The Jordan Times3 dead in Eilat suicide bombingBy Omar Karmi
RAMALLAH — A suicide bomb attack in Israel’s southern resort town of Eilat yesterday morning killed three in addition to the bomber in the first such bombing since April 2006.
The blast comes four days before representatives of the Quartet of Middle East mediators, the US, the EU, Russia and the UN, were due to meet in Washington to discuss reviving Palestinian-Israeli talks.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Fateh-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades both claimed responsibility and the bomber was identified as 21-year-old Mohammad Saqsaq from the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli army appears to believe that Saqsaq had entered Eilat from the Egyptian Sinai desert, contradicting an earlier statement by Islamic Jihad that he had set out from the West Bank and reached Eilat via Jordan after seven months of preparation. Jordan has denied that the bomber entered through its territory.
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Monarch condemns attack, Jordan denies infiltrationBy Khalid Neimat and Hana Namroqa
AMMAN — King Abdullah on Monday condemned the Eilat suicide bombing, which killed three people in the southern Israeli resort, as the government denied that the attacker infiltrated from the Kingdom.
The King told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over the telephone that efforts to revive the peace process should not be impeded by such an attack. He said a prompt relaunch of the process was a must to prevent undermining the resumption of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. At a meeting yesterday with EU and G-8 envoys to Jordan, the Monarch condemned “such operations that increase Palestinian suffering and undermine efforts to bridge Palestinian-Israeli gap”, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported. Government Spokesperson Nasser Judeh, meanwhile, denied that the Eilat suicide bomber infiltrated the resort from Jordan, saying he never entered the Kingdom.
“Records of government agencies and border control points, showed that this individual never entered the Kingdom and never resided in Jordan," Judeh told The Jordan Times.
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King orders allocation of JD20m to military housing fundAMMAN (Petra) — King Abdullah on Monday ordered the allocation of JD20 million to the housing fund of the Jordan Armed Forces and security departments, in appreciation of their significant national role in safeguarding the country.
Chairing a meeting at the JAF headquarters, the King directed the government to amend relevant legislation to increase the value of loans provided by housing funds to the JAF and security personnel.
He also ordered the allocation of land plots to army and security personnel. During the meeting, the King was briefed on financial, legal and technical difficulties facing housing funds as well as proposals to tackle such problems. The King’s donation was part of his efforts to improve the living conditions of members of the army and security departments. King Abdullah, meanwhile, told EU and G-8 envoys to Jordan that the Middle East was banking on their countries’ efforts to achieve tangible results in the peace process, leading to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
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Sudan loses Africa chair because of DarfurADDIS ABABA (Reuters) — Sudan lost the leadership of the African Union (AU) for a second time after the pan-African group on Monday awarded the rotating chairmanship to Ghana because of widespread outrage over continuing bloodshed in Darfur.
Alpha Oumar Konare, the AU's top diplomat, told reporters Ghanaian President John Kufuor would become chairman. "By consensus it is President Kufuor." He said Sudan had supported the decision, which avoided a damaging dispute eclipsing issues on the summit agenda including raising peacekeeping troops for Somalia.
Before the summit some analysts had predicted the dispute over Sudan would dominate the summit and only be resolved at the last moment.
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Cult leader, 200 others killed — Iraqi officialsNAJAF (Reuters) — The leader of a messianic Muslim cult was killed with 200 or more followers during a daylong onslaught by US and Iraqi forces on their camp near the holy city of Najaf, Iraqi officials said on Monday.
They accused him of making a claiming to be the Mahdi, a messiah-like figure in Islam, and said his uniformed "Soldiers of Heaven" had planned to massacre top Shiite clerics during a major religious holiday on Monday and had to be stopped.
No account was available from the group targeted in one of the strangest episodes in four years of conflict.
A web posting last week by a man identified by officials and styling himself the herald or messenger of the Mahdi bore out the existence of the movement and its belief in the imminent coming of the redeemer.
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Negotiations underway to secure release of Jordanian prisoners in Guantanamo — JudehBy Hana Namroqa
AMMAN — The government on Monday reiterated its keenness to free Jordanians held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Negotiations are being carried out between the concerned authorities in Jordan, entities responsible for Jordanian prisoners in Guantanamo and lawyers working on behalf of the inmates, Government Spokesperson Nasser Judeh told reporters during his weekly press briefing yesterday.
“The current talks are focusing on releasing two of the five Jordanian detainees in Guantanamo, however the issue is complicated and results of the negotiations can’t be determined as talks are still under way,” Judeh said.
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Hizbollah leader vows to fight back if US targets groupBEIRUT (AP) — The leader of Hizbollah vowed on Sunday to fight
back against the United States if White House-organised operations were to target the group in Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrallah said he was reacting to a recent report in the Washington Post that said US President George W. Bush’s administration has authorised widening a list of approved operations against Hizbollah in Lebanon aimed at curtailing Iran’s influence in the region.
“The Americans know that if they want to attack us, the one who will defend us is God. But also our religious duty calls on us to defend ourselves, our dignity and our blood,” Nasrallah told hundreds of Shiite supporters at a rally in Beirut’s southern suburbs Sunday night. His remarks, which appeared to be his interpretation of the newspaper report, drew repeated chants of “Death to America” from the crowd.
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Is Israel willing to take on the challenge of peace?By Nizar Abdel-Kader
It has been argued that wars create opportunities for security and political changes.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 proved this saying in the negative sense. In fact, Lebanon was plunged into a period of chaos and was exploited by Syria, which gained full control over the country for over two decades.
After the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, the situation in Lebanon changed dramatically, providing hope that Lebanon would be able to regain its sovereignty and deploy its armed forces along its international borders.
The July-August war of 2006 created a strong will among the population and the government to replace the paradigm of violence with one of political and security dialogue and to achieve a permanent ceasefire with Israel. Hizbollah, too, gave its consent.
http://www.jordantimes.com/tue/opinion/opinion5.htm
Editorial:
Admitting blameEvidence that Iraq is about to explode mounts almost by the minute now. The news of the resignation of Arab League envoy to Baghdad Mokhtar Lamani in an eight-page letter to Arab League Secretary General Amr Musa is proof.
The resignation demonstrates the envoy’s sheer exasperation. It’s no wonder the Arab League office in Cairo is still trying to deny the resignation.
More violent proof is the killing of hundreds of men from a reportedly unknown group known as the Soldier of Heaven in a major clash with Iraqi-led forces near Iraq’s holy city of Najaf.
Ambassador Lamani is not the first to throw up his hands and call it quits because of the divisions, indecisiveness and pettiness of fellow Arab League members. Assigned to coordinate reconciliation efforts, Lamani’s hands were tied because leaders spent precious time squabbling over who would or would not attend a reconciliation conference.
Lamani was appointed to the job in March 2006, and there has been no other reconciliation conference since the one held in November 2005 in Cairo.
In the meantime, a chilling figure to remember is that 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2006 alone, according to a UN official.
Perhaps the Arab world will reflect seriously on the contents of Lamani’s letter and draw the necessary conclusions. But recent history shows us that all manner of warning, alert, alarm is falling on deaf ears.
We can blame the US all we want for making an utter mess and travesty in Iraq. We can shout out questions like “where was all that intelligence US taxpayers paid for.” We can point to all the injustices slapped on the Arab and Islamic world. But, we have to admit, we, ourselves have proven our incompetence, our impotence.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Lebanon on the edgeJames J. Zogby
Lebanon is once again making headlines as a result of two distinct developments: in Lebanon, a Hizbollah-called general strike spilled over into violence; in Paris, Western and Arab nations met with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Siniora to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction assistance.
Some see the division between Lebanon’s two camps growing and being fuelled by external partners. There are fears that the government, emboldened by pledges and aid and strong words from US President George Bush, has hardened its position vis-à-vis the opposition. At the same time, the opposition, supported by Iran and Syria, has also hardened its position.
With the genie of sectarian violence now out of the bottle, the situation appears quite precarious.
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Egypt puts financial squeeze on opposition IslamistsCAIRO (AFP) — Egypt has tightened the noose on the opposition Muslim Brothers by freezing the assets of the Islamist movement's financiers it accuses of seeking to revive the group's secret apparatus.
Brotherhood leaders denied the allegations and denounced a political campaign they charged was aimed at breaking the back of their movement and risked harming the country's economy.
Egypt's public prosecutor on Sunday ordered a freeze on the assets of 29 businessmen considered close to the movement and their immediate families.
The decision marked the first time such measures — typically reserved for cases of fraud and embezzlement — were taken against the country's largest opposition bloc.
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Warning of Somali chaos if troops delayedADDIS ABABA (AFP) — African Union Commission Chief Alpha Oumar Konare warned Monday that chaos would prevail in Somalia without the rapid deployment of a peacekeeping force, while the US offered to give air support.
A 7,600-strong African Union (AU) force was meant to be sent to Somalia by the end of this month but it has been held up by the reluctance of member states to commit troops to a country which has been a byword for anarchy for the last 16 years.
The AU believes that the recent ouster of an Islamist movement that ruled the capital Mogadishu for the previous six months could serve as an opportunity to open a new chapter in the war-torn country's history.
But Konare said that chance could easily be blown if the force is not in place soon.
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The martyrdom of Hrant DinkGwynne Dyer
When they buried Hrant Dink in Istanbul last Tuesday (January 23), more than 100,000 Turks came to his funeral, filling the streets and chanting “We are all Armenians”.
There is a war going on for the soul of Turkey, but at least many Turks are on the right side.
Dink, who called himself “an Armenian from Turkey and a good Turkish citizen”, was murdered because he insisted on talking about the great crime that happened in the country 92 years ago: the mass murder of most of Turkey’s Armenian population in eastern Anatolia. The newspaper he founded and edited, a bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly called Agos, had only a small circulation, but his outspoken editorials had made him one of Turkey’s most famous journalists — and a target for assassination.
http://www.jordantimes.com/tue/opinion/opinion3.htm
Libya has proposal to free nurses — Qadhafi sonSOFIA (AFP) — Libya has proposed a plan to release the Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in an AIDS epidemic case in exchange for compensation, the son of Libyan President Muammar Qadhafi told a Bulgarian newspaper Monday.
"We have proposed a roadmap with solutions [satisfying] all parties: The parents, the Libyan government, the Bulgarian side, the EU," Qadhafi's son Seif Al Islam told the daily 24 Hours, adding that he had also discussed the plan with the foreign ministers of Germany and France.
The plan anticipates "substantial compensation for the families of those affected”, he added.
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death on December 19 after an appeals court upheld their conviction for having "knowingly" infected 426 children at a hospital in Benghazi with blood tainted by the HIV virus that can cause AIDS.
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Survey shows majority of Jordanians understand benefits of democracyBy Alia Shukri Hamzeh
AMMAN –— A majority of Jordanians have a clear understanding about the benefits of a democratic system and are more than ready for it, but a set of initiatives and plans is needed to further promote democratisation rather than keep it at a standstill, pollster Mohammed Masri, reported on Monday.
Masri, coordinator of the public opinion polling unit at the University of Jordan’s Centre for Strategic Studies (CSS), told The Jordan Times that a survey released Monday revealed that citizens have an advanced and sophisticated understanding of the content of democratic rule in general and its indicators, and believe that greater democracy will also lead to better economic conditions.
“What they seem to be still waiting for are concrete plans that will lead to the aspired level of democracy,” he said.
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Olmert approves rerouting of barrierHamas says US-aid package to boost security forces loyal to Abbas incitement
By Omar Karmi
RAMALLAH — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has approved a rerouting of Israel’s separation barrier to take in two more illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Israeli media reported yesterday.
The rerouting still needs to be approved by the Israeli Cabinet, but if it is, the barrier will be moved five kilometres eastward from the 1967 border and ensnare some 20,000 Palestinians who will be able to move neither west into Israel nor east into the rest of the West Bank.
The new route will lengthen the barrier by about 12 kilometres and cost Israel around $40 million.
The Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator Saeb Erekat condemned the move saying it “undermines everything we're doing to revive the peace process”.
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Iran 2-3 years from atom bomb — think tankLONDON (Reuters) — Iran is at least two to three years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, a leading global think tank said on Wednesday.
But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said pressure on the United States to stop the programme, including possibly through military strikes, would increase this year as Tehran mastered the process of enriching uranium.
The IISS said Iran's stockpile of 250 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), the raw material for feeding into linked cascades of centrifuges, was enough to produce between 30 and 50 nuclear weapons when enriched.
"The main bottleneck to producing such weapons remains learning how to run UF6 through the cascades for extended periods. If Iran overcomes the technical hurdles, the possibility of military options to stop the programme will of course increase," IISS Director General John Chipman said.
The United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran on December 23 and gave it 60 days to suspend uranium enrichment. Tehran denies pursuing the bomb and says it is developing nuclear energy only to generate electricity.
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HINTS are not what indictment is all about.US stops F-14 parts sales, hints Iran behind Karbala attackWASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States took new steps to isolate Iran by freezing the sale of all F-14 fighter parts, as officials told US news media they suspect Iranians masquerading as Americans were involved in a deadly attack on a US compound in Iraq.
Iran bought 79 US-built F-14 "Tomcat" fighters before the 1979 Islamic revolution, and US officials they could get spare parts for the planes through third parties.
The Defence Logistics Agency ordered the freeze January 26 "given the current situation in Iran", said agency spokesman Dawn Dearden on Tuesday.
The US move and the late Tuesday news report come as Washington increases pressure on Tehran to halt its alleged involvement with insurgents and sectarian fighting in Iraq — a charge Iran denies.
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Bombs strike Shiite areas in Baghdad, Sunnis face mortar attacks, kidnappingsBAGHDAD (AP) — Car bombs struck mostly Shiite targets in Baghdad on Wednesday, and the bodies of three Sunni professors and a student were found days after they were seized while leaving their campus in a Shiite part of the city. At least 47 people were reported killed across the country, including a US soldier.
A mortar attack also struck a predominantly Sunni neighbourhood in northern Baghdad, killing six people and wounding 20, police and hospital officials said.
The violence underscored the extreme difficulties facing the capital's six million residents as they try to go about their daily business even as US and Iraqi forces gear up for a planned security sweep to clear the city of Sunni insurgents and Shiite groups who are blamed in many of the attacks. Maamoun Abdel-Hadi said he was standing with a friend near his car when a mortar shell fell nearby during the attack on the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Azamiyah. The area was hit by nine mortar shells that damaged houses, shops and streets, killing six people and wounding 20, police and hospital officials said.
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Training Iraqi police essential, study group saysWASHINGTON (AP) — Training the police is as important to stabilising Iraq as building up an army there, but the United States has botched the job by assigning the wrong agencies to the task, two members of the Iraq Study Group say.
"The police training system has not gone well," former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the bipartisan commission, said in remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was joined in his statements by another member of the study group, Edwin Meese III, who was attorney general during the Reagan administration.
The US erred by first assigning the task of shaping the judicial system in a largely lawless country to the State Department and private contractors who "did not have the expertise or the manpower to get the job done," Hamilton and Meese said in testimony obtained by the Associated Press.
In 2004, the mission was assigned to the Defence Department, which devoted more money to the task. But department officials also were insufficiently trained for the job, Hamilton and Meese said.
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Millions of dollars wasted in Iraq reconstruction aid — investigatorsWASHINGTON (AP) — The US government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.
The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.
“The security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, hindering progress in all reconstruction sectors and threatening the overall reconstruction effort,” according to the 579-page report, which was being released Wednesday.
Calling Iraq’s sectarian violence the greatest challenge, Bowen said in a telephone interview that billions in US aid spent on strengthening security has had limited effect.
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German court orders arrest of Masri kidnappersBERLIN (Reuters) — A court in Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 people suspected of being involved in the abduction of a German national who says he was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA, state prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Prosecutors in Munich said, based on their findings, "the particulars of the suspects listed in the arrest warrants suggest these could be cover identities of CIA agents".
They said a district court in Munich had issued warrants for the arrest of the 13 on suspicion of abducting, falsely imprisoning and causing grievous bodily harm to Khaled Masri, a German of Lebanese descent.
Prosecutors did not give the nationalities of the suspects, although according to German media reports, most of them are resident in the United States.
Masri's lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said the issuing of the arrest warrants was the first sign that German authorities were now prepared to back his client against the CIA. "These are massive crimes that have been committed against Khaled Masri," he told Reuters. "German authorities are following up these crimes against a German subject and are looking to call those responsible to account." Masri was arrested in Macedonia at the end of 2003 and says he was handed over to the CIA, who flew him to Afghanistan and wrongly held him until his release in late May 2004.
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Bulgaria targets Libyan police over nurses’ tortureSOFIA (AFP) — A Bulgarian prosecutor launched a judicial enquiry Wednesday against 11 Libyan police officers who allegedly tortured five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in Libya in a high-profile AIDS epidemic case.
"We have enough information against 11 Libyan police officers to now open a judicial enquiry into their actions between February 9, 1999 and May 1999," Sofia's chief prosecutor Nikolay Kokinov told a press conference Wednesday.
The officers "will be investigated and might eventually be brought to trial for having forced the five Bulgarian nurses to give false testimony exposing them as perpetrators of a crime: The spread of an AIDS infection to over 400 Libyan children," Kokinov added.
The five women and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death after a court in Tripoli found them guilty of deliberately infecting the children with the HIV virus in a hospital in northeastern Benghazi.
The medics were convicted on the basis of confessions by the doctor and two of the nurses, despite the fact that they recanted their confessions during the trial.
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Ex-warlord elected speaker in SomaliaMOGADISHU (AP) — Somali officials were imposing martial law on areas the transitional government controls, moving to strengthen a tenuous grip on power and smother rising violence. An AU official said Wednesday that help was on the way in the form of peacekeepers from Uganda and Nigeria.
Prime Minister Ali Mohammad Gedi announced on government-controlled radio that the martial law measures were beginning with a curfew in the southern town of Baidoa. Gedi said remnants of an ousted Islamist movement have returned to some areas and were planning to try to further destabilise an already lawless country.
"From now on martial law would be implemented across government-controlled areas, starting with Baidoa tonight," Gedi said late Tuesday. The measure was taken under a three-month emergency law passed by parliament on January 13.
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ARAMEX 2006 profits climb 28% as revenues surgeAMMAN (JT) — ARAMEX, the total transportation solutions provider announced this week that 2006 net profits climbed 28 per cent to AED95.2 million, from AED74.4 million for the same period last year. Revenues climbed as well by 59 per cent to AED1.36 billion, from AED854 million the same period in 2005. In a preliminary statement of its 2006 full-year results, released to the Dubai Financial Market, the global express, freight and logistics innovator, revealed business was buoyant throughout the year but climbed significantly in the fourth quarter Fadi Ghandour, ARAMEX’s chief executive officer and president, said: “The strong financial performance we have seen in 2006 reflects the tremendous progress the company has made. The figures are very positive and the upturn in revenues confirms the success of our strategy of seeking expansion through acquisitions and organic growth.” He added: “ARAMEX has never been in better shape. The business is well positioned to capitalise on the trends that are reshaping the regional and global industry. Our strength in the regional express market, the innovations we have introduced in our service offering, the responsiveness of our people and their commitment to the ARAMEX culture of putting service first have added enormous value for our stakeholders.”
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Priority — Palestinian unityThe US needs a serious review of its policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Washington is prepared to spend $86 million to bolster Palestinian security forces loyal to one party, but is unwilling to spend any money to help the Palestinian Authority (PA) pay the salaries of schoolteachers and nurses because another party happens to have been elected to head that body. It’s perverse….
… Both Fateh and Hamas have publicly backed the proposal. As well they might. Palestinian security forces have for too long been the purview of Fateh and have thus, and especially in recent years, lost credibility, rightly or wrongly, along with the lost credibility of Fateh as a movement.
http://www.jordantimes.com/thu/opinion/opinion1.htm
University student receives reduced sentence for his sister’s murderBy Rana Husseini
AMMAN — A 19-year-old man walked free from the Criminal Court on Wednesday after receiving a three-month prison term for killing his sister in August 2006 for reasons of family honour.
The defendant, a university student, was convicted of shooting and killing his 22-year-old divorced sister at her family home on August 4.
He received a six-month prison term that was immediately reduced to half by the court because his family dropped charges against him and because "he is a student."
The court said the defendant learned that his sister had a lover 10 minutes before he shot her six times.
"The 10-minute interval between hearing of his sister's immoral actions and meeting her face to face is proof that he did not plot the murder," the court said.
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Development of agricultural sector a national priority — KingAMMAN (Petra) — His Majesty King Abdullah on Wednesday said the agricultural sector is a national priority as it is a basic pillar of the economic, social and environmental development process.
During a meeting with agricultural sector representatives yesterday, the Monarch underlined the importance of training farmers and helping them enhance the level of their production and living standards.
King Abdullah said it was also important to educate small farmers on how to boost their capabilities and ensure their participation in the development process to render it a success.
In statements to Jordan Television, Jordanian Farmers Union President Jamal Maqableh said the discussions also focused on how to help the small farmers produce agricultural products in line with the international standards.
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