Does Kabul Need a Green Zone?
Published November 05, 2009 @ 11:40AM PT
With Afghanistan's runoff election canceled and incumbent president Hamid Karzai handed another five year term, aidworkers evacuated after last Wednesday's deadly attack on a UN-approved Kabul guesthouse are heading back. But many are asking, what about the next time?
The attack on the Bakhtar guesthouse was not the first on aidworkers in Afghanistan since 2001, nor the first on foreigners. In 2004, five employees of Médecins Sans Frontières were killed in Badghis. In 2008, attacks on the Serena Hotel and on International Rescue Committee staff in Logar claimed ten lives. But there was something qualitatively different about the Bakhtar attack. I could feel it even here, in my cozy head office in the United States, as my colleagues discussed whether to approve an evacuation of our expatriate staff from Kabul.
The Bakhtar attack played on many fears at once. It was the ultimate home intruder scenario; the intruders were gunmen and suicide bombers come only to kill. The hour of the attack was early; people were still sleeping or were just waking up, disoriented and vulnerable. The location was a guesthouse --a private, intimate space-- not an office, the side of a road, or even a hotel. And the attackers were dressed in police uniforms, assassins disguised as protectors.
Yemeni Rebels Reported to Have Taken Saudi Territory
Published November 05, 2009 @ 10:39AM PT
Conflicts which once languished in highland nether regions around the world are spilling over borders. The latest case is Yemen. It almost sounds like it's made up. According to Reuters, Yemeni Shiite rebels have fought Saudi border guards amid Saudi bombing raids, then crossed into the country and taken Mount Dukhan, a speck on the Saudi-Yemen border.
To clarify, a Shiite Arab sect in Yemen has long protested their lack of clerical representation, on their terms, in the largely Sunni Arab Yemeni government. Both sides claim to have acted defensively as fighting broke out again this year. About a hundred thousand people were displaced by fighting in the north as government forces pounded the Shiite rebels. The Saudis may have joined the fight in an alliance with the Yemeni government only to keep the fighting from spilling over the border, but alas it has done so. Follow the news here.
By the way, try not to confuse this issue to much with the Al Qaeda threat. Al Qaeda is strictly Salafist Sunni Muslim, with very few ties to the Shiite rebels. The only thing they have in common is opposition to the Yemeni government. If Al Qaeda plans to increase its influence in Yemen, the group would likely treat this fight as a cover distraction, not likely a rally point. Then again, one never knows these days.
[Photo: Al Mawhit, Yemen, Franco Pecchio]
Southern Sudan: To Secede or Not to Secede?
Published November 05, 2009 @ 09:39AM PT
Let's say, just posing a hypothetical here, that the Sudanese government led by President Omar al-Bashir was giving preferential treatment to the largely Arab and northern elite at the cost of southerners and Darfuris. But let's also say that after decades of war, the Bashir government were to give in and fulfill its promise in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement to allow a referendum on southern independence in 2011. Two humongous questions:
First, would the Southern Sudanese, given a fair referendum in all the areas governed by the SPLA-led southern government, vote to become a separate sovereign nations? According to First Vice President of Sudan Salva Kiir and a number of other southern leaders this week: Hell yeah! Considering the region gave thousands of sons to the fight for independence from the north and lost hundreds of thousands of acres of farmable land to landmines while the north has done little to woo the population back save hold conferences and sign UN documents, then even the most naive onlookers would guess that the vote will come up, yes. The north has less than two years to turn magically into a fledgling fair trade democracy or, contrastingly, to defy the international community and break the promise of a timely referendum. (Okay, maybe the latter is more likely.)
If the vote went ahead, would an independent Southern Sudan fair better as a nation without the north? All those who voted yes above, as well as many global human rights advocates and aid workers will probably shout an enthusiastic yes. But here's the pickle. The central regions located between the north and south including Abyei, Southern Kordofan, and the Blue Nile are still unstable while resting on disputed oil fields. And the minority tribes allegedly allied to the north who live in the south still tend to hold vendettas against their southern-allied neighbors, this is within Malakal, Jonglei, and elsewhere. So if, hypothetically, the south becomes independent, the defining of the border and oil field divisions will be an extremely delicate, if not bloody decades-long process. Egad. Best place to follow Southern Sudan news is the Sudan Tribune.
Do you think the Bashir Administration (which includes southern First President Kiir) allow the referendum to go ahead? And if this happened and the vote was yes do you think the Three Areas disputes can be settled peacefully?
[Photo: Juba, Stein Ove Korneliussen]
Compassion for the Taliban's Child Soldiers
Published November 04, 2009 @ 05:15PM PT
“Child soldiers.” The phrase evokes many images: schoolchildren snatched from their homes at night to be porters and sex slaves for the Lord’s Resistance Army, drug-addled Liberian adolescents, rail thin Somali teens dwarfed by their own weapons. And now, the connected conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan have given child soldiering a new face --the child suicide bomber.
Abu Dhabi daily The National provides a snapshot of this chilling phenomenon:
Two Views on Sri Lankan IDP Resettlement
Published November 04, 2009 @ 11:18AM PT
The Sri Lankan government has announced it is nearing the halfway point for resettling the country's 280,000 predominantly ethnic Tamil families who were displaced in last year's fighting. The civil war reached it's climax this past year with the government surrounding and virtually destroying the rebel Tamil Tigers. When large numbers of Tamils were displaced, the government interned many of them in controlled camps. Many aid agencies were not permitted entrance and if they were could only bring certain kinds of supplies. Here are two views on the displacement and the new resettlement:
The predominantly Buddhist and ethnic Sinhalese Sri Lankan government considers the number of displaced to have been closer to 186,000. It claims that a military campaign against the Tamil Tigers was vital to bring back stability to the country, claiming that the Tamils were an extreme fighting force unwilling to compromise. When the Sri Lankan government forcibly displaced Tamils into unusually restrictive camps last year, it did so to limit the Tiger's access to support from that population. Now it is celebrating success in returning tens of thousands of people back to their home villages, claiming delays are mostly due to landmine risks which are being addressed.
Meanwhile, many of the region's Tamils feel that the government not only doesn't represent their interests but actively discriminates against them, which is why many rallied behind the Tigers despite the rebel's periodic lapses into extremism, which they see as less so than the government's repression. Tamils living in the West argue that even though there is one set of ethnic Tamils participating in the government that the northeastern Tamils are marked, required to show IDs to travel anywhere, are repeatedly stopped and questioned by police, and more. They claim that the IDP camps were more like internment camps. Foreign aid agencies back this up, claiming that many were not permitted entrance even to provide lifesaving aid. The resettlements are partly welcome, but also present a whole new set of questions about the future of the northeastern Tamils without substantial political representation. Here are viewpoints from Operation USA's Nimmi Gowrinathan and a political researcher named S L Neelavan who are both Tamils living in the US.
[Photo: Tamils in northeast Sri Lanka, Tro Kilinochchi.]
Germany to Kosovo Roma Refugees: You Must Return
Published November 03, 2009 @ 05:22PM PT
Life isn’t easy for Roma anywhere in Europe, but it is about to become much more precarious for thousands of Kosovo Roma refugees living in Germany. Beginning early next year, the German government will start returning thousands of Roma refugees to Kosovo. The governments of the two countries are expected to sign an agreement on refugee returns in a few weeks.
The move has alarmed Germany’s Kosovo Roma refugees.
The Danger of Rewriting History in Afghanistan
Published November 03, 2009 @ 05:00PM PT
Wazhma Frogh, Afghanistan country director former country director for Global Rights* recently published a long column in the Washington Post titled “Risking a Rights Disaster.” In it, she argues that a US shift to a narrow counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan, or attempts to bring some Taliban into the government, would spell disaster for Afghanistan’s civilians, especially women.
Frogh’s piece is earnest, and she makes some good points, but I still found myself cringing in a few places. To begin with, this paragraph:
In 2001, when the war in Afghanistan began, the liberation of Afghan women was one of the most important justifications for military intervention. Has the world now changed its mind about Afghan women? Is it ready to let them once again be killed and tortured by militants? Does the world no longer believe in the principles it supported in 2001?
And then this one:
