Ehud Olmert

ver since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, its leaders have been careful never to define its borders--obviously in the hope that these borders could be pushed deeper and deeper into Arab territory.
“We are a tiny country,“ Yitzhak Shamir, a former right-wing Israeli prime minister, once told me. “We need more, moreÉ“
This thirst for land has caused Israeli leaders of all parties to state repeatedly that Israel would never return to its pre-1967 borders, although those borders gave Israel 78 percent of historic Palestine, leaving a mere 22 percent to the Palestinians.
The dispossessed Palestinians--and indeed the entire Arab world--were ready to accept this division. In a historic resolution, Arab leaders meeting in Beirut in March 2002 offered Israel peace and normal relations if it withdrew to its 1967 borders. But the offer was scornfully rejected. Land, for Israel, was more important than peace.
Now, for the first time in Israel’s history, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has spelled out how he envisages his country’s final borders if his centre-right party, Kadima, wins the elections on 28 March, as it is widely expected to do.
He proposes a further division of the remaining 22 per cent, leaving perhaps only 10 or 12 per cent in Palestinian hands, divided into separate cantons surrounded by Israel, and cut off from Arab East Beit-ul-Moqaddas. The dream of a “Greater Israel“ absorbing the whole territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river may be dead; but also, so it would seem, is the Palestinian dream of a viable, sovereign, independent state.
In an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz on 10 March, Olmert declared:
I believe that in four years’ time Israel will be disengaged from the vast majority of the Palestinian population, within new borders, with the route of the fence--which until now has been a security fence--adjusted to the new line of the permanent borders. It could be that there will be cases in which we move the fence eastward, and it could be that there will be cases in which we move it westward, in accordance with a line that we will agree upon. We will take a crucial step forward in the shaping of Israel as a Jewish state, in which there is a solid and stable Jewish majority that is not at risk.
Israel’s new borders, Olmert declared, would be fixed in discussions with the settlers. He made no mention of discussions with the Palestinians or of a Palestinian state. The new ’line’ would be drawn by Israel unilaterally, with support from the United States. “I will conduct a very substantial dialogue with our greatest ally, President Bush,“ he promised.
Olmert made an interesting distinction between the new political borders established by the fence and Israel’s “security border“ along the Jordan River. In other words, the Jordan valley would remain under Israeli military control.
Palestinian leaders have described Olmert’s proposed new borders as a declaration of war against the Palestinian people. To which Olmert--and his defence minister Shaul Mofaz--have replied that, if Hamas attempted armed resistance, its leaders, including prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, would become targets for assassination.
Olmert made no mention of Syria’s Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967, which no Israeli politician seems inclined to return.
Arab leaders have, on the whole, remained silent in the face of Israel’s proposed land grab. They prefer to look the other way. The Persian Gulf states, now enjoying an unprecedented bonanza because of the high oil price, have not hurried to ease the plight of the Palestinian population, who continue in abject poverty from decades of brutal occupation.
AGENCEGLOBAL.COM

Democracy may have been promoted as the best of all political systems, but it has long been a rare form of actual government. It is difficult for any regime entirely to live up to the democratic ideal that the strong should treat the weak well and that any abuse of power should be genuinely and unreservedly condemned.
There are five necessary criteria: open elections; the existence of an organised, free political opposition; acceptance of the principle that power can change hands; the existence of an independent judicial system; and media freedom.
Democracy has become almost universal, initially in the United States during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), and then widely after the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But those goals have turned into indisputable dogmas, allowing President George Bush to legitimise military action in Iraq and the use of torture in secret prisons on foreign soil, and to justify the illegal treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, condemned by a United Nations Commission on Human Rights report and a European parliament resolution.
Despite these serious breaches, the US has no qualms about setting itself up as the global arbiter of democratic observance. The Bush administration is in the habit of branding opponents as undemocratic, or even as rogue states and outposts of tyranny. The only way to change is to organise free elections.
But with those free elections everything depends upon the outcome. Hugo Chavez has been elected president of Venezuela several times since 1998, under democratic criteria guaranteed by international observers, and will submit again to the ballot in December 2006. Much good may it do him. The US, which sponsored a failed coup in April 2002, continues to attack him, calling him a danger to democracy.
Iran, Palestine and Haiti demonstrate that it is no longer enough to be democratically elected. The Iranian election of June 2005 met with worldwide approval. A massive voter turnout was able to choose between candidates representing a wide range of different opinions within the framework of official Islamism. Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, fought a brilliant campaign and was expected to win. Nobody mentioned a nuclear threat. But everything changed abruptly after the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has made a series of unacceptable pronouncements about Israel.
Iran is being swiftly demonised. Although it has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and denies any military nuclear ambitions, France’s foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, recently accused it of pursuing a “secret military nuclear programme“. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has already forgotten last year’s election and has asked Congress for $75m to promote democracy in Iran.
Much the same has happened in Palestine. The US and the European Union insisted upon genuinely democratic elections monitored by an army of foreign observers, only to reject the result on the grounds that they don’t like the winners, the Islamo-nationalist Hamas movement, which has been responsible in the past for attacks on Israeli civilians.
In Haiti the international community was desperate to prevent the election of RenŽ PrŽval because of his association with the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, democratically elected but overthrown in 2004. But despite their best efforts, PrŽval was elected president on February 7.
MONDEDIPLO.COM

Demonstrators get ready to clash with police, March 14, near the Sorbonne university in Paris. (AFP File Photo)

Dominique de Villepin is being pilloried for the one thing he is doing right: making a courageous attempt to make his country’s youth more employable. France’s prime minister has suffered a sharp drop in his opinion poll rating for pushing the “first job contract“ law through parliament in the face of massive university sit-ins and union demonstrations aimed at forcing him now to repeal it. The stakes are high. If he stands firm, France has a chance of beginning to lower the 23 per cent jobless rate among its young, and Mr de Villepin a fair shot at the ElysŽe palace next year. If he backtracks, his credibility as a presidential candidate will crumble along with those for labour market reform.
France has an unhappy history of trying to prod its young into jobs. Insufficient vocational training and a high university drop-out rate are partly to blame. But so are rigid minimum wage and redundancy laws that make French employers reluctant to give regular contracts of indefinite duration to less skilled or experienced workers who are so often the young. Yet attempts to devise lower levels of pay and redundancy compensation for the young are resented as discrimination. The upshot is that young people just tend to go from one temporary contract (if they are lucky) to another. Mr de Villepin’s innovation has been to try to entice employers to give the young a footing on the ladder of regular work. His new law allows employers to dispense with the usual redundancy restrictions if they choose to dismiss workers under the age of 26 during the first two years of their contract.
This has been greeted with outrage. Student groups gripe the young are being treated as “the Kleenex generation“, used and then discarded. They seem oblivious to the fact such criticism is far better directed at the fixed-term contract system and to the plight of all those young unemployed who vented their frustration by burning cars in the poorer suburbs of Paris and other cities last autumn.
Meanwhile, the opposition Socialists are asking the constitutional court to overturn the law. They and trade union leaders fear the new law will be the thin end of the wedge aimed at making the labour code for all workers more flexible. Hopefully, it will be. But that may be too much to expect with the presidential election little more than a year away.
However, this half-reform can be made to stick if the centre-right holds solid behind Mr de Villepin. President Jacques Chirac has a record of retreat in the face of student opposition, but yesterday said he backed Mr de Villepin. Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr de Villepin’s presidential rival on the right, has been less explicit in his support. But reversal of the law would also complicate his calls for reform. This issue ropes the three centre-right leaders together like climbers on a mountain: if one slips the others will too.
FT.COM

All countries have good and bad leaders. For us Serbs, Slobodan Milosevic was the worst. Not only was he responsible for the death of so many, from the war with Croatia to the killing in Bosnia and Kosovo, but he was also responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia and for bringing down American bombs on our children during “Madeleine’s War“ in 1999.
As I told U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the months leading up to that war, my view was that U.S.-led NATO forces should go into Belgrade, find Milosevic and arrest him and put him in jail. They should have imprisoned him in The Hague then, not later, when he was out of power and could do no more damage. It was his policies, not that of the Serbian people, that threatened the Kosovar Muslims and stability in the whole Balkan region.
Albright responded that “it would be illegal“ to try to arrest the leader of a foreign country. But the fact that bombing the Serbian people was immoral didn’t seem to faze her. She played into Milosevic’s trap, making him a defiant hero to many. By and large, the Clinton administration ignored the advice that they should support the opposition, not negotiate with Milosevic. That policy is what helped keep him in place.
Now, in their retrospective recounting of history, the American leaders argue that it was that bombing that weakened Milosevic and led to his subsequent downfall. This is wrong. It only strengthened him, making it take longer and making it harder for us in the opposition to finally force him out from within.
When I was prime minister in the early 1990s, I was Milosevic’s consistent opponent. We maneuvered against each other and had countless open screaming matches, most memorably at the London conference on peace in the Balkans in August 1992, when I tried with the British hosts and the United States and others to block him in diplomatically.
When I arranged for the exchange of Croatian prisoners, he called me every name in the book and accused me of treason. I was beating him like a bag, but it didn’t help. He just mobilized his brutal political machine and ruined everything for the future of Yugoslavia. If he hadn’t stolen the election, which deprived me of power and set back the chances of the opposition, I believe we would be part of the European Union today.
Now we have to make sure that the losers of Yugoslavia’s former Communist system do not manipulate Serbian nationalistic pride by arguing that Milosevic was poisoned in The Hague. Having lived under his corrupt and cynical regime, there are plenty of people who imagine this is the way things are done. The odds of that having happened are nil, and Belgrade should not hesitate to make that clear. This is not the way Americans and European do things.
Serbs are a very proud people. Milosevic irreparably damaged that pride in the eyes of history and the world. And yet, let’s not forget, he remained somehow enough of a symbol of Serbian nationalism that Vojislav Kostunica, whom the opposition swept into power, initially balked at handing him over to the UN war crimes tribunal.
Now that Milosevic is dead, we can recover our reputation. His death, in a way, cleanses the stains on our national pride.
Milan Panic, a Serbian-American
biomedical entrepreneur, was prime minister of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1993
IHT.COM

If 2005 was the year in which even some of its sturdiest supporters feared that the United Nations was tottering on the brink of irrelevance, 2006 may be the year when it limps into greater credibility and utility.
Last year the UN was still laboring under the contempt of the Bush administration for the Security Council’s lack of backbone in dealing with Saddam Hussein. The UN had been charged with waste and ineffective management. Its oil-for-food program had been investigated and found sadly lacking, with corruption at high levels. The UN was the butt of the late-night talk-show hosts.
But this year marks a trend in the Bush administration away from unilateralism, and in a quest for partners, with the UN seen as offering a new and constructive contribution to the implementation of US foreign policy. It is also a year in which the leadership at the UN has been trying to reinvent itself, shrugging off the painful past and striving for reform, change, and a new image.
The UN is a ponderous organization that cannot swiftly be set on a new course. But Secretary-General Kofi Annan is urging reforms, which, if approved, could most likely not become fully effective until after he has left his post at the end of the year.
Last week the UN announced the launch of a new $500 million disaster fund that could speed aid to the victims of major disasters such as the tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004 and the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan that left millions of people dead or injured and homeless. The fund has already received pledges for about half the intended total from the US, Britain, Canada, and other nations, and will seek contributions from corporations and individuals. It will speed aid through UN agencies to bring food, medical, and other emergency needs to disaster victims. One of the most significant contributions of the UN over the years has been its humanitarian efforts around the world. These would be bolstered by the new UN fund.
Also last week, Mr. Annan proposed sweeping changes in the UN bureaucracy that would enhance the quality of its staff, simplify its procedures, and even outsource some of the services presently undertaken at UN headquarters in New York and its satellite operation in Geneva. Another goal would be to upgrade the corps of professionals supporting UN peacekeeping operations. The price for these improvements and modernization is some $510 million.
John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, who spearheads the Bush administration’s campaign for UN reform, says the US wants to examine the proposals in detail, but they are in line with American requests and hopes.
However, dissent is likely to come to a head this week over another issue which bedevils the US-UN relationship. This is the future and composition of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights. The membership of this commission has included such human-rights abusers as China, Cuba, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Libya, making a mockery of its purpose. Annan himself has proposed that the commission be abolished and replaced with something smaller that would be more effective. It should include, he feels, member-nations that would be committed to promoting and actively protecting human rights, one of the central missions of the UN. Instead of meeting in Geneva once a year for six weeks, as does the present commission, the new entity would meet three times a year and be more proactive in pursuing human rights violators. Member-nations would be screened, and if guilty of systematic human rights violations could be kicked off the new body.
But in the politicking that has gone on to bring this about, Annan’s proposals have been watered down. The 53-nation commission would be replaced by a Human Rights Council, with a still unwieldy membership of 47 nations. Instead of being elected by a two-thirds majority as Annan recommended, members would be chosen by a simple majority of the 191-member General Assembly.
Five Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including former US President Jimmy Carter, signed a New York Times op-ed page piece lauding what was supposed to be the final draft of the proposal, but The Wall Street Journal in an editorial said the new council is “barely an improvement“ over the existing commission.
John Hughes, served as assistant secretary-general of the UN in 1995
CSMONITOR.COM