March 31, 2006

World Media Watch

by Gloria R. Lalumia

BuzzFlash Note: WMW provides BuzzFlash readers foreign views and perspectives that are not usually available from the media here in the U.S. The presentation of these articles from these international publications is not an endorsement of their viewpoints.

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WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR MARCH 31, 2006

1//The Independent, UK--MOSUL SLIPS OUT OF CONTROL AS THE BOMBERS MOVE IN (When the 3,000 men of the mainly Kurdish 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division of the Iraqi Army go on patrol it is at night, after the rigorously enforced curfew starts at 8pm. Their vehicles, bristling with heavy machine guns, race through the empty streets of the city, splashing through pools of sewage, always trying to take different routes to avoid roadside bombs. "The government cannot control the city," said Hamid Effendi, an experienced ex-soldier who is Minister for Peshmerga Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government. He is influential in the military affairs of Mosul province with its large Kurdish minority, although it is outside the Kurdish region. He believes: "The Iraqi Army is only a small force in Mosul, the Americans do not leave their bases much and some of the police are connected to the terrorists." … General David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne tried to bring on board the Sunni Arabs but when he left this policy languished. Since November 2004 Arabs in the province claim that the US has simply joined forces with the Kurds after the mass desertion of the Arab police and army. "The Americans are now just one more of the tribes of Mosul," said one Arab source alleging that the CIA got all its information from Kurdish intelligence.)

2//Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Iran--IRAQI PRESIDENT URGES SPEEDY IRAN-US TALKS ON IRAQ (Iraq's president Jalal Talabani here on Thursday called for speedy talks and dialogue between Iran and the US on Iraq. "Speedy talks between the two countries will play a significant role in expediting Iraq's political process and removal of problems," said Talabani in a meeting with Iran's charge d'affaires to Baghdad Hassan Kazemi Qomi. … Qomi also briefed Talabani on outlines of Iran's policy on talks with the US in connection with Iraq. He voiced Iran's all-out readiness for contribution to Iraq's reconstruction process and its overall development.)

3//The Moscow Times, Russia--SECRET RULES TO DESTROY HIJACKED JETS STIR FEARS (After years of deliberations, Russia this month joined the handful of countries that allow hijacked airliners to be shot down to prevent the doomsday scenario of a plane slamming into a nuclear station. The ground rules for shooting airliners -- as well as for sinking passenger ships and opening fire on terrorists in apartment buildings -- are now being drawn up by the Defense Ministry. … After Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who is also a deputy prime minister, approves the rules, they will only need a go-ahead from the Justice Ministry to go into force. "We are stuck in a trap. The regulations in the law are vague, and I expect that Ivanov's order will contradict them, making a mess of the decision-making process," said Viktor Ilyukhin, a Communist deputy who co-drafted the anti-terrorism law in the State Duma's Security Committee. "As a result, we cannot guarantee that a plane set to ram into the Kremlin will be shot down or that a plane that terrorists are using to blackmail the government -- without any real plans to ram it into a sensitive facility -- is spared destruction," Ilyukhin said. The anti-terrorism law does not clearly spell out the chain of command in a hijacking crisis. As such, Ivanov's instructions are all but certain to aggravate the decision-making process. Furthermore, if a plane were mistakenly shot down, there would be no trail leading back to those responsible.)

4//The PakTribune (Pakistan News Service), Pakistan--US KEEN TO GET OBSERVER STATUS IN SAARC (The US has expressed interest in getting observer status in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Hemayetuddin has said. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Gastright, who is on a three-day visit here, is likely to communicate this formally to Bangladesh, the current chair of SAARC, the daily Bangladesh Observer reported. Last week, the US had written to the SAARC secretariat expressing ’eagerness’ to join as an observer. The SAARC groups India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The 13th SAARC Summit in Dhaka in November last year approved Afghanistan as its new member and China and Japan as observers. The US and South Korea had also applied for observer status. … Islamabad will host a meeting of SAARC finance ministers on April 14-15, which will finalise the modalities of different funds, including the South Asia Development Fund (SADF) and SAARC Development Fund (SDF). The SDF, which has under it the SAARC poverty alleviation fund, proposes to raise $300 million under it to undertake education, health, and human resource development projects in the region. India has already committed to contribute $100 million for the fund.)

5//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy--CAPTURE PUTS EX-WARLORD IN JAIL, LIBERIA IN A BIND (Advocates and analysts welcomed former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor's capture as a blow against impunity for war crimes but braced for political fallout from U.S. involvement in the affair. Taylor, an ex-warlord and president, is to stand trial nearly three years after a U.N.-backed court indicted him on 17 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in West African massacres. Many observers said Taylor's capture could aid peace and stability in Liberia as it claws its way back from more than two decades of civil war. However, some also decried the timing, saying Washington had bullied the fledgling government of Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf into pressing Nigeria to extradite Taylor, and had held the Liberian people hostage by threatening to withhold economic life support if Johnson-Sirleaf did not push the issue. … U.S. impatience over Taylor appeared to be driven in part by disgust at his reputation and in part by allegations he had harboured al Qaeda suicide bombers. Perhaps more significantly, the Bush administration has been eager to see a major despot brought to swift justice by a judicial panel other than the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court, to which it stands firmly opposed, the Christian Science Monitor newspaper quoted Ayesha Kajee of the South African Institute of International Affairs as saying.)

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1//The Independent, UK Published: 31 March 2006

MOSUL SLIPS OUT OF CONTROL AS THE BOMBERS MOVE IN
By Patrick Cockburn in Mosul

When the 3,000 men of the mainly Kurdish 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division of the Iraqi Army go on patrol it is at night, after the rigorously enforced curfew starts at 8pm. Their vehicles, bristling with heavy machine guns, race through the empty streets of the city, splashing through pools of sewage, always trying to take different routes to avoid roadside bombs. "The government cannot control the city," said Hamid Effendi, an experienced ex-soldier who is Minister for Peshmerga Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government.

He is influential in the military affairs of Mosul province with its large Kurdish minority, although it is outside the Kurdish region. He believes: "The Iraqi Army is only a small force in Mosul, the Americans do not leave their bases much and some of the police are connected to the terrorists."

In the days since a suicide bomber killed 43 young men waiting to join the Iraqi army at a recruitment centre near Mosul last week soldiers in the city have been expecting a second attack.

"We are not leaving the base in daytime because we know other bombers are waiting for us," said a soldier at a base near Mosul's city centre.

Saadi Pire, until recently the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Mosul, says bluntly that the 12,000 police "are police by day and terrorists by night. They should all be dismissed and other police brought in from outside."

He thinks that Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq with a population of 1.7 million, could erupt at any moment. He points out that it is difficult to pacify because so much of Saddam Hussein's army - some 250,000 soldiers and 30,000 officers - was recruited from there.

General Muthafar Deirky, the ebullient commander of the 3rd Brigade, is more confident about the government's grip the city. He has been stationed there since 11 November 2004 when, in one of the least publicised disasters of the US occupation of Iraq, insurgents captured the city as the police and army deserted en masse. Some 11,000 weapons and vehicles worth $40m (£23m) were lost.

The American media was almost entirely embedded with the US Marines who were engaged in the bloody battle for Fallujah, population 350,000, so the outside world did not notice that the anti-American resistance had captured a city five times as large.

(SNIP)

In reality, Mosul city, like so many places in Iraq, is an ethnic minefield which the US has sought to negotiate with varying success since the overthrow of Saddam in 2003. At first US commanders did not want Kurdish forces in the city fearing the reaction of the Arabs.

General David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne tried to bring on board the Sunni Arabs but when he left this policy languished. Since November 2004 Arabs in the province claim that the US has simply joined forces with the Kurds after the mass desertion of the Arab police and army.

"The Americans are now just one more of the tribes of Mosul," said one Arab source alleging that the CIA got all its information from Kurdish intelligence.

Most soldiers have an ethnic map of Mosul imprinted on their brain. "I feel safer now because there is nothing but Kurdish villages from now on," said a driver, with a sign of a relief, as we drove away from the city.

For the moment nobody is wholly in control and most expect more fighting.

2//Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Iran : 19:34 Thursday March 30, 2006

IRAQI PRESIDENT URGES SPEEDY IRAN-US TALKS ON IRAQ

Iraq's president Jalal Talabani here on Thursday called for speedy talks and dialogue between Iran and the US on Iraq.

"Speedy talks between the two countries will play a significant role in expediting Iraq's political process and removal of problems," said Talabani in a meeting with Iran's charge d'affaires to Baghdad Hassan Kazemi Qomi.

"Iran and the US are both friends of new Iraqi sovereignty, and dialogue and understanding between them will have a suitable impact on improvement of conditions in Iraq, guaranteeing the country's interests," he added.

The Iraqi president said that the Tehran-Washington talks on Iraq issues are effective in easing challenges facing their relations and in removing other problems of the two countries.

Senior Iranian officials have welcomed talks with the US on Iraq on a call by the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) Abdelaziz Hakim.

Qomi also briefed Talabani on outlines of Iran's policy on talks with the US in connection with Iraq.

He voiced Iran's all-out readiness for contribution to Iraq's reconstruction process and its overall development.

(SNIP)

He called on the Iraqi president to secure release of the Iranian prisoners in Iraq.

The Iranian diplomat said there are about 250 Iranian nationals, mostly pilgrims to the Iraqi holy sites, that have been detained and imprisoned on charges of illegal entry to Iraqi soil.

3//The Moscow Times, Russia Friday, March 31, 2006. Issue 3383. Page 1.
 
SECRET RULES TO DESTROY HIJACKED JETS STIR FEARS
By Nabi Abdullaev, Staff Writer

After years of deliberations, Russia this month joined the handful of countries that allow hijacked airliners to be shot down to prevent the doomsday scenario of a plane slamming into a nuclear station.

The ground rules for shooting airliners -- as well as for sinking passenger ships and opening fire on terrorists in apartment buildings -- are now being drawn up by the Defense Ministry.

But they will be top secret and will most likely not make the country any safer, said independent defense experts and one of the authors of the new anti-terrorism law, which President Vladimir Putin signed on March 6.

After Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who is also a deputy prime minister, approves the rules, they will only need a go-ahead from the Justice Ministry to go into force.

"We are stuck in a trap. The regulations in the law are vague, and I expect that Ivanov's order will contradict them, making a mess of the decision-making process," said Viktor Ilyukhin, a Communist deputy who co-drafted the anti-terrorism law in the State Duma's Security Committee.

"As a result, we cannot guarantee that a plane set to ram into the Kremlin will be shot down or that a plane that terrorists are using to blackmail the government -- without any real plans to ram it into a sensitive facility -- is spared destruction," Ilyukhin said.

The anti-terrorism law does not clearly spell out the chain of command in a hijacking crisis. As such, Ivanov's instructions are all but certain to aggravate the decision-making process.

Furthermore, if a plane were mistakenly shot down, there would be no trail leading back to those responsible.

The law says the military should destroy a plane hijacked by terrorists if the terrorists reject an order to land and if there is "a real danger of death to people or an environmental catastrophe."

The military should also destroy a plane if there is "reliable" information that the plane will be used to commit a terrorist attack and if all means to ground it are exhausted. The law allows the military to sink hijacked ships under similar conditions. The military could begin an anti-terrorist operation only with orders from the president.

(MORE)

4//The PakTribune (Pakistan News Service), Pakistan Friday March 31, 2006 (0317 PST)
 
US KEEN TO GET OBSERVER STATUS IN SAARC
DHAKA: The US has expressed interest in getting observer status in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Hemayetuddin has said.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Gastright, who is on a three-day visit here, is likely to communicate this formally to Bangladesh, the current chair of SAARC, the daily Bangladesh Observer reported.

Last week, the US had written to the SAARC secretariat expressing ’eagerness’ to join as an observer.

The SAARC groups India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The 13th SAARC Summit in Dhaka in November last year approved Afghanistan as its new member and China and Japan as observers. The US and South Korea had also applied for observer status.

According to the Daily Star, Dhaka and Islamabad will host three important meetings of different SAARC bodies next month to finalise the South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) implementation arrangements, modalities of SAARC funds and the terms and conditions for new membership and observer status of the association.

(SNIP)

The three-day standing committee meeting, comprising the foreign secretaries of the seven member countries, will prepare recommendations on how to strengthen SAARC. It will also determine the terms and conditions for new membership and observer status of the association.

It will also prepare a draft plan for the 2006-2015 decade that was declared as the ’SAARC Decade for Poverty Alleviation’ at the 13th summit.

Islamabad will host a meeting of SAARC finance ministers on April 14-15, which will finalise the modalities of different funds, including the South Asia Development Fund (SADF) and SAARC Development Fund (SDF).

The SDF, which has under it the SAARC poverty alleviation fund, proposes to raise $300 million under it to undertake education, health, and human resource development projects in the region. India has already committed to contribute $100 million for the fund.

The South Asia Development Fund will also focus on economic and social development. It already has $6 million in its coffers that are lying unutilised, officials here said.

5//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy Mar 29, 2006
 
CAPTURE PUTS EX-WARLORD IN JAIL, LIBERIA IN A BIND
Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, Mar 29 (IPS) - Advocates and analysts welcomed former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor's capture as a blow against impunity for war crimes but braced for political fallout from U.S. involvement in the affair.

Taylor, an ex-warlord and president, is to stand trial nearly three years after a U.N.-backed court indicted him on 17 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in West African massacres.

Many observers said Taylor's capture could aid peace and stability in Liberia as it claws its way back from more than two decades of civil war.

However, some also decried the timing, saying Washington had bullied the fledgling government of Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf into pressing Nigeria to extradite Taylor, and had held the Liberian people hostage by threatening to withhold economic life support if Johnson-Sirleaf did not push the issue.

Johnson-Sirleaf's government, in power since January, had sought to bring Taylor to justice after tackling the country's moribund basic services, 85 percent unemployment rate, and crushing HIV/AIDS crisis. Pushing it to deal with Taylor first could wrinkle the country's fragile peace, they said.

Taylor spent nearly three years in Nigerian exile and became the world's highest-profile fugitive Monday night, when he disappeared from his seaside mansion. Nigerian officials said border guards detained him Tuesday night as he attempted to steal into neighbouring Cameroon.

Taylor was repatriated Wednesday and then flown to the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown, according to U.N. news sources.

(SNIP)

Some also saw Taylor's capture as averting a potential new crisis in Liberia, saying that he would have ramped up efforts to destabilise the country and discredit Johnson-Sirleaf had he given Nigerian authorities the slip and established a new base of operations.

(SNIP)

Taylor's handover came after Johnson-Sirleaf asked Obasanjo to extradite him. Relief at the successful extradition was tempered by what some saw as unreasonable U.S. pressure on Monrovia, however.

"Clearly, a hammer was being used on the Liberian government," said Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. "There was a clear link between development assistance for the people of Liberia and actual extradition."

Several political and media analysts described U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as single-minded in her pursuit of Taylor, adding that some lawmakers also had trained their sights on him.

U.S. impatience over Taylor appeared to be driven in part by disgust at his reputation and in part by allegations he had harboured al Qaeda suicide bombers.

Perhaps more significantly, the Bush administration has been eager to see a major despot brought to swift justice by a judicial panel other than the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court, to which it stands firmly opposed, the Christian Science Monitor newspaper quoted Ayesha Kajee of the South African Institute of International Affairs as saying.

When it looked like Obasanjo might be dragging his heels -- and especially when it emerged that Taylor had gone missing Monday night -- the Bush administration brought its diplomatic cudgels to bear on Abuja, including threatening to cancel Obasanjo's long-awaited trip to Washington.

Taylor's extradition cleared the way for the visit to go forward as scheduled on Wednesday. Obasanjo thus dodged a political bullet he could ill afford amid opposition to constitutional amendments that would allow him a third term in office. Additionally, he is confronted with an insurgency that has cut off one-fourth of oil production in the country's Niger Delta region, a major U.S. supplier.

Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's much-trumpeted first female head of state, might not prove quite so lucky.

Her government won election last November on the strength of promises to improve the economy, health, and education services before turning to Taylor.

By catapulting Taylor to the top of the list, Washington appears to have exposed Johnson-Sirleaf to the political fallout of a Taylor trial without giving her time to make good on campaign promises and establish her own credentials as a provider of government services.

This when the country lacks an army following disarmament and demobilisation that have spawned new misgivings among old enemies, and even as Liberians pin their hopes of justice on a nascent, homegrown truth and reconciliation commission.

Instead of allowing the new Liberian government to tackle its problems and consolidate peace on its own terms, "the Bush administration, kind of like a bull in a china shop, said, 'Well, you do this and do this now according to our timeframe'," Woods said.

Even so, Bush told Obasanjo before reporters at the White House Wednesday that "the fact that Charles Taylor will be brought to justice in a court of law will help Liberia".