http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations - By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG - THE NEW YORK TIMES
Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: November 9, 2010
JAKARTA, Indonesia — President Obama, renewing his call for better relations between the United States and the Muslim world, used a long-awaited homecoming trip to this island nation to make a symbolic visit on Wednesday morning to the largest mosque in southeast Asia — even as he declared that “much more work needs to be done” to fulfill the promise he made 17 months ago in Cairo of a “new beginning.”
Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama delivered a speech at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta on Wednesday.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama and his wife, Michelle, with the grand imam during a visit to the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, in hat, after their joint news conference on Tuesday at the State Palace in Jakarta.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Yudhoyono gave a gift of medals to Mr. Obama on Tuesday during a state dinner at the palace complex in the capital.
He closed his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday evening with the Muslim greeting “salaam aleikum” and said he intended to reshape American relations with Muslim nations so they were not “focused solely on security issues,” but rather on expanded cooperation across a broad range of areas, from science to education.
In a speech on Wednesday morning to an enthusiastic audience of 6,500 people at the University of Indonesia, he also harked back to his Cairo message.
“I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust,” Mr. Obama said. “But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress.”
Earlier, at the Istiqlal Mosque, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, followed the Islamic custom of removing their shoes; Mrs. Obama wore a head shawl with beads. They walked along a courtyard on a pale blue carpet escorted by the grand imam, who told Mr. Obama that there was a church next door and that during Christmas parishioners use the mosque’s parking lot because the church does not have enough space.
Mr. Obama turned to reporters and said, “That is an example of the kind of cooperation” between religions in Indonesia.
For Mr. Obama, who suffered a backlash at home this year when he said he favored the right of Muslims to build a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan — and whose personal history makes him the target of anti-Muslim sentiment — the outreach effort is a delicate one. Jakarta is the place that has given rise to many of the myths about Mr. Obama, including the rumor that he is Muslim (he is Christian); that he attended a madrasa that was connected to radical Islam (he attended two schools here, one Roman Catholic and one secular, although most of the students were Muslim); and that he was not born in the United States (he was born in Hawaii).
In his speech, Mr. Obama tried to correct the misperceptions and he spoke about Indonesia’s ability to bridge religious and racial divides. “As a Christian visiting a mosque on this visit,” he said, “I found it in the words of a leader who was asked about my visit and said: ‘Muslims are also allowed in churches. We are all God’s followers.’ ”
The last time Mr. Obama was in Indonesia, in 1992, he spent a month holed up in a rented beachside hut in Bali, where he swam each morning and spent afternoons writing “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that later became a best seller. In it, he shared memories of his life here as a boy, “running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking into the cool, wet mud, part of a chain of other brown boys chasing after a tattered kite.”
He has chased after a few other things since then — notably the presidency — and when he returned here, he got the kind of rock-star welcome he no longer receives in the United States.
When Air Force One touched down on Tuesday in a typical Jakarta afternoon thunderstorm, a huge cheer went up inside the State Palace complex — not from average Indonesians, but from the local press corps, watching on television. “Finally, he arrived!” exulted Glenn Jos, a cameraman.
After descending the steps of his plane, Mr. Obama, in a dark suit, accompanied by his wife walked the red carpet that had been laid out for them and stepped into a black Cadillac limousine. He poked his head out the door to give a short wave.
“Yes!” the reporters shouted.
Indonesians have prepared three times previously for a visit from the president, only to be disappointed. Last year, the White House hinted that Mr. Obama might tuck in an Indonesia stop on a November trip to Asia, but it did not materialize.
Then, in March, Mr. Obama, his wife and daughters canceled a trip at the last minute so that he could shepherd his health care bill through Congress. In June, another Indonesia trip was canceled, this time so the president could deal with the BP oil spill.
And once Mr. Obama finally arrived, a cloud of volcanic ash played havoc with his schedule, forcing him to leave a few hours earlier than planned on Wednesday so that he could make it to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the Group of 20 conference of economic powers.
Mr. Obama spent four years, from ages 6 to 10, in Indonesia, living here with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. In his memoir he writes richly of the experience. He described the markets: “the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.”
He wrote of his introduction to the food: “dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).” And the menagerie in his backyard: “chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo and finally two baby crocodiles.”
Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he had come to “focus not on the past but the future,” but Indonesians seemed to have both in mind. At a state dinner, Mr. Obama was served Indonesian dishes he said he loved as a boy. And in a gesture that Mr. Obama said left him “deeply moved,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presented him with a gold medal in honor of his mother, who worked here for years as an anthropologist and pioneer in microcredit for the poor.
Jakarta has undergone a transformation since Mr. Obama first moved here in 1967. The tallest building he remembered, a shopping mall, has been eclipsed by skyscrapers. Mr. Obama recalled riding on “little taxis, but you stood in the back and it was very crowded” or on bicycle rickshaws.
“Now,” he lamented, “as president I can’t even see all the traffic, because they block all the streets.”
At the university, Mr. Obama sprinkled his speech with Indonesian phrases, mimicking the sing-song sounds of street vendors. Then, in this country’s native tongue, he said, “I’m home.”
In Curt Exchange, U.S. Faults Israel on Housing - By MARK LANDLER and ETHAN BRONNER --- THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
The Obama administration is struggling to restart direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, which stalled last month after the expiration of a partial freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to meet Mr. Netanyahu in New York on Thursday, while Egypt sent two top officials to Washington to discuss ways to salvage the process.
But the brusque exchange between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu reflected again the gulf between Israel and the United States over settlements — an issue Mr. Obama initially made the centerpiece of his Middle East diplomacy. Palestinian officials said Israel’s latest announcement threatened the talks and could prompt a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.
When asked in about Israel’s plans for 1,000 housing units for a contested part of East Jerusalem, Mr. Obama said, “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.”
“I’m concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough,” the president added during his visit to Indonesia. “Each of these incremental steps can end up breaking trust.”
A few hours later, Mr. Netanyahu’s office responded with a statement, saying that “Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”
The United States and Israel have well-known differences over Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement, adding that building plans should have no effect on the peace talks.
Despite their efforts to build mutual trust, Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu seem to keep talking past each other. On Tuesday, they were worlds apart in symbolism as well as substance: the president voiced his criticism of Israel while on a visit to Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim country.
Mr. Netanyahu was in New York, meeting business people, midway through a visit to the United States that included a speech to a Jewish group in New Orleans on Monday, in which he called on Washington to be more aggressive in threatening Iran with a military strike if it did not give up its nuclear program.
Analysts said Mr. Netanyahu’s unyielding tone — a palpable contrast to his chagrined reaction after a similar housing dispute during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — testified to the altered political environment in the United States. The stinging Democratic defeat in the midterm elections, the analysts said, had emboldened Mr. Netanyahu to push back harder against the administration.
“He is dealing with a president who is politically weakened,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel. “A lot of his friends in Washington are Republicans. He feels more comfortable with them, so he just feels that he’s got a freer hand here.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, rejected that view. “We’re not looking for a confrontation with the Obama administration,” he said.
He said Mr. Netanyahu was eager to discuss with Mrs. Clinton “how we are going to move forward, once we get over this hump.”
But Mr. Oren declined to say whether Mr. Netanyahu would offer new proposals for breaking the impasse. The United States has asked him to extend the settlement freeze for 60 days in return for security incentives.
Israeli officials have said Mr. Netanyahu is hemmed in by his right-wing coalition, which opposes extending the freeze. Some officials said that by taking a hard line on Israel’s right to build in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu might gain the political cover to compromise over the West Bank.
On Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton will meet with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and its intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Egypt is worried by the impasse, and American officials said they expected the Egyptians to advance their own ideas for resuscitating the talks, which could include an Israeli pledge to withdraw troops from parts of the West Bank.
Whether that would be enough to satisfy the Palestinians without an extension of the settlement freeze is not clear. In another gesture to the Palestinians, Mrs. Clinton will announce the United States’ annual financial contribution to the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday, an administration official said.
Mr. Netanyahu has supported Mr. Obama’s mix of engagement and sanctions against Iran. But in his speech to the Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans, he called for a more aggressive approach.
“If the international community, led by the United States, hopes to stop Iran’s nuclear program without resorting to military action,” he declared, “it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.”
Dan Diker, a senior foreign policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said the speech was calculated to “push the military option to the top paragraph of the policy from the third or fourth paragraph.”
But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that the threat of military action was not the best way to deter Tehran. Mr. Gates said the recent United Nations sanctions against the Iranian government were starting to bite.
Israel’s housing announcement came in the form of plans published for public review in local newspapers on Friday, just before Mr. Netanyahu headed to Washington. As with previous announcements, Israeli officials said the timing was determined bureaucratically, not politically.
Still, the timing raised questions about what Mr. Netanyahu knew and when. After Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel was spoiled last March by a similar announcement that Mr. Netanyahu said was a surprise to him, American officials told the Israelis that they wanted no more surprises.
At the time, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides said he sent out letters demanding lists of future settlement plans to avoid surprises while peace talks were under way. It was unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu knew about this one before it was published in newspapers last week. On Tuesday, it also became clear that some 800 units would be built in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Israel’s action was “a call for immediate international recognition of the Palestinian state.”
The Palestinian leadership has been talking about shifting its focus to getting international recognition of a Palestinian state if settlement building continued and the peace talks remained stalled. The Obama administration and Arab states have urged it not to go that route.
Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.
In Curt Exchange, U.S. Faults Israel on Housing
Bernat Armangue/Associated Press
Israeli police officers clashed with Palestinians on Tuesday in an area of East Jerusalem, the site of a dispute over settlements. By MARK LANDLER and ETHAN BRONNER
Published: November 9, 2010
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s criticism of new Israeli housing plans for East Jerusalem, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s even sharper retort, have thrown the Middle East peace talks into jeopardy, with the dispute over Jewish settlements looming as a seemingly insuperable hurdle.The Obama administration is struggling to restart direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, which stalled last month after the expiration of a partial freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to meet Mr. Netanyahu in New York on Thursday, while Egypt sent two top officials to Washington to discuss ways to salvage the process.
But the brusque exchange between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu reflected again the gulf between Israel and the United States over settlements — an issue Mr. Obama initially made the centerpiece of his Middle East diplomacy. Palestinian officials said Israel’s latest announcement threatened the talks and could prompt a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.
When asked in about Israel’s plans for 1,000 housing units for a contested part of East Jerusalem, Mr. Obama said, “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.”
“I’m concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough,” the president added during his visit to Indonesia. “Each of these incremental steps can end up breaking trust.”
A few hours later, Mr. Netanyahu’s office responded with a statement, saying that “Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”
The United States and Israel have well-known differences over Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement, adding that building plans should have no effect on the peace talks.
Despite their efforts to build mutual trust, Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu seem to keep talking past each other. On Tuesday, they were worlds apart in symbolism as well as substance: the president voiced his criticism of Israel while on a visit to Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim country.
Mr. Netanyahu was in New York, meeting business people, midway through a visit to the United States that included a speech to a Jewish group in New Orleans on Monday, in which he called on Washington to be more aggressive in threatening Iran with a military strike if it did not give up its nuclear program.
Analysts said Mr. Netanyahu’s unyielding tone — a palpable contrast to his chagrined reaction after a similar housing dispute during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — testified to the altered political environment in the United States. The stinging Democratic defeat in the midterm elections, the analysts said, had emboldened Mr. Netanyahu to push back harder against the administration.
“He is dealing with a president who is politically weakened,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel. “A lot of his friends in Washington are Republicans. He feels more comfortable with them, so he just feels that he’s got a freer hand here.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, rejected that view. “We’re not looking for a confrontation with the Obama administration,” he said.
He said Mr. Netanyahu was eager to discuss with Mrs. Clinton “how we are going to move forward, once we get over this hump.”
But Mr. Oren declined to say whether Mr. Netanyahu would offer new proposals for breaking the impasse. The United States has asked him to extend the settlement freeze for 60 days in return for security incentives.
Israeli officials have said Mr. Netanyahu is hemmed in by his right-wing coalition, which opposes extending the freeze. Some officials said that by taking a hard line on Israel’s right to build in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu might gain the political cover to compromise over the West Bank.
On Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton will meet with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and its intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Egypt is worried by the impasse, and American officials said they expected the Egyptians to advance their own ideas for resuscitating the talks, which could include an Israeli pledge to withdraw troops from parts of the West Bank.
Whether that would be enough to satisfy the Palestinians without an extension of the settlement freeze is not clear. In another gesture to the Palestinians, Mrs. Clinton will announce the United States’ annual financial contribution to the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday, an administration official said.
Mr. Netanyahu has supported Mr. Obama’s mix of engagement and sanctions against Iran. But in his speech to the Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans, he called for a more aggressive approach.
“If the international community, led by the United States, hopes to stop Iran’s nuclear program without resorting to military action,” he declared, “it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.”
Dan Diker, a senior foreign policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said the speech was calculated to “push the military option to the top paragraph of the policy from the third or fourth paragraph.”
But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that the threat of military action was not the best way to deter Tehran. Mr. Gates said the recent United Nations sanctions against the Iranian government were starting to bite.
Israel’s housing announcement came in the form of plans published for public review in local newspapers on Friday, just before Mr. Netanyahu headed to Washington. As with previous announcements, Israeli officials said the timing was determined bureaucratically, not politically.
Still, the timing raised questions about what Mr. Netanyahu knew and when. After Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel was spoiled last March by a similar announcement that Mr. Netanyahu said was a surprise to him, American officials told the Israelis that they wanted no more surprises.
At the time, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides said he sent out letters demanding lists of future settlement plans to avoid surprises while peace talks were under way. It was unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu knew about this one before it was published in newspapers last week. On Tuesday, it also became clear that some 800 units would be built in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Israel’s action was “a call for immediate international recognition of the Palestinian state.”
The Palestinian leadership has been talking about shifting its focus to getting international recognition of a Palestinian state if settlement building continued and the peace talks remained stalled. The Obama administration and Arab states have urged it not to go that route.
Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.
U.S. Says Holocaust Fund Was Defrauded - By Mosi Secret - THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
U.S. Says Holocaust Fund Was Defrauded
By MOSI SECRET
Published: November 9, 2010
While fleeing the Nazis in 1941, an 11-year-old girl dodged airplane bombs as she crossed the Dnieper River in Ukraine, ultimately finding refuge in Donetsk, where she and her mother lived in hiding until the liberation of 1944.A 13-year-old boy escaped from Kiev with his mother and younger sister, shuttling from basements to barns and sometimes the forest, where they often stayed for weeks.
These tales were among thousands of similar accounts given in the name of elderly immigrants who were seeking reparations from the German government through a fund established to provide help to survivors of Nazi persecution.
But many of the stories were works of fiction or embellishment of facts, perpetrated by a group that included six employees and custodians of the fund, which is based in New York, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday. Eleven other defendants were outsiders who recruited and funneled applicants to the programs.
Over 16 years, the suspects used fake identification documents, doctored government records and a knowledge of Holocaust history to defraud the fund of more than $42 million, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara.
The defendants, the indictment says, would recruit applicants — many of them from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn — through Russian-language newspapers, offering help to people applying for compensation from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. In many cases, the immigrants’ actual experiences would be manipulated or tailored to fit the requirements of the fund; once the payments were approved, the defendants would receive kickbacks from the applicants, according to the indictment.
Birth dates were changed so people would appear to have been alive during World War II; anecdotes about surviving inhumane conditions in a Nazi-occupied territory were repeated in multiple applications; photos of certain applicants were reused on dozens of unrelated applications.
The conspiracy was directed at two programs run by the claims conference. The conference was established in 1951 to compensate Jewish victims of Nazi persecution; the German government appropriated money for the conference the following year, and has been financing it since.
One of the programs, known as the Hardship Fund, pays reparations to Jews who became refugees when they fled the Nazis; the majority of payments from the Hardship Fund went to people from the former Soviet Bloc countries who were had not under direct Nazi occupation, but who fled to escape the Nazi advance, according to the indictment. The fund pays a one-time payment of approximately $3,600.
The second program, called the Article 2 Fund, compensates survivors who lived in hiding, under a false identity, in a Jewish ghetto, or who were incarcerated in a labor or a concentration camp. This program provides monthly payments of approximately $411 to survivors who make less than $16,000 per year.
“The alleged fraud is as substantial as it is galling,” Mr. Bharara said at a news conference announcing the indictment. The charges followed a yearlong investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. F.B.I. agents arrested 11 of the defendants Tuesday morning; 5 were previously charged.
The suspects are each accused of playing a role in creating, filing and processing fraudulent claims on behalf of applicants who should not have qualified for compensation. Semen Domnitser, who was the director of the Hardship and Article 2 Funds until he was fired on Feb. 3, was accused of being the leader. At the fund, his responsibilities included reviewing all applications for approval before they were sent to Germany.
The claims conference became suspicious when employees noticed two applications that came in within two weeks that had remarkably similar facts, said Gregory Schneider, the executive vice president of the organization. They began to look for patterns and, after finding other problems, alerted the F.B.I. in December 2009.
To date, investigators have found nearly 5,000 false applications from 2000 through 2009 to the Hardship Fund, resulting in a loss of about $18 million. They have found 658 fraudulent applications to the second fund, from 1993 to 2009, with losses of about $24.5 million.
Mr. Schneider said the theft amounted to less than 1 percent of the claims filed since the two programs’ inception. He said his organization had processed 630,000 applications for the two programs over the last two decades. He said he suspected that the nearly 6,000 people involved in the false claims were a mix of those who were aware they were committing fraud and those who may have been used.
When Mr. Bharara was asked whether the thousands of others involved in the fraud could be charged, he said, “the investigation remains open.”
In the example of the 11-year-old girl who crossed the Dnieper River, her application included a government document from the Soviet Union where the dates and location of her primary schooling had been changed to make it appear that she was in hiding then. The document also falsely omitted the existence of a brother and said that her mother had died, so operators of the program could not check her claims.
The man who submitted paperwork detailing his suffering as a 13-year-old used forged government documents to show he went to primary school in Kiev, when in fact he studied in Leningrad, which was never occupied.
Although the fund’s offices are in Midtown, much of the criminal activity was in Brighton Beach, known as Little Odessa because of the community’s large number of Ukrainian immigrants.
Dora Grande, who runs a business near Brighton 12th Street, created false identification documents that were submitted in many of the fraudulent applications, according to the indictment. Valentina Romashova, who lived in Brighton Beach, worked at a law firm that placed advertisements in Russian-language newspapers.
At the luxurious beachfront complex where Ms. Romashova lives, a neighbor, Victor Kason, 85, recalled his own youth during World War II. He said he was 14 when he was moved to a ghetto in Lodz, Poland. He and his parents were then moved to concentration camps; he survived, but his parents did not.
“They committed a crime,” Mr. Kason said of the defendants, adding that he did not know Ms. Romashova. “Let them pay.”
Khristina Narizhnaya contributed reporting.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Change Will Not Come Easily to the Security Council - By NEIL MacFARQUHAR - THE NEW YORK TIMES
Did Obama sold India a Lemon, promising to reform the UN Security Council with India as one of its permanent members?
“It costs us nothing to try to sell more motorcycles in India and propose something that is not going to go anywhere,” said Thomas G. Weiss, a political science professor at CUNY and the author of “What’s Wrong with the United Nations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/09nations.html
The main issues include how to expand the current council beyond 15 seats; whether the seats should be permanent or elected; and whether new permanent members would get a veto. A welter of proposals exist: five new permanent members without veto power plus five more elected for a total of 25, for example, or establishing a middle tier of seats for countries heavily involved in United Nations, who could serve for three or four years.
There is basic agreement that the council, outdated because it reflects the world in 1945 when the United Nations was founded, needs to be expanded to include emerging powers. The council was expanded to 15 members from 11 in 1965, and China took over the permanent seat of the nationalist Chinese in 1971.
But beyond the idea of expansion, any consensus falls apart, with fierce regional rivalries over who might gain new permanent seats making any change problematic, if not impossible. President Obama’s announcement on Monday was novel in that he actually named India as a candidate for a permanent seat.
About five years ago Washington offered a similar endorsement for Japan. Anti-Japan riots soon erupted in Beijing, and the Chinese government made it clear that Japan’s World War II aggression should prevent it from gaining a permanent seat. China does not now openly oppose new permanent members, but instead urges “compromise” over the various proposals, which diplomats interpret as opposition to any additional permanent members.
Of the other four permanent members, in addition to the United States, Britain and France are the most flexible, fearing that an outdated council will cost them even more of their diminishing global clout. Russia, like the United States, occasionally endorses a possible new permanent member; a few years ago it was Brazil.
But basically the five permanent members have veto power over any proposed overhaul of the council and do little to move it forward. Analysts also ask the larger question of whether an expanded council would be any more effective. Many deem it likely to be even slower to reach decisions.
Analysts noted that Mr. Obama can easily propose such a change, making it sound like the United States is recognizing an enhanced role for India in the world, without necessarily expecting any real change.
“It costs us nothing to try to sell more motorcycles in India and propose something that is not going to go anywhere,” said Thomas G. Weiss, a political science professor at CUNY and the author of “What’s Wrong with the United Nations.”
“It costs us nothing to try to sell more motorcycles in India and propose something that is not going to go anywhere,” said Thomas G. Weiss, a political science professor at CUNY and the author of “What’s Wrong with the United Nations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/09nations.html
Change Will Not Come Easily to the Security Council
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: November 8, 2010
The idea of overhauling the Security Council, even by the slow standards of the United Nations, has been under negotiation for about 18 years with no end in sight. Vague talks initiated under the auspices of the Open-Ended Working Group, mocked as the “never ending” committee, gave way in 2009 to what was supposed to be real negotiations.
But those who attend basically read their position papers and then leave, according to diplomats involved; no bartering occurs. Even with real talks, the potential for reaching a consensus are formidable.The main issues include how to expand the current council beyond 15 seats; whether the seats should be permanent or elected; and whether new permanent members would get a veto. A welter of proposals exist: five new permanent members without veto power plus five more elected for a total of 25, for example, or establishing a middle tier of seats for countries heavily involved in United Nations, who could serve for three or four years.
There is basic agreement that the council, outdated because it reflects the world in 1945 when the United Nations was founded, needs to be expanded to include emerging powers. The council was expanded to 15 members from 11 in 1965, and China took over the permanent seat of the nationalist Chinese in 1971.
But beyond the idea of expansion, any consensus falls apart, with fierce regional rivalries over who might gain new permanent seats making any change problematic, if not impossible. President Obama’s announcement on Monday was novel in that he actually named India as a candidate for a permanent seat.
About five years ago Washington offered a similar endorsement for Japan. Anti-Japan riots soon erupted in Beijing, and the Chinese government made it clear that Japan’s World War II aggression should prevent it from gaining a permanent seat. China does not now openly oppose new permanent members, but instead urges “compromise” over the various proposals, which diplomats interpret as opposition to any additional permanent members.
Of the other four permanent members, in addition to the United States, Britain and France are the most flexible, fearing that an outdated council will cost them even more of their diminishing global clout. Russia, like the United States, occasionally endorses a possible new permanent member; a few years ago it was Brazil.
But basically the five permanent members have veto power over any proposed overhaul of the council and do little to move it forward. Analysts also ask the larger question of whether an expanded council would be any more effective. Many deem it likely to be even slower to reach decisions.
Analysts noted that Mr. Obama can easily propose such a change, making it sound like the United States is recognizing an enhanced role for India in the world, without necessarily expecting any real change.
“It costs us nothing to try to sell more motorcycles in India and propose something that is not going to go anywhere,” said Thomas G. Weiss, a political science professor at CUNY and the author of “What’s Wrong with the United Nations.”
Monday, November 8, 2010
Partition myths must be broken to achieve peace - By Ghulam Muhammed
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Partition myths must be broken to achieve peace
Sixty three years down the line, the two partitioned countries of the Indian sub-continent, India and Pakistan continue to harbor myths and keep feeding them to their people --- myths that cannot be substantiated by hard facts of history.
While Pakistan holds that partition was the solely created by their founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s astute leadership, people of Pakistan are not informed that the major credit/debit for carving out a part of British India --- though under the false and fraudulent pretext that it was to create a Islamic Homeland for the discriminated Muslims of India --- was in fact, the long term need of the western powers, Great Britain and the USA, to hold on to some perch on the sub-continent, as a military outpost, to safeguard their future interests in the region. Though Germany was defeated by Allied forces and Communist Russia and Europe was run over by the two sides, the rivalry between them in holding on to more and more conquered territory bode ill for the future cooperation between them. Soviet Union’s successes in war zone had alarmed Churchill and he rightly feared that a strong Russia will move south and may tread on Western area of colonial regimes. Besides, a ravaged and exhausted West had to rebuild and they were aware that Persian Gulf’s oil resources were the key to their rebuilding success. The ‘wells of power’ therefore had to be defended and even though they tried their best with the leaders of Indian National Congress, Nehru and Patel, to keep links with the Wealth, both fresh with heady intoxication of coming freedom, thought it best to get rid of the colonists one for all. They were prepared to burn their boats with their erstwhile colonizer and its allies in the West. That forced Churchill to exhort Lord Wavell, the then Viceroy of India, to ‘keep some part of India for us’. They both planned and moved fast and picked up Jinnah’s Muslim League as the pretext to truncate India and rebuilt a military outpost that would serve their interest in days to come. Mahatma Gandhi was fully aware of their ruse and had offered Prime Ministership of Free India to Jinnah in an apparent bid to avoid partitioning the country where the communal divide was getting more and more violent and bloody.
Nehru and Patel were more concerned with governing the country that was coming to them and thought the twin irritants of Colonial Britain and Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan had to be cut off once for all to secure a more manageable India with a majority of Hindus securely ensconced with unshared powers, to usher in the New Free India. (Little did they imagined that they cannot change the geography and would have to fight 3 wars with their neighbor, who they have thought to become so weak in days to come, that they could easily swallow back into their country ---- either by force of arms or by force of diplomacy. )
Pakistan as a new nation created outwardly as an Islamic haven for the Muslims of India was in fact had to fall back on the same West that had an old colonial agenda while facilitating the creation of Pakistan. The first check to pay for Pakistan’s civil service payroll and other budgetary allocations came from the USA. An especial emissary was sent to the US to collect the check, as soon as Mohammad Ali Jinnah was sworn in on August 14, 1947. That was only the first of many and many disbursements that Pakistan will receive in 63 years of its independence. The donors and funders, mostly the US, however, extracted their pound of flesh and heavily invested only in Pak Army as a bulwark for their own strategic agenda. That ‘farsightedness’ of their strategic planning in partitioning of Indian subcontinent did become relevant, when Pakistan was enlisted to wage an unconventional war against the occupying Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
[ Now Obama has come to court India, with its vast resources, both to exploit it in economic terms, but mostly to enlist India’s services to bolster Western strategic interests and involvement in the region, in the wake of another rising power, China, that US is treating as a potential adversary in days to come.]
For 63 years, Indian democracy has been immorally based on the hatred of an artificially created ‘The other’. The insidious propaganda to demonize Muslims and treat them as new out castes, in fact has sapped the energies of a great nation. That artificially generated hatred has not only poisoned the psyche of a major section of Indian people, but isolated India from its immediate neighbors in ways that is not conducive to a healthy living on this planet.
The myth of Muslims dividing the nation has been used to perpetrate a diseased vision of exclusive India. The limits of that diseased vision are fast approaching and are fraught with dire consequences.
Think of a United India, with Indian National Congress having farsighted vision to treat all its native people as assets and ready to accommodate the aspirations of the Muslims when it was apparent that both British and US are siding with Muslim League, just to get a toe-hold on the subcontinent. Their flawed decision to build a closed nation, robbed India of the headway that could have rivaled Chinese resurgence much early in the day.
Pakistan and Kashmir is the unfinished agenda of the partition. It must be viewed as unnatural developments, arising out of the narrow vision of the Indian leaders. At least some of the leading minds in the present ruling coterie are aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of the alternatives available to both India and Pakistan. They must gather up courage, rise above narrow religious, historical and ideological hang-ups and view the India of tomorrow with its multicultural society blooming in a heady march to a peaceful and prosperous future and make bold moves to settle differences with a new set of ideas to embellish the Idea of India, in more inclusive and expanding terms.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/opinion/09roy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
But on Monday, during his visit here, he pleased his hosts immensely by saying the United States would not intervene in Kashmir and announcing his support for India’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. While he spoke eloquently about threats of terrorism, he kept quiet about human rights abuses in Kashmir.
Whether Mr. Obama decides to change his position on Kashmir again depends on several factors: how the war in Afghanistan is going, how much help the United States needs from Pakistan and whether the government of India goes aircraft shopping this winter. (An order for 10 Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, worth $5.8 billion, among other huge business deals in the pipeline, may ensure the president’s silence.) But neither Mr. Obama’s silence nor his intervention is likely to make the people in Kashmir drop the stones in their hands.
I was in Kashmir 10 days ago, in that beautiful valley on the Pakistani border, home to three great civilizations — Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. It’s a valley of myth and history. Some believe that Jesus died there; others that Moses went there to find the lost tribe. Millions worship at the Hazratbal shrine, where a few days a year a hair of the Prophet Muhammad is displayed to believers.
Now Kashmir, caught between the influence of militant Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, America’s interests in the region and Indian nationalism (which is becoming increasingly aggressive and “Hinduized”), is considered a nuclear flash point. It is patrolled by more than half a million soldiers and has become the most highly militarized zone in the world.
The atmosphere on the highway between Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, and my destination, the little apple town of Shopian in the south, was tense. Groups of soldiers were deployed along the highway, in the orchards, in the fields, on the rooftops and outside shops in the little market squares. Despite months of curfew, the “stone pelters” calling for “azadi” (freedom), inspired by the Palestinian intifada, were out again. Some stretches of the highway were covered with so many of these stones that you needed an S.U.V. to drive over them.
Fortunately the friends I was with knew alternative routes down the back lanes and village roads. The “longcut” gave me the time to listen to their stories of this year’s uprising. The youngest, still a boy, told us that when three of his friends were arrested for throwing stones, the police pulled out their fingernails — every nail, on both hands.
For three years in a row now, Kashmiris have been in the streets, protesting what they see as India’s violent occupation. But the militant uprising against the Indian government that began with the support of Pakistan 20 years ago is in retreat. The Indian Army estimates that there are fewer than 500 militants operating in the Kashmir Valley today. The war has left 70,000 dead and tens of thousands debilitated by torture. Many, many thousands have “disappeared.” More than 200,000 Kashmiri Hindus have fled the valley. Though the number of militants has come down, the number of Indian soldiers deployed remains undiminished.
But India’s military domination ought not to be confused with a political victory. Ordinary people armed with nothing but their fury have risen up against the Indian security forces. A whole generation of young people who have grown up in a grid of checkpoints, bunkers, army camps and interrogation centers, whose childhood was spent witnessing “catch and kill” operations, whose imaginations are imbued with spies, informers, “unidentified gunmen,” intelligence operatives and rigged elections, has lost its patience as well as its fear. With an almost mad courage, Kashmir’s young have faced down armed soldiers and taken back their streets.
Since April, when the army killed three civilians and then passed them off as “terrorists,” masked stone throwers, most of them students, have brought life in Kashmir to a grinding halt. The Indian government has retaliated with bullets, curfew and censorship. Just in the last few months, 111 people have been killed, most of them teenagers; more than 3,000 have been wounded and 1,000 arrested.
But still they come out, the young, and throw stones. They don’t seem to have leaders or belong to a political party. They represent themselves. And suddenly the second-largest standing army in the world doesn’t quite know what to do. The Indian government doesn’t know whom to negotiate with. And many Indians are slowly realizing they have been lied to for decades. The once solid consensus on Kashmir suddenly seems a little fragile.
I WAS in a bit of trouble the morning we drove to Shopian. A few days earlier, at a public meeting in Delhi, I said that Kashmir was disputed territory and, contrary to the Indian government’s claims, it couldn’t be called an “integral” part of India. Outraged politicians and news anchors demanded that I be arrested for sedition. The government, terrified of being seen as “soft,” issued threatening statements, and the situation escalated. Day after day, on prime-time news, I was being called a traitor, a white-collar terrorist and several other names reserved for insubordinate women. But sitting in that car on the road to Shopian, listening to my friends, I could not bring myself to regret what I had said in Delhi.
We were on our way to visit a man called Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar. The previous day he had come all the way to Srinagar, where I had been staying, to press me, with an urgency that was hard to ignore, to visit Shopian.
I first met Shakeel in June 2009, only a few weeks after the bodies of Nilofar, his 22-year-old wife, and Asiya, his 17-year-old sister, were found lying a thousand yards apart in a shallow stream in a high-security zone — a floodlit area between army and state police camps. The first postmortem report confirmed rape and murder. But then the system kicked in. New autopsy reports overturned the initial findings and, after the ugly business of exhuming the bodies, rape was ruled out. It was declared that in both cases the cause of death was drowning. Protests shut Shopian down for 47 days, and the valley was convulsed with anger for months. Eventually it looked as though the Indian government had managed to defuse the crisis. But the anger over the killings has magnified the intensity of this year’s uprising.
Shakeel wanted us to visit him in Shopian because he was being threatened by the police for speaking out, and hoped our visit would demonstrate that people even outside of Kashmir were looking out for him, that he was not alone.
It was apple season in Kashmir and as we approached Shopian we could see families in their orchards, busily packing apples into wooden crates in the slanting afternoon light. I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake. The news of our visit had preceded us, and a small knot of people were waiting on the road.
Shakeel’s house is on the edge of the graveyard where his wife and sister are buried. It was dark by the time we arrived, and there was a power failure. We sat in a semicircle around a lantern and listened to him tell the story we all knew so well. Other people entered the room. Other terrible stories poured out, ones that are not in human rights reports, stories about what happens to women who live in remote villages where there are more soldiers than civilians. Shakeel’s young son tumbled around in the darkness, moving from lap to lap. “Soon he’ll be old enough to understand what happened to his mother,” Shakeel said more than once.
Just when we rose to leave, a messenger arrived to say that Shakeel’s father-in-law — Nilofar’s father — was expecting us at his home. We sent our regrets; it was late and if we stayed longer it would be unsafe for us to drive back.
Minutes after we said goodbye and crammed ourselves into the car, a friend’s phone rang. It was a journalist colleague of his with news for me: “The police are typing up the warrant. She’s going to be arrested tonight.” We drove in silence for a while, past truck after truck being loaded with apples. “It’s unlikely,” my friend said finally. “It’s just psy-ops.”
But then, as we picked up speed on the highway, we were overtaken by a car full of men waving us down. Two men on a motorcycle asked our driver to pull over. I steeled myself for what was coming. A man appeared at the car window. He had slanting emerald eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard that went halfway down his chest. He introduced himself as Abdul Hai, father of the murdered Nilofar.
“How could I let you go without your apples?” he said. The bikers started loading two crates of apples into the back of our car. Then Abdul Hai reached into the pockets of his worn brown cloak, and brought out an egg. He placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it. And then he placed another in my other hand. The eggs were still warm. “God bless and keep you,” he said, and walked away into the dark. What greater reward could a writer want?
I wasn’t arrested that night. Instead, in what is becoming a common political strategy, officials outsourced their displeasure to the mob. A few days after I returned home, the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu nationalist opposition) staged a demonstration outside my house, calling for my arrest. Television vans arrived in advance to broadcast the event live. The murderous Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group that, in 2002, spearheaded attacks against Muslims in Gujarat in which more than a thousand people were killed, have announced that they are going to “fix” me with all the means at their disposal, including by filing criminal charges against me in different courts across the country.
Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm, boiled eggs.
Op-Ed Contributor
Kashmir’s Fruits of Discord
By ARUNDHATI ROY
Published: November 8, 2010
A WEEK before he was elected in 2008, President Obama said that solving the dispute over Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination — which has led to three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 — would be among his “critical tasks.” His remarks were greeted with consternation in India, and he has said almost nothing about Kashmir since then.But on Monday, during his visit here, he pleased his hosts immensely by saying the United States would not intervene in Kashmir and announcing his support for India’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. While he spoke eloquently about threats of terrorism, he kept quiet about human rights abuses in Kashmir.
Whether Mr. Obama decides to change his position on Kashmir again depends on several factors: how the war in Afghanistan is going, how much help the United States needs from Pakistan and whether the government of India goes aircraft shopping this winter. (An order for 10 Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, worth $5.8 billion, among other huge business deals in the pipeline, may ensure the president’s silence.) But neither Mr. Obama’s silence nor his intervention is likely to make the people in Kashmir drop the stones in their hands.
I was in Kashmir 10 days ago, in that beautiful valley on the Pakistani border, home to three great civilizations — Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. It’s a valley of myth and history. Some believe that Jesus died there; others that Moses went there to find the lost tribe. Millions worship at the Hazratbal shrine, where a few days a year a hair of the Prophet Muhammad is displayed to believers.
Now Kashmir, caught between the influence of militant Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, America’s interests in the region and Indian nationalism (which is becoming increasingly aggressive and “Hinduized”), is considered a nuclear flash point. It is patrolled by more than half a million soldiers and has become the most highly militarized zone in the world.
The atmosphere on the highway between Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, and my destination, the little apple town of Shopian in the south, was tense. Groups of soldiers were deployed along the highway, in the orchards, in the fields, on the rooftops and outside shops in the little market squares. Despite months of curfew, the “stone pelters” calling for “azadi” (freedom), inspired by the Palestinian intifada, were out again. Some stretches of the highway were covered with so many of these stones that you needed an S.U.V. to drive over them.
Fortunately the friends I was with knew alternative routes down the back lanes and village roads. The “longcut” gave me the time to listen to their stories of this year’s uprising. The youngest, still a boy, told us that when three of his friends were arrested for throwing stones, the police pulled out their fingernails — every nail, on both hands.
For three years in a row now, Kashmiris have been in the streets, protesting what they see as India’s violent occupation. But the militant uprising against the Indian government that began with the support of Pakistan 20 years ago is in retreat. The Indian Army estimates that there are fewer than 500 militants operating in the Kashmir Valley today. The war has left 70,000 dead and tens of thousands debilitated by torture. Many, many thousands have “disappeared.” More than 200,000 Kashmiri Hindus have fled the valley. Though the number of militants has come down, the number of Indian soldiers deployed remains undiminished.
But India’s military domination ought not to be confused with a political victory. Ordinary people armed with nothing but their fury have risen up against the Indian security forces. A whole generation of young people who have grown up in a grid of checkpoints, bunkers, army camps and interrogation centers, whose childhood was spent witnessing “catch and kill” operations, whose imaginations are imbued with spies, informers, “unidentified gunmen,” intelligence operatives and rigged elections, has lost its patience as well as its fear. With an almost mad courage, Kashmir’s young have faced down armed soldiers and taken back their streets.
Since April, when the army killed three civilians and then passed them off as “terrorists,” masked stone throwers, most of them students, have brought life in Kashmir to a grinding halt. The Indian government has retaliated with bullets, curfew and censorship. Just in the last few months, 111 people have been killed, most of them teenagers; more than 3,000 have been wounded and 1,000 arrested.
But still they come out, the young, and throw stones. They don’t seem to have leaders or belong to a political party. They represent themselves. And suddenly the second-largest standing army in the world doesn’t quite know what to do. The Indian government doesn’t know whom to negotiate with. And many Indians are slowly realizing they have been lied to for decades. The once solid consensus on Kashmir suddenly seems a little fragile.
I WAS in a bit of trouble the morning we drove to Shopian. A few days earlier, at a public meeting in Delhi, I said that Kashmir was disputed territory and, contrary to the Indian government’s claims, it couldn’t be called an “integral” part of India. Outraged politicians and news anchors demanded that I be arrested for sedition. The government, terrified of being seen as “soft,” issued threatening statements, and the situation escalated. Day after day, on prime-time news, I was being called a traitor, a white-collar terrorist and several other names reserved for insubordinate women. But sitting in that car on the road to Shopian, listening to my friends, I could not bring myself to regret what I had said in Delhi.
We were on our way to visit a man called Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar. The previous day he had come all the way to Srinagar, where I had been staying, to press me, with an urgency that was hard to ignore, to visit Shopian.
I first met Shakeel in June 2009, only a few weeks after the bodies of Nilofar, his 22-year-old wife, and Asiya, his 17-year-old sister, were found lying a thousand yards apart in a shallow stream in a high-security zone — a floodlit area between army and state police camps. The first postmortem report confirmed rape and murder. But then the system kicked in. New autopsy reports overturned the initial findings and, after the ugly business of exhuming the bodies, rape was ruled out. It was declared that in both cases the cause of death was drowning. Protests shut Shopian down for 47 days, and the valley was convulsed with anger for months. Eventually it looked as though the Indian government had managed to defuse the crisis. But the anger over the killings has magnified the intensity of this year’s uprising.
Shakeel wanted us to visit him in Shopian because he was being threatened by the police for speaking out, and hoped our visit would demonstrate that people even outside of Kashmir were looking out for him, that he was not alone.
It was apple season in Kashmir and as we approached Shopian we could see families in their orchards, busily packing apples into wooden crates in the slanting afternoon light. I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake. The news of our visit had preceded us, and a small knot of people were waiting on the road.
Shakeel’s house is on the edge of the graveyard where his wife and sister are buried. It was dark by the time we arrived, and there was a power failure. We sat in a semicircle around a lantern and listened to him tell the story we all knew so well. Other people entered the room. Other terrible stories poured out, ones that are not in human rights reports, stories about what happens to women who live in remote villages where there are more soldiers than civilians. Shakeel’s young son tumbled around in the darkness, moving from lap to lap. “Soon he’ll be old enough to understand what happened to his mother,” Shakeel said more than once.
Just when we rose to leave, a messenger arrived to say that Shakeel’s father-in-law — Nilofar’s father — was expecting us at his home. We sent our regrets; it was late and if we stayed longer it would be unsafe for us to drive back.
Minutes after we said goodbye and crammed ourselves into the car, a friend’s phone rang. It was a journalist colleague of his with news for me: “The police are typing up the warrant. She’s going to be arrested tonight.” We drove in silence for a while, past truck after truck being loaded with apples. “It’s unlikely,” my friend said finally. “It’s just psy-ops.”
But then, as we picked up speed on the highway, we were overtaken by a car full of men waving us down. Two men on a motorcycle asked our driver to pull over. I steeled myself for what was coming. A man appeared at the car window. He had slanting emerald eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard that went halfway down his chest. He introduced himself as Abdul Hai, father of the murdered Nilofar.
“How could I let you go without your apples?” he said. The bikers started loading two crates of apples into the back of our car. Then Abdul Hai reached into the pockets of his worn brown cloak, and brought out an egg. He placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it. And then he placed another in my other hand. The eggs were still warm. “God bless and keep you,” he said, and walked away into the dark. What greater reward could a writer want?
I wasn’t arrested that night. Instead, in what is becoming a common political strategy, officials outsourced their displeasure to the mob. A few days after I returned home, the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu nationalist opposition) staged a demonstration outside my house, calling for my arrest. Television vans arrived in advance to broadcast the event live. The murderous Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group that, in 2002, spearheaded attacks against Muslims in Gujarat in which more than a thousand people were killed, have announced that they are going to “fix” me with all the means at their disposal, including by filing criminal charges against me in different courts across the country.
Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm, boiled eggs.
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