Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

Civil violence is a red line that should never be crossed--"If we cross it, the country will return to square one in the history of the Lebanese crisis." These are words of experience and wisdom, and they came from Hizbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Nasrallah is the custodian of other commonsense concepts that found public expression on Sunday. For example, he called for a national dialogue to cement the things on which all parties concur. He was making clear that Hizbollah is Lebanese and that despite some differences in approach from some groups firmly entrenched in the opposition camp, there are, in fact, many points of agreement, including national unity and the parliamentary system.
He also said the "time was ripe for a safe withdrawal" of Syria's military presence in Lebanon, and that because Syria had been successful in its policies in Lebanon, the withdrawal would not cause instability, as long as the withdrawal was conducted sensibly and carefully. This means, Nasrallah said, that the best mechanism for such a withdrawal is the 1989 Taif Accord, which Syrian President Bashar Assad announced Saturday would be implemented.
By the same token, Nasrallah emphasized that a Syrian withdrawal does not give a green light for other powers to step into Syria's shoes: "Sovereignty and freedom means to be masters of our own destiny. We are ready to unite with the opposition in the fight for true freedom and independence." If sovereignty means anything at all, then it means independence from the United States and Israel as much as it means independence from Syria. Sovereignty means sovereignty--it cannot be interpreted one way for one party and another way for another party. This is why, Nasrallah maintains, Hizbollah cannot support UN Resolution 1559.
Nasrallah has a point, and Lebanese of all persuasions would be advised to listen more closely and afford the Hizbollah leader the respect he is due. There may be too many who are prepared to reject out of hand the words of moderation--in the very difficult circumstances in which Lebanon currently finds itself--coming out of the southern suburbs of Beirut. To dismiss Hizbollah or to entertain thoughts of confronting it, is to approach the red line that must be avoided at all costs.
Hizbollah must be accorded an important place in the process of national dialogue and rebuilding not so much because it is a powerful force that was capable of making the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon too costly for Israel, but because it is the major sociopolitical organization in Lebanon. Quite simply, Hizbollah is not a problem: It is part of Lebanon's solution.
So when Nasrallah also said that before we demand anything more of Syria we need to know what we want for ourselves, he knew what he was saying. To press ahead recklessly into the unknown will only be an invitation to approach the red line.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB

More than half of the worldÕs countries have either abolished the death penalty for normal crimes or have imposed moratoriums. (AFP File Photo)

Which country seems the odd one out in this list: China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United States? These eight countries are the only ones in the world that, since 1990, have executed citizens who were under 18 when they committed their crimes. Now, at last, the worldÕs self-proclaimed beacon of freedom will be able to take itself off the list. On Tuesday March 1st, AmericaÕs Supreme Court ruled, by five votes to four, that putting to death those who were minors at the time of their crimes is unconstitutional. The move reprieves 72 juvenile offenders on death row.
Of course, the death penalty will remain in place for convicted murderers in America. Indeed, it remains popular--two-thirds of Americans support it (though this number drops to half when life imprisonment without parole is offered as an alternative). Despite this weekÕs ruling, America is clearly still out of step with most of the countries it considers its friends.
America's Death Penalty Information Centre has information on the case that led to the ban on executions of under-18s (Roper v Simmons). The American Bar Association posts its amicus brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that juveniles do not have moral culpability. The Supreme Court publishes its decision in this case. Amnesty International reports on capital punishment.
More than half of the worldÕs countries have either abolished the death penalty for normal crimes or have imposed moratoriums, according to Amnesty International, a non-governmental organisation that campaigns against capital punishment. These include all but two countries in Europe and Central Asia (Belarus and Uzbekistan), as well as both of AmericaÕs neighbours, Canada and Mexico, and like-minded countries such as Australia and New Zealand. Among large democracies, only India, South Korea and Japan still practise capital punishment. But it is rare in those places. According to Amnesty, in 2003, 84% of the worldÕs known executions took place in just four countries: China, Iran, Vietnam and America.
Though AmericaÕs polls do not show it, the tide may be creeping against the death penalty. One reason to think it will not last forever is that in most of the countries where it has been abolished, a majority of the public remained in favour of keeping it at the time. In most cases, crime rates failed to shoot up after abolition--thus putting paid to the argument for execution as deterrence--and populations came to believe that judicial killing was wrong under any circumstances. Only one formerly abolitionist country has resumed executions--the Philippines--though it has since suspended them again.
A second trend is the gradual nibbling away at the death penalty within America itself. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that most Americans now regarded the mentally retarded as Òcategorically less culpable than the average criminalÓ, and banned executing them.
A third trend against the death penalty in America is the increasing attention paid to moral views elsewhere. In the Supreme CourtÕs majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court acknowledged Òthe overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penaltyÓ. While the court explicitly said that foreign opinions, legal or moral, are not binding in American law, they were nonetheless Òrespected and significant confirmationÓ for TuesdayÕs ruling.
America may be happy to differ sharply from the worldÕs other democracies on some moral and ethical issues, and this often irritates its closest friends. But this weekÕs death-penalty ruling seems to show that even a superpower can sometimes be swayed, even if just a bit.
ECONOMIST.COM

Polls show that most Americans get most of their information about politics and public affairs not from newspapers or from network TV or cable, talk radio or the Internet, family or friends, but from local television news. Americans like local news, according to surveys regularly touted by the National Assn. of Broadcasters--it's one of the most profitable slices of the entertainment industry, pulling in billions from advertisers eager to connect with all those avid viewers. And decades of evidence about the toxic effects of media have had no apparent effect on what gets broadcast.
Local news may scare people about the mean world beyond their doors, but there is a reason why "if it bleeds, it leads." People can't take their eyes off violence. Fear is a magnet for our attention. It was true when we were hunter-gatherers. It was true when St. Augustine couldn't resist the thrill of gladiators' mayhem. Every time we rubberneck at a car wreck, we prove it true again.
Sex, celebrity, novelty and melodrama are similarly mesmerizing. Our lizard brains can't help it. And as long as station owners have every incentive to seduce us and no incentive to educate usÑ-or to figure out how to make public affairs programming as irresistible as carnage or cat fashion showsÑ-we can expect to be fed this diet, no matter what its consequences to our psychology or our society.
Local news is broadcast over public airwaves. When stations apply for their free licenses, they promise to fulfill public interest obligations in return. Some station managers may see a responsibility to strike a balance between producing profit and generating useful reportage, rather like a public utility. But their programming choices suggest that they believe that people don't need to know much about local public affairs. For instance, on Monday, KCBS-TV Channel 2 sponsored a mayoral debate but decided not to air it live, instead broadcasting "Entertainment Tonight's" post-Oscar coverage.
When market forces don't provide something that the public needs, it's the job of government to make sure it's available. This is especially true when what's needed is owned by the public in the first place, as with wilderness and wetlands. In the case of the electromagnetic spectrum, there have been laws since the Hoover administration conditioning the use of that spectrum on the "public interest, convenience and necessity."
The government consistently enforced these laws until the 1980s, when, as part of the Reagan administration's deregulatory juggernaut, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Mark Fowler declared that television is "a toaster with pictures," an appliance like any other. The market would take care of things; the public interest should be defined as what the public is interested in. The rise of cable television added the argument of abundance: With consumers having so many choices, the old rules from an era of broadcasting scarcity no longer applied. If people wanted public affairs, they could find it somewhere.
It's possible that people don't express dissatisfaction with the coverage of local public affairs because, getting so little of the good stuff, they haven't had a chance to develop an appetite for it. It's also possible that the market already meets the demand, that the relatively few people who want thoughtful local coverage will find it on cable access, public television or radio or in the newspaper.
So the real question isn't "Who cares?" but "Should we care?"
Martin Kaplan
COMMONDREAMS.ORG

Judging from the ever-more accurate measurements of global disparities that flow from the world's leading humanitarian organizations--with the World Bank, IMF, WTO and OECD taking the lead--it would be no exaggeration to state that scholarly interest in this subject has now turned into a nearly unstoppable epidemic.
These estimates of global disparities still follow the established practice of comparing some characteristic, X, of economic development as it applies to people in rich and poor countries. Most commonly, X refers to per capita income. At other times, X refers to various indicators of the quality of life, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, adult literacy, or some combination of the previous three.
We need a different approach to the measurement of global disparities. The disparities between the rich and poor people are now so large, one has to ask if these comparisons make sense any more. When 25 million of the richest people living in the United States enjoy nearly as much income as 2 billion of the world's poorest people, one begins to wonder if the 'people' in the two groups are the same. It is likely that if knowledge of these comparisons became common, they could lead to the revival of old racist attitudes in the United States. Alternatively, they could induce feelings of deep despair among the world's 2 billion poorest people.
This is why I am proposing an alternative measure of global disparities. Instead of comparing X across people in poor and rich countries, I am suggesting that we make these comparisons for people in poor countries and mammalian pets in rich countries.
We begin this exercise by first establishing some basic facts about the pet economy in the United States. First, let us establish the size of the mammalian pet economy in the United States; we define mammals to include dogs and cats. According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association (APPMA), the total US pet industry expenditures for 2003 were $32.4 billion. I assume that 90 percent of this total was allocated to the canine and feline portion of the pet economy; this gives a total expenditure on this segment of the pet economy of $29.2 billion. Although impressive, these numbers seriously underestimate the true size of America's pet economy.
How does this pet economy compare with the poor economies of the world? To give the poor economies the greatest advantage in the comparisons, we will measure their size in terms of international dollars. By this metric, America's pet economy is 1.2 times larger than the economy of Pakistan with a population of 148 million; it is 1.4 times larger than the economy of Bangladesh with a population of 138 million; it is 2.7 times larger than the economy of Nigeria, with a population of 122 million; and it is 10.6 times larger than the economy of Congo (Democratic Republic) with a population of 34 million; and 24 times the size of the Albanian economy with a population of 3.2 million. In other words, the US pet economy is larger than most of the poor economies in 2003.
One might think that these more upbeat comparisons give reasons for optimism for the world's poor. Given the smaller disparities between the poor people and rich pets, the poor people can at least dream that once the great humanitarian project of globalization begins to yield its trickle-down benefits to the poor, they will, in the not-too-distant future, be able to catch up with the dogs and cats in the United States.
Shahid Alam
MSALAM.NET

Behind the facade of post-election political process, despite Tony Blair's desire to move on and George Bush's attempt to mend fences with Europe, in Iraq the atrocities continue to mount. Some, like the Hilla attack, are Zarqawi-style, with hundreds dead and wounded. Others are more mundane and sustained, like US warplanes bombing suspect houses in Ramadi, Hit, or Mosul, roadblock killings in Najaf, or post-curfew hunting by snipers in Sammara.
Despite all the rhetoric about "building a new democracy", daily life for most Iraqis is still a struggle for survival, with human rights abuses engulfing them. A typical Iraqi day begins with the struggle to get the basics: petrol, a cylinder of gas, fresh water, food and medication. It ends with a sigh of relief: Alhamdu ilah (thanks, God), for surviving death threats, violent attacks, kidnappings and killings.
For ordinary Iraqis, simply venturing into the streets brings the possibility of attack. Most killings go unreported. With no names, no faces, no identities, they cease to be human beings. They are "the enemy", "collateral damage" or, at best, statistics to argue about.
In March 1989, Iraqi and Arab writers contributed to a book called Halabja, to condemn Saddam Hussein's regime for using chemical weapons against civilians in the city. At the time of the attack, Saddam was still the darling of the west.
In my introduction to the book, I wrote: "They say 5,000 people died. Others say 10,000 died. We say: in Halabja, within minutes, Rasul, Piroz, Ahmed, Khadija, Sardar, Amina--have been killed. In Halabja, eyes no longer shine."
Now, we continue to watch life draining out of our country. Almost two years on from the beginning of the occupation, eyes no longer shine in many Iraqi cities. Thousands of civilians have been killed. One of them was Hazim Ahmed al-Obaidi. On January 16, Hazim, 57, left his house to go to work. He had a cash-and-carry shop, for fruit, vegetables and dates, in Mosul.
Before leaving, his wife reminded him to get some paraffin, if possible. He laughed loudly, hugging his four-year-old daughter, Manar, who wanted to go with him. He waved goodbye to his mother and his children: Dalal, 17, Shahad, 12, Maha, 9, and Zayed, 11.
Hazim never came back. He was shot, according to eyewitnesses, by a US patrol.
In his message broadcast to Iraqis last April, Tony Blair said: "Our aim is to help alleviate immediate humanitarian suffering, and to move as soon as possible to an interim authority run by Iraqis...which represents human rights and the rule of law and spends Iraq's wealth not on palaces and WMD, but on you and the services you need."
So much for illusions. Charred bodies, the massacre of children in a wedding party, the killing of detainees, shootings at demonstrations, kidnappings of civilians--these are the features of that "better future".
Occupation troops are responsible for an increasing list of abuses, including the torture and killing of Iraqi prisoners. Seeing a corpse photographed with grinning US soldiers at Abu Ghraib shocked the moral sensibility of people around the world. Following the US and British governments' line on human rights, members of the interim Iraqi government have sought to play down the violations committed by occupation troops--either by recalling that similar abuses were committed under Saddam's regime or by labeling the victims as terrorists.
Facing these daily atrocities, what do we expect an oppressed Iraqi to do?
Haifa Zangana
is an Iraqi-born novelist and former prisoner of the Saddam regime
GUARDIAN.CO.UK