Chechnya Gets Ready to Make Movies

Chechnya is teaming up with Moscow’s legendary Mosfilm Studio to set up its own film industry.

The Chechen studio — named Chechenfilm in accordance with Soviet tradition — will shoot its first film after the signing of an cooperation agreement with Mosfilm later this month, its head, Inal Sheripov, told reporters Friday, Interfax reported.

It was unclear what that film would be about. Sheripov said Chechenfilm was set up this summer with the support of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and endowed with 500,000 rubles ($16,300).

He said the studio would be noncommercial, “oriented not at Hollywood’s but at European traditions.”

Mosfilm director Karen Shakhnazarov told the same news conference that his studio would send specialists to aid and train their Chechen colleagues. He said it was important to support a native film industry in the North Caucasus. “They have never participated in the country’s cinema life and now they will have their own voice,” he said.

Chechnya Wins Right to Open Offices in Europe

By Nikolaus von Twickel

The Foreign Ministry confirmed Friday that Chechnya may set up representative offices abroad, but stressed that they should be called information centers and would operate strictly on a regional governmental level.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov raised questions about his foreign policy ambitions earlier in the week when he announced that his administration had received permission from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to open representative offices in European countries.

The Chechen government later backtracked on the announcement, but Foreign Ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov said Friday that Lavrov had indeed approved a Chechen request to open representative offices.

“Lavrov gave [Chechnya] permission to open such information centers, but they will have to work with the provincial governments of their host countries,” Lyakin-Frolov told The Moscow Times.

He explained that the centers would have to sign agreements with regional governments that correspond to Chechnya’s status as a subject of the Russian Federation. “They will have limited functions because they must not take on governmental functions,” he said.

Kadyrov said Thursday that Chechnya would open representative offices in six European countries — Germany, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Poland and France — in an attempt to convince the sizable Chechen migrant communities living there to return to their homeland.

Human rights groups have voiced concern over these plans, saying many Chechens fled their homeland precisely because they fear persecution by Kadyrov.

Asked whether homecoming policies were also sanctioned as part of the centers’ work, Lyakin Frolov said “of course.”

Kadyrov said he also would consider setting up a satellite TV channel especially for Chechen refugees.

“Among them are some who live in difficult conditions. We hear that many cannot even buy TV sets or a satellite dish. We need to help those citizens. They must see the changes in our republic, and they must know that we are happy to assist them to return,” Kadyrov said in an interview published on Chechnyatoday.ru, a web site run by his Information Ministry.

Diplomats in the countries where Chechnya wants to open information centers have expressed confusion about the plans and asked the Foreign Ministry for clarification. One diplomat said Saturday that his embassy had still not received an official reply from the Foreign Ministry.

A French Embassy spokesman confirmed Sunday that early talks had been held with a Chechen official about the opening of a representative office in France.

Tatarstan, which negotiated wide-ranging autonomy from Moscow in the 1990s, has representative offices in 11 countries, while Bashkortostan has offices in Austria, Turkey and Kazakhstan.

Missile kills 4 in Pakistan; 18 die in stampede

By RASOOL DAWAR, Associated Press Writer

MIR ALI, Pakistan – A missile fired from a suspected unmanned U.S. drone slammed into a car in a Pakistani tribal region close to the Afghan border Monday, killing four people, intelligence officials and residents said.

Separately, at least 18 women and girls waiting to get free flour in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi died when the crowd around them swelled and a stampede occurred, officials said.

The apparent American missile strike was the latest of more than 50 in the northwest region since last year aimed at killing top al-Qaida and Taliban leaders. Last month, the head of the Pakistani Taliban was killed in one such strike.

Monday's attack took place about 1.5 miles (3 kilometers) from the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, killing four people, two officials and witnesses said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they need to remain unnamed to do their job effectively.

The identities of the victims were not known.

Witnesses Ikramullah Khan and Mohammad Salim said the missile hit a vehicle with blacked-out windows — a style associated with Taliban fighters in the region.

Pakistan protests the U.S. missile strikes as violations of its sovereignty and says they fan support for the insurgents, but Washington has shown no sign of abandoning a tactic that it says has killed several ranking militants and disrupted their operations.

Islamist militants with roots in the border region launch near-daily attacks on Pakistan's U.S.-backed government and security forces. The mountainous, lawless area is also used as a safe haven from which to stage attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Under pressure from the West, Pakistan in May launched an offensive in the northwestern Swat Valley, which had fallen largely under Taliban control. It claims to have cleared most of Swat of the militants and killed more than 1,800 of them, although sporadic militant attacks continue.

The army announced the capture last week of five top Swat Taliban commanders, and Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Sunday authorities were now closing in on Swat Taliban chief Maulana Fazlullah.

"Fazlullah is surrounded, and he cannot escape us," Malik told reporters in Islamabad.

Pakistan's army said Monday to have killed 16 suspected militants in its latest operations in Swat and neighboring Dir district. One soldier died and another was wounded, an army statement covering the previous 24-hour period added.

Military officials also said 159 alleged militants had surrendered to security forces Monday. They include six boys recruited by the Taliban to be suicide bombers, Col. Amir Khan told reporters in Piochar, a main insurgent base in Swat.

In recent weeks, the army has reported an increasing flow of insurgents voluntarily surrendering.

The information provided by the military could not be independently confirmed because of limited access to the region.

The deaths in the Karachi stampede came during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a traditional time for charitable acts including giving away food. At times, however, the giveaways have turned rowdy and dangerous in this largely impoverished nation.

Monday's stampede occurred in a small building with narrow passages. As more women entered to get the flour, some began to panic and guards began using strong-arm tactics to clear the place, officials and witnesses said.

Karachi police chief Wasim Ahmad said at least 18 women and girls died in the ensuing rush. Mohammad Amin Khan of Karachi Civil Hospital said some of the women had suffocated and that there were at least 20 bodies.

"Hundreds of women were pushing to enter into the small hall, and guards started beating us to get the place cleared," said 30-year-old Kulsoom, who gave only one name and ended up among the many wounded. "I fell down and was being crushed. My heart was missing beats and I thought I was dying."

Panicked relatives streamed into the hospital, while others brought limp bodies in the backs of trucks or in their arms. Some women wailed while laying on stretchers.

The flour giveaway was organized by a private donor who Ahmad said was detained for not giving police prior notice of the event.

"Poverty is on the rise, there is a desperation among people," local government official Javed Hanif said. "Naturally, when people are frustrated, whenever they get such an opportunity, they try to grab the maximum."

Iraqi shoe thrower's release from jail delayed

BAGHDAD – The brother of the Iraqi reporter jailed for throwing his shoes at former President George W. Bush says the man will not be released Monday as planned due to paperwork processing delays.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi's family had gathered at dawn outside an Iraqi army base in central Baghdad where he was expected to be released from prison.

After waiting more than five hours, his brother Dargham said he received a phone call from al-Zeidi telling him he would not be released until Tuesday because of the delays.

The family said it will stage a sit-in outside the base Tuesday until he is released, and called for other Iraqis to join them.

Al-Zeidi's act of protest last December made the little-known reporter an instant hero across the Arab world.

Helping Palestinian Children Confront their Trauma of the Occupation

Iqbal Tamimi

September 13, 2009

Romi Elnagar: Art therapy enables children to deal in nonverbal ways with traumatic events in their lives.

Many who work with children who have experienced traumatic events, such as child psychologists, believe it is crucial for children to express their feelings about those events if they are to recover from their suffering. Art is a way for children to communicate the full range of emotions, and one of the most important ways to express feelings of anger, pain and fear. Child psychologists have found that art therapy works to enable children to show in nonverbal ways what they have experienced and to deal with traumatic events in their lives.

For example, the organization Darkness to Light, which deals with child sexual abuse, uses art therapy in its work, and says, "Anyone who has experienced psychological trauma may have difficulty expressing their experience directly or effectively in words…Art is a non-threatening way to visually communicate anything that is too painful to put into words."

People working with child survivors of the horrendous civil war in Sierra Leone also used art as part of the healing process. Children can show in pictures events that are too traumatic to be even brought to the surface of consciousness. Often, it is only when a child begins to draw that he can even remember what he has suffered, as painful events are brought to consciousness in the pictures he makes. Elsewhere in Africa, children's drawings of torture, rape and murder have been so detailed and so powerful that they have been used to bring a case in the International Criminal Court against janjaweed groups in Darfur.

I am more concerned, however, with helping children to deal with and overcome their terrible experiences through their art, and in particular, those children who have suffered the devastating and brutal Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

There are some organizations and individuals working on the West Bank and Gaza to help children overcome the traumas caused by seeing the helplessness of parents and caretakers in the face of vicious genocidal oppression, the hopelessness of poverty, starvation and incarceration in Gaza, which has been called the largest open-air prison on the planet and the brutality of daily beatings, violence and murder. While art therapy cannot be expected to right these wrongs, it may help to make young victims able to achieve a humanity that their oppressors can only envy, if they were even able to comprehend it.

Giving these children in the Occupied Territories and Gaza the tools to show what they have witnessed furthermore enables adults in their lives to understand and to validate their experiences. Artistic expression can nurture dignity and self-respect when individuals feel powerless in the face of oppression and violence. Helping children to regain a lost sense of safety and peace is what art therapy is all about, for Palestinian children and for the young victims of war, genocide and oppression everywhere.

These are the goals of organizations like the Palestinian Child Arts Center in Hebron, and Hope and Play.org (a British organization that works with refugee children worldwide). Another organization, the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts in Lebanon (al-Jana) says, "…the belief of Al-Jana [is] that the challenges that face these so called "marginalized communities" have enriched their existence and as such have contributed to a stronger sense of community building; creative problem solving; and communal initiative and resiliency. Their vibrant culture reflects this resourcefulness and deep human spirit."

In Jenin, a Freedom Theater provides a refuge for children from a world of Israeli raids and harassment. The director of the theater, Juliano Khamis, says, "Art cannot free you from your chains, but art can generate and mobilize discourse of freedom. Art can create debate. Art can expose."

Most of all, children's art can expose the ordeals they have suffered, and by doing so, pave the way for healing.

Enduring Freedom until 2050

By Pepe Escobar

September 13, 2009


And it's one, two, three
what are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
next stop is Vietnam
- Country Joe and the Fish, 1969

After eight long years, now more than ever, the United States invasion and (partial) occupation of Afghanistan is on a roll, courtesy of US President Barack Obama's "new strategy".

This - which Pentagon supremo Robert Gates insists is "working" - includes US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) staging mini-Guernicas, al la the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by German and Italian warplanes in 1937, as painted by Pablo Picasso.

It also includes General Stanley McChrystal - the former number one hit man for General David Petraeus in Iraq - assaulting Washington to demand (what else is new?) an extra 45,000 US boots on the ground.

Add 52,000 US troops and no less than a staggering 68,000 US contractors as of late March - don't even count NATO - and soon there will be more Americans wallowing in the Afghan mire than Soviets at their occupation peak during the 1980s. In only 450 days, Enduring Freedom plus NATO boots swelled up from 67,000 to 118,000.

Does it matter that, according to a McClatchy/Ipsos survey, almost eight years after the "war on terror" bombing of the Taliban, 54% of Americans think the US is "losing" the war while 56% are against sending more troops? Of course not.

We want our cut
The latest mini-Guernica is the air strike on two fuel trucks hijacked by the Taliban and stuck in a riverbed near a market in the Ali Abad district in Kunduz province. The strike was ordered by a helpless, intelligence-impaired German colonel under the NATO banner, and has now degenerated into a caustic war of words between Washington and Berlin.

NATO's "mission" in Afghanistan is extremely unpopular in Germany. According to Kunduz locals, the NATO air strike killed more than 100 villagers; NATO says no more than 25; all this while insisting it made sure no civilians were in the area before the hit. It's the same mini-Guernica scenario of Herat in August 2008 and Farah in May 2009.

None of this slows down the relentless Gates/Mullen/McChrystal gravy train - the Pentagon superstar trio obsessed with milking a Vietnam-style escalation of Obama's self-described "necessary war" whose final objective, according to super-envoy Richard Holbrooke, is of the "we'll-know-it-when-we-see-it" kind.

As for the United States Agency for International Development, it has just "discovered" that the Taliban - as a protection racket - take a cut from the international development aid pouring into Afghanistan. But the cut pales in comparison to what the Hamid Karzai government and his warlord compadres divert from the European Union coffers under United Nations supervision - via one "Afghan reconstruction" bash after another (Tokyo 2002, Berlin 2004, London 2006, Paris 2008).

Maybe not as much as Americans, European taxpayers are also being fleeced. In a devastating post at the Italian byebyeunclesam blog, Giancarlo Chetoni explains how Afghanistan is costing Italian taxpayers 1,000 euros (US$1,433) a minute, or 525.6 million euros a year, to "free the country from terrorism and drugs". Surrealism is the norm. Italy famously gave 52 million euros to "reform Afghanistan's judicial system" when, Chetoni notes, "3.5 million penal cases and 5.4 million civil lawsuits are currently pending" in Italy. During the next four years, Italy will practically double its contingent, from 3,250 troops to more than 6,000.

New NATO head, former president George W Bush-friendly Anders Rasmussen from Denmark, has been trying to explain the new "strategy" in pyrotechnic NATOese to skeptical Europeans. But the real plot of the non-stop tragicomedy is never spelled out. The US and its NATO allies will do - and spend - whatever it takes to implant military bases on the doorstep of both Russia and China and - Allah only knows - get their Trans-Afghan Pakistan gas pipeline on track.

From November 2001 to December 2008, the Bush administration burned $179 billion in Afghanistan, while NATO burned $102 billion. Former NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the West would keep troops in Central Asia for 25 years. He was corrected by the British army's chief of general staff, General David Richards: it will be 40 years. Expect the "evil", fit Taliban - immune to global warming - to be fighting Enduring Freedom by 2050.

Remembering 9/11

Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues

September 13, 2009

Yeah, another one. Never heard the end of it, did we now?

9/11. How come no one turned it into a song ? The 9/11 song, because it sure sounds like a broken record to me.

Eight years ago, two buildings fell to the grounds and the world changed in consequence. Mind you it was not so fantastic before but you got to admit it, it got much worse since...

For starters, I don't buy none of the 9/11 bullshit stories. Too many question marks that remain unsolved.

For starters, I would like to know where did the 3rd plane-- which allegedly fell in Pennsylvania, disappear ? And what about the plane that hit the Pentagon, what happened to it ? Dissolved like salt in water or what ?

But the biggest joke, and this I saw with my own two eyes, is when the CNN reporter straight after the twin towers attack, while people were screaming, rushing with bloodied faces covered with dust and tons of office paper and documents flying all over New York City, the CNN reporter, found Mohamed Atta's passport in the debris and rubbles.

Hahahahahahaha

I laughed my head off when I saw this. A brand new passport with not one scratch. He waved it in front of the camera.

And in the parking lot, they found in the cars allegedly used by the hijackers, copies of the Koran - this must have been some recommendation for the 9/11 script provided by Bernard Lewis -- and flying manuals in Arabic.

I know a few Arab pilots and I asked them about flying manuals in Arabic. They were all unanimous in their reply -- flying manuals don't exist in Arabic, full stop.

Leaving aside the question, as to why would anyone want to do this to America -- I mean surely the U.S deserves better. It has had, after all, a very clement foreign policy throughout its history...

So leaving aside the why of 9/11, I kind of reviewed in my head what happened since...

A hundred 9/11's took place, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and now in Pakistan...

Millions of innocent people were killed in these countries. Iraq alone beats the Guinness book of world records in 6 years. Thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, millions lost their livelihoods, millions became refugees, millions are bereft...

Yet we still hear and read about the "terror" attack on New York. And all the others who were slaughtered by American terrorism do not get even one second of silence for their dead...

There is something very wrong with the world and with its perception of events...
There is something fundamentally wrong with the scales here. The scales of Justice that is...There are none.

In Iraq, there is daily a 9/11. Daily.

For the 2'000 something who died in the twin towers, we lost up 3'000 Iraqis in one day alone, at the height of the occupation. Today, 6 years on, if there are 10 dead a day, we say it's a good day. Yet no one remembers that.

After 13 years of barbarian sanctions when 1.5 million Iraqis perished, Madeleine Albright proudly said -- the price was well worth it.Imagine anyone of us saying 2'000 Americans dead was well worth it. Yet an official from the American government said it publicly, it went round the world...it was well worth it. No one seemed shocked by this. It was normal. Iraq is after all a "third world country".

Not long ago, an ex CIA man by the name of Charles Duelfer was interviewed on Al Sharqiya satellite Iraqi TV, he repeated Madeleine Albright's quote with a smile.
When the presenter asked him was 1.5 million Iraqis massacred since 2003 worth the price for regime change. Charles Duelfer smiled and said - Iraqis are a capable people, they will get over it.

There are no call in centers for victims of Terror to contact, no long term therapy for the families of the victims and no indemnities either. No courts of law, no judges, no tribunals, no juries to try the terrorists who murdered thousands of Iraqis and destroyed their homes, buildings, infrastructure, society...beyond recognition.

There is something very wrong with the world and its "values". It has none.

Take another example - Afghanistan. This very poor country with an increasingly very impoverished people, who has been through years of wars, first repelling the Russian invaders, and now the Americans and its allies...where thousands of innocent Afghans, entire families and villages decimated, turned into a mass of bones and ruins...it is truly a miracle that the Afghan are still resisting...it is a miracle indeed. A valiant, honorable people for sure.

Who remembers their daily 9/11 since 2001 ? No one.
Does anyone stand for a minute of silence to honor their dead ? no.
Does anyone ask for Justice insofar as the Afghans are concerned ? no.
Does any aid for the hundred 9/11's reach the Afghan victims ? no.

The American terrorists are still on the loose, there is no Guantanamo for them, no black shadow site prisons, no military tribunals, no forced feeding with tubes, no "enhanced interrogation techniques", no "stress positions", no Abu Ghraib, no Bagram...no justice. No justice for the victims of American Terror.

There is something very wrong with the world. Very wrong indeed.

Source: Uruknet.
Link: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=57883&s2=13.