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EU Concerned About Afghanistan, Pakistan
Following recent developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan and rising violence in the two countries, European officials have stepped up diplomatic efforts to protect their own interests.
Just days after the visits of high-ranking European officials to Afghanistan, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband went to Pakistan, proceeded by the EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana’s visit to Afghanistan.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier and Spanish Defense Minister Carme Chacon visited Afghanistan in April.
More than 43,000 NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops have been deployed in war-torn Afghanistan.
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Picture on the left shows EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana in one of his foreign tours. To the right is British Foreign Secretary David Miliband seen talking with Asfandyar Ali Khan, head of PakistanŐs Awami National Party (ANP) in Peshawar on April 20.
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Solana in Kabul
Solana, the European Union’s high representative for common foreign and security policy, arrived in Afghan capital Kabul Monday for a short diplomatic visit to the post-Taliban country, Chinaview reported.
It was Solana’s third trip to Afghanistan which had been kept under wraps for security reasons.
Solana was expected to hold talks with President Hamid Karzai, parliament members as well as ISAF officials.
According to the sources from Solana’s office, one of aims of his visit is to prepare for the Paris Conference for donors to Afghanistan scheduled for June.
Solana is due to travel on to Pakistan.
Taliban Killed
Solana’s visit was accompanied by new violence in Afghanistan, as 11 Taliban were killed in the southern Helmand province, according to AP.
The Afghan Defense Ministry said clashes and air strikes in southern Afghanistan left 11 Taliban militants killed.
The ministry said seven militants were killed in clashes and air strikes, adding another four militants were killed in a clash in neighboring Kandahar province.
In Zabul province, a roadside bomb hit an Afghan army patrol, wounding five soldiers, the ministry said in a statement Monday.
All incidents happened on Sunday.
Over 1,000 people, mostly militants, have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press count based on numbers provided by Afghan and Western officials.
Dutch Killed
Also, in Afghanistan, the Taliban said a deadly attack on Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan Sunday was in retaliation for an anti-Islamic film made by a politician from the Netherlands.
The son of the new chief of the Dutch military and another Dutch soldier serving with NATO-led forces were killed when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on Friday, Reuters reported.
War on Terror
President Pervez Musharraf received Miliband on Monday, a day after he supported plans by Pakistan’s new government to negotiate with militants who renounce violence. AP said.
Musharraf and Miliband discussed the war on terror and other issues during their meeting in Islamabad, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Sadiq said.
Miliband then went to see new Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.
Pakistan’s regions bordering Afghanistan are a hotbed for militants said to orchestrate attacks against the Afghan government.
Gilani’s government has offered to negotiate with militants who commit to nonviolence.
At a news conference in Peshawar on Sunday, Miliband backed the approach, stressing the need for parties to lay down arms.
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UN Closes Offices
In Yemen
The United Nations has put up blast walls around its main headquarters and closed some of its offices in Yemen because of security concerns in the country, UN and Yemeni officials said Sunday.
The changes, which include pulling out some nonessential staffers, follow an attack earlier this month on a housing complex for Western diplomats in Yemen’s capital and a mortar attack last month on the US Embassy, AP reported.
Three mortars missed the American Embassy on March 20 but instead crashed into a high school for girls nearby, killing a security guard.
Three projectiles also hit a foreigners’ housing complex in Sanaa on April 6, but caused no injuries. The complex is in an upscale neighborhood that also houses UN buildings.
A number of UN staffers at various agencies already have left Yemen, UN High Commission for Refugees’ regional spokeswoman Abeer Etefa told the Associated Press by telephone from Cairo, Egypt.
She confirmed that some UN offices had closed but declined to elaborate. The UNHCR office remained open, Etefa said.
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Kuwait May Reopen Baghdad Embassy
Kuwait is looking to open an embassy in Iraq for the first time since Saddam Hussein invaded his tiny oil-rich neighbor in 1990, the country’s foreign minister said Sunday.
Kuwait closed its embassy in Baghdad after Iraq’s invasion and the ensuing 1991 Persian Gulf War, which saw US-led forces intervene to throw out Saddam’s army and end Iraq’s seven-month occupation of Kuwait, AP reported.
Sheik Mohammed Al Sabah told reporters that Kuwait is looking to buy a building in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone to house the new embassy.
A new Kuwaiti ambassador to Iraq would be named after Baghdad selected its ambassador to Kuwait, Sheik Mohammed said. The Iraqi Embassy in Kuwait, which reopened after Saddam was ousted following the 2003 US-led invasion, is currently led by a charge d’affaires.
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Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
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US soldiers from the 3rd Amoured Cavalry Regiment patrol on March 2, 2008 in the ruins of the Iraq-Iran border village of Nafet.
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In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantnamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times“ by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantanamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts“ whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse-- an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.
In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed.
With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.
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Anti-Al-Qaeda Members Killed
A female suicide bomber blew herself up near the office of a group fighting Al-Qaeda in the Iraqi city of Baquba on Monday, killing three of its members, police and a doctor said.
The bomber detonated her explosives-filled vest in the central Al-Mafraq neighborhood of the city, north of Baghdad, a police officer said, AFP reported.
Ahmed Alwan of Baquba hospital said three members of an anti-Qaeda group were killed and four other people wounded in the attack.
In the past several months, Al-Qaeda militants have been targeting groups who have sided with the US military to fight terrorists.
The military began forming the groups, mostly made up of Sunni Arab former insurgents, in September 2006.
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News Diary
LISBON - Portugal’s parliament will vote on the European Union reform treaty.
PHNOM PENH - Bail hearing for former Khmer Rouge President Khieu Samphan.
TOKYO - EU-Japan Summit.
VILNIUS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy visits Lithuania.
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PKK Clash
Five outlawed PKK terrorists and one Turkish soldier were killed in clashes that took place on Sunday in Kars, an eastern province of Turkey, Dogan News Agency reported on Monday.
Readmission
Pakistan expects to be readmitted to the Commonwealth at a meeting of the 53-nation group next month, the country’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Monday, Reuters reported.
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Carter in Jordan
Former US president Jimmy Carter briefed Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Sunday about Palestinian-Israeli peace moves and his meetings with the resistance group Hamas, a royal palace official said.
During the discussion, Abdullah focused his attention on US-backed talks between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, rather than on any of Carter’s dealings with Hamas, with which Jordan has frosty relations, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
According to AP, Carter met with senior Hamas leaders on Friday and Saturday in Syria, defying US and Israeli warnings that doing so would lend legitimacy to the group, responsible for suicide bombings and other attacks that have killed some 250 Israelis.
Hamas officials said they talked with Carter about an internationally--backed Israeli embargo on Gaza and a possible Israel--Hamas prisoner swap. Hamas did not respond to Carter’s requests, however, that it halt rocket fire on Israeli border towns and agree to talk to Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishak about a prisoner exchange.
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Al-Qaeda Will Hit Turkey?
by Stefan Nicola
Experts are worried that Turkey will soon be hit by an Al-Qaeda orchestrated terror attack. In November 2003 Istanbul was hit by a terror attack that targeted two synagogues, a British bank and the British consulate, killing more than 50 people and injuring 700 others.
Turkish security officials arrested Loai Al-Saqa, a Syrian man who was later convicted as the key perpetrator behind the bombings; he received the order to attack from Osama bin Laden, officials said. Another 48 terrorist suspects were arrested and later convicted in connection with the attacks--a surprisingly high level of support that had security experts fear more bombings. But nothing much happened since then.
Stashed Weapons
Nevertheless, Turkish security officials have been increasingly worried recently; over the past few months, they on repeated occasions arrested terror suspects; in January they were even engaged in a 12-hour gunfight with an Al-Qaeda cell that left five people dead, including one police officer. While no information surfaced about their plans, the cell had stashed away weapons and explosives in great style.
Gareth Jenkins, a British journalist and analyst based in Turkey, told German newspaper Die Welt that an Al-Qaeda attack in Turkey may be imminent.
“There have been much more arrests in connection with Al-Qaeda,“ he said. “In my opinion, it is to be feared that there will be a larger attack in Turkey soon.“
Earlier this month in Istanbul, police arrested 45 terror suspects during raids in eight neighborhoods in the European part of Turkey’s largest city; security officials said the group had planned a “major attack“ in Istanbul.
Synagogues could be targeted again, observers say, but also western institutions, first and foremost of course the Incirlik Air Base, where the US Air Force has at least 5,000 service members stationed, with several hundred British and Turkish personnel attached.
“In Turkey, terrorism comes from several different currents,“ Berndt Georg Thamm, a terrorism expert in Berlin, told United Press International in a telephone interview. “For one, we have the Kurdish terrorism of the PKK; then there are Islamist groups, like the Islamic Jihad Union, which originated among the Turkic people in Central Asia, but enjoy support inside Turkey; and thirdly, and this can’t be denied--there is Al-Qaeda, which with small cells has gained a foothold in Turkey.“
Controversial
Turkey, with its 80 million Muslims at the border with Europe, plays an important role for militant Islamists determined to create a “global caliphate,“ Thamm added.
Circles critical of the pro-Islam government of Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan say Ankara is pursuing a creeping Islamization of Turkey to demolish the tradition of constitutional separation of church and state first proclaimed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The secular elite have recently taken steps to stop that trend. On March 31 the Constitutional Court in Ankara decided to hear a case to outlaw Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party and ban 71 of its senior party officials, including the premier, from politics for five years because they are threatening the constitution.
While that decision is highly controversial and was mainly linked to the government’s decision to ease the head scarf ban at universities, some observers also fear that Erdogan’s pro-Islam government makes it easier for terrorists to gain a foothold in Turkey. “The current government has vowed to fight Al-Qaeda,“ Thamm told UPI.
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Journalists Protest
Israeli Killings
Journalists in the West bank city of Hebron gathered on Monday to demonstrate against the killing of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, who died after an Israel army shell was fired towards him last Wednesday.
The journalists held pictures and posters of the cameraman which read “Fadel Shana - Martyr of Truth“, Reuters reported.
Most were local Palestinian journalists who expressed their anger over the killing of 24-year-old Fadel. The Israeli army said on Sunday it was investigating the death of Shana and declined to say why one of its tanks opened fire, killing the journalist and five other Palestinians.
In Gaza, dozens of Palestinian children gathered for their own protest against the Israeli blockade of the Strip.
Children in Beit Hanoun burned tyres and chanted slogans from behind a mock barricade, made of chicken wire fencing, to demonstrate against sanctions imposed by Israel.
Israel has been blockading Gaza most of the time since June last year, allowing only basic supplies to enter.
Palestinian Vote
In another news, Former US president Jimmy Carter said on Monday Hamas told him it would recognize Israel’s right to live in peace if a deal is reached and approved by a Palestinian vote.
Carter made the comments following two meetings in Damascus with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal.
“They said that they would accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians and that they would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor, next door, in peace,“ Carter said.
Hamas would agree to such a deal, yet to be negotiated by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, provided it is “submitted to Palestinians for their overall approval even though Hamas might disagree with some terms of the agreement,“ Carter said in Jerusalem.
In a letter read out by Carter, Hamas said they were also willing to form a new government with Abbas.
EP to Debate AK Party, Turkish Reforms
The European Parliament is due to express concern on Monday about court action against Turkey’s ruling party and the slow pace of reforms needed for EU entry, a parliament official said, Reuters reported.
A non-binding resolution due to be debated and voted on in the foreign affairs committee of the parliament meeting in Strasbourg follows a progress report on Turkey’s EU accession process last year by the executive European Commission.
A parliament official said the resolution would address concern about efforts by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to shut down the ruling AK Party and bar Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from politics for alleged Islamist subversion.
The resolution, which will be debated in a full parliamentary session in May, will also reflect concern about a slowing of reforms in Turkey, the official said.
The parliament can make recommendations on foreign policy, but these are not binding on the 27 EU member states.
Many in Turkey’s secular elite -- the judiciary, army generals and university rectors -- believe the AK Party is trying to undermine the separation of state and religion, notably by proposing legislation to allow university students to wear the Islamic headscarf. The party denies this and says the court case is politically motivated.
Turkey started EU accession talks in 2005 but they have been held back by slow progress in EU-linked reforms, the impact of the unresolved Cyprus dispute and the reluctance of some EU members, such as France and Austria, to see Turkey join.
Russia Accused of Violating Georgia Airspace
Georgia on Monday accused a Russian air force jet of trespassing into its airspace and shooting down an unmanned Georgian reconnaissance plane, but Moscow said the allegation was nonsense.
The Georgian air force released video footage it said came from the drone’s on-board camera and which it said showed a Russian military MiG-29 jet launching a missile at the Georgian plane as it flew over the breakaway Abkhazia region, Reuters reported.
The allegation is likely to further aggravate tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi, which are locked in a standoff over Georgia’s ambitions to join NATO and Moscow’s support for separatist regions of Georgia.
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