Official: Saudis to back Sunnis if U.S. leaves Iraq
POSTED: 12:55 p.m. EST, December 13, 2006
• NEW: AP says White House rejects report on Saudi plan to act in Iraq if U.S. leaves
• Source says Saudi king "read riot act" to Vice President Dick Cheney about Iraq
• Saudi Arabia would support Sunnis in Iraq if the U.S. pulls out, the source says
• King Abdullah also is said to oppose talks between the U.S. and Iran
Adjust font size:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back the Sunnis if the United States pulls out of Iraq, according to a senior American official.
The official said the king "read the riot act" to the vice president when the two met last month in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
The New York Times first reported the conversation Wednesday, saying Saudi support would include financial backing for minority Sunnis in the event of a civil war between them and Iraq's Shiite majority.
Violence between the two sects has exploded in waves of revenge killings since February's bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
The White House dismissed the report.
"That's not Saudi government policy," press secretary Tony Snow said in Washington, according to The Associated Press.
"The Saudis have made it clear that they're committed to the same goals we are, which is a self-sustaining Iraq that can sustain, govern and defend itself, that will recognize and protect the rights of all, regardless of sect or religion," Snow said, the AP reported.
Cheney's November 25 visit marked his fourth trip to Saudi Arabia as vice president. An official with Cheney's office said the one-on-one meeting lasted two hours.
The Saudi king told Cheney that his country would be forced to step in and support "like-minded Sunni Arabs" if the situation in Iraq fell apart and the Sunnis' safety was in jeopardy, the senior U.S. official said.
The monarch said he would "intervene aggressively on one side absent an American presence," the source said.
The source said the king did not mean to imply that Saudi Arabia would support al Qaeda in Iraq, but rather tribal groups. However, some of those groups overlap with insurgents who are fighting Americans, the source conceded.
Saudi fears
The bipartisan Iraq Study Group that reported to President Bush and Congress said last week that money from Saudi citizens is funding Sunni insurgents in Iraq, although the Saudis may not know exactly where their money is going. (Watch how Saudis may be helping Iraqi insurgents )
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution said Saudi Arabia has a reason to take sides.
"They're terrified that Iraq is going to fall into civil war. They're terrified that civil war will spill over into Saudi Arabia. But they're also terrified that the Iranians, backing the various Shiite militias in Iraq, will come out the big winner in a civil war," Pollack told CNN.
However, the king's tough words to Cheney don't mean Saudi support for the United States is wavering, said Richard Murphy, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
"This has nothing to do with the Saudi-American alliance," Murphy said. "What it has to do with is the Saudi concern that we will quickly evacuate Iraq and that the Shia majority will take revenge actions against the Sunni."
In his meeting with Cheney, the Saudi king voiced strong opposition to talks between the United States and Iran, which has a majority Shiite population. The Iraq Study Group called for engaging other countries in the region, including Iran and Syria, in the search for solutions in Iraq.
According to the senior American official, the king told Cheney that Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, believed that talking to Iran was dangerous.
The Saudis are "nervous about giving Iran any more legitimacy or any more influence in Iraq," Murphy said.
"[Iraq is in] everybody's backyard -- Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran," he said. "And they all have interests, they're all watching each other very closely lest one get an undue advantage over the other. And it's going to take an extraordinarily skillful, wide-ranging regional diplomacy on America's part to cope with that."
A senior U.S. official said the conversation between Cheney and King Abdullah reflects the "anxiety about the situation" and the Saudi concern about being left "high and dry" if the United States leaves Iraq.
But the official said leaving Iraq is a "doomsday scenario" that will not happen because the United States isn't going to withdraw.
"We are not walking away from it," the official said.
CNN's Elise Labott, Kelli Arena, John King, Elaine Quijano and Zain Verjee contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/13/saudi.sunnis/
UN rights watchdog agrees Darfur mission
The United Nations Human Rights Council is to send a high:level mission to Sudan's Darfur region to probe claims of worsening abuses against civilians.
On Wednesday the 47:strong body approved a compromise proposal ? supported by Switzerland ? after a two:day emergency session.
The resolution expressed concern at the "seriousness of the human rights and humanitarian situation in Darfur" but stopped short of condemning the Sudanese government for widely documented atrocities.
The UN estimates that at least 200,000 people have been killed in the region since 2003 and more than two million others displaced.
Members did decide, however, to send a team of "highly qualified persons" appointed by the council president, along with the special rapporteur for human rights in Sudan. The mission is expected to hand over its report in March.
European countries had been holding out for a group of independent experts, whereas African countries just wanted to send diplomats to the region.
Speaking after the meeting, Switzerland's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Blaise Godet, said he was satisfied with the outcome. He added that the decision proved the council was capable of speaking with one voice.
"I am relieved, because if the council had not been able to send this message regarding one of the worst humanitarian crises, it would have diminished its reputation," he said.
The dispatch of five people representing the five regional groups was a "good compromise", he added.
Non:governmental organisation Amnesty International, however, called the decision a "lukewarm" response to the dramatic events in Sudan, calling it a "timid" text that did not recognise the Khartoum government's responsibility.
"Nightmare"
Speaking at the opening of the special session on Tuesday, UN Secretary:General Kofi Annan called for an immediate end to the "nightmare" in Darfur.
"The people in Darfur cannot afford to wait another day. The violence must stop. The killings and other gross violations of human rights must end," he said.
Godet, who also addressed the meeting, described the situation in Darfur as "alarming and intolerable".
The Swiss ambassador, who is vice:president of the council, said the Sudanese government had a duty to protect the population and to bring those responsible for crimes to justice.
It was the first time that the six:month:old council, which stems from a Swiss initiative, had devoted a special session to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
Members finally voted to do so last month following heavy criticism from Annan, who accused the council of simply focusing on the Arab:Israeli conflict.
Skilful manoeuvring by Arab and Muslim countries ensured that all three previous special sessions were on the Middle East. The Darfur debate was seen as important test for the credibility of the council.
swissinfo with agencies
http://www.nzz.ch/2006/12/13/eng/article7347349.html
The Playground & The Nukes!
December 13, 2006 06:21 AM
As a barrage of Israeli attacks hit Ehud Olmert over jeopardizing “Israel’s policy of ambiguity” on its nuclear weapons, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares in Tehran that Israel will “soon be wiped out.”
Just in case this is not enough to freak out the West, he convened a conference to discuss whether the holocaust is true or false.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal of no “ambiguity” is the reason why Iran is in a hurry to acquire the bomb, and is also
a pretty good reason why Arabs may rush to get that tool that achieves a reverend respect and security like no other. The sooner the better, that is before the Arab World finds itself sandwiched between the Israeli and Iranian bombs.
Last week Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Meqren Abdul Aziz warned at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Regional Security Summit in Bahrain that "this will also force moderate countries in the region that adopt a WMD-free policy to establish clandestine or declared nuclear programs to defend their interests and create a military balance."
That is especially the case after the USA lost its power of deterrent by failing miserably in Iraq and due to a consensus that further military adventures in the region are impossible.
The Arabs had attempted time after time to get international backing that would force Israel to declare its nuclear weapons and sign on to relevant agreements, but the affairs of the spoiled child of the West including its weapons of mass destruction is a taboo that no nation can mess with.
Every year at the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the Arabs make an attempt, and every year they fail. And every time an attempt at stopping the nuclear race fails, the prospect of “threatened nations” joining the race increases.
The only place were the Arabs are humored is the UN General Assembly that has passed many non-binding resolutions calling for a “nuclear-free Middle East.” But enjoying the support of the vast majority of the world is not enough. You need nuclear weapons to sit on the Security Council before you can be effective towards a nuclear-free region!
Olmert, who must not want to enter history as the Israeli premiere who brought about the demise of the “policy of ambiguity” rushed to rebuild ambiguity. Of course he said that the statement he made in Germany is not a declaration that Israel has nuclear weapons.
The statement was: "We have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"
Because he is a realist who knows what is hilarious and what is just not funny, he made a declaration that creates an ambiguity that didn’t exist before: Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the region, he said.
Since Israel is a nuclear power, does that mean there are others who have the bomb, or is he just telling us that his state of never-ending aggression does not intend to be the first to use them?
Now this is ambiguity. If another state in the region had the bomb, why does it choose to be an underdog? If he is talking about intention to push the trigger first, did he just forgo Israel’s option of a pre-emptive strike; the reasoning behind having the bomb?
Meanwhile, whereas Israel’s nuclear danger is an imminent threat to Iran and others, Iran that had exhausted all diplomatic channels to try get the USA into a dialogue that would avert ongoing hostilities had failed because it doesn’t have the bomb. North Korea enjoys a dialogue with the USA because it does.
In the standoff between the USA and Iran, the whole Middle East has been turned into a ticking bomb. Today Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine are a playground for the grand face-off between the USA and Iran, if we exclude Afghanistan for the sake of keeping the issue in the region.
Iran which has not acquired the weapon yet, achieved a veto power in the three countries of interest to the United States and its Israel; a veto power Iran would like to eventually enjoy at the Security Council where it is best exercised. Meanwhile exercising anywhere against the USA is the only option.
Iraq is occupied by the USA, yet Iran enjoys such influence even over America’s allies in the country that it is much more effective and practical to make a decision in Tehran than Washington DC on the future of Iraq.
Lebanon is being run by US allies, but the country is on the verge of a civil war if Iran’s own allies are not granted a veto power over all important decisions of the government. Even without a civil war erupting, the ongoing mass demonstrations in Lebanon have brought the country to an unnatural freeze of life; veto power again.
By finally managing to adopt Hamas which resulted in a political deadlock on the Palestinian front, any future Palestinian action including civil war would require Iran’s prior blessings.
To show how rewarding an adoption is to the child, Iran just promised Hamas a further $100 million in addition to the $120 million it has already dispatched, and Hamas which had never enjoyed Iranian support in the past, decided to pick up its eggs from this and that basket and place them all in Tehran.
This is the fault of the US Administration in Washington DC that has always been too confident and arrogant to realize the dangers of its dim-witted foreign policy. Even after its grand project failed in Iraq, and against the advice of friends and foes, the George Bush administration has not yet budged towards dialogue.
If the USA and its allies think that economic sanctions against Iran is going to stop it from acquiring the bomb or keeping the region on fire, they are deluding themselves and taking the world into an even more explosive territory.
The USA must engage in a direct respectful and sincere dialogue aimed at normalizing relations with Iran immediately because for as long as Iran is dealt with as a rogue state, it will continue to defend its interests and ready itself for the future by acquiring whatever weapons it can get its hands on; including local players like Hamas who are happy to keep their country a playground for Iran and the USA to have their match.
http://www.arabisto.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogEntryID=253
Home Depot to Acquire Home Way, Enter Chinese Market (Update7)
By Mark Clothier
Dec. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Home Depot Inc., the largest home- improvement retailer, will enter the Chinese market after agreeing to purchase a chain with 12 stores in six cities.
Home Way, China's fourth-largest home-improvement chain, has locations in Tianjin, Beijing, Xi'an, Qingdao, Shenyang and Zhengzhou. The stores will be renamed Home Depot, the Atlanta- based company said today.
Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli said in June 2004 Home Depot would enter China, the world's most populous country with more than 1.3 billion. The company is seeking sales in new markets as Americans purchase houses at a slower pace and spend less on home improvements. Smaller rival Lowe's Cos. begins its international expansion, in Canada, next year.
``This shows that, relative to Lowe's, they're looking further out and looking for longer-term growth channels,'' said Keith Davis, a Washington-based analyst with Farr Miller & Washington LLC, which owns 250,000 Home Depot shares among the $540 million it manages. ``It's one of the reasons I like Home Depot more.''
China's government approved the purchase, which is expected to be completed by 2007. Home Depot will compete with Kingfisher Plc in China's do-it-yourself market.
Home Depot shares gained 29 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $38.99 as of 1:57 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have dropped 3.7 percent this year, trailing the 13 percent increase for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.
`What Works'
``The challenge in China is staying true to what works for us,'' Nardelli, 58, said in a September interview. ``What works for us, whether it was in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, or HD Supply, is buy and build. We want to make sure that if we buy a platform that it has the ability to expand.''
Home World Group, the parent of Home Way, has sought to raise money after expanding and the delay of an initial public offering. Financial terms of the purchase weren't disclosed. Home Way annual sales are about $400 million, Alan Rifkin, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, wrote in a research note today.
China, the world's fastest-growing major economy, expanded 10.2 percent in 2005, creating higher wages and purchasing power for consumers. Demand for property and home-improvement services soared after the government ended its welfare housing system in 1998 and encouraged people to buy homes using bank loans.
2004 Rule Change
China opened its markets to foreign retailers in 2004 by allowing ownership of Chinese companies without a local partner.
``China is on the verge of a massive expansion,'' said Bryan Roberts, an analyst at Planet Retail, a London-based consulting firm. ``There is a burgeoning middle class that is increasingly happy to spend money on their homes.''
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, wants to double its stores in China by taking over supermarket operator Trust-Mart for about $1 billion, a person familiar with the proposal said in October. Wal-Mart operates 66 stores in 34 Chinese cities and plans to open 20 more this year.
Home Depot's contractor services, which lets shoppers buy carpet, tile, countertops or cabinets, and pay Home Depot to manage installation, is a significant growth opportunity in China, Annette Verschuren, president of Home Depot Canada and China said in an interview.
Big Business
``It's very strong,'' Verschuren, 50, said. ``When you look at how people renovate homes, they get a cement box and finish it completely. There's a big, big contractor business.''
Farr Miller's Davis doesn't expect China to add much to Home Depot's profit soon.
``I wouldn't expect to see any positive accretion to the bottom line from China for at least five years,'' Davis said. ``It's going to take a long time to become entrenched in that market. But it does show management is taking a long-term focus.''
Home Depot entered Canada in 1994 and has about 143 stores there. It is Canada's largest home-improvement retailer, with annual sales of $4.3 billion, and also is Mexico's biggest.
The relationship between Home Depot and Home Way goes back about a decade. Home Depot helped train some of Home Way's executives, which helps explain why Home Way stores resemble Home Depot's.
In June 2001, Home Depot expanded into Mexico, buying the four-store Total Home chain. A year later, it purchased Del Norte's four stores and began building outlets. It acquired a 20-store chain in May 2004 to almost double its size and enter Mexico City, the largest city in North America. Home Depot operates 57 stores in Mexico.
Verschuren, who joined Home Depot a decade ago, will divide time between the operations in Canada and China. She speaks English, Dutch and French. She doesn't speak Mandarin yet.
``I'm going to start taking lessons,'' she said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aoBagpylSitw&refer=home
raq violence sparks exodus to Syria
By Chris Morris
BBC News, Damascus
More and more families are leaving amid escalating violence
On the desert border between Syria and Iraq, a group of tents clings to the shifting sands. This is a desolate place at the best of times.
Now it has become an unwanted home to more than 300 Palestinian refugees. They fled from violence in Baghdad seven months ago, only to get stuck in no-man's land.
As Palestinians, they do not have proper passports - so Syria will not let them in; and it is too dangerous to go back into Iraq.
Amin Ramadan left his neighbourhood and his elderly mother when sectarian violence made it too dangerous for him to stay. Now he is trapped again.
"It's getting really cold here at night," he said. "We have to break the ice on top of the water in the mornings. Many people are sick. We can't stay here for a long time."
The United Nations is providing basic food and shelter, and the Syrians grant temporary access to urgent medical cases. But it is a bleak situation.
And while the Palestinians say they would like to go to Europe or Canada, there is hardly a queue of countries willing to help.
"We're desperately trying to find a more durable solution," admits Laurens Jolles, the UNHCR representative in Damascus, "to find someone prepared to take them in. The least favoured option is for them to remain in limbo between two countries."
'Everyone is leaving'
But as sad as it is, the dusty Palestinian camp is just a small statistic - part of a mass movement of people, an exodus from Iraq.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 as many as two million civilians searching for sanctuary have fled into neighbouring countries like Syria, Jordan and Iran.
They are ill-equipped to cope. The pressure group Refugees International calls it the fastest growing humanitarian crisis in the world.
Just up the road from the stranded Palestinians, the Syrian border crossing at al-Tanaf feels like a safe haven for Iraqis who make it this far.
Cars and trucks are packed with possessions. But for most people, escaping into exile, the future is uncertain.
"I'll find a place to stay, anywhere I can afford," Mohammed Abu Muhy says. "Everyone is leaving Iraq."
And they bring everything they can carry. Expressionless faces look on as border guards rummage through their worldly goods.
The numbers are staggering - at least three quarters of a million Iraqis have fled to Syria alone. And every month the rate of arrival is higher than it has been before.
'No-one's helping'
Many people head to the capital, Damascus, slowly changing the character of entire neighbourhoods.
In Sayida Zeinab, out towards the city's airport, the music blaring from loudspeakers in the market comes from Iraq. And posters on the wall back the Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr.
They took my house, they killed my father and my two brothers. I had no choice - there is only death in Iraq.
Refugee Nathir Rahim
Jalil Abu Mohammed arrived here a month ago with his wife and four children. He wants to buy a small food stall, but he cannot afford it. It is a familiar story.
"I must find a job in order to survive and to stay here," he tells me. "I simply have to. We sold everything we had back in Iraq and came here with our families. We sacrificed everything - houses, furniture, everything we owned."
As we talk, a crowd quickly gathers around us. Nearly all of them are from Iraq. Everyone is careful to thank the Syrian regime, but they are close to despair.
"Look at these children," Anwar says. "What have they done wrong? I can't begin to describe to an outsider what's really happening inside Iraq."
"No-one's helping," he adds angrily, "not the Arab countries, nor the western countries. It's all lies. The whole thing is lies."
Voting with their feet
The latest arrivals from Iraq register at the Damascus office of the UN refugee agency. Tens of thousands need urgent financial or medical assistance, or trauma counselling.
A growing number of Iraqis are in the Syrian capital
But who is prepared to pay to help them?
"The funds we have at the moment are not sufficient," says Laurens Jolles. "We are asking for more, we're approaching individual countries to contribute. This is quite a small office and in no way capable of dealing with the numbers that are here."
But still they come. Nathir Rahim is sitting at a café in what's become known as the Street of the Iraqis. It is Baghdad in exile, just a few minutes drive from the centre of Damascus.
"They took my house," Nathir says, "they killed my father and my two brothers. I had no choice. There is only death in Iraq."
And there is a knock-on effect in Syria as well. People see what is happening in Iraq and many draw their own conclusions. If this is what the promise of western-style democracy brings, they argue, then we are happy with the system we have.
Some see the situation as a choice between stable authoritarianism in Syria, and dangerous, frightening chaos and violence in Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have already voted with their feet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6172123.stm
Sunni Militants Issue Religious Edicts in Mosul
Terrified residents are forced to comply with puritanical Islamic laws as insurgents tighten their grip on the city.
By Yasmin Ahmed in Mosul (ICR No. 205, 9-Dec-06)
Scattered stones are the only remnants of a famous statue that stood in a Mosul square, in the northeastern part of the city. The sculpture in the al-Zihour area used to show a group of women carrying jars on their shoulders, before insurgents reduced it to dust last month.
The campaign against the public display of what they see as non-Islamic art is part of a wider operation by Sunni insurgents to try to establish an Islamic state in Iraq. As a stronghold of Sunni insurgents, about 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, Mosul is the intended capital of this so-called Islamic Emirate, comprising the provinces of Salahaddin, Anbar, Diyala, Baghdad and parts of Wasit and Babel.
To implement their agenda, the extremists have set up what they describe as a ministry of war that issues leaflets and announces campaigns, such as the one launched in November against public statues, which they claim were symbols of paganism.
Over the past few months, Mosul has been one of the most volatile cities in Iraq. Militants have conducted suicide attacks, planted roadside bombs against Iraqi and US troops and assassinated police officers, translators and journalists. Local authorities have been forced to impose a curfew.
The statues under threat were erected in the city during the 1970s and include those of ancient artists such as the Arab poet Abi Tammam and the singer of religious songs Mullah Othman al-Mosulli.
Brigadier-General Sa'eed Ahmed al-Juburi, a spokesman for Mosul police, told IWPR that “a group of foreign terrorists” had planted bombs under the destroyed statue during the curfew.
He says he’s dumbfounded by the destruction. “Do these statues work with police? Were they translators for the Americans or members of the dissolved Ba’ath party?” he asked. “Those terrorists are a bunch of idiots.”
Extremists have started to interfere in all aspects of daily life in Mosul. A recent leaflet called upon owners of clothes shops to cover the heads of manikins on display.
Many have complied with the demands, covering the figures with plastic bags. Shopkeeper Mutaz Ahmed, 30, protested, “I don’t know where these groups came from. They want to take us back 1400 years. But if you want to stay alive, you have to obey their orders.”
Several public baths have been forced to close after extremists banned the use of soap, claiming that it didn’t exist under the reign of the Prophet Mohammed 1400 years ago.
The leaflets prescribe in detail how to live, eat and behave, according to ultra-conservative Islamic principles. Some orders seem rather absurd, such as banning restaurants from preparing a mixed salad of cucumbers and tomatoes because one is male and the other female.
But people are taking them seriously out of fear. Khalaf Khalid, who runs a restaurant, has started to serve tomatoes and cucumbers in separate dishes. “We obey them because they threatened to blow up the restaurant and kill us if we didn't,” he said.
“They dictate even the way we eat. Tomorrow, they will even dictate how we sleep with our wives. It’s unbearable and the government should do something about Mosul.”
Even the city’s Christian minority is not spared the Islamists edicts, with women compelled to wear long Islamic dresses and headscarves.
Christian lawyer Elizabeth Ramon, 30, recalls how Islamists stopped a relative of hers and poured burning acid on her skirt. They pulled her by her hair and threatened to behead her next time they caught her without a long skirt.
“It is going from bad to worse,” said Ramon. “All my relatives have left Iraq, and we will join them before we lose our lives at the hands of these extremists.”
Speaking from his prison cell, Mohammed Taha, one of 68 militants arrested in October for an attempt to overthrow the local authorities, told IWPR that the main aims of his group was ending the US occupation; bringing down the current government; and implementing Sharia law.
Azhar Abdul-Hamid, assistant professor of education at Mosul University, believes that the extremists are largely poorly educated, ignorant people who don’t understand Islam or the Koran.
“They never read a book and use Islam to denounce good Muslim people, ” said Abdul-Hamid.
In a city seemingly ruled by extremists, the University of Mosul has emerged as a rare enclave of freedom. There, female and male students talk freely to each other, and no violence or threatening behaviour has been reported.
Mayada Akram, a student at the College of Economics and Administration, calls the extremists “stone-headed Islamists” who want women to wear the hijab, stay at home and raise children. “We are going backward hundreds of steps a day.”
For Salim Abdul-Baqi, a social researcher at a women’s centre in Mosul, the extremists “believe in the Islam of an era when people were living in caves” and cannot cope with modern life. He accuses them of double standards, “Why do they drive new cars instead of riding camels used [at the time of the Prophet Mohammad]?”
Khalid Ahmed, a police officer investigating the militants’ actions, says that they intend to blow up the famous Al-Hadba minaret, one of Mosul’s ancient landmarks. On a recent visit to Mosul, the Iraqi deputy prime minister Salam al-Zawbai warned them not to touch the landmark. He promised residents that the government would use “an iron fist” against those who tried to destabilise Iraq.
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=icr&s=f&o=326015&apc_state=henh
Eastern Sudan: A Forgotten Crisis
While the world’s attention is fixed on the Darfur killing fields, eastern Sudan struggles to cope with nearly 200,00 displaced people.
By Ayesha Kajee in Johannesburg (AR No. 87, 13-Dec-06)
If Darfur, Sudan’s neglected westernmost region, is the Cinderella of the country, then eastern Sudan must be its ugly stepsister.
Subjected to similar levels of marginalisation by the Khartoum government as Darfur, and a virtual absence of social service infrastructure, the humanitarian crisis in the east may be even worse than that in Darfur, according to some diplomats and aid workers.
Eastern Sudan, a vast sun-blasted terrain of some 300,000 square kilometres, is home to between 3 and 4 million of Sudan’s poorest people.
The region has gold mines and gas reserves, and the east coast city of Port Sudan is essential for the export of the “black gold” (crude oil) to China and India that is the country’s main revenue earner. But the per capita income in some areas is as low as 25 US cents a day. Since the World Bank’s international poverty line categorises people living on less than one US dollar a day as being extremely poor, the inhabitants of eastern Sudan must rank among the most abjectly impoverished citizens on the globe.
While the world’s attention is fixed on the Darfur killing fields and the plight of Darfur's refugees, the three eastern Sudanese states of Kassala, Red Sea and Gedaref together host about 74,000 internal refugees - called IDPs, internally displaced persons, by bureaucrats - and more than 110,000 refugees from neighbouring Eritrea and Ethiopia.
A number of refugee camps are so poorly resourced that they do not even have plastic tarpaulin to serve as shelter from the elements. Some refugees who fled to Sudan to escape recurrent warfare between Eritrea and Ethiopia have lived here in limbo for between two and four decades - a plight that the United Nations this year called “one of the ten most under-reported stories on earth”.
The region has been subject to a low-intensity rebel insurgency over the past eleven years. The eastern rebels have had similar complaints to those in Darfur and southern Sudan - marginalisation and neglect - and their demands are similar too: they want greater power sharing and a larger proportion of the profits from Sudan’s oil wealth.
Until recently, the Khartoum government’s response to rebel strikes has been, as in Darfur, counter-insurgency by the Sudanese army and affiliated militias. The fighting has forced thousands from their homes in relatively fertile areas to camps in desert-like, drought-stricken areas.
Eritrea has armed and provisioned the eastern rebels in retaliation for Khartoum’s support of Eritrean rebel groups. Most of the rebels are Beja herdsmen who wage hit-and-run attacks against government soldiers from the backs of their camels.
The eastern rebels have also received support from the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, SPLM, in the far south and the Justice and Equality Movement, JEM, which is one of the main rebel groups in Darfur.
After the signing of the north-south Comprehensive Peace Agreement, CPA, in January last year - painstakingly negotiated to end decades of conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south - the Eastern Front, a coalition of rebels from the two largest ethnic groups in eastern Sudan, intensified their protests in anger at their exclusion from the agreement.
Sudanese government forces gunned down 27 peaceful demonstrators in Port Sudan last January, sparking an international outcry. The government also incarcerated rebel leaders without charge and allegedly tortured them, suspended humanitarian access, closed the border with Eritrea and imposed a state of emergency in an attempt to limit rebel activity.
The attempt proved misguided and backfired. Rebels stepped up attacks on such strategic government installations as the 1500-km Chinese-built oil pipeline which pumps 500,000 barrels of oil from the centre and south of the country to Port Sudan each day. Facing so much pressure from the Darfur conflict and preoccupied with handling the infant and fragile peace in the south, Khartoum needed "to put out this [east Sudan] fire”, said Ahmed el-Amin Terik, an adviser to one of the eastern state governors. "It wasn't like the eastern rebels were so much of a threat. But even a mosquito doesn't let you sleep." The fighting in the east is estimated to have cost some 5,000 lives in the last ten years, compared with hundreds of thousands in Darfur and the south.
Conversely, the rebels realised that the planned withdrawal of SPLM troops and weapons from the east, under the north-south peace deal, would weaken their support base. Eritrea, desiring better relations with Sudan, hosted peace negotiations in Asmara, which culminated in the signing of a peace agreement between the Sudan government and the Eastern Front in mid-October 2006.
Under the agreement, a ceasefire was called and the eastern rebels got a presidential aide, several state ministers and members of parliament appointed from their ranks. It also guarantees that about 600 million dollars will be spent on health and water programmes for eastern Sudan over the next five years.
But the Sudan Human Rights Organisation, while welcoming the accord, expressed concerns that it “maintains the political hegemony of the ruling National Congress Party [in Khartoum] and doesn’t provide sufficient funds to develop the region”. Just as the May 2006 Darfur peace accord is routinely ignored by all its signatories, it is unclear as yet whether the eastern agreement will manage to stabilise eastern Sudan.
More than half a century of underdevelopment and neglect will take decades to reverse and will likely require billions of dollars. The infant mortality rate in Red Sea state is the highest in the country. Only 20 villages in there and 50 in Kassala State have access to healthcare. Half of Kassala State’s population is chronically malnourished. Towns such as Tokar in Red Sea State are prone to both drought and summer floods, with more than 30,000 people affected by flooding this year alone.
In some regions, the literacy rate is as low as three per cent, a situation exacerbated by the conservative Muslim culture which predominates in the region and restricts education for women.
Religion is what brings the two parties in the Eastern Front together - the Beja Congress, representing the 2.4 million ethnic Beja people of the region, and the Rashaida Free Lions, a group who claim Arab descent. The Beja-Rashaida alliance, unusual between African and Arab tribes, was cemented through an influential religious Sufi movement, the Khatmiyyah Brotherhood.
Both groups were traditionally nomadic, but recurrent droughts and displacement due to conflict have forced many easterners to seek employment in urban areas. This has seen a mushrooming of slums around cities such as Port Sudan and Kassala, where Beja support is concentrated.
The rebels have settled for a lot less than they had initially envisaged. Though they had asked for one dollar from every barrel of oil shipped from Port Sudan, which would have netted them about 150 million dollars a year, they settled for 600 million dollars in development funds over a limited time-span. Also, Beja leaders had wanted regional autonomy but were placated with appointments in Khartoum instead. Rebels say they were pressed into accepting a diluted deal because of Eritrea's eagerness to normalise relations with Sudan.
The long-running Eritrea-Ethiopia cold war has shown signs of heating up once more, prompting the Eritrean government in Asmara to make moves to neutralise Sudan as a possible Ethiopian ally. The Eastern Front, which had largely operated out of rear bases in Eritrea, had little choice but to yield to Eritrean pressure.
Both the Beja and the Rashaida are proud peoples, a factor Khartoum needs to take heed of. Should the Sudanese government fail to fulfill its obligations to accelerate development and social service delivery in eastern Sudan, there could be Eastern Front attacks on the oil pipeline artery that delivers wealth to Khartoum’s elites.
Saboteurs and hostage-takers in Nigeria and Iraq are pointing the way in which petro-economies can be held to ransom if they fail to take heed of local concerns. Given that the pipeline traverses much of eastern Sudan; that the Red Sea State hosts the nation’s single deepwater port; and that impoverished, ultra-conservative communities are fertile breeding grounds for political and religious extremism, Khartoum needs to push development of the east.
The refugee situation has not been addressed by the Asmara peace agreement, and conscription-dodgers fleeing enforced military service in Eritrea continue to swell the ranks of refugees in eastern Sudan. New refugees are not allowed to work and have relied on humanitarian aid which has since been proscribed by the Sudan government. Eric Reeves, a Sudan analyst, says that Khartoum deliberately escalates “malnutrition and human mortality in eastern Sudan as part of a war of attrition against the people seen as supporting an insurgency movement (the Eastern Front)”.
As a result, most refugees live in conditions where hunger is a constant and preventable diseases such as malaria take a grim toll. Despite the conservative culture, almost half of refugee households are headed by women, most of them widows. They are forced to earn money to supplement the meagre food rations that aid organisations manage to smuggle through to the region, but cultural constraints limit their mobility and the type of work they can do.
For those refugees who have lived in eastern Sudan since childhood, this is the only home they know, yet they cannot claim citizenship. Their only hope is that peace in the region may bring increased humanitarian aid, which could help to focus greater media attention on their plight.
With the ceasefire and a re-opening of the Sudan-Eritrea border, it is also hoped that regional trade, once a mainstay of areas such as Kassala, will be resumed. Leaders are trusting that stability will bring foreign aid and much-needed investment. But since the world has largely ignored eastern Sudan in its time of conflict, that indifference seems likely to persist unless global energy supplies are in the balance.
Ayesha Kajee, a researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, is a regular IWPR contributor.
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=acr&s=f&o=326122&apc_state=henh
Iran, The Israel-Hating Regime and The True Iranian Hero
Dec 13, 2006
Moment Magazine
Mr. Abdol Hossein Sardari, on behalf of all of us here at Persian Journal...
"Doroud bar on shiri ke khordi"
...for making us all Iranians so proud by living up to founder of Iranzamin "Cyrus The Great" Standrads
Islamic Republic Illusions in Iran
Sign "Not Under My Name" Petition.
----
How Jew- Friendly Persia Became Anti-Semitic Iran
The complex tale of how the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great-the world's "first" Zionist�metamorphosed into the Israel-Hating nation we know today.
Abdol Hossein Sardari didn't look like a hero. But when Paris fell to Hitler in June 1940, the 30-year-old Muslim-a dapper man with a receding hairline-took it upon himself to save Jews trapped inside Nazi-occupied France. Sardari, a junior official at the Iranian Embassy, had been left behind to look after the building when the Iranian ambassador and his staff abandoned Paris to establish residence in Vichy, the new home of France's pro-Nazi government. Once the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sardari, without authorization from his government, made liberal use of the embassy's supply of blank Iranian passports to assign new, non-Jewish identities to those in need, creating his own version of Schindler's list.
Ibrahim Morady, who died this past June in Los Angeles at the age of 95, was one of the hundreds of Jews Sardari helped spare from deportation. "My father moved to Paris from Persia when he was six," recounts his son Fred. Once Morady, a well-to-do rug merchant, had his new identity, he and two colleagues arranged to purchase false papers for about 100 other Jews of Iranian descent. Sardari served as their go-between, passing a bribe to a German official. In return, these Jews were given documents asserting that they were members of "some strange tribe in Iran-Djouguti, or something like that," Fred Morady explains. "I asked my father: 'What does this name mean?' And he said: 'They just made it up.'"
Sardari was not the only Iranian to protect Jews during World War II. The Iranian government itself kept its 3,000-year-old Jewish community out of Nazi reach. But his heroism is representative of Iran's civilized and empathetic attitude toward its Jews.
This attitude stands in marked contrast to the vitriolic Islamic Republic of Iran led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that we hear and read about today. The world was stunned when Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Tehran, felled an Iranian political giant�Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani-in the 2005 presidential election. Ahmadinejad, a radically conservative veteran of the Revolutionary Guards, an arm of the country's Islamic establishment, quickly became a confrontational presence. Standing aside a banner that read "The World Without Zionism," he whipped up a crowd of 4,000 students at an October 2005 conference in Tehran. "Our dear Imam ordered that the occupying regime in Al Quds be wiped off the face of the earth," Ahmadinejad declared, referring to the late Ayatollah Khomeini and using the Arabic name for Jerusalem. "Anyone who would recognize this state has put his signature under the defeat of the Islamic world."
The president also garnered world headlines when he publicly pronounced the Holocaust a "myth." He has since slightly toned down his rhetoric, questioning why, if the Holocaust happened, the Palestinians should suffer for it. "Under the pretext of protecting some of the survivors of the war, the land of Palestine was occupied through war, aggression and the displacement of millions of its inhabitants," he told the United Nations General Assembly this September, ignoring the historic presence of Jews in Palestine.
When it comes to the Jews, Abdol Hossein Sardari and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represent the two faces of Iran. This Muslim, but not Arab, country that protected its Jews from the Holocaust now questions whether that genocide ever occurred. Once one of Israel's closest Muslim allies, Iran now seeks to wipe the "Zionist entity" off the map. Tens of thousands of its Jews have left, yet Iran still retains the largest Jewish population of any Muslim country.
These contradictions have been embedded in the country's history since ancient times. "In a sense, the story of the Jews of Iran is literally the Bible itself," says Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. "The Bible says God asked Cyrus the Great [the founder of the Persian Empire] to build the Second Temple and Cyrus did. And Esther, a Jew married to the king of Persia, exposed the anti-Semitic, genocidal plot of Haman [his chief minister], and it was aborted. These two tendencies�the Hamanic anti-Semitic tendency and the tendency to welcome and accept the Jews and the rights that they have�have come all the way to the 21st century."
The first charter of human rights ever set to paper predates the Magna Carta by some 1,700 years. It was drafted not within the baronial estates of medieval England but in a desert palace in the Middle East. "I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire," proclaimed Cyrus upon entering the gates of Babylon on the first day of spring in 539 B.C.E., "and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them."
Cyrus's reign is warmly remembered as the Persian equivalent of Camelot, the mythical English court ruled by King Arthur. "Iranians take a lot of pride in the old civilization started by Cyrus," says Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Iranian-American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles. "He was extremely tolerant of other beliefs and ideologies; that, too, is an added measure of pride."
Cyrus is also sometimes referred to as the world's first Zionist. He righted the wrong done by King Nebuchadnezzar II 58 years earlier when he captured Jerusalem and Judah, and exiled thousands of Jews. "All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord, the God of heaven, has given to me and he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah," Cyrus declared. He offered the Jews the opportunity to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple at Persian taxpayer expense. Many accepted, while others remained in Persia.
Typically depicted as a bearded warrior-king with broad shoulders in a military tunic and helmet, Cyrus was killed in 529 B.C.E. in a battle in northern Persia. The Jews fared less well under his son, Cambyses II, who suspended construction of the Temple. But a few years later, work was resumed under King Darius. According to the Bible, Esther was the beloved wife of Darius's son. Xerxes, also known as Ahasuerus.
Overall, life was good for the Jewish community under the early Persian kings. "From what we know, the Jews were well trusted and tolerated," says Houman Sarshar, a scholar with the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History who edited an anthology called Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews. He points to the prominence of Jewish prophets in the Persian Empire and notes that Ezra held the respected job of scribe in the royal court. "The Jews weren't seen as a threat to anyone else's way of life," Sarshar says. But with the advent of Islam their world would change.
A battle in 642 C.E., which Arabs hail as the "victory of victories," brought an end to the golden age of Persian Jews. Some 30,000 battle-hardened Arab Muslims assembled at Nehavend, along the western Persian border, and defeated the 150,000-man Persian army, ending 2,000 years of Persian independence. The caliphate was then controlled from Damascus and Baghdad.
Although Muslims revered Jews as "the people of the Book," the imposition of Islam led to second-class citizenship for Persia's minorities�Jews, Zoroastrians, and Armenian and Assyrian Christians. "After the rapid expansion of the Muslim dominion, Muslim leaders were required to find a way of handling non-Muslims, who remained in the majority in many areas," says Nahid Pirnazar, who teaches Iranian studies at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and is founder and director of the House of Judeo-Persian Manuscripts Foundation. As a way of both protecting and discriminating against minorities, Islamic leaders came up with the notion of dhimma, or protected minorities. "The dhimmi were required to pay an extra tax but usually were unmolested," says Pirnazar. "This compares well to the treatment meted out to non-Christians in Christian Europe."
Over time, the list of hardships and humiliations grew. The Pact of Umar, named after the reigning leader from 634 to 644 C.E., established harsher laws for non-Muslims. Jews were barred from government office and the military, and forbidden to ride on white donkeys, which were seen as symbols of cleanliness. They were forced to wear yellow armbands, while Christians had to don blue ones.
After the Mongols invaded Persia in the second half of the 13th century, the standing of the country's Jews improved dramatically. "This period was the highlight of the life of Jews in Islamic Iran," says Pirnazar. "The Mongol rulers at the time were secular, not yet converted to Islam, so Jews had a chance to penetrate into socio-political and cultural levels."
This didn't last. Treatment of minorities deteriorated after the Safavids took power in the 1500s, imposing their hard-line brand of Shia Islam and ushering in "the worst era of Persian-Jewish relations," says political scientist Eliz Sanasarian of the University of Southern California, author of Religious Minorities in Iran.
The Safavids forcibly converted Iran's Sunni Muslims to Shia Islam and introduced the concept of "ritual pollution," which further segregated minorities from their neighbors. Because nonbelievers were deemed spiritually and physically contagious, Jews were barred from leaving their houses when it rained, for fear the water would transmit their impurities. A Jew who entered a Muslim home had to sit on a special rug and could not be offered tea, food or a water pipe, since any object touched by a Jew could no longer be used by a Muslim.
Safavid rule came to an end in 1736, but the Muslim perception of Jews as impure remained. Occasional violent outbreaks, reminiscent of the blood libels and pogroms carried out in Europe, punctuated the next two centuries of Qajar Dynasty rule. In one incident in the northeastern town of Mashhad in 1839, an ailing Jewish woman was told to use dogs' blood to cure a certain malady. A rumor quickly spread that she had tried the cure on a Shia holiday, deliberately insulting the sect. Jews were attacked and some three dozen killed, while the rest of the Jewish community was given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Such bloody outbreaks persisted until the 20th century, when a new breed of shah came to power.
Born in the isolated northern Persian village of Alasht in 1878, Reza Pahlavi was the son of a military officer. Pahlavi was a man of powerful military bearing, most often portrayed with a thick handlebar mustache and a curved knife hanging from his scabbard. In 1925, he deposed the last shah of the Qajar Dynasty, giving himself the title Reza Shah.
For the first time in 1,400 years, an Iranian ruler reached out to his country's Jews, bowing to the Torah to show his respect during a visit to the Jewish community of Isfahan, banning mass conversions and discouraging the idea that non-Muslims were unclean.
While respectful of Iran's Jews, Reza Shah was fascinated by Nazi Germany. With German encouragement�and to emphasize that Persians are Aryan, not Arab�he changed the country's name to Iran�from the old Persian "Arynam" or "of the Aryans."
Iran, sitting of vast pools of oil, became of great strategic importance during World War II. Hitler coveted the oil, sparking fears of an Iranian-German alliance. As a result, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran in 1941, forcing the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Though the younger Pahlavi was seen as a playboy more interested in fast cars than in governing, he had a bold vision for his nation.
A man of grandiose self-image, the new Shah viewed himself as heir to Cyrus the Great and as such was a friend of the Jews. Under his rule, the community "enjoyed almost total cultural and religious autonomy, experienced unprecedented economic progress and had more or less the same political rights as their Muslim compatriots," says David Menashri, a Tel Aviv University expert on Iran.
To protect them from the Nazis, Iran assured the Germans that its Jews were fully assimilated Iranians called kalimis�a term derived from the accolade for Moses in Koran. The Nazis, still more interested in Iran's oil, acquiesced, and also turned a blind eye to the fact that the Shah was providing an escape route for thousands of European Jewish refugees.
Rachel Meer, a Jewish Iranian expatriate who lives on the upper west side of Manhattan, remembers her father telling her the story of how, during World War II, he helped Jews pass through Iran. "He purchased a huge army tent to protect these refugees," she says. "When he married my mother, the Jews traveling through were invited to the wedding." Later, when great numbers of Iraqi Jews left their homes for the newly born state of Israel, they too were granted passage, says Shaul Bakhash, a veteran Mideast analyst at George Mason University in Virginia. "Iran was one of the few countries that did not charge the Zionist organization for this permission."
At first Iran had opposed the partition of Palestine, says Trita Parsi, author of the forthcoming book Treacherous Triangle�The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. "But once it was done, Iran and Israel realized they had common interests and common enemies." In the 1960s, Iran developed a military relationship with Israel and Israeli technicians assisted Iran with agricultural projects. Both nations, wary of Arab domination of the Middle East, saw value in creating a non-Arab "outer ring," consisting of Iran, Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia.
With the exception of Turkey, Iran stood virtually alone in the Middle East in its acceptance of the state of Israel. But in doing so, the Shah walked a fine line. As Iran's covert ties with Israel became public, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a campaign against the Shah. At home, his efforts to westernize Iran faced opposition from mullahs�Iran's Islamic clerics�on the right and intellectuals on the left, all of whom condemned his government as repressive.
After Israel seized and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Iranian clergy's antipathy toward Israel increased sharply. "1967 changed many minds," says Menashri. He recounts the story of the 200-rial banknote to illustrate the Shah's precarious position.
It was 1974, a time of great tension: Arab oil-producing nations had imposed an oil embargo on the West, but the Shah, wishing to maintain his strategic alliance with Washington and Jerusalem, refused to stop supplying them with oil. The Arabs were incensed. What seemed like routine government business�the replenishment of currency by issuing 10 million new 200-rial notes�quickly grew into a crisis. On the day the new currency was to be distributed to banks, attention fell on a six-pointed star on the back of the bill. Though the star was of a traditional Iranian design, rumors spread that the currency had been printed in Israel. Fearing rebellion, the government withdrew the notes that same day.
Protests against the Shah continued to escalate and the storm clouds of revolution gathered. "The revolution did not have Islamic overtones at first�it was a revolution of the intelligentsia and it was pro-democracy," recalls Esther's Children author Sarshar. "But, very quickly, in about two or three months, all the craziness started." While many Jews were sympathetic to the protestors, the community was seen as an ally to the Shah and part of the ruling establishment�thus an enemy of the revolution.
The most influential of the revolutionaries was a religious leader with a flowing beard who sat brooding in exile in a Parisian suburb: Ayatollah Rohollah Mousavi Khomeini. Born in 1902 near the holy city of Qom, Khomeini had been exiled from Iran in 1964 for condemning the Shah's modernization policies. After 13 years in Iraq, he moved to France, where he continued to challenge the regime. Via smuggled audiotapes of his sermons, he fanned the swelling protests against the Shah's regime from afar and inspired Iran's Islamic Revolution.
By 1978, widespread strikes had led to the collapse of the economy and, on December 12, two million protestors gathered on Tehran's Azadi Square. On January 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran into exile. Two weeks later, enormous crowds greeted Khomeini's triumphant return to Tehran on a chartered Air France airliner. That November 4, a mob of angry students, spurred on by his denouncement of the United States as an enemy of Islam stormed the American Embassy, taking 66 Americans hostage. The demonstrators included a young rabble-rouser named Ahmadinejad who also advocated seizing the Soviet Embassy. A new age of Islamic fundamentalism for Iran had begun, spelling great uncertainty for its 80,000 Jews.
As a skinny, brainy Tehran teenager in the 1970s, Roya Hakakian was one of many young Jews who supported the Islamic Revolution despite the nervous admonitions of their parents. For them, participation was not only an adventure but affirmation they were fully assimilated Iranians. Hakakian, now a 39-year-old mother in Connecticut, has written a memoir, Journey From the Land of No, that provides a glimpse into the turmoil that followed the Revolution.
Initially, the Islamists were too busy imposing their rules on society at large to worry about the Jews. "People weren't permitted to laugh on the streets on certain national mourning days; it was a crime to be with a boy you weren't related to; we had to cover our heads and we couldn't hold hands," Hakakian recalls. Women couldn't appear in public without a veil and garments like the chador that revealed not a clue of femininity. Women also lost the right to divorce, and most engineering and law schools began refusing them admission. People could be arrested�and sometimes executed�for possession of books such as The Communist Manifesto, or music cassettes. "Those were the Khmer Rouge days," Hakakian says.
Hakakian's first brush with the new order came when she and a few friends went for a hike in a public park in the Alborz, part of a mountain range outside Tehran. Encountering a sign that said the mountain was "closed," they giggled and ignored it. As they ascended, some of the girls loosened their mandatory head scarves. Soon, they were stopped by a teenager in army fatigues toting a Kalashnikov, who demanded to know what they were doing. Three other uniformed men joined him and took the group to a detention center. There, a policeman found a Jewish prayerbook in Hakakian's pocketbook; ironically, that broke the tension. "Jews are cowards," one of the uniformed men said. "They never get mixed up in politics. And we thought we'd got ourselves a pack of leftists or royalists." The girls were sent home.
"For once in Jewish history," says Hakakian wryly, "Jewish stereotypes came to our aid."
In the evenings, she and her friends would watch the show trials on television. Former leaders of the Shah's government, stripped of their dignity and wearing cardboard signs with their names around their necks, were charged with offenses like "corruption on earth," and taken to be shot. In March 1979, the spectacle hit close to home. Habib Elghanian, an industrialist who led the Jewish community council, was accused of corruption, contacts with Israel and Zionism, "friendship with the enemies of God," "warring with God and his emissaries" and "economic imperialism." He was tried by an Islamic revolutionary tribunal whose members kept their backs to him, refusing to look a traitor in the face.
Shot by firing squad on May 8, Elghanian was the first private citizen in Iran to be executed by the tribunal. His real crime was that he had failed to follow established custom for Jews and maintain a low profile. He had become a prominent figure under the Shah: While most well-off Iranian Jews were merchants with small businesses, Elghanian, owner of a huge conglomerate with interests in plastics, tile and aluminum, was a mogul. He even built a huge skyscraper in Tehran's business district.
Within days of his execution, leaders of the Iranian Jewish community selected a delegation to meet with Khomeini. They chose two rabbis and four intellectuals, some of whom had joined the early street demonstrations against the Shah. Early one morning, the six men climbed into a station wagon and drove to Qom, one of them later told Hakakian's father.
When they arrived, they were surprised to find that Khomeini, still not accustomed to the trappings of power, had cleared his calendar for their visit. As they seated themselves on folded blankets in a reception room, the Ayatollah entered. "Bism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim," one of the rabbis addressed him, invoking the name of God in Arabic in deference.
Khomeini began a long, roundabout discourse on subjects ranging from monotheism to how a man should choose a wife, to how to properly copulate, puzzling his Jewish audience. But when the Ayatollah completed his talk, his meaning became clear. "Moses would have nothing to do with these Pharaoh-like Zionists who run Israel," he said. "And our Jews, the descendants of Moses, have nothing to do with them, either. We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists."
When the Jewish delegation returned to Tehran, they spread the word: The Ayatollah had made Iran's Jews kosher in the eyes of the Revolution. Soon all synagogues were painted with Khomeini's decree and the Jews of Iran renounced Zionism.
True to its rhetoric, the Islamic Republic severed all official ties with Israel, but a clandestine relationship continued. Though Yasser Arafat was invited to Tehran and spoke of the plight of the mostly Sunni Palestinians, the Shia-Sunni divide and the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization was largely secular meant that Iran's support for the Palestinians was always lukewarm. Privately, Iran and Israel shared a common fear of the Arab states, especially Iraq. Israel sold Iran arms throughout the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.
In 1985, in the middle of that war, then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres helped broker a deal between the Reagan Administration and Iran. The agreement allowed the sale of American arms, including anti-tank missiles, to the Islamic Republic. In exchange, the United States sought Iranian influence to free Western hostages held by Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group supported by Iran. (It also used the Iranian money to fund the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.) When news of the deal surfaced, the Reagan Administration was embarrassed and politically damaged�both the United States and Israel had previously denied selling arms to the Islamic Republic.
At the end of the Cold War, Israel had a change of heart and concluded that Iran had become a major threat to its security. With Iraq severely weakened by its defeat in the Gulf War, Israeli strategists focused on Iran's quest for long-range missiles and nuclear weapons as well as Iranian funding of Hezbollah. At press conferences in Jerusalem and during many visits to Washington in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin began emphasizing his desire to make peace with the Palestinians and with Syria because an even greater danger loomed: a nuclear Iran.
In 1977, Abbas Milani, then a political scientist at Tehran University, was arrested by the Shah's police and thrown in jail. Considered a dangerous leftist academic, Milani shared a cell with some of the men who would become the leaders of the Islamic Revolution, including one of Ahmadinejad's predecessors, Rafsanjani. Recalling his incarceration with the Islamists, he says bluntly, "I couldn't stand them and they couldn't stand me."
Milani, who is not Jewish, left Iran for the United States in 1986, after the first waves of Iranian Jews fled the Revolution. He remembers that he first came to understand the special penalties that Iranian Jews faced under the mullahs when an Iranian friend, a prominent astrophysicist at Cambridge University, was invited to attend a conference in Tehran in 1982. The Iranian authorities had assured the young man he would have no problem returning to Britain, but because he was Jewish, they seized his passport upon his arrival and refused to return it.
"The poor guy had a wife and baby in England and they wouldn't let him leave," recalls Milani, who later discovered that the Islamic Republic had an unofficial policy of denying passports to young Iranian Jews to coerce their families into returning home after traveling abroad. They were in effect held hostage. "You can't be a human being without feeling offended that this is happening in your name in your country," says Milani.
Since the Islamic Revolution, approximately 75 percent of Iran's Jews have fled the country. Estimates of the number that remain vary from 13,000 (the U.S. State Department's 2005 International Religious Freedom Report, based on the most recent Iranian census) to the 25,000 to 30,000 claimed by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a non-profit group based in New Haven, Connecticut. The difference, the Center says, stems from the fact that many Jews in Iran do not wish to call attention to their heritage.
Whatever their number, Jews make up a tiny and vulnerable fraction of Iran's population of nearly 70 million. "Personally, I am very much concerned about attacks on Iranian Jews," says George Haroonian, former president of the Council of Iranian American Jewish Organizations (CIAJO), a group of outspoken Iranian expatriates that advocates for the rights of Iran's remaining Jews. "It's my viewpoint that Iranian Jews are in a very precarious situation."
CIAJO reports that since 1979, 10 Jews in addition to Elghanian have been executed, six have been assassinated by the regime, two have died as a result of being held in custody, eight have died under suspicious circumstances and 12 have disappeared.
The situation has become increasingly worse, says Haroonian. He points to the trial in 2000 of 13 Jews from Shiraz and Isfahan accused of illegal contact with Israel, conspiracy to form an illegal organization and recruiting agents, which provoked vandalism and boycotts of Jewish businesses. "This was the largest wholesale attack against the Jewish community," Haroonian says. Ten of those charged were found guilty, although espionage charges were dropped and an appeals court overturned all the convictions but those for illegal contacts with Israel. By 2003 all had been released from prison; 10 remain on probation.
Iran has seen a recent wave of anti-Semitic propaganda masquerading as anti-Zionism in print, on television and within the educational system, heavily influencing what Iranians�a quarter of them under 15�learn about their Jewish neighbors. Last February, Iran's largest newspaper Hamshahri sponsored an international Holocaust cartoon contest that solicited sinister anti-Semitic entries that were widely displayed. In 2000, the Al-Manar television station aired a claymation special in which Jews were turned into apes and pigs. In 2004, the station Sahar 1 aired a weekly series Zahra's Blue Eyes, also called For You, Palestine, in which the Israeli government is depicted as removing the blue eyes of Palestinian children for implantation into Jewish children. The claymation program "doesn't say 'all Jews are cursed,'" notes Yehudit Barsky, director of the Middle East and International Terrorism section of the American Jewish Committee. "It doesn't say the Jewish person next door is evil. But still, the selection of this story is saying there were Jews who were evil and were punished. It's a message of an insidious nature, not a direct nature."
As the line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism becomes increasingly blurred, the Jews who remain in Iran continue to stick to the Khomeini formula. "The Iranian Jewish community has gone out of its way to condemn the state of Israel, including the recent war with Hezbollah," says Nahid Pirnazar. Catholic University law professor Marshall Breger, who visited Tehran and Shiraz in 2003, says that the Iranian Jews he met expressed regard and affection for the people of Israel, but were not political Zionists. "They were creating what I would call Judaism without Israel," he explains. "It's not unknown. People would say, 'it's no problem to be a Jew' but the more observant wouldn't wear a kippah outside because people in Iran know kippahs as a symbol of the Israel Defense Forces."
While Iranian Jews are loath to speak out in defense of Israel, they do occasionally draw attention to other matters, such as anti-Jewish stereotypes in the media and the government's campaign denying the Holocaust. Earlier this year, Haroun Yashayaei, chair of the Tehran Jewish community, sent an extremely rare letter of protest to Ahmadinejad, expressing concern about the president's statements about the Holocaust. His objections were seconded by Maurice Motamed, who holds the one seat allotted to Jews in the country's 290-member parliament.
"When our president spoke about the Holocaust, I considered it my duty as a Jew to speak about this issue," Motamed told the British newspaper The Guardian in a June 2006 interview. "The biggest disaster in human history is based on tens of thousands of films and documents. I said these remarks are a big insult to the whole Jewish society in Iran and the whole world."
Motamed, an engineer, made clear to The Guardian that although he took issue with Ahmadinejad over the Holocaust, he supports the president on other issues, including the standoff with the United States, Europe and Israel over Iran's nuclear program. "I am an Iranian first and a Jew second," he stressed. Although he acknowledged that Jews in Iran face problems, he assured readers that "there is no pressure on synagogues, no problems of desecration. I think the problem in Europe is worse than here. There is a lot of anti-Semitism in other countries."
Similar sentiments can be found on the Jewish Central Committee of Iran's website, iranjewish.com. "Iran's Jewish community congratulates the achievement of nuclear fuel to the supreme leader, the Islamic Republic officials and all Iranians," a May 2006 entry reads. "We celebrate the coincident of this victory with the New Year and the unforgettable days of Passover."
Generally, Jews who have chosen to stay in Iran say that they are content and have no wish to leave their homeland. Tehran has more than a dozen active synagogues, and large groups of Jews also live in Shiraz and Isfahan. "Jews stay in Iran because they have their jobs, their lives and they love it,�" says Shirin Taleh, a family therapist who left Iran in 2001 with her children to join the rest of her family in California and has visited twice since then, including a stay earlier this year.
Taleh believes her children will have more opportunities in the United States but dearly misses the country of her birth. She balks at the notion that Iran discriminates against Jews. "I would say 'limitation' rather than 'discrimination.' Two words, two meanings. Limitations for everyone, not just the Jewish community. We have some freedoms that the Muslims don't have. Men and women mix. We are allowed to use alcohol for religious purposes. I don't claim everything is OK. Everybody in the world abuses the name of the Jews. It's an old problem between Muslims and Jews." But, she makes clear, "I don't know anything about political issues. I don't want to go there."
The decision to remain in Iran may not be measurable in rational ways. In 1998, when Manochehr Eliasi, Motamed's predecessor as the Jewish member of parliament, was asked by a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter why Jews don't leave, he burst into tears. "This is my birthplace," Eliasi said. "I love its smell."
In many ways, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sixth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the first non-cleric president in 24 years, is an exemplary product of modern Iran. Born to a modest family in a small village, he capitalized on high test scores to enter the civil engineering program at the Iran University of Science and Technology during the reign of the Shah. Later, he received his doctorate in a program funded by the Revolutionary Guards. With 12 percent of voters participating, he won the mayor's office in 2003.
This 50-year-old newcomer to the world stage shocked analysts during his recent visit to the United Nations, not only by his hardline address to the General Assembly but by his seeming enjoyment of the limelight. He parried questions at a press conference, deftly handled CNN's Anderson Cooper during a televised interview and spent 90 minutes jousting with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations. He stayed on message: The New York Times reported that Ahmadinejad spent 40 minutes of the session challenging evidence that the Holocaust took place. "I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this," he said after hearing the account of a Jewish member of the Council who saw the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II. After the meeting, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft described Ahmadinejad to The New York Times as "a master of counterpunch, deception, circumlocution."
Milani, who has followed Ahmadinejad's rise to power, believes the Iranian president is truly anti-Semitic and is playing the Israel card to gain international attention and enhance his stature. "Had he not said those comments about the Holocaust and Israel, he would have come to the UN as a two-bit president of a despotic regime. Instead, they gave him a rock star treatment here, and it all translated into more power for him back home."
"Not even a second-tier player" in Iran before the furor arose over his remarks, now he is world-renowned, says Milani. "The last month and a half, every time I have traveled and taken a cab, if the cab driver is Muslim and they get a whiff that I'm Iranian, they begin talking about Ahmadinejad as the man who is standing up to the Jews, to Israel and to America. It is working for him."
Still, for all its bombastic rhetoric, Milani says he doesn�t believe the regime poses a direct threat to Iran's Jews. "Is there a specific danger that Jews face? I don't think so," he says. "That kind of eliminationist anti-Semitism has never been part of Iranian history. Iranian anti-Semitism has been more or less limited to verbal pressure, verbal anti-Semitism, forcing Jews to live in ghettos, occasionally forcing them to wear the Star of David. Killings, pogroms�that's European, not Iranian."
Ahmadinejad's statements about Israel and the Holocaust may have more to do with political pragmatism than anything else. A man of a secular background, he must show the mullahs that he is as staunch an Islamist as they are; to mix religious metaphors, he has to be more Catholic than the Pope.
His outspokenness has advantages for the mullahs and the Supreme Leader they elect, who holds most of the real power. Seizing the limelight allows non-Arab Iran to pursue its goal of becoming the leader of the mostly Arab Middle East. And Ahmadinejad's vitriol makes the mullahs seem almost moderate by comparison.
His combativeness has another upside: it serves to shift attention from economic problems at home. Despite a huge rise in oil revenues, there is grumbling in Tehran's streets about economic conditions, reflecting the gross inefficiency of its bloated bureaucracy and centralized economy. Despite Iran's oil wealth and bravado, the government fears Western economic sanctions that would force it to spend more to subsidize food and fuel.
Growing speculation about a nuclear showdown in the Middle East is premature, according to Milani. "I don't see them picking on Israel militarily because they know that they will pay a very heavy price," he says. "Even in arming Hezbollah, they've been very careful. They have allowed Hezbollah to become more of a nuisance, they have given them more staying power, but not any weapon that could seriously change the balance with Israel or make Hezbollah a more lethal threat. I think the war in one sense was a big loss for the Iranians. They won a publicity war but not much else."
Mullahs' regime apologist Trita Parsi agrees. "Israel is a means for Iran, just as Iran is a means for Israel."
And Parsi doesn't believe that the Iranian people would support a war against Israel. "I think the larger feeling among the population is that it's really not Iran's main problem. People don't like what Israel is doing [in the occupied territories] but they don't like Arabs, either. A poll says that 67 percent of Iranians say that Israel does not have right to exist. But does that mean that they think Iran has to do anything about this? I don't think so."
Nonetheless, many Iranian expatriates long for regime change. Houman Sarshar doubts the voices calling for change inside Iran will remain silent. "A population of 75 million�with approximately 50 million born after 1978�is being run by a population of mullahs 60 and 70-plus [years old]. If only 60 percent [of the population] wants a completely secular government, then it's over," he says.
Milani believes that without $70-per-barrel oil, the regime would not survive long. "The age of pseudo-totalitarian corrupt dictatorships has come to an end," he says. "The majority of Iranian society doesn't want it. But tactically this is a very nimble regime, very brutal, and it has a lot of money."
However, Jerusalem-based Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar, co-author of the forthcoming book The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran, believes the chance of regime change is small. "Iranians are suffering from conflict fatigue after the Islamic Revolution, followed by one of the longest wars in modern history. They are tired. And there's no alternative. Who are they going to revolt for? People don't want chaos�who is going to give them hope? Who are they going to die for? Don't expect Tiananmen."
Iranians are upset that the government has shut down blogs as well as Shargh, the reformist newspaper. "It makes people angry. But go to the streets to revolt?" says Javedanfar. "Only two things would make a revolution overnight. One: Shoot the entire Iranian football team. Two: Ban the sale and eating of Persian rice. Then you will have a revolution on your hands. Until then, as they say in New Jersey, fuggedaboutit."
As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad commands the world's attention, Abdol Hossein Sardari, who died in 1981, has been all but forgotten. When the courageous diplomat returned to Iran after the war, he was imprisoned for the unauthorized distribution of passports, says George Hooranian. "After 30 days he was released by the Shah. The Shah said he did a good deed. He saved people's lives."
There is no memorial to Sardari in Iran, or until recently, anywhere else, says Haroonian. In 2004, Iranians living in the United States organized two Yom Hashoah events to honor the diplomat. One was at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the other at the Nessah Educational and Cultural Center in Beverly Hills. A cut glass tablet reads: "In memory of and admiration of his humanitarian and courageous efforts that led to the saving of many innocent lives while serving as the Iranian Consul in France during World War II."
Inspired by Sardari's deeds, and angry that he has received so little recognition, Hooranian collected hundreds of pages of documents and personally delivered them to Yad Vashem in Israel. He would like for Sardari to be become the first Iranian bestowed with the designation of Righteous Among the Nations, a title awarded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The public committee that decides who should be given this honor has discussed Sardari's case twice, and reports that it is "very interesting." A decision has not yet been made, pending further documentation. But the necessary information is not forthcoming; the Iranian government has refused to cooperate.
"How sad," says Haroonian, "that Sardari�and what he represents�cannot be honored in Iran."
Food, basic aid said not reaching Darfur
ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU
Associated Press
KHARTOUM, Sudan - Food and other basic relief is not reaching thousands in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, despite what the United Nations calls the world's biggest humanitarian effort.
Over a dozen aid workers have also been slain in recent months, and spiraling violence has forced many to pull out. Seventy-four World Food Program vehicles have been attacked and one driver has been killed since a peace treaty was signed in May between Khartoum and one of several rebel factions in Darfur. Other rebels rejected the deal.
Violence has been increasing and last month, in the worst looting yet, Arab tribal fighters known as janjaweed ripped apart a WFP warehouse and took 800 tons of food in the rebel stronghold of Bir Maza as government forces assaulted the town.
Over 200 U.N. and aid workers have had to leave remote outposts and refugee camps and some of the region's main towns - like the North Darfur capital of El Fasher, which last week was also looted by janjaweed.
Meanwhile, some 200 World Food Program trucks are being blocked by the government from reaching Darfur, said Kenro Oshidari, the Sudan director for the U.N. agency.
Janjaweed are not the only dangers. Three water engineers working with the U.N. Children's Fund were killed in June by refugees who thought they came to poison a well rather than fix it. Nine others were abducted in October and five are still being held, said UNICEF spokesman Edward Carwardine.
"Security is our most serious impediment throughout Darfur," he said.
The U.N. has called the Darfur conflict the world's worst humanitarian crisis. More than 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes in the three-year fight between the government and ethnic African rebels. The government is accused of unleashing the janjaweed to help put down the revolt, and the militia is accused of widespread atrocities against civilians.
The U.N. Human Rights Council held an emergency meeting Tuesday in Geneva to assess just how bad the crisis has become in Darfur.
"Food security is one of the most basic human rights, and it's constantly being challenged in Darfur," said Oshidari.
The WFP is the sole source of food for some 1.8 million people in Darfur, who without the U.N.'s help would starve because they fear marauding militias will kill or rape them if they leave the refugee camps to cultivate their fields. The WFP provides part of the dietary needs for nearly a million more people.
But it now cannot reach some 100,000 others - a number that fluctuates widely as lines of combat change - who are in desperate need, leaving them to rely on their own resources to find food. A few months ago, as many as 470,000 people were out of reach.
Nearly 1 million tons of food have been delivered to Darfur, at a cost of more than $1 billion dollars since April 2004. Some 15,000 Sudanese and international aid workers have been mobilized for the effort, which has created the longest supply line in Africa, with trucks going 1,800 miles - a third on unpaved roads - from a Red Sea port to the West Darfur town of El Geneina near the Chadian border.
WFP officials say they have brought the malnutrition rate below emergency levels in Darfur since 2005.
But two years ago, the WFP could freely access all of Darfur, a vast, landlocked region of western Sudan that is nearly the size of Texas.
"Now we have to fly by helicopter" to many locations because of dangerous roads, Oshidari said.
The magnitude of the relief can be measured at the WFP's transit warehouse, a set of industrial-sized buildings on the outskirts of Khartoum.
Early Tuesday morning, workers busily unloaded 100 pound bags of rice from massive trailer trucks, each of which can carry more than 80 tons of food. The supplies were to be put on smaller trucks that can navigate the unpaved roads out to Darfur.
"Today isn't a busy day, we only have 1,000 tons to handle," said Lemma Bayissa, a WFP logistician. "At times, we've had to work until midnight to get all the bags through," he said, pointing at the sacks from the US Agency for International Development - which provides half of the food for Darfur.
Aid agencies warn yet another peril could be looming: donor fatigue.
The WFP had to reduce food rations this year because it was lacking cash. Though Oshidari is confident international donors will provide most of the $685 million needed for 2007, he wonders what will come next.
He fears the crisis could just drag on, with aid workers in Darfur barely helping people survive.
"A political solution has to be found," he said. "Or donors will tire."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/16228926.htm
POSTED: 12:55 p.m. EST, December 13, 2006
• NEW: AP says White House rejects report on Saudi plan to act in Iraq if U.S. leaves
• Source says Saudi king "read riot act" to Vice President Dick Cheney about Iraq
• Saudi Arabia would support Sunnis in Iraq if the U.S. pulls out, the source says
• King Abdullah also is said to oppose talks between the U.S. and Iran
Adjust font size:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back the Sunnis if the United States pulls out of Iraq, according to a senior American official.
The official said the king "read the riot act" to the vice president when the two met last month in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
The New York Times first reported the conversation Wednesday, saying Saudi support would include financial backing for minority Sunnis in the event of a civil war between them and Iraq's Shiite majority.
Violence between the two sects has exploded in waves of revenge killings since February's bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
The White House dismissed the report.
"That's not Saudi government policy," press secretary Tony Snow said in Washington, according to The Associated Press.
"The Saudis have made it clear that they're committed to the same goals we are, which is a self-sustaining Iraq that can sustain, govern and defend itself, that will recognize and protect the rights of all, regardless of sect or religion," Snow said, the AP reported.
Cheney's November 25 visit marked his fourth trip to Saudi Arabia as vice president. An official with Cheney's office said the one-on-one meeting lasted two hours.
The Saudi king told Cheney that his country would be forced to step in and support "like-minded Sunni Arabs" if the situation in Iraq fell apart and the Sunnis' safety was in jeopardy, the senior U.S. official said.
The monarch said he would "intervene aggressively on one side absent an American presence," the source said.
The source said the king did not mean to imply that Saudi Arabia would support al Qaeda in Iraq, but rather tribal groups. However, some of those groups overlap with insurgents who are fighting Americans, the source conceded.
Saudi fears
The bipartisan Iraq Study Group that reported to President Bush and Congress said last week that money from Saudi citizens is funding Sunni insurgents in Iraq, although the Saudis may not know exactly where their money is going. (Watch how Saudis may be helping Iraqi insurgents )
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution said Saudi Arabia has a reason to take sides.
"They're terrified that Iraq is going to fall into civil war. They're terrified that civil war will spill over into Saudi Arabia. But they're also terrified that the Iranians, backing the various Shiite militias in Iraq, will come out the big winner in a civil war," Pollack told CNN.
However, the king's tough words to Cheney don't mean Saudi support for the United States is wavering, said Richard Murphy, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
"This has nothing to do with the Saudi-American alliance," Murphy said. "What it has to do with is the Saudi concern that we will quickly evacuate Iraq and that the Shia majority will take revenge actions against the Sunni."
In his meeting with Cheney, the Saudi king voiced strong opposition to talks between the United States and Iran, which has a majority Shiite population. The Iraq Study Group called for engaging other countries in the region, including Iran and Syria, in the search for solutions in Iraq.
According to the senior American official, the king told Cheney that Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, believed that talking to Iran was dangerous.
The Saudis are "nervous about giving Iran any more legitimacy or any more influence in Iraq," Murphy said.
"[Iraq is in] everybody's backyard -- Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran," he said. "And they all have interests, they're all watching each other very closely lest one get an undue advantage over the other. And it's going to take an extraordinarily skillful, wide-ranging regional diplomacy on America's part to cope with that."
A senior U.S. official said the conversation between Cheney and King Abdullah reflects the "anxiety about the situation" and the Saudi concern about being left "high and dry" if the United States leaves Iraq.
But the official said leaving Iraq is a "doomsday scenario" that will not happen because the United States isn't going to withdraw.
"We are not walking away from it," the official said.
CNN's Elise Labott, Kelli Arena, John King, Elaine Quijano and Zain Verjee contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/13/saudi.sunnis/
UN rights watchdog agrees Darfur mission
The United Nations Human Rights Council is to send a high:level mission to Sudan's Darfur region to probe claims of worsening abuses against civilians.
On Wednesday the 47:strong body approved a compromise proposal ? supported by Switzerland ? after a two:day emergency session.
The resolution expressed concern at the "seriousness of the human rights and humanitarian situation in Darfur" but stopped short of condemning the Sudanese government for widely documented atrocities.
The UN estimates that at least 200,000 people have been killed in the region since 2003 and more than two million others displaced.
Members did decide, however, to send a team of "highly qualified persons" appointed by the council president, along with the special rapporteur for human rights in Sudan. The mission is expected to hand over its report in March.
European countries had been holding out for a group of independent experts, whereas African countries just wanted to send diplomats to the region.
Speaking after the meeting, Switzerland's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Blaise Godet, said he was satisfied with the outcome. He added that the decision proved the council was capable of speaking with one voice.
"I am relieved, because if the council had not been able to send this message regarding one of the worst humanitarian crises, it would have diminished its reputation," he said.
The dispatch of five people representing the five regional groups was a "good compromise", he added.
Non:governmental organisation Amnesty International, however, called the decision a "lukewarm" response to the dramatic events in Sudan, calling it a "timid" text that did not recognise the Khartoum government's responsibility.
"Nightmare"
Speaking at the opening of the special session on Tuesday, UN Secretary:General Kofi Annan called for an immediate end to the "nightmare" in Darfur.
"The people in Darfur cannot afford to wait another day. The violence must stop. The killings and other gross violations of human rights must end," he said.
Godet, who also addressed the meeting, described the situation in Darfur as "alarming and intolerable".
The Swiss ambassador, who is vice:president of the council, said the Sudanese government had a duty to protect the population and to bring those responsible for crimes to justice.
It was the first time that the six:month:old council, which stems from a Swiss initiative, had devoted a special session to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
Members finally voted to do so last month following heavy criticism from Annan, who accused the council of simply focusing on the Arab:Israeli conflict.
Skilful manoeuvring by Arab and Muslim countries ensured that all three previous special sessions were on the Middle East. The Darfur debate was seen as important test for the credibility of the council.
swissinfo with agencies
http://www.nzz.ch/2006/12/13/eng/article7347349.html
The Playground & The Nukes!
December 13, 2006 06:21 AM
As a barrage of Israeli attacks hit Ehud Olmert over jeopardizing “Israel’s policy of ambiguity” on its nuclear weapons, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares in Tehran that Israel will “soon be wiped out.”
Just in case this is not enough to freak out the West, he convened a conference to discuss whether the holocaust is true or false.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal of no “ambiguity” is the reason why Iran is in a hurry to acquire the bomb, and is also
a pretty good reason why Arabs may rush to get that tool that achieves a reverend respect and security like no other. The sooner the better, that is before the Arab World finds itself sandwiched between the Israeli and Iranian bombs.
Last week Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Meqren Abdul Aziz warned at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Regional Security Summit in Bahrain that "this will also force moderate countries in the region that adopt a WMD-free policy to establish clandestine or declared nuclear programs to defend their interests and create a military balance."
That is especially the case after the USA lost its power of deterrent by failing miserably in Iraq and due to a consensus that further military adventures in the region are impossible.
The Arabs had attempted time after time to get international backing that would force Israel to declare its nuclear weapons and sign on to relevant agreements, but the affairs of the spoiled child of the West including its weapons of mass destruction is a taboo that no nation can mess with.
Every year at the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the Arabs make an attempt, and every year they fail. And every time an attempt at stopping the nuclear race fails, the prospect of “threatened nations” joining the race increases.
The only place were the Arabs are humored is the UN General Assembly that has passed many non-binding resolutions calling for a “nuclear-free Middle East.” But enjoying the support of the vast majority of the world is not enough. You need nuclear weapons to sit on the Security Council before you can be effective towards a nuclear-free region!
Olmert, who must not want to enter history as the Israeli premiere who brought about the demise of the “policy of ambiguity” rushed to rebuild ambiguity. Of course he said that the statement he made in Germany is not a declaration that Israel has nuclear weapons.
The statement was: "We have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"
Because he is a realist who knows what is hilarious and what is just not funny, he made a declaration that creates an ambiguity that didn’t exist before: Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the region, he said.
Since Israel is a nuclear power, does that mean there are others who have the bomb, or is he just telling us that his state of never-ending aggression does not intend to be the first to use them?
Now this is ambiguity. If another state in the region had the bomb, why does it choose to be an underdog? If he is talking about intention to push the trigger first, did he just forgo Israel’s option of a pre-emptive strike; the reasoning behind having the bomb?
Meanwhile, whereas Israel’s nuclear danger is an imminent threat to Iran and others, Iran that had exhausted all diplomatic channels to try get the USA into a dialogue that would avert ongoing hostilities had failed because it doesn’t have the bomb. North Korea enjoys a dialogue with the USA because it does.
In the standoff between the USA and Iran, the whole Middle East has been turned into a ticking bomb. Today Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine are a playground for the grand face-off between the USA and Iran, if we exclude Afghanistan for the sake of keeping the issue in the region.
Iran which has not acquired the weapon yet, achieved a veto power in the three countries of interest to the United States and its Israel; a veto power Iran would like to eventually enjoy at the Security Council where it is best exercised. Meanwhile exercising anywhere against the USA is the only option.
Iraq is occupied by the USA, yet Iran enjoys such influence even over America’s allies in the country that it is much more effective and practical to make a decision in Tehran than Washington DC on the future of Iraq.
Lebanon is being run by US allies, but the country is on the verge of a civil war if Iran’s own allies are not granted a veto power over all important decisions of the government. Even without a civil war erupting, the ongoing mass demonstrations in Lebanon have brought the country to an unnatural freeze of life; veto power again.
By finally managing to adopt Hamas which resulted in a political deadlock on the Palestinian front, any future Palestinian action including civil war would require Iran’s prior blessings.
To show how rewarding an adoption is to the child, Iran just promised Hamas a further $100 million in addition to the $120 million it has already dispatched, and Hamas which had never enjoyed Iranian support in the past, decided to pick up its eggs from this and that basket and place them all in Tehran.
This is the fault of the US Administration in Washington DC that has always been too confident and arrogant to realize the dangers of its dim-witted foreign policy. Even after its grand project failed in Iraq, and against the advice of friends and foes, the George Bush administration has not yet budged towards dialogue.
If the USA and its allies think that economic sanctions against Iran is going to stop it from acquiring the bomb or keeping the region on fire, they are deluding themselves and taking the world into an even more explosive territory.
The USA must engage in a direct respectful and sincere dialogue aimed at normalizing relations with Iran immediately because for as long as Iran is dealt with as a rogue state, it will continue to defend its interests and ready itself for the future by acquiring whatever weapons it can get its hands on; including local players like Hamas who are happy to keep their country a playground for Iran and the USA to have their match.
http://www.arabisto.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogEntryID=253
Home Depot to Acquire Home Way, Enter Chinese Market (Update7)
By Mark Clothier
Dec. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Home Depot Inc., the largest home- improvement retailer, will enter the Chinese market after agreeing to purchase a chain with 12 stores in six cities.
Home Way, China's fourth-largest home-improvement chain, has locations in Tianjin, Beijing, Xi'an, Qingdao, Shenyang and Zhengzhou. The stores will be renamed Home Depot, the Atlanta- based company said today.
Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli said in June 2004 Home Depot would enter China, the world's most populous country with more than 1.3 billion. The company is seeking sales in new markets as Americans purchase houses at a slower pace and spend less on home improvements. Smaller rival Lowe's Cos. begins its international expansion, in Canada, next year.
``This shows that, relative to Lowe's, they're looking further out and looking for longer-term growth channels,'' said Keith Davis, a Washington-based analyst with Farr Miller & Washington LLC, which owns 250,000 Home Depot shares among the $540 million it manages. ``It's one of the reasons I like Home Depot more.''
China's government approved the purchase, which is expected to be completed by 2007. Home Depot will compete with Kingfisher Plc in China's do-it-yourself market.
Home Depot shares gained 29 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $38.99 as of 1:57 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have dropped 3.7 percent this year, trailing the 13 percent increase for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.
`What Works'
``The challenge in China is staying true to what works for us,'' Nardelli, 58, said in a September interview. ``What works for us, whether it was in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, or HD Supply, is buy and build. We want to make sure that if we buy a platform that it has the ability to expand.''
Home World Group, the parent of Home Way, has sought to raise money after expanding and the delay of an initial public offering. Financial terms of the purchase weren't disclosed. Home Way annual sales are about $400 million, Alan Rifkin, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, wrote in a research note today.
China, the world's fastest-growing major economy, expanded 10.2 percent in 2005, creating higher wages and purchasing power for consumers. Demand for property and home-improvement services soared after the government ended its welfare housing system in 1998 and encouraged people to buy homes using bank loans.
2004 Rule Change
China opened its markets to foreign retailers in 2004 by allowing ownership of Chinese companies without a local partner.
``China is on the verge of a massive expansion,'' said Bryan Roberts, an analyst at Planet Retail, a London-based consulting firm. ``There is a burgeoning middle class that is increasingly happy to spend money on their homes.''
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, wants to double its stores in China by taking over supermarket operator Trust-Mart for about $1 billion, a person familiar with the proposal said in October. Wal-Mart operates 66 stores in 34 Chinese cities and plans to open 20 more this year.
Home Depot's contractor services, which lets shoppers buy carpet, tile, countertops or cabinets, and pay Home Depot to manage installation, is a significant growth opportunity in China, Annette Verschuren, president of Home Depot Canada and China said in an interview.
Big Business
``It's very strong,'' Verschuren, 50, said. ``When you look at how people renovate homes, they get a cement box and finish it completely. There's a big, big contractor business.''
Farr Miller's Davis doesn't expect China to add much to Home Depot's profit soon.
``I wouldn't expect to see any positive accretion to the bottom line from China for at least five years,'' Davis said. ``It's going to take a long time to become entrenched in that market. But it does show management is taking a long-term focus.''
Home Depot entered Canada in 1994 and has about 143 stores there. It is Canada's largest home-improvement retailer, with annual sales of $4.3 billion, and also is Mexico's biggest.
The relationship between Home Depot and Home Way goes back about a decade. Home Depot helped train some of Home Way's executives, which helps explain why Home Way stores resemble Home Depot's.
In June 2001, Home Depot expanded into Mexico, buying the four-store Total Home chain. A year later, it purchased Del Norte's four stores and began building outlets. It acquired a 20-store chain in May 2004 to almost double its size and enter Mexico City, the largest city in North America. Home Depot operates 57 stores in Mexico.
Verschuren, who joined Home Depot a decade ago, will divide time between the operations in Canada and China. She speaks English, Dutch and French. She doesn't speak Mandarin yet.
``I'm going to start taking lessons,'' she said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aoBagpylSitw&refer=home
raq violence sparks exodus to Syria
By Chris Morris
BBC News, Damascus
More and more families are leaving amid escalating violence
On the desert border between Syria and Iraq, a group of tents clings to the shifting sands. This is a desolate place at the best of times.
Now it has become an unwanted home to more than 300 Palestinian refugees. They fled from violence in Baghdad seven months ago, only to get stuck in no-man's land.
As Palestinians, they do not have proper passports - so Syria will not let them in; and it is too dangerous to go back into Iraq.
Amin Ramadan left his neighbourhood and his elderly mother when sectarian violence made it too dangerous for him to stay. Now he is trapped again.
"It's getting really cold here at night," he said. "We have to break the ice on top of the water in the mornings. Many people are sick. We can't stay here for a long time."
The United Nations is providing basic food and shelter, and the Syrians grant temporary access to urgent medical cases. But it is a bleak situation.
And while the Palestinians say they would like to go to Europe or Canada, there is hardly a queue of countries willing to help.
"We're desperately trying to find a more durable solution," admits Laurens Jolles, the UNHCR representative in Damascus, "to find someone prepared to take them in. The least favoured option is for them to remain in limbo between two countries."
'Everyone is leaving'
But as sad as it is, the dusty Palestinian camp is just a small statistic - part of a mass movement of people, an exodus from Iraq.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 as many as two million civilians searching for sanctuary have fled into neighbouring countries like Syria, Jordan and Iran.
They are ill-equipped to cope. The pressure group Refugees International calls it the fastest growing humanitarian crisis in the world.
Just up the road from the stranded Palestinians, the Syrian border crossing at al-Tanaf feels like a safe haven for Iraqis who make it this far.
Cars and trucks are packed with possessions. But for most people, escaping into exile, the future is uncertain.
"I'll find a place to stay, anywhere I can afford," Mohammed Abu Muhy says. "Everyone is leaving Iraq."
And they bring everything they can carry. Expressionless faces look on as border guards rummage through their worldly goods.
The numbers are staggering - at least three quarters of a million Iraqis have fled to Syria alone. And every month the rate of arrival is higher than it has been before.
'No-one's helping'
Many people head to the capital, Damascus, slowly changing the character of entire neighbourhoods.
In Sayida Zeinab, out towards the city's airport, the music blaring from loudspeakers in the market comes from Iraq. And posters on the wall back the Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr.
They took my house, they killed my father and my two brothers. I had no choice - there is only death in Iraq.
Refugee Nathir Rahim
Jalil Abu Mohammed arrived here a month ago with his wife and four children. He wants to buy a small food stall, but he cannot afford it. It is a familiar story.
"I must find a job in order to survive and to stay here," he tells me. "I simply have to. We sold everything we had back in Iraq and came here with our families. We sacrificed everything - houses, furniture, everything we owned."
As we talk, a crowd quickly gathers around us. Nearly all of them are from Iraq. Everyone is careful to thank the Syrian regime, but they are close to despair.
"Look at these children," Anwar says. "What have they done wrong? I can't begin to describe to an outsider what's really happening inside Iraq."
"No-one's helping," he adds angrily, "not the Arab countries, nor the western countries. It's all lies. The whole thing is lies."
Voting with their feet
The latest arrivals from Iraq register at the Damascus office of the UN refugee agency. Tens of thousands need urgent financial or medical assistance, or trauma counselling.
A growing number of Iraqis are in the Syrian capital
But who is prepared to pay to help them?
"The funds we have at the moment are not sufficient," says Laurens Jolles. "We are asking for more, we're approaching individual countries to contribute. This is quite a small office and in no way capable of dealing with the numbers that are here."
But still they come. Nathir Rahim is sitting at a café in what's become known as the Street of the Iraqis. It is Baghdad in exile, just a few minutes drive from the centre of Damascus.
"They took my house," Nathir says, "they killed my father and my two brothers. I had no choice. There is only death in Iraq."
And there is a knock-on effect in Syria as well. People see what is happening in Iraq and many draw their own conclusions. If this is what the promise of western-style democracy brings, they argue, then we are happy with the system we have.
Some see the situation as a choice between stable authoritarianism in Syria, and dangerous, frightening chaos and violence in Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have already voted with their feet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6172123.stm
Sunni Militants Issue Religious Edicts in Mosul
Terrified residents are forced to comply with puritanical Islamic laws as insurgents tighten their grip on the city.
By Yasmin Ahmed in Mosul (ICR No. 205, 9-Dec-06)
Scattered stones are the only remnants of a famous statue that stood in a Mosul square, in the northeastern part of the city. The sculpture in the al-Zihour area used to show a group of women carrying jars on their shoulders, before insurgents reduced it to dust last month.
The campaign against the public display of what they see as non-Islamic art is part of a wider operation by Sunni insurgents to try to establish an Islamic state in Iraq. As a stronghold of Sunni insurgents, about 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, Mosul is the intended capital of this so-called Islamic Emirate, comprising the provinces of Salahaddin, Anbar, Diyala, Baghdad and parts of Wasit and Babel.
To implement their agenda, the extremists have set up what they describe as a ministry of war that issues leaflets and announces campaigns, such as the one launched in November against public statues, which they claim were symbols of paganism.
Over the past few months, Mosul has been one of the most volatile cities in Iraq. Militants have conducted suicide attacks, planted roadside bombs against Iraqi and US troops and assassinated police officers, translators and journalists. Local authorities have been forced to impose a curfew.
The statues under threat were erected in the city during the 1970s and include those of ancient artists such as the Arab poet Abi Tammam and the singer of religious songs Mullah Othman al-Mosulli.
Brigadier-General Sa'eed Ahmed al-Juburi, a spokesman for Mosul police, told IWPR that “a group of foreign terrorists” had planted bombs under the destroyed statue during the curfew.
He says he’s dumbfounded by the destruction. “Do these statues work with police? Were they translators for the Americans or members of the dissolved Ba’ath party?” he asked. “Those terrorists are a bunch of idiots.”
Extremists have started to interfere in all aspects of daily life in Mosul. A recent leaflet called upon owners of clothes shops to cover the heads of manikins on display.
Many have complied with the demands, covering the figures with plastic bags. Shopkeeper Mutaz Ahmed, 30, protested, “I don’t know where these groups came from. They want to take us back 1400 years. But if you want to stay alive, you have to obey their orders.”
Several public baths have been forced to close after extremists banned the use of soap, claiming that it didn’t exist under the reign of the Prophet Mohammed 1400 years ago.
The leaflets prescribe in detail how to live, eat and behave, according to ultra-conservative Islamic principles. Some orders seem rather absurd, such as banning restaurants from preparing a mixed salad of cucumbers and tomatoes because one is male and the other female.
But people are taking them seriously out of fear. Khalaf Khalid, who runs a restaurant, has started to serve tomatoes and cucumbers in separate dishes. “We obey them because they threatened to blow up the restaurant and kill us if we didn't,” he said.
“They dictate even the way we eat. Tomorrow, they will even dictate how we sleep with our wives. It’s unbearable and the government should do something about Mosul.”
Even the city’s Christian minority is not spared the Islamists edicts, with women compelled to wear long Islamic dresses and headscarves.
Christian lawyer Elizabeth Ramon, 30, recalls how Islamists stopped a relative of hers and poured burning acid on her skirt. They pulled her by her hair and threatened to behead her next time they caught her without a long skirt.
“It is going from bad to worse,” said Ramon. “All my relatives have left Iraq, and we will join them before we lose our lives at the hands of these extremists.”
Speaking from his prison cell, Mohammed Taha, one of 68 militants arrested in October for an attempt to overthrow the local authorities, told IWPR that the main aims of his group was ending the US occupation; bringing down the current government; and implementing Sharia law.
Azhar Abdul-Hamid, assistant professor of education at Mosul University, believes that the extremists are largely poorly educated, ignorant people who don’t understand Islam or the Koran.
“They never read a book and use Islam to denounce good Muslim people, ” said Abdul-Hamid.
In a city seemingly ruled by extremists, the University of Mosul has emerged as a rare enclave of freedom. There, female and male students talk freely to each other, and no violence or threatening behaviour has been reported.
Mayada Akram, a student at the College of Economics and Administration, calls the extremists “stone-headed Islamists” who want women to wear the hijab, stay at home and raise children. “We are going backward hundreds of steps a day.”
For Salim Abdul-Baqi, a social researcher at a women’s centre in Mosul, the extremists “believe in the Islam of an era when people were living in caves” and cannot cope with modern life. He accuses them of double standards, “Why do they drive new cars instead of riding camels used [at the time of the Prophet Mohammad]?”
Khalid Ahmed, a police officer investigating the militants’ actions, says that they intend to blow up the famous Al-Hadba minaret, one of Mosul’s ancient landmarks. On a recent visit to Mosul, the Iraqi deputy prime minister Salam al-Zawbai warned them not to touch the landmark. He promised residents that the government would use “an iron fist” against those who tried to destabilise Iraq.
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=icr&s=f&o=326015&apc_state=henh
Eastern Sudan: A Forgotten Crisis
While the world’s attention is fixed on the Darfur killing fields, eastern Sudan struggles to cope with nearly 200,00 displaced people.
By Ayesha Kajee in Johannesburg (AR No. 87, 13-Dec-06)
If Darfur, Sudan’s neglected westernmost region, is the Cinderella of the country, then eastern Sudan must be its ugly stepsister.
Subjected to similar levels of marginalisation by the Khartoum government as Darfur, and a virtual absence of social service infrastructure, the humanitarian crisis in the east may be even worse than that in Darfur, according to some diplomats and aid workers.
Eastern Sudan, a vast sun-blasted terrain of some 300,000 square kilometres, is home to between 3 and 4 million of Sudan’s poorest people.
The region has gold mines and gas reserves, and the east coast city of Port Sudan is essential for the export of the “black gold” (crude oil) to China and India that is the country’s main revenue earner. But the per capita income in some areas is as low as 25 US cents a day. Since the World Bank’s international poverty line categorises people living on less than one US dollar a day as being extremely poor, the inhabitants of eastern Sudan must rank among the most abjectly impoverished citizens on the globe.
While the world’s attention is fixed on the Darfur killing fields and the plight of Darfur's refugees, the three eastern Sudanese states of Kassala, Red Sea and Gedaref together host about 74,000 internal refugees - called IDPs, internally displaced persons, by bureaucrats - and more than 110,000 refugees from neighbouring Eritrea and Ethiopia.
A number of refugee camps are so poorly resourced that they do not even have plastic tarpaulin to serve as shelter from the elements. Some refugees who fled to Sudan to escape recurrent warfare between Eritrea and Ethiopia have lived here in limbo for between two and four decades - a plight that the United Nations this year called “one of the ten most under-reported stories on earth”.
The region has been subject to a low-intensity rebel insurgency over the past eleven years. The eastern rebels have had similar complaints to those in Darfur and southern Sudan - marginalisation and neglect - and their demands are similar too: they want greater power sharing and a larger proportion of the profits from Sudan’s oil wealth.
Until recently, the Khartoum government’s response to rebel strikes has been, as in Darfur, counter-insurgency by the Sudanese army and affiliated militias. The fighting has forced thousands from their homes in relatively fertile areas to camps in desert-like, drought-stricken areas.
Eritrea has armed and provisioned the eastern rebels in retaliation for Khartoum’s support of Eritrean rebel groups. Most of the rebels are Beja herdsmen who wage hit-and-run attacks against government soldiers from the backs of their camels.
The eastern rebels have also received support from the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, SPLM, in the far south and the Justice and Equality Movement, JEM, which is one of the main rebel groups in Darfur.
After the signing of the north-south Comprehensive Peace Agreement, CPA, in January last year - painstakingly negotiated to end decades of conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south - the Eastern Front, a coalition of rebels from the two largest ethnic groups in eastern Sudan, intensified their protests in anger at their exclusion from the agreement.
Sudanese government forces gunned down 27 peaceful demonstrators in Port Sudan last January, sparking an international outcry. The government also incarcerated rebel leaders without charge and allegedly tortured them, suspended humanitarian access, closed the border with Eritrea and imposed a state of emergency in an attempt to limit rebel activity.
The attempt proved misguided and backfired. Rebels stepped up attacks on such strategic government installations as the 1500-km Chinese-built oil pipeline which pumps 500,000 barrels of oil from the centre and south of the country to Port Sudan each day. Facing so much pressure from the Darfur conflict and preoccupied with handling the infant and fragile peace in the south, Khartoum needed "to put out this [east Sudan] fire”, said Ahmed el-Amin Terik, an adviser to one of the eastern state governors. "It wasn't like the eastern rebels were so much of a threat. But even a mosquito doesn't let you sleep." The fighting in the east is estimated to have cost some 5,000 lives in the last ten years, compared with hundreds of thousands in Darfur and the south.
Conversely, the rebels realised that the planned withdrawal of SPLM troops and weapons from the east, under the north-south peace deal, would weaken their support base. Eritrea, desiring better relations with Sudan, hosted peace negotiations in Asmara, which culminated in the signing of a peace agreement between the Sudan government and the Eastern Front in mid-October 2006.
Under the agreement, a ceasefire was called and the eastern rebels got a presidential aide, several state ministers and members of parliament appointed from their ranks. It also guarantees that about 600 million dollars will be spent on health and water programmes for eastern Sudan over the next five years.
But the Sudan Human Rights Organisation, while welcoming the accord, expressed concerns that it “maintains the political hegemony of the ruling National Congress Party [in Khartoum] and doesn’t provide sufficient funds to develop the region”. Just as the May 2006 Darfur peace accord is routinely ignored by all its signatories, it is unclear as yet whether the eastern agreement will manage to stabilise eastern Sudan.
More than half a century of underdevelopment and neglect will take decades to reverse and will likely require billions of dollars. The infant mortality rate in Red Sea state is the highest in the country. Only 20 villages in there and 50 in Kassala State have access to healthcare. Half of Kassala State’s population is chronically malnourished. Towns such as Tokar in Red Sea State are prone to both drought and summer floods, with more than 30,000 people affected by flooding this year alone.
In some regions, the literacy rate is as low as three per cent, a situation exacerbated by the conservative Muslim culture which predominates in the region and restricts education for women.
Religion is what brings the two parties in the Eastern Front together - the Beja Congress, representing the 2.4 million ethnic Beja people of the region, and the Rashaida Free Lions, a group who claim Arab descent. The Beja-Rashaida alliance, unusual between African and Arab tribes, was cemented through an influential religious Sufi movement, the Khatmiyyah Brotherhood.
Both groups were traditionally nomadic, but recurrent droughts and displacement due to conflict have forced many easterners to seek employment in urban areas. This has seen a mushrooming of slums around cities such as Port Sudan and Kassala, where Beja support is concentrated.
The rebels have settled for a lot less than they had initially envisaged. Though they had asked for one dollar from every barrel of oil shipped from Port Sudan, which would have netted them about 150 million dollars a year, they settled for 600 million dollars in development funds over a limited time-span. Also, Beja leaders had wanted regional autonomy but were placated with appointments in Khartoum instead. Rebels say they were pressed into accepting a diluted deal because of Eritrea's eagerness to normalise relations with Sudan.
The long-running Eritrea-Ethiopia cold war has shown signs of heating up once more, prompting the Eritrean government in Asmara to make moves to neutralise Sudan as a possible Ethiopian ally. The Eastern Front, which had largely operated out of rear bases in Eritrea, had little choice but to yield to Eritrean pressure.
Both the Beja and the Rashaida are proud peoples, a factor Khartoum needs to take heed of. Should the Sudanese government fail to fulfill its obligations to accelerate development and social service delivery in eastern Sudan, there could be Eastern Front attacks on the oil pipeline artery that delivers wealth to Khartoum’s elites.
Saboteurs and hostage-takers in Nigeria and Iraq are pointing the way in which petro-economies can be held to ransom if they fail to take heed of local concerns. Given that the pipeline traverses much of eastern Sudan; that the Red Sea State hosts the nation’s single deepwater port; and that impoverished, ultra-conservative communities are fertile breeding grounds for political and religious extremism, Khartoum needs to push development of the east.
The refugee situation has not been addressed by the Asmara peace agreement, and conscription-dodgers fleeing enforced military service in Eritrea continue to swell the ranks of refugees in eastern Sudan. New refugees are not allowed to work and have relied on humanitarian aid which has since been proscribed by the Sudan government. Eric Reeves, a Sudan analyst, says that Khartoum deliberately escalates “malnutrition and human mortality in eastern Sudan as part of a war of attrition against the people seen as supporting an insurgency movement (the Eastern Front)”.
As a result, most refugees live in conditions where hunger is a constant and preventable diseases such as malaria take a grim toll. Despite the conservative culture, almost half of refugee households are headed by women, most of them widows. They are forced to earn money to supplement the meagre food rations that aid organisations manage to smuggle through to the region, but cultural constraints limit their mobility and the type of work they can do.
For those refugees who have lived in eastern Sudan since childhood, this is the only home they know, yet they cannot claim citizenship. Their only hope is that peace in the region may bring increased humanitarian aid, which could help to focus greater media attention on their plight.
With the ceasefire and a re-opening of the Sudan-Eritrea border, it is also hoped that regional trade, once a mainstay of areas such as Kassala, will be resumed. Leaders are trusting that stability will bring foreign aid and much-needed investment. But since the world has largely ignored eastern Sudan in its time of conflict, that indifference seems likely to persist unless global energy supplies are in the balance.
Ayesha Kajee, a researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, is a regular IWPR contributor.
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=acr&s=f&o=326122&apc_state=henh
Iran, The Israel-Hating Regime and The True Iranian Hero
Dec 13, 2006
Moment Magazine
Mr. Abdol Hossein Sardari, on behalf of all of us here at Persian Journal...
"Doroud bar on shiri ke khordi"
...for making us all Iranians so proud by living up to founder of Iranzamin "Cyrus The Great" Standrads
Islamic Republic Illusions in Iran
Sign "Not Under My Name" Petition.
----
How Jew- Friendly Persia Became Anti-Semitic Iran
The complex tale of how the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great-the world's "first" Zionist�metamorphosed into the Israel-Hating nation we know today.
Abdol Hossein Sardari didn't look like a hero. But when Paris fell to Hitler in June 1940, the 30-year-old Muslim-a dapper man with a receding hairline-took it upon himself to save Jews trapped inside Nazi-occupied France. Sardari, a junior official at the Iranian Embassy, had been left behind to look after the building when the Iranian ambassador and his staff abandoned Paris to establish residence in Vichy, the new home of France's pro-Nazi government. Once the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sardari, without authorization from his government, made liberal use of the embassy's supply of blank Iranian passports to assign new, non-Jewish identities to those in need, creating his own version of Schindler's list.
Ibrahim Morady, who died this past June in Los Angeles at the age of 95, was one of the hundreds of Jews Sardari helped spare from deportation. "My father moved to Paris from Persia when he was six," recounts his son Fred. Once Morady, a well-to-do rug merchant, had his new identity, he and two colleagues arranged to purchase false papers for about 100 other Jews of Iranian descent. Sardari served as their go-between, passing a bribe to a German official. In return, these Jews were given documents asserting that they were members of "some strange tribe in Iran-Djouguti, or something like that," Fred Morady explains. "I asked my father: 'What does this name mean?' And he said: 'They just made it up.'"
Sardari was not the only Iranian to protect Jews during World War II. The Iranian government itself kept its 3,000-year-old Jewish community out of Nazi reach. But his heroism is representative of Iran's civilized and empathetic attitude toward its Jews.
This attitude stands in marked contrast to the vitriolic Islamic Republic of Iran led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that we hear and read about today. The world was stunned when Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Tehran, felled an Iranian political giant�Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani-in the 2005 presidential election. Ahmadinejad, a radically conservative veteran of the Revolutionary Guards, an arm of the country's Islamic establishment, quickly became a confrontational presence. Standing aside a banner that read "The World Without Zionism," he whipped up a crowd of 4,000 students at an October 2005 conference in Tehran. "Our dear Imam ordered that the occupying regime in Al Quds be wiped off the face of the earth," Ahmadinejad declared, referring to the late Ayatollah Khomeini and using the Arabic name for Jerusalem. "Anyone who would recognize this state has put his signature under the defeat of the Islamic world."
The president also garnered world headlines when he publicly pronounced the Holocaust a "myth." He has since slightly toned down his rhetoric, questioning why, if the Holocaust happened, the Palestinians should suffer for it. "Under the pretext of protecting some of the survivors of the war, the land of Palestine was occupied through war, aggression and the displacement of millions of its inhabitants," he told the United Nations General Assembly this September, ignoring the historic presence of Jews in Palestine.
When it comes to the Jews, Abdol Hossein Sardari and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represent the two faces of Iran. This Muslim, but not Arab, country that protected its Jews from the Holocaust now questions whether that genocide ever occurred. Once one of Israel's closest Muslim allies, Iran now seeks to wipe the "Zionist entity" off the map. Tens of thousands of its Jews have left, yet Iran still retains the largest Jewish population of any Muslim country.
These contradictions have been embedded in the country's history since ancient times. "In a sense, the story of the Jews of Iran is literally the Bible itself," says Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. "The Bible says God asked Cyrus the Great [the founder of the Persian Empire] to build the Second Temple and Cyrus did. And Esther, a Jew married to the king of Persia, exposed the anti-Semitic, genocidal plot of Haman [his chief minister], and it was aborted. These two tendencies�the Hamanic anti-Semitic tendency and the tendency to welcome and accept the Jews and the rights that they have�have come all the way to the 21st century."
The first charter of human rights ever set to paper predates the Magna Carta by some 1,700 years. It was drafted not within the baronial estates of medieval England but in a desert palace in the Middle East. "I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire," proclaimed Cyrus upon entering the gates of Babylon on the first day of spring in 539 B.C.E., "and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them."
Cyrus's reign is warmly remembered as the Persian equivalent of Camelot, the mythical English court ruled by King Arthur. "Iranians take a lot of pride in the old civilization started by Cyrus," says Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Iranian-American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles. "He was extremely tolerant of other beliefs and ideologies; that, too, is an added measure of pride."
Cyrus is also sometimes referred to as the world's first Zionist. He righted the wrong done by King Nebuchadnezzar II 58 years earlier when he captured Jerusalem and Judah, and exiled thousands of Jews. "All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord, the God of heaven, has given to me and he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah," Cyrus declared. He offered the Jews the opportunity to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple at Persian taxpayer expense. Many accepted, while others remained in Persia.
Typically depicted as a bearded warrior-king with broad shoulders in a military tunic and helmet, Cyrus was killed in 529 B.C.E. in a battle in northern Persia. The Jews fared less well under his son, Cambyses II, who suspended construction of the Temple. But a few years later, work was resumed under King Darius. According to the Bible, Esther was the beloved wife of Darius's son. Xerxes, also known as Ahasuerus.
Overall, life was good for the Jewish community under the early Persian kings. "From what we know, the Jews were well trusted and tolerated," says Houman Sarshar, a scholar with the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History who edited an anthology called Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews. He points to the prominence of Jewish prophets in the Persian Empire and notes that Ezra held the respected job of scribe in the royal court. "The Jews weren't seen as a threat to anyone else's way of life," Sarshar says. But with the advent of Islam their world would change.
A battle in 642 C.E., which Arabs hail as the "victory of victories," brought an end to the golden age of Persian Jews. Some 30,000 battle-hardened Arab Muslims assembled at Nehavend, along the western Persian border, and defeated the 150,000-man Persian army, ending 2,000 years of Persian independence. The caliphate was then controlled from Damascus and Baghdad.
Although Muslims revered Jews as "the people of the Book," the imposition of Islam led to second-class citizenship for Persia's minorities�Jews, Zoroastrians, and Armenian and Assyrian Christians. "After the rapid expansion of the Muslim dominion, Muslim leaders were required to find a way of handling non-Muslims, who remained in the majority in many areas," says Nahid Pirnazar, who teaches Iranian studies at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and is founder and director of the House of Judeo-Persian Manuscripts Foundation. As a way of both protecting and discriminating against minorities, Islamic leaders came up with the notion of dhimma, or protected minorities. "The dhimmi were required to pay an extra tax but usually were unmolested," says Pirnazar. "This compares well to the treatment meted out to non-Christians in Christian Europe."
Over time, the list of hardships and humiliations grew. The Pact of Umar, named after the reigning leader from 634 to 644 C.E., established harsher laws for non-Muslims. Jews were barred from government office and the military, and forbidden to ride on white donkeys, which were seen as symbols of cleanliness. They were forced to wear yellow armbands, while Christians had to don blue ones.
After the Mongols invaded Persia in the second half of the 13th century, the standing of the country's Jews improved dramatically. "This period was the highlight of the life of Jews in Islamic Iran," says Pirnazar. "The Mongol rulers at the time were secular, not yet converted to Islam, so Jews had a chance to penetrate into socio-political and cultural levels."
This didn't last. Treatment of minorities deteriorated after the Safavids took power in the 1500s, imposing their hard-line brand of Shia Islam and ushering in "the worst era of Persian-Jewish relations," says political scientist Eliz Sanasarian of the University of Southern California, author of Religious Minorities in Iran.
The Safavids forcibly converted Iran's Sunni Muslims to Shia Islam and introduced the concept of "ritual pollution," which further segregated minorities from their neighbors. Because nonbelievers were deemed spiritually and physically contagious, Jews were barred from leaving their houses when it rained, for fear the water would transmit their impurities. A Jew who entered a Muslim home had to sit on a special rug and could not be offered tea, food or a water pipe, since any object touched by a Jew could no longer be used by a Muslim.
Safavid rule came to an end in 1736, but the Muslim perception of Jews as impure remained. Occasional violent outbreaks, reminiscent of the blood libels and pogroms carried out in Europe, punctuated the next two centuries of Qajar Dynasty rule. In one incident in the northeastern town of Mashhad in 1839, an ailing Jewish woman was told to use dogs' blood to cure a certain malady. A rumor quickly spread that she had tried the cure on a Shia holiday, deliberately insulting the sect. Jews were attacked and some three dozen killed, while the rest of the Jewish community was given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Such bloody outbreaks persisted until the 20th century, when a new breed of shah came to power.
Born in the isolated northern Persian village of Alasht in 1878, Reza Pahlavi was the son of a military officer. Pahlavi was a man of powerful military bearing, most often portrayed with a thick handlebar mustache and a curved knife hanging from his scabbard. In 1925, he deposed the last shah of the Qajar Dynasty, giving himself the title Reza Shah.
For the first time in 1,400 years, an Iranian ruler reached out to his country's Jews, bowing to the Torah to show his respect during a visit to the Jewish community of Isfahan, banning mass conversions and discouraging the idea that non-Muslims were unclean.
While respectful of Iran's Jews, Reza Shah was fascinated by Nazi Germany. With German encouragement�and to emphasize that Persians are Aryan, not Arab�he changed the country's name to Iran�from the old Persian "Arynam" or "of the Aryans."
Iran, sitting of vast pools of oil, became of great strategic importance during World War II. Hitler coveted the oil, sparking fears of an Iranian-German alliance. As a result, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran in 1941, forcing the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Though the younger Pahlavi was seen as a playboy more interested in fast cars than in governing, he had a bold vision for his nation.
A man of grandiose self-image, the new Shah viewed himself as heir to Cyrus the Great and as such was a friend of the Jews. Under his rule, the community "enjoyed almost total cultural and religious autonomy, experienced unprecedented economic progress and had more or less the same political rights as their Muslim compatriots," says David Menashri, a Tel Aviv University expert on Iran.
To protect them from the Nazis, Iran assured the Germans that its Jews were fully assimilated Iranians called kalimis�a term derived from the accolade for Moses in Koran. The Nazis, still more interested in Iran's oil, acquiesced, and also turned a blind eye to the fact that the Shah was providing an escape route for thousands of European Jewish refugees.
Rachel Meer, a Jewish Iranian expatriate who lives on the upper west side of Manhattan, remembers her father telling her the story of how, during World War II, he helped Jews pass through Iran. "He purchased a huge army tent to protect these refugees," she says. "When he married my mother, the Jews traveling through were invited to the wedding." Later, when great numbers of Iraqi Jews left their homes for the newly born state of Israel, they too were granted passage, says Shaul Bakhash, a veteran Mideast analyst at George Mason University in Virginia. "Iran was one of the few countries that did not charge the Zionist organization for this permission."
At first Iran had opposed the partition of Palestine, says Trita Parsi, author of the forthcoming book Treacherous Triangle�The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. "But once it was done, Iran and Israel realized they had common interests and common enemies." In the 1960s, Iran developed a military relationship with Israel and Israeli technicians assisted Iran with agricultural projects. Both nations, wary of Arab domination of the Middle East, saw value in creating a non-Arab "outer ring," consisting of Iran, Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia.
With the exception of Turkey, Iran stood virtually alone in the Middle East in its acceptance of the state of Israel. But in doing so, the Shah walked a fine line. As Iran's covert ties with Israel became public, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a campaign against the Shah. At home, his efforts to westernize Iran faced opposition from mullahs�Iran's Islamic clerics�on the right and intellectuals on the left, all of whom condemned his government as repressive.
After Israel seized and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Iranian clergy's antipathy toward Israel increased sharply. "1967 changed many minds," says Menashri. He recounts the story of the 200-rial banknote to illustrate the Shah's precarious position.
It was 1974, a time of great tension: Arab oil-producing nations had imposed an oil embargo on the West, but the Shah, wishing to maintain his strategic alliance with Washington and Jerusalem, refused to stop supplying them with oil. The Arabs were incensed. What seemed like routine government business�the replenishment of currency by issuing 10 million new 200-rial notes�quickly grew into a crisis. On the day the new currency was to be distributed to banks, attention fell on a six-pointed star on the back of the bill. Though the star was of a traditional Iranian design, rumors spread that the currency had been printed in Israel. Fearing rebellion, the government withdrew the notes that same day.
Protests against the Shah continued to escalate and the storm clouds of revolution gathered. "The revolution did not have Islamic overtones at first�it was a revolution of the intelligentsia and it was pro-democracy," recalls Esther's Children author Sarshar. "But, very quickly, in about two or three months, all the craziness started." While many Jews were sympathetic to the protestors, the community was seen as an ally to the Shah and part of the ruling establishment�thus an enemy of the revolution.
The most influential of the revolutionaries was a religious leader with a flowing beard who sat brooding in exile in a Parisian suburb: Ayatollah Rohollah Mousavi Khomeini. Born in 1902 near the holy city of Qom, Khomeini had been exiled from Iran in 1964 for condemning the Shah's modernization policies. After 13 years in Iraq, he moved to France, where he continued to challenge the regime. Via smuggled audiotapes of his sermons, he fanned the swelling protests against the Shah's regime from afar and inspired Iran's Islamic Revolution.
By 1978, widespread strikes had led to the collapse of the economy and, on December 12, two million protestors gathered on Tehran's Azadi Square. On January 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran into exile. Two weeks later, enormous crowds greeted Khomeini's triumphant return to Tehran on a chartered Air France airliner. That November 4, a mob of angry students, spurred on by his denouncement of the United States as an enemy of Islam stormed the American Embassy, taking 66 Americans hostage. The demonstrators included a young rabble-rouser named Ahmadinejad who also advocated seizing the Soviet Embassy. A new age of Islamic fundamentalism for Iran had begun, spelling great uncertainty for its 80,000 Jews.
As a skinny, brainy Tehran teenager in the 1970s, Roya Hakakian was one of many young Jews who supported the Islamic Revolution despite the nervous admonitions of their parents. For them, participation was not only an adventure but affirmation they were fully assimilated Iranians. Hakakian, now a 39-year-old mother in Connecticut, has written a memoir, Journey From the Land of No, that provides a glimpse into the turmoil that followed the Revolution.
Initially, the Islamists were too busy imposing their rules on society at large to worry about the Jews. "People weren't permitted to laugh on the streets on certain national mourning days; it was a crime to be with a boy you weren't related to; we had to cover our heads and we couldn't hold hands," Hakakian recalls. Women couldn't appear in public without a veil and garments like the chador that revealed not a clue of femininity. Women also lost the right to divorce, and most engineering and law schools began refusing them admission. People could be arrested�and sometimes executed�for possession of books such as The Communist Manifesto, or music cassettes. "Those were the Khmer Rouge days," Hakakian says.
Hakakian's first brush with the new order came when she and a few friends went for a hike in a public park in the Alborz, part of a mountain range outside Tehran. Encountering a sign that said the mountain was "closed," they giggled and ignored it. As they ascended, some of the girls loosened their mandatory head scarves. Soon, they were stopped by a teenager in army fatigues toting a Kalashnikov, who demanded to know what they were doing. Three other uniformed men joined him and took the group to a detention center. There, a policeman found a Jewish prayerbook in Hakakian's pocketbook; ironically, that broke the tension. "Jews are cowards," one of the uniformed men said. "They never get mixed up in politics. And we thought we'd got ourselves a pack of leftists or royalists." The girls were sent home.
"For once in Jewish history," says Hakakian wryly, "Jewish stereotypes came to our aid."
In the evenings, she and her friends would watch the show trials on television. Former leaders of the Shah's government, stripped of their dignity and wearing cardboard signs with their names around their necks, were charged with offenses like "corruption on earth," and taken to be shot. In March 1979, the spectacle hit close to home. Habib Elghanian, an industrialist who led the Jewish community council, was accused of corruption, contacts with Israel and Zionism, "friendship with the enemies of God," "warring with God and his emissaries" and "economic imperialism." He was tried by an Islamic revolutionary tribunal whose members kept their backs to him, refusing to look a traitor in the face.
Shot by firing squad on May 8, Elghanian was the first private citizen in Iran to be executed by the tribunal. His real crime was that he had failed to follow established custom for Jews and maintain a low profile. He had become a prominent figure under the Shah: While most well-off Iranian Jews were merchants with small businesses, Elghanian, owner of a huge conglomerate with interests in plastics, tile and aluminum, was a mogul. He even built a huge skyscraper in Tehran's business district.
Within days of his execution, leaders of the Iranian Jewish community selected a delegation to meet with Khomeini. They chose two rabbis and four intellectuals, some of whom had joined the early street demonstrations against the Shah. Early one morning, the six men climbed into a station wagon and drove to Qom, one of them later told Hakakian's father.
When they arrived, they were surprised to find that Khomeini, still not accustomed to the trappings of power, had cleared his calendar for their visit. As they seated themselves on folded blankets in a reception room, the Ayatollah entered. "Bism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim," one of the rabbis addressed him, invoking the name of God in Arabic in deference.
Khomeini began a long, roundabout discourse on subjects ranging from monotheism to how a man should choose a wife, to how to properly copulate, puzzling his Jewish audience. But when the Ayatollah completed his talk, his meaning became clear. "Moses would have nothing to do with these Pharaoh-like Zionists who run Israel," he said. "And our Jews, the descendants of Moses, have nothing to do with them, either. We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists."
When the Jewish delegation returned to Tehran, they spread the word: The Ayatollah had made Iran's Jews kosher in the eyes of the Revolution. Soon all synagogues were painted with Khomeini's decree and the Jews of Iran renounced Zionism.
True to its rhetoric, the Islamic Republic severed all official ties with Israel, but a clandestine relationship continued. Though Yasser Arafat was invited to Tehran and spoke of the plight of the mostly Sunni Palestinians, the Shia-Sunni divide and the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization was largely secular meant that Iran's support for the Palestinians was always lukewarm. Privately, Iran and Israel shared a common fear of the Arab states, especially Iraq. Israel sold Iran arms throughout the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.
In 1985, in the middle of that war, then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres helped broker a deal between the Reagan Administration and Iran. The agreement allowed the sale of American arms, including anti-tank missiles, to the Islamic Republic. In exchange, the United States sought Iranian influence to free Western hostages held by Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group supported by Iran. (It also used the Iranian money to fund the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.) When news of the deal surfaced, the Reagan Administration was embarrassed and politically damaged�both the United States and Israel had previously denied selling arms to the Islamic Republic.
At the end of the Cold War, Israel had a change of heart and concluded that Iran had become a major threat to its security. With Iraq severely weakened by its defeat in the Gulf War, Israeli strategists focused on Iran's quest for long-range missiles and nuclear weapons as well as Iranian funding of Hezbollah. At press conferences in Jerusalem and during many visits to Washington in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin began emphasizing his desire to make peace with the Palestinians and with Syria because an even greater danger loomed: a nuclear Iran.
In 1977, Abbas Milani, then a political scientist at Tehran University, was arrested by the Shah's police and thrown in jail. Considered a dangerous leftist academic, Milani shared a cell with some of the men who would become the leaders of the Islamic Revolution, including one of Ahmadinejad's predecessors, Rafsanjani. Recalling his incarceration with the Islamists, he says bluntly, "I couldn't stand them and they couldn't stand me."
Milani, who is not Jewish, left Iran for the United States in 1986, after the first waves of Iranian Jews fled the Revolution. He remembers that he first came to understand the special penalties that Iranian Jews faced under the mullahs when an Iranian friend, a prominent astrophysicist at Cambridge University, was invited to attend a conference in Tehran in 1982. The Iranian authorities had assured the young man he would have no problem returning to Britain, but because he was Jewish, they seized his passport upon his arrival and refused to return it.
"The poor guy had a wife and baby in England and they wouldn't let him leave," recalls Milani, who later discovered that the Islamic Republic had an unofficial policy of denying passports to young Iranian Jews to coerce their families into returning home after traveling abroad. They were in effect held hostage. "You can't be a human being without feeling offended that this is happening in your name in your country," says Milani.
Since the Islamic Revolution, approximately 75 percent of Iran's Jews have fled the country. Estimates of the number that remain vary from 13,000 (the U.S. State Department's 2005 International Religious Freedom Report, based on the most recent Iranian census) to the 25,000 to 30,000 claimed by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a non-profit group based in New Haven, Connecticut. The difference, the Center says, stems from the fact that many Jews in Iran do not wish to call attention to their heritage.
Whatever their number, Jews make up a tiny and vulnerable fraction of Iran's population of nearly 70 million. "Personally, I am very much concerned about attacks on Iranian Jews," says George Haroonian, former president of the Council of Iranian American Jewish Organizations (CIAJO), a group of outspoken Iranian expatriates that advocates for the rights of Iran's remaining Jews. "It's my viewpoint that Iranian Jews are in a very precarious situation."
CIAJO reports that since 1979, 10 Jews in addition to Elghanian have been executed, six have been assassinated by the regime, two have died as a result of being held in custody, eight have died under suspicious circumstances and 12 have disappeared.
The situation has become increasingly worse, says Haroonian. He points to the trial in 2000 of 13 Jews from Shiraz and Isfahan accused of illegal contact with Israel, conspiracy to form an illegal organization and recruiting agents, which provoked vandalism and boycotts of Jewish businesses. "This was the largest wholesale attack against the Jewish community," Haroonian says. Ten of those charged were found guilty, although espionage charges were dropped and an appeals court overturned all the convictions but those for illegal contacts with Israel. By 2003 all had been released from prison; 10 remain on probation.
Iran has seen a recent wave of anti-Semitic propaganda masquerading as anti-Zionism in print, on television and within the educational system, heavily influencing what Iranians�a quarter of them under 15�learn about their Jewish neighbors. Last February, Iran's largest newspaper Hamshahri sponsored an international Holocaust cartoon contest that solicited sinister anti-Semitic entries that were widely displayed. In 2000, the Al-Manar television station aired a claymation special in which Jews were turned into apes and pigs. In 2004, the station Sahar 1 aired a weekly series Zahra's Blue Eyes, also called For You, Palestine, in which the Israeli government is depicted as removing the blue eyes of Palestinian children for implantation into Jewish children. The claymation program "doesn't say 'all Jews are cursed,'" notes Yehudit Barsky, director of the Middle East and International Terrorism section of the American Jewish Committee. "It doesn't say the Jewish person next door is evil. But still, the selection of this story is saying there were Jews who were evil and were punished. It's a message of an insidious nature, not a direct nature."
As the line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism becomes increasingly blurred, the Jews who remain in Iran continue to stick to the Khomeini formula. "The Iranian Jewish community has gone out of its way to condemn the state of Israel, including the recent war with Hezbollah," says Nahid Pirnazar. Catholic University law professor Marshall Breger, who visited Tehran and Shiraz in 2003, says that the Iranian Jews he met expressed regard and affection for the people of Israel, but were not political Zionists. "They were creating what I would call Judaism without Israel," he explains. "It's not unknown. People would say, 'it's no problem to be a Jew' but the more observant wouldn't wear a kippah outside because people in Iran know kippahs as a symbol of the Israel Defense Forces."
While Iranian Jews are loath to speak out in defense of Israel, they do occasionally draw attention to other matters, such as anti-Jewish stereotypes in the media and the government's campaign denying the Holocaust. Earlier this year, Haroun Yashayaei, chair of the Tehran Jewish community, sent an extremely rare letter of protest to Ahmadinejad, expressing concern about the president's statements about the Holocaust. His objections were seconded by Maurice Motamed, who holds the one seat allotted to Jews in the country's 290-member parliament.
"When our president spoke about the Holocaust, I considered it my duty as a Jew to speak about this issue," Motamed told the British newspaper The Guardian in a June 2006 interview. "The biggest disaster in human history is based on tens of thousands of films and documents. I said these remarks are a big insult to the whole Jewish society in Iran and the whole world."
Motamed, an engineer, made clear to The Guardian that although he took issue with Ahmadinejad over the Holocaust, he supports the president on other issues, including the standoff with the United States, Europe and Israel over Iran's nuclear program. "I am an Iranian first and a Jew second," he stressed. Although he acknowledged that Jews in Iran face problems, he assured readers that "there is no pressure on synagogues, no problems of desecration. I think the problem in Europe is worse than here. There is a lot of anti-Semitism in other countries."
Similar sentiments can be found on the Jewish Central Committee of Iran's website, iranjewish.com. "Iran's Jewish community congratulates the achievement of nuclear fuel to the supreme leader, the Islamic Republic officials and all Iranians," a May 2006 entry reads. "We celebrate the coincident of this victory with the New Year and the unforgettable days of Passover."
Generally, Jews who have chosen to stay in Iran say that they are content and have no wish to leave their homeland. Tehran has more than a dozen active synagogues, and large groups of Jews also live in Shiraz and Isfahan. "Jews stay in Iran because they have their jobs, their lives and they love it,�" says Shirin Taleh, a family therapist who left Iran in 2001 with her children to join the rest of her family in California and has visited twice since then, including a stay earlier this year.
Taleh believes her children will have more opportunities in the United States but dearly misses the country of her birth. She balks at the notion that Iran discriminates against Jews. "I would say 'limitation' rather than 'discrimination.' Two words, two meanings. Limitations for everyone, not just the Jewish community. We have some freedoms that the Muslims don't have. Men and women mix. We are allowed to use alcohol for religious purposes. I don't claim everything is OK. Everybody in the world abuses the name of the Jews. It's an old problem between Muslims and Jews." But, she makes clear, "I don't know anything about political issues. I don't want to go there."
The decision to remain in Iran may not be measurable in rational ways. In 1998, when Manochehr Eliasi, Motamed's predecessor as the Jewish member of parliament, was asked by a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter why Jews don't leave, he burst into tears. "This is my birthplace," Eliasi said. "I love its smell."
In many ways, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sixth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the first non-cleric president in 24 years, is an exemplary product of modern Iran. Born to a modest family in a small village, he capitalized on high test scores to enter the civil engineering program at the Iran University of Science and Technology during the reign of the Shah. Later, he received his doctorate in a program funded by the Revolutionary Guards. With 12 percent of voters participating, he won the mayor's office in 2003.
This 50-year-old newcomer to the world stage shocked analysts during his recent visit to the United Nations, not only by his hardline address to the General Assembly but by his seeming enjoyment of the limelight. He parried questions at a press conference, deftly handled CNN's Anderson Cooper during a televised interview and spent 90 minutes jousting with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations. He stayed on message: The New York Times reported that Ahmadinejad spent 40 minutes of the session challenging evidence that the Holocaust took place. "I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this," he said after hearing the account of a Jewish member of the Council who saw the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II. After the meeting, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft described Ahmadinejad to The New York Times as "a master of counterpunch, deception, circumlocution."
Milani, who has followed Ahmadinejad's rise to power, believes the Iranian president is truly anti-Semitic and is playing the Israel card to gain international attention and enhance his stature. "Had he not said those comments about the Holocaust and Israel, he would have come to the UN as a two-bit president of a despotic regime. Instead, they gave him a rock star treatment here, and it all translated into more power for him back home."
"Not even a second-tier player" in Iran before the furor arose over his remarks, now he is world-renowned, says Milani. "The last month and a half, every time I have traveled and taken a cab, if the cab driver is Muslim and they get a whiff that I'm Iranian, they begin talking about Ahmadinejad as the man who is standing up to the Jews, to Israel and to America. It is working for him."
Still, for all its bombastic rhetoric, Milani says he doesn�t believe the regime poses a direct threat to Iran's Jews. "Is there a specific danger that Jews face? I don't think so," he says. "That kind of eliminationist anti-Semitism has never been part of Iranian history. Iranian anti-Semitism has been more or less limited to verbal pressure, verbal anti-Semitism, forcing Jews to live in ghettos, occasionally forcing them to wear the Star of David. Killings, pogroms�that's European, not Iranian."
Ahmadinejad's statements about Israel and the Holocaust may have more to do with political pragmatism than anything else. A man of a secular background, he must show the mullahs that he is as staunch an Islamist as they are; to mix religious metaphors, he has to be more Catholic than the Pope.
His outspokenness has advantages for the mullahs and the Supreme Leader they elect, who holds most of the real power. Seizing the limelight allows non-Arab Iran to pursue its goal of becoming the leader of the mostly Arab Middle East. And Ahmadinejad's vitriol makes the mullahs seem almost moderate by comparison.
His combativeness has another upside: it serves to shift attention from economic problems at home. Despite a huge rise in oil revenues, there is grumbling in Tehran's streets about economic conditions, reflecting the gross inefficiency of its bloated bureaucracy and centralized economy. Despite Iran's oil wealth and bravado, the government fears Western economic sanctions that would force it to spend more to subsidize food and fuel.
Growing speculation about a nuclear showdown in the Middle East is premature, according to Milani. "I don't see them picking on Israel militarily because they know that they will pay a very heavy price," he says. "Even in arming Hezbollah, they've been very careful. They have allowed Hezbollah to become more of a nuisance, they have given them more staying power, but not any weapon that could seriously change the balance with Israel or make Hezbollah a more lethal threat. I think the war in one sense was a big loss for the Iranians. They won a publicity war but not much else."
Mullahs' regime apologist Trita Parsi agrees. "Israel is a means for Iran, just as Iran is a means for Israel."
And Parsi doesn't believe that the Iranian people would support a war against Israel. "I think the larger feeling among the population is that it's really not Iran's main problem. People don't like what Israel is doing [in the occupied territories] but they don't like Arabs, either. A poll says that 67 percent of Iranians say that Israel does not have right to exist. But does that mean that they think Iran has to do anything about this? I don't think so."
Nonetheless, many Iranian expatriates long for regime change. Houman Sarshar doubts the voices calling for change inside Iran will remain silent. "A population of 75 million�with approximately 50 million born after 1978�is being run by a population of mullahs 60 and 70-plus [years old]. If only 60 percent [of the population] wants a completely secular government, then it's over," he says.
Milani believes that without $70-per-barrel oil, the regime would not survive long. "The age of pseudo-totalitarian corrupt dictatorships has come to an end," he says. "The majority of Iranian society doesn't want it. But tactically this is a very nimble regime, very brutal, and it has a lot of money."
However, Jerusalem-based Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar, co-author of the forthcoming book The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran, believes the chance of regime change is small. "Iranians are suffering from conflict fatigue after the Islamic Revolution, followed by one of the longest wars in modern history. They are tired. And there's no alternative. Who are they going to revolt for? People don't want chaos�who is going to give them hope? Who are they going to die for? Don't expect Tiananmen."
Iranians are upset that the government has shut down blogs as well as Shargh, the reformist newspaper. "It makes people angry. But go to the streets to revolt?" says Javedanfar. "Only two things would make a revolution overnight. One: Shoot the entire Iranian football team. Two: Ban the sale and eating of Persian rice. Then you will have a revolution on your hands. Until then, as they say in New Jersey, fuggedaboutit."
As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad commands the world's attention, Abdol Hossein Sardari, who died in 1981, has been all but forgotten. When the courageous diplomat returned to Iran after the war, he was imprisoned for the unauthorized distribution of passports, says George Hooranian. "After 30 days he was released by the Shah. The Shah said he did a good deed. He saved people's lives."
There is no memorial to Sardari in Iran, or until recently, anywhere else, says Haroonian. In 2004, Iranians living in the United States organized two Yom Hashoah events to honor the diplomat. One was at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the other at the Nessah Educational and Cultural Center in Beverly Hills. A cut glass tablet reads: "In memory of and admiration of his humanitarian and courageous efforts that led to the saving of many innocent lives while serving as the Iranian Consul in France during World War II."
Inspired by Sardari's deeds, and angry that he has received so little recognition, Hooranian collected hundreds of pages of documents and personally delivered them to Yad Vashem in Israel. He would like for Sardari to be become the first Iranian bestowed with the designation of Righteous Among the Nations, a title awarded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The public committee that decides who should be given this honor has discussed Sardari's case twice, and reports that it is "very interesting." A decision has not yet been made, pending further documentation. But the necessary information is not forthcoming; the Iranian government has refused to cooperate.
"How sad," says Haroonian, "that Sardari�and what he represents�cannot be honored in Iran."
Food, basic aid said not reaching Darfur
ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU
Associated Press
KHARTOUM, Sudan - Food and other basic relief is not reaching thousands in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, despite what the United Nations calls the world's biggest humanitarian effort.
Over a dozen aid workers have also been slain in recent months, and spiraling violence has forced many to pull out. Seventy-four World Food Program vehicles have been attacked and one driver has been killed since a peace treaty was signed in May between Khartoum and one of several rebel factions in Darfur. Other rebels rejected the deal.
Violence has been increasing and last month, in the worst looting yet, Arab tribal fighters known as janjaweed ripped apart a WFP warehouse and took 800 tons of food in the rebel stronghold of Bir Maza as government forces assaulted the town.
Over 200 U.N. and aid workers have had to leave remote outposts and refugee camps and some of the region's main towns - like the North Darfur capital of El Fasher, which last week was also looted by janjaweed.
Meanwhile, some 200 World Food Program trucks are being blocked by the government from reaching Darfur, said Kenro Oshidari, the Sudan director for the U.N. agency.
Janjaweed are not the only dangers. Three water engineers working with the U.N. Children's Fund were killed in June by refugees who thought they came to poison a well rather than fix it. Nine others were abducted in October and five are still being held, said UNICEF spokesman Edward Carwardine.
"Security is our most serious impediment throughout Darfur," he said.
The U.N. has called the Darfur conflict the world's worst humanitarian crisis. More than 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes in the three-year fight between the government and ethnic African rebels. The government is accused of unleashing the janjaweed to help put down the revolt, and the militia is accused of widespread atrocities against civilians.
The U.N. Human Rights Council held an emergency meeting Tuesday in Geneva to assess just how bad the crisis has become in Darfur.
"Food security is one of the most basic human rights, and it's constantly being challenged in Darfur," said Oshidari.
The WFP is the sole source of food for some 1.8 million people in Darfur, who without the U.N.'s help would starve because they fear marauding militias will kill or rape them if they leave the refugee camps to cultivate their fields. The WFP provides part of the dietary needs for nearly a million more people.
But it now cannot reach some 100,000 others - a number that fluctuates widely as lines of combat change - who are in desperate need, leaving them to rely on their own resources to find food. A few months ago, as many as 470,000 people were out of reach.
Nearly 1 million tons of food have been delivered to Darfur, at a cost of more than $1 billion dollars since April 2004. Some 15,000 Sudanese and international aid workers have been mobilized for the effort, which has created the longest supply line in Africa, with trucks going 1,800 miles - a third on unpaved roads - from a Red Sea port to the West Darfur town of El Geneina near the Chadian border.
WFP officials say they have brought the malnutrition rate below emergency levels in Darfur since 2005.
But two years ago, the WFP could freely access all of Darfur, a vast, landlocked region of western Sudan that is nearly the size of Texas.
"Now we have to fly by helicopter" to many locations because of dangerous roads, Oshidari said.
The magnitude of the relief can be measured at the WFP's transit warehouse, a set of industrial-sized buildings on the outskirts of Khartoum.
Early Tuesday morning, workers busily unloaded 100 pound bags of rice from massive trailer trucks, each of which can carry more than 80 tons of food. The supplies were to be put on smaller trucks that can navigate the unpaved roads out to Darfur.
"Today isn't a busy day, we only have 1,000 tons to handle," said Lemma Bayissa, a WFP logistician. "At times, we've had to work until midnight to get all the bags through," he said, pointing at the sacks from the US Agency for International Development - which provides half of the food for Darfur.
Aid agencies warn yet another peril could be looming: donor fatigue.
The WFP had to reduce food rations this year because it was lacking cash. Though Oshidari is confident international donors will provide most of the $685 million needed for 2007, he wonders what will come next.
He fears the crisis could just drag on, with aid workers in Darfur barely helping people survive.
"A political solution has to be found," he said. "Or donors will tire."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/16228926.htm
Comments