Central Bank of Greece, Reforms Must Continue
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, FEBRUARY 15 — Greece must carry out its structural reforms in a decisive way and with the support of most of its people, who have understood that the “old regime” cannot continue to exist. So says a statement by the Report of the Central Bank of Greece, on financial policies for the 2010-2011 period, which Governor George Provopoulos handed over today to the President of the Greek Parliament, Filippo Paltsanikos. The 2011 GDP will fall by 3% and possibly somewhat more, while unemployment will rise above 12.5%. The recession has had a negative impact on consumption and investments, and the uncertainty, the increase of the tax rates and the lack of liquidity have possibly led to a more than 18% decrease in investments in 2010. The progress recorded in the economic-financial sector is substantial, but not sufficient. In 2010 the deficit of the State budget fell to 8.4% of GDP against 13.1% in 2009. The report also mentions the Memorandum, signed by the Greek government and the EU-IMF-ECB. This agreement includes the concession of 110 billion euros in aid to Greece, to save its finances. The Memorandum, the report argues, has warded off the collapse of the Greek economy, guaranteeing the necessary financial coverage while the cost of money on the markets was too high. At the same time it has made it possible to make the necessary changes that were decades overdue. The signing of the Memorandum has avoided the creation of serious problems for the economy and the community, which would have caused Greece to pay a higher price than it has to pay now. Moreover, the country has regained part of its credibility on international level.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
China: Food and Housing Prices Push Up Inflation
Overall consumer prices rose 4.9 per cent last month, but food costs 10.3 per cent more. The cost of money is also expected to rise, but banks lent 1.2 trillion yuan last month. For experts, China is in for an “era of structural inflation”.
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) — China’s inflation rose 4.9 per cent last month from a year earlier after a 4.6 per cent gain in December, exceeding the government’s 2011 target for a fourth month in a row. Food prices rose at a faster rate however. Producer-price inflation also quickened to 6.6 per cent from 5.9 per cent. The cost of borrowing is likely to go up as well.
Overall food prices climbed 10.3 per cent last month from a year earlier, after gaining 9.6 per cent in December. Increases varied according to item, probably because of drought and speculation. For example, whilst vegetable prices jumped 2 per cent, fruit prices surged 35 per cent and grain rose 15 per cent. Non-food prices rose instead 2.6 per cent from a year earlier. Housing costs jumped 6.8 per cent in January from a year earlier, the most since August 2008.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) also revised the calculation of the components of the producer-price index, adding about 2,000 products to the basket and adjusting the weightings.
Under the revised weightings, the food component declined by 2.21 percentage points. Clothing, medical costs and telecommunications were also reduced, the NBS said today. Housing-related charges, which include rent and utility costs, were increased by 4.22 percentage points.
“All these numbers indicate that inflationary pressures haven’t abated and China has already entered into an era of structural inflation,” said Liu Li-gang, a Hong Kong-based economist. “This indicates more monetary policy tightening ahead.”
The acceleration reflects higher rents, a 53 per cent surge in money supply in the past two years and increasing domestic demand. In fact, banks handed out more than 1.2 trillion yuan of new credit in January compared with 481 billion in December.
This is why many expect the People’s Bank of China to raise its benchmark one-year lending (which it has already done three times since mid-October), and put more restrictions on bank loans.
Others believe the yuan’s low exchange rate also contributes to inflation by pushing up imported goods.
In the meantime, China has become the world’s No. 2 economy last year after Japan ‘s gross domestic product fell an annualised 1.1 per cent in the fourth quarter, the Japanese government said yesterday. Japan’s nominal GDP last year came to US$ 5.4742 trillion, less than China’s total of US$ 5.8786 trillion, the Cabinet Office said yesterday
According to the International Monetary Fund, the Chinese economy will grow 9.6 per cent this year, six times faster than Japan . However, China’s average income stands at 20 per cent of that of Japan.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt-Israel: Economy Also Plays Key Role in Peace
(ANSAmed) — JERUSALEM, FEBRUARY 17 — Peace is a good thing for the government coffers, and Egypt’s financial woes could be a sufficient reason to maintain good relations with their Israeli neighbours. Israel is following the developments of the post-Mubarak era with concern: they fear that the future Egyptian government could put the “cold peace” that has been in place between the two countries since 1979 in jeopardy. The future seems to be mired in uncertainty, but the Israelis can find a reason for cautious optimism by looking at the commercial ties between the two nations. For example, today’s Egypt, which is bogged down in the economic crisis, cannot afford to cause tens of thousands of Egyptians employed in Israeli textile industries in Egypt to lose their jobs. “We can be optimistic,” confirmed the Director of the Division of Foreign Trade and International Relations of the Manufacturers’ Association of Israel. “Business provides a good foundation for diplomatic stability,” he said while speaking with ANSAmed. “Of course, commercial relations between Egypt and Israelis in the private sector are limited: in terms of exports we are talking about 150 million dollars in 2010, about 0.5% of the total of Israel’s exports. But there are also other elements to keep in mind. Five years ago Egypt, Israel and the USA signed an agreement stating that Egyptian products containing at least 10.5% Israeli materials can be exported to the U.S. tax-free. Thanks to this programme, Egyptian exports to the U.S. are valued at over one billion dollars tax-free,” added the official. Israeli investors, added Catarivas, “are currently worried, but no more than other foreign investors. Israeli capital creates work and wellbeing in that country: if the government takes the prosperity of the people into account, it will not make decisions that can harm them”. The most important area of business between the two states is Israel’s natural gas imports from Egypt through a gas pipeline that runs through the Sinai Peninsula, built by the East Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG), an Israeli-Egyptian joint venture. Supplies have been cut off following an explosion that damaged part of the piping, but EMG assured: “Supplies will resume by the end of the month.” Last year Cairo sold 300 million dollars worth of fossil fuels to the Israelis, and according to recent estimates the volume of this business could reach one billion dollars in 2015.
“Today, 40% of Israel’s natural gas is imported from Egypt,” pointed out Catarivas.
The Camp David Accords also meant being able to save on military expenses. “After the peace agreement with Egypt, Israel reduced their defence spending from 30% to 7%,” said Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general and former national security advisor. After 1979, military spending in Egypt was decreased from 36% to 6%, and Tel Aviv hopes that Egypt will continue to prefer butter over guns.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Bill to Prevent State Assets Sale, Papandreou
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, FEBRUARY 16 — The harsh reactions to the possibility of the sale of assets held by the Greek state in the attempt to reduce public debt — supported by EU, ECB and IMF representatives at the end of their mission in Athens — has forced Prime Minister George Papandreou to intervene, announcing the presentation of a draft law prohibiting the sale of state property except for in particular cases and only following a ruling by Parliament. “Greece,” said Papandreou at a Public Education Ministry demonstration, “invests, valorises and protects its property, which belongs only to citizens. Our government has inherited a heavy weight from the past and has the will and the determination to free Greece from it.” Opposition parties do not believe the prime minister’s words and accuse him of using media tactics. “The prime minister,” said Antonis Samaras, leader of Greece’s main opposition party, Nea Dimocratia, “is the sole one responsible for the subjection and dependence of the Memorandum,” the name given to the document on the basis of the aid granted to the country by the EU-ECB-IMF ‘troika’.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Obama ‘Muddles Message’ On Muslim Brotherhood
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is sending mixed messages on its position toward the Muslim Brotherhood and its assessments of the group’s goals, as it struggles to articulate a policy on the largest and most organized Egyptian opposition group.
“It is hard, at this point, to point to a specific agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood as a group,” US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Wednesday, when asked about its stance on Iran, weapons smuggling by Hamas and Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.
Pressed on the last point, Clapper finally said, “They are not in favor of the treaty.”
His comments comes after criticism he received last week for asserting that the organization is “largely secular.”
On Wednesday he said he had been misunderstood and that he was trying to say that the group tries to work within the framework of a secular government.
At the same time, CIA Director Leon Panetta and FBI Director Robert Mueller, who appeared alongside Clapper at Wednesday’s hearing, described the group in more ominous tones.
“Within the Muslim Brotherhood, there are extremist elements that we have to pay attention to,” Panetta said. “We have to watch very carefully to make sure that they are not able to exert their influence on the direction of governments in that region.”
Mueller said that some members in the Muslim Brotherhood have “supported terrorism.”
Since the unrest that unseated Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak hit the country, the US has stated that its policy is not to speak to members of the Islamist organization, of which the US terror-designated Hamas is an offshoot, at the same time that it calls for nonsecular groups to be included in conversations about a new, fully representative government.
US President Barack Obama himself, speaking right after Mubarak abdicated last Friday, stressed that “this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table.”
“The administration has made contradictory and at times patently incorrect statements about the group, leading to confusion about how the administration sees the group and to speculation that the administration does not have a position or a unified position on how it sees the group,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“I think they’ve been caught off guard,” he said of the administration. “It suggests that they have not given enough thought to the issue.”
Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood itself had been caught off guard by the rapid removal of the repressive regime that had dominated its members’ lives for decades. That has meant the group has yet to adapt to the new political reality and formulate its goals.
Now that it doesn’t have to focus exclusively on survival and identifying pressure points in the regime, Byman said, “I don’t know if it knows what it wants.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Pruden: A Little Ignorance to Cure Insomnia
Where did Barack Obama get these guys?
Presidents good and bad have learned not to expect too much from the intelligence agencies, the distributors of expensive clappertrap over the years, but this week the two top spooks revealed just how much they don’t know — and, given the president’s own romantic view of Islam, maybe they don’t want to know.
Called before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the White House director of intelligence and the chief of the CIA conducted a seminar in officially deliberate ignorance for the panel of disbelieving senators.
One of the senators wanted to know about what the spooks think about the Muslim Brotherhood, the shadowy promoter of jihad that took a prominent role in organizing the demonstrators who toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. James R. Clapper, who is the first spook to whisper into Mr. Obama’s ear, took that question.
“It’s hard to, at this point, to point to a specific agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood as a group,” he said. The senators shouldn’t worry about it, and he showed that he can sprinkle an occasional French word into his answers about the Brotherhood even if he doesn’t actually know much about what’s going on in the Middle East: “It’s only one voice in the emerging political milieu.” He added, no doubt reading from a cue card prepared by a White House intern, that the Brotherhood is “a large, heterogeneous global organization whose agenda and impact differ from country to country. It also has different factions, including a conservative wing whose interpretation of Islam runs counter to broad electoral participation and a younger, more liberal wing who is more inclined to work through a secular political process.” Well, duh. That much is available on Wikipedia.
There was more clappertrap. He is “unaware” of the Brotherhood’s “declared stance” on smuggling weapons to Hamas in Gaza. He thinks a wait-and-see attitude is “required” before deciding what the Brotherhood is about in Egypt. The White House intern who prepped Mr. Clapper for his trip to Capitol Hill should at least have supplied him with a copy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s own statement of its aims: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Wisconsin Senate to Vote on Anti-Union Bill
Wisconsin Senate to vote on passing bill taking away collective bargaining rights for workers
Protesters clogged the hallways of the Wisconsin state Capitol on Thursday as the Senate prepared to pass a momentous bill that would strip government workers, including school teachers, of nearly all collective bargaining rights.
The nation’s most aggressive anti-union proposal has been speeding through the Legislature since Republican Gov. Scott Walker introduced it a week ago. After clearing a major legislative hurdle Wednesday night, it was headed to votes in the Senate and Assembly.
Hundreds of protesters massed outside the Senate chamber on the second floor of the Capitol early Thursday, hours before the planned vote. Republican leaders said it has the votes to pass in both the Senate and Assembly.
The bill marks a dramatic shift for Wisconsin, which passed a comprehensive collective bargaining law in 1959 and was the birthplace of the national union representing all non-federal public employees…
| — Hat tip: Zenster | [Return to headlines] |
Why Right-Wingers Aren’t the Scary Ones
Enquete is a great French CBC-TV show that has an unbelievable team of researchers and usually offers an informative perspective on public affairs.
Unfortunately, as often happens with the Crown corporation, it betrays a leftist bias and demonizes the political right.
Last week, Enquete journalist Brigitte Bureau tried to scare us with her report about the privileged access some evangelical Christians might have to Ottawa’s inner circle of power.
Opposition to abortion and gay marriage are presented as proof of the progress made by some obscure religious leaders. The report implies a Conservative majority would recriminalize the first and abolish the second, but it does not mention that a strong contingent of Conservative MPs are clearly opposed to going back to both issues.
The most troubling fact of the report is the choice made by the Bloc Quebecois to have Richard Nadeau, MP for Gatineau, lead their partisan attacks. Nadeau denounced the Tory government’s unconditional support of Israel. He also accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of receiving a prize in Jerusalem last March in recognition of his hard work in defence of the Jewish state.
Neither Nadeau nor Radio-Canada mentioned, however, that last Sept. 4 the Bloc MP received the 2010 El-Hidaya plaque of appreciation from the Montreal Muslim Community Center, a centre described by Canadian Muslim author Tarek Fatah as “a hotbed of pro-Hezbollah activities in Montreal.” Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist organization by Canada.
Given his participation in a rally under the Hezbollah flag in August 2006, it is not surprising to see Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe come back to that Radio-Canada story during his General Council last weekend while his party was officially reopening the door to a coalition with the Liberals and the NDP.
Duceppe attacked the alleged association of Conservatives and evangelists by saying, “This ideological bias of religious fundamentalists is dangerous in a society.”
Where was Duceppe when his own MP, Meili Faille, had to reimburse the Muslim Association of Canada $6,000 for one of her trips to the United Arab Emirates. Very embarrassing for Faille, who at the same time supported the help this association gave the Muslim Brothers to build a mosque in Montreal.
He probably does not remember, either, that in October 2008 former Bloc MP Marcel Lussier argued in favour of the abolition of the anti-terrorism law and the recognition of Hamas, another Islamic organization classified as terrorist.
Duceppe may also have forgotten his MP of Lebanese origins, Maria Mourani, who in February 2009 sent all Canadian parliamentarians an e-mail with links to videos praising terrorist groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade.
It flabbergasts me to see how ready Bloc MPs — and to an even greater extent federal Liberals — are to denounce people of Christian faith in the Conservative party and use them to scare those of us who do not believe in God by telling us how they do not share our values and have a social conservative agenda, while at the same time they are caving in to the most radical elements of the Islamists in the name of political correctness, Trudeau’s multiculturalism or — less openly — a few thousand Muslim votes.
The real threat to the equality of women, gay rights and our fundamental Western values might not be the ones the publicly funded CBC is presenting us.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
A Swiss in the Service of the SS
The most influential Swiss in Nazi Germany is the subject of a new biography by historian Marco Wyss.
A protege of military commander Heinrich Himmler, Franz Riedweg stood only two ranks below his mentor in the central office of the SS — an elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party, which served as Adolf Hitler’s personal guard — and was entrusted with extensive power and authority.
Wyss spoke to swissinfo.ch about his book, “Un Suisse au Service de la SS-Franz Riedweg 1907-2005 “ (A Swiss in the Service of the SS).
Long seen as public enemy number one in his homeland, Riedweg was the brains behind the idea of the Waffen-SS (Armed SS) as a military-political elite in a Europe ruled by Germany.
The Swiss was entrusted with organising the recruitment and political education of Waffen SS volunteers in the “Germanic” countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France, the Baltics, Croatia, Hungary and Switzerland.
He also tried, unsuccessfully, to organise a Swiss SS.
In 1938, Riedweg married the daughter of General Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg and acquired German citizenship.
He remained an unrepentant Nazi until his death.
Marco Wyss: The contention that he owed his high position to his marriage to General Field Marshal von Blomberg’s daughter is false. In fact, von Blomberg lost his position as war minister in 1938.
Initially, Riedweg had anti-Communist circles to thank for his swift rise to protege of Himmler… A further factor was that Riedweg was a non-German but still a “Germanic” man of learning. His tremendous political motivation enabled him to acquire considerable power in the SS in very little time.
M.W.: His influence was fairly substantial, due to his connections to people of influence in different circles, not only the SS, but also the Prussian aristocracy, the Nazi Party, and the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich.
He expanded the recruitment of volunteers for the SS and the Waffen SS from Germanic and non-Germanic occupied lands, broadening this enterprise to include political content. His direct access to Himmler enabled him to implement his initiatives more forcefully.
Even so, his power was limited in that he was dependent on his direct superior, Gottlob Berger, who held the rank just below Himmler. So it was not always possible for Riedweg to report directly to Himmler.
Marco Wyss (swissinfo)
M.W.: He probably didn’t know everything, but he must have known about 99 per cent of what was happening. First, he moved in the highest SS circles. Second, he received regular reports from his headquarters in occupied lands, reports which included, among other things, details of the persecution and deportation of Jews from western Europe to the east.
Moreover, the concentration camps were guarded by divisions which were partially integrated in the Waffen SS. Riedweg also visited SS troops fighting in the east many times. He must have known about the Holocaust, from Himmler either mentioning it directly or indirectly. He was clearly in the know. These and other Nazi atrocities seem not to have disturbed him.
M.W.: He had ideals as a young man, proved by his participation in the Coudenhove Movement, which advocated the unity of Europe. Later, he moved further and further to the right. His vehement anti-Communism brought him closer and closer to the ideals of Nazi Germany, until he finally crossed the line to become a fully-fledged Nazi.
What’s worse, he never disavowed his beliefs after the war. Instead, he attempted to find a new ideological home on the side of the west in the staunchly anti-Communist climate of the Cold War.
Riedweg never questioned his deeds or the racist aspects of Nazi ideology. So I would characterise him as an incorrigible Nazi.
M.W.: First, there was the influence of supporters like politician Heinrich Walther, as well as Riedweg’s brother, who was a lawyer. As late as the 1950s they were attempting to get him pardoned.
In addition, there were politicians and civil servants in Bern, and envoys in Berlin, who had a certain interest in not having Riedweg come to a trial which could prove problematic for them or others. This is just a guess. But the indications point in that direction…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
France Plans Nation-Wide Islam and Secularism Debate
France’s governing party plans to launch a national debate on the role of Islam and respect for French secularism among Muslims here, two issues emerging as major themes for the presidential election due next year. Jean-François Copé, secretary general of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party, said the debate would examine issues such as the financing and building of mosques, the contents of Friday sermons and the education of the imams delivering them.
The announcement, coming after a meeting of UMP legislators with Sarkozy on Wednesday, follows the president’s declaration last week that multiculturalism had failed in France. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron have made similar statements in recent months that were also seen as aimed at Muslim minorities there. France’s five-million strong Muslim minority is Europe’s largest.
Copé said the debate, due to start in early April, would ask “how to organise religious practice so that it is compatible in our country with the rules of our secular republic.”
UMP parliamentarians said Sarkozy told them they had to lead this debate to ensure it stays under control. The far-right National Front, reinvigorated with its new leader Marine Le Pen, has recently begun a campaign criticising Muslims here.
“Our party, and then parliament, must take on this subject,” they quoted Sarkozy as saying. “I don’t want prayers in the streets, or calls to prayer. We had a debate on the burqa and that was a good thing. We need to agree in principle about the place of religion in 2011.”
France has sought to keep religion out of the public sphere since it officially separated the Catholic Church and the state in 1905. The growth of a Muslim minority in recent decades has posed new challenges that lead to sometimes heated debates. The government banned headscarves in state schools in 2004 and outlawed full face veils in public last year. But there are no rules about halal meals in schools, for example, or whether Muslims can pray in the streets outside an overcrowded mosque.
The French government held a country-wide debate on national identity in 2009-2010 that preceded the full face veil ban. Many Muslims criticised the debate, saying it turned into a forum to stigmatise them and let people air biased views about Islam.
Marine Le Pen, daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, stole a march on the UMP in December when she compared Muslims praying in the streets to the wartime Nazi occupation. “Marine Le Pen is getting ratings higher than her father, so at 18 months before the presidential election, you can see why it’s getting urgent (for the UMP) to debate the place of Muslims in France and how they practice their religion,” said RTL radio commentator Marie-Bénédicte Allaire…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: Army Set to Open Ranks to Foreigners
Foreigners living in Germany could soon be able to join the country’s army, according to a proposal being put together by the Defence Ministry to make the new, professional fighting force more attractive.
The 73-page dossier of suggestions which has been seen by Focus magazine, includes the suggestion to open up the armed forces to foreigner residents in Germany.
Other ideas include attempts to make the Bundeswehr more family-friendly for soldiers, with the provision of parent-child work rooms in around 200 bases, as well as two-week holiday care for children to be provided at 100 bases.
Some bases will even include kindergartens, while parents and those caring for family members will be able to conduct at least part of their training remotely to make it easier for them.
Other changes could include soldiers being able to take time out, as well as the provision of trainee places, and new army-financed study places.
Those who leave the army for jobs in the private sector will also be able to take their pension provision with them in the attempt to make joining the military a more attractive professional option.
The top age limit for reserve soldiers will be scrapped, while the maximum time for soldiers to remain in the army will be raised from 20 to 25 years.
The dossier says these measures will all require significant financial investment, although it is not clear where the money might come from.
Germany is in the process of changing its military from one based partly on conscription to a smaller, professional force, with the last conscripts having been accepted for their six-month stint this January.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: The Nazi Next Door
In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in northern Germany right-wing extremists dominate entire villages. A few people go against the flow — and find the struggle a lonely one.
Sebastian Beck
For the Lohmeyers it was a good week in Jamel, which was unusual. On Sunday the police moved in with a special task force and arrested their worst neighbour. As of Tuesday the brass plaque is gone from the entrance to the hamlet. “The community of Jamel: Free, Social, National” was etched on the plaque to leave visitors in no doubt as to who has the last word here. And the wooden signposts showing the way to Braunau, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, had to be taken down finally by order of the municipal office.
Outwardly at least, Jamel looks again like a normal hamlet in Mecklenburg — and not like the Nazi stronghold that it still is.
Horst and Birgit Lohmeyer were invited to Berlin by President Christian Wulff for a New Year reception, and encouragement is flowing in from Germany and all over the world by e-mail. The musician and the writer are practically model citizens. But when they moved from Hamburg to the countryside six years ago they only wanted a little peace and quiet. They thought they would find it in Jamel, a hamlet between Wismar and Grevesmühlen, at the end of a narrow side road. And rather far from the norms of democracy.
The police raid on Sunday had headed once again for Sven Krüger, a twelve-times convicted NPD (National Democratic Party) member of the district council. The 36-year-old has managed to build up his little brown Reich in Jamel and its surroundings. “We’re the boys for the tough jobs” goes the slogan of his demolition company, which he runs out of nearby Grevesmühlen.
Krüger is regarded as particularly violent, and those who can get out of his way do. Now he sits in custody. Receiving stolen goods for commercial purposes and breach of the Kriegswaffen-Kontrollgesetz (law restricting the sales of armaments) are the accusations against him. The worldview that Kruger is at home in is betrayed by his “Thing-House” in Grevesmühlen, where the NPD has set up its command centre. The property is secured by a wooden fence and barbed wire, behind which looms up a watchtower with searchlights. Dogs run up to the fence when pedestrians approach. The NPD’s office is strongly reminiscent of a concentration camp — which it is probably meant to be.
For the Lohmeyers, fear is mixed with satisfaction that Kruger is locked up for the time being. They admit their fear of him and his cronies. “They think the hamlet is theirs,” says Birgit Lohmeyer. Once she found a dead rat in the mailbox, which she lets drop into the conversation as casually as she talks about the shooting practices in the forest. But what’s really awful are the drunken parties of the comrades in the hamlet square. In the evenings the men bawl out Nazi songs around campfires. When Krueger got married in the summer, hundreds of right-wing extremists came to celebrate in the “nationally liberated” Jamel.
It’s not just here where neo-Nazis and the NPD have taken hold with great aplomb. Right-wing extremists are also terrorising the population in two villages neighbouring Jamel. And it’s not just the community representatives who don’t want to talk about it openly. “Many people here think: ‘He who leans too far out of the window needn’t be surprised if he tumbles’,” says Horst Lohmeyer, describing the atmosphere in the area. He and his wife dared to go public in 2007 when a newspaper story on “Brown Jamel” gave the people a scare. Not everyone in the hamlet was a Neo-Nazi, the Lohmeyers explained. The few neighbours who weren’t among Kruger’s followers broke off contact with them afterwards.
Dieter Massmann also knows what it feels like to stand alone. He is the mayor of Hoppenrade, a village a hundred kilometres further east, in a lonely stretch of land with hamlets such as Jamel — and similar problems.
In December the brown mob threatened Massmann’s counterparts in the neighbouring community. He had refused to hand over to a right-wing extremist mother — a co-founder of the Rings Nationaler Frauen (National Women’s Circle) — a sponsorship certificate from the President and € 500 on the birth of her seventh child. Since then the mayor has been under police protection. “The extremists here are only so confident because the police aren’t really taking any action against them,” says Massmann. “But to live here in the community requires some civil courage.”
What he says sounds bizarre: The far-right family belongs to the orbit of the Artamanen. This is what the “blood-and-soil” farmers who have settled here since the fall of Eastern Germany call themselves. They see themselves as descendants of the “völkisch” (ethnic) Artamanen movement from the 1920s, which counted Reich SS Leader Heinrich Himmler as one of its members, along with the later Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.
The neo-Artamanen appear outwardly to be peaceful. They live in extended families, pursue organic farming, campaign against genetic engineering — and support the NPD, which has six seats in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state parliament. In 2009 scandal rocked a nursery not far from Hoppenrade, when children of the Artamanen sang Nazi songs that they had obviously learned at summer camp. The Artamanen are educated and adept at manoeuvring. “They try to play public roles in associations and the fire department,” Massmann says.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution briefs the community representatives twice a year, but otherwise there is little support coming from outside. Every summer the Lohmeyers put on a music festival to show that the hamlet doesn’t belong entirely to the Nazis…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Healthcare: Spain Faces EU Court Over Care for EU Pensioners
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 16 — The European Commission is to take Spain to the EU Court of Justice because of the country’s alleged refusal to offer free health care to pensioners originating from other member states who are present in the country on a temporary basis. Brussels is particularly annoyed by a Spanish regulation which calls on EU citizen pensioners to present a Spanish document along with their European Health pass. The document required is issued by the country’s state pension body and certifies that the bearer is in receipt of a Spanish state pension.
According to Community rules, pensioners staying in a member state on a temporary basis should be able to receive necessary health care services on the same terms as those insured under the system of the state in question. Spain is contesting the requirement on the basis that the European health pass does not specify whether or not the holder receives a pension. This has led to Brussels’ decision, as it would appear to show that Spanish courts are applying discriminatory practices, while the purpose of the European health pass is specifically that of simplifying procedures for citizens of member states temporarily residing in other member states.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
‘I’m Russia’s Reference Point in Europe’ Says Berlusconi
Italian premier meets Russian President Medvedev
(see related Berlusconi stories on site) (ANSA) — Rome, February 16 — Under fire at home, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi claimed he was playing a key role on the international stage by keeping European-Russia relations cordial after meeting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev here Wednesday.
“I think I am a friend and point of reference for Russia within the European Union,” said Berlusconi, under huge pressure in Italy after being indicted Tuesday on charges of allegedly using an underage prostitute.
“I have personally taken care of the relations the EU has developed and will develop with the Russian Federation,” added Berlusconi, well-known for being close to with Medvedev’s predecessor, current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. “Russia is the world’s biggest gas and oil exporter and Europe and Italy need its gas and oil.
“We are united in a strong, strategic partnership, with major investments in Italy and Russia, and consolidated friendly relations, reflected in my friendship with Putin and Medvedev”.
Berlusconi was speaking at the inauguration of the Italian-Russia cultural exchange year, which starts with a show by Russian painter Alexander Deyneka at Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni centre.
“We are two friendly states with important political, economic and trade relations, but above all we are two cultural superpowers,” said the Italian premier. Medvedev echoed those sentiments.
“The year of Italian-Russian culture will make cooperation between us even closer,” he said. “Italy is the treasurer of European civilization and it has always paid special attention to culture and art”.
Berlusconi said he and Medvedev were both deeply concerned about the crises in North Africa.
A number of commercial and security accords will be signed during the two-day visit to Rome of Medvedev, who met Italian President Giorgio Napolitano earlier on Wednesday.
These include an alliance between Russian energy giant Gazprom and Italy’s ENI to develop oil fields in Libya. On Thursday Medvedev will meet Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican.
It will be the first visit to the Holy See by a Russian leader since the establishment of full diplomatic relations in 2009 in what will be seen as a further sign that the once frosty relations between the Vatican and Russia are becoming increasingly cordial.
The Vatican and Russia were able to formally upgrade their relations from ‘official’ to ‘diplomatic’ in December 2009 following a gradual thawing of relations between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches.
The Russian church had accused the Catholics of trying to lure people over to their brand of Christianity on their back yard, prompting unfriendly relations between the Holy See and the Russian state too.
Putin was one of the few heads of state not to attend late pope John Paul II’s funeral in 2005.
But the two churches are now increasingly seeking to launch joint initiatives on areas of concern to them, such as growing secularism in Europe.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: ‘Press on’: Bossi Tells Berlusconi
Premier should ‘shake up’ govt for reforms after sex trial set
(ANSA) — Rome, February 16 — Northern League leader Umberto Bossi pledged his support to Premier Silvio Berlusconi in a late-night coalition summit after the premier was sent to trial April 6 on charges of using an underage prostitute and abuse of power in getting her out of police custody in another case.
“I’m with you, let’s push on with reforms, let’s keep our word,” Bossi told Berlusconi, according to those present. Bossi, the premier’s key ally, however asked him to “shake up” the government in order to secure reforms, especially a federalism programme that is dear to the League’s heart, the sources said. Berlusconi, for his part, pledged to widen the centre-right’s House majority to 325 seats to make sure federalism passes key commission tests, they said.
If that figure is not reached, Bossi reportedly said, it would be better to aim for snap elections, two years before the government’s term ends in 2013.
The premier’s legal team are expected to receive later Wednesday a copy of the order with which a Milan preliminary investigations judge sent Berlusconi to trial, for allegedly having sex last year with a then-17-year-old girl known as Ruby, legal sources said.
In the order, judge Cristina Di Censo said she agreed with prosecutors that the body of evidence was so large as to warrant an immediate trial, skipping a preliminary hearing.
The premier and Ruby, who has been named an injured party in the trial, deny having sex and she says money she got from him was a gift.
The teen Moroccan runaway and belly dancer, whose real name is Karima El Mahroug, insists the premier was the only man never to have tried to have sex with her, and never laid a finger on her.
The premier claims Milan prosecutors have long been plotting to bring him down.
According to experts, the trial could drag on for a long time as Berlusconi’s lawyers seek to show that he should have been tried by a special court for ministers since he was allegedly doing his official duty when he tried, as he said, to avoid a diplomatic incident by telling police officers Ruby was, as she had told him, a relative of then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Berlusconi has scorned opposition calls to quit over the alleged scandal and has called women who demonstrated against him all over Italy Sunday “biased”.
The premier’s poll ratings have dropped only slightly since news of the Ruby probe broke in mid-January.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Lamborghini to Unveil New $370,000 Sports Car
Sant’Agata Bolognese, 14 Feb. (AKI/Bloomberg) — Lamborghini will unveil a flagship supercar costing more than $370,000 called the Aventador, its most powerful series production vehicle ever, at the Geneva Motor Show, a person with direct knowledge of the plans said.
The Aventador LP 700-4, which has a 700-horsepower V12 engine that surges to 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour in 2.9 seconds, will premiere 1 March, said the person, who asked not to be identified before the model is shown publicly.
The Aventador, which replaces the Volkswagen brand’s top-of-the-line Murcielago model, is already sold for the first year of production, the person said. Lamborghini, which competes with Fiat’s Ferrari, will decide over the next year whether to add a third model to its portfolio to complement the Aventador and Gallardo lines, the person said.
“People may be ripping order forms for the new Lamborghini out of salesmen’s hands,” said Christoph Stuermer, a Frankfurt- based analyst at IHS Automotive. “The timing seems right, it’s no longer deemed inappropriate to flaunt your wealth.”
Lamborghini is counting on the Aventador to help capitalize on a recovering market for luxury autos costing more than $200,000. Supercar sales in the U.S., the top market for the world’s most expensive cars, may surge 146 percent this year for vehicles costing from $200,000 to $400,000 after plunging 40 percent in 2010, according to IHS.
Sant’Agata Bolognese, Italy-based Lamborghini is ramping up production of the Aventador and may expand output to build as many as 100 of the cars by 1 March, the person said. The brand is already taking orders and will start selling the new model, which has a top speed of 350 kilometers per hour, in the second quarter in showrooms. Lamborghini spokesman Raffaello Porro declined to comment on the carmaker’s Geneva plans.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Police Arrest Dozens in South Over ‘Plot’ to Murder Judge
Crotone, 11 Feb. (AKI) — Anti-mafia police on Friday arrested 28 people in southern Italy who are suspected plotting to murder local judge Pier Paolo Bruni.
The suspects were arrested of the port city of Crotone in the southern Calabria region. They allegedly belong to the Calabrian mafia, or ‘Ndrangheta’s Vrenna-Ciampa-Bonaventura clan.
The suspects face charges of mafia association, extortion against local businesses and drug and arms trafficking, according to police.
The suspected plotters aimed to target Bruni’s car. He already has police protection and has been followed by ‘Ndrangheta suspects on a number of occasions, police said.
Police wiretaps recorded one of the suspects in a phone conversation shortly before Christmas last year as saying: “Now we’re going to give Pino a nice present.”
The suspect was referring to local ‘Ndrangheta boss Giuseppe Vrenna, who was at that time being questioned by Bruni, according to investigators.
The ‘present’ for Vrenna was Bruni’s assassination, investigators believe.
Friday’s arrests followed the two-year-long ‘Hydra’ probe in which 12 other mafia suspects were arrested on 21 January.
The probe has involved police searches of properties, phone intercepts, bugging, tailing suspects and impounding of documents and other items.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Venice Water Alert Sirens Silenced by Budget Cuts
First ‘acqua alta’ of year went unannounced
(ANSA) — Venice, February 17 — Venice’s special sirens alerting citizens to high water levels were unable to warn of the first ‘acqua alta’ of the year Thursday because municipal budget cuts hit computer maintenance work.
Venetians could find out if they would need their wellies by text message, but the service is available to subscribers only.
Technicians worked overtime on the glitch and the sirens are back working, said Tide Control Centre Director Paolo Canestrelli. Explaining the hiccup, he said: “We received 500,000 euros (from the city council) in 2010 for the Tide Centre and at the end of the year we expected the municipal authorities to fork out the budget for 2011. “But nothing has been earmarked so far and, although we have machines worth millions of euros, we haven’t any money to carry out maintenance.
“After repairing last night’s outage, we still have three sirens that aren’t working and can’t be fixed”.
The latest generation of acqua alta horns were installed in 2007, replacing a notoriously mournful set that dated back to WWII air raid warnings.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
President Barack Obama to Make State Visit to Britain
Mr Obama will be joined by his wife Michelle for the three-day trip, which comes ahead of the G8 summit of world leaders in France which the American politician is expected to attend.
The announcement of the visit, from May 24 to 26, was made simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic by the Palace and the White House.
Downing Street said: “We are very pleased that this visit is taking place. It is a sign of the strong and enduring relationship between our two countries.”
It will be the first state visit by a US leader since George W Bush came to the UK in November 2003, although Mr Bush was later hosted by the Queen at Windsor Castle in 2008.
Mr Obama has previously been to London for the G20 summit in 2009. The US leader is likely to bring a delegation with him and is expected to hold talks with Prime Minister David Cameron on a range of issues. As is traditional with state visits, the President and his wife, who will stay at Buckingham Palace, will receive a full ceremonial welcome and a banquet will be held in his honour.
The visit comes too late for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding on April 29, although a guest list for the ceremony has yet to be released…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Treasury Places Over 6bln in Bonds at Lower Rates
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, FEBRUARY 15 — The Spanish Treasury met its goal today of placing 6.170 billion euros in 12 and 18-month bonds at lower interest rates compared to previous bond auctions and with demand tripling supply at 16.714 billion euros.
Twelve-month bonds were issued at an interest rate of 2.463% compared to 3.010% in the previous auction on February 15. Bonds maturing in 18 months were issued at a rate of 2.950% compared to 3.400% in the February 15 auction.
This morning the spread between Spanish 10-year bonds and the German bund was 205 basis points, the same as the level at the end of the day yesterday.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Jews Still Struggle to Feel at Home in Malmö
A year after claims about an exodus of Jews from Malmö made global headlines, many Jewish residents still don’t feel safe in southern Sweden, The Local’s Karen Holst discovers.
The past couple of years have been turbulent for Malmö’s Jewish community. A spike in anti-Semitic attacks in 2009 prompted a number of Jews to leave the city altogether, concluding they would never feel accepted there.
Controversial comments by the town’s long-serving Social Democratic mayor Ilmar Reepalu also put Malmö in the spotlight, drawing criticism from within his own party, as well as from influential Jewish organisations aboard.
And in December 2010, the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a warning urging Jews to exercise “extreme caution” when traveling in southern Sweden.
While current statistics show a significant decline in anti-Semitic attacks in 2010 when compared to 2009, the nearly 3,000-member Jewish community in Skånecontinues to shrink.
“People wonder if there will even be a Jewish community here in 10 years,” Fredrik Sieradzki, spokesperson for the Jewish Community of Malmö (Judiska Församlingen i Malmö), tells The Local.
Despite the decrease in reported attacks, as well as community efforts to ease racist rancor, many of south Sweden’s Jewish residents continue to feel dangerously threatened.
According to Sieradzki, many young Jewish families are relocating because they feel Skåne is not a safe area to raise their children. Coupled with an aging baby-boomer generation, there are few willing or present to take vacated leadership positions within many of the area’s Jewish organisations.
“Some of us feel there is no hope and we are losing people because of anti-Semitism,” he adds.
Police reports show the number of anti-Semitic incidents nearly doubled in 2009 but have declined in 2010 by more than half.
“We believe the number of attacks increased in 2009 due to the Davies Cup and two big demonstrations against Israel. Now the statistics show hate-crime against Jews going down dramatically in 2010,” explains Susanne Gosenius, a hate crime coordinator for Skåne police.
Sieradzki argues, however, that the numbers may not reflect reality as many Jewish residents choose not to report every incident, such as intimidating slurs and other verbal attacks.
“Maybe the numbers are lower or maybe not. It doesn’t matter because the feeling is the same — many of us cannot and do not feel at home here,” says Sieradzki.
He points out that the severity of attacks is also intensifying.
Last October a group of about 20 teenagers attacked the Jewish community’s residential education centre during a youth retreat.
“The first night they shouted vicious, nasty slurs. The next night it escalated and they broke down the fence and were banging on windows and doors,” Sieradzki explains.
“It was quite frightening.”
Sieradzki, who applauded the nearby municipality of Vellinge for its swift response to the incident, also points out that the teenagers in the attacking group were not Muslim as many are quick to assume.
“These boys were not Arabs. They were all Swedish. And I assure you the Jewish people are not attacking anybody.”
Despite the year’s decline in reported attacks, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the largest international organization for Jewish human rights, nevertheless went ahead with its decision to issue a travel warning for Jews visiting southern Sweden.
The move put Skåne to the same plane as countries that have experienced heinous, even fatal attacks and bombings on Jewish people, such as Turkey, Greece and Belgium.
“We made a very serious statement by putting Malmö on our advisory list,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Center, tells The Local.
“It’s a serious move and we hope to take serious measures to rectify it.”
But the warning rankled some members of Malmö’s Jewish community, who claim they weren’t informed about the move ahead of time, and surprised local authorities as statistics showed that attacks were on the decline.
“I can understand that Jewish people feel threatened in Malmö,” hate crimes specialist Gosenius explains.
“We have a huge population from the Middle East, West Bank and Gaza and most (Jewish) victims describe their perpetrators as young Muslim men.
“But I’m not sure the warning for Malmö fits. It’s a very drastic act.”
Sieradzki has mixed emotions about the Wiesenthal Center’s “surprise” advisory.
While he understands the Center’s point, he argues the move may have been too severe and feels the Jewish leaders in Skåne could have helped moderate the message had they known about it.
“They should have talked to us first,” argues Sieradzki.
“We are trying to create an atmosphere in Malmö where we co-exist and I’m not sure that this travel warning is good.”
Rabbi Cooper rejects the idea that the Center’s warning came as a surprise, pointing to a meeting in Stockholm prior to the advisory where prominent members of south Sweden’s Jewish community were in attendance.
“The analysis comes from the ground up,” says Cooper.
“Experiences from Jewish members in Malmö and a previous colleague there led to what we did.”
He stated that families should be able to go to any house of worship, whether it’s Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays, without fear of intimidation, violence or something worse.
“People of faith, or no faith, should be able to walk on the street and feel equally protected. There is a climate of intimidation in Malmö and we need to take steps to address it,” says Cooper.
In response to 2009’s hike in attacks, Malmö city officials created the Dialogue Forum to ease hostilities between Jews, Muslims, the Roma, and other victimized minorities.
As the Forum’s one-year anniversary approaches, the Jewish community believes the dialogue has had little effect.
“It’s sad we have to have a group, and we do hope something good comes of it but there hasn’t been anything yet,” says Sieradzki, adding that the 6,000-member Islamic Centre, of their own initiative, recently invited members of the Jewish community to their mosque.
Mayor Reepalu, who was also singled out by the Wiesenthal Center last year for comments about the city’s Jewish community in which he “blamed the situation on the Jews themselves as the community did not ‘distance itself from Israel,’“ according to the Center.
While Reepalu refused to be interviewed for this article, he has undertaken efforts in the last year to make amends and further understand the hostilities Jewish people encounter in Malmö through meetings with Sieradzki and other Jewish community leaders.
Since then the 15-year mayor has invited members from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to Malmö, although an exact date for the visit has not yet been set.
“I can confirm we are coming to Sweden and we are coming next month,” says Rabbi Cooper.
While the agenda for the meeting is still being hammered out, the focus will likely be on improving the situation in southern Sweden.
The meeting will be also accompanied by a seminar on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
“It’s good that something is happening,” says Sieradzki.
“There are Jews is Malmö. We live here, we are here to stay and we won’t gain anything by attacking each other.”
| — Hat tip: Steen | [Return to headlines] |
Turkish Embargo on Cyprus Has Impact on EU, Minister Says
(ANSAmed) — NICOSIA, FEBRUARY 16 — Losses in Cyprus’ economy as a result of Turkey’s air and sea embargo against Cypriot flagged vessels amount to 138,5 million euro, accounting for 1,3% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), daily Financial Mirror reports quoting Mrs. Erato Kozakou Marcoullis, Cyprus’ Communications and Works Minister as saying.
Addressing an international conference on transport in Larnaca, Marcoullis said that the Turkish embargo has also many negative financial repercussions for the EU and its member states. She noted that Turkey has imposed restrictions on 2,800 vessels, owned by Cypriot or other EU companies which are registered in Cyprus, preventing them from docking at Turkish ports, and that has a huge cost for European interests. She said that the Republic of Cyprus has focused its efforts on terminating these restrictions.
With regard to air transport, she said that Turkey creates problems to Cypriot air carriers by illegally restricting over-flights over its territory. The Minister stressed that this unacceptable Turkish policy violates the International Air Services Transit Agreement and the Chicago Convention of 1944, something that creates technical and huge financial problems for the Cypriot air carriers, since it makes them less attractive for certain destinations. Turkey, whose troops occupy Cyprus’ northern areas since they invaded in 1974, does not recognise the Republic of Cyprus, an EU member.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Two Towns in Europe: Valka-Valga, Two Sides to the Story
A walk from Valka to Valga not only takes you from Lativa to Estonia, but you also have the impression of traveling from one era to another. Postimees reports on a quarrel between the old guard and the new in one of Europe’s far-flung border towns.
Mikk Salu
“Everything is better in Estonia,” quips editor, Inguna Johansone, for the benefit of her arriving guests. With an ironic smile she explains: “That’s what Latvians always say, but I don’t think there is much of a difference.” Talk about Valga and Valka at the offices of Latvian regional newspaper Ziemellatvija, and people will always bring up the subject of former colleagues, friends and family members who are either working in Estonia or looking for jobs there.
No one knows exactly how many Latvians are working in Valga. There are supposed to 200, which is quite a lot for a small town. The Latvians have also developed a fondness Estonian shops. And even if they complain that prices have risen since the euro was introduced, hundreds of them still cross the border do their shopping every weekend. “In Valga, one apartment in five is bought by a Latvian,” explains real estate agent, Hans Heinjärv. “But I don’t know of any Estonians who have bought on the other side.”
A scandalous incentive
Latvians have also begun to use the hospital in Valga. Last year, 300 of them received treatment on the Estonian side of the border and 82 were born there (a big increase over the previous year, when these figures stood at 50 and 17 respectively). Until now, the eastward drift of the population in Valga/Valka has been a discreet and for the most part ad-hoc phenomenon. But all of that changed when last November, Valga’s young mayor, Ivar Unt, launched a campaign to encourage Latvians to register with municipal authorities as residents of Valga.
As an incentive for the scheme, which was described as “scandalous” by Valka’s mayor, Karlis Albergs, the participants were given a chance to win a gift voucher worth 319 euros. The ensuing uproar became national news when Latvian TV, radio, and newspaper journalists arrived from Riga to report on thriving Valga and Valka, where development appears to have ground to halt.
The truth is that Valga is not one of the richer towns in Estonia. According to official figures, only Ida-Virumaa [a Russian speaking region in the northeast of the country] has a higher rate of unemployment. And the statistics also show that salaries in the border town are among the lowest in the country.
In Valga, you can still find a job
However, that is not to say that Valga is a socio-economic ghetto with homeless on every street corner. Poverty here is relative and and for the most part only apparent in the number of dilapidated houses and the general aspect of the place which looks more rundown than other towns in Estonia. The Soviet period left a major mark on Valga, which as a border town and rail hub, became a centre for a number of industries which no one seems to want anymore.
But in spite of that, the Estonian town is in a better situation than Valka: mainly because it is larger and richer than its Latvian neighbour, and also because residents in Valga benefit from higher wages and a more generous social security system. In recent years, development on the Estonian side of the border has also been spurred by a number of new buildings and shopping malls, the opening of a number of small companies, a larger hospital and a brand new school.
Under the snow, the difference between the two towns is barely visible. However, in summer people say that the walk across the border is like a trip down memory lane. For local people like Latvian textile worker Marite Runka, the key difference is that “in Valga, you can still find a job.” Anu Eesmaa, the head foreman at the Finnish owned factory where she is employed, jokingly refers to Marite as the leader of the leader of the “Latvian line,” because several of the 20 Latvians who have found work at the plant are in her production team…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
UK: BA Worker Rajib Karim Denies Bomb Plot With Cleric
A British Airways computer expert has denied plotting with a radical Muslim cleric to put a bomb on a plane.
Rajib Karim said he had wanted help from Anwar Al-Awlaki to fight in Yemen.
The Newcastle upon Tyne-based worker denied having used his IT job to pass on useful information to Mr Al-Awlaki, who is currently on the run from the US authorities.
Mr Karim, 31, also told Woolwich Crown Court he believed targeting aircraft was not permissible under Islam.
Earlier the court had heard how Mr Karim took up a position as a software engineer with BA at their offices in Newcastle, where he was arrested a year ago.
He has pleaded guilty to terrorist fund-raising, offering to take part in insurgent operations abroad and working on a video for a banned terror group.
But he denies getting a job with BA and using his position there to help plot terror attacks with Mr Al-Awlaki.
The court was shown coded messages between the men from December 2009 in which the cleric said he was “excited by hearing your profession. I pray that Allah may grant us a breakthrough with you”.
He asked a series of questions about airline security to which Mr Karim gave answers, which he claims did not require any inside information.
Mr Karim told the court: “I gave him some information which I felt would be totally useless to keep him interested in me.”
He said Mr Al-Awlaki was “the key person who could help me gain entry to the tribal regions of Yemen” so he did not want to disappoint him.
Mr Al-Awlaki went on to ask: “Is it possible to get a package or a person on board a flight heading to the US?”, the court heard.
James Wood QC, for the defence, asked: “What is your belief about the permissibility of doing that sort of thing?”
Mr Karim replied: “At that point of time I had reached the view that it is not permissible.”
He told the court “As a Muslim I felt he was wrong. This message was worse than the previous ones… before he had asked only general questions.
“Now he was asking if I would be willing to help put a bomb on an aeroplane. I disagreed with that view but he is a scholar and I’m not in a position to debate with him.
“What I decided to do is put in front of him works of other scholars and let him think.”
The trial continues.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Controversial Islamic Preacher Speaks at Union
Controversial Islamic preacher Dr Zakir Naik addressed the Oxford Union on Friday despite the exclusion order against him entering the UK. Naik gave a speech and answered questions via video link from India to a crowd of students and other onlookers at the event, organised by the famous debating society.
In his speech, Naik blamed the “virulent propaganda” in the media for the “misconception of Islam” and for his own ban on entry to the UK. He claimed the media printed portions of his speeches “out of context” and so portrayed him as a “preacher of hate”. Home Secretary Theresa May excluded Naik from the UK last June after his “unacceptable behaviour”, referring to comments he made in speeches, which were then posted as YouTube videos.
Naik defended himself during his address, declaring himself on a “mission is to spread peace”.
“Unfortunately today the media portrays Islam as a religion which promotes terrorism”, Naik said. “The media picks up on the black sheep of the Muslim community and portrays them as though they are exemplary Muslims.”
Despite the ban — a decision made as Naik’s presence in the UK “might not be conducive to the public good”, according to the Home Secretary — the controversial preacher was confident it would be temporary. “I have full faith that very shortly this exclusion order will be reversed”, he said. “I hope that I will have the chance to meet the Home Secretary personally and explain to her the peaceful message of Islam.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Lessons in Hate and Violence: The Same Old Story
Prior to the transmission of Channel 4’s Dispatches, Lessons in Hate and Violence, a number of newspapers ran articles about the extremism and abuse in some mosques and madrassas. Muslim groups gave their reaction after the programme aired. The British Muslim Forum condemned abuse and bigotry but said that such incidents and attitudes were not widespread in the 2,000 Islamic institutions across Britain. It urged Channel 4 not to “fall in the trap of ‘Islam bashing’ or creating fear, hatred and racism against Muslims and their holy faith as has become fashionable these days by over-generalising and exaggerating such isolated incidents.”
The group also said it was “of extreme concern that the programme producers were aware of the incidents since July 2010 but failed to pass the information on to the relevant authorities, thereby compromising the health and safety of the children involved”.
The Muslim Council of Britain said:
“[We regard] it as a a priority that the professionalism and regard for the health and safety of children that characterises mainstream schooling should operate without fail in Islamic educational settings. We have asked Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor of Documentaries, Mr Hamish Mykura, to ask if Dispatches has reported the abuse recorded in this programme to Bradford Social Services and we have yet to receive a reply.”
The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board also condemned corporal punishment and intolerance. There seems to be a formula to these responses: condemn + caveat + deflect. So, what else has happened? The Darul Uloom school has received firebomb threats and it is also considering lodging a complaint with broadcasting watchdog Ofcom. West Yorkshire police have arrested a man after an alleged assault on a child. A Keighley mosque has suspended religious classes and its committee says staff will undergo child protection training.
The Dispatches episode serves as a reminder that there has been little lasting, real political, civil or religious change in Muslim communities even with — or perhaps despite — the plethora of Muslim groups at their disposal. There is no hard data on how many mosques and madrassas there are in Britain, who runs them or what they teach. Islam Channel had a stab at this a with its Model Mosque competition as has the Times (they were coming at the same subject from different perspectives).
Dispatches shocks people into reacting, condemning or pointing the finger and then this excited indignation sinks into nothing. It was only a few years ago that Channel 4 showed Undercover Mosque and Undercover Mosque, The Return — both programmes aroused similar levels of outrage and concern. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I fully expect another, similar programme to be shown in a few years time exposing intolerance in Britain’s mosques and madrassas. Do all mosques promote intolerance? Probably not. Is corporal punishment widespread? Ditto. But I can’t say for certain and neither can anyone else.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Muslim Protest Mars Cameron’s East London Visit
David Cameron’s welfare reform launch suffered a minor setback from disruption by a small group of Muslim protesters. The prime minister was highlighting Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform bill in Toynbee Hall, east London, when police guarding the venue were surprised by a group of around ten men.
One demonstrator was overheard telling police officers he was from Walthamstow. The men focused their anger against Mr Cameron on Britain’s foreign policy.
The protesters held placards stating “Women are provided for under Islam” and chanted “UK, UK, Islam is on its way”. They called on the government to withdraw from “Muslim lands” including Afghanistan and Iraq and shouted “British soldiers go to hell”. “Withdraw your soldiers from Afghanistan and you will be saving the economy,” one protester suggested.
Another explained afterwards that the small-scale demonstration had been organised by “Muslims who have got upset”.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Schools’ Counter Terrorism Project Scrapped
A Home Office counter terrorism programme that encourages teachers and community leaders to identify and report Muslim teenagers and others they suspect to be at risk of becoming involved with violent extremists is to be scrapped.
MPs have criticised the £12.5m Channel project for triggering accusations about teachers and community leaders being asked to spy on Muslim youths.
Th Home Office funded-project was set up in April 2007 as part of the government’s wider Prevent counterterrorism programme, which is now under review. In the first 20 months of its operation 228 people aged 15 to 24 and nearly all male were identified as potential terrorists at risk of radicalisation and referred to the police. Although the majority were Islamists they also included far-right racists.
Teachers and community leaders were asked to identify individuals who had not committed any criminal offence but who were accessing terrorist websites or frequently talking about taking part in violent activity.
Fears about the “anti-Islamic” ethos of the project has led to many of the 7,500 schools potentially involved opting out.
Professor Ted Cantle, who chairs the Home Office community cohesion review team, told the Times Educational Supplement that ministers are unlikely to continue the Channel project in its current form.
“There will be a separation between counterterrorist work and the efforts of schools to integrate communities. I hope the present government doesn’t make the same mistakes, which have alienated communities,” he said.
“I don’t think the identification of children at risk of terrorism will continue. It has caused an awful lot of trouble. Most teachers don’t have an in-depth understanding of Muslim communities.”
Graham Robb of the Youth Justice Board said senior police officers had made clear that existing child safety procedures run by schools and social services were satisfactory for dealing with vulnerable children.
The Home Office said the wider Prevent programme, including the Channel project, was under review. “We believe it isn’t working as well as it could and that is why we are reviewing it. We want a strategy that is effective and properly focused,” a spokesman said
Sir Norman Bettison, the West Yorkshire chief constable responsible for the national programme, has in the past cited the example of Hasib Hussain, one of the 7/7 bombers, who had been regarded as a model student. But when the police contacted his former teachers they told him they had written comments praising al-Qaida in his school exercise books but it had not been seen as substantive at the time.
Once children have been identified as being at risk they are referred to a “programme of intervention tailored to their needs” which range from discussions with their families, outreach workers or their local imam, to direct intervention by the police.
Materials sent to schools highlight case studies in which pupils talked about “wanting to be a bomb maker when they left school”, the “duty” of Muslims to join groups who will kill American and British soldiers, and pupils who turn up with swastikas cut into their hair.
Charles Farr of the Home Office’s counterterrorism and security office has strongly rejected claims that Channel has been used for spying or surveillance, saying it was the last thing the police or security services wanted to do.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Taxi Driver Slammed by Judge for Not Learning English After 20 Years in Britain
An unlicensed taxi driver who had not learned English despite living in Britain for 20 years has been criticised by a judge for failing to ‘integrate’.
Bangladeshi-born Zamal Uddin, 44, now faces a jail sentence and deportation for grabbing a passenger’s breasts after she got into his cab in Hoxton, east London.
The 44-year-old, who lives among one of Britain’s biggest Bangladeshi communities in nearby Bethnal Green, was yesterday found guilty of twice sexually assaulting the 26-year-old woman.
Uddin, who required a taxpayer-funded interpreter during the hearing at Snaresbrook Crown Court, was told he would be liable for deportation after he finishes his sentence.
‘The authorities may consider your continued presence here undesirable,’ Judge Timothy King told him.
‘These are serious matters and custody appears to be appropriate in this case,’ said the judge.
‘Also what troubles me, although it’s not something that bears on sentence, [is that] he has been her for nigh on 20 years and he requires an interpreter.
‘I suspect he lives within his own community and has never bothered to learn English.
‘It is highly desirable that those who come to this country from abroad integrate, rather than live isolated within their own community.’
Prosecutor Helen Owen had told the court: ‘The taxi driver picked up a female who was intoxicated and then touched her breasts while she was in the cab.
‘She got out of the cab and he followed her before pushing her against the wall and grabbing her under her clothes.
‘She then screamed and he ran off.’
A day after the attack on October 23 last year, brazen Uddin was caught illegally touting for fares in nearby Dalston.
Uddin, who lived in a council flat after moving to the UK in 1992, admitted two charges of sexual assault and driving while disqualified.
He was remanded in custody pending sentence on February 23.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Unemployed Italian Waited Can Sue Rich Ex-Wife for London Home
(AKI/Bloomberg) — A UK appeals court has ruled for the first time that the fairness of a divorce ruling made in another European country can be challenged in Britain, in a case filed by an unemployed Italian waiter seeking his wealthy ex-wife’s London home.
Francesco Traversa can sue his former spouse for ownership of her UK residence and a cash payment, even though he was ordered by an Italian court to vacate the home in 2008 as part of their divorce, the Court of Appeal in London said on Monday, in a ruling which described his ex-wife, Carla Freddi, as “affluent.”
“He’s very pleased that he’s been given permission to bring the case forward, but of course he’s got a long way to go,” Traversa’s lawyer, Frank Feehan, said in a phone interview. He said his client, 53, who is originally from southern Italy, has lived in England since the late 1980s.
The Valentine’s Day ruling follows a landmark UK Supreme Court decision in October that gave greater weight to pre- nuptial agreements in divorce settlements. Last month, a British millionaire was separately ordered to increase a payout to his ex-wife to 8 million pounds, from 5 million pounds, in a case where a judge said divorces involving wealthy couples are having an “unfortunate” effect on UK family law.
Freddi’s lawyer, Peter Callaghan, didn’t immediately return a call for comment.
UK lawsuits over foreign divorces can be filed when one spouse wins an allegedly unfair separation abroad against an ex with a “significant” connection to Britain. Freddi, whose family is from northern Italy, separated from Traversa in 2003 and got the divorce five years later from a court in Brescia, Italy, according to the ruling.
Non-European Countries
Before yesterday’s ruling, permission to file such cases mainly stemmed from divorces in non-European countries, particularly those that provide less protection for women, said Suzanne Todd, a family-law lawyer with Withers LLP, who isn’t involved in the case.
Traversa and Freddi, who have two children together, wed in 1987 after agreeing to keep their assets separate in case of divorce, according to the ruling. Freddi’s parents sought to “protect her fortune, present and future,” from Traversa, who came from a “modest” background, the ruling said.
Traversa didn’t participate in the Italian divorce case and hasn’t paid child support, according to the ruling. Freddi is seeking 67,000 euros in support payments.
“We’ll have to wait and see if the English court looks at the property regime as unfair,” Todd said. “It would seem pretty unfair for someone who decides to not participate in the proceedings in Italy to get another bite at the cherry.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Albania: Islamic Bank Finances Tirana-Elbasan Highway
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 17 — The Islamic Bank will finance the construction of a 31.7 km section of the new Tirana — Elbasan highway which includes a 4.2 km tunnel.
The Islamic Bank will provide a loan worth approximately 350 million dollars, which according to the preliminary agreement will last for 20 years. Interest on the loan will not exceed 5%.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Bosnia: Heroic Deed by Serb Soldier Made Into Film
(ANSAmed) — SARAJEVO, FEBRUARY 16 — Filming has started in Bosnia today for a film which has drawn its inspiration from the heroic deed by a Serb which cost him his life, while saving that of a Muslim during the War in Bosnia of 1992-1995.
As the SRNA news agency reports, the opening scenes of the film, which is directed by Serbia’s Srdjan Golubovic — were shot this morning in the centre of Trebinje, a town in southern Bosnia, not far from Dubrovnik (Croatia), where the event actually took place.
In January of 1993, the Serbian soldier, Srdjan Aleksic, intervened to stop some militiamen from killing a Muslim civilian in Trebinje market. The civilian managed to escape but Aleksic was caught by the militia and savagely beaten. His wounds were so serious that he died later in hospital.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Frattini: Avoid Risks of Stopping EU Accession Path
(ANSAmed) — TRIESTE, FEBRUARY 15 — Serbia and Montenegro EU accession process risk to “come to a halt”, according to Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. In an interview with Il Piccolo daily newspaper, the minister revealed that “several countries want to stop the process after the agreement with Croatia”. Frattini spoke about several EU members being “tired of enlargement” and confirmed Italy’s support “in order to avoid this”. Referring to Serbia’s situation, the foreign minister underlined his discussion with President Tadic, also in light of the popular protests in Belgrade, and how he believes that a more decisive role of the EU in the country is necessary. “I believe that Europe should be less timid than it has been before,” said Frattini, who pointed out that “here we have the president of a pro-European government, and on the other had we have people who do not want Europe, and desire an extreme nationalistic system.” Frattini expressed “great concerns” about the situation in Bosnia, which is in a complete political and institutional stall. “There is a clear result in the Republika Srpska, there is great uncertainty in negotiations between the parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said Frattini, who is certain that “in order to provide a greater stimulus to resolving this difficult situation, Europe needs to play a greater role in Sarajevo”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Macedonia’s Islamic Community Claims Religious Discrimination Sparked Fortress Fight
Macedonian Islamic leaders have blamed what they call discriminatory government policies for weekend ethnic clashes that left eight wounded. Islamic community spokesman Driton Dikena says governments for years promoted Orthodox Christianity as the state religion at the expense of Islam.
On Sunday, ethnic Albanians clashed with majority Macedonians at a historic Ottoman-era fort in Skopje in a dispute over a new structure being built on the foundations of a 13th Century church. The mainly Muslim ethnic Albanians, who comprise a quarter of the country’s 2 million people, objected to what they said was the rebuilding of a church on the site. They want a mosque to be built alongside the site.
The country’s Orthodox church condemned the violence Thursday.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Algeria: Municipal Guards and Civil Protection Protesting
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, FEBRUARY 17 — After nurses, students, teachers and the unemployed, also municipal guards, court personnel and Civil Protection staff have begun demonstrating. Hundreds of municipal guards have put on protests in several of the country’s regions to demand an improvement in their national contract and a rise in salaries. Dozens of courts across Algeria were paralysed yesterday by an extended strike announced by magistrate’s clerks.
“After 32 years of service,” said an official from the Sidi Mehamed court of Algiers,” I earn 22,000 dinars (about 200 euros). The salaries of magistrates have increased several times but not ours.” Meanwhile, while the strike by paramedical staff continue, teachers have announced a general strike on March 2, while the Civil Protection will begin an extended strike on February 27.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Algeria: Presidential Alliance Rejects Foreign Interference
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, FEBRUARY 17 — The parties of the alliance supporting President Abdelaziz Bouteflika have spoken out against ‘foreign interference in Algeria’s internal affairs.” “Many states,” said the secretary of the National Liberation Front (FLN, formerly the only party) and Bouteflika’s personal representative Abdelaziz Belkhadem, “are using Arab countries as terrain on which to try out models of democracy that they would like to impose.” “These states,” APS quoted him as adding, “use double standards and would like to get our country to adopt positions that they consider democratic.” Prime Minister Ouyahia, from Rally for Culture and Democracy (RND), noted that “during the 1990s no one said anything while Algerians were being massacred.” Just after the February 12 demonstration, the United States launched an appeal “to the security forces to exercise restraint”, while France and Germany asked Algiers to allow the people to demonstrate peacefully.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: ‘The Quran is Our Law; Jihad is Our Way’
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s extraordinary about this maxim is the succinct way that it captures the political dimension of Islam. Even more extraordinary is the capacity of these five pillars of faith to attract true believers. But the most remarkable thing of all is the way the Brotherhood’s motto seduces Western liberals.
Readers of this paper are familiar with the genesis of the Muslim Brotherhood: its establishment in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna; its history of terrorism; its violent offshoots such as al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamait Islamiya, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and others across the Muslim world. Readers may also recall the brutal crackdowns on the Brothers by autocratic regimes in the Middle East—particularly in Egypt under Nasser and in Syria during the Hama massacre of 1982.
As a result of these crackdowns, the Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s (after Nasser’s regime executed the Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb in 1966) and started a gradual process to participate in conventional politics. This renunciation—and the Brotherhood’s involvement in the Egyptian uprising, neither violent nor dominant—has prompted some commentators to encourage the American government to engage with the Brothers as legitimate partners in Middle Eastern affairs.
Like a drug addict after years in rehab, the Brotherhood is now regarded as clean. Precisely because of its troubled past, so the argument goes, it can be counted on to help lead the people of Egypt into a new era of political reform.
These commentators claim the Brotherhood will be a better partner for the U.S. than the ousted President Hosni Mubarak because it is a grass-roots movement with a significant civic and economic role in Egyptian society. They liken the Brotherhood to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party, which is widely admired in the West for its moderate Islamism, offering Turks the attractive combination of economic development and religious identity. According to this view, moderate Islamism is like Christian democracy in postwar Western Europe.
In recent days, Essam El-Errian and Tariq Ramadan have expressed such views in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. A member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council, Mr. El-Errian wrote that his organization has an “unequivocal position against violence” and aims “to achieve reform and rights for all.” According to his account, the Brotherhood has no desire to play a dominant role in a new government, and it won’t put forward a candidate for the presidency.
Mr. Ramadan, the grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder, predictably painted the group as peaceful. If it had ever done anything to make anyone doubt its peaceful credentials, he argued, it was the fault of the oppressive regimes supported by America and other Western powers.
Neither Mr. El-Errian nor Mr. Ramadan mentioned that the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto is still in place, let alone its implications. At least Mr. El-Errian admitted that the movement does not want a Western-style secular liberal democracy, since such democracies reject the role of religion in public life.
These apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood are targeting two audiences. The first is the small but influential liberal elite in the U.S. and its larger counterpart in Europe, which has never been comfortable supporting the likes of Mr. Mubarak and would love to believe in a touchy-feely moderate Islamism.
The second audience is the mainly young people who initiated the uprising and have kept it going with social-networking sites and other modern media tools. Young people in the streets of Cairo cannot help but be attracted to the force that has been the most tenacious and consistent opposition to the hated dictator. And they are mostly Muslims, after all.
Yet the youth also are not entirely ignorant of the drastic changes that Islamists impose on the societies that they end up governing—banning alcohol, music, movies, nightclubs. Muhammad Akef Mahdi, one of the supreme leaders of the Brotherhood in Egypt, has said in various interviews that the Brotherhood wants to purge the press of un-Islamic content and to seek conformity between the cinema and theater and the principles of Islam.
The Brotherhood’s political skill is formidable and it seems to be achieving its goals—namely, insistence from gullible Westerners that there should be elections as soon as possible and at least tacit support from young Egyptians whose votes it will need to win…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
‘Egypt Still Does Not Have a Middle Class’
Arend Oetker talks to Nina zu Fürstenberg
For the past ten years Arend Oetker, one the internationally committed entrepreneurs and a man with a vocation for foreign affairs, has been active in Egypt with his family- business, Hero. He has contributed to the creation of Cairo’s German University, “because growth, employment and education are the basis on which people can develop a positive vision of the future.” He believes that a rise in these kinds of initiatives and models can act as an antidote against the serious problems posed by unemployment among the young and also that the country is ready for democracy.
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Mr. Oetker, both personally and as an entrepreneur, what was your reaction to events in Egypt?
The first two days we closed down the factory, we had to protect those who work for us. We did stop a looting attempt. Now we have gone back to work, especially because we are in the middle of the strawberry picking season. We have now seen a solution to the Tunisian crisis but it is not over yet, and sooner or later there will be a change in leadership in neighbouring countries too. I am thinking of Libya and Yemen where there have already been riots.
You have had both the market and social trends analysed in depth. Could you tell us whether Egypt has a middle class capable of creating a really democratic future?…
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Day of Rage, Also Regime Supporters to Demonstrate
(ANSAmed) — TRIPOLI, FEBRUARY 17 — Those opposing Muammar Gaddafi’s regime have called for protests across all of Libya on the “Day of Rage”, but the government has brought in many elements to dissuade people from doing so, and the clashes in Al Beida, the country’s third largest city — where over the night several people lost their lives — show that harsh conflict is a serious risk. Human rights organisations have warned about the risk of a harsh crackdown by the police in a country unaccustomed to unrestricted expressions of people’s discontent. Libyan security forces, according to reports on opposition sites this morning, reacted during the night, especially in the eastern part of he country and in Al Beida where there were between “9 and 13 dead among the demonstrators” after intervention by the police, which have reportedly made use even of helicopters to open fire on protestors. Meanwhile, Libyan television broadcast only images of pro-Gaddafi demonstrations and the press — even the most reformist — did not report on yesterday’s clashes in Benghazi.
Instead, coverage was given to today’s marking of the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Italian consulate in Benghazi in 2006 by a group of Libyans to protest statements made by Minister Roberto Calderoli at the time, considered offensive to Muslims. To mark on the event, Gaddafi has over the past few days received the families of the victims, who he called “martyrs”. Another element of dissuasion is that of pro-regime supporters organised by Revolutionary Committees, the backbone of support for the Libyan leader. Yesterday in several cities — from Tripoli to Benghazi and including Sirte and Sebha — from the early morning hours until late night there were large demonstrations of young people, women and children who waved green cloths and images of the leader while yelling out slogans in support of Gaddafi and the system based on power to the masses, calling it an “irreplaceable historic and strategic choice”. And yesterday the day of the Libyan colonel ended with a huge crowd at the inauguration of the new sport club of the Libyan football club Al Ahli, where over 15,000 fans yelled out their support for the colonel.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Al Jazeera, 6 Dead Today in Clashes in Bengasi
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 17 — At least six people were killed today in Bengasi in clashes between demonstrators and the police, Al Jazeera reports quoting an eyewitness. The news has been confirmed by websites of the opposition based abroad.
The eyewitness, by the name of Abdallah, told the pan-Arab network that he has seen that several people were killed during the clashes, adding that there were six victims.
The opposition websites Al Yum and Al Manara mention that at least six people have died and that 35 were injured. Bengasi, Libya’s second city, is situated 1,000 km east of Tripoli.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spengler: Chinese Weather on Tahrir Square
The late novelist James Clavell had a tiresome habit of driving the plots of his potboilers into cul-de-sacs, whence he would extricate them with a natural disaster.
Egypt had its Clavell moment on February 8 when the Food and Agricultural Organization warned that drought in China might require the world’s largest wheat producer to import vast amounts of the grain, forcing the market price to levels never seen before.
While protesters continued to fill Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and Washington swung between urgent calls for President Hosni Mubarak’s departure and admonitions not to rush things, and Egypt’s elite wondered whether to take their money and run, the weather in China pre-empted all these petty calculations.
Not until June will we know the extent of the damage to China’s winter wheat crop, virtually all its production. Extremely low rainfall this winter parched more than 5 million hectares of 14 million hectares planted, and the next few weeks’ weather will determine if the world faces a real shortage of the staff of life.
Hoarding on the part of North African countries, starting with Algeria, has already pushed up the wheat price in the Mediterranean to a 20% premium over the price shown on the Chicago futures market. The immediate risk is that pre-emptive purchases of wheat will price the grain out of the reach of poor Egyptians, not to mention Pakistanis and Bengalis.
And if reserve-rich China, usually self-sufficient, goes into the world market to buy millions of tons of wheat, the price of wheat can rise to an arbitrarily high level.
There is a root cause to the Egyptian uprising, as I wrote last week (Food and failed Arab states,February 2), and it is not Israel, but China: prosperity in Asia creates inelastic demand for grain, such that a minor supply disruption such as the 2010 droughts in Argentina and Russia causes huge price increases. American economist Larry Kudlow observes as well that ethanol subsidies artificially inflate grain demand as well, contributing to the present price spike.
About 40 million Egyptians live on less than US$2 a day — far poorer than the Gazans who are now selling the food they received through Western largesse to Egypt. Amid all the blather about democracy and human rights, some pundits have taken notice.
Thomas Friedman wrote in the February 5 New York Times:
Of course, China per se is not fueling the revolt here — but China and the whole Asian-led developing world’s rising consumption of meat, corn, sugar, wheat and oil certainly is. The rise in food and gasoline prices that slammed into this region in the last six months clearly sharpened discontent with the illegitimate regimes — particularly among the young, poor and unemployed.
Since then, the impressionable Friedman has made his way to Tahrir Square, where he now writes odes to the spirit of freedom sweeping Egypt. On February 7, he wrote that “the truth is now gushing out of here like a torrent from a broken fountain”.
The trouble is that people want to eat almost every day. Pundits and political scientists talk of a choice of political models as if they were at a Ford dealership rather than the scene of a national catastrophe. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen titled his February 7 offering, “Tehran 1979 or Berlin 1989?”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns that Iran wants “a new Gaza in Egypt”. Swiss Tariq Ramadan wrote in the Huffington Post on February 8 that “Democratic Turkey is the Template for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood”. (Ramadan is the grandson of Brotherhood founder Husan al-Banna, whom he praises without mention of al-Banna’s allegiance to the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s).
Automobile models and political models, though, have one thing in common: you can’t have them unless you can pay for them. Iran in 1979 pumped 6 million barrels of oil a day, and petrodollars can pay for a lot of stupidity. Germany was in 1989 and remains one of the world’s most productive economies. Turkey is the only Muslim country that produces large numbers of first-rate university graduates — I had the privilege to work with many of them in the financial industry — thanks to founding father Kemal Ataturk’s emulation of the German university system starting in the 1930s.
Egypt has no oil, insignificant industry, small amounts of natural gas, and 40 million people who are about to become very, very hungry. Without figuring out how to feed the destitute bottom half of the Egyptian population, all the talk of “models” is window-shopping.
That is also why an Iranian outcome is less likely than Iran’s exultant leaders seem to think. A radical Islamist state is like J P Morgan’s yacht. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. Iran wants “another Gaza in Egypt”, Netanyahu warned on February 2. That might be true. But there’s a difference between a Gaza floating in foreign aid, and the bankrupt failed state that Egypt is about to become. The difference will be measured in starvation.
The United States alone has pledged $580 in annual aid per Gazan, slightly less than the annual per capita income of the bottom half of Egypt’s people. The Palestine Authority (PA) transfers $1.2 billion a year to Gaza, mostly in salaries for the 77,000 PA employees still on the payroll. The United Nations throws in about $250 million. Iran subsidizes the Hamas government with at least $100 million a year, although the PA claims that the flow is much greater.
The numbers are slippery, but according to a study for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published in the January 13 Jerusalem Post, the Hamas government in Gaza takes in several thousand dollars for each of the strip’s 450,000 residents.
Being such a statelet is great work, if you can get it. The misplaced fixation of the major powers on Israeli-Palestinian peace gives Hamas (the Palestine offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) an enormous claim on foreign aid. The Brothers back in Egypt won’t be so lucky. There are 178 Egyptians for every Gazan, and not much aid to go around.
Columnist Roger Cohen’s February 7 article concludes, “Obama, if he embraces 1989 over 1979, as he must, should twist the arms of Gulf allies. He should ensure Egyptian democracy delivers by preparing an oil-money-funded Marshall Plan for a democratic Arab world.” There won’t be enough money for emergency food aid, let alone a “Marshall Plan”. Cohen should invest in a pocket calculator.
What happens next? Egypt’s stock market has collapsed, and its pound has fallen to the lowest level since 2005, with some brokerage-house analysts warning of a 20% decline during the next several weeks. Foreign investors have deserted the market for Egyptian treasury securities, so the central bank will print money to give to the banks to buy government debt.
After half a century of military rule since the 1952 Free Officers’ coup, Egypt’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the old regime and its family and friends. If this regime is overthrown, and the corrupt nexus of army and business faces expropriation, the entire liquid wealth of Egypt will make a run for the border, along with its current proprietors.
This is a formula for a classic currency breakdown and galloping inflation, which invariably means panic purchases of commodities and hoarding: a collapse of the Egyptian pound, uncontrolled capital flight, inability to finance a current account deficit in the $15 billion range, and chaos in the Egyptian economy. Egypt might appeal to the international community for help, but the largesse offered to 450,000 Gazans will not extend to the 40 million Egyptians living on less than $2 a day.
Egypt’s rulers had a good run as an American client. They have not yet absorbed the enormity of Washington’s abandonment of a reasonably faithful and consistent ally. Accustomed as they are to hypocrisy in all public discourse, the rulers did not quite grasp President Barack Obama’s obsession with the salvation of the world of his father and stepfather, the world which his anthropologist mother labored her whole short life to defend against globalization.
America’s president really is prepared to gamble core American interests on the sketchy proposition that Egypt can turn into a Muslim democracy. Washington alternates between sentimental blather and diplomatic backsliding. Shlomo Avneri, a senior Israeli diplomat in the government of Yitzhak Rabin, wrote in the Financial Times on February 8:
Many in Israel have been shocked and dismayed by the inconsistency, bordering on amateurism, of the US response to events in Egypt. First the president, then Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, then again the president’s special envoy to Hosni Mubarak, have oscillated between distancing themselves from one of America’s staunchest allies and calling for him to step down, further calls for him to do it as soon as possible and then, taking a U-turn, endorsing an “orderly transition” headed by Omar Suleiman, his intelligence chief.
Oh, for the good old days of American power, when the likes of Jimmy Carter still had the will and means to cut America’s friends off at the knee! Obama’s ability to inflict damage is limited by the contempt which the world displays for American policy.
If Obama succeeds in forcing the Muslim Brotherhood into a new Egyptian regime, Mubarak’s cronies really would be better off in London exile. That implies a tsunami of capital flight and the disappearance of Egypt’s managerial class who, feckless as they might be, nonetheless keep the economy working day by day. As I noted last week, Egypt’s $12 billion a year in tourist revenue has gone to zero and would take years to restore under the best of circumstances.
At this point, Egyptians will begin to starve. The government’s immediate response is to spend more. Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan promised on February 5 that government subsidies would offset the rise in the world market price of food. The government budget would help to “achieve social justice”, Radwan told reporters.
The trouble, as the rating agency Standard and Poor’s explained, is that the government deficit will climb into the teens, from the 8.1% deficit registered last year.
How long Egypt can finance its external deficit, or its internal deficit, without recourse to the printing press, depends less on internal events than on the weather in China.
The Times’ Friedman writes rapturously that Egyptians “want to shape their own destiny”. Unless Egyptian intelligence has secretly mastered weather modification, Egyptians have very little say about their own destiny.
The New York Times on February 8 quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, the figurehead opposition leader, complaining that the Arab world is “a collection of failed states who add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education. That will change with democracy.”
It’s too late. A country that still practices female genital mutilation cannot undertake a grand leap into modernity (by way of comparison, China began to abolish foot-binding in 1911 and eradicated it entirely shortly after 1949).
In this case, Oswald Spengler’s motto applies: Optimism is cowardice. Memo to the temporary residents of Tahrir Square: pray for rain in China.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Army Foils Raid on Jendouba Governorate Office
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 15 — An attempt by a large group of people to raid the headquarters of the Governorate of Jendouba was thwarted yesterday by the Army, which also fired warning shots into the air during the incident. According to reports from TAP, three people sustained injuries and were brought to the hospital.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Arrests in Crime Crackdown
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 15 — Soldiers have arrested two criminal gangs in Ben Arous, a governorate in the southern suburbs of Tunis, during two separate operations. The first gang was arrested as they were about to attack a school armed with daggers and clubs, while the second group were planning to ransack the depot of the national telephone company, Tunisie Telecom, in Djebel Jeloud.
Elsewhere, four men with previous convictions, including one who had previously escaped from prison and is accused of a murder committed a few days ago, were arrested in the central Tunisian region of Zaghouan. The operation was carried out by mixed units from the army and the national guard. The press agency TAP says that the operation received the full collaboration of citizens.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Police and Army Arrest Gang of Robbers
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 16 — Having blocked the Number 2 state highway near Kondar (in the Sousse governorate), a group of six men belonging to the same gang robbed car drivers and passengers and then took off with their vehicles. The men have been arrested as part of a joint operation conducted by the army and the National Guard. The cars have all been recovered
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Call-Up of Reservists Begins
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 16 — The call-up of reservists to the Tunisian army, which was ordered by the provisional government a few days ago, began today. The move concerns soldiers from the last draft (term) of 2008 and all those from 2009. After a short training course, the reservists will enter supervision and public order services, which the army has carried out since the opening days of the “Jasmine revolution”. The Tunisian army is 45,000 strong.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Police and Army Operations Against Crime
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 16 — During a series of operations carried out in Kairouan (central Tunisia) by army, national guard and police units, dozens of people were arrested, some of which were already on the wanted list. They have all been charged with serious acts of violence.
The arrests were carried out during raids on cafe’s, working-class neighbourhoods, and even in the streets and squares of Kairouan and neighbouring area. Tap news agency says that, “according to sources within the security services, these campaigns will continue in the region until the acts of vandalism are stopped and the criminals involved in these serious events that terrorised the people are brought to justice”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Security, Night Trains to Tunis Banlieue Suspended
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 16 — The night service connecting Tunis with its populous southern suburbs to Borj Cedria has been suspended from 8 PM to 5 AM until further orders. This decision was made by the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Tunisiens (Sncft), due to the lasting lack of security onboard the trains with repeated incidents of attacks and robberies of passengers. The decision was made after army soldiers stopped and arrested a group of men a few days ago who, armed with knives, had managed to get onboard a train leaving from Tunis’s central station in Place Barcelona which was headed south. Attacks on passengers had occurred in the past, but over the last few days the situation has grown worse.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Arab Revolts Can Boost Anti-Terrorism Fight: UK
(Reuters) — Revolts by young Arabs seeking freedom are a “huge opportunity” for Western counter-terrorism because they weaken al Qaeda’s argument that democracy and Islam are incompatible, Britain’s Security Minister said on Thursday.
The minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, said the example set by ordinary Muslims seeking peaceful political change would counter the attraction violent extremism still exerted on a small number of young people in Britain’s Muslim minority communities.
“We have, if we can get this right, a great vehicle for the promotion of Western values,” Neville-Jones told Reuters in an interview, referring to a surge of anti-government protests in countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
“These young people … are asking for greater freedoms, they are asking for the kind of Western values to be implanted in their society that they can see through the Internet.
“It should be regarded in my view as a huge opportunity.”
Britain’s counter-terrorism efforts are widely watched in Europe and beyond after a string of attacks on the West dating back to the 1990s by young Islamist militants educated in Britain, which critics say has long been complacent about Islamist radicalism in its Muslim communities.
The leader of the last successful militant attack in Britain, British-Pakistani Mohammad Sidique Khan, made an implicit criticism of democracy in a posthumous statement explaining his decision to coordinate suicide bombings that killed 52 people in London in 2005.
“WE NEED TO INTEGRATE”
Referring to the Western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he drew a distinction between Western democracy and what he called his obedience to God, saying “your democratically elected governments perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you responsible.”
The West should help political transition in Arab countries, said Neville-Jones, who is working on a new strategy to try to draw alienated Muslim youths away from extremism.
“We need to integrate,” she said. “We need to be a single society and Muslims are as much a part of that as anybody else, and (for) extremists of any variety this is not welcome territory and not fertile ground for them.”
Saudi-born Osama bin Laden’s transnational militant network has traditionally drawn many recruits from Arab states, with Egyptians often figuring in senior positions. A principal ambition of al Qaeda is the violent overthrow of authoritarian Arab governments and their replacement by strict Islamic rule.
Bin Laden has said democracy is akin to idolatry as, according to him, it places men’s desires and authority above God’s. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has dismissed democracy as impious and as reflecting a state of “unbelief.”
Neville-Jones suggested these notions were at odds with the push for democracy now seen in Arab countries…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
As Arabs Demand Democracy, Iraqis Want Electricity
This photo shows protesters in Baghdad on Friday holding banners demanding better public services. A sign at right in Arabic reads, ‘We want clean water, we want electricity’. More protests took place on Monday. AP photo.
As other Arab nations call for democracy in the wake of uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, Iraqis are waging their own power campaign, demanding more electricity.
While pro-democracy protests have spread to other Arab countries to oust autocratic rulers, in Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was overthrown by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, protesters have different ambitions.
Peaceful protests decrying a lack of basic services such as electricity and water have grown across Iraq over the past two weeks, with demonstrators venting anger at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government.
Borrowing from the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, where the Internet charged uprisings that toppled unpopular leaders in both countries, some of the protests across Iraq also have been mobilized by Facebook.
Groups called “No Silence,” “Baghdad Is Not Kandahar” and “Blue Revolution” organized a Valentine’s Day protest in Baghdad on Monday to denounce corruption and “greed” among Iraqi officials, calling on them to provide jobs and improve electricity, water and sewage facilities.
Now, Facebook groups are abuzz with calls for a Feb. 25 protest in Baghdad that is being billed as a “Revolution of Iraqi Anger,” urging citizens to converge in large numbers to protest against a number of woes, with electricity at the top of the list.
“Our goal is not to change the government. We only want reforms,” said Karnas Ali, one of the organizer’s of the Valentine’s Day protest.
Inam Wahid, one of hundreds of protesters at another Baghdad rally, said his home had been without electricity for five days, while a banner at a protest on Tuesday in the western city of Fallujah read, “There is no life without electricity.”
Angry Iraqis staged violent demonstrations last summer in several southern cities over power rationing as temperatures reached 54 degrees Celsius and air conditioners sat idle.
A nationwide survey released this month by Washington’s International Republican Institute showed Iraqis polled last summer believed that basic services like electricity were the country’s biggest single problem, even ahead of the persistent and deadly insecurity.
In August 2003 Paul Bremer, the top American official in Iraq who led the post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority, promised that, “About one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use and will have it 24 hours a day, every single day.”
He soon learned there was no quick fix: Nearly eight years later, Iraqis get no more than eight hours of electricity per day.
Iraq’s entire electricity network, from generation plants to hub stations and transmission lines, took a beating in the 1980-88 war with Iran, the 1991 Gulf War, more than a decade of U.N. sanctions that followed, and finally by the U.S. invasion in 2003.
According to a master plan produced by U.S. firm Parsons Brinckerhoff for the Iraqi Electricity Mministry and unveiled last month, a whopping $80 billion dollars of investment is needed over the next 20 years to meet Iraq’s power needs, about the same amount as the country’s entire 2011 national budget.
It said that if the plan’s investments and recommendations are implemented on schedule, “capacity will be sufficient to meet the demand of Iraq with adequate reserves by 2013 or 2014.”
But the government’s worries are more immediate: What to do before temperatures and tempers soar next summer?
Currently, power generated domestically or imported from Iran and Syria totals no more than 6,500 megawatts, while demand is estimated at 13,500 megawatts, and growing.
Privately owned generators, which in neighborhoods across the country churn out about 5,000 megawatts, make up some of that shortfall, but not everyone can afford to pay for private supplies.
“The biggest issue in electricity, in my view, is the difference between supply and demand,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq.
He said supplies have been increasing “at a trot,” but demand has been “galloping ahead” as Iraqis, starved of consumer goods by more than a decade of sanctions following Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, have gone on a spending spree as import duties have been slashed and new products have flooded shops.
Now, international technology brands like Panasonic, Toshiba, LG and Samsung entice consumers with billboards mushrooming across the war-ravaged capital.
“Much of the equipment needed to boost generation has already been bought and delivered to Iraq,” said Adel Mahdi, advisor to the electricity minister. But he cautioned it would take at least 12-18 months before the equipment can be installed and brought online.
“By next summer we will have only an extra generation capacity of 1,500 MW, but this will be swallowed up by the increase in demand,” Mahdi said.
“I expect the situation next summer to be the same as it was last summer. This means that this summer we will have no more than eight hours of electricity a day across Iraq.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
At Least 16 Killed in Iraq Attacks
BAGHDAD — A car bomb killed 13 people at a vehicle trade fair in the deadliest of a string of attacks on Thursday in which 16 died, including a university professor hanged in his home.
Among those killed were a journalist, the professor and a Sunni Muslim imam, while 35 other people were wounded, security officials said. In the worst violence, a vehicle packed with explosives was detonated in the middle of a car sales fair in the town of Muqdadiyah, northeast of Baghdad in restive Diyala province.
Iraqi army Major Abbas al-Tamim put the casualty toll at 13 dead and 35 wounded.
Muqdadiyah is a mostly Shiite Muslim town with a substantial Sunni population.
While violence has declined nationwide since its peak in 2006 and 2007, Diyala remains one of Iraq’s least secure regions. In the northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi journalist was gunned down outside his home and a Sunni imam was killed inside his house, local police said.
Two gunmen shot dead Hilal al-Ahmadi, 50 and a father of four, as he left his home in Mithaq, an eastern district of Mosul, a police captain said, asking not to be named.
Ahmadi worked for two local weeklies, Mosul Echo and Iraqiyoun. Paris-based watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned the murder and demanded an investigation into Ahmadi’s killing. “The murders of journalists in Iraq are not letting up and generalised impunity is fuelling the cycle of violence,” RSF secretary-general Jean-Francoi Julliard said in a statement.
According to Iraq’s Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, more than 250 journalists and media workers have been killed in the country since the 2003 US-led invasion.
Also on Thursday, gunmen entered the home of Sheikh Ail Fakhri, an imam known locally for denouncing Al-Qaeda, and shot him dead using silencers, another officer said, on condition of anonymity. In the capital, armed men hanged Baghdad University medical professor Ali Abdulhussein al-Saadi overnight after breaking into his house, an interior ministry official said.
January saw an uptick in deaths resulting from violence across Iraq, recording the highest monthly toll in four months with 259 people killed, according to government figures…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Baghdad Wants U.S. To Pay $1 Billion for Damage to City
BAGHDAD (Reuters) — Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military.
“The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste,” the statement said.
“Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford…we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses.”
The statement made no mention of damage caused by bombing.
Baghdad’s neighborhoods have been sealed off by miles of concrete blast walls, transforming the city into a tangled maze that contributes to massive traffic jams. Despite a sharp reduction in overall violence in recent years only 5 percent of the walls have been removed, officials said.
The heavy blast walls have damaged sewer and water systems, pavement and parks, said Hakeem Abdul Zahra, the city spokesman.
U.S. military Humvees, driven on street medians and through gardens, have also caused major damage, he said.
“The city of Baghdad feels these violations, which have taken place for years, have caused economic and moral damage,” he said.
U..S. troops pulled out of Iraq’s cities in June 2009 before formally ending combat operations last August. Around 50,000 remain in Iraq but they are scheduled to withdraw by year end.
Baghdad is badly in need of a facelift. Electricity and trash collection are sporadic, streets are potholed and sewage treatment plants and pipes have not been renovated for years.
Iraq has seen growing protests in recent weeks over poor government services.
Zahra said the city’s statement issued on Wednesday would be the start of its measures to get the United States to pay for damages but he did not say what other steps might be taken.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Bahrain: Opposition, At Least 60 Missing After Clashes
(ANSAmed) — MANAMA, FEBRUARY 17 — There are reportedly at least 60 people missing after the clashes in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, reports an opposition representative.
The Army has made an appeal to the people of Manama to avoid the roads in the centre of the capital, the site of the clashes in recent hours. The Army “will take all measures necessary to maintain security and public order,” said a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry to state-run TV.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet
Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.
The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. But it has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments — many of them already known to interfere with and filter specific Web sites and e-mails — may also possess what is essentially a kill switch for the Internet.
Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.
But now, as Egyptian engineers begin to assess fragmentary evidence and their own knowledge of the Egyptian Internet’s construction, they are beginning to understand what, in effect, hit them. Interviews with many of those engineers, as well as an examination of data collected around the world during the blackout, indicate that the government exploited a devastating combination of vulnerabilities in the national infrastructure.
For all the Internet’s vaunted connectivity, the Egyptian government commanded powerful instruments of control: it owns the pipelines that carry information across the country and out into the world.
Internet experts say similar arrangements are more common in authoritarian countries than is generally recognized. In Syria, for example, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment dominates the infrastructure, and the bulk of the international traffic flows through a single pipeline to Cyprus. Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have the same sort of dominant, state-controlled carrier.
Over the past several days, activists in Bahrain and Iran say they have seen strong evidence of severe Internet slowdowns amid protests there. Concerns over the potential for a government shutdown are particularly high in North African countries, most of which rely on a just a small number of fiber-optic lines for most of their international Internet traffic…
| — Hat tip: Zenster | [Return to headlines] |
Source: Ben Ali in Coma After Ictus
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 17 — The former President of Tunisia, Ben Ali, has been in a coma for two days now due to an ictus, in a hospital in the Saudi capital Jedda. The news was reported by a source close to the family. “He went into a coma two days ago”, the source told France Presse. “He is in a hospital in Jeddah. He has had a cerebral vascular attack, and his condition is serious”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Syrian President Warned by Cousin “Change or be Changed”
(AGI) Berlin — Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has been warned by his cousin Ribal, who lives in exile in London where he manages the Organization for Democracy and Freedom in Syria, that he must “change or we will be changed”. “We do not want a revolution in Syria. We want the government to start to implement change, peaceful change,” said Ribal, while attending a conference in Berlin.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
The West Looks to Fan Flames as Iran and Libya Feel the Heat From Within
All of a sudden, the leaders of the Middle East’s rogue states appear to have lost their appetite for upholding the protests that have already accounted for the governments of Tunisia and Egypt. In Iran, the government has ordered its supporters to stage nationwide demonstrations today to express their hatred for the opposition Green Movement, which earlier this week made a dramatic reappearance on the streets of Tehran to demand the overthrow of President Ahmadinejad’s regime.
That was hardly the response the clerics were hoping for when they extolled the protests in Egypt, comparing events with their own Islamic revolution in 1979. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, claimed earlier this month that the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak was part of the same “Islamic awakening” as the events of 32 years ago in Iran. Once the crowds of demonstrators and chants of “Death to the Dictator” appeared on his own doorstep, he rapidly backtracked. Within a few hours, the order had gone out to the broadcast media to halt all coverage of unrest elsewhere in the Middle East. The next day, in a rowdy session of parliament, government MPs called for the execution of the Green Movement’s leaders, including Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister, and Mehdi Karroubi, the parliament’s former speaker. So much for free speech.
The re-emergence of the Green Movement is certainly a major embarrassment for the government. The mullahs no doubt assumed that their uncompromising response had silenced the protests that erupted in the wake of the disputed presidential election in 2009. Indeed, over the past few months, their executioners have been fully occupied with those accused of organising the protests, many of whom were sentenced to death on trumped-up charges such as drug-smuggling. Iranian opposition groups estimate that the majority of the 89 people executed in January — the highest rate of any country in the world — were anti-government activists. They included Sahra Bahrami, a 46-year-old Dutch-Iranian woman, detained during the 2009 protests. She was hanged on bogus drug-smuggling charges, causing the Dutch government to freeze all ties with Iran.
The opposition has shown this week that it refuses to be cowed by the brutality of the regime’s response. But of more concern for Iran’s ruling elite will be fresh signs of a split within the ranks of the Republican Guards, the organisation formed specifically to protect the revolution.
In a letter to Mohammad Ali Jafari, the Guards’ hardline commander, a copy of which has been seen by The Daily Telegraph, senior officers seek reassurance that “we will not [have to] shoot nor beat our brothers seeking to express legitimate protest against the policies and conduct of their leaders”.
To date, the officers, who are based in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom and Tabriz, have received no official response from Mr Jafari, who has passed the letter to the Supreme Leader’s office. But any suggestion that the guardians of the Islamic Revolution might be unwilling to fight their own countrymen raises serious questions about the ability of both Mr Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad to survive a renewed bout of protests. What ultimately sealed Mr Mubarak’s fate was the refusal of his military to fire on the protesters in Tahrir Square. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the same could happen in Iran. Another rogue state reeling from the wave of protest is Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi has dominated the country for 41 years. This week’s demonstrations, in the eastern cities of al-Bayda and Benghazi, were sparked by the arrest of a human rights lawyer who was campaigning for the families of more than 1,000 prisoners killed by the security forces 15 years ago…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Turkish Authorities Trying to ‘Suppress’ Critics, CPJ Says
CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Mohamed Abdel Dayem and Executive Director Joel Simon speak to DHA about the Dogan tax case and other issues.
Turkish authorities in 2010 “paraded” journalists into court in an attempt to “suppress critical news and commentary,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday in its annual worldwide report.
The report, “Attacks on the Press 2010: Turkey,” provided an overview of what the human rights organization considered key developments in the country during 2010.
“Authorities paraded journalists into court on anti-terror, criminal defamation and state security charges as they tried to suppress critical news and commentary on issues involving national identity, the Kurdish minority and an alleged anti-government conspiracy,” the CPJ report states.
It noted that there had been no convictions in the 2007 killing of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. The report also highlighted that the European Union, which Turkey is trying to join, also criticized Ankara’s press freedom record.
Citing numerous cases, the report claimed Turkish officials used anti-terror legislation “against critical journalists, many of them writing about Kurdish issues and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.”
The report also made note of the Dogan tax case, in which the Turkish government claimed unpaid taxes amounting to billions of Turkish Liras from the Dogan Media Group, or DMG, Turkey’s biggest media company.
“We’re monitoring the situation, we’re concerned about it and we’re concerned about a number of recent incidents that suggest that the press freedom gains that have been made in Turkey are vulnerable,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon told Dogan news agency, or DHA, at a press conference in New York on Tuesday.
* The Daily News is a Dogan Media Group publication.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Turkish Religious Head Criticizes Remarks Blaming Women for Sex Crimes
A professor’s controversial remarks on sex crimes have drawn strong criticism, including from the head of Turkey’s top religious body.
Religious Affairs Director Professor Mehmet Görmez said Thursday criticisms and bans in Islam preventing women from exposing their sexuality cannot be used as an excuse for harassment or rape.
His comments came after a professor from Konya’s Selçuk University Faculty of Theology claimed women wearing clothes that reveal their cleavage were provoking harassment.
“Who is the focus of the problem? Women,” said Professor Orhan Çeker. “If you wear clothes that reveal your cleavage, it would not be a surprise for you to encounter such ugliness. It would not be reasonable for you to complain about the result after your provocation.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
US Envoy’s Tough Talk Draws Tough Response From Turkish Officials
The new U.S. envoy to Ankara, who criticized Turkey late Tuesday for detaining journalists while saying it supports freedom of speech, has been slammed by ruling party officials for “interfering” in domestic affairs.
“Ambassadors cannot interfere in domestic issues. They have limits,” Hüseyin Çelik, the deputy leader and spokesman for the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, told reporters Wednesday. “Whether this is the U.S. or the Russian ambassador, they have to adhere to the limits.”
Newly appointed U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone drew Çelik’s ire with comments he made at a reception at his residence late Tuesday, where reporters asked him his opinion about a recent raid on Oda TV, a dissident online news portal.
“Journalists are being detained on the one hand, while addresses about freedom of speech are given on the other. We do not understand this, so we ask you,” Ricciardone said, adding that he does “not have full knowledge of the details,” but is “following the process closely.”
The offices of Oda TV and the homes of its owner, the well-known journalist Soner Yalçin, and several staff members were raided Monday by Istanbul police based on suspected links to the alleged Ergenekon gang, which is accused of planning to topple the government by staging a coup, initially by spreading chaos and mayhem.
“Turkey wants a free press. Turkish people want a critical press even if it is a dissident one. The opposition parties and the government say they support freedom of the press,” Ricciardone. “The Turkish people’s opinion is important. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are vital for Turkey, the United States and the people of this region.”
Ricciardone’s words also drew a reaction from Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç, who told reporters Wednesday that the U.S. envoy “had praised Turkey’s democratization process” during a meeting with him Tuesday. “He may have been influenced by the media [coverage],” Arinç said.
Deputy AKP leader Çelik also criticized the journalists’ decision to pose such questions to a foreign ambassador. “We have this habit: We ask in-season and out-of-season questions. And when we get a reply, we ask others why he or she has spoken this way,” he said. “OK, but why do you ask questions? I mean, why do you ask questions to irrelevant people?”
CHP supports envoy’s observation
The country’s main opposition, however, expressed approval of Ricciardone’s statement on press freedom. “The mission of the envoys is to closely follow the developments in the countries they are appointed to and inform their governments. If need be, the ambassadors also express openly their opinions. Is it possible for him not to make any observations when these things are happening?” Osman Korutürk, deputy leader of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Wednesday.
Saying the U.S. envoy’s observation is shared by ambassadors from other countries as well, Korutürk added: “We are a candidate country to the European Union. It’s very normal for the ambassadors of EU countries and other countries to speak about deficiencies in terms of democracy and human rights.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
WikiLeaks: US Wanted ‘Derogatory’ Information on Bahrain King’s Sons
The office of Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, wanted to know if Prince Nasir bin Hamad al Khalifa or Prince Khalid bin Hamad al Khalifa took drugs, drank alcohol or “caused problems” within the monarchy. Embassy staff in the Bahraini capital of Manama were also asked whether the princes had any friends among the country’s Shia Muslim majority, which is behind this week’s protests against the minority rule of the Sunni regime.
Prince Nasir, 23, who is serving in the Bahrain Defence Force, and Prince Khalid, 21, are King Hamad’s sons by his second wife and there have been fears in the region that hardliners from neighbouring countries might try to influence them.
In October 2009 a diplomatic cable from Mrs Clinton’s office, marked “secret”, described the princes as “important emerging targets of leadership analysis”.
As well as asking for basic biographical details on each prince, including their date of birth, ability to speak English and educational background, the cable, obtained by WikiLeaks and seen by the Daily Telegraph, asked about possible tensions with the King’s heir apparent, Crown Prince Salman.
“Is there a rivalry between (either) Prince and Crown Prince Salman?” Mrs Clinton’s staff asked. “If so, what is the nature of this rivalry? Has it caused problems within the family?”
King Hamad, 61, has seven sons and five daughters by his four wives, including three sons who are older than Sandhurst-trained Prince Nasir. The cable also asked: “Does (either prince) have any Shia friends? What are his views on how the ruling family should address the Shia majority in Bahrain?”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Afghan Imams Wage Political Battle Against U.S.
KABUL — For the U.S. government, and for the 100,000 American troops fighting in Afghanistan, the messages delivered last Friday could hardly have been worse.
Under the weathered blue dome of Kabul’s largest mosque, a distinguished preacher, Enayatullah Balegh, pledged support for “any plan that can defeat” foreign military forces in Afghanistan, denouncing what he called “the political power of these children of Jews.”
Across town, a firebrand imam named Habibullah was even more blunt.
“Let these jackals leave this country,” the preacher, who uses only one name, declared of foreign troops. “Let these brothers of monkeys, gorillas and pigs leave this country. The people of Afghanistan should determine their own fate.”
Every Friday, Afghan clerics wade into the politics of their war-torn country, delivering half-hour sermons that blend Islamic teaching with often-harsh criticism of the U.S. presence. In a country where many lack newspapers, television or Internet access, the mosque lectures represent a powerful forum for influencing Afghan opinion.
The raw frustration voiced in these sermons is periodically echoed by President Hamid Karzai in his somewhat more diplomatic criticism of the West. Although cast in tones of prayer and contemplation, the messages from the mosques pose a serious and delicate problem for President Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy: how to respect the sacredness of Islam without conceding the propaganda war.
In Afghanistan’s mosques, American troops are derided as crusaders and occupiers. Officials with the U.S.-backed government are accused of corruption and deceit. Even in Kabul, the most modern city in an impoverished country, imams regularly denounce American troops and label as stooges their Afghan partners.
‘A feeling of xenophobia’
With 7,100 publicly funded mosques and tens of thousands of private mosques scattered in cities and villages, it is difficult to generalize about the content of Friday sermons in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, a sampling of sermons in Kabul found that preachers often depict developments here as anti-Islamic but also are careful not to veer into open support for either warring side.
Choosing sides in the war is dangerous for Afghans, and imams are no exception. Those who preach openly in support of the Taliban risk arrest or worse. Any pro-government or pro-coalition rhetoric, particularly in rural areas where the Taliban thrive, can warrant a death sentence. In interviews, several Kabul mullahs insisted that Islam is a religion of peace and said they strive to remain neutral. Honest mullahs, they said, have a responsibility to preach against violence and terrorism.
“My sermons are mainly focused on peace, reconciliation, mutual respect and obeying the central government,” said Abdul Rauf Nafi, the imam of the government-funded Herati mosque in Kabul. “In every Friday sermon, I call on people and explain to them that, look, this is a golden opportunity God has given us. Dozens of foreign countries have a presence here, and they’re all here to help us take steps toward a prosperous future.”
Because the Taliban is led by mullahs and seeks followers in part by casting itself as a defender of Islam, other religious leaders in Afghanistan must take the group’s views into account. Several said that the Taliban’s orthodox interpretation of Islam has flaws and that its reliance on funding and support from Pakistan further discredits the organization. But their arguments against the presence of foreign forces are more categorical.
“If you see a feeling of xenophobia these days, that’s understandable,” Balegh, the preacher, who is also a professor of Islamic law at Kabul University, said in an interview. “I don’t think even a single Afghan is happy with the presence of the foreign military forces here.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Central Asia: Schools, Roads, Hospitals and Power Plants Disappearing in Central Asia
A report by the International Crisis Group says that Soviet-era infrastructures are still the backbone of the region. However, they are deteriorating and not been replaced. Without radical action, poverty and social disorder are the likeliest future of the region.
Bishkek (AsiaNews/Agencies) — The infrastructure of the nations of Central Asia is steadily disappearing. Without a major injection of money, these countries will no longer have roads, power plants, hospitals, and schools and the trained engineers and teachers needed to keep them running, this according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICS).
According to the study, the infrastructures in all the countries in the region date back to the Soviet era, and many of them are unable to replace them, especially Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
“In five-ten years there will be no teachers in the school, doctors in the hospitals while the absence of electricity will become the norm”, said Paul Quinn-Judge, the director of the crisis group project for Central Asia.
“Power cuts in Tajikistan each winter—twelve hours a day in the countryside, if not more—are already a tradition. Power failures in Kyrgyzstan are becoming increasingly common,” the report said.
In the countries, the new generation of engineers, doctors and teachers are not likely up to par with its predecessor. Moreover, both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan suffer from political instability, which is leading to an authoritarian state in the first and a weak state in the latter following spring protests that led to domestic political realignments.
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are heading in the same direction. Exactly how far they have gone is hard to say as reliable data either does not exist or is secret. In Turkmenistan, the state appears to be concerned only about the capital Ashgabat.
Even Kazakhstan, the region’s only functioning state, will be severely tested by infrastructure deficiencies, particularly in transportation and training of technical cadres, this in a country that is raking in riches from the sale of oil, uranium and other resources.
For the ICS, the current predicament has many causes. As part of the Soviet Union, the five countries tended to be neglected even though they were part of a single system and had to work together.
The lack of local energy sources and hydroelectric plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan did not matter as long as their neighbours supplied them with what they needed. Economic self-sufficiency was unnecessary since Moscow provided a social safety net.
With the USSR gone, leaders in the new states, even those rich in energy and natural resources, sought to consolidate their personal power rather than implement the needed reforms in key sectors like education, infrastructure, health care and welfare.
Rising poverty and lack of social services played a significant role in the unrest that led to the overthrow of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev in April 2010. For the ICS, it could well play a similar role in other countries, most notably Tajikistan, in the not too distant future.
For the ICS, international donors are not free from blame because they tend to provide aid without demanding real change.
If something is not done, the outcome could be dire. “The rapid deterioration of infrastructure will deepen poverty and alienation from the state,” the report said. “The disappearance of basic services will provide Islamic radicals, already a serious force in many Central Asian states, with further ammunition against regional leaders and openings to establish influential support networks.”
Ultimately, “the poorest states will become ever more dependent on the export of labour.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Christian Gorkhas Protest Indian Government Discrimination
Indian police kill two Gorkha women during a peaceful protest for independence. Thousands demonstrate in New Delhi for justice. In Darjeeling District, the government deploys paramilitary troops and imposes a curfew in the main cities.
Kathmandu (AsiaNews) — Thousands of Gorkhas of Nepali origin demonstrated in New Delhi, demanding justice and an end to discrimination, after two women protesters were shot dead by police in Jalpaigudi (Darjeeling).
The incident, which occurred on Wednesday, sparked protests in Darjeeling, on the border with Nepal. The government sent in paramilitary forces to patrol the cities of the state. A curfew was imposed in the most affected areas.
“We want an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation,” Bimal Gurung, president of the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM), told AsiaNews. “Police show two women during a peaceful demonstration. We will not stop until we get justice.” The GJM also called for a general strike in the next few days to halt transportation and other activities in Darjeeling.
Gorkhas began accusing the central and local governments of discrimination towards their community after an unfair tax was imposed on the Nepali minority. For this reason, they set up an organisation in 2007 that seeks autonomy for their district.
Ethnic Nepalis represent the majority in Darjeeling, where they work in tea plantations. Most of them are Christians (both Protestants and Catholics) who fled Nepal when the country became an absolute Hindu monarchy
At present, Catholics number around 8,000. In 2006, with the end of Nepal’s monarchy, many began to attend the Nepali church across the border.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: Christian Killed by Muslim Employer, Relatives Say
LAHORE, Pakistan — The Christian family of 24-year-old Imran Masih in Pakistan’s Punjab Province was in anguish. The previous week, on Feb. 7, Masih was found dead at his Muslim employer’s farmhouse.
The employer, influential landowner Chaudhry Maqsood Cheema, claimed that Masih committed suicide by hanging himself. Masih’s relatives believe that Cheema — seeing the young Christian man as a “soft target” whose family had little standing or legal recourse in the predominantly Muslim society — killed him for taking a day off without informing him.
Masih had married eight months ago, and the couple was expecting their first child, his father Lal Masih told Compass by telephone from Nath Kallan village in Esa Nagar, Gujranwala district. He said Cheema had hired his son to care for his livestock a month ago, and that a few days before his death, Imran Masih had taken a day off from work without informing Cheema.
“Cheema did not approve of this action and reprimanded him severely,” he said.
Imran Masih went to work the morning of Feb. 7 as usual, said Lal Masih, who was also employed by Cheema as his tractor driver. Shortly thereafter, Cheema’s brother called him and said his son had committed suicide by hanging himself, he said. The family rushed towards Cheema’s farmhouse, where they were told that Masih had hung himself in a cattle stall.
“When I entered the room, I saw my son’s body hanging with a rope, and a very loose noose was around his neck,” Lal Masih said. The body hung only about six inches off the ground, he said, and there was nothing nearby that could have served as a mount from which to fall in an attempt to hang himself…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Singapore: Christians in City-State Reach 18 Per Cent of Total Population
Christian group gains 3 per cent over 2000 because of the sense of community and protection Churches provide. The number of single people and people with no religion is up, marriage and fertility rates are down. The percentage of Muslims is unchanged (15 per cent). Buddhism loses 10 per cent.
Singapore (AsiaNews) — Christianity saw the greatest increase in followers over the past ten years, this according to the 2010 government census. Christians now form 18 per cent of the population, up 3 cent from 2000. The census also reported more single people, people with no religion as well as declining marriage and fertility rates across ethnic groups.
Taoism and Hinduism also reported significant growth, hitting 11 per cent and 5 per cent respectively in 2010. Islam remained stable at 15 per cent, whilst Buddhism saw the largest drop in followers, from 43 per cent to 33 per cent over ten years.
Detailed figures suggest that many Christian converts are ethnic Chinese who previously followed Buddhism.
The rise in the Christian population could also be affected by the rising number of permanent residents, 23 per cent of whom are Christian.
Christian groups offer a sense of community that is ideal for new residents, said researcher Mathew Mathews, from the Institute of Policy Studies.
Homemaker Teo Mong Geck, 54, told the Straits Times that she converted to Christianity after attending Hokkien dialect services at a Baptist church. “The words the pastor says are very reasonable,” said the former Taoist.
The census also reported that one in three university graduates are Christian. However, there are more Christians with only secondary educational qualifications. Mathews told the Straits Times this could be because of outreach services in the heartlands that are offered in Tamil and Mandarin.
Islam maintained its numbers, as it continues to be the dominant religion among ethnic Malays, 99 per cent of whom declared themselves Muslim in 2010.
People with no religion also grew from 15 per cent to 17 per cent, a trend often attributed to higher education levels.
Most worrying was the continued decline of marriage and fertility rates across all ethnic groups. Only 59 per cent were married in 2010, down by 3 per cent over 2000. Correspondingly, singlehood and divorce were on the rise.
Among married females in their thirties, 20 per cent were childless, compared to 14 per cent in 2000. The overall fertility rate was 1.1 children per woman in 2010 and more females had only one child.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Muslim Extremists Linked to Hezbollah and Al Qaeda Operating in Chile
Muslim extremists linked to Hezbollah and al Qaeda are operating in Chile, where they provide “significant” financial aid to the Arab terrorist groups, according to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago.
“These fundamentalists who are known to be associated with Hezbollah are increasing their presence and activity in Chile,” says a 2006 diplomatic cable from Craig Kelly, U.S. ambassador to Chile from 2004 to 2007.
“Additionally, there are indications that there may be Pakistani extremists and others sympathetic to al Qaeda.”
Mr. Kelly described a “radical fundamentalist presence” in the northern port city of Iquique and “to a lesser degree” in the capital, Santiago.
“There is substantial information that indicates that significant financial fund-raising for Hezbollah is taking place in northern Chile within the Muslim community,” he wrote in the cable published this week by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
Mr. Kelly added that the Islamic Center in Santiago “certainly provides financial support” for terrorists and that the U.S. and Chilean governments are working together to “monitor” the center and “take action against them, if required.”
The ambassador said authorities had no information that the extremists were involved in any other terrorist activity beyond fundraising. However, he added that “explosives are easy to obtain” in Chile because of extensive mining operations.
Al Qaeda and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah are allied with Iran, which has been extending its influence in Latin America for several years.
Jamie Daremblum, a former Costa Rican ambassador to the United States, has been tracking the growing relationship between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
EU: Financial Assistance to Italy
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 15 — The European Commission received a letter from Italy asking for Europe to provide assistance to manage the extraordinary number of immigrants arriving to Italy and is ready to assure “financial assistance” from the European funds available for refugees and borders, said the spokesperson for EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom. The aid “can be made available quite quickly,” assured Michele Cercone, without specifying the amount of funds to be provided. Italy has asked for 100 million euros in aid.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Frontex: 5,526 Landed in Italy Since January 1
(ANSAmed) — FEBRUARY 16 — 5,526 illegal immigrants landed on the shores of southern Italy between January 1 and Februray 13. The figure has emerged from a table drafted by Frontex, the EU agency for the supervision of borders, and is based on figures supplied by the Italian authorities.
A total of 116 boats landed in Italy, 80 of them at Lampedusa, and carried 5,031 people, including 18 women and 69 unaccompanied minors.
3 boats landed at Agrigento, with 20 people on board, while 21 boats containing 211 immigrants landed in other parts of the Sicilian coast.
Frontex figures say that during the same period, three boats landed in Puglia containing 57 people, of which 43 were men, 2 were women and 12 were minors, half of them unaccompanied. 8 boats landed in Calabria carrying 192 people — 152 men and 26 minors, 14 of them unaccompanied. Sardinia, meanwhile, was the destination for just one boat, which was carrying 15 men, none of them under the age of 18.
In total, out of 5,526 immigrants to have arrived on the Italian coasts, 5,384 are men and 34 are women, while there were 108 minors, 90 of them unaccompanied.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Frattini to Propose New Mediterranean Pact
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 16 — A new pact for the Mediterranean, “embryo of a true and proper” European “Marshall Plan” for the Countries on the Southern shore. The proposal will be launched on Sunday by Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini to his European colleagues during the scheduled meeting of chief diplomats of the 27.
Speaking to the Senate the Foreign Minister stated that “I am preparing a strategic document for Sunday that prefigures a new Pact for the Mediterranean for stability, security and prosperity”. He added that “Sadly we noted the failure of the Union for the Mediterranean but Europe cannot escape re-launching its policy for the Mediterranean”.
As for the wave of immigrants from North Africa generated by the events in Tunisia and Egypt, he stated “do not be deceived, we must stay alert”.
Even though over the last 24 hours the situation concerning Tunisian illegal aliens has “stabilised” itself, Frattini pointed out that “in recent hours our police forces have intercepted organisations and groups of immigrants that were illegally attempting to access Italy, even via land”.
The Foreign Minister pointed to some 50 Afghan and Iraqi immigrants hidden in a number of trucks; the arrest of two people smugglers who were using a sailing boat to transport Iraqi, Afghan and Iranian people; a rubber dinghy carrying 48 Afghans and Iranians stopped by a Navy patrol while approaching the shores of Calabria; and lastly the arrest of a people smuggler who was taking some Egyptians to Sicily.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Lampedusa: Tension Rises on Italian Island as Immigrants Flood in From Post-Revolution Tunisia
The island has long been a landing point for immigrants making a perilous journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Over the past two weeks, a new wave has fled uncertainty in Tunisia.
This tiny island south of Sicily suddenly seems half-Tunisian. Having arrived by boat in the wake of the Tunisian regime’s collapse, hundreds of Tunisians are walking around the small streets near the port, raising levels of both anger and fear amongst locals. ? This weekend, Lampedusa’s mayor was forced to pass an urgent decree that forbids the selling of alcohol in cafes and grocery stores because it has become a “serious danger to citizens’ safety.”? With many of the immigrants forced to sleep outside, drinking may help brave the cold on these chilly February nights, but authorities worry that it could also be the spark that turns rising tension into actual violence. ? Consider the numbers.
On Sunday — the first day in the past week without any new immigrant arrivals — 250 immigrants were evacuated from Lampedusa: 150 by boat and 100 by plane. But that is just a small percentage of the 2,000 who have arrived over the past few weeks on an island with a population of fewer than 6,000. All of southern Italy’s immigrant shelters are currently at capacity, keeping the vast majority of the recent arrivals on Lampedusa, with some 150 police officers from various squadrons brought in to monitor this potentially dangerous situation. The local center for immigrants has finally been reopened by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, after days of inexplicable resistance. The center’s gates nevertheless remain open, because there is simply not enough security to prevent the immigrants from walking in and out as they please.
A visit Sunday night to the shelter, which is meant to hold a maximum of 800 people, one could see an estimated 2,000 people sleeping in the vicinity The following morning, the owner of “Bar del Porto” (Harbor Cafe), Massimo Tuccio, was yelling in Sicilian dialect: “It is a shame. This could only happen to us. If it were the North of Italy, the locals wouldn’t be abandoned (by the government) like this.” Referring to the Tunisians as “Moroccans,” he laments that they have “taken over” the island. “They act as if they were the owners. We are afraid for the women and children. They hit on our girls, one will end up getting pregnant,” he said. “I have three children, and I will not let them go to school anymore. There are no police, and it is too dangerous.” Captain Donato De Tommaso, commander of Lampedusa’s police force, is doing his best with limited staffing. But he recognizes the tense situation is ripe for serious confrontation. “A half-drunk man on one side, and a hot-headed on the other side are enough to start a sort of civil war. Tunisians vs. Sicilians: no one knows how that could end.” ?
Locals also worry about theft. For now, many of the Tunisian arrivals still have some cash to charge their mobile phones, buy cigarettes, have breakfast in the cafes. But what will happen when that money runs out? “Maybe they will go to rob some of the (empty) beach homes,” says Don Pino, owner of the most famous cafe on the island. “Or maybe they will rob our homes.” The island’s fisherman, some of whom over the years have saved immigrants stranded in broken-down boats, have their own calculus. They have been on strike for weeks, protesting the price of oil for their boats, which in the wake of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt now costs twice as much as elsewhere in Italy. They are looking forward to expressing their grievances at a meeting with government ministers that is scheduled to take place in Rome next Thursday. ?”We want answers, or there will be trouble,” says a threatening banner on one of the fishing boats. Salvatore, the boss of the protest committee and owner of the boat La Cambusa vows a hard line if their demands are not met. “We will close the harbor with steel cables and won’t let anyone in or out; neither the authorities nor immigrants, seeing as they receive better treatment than we do.”?
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Migrant Tensions Rise on Lampedusa
EU funds ‘ridiculous’ says Tunisian minister
(ANSA) — Lampedusa, February 17 — Tensions rose on the island of Lampedusa between Tunisia and Sicily Thursday as some 1,800 Tunisian migrants threatened a hunger strike unless they were moved off the island fast.
Up to 5,000 migrants swamped Lampedusa last week but many have been flown to other parts of southern Italy while there have been no more landings for four nights, partly because of bad weather.
However, the 800-bed reopened migrant facility on the island is still operating at over twice its capacity and there are also reports the migrants could revolt out of fear of being sent home.
Interior Minister Roberto Maroni has told the island’s mayor that a 7,000-capacity centre in Sicily which formerly housed US air force personnel will be ready to open on Wednesday. The Italy spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Laura Boldrini, said: “up till now the situation has been handled with a great sense of responsibility but things must not be stretched too far”.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told a Rome forum that the European Union should do more to help Tunisia’s economy.
Tunisian Industry and Technology Minister Afif Chelbi said the sums being discussed by the EU were “ridiculous”.
After intense lobbying by Italy, immigration will be on the agenda of EU ministerial talks on February 24 and the EU’s next summit on March 24-25.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: Staunchly Protestant Village to Ban Soft Drugs in Public
The local council in the staunchly Protestant village of Urk, east of Amsterdam, wants to ban the consumption and possession of soft drugs in public places, news agency ANP reports.
The council is unanimous in its backing for the ban. On a national level, private individuals can have up to five grammes of marijuana or hashish without facing prosecution.
The move means youngsters in Urk caught with soft drugs face a fine. The council will take a formal vote on the plan on March 3.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Diana West: Global Dhimmitude
Caroline Glick wrote a column this month to explain what she calls “Israeli indifference to democratic currents in Arab societies” — an apparent paradox, it seems, to American naifs who believe that a functioning ballot box is all a society needs to join the fraternity of enlightened nations where individual rights are protected in the enshrinement of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the blessed like. But what if there are masses who want, yearn and are animated by something entirely different, something antithetical to life as we know it, liberty as we enjoy it, and the pursuit of happiness in accordance with individual desire?
Glick writes:
The fact is that Israeli indifference to democratic currents in Arab societies is not due to provincialism. Israelis are indifferent because we realize that whether under authoritarian rule or democracy, anti-Semitism is the unifying sentiment of the Arab world. Fractured along socioeconomic, tribal, religious, political, ethnic and other lines, the glue that binds Arab societies is hatred of Jews.
Let’s become simultaneously broader and more specific: Anti-Semitism is the unifying sentiment, the glue that binds the Islamic world. Don’t take my word for it. But try making your way even part way through Andrew Bostom’s compendium, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, and coming to any other conclusion.
I was thinking about this in light of a key detail in the heinous attack on CBS’s Lara Logan, the subject of this week’s upcoming column. “Jew! Jew!” yelled the attacking throng. The detail hangs like a sore thumb in the context of the see-no-anti-Semitism MSM reporting of the Tahrir protests. But as John Rosenthal has amply catalogued at Pajamas Media, anti-Semitic iconography was widely evident on the streets of Cairo. And widely ignored.
Now we are venturing into dark psychological territory (in many ways, is the subject of the book I am currently working on, The Hollow Center). Quoting again from Caroline Glick, I want to illustrate where such self-censorship on the part on non-Islamic populations leads — to dhimmitude.
Glick writes:…
| — Hat tip: Andy Bostom | [Return to headlines] |
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