Tunisian journalist loses appeal against six-month jail term

Sat, 30 Jan 2010

Tunis (Earth Times) - A Tunisian court on Saturday rejected an appeal filed by journalist Taoufik Ben Brik against a six-month jail term he received after being found guilty of assaulting a young woman. Ben Brik was arrested November 26 and sentenced to six months in prison. He claims he is the victim of a government conspiracy and that his signature on government documents has been forged.

"Supporting the sentence against Ben Brik is great injustice and reflects the desire for revenge," Azza Zarrad, Ben Brik's wife, told the German Press Agency dpa, adding that she will raise the issue to the United Nations.

The 49-year-old journalist, who was arrested shortly after Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was re-elected, was also charged with insulting the woman and damaging her car on purpose.

In the run-up to the election, Ben Brik wrote several articles critical of the president. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said that Ben Brik is "paying the price for his commitment and for the freedom of his voice."

Ben Ali was elected to a fifth presidential term last year, receiving nearly 90 per cent of the vote. Before the election, he had publicly warned that anyone claiming the vote was rigged without furnishing proof would be prosecuted.

The arrest has led to strained relations between Tunisia and Paris, which has registered concern for "journalists and human rights advocates" in Tunisia.

Yemen rebels offer truce, accept government terms - Summary

Sat, 30 Jan 2010

Sana'a, Yemen - Yemen's Shiite rebel groups announced a unilateral ceasefire with the national army on Saturday, a few days after they announced a truce with Saudi Arabia. Rebel leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi made the announcement in an audiotape posted on the group's website, www.almenpar.net.

He said he accepts the government's conditions for an end to the army's offensive against the rebels, launched last summer.

Al-Houthis said his ceasefire offer intends to "stop the bloodshed" and "prevent Yemen from falling into a catastrophic situation."

The government has set out six conditions for it to halt its all- out attack against the rebels in Saada and Amran province.

The conditions included the end of hostilities by the insurgents, known as Houthis after their leader's family, and their withdrawal from all districts and mountainous positions and the surrendering of military hardware seized from the army.

The government also called for the rebels to give up their heavy and medium weapons and hand over military personnel they captured during the fighting.

One condition that was dropped was for a clarification from the rebels about the fate of a German family of five and a British engineer taken hostage in Saada in June.

The six people were among a group of foreign hostages - seven Germans, a Briton and a South Korean - abducted by armed men in Saada, where the rebels operate.

Three of the hostages - two German women and a South Korean woman teacher - were found dead two days after the abduction.

This condition was dropped after the Houthis insisted that they had nothing to do with the abduction.

Members of al-Houthi group have been battling the Yemeni government forces since mid-2004 in Saada, along the Saudi Arabia.

They say they are fighting against the Yemeni government's corruption and its alliance with the United States.

Army forces have been pounding rebel bases in Saada since August 11. The offensive included aerial, artillery and missile strikes on rebel strongholds in strategic heights overlooking the Saudi border.

The Sana'a government accuses the Houthis of trying to reinstall the rule of Shiite imams who were toppled by a republican revolution in northern Yemen in 1962.

In November, the rebels carried out a cross-border raid, killing a Saudi border guard, and drawing Saudi forces into the conflict.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/306719,yemen-rebels-offer-truce-accept-government-terms--summary.html.

Father of plane crash victim dies in Lebanon from grief

Jan 29, 2010

Beirut - The father of a Lebanese national who was among those killed in the Ethiopian plane crash, died Friday from a heart attack caused by his grief, Lebanese media reported Friday.

According to the reports, Jirji Assal was admitted to Bitar hospital in Batroun, north of Beirut, after suffering a heart attack, but later died. His son Albert Assal was one of the passengers on the plane, but his body had not yet been recovered.

Doctors said that the man has suffered a heart attack after he spent the last few days crying and not sleeping waiting news about his son.

Of the 90 passengers on board the Ethiopian airliner which crashed into the sea early Monday shortly after takeoff, 54 were Lebanese nationals.

Meanwhile, rescue teams on Friday continued search for victims and the black boxes of the Ethiopian plane. Search teams managed on Thursday to detect signals from the flight data recorder.

Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi told the German News Agency dpa Friday, 'nothing so far but we are hopeful that the coming days will bring positive results.'

A rescue team member who requested anonymity told dpa, 'we believe that the black boxes are still attached to the plane, so if we find them we will find the main body of the plane and more bodies.'

Rescue officials have said a number of the victims may still be strapped to their seats underwater.

At the crash site dozens of schoolchildren Friday were throwing white roses into the sea, in the hope that the coming days will bring comfort to the victims families.

The stricken Ethiopian plane bound for Addis Ababa was carrying many Lebanese who work in African countries like Liberia and Angola and Ethiopian nationals who work in Lebanon as domestic helpers.

Source: Monsters and Critics.
Link: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/middleeast/news/article_1529552.php/Father-of-plane-crash-victim-dies-in-Lebanon-from-grief.

Interpol involved in suspected Dubai assassination

Saturday 30th January, 2010

The Gulf is ablaze with news of the brazen assassination last week of one of the founders of a Hamas military arm in a hotel at Dubai.

The incident only became public on Friday, the day of the funeral of the murdered man at Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, near Damascus, in Syria (pictured).

The Israeli intelligence service is alleged by Hamas to have carried out the attack. Mossad agents had reportedly been pursuing the man for several years, and had previously attempted to assassinate him on two occasions, the most recent in Beirut six months ago when the man was poisoned and was unconscious for thirty hours.

Mahmoud Al Mabhouh, 50, one of the founders of the Hamas military wing, the Ezz Al Deen Al Qassam Brigades, had booked into the Al Bustan Rotana near Dubai International Airport on January 19. A day later he was found dead in his room.

Al Mabhouh reportedly was pedantic about security precautions due to the Mossad's intention of killing him. He reportedly barricaded his hotel door after checking in. Al Mabhour was on Israel's Most Wanted list being involved in the capture and subsequent death of two Israeli soldiers. He spent years in Israeli jails before being deported to Syria where he lived in exile. Gilbert Sa'adon, the mother of one of the soldiers Al Mabhouh was involved in capturing and killing, Ilan Sa’adon, said on Friday she was happy at the man's death but lamented that it came 20 years after her son's death. “I am happy that his death has been avenged, but sad that twenty years passed before this happened,” she told Israeli army radio.

Dubai Police say they are pursuing the killers. They say most of them entered and left the country using European passports. Dubai Police say they have identified the killers and have called on Interpol to assist in tracking them down. They have disclosed no information on the identity of the killers or who they may represent, other than saying they were a, "professional criminal gang."

The family of Al Mabhour who live in Gaza however say they have been told by Hamas that he died as the result of an assassination by the Mossad. Al Mabhouh’s brother, Fayeq, told the Al Jazeera network his family had been informed by Hamas and “people close to the UAE authorities” that his brother had been murdered.

“The information we have is that he was assassinated inside his hotel room,” he said. “He first received an electrical shock on the head and then he was strangled.”

The Al Mabhour family home in Gaza where the Hamas leader grew up was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers as retaliation.

Dubai Police Chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim said Al Mabhouh had traveled under a different name. "If we had been told of his presence, we would have provided him with the necessary protection," he told the Al Arabiya satellite channel.

Ahmed Yousef, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, said Friday night that the killing showed Israel “does not respect international law. It does not respect the sovereignty of other states. The country wants to show its hands can reach anywhere without being held accountable.”

Israel has a long history of assassinations within the Palestinian occupied territories, but has also carried out assassinations abroad. Israeli intelligences services have recently been blamed for car bombings claiming the lives of top militant figures in Beirut and in Damascus.

One notable attempt at an Israeli assassination in Jordan in 1997 was the attack on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal who was poisoned. Jordan's King Hussein, joined by then U.S. President Bill Clinton, insisted Israel hand over the antidote which it did, and Meshal survived.

Source: Malaysia Sun.
Link: http://story.malaysiasun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/b8de8e630faf3631/id/595079/cs/1/.

Turkey continues the search for its missing children

When he was kidnapped last week in Tatvan from the hospital where he was born, he was just 2 days old and had yet to be named.

He was not the only missing child who was keeping security forces and the media busy, increasing the already high anxiety of families in Turkey.

Almost on the same day a man who allegedly tried to kidnap four girls in the district of Mazıdağ in Mardin province was caught. He introduced himself as a worker for the Ministry of Education and put all the girls in the village into a room and asked them if they had any diseases or if they had undergone any surgery. The girls and their families became suspicious, and he was arrested. In another city, Şanlıurfa, last week two boys aged 13 and 14 were kidnapped for ransom but were later released.

The boys and their families were luckier than 1,657 families whose children are still missing, according to information supplied by the police.

Since the beginning of the new year, stories about missing children have increased in the media more than ever, which has led the police to make a statement on the subject.

Özer Zeyrek, from the police’s public order department, at a press conference on Wednesday said 1,657 children have disappeared during the last 10 years. He claimed that families do not provide much follow-up information even if they find their children and that this is one of the reasons for the high number. He added that most of these children are kids who run away from orphanages.

“If you don’t take the number of runaways from orphanages into consideration, the number is normal,” he claimed.

Organ mafia is main suspect but no evidence

But many families in Turkey do not agree with the police. They have concerns about the security of their children. They share the grief of two families from Kayseri whose three children, aged 6, 8 and 11, disappeared last year on Sept. 21, the second day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, after leaving home to buy candy. Despite intensive searches by security forces and the intervention of President Abdullah Gül, the children still have not been found, just like 9-year-old Leyla from Diyarbakır, who did not return home from a shop in close proximity to her home where she went to buy shampoo for her little sister.

Most of the families strongly believe that the children were kidnapped by organ mafias, but Zeyrek from the police department was not sure about it, although he said they are weighing all kinds of possibilities.

When he was asked if there are international connections regarding missing children, he claimed that they are investigating all cases but that they don’t have any findings as of yet.

He added that 1,462 of the missing children are 13-18 years old and 195 of them are 0-12 years old. According to information that he gave, 562 of those children are boys and 1,062 are girls.

Police claim ‘love affairs,’ report points to ‘early marriage’

Zeyrek underlined that most of the missing children are girls between the ages of 13-18 and that this is due to “love affairs.”

Regarding the missing girls in Turkey, instead of the “love affair” explanation of the police, another explanation is forced early marriages, according to a report by the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Presidency that was prepared two years ago. The report on missing children cited “early marriage” as the primary reason for disappearances, while the second reason was poverty.

He also warned families to be careful about their children’s use of the Internet.

Families strongly disagree with the “love affair” explanation but believe prostitution gangs are taking the children.

No special measures or methods

Zeyrek claimed that the police’s juvenile units are investigating the cases but that Turkey has no statistics on missing children.

There is no legislation specifically dealing with missing children, either. Despite the Turkish police urging families to be careful about children’s Internet usage, in many other countries technology is used to ascertain the whereabouts of children. For example, in Germany there are special procedures for missing children: Within 20 minutes of the first call to police about a missing child, SMS messages are sent to all mobile phones in the area of the disappearance. Pictures of the child are immediately posted on billboards. In Britain the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP), which is dedicated to eradicating the sexual abuse of children, is planning to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to find missing children and also to raise awareness.

In Turkey there is neither a clear action plan for finding missing children nor any specific legislation, nor, as Professor Betül Ulukol, the chairperson of the child protection unit of Ankara University’s medical faculty, puts it, are there any statistics on missing children. “We don’t have any data or information about these children, how many of them were kidnapped, if they are in the hands of the organ mafia or any other gang, and this is exactly the problem. We don’t have any idea what we face; we cannot even describe the situation,” she told Sunday’s Zaman in a previous interview.

According to Zeyrek at least this part is about to change. The police are about to sign a protocol with the Social Services and Child Protection Agency (SHÇEK) in order to monitor the cases of missing children:

“When this protocol is signed, we will be able to keep and monitor the information on missing children at databanks so we will be able to access more updated information about missing children,” he claimed.

But according to a report by the Prime Ministry, there are many other measures that can be taken to prevent the disappearance of children. At the individual level, psychologists should help develop conflict resolution and problem-solving skills, and awareness-increasing studies should be performed, especially in regions with low socioeconomic levels, in order to deter early marriages. According to the Prime Ministry, family support programs should be implemented, and economic, socio-cultural and psychological support programs should be developed and started, especially in areas resided in by migrant families. The report also emphasizes the necessity of ensuring camera surveillance and security measures in places frequented by children, in addition to other security measures.

Source: Today's Zaman.
Link: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-200162-100-turkey-continues-the-search-for-its-missing-children.html.

'Corruption will let Hamas take W. Bank'

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
29/01/2010

Dramatic warning delivered by Abbas’ former corruption-buster Fahmi Shabaneh.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has surrounded himself with many of the corrupt officials who used to work for his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, and that’s why Hamas will one day take control of the West Bank, Fahmi Shabaneh, who was appointed by Abbas four years ago to root out corruption in the Palestinian Authority, said on Thursday.

In an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post, Shabaneh, who until recently was in charge of the Anti-Corruption Department in the PA’s General Intelligence Service (GIS), warned that what happened in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007, when Hamas managed to overthrow the Fatah-controlled regime, is likely to recur in the West Bank.

“Had it not been for the presence of the Israeli authorities in the West Bank, Hamas would have done what they did in the Gaza Strip,” Shabaneh told the Post. “It’s hard to find people in the West Bank who support the Palestinian Authority. People are fed up with the financial corruption and mismanagement of the Palestinian Authority.”

Shabaneh said that many Palestinians in the West Bank have lost hope that the PA would one day be reformed. “The Palestinian Authority is very corrupt and needs to be overhauled,” he said.

Shabaneh cited several specific cases of alleged corruption within Fatah and the PA in the course of the interview, including asserting that Fatah personnel stole much of a $3.2 million donation given by the US to Fatah ahead of the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election, won by Hamas, which had been intended to improve Fatah’s image and boost its chances of winning.

Shabaneh, a resident of east Jerusalem who worked as a lawyer before joining the GIS as its legal adviser after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, said he was forced to quit his anti-corruption job several months ago after exposing a sex scandal involving one of Abbas’ top aides in Ramallah in 2009.

Video footage and other documents presented to the Post by Shabaneh show the aide lying naked in bed after being lured to an apartment in Ramallah by an east Jerusalem woman.

The footage shows Shabaneh and other armed security agents storming the bedroom, much to the surprise of the Abbas aide who is heard uttering: “Thank God it’s you and not the Israelis.”

Shabaneh said in the interview, the first of its kind with a high-ranking PA security official, that he and his men had been operating on instructions from their boss, Gen. Tawfik Tirawi, the former head of the GIS. Tirwai, for his part, denied that he had authorized Shabaneh to spy on the Abbas aide.

The top aide, who is one of the closest advisers to Abbas, was caught on tape making derogatory remarks against Abbas and Arafat. “President Abbas has no charisma” and is “not in control,” he was quoted as saying. The aide was also caught on tape denouncing Arafat as one of the biggest dajjals (swindlers).

After the revelations, which were brought to Abbas’s attention and were embarrassing for the PA president, Shabaneh was removed from his anti-corruption post and reassigned as head of the GIS’s internal security force. More recently, he was promoted to overall commander of the GIS in the area.

Shortly afterward, however, Shabaneh was arrested by Israeli police on suspicion of recruiting east Jerusalem residents to the GIS, spying on Israel, chasing suspected “collaborators” and Arabs involved in real estate deals with Jews, and threatening and blackmailing the senior Abbas aide.

Shabaneh has since been released from prison and most of the charges against him dropped. Today he remains under house arrest and is banned from entering the West Bank. The only charge he faces today is membership in a Palestinian military organization – a charge he claims is absurd given the fact that about 1,200 residents of east Jerusalem serve in the various security branches of the PA.

Shabaneh said that he had no doubt that his arrest by Israel was carried out at the request of “someone high in Abbas’ office to punish me for fighting corruption and exposing sex scandals involving not only the senior aide, but many other officials as well.”

He said that the decision to arrest him and prosecute him was also absurd because was always aware of his work and status in the PA security forces and never did anything to him.

“For many years I worked as legal adviser to the General Intelligence Apparatus and no one ever asked me anything,” Shabaneh noted. “When I was commander of the force in the area the Israelis even used to coordinate a lot with us.”

Shabaneh insisted that the decision to pursue corrupt officials in Abbas’ inner circle was part of the PA president’s declared policy to combat financial corruption. “In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end financial corruption and implement major reforms, but he hasn’t done much since then,” he said. “Unfortunately, Abbas has surrounded himself with many of the thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public funds and who became icons of financial corruption.”

Shabaneh said that as head of the anti-corruption unit he and his men succeeded in exposing dozens of cases involving senior officials who had stolen public funds but were never held accountable.

“Some of the most senior Palestinian officials didn’t have even $3,000 in their pocket when they arrived [after the signing of the Oslo Accords],” Shabaneh said. “Yet we discovered that some of them had tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in their bank accounts.

Until today we didn’t hear about one official who was brought to trial for stealing money from the PA, although we had transferred many of the cases to the Palestinian prosecutor-general.”

Questioned as to why he had decided to go public now, Shabaneh said: “I’m not criticizing the Palestinian Authority simply because I like to criticize, but because I want to see a state of law, one with no room for corruption. I was offered $100,000 not to expose the last sex scandal, but I chose not to accept the bribe. I’m the one who resigned after my arrest, because after all that I’ve seen I no longer believe that Abbas’ authority can be reformed.

Asked whether PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is working to establish good government, Shabaneh said: “Salam Fayyad is a good man and I have a lot of respect for him. He’s really working to build professional institutions and good government, but the corrupt Fatah people around Abbas are doing their utmost to thwart his efforts.”

He added: “Even Abbas tried in the beginning, but the corrupt officials working with him didn’t allow him to make progress.”

Shabaneh also said he had managed to track down some of the financial aid that went missing during and after the period of Arafat’s death.

“I discovered, for example, that several senior officials had taken millions of dollars from the Palestinian leadership under the pretext that they wanted to purchase land that would otherwise be confiscated by Israel,” he said.

“Our investigations revealed that many of the purported land deals were fictitious transactions and we even forced one official to return more than $800,000. We had another case where a senior Fatah official and his brother pocketed about $2.5m. which they took from Arafat under the pretext that they wanted to purchase land in the West Bank before Israel lays its hand on it.

Asked whether he believed outside donors should stop channeling funds to Abbas, he said his advice to the donor countries “is to follow up on their donations to examine how and where the money is being spent. We caught some officials who stole about $700,000 from the donors to study the atmosphere in. Why do we need to spend such a huge amount of money on something trivial like this when many people are suffering and have nothing to eat or feed their children?”

Was he serious about Hamas taking over the West Bank? “Yes, no question about that,” he said. “It will happen one day if the state of corruption and anarchy continue in the West Bank.

“Why do you think Hamas kicked us out of the Gaza Strip? Because the people there were fed up with the corruption and bad government of Fatah. What do you think the people in the Gaza Strip used to think when they saw a colonel in the Palestinian Authority driving in a big motorcade and surrounded by dozens of bodyguards and assistants?”

Did he see no chance that Fatah would reform? “As long as the same corrupt guys are running the show we shouldn’t expect real changes,” said Shabaneh.

“Before the 2006 parliamentary election, the Americans gave Fatah $3.2m. to improve the party’s image and boost its chances of winning. But the Fatah people even stole most of the money that was intended to help them improve their image and reputation. These corrupt officials know no limits. They even used to forge Arafat’s signature to obtain money by fraud,” he said.

Source: The Jerusalem Post.
Link: http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=167194.

Davos ends on uncertain note

Edith M. Lederer
Davos, Switzerland — The Associated Press

The world's foremost gathering of business and government leaders wrapped up a five-day meeting Sunday with widespread agreement that a fragile recovery is under way, but no consensus on what's going to spur job growth and prevent another global economic meltdown.

In a group of big egos and many power players attending the annual World Economic Forum, there was even some humility and a realization that overcoming the first global financial crisis is uncharted territory.

The gathering of roughly 2,500 VIPs in this Swiss alpine resort saw much spirited debate on whether more regulation is needed for the financial industry, how to reduce global unemployment, and finding ways to ensure the nascent recovery is kept on course through 2010.

The atmosphere of doom and gloom that pervaded last year's forum, which took place at the height of the economic crisis, was replaced this year by a feeling of some satisfaction that a modest recovery is under way, but uncertainty about the way forward and how banks should respond.

Deutsche Bank chief executive Josef Ackerman told a closing panel that the worst of the financial and economic crisis had been managed “quite successfully,” but decision-makers now had a tough choice: “Should we take more risk, be a creative force for growth, or should we focus on security?”

Peter Sands, the CEO of Britain's Standard Chartered Bank, said at the panel that the right balance must be struck “between making a safer banking system and a financial system that can support the sort of dynamism and growth in job creation.”

“Get it wrong one way and we risk a new crisis; get it wrong the other way and we'll take the steam out of the recovery and reduce the chances of creating new jobs,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Sands said, everyone must have “a degree of humility about what we actually know, and how confident we can be, that the ideas we're going to put in place are going to have the consequences that we thought they were going to have.”

At Davos, the pendulum swings between a focus on the economy and other global issues.

The spotlight at past forums has been on celebrity guests such as Angelina Jolie and Bono, but this year it fell on the big bankers and government financial regulators. Many participants remarked on the absence of high-profile figures from the Obama administration. The highest-ranking delegate was Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council.

In the keynote speech, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a return to ethics and morality in business and gave a broad riposte to free-market capitalism.

Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder, ended the meeting with a call to the business and government leaders to reflect “on values” and social responsibility.

Mr. Sarkozy told international bankers and CEOs just what they didn't want to hear: Brace for bonus curbs, tighter banking regulations and new bookkeeping rules. He echoed rallying cries of workers from the United States to Europe and Asia, and hours later, President Barack Obama also called for reforms on Wall Street.

Perhaps the most important meeting was unscheduled. It came Saturday on the sidelines of the forum when government regulators, finance ministers and central bankers from the U.S. and Europe laid out their financial-reform plans during a two-hour meeting with bank executives.

Mr. Sands called the discussions at this and other meetings “very constructive,” though he urged caution in the face of optimism: “They haven't ... solved the issues, but they certainly ... pushed them forward.”

Mr. Ackerman praised the major economic players for expanding their Group of Eight to the Group of 20. He said there should be a Business group of 20 to work alongside them and focus on business issues.

With China and India spurring the global economy, Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Ltd., India, a global communications company, predicted that the difference between growth rates between the developing and developed worlds “are increasingly going to become larger.”

The result, he told a closing panel, is that richer countries will “more aggressively” invest in emerging markets in order to maintain their own growth, which will be “good for the emerging world.”

Muhammad Yunus, managing director of the micro-credit-pioneer Grameen Bank, said in an interview that “this is a good time to redesign the entire financial system.”

“Big guys are not the big sufferers,” he said. “Big sufferers are the small guys who lost their jobs, who lost their food, who lost their livelihood.”

Source: The Globe and Mail.
Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/davos-summit-ends-on-uncertain-note/article1450870/.