By VOA

By Mike Richman

For the second straight day, a Canadian ice hockey team has spoiled any dreams of Olympic gold for its North American rivals.

In a semifinal game Friday in Sochi, the Canadian men beat the United States, 1-0, at the Bolshoi Ice Dome with a dominant performance that stifled the Americans’ offensive attack.

Canada’s Jamie Benn scored early in the second period, and teammate Carey Price, who was rarely challenged, stopped 31 shots.

Canada will now play in the gold medal game Sunday against Sweden, which crafted a 2-1 win over its own heated rival, Finland, in Friday’s other semifinal.

On Thursday, the Canadian women overcame a late two-goal deficit and beat the United States in overtime to win the gold medal.

Four years ago, at the Vancouver Olympics, Canada’s men’s and women’s hockey teams also eliminated the United States.

Canada Keeps on Winning

Friday also was a big day for Canadian athletes in other sports. The men’s curling team won gold for the third straight Olympics, defeating Britain, 9-3. Canada’s Marielle Thompson edged out teammate Kelsey Serwa for the women’s ski cross title. The two ski racers gave their country its third gold-and-silver-medal double in freestyle skiing events.

Thompson described her win as “huge.”

“I can’t even put [it] in words,” she said. “I am just overjoyed and so, so happy. Especially to be out there with Kelsey, my teammate who, we race all the time together.”

Elsewhere, Russian short track speed skater Viktor Ahn won the men’s 500 meter final, becoming the first short track speed skater to capture five Olympic gold medals. He won the 1,000 meter gold in Sochi last week.

The 28-year-old Ahn also won three gold medals at the 2006 Turin Olympics, when he competed for South Korea. After he was not chosen for the Korean team at Vancouver in 2010, he switched allegiances to Russia and changed his name after being granted citizenship.

South Korea did collect a gold in the women’s 1,000-meter final in Sochi, when Park Seung-hi skated to victory.

Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States made alpine skiing history by becoming the youngest athlete, male or female, to win an Olympic slalom gold medal. The 18-year-old American showed impressive balance and agility on the Rosa Khotur course, beating Austrian veteran Marlies Schild by 53 seconds.

Ukraine edged out Russia to win gold in the women’s team biathlon relay, an emotional victory that comes as Ukraine struggles with a political crisis and unrest.

The article Canada Beats US In Men’s Hockey appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By RT

The Arizona state Senate approved legislation Wednesday permitting businesses in the state to refuse service to potential customers based on an owner’s religious beliefs, infuriating equal rights advocates who claim the bill legalizes LGBT discrimination.

The bill, known officially as Senate Bill 1062, was approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, which voted along strict party lines. State Democrats proposed eight amendments to the bill in an attempt to stop what they decried as discrimination against the gay and lesbian community, but each of those efforts failed.

The most polarizing part of the bill reads, in part:

“’Exercise of religion’ means the practice or observance of religion, including the ability to act or refusal to act in a manner substantially motivated by a religious belief whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.”

State Senator Steve Yarbrough, the bill’s sponsor, said he has been pressing for the bill because of a New Mexico state Supreme Court ruling that allowed a gay couple to sue a photographer for refusing to take pictures at their wedding.

The bill’s opponents say that Yarbrough and other social conservatives are trying to portray themselves as martyrs as they aim to pass a vague law that would leave widespread discrimination unchecked.

The Arizona Republic reported that the bill, which has a counterpart in the state House of Representatives known as HB 2153, was written by the conservative Center for Arizona Policy and Alliance Defending Freedom – a non-profit Christian lobby group that dedicates funding to the pro-life movement and has long opposed marriage equality.

The bill now heads to the desk of Republican Governor Jan Brewer. She has five days to sign or veto the bill. If she chooses to ignore it, it will automatically become law. While the governor has given little indication about which way she is leaning, Brewer has forged her reputation as a conservative on similar hot button social issues like immigration and abortion.

EJ Montini, a columnist with the Arizona Republic, said that SB 1062 sets a dangerous precedent for people of various backgrounds.

“Essentially what it would do is allow people to refuse service to people who may be gay, who may be of certain religious affiliations – we don’t know, there could be a lot of exposure in this particular bill- only because they have a particular religious belief,” he said. “We really have no issue like this in Arizona and this is extremists in the legislature essentially appeasing zealots out in the community…It is the most ungodly way to view religious freedom.”

While Arizona would be the first state in the US to approve such a bill, other right-leaning states including Idaho, South Dakota, and Kansas have considered similar legislation. A number of the bills have come in response to the federal government’s recent announcement that same-sex couples will be given the same treatment as heterosexual couples under current tax law.

The article Controversial Arizona Bill Takes Step Toward Becoming Law appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By MINA

A presidential impeachment bill was introduced in Ukrainian parliament on Friday evening. The bill was published on parliament’s website, but no details were provided.

Soon after the bill’s introduction, President Viktor Yanukovich left for Kharkov to attend a summit of south-eastern regions, according to media reports.

The new bill was authored by Nikolay Rudkovskiy, head of the Socialist Party in Ukraine, which is part of the ruling Party of Regions coalition.

Current Ukrainian legislation has an impeachment clause, though it is extremely complex and many argue it is practically impossible to enact, RIA Novosti reported.

Despite the new EU-brokered deal signed by Yanukovich and the opposition, radical protesters have set their own ultimatum – a new wave of riots if Yanukovich does not step down before 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Opposition leader and head of the UDAR party Vitaly Klitschko was booed while speaking on stage at Maidan Square about the newly signed deal. Klitschko was booed while attempting to speak during a memorial service for a protester killed during recent clashes.

He was then interrupted by a protester who got on stage and declared: “If tomorrow by 10 a.m. you don’t come and tell us that Yanukovich has resigned, we will put up a storm with weapons, I swear.”

The article Ukraine: Presidential Impeachment Bill Introduced In Parliament appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Said Temsamani

On February 20, King Mohammed VI and Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita presided over the signing ceremony of seventeen bilateral cooperation agreements in different fields and sectors. This ceremony reflects the powerful commitment of both Moroccan public and private sectors to contribute to effectively to the ongoing development process that Morocco has initiated in total collaboration with the Malian government.

These agreements also show the Monarch’s commitment to fostering an active, solidarity-based south-south cooperation, which the sovereign made a basic component of Morocco’s foreign policy to serve the interests of the brotherly African peoples.

They also seek to promote human development programs given their direct impact on the amelioration of Malians’ living conditions and give momentum to economic cooperation.

Below the list of the seventeen agreements signed between the two states:

1. The agreement on investment encouragement and reciprocal protection, signed by Moroccan Economy minister Mohamed Boussaid and Malian counterpart Bouaré Fily Sissoko.

2. The agreement on the avoidance of double taxation and the fight against tax evasion. It was signed by Moroccan Economy minister Mohamed Boussaid and Malian counterpart Bouaré Fily Sissoko.

3. The cooperation agreement on breeding which was signed by agriculture minister Aziz Akhannouch and rural development minister Bokary Treta.

4. The agreement on air services signed by equipment minister Aziz Rebbah and Malian peer Abdoulaye Koumaré.

5. The protocol on industrial cooperation signed by Industry, trade, investment and digital economy minister Moulay Hafid El Alami and minister of industry and mining Boubou Cissé.

6. The cooperation agreement between the Moroccan center for exports’ promotion (Maroc Export) and the Casablanca Fairs and Exhibitions Office (OFEC), and the Malian trade and industry chamber (CCIM). It was signed by Industry, trade, investment and digital economy minister Moulay Hafid El Alami and Trade minister Abdel Karim Konaté.

7. The twining and cooperation agreement between Ibn Sina university hospital center of Rabat and Hospital G university hospital center of Bamako. It was signed by Health minister El Houssine El Ouardi and minister of health and public hygiene Ousmane Koné.

8. The twining and cooperation agreement between Ibn Rochd university hospital center of Casablanca and Gabriel Touré university hospital center of Bamako. It was signed by Health minister El Houssine El Ouardi and minister of health and public hygiene Ousmane Koné.

9.The cooperation specific protocol in the mining, oil and gas fields which was signed by Minister of energy Abdelkader Amara and minister of industry and mining Boubou Cissé.

10. The partnership agreement between Morocco’s Groupe Banque Centrale Populaire (BCP) and Mali’s ministry of economy, finance and budget which was signed by CEO of BCP Mohamed Benchaaboun and minister of economy, finance and budget Bouaré Fily Sissoko.

11.The agreement on the change of indirect control of Sotelma (Maroc Telecom) which was signed by head of the board of directors of Maroc Telecom Abdeslam Ahizoune and minister of communication and new information technologies Jean Marie Sangaré.

12.The memorandum of understanding of cooperation on industrial areas between the MEDZ company and the Malian industry ministry. It was signed by head of MEDZ’s board of directors Omar El Yazghi and minister of industry and mining Boubou Cissé.

13.The agreement between the Malian government and the Addoha Group which was signed by Addoha Group’s CEO Anas Sefrioui and minister of industry and mining Boubou Cissé, and minister delegate for the promotion of investment and private initiative Moustapha Benbarka.

14. The protocol of cooperation agreement on vocational training which was signed by director general of the office of vocational training and labor promotion (OFPPT) Laarbi Benchekh and director general of the support fund for vocational training and apprenticeship (FAFPA) Mohamed Al Bachar Touré.

15. The cooperation agreement between the national office for electricity and drinking water (ONEE) and Malian company for drinking water management (SOMAGEP-SA). It was signed by director general of ONEE Ali Fassi Fihri and CEO of SOMAGEP-SA Boubacar Kané.

16. The cooperation agreement between the general confederation for enterprises in Morocco (CGEM-employers’ body) and Mali’s national council of employers (CNPM) which was signed by president of CGEM Meriem Bensalah Chaqroun and president of CNPM Mamadou Sidibé.

17. The agreement between Mali’s international bank and the national union -cooperative company for Malian cotton producers- (UN-SCPC). It was signed by CEO of Attijari Wafabank Mohamed Kettani and president of UN-SCPC Bakary Togola.

The article Morocco And Mali: 17 Agreements Signed To Promote Human Development And Economic Prosperity In Mali‏ – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By MISNA

At least two people were killed in clashes during a demonstration staged by secessionists in the southern city of Aden, demanding the restoration of the south’s independence before union with the north in 1990.

The demonstrators aimed also to commemorate the death of eight protesters killed in clashes with security forces last year in rallies marking the first anniversary of the ouster of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Challening a ban on protests by authorities, thousands of people marched along Mouall street after the ritual Muslim Friday prayers, headed to the Aroud Square in the Khor Maksar area.

According to witnesses, police fired tear gas and opened fire with live ammunition to disperse the crowd, also injuring at least 16.

Ali Abdullah Saleh was ousted by Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi in February 2012 after over a year of protests, under a deal mediated by the UN and Gulf Cooperation Council. The national dialogue led in January to the federal division of the nation into four regions in the north and two in the south.

The southern secessionists had boycotted the national dialogue, rejecting the federal system – which will be included in the new Constitution to be submitted to a referendum – stepping up protests against the government.

The article Yemen: Police Open Fire On Demonstrators appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By MISNA

A special court in Pakistan hearing treason charges against the ex-ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf rejected his plea for trial in a military court and set March 11 for his formal indictment, ordering he appear in person.

The ruling sets a precedent, because not only does it ensure Musharraf faces justice after numerous delays since his first hearing set for December 24, but that the process begun on February 18 and immediately adjourned to today, marks a test of civilian rule over the country’s powerful army. Musharraf is the first army chief to appear before the court.

A reaction is not excluded of the influential military hierarchs, who in the past years appear to have abandoned the line of direct interference in the nation, but taken on a more institutional role in defence of national interests and the fight against terrorism.

The three-judge bench ruled that he was no longer in the army and that high treason can be tried exclusively in a special court and not a military court.

A decision defined as “factually wrong” by the lawyer of the former strongman, 70, who controlled the nation from the 12 October 1999 coup that sent former premier Nawaz Sharif into exile, to August 2008. His imposition of a state of emergency to boost his powers in 2007 while he was president led to the treason charges, which can carry the death penalty.

On return to Pakistan in 2013 from exile in Saudi Arabia, where he had taken refuge after his ousting amid popular protests and lost elections after the assassination of Benazir Bhuto, Musharraf faced a series of probably unexpected events in his country.

Not only was he barred from running in the March 24 general elections, but faced a barrage of legal cases and arrest warrants tied to his presidency and Bhutto’s assasination, of which he is considered the mastermind. He received little backing from the armed forces so far, despite personal ties with many.

The article Pakistan: Former Strongman Musharraf Toward Indictment For Treason appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Eurasia Review

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) should carry out a series of reforms to avoid the human rights abuses that tainted the Sochi Winter Games, 33 human rights groups said today in an joint letter to the IOC president, Thomas Bach. The IOC should reform the host city selection process and amend the Olympic Charter’s nondiscrimination principle to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories, the groups said.

The groups pointed to a worldwide wave of outrage spurred by Russia’s discriminatory anti- lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) laws, as well as other serious human rights abuses. A truly successful Olympics cannot be held in host countries that flagrantly violate the principles of “nondiscrimination,” “human dignity,” and other core tenets of the Olympic Charter, the groups said.

“The Sochi Olympics have brought cheers for the athletes, but jeers for the host country’s state-sponsored discrimination and other rights abuses,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. “Only through long-term institutional reform of the Olympic Movement can similar human rights debacles be prevented at future Winter and Summer Games.”

Russia’s adoption of an anti-gay “propaganda” law in June 2013 sparked worldwide condemnation before and during the Sochi Games. The ensuing crackdown by Russian authorities on peaceful protests throughout the country further tarnished the country’s image at the very time it sought to burnish it as host country of the Winter Olympics.

Other rights abuses resulting directly from Russia’s preparations for the Sochi Games include the exploitation of workers on Olympic venues and other sites in Sochi, forced evictions of families to make way for construction of these sites, environmental and health hazards such cutting off the water supply for a nearby village, the harassment and jailing of activists, and the stifling of journalists’ efforts to document these abuses.

“The IOC and President Bach can and should learn important lessons from the anti-gay fiasco in Russia,” said Andre Banks, cofounder and executive director at All Out, an LGBT rights group. “Now is the time for the IOC to ensure this never happens again by making respect for the Olympic Principle of nondiscrimination a binding condition for all future Olympic host applications.”

The letter was signed by a wide range of international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Campaign, PEN, All Out, Athlete Ally, and the Russian LGBT Network. The complete list can be found at the end of the letter.

The groups called on the IOC to take the following steps:

• Strengthen the Olympic Host City Bid process to include requirements that host countries do not have laws in place that discriminate on protected grounds and against groups, including LGBT people, in violation of international law. Host countries should also have effective mechanisms to impartially resolve human rights abuses linked to Olympic preparations in a timely and effective manner. The process of selecting a host country should include input and analysis from independent human rights organizations regarding the country’s human rights record;
• Ensure that future host city contracts with governments include specific human rights pledges and a commitment not to introduce laws or policies that violate human rights law.The IOC should monitor these commitments closely. The contracts should include clear sanctions for a host country failing to respect these commitments, up to and including relocating the Games; and
• Amend Principle 6 of the Olympic Charter, prohibiting discrimination on a number of grounds, to include “sexual orientation and gender identity.” The principle currently states, “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”

The Bach letter follows an earlier joint letter from 40 human rights and LGBT groups to 10 major corporate sponsors of the Sochi Games – Atos, Coca Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, and Visa – urging them to condemn Russia’s anti-LGBT “propaganda” law and to support the call for an IOC human rights committee or similar mechanism.

“There have been and always will be LGBT athletes training for and competing in the Olympic Games,” said Hudson Taylor, executive director of Athlete Ally, which works to end homophobia and transphobia in athletics. “To maintain the integrity of the Olympic movement, the IOC should turn its principles into practice and take meaningful measures to make sure future games are free from discrimination and human rights violations of any kind.”

The article Russia: Sochi Highlights Need For Olympic Reforms, Says HRW appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Observer Research Foundation

By N Sathiya Moorthy

Reports that ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ at the UNHRC could move a ‘friendly resolution’ to contest and compete with the harsher one promised by the US, the UK and the rest of the West could complicate matters for India. Considering that India was among the prime-movers of a similar resolution less than a fortnight after the decisive conclusion of ‘Eelam War IV’ in May 2009, and with China and Pakistan too backing the same to defeat an earlier move of the American kind by the European Union (EU), New Delhi’s moods and moves would be closely watched, not only in Chennai and Colombo, but across the world capitals as well.

“The decision to submit a Sri Lanka-friendly resolution at the UNHRC sessions is entirely an independent move by friendly countries with the Government having no hand in it. We are remaining aloof because any interaction with them will give a wrong impression,” a Sri Lankan media report quoting Government spokesman, Cabinet Minister Keheliya Rambukwella has said. The Sri Lankan position sounds logical as any overt interest by the nation to counter-argue the West by haviing to ‘name’ some of them – and also try and ‘shame’ them in the process, possibly in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq – could be counter-productive at best.

Fence-sitters among the voting-members, who are waiting to see the draft US-UK resolution before making up their mind, could be turned away should Colombo display the same kind of aggression in the international arena as it has been doing nearer home, before the domestic (election) constituency. It is in this context, the 29 March elections to the Southern and Western Provincial Councils may be viewed, depending on when the UNHRC discusses Sri Lanka – and when the vote is scheduled.

Thankfully for Sri Lanka, the country is not a voting-member of the UNHRC ever since the US-sponsored resolutions came to be adopted since March 2012. This time, however, acknowledged friends like Russia, China and Cuba, not necessarily in that order, are back there this March, not only to propose resolutions and/or counter-resolutions, but also openly contesting the West on what it had to say on HR violations, war crimes and accountability issues in the South Asian nation.

It remains to be seen how far those ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ would be going to contest the (leaked) report of UNHRC Chair Navi Pillay, which is harsh on the Colombo dispensation and whose content could form the basis for the promised US resolution. Pillay was in Sri Lanka last year, ahead of the second, November meet of the UNHRC, and presented an oral report to the Council when it met. It is not unlikely that the ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ and the nation’s response in the Council could cite the time-lapse since to argue against the contents of Navi Pillay’s report – and consequently her recommendations.

Moderate resolution

Independent of the sentiments of the Sri Lankan neighbour and the strong advice from the Ministry of External Affairs, possibly starting with Minister Salman Khurshid, New Delhi could have voted for a ‘moderate and negotiated’ American resolution, this time as in the two previous years. On the one hand, the Navi Pillay report is expected to be harsher than her oral statement in the previous session of the UNHRC.

There may be contestable facts and concepts that New Delhi might not be able to overlook outright, just as it could not overlook the appreciable apathy of the Colombo dispensation on the previous promises made to India at the highest-levels, on the reconciliation processes, post-war. Striking a balance is one thing, choosing between any such two may be another. In doing so, New Delhi could well expose itself to ‘friends of India’ on the one hand, and ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ on the other. In most cases, ‘friends of India’ are spread across time-zones and ideological posturing on the likes of ‘accountability issues’, viz , Sri Lanka in particular.

Yet, relative to what the US-West may have thought of initially, the final resolution may have to be more moderate and accommodative, compared to the commitments from the prospective proposers to the Sri Lankan Tamils, both in the island-nation and the Diaspora nearer home. Under pressure to win the resolution, as least with as many votes as last time, the US may have to moderate its language, goal and motives, if it has to have a relatively smooth sail in the UNHRC Council this time, too.

Such a course by itself would have helped India to decide on voting with the US resolution, as if it were a continuation of the earlier two and not deviating too much from the original text and concepts. The situation however may now change if there is a ‘counter-resolution’ from ‘friends of Sri Lanka’. Such a resolution could be expected to draw extensively from the 2009 pro-Sri Lanka resolution, which too stood in the name of ‘friends of Sri Lanka’.

India was not only among the co-sponsors of the 2009 resolution but it also worked over-time with traditional adversaries like China and Pakistan too to have the EU resolution defeated on the floor, and the counter-resolution passed at Geneva. Today, New Delhi should be embarrassed to take a different, and exactly opposite position, if ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ were to marshal their facts and arguments from the common resolution from the past, of which it was a part. Worse could be the case if those arguments also seek to contest the content and intent of the two US-sponsored resolutions of 2012-13.

Neither simple nor straight forward

The Indian dilemma is neither simple nor straight forward. Nearer home, the ruling Congress-led ruling coalition is facing a crucial parliamentary poll across the nation, only weeks after the UNHRC session of March. Of equal importance to the party is the ‘Tamil Nadu factor’, particularly in the south India, accounting for 40 seats, including one from neighbouring Union Territory of Puducherry in a total elected House strength of 442.

Elections-2009 in particular, held at the height of the concluding ‘Eelam War IV’, proved otherwise, proved that the ethnic issue, war and violence were not a decisive poll factor in Tamil Nadu. It has been so, earlier and later, too, barring 1991, in the aftermath of the ‘Rajiv Gandhi assassination’. Yet, they are all still strong talking-points, particularly during election time in the State.

Needless to point out, the ‘Tamil Nadu factor’ did play a part, though not exclusively, in the Indian decision to vote with the US resolution in 2012. The political protests in 2012 and the public revulsion and consequent perception over the Channel 4 tele-serial on the killing of Balachandran, the young son of slain LTTE leader Prabhakaran, in 2013, set the mood. The 2013 resolution was in a way only procedural, both in the content of the draft, and the form of India supporting the same.

Yet, doubting Thomases about India’s options would not take chances. Large-scale student protests all across Tamil Nadu, with other segments like lawyers pitching in, became visible for the first time in almost 40 years, after the anti-Hindi agitation in the mid-Sixties. There is no indication now that such a course could prevail another time, yet exhibits like the Channel 4 videos from the past could stir up the poll scene in Tamil Nadu, still.

Though relatively muted compared to the two previous years, already there are demands for India backing the US resolution, from the Tamil Nadu polity. Some influential parties like the ruling AIADMK and the Opposition DMK have also revived their last-ditch effort of 2013, for India to either move a harsher resolution of its own against Sri Lanka in the UNHRC, or to canvas support for whatever draft that the US mooted. Electoral pressures on the ruling Congress apart, such public posturing and also protests have their effect on the Government of India as an institution.

Taking the initiative

It is in these complex backgrounds that India would be called upon to decide its position on ‘competing resolutions’ at the UNHRC, if there are any. Under the circumstances, ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ would wait for the early drafts of the US-West resolution before deciding on their strategy and tactic, which may include a decision to move or not to move a ‘counter-resolution’. In doing so, they may also wait for the US tactic of approaching any or all of them, or deciding not to take any of them into confidence.

Yet, any ‘competitive showdown’ on Sri Lanka at the UNHRC has the potential to revive the forgotten ‘Cold War’ complexities on the one hand, and the equally forgettable North-South divide in the post-Cold War context. Issues such as Palestine have triggered such sentiments, both in the UN and affiliated organisations like the UNHRC even in the recent past.

Yet, this would be the first of its kind where South Asia will get a direct taste of such a course. India, the largest country in the region and is seen by many as fighting a losing battle to protect its turf and ‘sphere of influence’ would then be called to take a position that goes beyond the immediate. The job has been made more complex by the advent of the parliamentary polls nearer home.

If nothing else, no Government in New Delhi could now be expected to try and evolve a national consensus on the larger issue that any set of ‘competitive resolutions’ on Sri Lanka at the UNHRC could entail. Nor could such a Government expect whole-hearted participation and cooperation of the nation’s diverse and divided polity to such efforts. With every party and leader counting his electoral chickens before the eggs are hatched, New Delhi cannot expect even all those claiming to be ‘national parties’ with ‘larger national interests’ to take a sane and serious decision that looks beyond the obvious – and work towards achieving the same, both nearer home and afar.

Maybe, India should take the initiative towards working out a consensus resolution this time round, where not just the Sri Lanka-related ‘accountability’ concerns of the West but also the competing counter-concerns of ‘friends of Sri Lanka’ are also addressed. Yet, they would all shy away from talking to Sri Lanka on such a course at every stage – and talking to rope it in, even more.

Such a course alone would address the problems of fence-sitting nations at the UNHRC and outside (friends of the West like Australia). Should it however progress, the Tamils in Sri Lanka and their Diaspora brethren elsewhere would cry hoarse and ‘foul’ – and in nations where their votes and voting count.

(The writer is a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter)

The article Sri Lanka: Competing Resolutions Can Complicate Decision For India At UNHRC – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Indo-Pacific Review

By Arafat Kabir

Bangladesh embarked upon a unique form of democracy as its’ national assembly went into session last week.

For the first time in the nation’s history, its’ National House will be opposition-less. There has been a vague attempt to portray a pro-government party as “opposition”, but their simultaneous representation in the cabinet foils such a mechanism. This provides the ruling party, Awami League, with total control over the legislation. Democracy has become a tool for political control, which is unfortunate, given that Bangladesh is one of the few democracies in the Muslim World.

The election on January 5^th, which returned the Awami-led government to power, lacked democratic credentials. The U.S. Department of State found it “disappointing” while the British Parliament labeled it “neither free nor fair”. These assessments echoed the opinion of the European Union and the United Nations. The principal opposition, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), in concert with 18 other parties, boycotted the election leaving 153 of 300 parliamentary seats uncontested. Former military dictator General Ershad, who is the leader of the Jatiya Party, the third largest political party, followed suit. No sooner had Ershad announced his decision than security forces escorted him to a military hospital in Dhaka. He was confined there until the Awami leader Sheikh Hasina was sworn in as the Prime Minister for a second consecutive term. Although Jatiya Party was the biggest ally of Hasina’s last coalition government, Ershard decided not to run after taking the credibility of this election to task. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ershad put together the remaining factions that opposed Ershad’s decision to abstain from the poll and was elected her self. Ershad is now the Prime Minister’s special envoy while Jatiya Party doubles as the opposition.

On the eve of election, BNP and its allies, mainly the largest Islamist group Jamaat, vocalized their dissent as party activists rampaged throughout the country. Their only demand was to hold the national election under the supervision of any administration other than Hasina’s. However, the uncompromising prime minister vehemently denied such a concession. Earlier in 2011, Hasina used a court rule to abolish the provision of a caretaker government, a non-partisan administration that oversees the poll. Since then tensions have been rising. Taking into account the immature democracy in Bangladesh, the verdict determined that the next three elections could be held under the interim government. That fact, nevertheless, fell on deaf ears.

A prominent characteristic of Bangladesh’s politics is that no parties trust each other. For this reason the politicos chose a reasonable alternative: the caretaker government system whose main task is to arrange a fair election. Since democracy was rehabilitated in 1990s, every election, but one, was arranged under such an interim government. Both BNP and Awami League handed over power to each other in the alternate term. However, BNP’s sleight of hand policy to manipulate the caretaker government in 2006 triggered massive unrest. Neither BNP nor the League could come to a political consensus on who would become the head of the interim government. In response, the military stepped in. During a prolonged state of emergency, the army-backed caretaker administration locked up both Hasina and her political rival Mrs. Khaleda Zia, the BNP leader. Both leaders were charged with corruption and abuse of power. Rumors spread that they might be permanently banned from politics, an option popularly known as the “minus 2 formula”.

Yet, despite the turmoil and involvement of the military, there was no violence. The army received unreserved commendations from all parties, for preparing a comprehensive list of voters, which is key to a transparent election. In the subsequent election, Sheikh Hasina emerged triumphant with a landslide victory. Unfortunately, the absolute Awami majority in the Parliament did not result in a positive outcome for Bangladeshis. Rampant corruption, a loquacious cabinet, extra-juridical murder and draconian measures to repress the opposition became the hallmark of Hasina’s reign. The World Bank scrapped its’ plan to finance one of the largest infrastructure projects in South Asia.  Foreign relations, especially with Muslim nations, became strained as the government set up a tribunal to try the provocateurs of the bloody liberation war with Pakistan in 1971. The international community, including the United States, urged the government to maintain international standards for seeking justice. In contrast, the tribunal became a political witch-hunt as the accused came from the opposition parties only. Thus, it jeopardized Bangladesh’s belated attempt to bring resolution to its’ troubled past.

Coinciding with the tribunal, Jamaat was banned due to the party’s overtly religious charter. Several opposition-leaning media were shut down. Human rights activists as well as thousands of opposition leaders are still confined in prison. The election, in which 48.3 million out of 92 million eligible constituents could not exercise their democratic right to vote, served to further erode democracy in Bangladesh. With the dwindling opposition, a sycophantic House, and weak state institutions such as the election commission and the anti-graft bureau, democracy is in decline in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh’s political leadership may have sowed the seeds of democracy in the 1990s but recent developments demonstrate the country’s fragile hold to democratic principles is quickly slipping and current leaders are democratic in name only. Rather it appears they have every intention of ruling the country in an autocratic fashion. Sadly, Bangladesh has joined the ranks of countries in Asia where political representation in the form of democracy is increasingly under assault. The January election is yet another example of this deeply concerning trend.

Arafat Kabir Upol is an observer of national and global politics, foreign policy and diplomacy. A native from Bangladesh, his articles have appeared in the The National Interest, Diplomatic Courier, International Policy Digest, the Diplomat and other publications. He is a member of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and can be followed on Twitter @ArafatKabirUpol

The article Bangladesh’s Autocratic Democracy – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Indo-Pacific Review

As Indonesia prepares to elect a new president, disaffected voters are pinning their hopes on an exciting newcomer – but whether he runs depends on his party boss.  

By Gordon LaForge

Recently, at the 41^st anniversary celebration of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), party chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri gave the first slice of a traditional rice cone to Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo (popularly called Jokowi), who then touched her hand to his forehead, a Javanese sign of deference and respect.

That the chairwoman offered up the first serving indicated her appreciation for Jokowi and the increasing closeness of the two – but to the disappointment of observers it didn’t answer the most consequential political question of the year: Will she choose the wildly popular governor as the party’s nominee for president?

On July 9, for only the third time, Indonesia’s voters will elect a new chief executive. What is clear is that the people want Jokowi, who tops every credible poll of potential candidates by increasingly wider margins. What’s uncertain is whether he will make it onto the ballot. His fate – and that of the nation for the next five years – rests in the hands of the imperious PDI-P matriarch Megawati (Reformasi Weekly, Dec. 6, 2013).

The election comes at a pivotal time for Indonesia’s nascent democracy. The country’s economic outlook is troubling. Growth has slowed and the rupiah was Asia’s worst-performing currency last year, falling more than 20 percent against the US dollar. Unless the country develops infrastructure and builds its manufacturing base, it risks slipping into the middle-income trap that has swallowed up other emerging economies.

Many Indonesians have become disaffected with politicians and political parties they see as corrupt, plutocratic and unresponsive to the needs of citizens. The administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – who won election and reelection on an anti-corruption platform – has been mired in graft cases that have sunk or sullied cabinet ministers, the ex-chairman of his Democratic Party, the vice president and his own family. Accordingly, the peopleʻs disgust with corruption and partisan dysfunction is translating into a consistent decline in election turnout. Only Jokowiʻs candidacy seems likely to bring new enthusiasm for political leadership.

Yudhoyono is term-limited, and just three candidates will vie to replace him. An electoral threshold law allows only parties or party coalitions that garner 25 percent of the popular vote or 20 percent of House of Representatives seats in the April 9 legislative election to nominate a presidential candidate. A challenge before the Constitutional Court could see the law scrapped and the field widened, but the court is dragging its feet on issuing a ruling.

The revamped political machine of former president Soeharto, the Golkar Party, is set to meet the threshold and has nominated its chairman, the wealthy but unpopular tycoon Aburizal Bakrie. A continuously erupting mud flow in East Java – which displaced tens of thousands of villagers and may have been unleashed by the drilling activities of an exploration company he owns – still clings to him as a symbol of his disregard for the common man.

It’s likely a coalition will form to nominate former general Prabowo Subianto, who in recent polls comes in a distant second to Jokowi. Prabowo, who founded the Great Indonesia Party (Gerindra) to ferry his presidential ambitions, garners support among the poor for his flagrant populism – such as a pledge to hand out cash to villagers if elected. He brings with him a troubling past: As head of the Army’s feared Special Forces he allegedly directed the kidnapping and torture of political activists during the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998. For this and other allegations of human rights abuses, he was the first person denied entry to the United States under provisions in the UN Convention against Torture.

The last candidate slot will be filled by the PDI-P, which has ascended as Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party has foundered. The eldest daughter of founding president Sukarno, Megawati held the office from 2001 to 2004, but then lost the country’s first two popular presidential elections to Yudhoyono. Though a recent poll put her fifth among possible candidates, many say she still envisions a return to the State Palace.

Megawati has said she will announce the nominee after the April legislative election, but hints leaking out of her party have been ambiguous. A month ago, one high-level PDI-P spokesperson said that party members favored a Megawati-Jokowi ticket, as the wise and experienced chairwoman could handle the weighty problems facing the nation and protect the fledgling Jokowi from his opponents. More recently, however, a senior aide said Megawati had told him she would not nominate herself, a claim she has neither confirmed nor denied (Reformasi Weekly, Dec. 13, 2013).

Megawati, Bakrie and Prabowo represent, to varying degrees, the moneyed, elitist brand of politician many Indonesians have come to distrust. In brilliant contrast stands Jokowi. The son of middle-class furniture dealers, he served as mayor of the small Central Java city of Surakarta before riding a wave of grassroots support to a landslide victory over an incumbent in the 2012 Jakarta gubernatorial election.

As governor, he often goes out into the streets to explain his programs and hear the complaints of residents. He has made gradual progress in tackling the problems most acutely felt by the city’s 10 million denizens: paralyzing traffic, annual rainy season flooding and obdurate bureaucracy. He also appears to be honest and incorruptible. Indonesians proudly cite when Jokowi, an avid metal fan, was given a signed bass guitar by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo he immediately submitted it to the country’s anti-corruption commission to comply with a law forbidding gratuities to government officials.

A national volunteer secretariat has begun organizing for a putative Jokowi campaign. He reportedly expressed his willingness to run to a group of Jakarta residents, and he recently met with the leadership of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Islamic organization in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. In a prescient or maybe premature move, the organization asked him to open its upcoming annual congress, an honor that in past years has fallen to President Yudhoyono.

As Jokowi has risen, the world has taken note. Singaporean policy school dean and former UN ambassador Kishore Mahbubani has glowingly described him as a transformational leader who could help usher Indonesia and Southeast Asia into a modern age of global cooperation. “He understands well the political dynamics of Indonesia and the world. If more leaders like Jokowi continue emerging, the world will continue to move toward a great convergence,” he wrote.

Not everyone is so optimistic. Doubters say Jokowi should finish the job he started in Jakarta, or that his inexperience and outsider status with the country’s political elite will render him ineffective in national office. But he is the change most Indonesians are placing their hope in.

Lets see if he gets the chance.

Gordon LaForge is an editor and contributor for The Jakarta Post. Before that he was a Fulbright fellow to Indonesia working on high school educational development in Aceh and Kalimantan. He sits on the advisory board for the Aceh chapter of the Forum for Female Indonesian Journalists and is co-founder of upstart Jakarta-based think tank the Council on Indonesian Current Affairs.

The article Mahbubani’s ‘Transformational Leader’…And Maybe Indonesia’s – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Franklin Lamb

Since around Valentine Day and aided by truly magnificent warm weather for this time of year, the dozens of parks in Damascus have been receiving unusually large numbers of visitors, not least of whom are Syrian soldiers on leave, enjoying the green space with girlfriends, families and friends. At the large garden with dozen of benches and sculptures, called Al-Manshia (Presidents Bridge) public park, and located between two five-star hotels, the Dama Rose and the 4-Seasons, some soldiers, presumably from out of town and with many appearing utterly exhausted, can be seen simply laying on the grass fast asleep under the warm healing sunshine.

Soldiers joke, laugh and seem pleased when citizens approach them to offer their thanks for the army’s service to the Syrian Arab Republic and to inquire about how things are going personally and if there is some help the citizen might offer the soldier. Such is the nature of Syrian nationalism and connection with Mother Syria that this observer has remarked about before and is strikingly rare from his experience. I love my country but frankly do not feel the pride and deep connection that Syrians appear to exhibit about their country’s 10,000 year history as the cradle of civilization. I would defend my country and fight for it if there were to be a legitimate war which frankly has not been the case in my lifetime.

Over the past 30 months of frequent visits to Damascus, the city has never appeared more ‘normal’ Last night this observers was up all night reading and there was not one bombing run or mortar or artillery fire to he heard, a first for more than two years. For many months, I used to avoid the historic Al-Hamidiyah Souk, the largest and the central souk in Syria located inside the old walled city of Damascus next to the Umayyad Mosque, despite its hundreds of interesting shops. The reason I tended to stay away was because I was one of very few people meandering among the warren of stalls and felt self-conscious when shopkeepers would plead with me to buy something-anything to help feed their families many of whom lived near the labyrinth.

Today, Al-Hamidiyah Souk, if not frequented with the numbers of shoppers and visitors as it was before March 2011, it is nonetheless very crowded such that foreigners can pass unnoticed…well, sometimes for at least the first hundred yards or so. In Damascene neighborhoods, no longer do citizens quickly disappear into their homes at the first sign of dusk but the streets and many cafes are crowded well past 9 p.m.

“Quo Vadis Syrie”, (‘where is Syria heading’) one Damascus University classics major, turned international law student, asked this visitor as we both sat on the steps of the Law Faculty while enjoying a bit of sun yesterday afternoon. “Is our crisis nearly over so we can start re-building Mother Syria or do our enemies have other plans to destroy us? I worry that today’s calm will soon disappear with an arriving hurricane.” His comment was perhaps triggered by a certain sense here and more widely elsewhere that a forming “coalition of the willing” appears to be pressing for a ‘humanitarian’ No Fly Zone. Some American allies envisage and are making plans to implement, a NFZ stretching up to 25 miles into Syria which would be enforced using aircraft flown from Jordanian bases and flying inside the kingdom, according to Congressional sources.

Any NFZ would be very different from what is currently being promoted and advertised by certain war-mongers in Washington, Tel Aviv and several European capitals as well as among elements of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the League of Arab States. Post Round Two of Geneva II, the White House and the usual “bomb the bastards” coterie in Congress and among the US Zionist lobby, are said to be re-thinking the idea of a No Fly Zone (NFZ) for Syria. It would be planned and executed with US and a yet to be specified, “Coalition of the willing” using aircraft now at the ready in Jordan and Turkey to begin with.

Ranking with the fake “non-lethal aid” concept, in terms of cynical deception (virtually all “non-lethal” aid is indeed lethal for its facilitates certain forces killing others including night goggles, telecommunication equipment, GPS equipment, salaries, fake IDs and much else), a limited, ‘humanitarian’ NFZ would almost certainly became a bomb anything/person that moves ‘turkey shoot’ as was the case in Libya in 2011 as was studied and witnessed first-hand by this an many other observers. What we observed in the then, but no more, Al Jamahiriya (state of the masses), was that the misnomer ‘limited humanitarian Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) promoted by Obama Administration UN Ambassador Susan Rice for Libya and now by her predecessor Samatha Power for Syria, was that a NFZ means essentially an all-out war for regime change at all costs in terms of expendable lives and treasury.

The Libya experience, conceding many differences between the two countries and their governments and quality of each country’s military, may be prologue for Syria. Backed by a U.N. Security Council mandate, NATO charged into Libya citing its urgent “responsibility to protect” civilians threatened by claimed bloody rampages occurring across the country. Within days, we witnessed the ‘limited carefully vetted’ targets bank turn from a promoted ‘several dozen purely military targets” into more than 10,000 bomb runs using over 7,700 ‘precision guided bombs” and from the ground and what we learned during weeks in Libya by victims and eye-witnesses it seemed at times that the targets were basically anything that moved or looked like it might have a conceivable military purpose of some sort.

Human Rights Watch documented nearly 100 cases of civilians being bombed and killed as part of the R2P campaign. Other estimates are several times the HRW published figures. To this day Libyan civilians and demanding to know from NATO, “Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?” No answer has to date been provided to the Libyan victims’ families despite investigations that showed NATO pilots frequently disregarded instructions and “we essentially bombed at if we were playing video games” according to post-conflict contrite British airman.

Susan Rice, now Obama’s national security adviser, met with Saudi officials last week to discuss a NFZ and related strategy despite White House claims that it is still skeptical. Rice told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last month that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are working together again on Syria policy after a year of occasional bitter disagreement.

Among those currently petitioning the Obama Administration for a NFZ, which would quickly devolve into thousands of bomb runs across Syria that would likely decimate its air force and tank corps are the so-called ‘rebels.’ They tend to agree with France that problems lay ahead for them given April’s fast approaching Presidential election, in which the incumbent President, Bashar Assad, is likely to seek and win re-election.

In addition, Israel, according to a Congressional source, has offered to help ‘behind the scenes” with airbases if needed and certain activities along the southern Syrian border with occupied Palestine. A majority of Arab League countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plus Turkey, France, the UK and some members of the EU also support the NFZ idea. Saudi Arabia has already approved large quantities of Chinese man-portable air defense systems or Manpads as well as antitank guided missiles from Russia and more cash to help rebels oust the Assad regime, according to an Arab diplomat. Meanwhile, the US has upped its contribution to pay the salaries of preferred rebel fighters.

Ominously, the U.S. has already positioned Patriot air defense batteries and F-16 fighter aircraft in Jordan, which would be integral to any no-fly zone. The U.S. planes have air-to-air missiles that could destroy Syrian planes from long ranges. But officials have advised Congress that aircraft may be required to enter deep into Syrian air space if threatened by advancing Syrian planes. This could easily lead to all-out war with Syria and if Russia decides to provide advanced, long-range S-300 air defense weapons to Syria, it would make such a limited no-fly zone far more risky for U.S. pilots and it’s anyone’s guess what would happen next.

President Obama so far is keeping his own counsel as his Secretaries of Defense and State, current and former, and many other officials and politicians offer their advice for the White House ordering a NFZ. Hilary Clinton and General David Petraeus reportedly both favor a NFZ to ‘end this mess” in the words of the retired CIA Director.

To his great credit, Barack Obama appears so far to many on Capitol Hill to be reluctant to give formal approval to another NFZ as he was last summer when he resisted calls to launch a war against Syria as well as Congressional war-monger demands to go to war with Iran on behalf of the Netanyahu government. This week Mr. Obama acknowledged that diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict are far from achieving their goals. “But the situation is fluid and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue including diplomacy.”

If President Obama extends his record of putting American interests first to three key decisions over the past six months, and if he sticks with diplomacy rather than launch all-out war with Syria, and potentially the allies of Damascus, via a NFZ, he just may be on his way to earning his prematurely awarded Nobel Prize.

The article ‘Coalition Of The Willing’ Promotes No Fly Zone – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By IRIN

By Andreas Hackl

The European Union (EU) has long been one of the most reliable foreign sources of humanitarian, economic and political aid in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), providing 426 million euros (US$575 million) in 2013 alone.

In 2011, overall overseas development aid to the OPT was worth $2.5 billion, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Much of this aid to the Palestinian people is focused on a single long-term objective, according to EU officials – the building up of the institutions of a future democratic, independent and viable Palestinian State, living side-by-side in peace and security with Israel.

But with limited progress so far in the current US-brokered peace talks and the wider aim of the realization of a Palestinian state, some in the more austerity-minded EU are starting to wonder if the aid is being well spent, when humanitarian crises in Syria and Mali are in need of greater funds.

“By now there is no Palestinian state. The point is: what are we funding here? Are we helping Israel to maintain the occupation, or are we actually helping Palestinians to build independence?” Caroline du Plessix, a French political scientist specialized on EU policy towards the two-state-solution, told IRIN.

“EU member states are today much more aware than before that their aid has not made possible the creation of an independent Palestinian state,” she said, adding: “The EU is trying to figure out what the best strategy may be. Member states need to show that their policy is reaching its ends and is effective. But if the main solution still is the two-state-solution and we are not really going in that direction, this policy is not sustainable and cannot go on forever.”

Carrot and Stick

A substantial reduction in EU aid seems unlikely at the moment. Such a move would have dramatic consequences for the Palestinian economy and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of families.

“There will be a price to pay if these negotiations falter,” the EU’s ambassador to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, said in late January. In December 2013, an EU official was cited in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying that the EU may cut off financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) if peace talks fail, while “some people suggested giving the money to other countries, like Syria, Mali and other places around the world.”

On the other hand, EU foreign ministers are making unprecedented offers, setting out a very substantial set of incentives designed to encourage both parties to finalize a peace agreement.

“These incentives aim at boosting prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians by increasing access to European markets, facilitating trade and investment and deepening business and cultural ties,” EU-representative John Gatt-Rutter told IRIN, adding: “Therefore, at this stage our approach is one of encouraging both parties to seize this unique opportunity provided by the peace negotiations.”

“In spite of donor fatigue in Europe we will not see more than a limited gradual reduction – say 10 percent a year – in European aid if negotiations fail because European leaders do not want to trigger major instability or a humanitarian crisis,” Ofer Zalzberg, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told IRIN.

Building the State to Come

Of the 426 million euros provided by the EU to Palestinians in 2013, 168 million was Direct Financial Support to the PA under the so-called PEGASE-mechanism.

PEGASE helps the PA to meet its recurrent expenses through paying salaries, pensions and social allowances to people in extreme poverty, and through supporting essential public services and revitalizing the private sector through policy reforms, institution-building and strengthening the relations between Palestinian enterprises and European counterparts.

The funds are transferred directly to individual beneficiaries like 55-year-old Nabila from the Qaddura refugee camp. “I get 750 shekels [$210] every three months, have a disabled son, and my husband died 10 years ago. How can I move on?” she told IRIN at the Ramallah district office of the PA’s Ministry of Social Affairs.

“There is poverty and we get tired of this situation,” she said, adding though that restrictions on movement (caused, for example, by the Barrier and numerous Israeli checkpoints allegedly set up for security reasons) highlighted a greater problem that aid would never solve. “How do you want to solve this problem? Why do we have to be in this miserable situation?”

In addition to the direct financial support, humanitarian aid is provided through the European Commission Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department (ECHO), which spent 35 million euros in 2013 on areas such as humanitarian coordination, legal assistance and emergency response to demolitions and evictions.

Propping up the Status Quo

EU aid faces the same challenges as non-governmental aid groups have faced – that by providing support they may inadvertently be playing a political role by helping prop up the status quo, giving life-support services that should normally be provided by Israel, as the occupying power.

“EU funding is strategic. Its main aim is to prevent instability. It is thus scared of the PA’s breakdown,” said Caroline Du Plessix.

For Sami Abu Roza, former economic policy adviser to the Palestinian president, this system of dependency has a bitter political aftertaste.

“If you take away the good intention behind the money, aid is a substitute for not having real remedies,” he told IRIN at the PA’s Ministry of Education, where he currently works. The EU’s approach to solving the conflict, he says, is part of a larger trend he calls “peaceconomics”, the feeding of an illusionary idea that institution-building and economic aid can contribute to real progress, while the actual political causes behind the difficult situation are side-lined and remain unresolved.

“Patronizing” Attitude

“The EU’s attitude towards Palestinians is patronizing, as if money was the only thing Palestinians needed,” he said, adding: “They are sacrificing real solutions for economic aid, building a smoke screen around the real problems.”

“Palestinians know that any money coming to Palestinians is political. But they also know that the world won’t stop paying for Palestinians under occupation. That’s the strange kind of peace Palestinians live in.”

In an attempt to decrease the political dependence from aid, the Ministry of Education has implemented a new mechanism, the Joint Financing Agreement, which has been running for about three years. With aid money flowing from the German KfW Development Bank, Finland, Ireland, Norway and Belgium, directly into a pool at the treasury of the PA’s Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education has full ownership of the money and decides how and where it is spent.

“It’s a small path to independence, towards political independence,” Abu Roza said.

But for one senior official in the Ministry, who asked to remain anonymous, the notion of independence remains unreal. “We don’t have control of our own borders, no taxation, and all of Area C is under Israel’s control. What economic independence are we speaking of?” he said, adding that the PA was not created to become a social entity providing salaries and services to Palestinians. “Its aim was political, and so are our problems.”

“Aid has not helped to fulfill Palestinians dreams”

Some anomalies in the EU’s funding to the PA emerged recently in a report of the European Court of Auditors (ECA), which criticized the EU’s paying of salaries to Palestinian civil servants in the Gaza Strip “who no longer work”. The report suggested financial assistance “be discontinued and redirected to the West Bank”. Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, is classified by the EU as a terrorist group.

So the EU continues to support the former PA structure in Gaza with salary payments even though the PA no longer has any control: The political cost of stopping funding is seen as too great.

From 2008 to 2012, the average number of civil servants and pensioners whose salaries were at least partly paid by the EU rose from 75,502 to 84,320, about half of the PA’s 170,000 civil servants and pensioners.

During the same period, the average monthly PA wage bill for EU-beneficiaries rose from 45.1 million euros to 62.9 million euros, an increase of 39 percent. But at the same time, contributions to PEGASE for Civil Servants and Pensioners fell from 21.3 million euros (47 percent of total pay to eligible beneficiaries) in 2008 to 10.4 million euros (16 percent) in 2012, mainly due to reductions in contributions from donors, such as Spain.

These pressures point to a new funding environment in which the PA is finding it increasingly difficult to pay salaries and pensions on time.

The UN Works and Relief Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) faces similar challenges. This year it has a deficit of $65 million in its core budget and struggles with declining international funding. The EU is UNRWA’s largest donor.

“Aid has not helped to fulfil Palestinians dreams, nor did it lead to sustainable development. Independence is today further away than 20 years ago,” Alaa Tartir, program director of the Palestinian Policy Network, told IRIN.

Despite the contradictions in EU aid policy, it is clear that without EU aid the humanitarian situation in OPT would worsen significantly.

“If we reach a condition where there is no more aid for PA employees, who will fill this gap? This will have a severe humanitarian impact,” said Tommaso Fabri, head of the Jerusalem office of Doctors Without Borders.

One beneficiary of the EU’s direct assistance to the PA is 49-year-old Said Samara, a teacher at the Secondary Boarding School in Ramallah.

“As a teacher, I hope that this aid will continue. But as a teacher, and for my students, I also need some hope for an independent Palestinian country,” he said.

The article EU Aid To Palestinians: Help Or Hindrance? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By EurasiaNet

By Shahin Abbasov

As the Syrian civil war nears its third anniversary, Azerbaijanis fighting for militant Islamic groups increasingly feature among those reported killed. While such reports are unsettling to officials in Azerbaijan, non-governmental observers in Baku believe the implications are limited for domestic stability.

The first reports about Azerbaijani citizens fighting in Syria appeared in May 2013. Most of those Azerbaijani citizens who have taken up arms against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime appear to be adherents of Salafism, a puritanical form of Sunni Islam that has its roots in Saudi Arabia.

Of the four Azerbaijani fighters reported killed this month in Syria, three were members of Salafi militant factions with ties to the al Qaeda network. Salafis, also described as Wahhabis in the Azerbaijani press, remain a distinct, urban-concentrated minority in mainly Shi’a Azerbaijan.

Citing both Syrian and various international sources, Azerbaijani media outlets suggest anywhere from 100 to 300 Azerbaijani citizens are now fighting in Syria, and claim that the number killed runs into the dozens. There is no way to independently confirm such estimates.

In response to reports of Azerbaijani militants killed in Syria, the head of the Baku-based Caucasus Muslim Board, Sheikh Allahshukur Pashazade on January 28 angrily charged that the concept of jihad was being twisted and used “as a pretext” to send fresh rebel fighters to Syria, and to destabilize Azerbaijan, the Turan news agency reported.

There does not appear to be much that the Azerbaijani government can do to stem the flow of militants to Syria. Recruits are believed to be infiltrating Syria via bordering Turkey; Azerbaijani citizens can travel to Turkey without visas.

Officials at the State Committee for Work with Religious Communities claim to be monitoring Azerbaijanis who are fighting abroad and that, “according to the results of the monitoring, the necessary legal measures will be undertaken.” The Ministry of National Security has issued similar statements. It’s not clear what effective measures these bodies can take to prevent and/or punish militants from participating in the Syrian fray.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Elman Abdullayev has acknowledged that Baku has only a limited capacity to track the activities of Azerbaijani citizens inside Syria. “All Azerbaijanis officially registered in Syria were evacuated long ago. Our embassy also moved to Lebanon, so we have limited access. However, the Foreign Ministry still tries to investigate these issues,” he said.

Fighting in military units not under an official Azerbaijani command is a criminal offense in Azerbaijan, but prosecution depends on a request from the Syrian government, noted criminal-law attorney Aslan Ismayilov. To date, the Syrian government has not submitted any such request to Azerbaijan, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Abdullayev told EurasiaNet.org.

Syria is not the first place where militant Muslim Azerbaijanis have fought. In the past, Azerbaijani “Mujhahedin” have reportedly seen action in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq and even Mali. Several were sentenced subsequently to prison terms.

Gamet Suleymanov, the imam of Baku’s Abu Bekr congregation, a moderate Salafi community that opposes Azerbaijani participation in jihads, said a variety of factors are drawing believers to fight in Syria.

While the desire “to help Muslims” prompts some radicals, known as kharidiis, to fight, the Azerbaijani government’s closures of mosques and “repression against believers” plays a role, too, claimed Suleymanov, whose mosque was closed in 2008 after a grenade attack. Informal restrictions on women wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and regulations about the dissemination of Islamic literature also have angered many.

“Radical forces do use these factors in their propaganda” to recruit believers online, he added.

Arif Yunusov, a Baku-based author of several books on the role of Islam in Azerbaijan, agreed. “In some cases, the government exaggerates the level of radicalization to justify [to the West] repression by the need to defend the secular political system against the threat of religious radicalism,” Yunusov contended.

The prevalence of Azerbaijani fighters in Syria has raised concern in some quarters about a potential increase in militant activity down the road in Azerbaijan. Suleymanov predicted that while the return of militant Azerbaijanis from Syria could cause problems, it would not lead to “serious destabilization.” Yunusov echoed that sentiment, saying the number of radicals among Azerbaijani believers would remain relatively low.

Many of those going to fight in Syria come from Azerbaijan’s more economically depressed areas. The industrial city of Sumgayit  — a half-hour’s drive from Baku, and considered a center of Salafism in Azerbaijan — is the reported hometown of at least one of the Azerbaijanis (former professional boxer Rahman Shikhaliyev) reported killed this month in Syria.

Yunusov said the apparent connection between Sumgayit and Syria-bound militants is logical. “Sumgayit has a high level of unemployment and a lot of IDPs; therefore, tension over social issues in the city is high,” he said.

The article Azerbaijan: Baku Wrestles With Syria-Salafi Connection – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By New Civilisation

By Ali Harfouch

If there is one thing we can learn from Azzam Tamimi’s article ‘The Quest for Democracy in the Arab World is an Islamic Cause ’ it is that the continuity of colonization in the Muslim world is primarily a self-perpetuating process sustained and legitimized by what Bertrand Badie aptly called “the importers”.

Western systems, theories, and laws need not be imposed – in fact their imposition usually produces regressive results – however a far more insidious yet perceivably benign process of colonization occurs when the ‘native elites’ who claim to represent the “colonized” imitates the colonized. This process of imitation/importation however puts the mimic in a difficult situation, on one hand he must retain the ‘authenticity’ he represents (culture, religion, etc.) i.e. that of his ‘natives’ and on the other hand he incessantly and obsessively imports the unauthentic from the West.

To deal with this paradox, the mimic must create a synthesis between the ‘Authentic’ and the ‘Imported’. The mimic is the polisher of chains, a grand illusionist and the greatest enemy to liberation. That explains why we have haphazardly superficial “Islamic Democratic” discourses or ambivalent notions of a “Civil State with an Islamic Reference” (only Allah, the All-Knower, seems to know what that contradiction-in-terms might mean).

What is all-the-more problematic is that Tamimi is not only reifying the Eurocentric ‘Democratic’ State but he is also speaking about the quest of the Arab Spring, its trajectory and for our respected brother Tamimi it is a fixated path towards Democracy. A vision eerily similar, if not derivative of, the Western doctrine of “progress” towards “maturity” (i.e. Westernization). Essentially, even our future is determined by a Eurocentric mirage and clay idol named “Democracy”.

The situation was articulated brilliantly by Paulo Freire “The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be “hosts” of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible”.

In other words, there is a two-step transformative process which involves the authentication of identity through (1) producing non-Eurocentric narratives on the pre- and post-Arab Spring (because we are in no way in a post-Arab Spring in any existential sense) instead of recycling and loathing over Western narratives i.e. a “quest towards Democracy” and (2) excluding, from our map road towards liberation the neo-imperial West and their despots who until now have acted as midwives for this process or what Tamimi referred to in albeit more benign terms “power-sharing”.

Asides for the intellectual and normative inconsistencies of universalizing and essentializing ‘Democracy’, an issue we have touched upon elsewhere, from a purely pragmatic perspective, what makes this obsessive pursuit of ‘Democracy’ all the more dumb-founding is its shallowness. Their reformist-accommodationalist methodology means that he paradoxically ends up both preserving the very power-structures which render the actualization of ‘Democracy’ impossible and continues to pursue it (Democracy) at the same time.

In an age of free-market capitalist globalization and the anarchic state of the international order, the ‘Nation’ and its ‘People’ are neither sovereign nor free to determine their own trajectory and destiny as hegemonic forces external to the ‘Nation’ and its ‘People’ do so. And thus even on a pragmatic level, the ideals and material-goals of the mimic remain a mirage.

Secondly, how does ‘Democracy’ – in itself – alleviate the economic, social and political structural contradictions in the Muslim world?

What is it intrinsic to ‘Democracy’ that makes it an all-encompassing and comprehensive political programme which can seemingly do away with the deep-rooted problems? History testifies to the fact that there is indeed no causal link between economic development, technological advancement and ‘Democracy’. Unless ‘Democracy’ is a masquerade for a far-reaching neo-liberal political programme, it falls nothing short of a mirage. Both ways however, ‘Democracy’ is part of the problem and not a solution of any sorts.

In the end, both ‘Democracy’ and ‘Power-sharing’ are mirages and illusions of the Modern State system. There is nothing liberating about the hegemonic Democratic theory which is now defunct in its countries of origins and (I can safely say) it goes without saying that the power-elites who dominate the Muslim world are in no way interested in “power-sharing”.

Power must be taken, it is not shared nor given with power-elites who fetishize power with the Qur’an warning ““…do not obey the order of the transgressors…”. Does the Qur’anic repetition of Musa’s climatic clash with Pharaoh not teach our dear Tamimi any lessons on liberation?

Or was the rejection of a dozen “power-sharing” offers by tribes to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him) not an indication that power can only belong to an idea – authentic Islam – and not a disfigured distilled compromise-based reconfigured “Democratic Islam”?

The article Azzam Tamimi And The Mirage of Democracy: A Quest Towards Subversion – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

By Justin Scott Finkelstein

Particularly in the past few years, a wide array of pundits, experts and observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict have suggested that the two-state solution is dead. Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest push for peace has not done much, if anything, to temper these opinions. Despite his proclamations—at times ubiquitous in the media—that the two sides are close to an agreement, Kerry is being met with far more pessimistic assessments among most Israelis, Palestinians and commentators.

This embodies part of a trend on both sides of the political divide: On the right, many argue that Palestinian hate and incitement against Israel and Jews, Palestinian maximalist demands and a general unwillingness to live in permanent peace with the state of Israel precludes the conclusion of any peace accord. On the left, many argue that America’s enabling of self-destructive Israeli policies, such as the continued expansion of settlements and the entrenchment of the occupation, the rise of the Israeli right-wing, and a general inflexibility of the Israeli public and their leaders to make necessary concessions for peace are the primary reasons a two-state solution is unattainable. Still others—again, on both sides of the political spectrum—are ideologically against the principle of a peace agreement based on two states for two peoples; they argue that this would be fundamentally unjust to either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Some therefore argue for a continuation of the status quo or a one-state solution, wherein all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea live in one democratic state.

Prominent in this discourse is the discussion about Israeli and Palestinian public opinion: What do most Israelis and Palestinians actually want? What solution do they accept? Is a two-state solution acceptable to most Israelis and/or Palestinians? How much support does a one-state solution garner among both publics?  What do the Palestinian and Israeli publics mean when they speak of a two-state solution? Which two-state formula elicits the most positive response? The most negative response?

For answers to these questions, one is largely forced to rely on polls—which are always subjective and often partisan. How else to explain that a simple Google search of polls on Israeli and Palestinian public opinion brings forth almost innumerable contradictory results? The consequence of this has often been that commentators use data most aligned with their preconceived notions to support their arguments. So we are forced to ask ourselves yet another question: How do we disentangle these polls and arrive at some sort of conclusion about an accurate reflection of both Palestinian and Israeli public opinion?

THE JOINT ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PUBLIC OPINION POLL

Among the constellation of polls on Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, the Joint Israeli-Palestinian Poll may be the one most frequently cited by journalists and policymakers. Conducted once a year since 2003 by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, the joint poll presents a representative sample of both Israelis and Palestinians with six main elements of a two-state solution based on the Clinton Parameters and the Geneva Initiative.[1] The six elements that comprise the surveyed agreement are:[2]

1) Borders: The entirety of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would make up Palestine, with the exception of 3% of the West Bank (to account for Jewish settlements). There would be proportional land swaps to make up for this.

2) Refugees: The solution for the issue of the Palestinian refugees would be based on UN Resolutions 194 and 242. All Palestinian refugees would receive financial compensation, and Palestinian refugees would be given 5 options for permanent residency:

a)      Palestinian state

b)      Areas of Israel (pre-1967) swapped to Palestine

c)      Current country of residence

d)      A third country

e)      Israel (subject to the Israeli government’s discretion)

3)      Jerusalem: East Jerusalem would be the capital of Palestine, with its Arab neighborhoods falling under Palestinian sovereignty and its Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sovereignty. All of the Old City and the Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount) would go to Palestine, except for the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall plaza; those areas and West Jerusalem would be the capital of Israel.

4)      Demilitarized Palestinian state: Palestine would have no army, but would have a strong security force and multinational forces to ensure its safety and security. Both Israel and Palestine would be committed to ending all violence against each other.

5)      Security Arrangements: Palestine would have sovereignty over its land, water and airspace, but Israel would have the right to use Palestinian airspace for training purposes. Israel would maintain two security stations in the West Bank for 15 years, and a multinational force would monitor the borders between the two states and the implementation of the agreement by both sides.

6)      End of Conflict: Upon the full implementation of the above agreement, the conflict would be declared over by both sides. Both Israel and Palestine would recognize each other as the homeland of its respective peoples.

After presenting each of these six elements, the interviewees are asked whether or not they accept that part of the plan.

Subsequently, the joint poll asks interviewees whether or not they support the package as a whole. Figure 1 below depicts all of the statistics gathered since the first joint poll was conducted in December 2003.

Figure 1: Support for Peace Plan Surveyed in Joint Israeli-Palestinian Poll[3]

As seen above, the joint polls have found that about 54% of the Israeli public consistently supports a two-state peace agreement based on the Clinton Parameters and the Geneva Initiative. While it additionally found that a considerable portion of the Palestinian public also supports these plans, the Palestinian approval rate since 2003 has been under 50% (around 45%). Furthermore, individual elements of the plan garner significantly different levels of support. Among Palestinians, for example, support for a demilitarized Palestine hovers at 27%, a whopping 18% decrease from overall Palestinian support for the package. Among Israelis, a similar story can be told about the proposed solution to the Palestinian refugee problem: on this issue, Israeli support only comes to about 40%.

Furthermore, it may be observed that the most significant uptick in support for the peace plans from both the Palestinian and Israeli publics occurred in December 2004. This may be attributed to longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s death the prior month: Arafat came to be seen by a majority of Israelis as an impediment to a peace deal, and Palestinians knew this. Therefore, after his death, there was a flicker of hope—and with it, an acceptance of greater compromise—among both publics.

The joint poll also asks Palestinians and Israelis whether or not they support the Arab Peace Initiative. The initiative, drafted by Saudi Arabia and unanimously approved by the Arab League in 2002, originally proposed a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines (on all fronts—the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms) and an “agreed upon” solution to the Palestinian refugee problem in return for the normalization of relations between the Arab world and Israel. The plan signified the first time the Arab world publicly accepted Israel’s existence and presented a comprehensive two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, the initiative’s insistence on a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines on all fronts was a major sticking point for Israel and much of the international community, as Israel has counted on maintaining large Jewish settlements in the West Bank and at least some of the Golan Heights as part of any final peace deal and views the 1967 lines as indefensible. The vague language on the Palestinian refugee problem was also a point of contention. This was reflected in joint polls, which found only 20% to 30% of Israelis in support of the initiative.

Secretary Kerry seemed to grasp at least part of the problem and in the spring of 2013, he was able to convince a number of key officials in the Arab world to amend the plan to allow for minor land swaps to the 1967 lines. Both before and after the amendment, majority Palestinian support has been recorded (anywhere from 51% to 65%), although the last joint poll, conducted in December 2013, found only 47% of Palestinians in support of it (50% were opposed). Conversely, large majorities of Israelis continued to reject the proposal even after it was amended, with support remaining at only around 20% to 30%. Reasons for the continued Israeli rejection remain speculative, but it may be inferred that Israelis are still concerned about the vague language on the refugee issue and have qualms about the lack of explicit security arrangements and details regarding the fate of the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms. Moreover, Israelis may have less trust in any peace plan that comes from the Arab world.

Finally, the joint poll also periodically asks both Israelis and Palestinians for their opinions about the formation of one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, with equality for both Arabs and Jews, in order to solve the conflict. Its findings have been clear: Only about 25% to 30% of the Israeli and Palestinian public supports this type of solution. The last joint poll that asked this question, released in June 2013, was consistent with these numbers.[4] A survey conducted independently by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research more recently, in December 2013, found that while support for the one-state solution rose marginally to 32%, opposition remained strong, at 66%.

POLLS THAT CORROBORATE THESE FINDINGS

Numerous other polling centers have corroborated the findings of the joint poll shown above. A Gallup poll conducted in August and September of 2012, for example, found that 52% of Jewish Israelis and 85% of non-Jewish Israelis support (and 40% of Jewish Israelis and 5% of non-Jewish Israelis oppose) “a situation in which an independent Palestinian State existed alongside an independent state of Israel.” It found that 70% of West Bank Palestinians also supported this (28% did not), while 48% of Gaza Strip Palestinians expressed support (and 51% did not). Taken altogether, the Gallup survey shows clear majority support on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides for a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Figure 2 presents the complete results of the survey:

Figure 2: Gallup Survey from August/September 2012[5]

A poll conducted in November 2013 by multiple American, Israeli and Palestinian organizations and overseen by Shibley Telhami, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, also came up with important information.[6] Presenting a detailed peace plan to Israelis and Palestinians similar to the one used by the joint poll—with the notable addition of a provision wherein Palestinians recognize Israel as “a state of the Jewish people and of all its citizens”—it found that 54% of Israelis but only 41% of Palestinians accepted the plan. However, the poll then asked respondents whether their opinions would change if the other side (either the Palestinians or Israelis) publicly accepted the deal, after which Israeli support rose to 63% and, remarkably, Palestinian support jumped to 59%.

In this vein, it is also important to note that the December poll conducted by the Palestinians Center for Policy and Survey Research (mentioned earlier) found that while only 46% of Palestinians accepted the Clinton/Geneva peace plans after they were first presented, 50% of Palestinians said they would vote in favor of the plan if it were put to a referendum, 25% of those originally opposed said they would change their minds if the package included an Israeli acknowledgement of responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, 18% would change their minds if the package included an Israeli acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative, 22% would change their minds if Palestine were offered $30 to $50 billion in order to settle and compensate refugees and 21% would change their minds if the European Union offered Palestine membership. On the Israeli side, a poll conducted in May 2013 found that if Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were to accept the amended Arab Peace Initiative, 69% of the Israeli public would as well.[7] These findings may have significant implications about under what conditions the Palestinian and Israeli publics are most willing to accept a two-state solution.[8] Finally, the poll overseen by Shibley Telhami also found that only 21% of Israelis and 30% of Palestinians positively view a scenario wherein “Israel and the Palestinian Territories would become one state with Israelis and Palestinians as equal citizens.”

Furthermore, an American nongovernmental organization, the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, has commissioned polls since November 2003—the last one was published in November 2012—that show majority support for the two-state solution among the Jewish Israeli public. The Abraham Center-commissioned polls present interviewees with a peace proposal slightly less far-reaching than the one proposed by the joint poll. The only significant differences are that the Old City would be under international control (not split between Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty) and the Palestinian refugees would only have the option of returning to the Palestinian state. The polls have found that an average of about 60% of the Jewish Israeli public endorses the proposal. Moreover, when presented with an “enhanced package” that includes additional perks such as a mutual defense treaty with America and the agreement being conditioned on Hamas’s disarmament, the average approval rating of the two-state proposal soars to about 75% among Jewish Israelis. These figures can be seen in Figure 3 below:

Figure 3: S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace Survey[9]

The Daniel Abraham Center commissioned another poll in November 2013 which found that 67% of Israelis would vote for a peace agreement with the Palestinians (ostensibly based on two states) that Netanyahu brought to a referendum.[10] The poll did not present interviewees with an outline of the prospective agreement, which likely demonstrates the confidence the Israeli public has in Netanyahu to oversee the negotiation of a peace agreement that meets Israel’s vital interests.

Polls conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), based in Tel Aviv, have come up with similar findings. INSS studies have shown that from 2003 to 2012, an average of 56.4% of Israelis have supported “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in the framework of a permanent settlement.”[11] Its latest survey, conducted in 2012, also found a large plurality of Israelis in support of a two-state solution with similar details to the one presented in the joint poll.

Other polling organizations have also obtained results that show strong support for a two-state solution among Palestinians. The Ramallah-based Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, for example, found in its latest survey—conducted in November 2013—that a strong plurality of 48.1% supports a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Its previous poll, conducted in March 2013, had very similar findings). As seen in Figure 4 below, the poll also gave respondents the opportunity to support “a bi-national state on all of Palestine where Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal representation and rights” (as an alternative to the two-state solution), to which only 21.3% of Palestinians responded approvingly:

Figure 4: Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre Survey[12]

Q17. Some believe that a two-state formula is the favored solution for the Arab-Israeli  conflict, while others believe that historic Palestine cannot be divided and thus the favored solution is a bi-national state on all of Palestine where Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal representation and rights. Which of these solutions do you prefer?

* These answers were not included as part of the options read to the interviewee

A poll conducted by the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) center in December 2013 also found that a majority of Palestinians endorse the framework of a two-state solution to end the Arab-Israeli conflict:

Figure 3: Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) December 2013 poll[13]

Yet another Ramallah-based Palestinian research center, Near East Consulting, came up with complementary results in its latest survey of the Palestinian public, published in April 2012. Querying interviewees about their views on a one-state solution that allows Palestinian refugees to return to their homes (in pre-1967 Israel, with no other alternative solution presented), the survey found that 76% of Palestinians opposed the one-state solution.[14]

POLLS THAT COMPLICATE THE PICTURE

Despite the above evidence of significant support for a two-state solution (and much less support for a one-state solution) among both the Israeli and Palestinian publics, the statistics have been hotly contested. On the Israeli side, a 2009 poll conducted by an Israeli research organization, Maagar Mochot, and Israel’s Channel 2 found that 51% of Israelis oppose and only 32% support a two-state solution. And another poll conducted in 2013 by the Geocartographia organization showed that 45% of Israelis oppose and only 40% support the two-state solution.

Yet when looking at the precise formulation of the questions asked in these surveys, it becomes evident that semantics played a large role in the results. For instance, the question presented for the 2009 poll asks “In light of the experience with disengagement, the Second Lebanon War and the war against Hamas in Gaza, do you support or oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria?” By invoking the violence that Israel has faced after other withdrawals before asking the question, the pollsters received a predictable answer. The 2013 poll also had an oddly formulated question: “Are you for or against the concept that two states for two peoples (Israel and Palestine) is the desirable solution for a peace agreement with the Palestinians?” Like the other poll, this survey does not ask interviewees simply if they would accept the two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict; rather, it asks whether or not it is the “desirable” solution. It may also be noted that the survey recorded that 14% of interviewees either had no opinion or refused to reply. This is a high percentage that could have a significant impact on the findings.

Peace Index polls (surveys conducted almost monthly by The Israel Democracy Institute) published in July and August of 2013[15] have also provided fodder for those insisting Israelis do not accept a two-state solution that allows for a viable Palestinian state. For example, in a September article for the Open Zion Blog in The Daily Beast, commentator Jerry Haber claimed that Israelis do not support the two-state solution and used the aforementioned polls as proof.[16] The center of concern in the July poll was the question that asked Israelis to consider a situation wherein Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have reached a peace settlement that included “security arrangements for Israel, a demilitarized Palestinian state, international guarantees, and [a] declaration of the end of conflict by the Palestinians.” The survey then recorded opposition and support for four additional compromises that would be on the table in this scenario: on borders, Jerusalem, settlements and the Palestinian refugees.

On borders, the survey suggested a withdrawal to the 1967 lines with territorial swaps; on Jerusalem, it proposed the “transfer of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority, and a special arrangement for the holy places;” on settlements, it proposed an evacuation of settlements except for Ariel, Maaleh Adumim and settlement blocs; and finally, it proposed and Israeli recognition “in principle” of the Right of Return, with the return of a small number of refugees to Israel and financial compensation for the others. The poll found that for each one of these compromises there was either a plurality or majority in opposition.

How to explain this? In the end, the results of this poll came down to methodology. If one compares the level of support for each of the compromises surveyed in the Peace Index poll to similar compromises proposed in the joint poll, one will find somewhat similar numbers: On the proposal for settlements and borders, the joint poll has found an average of 48% support, while the Peace Index poll has come up with 41%; on Jerusalem, the joint poll has shown an average of 38% in support versus 44% support in the Peace Index survey; and finally, on the refugee issue, the joint poll has found an average of 40% in support, while the Peace Index poll recorded 28% in support. On the latter issue, it should be noted that the joint poll does not propose that Israel accept the Palestinian Right of Return “in principle,” as the Peace Index poll does—which is probably the main reason for the large disparity on the refugee issue between the two polls. Aside from that, statistics from both the Peace Index poll and the joint polls are fairly comparable. The tough issues the Peace Index poll surveys are indeed beyond what most Israelis are usually willing to concede for a peace agreement; it is only when one combines those compromises in a package that also includes strong security arrangements that overall support rises above 50%.

In his analysis of the August Peace Index poll, Haber points to a sentence in the summary prepared by its compilers that says the results of that month’s poll “strengthen our previous finding that there is currently no sweeping support for the two-state solution and indicate that the Israeli public is not losing sleep over the basic premise of the negotiations that without two states a bi-national reality will emerge.” But when looking at the poll, one finds that only two questions were asked about the two-state solution, and its findings do not indicate any less acceptance of a two-state solution among Israelis than in other polls. The August Peace Index poll asked interviewees 1) whether or not the failure to achieve a two-state solution would lead to a binational state, and 2) whether or not they agree that the two-state solution is dead. On the former, the poll found the Israeli public virtually split, and on the latter it found that a majority of 54% believe that the two-state solution has not yet died. There was no question that asked whether or not interviewees would accept a certain two-state solution; the sentence Haber quotes is therefore misleading.

On the Palestinian side, the idea that a majority or a very significant amount of Palestinians support a two-state solution has also been hotly contested. In February 2007, for example, the website The Electronic Intifada reported a poll published by Near East Consulting that found 70% of Palestinians in support of a one-state solution. And indeed, upon looking up the poll (seen in chart form in Figure 5) on the Near East Consulting website, one finds that when asked whether they support or oppose “a one-state solution in historic Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal rights and responsibilities”, 70.4% of Palestinians said they support this scenario, whereas only 29.6% responded that they oppose it:

Figure 5: February 2007 Near East Consulting Poll[17]

In addition, the survey reported that about three quarters of the Palestinian public believe Israel does not have the right to exist. The survey also registered one of the lowest levels of support among the Palestinian public for Hamas to change its position that Israel should be eliminated (this question was asked often in Near East Consulting polls), with just a slight majority—50.8% to 49.2%—responding that Hamas should change its stance.[18]

However, the cited poll has internal contradictions, and it is problematic to look at the question about a one-state solution in a vacuum. For instance, in a different question within the same survey, interviewees were asked whether or not they support or oppose a peace settlement with Israel. The poll found that 70.3% of Palestinians support and only 29.7% oppose a peace agreement—almost the exact opposite of the findings for the question on a one-state solution. Furthermore, when interviewees were asked whether Hamas should “use all of its efforts to reach a peace agreement with Israel,” a remarkable 63.1% responded in the affirmative, while only 36.9% responded in the negative. These results are consistent with other Near East Consulting polls conducted over the past several years.

A poll published in November 2007 (just several months later) by Near East Consulting provided more interesting twists. As seen in Figure 6, it found that a majority of Palestinians prefer a two-state solution to the conflict:

Figure 6: November 2007 Near East Consulting Poll Results[19]

The November 2007 poll also found that a majority of 69% of Palestinians oppose Hamas’s position on the elimination of Israel, a number more consistent with numerous other polls conducted by Near East Consulting.[20]

Nevertheless, Near East Consulting polls conducted in April 2008[21] and May 2009[22] each found that a majority of 55% to 70% of Palestinians support both a two-state and a one-state solution to the conflict (two questions were asked in each poll, one about a one-state solution and another about a two-state solution[23] ). This lends credence to the idea that Palestinians do support a one-state solution, yet it fleshes out a larger trend: Palestinians usually accept the two-state solution as well. A poll conducted by Near East Consulting in July 2008[24] that found about 65% of Palestinians in support of “two states for two peoples”(emphasis added) is notable in this vein because it seems to demonstrate that the lion’s share of Palestinians who were found to support “two states” in the other polls understand that this would entail Israel retaining its strong Jewish majority in a final peace agreement.

Finally, the Near East Consulting polls also consistently show that a large majority of Palestinians do not believe Israel has the right to exist. Yet, as seen in those same polls (and in many others), surveys also show that Palestinians are likely willing to reconcile themselves to Israel’s existence in the form of a two-state solution. Crucially, Palestinians may not have to accept Israel’s right to exist in order to accept its simple existence.

Another poll that complicates the picture was conducted jointly by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO) and the The Israel Project (TIP) in 2011. It found that 66% of Palestinians believe that the real Palestinian national goal should be to start with a two-state solution but then work towards making the whole area one Palestinian state. Some observers have dubbed this the “two-stage” (as opposed to two-state) solution, wherein the Palestinians make tactical concessions in the short term in order to conquer the Jewish state and turn it into an Arab state in the long term. Interviewees were also asked whether or not they agree with President Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.” 34% of Palestinians accepted this idea, while 61% opposed it. Nevertheless, a contradiction appears within the survey: responding to a different question, a majority of Palestinians said they accept the idea of two states based on the 1967 lines for peace.

So on the one hand, the survey showed that Palestinians only tactically want to temporarily accept a two-state solution when presented with the idea of doing so, but on the other hand it showed that when asked about the 1967 lines in return for peace, there is also acceptance of this idea (which roughly reflects the findings of the Near East Consulting polls). It may also be noted that the TIP/PCPO poll only asked interviewees whether they want the solution to the conflict to be based on two states, not whether they would accept it (as is done in the joint polls).

A PATH FOR PEACE?

When simply asked whether they are willing to accept a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is virtually always majority (or plurality) support among Israelis and usually among Palestinians as well. However, it is the precise details of such a solution that makes maintaining a consensus complicated.

For Palestinians, the question of whether or not a two-state solution is the most desired solution remains open. Yet one near-certain position does emerge from the polls: regardless of whether or not Palestinians want one state or two, anywhere from a large minority (or plurality) to a majority of Palestinians are willing to accept a solution wherein two states, Israel and Palestine, exist side by side in peace. Importantly, however, for the two-state solution to be acceptable to Palestinians the borders will have to be based on the 1967 lines (limited land swaps would be acceptable), East Jerusalem will have to be the capital (with the exception of Jewish neighborhoods), and some refugees must be allowed to return to pre-1967 Israel.

For Israelis, the situation is a bit different. No reputable poll has ever found a majority of Israelis in favor of a one-state solution. The question for Israelis is simply under what conditions a two-state solution is acceptable. The few polls that have found the Israeli public opposed to a two-state solution reveal that security concerns are perhaps the most important deciding factor. Therefore, in order for the two-state solution to be acceptable to Israelis, there must be a strong security arrangement, and the security arrangements should be trumpeted by Israeli officials in order to receive as much support as possible. The polls also show that for Israeli support to stay above 50% the final borders between Israel and Palestine cannot fall precisely on the 1967 lines; there will have to be some land swaps. Finally, Israeli (and Palestinian) support for a two-state solution is highest and most consistent when interviewees are presented with all parts of such a peace plan—not only the most difficult, such as borders, refugees and Jerusalem.

Yet support for a two-state solution with all the details listed above is fragile. It may yet be true that the two-state solution is dead and some of the issues commentators point to are borne out by reality. A major factor could be that the people who accept a two-state solution support it much less than those who oppose it are against it. Just because majorities on both sides may support a peace agreement based on two states does not mean that a strong and determined minority would not be able to prevent it from happening. This could turn out to be the decisive factor for the failure of a two-state solution if it indeed never comes to fruition.

Conversely, it is important to remember that when either the Israeli or Palestinian public is more optimistic about the chances for peace—as they were after Arafat’s death in 2004—support for a two-state solution rises. While pessimism currently reigns, there is no telling when this could change. On the Israeli side, studies showing that public opinion is significantly swayed by the official position of the Israeli government may have a historical precedent: before Israel committed itself to a complete withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in the context of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israelis were largely opposed to such a move. Yet soon after the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin publicly agreed to a full withdrawal in return for peace, Israeli public opinion followed. Interestingly, the Israeli government may hold similar sway on Palestinian public opinion. As mentioned, there is solid evidence that suggests Palestinian support for a two-state solution based on the Clinton Parameters and Geneva Initiative would rise significantly above 50% if the government of Israel officially accepted those or similar plans. These trends further solidify the body of evidence indicating that among all Palestinians and Israelis living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, there is more of a consensus on the two-state solution than there is for any alternative. Both Palestinian and Israeli decision makers would be well to consider this as they barter over their people’s respective futures.

About the author:
Justin Scott Finkelstein is the first Harvey Sicherman Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, an honor conferred on a particularly promising intern-turned-research associate to memorialize the late President of FPRI, who always took a deep interest in helping his interns develop a career in international relations or government service. Finkelstein has an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from NYU.

This article was published at FPRI and may be accessed here.

[1] The Clinton Parameters was a last-ditch effort by President Bill Clinton to bridge the gaps in negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials in 2000 and the Geneva Initiative is an unofficial peace agreement drafted by several top Israeli and Palestinian former or then-current officials in 2003.

[2] The text of the peace plan presented here is largely copied from the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Poll. See http://pcpsr.org/survey/index.html#head3.

[3] Chart taken from Joint Israeli Palestinian Poll, December 2012, http://pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2012/p46ejoint.html.

[4] See “Joint Israeli-Palestinian Poll, June 2013,” http://pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2013/p48ejoint.html. For Palestinians, see “Poll Number (50) ,” Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, December, 2013, http://pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2013/p50e.pdf.

[5] Chart taken from Lydia Saad and Elizabeth Mendes, “Israelis, Palestinians Pro Peace Process, but Not Hopeful,” Gallup, March 21, 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/161456/israelis-palestinians-pro-peace-process-not-hopeful.aspx.

[6] “Israeli and Palestinian Public Opinion on Negotiating a Final Status Peace Agreement,” The Brookings Institution, December 6, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2013/12/06%20public%20opinion%20israel%20palestine/israel%20palestine%20opinion%20poll%202.pdf.

[7] Akiva Eldar, “Most Israelis Back Arab Peace Initiative,” Al-Monitor, May 27, 2013, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/most-israelis-back-arab-peace-initiative.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter).

[8] The poll also found that a strong majority of 60% of Palestinians think the Palestinians leadership should reject any American attempt to force them to accept the proposal, which has significant implications as well.

[9] Chart taken from “Polls,” S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, http://centerpeace.org/polls/.

[10] “Perceptions and Positions Regarding the Consequences of Attaining/Not Attaining a Peace Agreement with the Palestinians,” Midgam Research and Consulting, November 2013. It may also be noted that an additional question in this survey found that Israelis are split on whether or not the agreement put to a referendum would receive majority support, with 50% of Israelis believing it would and 50% believing it would not. This may exemplify the level of pessimism among the Israeli public about the possibility of actually reaching a peace agreement.

[11] Yehuda Ben Meir and Olena Bagno-Moldavsky, “The Voice of the People: Israeli Public Opinion on National Security 2012,” The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), April 2013, http://d26e8pvoto2x3r.cloudfront.net/uploadimages/systemfiles/memo126e%20(2)410001833.pdf. See pp. 77-78 for statistics. Surveys referred to were conducted in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2012.

[12] Chart taken from “Poll No. 79, March 2013 – Reconciliation, Obama Visit and Security Coordination,” April 10, 2013, http://jmcc.org/documentsandmaps.aspx?id=861.

[13] Chart adapted from “Results of an Opinion Poll: Negotiations, Evaluation of Government and Elections,” Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), January 2, 2014, http://awrad.org/page.php?id=nUJi6KP8Jsa9850458AxjqZP9J5Si.

[14] April 2012 Near East Consulting (NEC) survey, http://neareastconsulting.com/press/2012/April2012-PR-EN.pdf.

[15] See The Israel Democracy Institute Peace Index Polls, Year 2013, http://peaceindex.org/indexYearsEng.aspx?num=20.

[16] Jerry Haber, “Reading Lustick Carefully,” The Daily Beast, September 20, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/20/rereading-lustick-carefully.html.

[17] Chart taken from Near East Consulting, General Monthly Survey, February 2007, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/all/p22/out_freq_q27.php.

[18] See Near East Consulting, Palestinian Peace Pulse, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/peace/22/.

[19] Chart taken from Near East Consulting, General Monthly Survey, November 2007, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/peace/211/out_freq_q21.php.

[20] See Near East Consulting, General Monthly Survey, Online Poll Results, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/all/results.php.

[21] Near East Consulting, General Monthly Survey, April 2008, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/all/p34/#Peace.

[22] Near East Consulting, “NEC’s monthly monitor of Palestinian perceptions towards politics and economics,” May-June 2009, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/all/files/2009/pppmay09final.pdf.

[23] In both polls, the results are presented under the phrases “level of support for a two state solution” and “level of support for a one state solution,” respectively. The exact question presented to interviewees is not included.

[24] Near East Consulting, General Monthly Survey, July 2008, http://neareastconsulting.com/surveys/all/p37/out_freq_is5.php.

The article An Opening For Peace: Israelis, Palestinians And The Two-State Solution – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By CNA

L.A. Archbishop José H. Gomez has called for “interim measures” such as a moratorium on immigration raids and help for undocumented minors in order to bypass immigration reform’s apparent “political dead end.”

“These two proposals are no substitute for true immigration reform — but they would make a big difference in the lives of millions of our neighbors,” Archbishop Gomez said in his Nov. 21 column for the Los Angeles archdiocese’s newspaper The Tidings.

He voiced disappointment in the House of Representatives’ recent decision not to move forward with immigration reform proposals at the current time.

Saying the interim measures would help “ease suffering,” the archbishop called on Congress to approve a moratorium on deportations and immigration raids and arrests, except for violent criminals.

“Since 2008, our government has deported nearly two million people and nearly a half million more are locked up in immigration detention centers,” he said, emphasizing that these are “real people.”

“One in every four persons who is being arrested or deported is being ripped out of their homes — taken away from their children, their wives and husbands, all their relatives,” the archbishop said.

He added that two-thirds of the 11 million undocumented immigrants have been living in the U.S. for at least a decade.

“The vast majority pose no criminal danger to our community. Just the opposite,” he said. “They are going to church and working alongside us, paying taxes, making our country and our communities stronger.”

Archbishop Gomez said the U.S. should also help the “dreamers,” children born in a foreign country but brought to the U.S. by their immigrant parents when they were young. Their name comes from the proposed federal DREAM Act, which would regularize their status.

“It’s cruel, and it serves no purpose, to keep denying these kids any legal status,” he said. “They’ve been here their whole lives. It’s time we welcome them as citizens and give them the opportunities they need to help our country grow.”

He said a just society “cannot punish innocent children for the crimes of their parents.”

The archbishop emphasized that these proposals are not a substitute for “true immigration reform” but would make a “big difference in the lives of millions of our neighbors.”

True reform, he said, would provide “a generous path to citizenship” for the undocumented.

“A just and compassionate society can’t allow an underclass of people to keep growing at the margins of our society, living in constant fear of arrest, without rights or reasons to hope,” he said, urging continued prayers for the United States and its leaders.

He concluded by encouraging Catholics to ask the Virgin Mary to “give us the courage to always do what is right and just.”

The article Archbishop Gomez: Avoid ‘Dead End’ On Immigration Reform appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By COHA

By Ronn Pineo

Latin America is the most dangerous region in the world, and the situation is getting worse, a lot worse. According to a recent World Bank study, over the past two decades nearly every region in the world has grown safer or at least stayed the same, except, that is, Latin America. [1] Latin America holds eight percent of the world’s population but suffers 40 percent of the world’s homicides and 60 percent of the kidnappings. [2] The murder rate in Latin America is 26 per 100,000. In Europe it is nine. [3]

Of the 50 most murderous cities in the world, 41 are located in Latin America. [4] Mexico’s Acapulco ranked third, with 113 murders per 100,000 in population, behind the Latin American cities of Caracas, Venezuela, placing second at 134, and San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with 187, winning the dubious honor as the most dangerous city in the world. [5]

Mexico has an overall homicide rate of 22 murders per 100,000 people per year, an elevated rate, although not as high as its neighbors. According to a Interpol study, from 1998 to 2009 the homicide rate rose from 24 to 47 in Guatemala, from 30 to 51 in El Salvador, and jumped from 41 to 68 in Honduras. [6] Still, Mexico is dangerous enough for the U.S. Department of State to issue a January 9, 2014 statement “warn[ing] … U.S. citizens about the risk of traveling in Mexico due to … carjacking[s], … kidnapping[s], and … [other] violent crimes.” [7]

Not all of Mexico is unsafe, just some of it. As Harvard scholar Viridiana Ríos has correctly pointed out, the illegal drug cartels run their violent operations in less than a third of all Mexican municipal districts. [8] The carnage is concentrated: more than eight of ten homicides in Mexico take place in contested cartel zones along the border and in the states of Sinaloa and Guerrero. [9] Some cities are worse than others: five of the ten most violent cities in Latin America are in Mexico, including Acapulco, Ciudad Juárez, Torreón, Chihuahua, and Durango. [10] Ríos is right, much of Mexico is peaceful, but parts of Mexico are very dangerous, and some places one really should avoid no matter what. As reporter Dawn Paley warned, driving “a new SUV [in parts of the northern Mexico] … is akin asking to be held up.” [11]

The War on Illegal Drugs, Mexican Style

The official tally in the 2006 presidential election proclaimed Enrique Calderón of the conservative Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party or PAN) the winner, albeit by a narrow 200,000 vote margin. Losing candidate Andres Manuel López Obredor of the left-wing Partido del la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD) leveled angry allegations of election fraud and organized massive protest rallies in downtown Mexico City. Calderón desperately needed to change the conversation, and made a fateful decision to launch an all-out war on the illegal drug cartels.

The situation that Calderón confronted had been long in the making. The illegal drug trade in Mexico had taken off 1960s with commerce in marijuana, and in the 1980s Mexico had become a much more important player in the cocaine business after the United States Drug Enforcement Agency cracked down on drug traffickers’ favored transshipment routes from Colombia through the Caribbean and on to Florida. With the Caribbean passage under assault, the route shifted to Mexico. Then, after the North American Free Trade Accord went into effect in 1994, the volume of trade between Mexico and the United States rose dramatically. The U.S.-Mexican frontier became the busiest crossing in the world, with both legal and illegal commerce growing ever upward. [12] While in 2008 less than half of the America’s illegal drugs came up through Central America and into Mexico, today nine of every ten tons of cocaine destined for U.S. users comes in via Mexico. [13] As researcher Stephan Morris notes, “these changes funneled vast fortunes to the Mexican [illegal drug] organizations which, in turn, heightened the degree of competition among them … These changes multiplied the number of organizations, raised the stakes, and, in the process, made them more violent.” [14]

Calderón’s strategy to win the war on illegal drugs was a surge, deploying over 40,000 soldiers across Mexico. [15] The cartels responded to Calderón’s offensive by fighting back, and levels of violence directed against the government exploded. What followed was a sea of blood. During President Calderón’s time in office, 2006-2012, Mexico’s murder rate tripled, with nearly three-quarters of homicides drug-war related. [16] The occasional government successes in killing drug kingpins served mainly to create leadership vacuums inside the cartels, triggering fierce internecine conflict. In the ensuing slaughter over 60,000 have died and another 26,000 have gone missing in the violence brought on by Calderón’s assault on the drug cartels. [17] Hammering the cartels is like hammering mercury.

Stability, Predictability, and Corruption

Law enforcement officials in Mexico have long been forced to make a choice offered to them by the cartels, plata (silver) or plomo (lead)–take a bribe or take a bullet. When police officers earn but $6,000 USD a year in official salary, as they do in Mexico City, the choice is not really a difficult one. [18]

While the illegal drug trade exploded in volume and violence in the 1980s, with time matters started to get sorted out. The cartels showed a willingness to put making money over killing people, for as violent as they can be, the drug lords understand that warfare is bad for business. [19] Despite common perceptions about the innately violent proclivities of illegal drug trafficking enterprises, they are not necessarily so if cooperation between the cartels and with the government can be established in some manner. And this is what happened in Mexico.

The rise of the trade in illegal drugs came during the long the reign of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI), which had consolidated its hold over Mexico and constructed a single-party state. PRI had a long-standing propensity for bribe taking, and this characteristic proved an attractive asset in arranging things with the emerging cartels. The PRI’s stranglehold on political power allowed it to organize and centralize cartel bribe payments. [20] As a rule, the cartels only had to pay off the head honchos in the PRI and law enforcement, with the leading PRI cronies and top-ranking police officials raking in the biggest shares of the loot. This arrangement seems to please both parties. Together, the PRI and the cartels created a business atmosphere that was more stable and predictable for the burgeoning trade in illegal drugs.

Under the PRI system the cartels were relatively well behaved. As George Grayson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, under the PRI-cartel pact the “drug dealers behaved discretely, showed deference to public figures, spurned kidnapping, … [and] helped the hegemonic PRI discredit its opponents by linking them to narco-trafficking.” [21] “When conflict among [illegal drug trafficking] organizations emerged,” researcher Stephan Morris adds, “state governors, under the direction of central authorities, would resolve it.” [22] “This state-sponsored racket,” Morris concludes, “resulted in lower levels of violence: a situation that prevailed well into the 1980s and 1990s.” [23]

However, as Amherst and New York University researchers Arindrajit Dube, Oeindrila Dude, and Omar García-Ponce note, “beginning in the late 1980s … opposition [political] victories first occurred in local elections, culminating ultimately in a national national-level democratic transition in 2000,” bringing a “marked rise in political competition.” [24] Soon “electoral turnover … encourage[ed] … [drug cartel] rivals to expand into areas where they previously did not operate,” leading to “greater territorial contestation and fighting.” [25] As Dube, Dube, and García-Ponce conclude, the “rising political competition reduced the ability of drug cartels to bribe PRI [officials] …, fueling fighting with rival cartels and the state.” [26]

With the one party system breaking down the PRI-cartel pact began to unravel. Now the drug lords had to hand out many more bribes, and the return on the money they laid out became much more uncertain. Rival illegal drug organizations returned to fighting over previously settled and PRI-backed cartel boundaries. Fragmentation followed: Mexico had six cartels in 2006, eight by 2009, and then broke apart into many more after that as fighting between cartels intensified. [27]

Other problems emerged. Corrupt officers weeded out during government crackdowns often become job applicants for full-time work for the very cartels for which they had previously worked part-time. Meanwhile, the special units created to combat illegal drugs ended up, sooner or later, joining forces with the cartels. As Stephen Morris concludes, “increased enforcement heighten[ed] … the degree of violence.” [28] Unfortunately, “launching a simultaneous attack on all is beyond the state’s capacity,” he adds. [29]

U.S. Arms Sales to Mexico

Several other factors have contributed generously to the rising violence in Mexico. One is the availability of firearms. The United States is by far the largest manufacturer of weapons in the world and is also the most active in the international trade in firearms. In the U.S. gun enthusiasts enjoy a largely unregulated environment for the purchase, trading, transportation, and carrying of all manner of guns, ranking second in the world, after Yemen, in this regard. [30]

Not surprisingly, the Latin America countries in closest proximity to the U.S. free market in firearms find it easier to obtain guns, even if their own laws ban or restrict weapons sales. The tracing of weapons used in crimes reveals that 8 of 10 crime guns in Jamaica were purchased in Florida, while 9 of 10 in Mexico were purchased in U.S. border states, especially Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. [31]

In an effort to staunch gun violence, U.S. president Bill Clinton in 1994 signed into law a ban on the sale of assault weapons, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The law was written with a ten-year sunset clause, and the ban expired in 2004. However, in California state-level restrictions remained in place after the expiration of the federal law. For researchers Dube, Dube, and García-Ponce, this situation created a sort of natural experiment: with the assault weapons ban lapsing in the border states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, but not in California, they could study the variable impact on violence levels in adjacent sections in Mexico. [32]

Dube, Dube, and García-Ponce found that the lifting of the U.S. federal ban led to a “substantial increases in homicides … tied specifically to guns” in the non-California Mexican border zones, with murders rising “60% more in municipios at the non-California entry ports” in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. [33] Mexico suffered “at least 238 additional deaths annually in the area located within 100 miles of the border ports” in the non-California border zones in Mexico. Today the Mexican cartels routinely load up on U.S. military-grade weapons with larger clips. The easy availability of U.S. weapons made for war has transformed much of Northern Mexico a war zone.

The Lack of Respect for the Rule of Law

One key contributor to high levels of violence in Mexico and Latin America is the widespread lack of faith in the fairness and honesty of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. A recent public opinion survey by the leading Latin American polling firm, Latinobarómetro, revealed that more than half of Latin Americans had “little” or “no” confidence in the police, and just one in five thought that poor people had equal access to the justice system. [34] A study by Benjamin Widner, Manuel Reyes-Loya, and Carl Enomoto of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, concluded that the number one cause of rising violence in Mexico was the defective judicial system. For lawbreakers, they found, “the probability of getting caught and punished … is low.” [35]

Criminals in Mexico operate with near total abandon. Only about one in four crimes in Mexico are ever reported to the police, either because people have come to the conclusion that the police can never to trusted, or else because experience has taught them that contacting the authorities is just a waste of time. Worse, only 7 percent of reported crimes in Mexico proceed on to court. Most cases never go on from there; overall, only about 3 percent of lawbreakers ever come to trial in Mexico. Many of these, of course, are not convicted. [36] Whether due to police and prosecutor corruption, incompetence, lack of funding and resources, understaffing, or poor training, nearly no one is ever jailed for committing a crime in Mexico. On the off chance that a violent criminal is convicted and actually sent to prison, it is relatively easy to escape. On December 17, 2010 151 inmates broke out of the Nuevo Laredo prison, and then on July 15 the next year another 61 ran off from the same facility. [37] In Mexico this sort of thing happens all the time.

Given all this, for potential law breakers the decision-making balance is tipped toward criminal behavior. Just do it, there is almost no chance that you’ll get caught and punished. Crime pays. As researcher José Luis Solís González of the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila put it: “impunidad es casi absoluta (there is near absolute impunity).” [38]

“Barbarians” in a World of Inequality

Demography is also an important factor in the rise of violence. Most lawbreakers, throughout history and around the world, are young men. It is not an accident that prison populations are nearly all male and young, for it has always and everywhere been so. Demographers routinely use a shorthand expression for this group: the “barbarians.”

In Latin America today the most violent nations tend to be those with the largest cohorts of “barbarians.” Still, several social institutions have a proven record at getting “barbarians” to behave. If young men are surrounded by a loving and watchful home community, if the church exerts a strong moralizing influence, and, above all, if “barbarians” marry, crime will go down. Married men commit five times fewer crimes than unmarried ones do. [39] But the best solution for getting good conduct out of the “barbarians” is to age them. As men get older they usually find they just have less energy for crime. Past 35 years of age further criminal conduct becomes rare.

When violent crimes do take place, it is usually “barbarian” on “barbarian.” [40] As researcher Pierre Salama of the University of Paris notes, in Brazil young men between the ages of 15 and 19 suffer nearly double the national homicide rate. [41] In Mexico, according to the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization, the male homicide rate in 2002 was 29.6 per 100,000 while the female homicide rate was 3.1, a ratio of nearly 10 to 1. [42]

For these young men, unemployment and poverty can make becoming a criminal or a cartel a foot soldier more attractive options to them. Too often they can see no other employment opportunities. Research shows that as the job market improves, crime does go down. [42]

But although poverty is an important factor, inequality is more important. Latin America has the greatest income inequality of any region in the world. Every day young males living in poverty in Latin America see dangled before them the products that decorate the lives of the wealthy. Television ads teach these young men what they are supposed to want, but their day-to-day struggle for survival in the slums teaches them that they will never possess these goods. As researchers Roberto Briceño-León of the Universidad Central de Venezuela; Andrés Villaveces of the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia; and Alberto Concha-Eastman of University of North Carolina sum up the research findings, “in areas where wealth and extreme poverty cohabit, violence tends to occur more frequently.” [43]

The Latin American pandillas (youth gangs) are formed by adolescents who live in a world that treats them like human trash. Joining a gang gives them power. They have the power to make you afraid, the power to make you obey, they wield the power to kill you. As one incarcerated Brazilian gang member, proudly rejecting conventional morality, explained, “we are different than you … we are a new species.” [44] This is half right. We have always had ego-centric, self-justifying sociopaths living amongst us.

It is worth remembering that most young adults in Latin America, no matter what their living circumstances, do not become criminals. It is these individuals, and not those who would prey upon them, who show the most dignity and courage in their lives.

The Emergence of Mexican Self-Defense Groups

Beginning in 2013 self-defense groups have formed in Mexico, especially in the states of Michoacán, Jalisco, Chihuahua, and Veracruz. This too may be a by-product of the war on illegal drugs. Cartel fragmentation has led to the appearance of many new gangs, ones that are too small and weak to grab a part of the lucrative trade in illegal drugs. As a consequence, small gangs have turned to more accessible, but lower-profit crimes, focusing their efforts on car-jacking, kidnapping, and petty extortion. From 2007 to 2010, as President Calderón’s war on illegal drugs moved into full assault mode, “bank robberies increased 90 percent, extortion 100 percent, car theft with violence 108 percent, and kidnappings 188 percent,” Mexican analyst Guerrero Gutiérrez reports. [45] The situation for law-abiding people became intolerable, and the government, preoccupied with high-profile assaults on cartels, did almost nothing to crack down on rising crime. Ordinary people decided they had to do something on their own.

The self-defense groups have seldom taken on the drug cartels, focusing instead on punishing the small gangs and local criminals that carry out robberies, assaults, and rapes. These community-protection organizations only go after the cartels when some of their members start to engage in crimes of violence against citizens. Most Mexicans do not care about the illegal drug trade unless the violence is turned against them. Drug use is mostly viewed as a U.S. problem, and producing for that market is not regarded as wrong.

One advantage of the self-defense groups is that they know the local population and the lay of the land, something that national level police or military forces sorely lack. However, the danger with the formation of self-defense groups is that the can sometimes morph into cartels. After all, the notoriously violent drug cartel La familia Michoacana started as a self-defense group. Although his view is self-serving, the head of the Los Caballeros Templarios cartel (the Knights Templar), Servando Gomez, is already claiming that the self-defense groups are allied with rival drug cartels. [46] There is some evidence that he might be right about this, for the groups have fairly impressive arsenals of weapons for such limited resources. For the moment the self-defense forces are succeeding in carving out some islands of relative security for long-beleaguered Mexicans. Nevertheless, the emergence of self-defense groups is fraught with potential dangers, from out-of-control vigilantism, to cooptation by major drug cartels.

The Role of the United States

While the United States government has expressed alarm over spiking levels of violence in Mexico and Latin America, its policies have served to aggravate the situation. The easy available of weapons from the United States continues to be a significant concern to the Mexican government. In a May 2010 address before a joint session of the U.S. Congress Mexican President Calderón pleaded for a reinstatement of the U.S. assault weapon ban. Mexico’s highly restrictive gun laws do little good when weapons steadily flood in from the United States. Unfortunately, there is at present no chance that the U.S. Congress will move on this question, even in the wake of repeated massacres.

U.S. policy has contributed to violence in the region in other ways. The United States brought considerable pressure on Latin American nations to adopt neoliberal, free-market economic policies, and the resulting government programs have served to retard job growth and hindered the reduction of income inequality in Latin America.

Moreover, two of the most violent gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and the 18th Street gang (M 18), were actually made in America. These gangs started in Los Angeles, but when law enforcement arrested gang members for any criminal conduct, U.S. policy called for their deportation if they were not U.S. citizens. If they were not born in the U.S. they were not, for many had come to the U.S. as infants when their parents fled El Salvador or Honduras. A large population of non-U.S. citizen criminal gang members were shipped out of the country and dumped into El Salvador and Honduras. The results of this U.S. policy have been horrific, dramatically raising the level of violence in both of these nations.

Worst of the all, the U.S. continues to mindlessly pursue its failed war on illegal drugs, even after many in the hemisphere long ago recognized the folly of these policies. When the United States recently provided $1.4 billion USD to Mexico to beef up its military response to illegal drugs, it further shoved the nation in precisely the wrong direction.

According to U.S. Department of Justice estimates, the Mexican cartels collectively take in some $39 billion a year. [47] But if the business environment were to shift, if the drug trade were no longer illegal, then the cartels would either have to adapt or they would die. It is possible that they could double-down on their other criminal economic activities and move more deeply into pirated software and human trafficking. Still, the cartel’s real money comes from illegal drugs, not from peddling knock-off hip hop CDs or from trying to squeeze a few extra pesos out of impoverished migrants looking to hire a coyote to help them across the U.S. border. The cartels are, after all, in the business of making money, not just making money illegally. Decriminalization of the drug trade would change the business climate for the cartels. Do this and we might well see them become more intent on making a killing in the stock market than ordering a mass killing along the border, less eager to cut throats than to hatch cutthroat business deals.

But without this basic change in U.S. policy, the violence will continue.

Ronn Pineo, COHA Senior Analyst and Chair of the Department of History, Towson University

References

[1] Elaine Denny and Barbara F. Walter, “Explaining High Murder Rates in Latin America: It’s Not Drugs,” Political Violence @ a Glance, August 30, 2012.

[2] “Latin America Has World’s Highest Murder Rate,” Latin American Herald Tribune January 26, 2014.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Edwin Mora, “Study: 41 of World’s 50 Most Violent Cities in Latin America,” Breitbart, January 20, 2014.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Pierre Salama, “Homicidios, ¿es ineluctable la violencia en América Latina?” Frontera norte 25:49 (January-June 2013), 10.

[7] U.S. Department of State, “Travel Warning for Mexico,” January 9, 2014 http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/alertswarnings/mexico-travel-warning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ca/travelwarnings+($%7BTravelWarnings%7D).

[8] Viridiana Ríos, “Who Started the Mexican Drug War?” Harvard Kennedy School Review 13 (May 2, 2013), 21.

[9] Salama, 11.

[10] Ibid, 12.

[11] Dawn Paley, “Off the Map in Mexico: In the Wake of a Militarized Drug War, the Power of Cartels is More Pervasive than Ever,” The Nation May 23, 2011, 22.

[12] Evelyn Krache Morris, “Think Again: Mexican Drug Cartels,” Foreign Policy 203 (November/December 2013): 30-33.

[13] Gabriel Marcella, “The Transformation of Security in Latin America: A Cause for Common Action,” Journal of International Affairs 66:2 (Spring/Summer 2013), 72.

[14] Stephen D. Morris, “Drug Trafficking, Corruption, and Violence in Mexico: Mapping the Linkages,” Trends in Organized Crime 16 (2013), 209.

[15] Paley, 20; Ríos, 21.

[16] Patricio Asfusa-Heim and Ralph Espach, “The Rise of Mexico’s Self-Defense Forces,” Foreign Affairs 92:4 (July/August 2013): 143-150; Arindrajit Dube, Oeindrila Dude, and Omar García-Ponce, “Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico,” American Political Science Review 107:3 (August 2013), 399.

[17] E. Morris, 30-33.

[18] Benjamin Widner, Manuel L. Reyes-Loya, and Carl E. Enomoto, “Crimes and Violence in Mexico: Evidence from Panel Data,” The Social Science Journal 48 (2011), 605.

[19] S. Morris, 199-200.

[20] Ibid, 196.

[21] Quoted in S. Morris, 206-207.

[22] S. Morris, 207.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Dube, et al., 400.

[25] Ibid, 400.

[26] Ibid, 398.

[27] Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, “At the Root of Violence,” Washington Office on Latin America,” translation by Charlie Roberts, September 10, 2011, 3.

[28] S. Morris, 213.

[29] Ibid, 214

[30] Dube, et al, 402.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid, 397.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Salama, 8.

[35] Widner, et al., 604.

[36] Ibid, 605, 611.

[37] Garry Moore, “Mexico’s Massacre Era: Gruesome Killings, Porous Prisons,” World Affairs (September/October 2012): 61-67.

[38] José Luis Solís González, “Neoliberalism y crimen organizado en México: El surgimiento del Estado narco,” Frontera norte 25:50 (July-December 2013), 21.

[39] Widner, et al., 606.

[40] Roberto Briceño-León, Andrés Villaveces, and Alberto Concha-Eastman, “Understanding the Uneven Distribution of the Incidence of Homicide in Latin America,” International Journal of Epidemiology 37 (2008), 753; Salama, 14.

[41] Salama, 15.

[42] Widner, et al., 606.

[43] Briceño-León, et al., 755.

[44] Salama, 20.

[45] Guerrero Gutiérrez, 17.

[46] Jerónimo Mohar and Benoît Gomis, “Rise of Self-Defense Groups Highlights Mexico’s State-Level Security Challenges,” World Politics Review January 24, 2014.

[47] E. Morris, 30-33.

The article Violence In Mexico And Latin America – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Eurasia Review

In this week’s address, President Obama said this is a year of action, and he will do everything he can to restore opportunity for all. The President already lifted the wages for federal contract workers, and he calls on the American people to tell Congress to finish the job by boosting the federal minimum wage for all workers to $10.10 and give America a raise.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
February 22, 2014

Hi, everybody.

Restoring the idea of opportunity for all requires a year of action from all of us. Wherever I can act on my own, I will – and whenever I can ask more Americans to help, I’ll do that too.

In my State of the Union Address, for example, I asked more business leaders to take action to raise their employees’ wages. Because even though our economy is growing, and our businesses have created about eight and a half million new jobs over the past four years, average wages have barely budged.

So it’s good news that, earlier this week, one of America’s largest retailers, The Gap, decided to raise wages for its employees beginning this year. Their decision will benefit about 65,000 workers in the U.S. That means more families will be able to raise their kids, finish their studies, or keep up on their bills with a little less financial stress and strain.

Gap’s CEO explained their decision simply – he said, “[It’s] right for our brands, good for our people, and beneficial to our customers.” And he’s right – raising Americans’ wages isn’t just a good deed; it’s good business and good for our economy. It helps reduce turnover, it boosts productivity, and it gives folks some more money to spend at local businesses.

And as a chief executive myself, that’s why I took action last week to lift more workers’ wages by requiring federal contractors to pay their employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour.

In the year since I first asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, six states have passed laws to raise theirs, and more states are working on it as we speak. But only Congress can finish the job and lift Americans’ wages across the country.

Right now, there’s a bill before Congress that would boost America’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. That’s easy to remember – “ten-ten.” That bill would lift wages for more than 16 million Americans without requiring a single dollar in new taxes or spending. But even though a majority of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans across the country support raising the minimum wage, Republicans in Congress don’t want to give it a vote.

Hardworking Americans deserve better than “no.” Let’s tell Congress to say “yes.” Pass that bill. Give America a raise. Because here in America, no one who works hard should have to live in poverty – and everyone who works hard should have a chance to get ahead.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

The article Obama: Time To Lift The Minimum Wage And Give America A Raise – Transcript appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By RT

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has called the latest developments in the country a coup d’etat, denying speculations of his resignation. He also accused international mediators of not fulfilling their obligations.

“I’m always threatened with ultimatums. I’m not going to leave the country,” Yanukovich said in an interview with local UBR TV channel. “I’m not going to resign. I’m a legitimately elected president.”

The interview with the embattled president was broadcast right after the opposition claimed it had received verbal assurances that Yanukovich was resigning.

But as parliament deputies said they were waiting for the written confirmation on his resignation, the president announced his plans to travel across the country’s southeast, which is “so far, less dangerous.”

“Everything that is happening today is, to a greater degree, vandalism and bandits and a coup d’etat,” Yanukovich said in a televised statement.

On Saturday, Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) held a new emergency session, during which it passed a law on the return to the 2004 constitution without the president’s signature, saying that the president had removed himself from power.

It also appointed a new head of the Ministry of Interior and a new head speaker of the Rada. In addition, parliament ruled to free former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko from prison and set early presidential elections for May 25.

But Yanukovich says the motions passed by parliament are illegitimate, and says he will not sign any of them.

“The decisions that they are now approving are illegal. I won’t sign anything,” he told UBR journalists in Kharkov. “This is not an opposition, these are bandits.”

The president said his car had been shot at while he was traveling to the airport to go to Kharkov.

“But I have no fear. I am overwhelmed by grief for our country. I feel responsibility,” he said.

“I’m doing everything to prevent the bloodshed of the people who are close to me,” Yanukovich stated, referring to his supportive deputies who he said are being threatened, beaten, and targeted by stone-throwing rioters.

He compared the situation in turbulent Ukraine – which is facing its worst political crisis in modern history – to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.

“We now see the same what was [happening] in 1930s, when the Nazis came to power. [They] forbade [political] parties…It’s the same now – [they] ban the party, stalk, beat people, burn down offices,” he said.

Will EU mediators fulfill their responsibilities?

Yanukovich is determined to do whatever it takes to “stop the bloodshed” and protect Ukraine “from a split.” But the president admits: “I still don’t know how I am going to do it.”

The leader has stated that he expects international mediators to fulfill their commitments.

“What we are going to do depends on the reaction from the international community, how they are going to meet their responsibilities,” Yanukovich said. “The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, still legitimate, reported yesterday he was speaking with Europeans, with Poland’s head of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called the US. I hope to hold negotiations in the coming days.”

Yanukovich will call on EU mediators to stop “actions by radicals.”

“I was given guarantees of all the international mediators, with whom I worked. They gave security assurances. I’ll see how they will perform this role,” he said.

On Friday, Yanukovich and opposition leaders signed an EU-brokered agreement on ending the political crisis in the country. While it stipulated five major conditions, the agreement did not give the opposition the power to impose new laws or appointments without presidential approval, though they have attempted to do just that.

Thus the conditions of the deal are being clearly violated. However, the EU – which mediated the deal between the opposition and ruling government – remains quiet.

What the Ukrainian opposition IS NOT fulfilling:

1. Within 48 hours of the signing of this agreement, a special law will be adopted, signed and promulgated, which will restore the Constitution of 2004 including amendments passed until now. Signatories declare their intention to create a coalition and form a national unity government within 10 days thereafter.

2. Constitutional reform, balancing the powers of the President, the government and parliament, will start immediately and be completed in September 2014.

3. Presidential elections will be held as soon as the new Constitution is adopted but no later than December 2014. New electoral laws will be passed and a new Central Election Commission will be formed on the basis of proportionality and in accordance with the OSCE & Venice commission rules.

4. Investigation into recent acts of violence will be conducted under joint monitoring from the authorities, the opposition and the Council of Europe.

Lavrov to EU: Urge opposition to fulfill the deal

On Saturday, the foreign ministers of France, Poland, and Germany – the trio that most actively helped reach the deal between the rival sides in Kiev – admitted that opposition leaders have broken the agreement, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The three EU ministers have spoken separately with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who has voiced concerns over the Ukrainian opposition’s failure to fulfill the conditions of the agreement.

“The opposition not only has failed to fulfill a single of its obligations but is already presenting new demands all the time, following the lead of armed extremists and thugs whose actions pose direct threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty and constitutional order,” Lavrov told the ministers.

Russia’s FM has called on his counterparts to use their influence with the Ukrainian opposition to stop what he described as rampages by its supporters.

“It is time to stop misleading the international community and pretend that today’s Maidan represents the interests of the Ukrainian people,” Lavrov said.

But it seems that German Foreign Minister Steinmeier also has a separate agreement with British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

“Agreed with German Foreign Minister Steinmeier today to support new government in Ukraine and push for vital IMF financial package,” Hague stated on Twitter.

Sergey Lavrov also voiced his concerns in a talk with US Secretary of State John Kerry. The Russian FM told his counterpart that Kiev had been taken over by “illegal extremist groups,” adding that the situation in Ukraine has sharply escalated, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The article Ukraine: Yanukovich Accuses Opposition Of Coup D’Etat appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Maan

Dozens of Israeli settlers attacked private homes and smashed vehicles on Saturday evening in the village of Jeet near Nablus, a PA official said.

Ghassan Daghlas, a PA official who monitors settlement activity in the northern West Bank, said that dozens of settlers from the Israeli outpost of Havat Gilad hurled rocks at local homes and smashed vehicles on the main village road.

Clashes subsequently broke out between settlers and locals, who tried to stop them from attacking the village.

Daghlas said that the settlers attacked local farmers who were planting seedlings near the village on lands they own located close to the illegal Israeli outpost.

Locals confronted the settlers and forced them to leave the village after throwing stones.

The destroyed cars were identified as belonging to Nassim al-Sadda and Awne Nassar.

In 2013, there were 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Over 90 percent of investigations into settler violence by Israeli police fail to lead to an indictment.

More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.

The article Settlers Attack Homes And Smash Vehicles In Jit, Near Nablus appeared first on Eurasia Review.