To believe or not believe Iran?

A couple of resources made by Chatham House about Iran and the Middle East.

As the blog is back on track, there is more to come, soon, about Iran, the Middle East and the crazy world we live in.

Stories of war

Telling stories about fighting in Afghanistan.

Iraq Releases First Official Count of War Dead

Slate

October 14

More than 85,000 Iraqis were killed during the country's violent upheaval between 2004 and 2008, according to the Iraqi government's first official count. The Human Rights Ministry based its numbers on death certificates issued once the country regained a functioning government in 2004, according to the Associated Press. (For this reason, there are no reliable statistics for 2003, the year the U.S. invasion began.) The casualties include 1,279 children and 2,334 women, as well as 263 university professors, 21 judges, 95 lawyers, and 269 journalists—"some of the professions which were specifically targeted as the country descended into chaos," the AP notes.

Untold stories

of China and Taiwan.

Fighting against violence and lies and mystification with the power of the testimonies. A weapon of social dissent present in the works of many artists and writers from China.

U.S. urges Sri Lanka to reach out to Tamils

Reuters
May 18

Sri Lanka should reach out to Tamils and build a political accommodation that protects the rights of all its citizens, the United States said on Monday after Colombo declared victory against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Sri Lanka said it had militarily defeated the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and taken control of the entire country for the first time since 1983, apparently ending one of the world's most intractable civil wars.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly declined to say whether the United States still opposed the International Monetary Fund giving Sri Lanka a $1.9 billion loan, seen as vital to helping it recover from the global financial crisis and rebuild after the war.

U.S. officials told Reuters in late April they were seeking to delay the loan to pressure the government to better protect civilians caught in the fighting and do more to forge a political settlement with the Tamils.

"This is an opportunity for Sri Lanka to turn the page on its past and build a Sri Lanka rooted in democracy, tolerance and respect for human rights," Kelly told reporters.

"Now is the time for the government to engage the Tamils, Sinhalese and other Sri Lankans to create a political arrangement that promotes and protects the rights of all Sri Lankans," he added.

The Sri Lankan government has to provide basic assistance and services to the estimated 280,000 people who fled the fighting in the northern part of the country, Kelly said.

Focus on Sudan

Council for Foreign Relations - Sudan's Fractured Internal Opposition

Hamas: Draft for Gaza truce has been reached

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff

Haaretz Correspondents

February 5

Egypt and Hamas have reached a draft agreement on a cease-fire with Israel in the Gaza Strip, a representative from the Islamist group told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram on Thursday.

The representative, Salah al-Bardawil, said that the draft stipulates a year-and-a-half long truce between Hamas and Israel. It also includes the opening of all border crossings for 80 percent of goods. Israel would need to clarify exactly what type of goods it would allow in, Bardawil said.

Bardawil told the Egyptian newspaper that according to the draft agreement, the Rafah crossing would be closed from time to time. He also said that Israel rejected a proposal to station international observers on the Rafah border.

Israeli security officials said Wednesday they believed Egypt and Hamas were making significant progress in drafting terms for a long-term lull in fighting in the Gaza Strip, but that a number of unresolved issues remain between the two sides.

Egypt had set Thursday as the target date for signing the agreement, but the differences in opinion mean it may take several more days or even longer before a deal is reached, with all clarifications set.

Israel is not participating in the talks, but is expected to arrive at a verbal agreement with Egypt that would allow the lull to continue at a later date.

Egypt has been pushing for an agreement that includes a lull for a year and a half, while Israel prefers to see one lasting only a year, and in the framework of a non-binding agreement.

A key issue in the negotiations is the opening of Rafah crossing, which Hamas is seeking to have opened completely, with Turkish troops monitoring its operation, in accordance with a plan drafted by the United States three years ago. Egypt is opposed to such a move, but is nevertheless seeking to place a force loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the crossing, a proposal Hamas has thus far resisted.

Another outstanding issue is the Israeli request to create a half-kilometer buffer zone in the area known as the "security parameter" on the Palestinian side of the border fence with Israel. Israel is seeking to prevent the entry of armed militants to the area to combat the placement of explosive devices or the digging of tunnels there.

Another critical issue involves the link between the release of captive Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit with the lull and the opening of crossings. Israel is demanding that even a partial opening of the crossings be dependent on progress towards Shalit's release, for example providing a clear sign the soldier is still alive. Hamas has until now opposed such a link. Egypt has expressed uncertainty in relation to its capacity to force Hamas into such an agreement, but promised Israel it would make efforts towards that end.

See also:

Newsweek - Unusual diplomatic advice

Israel Must Stop Fanning the Flames That Will Consume Us

By David Grossman
Sunday, January 25, 2009

Washington Post

Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster -- despite our disparate strength, and even when we try very hard to separate. And as we do, we burn the one who is bound to us, our double, our nemesis, ourselves.

So, a month after the war began, in the midst of the wave of nationalist invective now sweeping Israel, it would not hurt to keep in mind that this latest military operation in Gaza was, when all is said and done, just one more way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred. On this road, you sometimes win and you sometimes lose, but in the end it leads to ruin.

As both Israel and Hamas declared their own cease-fires, we Israelis rejoiced at how this campaign has rectified Israel's military failures in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. But we should listen to the voice that says that the Israel Defense Forces' achievements are not indubitable proof that Israel was right to set out on an operation of such huge proportions; they certainly do not justify the way our army pursued its mission. The IDF's success confirms only that Israel is much stronger than Hamas, and that under certain circumstances it can be very tough and cruel.

But as the magnitude of the killing and the devastation has become apparent to all, perhaps Israeli society will, for a brief moment, put its sophisticated mechanisms of repression and self-righteousness on hold. And then perhaps a lesson of some sort will be etched into the Israeli consciousness. Maybe then we will finally understand something deep and fundamental -- that our conduct here in this region has, for a long time, been flawed, immoral and unwise. Time and again, it fans the flames that are consuming us.

Of course, the Palestinians cannot be absolved of culpability for their errors and crimes. To do so would show contempt and condescension toward them, as if they were not rational adults responsible for their mistakes and oversights. True, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were in large measure "strangled" by Israel, but they, too, had other options, other ways of protesting, voicing and displaying their difficult plight. Firing thousands of rockets at innocent civilians in Israel was not their only choice. We must not forget that. We must not be forgiving of the Palestinians, as if it goes without saying that when they are in distress, their almost automatic response must be violence.

But even when the Palestinians act with reckless belligerence -- with suicide bombings and Qassam missiles -- Israel, which is many times stronger than they are, has tremendous power to control the level of violence in the conflict as a whole. As such, it can also have a profound influence on calming the conflict and extricating both sides from its cycle of destruction. This most recent military action indicates that there does not seem to be anyone in the Israeli leadership who grasps that, who fully appreciates this critical aspect of the dispute.

After all, the day will come when we will want to try to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted. How can that day come if we do not understand that our military might cannot be our principal tool for establishing our presence here, across from and among the Arab nations? How can those days come if we do not grasp the gravity of the responsibility imposed on us by our multifarious, fateful ties and connections, past and future, with the Palestinian nation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and inside Israel itself?

When the clouds of smoke clear, when the politicians' declarations of comprehensive, decisive victory fade, when we realize what this operation has really achieved, when we see how large the gap is between those declarations and what we really need to know in order to live a normal life in this region, when we acknowledge that an entire nation eagerly hypnotized itself because it needed so badly to believe that Gaza would cure its Lebanon malady -- then we can turn our attention to those who time and again have incited Israeli society's hubris and its exaltation of power. To those who have, for so many years, taught us to scorn belief in peace and hope for any change at all in our relations with the Arabs. To those who have persuaded us that the Arabs understand only force, and that we can speak to them only in that language.

Since we have spoken that way to them so often, and only that way, we have forgotten that there are other languages that can be used to communicate with other human beings, even enemies, even enemies as bitter as Hamas -- languages that are mother tongues to us, the Israelis, no less so than the language of the jet and the tank.

To talk to the Palestinians. That must be the central conclusion we reach from this last, bloody round of war. To talk even with those who do not recognize our right to exist here. Instead of ignoring Hamas now, we must take advantage of the new situation and enter into a dialogue to enable an accommodation with the Palestinian people as a whole. To talk, in order to understand that reality is not just the hermetically sealed story that we and the Palestinians have been telling ourselves for generations, the story that we are imprisoned within, no small part of which consists of fantasies, wishes and nightmares. To talk in order to devise, within this opaque, unhearing reality, an opportunity for speech, for that alternative -- so scorned and forlorn today -- for which, in the tempest of war, there is almost no place, no hope, no believers.

To talk as a well-considered strategy, to initiate dialogue, to insist on speech, to talk to the wall, to talk even if it seems fruitless. In the long term, this stubbornness may do far more for our future than hundreds of airplanes dropping bombs on a city and its people. To talk out of the understanding, born of the recent horrors we have seen, that the destruction we, each people in its own way, are able to cause one another is a huge and corrupting force. If we surrender to it and its logic, it will, in the end, destroy us all.

To talk, because what has taken place in Gaza over the past three weeks places before us in Israel a mirror that reflects a face that would horrify us were we to gaze on it for one moment from the outside, or if we were to see it on another nation. We would understand then that our victory is no real victory, and that the war in Gaza has not brought us any healing in that place where we desperately need a cure.

David Grossman is a leading Israeli novelist and peace activist. A version of this article first appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It was translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman.

Here we have a writer's perspective, who cannot think the world without words and without ways to express your ideas and feelings through it, instead of military actions, of whatever kind. In order to express your readers you need to found a common code of communications, common senses conferred to the words.

Gaza's smuggling tunnels open again

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/4310772/Gazas-smuggling-tunnels-open-again.html

On Sunday, January 18, within hours of the ceasefire beginning, at least 18 rockets were fired into the south of Israel.

Israel declares ceasefire in Gaza

The three-weeks operations are to halt, the Israeli cabinet decided unilateraly.

Tech Warfare in Gaza Spreads

Politics OnLine

The centuries-old conflict in the ancient Middle East is being influenced by a young generation of citizens, soldiers and militants who have grown up using new media.

Cellphones are being used as a form of psychological warfare to send threatening text messages. Here are a few examples of the use of new media in the Gaza war:

• Israeli government officials have also been using technology such as text messaging, social networking sites on Facebook and MySpace and the microblogging site Twitter to communicate Israel's point of view to the western world and to a younger demographic.
• Relief efforts and various organizations are finding a strong donor base in young people online who are using the internet to form grassroots movements and to co-ordinate fundraising events in support of Palestine.
• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has its own YouTube Channel and according to an ISF spokesman, contains "exclusive footage showing the IDF's operation success".

Stay tuned as the high tech new world continues to collide with centuries-old conflicts.

(Times) Facebook Users Go to War Over Gaza
(FT) Websites And TV Spur Flood of Donations For Political Causes In Arab World
(USAToday) Cellphones Put to 'Unnerving' Use in Gaza
(BBC) Gaza Crisis Spills onto the Web
(Time) Fighting the Media War in Gaza

Strikes on Israel From Lebanon Raise New Tensions

by Farnaz Fassihi

The Wall Street Journal

January 15

BEIRUT -- The war in Gaza, with its mounting casualties and threat of destabilizing the region, is presenting Lebanon's government with a new challenge: controlling its border with Israel as the risk of a second front in the war looms.

On Wednesday, three rockets fired from southern Lebanon hit Israel, the second such incident since the conflict between Hamas and Israel started nearly three weeks ago. Israel responded by shelling southern Lebanon and flying a helicopter gunship low above the area. No casualties were reported on either side. The Lebanese army found three other rockets ready to be launched into Israel and some explosives.

European Pressphoto Agency

Lebanese soldiers inspect a rocket that fell short of the Israeli border. Other rockets struck Israel Wednesday in attacks Lebanon condemned

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Lebanon's moderate, pro-Western prime minister, Fouad Siniora, condemned them. Lebanese officials speculate that they are the work of militant Palestinian groups that operate from within the several Palestinian refugee camps inside Lebanon. The Iranian-backed Shiite group Hezbollah said Wednesday that it wasn't responsible for the attacks.

Automated calls in Arabic warned residents of Beirut and southern Lebanon not to retaliate against Israel, as images of dead Palestinian children in Gaza flickered across Arabic news broadcasts in Lebanon, fueling resentment and anger at Israel. The Lebanese army sent special forces to the south to beef up security.

The government said all Lebanese factions, including rival party Hezbollah, had a consensus not to drag the country into another war with Israel.

"The risk is always there that things can quickly escalate, but these are really the acts of people outside the government. It's not accepted by us whatsoever and clearly we don't want to open this front," said finance minister Mohamad Chatah, a close adviser to Mr. Siniora.

Lebanon, despite its tiny size, is regarded as a key element in stabilizing the region. It has often been the place where regional powers such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia fought out their grievances against each other and against Israel and the U.S.

The country is just starting to recover from two years of political standoff and a period of violent clashes in 2008 between Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Sunni political party aligned with Mr. Siniora. When consensus for a government was reached in May, Hezbollah gained veto power, delivering a blow to the U.S.'s influence in Lebanese politics.

Mr. Siniora has been eager to show Lebanon can act as one state. He struck a cease-fire deal between Hezbollah and Israel after a month-long conflict in 2006 by vowing to implement a United Nations Security Council resolution that mandates the south, a Hezbollah stronghold, be policed by the Lebanese army and U.N. forces.

The threat of rogue elements in the south could hurt Mr. Siniora. Lebanon will have parliamentarian elections in June and all parties, including Hezbollah, have been campaigning on their ability to rebuild and unite the country.

"Everything we have built in the past few years is at stake. If the frequency of the attacks increases, if there are any casualties on both sides, we have a lot to lose," says Oussama Safa, director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut.

In Gaza City, Israeli soldiers engaged with Hamas militants in the densely populated streets. Rockets continued to strike Israel. Palestinian casualties reached over 1,000 Wednesday with 4,550 wounded, according to medical workers from Gaza's Ministry of Health. Thirteen Israelis have died, including 10 soldiers, according to Israel's military.

-- Joshua Mitnick in Tel Aviv contributed to this article.

Write to Farnaz Fassihi at farnaz.fassihi@wsj.com

Fundamentalism, fought with the education weapon

When going to school, for a young girl is not something normal and, plus, it involves life risks. In Afghanistan.

Latest from the Middle East

Last operations on the ground, Day 18 - IHT

The tasks of diplomacy - The Jerusalem Post

Egypt pushes Hamas to accept truce - AP

China is entering the stage - Xinhua

Ethiopia troops leave Mogadishu

It could be the end of the war or not. The conflict is not over and Somalia is only a generic name of a country lacking government or any other functional institutions.

Darfur: Neverending war

Darfur, still fighting at the brinks of chaos.

Pew Center: Hamas popularity, on the rise, again

Pew Global, January 8, 2009

In the Middle East and elsewhere, Muslim reaction to the Israeli offensive in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has been swift and angry, with protests in Amman, Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran, Jakarta, and several other capitals.

Palestinians in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, where Hamas rival Fatah dominates, have also demonstrated against Israel, some carrying the green flag of Hamas into the streets.

However, before the current conflict in Gaza, Hamas hardly enjoyed universal popularity among Muslims, and among some key Arab publics, its support had been waning.

The 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey found significant opposition to the organization in several predominantly Muslim countries, not to mention considerable opposition to suicide bombing -- a frequent tactic of Hamas in the past -- as well as deep reservations about one of Hamas' chief sponsors, Iran.

Still, given the striking antipathy toward Israel throughout much of the Arab and Muslim worlds, if Hamas survives reasonably intact and comes to be viewed as the Palestinians' primary defender against the Jewish state, its popularity may rise.



Read the full report: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1075/before-israels-invasion-hamas-popularity-was-waning-among-its-neighbors-even-in-gaza-itsel



See also: ADL - Anti-Semitism, on the rise

The Middle East front

- Lebanon fire rockets hit the north of Israel

- The bombardments continued in Gaza, while the US is supporting the ceasefire

- No UN Security Council agreement reached

- Thomas L. Friedman - Mideast's Ground Zero

War in the Middle East - day 11

- Israel agreed to open an humanitarian corridor to Gaza, starting Wednesday - VoA

- UN secretary general called for a cease-fire - Telegraph

- Egypt proposed a ceasefire - Reuters

- French president Nicolas Sarkozy ended in Egypt his Mideast trip - VoA

- Venezuela expels Israel's envoy - BBC

- The War 2.0, The Jerusalem Post

- The war from the media perspective - NYTimes

Congo - 1,250 people dying daily

The natural resources of a country could represent a valuable source of wealth. The primordial condition is to set up proper, functional institutions and to have the minimal basis of a state. If not, everything could be at the mercy of small or larger entropic groups with terrific effects on the population and the resources are spoiled in the advantages of military/armed groups. In Congo, for example, since 1998, 5, 400,000 people have died because of a deadly conflict, the equivalent of the population of Denmark.
The total population is of 65.75 million, distributed on 905,063 square miles, being the third largest country by area in Africa. It is reach in natural resources, as diamonds, copper, zinc and coltan.
The victims are dying mostly because of hunger and diseases.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, former Belgian colony, acquired its independence in 1960. After the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the power was seized and kept for 30 years by Mobutu Sese Seko, whose reign was rotten by corruption and dictatorship. In 1994, he was lashed following a civil war, nurtured by the Rwandan refugees, after the Hutu’s massacre of the Tutsi tribe, who occupied the Eastern part of the country. Laurent D. Kabila, a former rebel himself, became president in 1997. He was later assassinated in 2001 and followed by his son Joseph. Despite some efforts to create certain normality, by organising elections – the first free elections ever, in 2006, confirming Joseph Kabila as president – or signing peace accords, in 2003, the conflict between various warrior groups are continuing. According to International Rescue Committee, almost 1.250 people are dying daily, while the UN is hesitating to take a final decision to send more troops in the area.