Target Centermass

Category: Europe

  • Mbeki Attacks ‘Racist’ Churchill

    It seems the South African president is embracing the long-held Arab tradition of placing blame on outsiders in an attempt to shrug off local shortcomings, in this case those of Sudan.

    President Thabo Mbeki has made a withering attack on Winston Churchill and other historic British figures, calling them racists who ravaged Africa and blighted its post-colonial development.

    The South African president was addressing the Sudanese assembly, and he was criticised for not dealing with the government’s human rights violations in Darfur.

    He said British imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries had treated Africans as savages and left a “terrible legacy” of countries divided by race, colour, culture and religion.

    He singled out Churchill as a progenitor of vicious prejudice who justified British atrocities by depicting the continent’s inhabitants as inferior races who needed to be subdued, and pointed out that Kitchener and Wolseley had waged ruthless campaigns in Sudan and South Africa.

    “To some extent we can say that when these eminent representatives of British colonialism were not in Sudan, they were in South Africa, and vice versa, doing terrible things wherever they went, justifying what they did by defining the native peoples of Africa as savages that had to be civilised, even against their will.”

    The speech was made on New Year’s Day but the full text was made available in South Africa only this week.

    As an exile in Britain in the 1960s Mr Mbeki was educated at Sussex University and worked in the London office of the African National Congress.

    Once considered an Anglophile, his admiration for South Africa’s former colonial power seems to have been cooled by spats over the Iraq war and strife in Zimbabwe.

    ….

    Mr Mbeki said this attitude [exhibited by Churchill] conditioned the behaviour of British empire-building in South Africa, including the crushing of the Zulu people and the scorched earth policy and concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer war.

    He was in Sudan after attending last week’s signing in Kenya of a peace accord between the Khartoum government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement .

    He visited Darfur, where Khartoum is accused of massacres and ethnic cleansing.

    Mr Mbeki said he had seen the “challenges” in the region, and he thanked the government for cooperating with the African Union and moving towards peace and reconciliation.

    South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said the speech was a missed opportunity to press Khartoum to rein in the Janjaweed militias.

    “Mollycoddling the Sudanese government is hardly appropriate in the face of its failure to put a stop to the Janjaweed terrorism,” he said.

    Douglas Gibson, a party spokesman, said: “It amazes me that President Mbeki feels that he should insult the memory of the greatest Briton by associating him with British colonial policy of 120 years ago.

    “All this in order to create some superficial similarity between Sudan and South Africa.

    “There is no similarity at all. South Africa has a liberal democratic constitution … Sudan is a country which is hardly governed and where the Arab north dominates the African south and west.”

    And just what was Mbeki’s beef with ol’ Winston? Simply this:

    As a young man Churchill served in Africa as an army officer, he was colonial secretary in 1921-22, and wrote articles and books about the continent.

    Mr Mbeki quoted a passage from The River War, Churchill’s account of Kitchener’s campaign in Sudan, which described shortcomings in “Mohammedanism” – Islam.

    It said: “Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

    “The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

    “A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.”

    Winston Churchill — though not perfect, right so many times in history about so many things. And as right today as he was then about the state of the Islamic world.

  • Man Charged in UK Tsunami Death Email Probe

    This man is just freakin’ sick.

    British police said on Monday they had charged a man with sending hoax emails to relatives of people missing since the Asian tsunami, saying their loved ones had been confirmed dead.

    The hoaxer, claiming to be from the “Foreign Office Bureau” in Thailand, targeted people who had placed appeals for information about relatives and friends on the Web site of TV station Sky News.

    Police said a 40-year-old man from Lincolnshire in northeastern England was charged with malicious communication and causing a public nuisance.

    He was due to appear at a London court on Monday.

    On Sunday, officers seized computer equipment in a joint operation by London’s Metropolitan Police and Lincolnshire police.

    All the messages came from one bogus email address, ukgovfoffice@aol.com.

    “The British government would not use email to convey news of the death of a loved one,” police said. “Anyone receiving such an email should treat it with utmost caution.”

    Sky News said it was “disgusted” at the abuse of the message board on its Web site and had contacted police as soon as it was alerted to the hoaxes.

    The death toll from the tsunami, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off western Indonesia a week ago, stood at almost 130,000 on Monday, including at least 40 Britons.

  • Ukrainian Transport Minister Found Dead

    With opposition leader Victor Yushchenko’s victory apparently assured in the Ukrainian presidential do-over, there may be a break on the fraud allegations of the earlier balloting. Is this the smoking gun?

    Ukrainian Transport Minister Heorhiy Kirpa, a supporter of the trailing candidate in Sunday’s presidential election, was found dead in his house from a gunshot wound Monday, a spokesman for the nation’s railways said.

    Local media speculated that Kirpa’s death was a suicide but officials did not confirm that. The Unian news agency reported that a gun was found near his body.

    A duty officer in Kiev’s police headquarters told The Associated Press that Kirpa was found wounded. When asked whether Kirpa had committed suicide, the officer would not comment.

    Kirpa’s death came a day after a presidential election rerun in which opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko held an insurmountable lead over Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. Opposition figures claimed that Kirpa allocated trains to ferry Yanukovych supporters to vote at multiple polling sites in Nov. 21 presidential balloting that eventually was annulled by the Ukraine Supreme Court.

    That overturning of the election led to Sunday’s rerun.

    Well, obviously it’s a smoking gun, but is it the smoking gun, one pointing to a man who tried to screw over the wishes of his own countrymen?

  • Yushchenko Declares Victory in Ukraine Re-vote

    The people of the Ukraine have made their choice … again … maybe.

    Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko declared victory early Monday in Ukraine’s presidential election, telling supporters it is the dawn of a new political era in the former Soviet republic.

    Although final results will be released Monday morning, Yushchenko had a huge lead in early returns, and exit polls indicated he would defeat Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

    I hope Yushchenko is not relying only on exit polls.

    Yushchenko, who was poisoned with dioxin during the campaign, told tens of thousands of supporters who had massed in Independence Square, “After today, everything is going to change in the Ukraine.”

    “For 14 years, we were independent, but we were not free,” he said. “This is a unique, clear political victory, an elegant victory from the people who have proved their power.”

    The bitterly contested race was a repeat of a November 21 election whose results were thrown out because of widespread fraud. Yanukovych won the official count by 2.7 percentage points in that election.

    In response, Yushchenko supporters gathered daily in the square, calling for another election. Sunday night, they gathered in celebration.

    “Today, the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian people have won. The Ukrainian people have won,” Yushchenko said.

    Three exit polls released just after the voting ended showed him with a 12- to 20-point lead lead over Yanukovych, who was backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Damn, there’s those exit polls.

    Yanukovych told reporters that he still believed he could win — but that if he did not, he would fight as an opposition voice in parliament.

    With ballots from just over 60 percent of precincts counted, Yushchenko was leading 56 percent to 40 percent, The Associated Press reported, citing election officials.

    Okay, so it looks like much more than just exit polls. In addition, so far there have been no official allegations of fraud that haunted the previous balloting. The Yshchenko campaign was confident that the “election results could not be ‘stolen’ this time.”

    “I am very happy that our Ukrainian people rose up and fought for freedom and democracy, and I think that we will have our victory,” a Yushchenko supporter said.

    Whoever wins, and it certainly looks like Yushchenko right now, certainly has a tough row to hoe, as Ukraine has been torn in half by this election.

    The election will determine Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and Russia. Yushchenko has stronger ties to the West than does Yanukovych.

    The winner will face the challenge of uniting the country and building stability. Ukraine is divided geographically, with people in eastern and southern regions of the country largely supporting Yanukovych and those in other areas, including Kiev, mostly backing Yushchenko.

    ….

    If Yushchenko wins, he will also face the challenge of building a relationship with Russia.

    Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma has called on whoever loses to congratulate the winner the next day to help build stability. Asked whether he would call Yushchenko if the polls prove accurate, Yanukovych said he would do so, with regret.

    He has argued that the new election was unnecessary and unconstitutional. But international monitors condemned irregularities and fraud in last month’s vote, and Ukraine’s supreme court ultimately ruled the results invalid.

    To say the winner is inheriting a nightmare, both internationally and domestically, is certainly accurate.

  • Playwright Hiding after Sikh Fury Shuts Play

    Well, it seems as if the Sikhs in Britain have stolen a page from the all-too-typical Moslem playbook.

    The author of a play that triggered violent protests by Sikhs in Birmingham, central England, has gone into hiding amid threats against her life, friends were quoted as saying.

    Word that Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti had fled her home on the advice of police emerged a day after the Birmingham Repertory Theatre said it was abandoning further performances of her black comedy “Behzti” (Dishonour).

    Sikh anger at the play’s depiction of rape and murder in a fictional gurdwara, or Sikh temple, turned violent on Saturday, with several hundred protesters trying to storm the theatre.

    Three men were arrested, five police officers hurt, the sell-out audience of some 600 evacuated, and several hundred pounds worth of theatre equipment damaged.

    “She has been threatened with murder and told to go into hiding by the police,” said filmmaker Shakila Taranum Mann, a friend of Bhatti, an actress turned playwright who is herself Sikh.

    “She is personally paying a high price. She feels this is an attempt to censor her. It is mob rule,” Mann was quoted by London’s Evening Standard newspaper as saying.

    “I spoke to her after the play was axed and she feels she is in the eye of the storm,” added another friend, Nirjay Mahindra.

    Stuart Rogers, executive director of the Birmingham Repertory Company, said Monday his company had decided “very reluctantly” to cancel the play “purely on safety grounds” and not under pressure over its content.

    As ugly as this affair has been, here is where the Sikhs are so sadly reminiscent of the Moslems.

    Britain is home to some 336,000 Sikhs, most of whom trace their roots to Punjab, with a handful via West Africa. An estimated 40,000 live in the Birmingham area.

    Sikhs make up 19 million of India’s billion-plus population.

    The Sikh Federation in Britain said in a statement it felt the theatre “has incited racial hatred”, arguing that it “knew full well” the play’s subject matter would offend Sikhs.

    The group, which describes itself as the sole Sikh political party in the country, said it was moved to speak out in response to press reports of the protest.

    “The violent scenes by a small minority of the protesters on Saturday have been blown out of all proportion,” it said.

    No apologies for the violence. No condemnation of the radicals. Only finger-pointing towards others.

    To be honest, I know little of the Sikh faith, but their actions certainly ring familiar.

  • Israel to Boycott Blair’s Peace Conference

    As I read this story, I did not understand the usage of the word “boycott” and its negative connotations in the story’s headline.

    Tony Blair will take on the role of go-between for the Israelis and Palestinians as he tries to keep up the momentum of the Middle East peace process on a two-day visit to the region starting today.

    Meanwhile, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon announced yesterday that Israel would not attend the Middle East conference Mr Blair plans to host in London after next month’s Palestinian presidential election. The conference is due to discuss how the Palestinian Authority can meet its obligations under the internationally backed road map to peace.

    As Mr Blair prepared for a flying visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah, British diplomats received the news of Mr Sharon’s announcement with equanimity. It was seen as a logical outcome of preliminary talks last week between Israeli leaders and Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the Prime Minister’s senior foreign affairs adviser.

    “Mr Sharon’s decision neither surprises me nor disturbs me,” an official at the British embassy in Tel Aviv told The Independent. “It indicates an understanding on the part of the Israeli government of the purpose and scope of the London conference. It was always our intention that it should be a conference preparing the Palestinians for the day after Israel disengages from Gaza.”

    The summit will be attended by foreign ministers of donor countries and representatives of the quartet that drafted the road map – the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

    Neither Israel nor Britain wanted to turn the road map into an alternative political initiative. They feared that Israeli participation would change the emphasis, which is meant to be on Palestinian democratisation, economic reform and reconstruction under a new leadership.

    A senior source in Mr Sharon’s office said that the Israeli decision had been co-ordinated with Downing Street in an extensive exchange of letters. “We support this conference,” he said, “but we see no purpose for us to participate. It’s between the Palestinians and the donor countries.” The Prime Minister will promise Israel that it will not be “bounced” into premature final-status negotiations before it is ready or before the emergence of a moderate Palestinian leadership committed to making political progress.

    At the same time, Mr Blair will offer to help the Palestinians to “fill the vacuum” when Israel implements Mr Sharon’s plan to withdraw more than 7,000 settlers from Gaza. His talks with the Palestinians will cover assistance on security, political reform and economic infrastructure. Mr Blair hopes these proposals will reassure Israel and the US that the Palestinians have a credible, non-militant leadership.

    The British say the Israelis aren’t needed. The Israelis agree, and even expressed support for the conference. So why call it a boycott?

    The press continues looking for a problem.

    Asked whether the timing of Mr Sharon’s announcement – during a meeting yesterday with the Czech Foreign Minister, Cyril Svoboda, might be seen as a snub to Mr Blair, he replied: “We decided to publicise the content of the letters in order to dispel all the rumours and misconceptions circulating about the purpose and scope of the conference.”

    Still no problem. So, why the headline? Well, there is this bit.

    No one, however, seems to have told the Palestinians. Saeb Erakat, their chief negotiator, denounced Mr Sharon’s decision as “very unfortunate”. The Palestinians, he said, believed a conference was the best way to restart peace talks. “We want to focus on reviving the peace process and resuming permanent status negotiations,” he said.

    So, it’s an Israeli boycott, as the press decides to shun the British and Israeli stances and view the matter through the eyes of the Palestinians. Very telling but not very surprising.

  • Sixty Years Ago: the Bulge

    Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last offensive and one of the most desperate and courageous stands in the storied history of the U.S. Army.

    American veterans mark and remember the day. The day is also remembered and honored by the people of Belgium, who lost thousands of civilians during the fighting.

    More on the U.S. veterans of the battle can be found here.

  • France Orders TV Station Off Airwaves

    France, that high-and-mighty bastion of European enlightenment, may be beginning to grasp the danger of the propaganda being broadcast within its borders — the propaganda of the radical enemy we are currently struggling with throughout the globe and Israel has wrestled with for decades.

    France’s highest administrative body on Monday ordered the TV station of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group off French airwaves within 48 hours for broadcasting hateful content in some shows and posing risks to public order.

    The decision came after a Nov. 23 Al-Manar program quoted someone described as an expert on Zionist affairs warning of “Zionist attempts” to transmit dangerous diseases like AIDS to Arab countries. Another program the same day glorified attacks against Israel, the administrative body said.

    Well, obviously something needs to be done here. Some kind of strong message needs to be sent.

    The Council of State ordered Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat to stop broadcasting Al-Manar within two days or pay a fine of $6,600 a day.

    $6,600? Well, that ain’t much of a message.

    The station broadcast some programs that were “openly contrary” to a French law banning incitement to hate, a situation that poses “risks to maintaining public order,” the council said in its 11-page ruling.

    However, the council left open the possibility that Al-Manar could keep operating if the company that airs the station, the Lebanese Communication Group, shows itself ready to modify its programs to conform with French law.

    In Beirut, Al-Manar TV condemned the French ban as “a dangerous precedent” against the Arab media and blamed Israeli pressure for it.

    Ah yes, I thought we had gotten too far into the story without Israel being blamed. It is obviously the Jews that made the Arabs lie.

    The threat of $6,600 a day apparently is not enough to bring on any honest self-examination or even a moment of pretended contrition. Hey, France, just let it air and get back to me when you really understand the threat civilization is facing.

  • Ukraine Rivals OK Vote Reforms for Rematch

    Time for an update on the circus that has become the Ukrainian presidential election: it’s a do-over.

    Ukraine’s political rivals agreed early Tuesday on legislation to ensure a fair vote during the rerun later this month of the fraud-ridden presidential runoff but remained divided on constitutional amendments trimming presidential powers.

    In addition to supporting changes in election laws, outgoing President Leonid Kuchma agreed to change the Central Election Commission, which was accused of covering up rampant fraud during the Nov. 21 runoff.

    On Monday, Kuchma and Russian President Vladimir Putin had said they would abide by the results of the new election, removing major question marks surrounding the Dec. 26 rematch. The vote was ordered by the Supreme Court, which last week struck down the election commission decision that Kremlin-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych won the runoff.

    “Of course we will … accept the will of any nation in the former Soviet space, and will work with any elected leader,” Putin said during a state visit to Turkey.

    Yanukovych emerged from seclusion and declared he was confident of victory. Kuchma had supported Yanukovych in the runoff against Western-leaning opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko but has distanced himself from the prime minister over the past two weeks as protesters swarmed the capital.

    Tuesday’s agreement on electoral law changes was reached during six-hour talks involving Kuchma and the two candidates and brokered by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.

    Kuchma emerged from the talks after midnight and said the parties had failed to reach agreement on his initiative to push through constitutional reform to transfer some powers from the presidency to parliament.

    Yushchenko had opposed the constitutional changes, saying that Kuchma and his allies want to weaken the presidency, fearing his victory in the election rematch with Yanukovych.

    However, just before the talks, Yushchenko’s allies in parliament reached a tentative agreement with pro-government lawmakers to approve changes in the electoral laws and the constitutional amendments on presidential powers simultaneously Tuesday.

    Should this fail, I would suggest best-of-seven Rock, Paper, Scissors.

  • Brits Find Soft Touch Doesn’t Work under Fire

    As the storied Black Watch Regiment rolled north to take up position near Baghdad, I blogged about the British hope to replace the Americans’ heavy-handed approach towards the insurgents with a softer, gentler approach. Once they reached their destination, the soldiers of the Black Watch met a different kind of enemy than they had faced around Basra.

    The much-hyped conceit about Britain’s soft military touch in Iraq had a hard landing on a road south of Baghdad one November morning, when an Iraqi car accelerated toward a British checkpoint and a young gunner fired a blizzard of bullets through its windshield.

    The soldiers from Scotland’s Black Watch regiment didn’t stick around to determine whether the dead driver was an aspiring suicide bomber or just a man impatient to get through the backup of traffic. But the myth might have died along with him.

    The troops of the regiment also met cold, hard reality about American tactics.

    In postwar Iraq, contrasting images have percolated through media coverage of the alliance: the martial Americans on one hand, looking to crush the insurgency through force, the world-weary British on the other, choosing accommodation over provocation. The implication was that something in their tactics or temperament made British soldiers better suited than Americans to cope with the insurgency here.

    But the October deployment of the Black Watch to these badlands controlled by Sunni extremists provided the first chance to compare the two countries’ operating styles under the same level of danger.

    Until the Black Watch moved north, the British military had been operating exclusively in southern Iraq, where the violence, while simmering, has not matched the mayhem in the American sector around Baghdad, the capital. The relative calm allowed the British to adopt a less bristling posture on patrol, to wear their soft regimental berets instead of Kevlar helmets and to keep their weapons lowered rather than peering at Iraqis through gun sights.

    It also gave rise to a certain smugness among British officers and media, which cast the contrast as one between the “heavy-handed” Americans and the less hostile tactics of “the lads.” There were jokes over beers in Basra that, to an American, the concept of winning Iraqi hearts and minds meant one bullet to the heart, one to the head. And the British media even coined a phrase to describe the British style, dubbing the less robust approach “softly, softly.”

    The Black Watch tried to bring that culture north with them when they merged operations with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit based south of Baghdad in a deployment that ended Saturday. The British began the assignment patrolling in their berets. They handed out leaflets in Arabic explaining they were a “Scottish” regiment in case Iraqis mistook them for Americans, and proclaimed they had come only to help build a safe and free Iraq.

    Insurgents responded with two suicide car bombings and a roadside bomb in the first week of operations, killing four British soldiers and gravely injuring two others.

    The shooting of the Iraqi driver at the checkpoint came just an hour after the second car bomb had blown the legs off two of the gunner’s colleagues.

    “The threat here is at the other end of the spectrum from what we faced in Basra,” said Black Watch Capt. Stuart MacAulay, sitting on the edge of a bunker at Camp Dogwood. “After the suicide bombings against us, I went to an American soldier I know here and put my hands up. I said, ‘I confess, I was one of those who sat around in Basra criticizing your approach.’ And I’m embarrassed that I criticized American tactics without ever being here and without having met them.”

    People lie all the time, especially in sentences that begin with the phrase “I hate to say I told you so, but ….” In this case, I cannot say I told you so. I doubted, but held out enough hope that I restrained.

    I should’ve known better. Our British allies certainly know better now. The Islamists and Saddamists know only one language. Luckily, it is one in which our weapons are already fluent.