Global News Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

The other Guantanamo

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered the Guantanamo military prison closed within the year, but what about the detention centre in Bagram, the U.S. military base in Afghanistan, which has an equally murky legal status ?

An estimated 600 detainees are held there, without any charge and many for over six years, rights activists say. That makes it more than twice the number held in Guantanamo, and according to military personnel who know both facilities, it is much more spartan and with lesser privileges as this report in the New York Times says.

Few detainees have had access to lawyers, and there was no question ever of allowing journalists or human rights advocates into the facility. I lived on the military base for four weeks as part of a group of journalists covering the war in 2002 and we had no clue where the prison was located, and we would keep guessing which one of the cavernous Soviet-built aircraft hangars the detainees were kept in.

Since then, the New York Times says, the population at the Bagram prison has expanded substantially, especially after the Bush administration largely halted the movement of prisoners to the Cuban facility in September 2004, making the Afghan centre the preferred alternative.

Indeed there is a U.S. plan to expand the prison complex to hold 1,100 "enemy combatants" - prisoners who cannot see lawyers, have no trials and never see any evidence there may be against them, Britain's Telegraph said. The one concession that has happened over the past year is that every Monday families gather in a Red Cross compound in Kabul for a glimpse by live video of brothers, sons and husbands who have disappeared into the feared detention centre in Bagram.

The U.S. military says the detainees are Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who must be kept off the battlefield. But human rights lawyers say the prison also holds scores of innocent people, many seized after tip-offs from feuding rivals in a viciously warring tribal society, as the Telegraph story says.

from Africa News blog:

New hope for Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change has agreed to join a unity government with President Robert Mugabe, breaking a crippling deadlock four months after the political rivals reached a power-sharing deal.

The decision could improve Zimbabwe's prospects of recovering from economic collapse and easing a humanitarian crisis in which more than 60,000 people have been infected by cholera and more than half the population needs food aid.

Zimbabweans have long wished for a new leadership that can ease the world's highest inflation rate and severe food, fuel and foreign currency shortages. Millions have fled the suffering to neighbouring countries, straining regional economies.

Western aid and financial assistance tied to the creation of a democratic government and economic reform could be crucial to rescuing what was once one of Africa's most promising countries.

South Africa's President Kgalema Motlanthe was optimistic and told Reuters in Davos that his country would help rebuild Zimbabwe.

But Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga cast doubt on whether the deal would work and said President Mugabe must go.

Will this decision work? Will it bring change and help ease the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans? What do you think?

Gaza damage more than even the ‘fixer’ can fix

I first met Raed al-Athamna when he was driving a journalist friend of mine around Gaza in his yellow, stretch-Mercedes taxi during the tense and violent days after Gaza militants captured Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, in the summer of 2006.

Raed seemed to be a good ‘fixer’ – attentive, sensible and with far-from-perfect but perfectly understandable English.

A few months later, I interviewed him in the rubble of Beit Hanoun – after Israeli tank shells slammed in to a relative’s home killing 18 members of his extended family early one morning as most were still sleeping.

Israel said a technical mishap caused the shells to stray from their intended targets and in to the residential neighbourhood where the Athamnas lived.

Perhaps because his immediate family had escaped the tragedy in their nearby home, and perhaps because loss is so intimately entwined in the lives of Gazans, Raed seemed sanguine and calm in the interview and still confident that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible.

Raed’s business hit a lean patch soon after that interview – when many of the foreign journalists he worked with stopped making the trip in to Gaza as the menace of kidnapping and the unpredictability of the factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas effectively put the Strip off limits.

Israel goes to the polls via the internet

Its election time in Israel which, despite the weighty issues at stake, is always something of a let-down for people who like a bit of U.S. style political pageantry.

There are few, if any, stump speeches, rallies, debates. There is, however, blanket campaigning in the traditional media and of course on the internet as well. Here are a few campaign ads from the internet kicking off with Ehud Barak and his Labour Party.

Like all the major candidates Barak has his own website from where you can link to dedicated pages on YouTube, Facebook, Flickr et al.

Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party are no new-media slouches either and have used every trick in the video editing manual to depict opponent Benjamin Netanyahu as a man prone to panic.

Right-wing party Yisrael Beytenu has seen its standings improve in recent polls and goes with a fairly straight-forward approach on one of its big election themes, demanding something be done about Israeli Arab lawmakers whose loyalty to a Jewish State of Israel is open to question.

Afghanistan and the surge skeptics

For months U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have been asking for more troops and Washington has been increasingly receptive. Today, we turned the spotlight on the skeptics in this story.

How much heed should President Barack Obama pay to their concerns? As a presidential candidate, he promised to send more troops to Afghanistan and he has made the war there the top U.S. military priority. But are more U.S. forces the answer to Afghanistan’s worsening violence? If so, how many more?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to make a recommendation to the president on Afghanistan in the coming days.  But Gates has already publicly supported a request by General David McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, for up to 30,000 more troops.

Opponents of a big buildup of forces have some alternative proposals:

– pay tribal leaders or warlords to keep al Qaeda out of their areas.

– focus international efforts on improving infrastructure and providing humanitarian aid.

– send a smaller number of troops to accomplish clearly defined missions, rather than large brigades of more than 3,000 which run more risk of alienating local people.

Casting a vote against fear in Iraq

The last time Iraq held provincial elections four years ago, the sole question haunting people’s minds, mine included, was whether or not to venture out to vote, risking life and limb to make our way to polling places as Iraq slid into civil war.

Then, suicide and car bomb attacks were close to their peak, as sectarian violence surged between the Shi’ite majority and Sunnis who were disempowered after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

I remember that day in Jan. 2005, when Iraqis voted for local leaders and an interim national assembly, our first general election after decades of Saddam’s authoritarian rule. My mother, father and I set out on foot — travel by car was prohibited that day — to search for our polling place. We weren’t sure where we needed to be, and we ended up in the wrong spot. We walked to a second voting centre — again wrong.

We became more and more nervous that we might fall victim to a suicide bomber, who often seek out crowds. “If we survived the first and second, we won’t survive the third,” I anxiously said.But we finally found our polling place, and we cast our votes. I felt I had done something great and patriotic for Iraq.I tried to let the best interests of my country guide my choice rather than selecting a candidate along sectarian lines.

In the provincial elections on Jan. 31 this year, fear is no longer dominating Iraqis’ minds. They are too busy deliberating who will be the right person to represent them in provincial councils that are major local power brokers. That is because the sectarian and insurgent bloodshed unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, which has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, has eased.

Car bombs and other attacks are still common, but a semblance of normal life has returned as Iraqi police and army units grow more proficient and prepare to take over from the 140,000 U.S. troops who must leave Iraq by the end of 2011. All this has encouraged people to return to their jobs, to go out shopping, to visit parks and restaurants — and to think more freely about candidates for public office.

No melting in Gaza’s ice cream war

Trying to describe a remote conflict of obscure origins, and also the curious and unexpected situations that arise in combat, a writer once coined the phrase “An Ice Cream War”. The bustle at our local ice cream parlour in downtown Gaza this week brought to mind just those contradictions, between the din and horror of warfare and the everyday civilian life that somehow carries on in the spaces between the battles.

Just up the street from where Ahmed al-Hindi and his colleagues were dishing up sugary cones and sundaes for customers young and old at their Musk & Amber ice cream shop lay the ruins of Gaza’s main security force compound. It was pulverised into a maze of jagged concrete and heaps of dust during the 3-week bombing campaign that Israel said was aimed at the ruling Hamas Islamist movement.  Staff and customers alike - and there was plenty of business on a typically mild Mediterranean winter’s afternoon - were hugely relieved to have come through the war.

But if would-be peacemakers like U.S. President Barack Obama’s new Middle East envoy George Mitchell happened to stop by, they hear some troubling sentiments amid the chatter and laughter. Even here, among the relatively affluent Palestinians of Gaza’s urban elite, there remains a public defiance of Israel and its action against Hamas – both the military and economic sanctions that have impoverished Gazans since Hamas took over in 2007: “We hope that the situation will change for the better and the crossings will open and we’ll be able to get supplies, like people have in any other country,” said Hindi, one of the young serving staff at Musk & Amber, as he passed out scoops of favourite flavours of the locally produced ice cream. But he was quick to add: “Firing rockets is part of our resistance and is part of our legitimate right. They want to twist our arms and say ‘stop firing rockets or we won’t open the crossings’? We will not accept that. If the crossings don’t open because we are exercising our legitimate right to resist, then so be it. Leave the crossings closed.”

Since the war, more Gazans have been publicly questioning Hamas’s policy of peppering southern Israeli towns with rockets. It is that policy that Israel says justifies two years of blockade on Gaza’s trade, as well as the offensive this month that killed some 1,300 people. But in the enclave of 1.5 million people, where most trace their origins back to families who fled or were forced from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, there seems little appetite for simply letting bygones be bygones.  My colleague Douglas Hamilton found the next generation of Gazans back at school this week, and determined to continue an often violent struggle against Israel. At the ice cream counter, Rula Abu Hassan had come in to give her two young daughters an ice cream treat: ”I hope there will be peace,” said the young mother, whose uncovered hair and Western dress are fairly unusual in conservative, Islamic Gaza. But as to whether Palestinians should give up their weapons and work to build peace and prosperity with Israel, she shot back: “There must be resistance to the occupation. We shouldn’t just sit with our hands tied.”

That kind of attachment to the confrontations and struggles of the past 60 years is not unique to Gaza. Many Israelis, too, have little patience for negotiation with Palestinians they see as incapable of accepting their right to exist. For those feeling it may all just be too depressingly intractable even for a new US president who shoulders as many aspirations as Barack Obama, an op-ed in the New York Times by an anthropologist, Scott Atran, and a psychologist, Jeremy Ginges, might offer an explanation, and even a glimmer of hope. “Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters (electricity, water, agriculture, the economy and so on) will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues,” they wrote. “But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years’ War.” They went on, however, to indicate how apparently only symbolic concessions by the other side – say, an apology by Israel to Palestinian refugees, or a sincere embrace by Palestinians of the state of Israel’s rights – might yet begin to loosen the deadlock. There’s a thought. And if hope still seems in short supply, try the raspberry ripple.

(Photos: A Palestinian protester eats an ice-cream and uses a sling shot at Israeli soldiers during a protest against Israel’s security fence in the West Bank village of Bilin April 4, 2008. REUTERS/Baz Ratner; A Palestinian salesman serves a child an ice cream at an ice cream parlour in Gaza Jan 29, 2009. REUTERS/Ismail Zaydah)

from Africa News blog:

Storm in Madagascar

In the relative political calm of the Indian Ocean, Madagascar has long been a centre of turbulence.

Now another political crisis is brewing as the opposition accuses President Marc Ravalomanana of abuse of power and threatening democracy. Tens of thousands of opposition protesters demonstrated in Antananarivo on Wednesday, two days after an earlier rally descended into violence that left nearly 40 people dead.

The bodies of most the victims were found in a burned out clothing store. The authorities said they were looters who got trapped.

Ravalomanana and opposition leader Andry Rajoelina are very different characters.

The president is a self made millionaire. In his early twenties, he started selling yoghurt off the back of a bicycle. Today, at 59, he is a dairy tycoon with extensive business interests.

Rajoelina is 34 years old and nicknamed TGV, after the French high speed train, for his rapid-fire manner.

He is incensed that the authorities closed down his private TV station after it broadcast an interview with the former president, Didier Ratsiraka. Since he was elected mayor of the capital - a position Ravalomanana once held - Rajoelina has been one of the most vocal critics of the presidency.

A fresh start with Russia: what’s the trade-off?

Russia has reversed its decision to station missiles in the Western outpost of Kaliningrad, next door to the European Union, according to Interfax.

The move would be the clearest signal so far of the start of a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations, which could be one of the major changes in U.S. President Barack Obama’s first year in office. We don’t know what commitment, if any, Obama may have given to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the missile shield (the two spoke by telephone earlier this week).

Obama’s scepticism about the effectiveness and utility of missile defence was clearly stated during the campaign. But since the Russians unilaterally made the Kaliningrad threat on the day of his election, the suspension of the deployment plan is a clear goodwill gesture. It follows NATO’s announcement, slipped out without fanfare earlier this week, that political relations with Moscow, frozen after the Georgia war, would resume within a few weeks.

Expect Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to foam about appeasement.

The Obama administration has already made clear it will pursue bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control treaties which Bush eschewed. At the very least, they will try to negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty to replace START 1, which expires at the end of this year. This is important because it treats Russia as a nuclear power on an equal footing with the United States, which the status-conscious Kremlin craves and the Bush administration always dismissed.

Obama realises he needs Russian cooperation for the two biggest foreign policy items on his agenda this year: trying to defang Iran’s nuclear ambitions and turn the tide in Afghanistan.

The Russians have made clear what some of the trade-offs could be: safe supply routes for U.S. and NATO forces to Afghanistan across Russia and its central Asian friends in exchange for a halt to NATO expansion along Russia’s southern border. There is no consensus in NATO to take in Ukraine and Georgia. Germany and France blocked giving them a roadmap to membership last year and the U.S. agreed reluctantly in December to put the issue on the back-burner for now.

from FaithWorld:

Russian Othodox Church picks Kirill, better Vatican ties expected

The Russian Orthodox Church elected Metropolitan Kirill, 62, as its new leader on Tuesday, succeeding Alexiy II who died last month. The new leader of the 165 million-strong Church, the largest in the Orthodox world,  is seen as a moderniser who may thaw long icy ties with the Roman Catholic Church.

There was speculation before the vote that nationalists, anti-westerners and anti-Catholic forces among the clergy and monks might rally to block Kirill's election. He seemed to take the possibility seriously enough to strike a conservative tone in recent days. In his address before the vote, Kirill spoke of "the assault of aggressive Western secularism against Christianity" and of "attempts by some Protestant groups to revise the teachings of Christianity and evangelical morality". He also hit out at Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries, saying they sought converts in post-Soviet Russia -- a key point of discord with the Vatican.

But the vote showed his support was strong. Kirill received 508 votes from a total of 677 valid ballots cast. His rival, conservative nationalist Metropolitan Kliment, 59, polled just 169 votes and a third candidate, Metropolitan Filaret of Belarus, withdrew in favour of Kirill.

Kirill, whose official title is Metropolitan (senior archbishop) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, is one of the few  senior Russian clerics to have met Pope Benedict. He favours closer ties with the Vatican and observers say he would chart a more independent course for the Russian church.

Hopes of a thaw have been fuelled by Kirill's meetings with Pope Benedict at the Vatican in 2006 and 2007 and his optimistic comments about better relations with Rome. He even spoke about a thaw in an interview with the pope's own paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

But Kirill has also echoed Alexei's criticisms of Catholics on occasions. On Monday, as delegates gathered for the election, Kirill said in a newspaper interview that there was some way to go before a meeting between the heads of the two churches would be possible. "A meeting between the patriarch and the pope will become possible only when there are conclusive signs of real and positive progress on issues which for a long time have been problematic for our relations," he said.

Here's our video of the voting session in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral, with a long clip of Kirill addressing the Local Council (in Russian):