Macedonia Mulls Kosovo Border Agreement
October 16, 2009
Skopje | 16 October 2009 | Sinisa-Jakov Marusic
On Friday afternoon, the Macedonian government requested an urgent session of parliament to discuss the ratification of a border agreement with neighbouring Kosovo.
Beer diplomacy
July 29, 2009
BBC News
To the already long list of improbable White House get-togethers – Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Princess Diana and John Travolta – we will be able to add the names of a black professor and a white policeman at the centre of a national uproar over race relations.
Sgt Crowley and Prof Gates are to meet at the White House
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Cambridge police sergeant Jim Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard scholar he arrested after responding to a report of a possible break-in at Mr Gates’s home, will sit down with Mr Obama on Thursday for a conciliatory beer.
Admittedly, it is tempting to view the invitation as the ultimate conflation of the age of Obama and the age of Oprah.
Aside from the choice of beverage, there is something very daytime television, something very soft focus, something very soft sofa, about this attempt to defuse the controversy.
Mr Gates was held for disorderly conduct, after he allegedly criticised police behaviour during the incident at the scholar’s home on 16 July. President Obama – a friend of Mr Gates – got involved in the case, saying the police had acted “stupidily”.
Yet startling and novel as Mr Obama’s attempts to defuse the controversy are, he is merely upholding a long tradition. Presidential racial politics have often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre.
Obvious gestures
Ever since the war, when black voters – or the Negro vote, as it was then known – became a potentially election-deciding force, presidents have embraced symbolic gestures, for the simple reason that they allow them to appeal to blacks without alienating whites.
Often the gestures have been rather obvious. Sometimes they have been so subtle as to be almost subliminal.
Alert to the growing strategic importance of the black vote in key northern battleground states, Dwight D Eisenhower invited the black contralto, Marian Anderson, to perform at his 1956 inauguration. It was a gesture especially redolent with meaning, since in 1939 she had been barred from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington.
His successor, John F Kennedy, happily extended a White House invitation to the world heavyweight boxing champion, Floyd Patterson, hoping it would compensate for his stubborn refusal to offer similar hospitality to Martin Luther King.
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 Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race   |
Not to be outdone by President Eisenhower, JFK also invited Marian Anderson to sing at his inaugural, but then went a few notable steps further by dancing with black women at the balls later on that night.
This kind of imagery has also been used in reverse, using more harmful symbolism.
Ronald Reagan delivered the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town memorialised in the Hollywood movie, Mississippi Burning – where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964.
The subject of his speech was “states rights”, for some a euphemism for white supremacy.
In 1992, the then Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, famously attacked the black singer Sister Souljah; and, more infamously, made sure he returned home to Little Rock mid-campaign to oversee the lethal injection of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain damaged black man who had killed a police officer.
Fears and grievances
These kinds of techniques are so commonly deployed, largely because they can have such a dramatic effect.
Even as black leaders attacked him for his timidity on civil rights, Mr Kennedy enjoyed high approval ratings among black voters, partly because they had been such full participants in his inaugural celebrations.
Nothing underscored Bill Clinton’s moderate, New Democrat credentials better than his attack on a black hip-hop artist.
So history suggests it would be foolish to underestimate the reconciliatory potential of this Budweiser moment, however dubious it sounds.
After all, conflict resolution often turns on the mutual and public acknowledgement of each side’s fears and grievances, along with the photo-opportunity that accompanies it.
Mr Obama talked about black self-improvement at the NAACP conference
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By extending this invitation, Mr Obama also appears to be signalling that neither Prof Gates nor Sgt Crowley was wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong.
The beer at the White House, then, marks an attempt to balance white fears about black lawlessness, whether real or imagined, with black middle-class grievances about white racism, whether real or imagined.
Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race. To be a history-defying candidate he became a history-denying figure, and left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy.
Since winning the presidency, however, he has been much more expansive on the issue, starting with his victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago, where he located his achievement in the context of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, the climactic moments of the civil rights era.
During his recent speech before the civil rights group, the NAACP, he made reference to these events to emphasise his theme of black self-improvement.
“I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere,” he said accusingly.
Biblical language
The Gates controversy has been harder for him to deal with because it deals with more awkward history and touches on the ambiguous legacy of the civil rights era.
White support for the civil rights movement started to wane when blacks demanded affirmative action and reparations. Conversely, racial profiling is an area where blacks feel they are still treated as second-class citizens.
This controversy not only taps into that milieu, but inadvertently brings together two unlikely protagonists: Prof Gates, one of America’s most eloquent advocates of affirmative action, and Sgt Crowley, who for five years taught a class on racial profiling at a local police academy which cautioned against stereotyping.
When you reach back into American history, you often find that racial progress has come when the case for reform or reconciliation has been framed in Biblical language or used faith-based allegories.
Rev King’s I Have a Dream speech is the most obvious and glorious example.
Now Barack Obama is conjuring up a modern-day parable: the story of the professor, the policeman and the president. But can he turn beer into progress?
Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.
bbc.co.uk
US troops back on patrol
July 29, 2009
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By Gabriel Gatehouse
BBC News, Mosul |
Nearly a month after American troops officially withdrew from urban areas in Iraq, they are quietly going back in again, patrolling the streets of towns and cities where, despite improvements in security, violence remains an everyday occurrence.
By the US military’s own reckoning, Mosul and its surrounding region is the most dangerous area in Iraq.
On average they calculate there are four attacks here every day – explosions, shootings, suicide bombings. That is down from six per day in January – progress, of sorts.
Since 30 June, Iraqi forces have been entirely responsible for maintaining security in urban areas. But the Americans want to keep a close eye. So they are maintaining a limited number of joint patrols inside cities like Mosul.
Lt Joel Brown was going into Mosul for the first time since the handover. When he and his platoon were last in the city, they came under attack – a grenade was thrown at their convoy from one of the many narrow alleyways along their route.
“The grenade thrower was right behind that red car,” Lt Brown said, pointing out of the window of his armoured Humvee. “It bounced off the Humvee and blew up on the ground.”
On the roof of the vehicle, a gunner swept the road from right to left, watching for similar threats. Many of the buildings on the way into town had either been reduced to rubble or were pockmarked by bullets. Six years after the US-led invasion, Mosul still looks like a city at war.
Visible presence
The convoy consisted of five heavily armed vehicles: three American and two Iraqi, one each at the front and back – our escort, required under the terms of the handover agreement.
The Iraqi security forces were maintaining a highly visible presence on the streets of Mosul: checkpoints at almost every corner, watchtowers and more armoured vehicles.
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The Iraqi police have come a long way… Their proficiency, their ability to get the job done, is going to work me out of a job, which is good, which I’m looking forward to Cpt Brian Panaro, US Army
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Our destination was a large area of wasteland in the south-west of the city. Officially, the reason for the US patrol was to oversee a project to clear rubbish from the area.
“What we’re trying to do is to is get all these wrecked vehicles, trash, get that all moved out of here,” Lt Brown said. “It’ll help stimulate the economy as well as accomplish a major project here in the west side of Mosul.”
There was plenty to do. An open sewer ran along the street, as goats and geese nosed around in the rubbish, discarded shoes, bottles and plastic bags. A dog with three legs barked mournfully as it sat in the blazing sun outside a house built of concrete breeze-blocks.
But Lt Brown and the roughly 130,000 other US troops still stationed in Iraq are more than just heavily armed garbage men. In Mosul, the threat of violence is never far off.
Suddenly a shot rang out from the direction of a sandbagged watchtower at the end of the street. A warning shot, Lt Brown said, fired by one of the Iraqis manning a checkpoint.
No one was injured in the shooting, but the Americans didn’t stay to find what had prompted it.
The patrol was attracting increasingly unfriendly-looking attention from many of the local residents in the area, unused by now to the presence of US forces in town. So they got back in their Humvees and headed back to base.
New rules
Following the handover, patrols to monitor reconstruction projects are a good way for the Americans to get their boots, eyes and ears back on the ground inside the cities.
But there are new rules in place – they have to ask for permission and an escort from the local Iraqi security forces.
Lt Gen Abbas negotiates the details of a convoy from a position of strength
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Co-operation is not always smooth, involving patient persuasion and impassioned gesticulation – plenty of head-scratching, the comparing of maps and a little bargaining.
“How many vehicles do you have?” Lt Gen Majed Abbas of the Iraqi Police Force asked Lt Brown before they set off. When he was told they had four, he told the Americans could bring only three. One would have to be left behind.
The whole process took place with the help of interpreters, and the traditional glasses of sweet black tea.
Everyone was friendly, but the Iraqis were clearly keen to emphasise that they were now in charge.
Gains
The smaller towns and villages just a few kilometres south of Mosul present a different picture from the city itself. Here US troops are freer in their movements, though they still bring an Iraqi escort when they go out on patrol.
In one such village, Cpt Brian Panaro and his men were soon surrounded by local children, asking for their watches and sunglasses. The problems people complain about here are often not matters of security, but of infrastructure – dirty water, bad roads, no jobs.
Ali Mustafa, an elderly man dressed in white, was sitting on the doorstep of his home.
There are still 130,000 US soldiers in Iraq
“The Americans invaded our country,” he said, “so they should be responsible for these things too, not just security.”
But in a little over two years’ time, the Americans don’t want to be responsible for any of it. They want out.
“The Iraqi police have come a long way since the beginning of our deployment here,” Capt Panaro said. “Their proficiency, their ability to get the job done, is going to work me out of a job, which is good, which I’m looking forward to.”
Many of the soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Marez, the US military’s main camp outside Mosul, are effectively out of a job already, confined to barracks.
Joint patrols in cities like Mosul are relatively rare compared to what they were before 30 June. If the Pentagon has its way, they will soon cease altogether.
As the Americans shift their attentions towards Afghanistan, they are hoping that the security gains they’ve achieved in Iraq will hold once they do finally pack up and leave.
bbc.co.uk
Cold war,The First Moon Landing, Final Destination
July 20, 2009
Cold war started,technology was advesing a new playground was needed in order to protect the waiste of human been, so this is how The First Landing on the Moon was born.
On the morning of July 16, 1969 , Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.
Armstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern, saying “the unknowns were rampant,” and “there were just a thousand things to worry about.”
At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” (› Play Audio)
They leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and a plaque on one of Eagle’s legs. It reads, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Withoutthe cold war it would never happend ,Sputnik pushed the americans to it,the world war already developed a strong high tech industry in wepons, so the base was secure and ready to be tested for defending out of space this time.The first moon station is to be described as a military defence point with complex , intelligent missiles.
The future war will be in space, and the strategy for it’s social preparing it’s obvious in the media movie and direction.
Russia did not payed so much attention to it then, it was just a great event who was saluted as a big step in research , just it, and the movie with Apollo 1 never got acces to the public in the soviet area.
This event was ment to rebuild the cooperation betwen both sides,pushing forward to a much higher level , who will bring spectacular results and performance later, today.
by Burca Alice Larisa
on Iranian border
July 18, 2009
BBC News, Suleimaniya
Portraits of Iran’s leaders hang above the border crossing with Iraq
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More than a month after the disputed presidential election in Iran, much of the country is still closed to the outside.
Following the street demonstrations in Tehran, the Iranian authorities have expelled and barred some foreign journalists and restricted others to reporting only from the capital.
Little news about the aftermath of the election and the subsequent street demonstrations is coming out of the smaller provincial towns, simply because there is no one there to report it.
But it is still possible to speak to the people who travel from those towns and villages to other places where journalists can work more freely.
One such place is Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border.
The main street in the town of Suleimaniya is a teeming mass of shops and stalls, selling almost anything you might want to buy, from nuts to vegetables to second-hand mobile phones.
Many of the wares, cosmetics and cheap clothes, come from Iran, but one product that most definitely did not was the whisky.
Tight lipped
A small shop on the high street was piled with bottles from floor to ceiling: Scotch, Irish, American bourbon.
Our translator pointed to three men, crammed into the little store, busy filling their bags. “Iranians,” he said.
In Suleimaniya, few were keen to speak about events in Iran
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The Iranian authorities have blamed “foreign powers” for stoking the unrest that followed last month’s elections. Since then, many people in Iran have been nervous about talking openly to foreigners, especially journalists.
I thought that here, in autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, on the steps of a liquor store, we might find tongues a little looser. I was wrong.
The three men were ethnic Azeris, one of Iran’s largest minority communities. They live mostly in the north-west of the country.
In 2006, clashes between Iranian Azeri demonstrators and police left five dead, according to reports at the time.
But despite this history of tension with the central authorities in Tehran, these three had nothing to say.
Had there been any demonstrations in their home town following the elections? They were not interested in politics. How was the economy, how was business? They were satisfied with their lives.
What did they think of Mir Hossein Mousavi, supposedly a liberal, a reformer? (I eyed their plastic bags stuffed with booze.)
Might he have made life at home a little more relaxed? They were, again, satisfied with their lives. Or was it fear?
Spot the police
The following morning we drove up through the hills of Kurdistan towards the border with Iran. The little town of Bashmagh is the main frontier post in this area.
A steady stream of vehicles and pedestrians were crossing over mainly in one direction – from Iran into Iraq.
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These people were lorry drivers and traders, or simply families going to visit relatives on the other side of the border.
Watching over them were two brooding portraits – those of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, the father of the Iranian revolution and his successor, the current supreme leader.
As if aware of their gaze, most of the people crossing here were even more reluctant to speak than the Iranians in Suleimaniya.
Some said they were convinced the Iranian secret police had agents watching and listening to them, even on the Iraqi side of the border.
I looked around. I saw a plethora of men in different uniforms, border guards, customs officers, policemen.
Three money-changers sat behind fold-up tables counting wads of brightly coloured bank notes. Old men wearing turbans and baggy pantaloons stood around doing nothing much, apart from smoking.
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This government is not the elected government of the people Hadi
Kurdish trader |
In the eyes of a wary traveller, any one of them could be an Iranian agent. The nervousness was easy to understand. And yet there were those who were willing to talk.
Hadi is an Iranian Kurd in his mid-twenties. He lives in Mariwan, a small town not far from the border, and makes his living trading in cosmetics, crossing back and forth between Iran and Iraq.
He voted for Mr Mousavi, he said, in the hope that the economy would improve. But he believes his vote was stolen.
“This government is not the elected government of the people,” he said. “It is a fake and a coup d’etat. Nothing can change this system except force.”
Watching the protests in Tehran over the past month, Hadi and his friends had wanted to demonstrate too. But, he said, in Mariwan it was simply too dangerous.
“There were more police than civilians in the streets, we couldn’t do anything in these small towns, because if you talk freely it could cost you your life. Everybody wanted to take part in the demonstrations. But we couldn’t.”
“This government it so repressive,” he went on, “we are afraid even when we are in our own homes.”
Friend of the poor
It is unusual to hear someone speak so openly and critically of the Iranian authorities.
Lorry driver Sayyad said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a friend of the poor
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Reading between the lines though, many seemed unhappy with the events of the past month. But not everyone.
A short while after we spoke to Hadi, a vast yellow truck rolled across the border. Out of the cab jumped Sayyad, the driver.
He was transporting a consignment of rice from Pakistan, destined for Iraqi consumers.
Sayyad, who is from another town in western Iran, voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he said, because the president was on the side of poor people.
To prove the point, he told us how he had recently bought his own lorry, at a good price and in instalments.
So he was pleased his man had won the election. He was also relieved that the authorities had restored law and order.
Of all the people we spoke to at Bashmagh, whatever part of Iran they came from and whoever they had voted for in the election, they all appeared to agree on two things.
Firstly, the Iranian economy is in bad shape. Many complained of high unemployment and of having difficulty making ends meet.
The other was that – excepting Tehran – there had been no recent demonstrations on the streets of their hometowns.
bbc.co.uk
North Korea and the everlasting red spot…
June 10, 2009
In the last few months we were the silent spectators of a modern ‘tragicomedy’ display of international dramatization… North Korea, one of the last standing communist countries, became the secondary stage (Iran still keeping the main spotlight) for a global dispute: Nuclear proliferation amid poor and authoritarian political states.
The first part of this staged confrontation was the scene in which Kim Jong IL tented a “to be or not to be” dialogue with Death. Many thought that with him out of the way the country would see better policies and will forget about communism… They were wrong?!
The second scene was the moment when N Korea begun mysterious missile and nuclear testing. We were daily posted by the Medias and Internet community about the actors and acting flaws or high performances. Dumbed by so many views on that act we lost the track of time… And the global time begun its beating once more in favor of N Korea’s ambitions!!!
The third (and last?) part it’s playing right now before our eyes! N Korea’s president doesn’t show realistic signs of life…he still seems long dead
While piles of intelligence and analysis documents are rising in archives, N Korea is and will remain a red spot amongst others in a true, post-modern landscaping of the globe. The scenery is red, the artisans are red, but for how much time?!
by Burca Alice Larisa
Iran’s new Change -Karroubi
June 8, 2009
Twice member of parliment, Mehdi Karroubi talk to BBC international corespondent about the election and future in Iran’s future.
After a debate with Ahmadinejad , , he is still not the chnage of the already progressiv people of this country who wants more and more day by day.
Asked about the political ”Change” he wants to bring , he offers some important issues on the table. Social and political freedom, stronger rights for women, political detainee freed,a much open and warm colaboration with foreign countries in economical intrest.
Inflation and hard life becomes a priority for this candidat and ofcourse, great talk with the High Cometee of the country for freedom of speach among students.
Women , he says, they should be able to wear anything that it’s not decadent, exposing or temting by respecting religion of the Islamic country.
Asked whether he will frop the nuclear programm , he acussed Ahmadinejad, the actual President about lieing and exposing this project as dangerous and agresiv , in stad of it’s reality- the energy use of it.
Will Karroubi bring change to the Iranian people?From what we see, people ’s progress is stronger than sistem improuvement .I hopw people will change it and sistem will be able to adapt to it’s real needs, otherwise I think a revolution will rise again for it’s world,
by Burca Alice Larisa
Big test for Iranian democracy
June 6, 2009
BBC News, Tehran
Iran boasts that it is the most democratic country in the Middle East. It’s a claim worth examining, as the presidential election approaches.
Four presidential candidates – but how democratic is Iran?
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On 12 June, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be challenged by three contenders: Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezai.
Those are the only four candidates allowed on the ballot paper. The remainder of the 475 candidates who registered, including 42 women, were ruled ineligible by the powerful Guardian Council.
By most standards that would suggest a less than open contest.
And many more candidates may have been deterred even from registering, by the likelihood that they would be disqualified.
Certainly it is true that the choice is restricted.
Surprise results
No candidate who challenges the basic tenets of the Islamic Republic would be allowed to stand, even though there are plenty of Iranians who might vote for them.
At the same time, none of those disqualified by the Guardian Council was seen as a serious contender in any case.
No-one challenging the basic tenets of Iran’s Islamic Republic could stand
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And the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, and of President Ahmadinejad in 2005, were both unexpected.
So if people behind the scenes are trying to fix the election, they are either not very good at it, or they are afraid to be seen to be going too strongly against the will of the people.
Free and fair elections, of course, include many elements. And there’s a strong suspicion that the government machine is behind Mr Ahmadinejad.
‘Encouraged’
There’s much discussion over whether the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia, and government employees like teachers, will be “encouraged” to vote for Mr Ahmadinejad.
Some of his opponents have had problems getting permission to hold rallies.
While former President Khatami was still a candidate, one provincial governor refused permission for a visit, on the rather transparent grounds that he would cause traffic jams!
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KEY BACKGROUND
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The international media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, rates Iran close to the bottom of its world press freedom table.
Most newspapers support the government. All television is state controlled.
Until the election began, Iranian TV was fairly openly behind the president.
However, during the campaign, all four candidates have been given equal airtime for a series of broadcasts, campaign videos, and one-on-one debates.
Many Iranians do have access to satellite television, even though it is illegal.
Many more Iranians are avid users of the internet, though that is also heavily censored.
But the country has a new digital divide, between those with access to outside information, and those mostly poorer people reliant on state-controlled outlets.
Does it matter anyway? There’s a view that, as his title suggests, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wields the real power in the Islamic Republic, particularly over foreign policy and the nuclear issue.
Candidates have been given equal air time during the campaign
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But as so often with Iran, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Though he does hold a position of immense authority, Ayatollah Khamenei is not considered by many people to be even the most senior cleric in Iran.
So he faces pressure from religious leaders who believe they hold more religious authority. Partly as a result, he has built up a power base in the Revolutionary Guards.
While the Guards report directly to the leader, they also have their own interests that must be taken into account.
The commercial elite – the “Bazaaris” – also have an almost legendary power, derived from the belief that they helped to overthrow the Shah’s regime. A recent strike by Bazaaris over new taxes brought a swift change of policy from the government.
Distant leader
Then, of course, there is the parliament, the Majlis, with its powerful speaker Ali Larijani. And former President Hashemi Rafsanjani continues to be influential, partly through his chairmanship of two important institutions, the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts.
Iran’s Supreme Leader has immense authority and the final say in key decisions
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The leader’s role, in any case, is to maintain his distance, not to interfere too directly in the day-to-day running of the country. How much he is involved in individual decisions, or in vetting major speeches, is a matter shrouded in mystery.
Above all, evidence suggests that different presidents produce different policies. Despite many restrictions placed on him, the “reformist” President Khatami helped to liberalise social and cultural life, and attempted to reach out for a dialogue with the West.
And while it is always said that the leader has the final say on the nuclear programme, it is surely no coincidence that it has been dramatically speeded up under the presidency of Mr Ahmadinejad.
The nuclear programme has now gained such momentum that it is hard to see any new Iranian president stopping or suspending it. Neither will Iran’s next president have the authority to change dramatically the Iranian system of government, or its relations with the outside world.
But within those limitations, this election could substantially change the direction of this country. And Iranians are just beginning to realise it.
It appears that more and more Iranians, inspired by strong views for or against President Ahmadinejad, want to have their say on 12 June in the country that boasts that it is the most democratic in the Middle East.
bbc.co.uk
the end of a special relationship
June 5, 2009
Israel papers: new era in US ties
Israelis react to Obama’s speech with “mixed feelings”
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Commentators in Israeli papers interpreted US President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world as marking a clear shift in ties between the US and Israel, and possibly the end of a special relationship.
One writer called on the Israeli government to adapt to the new winds blowing from Washington or face a storm, while several said the US president had given the government notice that it would now have to honour commitments made towards reaching peace with the Palestinians.
At least one interpreted this as meaning that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would have to reshape his cabinet.
Several writers referred respectfully to the US leader and saw his words in a positive light, while others were disparaging. One saw him as a sycophant.
The speech was balanced but this is exactly the problem… For light years we were spoilt by the lack of US balance in our favour… The speech yesterday is the beginning of a “new countdown” in the relations between Washington and Jerusalem. It seems there will be no intimacy in the relations, that intimacy that granted Israel and its leaders a unique, special status among the leaders and nations of the world.
Only over one evil the new American prophet weeps – the settlements … What is left as an obstacle to peace, according to Obama, are those settlers… They are the ones responsible for the Israeli-Arab conflict… Had we not been witnesses to the result of the dismantling of the settlements in Gaza, someone in Israel still could believe that this is right.
Obama’s speech was intended as a war instrument against one enemy – Islamic extremism… It is impossible not to appreciate a president who opens his term with an intensive effort to promote solution of the problem under which Israel has laboured since its creation… He is not naive. He knows that a long time will pass until the achievement of peace – if at all. Yesterday he crossed the start line.
The proposal placed on the table by Barack Obama in Cairo is one that Israel would not be able to refuse… Obama is timing Netanyahu, while expecting him to voluntarily connect to the new winds blowing from Washington, before he is forced to contend with a storm.
Obama left no room for doubt: The United States supports Israel, yet the era of trickery, promises, and the gradual annexation in Judea and Samaria is over. The time has come for action; the time has come for moving towards a resolution of the Palestinian problem… Barack Obama’s speech was meant to make it clear to Netanyahu who the master of the house is.
Today, 5 June, 42 years after the Six-Day War, the time has come to respond to the question posed by President Lyndon Johnson to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol: What kind of Israel do you people want? Yesterday, Obama made it clear what the answer should be, and that we should view his sycophantic speech in Cairo as a true alarm.
It was not only before Islam and the West, but also, perhaps mostly, before Israel, the Palestinians and the Arabs that an opportunity for a new beginning was laid out in Cairo yesterday… The government of Israel, like that of the Palestinians, has no right to ignore this opportunity and place it in the drawer alongside all the other missed opportunities. The price of missing out will not be measured in the quality of relations with Washington, but in human lives.
The moment of political reckoning that he [Binyamin Netanyahu] so feared is now rapidly approaching… Netanyahu will have to decide over the coming weeks who he would rather pick a fight with: the powerful US administration or his own coalition and members of his party… If he aligns himself with the coalition, he will keep his job but risk isolating Israel.
Only the Israeli analysts tried to diminish the speech’s importance (“not terrible”), to spread fear (“he mentioned the Holocaust and the Nakba in a single breath”), or were insulted on our behalf (“he did not mention our right to the land as promised in the Bible”). All these were redundant and unnecessary. Obama emerged on Thursday as a true friend of Israel.
Bush’s work tools were the aircraft carriers. Obama’s work tools, at this stage, are his conquering personality, sweeping charisma and reconciled diplomacy… Netanyahu will have to decide soon. It is either “Yes” or “No” to Obama… If Netanyahu wants to go with the president, enter history and give peace a chance, he will have to change his government’s composition.
Obama reiterated his wish to establish two states for two peoples. Balance and equality between Jews and Arabs as it were. But Obama “forgot” that in the Jewish state there are more than a million [Israeli] Arabs who enjoy democratic rights unknown to their brothers in Arab countries. No one stops them from building… But for us Jews in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] it is forbidden to live, build or to buy land. Obama, who is supposed to be sensitive to racism, has turned himself into a racist.
It was with mixed feelings that we watched President Barack Obama deliver his extraordinary speech to the Muslim and Arab worlds in Cairo yesterday. Critics will see the speech as incredibly naive… Obama didn’t really need to tell Israelis to acknowledge “Palestine’s” right to exist since every government since Yitzhak Rabin’s has been explicit that the Jewish state does not want to rule over another people. The real question is whether a violently fragmented Palestinian polity is capable of making the necessary compromises required to close a deal.
BBC Monitoringselects and translates news from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. It is based in Caversham, UK, and has several bureaux abroad.
Turkey, the EU and a love-hate relationship
June 2, 2009
Posted by: ibon.villelabeitia Tags: Global News
French President Nicolas Sarkozy opens a jack-in-the-box decorated with the EU flag, a boxing glove springs out and knocks out the teeth of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan .
“No more empty promises to Turkey,” a snickering Sarkozy says. The cartoon in daily Milliyet darkly panders to what most Turks feel these days are the European Union’s true intentions towards Turkey’s EU quest — no matter how many obstacles thrown at its wheels Turkey surmounts on the long and winding road to Brussels, it will ultimately be denied entry at the gates of the promised land .
A survey last weekend by Bahcesehir University in Istanbul showed that 80 percent of Turks believe that even if Ankara meets all political and economic requirements for EU accession, the EU will still not accept it as a member.
The study was published ahead of the June 4-7 European Parliament vote, in which Turkey’s bid to join the EU has become an election issue in some EU countries to the chagrin of the Turks, always sensitive about their self-image in the West .
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy of France have used the campaign trail to reiterate their opposition to Turkey’s full EU membership, saying Ankara instead should be given a “privileged partnership”; Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and his British counterpart David Miliband joined voices to stress the “strategic interest” of accepting Turkey into the bloc .
Election issues can be notoriously short-sighted, but at the heart of the debate is the very idea of Europe and where it should draw its borders as it strives to tackle new challenges such as globalisation, climate change, nuclear proliferation, energy dependency, the rise of China and other powers or security .
Is Turkey — a predominantly Muslim country of 72 million people with a per capita income of only one-third that of the 27-nation bloc — too poor and too culturally different to fit into the EU? Do “Little Europeans” from Paris to Berlin, aghast at the prospect of a EU bordering Iran, Iraq and Syria really want a fortress and “Christians-only” Europe? Can Europe afford losing Turkey?
Enlargement-fatigue and a Lisbon Treaty in intensive care have narrowed politicians’ sights, but the wider question over the future of Europe will not go away.
Ankara’s lack of progress in key areas such as clipping the power of the military and expanding freedom of expression since accession negotiations began in 2005 has consumed much of the debate of late. But again, what are four years in a country which has changed beyond recognition since the 1980s by throwing open its markets to foreign investors, shattering long-held taboos and democratically electing former Islamists as president and prime minister without witnessing a military coup?
Those who back Ankara’s full membership say Turkey has enormous benefits for the bloc — it is a secular democracy with a vibrant market economy, NATO’s second-largest army, a strategically positioned energy hub between the West and the East, and a rising regional power with bridges to the Muslim world .
Those against it shudder at its sheer size — by 2050 Turkey’s fast growing population will reach 100 million –, are troubled by its authoritarian ways, awed by its Islamic identity and horrified at its treatment of minorities and news of honour killings that feed the view of the “barbarian Turk” .
Turks insist that joining Europe is the culmination of founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s drive to modernise the country and say Europe without a city like Istanbul will never fully be Europe.
Brussels says banning Youtube, prosecuting Nobel laureate writer Orhan Pamuk for “insulting the Turkish nation” and meddlesome generals are incompatible with European values of tolerance, freedom and rule of law .
In any case, if Turkey is to join Europe — there are more than 80,000 pages of European laws and regulations before that happens — it would take decades rather than years. By then both Europe and Turkey will be quite different from what they are today. Sarkozy and Merkel will be long gone from the stage .
History of course carries its weight. After all, Ottoman Turks stormed twice as conquerors into Europe, hammering at the very gates of Vienna, and European powers occupied large parts of today’s Turkey after the collapse of the empire .
The survey by Bahcesehir University also highlighted Turkey’s own ambivalence toward Europe — aspiring to be a part of it but harbouring dark suspicions towards it as well .
Three out of four Turks believe the EU is trying to dismember Turkey and 81 percent believe the bloc’s goal is to spread Christianity. However, 57 percent said they wanted full EU membership for Turkey .
But again, can Turkey afford to lose Europe?
