N.O.R.F Posted June 18, 2007 Lebanon under US custodianship By Awni Sadeq, Special to Gulf News In September 2004, the United States and France managed to legalise their interference in Lebanon's internal affairs by internationalising its issue through the UN Security Council resolution No 1559. The UN resolution which called for disarming Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias, was passed with full support from the US and France, under the label of defending Lebanon and preserving its sovereignty and independence. The resolution demanded disarming all militias and allowing the Lebanese army to spread its control over all the Lebanese territories. Although it was said that the resolution aimed to end the Syrian presence in Lebanon, the key objective was to disarm the Lebanese resistance and Palestinian groups in preparation for placing Lebanon under the US custodianship. Designs The US wants a Lebanon that suits its interests and those of Israel, and further that serves its designs in the region. Following the resolution, Syrian forces and intelligence services withdrew from Lebanon while the arms of the Lebanese resistance still exist. The withdrawal of Syrian troops did not bring about any change that places Lebanon on the map of countries that serve the interests of the US and Israel. This has prompted the planners to carry out the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and hold Syria responsible for the crime to place Lebanon on the brink of a civil war. All the events that took place in Lebanon after Hariri's assassination, including the July war launched by Israel with US backing, and the fighting between the Lebanese Army and Fatah Al Islam militants in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al Bared, were carried out to explode the situation and make Lebanon succumb to the US- Israeli will. Nevertheless, The US, France and Israel have not achieved the required goals behind their dubious designs. So, the US and Israel have no other choice except to spark another war to correct the mistakes of the July war and make up for its losses. The war is expected this summer and the issuance of UN resolution No 1575 under the seventh chapter was to provide an international umbrella for this potential war against Lebanon and Syria. The war may be launched with international participation under the pretext of the implementation of international legitimacy. It is ridiculous that the 14th of March team considered the UN resolution that calls for setting up an international court a victory. The pro-government team celebrated the resolution as a second victory in the battle of Lebanon's independence as they considered UN resolution No. 1559 the first victory. Hurts What hurts most is that the UN resolution was issued at a request from the Lebanese government following Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's letter to the UN Security Council demanding this resolution be under the seventh chapter of the UN Charter. Second, the pro-government team does not understand the consequences of the resolution, which places Lebanon under the international custodianship nominally, and the US custodianship actually. Despite this obvious fact, this team continues to claim that it defends Lebanon's independence and sovereignty. What a joke! The situation in Lebanon makes one recalls a similar scenario - the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, which promised Jews a homeland in Palestine. Following the declaration, the British government found itself committed to create appropriate conditions and find the proper mechanism to put the declaration into effect. The British government put Palestine under its mandate and custodianship following the Franco-Anglo alliance to divide the legacy of the Ottoman Empire after the end of the Second World War. By placing Palestine under its mandate, the British government sought to fulfil its commitments towards the Zionist movement. History repeats itself now. Lebanon is now under US custodianship after the issuance of the UN resolution under the seventh chapter. Therefore, remarks made by the pro-government party, which reacted with joy at the resolution, came as no surprise. Those who called for internationalising the investigation into Hariri's murder and demanded a UN resolution under the seventh chapter, have placed Lebanon, its government, people, present and future under the US custodianship. Awni Sadeq is a prominent Palestinian journalist based in Amman. gulfnews.com Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jacaylbaro Posted June 18, 2007 Ilaahay caraba ha naxariisto ,,,,,,,,, kuwaasi dadkoodii bay iibsadeen maxaynu kuwan ula yaabaynaaba Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted June 18, 2007 Waar meesha waxbaa kasoo soo socda Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jacaylbaro Posted June 18, 2007 Adduunku wuu rogmayaa believe me ,,,,,, qaarad walba dagaal baa ka socda oo wax baa burburaya Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted June 18, 2007 Robert Fisk: Sinister strategy behind an MP's murder Published: 15 June 2007 Everybody was obsessed by figures. True, the cortège was proceeding towards the Chatila martyrs' cemetery, true Saad Hariri - the son of the murdered ex-premier whose killers are now to be tried by the United Nations - walked in the vanguard. But it was the numbers that mattered. A phone call came through on my mobile from a Lebanese MP - readers may debate his identity - when the carbonised skeleton of Walid Eido was still hot in his bombed car. "Robert, they only need to kill three more and Siniora has no parliamentary majority." True. The first words of L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper's lead story yesterday began: "70...69...68." If the MPs supporting the government of Fouad Siniora fall to 65, there is no more "majority" to support in parliament. So no wonder they were claiming yesterday that the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, must permit by-elections for the murdered assembly members, that such elections would be held even if Mr Lahoud declined to give his assent. MPs might be forgiven for losing their seats to popular dissatisfaction in Lebanon, but why should they lose their seats because of bombs or because of the accuracy - and here we speak of the ex-minister Pierre Gemayel - of an AK-47 rifle? Eido's funeral yesterday - along with that of his son, Khaled (another eight died with them in the car-bombing in west Beirut on Wednesday), was a wearying, dismal, painful affair. "Omar, Omar," the crowds cried, clinging to their caliph, and "Hizbollah out of the southern suburbs," a demand flourished with a series of obscene references to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. This was a Sunni funeral and they buried their dead beside the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh al-Husseini, who tried to maintain the existence of Palestine (and frolicked with Adolf Hitler, to the disgust of Israel and the West). Saad Hariri - more noble in vision than he tends to be in words - walked at the top of the procession. It marched past bullet-scarred buildings from the civil war - a ghostly reminder of everything we hope to avoid in the coming days -- and past the 1941 French war cemetery many of whose Free French "liberators" were Muslim Algerians and Indo-Chinese (as we would have called them then) whose Petainist French adversaries left for France under a truce that allowed them to fight again against the Allies. Walid Eido was a respected judge, a Sunni opponent of Syria, a man who had called Hizbollah's "camp" down town an "occupation" and he was murdered, as so many of Syria's opponents have been in Lebanon. No, of course there is no proof that Syria did the deed. Any more than there is proof that all the other opponents of Syria were murdered by Damascus (Hariri? Gibran? Kassir? Gemayel? Now Eido?). And as usual, there are no arrests. Martyr, martyr, martyr; that's what the press keep calling the Fallen of Lebanon. I guess it's easier that way. http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2659710.ece Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted June 18, 2007 Robert Fisk: Sinister strategy behind an MP's murder Published: 15 June 2007 Everybody was obsessed by figures. True, the cortège was proceeding towards the Chatila martyrs' cemetery, true Saad Hariri - the son of the murdered ex-premier whose killers are now to be tried by the United Nations - walked in the vanguard. But it was the numbers that mattered. A phone call came through on my mobile from a Lebanese MP - readers may debate his identity - when the carbonised skeleton of Walid Eido was still hot in his bombed car. "Robert, they only need to kill three more and Siniora has no parliamentary majority." True. The first words of L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper's lead story yesterday began: "70...69...68." If the MPs supporting the government of Fouad Siniora fall to 65, there is no more "majority" to support in parliament. So no wonder they were claiming yesterday that the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, must permit by-elections for the murdered assembly members, that such elections would be held even if Mr Lahoud declined to give his assent. MPs might be forgiven for losing their seats to popular dissatisfaction in Lebanon, but why should they lose their seats because of bombs or because of the accuracy - and here we speak of the ex-minister Pierre Gemayel - of an AK-47 rifle? Eido's funeral yesterday - along with that of his son, Khaled (another eight died with them in the car-bombing in west Beirut on Wednesday), was a wearying, dismal, painful affair. "Omar, Omar," the crowds cried, clinging to their caliph, and "Hizbollah out of the southern suburbs," a demand flourished with a series of obscene references to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. This was a Sunni funeral and they buried their dead beside the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh al-Husseini, who tried to maintain the existence of Palestine (and frolicked with Adolf Hitler, to the disgust of Israel and the West). Saad Hariri - more noble in vision than he tends to be in words - walked at the top of the procession. It marched past bullet-scarred buildings from the civil war - a ghostly reminder of everything we hope to avoid in the coming days -- and past the 1941 French war cemetery many of whose Free French "liberators" were Muslim Algerians and Indo-Chinese (as we would have called them then) whose Petainist French adversaries left for France under a truce that allowed them to fight again against the Allies. Walid Eido was a respected judge, a Sunni opponent of Syria, a man who had called Hizbollah's "camp" down town an "occupation" and he was murdered, as so many of Syria's opponents have been in Lebanon. No, of course there is no proof that Syria did the deed. Any more than there is proof that all the other opponents of Syria were murdered by Damascus (Hariri? Gibran? Kassir? Gemayel? Now Eido?). And as usual, there are no arrests. Martyr, martyr, martyr; that's what the press keep calling the Fallen of Lebanon. I guess it's easier that way. http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2659710.ece Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted June 18, 2007 Robert Fisk: Welcome to 'Palestine' Published: 16 June 2007 How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East. Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement. No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ? And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority". I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people? All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control. For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza? It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other). If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners. So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love. How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government? http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2663199.ece Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted June 18, 2007 The people of Palestine must finally be allowed to determine their own fate The drivers of violence in Gaza are clearly external. When all Palestinians can vote for sovereign rule, peace will be within reach Karma Nabulsi Monday June 18, 2007 The Guardian There is nothing uglier and more brutal to the human spirit, nothing more lethal to that universal hope for freedom, than to see a people struggling for liberty for such a long time begin to kill each other. How and why did we get here? Above all: how do we get out of here? These are the questions everyone watching events unfold in Gaza and the West Bank are asking themselves. But before answering them, it is essential to understand just what we are witnessing. This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster. The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured." How did we get here? The institutions created in occupied Palestine in the 1990s were shaped to bring us to this very point of collapse. The Palestinian Authority, created through negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, was not meant to last more than five years - just until the institutions of an independent state were built. Instead, its capacities were frozen and it was co-opted into performing the role of a security agency for the Israelis, who were still occupying Palestine by military force, and serving as a disbursement agency for the US and EU's funding of that occupation. The PA had not attained a single one of the freedoms it was meant to provide, including the most important one, the political liberty of a self-determining sovereign body. Why did we get here? Once the exact nature of its purpose emerged, the Palestinians began to resist this form of external control. Israel then invaded the West Bank cities again and put President Yasser Arafat's compound under a two-year siege, which ended with his death. Under those conditions of siege the international "reform" process created a new institution of a prime minister's office and attempted to unify the security apparatus under it, rather than that of the president, whom they could no longer control. Mahmoud Abbas was the first prime minister, and the Israeli- and US-backed Fatah strongman, Mohammed Dahlan, was appointed head of security. After the death of Arafat, Abbas was nominated to the leadership of the PLO, and directly elected as the president of the PA. Arafat had followed the strategy of all successful liberation movements: a combination of resistance and negotiation until the conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty. Abbas's strategy was of an entirely different order: no resistance in any form and a complete reliance on the good faith of the Israelis. After a year of achieving nothing - indeed Ariel Sharon refused to negotiate with him and Israeli colonisation was intensified - the Palestinian people's support for this humiliating policy of submission wore thin. Hamas, polling about 20% in previous years, suddenly won 43% of the vote in 2006. This popular reaction was a response to the failure of Abbas's strategy as much as the failure of Fatah to present any plausible national programme whatsoever. The Palestinians thus sought representation that would at least reflect their condition of occupation and dispossession. Although the elections were recognised as free and fair, the US and Britain immediately took the lead in applying sanctions against the Hamas government, denying aid - which was only needed in the first place because the occupation had destroyed the economy - and refusing to deal with it until it accepted what had become, under these new circumstances, impossible "conditions". The US administration continued to treat Fatah as if it had won the election rather than lost it - funding, arming, and directly encouraging agents within it to reverse the outcome of that democratic election by force. The Palestinian president brought pressure to bear on Hamas to change its position on recognition of Israel. Palestinians refused to participate in this externally driven coup - indeed, the vast majority of Fatah cadres rejected outright an enterprise so clearly directed at destroying the Palestinian body politic. Both the prisoners' document and the Mecca agreement signed in Saudi Arabia creating a national unity government took place because Palestinian society insisted on a national framework. Yet a small group has brought us to this point. The outcome is what we have before us today, similar to what the Americans were seeking to create in Iraq: the total exclusion of democratic practices and principles, the attempt to impose an oligarchy on a fragmented political society, a weakened and terrorised people, a foreign rule through warlords and strongmen. How do we get out of here? For the west, the path is both obvious and simple. It needs to allow the Palestinians their own representation. It can look to the terms of the Mecca agreement to see the shape that would take, and to the 2006 prisoners' document for the political platform the Palestinians hold. It needs to urgently convene a real international peace conference, which no one has attempted since 1991, as recommended in the Baker commission's report on the Iraq war, de Soto's end of mission report, and as championed by President Jimmy Carter. And it needs only to look to the Beirut Arab peace initiative to find everything it has been seeking, if indeed it is seeking peace. For the Palestinians, the path is also clear: we have come to the end of the challenging experiment of self-rule under military occupation. We now need to dissolve the PA, mobilise to convene direct elections to our only national parliament, the Palestine National Council, in order to enfranchise the entire political spectrum of Palestinians, and thereby recapture the PLO, transforming it into the popular and democratic institution it once had a chance of becoming. This is already a popular demand of all Palestinians. Palestinians in exile must take their turn again in lifting the siege inside Palestine, as the inside did for the outside after the almost total destruction of the PLO in 1982 in Lebanon and the siege of the refugee camps there in 1986: we are one people. The Palestinians have a long history of struggle in which each generation has had to break out of the coercive prison imposed by British colonial, Arab, Israeli, and now American rule, and we will do it again. · Karma Nabulsi is fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University karmanabulsi@hotmail.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2105483,00.html Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Fabregas Posted June 18, 2007 Originally posted by Jacaylbaro: Ilaahay caraba ha naxariisto ,,,,,,,,, kuwaasi dadkoodii bay iibsadeen maxaynu kuwan ula yaabaynaaba Carabti rag geesiyal ah baa usoo baxay......So the Zio-cons and Arab Zionist leaders are scrambling all over the place, to put out the very flames they created themselves.... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
