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As Planner Of 1976 Terrorist Attack On A Cuban Airliner

By Prensa Latina

A declassified 1976 U.S. State Department document identifies Luis Posada Ca­rriles as the most likely author of a terrorist attack on a Cuban airliner that year which took the lives of all 76 passengers aboard.

The memorandum, released June 3, illustrates the department’s concern regarding ties between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and extremist Cuban émigré groups in South Florida.

The note was sent by two high level CIA officials to then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kis­singer, in reference to Fidel Castro’s accusations of U.S. involvement in the downing of the Cuban aircraft, as it departed Barbados on October 6, 1976.

According to the memorandum, the CIA had ties to three of the persons implicated in the attack, “but any role that these people may have had with the demolition took place without the knowledge of the CIA.”

The document details the CIA’s links with “individuals allegedly involved” in sabotaging the plane – and specifically cites Hernán Ricardo Lozano, Freddy Lugo, Luis Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch, Frank Castro, Orlando Garcia, Ricardo Morales Navarrete and Felix Martínez Suárez while specifying that the CIA had only made contact in the past with Posada, Bosch and Martínez Suárez. Martínez Suárez was not involved in the bombing, according to the report.

The document is signed by Harold H. Saunders, director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and Harry W. Shlaudeman, assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

A heavily censured version of the memorandum was already on file at the National Security Archives, and was declassified by the State Department’s historian, with a volume of other documents concerning Central America and Mexico, from the period 1973 through 1976.

Cuba has, on multiple occasions, denounced U.S. involvement in the downing of Cubana flight 455, identifying as CIA agents the two Venezuelans, Hernán Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who placed the bombs inside the aircraft, on the orders of Luis Po­sada Carriles and Orlando Bosch.

Posada was trained by the U.S. Army at Ft. Benning in the 1960s, to undertake military action against Cuba, as part of the CIA’s Operation Mongoose.

He continues to live in Miami, and has admitted his role in the 1976 terrorist attack and been identified as the organizer of a 1997 series of hotel bombings in Havana.

07 June 2015
Granma.cu

By Eric Zuesse

On May 21st, I headlined “Secretary of State John Kerry v. His Subordinate Victoria Nuland, Regarding Ukraine,” and quoted John Kerry’s May 12th warning to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to cease his repeated threats to invade Crimea and re-invade Donbass, two former regions of Ukraine, which had refused to accept the legitimacy of the new regime that was imposed on Ukraine in violent clashes during February 2014. (These were regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the Ukrainian President who had just been overthrown. They didn’t like him being violently tossed out and replaced by his enemies.) Kerry said then that, regarding Poroshenko, “we would strongly urge him to think twice not to engage in that kind of activity, that that would put Minsk in serious jeopardy. And we would be very, very concerned about what the consequences of that kind of action at this time may be.” Also quoted there was Kerry’s subordinate, Victoria Nuland, three days later, saying the exact opposite, that we “reiterate our deep commitment to a single Ukrainian nation, including Crimea, and all the other regions of Ukraine.” I noted, then that, “The only person with the power to fire Nuland is actually U.S. President Barack Obama.” However, Obama instead has sided with Nuland on this.
Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, bannered, on June 5th, “Poroshenko: Ukraine Will ‘Do Everything’ To Retake Crimea’,” and reported that, “President Petro Poroshenko has vowed to seek Crimea’s return to Ukrainian rule. … Speaking at a news conference on June 5, … Poroshenko said that ‘every day and every moment, we will do everything to return Crimea to Ukraine.’” Poroshenko was also quoted there as saying, “It is important not to give Russia a chance to break the world’s pro-Ukrainian coalition,” which indirectly insulted Kerry for his having criticized Poroshenko’s warnings that he intended to invade Crimea and Donbass.

Right now, the Minsk II ceasefire has broken down and there are accusations on both sides that the other is to blame. What cannot be denied is that at least three times, on April 30th, then on May 11th, and then on June 5th, Poroshenko has repeatedly promised to invade Crimea, which wasn’t even mentioned in the Minsk II agreement; and that he was also promising to re-invade Donbass, something that is explicitly prohibited in this agreement. Furthermore, America’s President, Barack Obama, did not fire Kerry’s subordinate, Nuland, for her contradicting her boss on this important matter.

How will that be taken in European capitals? Kerry was reaffirming the position of Merkel and Hollande, the key shapers of the Minsk II agreement; and Nuland was nullifying them. Obama now has sided with Nuland on this; it’s a slap in the face to the EU: Poroshenko can continue ignoring Kerry and can blatantly ignore the Minsk II agreement; and Obama tacitly sides with Poroshenko and Nuland, against Kerry.

The personalities here are important: On 4 February 2014, in the very same phone-conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, in which Nuland had instructed Pyatt to get “Yats” Yatsenyuk appointed to lead Ukraine after the coup (which then occured 18 days later), she also famously said “F—k the EU!” Obama is now seconding that statement of hers.

In effect, Obama is telling the EU that they can get anything they want signed, but that he would still move forward with his own policy, regardless of whether or not they like it.

Kerry, for his part, now faces the decision as to whether to quit — which would force the EU’s hand regarding whether to continue with U.S. policy there — or else for Kerry to stay in office and be disrespected in all capitals for his staying on after having been so blatantly contradicted by his subordinate on a key issue of U.S. foreign policy. If he stays on while Nuland also does, then, in effect, Kerry is being cut out of policymaking on Europe and Asia (Nuland’s territory), altogether, and the EU needs to communicate directly with Obama on everything, or else to communicate with Nuland as if she and not Kerry were the actual U.S. Secretary of State. But if Kerry instead quits, then the pressure would be placed on EU officials: whether to continue with the U.S., or to reject U.S. anti-Russia policy, and to move forward by leaving NATO, and all that that entails?

If they then decide to stay with the U.S., after that “F—k the EU!” and then this; then, the European countries are clearly just U.S. colonies. This would be far more embarrassing to those leaders than John Kerry would be embarrassed by his simply resigning from the U.S. State Department. It might even turn the tide and force the Ukrainian Government to follow through with all of its commitments under the Minsk II accords.

It would be the most effective thing for Kerry to do at this stage. But, it would lose him his position as a (now merely nominal) member of Obama’s Cabinet.

The way this turns out will show a lot, about John Kerry. The nations of Europe already know everything they need to know about Barack Obama. If Kerry quits, he’ll have respect around the world. If he stays, he’ll be just another Colin Powell.

The ball is in Kerry’s court, and everyone will see how he plays it — and what type of man he is (and isn’t).

 

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

07 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Richard Heinberg

The world needs to end its dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. That’s the only sane response to climate change, and to the economic dilemma of declining oil, coal, and gas resource quality and increasing extraction costs. The nuclear industry is on life support in most countries, so the future appears to lie mostly with solar and wind power. But can we transition to these renewable energy sources and continue using energy the way we do today? And can we maintain our growth-based consumer economy?

The answer to both questions is, probably not. Let’s survey four important sectors of the energy economy and tally up the opportunities and challenges.

The electricity sector: Solar and wind produce electricity, and the fuel is free. Moreover, the cost of electricity from these sources is declining. These are encouraging trends. However, intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow) still poses barriers to high levels of solar-wind electricity market share. Grid managers can easily integrate small variable inputs; but eventually storage, capacity redundancy, and major grid overhauls will be necessary to balance inputs with loads as higher proportions of electricity come from uncontrollable sources. All of this will be expensive—increasingly so as solar-wind market penetration levels exceed roughly 60 percent. Some of the problems associated with integrating variable renewables into the grid are being worked out over time. But even if all these problems are eventually resolved, only about one-fifth of all final energy is consumed in the form of electricity; how about other forms and ways in which we use energy—will they be easier or harder to transition?

The transport sector: Electric cars are becoming more common. But electric trucks and other heavy vehicles will pose more of a challenge due to the low energy density of battery storage (gasoline stores vastly more energy per kilogram). Ships could use kite sails, but that would only somewhat improve their fuel efficiency; otherwise there is no good replacement for oil in this key transport mode. The situation is similar, though even bleaker, for airplanes. Biofuels have been an energy fiasco, as the European Parliament has now admitted. And the construction of all of our vehicles, and the infrastructure they rely upon (including roads and runways), also depends upon industrial processes that currently require fossil fuels. That brings us to . . .

The industrial sector: Making pig iron—the main ingredient in steel—requires blast furnaces. Making cement requires 100-meter-long kilns that operate at 1500 degrees C. In principle it is possible to produce high heat for these purposes with electricity or giant solar collectors, but nobody does it that way now because it would be much more expensive than burning coal or natural gas. Crucially, current manufacturing processes for building solar panels and wind turbines also depend upon high-temperature industrial processes fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas. Again, alternative ways of producing this heat are feasible in principle—but the result would probably be significantly higher-cost solar and wind power. And there are no demonstration projects to show us just how easy or hard this would be.

The food sector: Nitrogen fertilizer is currently produced cheaply from natural gas; it could be made using solar or wind-sourced electricity, but that would again entail higher costs. Food products—and the chemical inputs to farming—are currently transported long distances using oil, and farm machinery runs on refined petroleum. It would be possible to grow food without chemical inputs and to re-localize food systems, but this would probably require more farm labor and might result in higher-priced food. Consumers would need to eat more seasonally and reduce their consumption of exotic foods.

In short, there are far more challenges associated with the energy transition than opportunities. There are potential solutions to all of the problems we have identified. But most of those solutions involve higher costs or reduced system functionality. Moreover, the energy dynamics of the transition itself will pose a challenge: where will the energy come from to build all the solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric blast furnaces, and solar cement kilns that we’ll need? Building the fossil-fueled energy producing-and-consuming infrastructure of the modern world has been by far the greatest construction project in human history. It took over a century, and it’s still a work in progress. Now we’ll have to replace most of this vast infrastructure with something different—different energy generators, different cars, trucks, roads, buildings, and industrial processes, using different materials (no petroleum-based plastics, no asphalt). All of this will take time, money . . . and energy.

And there’s the rub. Where will the energy come from? Realistically, most of it will have to come from fossil fuels—at least in the early-to-middle stages of the transition. And we’ll be using fossil fuels whose economic efficiency is declining due to the depletion of existing stocks of high-quality oil, gas, and coal. Again, this implies higher costs. Why not just use renewables to build renewables? Because it would be slower and even more expensive. Yet the faster we push the energy transition, the more energy will have to be diverted to that gargantuan project, and the less will be available to all the activities we’re already engaged in (running the transport, manufacturing, communications, and health care sectors, among others).

The issues surrounding the renewable energy transition are complicated and technical. And there are far too many of them to be fully addressed in a short article like this. But the preponderance of research literature supports the conclusion that the all-renewable industrial economy of the future will be less mobile and will produce fewer and more expensive goods. The 20th century industrial world was built on fossil fuels—and in some ways it was built for fossil fuels (as anyone who spends time in American suburban communities can attest). High mobility and the capacity for ever-expanding volumes of industrial production were hallmarks of that waning era. The latter decades of the current century will be shaped by entirely different energy sources, and society will be forced to change in profound ways.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The globalized consumer society was always unsustainable anyway, and we might be happier without it. But unless we plan for the post-growth renewable future, existing economic institutions may tend to shatter rather than adapt smoothly.

The fossil fuel and nuclear industries have an understandable interest in disparaging renewable energy, but their days are numbered. We are headed toward a renewable future, whether we plan intelligently for it or not. Clearly, intelligent planning will offer the better path forward. One way to hasten the energy transition is simply to build more wind turbines and solar panels, as many climate scientists recommend.

But equally important to the transition will be our deliberate transformation of the ways we use energy. And that implies a nearly complete rethinking of the economy—both its means and its ends. Growth must no longer be the economy’s goal; rather, we must aim for the satisfaction of basic human needs within a shrinking budget of energy and materials. Meanwhile, to ensure the ongoing buy-in of the public in this vast collaborative project, our economic means must include the promotion of activities that increase human happiness and well being.

Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute. He is the author of ten books, including The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.
07 June, 2015
Resilience.org

 

By Eli Lake

Since the beginning of 2014, representatives from Israel and Saudi Arabia have had five secret meetings to discuss a common foe, Iran. On Thursday, the two countries came out of the closet by revealing this covert diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Among those who follow the Middle East closely, it’s been an open secret that Israel and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in thwarting Iran. But until Thursday, actual diplomacy between the two was never officially acknowledged. Saudi Arabia still doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israel has yet to accept a Saudi-initiated peace offer to create a Palestinian state.

It was not a typical Washington think-tank event. No questions were taken from the audience. After an introduction, there was a speech in Arabic from Anwar Majed Eshki, a retired Saudi general and ex-adviser to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Then Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations who is slotted to be the next director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, gave a speech in English.

While these men represent countries that have been historic enemies, their message was identical: Iran is trying to take over the Middle East and it must be stopped.

Eshki was particularly alarming. He laid out a brief history of Iran since the 1979 revolution, highlighting the regime’s acts of terrorism, hostage-taking and aggression. He ended his remarks with a seven-point plan for the Middle East. Atop the list was achieving peace between Israel and the Arabs. Second came regime-change in Iran. Also on the list were greater Arab unity, the establishment of an Arab regional military force, and a call for an independent Kurdistan to be made up of territory now belonging to Iraq, Turkey and Iran.

Gold’s speech was slightly less grandiose. He, too, warned of Iran’s regional ambitions. But he didn’t call for toppling the Tehran government. “Our standing today on this stage does not mean we have resolved all the differences that our countries have shared over the years,” he said of his outreach to Saudi Arabia. “But our hope is we will be able to address them fully in the years ahead.”

It’s no coincidence that the meetings between Gold, Eshki and a few other former officials from both sides took place in the shadow of the nuclear talks among Iran, the U.S. and other major powers. Saudi Arabia and Israel are arguably the two countries most threatened by Iran’s nuclear program, but neither has a seat at the negotiations scheduled to wrap up at the end of the month.

The five bilateral meetings over the last 17 months occurred in India, Italy and the Czech Republic. One participant, Shimon Shapira, a retired Israeli general and an expert on the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, told me: “We discovered we have the same problems and same challenges and some of the same answers.” Shapira described the problem as Iran’s activities in the region, and said both sides had discussed political and economic ways to blunt them, but wouldn’t get into any further specifics.

Eshki told me that no real cooperation would be possible until Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accepted what’s known as the Arab Peace Initiative to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan was first shared with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman in 2002 by Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah, then the kingdom’s crown prince.

Israel’s quiet relationships with Gulf Arab states goes back to the 1990s and the Oslo Peace Process. Back then, some Arab countries such as Qatar allowed Israel to open trade missions. Others allowed an Israeli intelligence presence, including Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

These ties became more focused on Iran over the last decade, as shown by documents released by WikiLeaks in 2010. A March 19, 2009, cable quoted Israel’s then-deputy director general of the foreign minister, Yacov Hadas, saying one reason for the warming of relations was that the Arabs felt Israel could advance their interests vis-a-vis Iran in Washington. “Gulf Arabs believe in Israel’s role because of their perception of Israel’s close relationship with the U.S. but also due to their sense that they can count on Israel against Iran,” the cable said.

But only now has open cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel become a possibility. For Gold, it represents something of a sea change. In 2003, he published a book, “Hatred’s Kingdom,” about Saudi Arabia’s role in financing terrorism and Islamic extremism. He explained Thursday that he wrote that book “at the height of the second intifada when Saudi Arabia was financing and fundraising for the murder of Israelis.” Today, Gold said, it is Iran that is primarily working with those Palestinian groups that continue to embrace terrorism.

Gold went on to say that Iran is now outfitting groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon with precision-guided missiles, as opposed to the unguided rockets Iran has traditionally provided its allies in Lebanon. He also said Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forces propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime are now close to the Israeli-Syrian border.

A few years ago, it was mainly Israel that rang the alarm about Iranian expansionism in the Middle East. It is significant that now Israel is joined in this campaign by Saudi Arabia, a country that has wished for its destruction since 1948.

The two nations worry today that President Barack Obama’s efforts to make peace with Iran will embolden that regime’s aggression against them. It’s unclear whether Obama will get his nuclear deal. But either way, it may end up that his greatest diplomatic accomplishment will be that his outreach to Iran helped create the conditions for a Saudi-Israeli alliance against it.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He was previously the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast.

4 June 2015

By Julian Borger

Twenty million Yemenis, nearly 80% of the population, are in urgent need of food, water and medical aid, in a humanitarian disaster that aid agencies say has been dramatically worsened by a naval blockade imposed by an Arab coalition with US and British backing.

Washington and London have quietly tried to persuade the Saudis, who are leading the coalition, to moderate its tactics, and in particular to ease the naval embargo, but to little effect. A small number of aid ships is being allowed to unload but the bulk of commercial shipping, on which the desperately poor country depends, are being blocked.

Despite western and UN entreaties, Riyadh has also failed to disburse any of the $274m it promised in funding for humanitarian relief. According to UN estimates due to be released next week 78% of the population is in need of emergency aid, an increase of 4 million over the past three months.

The desperate shortage of food, water and medical supplies raises urgent questions over US and UK support for the Arab coalition’s intervention in the Yemeni civil war since March. Washington provides logistical and intelligence supportthrough a joint planning cell established with the Saudi military, who are leading the campaign. London has offered to help the Saudi military effort in “every practical way short of engaging in combat”.

On western urging, Riyadh had promised to move towards “intelligence-led interdiction”, stopping and searching individual ships on which there was good reason to believe arms were being smuggled, and away from a blanket policy of blocking the majority of vessels approaching Yemeni ports. But aid agencies and shipping sources say there is little sign of any such change. UN sources say that only 15% of the pre-crisis volume of imports is getting through, and that the country depends on imports for nine-tenths of its food.

“There are less and less of the basic necessities. People are queueing all day long,” said Nuha Abdul Jabber, Oxfam’s humanitarian programme manager in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. “The blockade means it’s impossible to bring anything into the country. There are lots of ships, with basic things like flour, that are not allowed to approach. The situation is deteriorating, hospitals are now shutting down, without diesel. People are dying of simple diseases. It is becoming almost impossible to survive.”

In April, Saudi Arabia pledged it would completely fund a $274m UN emergency humanitarian fund for Yemen, but so far none of the money has been transferred to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Riyadh is nonetheless insisting upon the right to decide which aid workers can enter Yemen.

At Al Hudaydah on Yemen’s west coast, the only major port still functioning, a trickle of humanitarian food supplies is arriving on a handful of aid ships allowed through the naval blockade each week, but many more ships are being turned away or made to wait many days to be searched for weapons.

A State Department official said Washington was pressing for basic goods to be allowed through the blockade. “We continue to urge all sides, including the Saudis, to exercise restraint and avoid unnecessary violence,” the official said in an emailed statement. “We also urge all parties to allow the entry and delivery of urgently needed food, medicine, fuel and other necessary assistance through UN and international humanitarian organisation channels to address the urgent needs of civilians impacted by the crisis.”

Britain’s Royal Navy has liaison officers working with their Saudi counterparts, and they have been trying to urge a more targeted, intelligence-driven, approach to stopping a much smaller number of ships, so far with limited effect. In London, where a pro-Saudi line has been driven principally by Downing Street, there is growing unease over the impact of the blockade.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the UK “urges the coalition to quickly move to targeted naval interdictions of incoming commercial ships”.

“The UK remains in close contact with the government of Yemen and other international partners regarding the situation in Yemen, including the maritime blockade. The foreign secretary discussed Yemen with the Saudi foreign minister while in Paris this week,” the spokesman said.

“We are not participating directly in military operations, but are providing support to the Saudi Arabian armed forces through pre-existing arrangements. A small number of UK personnel are coordinating planning support with Saudi and coalition partners. All UK military personnel have extensive training on International Humanitarian Law.”

The Saudi government did not respond to requests for comment.

The blockade – which is also being enforced in the air and on land – has choked a fragile economy already staggering under the impact of a six-month civil conflict pitting Yemeni forces loyal to the President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, now exiled in Riyadh, against Houthi rebels allied to his predecessor and rival, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

A coalition led by Saudi Arabia and including Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Bahrain intervened in March in support of Hadi, viewing the Houthis as an Iranian proxy force. Iran denies accusations of supplying arms to the insurgents, but British officials believe there are Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers with the Houthi rebel leadership.

Over 2,000 Yemeni civilians are known to have been killed in the fighting so far, and, according to new UN figures, a million have been forced from their homes. The humanitarian crisis meanwhile, affects the overwhelming majority of the population. Tankers carrying petrol, diesel and fuel oil are also being stopped routinely by the naval blockade, crippling the country’s electricity supply and forcing the mass closure of hospitals and schools. Most urgently, it has stopped water pumps working. Oxfam reckons the fighting and embargo have led to 3 million Yemenis being cut off from a clean water supply since March, bringing to 16 million the total without access to drinking water or sanitation – nearly two-thirds of the population – with dire implications for the spread of disease.

Cooking gas is almost impossible to find. Queues to refill gas cylinders in Sana’a now last for than a week, with people camping out by their cylinders or chaining them down to keep their place in the queue. There are also long lines of abandoned cars waiting for elusive supplies of petrol.

The UN estimate that nearly 20 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian assistance – 78% of the entire population – represents an increase of 4 million since the escalation of the conflict with the Saudi intervention in March. Twelve million Yemenis are “food insecure”, having to struggle to find their next meal, up 1.4 million since March. Five million are described as “severely food insecure”, meaning they often go for days without a meal.

In the cities worst hit by street fighting, such as Aden, civilians are either cowering at home to avoid sniper fire and bombardment or have joined the more than half million Yemenis forced out of their houses and now looking for food and shelter. But the blockade has spread the impact of the humanitarian crisis around the country.

According to Save the Children, hospitals in at least 18 of the country’s 22 governorates have been closed or severely affected by the fighting or the lack of fuel. In particular, 153 health centres that supplied nutrition to over 450,000 at-risk children have shut down, as well as 158 outpatient clinics, responsible for providing basic healthcare to nearly half a million children under five. At the same time, due to lack of clean water and sanitation, cholera and other diseases are on the rise. A dengue fever outbreak has been reported in Aden.

“Children are dying preventable deaths in Yemen because the rate of infectious diseases is rising ,” said Priya Jacob, Save the Children’s director of programmes in Yemen. “The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is a protracted and rapidly deteriorating situation that leaves four out of five Yemeni people in need of aid. The ongoing naval and air blockade means very little aid is getting through, exacerbating the needs of the Yemeni people.”

“The lack of fuel is a real issue – both for our teams and for local people, making it difficult to transport patients and medical supplies,” said Ahmad Bilal, medical coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières based in Yemen’s third city, Taiz. “For ordinary people it means that it is hard to move around the city and it’s an ongoing struggle to access clean water and food. Many people living in frontline areas are unable to travel to clinics or hospitals for medical care both because of the fighting and the lack of fuel. Even those who are able to make it to health facilities find that they are not functioning. At least 12 hospitals in Taiz had to close their doors and stop receiving patients, for these reasons.”

A shipping source in Al Hudaydah said the flow of ships into Yemen was down 75% compared with before the March intervention.

“Some ships have been docked in the past week or so, but many others have been stopped and it’s hard to see any pattern. Sometimes the coalition conducts a search and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it depends which navy is involved. In the past few days the Saudis have been more flexible, but the Egyptians have been rigid, not letting anything through,” the shipping source said.

The uncertainty has made some ship owners nervous about having their vessels impounded. Over the past few days, two tankers carrying 70,000 tonnes of diesel, steered away from the Yemen coast and have begun offloading the fuel into small ships offshore. But as of this week, less than a tenth of the country’s monthly fuel requirement of 5m tonnes is getting through the blockade.

“We have heard a lot about international commitments to help Yemen with big sums but we haven’t seen anything here,” Oxfam’s Nuha Abdul Jabber added. “This is the moment for the world to understand the severity of the situation.”

Julian Borger is the Guardian’s diplomatic editor. He was previously a correspondent in the US, the Middle East, eastern Europe and the Balkans. His book on the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals, The Butcher’s Trail, will be published by Other Press (NY) in January 2016

5 June 2015

By Taj Hashmi

Last time I met my old friend Gowher Rizvi at his office in December 2011, he was very upbeat and optimistic about the “impending” Teesta water sharing agreement with India. He seemed to have reposed absolute trust in what Manmohan Singh – a fellow Oxford alumnus – had promised him in this regard. Although I was still a bit skeptical about the deal, I brushed aside my skepticism momentarily, thinking the Oxford Old Boy camaraderie might have worked to the advantage of Bangladesh.

However, Manmohan Singh simply did not keep his word because of some not-so-convincing “Mamata Banerjee Factor”. Consequently, as Bangladesh was disappointed, so I believe was Gowher crest-fallen. Now, it is irrelevant if I believe erudite, honest, and sincere people have no place in the arena of politics, especially in South Asia, where competence, hard work, and honesty hardly pay off.

Despite the recent ratification of the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) with Bangladesh by the Indian Parliament under Modi, there is nothing to celebrate about what Bangladesh has so far got from India, and what it had to give to India in return. I have reasons to believe Modi does not enjoy a good reputation in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. To tell the least, Modi’s image – along with that of his rightist Hindu party – is problematic, especially in the backdrop of the Gujarat killings of 2002. At least 1500 Muslims got killed in the state-sponsored rioting in the province while Modi was the Chief Minister. The 2003 International Report by the US State Department is quite unambiguous about his controversial role in the riots.

If we learn anything from history, then we know India has never been nice and benign to its smaller neighbours. However, India plays a different ball game with Pakistan. And we know the ground reality. What India gets away with Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka, cannot think of doing to Pakistan.

In the wake of India’s signing the World Bank brokered Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan in 1960, India fought two wars against Pakistan (1965 and 1971) but has not scrapped the Treaty. The countries over the years have amicably settled their disagreements over the Treaty. One of the most successful water sharing endeavors in the world, the Treaty is about sharing waters of six rivers in the Indus River System that includes the Indus, Jhelum, Chenub, Sutlej, Beas and Ravi. Interestingly, India and Pakistan exchange data and co-operate with each other in matters related to the Treaty; and have created the Permanent Indus Commission, with a commissioner appointed by the countries.

As there was nothing substantial for Bangladesh in Manmohan Singh’s hyperbole, so is there nothing substantial in Narendra Modi’s basket to be happy about by Bangladesh. India’s empty promises and lame excuses have taught the resolute nation of Bangladesh what to expect from India, and how to live with the mighty neighbour, who has never been a gentle giant across the border. This, however, does not bode well for good neighbourly relationship between India and Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh Government is least likely to get much political dividends at the home front by self-praise or extolling the virtues of the Modi Government for signing the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) between the two countries. The LBA was overdue. The Indian Parliament should have ratified it in 1974. So, there is nothing to go gaga about it by anybody, especially by the Bangladesh Government, which had no role to play in the belated ratification of the Agreement.

Had the Awami Government got any clout in New Delhi, all major issues between the two countries, including Teesta, Farakka and Tipaimukh Dam, would have been resolved by now. It seems even the Bangladesh Government – not people in the country – has forgotten about the monster of Farakka, which has turned northwestern Bangladesh into a semi-desert. Although Modi has compared the signing of the LBA with the fall of the Berlin Wall, India has not done any favour to Bangladesh by signing the Agreement, which is not something that happened out of the way.

Meanwhile India has erected the longest barbed wire fence in the world across the Indo-Bangladesh border. More than 70 per cent of the 4,096 kilometer long border has been fenced by eight-foot tall barbed wire to prevent illegal migrants, smugglers and drug traffickers. The fence is much longer than the now demolished Berlin Wall and the Israeli built wall across the occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

It is time for Bangladesh to understand while Teesta and Tipaimukh are the proverbial sticks, Farakka a death warrant, the LBA is the carrot for Bangladesh. It is a means towards an end, albeit for India’s benefit alone. Although Modi is coming empty handed to Bangladesh, he is not returning empty handed at all. He will get transit facilities and virtually the corridor to link New Delhi with India’s turbulent Northeast through Bangladesh.

One is not sure what to read in India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s recent statement that India would not sign the Teesta water sharing agreement with Dhaka during Modi’s trip. She told reporters that the countries had “not reached an understanding” on the agreement, and that Mamata Banerjee would be travelling to Dhaka along with the Prime Minister to discuss other bilateral issues, including the LBA, Transit etc. We only hear about enhancing rail, road and water connectivity, strengthening economic ties and security cooperation as the major issues between India and Bangladesh, not Teesta, Farakka or Tipaimukh.

Nobody in Bangladesh – in the Government and media – raises the issue of tens of thousands of illegal Indian white-collar workers in Bangladesh, remitting more than $2 billion to India every year. I also come across op-eds, articles and comments of expert analysts in Bangladesh, which are full of wishful thinking and exuberance about what Bangladesh is going to gain from Modi’s visit. I have not yet read anything in Bangladeshi media on Modi’s recent announcement that Hindus from Bangladesh will get Indian citizenship as they are fleeing the country because of persecution.

I do not think Bangladesh is going to benefit from Modi’s visit. It is fat hope that Mamata Banerjee will play a different role vis-à-vis Teesta water sharing “the next time”. I believe irrespective of whoever is the Prime Minister, India is not going to discuss Teesta, Farakka, Tipaimukh, and other bilateral issues with Bangladesh in a meaningful manner, let alone resolving them permanently. Bangladesh’s enormous trade deficit with India will perpetuate. It is noteworthy that since 2010, while India exports goods worth $6.1 billion to Bangladesh (previously it was worth $2.7 billion), the corresponding figure for Bangladeshi export to India grew from paltry $274 million to $456 million per year.

I think it is time to appraise a) if India’s Bangladesh policy under the Hindu Nationalist Modi government is somewhat more benign and friendly than what it was under his predecessors; and b) if Bangladesh will be getting its due share of waters from the Ganges, Teesta and Barak. I have not yet seen any such sign. What I see is: Modi is not even going to discuss Teesta, let alone giving Bangladesh its due share of the waters, “this time”. One wonders, if there will ever be a “next time”!

I think Mamata Banerjee’s opposition to sharing the Teesta waters with Bangladesh is a convenient and flimsy excuse by New Delhi not to ever implement the Teesta water sharing agreement. A provincial government’s refusal to share international waters with lower riparian country is not acceptable in international law. Unless a miracle happens, Mamata Banerjee or whoever is the Chief Minister of West Bengal is not going to act positively in this regard, ever. In sum, it seems Indo-Bangladesh relationship is likely to remain on an uneven keel, indefinitely.

The writer teaches security studies at Austin Peay State University. Sage has recently published his latest book, Global Jihad and America: The Hundred-Year War Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
06 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Sheikh Shahid

Oppression breeds revulsion & that revulsion, when treated with more
oppression, inevitably gives rise to resistance, thus shaking the
oppressor & shredding the false notion of pussillanimity regarding the
oppressed. As a Kashmiri, born one bloody afternoon in the spring of
90, just a few moments after the grenade went off in the hands of
Ashfaq Majeed, the revolutionary founder of the unorthodox resistance
in Kashmir, I, like thousands of my contemporaries, am witness to one
of the crucial periods of our resistance against the Indian occupation
of our land. It was the time where oppression had reached beyond the
point of tolerance & where the only shadow that could shield Kashmiris
from the Indian oppression seemed the shadow of the guns.

Young men crossed the endless helices of barbed wire & came back with
AK-47 rifles hanging from their shoulders, promising Aazadi for their
countrymen. India retaliated with its full military might & the dirty
covert wars of counterinsurgency. Hundreds of fake encounters resulted
in countless mass graves under the velvety green of meadows, where
some got accidentally exposed with time, while still a thousand might
be deep under the debris of Indian ‘democracy’.

Life under these circumstances seemed to throw only one single
question our way. The question of existence. Other tasks were
decidedly quotidian where some things got worn down by the waves of
time, while some others got incised deep into the psyche. Times under
the occupation only added up to the bitter memories.

Occupation as a domineering thing, is not confined to mere physical
contours of humans, but it sinks its pernicious fangs deep down one’s
subconscious & thus percolates down through the social stratum as a
whole. It defines the existence of its subjects in more ways than
meets the eye.

When we were kids, messing about, we didn’t play hopscotch or hide &
seek much often, but rather Police & Thieves, exchanging imaginary
bullets fired from wooden guns, the ammunition of which would never
exhaust. Often police would be made to capitulate. It was during our
childhood that we perfected the enunciation of ‘dishkyov’, that
ubiquitous & reverberating music in a conflict. The more clear & sharp
the accent of it, the more police it will kill. Then as we grew up,
perpetually under the babel of bullets, we witnessed our game of
Police & Theives being played in the real world. The imaginary bullets
reified with a mettalic buzz & the illusory blood drained off pure
red. At first it all seemed to be a sort of delirium, until we joined
some big protests led by some men carrying a deadbody on their
shoulders & shouting anti-india slogans with their faces telling a
thousand stories of persecution. Sometimes a fake encounter & someday
a sudden disappearance, those protests are a regular spectacle till
this day.

With time, everything revealed itself like a bud developing into
flower (if flowers grow bloody at all, somewhere in this world!) & we
realized that we were the children under bloody occupation where all
life teaches you about is the absurdity of life itself. We learned
that there are children who are sold even before they are born & that
they unlike others are born just to set, if not themselves, at least
their ‘still unborn’ children free. That occupation is such a monster
that would not spare even your dreams & the silence of nights was a
cataclysm in anticipation of a sudden knock on the door.
Life went on & everyday, we would be reminded of our chained
existence. If we somehow forgot it for a moment, a slap on our cheek
or a beating with the butt-end of AK-47 would come to us as a perfect
reminder. A reminder that is there all over us whenever we fail to
prove our identity (not quite ironically at our home!) before someone
from some hinterland of India. Or when we, in trepidation, would
forget our own names when enquired by an Indian soldier by the
roadside.

Early morning crackdowns with the Muazzin instead of calling for Azaan
ordering people to gather in the Mosque compound or the school
playground was a sharp gesture to remind ourselves, once again, of our
occupied identity. It was to remind us that we were a flock of cattle
to whom the call of their master was to hurry up & gather around him.
I remember one morning while still sleeping in the bed, someone woke
me up & told me to wear my ‘Pheran’ & swiftly leave for the Mosque
compound, failing which would invite a beating from the Indian
soldiers. I left & reached the compound where the rest of the male
villagers had already arrived. Everyone was told to show their
Identity-cards & everyone began to rummage through their pockets. One
of my friends looked frightened while looking at his identity card in
his hands. His fear was reasonable enough as the identity card lacked
the requisite photograph on it. Consequently, he was tossed flat on
the ground & bastinadoed with the gun butts & truncheons while we all
silently watched the whole episode & sank our heads in a blend of
anger, shame, & fear. Then the soldiers harrumphed, spat & left & my
friend limped back to his home. A kick here & a punch there, the
Indian forces would leave, only to visit us again, soon. It would take
years of sweat & blood for us to make our homes, the destruction of
which would take Indian troops a speck of gunpowder & a few bullets
during an encounter. We own the responsibility to build & they have
the legal impunity to destroy at will.

Yet, one thing was clear. Reminders like such were weighing heavy on
our hearts & exacerbating the revulsion inside. As time passed by, the
occupation was still there, but something had begun to change. It was
fear, the fear of being killed, tortured or maimed. Revulsion had
grown to a point where the hearts could not contain it anymore. So, it
took the shape of the mammoth protests buzzing with the noise of
stentorian slogans, bullets began to be answered with stone
projectiles & the so called security forces were seen eyeball to
eyeball. It was the call of Freedom that united people from all
corners of the valley. Stones were hurled together, slogans were
answered in one voice & Kashmiris began to write for a cause.
Intellectual integrity saw a new dawn & the false notions &
fabrications were pulled down with a thud.

We can trace the origins of this anti-establishment struggle from the
autocratic dogras in 1930s, but the summers of 2008 & 2010 can be
rightly defined as the renaissance of Kashmiri resistance. Where the
world community got to witness the brutality of Indian occupation in
Kashmir, the manifest lack of justice here & the exceptional show of
resistance by Kashmiri people. Young men took on India’s military grid
of nearly 7 lakh in a ‘kani jang’ (Bullets vs Stones) in a way that
shook the foundations of India’s false claims to the land of Kashmir.
Every killing was a cry of forced accession & an expired legitimacy.
The determinant slogan – ‘Hum kya chahtay, Aazadi’ was a clear
message to the world in general & the Indian establishment in
particular. Kashmir was no more a mute entity to be contained at gun
point, against their will.

India on its part relied upon the only language it speaks, the
language of coercion. A security build-up, close to a million men was
built up & new types of weapons introduced. Some lethal & some
‘non-lethal’. One ‘non-lethal’ weapon announced by New delhi was a
pressure-pump pellet gun that shoots hundreds of high-velocity plastic
pellets simultaneously. It proved its ‘non-lethality’ the other day in
the northern town of Sopore when an Indian soldier fired at close
range & killed a man. After all, where else in the world could be the
effectiveness of the new weapons be tested, if not under an
occupation!

Other such ‘non-lethal’ thing was the Y-weapon aka the slingshot. It
was a thing that was sweet to the public relations as it didn’t kill
anyone. Least it did, was to blind a stone pelting man! It was only a
few days back when 16 years old Hamid Ahmad Bhat was blinded by the
Indian soldiers who fired a volley of pellets into his head in
response to a stone, that he dare thorw at the so called ‘Security
forces’.

But, even then the grip of Indian establishment was made slippery as
the Sang-baz were high on the drugs – The drugs of Freedom.
If today, Kashmir seems relatively calm it is not that the sentiment
of Aazadi is dead, but that in absence of a resolution the summers are
bound to return anytime, with a renewed dynamism. Hence, a solution to
Kashmir conflict is to be found without the banal time-buying tactic,
that only provide a silent impetus to the bloody summers.

Sheikh Shahid
From Thamuna Pulwama.
Student of English
Literature & Philosophy.

06 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Bill Van Auken

The US-backed war against Yemen has left some 20 million people—nearly 80 percent of the country’s population—facing a humanitarian disaster, without access to adequate food, water and medical care, the United Nations top aid official informed member nations of the UN Security Council this week.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien described the situation confronting the population of the Arab world’s poorest country as “catastrophic,” placing much of the blame on the Saudi-led air strikes that have devastated Yemeni cities, and Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen’s ports, which have prevented not only the arrival of emergency relief supplies but also the basic flow of goods that existed before the war.

“The blockade means it’s impossible to bring anything into the country,” Nuha Abdul Jaber, Oxfam’s humanitarian program director in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa told the Guardian newspaper. “There are lots of ships, with basic things like flour, that are not allowed to approach. The situation is deteriorating, hospitals are now shutting down, without diesel. People are dying of simple diseases. It is becoming almost impossible to survive.”

The Guardian , citing a report by the aid group Save the Children, reported that hospitals have closed down in at least 18 of the country’s 22 governates, along with 153 health centers that provided nutrition to at-risk children and 158 outpatient clinics that treated children under five. “At the same time, due to lack of clean water and sanitation, cholera and other diseases are on the rise,” the paper reported. “A dengue fever outbreak has been reported in Aden.”

The Saudi monarchy, meanwhile, has provided none of the $274 million for an emergency humanitarian fund that it promised to create when, in late April, it announced an end to what it had dubbed “Operation Decisive Storm” and declared that it would shift from military operations to “the political process.”

Since then, along with the blockade, the air war against Yemen’s impoverished population, now in its third month, has continued unabated. On Wednesday and Thursday alone, at least 58 civilians were reported killed, as bombs struck a number of areas including in the north near the Saudi Arabian border, where 48 people, mostly women and children, were reported killed in a single village. According to the UN’s estimate, at least 2,000 civilians have lost their lives since the onset of the war.

The Obama administration has provided the Saudis with logistical and intelligence support, helping to select targets for bombardment, sending refueling planes to keep the bombers of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf monarchy allies in the air and rushing bombs and missiles to replace those dropped on Yemen.

It was reported Thursday that the leadership of the Houthi rebels have agreed to attend UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva on June 14. Agence France Presse quoted Daifallah al-Shami, a politburo member of the Houthi militia’s political wing as saying, “We accepted the invitation of the United Nations to go to the negotiating table in Geneva without preconditions.”

The rebels have refused to submit to a one-sided resolution pushed through the United Nations Security Council in April by the US and its allies (with Russia abstaining), imposing an arms embargo directed solely against the Houthi rebels, while demanding that they disarm, cede territory under their control and recognize the government of President Abd Rabbuh Monsour Hadi, a puppet of Washington and Saudi Arabia, who fled the country in March. The Security Council resolution made no criticism whatsoever of the Saudi air strikes, launched against a civilian population in violation of international laws against aggressive war.

Representatives of Hadi, who is holed up in Riyadh, are also reported to have agreed to attend the Geneva talks. Previously, Hadi had demanded that the Houthis bow to the UN Security Council resolution before any peace talks.

Also expected to join the talks are representatives of former president and longtime strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists allied themselves with the Houthis.

Not expected to participate are rebel factions in the south of Yemen who have resisted the Houthis but have no interest in restoring Hadi to power, fighting instead for the independence of South Yemen, a former British colony which existed as an independent state aligned with the former Soviet Union before its unification with the north in 1990. That unity broke down in 1994, resulting in a civil war that ended with the secessionist south defeated and forced back into unification.

The war in Yemen has led to a ratcheting up of tensions throughout the region, with the Saudi monarchy and Washington both charging Iran with supporting the Houthis, who are based among the Zaidi Shiites, and who make up approximately one third of Yemen’s population, dominating the north of the country.

Washington has repeatedly charged Tehran with supplying arms to the Houthis, while presenting no evidence. Iran has denied the charges.

06 June, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Seumas Milne

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead withthe trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much. But it’s only the latest of a string of such cases. Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence a fortnight earlier for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention.

But terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder. And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – and allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a western policymaker’s conference call.

For the past year, US, British and other western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying the hyper-sectarian terror group Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq). This was after Isis overran huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaimed a self-styled Islamic caliphate.

The campaign isn’t going well. Last month, Isis rolled into the Iraqi city of Ramadi, while on the other side of the now nonexistent border its forces conquered the Syrian town of Palmyra. Al-Qaida’s official franchise, the Nusra Front, has also been making gains in Syria.

Some Iraqis complain that the US sat on its hands while all this was going on. The Americans insist they are trying to avoid civilian casualties, and claim significant successes. Privately, officials say they don’t want to be seen hammering Sunni strongholds in a sectarian war and risk upsetting their Sunni allies in the Gulf.

A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.

Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.

Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

The calculus changed when Isis started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage.

It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the Nato-orchestrated war in Libya, where Isis last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte.

In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.

What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. He was the Guardian’s comment editor from 2001 to 2007 after working for the paper as a general reporter and labour editor.

3 June 2015

By Akbar E. Torbat

The nuclear negotiations between Iran and six world powers to finalize the Lausanne “framework” of understanding are scheduled to reach an agreement by June 30. Yet, it is not expected that a final agreement can be reached by that time. In the US, the White House and the Congress have agreed that the final agreement must be carefully reviewed by the Congress before some of the sanctions against Iran are gradually suspended. The US is pushing to impose its will completely and permanently on Iran. The Secretary of State John Kerry said on April 2, 2015 “there will be no sunset to the deal we are working to finalize …” However, there have been heavy criticisms of the Iranian negotiators for the concessions they have secretly made to the primary contender, the United States. The quarrel is between the Iranian negotiators and various opposition factions and most of the representatives in Iran’s parliament (Majles). According to the Lausanne “framework” the Iranian negotiating team has agreed to practically scrap
Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore, if this deal is finalized, many billions of dollars of Iran’s investment to develop such important advanced industry will be totally wasted along with the lives of several top Iranian nuclear scientists that were killed by foreign agents.

The negotiation team had initially concealed the major concessions it had made to the other side. However when details of the framework were released by the US State Department on April 2, 2015, it became clear that the team had accepted all major parameters of the US demands.[1] Further details disclosed in a closed session of the Majles confirmed that the team’s acceptance of the US demands had been in consultation with the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The West is demanding to have access to all Iran’s military installations and to be allowed to interview Iranian military and nuclear scientists at its will.

Pros and Cons of the Deal

The Lausanne proposed agreement and its details related to the Additional Protocol which requires inspection of Iran’s military sites for Possible Military Dimension (PMD) of the nuclear program have generated clashes among various factions of Iranian political spectrum. These factions are generally divided to two groups of pros and cons of the Lausanne deal. The pros argue the Islamic regime must yield to all US demands without any pre-condition, then in return, the sanctions will be lifted and the country will come out of international isolation, otherwise there will be possibility of military attacks against the country. These factions are the minority supporters of Hassan Rouhani’s administration. This group is composed of the compradors, including merchants that expect benefits when sanctions are removed by importing goods from abroad and also the financial sector that can benefit from flow of foreign funds to Iran if that can happen.

The cons are those of the nationalists and radical Islamists that hesitate to give up to the United States. They say yielding to the US demands will lead to expansion of American hegemony in Iran and make the country more dependent to the West. The conservative cleric, Ahmad Jannati, who heads the Guardian Council, has made this point clear. On May 22, 2015, at the Friday’s prayer while giving the sermon at Tehran University, Jannati said “Assume like Libya we give them what we have and retreat, then it will be naive and pure wishful thinking that by this action the sanctions are lifted and our economy grows and people will benefit and we can run the country. ….The US wants to re-impose its hegemony over Iran ten times more than it was under the Shah. They [the US] want to hold the pulse of our economic and political affairs…”[2]

Stormy Session of the Parliament

On May 24, the Foreign Minister Mahammad Javad Zarif and his deputy Abbas Araghchi attended a close session of the Majles to give details about the Lausanne nuclear deal.[3] That session became stormy and ended with personal clashes, as a short video clip later showed. A Majles representative Mehdi Kouchekzadeh shouted at Zarif “negotiations must be stopped” claiming he was speaking on behalf of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Zarif responded “the Leader does not need a speaker”. Then Koucheckzadeh called Zarif a “traitor,” which prompted an angry reaction from the minister.[4] Zarif has had friendly relations with the American diplomats. Washington had eyed Zarif for some time as a future leader since he was a young diplomat member of the Iranian delegation at the United Nations. Zarif is listed as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.[5]

Hamid Rasaei, a parliament representative, published a part of Araghchi’s speech in the closed session of the Majles. Araghchi had said he had obtained permission from Khamenei to accept the Additional Protocal that includes inspection of the military sites by the IAEA. Araghchi qualified his statement by saying it will be “managed inspection”. That statement angered many of the parliament representatives who protested the way that the negotiating team had concealed important information from the parliament, and believed accepting Additional Protocol is a big mistake for Iran because it stops the country from returning to its initial position if the other side violates the agreement. Next day, Sadegh Larijani , head of the judiciary, criticized Rasaei for making Araghchi’s words public.

President Rouhani feels the present Majles could be a barrier to a possible nuclear agreement and wants to push his own affiliated groups’ candidates to the next Majles that is for vote on February 26, 2016.[6] He is now advocating “free legislative vote”, while himself was not genuinely elected according to Abass ali Kadkhodaei, the then Guardian council’s spokesman.[7]

Protests against the Deal

After the details of the closed session of the Majles leaked to the press, the opposition began to mobilize Iranians against the secret deal. On May 28, some 20,000 gathered in Mashhad to protest against the nuclear agreement. In Mashhad, a large number of legal experts jointly with the families of the murdered nuclear scientists along with one of the heads of Basiji forces issued an open letter to the people of the world and Iran’s negotiating team, indicating that an acceptable agreement must include: 1. Give Iran the ability to return to its initial position if the other side violates the terms of the agreement. 2. No inspection of and limitations on Iran’s military forces or military installations is acceptable. 3. No supervision beyond international norms must be accepted. 4. No contacts with Iranian nuclear scientists or limits for conduct of nuclear scientific research and development in Iran are acceptable. 5. The required nuclear facilities for Iran’s domestic needs must be preserved. 6. All sanctions imposed on Iran must be lifted immediately when the agreement is signed. The uprising further flared up after Friday prayer. On May 29 there were many demonstrations in major cities in Iran, including Tehran, Esfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Bushehr, Kerman, Gorgan, Qazvin, Qhom, Kermanshah, Rasht, Ardebil, Bandar-Abbas, Sanandaj, Semnan, Hamedan, where protestors chanted anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans.[8]

To preserve the status quo, the Leader Khamenei has accepted the US demands behind the scene, while in public he is saying otherwise to restrain the opposition. Khamenei has told the opposition to cooperate with Rouhani’s administration. However, he has rapidly lost support due to his backing of Rouhani to seal the agreement. The opposition feels this agreement will convert Iran to a de facto US puppet state and therefore it should not be signed.

Akbar E. Torbat teaches economics at California State University, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in political economy from the University of Texas at Dallas. Email: atorbat@calstatela.edu, Website: http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/atorbat

[1] Akbar E. Torbat, Iran is Falling to a Nuclear Agreement Trap, May 05, 2015, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41772.htm

[2]Ahmad Jannati Speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgFAN8BRNRM

[3] Negotiator: Iran Agrees ‘Managed Access’ to Military Sites,MAY 24, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/05/24/world/middleeast/ap-ml-iran-nuclear.html?_r=0

[4] Video secretly filmed inside Iranian parliament exposes divisions over nuclear talks , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/11632180/Washington-Post-journalist-goes-on-trial-in-secret-Iranian-court.html, also in Persian: http://booyebaran.ir/?p=20022

[5] Javad Zarif, http://www.weforum.org/contributors/javad-zarif

[6] Iranian President Hassan Rouhani Calls for ‘Free’ Legislative Vote in Iran

World | Agence France-Presse, May 30, 2015, http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/iranian-president-hassan-rouhani-calls-for-free-legislative-vote-in-iran-767262

[7] http://www.tehrantimes.com/politics/109621-rohani-aref-confirmed-to-run-for-president-through-guardian-council-chiefs-mediation-report

[8] Iran, US eye ‘intense’ month to seal historic deal, http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-iran-us-eye-intense-month-to-seal-historic-deal-2015-5

03 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org