One of the kids from Deraa who scribbled a forbidden word
and whose arrest and beatings sparked the rebellion
P U L S E
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Heather Hodges
The following press release is from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Mark Weisbrot is co-writer with Tariq Ali of the Oliver Stone film “South of the Border“.
A declaration by the Ecuadorian government that U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges is “persona non grata” and must leave Ecuador as soon as possible should not come as a surprise, Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said today. Weisbrot noted that the expulsion follows recent troubling revelations in cables released by Wikileaks that describe U.S. government co-ordination with Colombia over a public relations strategy to attempt to link Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to the Colombian guerrillas the FARC.
“The Obama Administration doesn’t seem to know how to have normal diplomatic relations with democratic, left-of-center governments in the hemisphere,” Weisbrot said. He noted that there was a trend – well documented through U.S. government cables, funding disclosures, and other information – of attempts to undermine governments in Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, Venezuela, and other countries.
“They still haven’t restored ambassadorial relations with Bolivia, and can’t seem to find an ambassador for Venezuela,” Weisbrot noted. “Despite a much better media image, they don’t seem be doing any better than the Bush administration in the region.”
The Ecuadorian government’s announcement was in reaction to disclosure of comments Ambassador Hodges had made — in cables also recently released by Wikileaks — describing “widespread and well-known” corruption among the Ecuadorian National Police, and making specific allegations against the ENP commander. Reuters reported that “Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño told reporters he had not received a satisfactory explanation” from the Embassy regarding the cables.
Weisbrot noted that the Ecuadorian government would also have cause to be concerned about a March 27, 2008 cable from Bogotá, that was shared with the U.S. Embassy in Quito, revealing that “the [Government of Colombia] GOC plans to selectively leak information from FARC computers connecting Presidents Chavez and Correa and their Governments to the FARC over the next 4-6 weeks…” The cable notes that the Colombian government was providing the U.S. government with the hard drives, but “on the condition that we not release any information without first consulting with the GOC.”
The cable described how “the GOC plans to selectively provide intelligence from the computers to carefully chosen North American, Colombian, Spanish, and Latin media tied to specific themes”, with one of the proposed themes being “the FARC and President Correa”. There is no indication of U.S. government concern over the validity of these claims, which were based solely on information provided by the Colombian government.
The Ecuadorian government’s announcement follows other recent setbacks in U.S.-Latin American relations. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual resigned only two weeks ago following Mexican government outrage over cables, also released by Wikileaks, describing friction between Mexico’s army and navy, and tensions and poor co-ordination between various Mexican security forces.
Also just weeks ago, concurrent with the beginning of U.S. air strikes on Libya, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva conspicuously declined to attend a meeting between President Obama and former presidents of Brazil. Brazil’s government, like many in the region, has been outspoken in its opposition to the use of external military force in the Libyan conflict.
Israeli leaders can legitimately pop the Champaign cork and drink on the graves of the 1400 Palestinian martyrs who were massacred during the “Cast Lead” attack against the Gaza Strip population from December 2008 to January 2009.
The retired South African judge Richard Goldstone, who, at the request of the UN Council on Human Rights, had directed the commission investigating the events, which had concluded that war crimes, even crimes against humanity had been committed, had, in the end, retracted those conclusions.
As a Jew, and self-declared Zionist, Goldstone had thought that he would be safe from accusations of partiality or worse, anti-Semitism on the part of Israeli leaders when he submitted his report in September 2009.
He was wrong. On the strength of their impunity (because Goldstone’s report was not followed up by the UN or any of the powers which direct that organization, no pressure, much less sanctions, had been applied), Israeli leaders and their allies in the “Jewish communities” around the world launched fatwa after fatwa against Goldstone and banished him from the tribe as a “Jewish traitor.”
The pressure went as far as the inner circle of Goldstone’s family, for example refusing him the right to attend the Bar Mitzvah (religious ceremony marking the passage of a boy to adulthood) of one of his own grandsons.
At the same time, the Israeli propaganda machine had the impudence to accuse Goidstone of having served the South African Apartheid regime during the 1970s and 1980s ; a shameful lie. Goldstone had been one of the rare South African judges to publicly oppose the racist regime. And that during an epoch when Israel had been the number one ally of the White power structure !
So, the menaces and the slanders of Israeli propaganda have been rewarded today. In an article published on Saturday by the US daily Washington Post, Goldstone completely retracted himself and suggested that the report be thrown in the trash.
(To read Goldstone’s piece, in English, click on : <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini…) In that piece the old judge of lost honor said, in essence, that with “Cast Lead” Israel had only exercised her inalienable right to legitimate self-defense. Certainly Goldstone could not totally ignore the hundreds of civilian men, women and children massacred during the three weeks of horror. It was regrettable, he said, but Israel did not do it intentionally, and, as everyone knows, all wars have their inevitable technical errors and collateral damage. “It’s just bad luck !” In the end, if those responsible must be identified, for Goldstone that leaves only Hamas, accused of blindly firing home made rockets in the direction of Israeli territory, the damage from which was derisory compared to the death and destruction spread by one of the most powerful armies on the planet. In phase with the Israeli agenda and its propaganda in his exercise of the “repentant Jew” (and hailed as such since Saturday by Israeli politicians and Zionist commentators), Goldstone pushes the ignominy to the point of accusing Hamas of another, more recent crime (for which he has neither personal competence nor professional jurisdiction) ; the assassination of 5 members of the same family, including a 3 month old baby, in the Jewish settlement of Itamar in the West Bank. Responsibility for the Itamar slaughter during which the Fogel couple and their three children were stabbed to death in their sleep last month, has never been claimed, and has been denounced as a monstrous crime by all Palestinian parties, including militarized entities, such as the Ezzedine al Quassam Brigades, Al Qods and the Martyrs of Al Agsa. Three weeks after the events, the police inquiry, surrounded by secrecy, did not produce any charges, in spite of the terror (blockades, mass arrests) imposed on the Palestinian population surviving in the neighborhood of the Itamar settlement. Rumors about the interrogation of a Thai family working for the Fogels (Palestinian workers being prohibited form entering the Itama settlement, even as beasts of burden) continue to circulate without being either denied or confirmed on the Israeli side, where, on the contrary, there is talk of ADN tests on dozens of rounded up Palestinians. And for want of having found the real guilty parties, Israel is certainly capable of accusing others, preferably, of course, Palestinians. It would not be the first time that the grand Israeli diplomacy engaged in that type of exploit. When one sees how Israel succeeded in making Salah Hamouri plead guilty, when he had committed no crime, and inflicting 7 years on prison on the young Franco-Palestinian to teach him to renounce all ideas of resistance, one has no worries about the Israeli government’s capacity to find guilty parties… and even to stir up crimes in order to counter any menace of peace. Candidate for redemption, the Inspector Goldstone has, for his part, already found the guilty one. CAPJPO-EuroPalestine”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini…)
In that piece the old judge of lost honor said, in essence, that with “Cast Lead” Israel had only exercised her inalienable right to legitimate self-defense.
Certainly Goldstone could not totally ignore the hundreds of civilian men, women and children massacred during the three weeks of horror. It was regrettable, he said, but Israel did not do it intentionally, and, as everyone knows, all wars have their inevitable technical errors and collateral damage. “It’s just bad luck !”
In the end, if those responsible must be identified, for Goldstone that leaves only Hamas, accused of blindly firing home made rockets in the direction of Israeli territory, the damage from which was derisory compared to the death and destruction spread by one of the most powerful armies on the planet.
In phase with the Israeli agenda and its propaganda in his exercise of the “repentant Jew” (and hailed as such since Saturday by Israeli politicians and Zionist commentators), Goldstone pushes the ignominy to the point of accusing Hamas of another, more recent crime (for which he has neither personal competence nor professional jurisdiction) ; the assassination of 5 members of the same family, including a 3 month old baby, in the Jewish settlement of Itamar in the West Bank.
Responsibility for the Itamar slaughter during which the Fogel couple and their three children were stabbed to death in their sleep last month, has never been claimed, and has been denounced as a monstrous crime by all Palestinian parties, including militarized entities, such as the Ezzedine al Quassam Brigades, Al Qods and the Martyrs of Al Agsa.
Three weeks after the events, the police inquiry, surrounded by secrecy, did not produce any charges, in spite of the terror (blockades, mass arrests) imposed on the Palestinian population surviving in the neighborhood of the Itamar settlement.
Rumors about the interrogation of a Thai family working for the Fogels (Palestinian workers being prohibited form entering the Itama settlement, even as beasts of burden) continue to circulate without being either denied or confirmed on the Israeli side, where, on the contrary, there is talk of ADN tests on dozens of rounded up Palestinians. And for want of having found the real guilty parties, Israel is certainly capable of accusing others, preferably, of course, Palestinians. It would not be the first time that the grand Israeli diplomacy engaged in that type of exploit.
When one sees how Israel succeeded in making Salah Hamouri plead guilty, when he had committed no crime, and inflicting 7 years on prison on the young Franco-Palestinian to teach him to renounce all ideas of resistance, one has no worries about the Israeli government’s capacity to find guilty parties… and even to stir up crimes in order to counter any menace of peace.
Candidate for redemption, the Inspector Goldstone has, for his part, already found the guilty one.
CAPJPO-EuroPalestine
the poetry addressed him by some supporters
By VOLKER PERTHES
Published: March 30, 2011
BERLIN — In a brief address before Syria’s Parliament on Wednesday, President Bashar al-Assad declared that he was still for reform, but insisted that the first priority was to combat a “conspiracy” that was responsible for the bloody protests in his country. The speech came the day after the president dismissed his cabinet.
The speech was bound to disappoint those who had expected Assad to at least lift the emergency status and announce a new law on political parties. Changing the ministers is a meaningless gesture unless it’s followed by real reform. Assad mentioned the emergency law and the party law but insisted that he would not act under pressure — “haste comes at the expense of the quality of reforms.”
It’s a refrain that Syrians have heard too often. The idea of a new party law in particular has come up whenever the regime was under pressure — for example in 2000, after Assad took power, or in 2005, after Syria’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon. But the time has never been right.
I remember a meeting I had five years ago with Faisal Kalthoum, a professor of law and at the time a confidant to Assad, who proudly told me about a draft party law he and other members of a special committee had just finalized. (Kalthoum, who regarded himself as a reformer, later became governor of Dara’a and was in that position until he was fired after the first bloody crackdown.)
The new law, he told me at that time, would allow parties of various tendencies to be established. But there was no intention, he added when I asked, to change the Constitution, particularly Article 8, which states that the Baath Party is the “leading party in the society and the state.” In other words, parties could be freely constituted so long as they did not challenge the Baath’s monopoly on power. It is hardly necessary to add that Assad did not enact the law. The situation, other officials told me in subsequent years, “wasn’t yet considered ripe” for such a reform.
I would be positively astonished if Assad was prepared today not only to enact that law, but also to lift the state of emergency and rescind Article 8. He could make history with such moves, probably setting the stage for a step-by-step political liberalization in Syria — for which, I assume, a small window of time still exists. But I doubt he will do it.
This is mainly because Assad, in contrast to the image of him that some Western leaders have developed, is not a reformer. He can better be described as a modernizer. When he inherited power from his father in 2000 he set out to modernize the system — the economic and technological foundation as well as the political, security and bureaucratic elite on which he bases his power.
He allowed archaic economic and trade regulations to be shelved, private banks to operate, foreign investments to come in, mobile-phone companies to operate. And, starting with regional party leaders and governors, then ministers, and finally the top echelons of the security apparatus, he managed within only a couple of years to remove his father’s old guard and replace it with people loyal to himself.
In doing so, he gave Syria a more modern face and made some things work more efficiently, but he also made sure that the basic system — which relies on the heavy hand of the security services, on personal ties, and on a form of tolerated corruption that allows loyalists to enrich themselves — remained intact.
Initially, after his assumption of power, Assad encouraged a somewhat freer political debate. But in 2001, after a short-lived “Damascus Spring,” the regime cracked down on many of the intellectuals who had thought that it was really the beginning of a political opening. Many have been arrested repeatedly over the past decade.
To be fair, Assad has not relied only on repression and cronies. Unlike Hosni Mubarak or Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the relatively young Syrian leader did gain some real popularity. The regional situation has helped him, as he quite frankly admitted in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. He was extremely critical of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, rightly warned of chaos after an externally enforced regime change there, and gained a reputation for saying no to the United States.
He was compelled to withdraw his forces from Lebanon, but managed to make the best of it by opening up the economy in Syria, thereby reducing the reliance of Syrian businessmen on Lebanon, and gradually rebuilding Syrian political influence in Lebanon.
He denounced American and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, while making clear that Syria would not block a peace treaty with Israel. All this made him for a time one of the most popular heads of state in the Arab world, and, to the extent that it can be judged, at home.
This apparent popularity may have led him and his advisers to ignore the fact that even in Syria, many people were angry with a repressive regime, bad governance and blatant corruption.
In Syria, as in other Arab countries, there is a widely shared feeling, particularly among those between 20 and 30, that the regime denies them dignity and a fair chance to participate in politics and the economy. Offering cosmetic reforms now is likely to be too little too late.
Assad may find that while it was relatively easy to deal with intellectuals and activists, it is far harder to restrain an entire generation.
Volker Perthes is director of SWP, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, and author of several works on Syria and the Arab world.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 31, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.
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