Somalia: More Than 40 Local Elders Arrested in Nation's Puntland State

22 June 2011

Bosaso — After extensive security crackdown in Bari region in Somalia's semi-autonomous state of Puntland, more 40 local clan elders arrested by the security forces.

Most of the operations took place in Bosaso, Puntland commercial hub, according to eyewitnesses in the town.

Puntland security officials say the elders were accused of inciting clan related grudges that claimed the lives of so many people.

At least two well-known businessmen were recently killed in the center of port town of Bosaso.

In what the local residents described as revenge attack, armed clan militiamen sprayed worshipers with bullets in a mosque in Somalia's semi-autonomous state of Puntland, killing at least four and wounding two others.

Source: allAfrica.
Link: http://allafrica.com/stories/201106221339.html.

Hundreds rally to protest of rejection of new political party in Russia

The government refuses to register the People's Freedom Party, or PARNAS, which seeks to unite Russia's fractured opposition, citing flaws in its charter. Hundreds turn out to protest that action in Moscow's Pushkin Square, calling it a political maneuver.

By Sergei L. Loiko
June 26, 2011

Reporting from Moscow—
Hundreds of people turned out in Moscow's Pushkin Square on Saturday to protest the government's refusal to register a new party that seeks to unify Russia's fractured opposition.

The People's Freedom Party, known as PARNAS, was organized last winter by four of the country's most well-known opposition politicians, all former members of previous Russian governments: Mikhail Kasyanov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Vladimir Milov.

The often-amended legislation on political parties is difficult to follow and easy for bureaucrats to interpret the way they see fit: In the last four years, nine liberal parties have been denied registration on various technicalities.

Last week's rejection appeared no exception: The Justice Ministry found some flaws in the party's charter and detected some "dead souls" — dead people and youngsters not of age — registered among the required 45,000 membership.

The opposition called it a political decision by a Kremlin that doesn't want a strong opposition party on the ballot in December's parliamentary elections. Organizers alleged that the authorities harassed many party members across the country, compelling them to drop their names from the party lists.

The State Department promptly expressed its concern, urging Russian authorities "to investigate the reports of irregularities in the PARNAS registration process."

"We are troubled by reports of pressure from authorities in the regions designed to intimidate PARNAS supporters, prompting them to resign positions or disavow their signatures on required lists," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said last week on the State Department's website.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev insisted he saw no political motives behind the decision and advised PARNAS leaders to correct the mistakes in the registration papers and try again.

Addressing the Pushkin Square crowd on a hot, sunny Saturday afternoon, Nemtsov said Kremlin officials didn't register the party because they were "mortally scared" of the competition. He called Medvedev's advice to correct the papers "an outright deception and hypocrisy."

"All over the country [the authorities] were summoning people and telling them to write a letter denying their party membership: Write this letter, please, they said, or else you will lose your jobs and your children will not be admitted at universities," Nemtsov said.

The opposition vowed to take the case to court. In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, overruled a 2007 decision in Russian courts to disband the Republican Party — organized by Ryzhkov, now one of the PARNAS four. Russian legislators are preparing a bill that would enable Russian courts to ignore the Strasbourg decisions in some cases.

Source: Los Angeles Times.
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-russia-protests-20110626,0,2584833.story.

The Bedouin of Sinai: Free but dangerous

WARNING: Article contains propaganda!

* * * * *

Since Egypt’s revolution, the Bedouin of Sinai have been able to do as they like.

Jun 23rd 2011

HUNKERED inside his fortified compound, North Sinai’s governor, Abdel Wahhab al-Mabrouk, a military man, plans his counter-attack against the peninsula’s rebellious Bedouin. Since the Egyptian uprising five months ago, they have thrown off the yoke of Egypt’s police and are determined to keep it that way. “We’ll kill them if they return,” says a Bedouin sheikh. General Mabrouk has recently repainted one of four police stations in his provincial capital, el-Arish, which the Bedouin torched. Plans for restoring another are in hand. But on the streets outside the governor’s building, uniformed police venture out only under an army escort.

The chaos may be the governor’s best ally. Hospitals are crowded with the victims of tribal vendettas. Notices tied to lamp-posts record the names of women who have disappeared. Traders load their guns before setting off to do business, for fear of highwaymen. In the early hours of June 22nd two Egyptian soldiers were shot dead by masked gunmen in a main street of el-Arish. If such lawlessness continues, hopes an adviser to the governor, everyone will be begging for the police to come back and restore order.

Such hopes are, for the time being, forlorn. The Bedouin of Sinai loathe the old order. Talk to an adult male Bedou in North Sinai, and the chances are he will tell you he has been in prison, sometimes in solitary confinement in a cell too small to sit down in. For years Egyptian bureaucrats from the Nile Valley have refused to let the Bedouin register their land. Checkpoints dotting Sinai’s rocky wastelands prevented the Bedouin from reaching their area’s main cash-cows: the peninsula’s tourist resorts, its oil installations and its giant cement factory. The government buildings that the Bedouin ransacked during the revolution are still littered with security files.

Most Bedouin leaders now prefer to rely on their own people to keep order. For decades, outsiders have manipulated their hierarchies and handpicked their sheikhs; now they are selecting their own. Control over smuggling routes linking Africa to Asia has provided them with enough guns and cash to keep the governor and his heavies away. A businessman robbed of $250,000 found it more sensible to appeal to Bedouin leaders than to the local courts, bereft of police to enforce rulings. “We can’t really arrest anyone any more,” moans the hapless governor.

Few Bedouin say they want to rid Sinai of Egyptian rule altogether, though the more wistful wonder whether Western powers might yet set up a Bedouin dynasty in Sinai as they did with the House of Saud in the Arabian peninsula. The more pragmatic Bedouin want a new contract with the state, including a degree of local autonomy, access to government and army jobs that have long been denied to them, and an amnesty from the sentences passed on them, often in absentia.

The governor has met tribal leaders and freed a few hundred prisoners. Egypt’s justice ministry has signaled its readiness to release others who have served half their terms. Egypt’s post-revolutionary prime minister, Essam Sharaf, has even paid el-Arish a visit, the first holder of his post to do so for years. But Bedouin leaders damned it as a cheap photo opportunity while, away from the cameras, Egyptian generals seemed intent on reviving the old order. “We’re not in the business of legitimizing smugglers, terrorists, drug barons and outlaws,” says an intelligence officer.

In frustration, some Bedouin have resorted to sabotage. Within hours of Mr Sharaf’s departure, a bomb blew up an unguarded pipeline that supplies Israel and Jordan with gas. They may yet attack South Sinai’s oil installations and tourist resorts, and perhaps the Egyptian “guests”—workers whom the government settled on Bedouin territory in an effort to cement the state’s grip. Attacks on cars with Nile Valley license-plates are getting more frequent. The head of a women’s association in Nakhl, an isolated Sinai town, fled back to the main bit of Egypt after 30 years. Bedouin protesters recently cut the road, albeit briefly, between Cairo and the tourist resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

The governor denies reports that the vacuum in Sinai’s rocky land, which has around 400,000 inhabitants, has been filled by 400 al-Qaeda men. But he accuses Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, and Hizbullah, the Shia party-cum-militia that holds sway in southern Lebanon, of spotting a chance to stir up trouble. He adds that Salafist groups, who follow the puritanical Saudi model of Islam, have flourished since Hosni Mubarak’s fall. A bomb recently destroyed the walls of Sinai’s main Sufi shrine, but the dome miraculously dropped intact over the tomb.

Seeing threats in every corner, the governor has turned to the secret police, who have survived the uprising remarkably unscathed. By warning that the chaos may spill across the eastern border, he has persuaded Israel to allow 3,000 Egyptian troops into eastern Sinai, which, under the Camp David accords of 1978 that provided for Israel’s withdrawal, is a demilitarized zone. Egyptian military vehicles now proliferate, though Egyptian soldiers have taken a hands-off approach to the Bedouin for fear of being dragged into a domestic squabble with them. The governor toys with the idea of a heavier crackdown, but it is plain that only a political agreement has a chance of restoring calm and preventing the pesky Bedouin from soliciting outside support, which would make Sinai even more dangerous.

Source: The Economist.
Link: http://www.economist.com/node/18867450?story_id=18867450.

Officials: 2 Egyptian policemen killed in Sinai

By ASHRAF SWEILAM, Associated Press – Jun 22, 2011

EL-ARISH, Egypt (AP) — Security officials say unidentified assailants have killed two policemen and wounded another two when they opened fire on their patrol in northern Sinai.

The officials said the shooting happened early Wednesday when the gunmen opened fire on a two-vehicle police patrol in the Egyptian city of el-Arish.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Security has for months been tenuous in northern Sinai, with Bedouins involved in human trafficking to Israel challenging the local police.

Attempts by authorities to bring the area under government control are being met with resistance from the heavily armed Bedouins.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Syria reinforces northern border as Turkey loses patience with Assad

Advance on Khirbet al-Jouz seen as a warning after Ankara seeks reforms and end to crackdown on Syrian protesters.

Martin Chulov, Istanbul
Saturday 25 June 2011

Syrian officials have ordered military units to step up patrolling near the Turkish border in a warning to its increasingly irate northern neighbor not to establish a buffer zone inside Syria.

Diplomats in Ankara and Beirut believe the Syrian advance on the border village of Khirbet al-Jouz, initially portrayed as a sweep against dissidents, was a veiled threat to Turkey, which is steadily turning on President Bashar al-Assad as his regime's crackdown on dissent continues.

In the wake of Assad's speech last week, Turkish officials gave him one week to start reforms and stop the violent suppression of protests, which is estimated to have killed more than 1,400 people in less than four months. At least 18 were killed and dozens more wounded during nationwide protests on Friday – a relatively low toll compared with the past few Fridays. But the pattern of activists being attacked by the security forces remains the same.

British government officials traveled during the week to the south of Turkey to interview Syrian refugees. A Foreign Office official told the Observer that diplomats are compiling accounts of what happened in Jisr al-Shughour and the villages around it during the first two weeks of this month, when the Syrian army mounted a series of raids, followed by an assault that led almost every resident of the 41,000-strong town to flee, first for the nearby hills, then to Turkey.

Among the allegations being investigated are claims that Iranian soldiers operated alongside Syrian units – especially the Fourth Division of the army, which is led by Assad's brother Maher and has a reputation for ruthlessness.

The European Union last week adopted sanctions against three leading officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, among them Qassem Suleimani, commander of the elite Al-Quds force, who is widely regarded as the leader of all the Iranian military's clandestine missions abroad.

A senior diplomat in Beirut said on Friday that intelligence agencies had evidence that Iran sent weapons to Syria, but had not yet determined whether there had been an actual Iranian presence at demonstrations.

In a further sign of Turkish unease with Damascus, officials from the country's Red Crescent who run the five refugee camps along the border no longer seem to be banned from talking to reporters. Embarrassment to Syria has clearly become less of a concern.

Refugee accounts are being used to compile a referral to the international criminal court, which will be asked to prosecute Assad and key regime officials for crimes against humanity. The referral is being prepared by several rights groups, including Insan, which is also compiling testimonies from defecting Syrian soldiers.

Turkey's growing diplomatic anger at Syria has made Istanbul an attractive hub for the Syrian opposition movement, which has received scores of defectors in recent weeks. Beirut, which is less than three hours' drive from Damascus and offers easy access to Syrian citizens, is now considered too dangerous for anti-regime dissidents. "It is a clearing house only," said one Syrian activist who directs a network of dissidents across the border. "There are many ways that the regime can get to people here – they don't even have to be here themselves. They just use their proxies."

One Syrian journalist who fled to Beirut has told the rights group Avaaz of his capture by Lebanese military intelligence officers. The journalist says he was seized from a coffee shop in Jounieh, 25km north of Beirut. He said he was first asked by a stranger to step outside for a conversation, then seized and taken to a fetid barracks where he was interrogated for several days.

"During the days I spent in Beirut, some other Syrian activists were kidnapped and extradited to the Syrian security police," he said. "The Lebanese authorities have also captured the few fugitive Syrian soldiers who had fled Syria through the borders, and then turned them in to Syria, claiming that it had to because of the security agreement signed between the two countries."

At least 1,000 refugees crossed into Lebanon at the Wadi Khalled border point on Friday, including five men with gunshot wounds, after an assault on the Syrian city of Homs, according to Lebanese officials. A resident of the border village told the Observer that Syrian army units had opened fire towards the wounded as they attempted to enter Lebanon.

Source: The Guardian.
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/25/syria-border-turkey-president-assad.

Family sit-in for 15th day at Royal Court

2011-06-19

AMMONNEWS - A family consisting of 5 members have been on a sit-in in front of the Royal Hashemite Court in Amman for 15 consecutive days.

The family was spotted protesting in front of the Royal Court during the retired military veterans' protest earlier on Sunday.

Asked of the reason for their sit-in, the father said that the family submitted a petition to the Royal Hashemite Court and are staging a sit-in until they hear a response.

"Gotcha" asked the family for further information on their cause, but the father preferred not to disclose further information, saying "We want a direct response from the Royal Court to meet His Majesty King Abdullah because no one would listen to our cause other than him."

Source: Ammon News.
Link: http://en.ammonnews.net/article.aspx?articleNO=12485.

Differences over Syria unrest deepen 'crisis' of Jordan's political elite

By Thameen Kheetan

AMMAN - Divisions have surfaced among Jordan’s elite over the ongoing unrest in the northern neighbor Syria.

Many writers, academicians and activists have engaged in a series of tit-for-tat statements, reflecting conflicting positions on street demonstrations in Syria, which President Bashar Assad described as part of a foreign “conspiracy”.

Several Jordanian figures and groups have denounced the northern neighbor's Baath regime for “crimes and oppression” against civilians who demonstrate calling for democracy and freedoms.

Others, however, voice fears that such a conflict in an Arab country that has backed Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements against Israel would affect the region’s balance of power in favor of Tel Aviv.

A group of 72 writers published a statement on news websites criticizing what they described as the “silence of the administrative commission” of the Jordanian Writers Association (JWA) over the news from Syria, where over 1,200 people are reported to have been killed by security forces since the eruption of protests some three months ago.

The association, for its part, voiced “surprise” over the resignation of three of its leading members, insisting that it stands against the “oppression and cruelty that is being practiced against the Arab people in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya”.

For JWA President Soud Qbeilat, “Jordanians follow what is happening in Syria with concern,” because, he said, Syria has openly adopted anti-Israeli positions and any threat to this country will automatically tilt the balance in Israel’s favor.

“People are with democratic change in the Arab world, but when it comes to the Syrian issue, we are talking about the fight against Israel,” he explained, charging that the US and its allies in the region are taking advantage of the unrest to pressure Damascus “to bow to Israeli interests”.

He said some of those who criticize the JWA have “suspicious” positions and relations with the West.

“If the Syrian regime goes, the alternative is the unknown,” noted Qbeilat.

But for the other camp, a natural alternative is one that guarantees public freedoms, maintaining, at the same time, the will of people in resisting the “Israeli threat”.

Division, no division

“There is a clear division,” remarked renowned cartoonist Imad Hajjaj, who has drawn several caricatures denouncing Assad and supporters of his regime.

One of his drawings earlier this month in Al Ghad daily depicted a group of people representing the “role of intellectuals” lining up to shake hands with a blood-handed dictator.

“I am very much frustrated by the role of some intellectuals… who have attempted to polish the image of the [Syrian] regime and cover up for its crimes using unacceptable excuses,” Hajjaj told The Jordan Times.

But a researcher at the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies, Mohammad Abu Rumman, who has also taken the side of Syria’s popular uprising, does not see “any substantial division” inside the local elite circles on Syria.

“Only a handful of writers say they are with the Syrian people but against the ‘conspiracy’… What conspiracy is bigger than suppressing the people?” Abu Rumman asked.

The analyst, who is also a leading columnist at Al Ghad, was one of several figures who launched a campaign to boycott a dinner last month hosted by Syrian Ambassador in Amman Bahjat Suleiman to explain his country’s stance regarding the unrest.

“What is alarming is not their position on Syria, but their position on democracy in general,” Abu Rumman said, adding that “it is unacceptable that you call for democracy here but stand against it there”.

The writer said Damascus’ stance in support of the resistance in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon was “good”, but warned that the Syrian regime “will not be able to succeed in the battle with Israel when it continues to crackdown on its people”.

“This limited group of people have failed the test of democracy,” noted Abu Rumman.

Young activist Firas Mahadin, who is a member of the March 24 Youth Coalition that calls for political reforms and more freedoms in Jordan, insisted that speaking in favor of Syria is a matter of opinion that should be respected.

The self-proclaimed nationalist filmmaker explained: “It is a matter of different points of view, but some groups just do not accept the others’ opinion.”

Stressing that he, too, calls for democracy in Syria, Mahadin alleged that what is currently happening is a “sectarian-based” movement that aims to “dismantle the state in Syria in a way that serves Israel”.

Media professor at Al Hussein Ben Talal University in Maan, Bassem Tweisi argues that the Jordanian elite is treating the Arab Spring on the basis of their different ideologies.

“This explains the double standards in certain cases.”

“The Kingdom’s political elite is incapable of formulating a democratic and political discourse to replace the existing ideological one,” he remarked, adding that this “will further deepen the elite’s crisis”.

21 June 2011

Source: The Jordan Times.
Link: http://www.jordantimes.com/index.php?news=38704.