By Charles Fromm and Mohammed A. Salih
WASHINGTON, Mar 11 2010 (IPS)

The United States should accept an “Islamist authority” in Somalia as part of a “constructive disengagement” strategy for the war-torn country, according to a new report released here by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on Wednesday.

The 39-page report urges the U.S. to recognise that “Islamist authority” even if it includes al-Shabaab, or “the youth” in Arabic, an Islamist insurgent group that has declared loyalty to al Qaeda.

It calls the current U.S. approach toward Somalia of propping up the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) “counterproductive”. Not only is it alienating large sections of the Somali population, but it is effectively polarising its diverse Muslim community into so-called “moderate” and “extremist” camps, the report says.

While the report encourages an “inclusive posture” by the U.S. toward local fundamentalists, it suggests the U.S. should show “zero-tolerance’ toward transnational actors attempting to exploit Somalia’s conflict”, apparently referring to al Qaeda.

“The Shabaab is an alliance of convenience and its hold over territory is weaker than it appears. Somali fundamentalists – whose ambitions are mostly local – are likely to break ranks with al-Qaeda and other foreign operatives as the utility of cooperation diminishes,” says the report, authored by Bronwyn Bruton, a CFR international affairs fellow. “The United States and its allies must encourage these fissures to expand.”

However, David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to neighbouring Ethiopia in the 1990s, disagrees that the al-Shabaab leadership will be ready to join any future political arrangement in the country.

“I think al-Shabaab has become more radicalised and I don’t see any pragmatic leaders in al-Shabaab today. Many in the rank and file maybe pragmatic, the gun-carriers, but they are not the leaders,” said Shinn, who also served as U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso in the late 1980s.

“I don’t see cracks in the leadership and I don’t see pragmatics in the leadership. A lot of the report is predicated on the idea that it is possible to negotiate with al-Shabaab and I think that’s wishful thinking,” he said.

The report also warns against continued support for the U.N.-backed TFG since it has proven “ineffective and costly”.

“The TFG is unable to improve security, deliver basic services, or move toward an agreement with Somalia’s clans and opposition groups that would provide a stronger basis for governance,” the report says.

The TFG was established in 2004 through U.N. mediation in Kenya in an effort to end the ongoing crisis in Somalia. The TFG moved to Somalia in 2005 but has been unable to make “any progress on state building tasks” due to internal divisions, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said.

It was hoped that the installation of Sharif Ahmed, the former head of the Union of Islamic Courts, as president in January 2009 would attract a sufficient number of Islamist leaders to subdue or at least fragment al-Shabaab’s forces. But Shinn says the TFG has become “marginally stronger” in recent months.

“She [Bruton] seems to begin with the assumption that the TFG is doomed to fail. I am not convinced that it will fail,” said Shinn, who was a member of the Advisory Committee to the report. “The fact the TFG under President Ahmed has now existed for more than a year has already surprised many so-called Somali experts. It’s just wrong to make the assumption that it’s going to fail.”

Entitled “Somalia , A New Approach”, the report comes at a critical moment in the evolution of U.S. policy toward Somalia . Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are helping the Somali government, which has about 7,000 troops in the capital, plan an impending TFG military offensive aimed at dislodging al-Shabaab fighters from Mogadishu.

The report details two decades of strife in the Horn of Africa nation, the establishment of the TFG, and its ongoing ensuing power struggle with the al-Shabaab’s movement and its allies.

Bruton contends that the U.S. policy of providing indirect diplomatic and military support to the weak TFG has only “served to isolate the government, and…to propel cooperation among previously fractured and quarrelsome extremist groups.”

The report calls on the United States to make a final attempt to help the Somali government build public support by drawing in leaders of the other Islamist groups. But it urges the administration of President Barack Obama to consider major policy changes should the TFG fail or continue to be marginalised to the point of powerlessness.

The TGF, which is backed by some 5,000 African Union (AU) troops in a U.N.-authorised peacekeeping mission, controls only several blocks of Somalia’s sprawling capital of Mogadishu and the Aden Adde International Airport, while al-Shabaab controls vast swaths of land to the south, and parts of the capital as well.

Historically, Washington’s interest in the volatile East African nation has been limited to security issues, and most recently to denying sanctuary to al Qaeda or its affiliates on Somali territory. In recent years, the U.S. has carried out a number of attacks on targets in Somalia believed to be linked to al Qaeda.

However, some analysts believe that the U.S. help could easily lead to strengthening the insurgent movement in an already complicated set of circumstances.

“The administration has decided to move aggressively to support the TFG and is providing training, intelligence, military advice, and hardware to the TFG army in anticipation of a major TFG offensive against al-Shabaab,” said David R. Smock, vice president of the United States Institute of Peace’s Centre for Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

“This is a major American gamble which could backfire. The offensive could easily fail, which might lead the U.S. to get even more heavily engaged. We have been burned badly in Somalia before, and we could be burned again,” he added.

In late 1992, the administration of former President George H. W. Bush sent troops to Somalia as part of a U.N.-authorised operation to protect the delivery of humanitarian and food relief to starving communities there. But, in an aborted “nation-building” enterprise, U.S. military forces became increasingly engaged in the ongoing warfare between and among clans that followed the ouster in 1991 of the Siad Barre regime.

Then-President Bill Clinton began withdrawing U.S. troops after 18 SOF soldiers were killed during a botched helicopter raid against one clan leader in Mogadishu in October 1993 and completed the withdrawal early in 1994.

The CFR report also recommends a decentralised development strategy in collaboration with “the informal and traditional authorities” on the ground. It calls for restraining Ethiopia, which has been involved in Somalia’s conflicts for years.

Bruton suggests that the U.S. should not “own the Somali crisis” and needs to launch a diplomatic campaign to involve European and Middle Eastern countries to support Somalia’s stabilisation and address its humanitarian and developments needs.

A U.N. report on Wednesday alleged that up to half of the food aid delivered by the World Food Programme (WFP) to Somalia is being diverted to corrupt contractors, local U.N. workers and Islamist militants in the country. The WFP has rejected the allegations, calling them “unsubstantiated”.

Excerpt:

Last year, Kuwaitis elected their first female members of Parliament. Yet in countries like Yemen, child marriage remains common and personal status laws still discriminate against women in matters concerning marriage, divorce and child custody.

Aseel al-Awadi is one of four women elected in 2009 to Kuwait's Parliament. Credit: Kuwait-Ra'ed Qutena/creative commons license

This dual trend is evident across much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, a new report says, with women making considerable strides in achieving certain rights over the past five years, but still lagging badly behind men in others.

The 591-page study released by Freedom House on Wednesday, supported through grants by the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), contends that while women in the region suffer from greater inequality than women elsewhere, they now enjoy greater economic opportunities, access to education, and increased participation in the political process than in years before.

Subtitled “Progress Amid Resistance”, it states that these recent gains have created “grounds for cautious optimism”.

“There are more women entrepreneurs, more women doctors, more women PhDs, and more women in universities, than ever before,” said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House. “However, substantial roadblocks remain for women pursuing careers. These findings remind us of the complexities of women’s status in the Middle East.”

The report found that Tunisian women enjoy the greatest degree of freedom in the MENA region, followed by women in Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt.

But the authors found that, “deeply entrenched societal norms, combined with conservative interpretations of Shari’a (Islamic law), continue to relegate women to a subordinate status.”

They also discussed women’s struggle for equality in a global context and within the United States, where “women today earn roughly 23 percent less than men and make up only three percent of the Fortune 500 chief executives.”

The Middle East is hardly the only region where women experience inequality, but the gap between the rights of women and men there has been the most visible and severe in the world.

Still, out of the 18 countries surveyed in MENA, 15 recorded gains in women’s rights over the past five years, with Kuwait, Algeria and Jordan seeing the most significant improvements.

Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories – all of which have been subject to military occupation or internal conflict – were the only countries to record overall declines.

The bulk of the report focuses upon the regions lack of democratic institutions, independent judiciaries, and what it defines as “excessively restrictive rules on the formation of civil society organisations which make it more difficult for women’s advocates to effectively organise and lobby the government for expanded rights.”

“The absence of democratic institutions is a significant impediment to women’s rights in the Middle East and elsewhere,” said Sanja Kelly, a senior researcher at Freedom House who directed the study. “When courts are incapable of upholding basic legal rights in face of political and societal pressures, those guilty of spousal abuse, gender based discrimination, or even murder, often walk free.”

The number of women holding political positions has also increased, according to Freedom House’s study, due in part to the adoption of quota systems for elected offices in countries such as Iraq and Jordan.

The most significant gains for women in politics occurred in Kuwait, where women received political rights equal to that of men in 2005, letting them vote and run for office. This legislation preceded the election of the country’s first female members of parliament in 2009.

Meanwhile, in Yemen this year, conservative lawmakers succeeded in postponing a draft law that would make marriage illegal for girls under the age of 17.

“Yemen is still very much a tribal society whereby early marriage is a traditional factor,” Nadya Khalife, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Media Line last week. Khalife said child marriages were common in Yemen and neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

“There are numerous factors that have to do with culture and tradition, and the socio-economic situation of families,” Khalife explained. “For instance, families may marry off their daughters for economic reasons, a family that may be poor may see an incentive for marrying their daughter because the husband and his family will have to pay mahr or a bride price – a mandatory gift in Islam given to the bride’s family by the groom and his family.”

Freedom House calls on governments in the Middle East and North Africa to provide greater legal protection for women against domestic violence as well as to increase the legal, economic and political rights of women.

The Washington, D.C.-based think tank, which is a registered non-profit organisation, characterises itself as “an independent nongovernmental organisation, [that] supports the expansion of freedom in the world.”

Sixty-six percent of Freedom House’s funding comes from the U.S. government, according to their most recent financial statement.

By Mohammed A. Salih and Charles Fromm
WASHINGTON, Feb 16 2010 (IPS)

A report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on press freedom around the world in 2009 depicts an especially gloomy situation in the Middle East and North Africa, where authorities continue to use repressive measures to muzzle journalists.

Highlighting the greatly deteriorating press conditions in Iran, CPJ’s report, released Tuesday, accuses the country’s authorities of one of the “most vicious and widespread crackdowns on the press in recent memory” following last June’s disputed presidential elections, which saw incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad re-elected.

More than 90 journalists and media workers were detained by Iranian security forces, including several foreigners, according to CPJ. In one case, the authorities rounded up most of the staff of Kamaeh Sabz, a newspaper close to the main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. Many of the detained journalists have reportedly been tortured.

The government restricted access to the internet and mobile phone services and highly limited foreign journalists’ ability to cover the protests. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei branded foreign media as “evil” and accused them of trying to create discord in the country.

“Restricting the foreign press appeared to serve the dual purpose of limiting coverage of internal upheaval and the graphic abuse of protesters, while pinning the unrest on Western interference in Iran’s internal affairs,” the report said.

Next door in Iraq, improving security conditions meant a relatively safer environment for journalists, although harassment and attacks continued.

While four journalists were killed in the country during 2009, for the first time in six years, Iraq was not the deadliest nation for journalists, as the Philippines was scene of the worst massacre of journalists last year.

The CPJ report criticised Iraqi authorities for failing to “address impunity in journalist murders”, noting that by the end of last year, not one person had been convicted out of 89 cases of journalists killed explicitly because of their work since the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003. A total of 140 journalists were killed in that six-year period.

Despite last year’s low death toll and no reported abductions of journalists, Iraqi authorities launched a campaign of harassment, assault and legal action against the press, CPJ said.

“Officials don’t want journalists to write about things such as security issues, violations of human rights, lack of basic services and corruption,” Ziad al-Ajili, director of the Journalistic Freedom Observatory in Iraq, told CPJ. “They are imposing restrictions on journalists – and the direction they are taking is more toward authoritarianism.”

In Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, a court in Sulaimaniya ordered Hawlati, one of the most popular Kurdish newspapers, to pay a hefty fine of 10 million Iraqi dinars, nearly 9,000 U.S. dollars, based on a lawsuit by Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani.

Hawlati’s editor, Abid Aref, was also personally fined three million Iraqi dinars, almost 2,500 U.S. dollars. Hawlati had translated a critical article by U.S. scholar Michael Rubin in 2008 that accused Talabani and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region, of corruption and undemocratic governance.

With the Middle East and North Africa witnessing the fastest growth of internet penetration in the world, online journalism and blogging have played a highly significant role in drawing attention to governments’ human rights abuses.

In Egypt, Wael Abbas, a well-known human rights activist and blogger, made a name for himself by posting videos of police brutality and civil unrest in the wake of Egypt’s presidential referendum in 2005.

Since then, he has paid the price for his commitment to advocacy. He has been prevented from leaving the country and is often subjected to harassment, detention and arrest by state security officials and the police, the report says.

Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco have sometimes suspended the broadcast of satellite news channels, particularly Al-Jazeera, for highlighting sensitive human rights, political, or religious issues, the report notes.

“In Tunisia, people learned about human rights violations mainly from satellite TV stations and particularly Al-Jazeera, which was seen by many Tunisians as a breath of oxygen,” said local journalist Naziha Réjiba. Réjiba received CPJ’s 2009 International Press Freedom Award.

Morocco is home to an infamous press code, which can levy decades-long prison sentences for libel against the king. The law was revised in 2002, but many changes were seen as cosmetic. Article 41 of the code extends the law’s applicability to Islam and Morocco’s territorial integrity as well.

Morocco’s courts, in addition to executive power, were also given the authority to suspend or close newspapers.

“We counted many cases of physical abuse against journalists in many areas, the most recent occurring in Casablanca,” the head of the Journalists’ Syndicate, Yunis Moujahid, told Menasat, an online clearinghouse for journalism in the Middle East.

He added that it is imperative to adopt regulations that guarantee better conditions for journalists to practice their profession in respect of national and international law.

However, CPJ’s report asserts that Morocco has seen an increase in human rights reporting, since a truth commission began examining abuses committed during the 1961-1999 reign of King Hassan II.

Although the hearings of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission ended in 2005, the independent press has continued to report on abuses – and not just under Hassan, but also under his successor, Mohammed VI.

Still, authorities censor, jail and harass journalists to silence coverage of the royal family, contends the report.

In Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories, Israel’s decision to bar international press access to the Gaza Strip during its three-week military campaign in the coastal territory last year was highlighted in the report.

This policy is described as part of “a massive public relations battle over coverage in the international press.”

It also mentions the Israeli army’s targeting of news media buildings in Gaza for air strikes, and the taking over of local television and radio frequencies to distribute Israeli military propaganda.

Meanwhile, rival Palestinian ruling factions of Fatah and Hamas detained and harassed members of the media they perceived as biased.

The CPJ report highlights deteriorating conditions for the press in many other countries around the world as well. In the Philippines, 31 journalists and media workers were killed during an ambush by unknown assailants, ranking it “worst among peacetime democracies, trailing only war-ridden places such as Iraq and Somalia.”

The report also criticises Russia for doing little to bring to justice those responsible for the murder of 19 journalists during the past 10 years, with a murder conviction won only in one case. As three journalists died alone last year in Russia, CPJ says the “brutal reality” for the country’s press has not changed.

Excerpt:

By Charles Fromm and Ellen Massey
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 2010 (IPS)

One year ago Thursday, the last Israeli tanks were lumbering out of the Gaza Strip, ending the 22-day Gaza War and leaving in their wake a decimated landscape and population.

A year later, the humanitarian and security situation in the devastated coastal enclave remains dire, yet the Barack Obama administration continues to overlook the crisis in Gaza, an approach which some experts say is an extension of the previous administration’s policy.

This policy has also done little to alleviate what human rights groups warn is a growing humanitarian crisis, plunging the Gaza Strip further into poverty and insecurity.

Sworn into office in the midst of the Gaza War, President Obama gave early prominence to the Middle East peace process in his administration’s foreign policy. Yet that rhetoric has failed to materialise into progress on the peace process or relief for the people of Gaza.

The U.S. remains resolute in its refusal to engage with Hamas, the Islamist party that now rules Gaza and is designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation. This policy began to have a dramatic affect upon Gazans in 2007, under President George W. Bush, when Hamas took control of the territory.

“Obama showed his trajectory early on,” said Paul Woodward, editor and creator of the reputable blog warincontext.org. “The U.S. made a decision to sideline Hamas after the 2006 [Palestinian] elections, which they and Israel [had initially] supported- marginalising Hamas and by default, marginalising Gaza.”

“The Obama administration has engaged in much more cosmetic changes than strategic changes,” Woodward told IPS.

Such cosmetic changes included soaring rhetoric that reached out to Arab and Muslim communities in an effort to strengthen ties that had been weakened under the previous administration.

“America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own,” Obama said during his landmark speech in Cairo.

Despite such commitments, Gaza, which has been subject to a tightening blockade by neighbouring Israel and Egypt since 2007, continues to languish without access to the necessary humanitarian aid, reconstruction materials, and trade opportunities that would allow it to recover from the devastating conflict.

As the crisis deepens, U.S. complicity in the siege is becoming more evident in the eyes of the Arab world.

“The idea that the U.S. is impotent… is something that no Palestinian in Gaza who we met believed,” said Amjad Atallah, at a Brookings Institution event last week. Atallah is the co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.

The Gaza War, also known as Operation Cast Lead, was a three-week battle between Hamas militants and the Israeli army last winter. The conflict resulted in widespread devastation and casualties in Gaza, where more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed. There were 13 Israeli causalities suffered from Hamas-launched rockets and during the ground incursion into the territory.

According to Human Rights Watch, the blockade has forced 80 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.5 million people to rely upon humanitarian aid and a black market supplied by smugglers.

Smuggling tunnels below the Gaza/Egypt border are the only remaining link to the outside world for the Gaza’s citizens, and have “literally driven Gaza’s economy underground,” said Daniel Levy, co-director of the Middle East Task Force, at the Brookings event.

Yet even this last loophole in the blockade is threatened. According to the BBC, Egypt has started work on an underground barrier, with the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which cuts off the cross-border tunnel system used by smugglers to circumvent the siege.

“I don’t think there has ever been an instance in history when the United States played such a complicated role in the physical blockading of a population – it’s no wonder they don’t want to take any credit for it,” said Yousef Munnayer, executive director of the Palestine Centre, about the Obama administration’s understated participation in the cordon of the Gaza Strip.

Some analysts believe the wall is a strategic maneuver on the part of the U.S. to pressure Hamas into a reconciliation with Fatah, the dominant political party in the West Bank, in order to restart stalled peace talks.

“Egypt’s tough new stance toward Hamas is enabled by Cairo’s current efforts to restart peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation… Hamas is being squeezed on all fronts,” said Yossi Alpher, the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, in his column in The Jewish Daily Forward.

While the Obama administration has failed to follow through on its commitments to relieve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the United States Congress has, it seems, largely ignored it. Since January 2009, a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives that expresses concern about the situation in Gaza has stalled in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In contrast, last November the House overwhelmingly supported a resolution that condemned the Goldstone Report, the product of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict. The report, named after respected jurist Richard Goldstone, found both Hamas and Israel committed war crimes during the 22-day conflict.

Rep. Keith Ellison was one of only 58 representatives to vote against or abstain from voting on the resolution. He also represents one of only a handful of U.S. elected officials who have visited the Gaza Strip, while more than 70 members of Congress have traveled to the region. During his trip to the territory in February 2009, Ellison met with residents of both Gaza and the Israeli border town of Sderot.

“When someone like [Rep.] Keith Ellison visits Gaza, I would say that does more for American security in the Middle East and your public diplomacy than virtually anything else we’ve seen this year,” Levy said at a briefing on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

But Ellison remains an outlier among members of Congress. “If you want to know how much knowledge there is [among] my colleagues in Congress, all you need to do is look at the vote on the Goldstone Report,” Ellison told the audience at the Brooking Institution last week.

“I bet nobody read the Goldstone Report or even the executive summary. So we’re ready to condemn a report which we have not read at all,” he added, describing his colleagues in the House of Representatives.

The combination of the war and the continued siege has plunged the Gaza Strip into crippling poverty and the effects of the closure on the health sector have been catastrophic. Amnesty International reported recently that chronic shortages in equipment and medical supplies are routine, leaving health professionals with insufficient resources to treat their patients.

Even as the Obama administration attempts to re-start the peace process, Gaza casts a looming shadow over any such efforts. Some experts claim that peace negotiations are futile until the siege in Gaza has been addressed.

“That’s the precondition for everything,” said Andrew Whitley, director of the Representative Office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, in reference to the lifting of the blockade in Gaza.

Excerpt: