…here has been so little discussion in Washington of a gas deal between Russia and Ukraine this winter that, in its own way, may be as significant as the Palestinian vote. Here is a terribly dense tangle of a half-dozen contracts that involves hidden partners, disputed pricing arrangements, and esoteric side agreements about transit fees and storage facilities. It is mind-numbingly boring — and it may tip the balance against democracy in much of the eastern half of Europe.

…It was not until more than a month later that the Bush administration and other key allies of Ukraine’s pro-Western government — elected after the popular Orange Revolution of 2004 — learned more about what was in the Russian-Ukrainian contracts. When they did they were stunned. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, and Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov had agreed to purchase Ukraine’s gas through a Swiss trading company whose owners and beneficiaries are publicly unknown — but are rumored to include senior officials and organized crime figures in both Russia and Ukraine. They granted this same shadowy company a 50 percent share in the business of delivering gas to Ukrainian consumers. They accepted a price deal on gas delivered to Ukraine lasting only a few months but guaranteed that rock-bottom rates charged by Ukraine for the storage and transit of Russian gas to the West would be frozen for 25 years.

What does this have to do with democracy in Europe? In effect, some U.S. experts concluded, the Ukrainians may have sold to Putin that which he was prevented from stealing: a Kremlin stranglehold on Ukraine’s government. The Russian leader poured money and men into his huge neighbor in late 2004 in a blatant bid to install a pro-Moscow strongman as president and make Ukraine’s political system a mirror of the new authoritarian Russian order. His overreach triggered the Orange Revolution and the subsequent democratic election of Yushchenko, whose goals include leading Ukraine to membership in NATO and the European Union.

Putin sees the fragile new democracy in Ukraine, and an allied government in the tiny Black Sea nation of Georgia, as dire threats. If Western-style freedom consolidates and spreads in the former Soviet republics of Eastern Europe, his own undemocratic regime will be isolated and undermined. What’s more, Ukraine and its neighbors are likely to integrate with Europe rather than remaining economic and political vassals of Russia.

…How to save democracy in Ukraine, and the chance it will someday spread back to Russia? As in the Middle East, the Bush administration faces some difficult choices. If pro-Western parties lead the next government — something that is far from certain — President Bush could press them to scrap the gas deal as a condition for taking the first step toward membership in NATO, a “membership action plan.” But that would probably lead to a new face-off between Ukraine and Putin, in which Kiev would require U.S. and European support — at a moment when those same allies are pleading for the Kremlin’s help with the Palestinians and Iran.

Or the administration could decide to sidestep Putin’s gas-fired imperialism, leaving a complicated issue to its present obscurity. The Ukrainians might eventually find a way to free themselves from Russia’s chokehold. But they also might allow one of the signal democratic breakthroughs of the Bush years to suffer a crippling reverse.

Ukraine and Georgia’s choice is whether to be vassal to Russia or to the U.S. How can a story about this fail to mention U.S. influence behind the ‘Orange Revolution’ or Georgia’s virtual coup? Or the Unocal pipelines? Or where the gas is coming from (Iran, Afghanistan, and other ‘Stans’)?

CAIRO — On a dirt lane in the poor Arba wa Nus neighborhood, Malles Tonga, a Sudanese refugee, spoke loudly about the brutality of Egyptian police and blamed President Hosni Mubarak for their behavior.

Suddenly, an Egyptian merchant emerged from a nearby dry-goods store, shouted an Egyptian slur for black Africans and yelled: “If you don’t like it here, go home!”

The use of the expletive exemplifies the plight of Sudanese who come to Egypt as refugees: They fear going home, but the welcome mat in Egypt, always thin of resources and tolerance, is almost threadbare.

The situation of Sudanese in Egypt brings to light the special difficulties refugees face when they flee a war-ravaged and impoverished land for another poor country. Egypt is in many ways an inhospitable place for its own citizens. In Arba wa Nus, Egyptians share with the Sudanese arrivals the neighborhood’s open sewers, dusty alleys, lack of plumbing and precarious chockablock housing.

But dark-skinned Sudanese Christians stand out among the Egyptians, typically lighter-skinned Muslim Arabs. Human rights workers say the Sudanese are subject to taunts, discrimination and violence.
washingtonpost.com

aka Mr. Stench of Brimstone

The image of Ariel Sharon lying comatose in an Israeli hospital has a haunting quality. There is the poignancy of the warrior who fought — occasionally ruthlessly — in all of Israel’s wars, incapacitated when he was on the verge of proclaiming a dramatic reappraisal of Israel’s approach to peace. And, there is the prospect that this combative general has transcended his implacable past to show both sides the sacrifice needed for a serious peace process.

Well Henry should know about ‘haunting’ being a ghoul himself. Ask the massacred people of Sabra and Shatila, his and Sharon’s little project, about “poignancy.”

…The Palestinians have yet to make a comparable adjustment. Even relatively conciliatory Arab statements, such as the Beirut summit declaration of 2003, reject Israel’s legitimacy as inherent in its sovereignty; they require the fulfillment of certain prior conditions. Almost all official and semi-official Arab and Palestinian media and schoolbooks present Israel as an illegitimate, imperialist interloper in the region.

Fancy that! “Fulfillment of certain prior conditions,” which, if not met, render a Palestinian state in name only.

…To the Palestinians, “fair and just” signifies a return of refugees to all parts of former Palestine, including the current territory of Israel, thereby swamping it. To the Israelis, the phrase implies that returning refugees should settle on Palestinian territory only.

Territory agreed upon by whom? It’s really an unreasonable demand to shut down those refugee camps in Lebanon, right Henry? Israel was established to gather a scattered people. Why should Palestinian attempts to do the same be condemned?

…A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.

The most logical outcome would be to trade Israeli settlement blocs around Jerusalem — a demand President Bush has all but endorsed — for some equivalent territories in present-day Israel with significant Arab populations. The rejection of such an approach, or alternative available concepts, which would contribute greatly to stability and to demographic balance, reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently open.

Well we all know how irrational the Arab nature is…

…A serious, comprehensive negotiation is therefore impossible unless Hamas crosses the same conceptual Rubicon Sharon did.

Yes Sharon the mostly-dead visionary leads the way. He would have crossed the Rubicon and slaughtered man, woman, child, and dog.

…Hamas may in time accept institutionalized coexistence because Israel is in a position to bring about unilaterally much of the outcome described here.

Yes, with brute force.

…A diplomatic framework is needed within which Israel can carry out those parts of the road map capable of unilateral implementation, and the world community can strive for an international status that ends violence while leaving open the prospect of further progress toward permanent peace.

In other words, the world should turn a blind eye to the bloodbath that ‘unilateral implementation’ will mean on the ground, and for all the phony striving for permanent peace, there will be permanent war. Nothing like that scary, oh-so-reasonable Harvard rhetoric.

One mostly-dead irredeemably evil war criminal idealizes another.
washingtonpost.com

02/26/06 “The Independent” — — Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life – helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I’m reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers’ shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers’ shops – and don’t even care.

Last week’s visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush’s bats – his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice – was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning “democracies” of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as “the greatest strategic challenge” facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that “contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States”.

As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria’s not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: “What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?” As Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush “believes in self-determination only if he’s doing the determining … The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.” And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.

Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the “shock and awe” mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the wastes of Iraq. He’s been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa to consult some of America’s nastiest dictators, among them President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of gleaning information from suspected “terrorists”: to hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.
informationclearinghouse.info

Iran and Russia signalled agreement yesterday on a joint uranium enrichment project aimed at reducing suspicions that Tehran is bent on building a nuclear bomb.

But the agreement had few long-term prospects of surviving. Its timing and vagueness looked geared to forestalling Iran’s referral to the UN security council when the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, meets next week to discuss Iran’s nuclear plans.

The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, is about to issue a major report on three years of nuclear inspections in Iran. The Iranian moves – agreement with Russia plus access and information this week for senior IAEA officials – looked intended to influence and water down his findings.
guardian.co.uk

…There is growing anger among farmers in Helmand at the imminent destruction of their crops and, with it, their livelihoods. And some of this backlash is likely to be directed at British troops who have begun deploying in this area.

“Why shouldn’t people be angry? For three years the government has said they will compensate us for cutting our crop, but they have given nothing,” said 77-year-old Agha Nour, the mayor’s cousin, patriarch of the hundred-strong extended family, and poppy farmer.

“We are not rich people and we must fight to protect our crop. We have fought the army and police in the past and if the British come with them then we will fight them too. We have had this land for 40 years. If we cannot sell our crop we shall have to lose this land to pay for everything else.”
independent.co.uk

At least 30 prisoners were injured and unconfirmed reports said seven others were killed in fighting after inmates took two female prison guards hostage in protest at new regulations requiring them to wear uniforms.

Bursts of gunfire could be heard throughout the day from Pulicharkhi prison after the Afghan police rapid reaction unit, armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, entered the complex in an attempt to prevent a mass break-out. Prisoners were heard chanting “Allah ho Akhbar” in between the firing.

Pulicharkhi, which holds around 2,000 prisoners, became notorious during Afghanistan’s Communist era with allegations of torture and secret executions. About 110 detainees held by the US at Guantanamo Bay are expected to be transferred there later this year.

The prisoners had allowed 70 women inmates to be moved to another part of the prison after storming into the female wing from their own. As night fell, negotiations announced by the Interior Ministry to end the stand-off were suspended. Security forces had yet to gain access to parts of the jail under the prisoners’ control.

…General Mahboub Amiri, the chief of Kabul’s rapid reaction police force, said Taliban members triggered the riot in an attempt to break out of the prison. “They started the trouble and then tried to use that as cover to get away,”

…Meanwhile, a new controversy has broken out over an even more sinister Afghan prison – the secret detention centre at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, where some 500 terrorist suspects are being held in conditions at least as harsh as at Guantanamo Bay.

In the most detailed account of the facility yet, The New York Times has reported that many prisoners were held by the dozen in large wire cages, where they slept on the floor on foam mattresses. Inmates at Bagram are held for indefinite periods without charges, without legal representation, and without even disclosure of their names.

A US military spokesman defended practices at the jail, saying prisoners were treated humanely and given “the best possible living conditions.” But the numbers held at Bagram have increased considerably in the past two years, in part because “enemy combatants” captured in Afghanistan are no longer being transferred to Guantanamo.
independent.co.uk

The World Court is today due to start hearing Bosnia’s claim for billions of pounds in reparations from Serbia on the grounds that they was responsible for genocide against Bosnia in the 1992-95 war in former Yugoslavia.

Bosnia first lodged the claim in 1993. It has taken the panel of judges at the UN court, the International Court of Justice, 13 years to hear the case, a delay that has attracted criticism from human rights activists and international legal experts.

The Bosnian argument has to prove the war was an international conflict and not, as Serbia claims, a civil war within Bosnia.
guardian.co.uk

The IDF commander of the Gaza division, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, has cancelled plans to study in the U.K. after warnings from the military that he could be arrested for war crimes.
ynetnews.com

Gordon Brown today signals his support for lowering the age of voting to 16 as part of a radical programme to counter widespread alienation from modern politics. In an exclusive article in the Guardian, he says Labour must be prepared to reopen the debate on electoral reform for the House of Commons, a proposal he has previously opposed.

He says the executive must give up power, and again backs changes to the unelected House of Lords. Labour dropped the idea of voting at 16 after the proposal was rejected by the Electoral Commission, but Mr Brown’s aides say the chancellor is in favour, so long as it is part of a package of “citizenship education” in schools.
guardian.co.uk

Yeah, I can imagine…