Yearly Review By Harper’s Magazine

December 30, 2013

The civil war in Syria counted its 100,000th death, and the Syrian government formally acceded to the international convention banning chemical weapons and agreed to the inventory, seizure, and removal or destruction of its chemical weapons and chemical-weapons facilities by mid-2014. Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the country’s military, sparking protests and violence that culminated in August with the deaths of at least 638 people during the clearing of encampments set up by Morsi’s supporters. More than 8,000 people were killed by sectarian violence in Iraq. Pakistan underwent the first democratic transfer of power in its 66-year history. Iran claimed to have launched monkeys named Pishgam and Fargam into space, and agreed to halt the enrichment of high-grade uranium for six months in exchange for the relaxation of international sanctions. In Nairobi, gunmen stormed the Westgate shopping mall and killed at least 62 people; in Algeria, 38 hostages and 29 militants were killed during a four-day standoff at a natural-gas refinery in the Saharan outpost of Ain Amenas; and in Mali, militants set fire to the Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute, which houses manuscripts dating to the twelfth century. “They are bandits,” said institute employee Ali Baba.

The United Nations warned of a risk of genocide in the Central African Republic, where more than 650 people died in December during sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims, and discovered mass graves in South Sudan, where thousands of people died during fighting in December. North Korea hosted NBA hall-of-famer Dennis Rodman three times, executed the ex-girlfriend and the uncle of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, nullified its 1953 armistice with South Korea, and sent a fax to the South Korean government warning that it might strike without warning. Typhoon Haiyan killed at least 6,100 people in the Philippines; flash floods and landslides killed at least 5,700 in the Indian state of Uttarakhand; the Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,127 people; and a 7.7-magnitude earthquake killed at least 825 people in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. One hundred and six prisoners participated in an ongoing hunger strike at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Uruguay became the first country to legalize the cultivation, sale, and consumption of marijuana, and a construction company bulldozed a 2,300-year-old Mayan temple to make road fill in Belize. “Mind-boggling,” said archaeologist Jamie Awe. A Reykjavík court granted a 15-year-old officially known as “girl” the right to use the name Blær, and New Zealand barred its citizens from naming their children Lucifer and Anal. Pope Benedict XVI retired, as did David Beckham, Jack Nicholson, and the world’s most prolific streaker.

The Vatican recalled 6,000 medals recounting a story about Lesus, opened a Vacant See, and elected to the papacy the Argentine Jesuit priest Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became the first Pope Francis. A Catholic diocese in southern Austria was fined for mass texting. Malawi accused Madonna of bullying. Saudi Arabia expelled three Emirati men for being too handsome. Turkey exonerated a kestrel accused of spying for Israel, and sculptors built a snow replica of an M75 missile on the Temple Mount. Russia ordered its soldiers to start wearing socks, and Pakistan ordered its civil servants to go sockless. India shut down the world’s last remaining telegraph service. Representatives from the House of Keys declared their support for a lesbian couple denied an apartment on the Isle of Man, and Uganda passed a law making “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by life imprisonment. Russia passed an antigay bill banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” and imprisoned, then freed, the punk band Pussy Riot and 30 members of Greenpeace.

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to seven years in prison for paying for sex with an underage dancer known as Ruby the Heart-Stealer. Olympic sprinter and double-amputee Oscar Pistorius was charged with the murder of his girlfriend. Icelandic police shot and killed a civilian for the first time, then apologized. Nelson Mandela died, as did Hugo Chávez and Margaret Thatcher; authors Chinua Achebe, Tom Clancy, Evan S. Connell, Seamus Heaney, Elmore Leonard, and Doris Lessing; film critic Roger Ebert; cruciverbalist Araucaria; the original Dear Abby; athletes Walt Bellamy, Stan Musial, Bill Sharman, and Earl Weaver; actors Annette Funicello, James Gandolfini, Peter O’Toole, and Harry Reems; musicians Richie Havens, George Jones, Yusef Lateef, Lou Reed, and John Tavener; computer programmer Aaron Swartz; the inventors of the AK-47 and Twister; and a skydiver in Yolo County, California. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a son and named him George Alexander Louis.

The world’s oldest bird hatched a chick.

remainder:http://harpers.org/blog/2013/12/yearly-review-6/

The Hazards of Revolution A Long Ferment in the Middle East

Weekend Edition December 27-29, 2013

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Soon after the Libyan capital fell to the rebels in August 2011 I got to know a 32-year-old man called Ahmed Abdullah al-Ghadamsi. We met when he tried to evict me from my hotel room, which he said was needed for members of the National Transitional Council, in effect the provisional government of Libya. I wasn’t happy about being moved because the hotel, the Radisson Blu on Tripoli’s seafront, was full of journalists and there was nowhere else to stay. But Ahmed promised to find me another room, and he was as good as his word.

He was lending a hand to the provisional government, he said, because he was strongly opposed to Gaddafi – as was the rest of his family. He came from the Fornaj district of the city, and was contemptuous of the efforts of government spies to penetrate its network of extended families. He derided Gaddafi’s absurd personality cult and his fear of subversive ideas: ‘Books used to be more difficult to bring into the country than weapons. You had to leave them at the airport for two or three months so they could be checked.’ He had spent six years studying in Norway and spoke Norwegian as well as English; on returning to Libya he got a job on the staff of the Radisson Blu. One of Gaddafi’s sons, Al-Saadi, had a suite in the hotel, and he watched the ruling family and their friends doing business and enjoying themselves.

Ahmed was a self-confident man, not noticeably intimidated by the sporadic shooting which was keeping most people in Tripoli off the streets. I asked him if he would consider working for me as a guide and assistant and he agreed. Tripoli had run out of petrol but he quickly found some, along with a car and driver willing to risk the rebel checkpoints. He was adept at talking to the militiamen manning the barricades, and helped me get out of the city when the roads were blocked. After a few weeks I left Libya; I later heard that he was working for other journalists. Then in October I got a message saying that he was dead, shot through the head by a pro-Gaddafi sniper in the final round of fighting in Sirte on the coast far to the east of Tripoli. It turned out that there was a lot that Ahmed hadn’t told me.

When the protests started in Benghazi on 15 February he had been among the first to demonstrate in Fornaj, and he was arrested. His younger brother Mohammed told me that ‘he was jailed for two hours or less before his friends and the protesters broke into the police station and freed him.’ When Gaddafi’s forces regained control of Tripoli, Ahmed drove to the Nafusa Mountains a hundred miles south-west of the capital to try to join the rebels there, but they didn’t know or trust him so he had to return. He smuggled weapons and gelignite into Tripoli and became involved in a plot, never put into action, to blow up Al-Saadi Gaddafi’s suite in the Radisson. Mohammed said Ahmed felt bad that he’d spent much of the revolution making money and, despite his best efforts, had never actually fought. He went to Sirte, where Gaddafi’s forces were making a last stand, and joined a militia group from Misrata. He had no military experience, as far as I know, but he didn’t flinch during bombardments and was stoical when he was caught in an ambush and wounded by shrapnel from a mortar bomb, and the militiamen were impressed. On 8 October his commander told Ahmed to take a squad of five or six men to hunt for snipers who had killed a number of rebel fighters. He was shot dead by one of them a few hours later.

remainder: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/27/a-long-ferment-in-the-middle-east/

All in play in the New Great Game

By Pepe Escobar

The big story of 2014 will be Iran. Of course, the big story of the early 21st century will never stop being US-China, but it's in 2014 that we will know whether a comprehensive accord transcending the Iranian nuclear program is attainable; and in this case the myriad ramifications will affect all that's in play in the New Great Game in Eurasia, including US-China.

As it stands, we have an interim deal of the P5+1 (the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany) with Iran, and no deal between the US and Afghanistan. So, once again, we have Afghanistan configured as a battleground between Iran and the House of Saud, part of a geopolitical game played out in overdrive since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 along the northern rim of the Middle East all the way to Khorasan and South Asia.

Then there's the element of Saudi paranoia, extrapolating from the future of Afghanistan to the prospect of a fully "rehabilitated" Iran becoming accepted by Western political/financial elites. This, by the way, has nothing to do with that fiction, the "international community"; after all, Iran was never banished by the BRICS, (ie Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Non-Aligned Movement and the bulk of the developing world.

Those damned jihadis
Every major player in the Barack Obama administration has warned Afghan President Hamid Karzai that either he signs a bilateral "security agreement" authorizing some ersatz of the US occupation or Washington will withdraw all of its troops by the end of 2014.

in full: http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-03-231213.html

The Deadly Pawns of Saudi Arabia

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight “the war on terror”, they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.

Compare two US pronouncements stressing the significance of these donations and basing their conclusions on the best intelligence available to the US government. The first is in the 9/11 Commission Report which found that Osama bin Laden did not fund al-Qa’ida because from 1994 he had little money of his own but relied on his ties to wealthy Saudi individuals established during the Afghan war in the 1980s. Quoting, among other sources, a CIA analytic report dated 14 November 2002, the commission concluded that “al-Qa’ida appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia”.

Seven years pass after the CIA report was written during which the US invades Iraq fighting, among others, the newly established Iraq franchise of al-Qa’ida, and becomes engaged in a bloody war in Afghanistan with the resurgent Taliban. American drones are fired at supposed al-Qa’ida-linked targets located everywhere from Waziristan in north-west Pakistan to the hill villages of Yemen. But during this time Washington can manage no more than a few gentle reproofs to Saudi Arabia on its promotion of fanatical and sectarian Sunni militancy outside its own borders.

Evidence for this is a fascinating telegram on “terrorist finance” from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to US embassies, dated 30 December 2009 and released by WikiLeaks the following year. She says firmly that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”. Eight years after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Mrs Clinton reiterates in the same message that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups”. Saudi Arabia was most important in sustaining these groups, but it was not quite alone since “al-Qa’ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point”.


in full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/09/the-deadly-pawns-of-saudi-arabia/

My tribute to vintage Nelson Mandela of South Africa