Global News Journal

Olmert exit excites strong feelings in Israeli media

“The right step,” Israel’s most popular news daily screamed in red letters on Thursday across a front-page photo showing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, his back turned, after he announced plans to resign.   Olmert’s announcement on Wednesday triggered bold headlines and even bolder commentaries in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth in a climax to months of tensions over corruption scandals.

In a country of news junkies where emotions are raw and debate as hot as a mid-summer’s day, Israeli dailies typically give expression to pent-up feelings almost as much as they seek to inform.   Global concerns about the future of Middle East peace talks were not the main focus. Speculating over the political impact of Olmert’s downfall was more the order of the day.   “He couldn’t take it any more,” read the headline over a column on Yedioth’s front page by Eitan Haber, a former aide to the late Yitzhak Rabin, once a rival of Olmert’s felled by an Israeli rightist assassin who opposed peace talks.   “Olmert died in the war and was buried by the investigations,” Yedioth commentator Nahum Barnea wrote in another piece, referring to Olmert’s censure by an official panel for his handling of a 2006 war in Lebanon.   Some Israeli writers praised the dignified manner in which Olmert delivered his statement, quietly vowing to step aside and looking uncharacteristically humble in a speech broadcast live over radio and television.

Olmert protested his innocence, but his remarks bore little of the traditional mudslinging common in Israel’s fractious politics. “He lost with honour,” wrote Sima Kadmon, taking an unusually deferential tone. In her article entitled “Not so fast,” Kadmon, a veteran political journalist, wrote the complex political manoeuvring needed to form a new government or to hold an election may result in Olmert remaining in office for months to come.

Under Israeli law, Olmert stays on as caretaker leader for the weeks or months it could take to form a new government or hold an election. “Olmert has announced the end of his political career, but the ending may drag on, and he could end up staying on as premier through next February or March,” Kadmon wrote.

Is the war in Iraq over?

A Washington Post story on Barack Obama’s visit to Iraq caught my eye last week.

“In essence, Obama has declared the war in Iraq all but over,” the story said, noting the Democratic presidential candidate’s vow to shift troops away from Iraq to the worsening conflict in Afghanistan.

At a time when U.S. military statistics show less violence in Iraq than at any time since early 2004, it’s worth asking the question — is the war over?

It is not over for Iraqis in some northern provinces, where al Qaeda militants remain active. And there may be more days like last Monday when four suicide bombers killed nearly 60 people in Baghdad and the city of Kirkuk.

But in Baghdad, something dramatic has happened in the past couple of months. There is an air of hope and even optimism despite the occasional major bombing in the capital.

I asked some Iraqis if they thought the war was over.

Absolutely said five friends, all men aged between 19 and 22 who were sitting on a bench in a park alongside the Tigris River just before dusk last weekend. Scores of families were at the park, children playing on swings or flying kites.

Reading in Riyadh

It has got slightly easier to get a hold of Saudi novels in Arabic, but they remain suspicious material hard for average Saudis to find.

There are a number of book chains around the country and invariably the religion section has the largest number of Arabic books, alongside educational materials on medicine, business, computers and foreign language books on various subjects. But the Saudi novel remains controversial.

Riyadh has one bookstore known for its focus on modern literature and it’s there that Saudis in the know will head for a particular work. I eventually found the shop the other day, it’s called innocuously al-Kitab (The Book) and an array of novels that many aficionados might never have even heard about by famous Saudi writers were laid out sinfully on neat shelves. The novels of Turki al-Hamad, the liberal probably most despised by Islamists, were there. Another irritant for Islamists, Abdo Khal, had titles there I didn’t know existed.

Tony Calderbank, a noted translator of Arabic novels into English, says most of the quality works that come his way are passed to him personally by the authors themselves — getting a hold of them is too troublesome.

The shop assistant said they often have problems with the religious police who remove certain novels in particular, like Siba al-Harz’s racy, and acclaimed, al-Akharoun (The Others) about lesbian schoolgirls, but they leave the foreign language stuff — which is far more racy — alone.

Normally it’s in Dubai, Beirut or Cairo that you can find Saudi novels; I came across al-Akharoun in Dubai. A colleague dropped a pleasant surprise this week when she revealed she got a copy at the Riyadh Book Fair this year — an event which in itself has enraged many of the religious right.

With the rampant success of the Internet in Saudi Arabia as a means for young people to flout the suffocating morality rules of society through direct online contact, with the anonymity that allows if desired, book-buying has decreased in recent years, the assistant in al-Kitab said.  And yet the number of novels being put out by Saudis is increasing every year.     It seems to me the cracks are slowly appearing in the walls of isolation that have been slammed down left, right and centre in every avenue of Saudi cultural, political and social life. They have been appearing since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 — in which 15 Saudis were among the 19 Arabs who carried out the attacks – forced some in government to take a long hard look at what the country had become.

Does Karadzic detention give Bashir cause for concern?

      The extradition of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on Wednesday to face genocide charges in The Hague sends a signal that the international community means business in bringing fugitives to justice.      Reinforcing the same message,  Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, called again for the arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic. Like Karadzic, Mladic is accused of  genocide over the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.

    This ought to ring alarm bells for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is also accused of war crimes. But world leaders are also sending other signals which may ease any concerns he has that he may soon be arrested.     Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor, has charged Bashir with masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and persecuting 2.5 million. But the U.N. Security Council is divided over his calls for an arrest warrant against Bashir. Some countries hope the ICC will halt any genocide indictment in the interests of peace, fearing any attempt to arrest him could cause more bloodshed.     Dumisani Kumalo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations, made this clear on Tuesday as the U.N Security Council prepared to consider a South African and Libyan proposal that it call on the ICC’s judges to refrain from taking any action.     “We are not saying ‘stop doing it’ to the prosecutor of the ICC,” the ambassador said.      “We are saying, give peace a chance, can you just give it a year, let’s see UNAMID deployed,” Kumalo said, referring to the U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur.     UNAMID’s mandate expires on Thursday and Britain has drafted a resolution on extending the mandate until July 31, 2009. But South Africa and Libya want to insert a paragraph calling for a suspension of any ICC moves. Such moves suggest Bashir, who denies the charges against him, is unlikely to be arrested any time soon. 

   If arrested, Bashir would follow prominent figures such as Karadzic, late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, former Liberian President Charles Taylor and Congolese former rebel warlord and vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba into the dock.     Taylor is accused by the U.N. -backed Special Court for Sierra Leone of orchestrating rebel atrocities during Sierra Leone’s 1991-2002 conflict. Milosevic died in detention in 2006 before a verdict was reached in his trial on genocide charges. Bemba is accused by the ICC of leading Congolese rebels in a campaign of rape and torture in the Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003.      The chances of Karadzic or Milosevic being arrested and brought to trial initially seemed slim, but political changes in Serbia — namely the appointment of a Western-leaning government keen to join the European Union — helped secure his arrest.     Bashir’s arrest is more complicated as he is a sitting head of state. It also appears to depend heavily on political will and political change — but are there any signs of this? Should  Karadzic’s arrest and detention give Bashir any real cause for concern?

from Africa News blog:

Losing billions in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe may lose its status as the country with the world's highest proportion of billionaires after the central bank's decision to lop 10 zeroes from its dollar.

What it means for the currency is that 10,000,000,000 dollars will become just one - although it will still take 25 of the new dollars to buy a loaf of bread.

What it means for Zimbabweans could be much less.

Having so many zeroes on the notes certainly doesn't make shopping any easier, but there is little in the shops anyway and what is there costs too much for many to afford.

The decline of the currency's value has become a stark symbol of the economic collapse of a country that was once prosperous by regional standards, but now suffers shortages of food and fuel and has lost millions of its people as refugees to neighbouring states.

Experts doubt whether the impact of the re-denomination will be any more than cosmetic. Zimbabwe removed three zeroes from the dollar in 2006, but prices actually spiked after that.

Is there any hope of economic recovery without a deal to end the political crisis? And can there be a hope of that given the differences between Zimbabwe's rivals? Is the optimism of South African President Thabo Mbeki realistic with the clock ticking down to the initial deadline for an agreement?

Trading kisses? Love-in fails to save WTO talks.

Call it the Geneva syndrome – a variation of the Stockholm syndrome where a kidnap victim grows to love his captors.

After gruelling nine-day World Trade Organisation talks collapsed spectacularly, the main warring parties – India and the United States – kissed and made up.

“Yesterday, in the Green Room (where the talks took place), Susan Schwab said that she loved me,” India’s Trade Minister Kamal Nath told reporters when asked about relations between himself and his U.S. counterpart. “I said that I loved her too. But probably she didn’t love me enough.”

In back-to-back news conferences held to explain what went wrong, both Nath and Schwab laid the blame at the other’s door.

But behind closed doors, the two key negotiators say they maintained a warm relationship.

Earlier in the week, Schwab had tried another tactic to win Nath’s affections by passing him an envelope containing a single dollar signed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

The gift was a reference to Nath’s often repeated mantra that if U.S. subsidies could be reduced by just one dollar, a trade deal could be reached that would benefit India’s poor farmers, many of whom live on no more than a dollar a day.

Iran’s theological heartland: why are some clerics nervous?

    A  fellow journalist, an Oxford alumnus who worked in Iran, had a soft spot for Qom. There was something he found familiar about the Islamic Republic’s centre of Shi’ite learning.

     The brickwork and tiled domes did not much resemble the classic stone structures of his alma mater. Nor did students in their robes and turbans look like their jean-clad counterparts in the heart of England. But seminaries, set around courtyards, and the air of erudition evoked for him the quads of that city in Oxfordshire and its history.

    Qom now, however, is more like Oxford of centuries past when scholastic theologians wandered its streets. Philosophy and politics may be debated but everything comes down to theology.

    For Qom is the beating heart of the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late figurehead for the revolution in 1979, was in exile when he propounded his theology of ‘velayat-e faqih’, or rule by the religious jurist. But it is the clerics of Qom who hold it in trust. The city provides the religious and political compass for the system.

    That does not mean Khomeini’s theology is not subject to debate. Some clerics argue that the supreme leader — the position Khomeini occupied and now held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – draws his power from the will of the people. Others say it is divine will that matters, and the electorate confirms what has been ordained by God, providing further legitimacy. But what you don’t hear (at least out loud) are those challenging what is still a controversial theory in the Shi’ite world outside of the Islamic Republic.

    So why dip into this arcane theological debate? Because some in Iran’s clerical establishment, say analysts, are nervous. They cite two particular reasons: the first is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and second involves the re-awakening of that other Shi’ite religious centre, Najaf, in Iraq.

    Ahmadinejad’s presidency marked a break with what had become a tradition. Not for about a quarter of a century had there been a president who was not a cleric. The last secular politician to hold the post did so in the early years after the 1979 revolution when the religious establishment was still bedding down the idea of having clerics in charge.

Iran Geneva talks: whose interpretation will triumph?

Was the meeting in Geneva filled with “meandering” small talk? Or did the discussions between world powers and Iran begin work on an intricately woven carpet, that in time, would yield an “elegant and durable” outcome?

The two views, the first voiced by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the second by chief Iranian nuclear  negotiator Saeed Jalili, say much about how the two foes approached Saturday’s meeting to resolve Iran’s long-running nuclear row with the West.

It may also indicate prospects for a deal between officials from the “Great Satan” and “Axis of Evil”, who have spent so long without diplomatic ties that they have forgotten what makes the other one tick — while trust has all but vanished.

Perhaps the result of Saturday’s meeting (Iran, it was announced, did not give a clear answer to demands by world powers) was clear before officials sat round the table.

Those who watched the scene in Geneva saw U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns enter with a demeanour that did little to suggest a man who really wanted to be there.

If history was on his mind, he had little reason to be encouraged. Talks to try to get Iran to halt the most sensitive part of nuclear work, uranium enrichment, have gone nowhere since Tehran tore up a previous suspension deal with the European Union in 2005. The United States saw this as a sign Tehran was bent on producing a nuclear bomb, despite Iran’s insistence that it was just exercising its right to develop the technology needed to make electricity.

The Iranians also offered little reassurance before Jalili sat down in front of the six world powers and their representative, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. Shortly before discussions began, an official told Reuters bluntly: “Any kind of suspension or freeze is out of the question.”

from India Insight:

With Islamist militancy, has India passed the tipping point?

The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India's establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in previous years.   

A group called "India Mujahideen" claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world's biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India's roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

"We have crossed the tipping point," he said.

Are women behind the wheel driving Saudi reform?

Could Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah finally live up to his reformer reputation and issue a clear decree allowing women to drive? Reformers speculate that it might happen by the end of the year or even, as one hopeful woman activist told me last week, by Saudi National Day on September 23.

One of the main factors driving this excitement has been a recent spate of incidents reported in the Saudi media where Saudi police have caught women behind the wheel. In the most recent case, a young woman in Riyadh died when she crashed the car, a tragedy one paper presented as evidence that the reform should not happen at all.

What’s interesting about these incidents is that they give the impression of some kind of spontaneous mass movement of  women determined to drive – unlike the last major effort in 1990 which was highly organised but a great failure.

Then, a group of 45 women famously drove through central Riyadh in what was at that time a much more closed society and paranoid regime. American troops had flooded into the country and an army of journalists had followed, and the powerful clerical establishment was bristling at having been forced by King Fahd to accept the foreign troops and their mission to fight the Iraqis in occupied Kuwait. The authorities were in no mood to put up with a publicity stunt by uppity educated women, who were arrested and removed from jobs.

Eighteen years on, things are different.

“Driving has become an individual movement, women are starting to move,” said rights activist Wajeha Al-Huwaider, who a few months back posted a video of herself on YouTube driving a car around the Aramco Compound in Dhahran — one private area where women can drive with impunity. “I think they will do it, and if the king wants to make a real change he should start with women’s status,” she said.

Internet sites have touted possible details of a royal decree that would set a minimum age of 30 for women drivers and specific times when they can hit the roads such as from 8 am to 8 pm, with an extension to 11 pm on weekends. The ubiquitous “male guardian” — the bane of life in Saudi Arabia for women — may also have to be present. Another factor that could drive reform are rising living costs. Over the past year inflation has shot up to around 10 percent, cutting into ordinary Saudis lifestyles. Families have to employ male drivers if they want their women to be able to move around at all and that costs them at least $300 a month.