Syria opposition to receive more assistance
from Britain
William Hague confirms equipment and vehicles – but no weapons – to be sent to National
Coalition forces fighting Assad

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 March 2013 19.29 GMT
William Hague tells the House of Commons of an increase in assistance to Syrian rebels.
Photograph: PA
Britain is to step up assistance to Syria's opposition, the foreign secretary, William Hague, has
said on Wednesday , providing armoured vehicles, body armour and other non-lethal equipment
to the "moderate, democratic forces" battling President Bashar al-Assad.
In a statement to the House of Commons, Hague said that international efforts to end the bloody
two-year conflict in Syria had been an "abject failure". He said the European Union had to
"move further" if there was no political solution.
But he ruled out providing arms to the rebels – a key demand of the Syrian opposition – at least
for now. He also said that there was no prospect of western military intervention in Syria.
Hague's comments came as the number of refugees fleeing the fighting passed 1 million. The UN
high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said the numbers had risen sharply since the
beginning of the year as violence gripped the country.
"Syria is spiralling towards full-scale disaster," Guterres said, warning that the ability of
neighbouring countries to absorb the new arrivals was "dangerously stretched". Half of the
refugees were children, he said, many traumatised.
Britain will now provide non-lethal military equipment to the opposition Syrian National
Coalition. This will include electricity repair, water purification equipment and testing
equipment for chemical weapons. The assistance is designed to protect civilians and was a
"necessary, proportionate and lawful response to the situation of extreme humanitarian
suffering," Hague said.
The EU arms embargo to Syria remains in force. But Hague said the EU would re-examine it in
May, and hinted that he would push for it to be lifted if the bloodshed continued. "We must be
prepared to do more in a situation of such slaughter and suffering. A more static policy would
not measure up to the gravity of the situation," Hague told MPs.
Last week, the National Coalition's London representative said he expected some European
countries to break with Washington and to start supplying arms to the Syrian rebels in the next
few months. Speaking to the European parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, Syria's top rebel
commander, Salim Idris, said anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were needed to protect the
civilian population. "When we don't have enough weapons ... the regime still considers itself
powerful, and it continues killing," he said.
There has already been a noticeable relaxation in recent days of strict restrictions the US and
Turkey had imposed on arms flows over the Turkish border. Video footage on Wednesday
showed rebels shooting down a helicopter near Aleppo with an FN-6 shoulder-launched missile.
The UK's pledge to spend $20m (£13.2m) follows a similar announcement from the US, which
has promised $60m for non-lethal equipment. The British money will be spent on armoured fourwheel-drive vehicles to allow opposition figures to move around more freely, as well as personal
protection including body armour. The UK will train armed opposition groups in international
law and human rights standards.
Hague said there was little possibility of a political solution in Syria. He said that the
international community had made "countless" unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with al-Assad,
who enjoyed strong support from Moscow. What happens in Syria was "vital to our national
interest", he told the House of Commons, citing the growth of extremism, which has made Syria
the "top destination for jihadists anywhere in the word". He also pointed out that the crisis was
undermining regional security, adding that there was growing concern Assad might use his
stockpile of chemical weapons.
The foreign secretary rejected a suggestion by one MP that Britain should express its displeasure
with the Kremlin by boycotting the 2018 World Cup, to be hosted in Russia. "I'm not a great fan
of sporting sanctions," he said.
Japan’s New Leader Takes On Old Order to
Jolt Economy
Yoshikazu Tsuno/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, right, and Finance Minister Taro Aso watched an interruption at the
National Diet in Tokyo on Monday.
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: March 6, 2013, NYT
TAHARA, Japan — Just two months into office, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is showing an
increasing willingness to take on some pillars of Japan’s establishment — the central bank and
the country’s politically influential farmers — in an aggressive attempt to finally breathe some
new life into Japan’s listless economy.
Mr. Abe has already forced the departure of the cautious head of the central Bank of Japan and
nominated a replacement who vowed Monday to do “whatever it takes” to fight crippling
deflation that has eroded profits and wages and stifled spending. Mr. Abe is also expected to
announce soon that his nation will join negotiations on an American-led Pacific free-trade pact
that the Obama administration hopes will offset China’s growing economic and political might,
but that could also force Japan to make painful, market-opening changes it has resisted for nearly
two decades.
Joining the pact risks alienating farmers, longtime staunch supporters of Mr. Abe’s conservative
Liberal Democratic Party, who would face more intense competition from cheaper imports.
But the broader public appears more willing to embrace drastic economic measures at a time
when Japan, the region’s waning economic superpower, feels threatened by China, helping push
Mr. Abe’s approval ratings to around 70 percent in recent polls. That is a vast improvement from
his disastrous first term in office six years ago, and from concerns that his hawkish views might
alienate him once again from voters.
“The future of Japan’s economic growth depends on us having the willpower and the courage to
sail without hesitation onto the rough seas of global competition,“ Mr. Abe declared in a speech
to Parliament last Thursday.
Critics warn that his stimulus measures, including a new wave of public works projects, could
increase Japan’s already crushing public debt, or set off a currency war as the prospect of drastic
easing by the central bank has caused the yen’s value to plummet.
They also worry that Mr. Abe’s effort to combat deflation could include radical steps that they
warn could disturb global financial markets by unleashing a flood of Japanese money into
developing economies, causing dangerous, speculative bubbles.
The many economists who support Mr. Abe’s plans, however, have a different warning: that any
economic benefits could prove short-lived unless they are accompanied by a longer-term growth
strategy.
The trade pact, they say, will be a good litmus test of Mr. Abe’s willingness to force such deeper
structural changes in Japan. It could also force the country to face a long-debated and difficult
decision: whether it is willing to trade some of the egalitarianism it takes such pride in to
embrace a freer form of capitalism that could break the grip of vested interests and reverse a long
decline.
“The T.P.P. is a battle over what kind of country we want Japan to be,“ said Hisaharu Ito, a top
official in Aichi Prefecture’s Union of Agricultural Cooperatives, referring to the trade
agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. His organization represents some 10,000 full-time
farmers who fiercely oppose the trade group.
He added, “Do we want to turn into a harsh society of winners and losers, or remain a gentler
society where benefits are shared?”
Japan’s joining the trade group could have an added advantage for the United States, possibly
opening some of Japan’s still impenetrable markets to American products.
Here in Tahara, a city in central Aichi, where rice paddies and cabbage fields run up against a
Lexus plant, Shigeaki Okamoto is the rare voice in the farming community pushing for change.
He says Japanese farmers could compete without the tariffs they have been sheltered behind if
they were allowed to become entrepreneurial.
Mr. Okamoto tried to export rice to China, only to be told that a company controlled by a farm
co-op has a monopoly on sales to that country. He says such restrictions are typical of
government bureaucrats and farming co-op officials who have tried to block him every step of
the way with arbitrary regulations and even attempts to ostracize him from others farmers.
“Japan is wrapped in an invisible web that prevents you from showing any sort of initiative,”
said Mr. Okamoto, 51.
Mr. Abe’s promises of economic revival have already created a budding optimism in urban areas
like Tokyo, where the stock market has rallied and restaurants seem more crowded than they
were during years in which many people resigned themselves to Japan’s fading prospects. The
new, if fragile, hopefulness has been boosted by rising corporate profits, as a weakening yen has
brought desperately needed relief to badly shaken electronics corporations and other exporters
struggling to compete with Chinese and Korean rivals.
The yen has dropped 20 percent in recent months, on the strength of Mr. Abe’s promises to
rethink Japan’s priorities.
While the new prime minister is off to a strong start, political analysts said it was too early to tell
if he will be the rare decisive Japanese leader who can make a real impact, like his mentor,
former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose liberalizing policies Mr. Abe is apparently
seeking to continue.
Economists say the jury is still out on whether Mr. Abe’s measures, popularly called Abenomics,
will be drastic enough to restore growth to a $5.9 trillion economy that in yen has shrunken back
to the same size it was in the early 1990s and caused the country to slip behind China on the list
of the world’s largest economies. (The current ranking is the United States first, followed by
China and Japan.)
Mr. Abe started his push for changes at the Bank of Japan less than a month after taking office in
December, pressing its leaders to set a target of causing rising prices, or inflation, at a rate of 2
percent per year. When the bank failed to follow quickly with bold measures to accomplish that
goal, Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democrats threatened to rewrite the law to make the bank more obedient.
That was enough to drive the incumbent central bank governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, who has
long been criticized for inaction, to announce that he would step down three weeks earlier than
planned. On Thursday, Mr. Abe nominated his replacement, Haruhiko Kuroda, an Oxfordtrained former Finance Ministry official.
Even Mr. Abe’s own economic advisers say it is unclear what Mr. Kuroda will do, and point out
that he is more cautious than other people whose names were floated as possible replacements
for Mr. Shirakawa. Still, at parliamentary hearings on his nomination on Monday, Mr. Kuroda
pledged to do “whatever it takes to escape from deflation,” without giving specifics.
Mr. Abe’s advisers say they expect Mr. Kuroda to at least catch up with the more aggressive
increase of the money supply adopted by the United States’ Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S.
Bernanke, since the 2008 financial crisis.
Many Japanese voters seem to agree that bolder steps are needed as anxiety grows over Japan’s
geopolitical standing versus China’s.
“People here realize that economic revival is tied to Japan’s security,” said Robert Feldman, an
economist in Tokyo at Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities.
South Korea Pushes Back on North’s Threats
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: March 6, 2013, NYT
SEOUL, South Korea — The South Korean military warned on Wednesday that if it was
provoked by North Korea, it would strike the North’s “command leadership,” escalating a war of
words and hinting at an attack on a North Korean headquarters.
The day before, the North Korean People’s Army threatened to attack the United States and its
ally South Korea with “lighter and smaller nukes,” apparently in reaction to the United Nations
Security Council’s consideration of new, tougher sanctions against the North over the nuclear
test it conducted in February.
Bellicose statements from North Korea are nothing new, but their tone has grown bolder recently
after apparently successful recent tests of a long-range rocket and a nuclear device, and
especially in the past week, as the United States and South Korea began their annual joint
military exercises.
South Korea usually does not respond to North Korean tongue-lashings, but it did on Wednesday,
dismissing the North’s threat as mere propaganda.
Still, with officials and analysts here worried that North Korea might provoke a deadly skirmish
sometime soon, to shake the new government of President Park Geun-hye in the South and to
destabilize the region, the South Korean military called a news conference on Wednesday to
deliver a categorical public warning.
“If North Korea attempts a provocation that threatens the lives and security of our people, our
military will forcefully and decisively strike not only the origin of provocation and its supporting
forces but also its command leadership,” said Maj. Gen. Kim Yong-hyun, chief operations
officer at the military’s Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We make it clear that we are all
prepared.”
South Korea has since vowed to strike back with a deadlier force if North Korea provokes it
again.
Despite such warnings, however, officials worry that the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, or
ambitious generals under him may be thinking that possessing nuclear weapons will allow them
to provoke the South with impunity.
“We read their confidence in nuclear weapons behind their aggressive, more provocative rhetoric
and actions recently,” said Chang Yong-seok, an analyst at the Institute for Peace and
Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “There is a higher possibility of North Korea
attempting a provocation, something that would involve limited causalities but have all the
impact that one expects from an armed provocation.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 6, 2013
An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the possible targets suggested in a warning by
the South Korean military that, if provoked, it would attack the North’s “command leadership.”
The statement was not meant to include the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un among the
possible targets.
French Ministry Posts Online Full File on
‘Dreyfus Affair’
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: March 6, 2013 NYT
PARIS — The entire secret military file that was used to wrongly convict Capt. Alfred Dreyfus
of spying for Germany in 1894 has been posted online by the historical department of the French
Ministry of Defense.
The Dreyfus case consumed and divided France for more than a decade and became a litmus test
for patriotism, press freedom, individual rights and religious tolerance. With strong themes of
xenophobia, anti-Semitism, patriotism and paranoia, the affair was finally resolved, after a
fashion, in 1906. Captain Dreyfus was pardoned and restored to the army as a major after a
lengthy court battle and nearly five years of solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, the notorious
penal colony in French Guiana; he had been sentenced to life.
Even when new evidence emerged in 1896 pointing toward the guilt of another officer, military
leaders who were eager to protect the army’s reputation suppressed the evidence and concocted
forged materials to convict Captain Dreyfus again. The case was widely denounced as a
miscarriage of justice, most notably in “J’accuse,” an open letter by Émile Zola published on the
front page of the newspaper L’Aurore in 1898.
The voluminous files on the case were archived in 1906, but they had never before been
published in their entirety. They have now been scanned, transcribed and made accessible to the
general public without cost on the Internet. The dossier was never given to Captain Dreyfus or to
his lawyer.
The files contain more than 470 documents, and another 84 folders and envelopes, some of
which have annotations. According to the historical service, the documents include items like
investigative notes, witness statements, letters, documents stolen from foreign embassies, reports
about some important figures, and information about “homosexual liaisons between certain
actors in the affair.”
Captain Dreyfus received an honorable discharge after his exoneration. He volunteered to serve
again in the French army at the beginning of World War I, and finished the war as a lieutenant
colonel of artillery.
Malaysians Kill 13 Filipino Fighters Amid
Fears of Wider Conflict
By FLOYD WHALEY
Published: March 6, 2013 NYT
MANILA — An air and ground assault by Malaysian forces killed at least 13 of the nearly 200
militants seeking to reclaim part of Borneo Island for a Filipino sultan, Malaysian police officials
said Wednesday.
Sporadic fighting continued on Wednesday in remote coastal areas of the eastern Malaysian state
of Sabah as the police and soldiers scoured rugged territory, searching house to house to find
Filipino rebels who escaped the large assault on Tuesday. At least 40 people have died so far in
the fighting.
The Malaysian state news agency, Bernama, said the police warned on Wednesday that some of
the rebels were “impersonating as members of the public.”
“The mopping and searching will cover a wider area given there are signs the intruders moved to
another location,” Chief Ismail Omar of the Royal Malaysia Police told reporters on Wednesday,
without providing more details.
The situation began about a month ago when an estimated 200 people from the southern
Philippines landed in a remote area of Sabah State to re-establish a claim over the area by the
Sultanate of Sulu, which ruled the area for centuries.
Nur Misuari, the leader of the southern Philippine militant group Moro National Liberation Front,
said after Tuesday’s assault that some of the battle-hardened fighters from his group were taking
part in the fighting in Malaysia.
In a sign of potential widening of the conflict, the rebel leader said that more of his fighters were
planning to go to Borneo on their own to reinforce the Filipino combatants there, even though he
did not support the incursion into Sabah.
To halt further incursions, Malaysian and Filipino naval ships have set up a blockade between
the southern Philippines and Sabah, a distance that can be traveled by speedboat in about an hour.
One regional security analyst said that Tuesday’s airstrikes were designed to send a message of
Malaysia’s military strength to the rebels, partly in retaliation for the killing of security forces.
But the failure of the strikes to eliminate the group could have broader consequences.
“It looks like the situation in Sabah is going to remain unstable for a while yet because the
Sultan’s followers have managed to disperse into a wider area,” said Bryony Lau, a senior
analyst with the International Crisis Group in Jakarta.
“If there are more deaths of Filipinos at the hands of the Malaysian security forces, there’s no
question that will further inflame anti-Malaysian sentiment in the southern Philippines, with
potential security consequences for Sabah,” she said.
Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia and President Benigno S. Aquino III of the Philippines
have tried repeatedly to convince the group from the southern Philippines to return before
violence broke out. Both leaders are facing elections, and the fighting is being used by
opposition candidates to criticize government efforts.
Mr. Aquino is not up for re-election, but members of his party in both chambers of the legislature
are running for office. Victories by his political allies in the Senate and House of Representatives
are crucial for the president to successfully pursue his political agenda.
Jamalul Kiram III, the Manila-based leader of the fighters in Sabah, and one of the claimants of
the title of Sultan of Sulu, has support on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, which is a
politically important, vote-rich area.
The self-proclaimed sultan also has support from Filipinos in other parts of the Philippines who
believe the country has a legitimate claim to Sabah. Members of Mr. Aquino’s cabinet are
treading carefully in their dealings with the sultanate. Taking a strong position against the sultan
could cost votes in the May national elections.
Malaysian authorities, on the other hand, are incensed by the incursion into Sabah and have
labeled the Filipino fighters as “terrorists.” Mr. Aquino’s government has rejected the term but
noted that if the bodies of Malaysian soldiers were desecrated, as reported by authorities, those
would be considered “terroristic” acts.