed
reporting from Washington.
Flow of Arms to Syria Through Iraq
Persists, to U.S. Dismay, NYT, 1.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/world/middleeast/us-is-stumbling-in-effort-to-cut-syria-arms-flow.html
|