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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Arrests after Spain 'forgery' raids

Spanish police have arrested 13 people suspected of belonging to an international crime organization involved in passport forgery.

Local media reports said some of those detained are also suspected of having links to Islamic extremist groups, including al-Qaeda.

The arrests, which took place in Barcelona and Valencia, included 11 Pakistanis, a Nigerian and an Indian.

Police, who wore masks to conceal their identities during the raids, seized false and blank passports, as well as other material used for forging documents.

Crime gangs

Spanish radio reported a number of men were arrested over "falsifying identity documents in connection with Islamist terrorism".

In a statement, police said the group allegedly stole passports in Spain and forwarded them onto Thailand, where they were altered before being sent back to crime gangs in Europe.

Police said they were investigating whether the group may also have supplied such documents to international "terror" groups.

Spanish police have carried out several raids against suspected Muslim extremists since the March 2004 bomb attacks on commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 191 people.

Those claiming responsibility for the attack said they had carried it out in the name of al-Qaeda.

Last month, six people were arrested in Barcelona on suspicion of tax fraud and possible links to financing "terrorist" activities, while a year earlier police arrested 15 people who were suspected of planning an attack in Barcelona.

Witnesses says Ethiopians are back in Somalia

By MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN
Associated Press Writer

Witnesses reported that Ethiopian troops have returned to a border town in Somalia, just over a week after they ended their unpopular two-year presence in the nation. The Ethiopian government on Tuesday denied the claim.

The Islamists who control most of Somalia and have used the foreign presence to rally recruits vowed to fight any Ethiopian troops who did not leave.

Somalia's newly elected president told fellow African leaders, however, that he wants to improve relations with Ethiopia after having previously characterized it as an enemy.

In the Somali town of Kalabeyrka, a few miles (kilometers) from the border, resident Farhan Dheere said that Ethiopian troops in 17 military vehicles arrived Monday and set up a checkpoint.

Truck driver Botan Ali said his vehicle was searched by Ethiopian troops in Kalabeyrka on Tuesday and Somali militiamen working with the Ethiopians demanded he pay some money that they described as "tax."

Ethiopian Communication Affairs Minister Bereket Simon denied there are any Ethiopian troops in Somalia. "We're within the bounds of Ethiopian territory and we have no intention of crossing" the border, Bereket told The Associated Press.

Somalia's weak U.N.-backed government called in the Ethiopian troops in December 2006 to oust an umbrella Islamic group that had controlled southern Somalia and the capital for six months. The Islamists launched an insurgency that has killed thousands of civilians.

The last Ethiopian troops withdrew Jan. 25 in a move widely welcomed by Somalis who had viewed the troops as an occupying force.

The chairman of the Council of Islamic Courts in the Somali region of Hiran, where the two witnesses reported seeing Ethiopian troops, urged them to leave. "We, the authorities in the region, will not accept it. If they do not leave within 24 hours we will fight with them," Sheik Abdurrahman Ibrahim Ma'ow told The Associated Press by telephone.

Somalia and Ethiopia have been rivals for decades, and fought in the late 1970s over a southeastern region of Ethiopia populated principally by people of Somali origin.

The Ethiopian army, one of Africa's largest, was viewed by many Somalis as abusive and heavy-handed. Ethiopia long said it wanted to pull out after stabilizing Somalia, but opponents said Ethiopia - a mainly Orthodox Christian country - was interested in preventing an Islamist regime in neighboring Somalia.

In his first speech to his fellow African leaders, Somalia's new president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, said his country will lay aside its decades-long animosity for Ethiopia. It was unclear if he was aware of reports of Ethiopian troops being in his country.

"I have a commitment to create a peaceful life for my people," Ahmed said, speaking in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "I will do my best to create a good relationship between Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti. I think all of them, they are doing well to create a peaceful life in the Horn of Africa. And we have to respect each other and to respect our sovereignty.

Ahmed was a key leader of the Council of Islamic Courts that ran Mogadishu for six months in 2006 before Ethiopian soldiers drove them from power. Since his election Saturday as president, he has vowed to part with his former extremist allies and pursue a moderate Islamic policy.

He also said his government will play a role in combating piracy off the coast of Somalia. The coastline of the lawless Horn of Africa nation has become a haven for pirates, who last year seized more than 40 vessels.

In Uganda, Defense Minister Crispus Kiyonga told journalists Tuesday that the commander of the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia will investigate whether peacekeepers killed 18 civilians in the Somali capital on Monday.

Somali officials and witnesses said Ugandan members of the AU force killed the civilians when they fired at three minibus taxis carrying civilians after a land mine exploded and damaged an AU vehicle in Mogadishu. Uganda forms the larger part of the AU force and its commander is an Ugandan officer.

Kiyonga said that if the commander found Ugandan troops killed civilians in Mogadishu then Uganda would form an inquiry and punish any soldier found responsible for the deaths.

Somalia's new president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, told reporters Tuesday that he discussed the killings with top AU officials and told them the force should use "proportionate" force while in Mogadishu.

The AU peacekeeping force, which numbers fewer than 3,000, has been in Mogadishu for about two years.

Writing on the wall

Few have the nerve to barge in like Dan Kurtzer. If he wanted something off his chest, he'd march into the highest office in the land. In the mid-1980s, as a US diplomat in Tel Aviv, Kurtzer did not like what he saw in Gaza.

"Have you guys lost your minds?," he yelled at then prime minister Shimon Peres's most senior advisers. "Don't you ever learn from history?"

It was apparent to Kurtzer that Israel, despite denials, was nurturing an emerging Islamist movement in Gaza as a foil to Yasser Arafat's secular Fatah movement. "The Islamists were OK as long as they were not shooting and bombing," an official who was stationed in Gaza in the early days of the Israeli occupation explained in a recent interview. Back in 1985, Kurtzer thought the Israelis were kidding themselves.

The feisty American's previous posting had been Cairo - he was there in 1981 when Islamists assassinated President Anwar Sadat. He was monitoring a new group called Hezbollah which had emerged in Lebanon - also Islamist and tied to Iran. "You really think you can tame these guys," Kurtzer asked in disbelief as he left the prime minister's suite.

The first Islamists in Gaza came from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian organization founded in the 1920s which, despite serial repression by the Cairo authorities, has become a powerful opposition force in Egypt. Hamas emerged from their ranks in the chaotic early days of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in December 1987.

In providing space for the early Islamists to take root and grow at the expense of Arafat's Fatah organization, Israel's occupation authorities helped launch an intra-Palestinian conflict, the ferocity of which now puts at risk the Palestinians' most powerful weapon in their struggle with Israel - an enduring sense of national unity which has held solidly since 1948.

In renouncing violence and recognizing Israel, the Arafat-controlled Palestine Liberation Organization won a berth in the so-called Oslo peace process. Working with Israeli forces and egged on by Washington, Arafat went to war against the Hamas fundamentalists - who refused either to end violent resistance or to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

Along the way, spectacular mistakes were made with all the conviction and certainty that the key players evince in this latest Gaza crisis, a convulsion which is as much about Washington and Tel Aviv's urge to have the faltering remnants of Arafat's Fatah triumph over Hamas, as it is about Israel's urge to keep the Palestinians in their place.

The Israelis were convinced they were on the right track in the early 1990s when they deported hundreds of key Hamas figures to south Lebanon, where they immersed themselves in explosives and other combat training with their Hezbollah comrades.

In 1997, Arafat and the Israelis had Hamas pinned down, to the point that Martin Indyk, then serving as American ambassador in Tel Aviv, concluded that the Islamists were "getting screwed". Hamas's two top leaders were in jail - one in the US and one in Israel - and Arafat was rounding up Islamists by the thousand.

By then Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel's prime minister and he decided with great certainty that he should assassinate a third leadership figure - Khalid Mishal. The attempt was bungled so spectacularly that Hamas was able to revive and survive.

Then Arafat became the problem and Mossad, under its director Efraim Halevy, came up with a grand plan, bought by the Bush White House, to force the autocratic Arafat aside in order to make way for the very feeble Mahmoud Abbas as leader of the Palestinian people.

Amid suspicion that he was a Washington puppet, Abbas desperately needed to show he could deliver for Palestinians where Arafat and Hamas had failed. Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza in 2005 was a perfect opportunity for him to be seen to negotiate a breakthrough - but Israel withdrew unilaterally, leaving Abbas high and dry. This was about the time we started to hear of the Arab Spring. Remember in the aftermath of the first post-Saddam elections in Iraq how Bush wanted Palestinians to prove democracy indeed was on the march in the Middle East?

Israel pleaded with Washington to block Hamas from standing candidates. Instead, Bush listened to Abbas, who argued he would be better placed to deal with Hamas after Fatah triumphed in the January 2006 election. Problem was Hamas triumphed at the poll.

So affronted was the world that the Hamas government was put in a deep freeze until it renounced violence and recognized Israel. In the meantime, many of its MPs were locked up by Israel and essential aid was cut to a trickle.

Quietly, Washington and Israel opted for a coup. If they could not get Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority to sack the government elected by the Palestinian people, they would - along with the European Union - fund, train and arm Abbas's security forces to drive Hamas from its Gaza stronghold.

Keith Dayton, the American general who readied the Fatah forces for war, spoke prophetically of a battle "like never before". His men were whipped in a matter of days.

For all that, Hamas's absolute rule in Gaza was a poison chalice. Isolated from the world and besieged by Israel, it got the stick while Abbas and the West Bank benefited from the foreign-aid carrot - stopping short of effective pressure on Israel to lift the hundreds of road blocks drastically containing Palestinian movement.

Management of the often high-octane conflict between Israel and Hamas remained the focus of regional attention; in the background the friction between Hamas and Fatah was equally corrosive.

Propped up by Washington, the EU and Israel, Abbas might have been expected to have a good war. But there are signs he is being punished for his early rhetoric which, like that from Cairo, gave comfort to Israel.

Abbas's right even to hold office as President of the Palestinian Authority came under a cloud as of yesterday, with formal expiration of his four-year term which, before the Israeli assault on Gaza, had prompted Hamas to warn that from this weekend it would cease to recognize Abbas as Palestinian leader.

A key field of battle between Fatah and Hamas is for the leftovers of the PLO. Hamas has been accused of attempting a hostile takeover for the organization.

But this week, Hussam Khader - one of the Fatah young turks trying to wrest control of the faction from Abbas's generation - was quoted: "Hamas will be stronger and Fatah weaker … after this war [in Gaza] Hamas will lead the PLO."

In Nablus, on the West Bank, long-time Fatah stalwart Abdel Ghani Marmash vowed to switch sides. "I was arrested 19 times by the Israelis [as a member of Fatah]," he said. "But at a time like this, all Palestinians are Hamas. Today I'm honored to follow the Hamas flag."

The current crisis has prompted calls from the likes of John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, to abandon the two-state solution and hand the West Bank to Jordan and for Gaza to come under the aegis of Egypt, as it was from the time of Israeli independence in 1948 through to the Six-Day War in 1967.

Bolton believes that despite their reluctance, Amman and Cairo could be bought with aid funds. But Cairo treats Gaza like toxic waste because of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt does not want any of the Gaza foment spilling over the border, especially after the chaos in January last year when Hamas blasted away sections of the border wall and fence to allow thousands of Gazans to go shopping in Egypt for a few days.

Conscious it must please a Washington which delivers almost as much aid to Egypt as it does to Israel, Cairo pitched in to keep its border with Gaza closed during the latest Israeli lock-down. This week Egyptian officials intimated they would reopen the Gaza border only if the crossing was manned by Abbas forces, not Hamas.

"We believe Hamas is going to stay [in power in Gaza], but we want it to stay in a way that would not harm [Abbas] legitimacy or harm us," Gihad Auda, a member of Egypt's ruling party, said during the week.

These are fluid days for Hamas. It controls Gaza where, this week, it was accused of executing Fatah members who it alleged collaborated with Israel.

Meanwhile, on the West Bank, Hamas supporters are being rounded up and jailed by Abbas's Fatah forces. Both factions ended up in a slanging match over whose approval was needed for Gazans to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Because Iran is a key backer, Hamas finds itself with less support than in the past from regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, both of which got away with treating the Bush drive for democracy with contempt because ganging up on Iran was a higher calling.

Herald chief correspondent Paul McGeough's new book, Kill Khalid: Mossad's Failed Hit … And The Rise Of Hamas , will be published early in March by Allen & Unwin.

3 Uighurs at Guantanamo ask Canada for asylum

By ROB GILLIES
Associated Press Writer

Three Chinese detainees cleared for release from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay have applied for political asylum in Canada, lawyers for the men and a group sponsoring them said Tuesday.

The men are among 17 Chinese Muslims called Uighurs (pronounced WEE'-gurz) at Guantanamo. The U.S. has cleared them for release but fears they could be mistreated or even tortured if they are turned over to China, which alleges they are terrorists who belong to an outlawed separatist group.

Two of the inmates applied last week and one applied last October, said Mehmet Tohti, a member of the Uighur Canadian Association, a non-profit cultural organization that is part of the group sponsoring the men's request for asylum.

Tohti said there has been no government response so far to the Uighurs' request. But Canada has refused several requests from Washington in the past to provide asylum for Uighurs cleared for release from Guantanamo.

Danielle Norris, a spokeswoman for Canada's Citizenship and Immigration government agency, said without the consent of the men she could not speak to their specific cases because of privacy laws.

Norris said in an e-mail that the number one focus of the department is protecting the security of Canadians and that any applicant would face rejection if there were reasonable grounds to believe they have "engaged or will engage in acts of terrorism."

Seema Saifee, a New York-based lawyer who represents the other two Uighurs, said the economic and diplomatic threat of straining relations with China by accepting the Uighurs is enough to scare a number of governments away from taking them.

Canada - like other countries - has seemed ill at ease in the past with taking on Guantanamo prisoners to remedy a massive headache for the U.S.

The former Bush administration set up Guantanamo in January 2002 for suspected al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners, many of them plucked from battlefields in Afghanistan. They were deemed "enemy combatants" and most were never charged with any crime, or given a trial. The prison was condemned repeatedly by human rights groups and many governments.

In one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama ordered Guantanamo shut down within a year. Last month, Obama gave a U.S. task force 30 days to recommend where to put the 245 remaining detainees.

The former Bush administration contended that the Uighurs were too dangerous to be admitted to the U.S. Albania accepted five Uighur detainees in 2006 but has since balked at taking others, partly for fear of diplomatic repercussions from China.

Notes prepared for former Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay in February 2007, obtained by The Canadian Press news agency under Canada's Access to Information Act, indicate the Bush administration asked Canada to accept Uighur detainees who were deemed to be no threat to national security.

Canadian officials indicated to the U.S. that the men would likely be inadmissible under Canadian immigration law, according to a Foreign Affairs briefing note prepared about a meeting in 2007.

Lawyer George Clarke, whose client Anwar Hassan applied to Canada last October, said Hassan was sent to Guantanamo after being captured in Pakistan in 2002.

"At this point, he is looking forward, not backward, and wants to get on with the rest of his life," Clarke said an e-mail.

Saifee said Canada could help the U.S. by accepting the Uighurs. "It would be a very wonderful gesture of goodwill."

Canadian opposition Liberal Senator Colin Kenny said the United States should deal with Guantanamo itself.

"Why should people clean up their dirty business?" Kenny said. "I don't have much sympathy with the Americans for creating that prison."

Kenny, however, said the only Canadian at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr, should be returned to Canada. Khadr is accused of killing a U.S. medic in Afghanistan. Canada's Conservative government has not asked for his return but has come under pressure to bring him back to Canada.