A new report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) Friday contends that the dearth of meaningful reform in the protection of human rights and the rule of law in Yemen threatens political stability as the fledgling transitional government copes with a deteriorating economy and continued violence.

“While Yemen’s new government has taken several promising steps, the repressive security apparatus of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh remains largely intact,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director, after observers met for two weeks in Sanaa.

“Civilian leaders reiterated that they cannot move forward on accountability and reform of the security services so long as Saleh continues to play a hand in directing various security forces there,” Whitson added.

Since last December, when Saleh and his political supporters were granted legal immunity in exchange for a new government under President Abu Rabu Mansur Hadi, the progress made thus far is insufficient, according to the report.

Some of the reforms in Yemen, the poorest member country in the Arab League, include a draft law that would open investigations into last year’s government abuses and the authorisation for a new office of the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the country.

But after a number of interviews with senior government officials, civil society leaders and other witnesses, HRW found that large gaps remain in government accountability, arbitrary detentions, children forced into the military, and judicial and legal reforms.

No government or security officials have been charged with crimes that left hundreds of Yemeni citizens dead during last year’s anti- government protests.

“Events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya show that removing an authoritarian leader is only the first of many difficult steps…The best way for Hadi to gain the support of all Yemenis is to ensure their grievances are addressed,” Whitson went on to say.

Regional experts have suggested that Saleh has retained a strong influence in Yemeni politics, which has only exacerbated the violent rivalries between different factions vying for power.

“So far, all signs point to Saleh’s unwillingness to give up his influence, especially as long as his political rivals remain active and in a position to dominate Yemen… Their continued presence represents a threat to the emergence of a stable political order in the country,” Princeton Professor Bernard Haykel wrote for majalla.com last week.

With extremely high levels of unemployment, food shortages, dwindling foreign exchange reserves, and an economy almost entirely dependent on neighbouring Saudi Arabia for food and oil subsidies, Yemen’s stagnant economy is just as worrying for some analysts as the growing political instability.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved 93.75 million dollars in assistance to Yemen to “address its urgent balance of payments needs”. Other governments and international organisations such as the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations are in the process of securing additional funds in economic and humanitarian assistance to Yemen.

“The Fund-supported program will help the authorities tackle pressing economic challenges while giving them time to formulate their medium- term strategy to address structural issues,” Nemat Shafik, chair of the IMF’s executive board, said on Wednesday.

“The role of donors is crucial. Financing needs are likely to remain large as the political crisis has worsened poverty and unemployment conditions and severely impacted tax revenues,” Shafik added.

Some experts argue, however, that without an end to Yemen’s political instability, the economic situation is unlikely to improve.

In a report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Tuesday, regional specialist Dr. Charles Schmitz emphasised that structural economic reforms such as a revised tax system, more investment in human capital programmes, an enhanced partnership between the government and private business, and proper management of Yemen’s non-hydrocarbon natural resources will all work to promote economic growth.

“Yemen’s economic problems are real, but they are not caused by an absolute, irreparable shortage of resources. Rather it is Yemen’s contentious politics and its lack of institutional development that constitutes the main obstacle to surmounting economic difficulties,” the Schmitz wrote.

“Ultimately, long-term success depends on the Yemeni state, not on outside help from the U.S. or the Gulf countries – though they can play a critical role in helping to stabilise the Yemeni economy in the short term,” the report goes on to say.

While the U.S. commended the negotiated political transition brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) last year, U.S. policy remains focused on its support for counterterrorism operations in the country and, in what U.S. officials have begun to emphasise more frequently, countering Iran’s alleged influence in Yemen.

Speaking at a GCC forum in Saudi Arabia last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted that Iran has been undermining “regional security” with “interference” in both Yemen and Syria.

One substantial component of the U.S.’s campaign against organisations affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Yemen is an increasing number of drone attacks.

According to a study published last week by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the number of U.S. drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and naval bombardments in Yemen now rivals the intensity of a similar covert campaign against militants in Pakistan, with up to 35 attacks since May 2011 that have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 55-105 Yemeni civilians.

After suspending 150 million dollars in military aid to Yemen during the uprisings last year, U.S. officials have stated that they plan to seek authorisation for nearly 75 million in military aid to resume this year. Yemen has received nearly 316 million dollars in civilian aid since 2007.

“The U.S. government has no business resuming aid, overt or covert, to security forces that are implicated in murdering Yemen’s citizens and refuse to accept accountability for these abuses…Direct military aid to these forces could undermine the government’s ability to ensure accountability and bring peace and security to the country,” HRW’s Whitson said.

“The U.S remains focused on supporting a peaceful political transition in Yemen, and will continue to address the needs of the Yemeni people by delivering humanitarian and economic aid and providing security assistance as requested by the National Consensus Government,” the State Department said in a press release on Monday, after a senior level delegation, which included U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Ambassador Jeffery Feltman, returned from Yemen last week.

“We want to help the people of Yemen. They are in great need of development assistance and other forms of help so that they can begin to realise the benefits of a new government that wishes to try to help them,” Clinton said last week during her trip to Riyadh.

In a memorandum released Tuesday, President Barack Obama ordered the State Department to allocate additional humanitarian assistance funds for Sudan as famine looms for thousands of civilians caught between intensified levels of armed conflict along the borders of Sudan and South Sudan.

Thousands fleeing fighting last year in Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan State, seek refuge in area secured by UNMIS. Credit: UN Photo/Paul Banks

In light of the most violent escalation in tensions between Sudan and South Sudan since the two countries split last year, the Obama administration on Monday voiced concern over the implications of continued fighting for a settlement on a variety of divisive issues by urging South Sudanese President Salva Kiir to end hostilities.

While emphasising the need to end fighting over disputed border regions, particularly in South Kordofan, President Obama noted that an agreement over oil transportation fees – a hotly contested issue between the two governments – will be “important”.

“(I)t’s important not only to encourage the governments to reach an agreement on oil, but to reach an agreement on the issues that are dividing them so sharply and creating so much conflict,” Ambassador Princeton Lyman, U.S. special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, said in a teleconference on Monday, “We all need to engage in a broad diplomatic effort, not just on one issue.”

President Kiir and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir were set to meet this week until the recent spate of violence, which has included clashes between ground forces and aerial attacks in a number of contested border states including South Kordofan and Blue Nile, diminished the chances for a peace summit.

Last week’s clashes took place in the South Sudanese border state of Unity, where substantial oil fields and production facilities are located.

While U.S. policymakers and the U.N. Security Council continue to press for maximal “restraint” on both sides, some analysts have argued that holding both the Khartoum and Juba governments equally accountable for the most recent surge in violence actually works to discredit the international community’s ostensible role as impartial mediators, and helps to perpetuate the conflict.

“It must be stressed that there is no publicly available evidence that the South is providing significant assistance to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North or indeed the means to do so. International failure to acknowledge this dramatic asymmetry only encourages Khartoum to continue arming militias operating in the South,” Dr. Eric Reeves, a regional specialist, wrote on his blog sudanreeves.org last week.

Several regional observers have suggested that hard-line factions within the Sudanese government have everything to gain from continuing the armed conflict, both because of lost territory, oil production capacity, and warrants for their arrest issued by the International Criminal Court.

Nevertheless, others see an impartial posture for the U.S. and international community as essential to diplomatic mediations.

“Would-be mediators should resist the temptation to look for the ‘good guys’ in Sudan and take sides,” Alan Goulty and Nuredin Satti, two regional specialists, wrote in a report last month published by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Affairs.

“The parties to Sudanese conflicts need help to make peace, not war. It follows that the secondary temptation of bringing pressure or leverage to bear on only one of the parties should also be resisted. It will lead the antagonists to eschew negotiation in favor of waiting for outside pressure to weaken their opponents,” the report goes on to say.

In addition to last week’s armed clashes and the ongoing oil dispute, the governments in the north and south have yet to form a consensus on other significant issues such granting humanitarian relief agencies access to distressed populations, some that are on the verge of starvation, border demarcation, and the citizenship status of displaced persons.

“The highest priority of the U.S. government is to get a humanitarian relief corridor open and that means you have to get an agreement between both the north and the south. And that effectively means a cessation of hostilities,” David Shinn, former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, told IPS.

“The problems are coming form both sides. This is not just all the north that is creating the problems,” Ambassador Lyman added.

Last month, U.S. lawmakers introduced new legislation that would require a “comprehensive” U.S. strategy for Sudan to encourage the use of a number of policy tools, including additional sanctions, to help pressure both sides into finding a peaceful solution.

Of particular concern for politicians here, however, are increasing oil prices in the middle of a crucial election year.

Global oil markets have received extra attention in recent weeks as Republican presidential candidates lay the groundwork for the upcoming general election with arguments blaming President Obama’s policies for exorbitant prices at the pump.

“Global oil prices are set by a variety of factors, many of which are outside of the control of U.S. policy,” a senior administration official said in a conference call on Monday.

“(A)s the president has talked about on several occasions, factors that are influencing oil prices right now include growth in countries around the world as well as disruptions in supply in countries across the globe from Sudan to Yemen to Nigeria,” the official added.

With continued disagreement over the price for transporting South Sudanese oil through the north, which owns the vital pipelines and infrastructure necessary for export to the Red Sea, Juba now faces large shortfalls in government revenues. Before shutting down exports, South Sudan’s estimated 345,000 barrel per day oil capacity accounted for 98 percent of government revenues.

“(W)e’re obviously interested in reducing tensions there, and certainly in trying to mitigate the factors that are having an impact on high oil prices,” Jay Carney, White House press secretary, said in a briefing last week.

China, which imported roughly 67 percent of Sudanese oil before supplies were disrupted, and other major Asian importers are now seen as crucial to an all-inclusive diplomatic push toward resolving the multiplicity of conflicts.

“(B)oth China and India have significant investments in the oil sector. And as a result, they both have an interest in a stable and peaceful relationship between the two countries because, as you know, much of the oil is in the south, the infrastructure to export it in the north,” Ambassador Lyman said Monday.

“So we have been in touch on many occasions with the Chinese…and I’ve been in touch with the new Chinese envoy,” Lyman added.

Egypt's military has prolonged the transition to civilian rule. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By David Elkins
WASHINGTON, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

The U.S. State Department announced on Friday that military aid to Egypt will resume, citing a national security waiver that was included in the most resent appropriations legislation on foreign assistance.

“These decisions reflect America’s over-arching goal: to maintain our strategic partnership with an Egypt made stronger and more stable by a successful transition to democracy,” Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman for the State Department said in a statement.

“The secretary’s decision to waive is also designed to demonstrate our strong support for Egypt’s enduring role as a security partner and leader in promoting regional stability and peace,” Nuland added.

The announcement comes after U.S. lawmakers conditioned aid on Egypt’s progress in transitioning to a verifiably democratic system of governance – an unprecedented move since the U.S. began supplying Egypt with roughly 1.3 billion dollars in aid after it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

Relations between the U.S. and Egypt hit an all-time low late last year when Egyptian security officials raided the offices of several U.S. government-funded democracy-promotion organisations and charged several of the employees with crimes against the state, which elicited a temporary hold on Egyptian aid.

In February, Egypt permitted the remaining U.S. citizens who were charged in the incident to leave the country after initially placing travel restrictions, pending the trials. According to Freedom House, a U.S.-based human rights advocacy organisation, nearly 400 Egyptian NGOs are still under investigation or facing similar charges.

The announcement, in the works for several weeks, has drawn harsh criticism from human rights groups and regional experts who have characterised U.S. policy since the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 as being callously attuned to U.S. regional interests rather than genuinely supportive of the popular calls for meaningful reforms.

“Amnesty International opposes the funding, sale, or transfer of arms internationally where there is a substantial risk that the specific arms in question will be used to commit or facilitate serious human rights violations,” Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said on Friday.

Earlier this month, Amnesty International sent an open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stating that “waiving the certification requirement would forfeit a key form of pressure for the advancement of human rights.”

According to a Gallup poll released on Friday that canvassed Egyptian public opinion between January and February 2012, 56 percent of respondents thought that closer relations with the U.S. was a “bad thing”.

“A resumption of military aid at this point also sends the wrong message to the Egyptian people – that we care only about American NGO workers, not about the aspirations of the Egyptian people to build democracy,” David J. Kramer, president of Freedom House, said in a release on Thursday.

“The U.S. government risks repeating the mistakes of the past, indulging the Egyptian military in the name of regional stability while ignoring what the Egyptian people want…Stability in Egypt is best achieved by supporting a full transition to a democratic government, which will uphold human rights and a free society,” Kramer said.

Some observers have emphasised that, given the U.S. citizens’ return, attention has shifted to the outstanding weapons contracts between the Egyptian government and U.S. arms manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin, which would have gone unpaid if the hold on U.S. military financing were to have continued.

Senator Patrick Leahy, who authored the amendment requiring a national security waiver if military aid were to be resumed, and a strong supporter of the Barack Obama administration, voiced concern over the announcement on Friday.

“Waiving the new conditions on democracy and human rights is regrettable, and handing over the entire 1.3 billion dollars at once to the Egyptian military compounds the mistake by dissipating our future leverage,” Leahy said.

“Using this waiver authority, at this time, sends a contradictory message. The Egyptian military should be defending fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, not harassing and arresting those who are working for democracy.”

According to a foreignpolicy.com blog post by Josh Rogin on Thursday, there was some confusion in Congressional offices, before the announcement came today, about whether the State Department would be issuing a partial waiver and withhold some of the monies appropriated in the foreign military financing and economic stability accounts.

Nuland stated in a press conference Friday, however, that the national security waiver would entail resuming all foreign assistance to Egypt, including economic.

“The congressional legislation required that certification before the economic aid could go forward. So this decision, essentially, releases that economic aid,” Nuland said.

As Egyptians prepare for presidential elections in May, the decision to resume U.S. aid may have the unintentional consequence of a more deeply entrenched Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the group of military officials that have retained power since Mubarak’s ouster and work as a disincentive for additional reform in civil rights laws, an independent judiciary, and civilian control of the government.

“(I)t is from that disadvantaged position that the United States will have to start the difficult process of building a new bilateral relationship with a changing Egypt, once the military (on which the United States continues to double down) leaves power and a new president and cabinet step in,” Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, wrote a blog on Friday.

“Will showing that Americans sacrifice our principles at the first sign of inconvenience stand U.S. in good stead with a new civilian Egyptian leadership, especially one with a heavy Islamist presence? Not likely.”

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

As government crackdowns continue, Bahrain is attracting more international visitors than just those coming in preparation for next month’s Forumla One Grand Prix.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa recently hosted Dr. Jimmy Gurulé, a law professor at Notre Dame University and former U.S. assistant attorney general, to “assess the country’s pretrial detention policies and procedures”.

Dr. Gurulé’s delegation, which was sponsored by the American Bar Association and the U.S. State Department, included a visit to Jawa prison, a major detention facility in Bahrain.

The Bahraini government is “in the process of implementing the necessary legislation, the necessary authority of judicial inspections of prisons”, Dr. Gurulé told IPS.

“They are sincere and intent to implement the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report and intend to implement them fully…the fact that they brought me out suggests that they’re acting in good faith and wanting to implement the recommendations,” he said.

“The most effective way of preventing instances of torture is to ensure that detainees are afforded rights of consul immediately after detention…but there is a dearth of human rights lawyers in the country,” Gurulé said.

Despite reports of increasingly deadly government tactics to suppress protestors and unofficial detention facilities where security forces beat and torture civilians, the Bahraini government has remained, rhetorically, committed to implementing reforms – a claim Western governments, particularly the U.S., seem unwilling to contest publicly.

“(T)he government is taking some actions, but it doesn’t seem to be acting very effectively,” Bill Marczak, a director at Bahrain Watch, a human rights group, told IPS.

“Yes the government issued a police code of conduct on Jan. 30, and set up an Interior Ministry ombudsman, but there are concerns about the independence of the ombudsman, and police still continue the same abuses with impunity.”

A “major non-NATO ally” of the U.S., the Saudi-backed al-Khalifa monarchy has housed the U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet and U.S. Naval Central Command since 1971 – the base for most of the U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf as well as the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Of primary concern for U.S. policy makers are strategic and political rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran – however exaggerated or understated these rivalries may be – as well as regional security issues, according to some experts.

“The vast majority of connection and effort and diplomacy has been between through the White House and the Pentagon…that is significant because it means that the security architecture is how it gets it leverage,” Dr. Toby C. Jones, a professor of modern Middle East History at Rutgers University told IPS.

“But it can be argued that that leverage has not been used effectively,” Jones added.

Saudi Arabia, which has largely avoided the popular demands for political change in the region, has a large interest in preventing religious and ethnic tensions in Bahrain from spilling over into its eastern provinces that serve as major hubs for oil production and transportation – tensions that the Saudi monarchy has attributed to Iranian machinations.

While there has been no evidence of Iranian meddling in Bahraini affairs, Saudi Arabia does have a genuine concern for Iran’s growing political and military influence in the region.

Other observers argue that the U.S. has a much larger policy toolkit to choose from to pressure the Bahraini government.

“There’s a lot of tools that the U.S. might use to apply pressure, such as the free trade agreement, its base in Bahrain, and arms sales. Even calling the government out on its practices would be helpful. For example, the government stopped demolishing mosques shortly after (President Barack) Obama mentioned this practice in a speech,” Marczak said.

“Linking military aid to reform, suspending weapons licenses (as the UK did in February 2011, though most seem to have been resumed), and launching investigations could all be used to pressure Bahrain,” Marczak added.

Most experts have come to the conclusion, however, that strategic and security interests have galvanised U.S. support for the al-Khalifa monarchy.

“When the Arab League gave its approval to the (2011) no-fly zone in Libya, it was vital to get Saudi support for that… But it’s been pretty widely acknowledged that the U.S. needed Saudi help on Libya, so it kind of gave up on Bahrain,” Jones told IPS.

U.S. policymakers seem intent on a quietest approach where private diplomacy and gradual shifts toward political and human rights reform trump any major challenge to the status quo in Bahrain.

“The administration will say ‘listen we are involved in quite diplomacy,’ and the problem with quiet diplomacy is that you don’t actually know what they’re saying and how forcefully they’re saying it. Without the public limelight you can’t add to that pressure very effectively,” Joost Hiltermann, a regional expert at the International Crisis Group, said in a recent conference.

“In the same breath they say ‘Saudi Arabia has a chokehold on Bahrain and that’s going to prevent any accommodation.” And that seems to be the bottom line. And the United States doesn’t seem to want to confront that particular dilemma,” Hiltermann added.

While there is a temporary congressional hold on a proposed 53- million-dollar U.S. weapons deal with Bahrain, an Obama administration official announced last week that a previously undisclosed shipment of “small military items” in January 2012, which was under the one-million-dollar threshold requiring congressional approval, consisted of 19 Navy patrol boats, according to a blog post by Josh Rogin at foreignpolicy.com.

Cole Bockenfeld, advocacy director for the Project on Middle East Democracy, said that although the January arms deal fell in line with the Obama administration’s stated purpose of providing weapons for Bahrain’s external defence, more transparency would ally fears of the U.S. supplying equipment to suppress demonstrations.

“At the time, they had not offered any detail of the contents of those sales, which led to an outcry from the ground in Bahrain over concerns that military equipment was supporting a regime using excessive force against internal dissent,” Bockenfeld said earlier this week.

“It is absolutely essential to address these fears up front, and for the administration to communicate clearly and publicly the contents of any security assistance to Bahrain in a transparent manner,” Bockenfeld added.

As human rights and opposition groups continue to press for an end to the repression and work toward some kind of solution, some consider the Bahraini government’s past actions as an accurate indicator of what is to come in the future.

“I think the government has missed, and continues to miss, many important reform opportunities…Each death or injury is also an opportunity for the government to say ‘enough is enough,'” Marczak said.

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 22 2012 (IPS)

Months after an independent commission presented damning evidence of the Bahraini government’s crackdown on pro- democracy demonstrators, thousands press on with a reinvigorated protest movement for genuine reform.

Earlier this month, an estimated 100,000 civilians filled the streets in what, according to observers, has been the largest demonstrations the gulf nation has experienced since protests began last year.

The continued crackdown of the near-daily protests since then prompted a U.N. condemnation on Tuesday of the Bahraini security officials’ “disproportionate use of force” to suppress protesters.

On the same day, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, one of the few human rights advocacy groups operating in the country, released evidence of the deaths of two civilians last week from tear gas asphyxiation.

“Since Nov. 23, when the King received the Bahrain Independent Commission on Inquiry report, there have been 31 civilian deaths that were allegedly caused by unrest, and zero deaths of members of the security forces,” Bill Marczak, director of Bahrain Watch, a human rights watchdog and advocacy group, told IPS.

“Three of the deaths seem to be attributable to long-term declines in physical or mental health that may have been caused by unrest before 23 November,” he said.

The Bahraini government has restricted entry for journalists and human rights observers, as independent witnesses continue to document abuses, including torture, arbitrary detention, sexual harassment, beatings, and a growing number of deaths and serious injuries from rubber bullets and tear gas, some of which are supplied by U.S. manufacturers.

“While the U.S. has paused a 53-million-dollar arms sale to Bahrain, other smaller arms sales are ongoing, and the U.S. government still apparently issues licenses for direct commercial sales of tear gas and other items to Bahrain,” Marczak said.

“(T)here has been no known investigation of the use of likely U.S.- origin weapons against protesters, such as M113 APCs fitted with .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns that were used last year…The use of these weapons against unarmed protesters is likely violation of U.S. law, and in violation of the end-use conditions agreed to when the M113s were originally donated to Bahrain at little or no cost in the 1990s and 2000s under the Excess Defense Articles programme.”

The commission was funded by the Bahraini government and chaired by M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of international human rights law at DePaul University. Despite its findings, which contained unequivocal evidence of human rights abuses and made recommendations for reform, the likelihood for genuine reform or a political settlement seems to be dwindling, according to analysts here.

Earlier this year the Bahraini government resumed trials, after indicating that the charges would be dropped, of 20 doctors who were indicted for fomenting armed insurrection against the government and subsequently received sentences from five to 15 years after supposedly forced confessions from torture.

According to Brian Dooley, a Human Rights First observer who witnessed their appeal trials last week, the defendants were not given permission to field all of the witnesses for their defence, this coming after government prosecutors supplied “unpersuasive” video footage of ambulances that allegedly proves that weapons were “being ferried to protestors”.

Bahraini diplomats followed King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa’s lead in showering praise on the steps his government has taken toward political and human rights reform earlier this week.

“Over 10 years ago, His Majesty the King instituted a reform process that has brought meaningful change to Bahrain. And despite assertions to the contrary, this process has never stopped,” the Bahraini Ambassador to the U.S. Houda Nonoo wrote on his blog on Wednesday.

In a display of good faith, Bahraini officials announced on Thursday that cameras would be installed in prisons to help dissuade abuse of detainees.

“On balance, these steps taken so far and promised are welcome and we should look at them seriously and see how far they go. However, there are a number of problems…They are clearly trying to convince the world that the situation is not as bad as it sounds,” Joost Hiltermann, a regional expert at the International Crisis group, said at a recent conference.

Opposition groups have coalesced around a common enemy in the al- Khalifa government but disagreements over, for instance, whether a negotiated settlement with the monarchy or a complete overthrow of the current government’s grip on power will suffice, has embedded a competitive dynamic for the loyalty of the protestors and the various ethnic religious, and political groups in the country.

As entrenched political factions within the Bahraini government, representing Sunni Islamists and supporters of the powerful Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa ibn Salman al-Khalifa, continue to thwart attempts at genuine reform, many are left questioning whether any of the recommendations in the commission’s report will be implemented in the foreseeable future.

“One tactic that seems to be used by Bahrain’s government to avoid giving up power is to build barriers of fear and intolerance between different groups of people (Sunni vs. Shia, expatriates vs. locals, citizens vs. police) to prevent them from realising common ground and achieving the more effective, accountable and transparent governance that they all want,” Marczak said.

“How does Bahrain begin taking those steps? It’s difficult to say, but I think the solution is continued pressure, both through monitoring and other forms of activism, and direct pressure from foreign governments and ordinary Bahrainis.”

Several experts remain convinced that regardless of any improvements made in protecting human rights, a lasting solution will be difficult without political and social reforms, including genuine dialogue, government accountability, ethnic and religious integration of the security and military forces and institutional reform of the electoral and judicial systems.

“What we really need is political reform. Even if all these human rights reforms are implemented, we will be back, more or less, to the status quo ante of Feb. 11, 2011. Which, of course, that situation was unsustainable, hence the protests,” Hiltermann said.

“It is a matter both of the international regional situation and the local situation converging in a particular good constellation. Right now I don’t see it, frankly.”

In an interview with jadaliyya,com on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Coalition of February 14 Youth, a decentralised opposition group in Bahrain, echoed the sentiment that deeper changes will be necessary.

“The first and foremost goal that revolutionaries are struggling for is the liberation of our land from Saudi occupation and the overthrow of the al-Khalifa regime, which has lost its popular and constitutional legitimacy,” the spokesperson said.

“Once that is achieved, the people can choose their own destiny and choose the political and economic system that meets their ambitions and aspirations. We will not under any circumstance accept a compromise with this bloody regime that continues to violate our human rights. We are determined to liberate our precious homeland from dictatorship, and build a nation of justice, dignity, and equality for all its citizens.”

Excerpt:

The scars of war in Tripoli's Abu Salim district. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By David Elkins
WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

Amnesty International (AI) released a scathing report late last week calling for an investigation into civilian deaths from air strikes during the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya, which began one year ago Monday.

“It is deeply disappointing that more than four months since the end of the military campaign, victims and relatives of those killed by NATO air strikes remain in the dark about what happened and who was responsible,” Donatella Rovera, a senior researcher at Amnesty International, a human rights advocacy group based in the U.S., said in a release on Thursday.

“NATO officials repeatedly stressed their commitment to protecting civilians. They cannot now brush aside the deaths of scores of civilians with some vague statement of regret without properly investigating these deadly incidents.”

The report comes as a growing number of countries are calling for a similar intervention in Syria.

It says that after interviewing witnesses and victims’ families, researchers found that 55 civilians, including 16 children, were killed during the military campaign, and none have been offered reparations or even the promise of a thorough investigation by officials from NATO or Libya’s National Transition Council.

Many of the civilian deaths resulted from direct strikes on homes in residential areas where “AI, UN experts, other international NGOs and journalists found no evidence of military objectives at the strike locations at the time of the strike,” according to the report.

NATO’s seven month-long “Operation Unified Protector” began on Mar. 19, 2011 and included nearly 9,700 sorties, or attack missions, and destroyed close to 5,000 military targets, according to NATO officials.

Russia and China, two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council that have expressed major doubts about both the justification and efficacy of a possible military intervention in Syria, abstained from the March 2011 vote on Libya.

Despite the termination of NATO’s jurisdictional mandate to conduct Libyan operations in October 2011, the report questions the alliance’s decision to forgo an investigation into civilian deaths during the campaign and its refusal to release detailed information about strikes involving civilian deaths that may have already been compiled internally.

NATO officials responded to an AI inquiry into the civilian deaths with a letter stating, “While NATO did everything possible to minimize the risk to civilians, in a complex military operation that risk cannot be reduced to zero. NATO deeply regrets any harm that may have been caused by those air strikes.”

“NATO’s response is tantamount to refusing to take responsibility for its actions. It leaves victims and their families feeling that they have been forgotten and that they have no recourse to justice,” Rovera added.

Earlier this month, the U.N.’s International Commission of Inquiry in Libya released its comprehensive report on war crimes and crimes against humanity that took place both before and subsequent to the March 2011 UNSC resolution allowing for “all necessary measures to protect civilians”.

“On limited occasions, the Commission confirmed civilian casualties and found targets that showed no evidence of military utility. The Commission was unable to draw conclusions in such instances on the basis of the information provided by NATO and recommends further investigations,” the authors wrote.

Human Rights Watch, another advocacy organisation based in the U.S., commended the report, particularly its conclusion that “international crimes, specifically crimes against humanity and war crimes, were committed by Qadhafi forces in Libya,” and agreed that further investigation into the NATO operation was appropriate.

“Human Rights Watch calls on NATO to investigate cases in which Libyan civilians died from its attacks during last year’s campaign… NATO took extensive measures to minimize civilian casualties and the number of victims is relatively low. But that does not lift the legal obligation to investigate questionable cases. NATO should also compensate the civilian victims of its campaign,” officials said in a statement last week.

The AI report emphasises a possible breach of the rules of international humanitarian law codified in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocol.

“Many of the specific rules included in these treaties form part of customary IHL and are thus binding on all parties to any type of armed conflict, including on armed groups. Violations of many of these rules can constitute war crimes. All of the principles and rules cited in this briefing are part of customary international law and are binding on all parties to an armed conflict,” according to the AI report.

Although the NATO mission has ended, the Security Council voted last week to extend its mission in Libya to assist its democratic transition with “a commitment to democracy, good governance, rule of law, national reconciliation and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The U.N. Humans Right Council is expected to release a resolution on Libya later this week.

Excerpt:

Kofi Annan (left) meets with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus. Credit: UN Photo/Reuters/SANA

By David Elkins
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2012 (IPS)

As Western governments reexamine their options for ending the ongoing violence in Syria, Kofi Annan, U.N.-Arab League special envoy to Syria, briefed diplomats Friday at the U.N. Security Council, who remain divided over whether a negotiated ceasefire or direct intervention will be necessary, or even feasible.

Annan’s assessment comes amid renewed pro-government protests in Damascus and escalated fighting in Idlib, a city in northwest Syria, where 45 people were reportedly killed on Thursday as the Syrian military continues its latest offensive to quell opposition groups.

The U.N. estimates that over 7,500 people have been killed since uprisings began last year, while the World Food Programme announced recently that 1.4 million Syrians are now “food insecure”. On Thursday, U.S. State Department officials said that Syria will receive 12 million dollars in humanitarian aid from the U.S.

Russia and China, permanent members of the Security Council, remain adamantly opposed to any form of intervention – as their recent vetoes over resolutions condemning violence in Syria can attest – as multilateral and bilateral diplomatic negotiations attempt to forge a consensus.

Authors of a policy memo published by the Brookings Institute on Thursday, a research organisation based out of Washington, argue that Russia is unlikely to cooperate in a final diplomatic settlement.

“The Russian track record of support for (Syrian President Bashar) Assad should lead Washington to assume that any effective action will have to take place despite, not because of, Russian policy. Washington would also have to judge whether more provocative measures like a maritime blockade would lead to a direct Russian challenge,” the authors wrote.

“Bypassing Russia, however, is not without its dangers. It risks embroiling the United States and its allies in a costly and dangerous Cold War-style competition along the strategically important Syria fault-line, or worse. Russia could continue to arm and fund the regime, enabling Assad to defy international pressure indefinitely,” the memo went on to say.

An International Crisis Group report released last week stressed the need for sustained diplomacy.

“If the proposed transitional plan addresses those concerns and gives Russia an important role in guaranteeing its implementation, it conceivably could be brought on board,” the report stated.

“Russia and other countries must understand that, short of rapidly reviving a credible political track, only an intensifying military one will remain, with dire consequences for all,” the report went on to say.

According to some analysts, however, U.S. officials have used Russian intransigence over Syria as political cover in order to avoid intervening – a policy for which Republican members of Congress and presidential candidates in the U.S. have been highly critical.

“The level of Russian-American recrimination over Syria has certainly increased dramatically,” Professor Mark N. Katz, a Russian foreign policy specialist at George Mason University, wrote on his blog last week.

“The Kremlin, however, may have several reasons to believe that the Obama Administration does not actually want to see the downfall of the Assad regime – and that Washington thus finds Russia’s opposition to Security Council resolutions against Syria, which the U.S. supports publicly, to be quite useful,” he wrote.

U.S. public opinion that is opposed to U.S.-led wars in the region, the historical failure of economic sanctions to coerce authoritarian regimes, and Israel’s fear of a highly destabilised political situation in Syria all point to the Barack Obama administration’s unwillingness to support a forceful removal of President Assad, according to Katz.

“For if the U.S. was serious about toppling the Assad regime, Russian observers have noted, it would assemble a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene in Syria without waiting for UN Security Council approval – just as it did in Kosovo during the Clinton Administration and Iraq during the Bush Administration,” Katz wrote.

After abstaining from a Security Council vote on Libya last year, Russian officials voiced strong displeasure over how Western nations implemented the NATO-led military campaign that eventually helped to depose Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi.

With its naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and weapons contracts with the Syrian military worth billions of dollars, Russia is a staunch ally of the Syrian government. Russian officials recently announced that they will continue to allow Syrian purchases of weapons.

A number of U.S. allies, most notably France and some of the Arab Gulf states, continue to call for Assad’s departure.

On Thursday, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, announced they would be closing their embassies in Syria.

Policymakers here have articulated a cautious approach that does not include plans for an intervention.

“Right now, we’re focused on getting humanitarian aid to those in need. We agreed to keep increasing the pressure on the regime – mobilising the international community, tightening sanctions, cutting the regime’s revenues, isolating it politically, diplomatically, and economically,” President Obama said in a press conference at the White House on Thursday with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

“(W)hen we see what’s happening on television, our natural instinct is to act. One of the things that I think both of us have learned in every one of these crises – including in Libya – is that it’s very important for us to make sure that we have thought through all of our actions before we take those steps,” Obama added.

According to a poll released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday, 64 percent of U.S. respondents are against a U.S. military intervention and 63 percent oppose sending weapons to anti-government groups fighting in Syria.

“In a way, if we were not in this phase of the election season…we might be moving very quickly toward military action in Syria,” Robert Kagan, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institute, said in a conference on Thursday.

“I think the president does not think that the American people want another military intervention now, and he’s not going to do it before the election…(U.S.) capacity to create a safe zone if we wanted to and carve it out using airpower in Syria is something we could do, but I don’t think the president is in the frame to do it,” Kagan added.

“(U)ltimately, the way the international community mobilises itself, the signals we send, the degree to which we can facilitate a more peaceful transition or a soft landing, rather than a hard landing that results in civil war and, potentially, even more deaths – the people who are going to ultimately be most affected by those decisions are the people in Syria itself,” President Obama said at the end of his press conference on Thursday.

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 14 2012 (IPS)

Less than a year since South Sudan’s independence, thousands of people in the region continue to face the stark realities of secession.

Ethnic clashes persist in South Sudan's Jonglei State. Credit: UN Photo/Isaac Billy

Among the areas most affected by the latest violence and food shortages are states on the border between Sudan and South Sudan. Thousands of civilians stranded in the Nuba Mountains of Southern Kordofan, a Sudanese province with a population close to 1.1 million, now face starvation – largely a result of the Sudanese government’s move to restrict international humanitarian relief agencies from accessing the most troubled areas.

The recent fighting has destroyed large tracks of farmland and crops essential for isolated populations in Sudan’s Blue Nile State and Southern Kordofan. According to U.S. officials, 250,000 people in the region are threatened by starvation.

“A vast humanitarian catastrophe is already underway, and there is no clear plan for either securing humanitarian corridors to these distressed populations in northern Sudan or for an appropriate pre- positioning of the food and non-food items that are critical,” Dr. Eric Reeves, an expert on Sudan, told IPS.

Earlier this week, over 200 people in South Sudan’s state of Jonglei were killed in tribal clashes that have accompanied months of sustained violence, including attacks by Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) on civilian refugee camps in South Sudan and in neighboring Ethiopia.

Close to 140,000 people have been displaced in the conflict, according to U.N. estimates.

Government officials in Khartoum have denied allegations of war crimes by claiming that the attacks are attributable to South Sudanese rebels and ethnic rivalries.

U.N. officials estimate that the near decade of conflict, including mass atrocities committed in Darfur, has left nearly 300,000 dead, and displaced over two million people.

Earlier this year, South Sudan signed an agreement with Ethiopia and Djibouti that will encourage partnerships focusing on economic and infrastructure development.

U.S. officials have strongly condemned the most recent spate of violence, but some critics of the administration’s policy argue that little progress has been made on the fundamental disagreements between the two nations.

“Going back to March 2009, when President (Barack) Obama appointed retired Air Force General Scott Gration as special envoy to Sudan, U.S. Sudan policy has been a shambles and deeply destructive of the chances for peace,” Dr. Reeves told IPS.

“To be sure, the Bush administration had let implementation of the (2005) Comprehensive Peace Agreement slide off its agenda. But the Obama people – including Gration, Clinton, Senator John Kerry, and presently Princeton Lyman – have compounded error with error, misjudgment with misjudgment.

“The ways are myriad, but they have consistently entailed a failure to understand the nature and ambitions of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime in Khartoum. The U.S. will bear heavy responsibility for the outbreak of all-out war that seems increasingly inevitable.” Reeves added.

The U.S. has reinstated trade sanctions on Sudan, but one component of the administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2013 is 250 million dollars in Sudanese debt forgiveness.

Senior U.S. officials continue to review the sanctions – a scenario made possible after the Obama administration decided to “de-couple” international justice and reconciliation efforts in response to the genocide in Darfur from negotiations over disputed territory.

Amb. Lyman and Nancy Lindborg, an assistant administrator at USAID, emphasised in congressional testimony on Wednesday that humanitarian workers were prepared for immediate relief operations if access were to be granted, and that diplomatic negotiations over a political settlement are continuing in earnest.

“If the government has opened up the area to international access, what we’re hoping is, that will lead not only to a quieting of the hostilities, but hopefully the atmosphere that political talks can start. That will change the atmosphere,” Lyman said Wednesday.

“There is a growing realisation in Khartoum that there isn’t a military solution to a problem and that simply going on with the fighting and facing the opprobrium of a humanitarian disaster is not in their interest…I hoping that we will get better news in the days ahead.” Lymon added.

Congressman Frank Wolf, having recently visited a refugee camp in South Sudan, introduced legislation last week that will focus on the humanitarian crisis there. A similar resolution was introduced in the Senate on Wednesday.

“We need to provide the Obama administration with all the tools and all the authority it needs to seek a comprehensive peace in Sudan, end human rights violations, and bring those guilty of crimes against humanity to justice,” Congressman Jim McGovern, a co-sponsor of the bill, said last week.

Both congressmen stated the bill would be a fitting dedication to the life of Congressman Thomas Payne, a fierce advocate for human rights and genocide prevention in the region, who died last week.

U.S. officials announced this week that a planned conference focusing on international investment opportunities in Sudan has been postponed because of President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir’s continued intransigence over humanitarian relief and ongoing violence.

While the African Union (AU) announced Wednesday that the governments of Sudan and South Sudan have agreed to a “framework” for settling disputes over citizenship, the most divisive issues remain unresolved.

President al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal, is scheduled to travel to South Sudan for the first time since its independence for additional negotiations over disputed borders and oil fees.

As negotiations carry on, Lyman noted that Khartoum’s resistance to a settlement has been indicative of the atmosphere of mistrust between Sudan, South Sudan and the international community.

“There’s a deep suspicion of the motives of the international community and they see this as ‘we’re not going to go down that path again, we’re going to keep our country together, even if we have to do it militarily.’ So it’s taken a lot of time and effort to say look, you’re looking at it wrong way, and you’re looking at it in a way that will hurt your own interests,” Lyman said on Wednesday.

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

The Syrian military has placed anti-personnel mines along its borders with Turkey and Lebanon, which have provided asylum for a large number of civilians fleeing the crackdown on year- long pro-democracy uprisings there, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Citing firsthand accounts from Syrian residents who witnessed troops laying the mines last week, Steven Goose, arms division director for the Washington-based HRW, strongly denounced the latest move by Bashar al-Assad’s government to quell resistance and prevent a mass exodus of Syrian citizens.

Anti-personal mines are notorious for civilian deaths and are considered to be ineffective tactical weapons.

“Any use of antipersonnel landmines is unconscionable…There is absolutely no justification for the use of these indiscriminate weapons by any country, anywhere, for any purpose,” Goose said in a press release Tuesday.

Syria is not a party to the 159-nation strong 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which “comprehensively prohibits the use, production, trade, and stockpiling of antipersonnel mines.”

“(There is) only one reason why Syria would want to plant anti- personnel landmines at its borders: to murder civilians trying to escape it. Truly horrific,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice tweeted on Tuesday.

The landmines appear to be the latest in a series of deadly tactics used by the Syrian government to prevent civilians from escaping. Over past weeks, several human rights groups, including Refugees International, have documented Syrian troops shooting civilians trying to flee besieged cities in Syria.

The U.N. estimates that nearly 230,000 people have been displaced since the uprisings began last year, with close to 30,000 having already fled to Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon.

The findings come as Western nations continue to grapple with the best policy approach toward ending the hostilities and providing aid for Syria’s most devastated populations – a task made more difficult by the contrasting political and strategic alignments of U.N. Security Council member states.

After Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution late last year that would have signaled a clear, unified message demanding that Assad stop the violence, step down, and work toward a peaceful transition, U.S. officials have ratcheted up diplomatic pressure to secure a binding resolution.

Last week, calls for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria intensified after Senator John McCain advocated air-strikes to precipitate a toppling of Assad’s government.

“Providing military assistance to the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups is necessary, but at this late hour, that alone will not be sufficient to stop the slaughter and save innocent lives. The only realistic way to do so is with foreign air power,” McCain told lawmakers on the Senate floor last week.

Senior U.S. military officials remain sceptical about the feasibility of an aerial bombardment.

In congressional testimony last week, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey said that the size of Syria’s conventional forces, its extensive, Russian-supplied anti-aircraft defence network, and its stockpile of chemical and biological weapons – one of the largest in the world – should all be cause for concern if policymakers decide to intervene.

Although the Barack Obama administration remains committed to a multilateral approach, in which any intervention would be predicated on international consensus, U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta said during the same Senate hearing last week that he had been instructed to draw up preliminary plans for strike, even as diplomatic negotiations continued.

During a U.N. Security Council meeting Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the she “took note” of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavorov’s call for a peaceful solution and an end to the violence.

However, in a veiled denunciation of Russia’s intransigence at the U.N., she stated that the growing death toll in Syria should be met, rhetorically at the very least, with firm resistance from the international community.

“(T)he United States believes firmly in the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all member-states, but we do not believe that sovereignty demands that this council stand silent when governments massacre their own people, threatening regional peace and security in the process,” Clinton said.

“And we reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self-defence.

“How cynical that even as Assad was receiving former Secretary- General Kofi Annan, the Syrian army was conducting a fresh assault on Idlib and continuing its aggression in Hama, Homs, and Rastan…The international community should say with one voice – without hesitation or caveat – that the killings of innocent Syrians must stop and a political transition must begin,” Clinton added.

After meeting with Assad over the weekend, Annan, the joint U.N.-Arab League special envoy to Syria, left Damascus without a conclusive agreement over a ceasefire or a plan for humanitarian relief.

“I’m expecting to hear from the Syrian authorities today since I left concrete proposals with them to consider, and once I receive their answer we will know how to react,” Annan said on Tuesday.

“We should put the interests of the people at the centre of everything that we do, and I know that the strong international community support, the whole world is coming together, is working with us to resolve this situation in Syria, and with goodwill and determination I am hopeful we will make progress,” Annan went on to say.

As the number of defections from the Syrian Army and government ministries increases, Syrian opposition parties, including the Syrian National Council, have yet to gain official international recognition as legitimate transitional authorities.

A small number of journalists reporting from inside Syria have indicated that Syrian public opinion is deeply divided over the pro- democracy protests. Assad has received firm backing from both Alawites and Christians, minority groups in Syria.

Turkey has announced that another “Friends of Syria” meeting will take place early next month, after a previous meeting held in Tunisia several weeks ago failed to garner much consensus over what action to take, if any.

Coming shortly after rebels were defeated in Homs, a bastion of regime opposition, the Arab League, in response to the most recent assault on Idlib, stated on Tuesday that President Assad’s government is responsible for crimes against humanity.

“We condemn the Syrian regime’s horrific violence against innocent civilians, and we are focused on the urgent humanitarian task of getting food and medicine to those in need,” President Obama and co- author UK Prime Minister David Cameron wrote in a Washington Post op- ed on Tuesday.

“With our international partners, we’ll continue to tighten the noose around Bashar al-Assad and his cohorts, and we’ll work with the opposition and the United Nations-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan to plan for the transition that will follow Assad’s departure from power.”

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

A new policy paper published earlier this week by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation documents a number of cases occurring over the past decade in which weapons and ammunition produced and financed by the U.S. have been used to kill unarmed Palestinians and U.S. citizens.

For many survivors of the last Israeli war on Gaza, time has not healed their wounds, physical or emotional. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

“U.S. weapons provided to Israel at taxpayer expense make the U.S. complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians living under Israel’s 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip and defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives of halting Israeli settlement expansion, ending Israeli military occupation, and establishing a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace,” Ruebner added.

Between the years 2000 and 2009, the U.S. transferred “more than 670 million weapons, rounds of ammunition, and related equipment”, according to the report.

During the same period, “Israel killed at least 2,969 unarmed Palestinians, including 1,128 children, often with U.S. weapons in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act and Arms Export Control Act.”

The Foreign Assistance Act, signed into law in 1961, stipulates that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Several U.S. administrations have sanctioned or withheld funding from countries, including Israel, that violated laws such as the Foreign Assistance Act. But according to the report, official inquires and investigations into U.S. military aid to Israel over recent decades have been met with growing resistance from groups both within and outside of the U.S. government.

Although more expensive weapons systems such as tanks and aircraft make up the bulk of purchasing contracts made between the Israeli government and U.S. manufacturers, small arms and ammunition purchases account for the largest number of deaths.

The report notes evidence that the Israeli Defense Forces load some of their guns with high-velocity tear gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets manufactured in the U.S. – a frequent culprit in deaths throughout the Palestinian territories.

“From fiscal year 2000 to 2009, the State Department licensed – and U.S. taxpayers funded – the delivery of more than 595,000 tear gas canisters and other ‘riot control’ equipment to the Israeli military, valued at more than 20.5 million (dollars),” according to the report.

In a 2007 memorandum of understanding, the U.S. pledged 30 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel between 2009 and 2018 – a 25-percent increase in average annual military aid over previous years. Israel will receive roughly 3.1 billion dollars in U.S. military aid for fiscal year 2012.

Speaking at a conference held at the Center for Palestine on Monday, Ruebner argued that, apart from the seeming contradiction of the U.S.’s pledge to protect human rights for everyone, military aid to Israel imperils U.S. strategic interests in the region.

It also defers much-needed U.S. tax revenues away from domestic programmes, and contributes to a positive feedback loop that conditions the fulfillment of U.S. goals in the region, such as a negotiated, two-state settlement, on even more military aid that, in turn, is used to continue the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, he said.

Citing data obtained for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and Census Bureau, the report places the quantity of U.S. military aid in a larger context.

“With the same amount of money that the U.S. gives each year to fund weapons for Israel, the federal government could instead fund affordable housing vouchers for 350,000 low-income families, or green jobs training for 500,000 unemployed workers, or early reading programs for 900,000 at-risk students, or primary health care to 24 million people without insurance,” according to the report.

“Far from being a strategic benefit to the U.S., (military aid to Israel) is actually a growing political, economic and strategic liability,” Ruebner said.

The release of the policy paper coincided with the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, in Washington that included speeches by senior U.S. government officials, including President Barack Obama.

U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta reaffirmed the U.S.’s security commitment to Israel, including financing for a missile defence and fighter-jet weapons systems in a speech at conference.

“This is an ironclad pledge which says that the United States will provide whatever support is necessary so that Israel can maintain military superiority over any state or coalition of states, as well as non-state actors,” Panetta told attendees.

On Monday, U.S. Congressmen Eric Cantor and Steny Hoyer introduced legislation that will “expand Israel’s authority to make purchases under the foreign military financing program,” and require the president to report to Congress on “actions to improve the process relating to Israel’s purchase of F-35 aircraft to improve cost efficiency and timely delivery”.

“Today, my friend Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and I are introducing legislation to reaffirm our enduring commitment to the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship and to ensure that threats to Israeli and American security will be answered with strength,” Congressman Cantor stated in a press release on Monday.

“It is a bond that reflects the shared values of our people and our shared interests in preserving stability in the Middle East…It is a reminder that support for Israel is not and should never be a partisan issue,” Congressman Hoyer added.

Ruebner emphasised several steps U.S. lawmakers could take to prevent additional human rights violations, most notably the enactment of laws that would leverage U.S. military aid to freeze Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and end the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Two days after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder outlined the statutory justifications for “targeted killings”, civil liberties groups here continue to question the legality of the Obama administration’s policy, particularly as it applies to the rights and very lives of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals.

The use of drones for targeted assassinations in Yemen and elsewhere has created a storm of controversy in the United States and beyond. Credit: Northrop Grumman/CC by 2.0

Holder argued that the distinction between due process – the right guaranteed to U.S. citizens that the government cannot deprive life without due process of law – and judicial process – the system of military courts used to try suspected terrorists during a time of war – was an important one.

“The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process… These circumstances are sufficient under the Constitution for the U.S. to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen abroad – but it is important to note that the legal requirements I have described may not apply in every situation,” Holder noted.

Although the Obama administration has stated publicly that its policy to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreign nationals allegedly involved with terrorist organizations does not fall outside of legal bounds, the actual decision-making process – how, when and under what circumstances – through which authority is granted remains classified.

The debate over targeted killings reignited in December 2011 when President Obama signed into law a bill that included language reaffirming the executive’s right “to use all necessary and appropriate force” in combating terrorism.

“We have had all of these arguments since 2010. They are inadequate,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specialises in international dispute, told IPS.

“This is the global war on terror with a new name – the same global war on terror that President Obama dismissed on the campaign trail” in 2008, O’Connell added. “The U.S. has always had a policy against targeted killing for legal, moral and strategic reasons. None of these reasons have changed.”

An increase in attacks – and in debate

Obama has doubled the number of drone attacks conducted by the previous U.S. administration in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The most notable case of officially sanctioned assassination came in September 2011, when a U.S. drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and senior operative of al- Qaeda’s affiliate organization in Yemen.

Since 2009, the number of civilian and militant deaths from such attacks has been hotly contested by government officials and outside groups.

Officials in the U.S. Department of Justice and intelligence agencies have declined to release government memos describing the justification and details of drone operations abroad, despite a recent motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the Freedom of Information Act for publication.

The speech is “ultimately a defence of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public,” Hina Shamsi, a specialist in national security issues for the ACLU, said in a statement on Monday.

She called the speech “a gesture towards additional transparency”.

International law

Holder also argued that certain legal principles “do not forbid the use of stealth or technologically advanced weapons”, such as covert operations and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, used to kill militants and foreign nationals suspected of posing an “imminent threat” to U.S. national security.

But the use of such methods has set controversial precedents that may violate international law, Laura Pitter, a specialist on U.S. counterterrorism policy for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“The reason it’s important to comply with international law is that there are standards that all countries use when applying lethal force so that countries like Russia and China, when they have these technologies, all apply the same standards,” Pitter explained.

While the speech provided the clearest insight to date regarding the administration’s legal framework for assassinations of U.S. citizens, Holder avoided detailing the implications of such a policy for foreign nationals.

“[The speech] deals with what would be justified for a U.S. citizen,” said Pitter. The fact that it didn’t address non-citizens leaves “little basis for determining whether the U.S. is meeting its legal obligations when it conducts these operations in regard to non-citizens,” she added.

“Each targeted killing that occurs takes place in different circumstances, and all of it is secret because it’s being conducted by the CIA…We’ve called for a long time for them to be conducted under military authority, which has greater transparency,” Pitter added.

The search for justification

Holder’s speech briefly touched on sovereignty issues related to the drone campaigns – a point of bitter disagreement between U.S. and Pakistani officials – and cited the fundamental legal principles guiding the use of force during wartime, including those of proportionality and humanity, statutes ostensibly put in place to avoid excessive “collateral damage” and “unnecessary suffering”.

“He mention[ed] a right to attack states that are ‘unable or unwilling’ to control criminality on their territory. There is simply no such right in international law,” Mary O’Connell, the Notre Dame professor, added.

As human rights groups and some Congressional leaders remain adamant that the White House publicly declare, in concrete terms, its assassination policy in a broader context that includes a legal justification for killing both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, drone operations continue in many countries around the globe.

“The most important point to note for this entire debate is how perverse and warped it is that we’re even having this ‘debate’ at all,” wrote Glenn Greenwald, a writer specialising in constitutional and civil rights, wrote Tuesday on his Salon.com blog.

“It should be self-negating – self-marginalizing – to assert that the president, acting with no checks or transparency, can order American citizens executed far from any battlefield and without any opportunity even to know about, let alone rebut, the accusations.”

Excerpt:

After weeks of political pressure from the U.S., Egyptian officials announced Wednesday that the remaining employees of two U.S. government-supported organisations facing a criminal investigation would be permitted to leave the country.

Although the indictments remain in effect, the decision casts light on the tenuous nature of non-profit and NGO work in Egypt and future levels of financial support from foreign donors.

The announcement comes on the heels of intense diplomatic maneuvering last week, including a U.S. delegation to Cairo led by Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI), an employer of several of the U.S. citizens now facing charges surrounding alleged involvement in illegally funded activities deemed harmful to the Egyptian state.

Sam Lahood, son of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Roy Lahood, is one of the 43 that are slated for trial.

Prominent among discussions between U.S. and Egyptian officials was the fate of Egypt’s roughly 1.5 billion dollars in U.S. aid appropriated for fiscal year 2012.

As negotiations between U.S. and Egyptian officials took place, three judges overseeing the indictments recused themselves after an announcement that the court would adjourn until Apr. 26, pending further inquiry. The recusal was an apparent protest by the judges to avoid perceptions of political meddling in the cases.

The charges stem from raids conducted by Egyptian officials in December 2011 that ended in multiple charges and confiscated property from offices of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and IRI – Congressionally-financed organisations officially tasked with “non- partisan” efforts in “democracy promotion”.

Since the 1990s, IRI has been implicated in a number of attempted coups d’etat abroad, including a successful Haitian coup in 1994.

Several lawmakers here greeted the news with a mixed sense of jubilance and foreboding.

“I want to recognise the efforts of the Egyptian interim ruling military government for making the right decision in facilitating the release of these American NGO workers,” Senator James Inhofe, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Foreign Relations, said Thursday.

“The U.S. must continue our strong military-to-military relationship with Egypt… I will continue to monitor the situation in Egypt closely and, should radicals highjack the democratic process, respond accordingly,” Inhofe added.

Earlier this year, U.S. lawmakers voted to make financial aid contingent on continued, verifiable political reform in Egypt.

Elliot Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the Bush administration’s National Security Council, cast the recent announcement as a small concession made by the Egyptian government in what he considers to be a series of egregious crackdowns on U.S. NGOs.

“(T)he government of Egypt has not said that promoting democracy and human rights is welcome, as it should be in any country seeking to build a democratic system, rather than considered to be a criminal offense… In fact, the situation of NGO staff may still be worse in Egypt 2012, ‘after the revolution,’ than it was under the Mubarak dictatorship.”

“If that turns out to be true, the Egyptian government should not be rewarded by a full renewal of our aid program,” Abrams wrote on his blog Thursday.

Some were more critical of the decision to lift travel restrictions.

“Erratic due process is blatantly irreconcilable with independent judiciary and genuine democracy,” Mohammad ElBaradei, former candidate in Egypt’s presidential elections set for May 2012, said in his Twitter feed on Thursday.

Despite the intensifying rhetoric from both U.S. and Egyptian officials about the role of NGOs in Egyptian civil society, thousands of organisations based out of Egypt that work on a spectrum of issues from public health to environmental protection have landed in the middle of a debate about foreign financing, the outcome of which may determine the feasibility of their work in the coming months.

Under current Egyptian law, organisations are barred from receiving foreign funding without official approval in what amounts to one of the world’s most restrictive set of statutes regarding foreign and domestic NGOs. Much is left to the discretion of Egyptian military authorities, particularly the Supreme Council of Armed Forces.

“Today’s action didn’t go far enough. We have been calling for changes in the unfair laws that oversee NGOs that really muzzle civil society. These are the old Mubarak regime rules and this just goes to show that Mubarak’s rules are still in play… The space for NGOs’ activity in Egypt is narrowed,” Geoffrey Mock, an expert on Egypt at Amnesty International, told IPS.

“The state of emergency has to go. If the state of emergency goes, if the associations law gets changed, there are things that can happen that can open Egypt to a new political future and there are still people in Egypt to make that happen,” Mock added.

Questioned on how the indictments will effect the U.S. State Department’s report on political in transition in Egypt – an assessment U.S. lawmakers will use to decide whether or not Egypt receives the Obama administration’s aid requests for this year – State Department Press Secretary Victoria Nuland avoided making a definitive appraisal.

“I am not going to speak to how the decisions will be made, when the time comes… We continue to want to see the NGO situation settled in a manner that allows all NGOs, our own, European NGOs, other international NGOs and Egyptian NGOs to be registered. We think that’s part and parcel of the democratic transition,” Nuland said on Thursday.

“Many Americans believed that Egyptians would welcome American democracy promotion efforts since there has been broad public support in Egypt for both democracy in general and the ouster of the anti- democratic regime of Hosni Mubarak in particular,” Mark Tessler, a professor of International Relations at the University of Michigan, said Thursday.

“But in fact, the survey we conducted in Egypt just this summer showed that a solid majority of the Egyptian public distrusts American foreign policy and this includes American democracy promotion activities in their country…

“However laudable their objectives – and in Egypt at least, however congruent with the goals of the vast majority of ordinary men and women – these groups will be viewed the way U.S. foreign policy is viewed, and in Egypt that view is not favourable,” Tessler added.

(END)

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

After weeks of political pressure from the U.S., Egyptian officials announced Wednesday that the remaining employees of two U.S. government-supported organisations facing a criminal investigation would be permitted to leave the country.

Although the indictments remain in effect, the decision casts light on the tenuous nature of non-profit and NGO work in Egypt and future levels of financial support from foreign donors.

The announcement comes on the heels of intense diplomatic maneuvering last week, including a U.S. delegation to Cairo led by Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI), an employer of several of the U.S. citizens now facing charges surrounding alleged involvement in illegally funded activities deemed harmful to the Egyptian state.

Sam Lahood, son of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Roy Lahood, is one of the 43 that are slated for trial.

Prominent among discussions between U.S. and Egyptian officials was the fate of Egypt’s roughly 1.5 billion dollars in U.S. aid appropriated for fiscal year 2012.

As negotiations between U.S. and Egyptian officials took place, three judges overseeing the indictments recused themselves after an announcement that the court would adjourn until Apr. 26, pending further inquiry. The recusal was an apparent protest by the judges to avoid perceptions of political meddling in the cases.

The charges stem from raids conducted by Egyptian officials in December 2011 that ended in multiple charges and confiscated property from offices of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and IRI – Congressionally-financed organisations officially tasked with “non- partisan” efforts in “democracy promotion”.

Since the 1990s, IRI has been implicated in a number of attempted coups d’etat abroad, including a successful Haitian coup in 1994.

Several lawmakers here greeted the news with a mixed sense of jubilance and foreboding.

“I want to recognise the efforts of the Egyptian interim ruling military government for making the right decision in facilitating the release of these American NGO workers,” Senator James Inhofe, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Foreign Relations, said Thursday.

“The U.S. must continue our strong military-to-military relationship with Egypt… I will continue to monitor the situation in Egypt closely and, should radicals highjack the democratic process, respond accordingly,” Inhofe added.

Earlier this year, U.S. lawmakers voted to make financial aid contingent on continued, verifiable political reform in Egypt.

Elliot Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the Bush administration’s National Security Council, cast the recent announcement as a small concession made by the Egyptian government in what he considers to be a series of egregious crackdowns on U.S. NGOs.

“(T)he government of Egypt has not said that promoting democracy and human rights is welcome, as it should be in any country seeking to build a democratic system, rather than considered to be a criminal offense… In fact, the situation of NGO staff may still be worse in Egypt 2012, ‘after the revolution,’ than it was under the Mubarak dictatorship.”

“If that turns out to be true, the Egyptian government should not be rewarded by a full renewal of our aid program,” Abrams wrote on his blog Thursday.

Some were more critical of the decision to lift travel restrictions.

“Erratic due process is blatantly irreconcilable with independent judiciary and genuine democracy,” Mohammad ElBaradei, former candidate in Egypt’s presidential elections set for May 2012, said in his Twitter feed on Thursday.

Despite the intensifying rhetoric from both U.S. and Egyptian officials about the role of NGOs in Egyptian civil society, thousands of organisations based out of Egypt that work on a spectrum of issues from public health to environmental protection have landed in the middle of a debate about foreign financing, the outcome of which may determine the feasibility of their work in the coming months.

Under current Egyptian law, organisations are barred from receiving foreign funding without official approval in what amounts to one of the world’s most restrictive set of statutes regarding foreign and domestic NGOs. Much is left to the discretion of Egyptian military authorities, particularly the Supreme Council of Armed Forces.

“Today’s action didn’t go far enough. We have been calling for changes in the unfair laws that oversee NGOs that really muzzle civil society. These are the old Mubarak regime rules and this just goes to show that Mubarak’s rules are still in play… The space for NGOs’ activity in Egypt is narrowed,” Geoffrey Mock, an expert on Egypt at Amnesty International, told IPS.

“The state of emergency has to go. If the state of emergency goes, if the associations law gets changed, there are things that can happen that can open Egypt to a new political future and there are still people in Egypt to make that happen,” Mock added.

Questioned on how the indictments will effect the U.S. State Department’s report on political in transition in Egypt – an assessment U.S. lawmakers will use to decide whether or not Egypt receives the Obama administration’s aid requests for this year – State Department Press Secretary Victoria Nuland avoided making a definitive appraisal.

“I am not going to speak to how the decisions will be made, when the time comes… We continue to want to see the NGO situation settled in a manner that allows all NGOs, our own, European NGOs, other international NGOs and Egyptian NGOs to be registered. We think that’s part and parcel of the democratic transition,” Nuland said on Thursday.

“Many Americans believed that Egyptians would welcome American democracy promotion efforts since there has been broad public support in Egypt for both democracy in general and the ouster of the anti- democratic regime of Hosni Mubarak in particular,” Mark Tessler, a professor of International Relations at the University of Michigan, said Thursday.

“But in fact, the survey we conducted in Egypt just this summer showed that a solid majority of the Egyptian public distrusts American foreign policy and this includes American democracy promotion activities in their country…

“However laudable their objectives – and in Egypt at least, however congruent with the goals of the vast majority of ordinary men and women – these groups will be viewed the way U.S. foreign policy is viewed, and in Egypt that view is not favourable,” Tessler added.

Excerpt:

In a much-anticipated speech on the Middle East and North Africa on Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama broadly outlined an ambitious set of U.S.-guided initiatives intended to reinforce economic and political prosperity, democratic reforms and, most emphatically, self-determination for the millions of protestors throughout the region who have taken to the streets over the past six months.

However, some analysts here were quick to characterise the speech as a recapitulation of earlier policy positions.

“[W]e have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals. The status quo is not sustainable. Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder,” Obama stated.

Decades of violent conflict, corruption and diminishing economic opportunities for millions have ingrained the perception – based on both fact and opinion – held by many in the region of the U.S. as being a complicit partner, if not sole instigator, in the perpetuation of such misfortunes: a perception that, since first coming to office, Obama tried to counter assiduously.

Some analysts argue that it was critical for the Obama administration to outline a shift in its regional policy.

“Moving more boldly – as President Obama did in his decision on the bin Laden raid – will lead to greater chances for progress and change in the region,” Katulis added.

Dr. Paul Pillar, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, argued that the speech failed to deliver an immediate shift in overall policy, but left room for some optimism.

“Most appetites – of those on different sides of the issues concerned – will be left unsatisfied by this speech. That is unsurprising, given the political realities with which the president has to work. But there was enough in the appetizer to raise hope that later – even if only in a possible second term, when Mr. Obama will never have to face re-election again – the president will serve up some real meat,” Pillar wrote in the nationalinterest.com blog on Thursday.

Since the uprisings began, two parallel themes that emerged along with that of the power of organic, peaceful and popular uprisings yearning for dignity, justice and political reform was that of the U.S. response, which received charges of hypocrisy, to the uprisings and Obama’s self-described pragmatic “country-by-country approach and that of the uprisings as presenting an opportunity for a dramatic change in U.S. policy towards the region.

“We have the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator,” Obama said.

The speech touched on human rights abuses in countries such as Yemen, where the Obama administration has backed a Gulf Cooperation Council- mediated dialogue with President Ali Abdullah Saleh; and in Bahrain, where the U.S. continues to support a dialogue between Bahraini opposition leaders and their government, which has used violence to suppress protests and arrested doctors providing aid to victims.

“The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail,” Obama said, referring to the protests in Bahrain.

President Obama took a tougher tone in acknowledging the intransigence of some the U.S.’s closest allies in the region in suppressing protests, but he did not put forth a clear set of consequences if governments continue such repression.

“[I]f America is to be credible, we must acknowledge that at times our friends in the region have not all reacted to the demands for consistent change — with change that’s consistent with the principles that I’ve outlined today,” Obama stated.

The central message in his speech was framed as an optimistic plan forward, rather than a retort to the criticism of the contrasts in U.S. policy in the region – full support, even military intervention in Syria and Libya compared to the negligible U.S. backing for political change in Bahrain and Yemen.

As Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington Friday and the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee gears up for its annual conference this weekend in Washington, Obama did not include any profound changes in policy with regards to the Palestinian- Israeli issue.

He stated that the U.S.’s focus will now be on Israeli security and, most significantly, pre-1967 borders for a Palestinian state rather than the controversial Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, the division of Jerusalem or the return of Palestinian refugees

Notably, however, he explicitly denounced the United Nations General Assembly vote on officially recognised statehood planned for September while remaining open to the recent Palestinian national reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, a group the U.S. considers to be a terrorist organisation.

The largest piece missing from the president’s speech was mention of Saudi Arabia – a historically strong U.S. ally that has articulated seemingly divergent policies than those of the U.S. in the regional uprisings.

“Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s policies have changed quite dramatically in the last couple of months,” Gary Sick, former member of the National Security Council under three administrations said on a PRI “To the Point” interview on Thursday.

“One hand we have enormous people-driven change in part of the Arab world and on the other, we have a really counter-revolutionary movement that is saying ‘we want nothing to do with any of this,'” Sick added.

Obama’s brief mention of Iran, centred on its past human rights abuses, the Iranian government’s role as an enabling ally of Syria and its alleged meddling in sectarian divisions in countries such as Bahrain – a shift from the U.S.’s concentrated focus in the past on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

Implicit, however, in his emphasis on self-determinism was that fact that the U.S., as has been the case since protests began, will wield little influence over the path that each uprising ultimately takes.

“[W]e must proceed with a sense of humility. It’s not America that put people into the streets of Tunis or Cairo – it was the people themselves who launched these movements, and it’s the people themselves that must ultimately determine their outcome,” Obama said.

Far from concluding the war on terror, both Western and Muslim-majority countries – many emerging or still embroiled in months of popular protests – will continue to face a threat from extremist ideology after the United States’ decade-long campaign to capture or kill Osama bin Laden has come to an end, most analysts say.

The U.S. will now position its tactical focus and key intelligence assets to defeat those members of al Qaida’s (AQ) network of global affiliates who remain elusive.

The hunt for bin Laden was costly, resulting in wars both in Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming the lives of over 100,000 civilians and 5,000 U.S. military personnel, and draining 1.3 trillion dollars from state funds since Sep. 11, 2001.

However, as President Barack Obama made clear in his speech on Sunday night, bin Laden’s death, while an important moment for U.S. morale, does not herald the end of the U.S. campaign against extremist ideology nor does it greatly reduce the potential for more terrorist attacks, according to analysts.

“He’s been a source of ideology and a symbol and those are roles that can be played by a dead man, as well as a live one… These [attacks] will happen regardless of bin Laden,” former CIA analyst Dr. Paul R. Pillar told IPS.

Since news of the death of al Qaeda’s figurehead broke over Washington Sunday night, there has been almost universal consensus that it will do little to strange the group’s operational capacity, given its decentralised leadership and diffuse bases of operation.

The most recent attempts on U.S. targets – Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s “underwear” bombing of a Detroit-bound commercial airliner and Faisal Shazad’s car packed with faulty explosives in New York’s Times Square – were attributed to the Yemeni-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and are highly indicative of this trend.

“External operations (AQ’s attacks against the West) are not likely to be impacted. [Bin Laden] really only got involved in ops planning to approve spectaculars, particularly those using a new means of attack or against a new target,” Leah Farrall, a former senior counterterrorism analyst with the Australian Federal Police, wrote on her blog, “All Things Counter Terrorism.”

“Second-tier leaders deal with external operations for the most part. Aside from communications disruptions (which do little to disrupt those already deployed) this section will continue on business as usual,” Farrall added.

While bin Laden’s death marks a significant loss for the organisation’s strategic guidance, its ability to coalesce and focus the energies of disparate extremist groups into terrorising on both a local and global scale, and in promoting its grotesque model of inspirational authority, according to some analysts, AQ’s organisational leadership is structured to allow others such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, AQ’s putative but far less capable heir-apparent, or Anwar al-Awlaki, AQAP’s chief of operations to continue attacks, albeit with less cohesiveness.

As recently as Apr. 30, in a bombing thought to have been perpetrated by AQIM, 16 Western tourists were killed in Morocco.

Along with other organisations that espoused violence as a means to create an Islamic utopia, using as religious justification various fundamentalist interpretations such as al-Wahhab and Egyptian born- Sayyid Qtub’s, AQ succeeded in exploiting particular world events beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s to elicit a violent response from a few hundred like-minded individuals – burdening, in the process, an overwhelming majority of Muslims who did not have, nor wanted to have any association with bin Laden’s violent variant of anti-imperialism.

Despite bin Laden’s questionable religious authority, he was extremely adept at melding political sentiments that stood up against the historical and modern legacies of Western imperialism, the Middle Eastern autocrats of pan-Arab nationalism – as well as Arab monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s birthplace – with messages of social justice for all Muslims and a incitement of jihad against Western targets throughout the world.

Since the U.S.’s failed attempts to kill bin Laden under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations – the 1998 missile attack on a compound near Khost, Afghanistan and the 2001 firefight in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region – the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command as well as other intelligence agencies have, in a frustrating, at points disappointing campaign, targeted AQ’s leadership with tenacious zeal.

President Obama stated in his announcement on Monday night that bin Laden’s death “should be welcomed by all who believe in human peace and dignity.” But his movement is far from being defeated wholesale.

The pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East have reiterated what has long been a formal rejection of the extremist narrative in the mainstream public opinion of Muslim-majority countries, and they indicate a further shift away from the latest version of fundamentalist revivalism – religious identity was but a peripheral component that motivated the forces for change in both Egypt and Tunisia.

“[E]ven before bin Laden’s death, analysts had begun to argue that al-Qaida was rapidly becoming irrelevant,” Richard A. Clarke, former counterterrorism coordinator at the National Security Council wrote in a New York Times op- ed on Tuesday.

“But such rejoicing would be premature. To many Islamist ideologues, the Arab Spring simply represents the removal of obstacles that stood in the way of establishing the caliphate. Their goal has not changed, nor has their willingness to use terrorism,” Clarke added.

Regardless of any continued threat AQ and its affiliates may pose, most would agree that Osama’s death will encourage the West, if only symbolically, to move away from its preoccupation with radical Islam and focus on the real concerns and aspirations in those countries where its existence has had the most devastating impact.

“It is time to declare extreme Islamism a failed ideology, renounce the culture of fear, and get on with the new world of Middle East politics,” Dr. Gary Sick, a regional expert wrote in his blog “Gary’s Choices” on Tuesday.