World

South Africa marks anniversary of massacre

wali — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:56:43 +0530

Family members of victims raised flowers to the sky and placed them on gravestones Sunday to mark the 50th anniversary of the massacre that became a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle and drew world condemnation.

Mourners sang freedom songs that date back to the struggle against racist white rule. In 1960, police officers killed 69 black South Africans in Sharpeville, where people had gathered to protest the pass books that the apartheid government required them to carry at all times.

South Africa's Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe laid flowers at the memorial Garden of Remembrance on Sunday, and spent time speaking with survivors and family members of massacre victims.

"We say never, never and never again will a government arrogate itself powers of torture, arbitrary imprisonment of opponents and the killing of demonstrators," Motlanthe told a crowd of 5,000 who had gathered at a stadium.

"In the same breath, we state that our democratic government undertakes to never ignore the plight of the poor, those without shelter, those without means to an education and those suffering from abuse and neglect," said Motlanthe.

Many though wonder when the change they thought they were fighting for a half century ago will come to the township of Sharpeville. Residents in recent weeks have set fire to tires in the streets to protest the lack of basic city services such as electricity and running water.

World condemnation

"Our lives started changing with Nelson Mandela's release, but people are still financially struggling and finance is still in white people's hands," said Abram Mofokeng, who was just 21 when officers opened fire on protesters in 1960, shooting demonstrators including women and children as they ran away. Mofokeng still bears the scar where a bullet entered his back.

The massacre drew world condemnation of the ruthless treatment of South Africa's disenfranchised black majority and led the apartheid government to outlaw the African National Congress party.

The country's first all-race elections were not held until 1994, and the ANC has governed South Africa ever since.

Sixteen years after the end of apartheid, many black South Africans feel that they have not benefited from the economic growth that has made many government and ANC officials rich.

President Jacob Zuma, a popular figure among the poor, has promised to speed up delivery of houses, clinics, schools, running water and electricity as well as create jobs. But he also has acknowledged the difficulties of doing so amid the global recession.

Sunday's 50th anniversary of the massacre was largely calm, despite concerns that commemoration activities could be interrupted with demonstrations.

Some gathered in the streets of Sharpeville and sang of their displeasure with the ANC, but no violence had erupted. All the day's events have been characterized by a heavy police presence, more pronounced than previous anniversaries.

"People's lives haven't changed. There are so many things we don't have ... a community hall, a sports ground ... People are unhappy," said Phillip Makhale, caretaker of the memorial site.

Busisiswe Mbuli, 18, lives with her mother and four siblings in an informal settlement on the edge of Sharpeville.

"There are no school buses in Sharpeville," she said. "We have to walk very far to go to school, and it is difficult for the little ones."

The floor of the family shack she lives in is bare earth and corrugated iron walls reveal large holes where rain and bitter winter winds can come through.

"We cannot live in these shelters. They are right next to the tar road, and the gas heating inside the shelter is not safe. And then there are the toilets. They are the worst," she said.

'East Jerusalem construction to continue'

wali — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:56:38 +0530

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he would not restrict construction in east Jerusalem, a step requested by the US, but would upgrade upcoming indirect talks with the Palestinians to include the main issues dividing them.

Netanyahu originally had wanted to put off a discussion of issues like the status of contested east Jerusalem, final borders and the fate of Palestinian refugees until direct talks are launched.

It was not clear what Netanyahu's declared refusal to budge on east Jerusalem - the territory whose fate lies at the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - would mean for future relations with Washington and the rest of the international community.

Netanyahu's moves go nowhere near the US demand to cancel a major new housing project at the heart of the row, but apparently he has offered enough to prompt US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to call them "useful and productive" and dispatch an envoy back to the region this week.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, said troops in the West Bank shot dead two Palestinians who tried to stab a soldier. A third Palestinian died of a gunshot wound inflicted at a demonstration the day before.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who was touring the Gaza Strip on Sunday, told reporters that Netanyahu would be meeting with President Barack Obama while in the U.S. The prime minister's office had no immediate confirmation.

He described Israel's recent opening of Gaza's borders to allow in window frames and other supplies to complete a 151-apartment U.N. housing project in southern Gaza as "a drop in a bucket of water."

The blockade causes "unacceptable suffering" and "undercuts moderates and encourages extremists," he said, after visiting the project in the Khan Younis refugee camp. "My message to the people of Gaza is this: the United Nations will stand with you, through this ordeal."

Most of the 15,000 homes destroyed or damaged during Israel's war in Gaza that ended in January last year have also not been repaired because of the blockade. Israel launched the war after years of militant rocket fire from Gaza on its southern communities.

Hamas police lined the streets in areas Ban visited. They repeatedly prevented journalists from keeping up with the U.N. convoy, blocking roads and repeatedly raising their assault rifles in the direction of the journalists' cars.

The blockade was imposed in 2007 after Hamas violently took over the territory.

Israeli construction in east Jerusalem is such a fraught issue because it challenges Palestinian claims to that sector of the city as a future capital. The announcement of a major new building project during Vice President Joe Biden's visit earlier this month insulted Washington and provoked the biggest rift between the two allies in decades.

That rift has put Netanyahu in a particularly difficult bind, forcing him to find a formula that would repair ties with the U.S. without antagonizing his hawkish coalition, which is resistant to sharing Jerusalem.

Since the feud erupted, Netanyahu has not announced changes in Israel's policy of allowing unrestricted construction in the eastern sector, home to Jerusalem's holiest sites. And his office denied reports that he promised to slow construction in the city's eastern sector.

"Our policy on Jerusalem is the same as that of all previous Israeli governments in the past 42 years and it hasn't changed," he told his Cabinet at the start of its weekly meeting. "As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is like building in Tel Aviv. We made this clear to the U.S. administration."

In a call to Clinton on Thursday, Netanyahu did assure the U.S. that a mechanism would be put in place to ensure that such announcements would not take Washington by surprise again, government officials have said.

Iraqi president demands election recount

wali — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:56:32 +0530

Iraq's president on Sunday called for a recount in this month's parliamentary elections, which have turned into a tight race between the prime minister and a secular rival amid accusations of fraud.

A new count could further extend political wrangling in the contentious race.

The demand from President Jalal Talabani came a day after Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki appeared to back the idea by calling on the election commission overseeing the counting to quickly respond to requests from political blocs for a recount.

The demands are the latest twist to an election that will determine who will govern the country as US troops go home.

Counting since the March 7 vote has been slow and plagued with confusion and disarray, fueling claims of fraud, though international observers had said the vote and count have been fair.

Talabani, in a statement on his Web site Sunday, demanded an immediate recount to "preclude any doubt and misunderstanding" in the results.

"As the president of the state, authorized to preserve the constitution and to ensure justice and absolute transparency, I demand the Independent High Electoral Commission recount the ballots manually starting from Sunday, March 21," Talabani said.

Al-Maliki, whose bloc is among those seeking a recount, issued a statement late Saturday calling on the commission to respond to the demands, saying that doing so quickly would "protect the democratic experiment and maintain the credibility of elections."

"Because there are demands from many political blocs to repeat the counting," al-Maliki said he was urging the election commission "to respond urgently to these demands in order to preserve the political stability and avoid the deterioration of security ... and a return to violence."

The latest partial results, released Saturday, showed al-Maliki's secular Shiite challenger, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, leading by a slim margin over the prime minister's coalition in the overall tally.

However, al-Maliki is winning in seven of Iraq's 18 provinces, which is significant because parliament seats are allotted based on the outcome of voting in each province.

Both Allawi's Iraqiya list and al-Maliki's State of Law coalition have alleged fraud in the counting — though many blocs' claims have sometimes appeared to reflect how well they are doing in the tally.

This is the first time Talabani, a Kurd, has weighed in on the counting process. His party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, has been under heavy pressure from a new political party on the Kurdish scene, Gorran, which has been making inroads in the Kurdish province, Sulamaniyah. That province has been considered the PUK's stronghold.

Moreover, results so far have shown that the Kurdish Alliance, composed of the PUK and the other main Kurdish political party, is narrowly losing to Iraqiya in Tamim province in the north. The province is home to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by both Arabs and Kurds. A win for Iraqiya would be a blow for Kurdish claims on the city.

Al-Maliki's bloc earlier this week accused the electoral commission's counting center of doctoring the numbers and demanded a re-count.

The calls for a recount appear to be stirring tensions. In the city of Najaf in Iraq's Shiite-dominated south, hundreds of residents protested outside the local government office demanding a manual recount of the elections, carrying banners that said "No to stealing our votes."

The rally was taking place as several governors from the southern provinces were meeting inside the building.

Afghan VP hopes for peace as bombs kill 12

wali — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:56:24 +0530

Afghanistan's hard-line vice president expressed hope Sunday that an upcoming national conference will lay the foundation for peace with insurgents as a dozen civilians died in separate bombings in front-line provinces.

During celebrations in Mazar-I-Sharif marking the Afghan New Year, Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim, who fought the Soviets and commanded forces that overthrow the Taliban in 2001, said a "peace jirga" planned for late April or early May would try to chart a way to reconcile with government opponents.

"The government will try to find a peaceful life for those Afghans who are unhappy," Fahim said without mentioning the Taliban by name. "God willing, by the help of the people, we will have a successful, historic jirga. ... My dear countrymen, my hope is that this year will be the year of peaceful stability."

Fahim's support would be crucial to efforts by President Hamid Karzai to reach a political settlement with Taliban leaders to end the war, now in its ninth year.

Fahim, who has been critical in the past of any deals with the Taliban, is an ethnic Tajik and former defense minister, while Karzai and the Taliban leadership are ethnic Pashtuns.

The jirga, an Afghan institution where community leaders meet to take decisions by consensus, is expected to formulate a national strategy for reconciliation talks with the Taliban and their allies.

Talking with the Taliban is gaining support in Afghanistan as thousands of U.S. and NATO reinforcements are streaming in to reverse the Taliban's momentum. That has prompted Pakistan, Iran and others to stake out positions on possible reconciliation negotiations that could mean an endgame to the war.

In an interview broadcast by BBC last Friday, the U.N.'s former envoy to Afghanistan, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, said he and other U.N. officials had been in discussions with senior Taliban officials since last year but the dialogue has stopped since the arrests of top Taliban figures in Pakistan.

Reconciliation talks

Eide criticized Pakistan for arresting the Taliban's No. 2 leader and other members of the insurgency, saying the Pakistanis surely knew the roles these figures had in efforts to find a political settlement. Pakistan denies the arrests were linked to reconciliation talks.

Talk of reconciliation, however, has done little to slow the violence, which has escalated dramatically over the past three years.

In Sunday's deadliest attack, a suicide bomber killed 10 civilians and wounded seven others when he detonated his explosives near an Afghan army patrol at a bridge in Gereshk, a town in the southern province of Helmand.

Provincial spokesman Dawood Ahmadi said all the victims were civilians, most of them vendors selling goods along the highway. Helmand is the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in recent months.

Elsewhere, two other civilians died and four were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a crowd of New Year's celebrants in Khost province near the border with Pakistan.

Khost police Chief Yaqoub Khan was about 40 yards (meters) away from the blast but was not injured. He said Afghan and U.S. forces provided enough security to prevent a deadlier attack "but unfortunately the enemy uses every means and planted a bomb just off the road."

Late Saturday, two other explosions shook the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province north of Khost, causing no damage or casualties. Nangarhar police spokesman Ghafour Khan said the bombs were designed "to create fear among the people" during New Year's celebrations.

During the New Year's celebrations in Mazar-i-Sharif, 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Kabul, a large crowd cheered as clerics raised a colorful banner at the shrine of Imam Ali, the nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.

White birds were released into the cloudy sky over the turquoise and light-green shrine as Afghan army helicopters circled overhead, dropping leaflets with New Year's messages from the local governor.

During his speech to the crowd, provincial Gov. Atta Mohammad Noor also expressed support for reconciliation and stressed the need for input from Afghans across all ethnic factions and regions, especially those who have "been damaged by fighting from both sides."

Reconciliation cannot set back democracy or women's rights, he told the crowd.

"If the people participate or share in this process, then there is no doubt the war machine of the Taliban will get weak," he said.

US-Russian deal on nukes nearly completed

wali — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:56:16 +0530

Nearly a year after President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered negotiators to work on a new treaty to reduce their nuclear arsenals, the two countries say they are finally close to completing a deal.

A deal - a small but important step toward Obama's goal of a nuclear arms-free world - could build momentum and trust toward resolving other key nuclear issues.

They range from how to pressure Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear ambitions to reducing the number of tactical nuclear weapons that are so unpopular in Europe.

It could also set a positive tone for a key conference on nuclear non-proliferation this spring.

On another level, it could bolster Obama's credibility, which is being battered on multiple fronts: the disappointing results of the Copenhagen climate change conference, ongoing economic miseries, faltering Middle East peace efforts and growing skepticism about last year's Prague speech in which he promised to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

"It's important to show the Prague speech was not just rhetoric," Mark Fitzpatrick, senior fellow for non-proliferation at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Associated Press.

An agreement would end a drought in disarmament accords between the United States and Russia, which were a hallmark of the Cold War years and were negotiated even during the worst periods of tension between them.

It officially would reconfirm Moscow's nuclear superpower status, which remains an essential element of its national identity and prestige.

"For Russia, it's the mother of all the negotiations," said Thomas Gomart, head of the Russia Center at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris, said in an interview. The magnitude of Russia's nuclear arsenal, Gomart says, is what distinguishes it from other nuclear powers and is the "ultimate guarantee" of superpower rank.

Analysts differ

The negotiations under way in Geneva are intended to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired in December, and are likely to limit the number of deployed strategic warheads by the United States and Russia.

Any agreement would need to be ratified by the legislatures of both countries and would still leave each with a large number of nuclear weapons, both deployed and stockpiled.

Both US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following talks in Moscow last week that a deal was near - but not done.

Officials and analysts differ on what issues are still keeping them apart. An official with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said Friday the "focus is on technical issues and not on posturing."

Even as negotiations continue, other important meetings on nuclear security loom.

Obama will host a nuclear security summit of some 40 nations on April 12-13 in Washington. A review conference on the 40-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty will also be held at the United Nations in May.

Successful completion of a START replacement treaty could have an impact on those summits, as well as on Obama's efforts to get the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, efforts to make progress on the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty and a Russian initiative to establish an international nuclear fuel enrichment center in Siberia.

Europe and other nations on the sidelines of the START talks have a vital stake in their outcome too, because deep cuts in nuclear arsenals could slow proliferation, said Alexander Savelyev, a disarmament expert with the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"From the international point of view, this treaty will be extremely important," he said, because it would strengthen the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which called for a gradual disarmament. "This new agreement, I hope, will help prove that the non-proliferation treaty is still active, is still effective and will remain in force."

Having a START replacement signed before the Washington and New York summits could help persuade other countries to cut their arsenals or to refrain from expanding or developing their programs, given that the two major nuclear powers are taking steps to reduce theirs.

It could also help the Europeans advance their goal of removing U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from their territory.

Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway - all NATO members - plan to discuss having the United States eliminate its nuclear arsenal deployed in Europe at the NATO summit in Lisbon in November.

"Hopefully, it will create the momentum to do more," said Fitzpatrick. "This agreement will be very important for setting the tone for the NPT review conference."

While a new START treaty would be an important step to show the rest of the world that Russia and the United States are serious about nuclear downsizing, it will not result in a nuclear-free world in the short term. Many challenges still block that goal.

One Kremlin official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the subject, said Russia recognizes that pushing for a ban on nuclear weapons could help slow their spread.