09
Bombs Target Students
May 3, 2010
An Iraqi official says two bombs in the northern city of Mosul appeared
to target buses carrying Christian students, killing at least one bystander
and injuring around 100 others.
Middle East
Egypt Opposition Demand Netanyahu’s Arrest
Egyptian opposition groups on Sunday called for arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on “war
crimes” when he visits Egypt this week.
Representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and the
Kifaya (Enough) coalition, along with a number of independent politicians filed a report to state prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud demanding the immediate arrest
of Netanyahu when he arrives in Egypt on Monday for
talks with President Hosni Mubarak, DPA reported.
The Brotherhood and Kifaya are considered Egypt’s
largest opposition groups. In 2005 parliamentary elections, the Brotherhood won 20 percent of the popular
vote.
“Our demand is based on a number of international
reports about the Israeli offensive on Gaza, including
the Goldstone report,” said opposition journalist AbdelHalim Qandil, the current head of the Kifaya coalition.
The fact-finding mission of Justice Richard Goldstone
last year charged that war crimes may have taken place
during the 2008-2009 three-week-long Israeli offensive
in the Gaza Strip, which left some 1,300 Palestinians and
13 Israelis dead.
“We also filed a separate legal memorandum reviewing evidence of Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza based on
international laws,” Qandil added.
Meeting at the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh,
Netanyahu and Mubarak are expected to discuss Palestinian-Israeli “proximity” talks, which Washington said will
resume next week.
On Saturday, the Arab League gave its blessing to the
indirect talks. Egypt has been a key player in the negotiations, which were suspended in late 2008.The Muslim
Brotherhood’s Mohamed Al-Beltagi said that the report is
a “a political message to emphasize that receiving Netanyahu in Sharm El-Sheikh is rejected by the people.”
The independent-daily Al-Masry Al-Youm on Saturday quoted Egypt’s ambassador to Israel, Yasser Reda, as
saying that “the Egyptian opposition isn’t opposed to the
peace treaty or Israel.”
“Those people don’t want war. Most of the world wants
peace,” he said at a Tel Aviv University after expressing
his hopes of seeing a football match played between the
Egyptian and Israeli national teams in the near future.
Despite being the first Arab country to sign a peace
treaty with Israel in 1979, the question of normalizing
relations remains a hot topic of debate in Egypt, where
many reject the idea of direct relations with Israel.
Hezbollah Insists on Owning
Weapons for Self-Defense
T
he chief of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement said on Saturday
it had a “legal” right to own any
weapon it wishes to protect his country
from Israeli threats.
“The Scud (issue) emerged a while
ago... and it created a lot of fuss,” Hassan Nasrallah said in his first public reaction to the controversy, according to a
statement from Hezbollah’s press office,
Middle East Online reported.
“We do not confirm or deny if we have
received weapons or not, so we do not
comment and we will not comment,” he
told a committee in charge of security, financial and logistical backing for Hezbollah, adding: “This is our position.”
Hezbollah has a “legal and humanitarian right to own any weapon it wants to
protect people oppressed and threatened
by Israel’s cancerous presence.”
The controversy erupted in April
when Israeli President Shimon Peres
accused Syria of supplying its Lebanese ally Hezbollah with the missiles, a
charge Damascus denied.
Washington, which has sought a rapprochement with Damascus, further fed
the controversy as Defense Secretary
Robert Gates accused Iran and Syria of
arming Hezbollah with sophisticated
weaponry, without specifying they were
Scuds.
Gates warned at a joint news conference on Tuesday with Israeli Defense
Minister Ehud Barak that Hezbollah has
“far more rockets and missiles than most
governments in the world.”
On Saturday Nasrallah dismissed talk
that the controversy about Hezbollah
weaponry was a prelude to a new armed
conflict.
“When the US defense minister Gates
said Hezbollah has more weapons than
most governments in the world... whether this is right or wrong, I will not comment,” he said.
“I don’t believe that all this fuss about
the missiles is a prelude to a war, and
God willing I am right. It is not a climate of war.”
Hezbollah on Friday slammed “interference” in Lebanese affairs by UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen.
“Hezbollah condemns this attempt to
create dissent and sedition among the
Lebanese under the guise of advice and
Turkey Vows to Crush Rebels
Turkish army chief Ilker Basbug vowed on Sunday to pursue
the fight against separatist Kurdish rebels unabated after five
soldiers were killed in militant attacks in two days.
“If you think these attacks will deliver a blow to the determination and resolve of the Turkish armed forces in its struggle against terrorism, you are gravely mistaken,” Basbug told
reporters in Ankara, AFP reported.
“You cannot achieve anything through terrorism,” he added
on a visit to the mausoleum of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
In one of their deadliest attacks in months,
rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK) fired on a military outpost in the
eastern province of Tunceli with assault rifles
on Friday, killing four soldiers and wounding
seven.
Another soldier was killed when PKK
rebels ambushed a group of soldiers on a security sweep around Lice town in Diyarbakir
province late Saturday, a security source said.
The army launched operations to hunt
down the attackers.
The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms
against Ankara in 1984 for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish
southeast, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000
lives.
The arrival of spring usually brings a resurgence of violence
as the rebels move out from their mountain hideouts in Turkey
and neighboring Iraq when the snow melts.
Last year, the Turkish government announced steps to expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to erode popular support for
the PKK while keeping the rebels under military pressure to
cajole them into laying down arms.
But the plan has faltered amid the banning of Turkey’s main
Kurdish political party in December and a number of bloody
rebel attacks that have unleashed public anger at the government.
Jordan Veterans Warn of
Israel ‘Transfer’ Policy
Israeli President Shimon Peres accused Syria of supplying its Lebanese ally Hezbollah with the missiles.
guidance,” the party said in a statement.
“Roed-Larsen’s continuous attempts
to interfere in Lebanese affairs and incite the Lebanese to fight one another
are unacceptable for an international official working for peace in the region,”
it said.
On Thursday the UN envoy had
warned of the need to address the presence in Lebanon of heavily armed
groups, which he said was a violation of
UN Security Council Resolution 1559,
adopted in 2004.
Israel waged a bloody 33-day war on
Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers
in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to
free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more
than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of
them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance
group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the
Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000.
Israel, however, continues to occupy the
Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on
an almost daily basis and are in breach
of UN Security Council resolution 1710,
which in August 2006 ended the war.
Border Security
France wants Syria to guarantee security on its border with Lebanon, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on
Sunday after Israel accused Damascus
of supplying missiles to Hezbollah.
“The situation is serious, dangerous,”
Kouchner told Europe 1radio.
“There is a stockpile of weapons,
short-range, medium-range and perhaps
even long-range missiles and we are
concerned.”
A US anti-terrorism assessment team
visited the main Lebanon-Syria border
crossing last week amid allegations that
Damascus had allowed deliveries of
Scud missiles to its ally Hezbollah.
“We are asking the Syrians to guarantee the security of that border,” Kouchner said. “I am not saying that it’s a sieve
because a certain number of facts have
not been established.
“But this is dangerous and reinforces
extremism,” he added.
France has been spearheading moves
to bring Syria out of diplomatic isolation since President Nicolas Sarkozy
took office in 2007.
Gunfire Erupts During Darfur Protest
Gunfire broke out and ambulance sirens
wailed as hundreds of angry victims of a
failed pyramid scheme protested in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region on Sunday,
as a witness said police had opened fire.
“We have heard sporadic gunfire but
it is not fighting,” Kemal Saiki, an official of the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), told
AFP of the protest in El-Fasher, capital
of North Darfur state.
“We have instructed our personnel
News in Brief
to stay at their workplace,” said the official of the force, which is based in ElFasher.
Dirar Abdallah Dirar, one of the demonstrators, contacted by telephone, said
police had opened fire as the protesters
tried to march on the house of the state
governor, Mohammed Yussif Kibir.
“There have been casualties,” he said.
Aid workers said the ambulances
could be heard out on the streets but
they were also staying indoors and un-
able to give a toll, while local authorities and hospitals were not immediately
reachable.
Tension has been running high for
weeks in El-Fasher where thousands of
small investors have lost millions of dollars in a “Ponzi scheme,” a fraud involving the payment to investors of funds
contributed by new investors.
According to local residents, the
governor had promised during Sudan’s
elections last month to compensate the
victims but failed to keep his word. His
office was unavailable for comment on
Sunday.
“This situation has been brewing
for weeks. I knew it would blow up
one day or another,” said another humanitarian aid worker in El-Fasher,
which has around half a million inhabitants.
Many investors had sold land or
ploughed in their savings to take part in
the get-rich-quick scheme.
Veterans of Jordan’s army warned on Sunday that the government in Amman must take steps to counter the perceived
threat from Israel, in the wake of a decision to classify all
West Bank Palestinians without proper documentation as
“infiltrators.”
An Israeli military order, which classifies people living
in the West Bank without proper documents as “infiltrators”, came into effect on April 13, DPA
reported.
Arab and Israeli media have predicted
that more than 70,000 Palestinians, mostly
Gazans, would be deported from the West
Bank as a result of the new ordinance.
In a rare statement Sunday, the National
Committee of Retired Military in Jordan
said that countermeasures should include supplying the
armed forces with “an effective missile system” and reactivating the militia forces law “to encounter the dangers of
the prospective Israeli aggression”.
The Jordanian government recently summoned the Israeli ambassador in Amman and handed him a stronglyworded protest over the new Israeli move which Jordanian
politicians and columnists envisaged would lead to a new
wave of Palestinian migration to Jordan – already home to
1.9 million Palestinian refugees.
Hamas Probes Tunnel Deaths
Hamas said on Sunday it was investigating the deaths of
four Palestinians in a smuggling tunnel between the Gaza
Strip and Egypt, allegedly by poison gas pumped in from
the Egyptian side.
A statement from the Hamas-run interior ministry in
Gaza said it has set up a committee to probe last week’s
death and called on Egypt to launch its own investigation,
pledging to cooperate with Cairo authorities, AFP reported.
Palestinian medics working for the Hamas-run health
ministry said after last Wednesday’s incident that the four
had died from suffocation and that there was evidence of
poisonous gas.
Egypt has denied Hamas accusations that it pumped gas
into the tunnel.
Gaza’s 1.5 million people have largely
relied on a network of hundreds of tunnels beneath the border with Egypt since
Israel and Egypt tightened an already strict
closure of the territory after Hamas seized
power in June 2007.
Most of the tunnels are used to bring
in basic goods like food, household appliances and livestock.
Egypt is building an underground wall in a bid to curb
smuggling, which it views as a security problem.
Following last week’s reported fatalities Egyptian security officials said their forces had destroyed four smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border but were not
aware of any casualties.
More than 120 Palestinians have died in cave-ins or
been killed by Israeli military operations aimed at the tunnels since the Hamas takeover, medics say.