On the eve of the silliest peace talks in history, the big question is this. What makes Obama’s envoy George Mitchell, a negotiator of high repute, say there is ‘no role’ for Hamas?

The talks are silly because they seek to overturn what the United Nations has already decided for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and drive a bulldozer through the building blocks of justice.

It might be music to Zionist ears, but to people of good will it’s a cruel, futile and immensely damaging ploy.

The talks are also silly because they bring together two people who by no stretch of the imagination could qualify as partners for peace. And they sit down under the auspices of a third party with an appalling track record in the Middle East and whom no-one trusts to act fairly.

So Mitchell has been dealt a terrible hand. The former US senator, we’re told, has had an illustrious career in politics. Honours have been heaped upon him for his part in the Northern Ireland ‘Good Friday’ agreement.

Accepting one of those awards – the Liberty Medal in 1998 – Mitchell said: “I believe there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended… No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail. But only if those who stand for peace and justice are supported and encouraged, while those who do not are opposed and condemned. Seeking an end to conflict is not for the timid or the tentative. There must be a clear and determined policy not to yield to the men of violence…”

How about that? Conflict can be ended only by supporting those who stand for peace and condemning those who don’t. But does he know – has he really taken the trouble to find out – who actually stands for peace and justice in the ever-escalating obscenity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine? And is he absolutely clear who “the men of violence” are? Get it wrong and matters are made worse.

Read more here.

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Pakistan’s UN envoy in Geneva said on Tuesday that reconstruction in northern areas alone could cost 2.5 billion dollars, after floods stretching to the south ravaged an area “the size of England”.

Zamir Akram, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said the country had received more immediate multilateral relief aid through the UN and direct bilateral aid totalling about 301 million dollars.

UN agencies have warned that funding for their 460 million dollar multilateral appeal for emergency relief aid launched last week is not coming in fast enough.

Just 35 per cent — 160 million — has been paid in so far, although the pace has accelerated in recent days.

Pakistan hoped for “a greater international commitment” during a special session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Akram said, dismissing concerns that aid money could be diverted by corruption or Taliban influence as exaggerated.

“The affected area is about the size of England,” Akram told journalists, also pointing to huge longer term needs to rebuild homes, roads and farming and secure river beds over five years.

“Initial indicators are that just for the northern part of Pakistan, the requirement would be somewhere to the tune of about 2.5 billion dollars, so it’s going to be massive effort for reconstruction and rehabilitation,” he added.

A full damage assessment is likely to take another week to 10 days to complete, said Akram.

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The Forum of Seven senior ministers on Monday decided that Israel must accept the United Nations’ proposal to establish an international panel of inquiry into its deadly naval raid on a humanitarian aid ship bound for the Gaza Strip.

This is the first time Israel has ever agreed to participate in a United Nations probe regarding the Israel Defense Forces. It is also the first time Israel will be represented on a UN committee dealing with its activities.

The panel will investigate the events of the Israel Navy’s May 31 commando raid of a six-ship flotilla, which left nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists dead. Israel had balked at the UN request, but has faced international pressure to allow for an external probe into the matter.

The Forum of Seven ruled that it would give UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a positive response, in principle, to allow him to move forward with establishing the panel of inquiry. Simultaneously, negotiations will continue regarding who will comprise the committee and the composition of its mandate.

Ban has suggested forming a review panel before establishing the officials committee, to look into the investigations already carried out by Israel and Turkey into the incident. This means that the official panel will only begin its work once the two countries have completed their missions.

According to Ban’s proposal, the review panel would be headed by former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, while his deputy would be outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Read more here.

While Kyrgyzstan’s interim leader Roza Otunbayeva says the death toll in the country’s worst ethnic violence in decades could be as high as 2,000, those who lived through five days of violence in southern Kyrgyzstan are not sure who started the fighting, or why.

In Osh, the epicenter of the violence, the mayhem abated on June 15, but there were few signs that life was returning to normal. Almost all shops, restaurants and businesses remain closed amid the prospect of further violence. Some of the closed businesses had been severely damaged by looting and arson, while shops next door remained untouched. Uzbek-owned businesses were targeted for destruction, some Uzbeks contended.

“They knew exactly whose business was Uzbek and whose was Kyrgyz,” said an Uzbek who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Next to the shell of an Uzbek teahouse gutted by fire was a long shop whose owners had painted the word “Kyrgyz” across the front in an apparent effort to prevent an attack on the property. “There’s an impression that it [the arson and looting] was planned because it is only Uzbek places being hit,” said another Uzbek, a man who would only identify himself as Babur.

The threat of violence remained constant, and apt to arise suddenly. For example, not far from where Babur spoke, a group of elders was drinking tea and mulling the tragic events of the past few days. Suddenly, a pick-up truck carrying gunmen appeared about 50 meters away, and some of its occupants fired bursts from their AK-47 assault rifles into the air. Then, the truck hauled off amid the screech of its tires.

Asked who was behind the violence, locals struggled to formulate a coherent response. Some suggested that forces loyal to Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted amid political violence in April, were responsible for starting the fighting. Others pointed to outside forces or drug gangs with an interest in promoting instability in southern Kyrgyzstan. However, most agree that whoever instigated the attacks, local Kyrgyz took part. Many ethnic Kyrgyz residents did not dispute this, but no one admitted to knowing any of the participants. Officially, almost 200 people died in the violence. But unofficial estimates put the toll at over a thousand.

Adding to the climate of fear in Osh is graffiti scrawled across walls in several parts of the city. “Death to Sarts!” read one wall, using a derogatory term for Uzbeks. “Sarts Out!” said another. Osh has within the span of a few days become an ethnically divided city, with Uzbeks and Kyrgyzs wary of wandering out of their own neighborhoods.

Two ethnic Tartar women who left their neighborhood on June 16 to buy food in the city center said they witnessed a chilling attack on an Uzbek woman. “They grabbed her by the hair and bashed her head on the ground,” said one of the witnesses, sobbing as she recounted the incident. “She was shouting: ‘Don’t kill me! I’ve got three children.’ We tried to get the military to intervene but they pushed us away. That has just happened in front of our eyes.”

Most Uzbek women and children have fled Osh, while many men have remained behind to defend their neighborhoods, erecting makeshift barricades, using anything from buses and burned-out cars to debris from looting and branches sawn off trees.

Read more here.

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The number of refugees fleeing the deadliest ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan in 20 years may soon rise to 100,000, a United Nations envoy said on Tuesday.

Clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents in the cities of Osh and Jalalabad began Thursday of last week and escalated during the weekend. Witnesses said gangs with automatic rifles, iron bars and machetes set fire to houses and shot fleeing residents.

At least 170 people were killed in the violence, which has fuelled concern in Russia and the United States, both of whom operate military air bases in the strategic but volatile nation west of China.

A Reuters reporter said Osh appeared calm on Tuesday.

“We received information from the Uzbek authorities that the number of refugees massed on the Uzbek side is 75,000, but this number is rising and may soon pass 100,000 people,” United Nations Special Envoy Miroslav Jenca told reporters.

He said the security situation on the Kyrgyz side of the border made it impossible to monitor numbers.

Lynn Pascoe, the UN’s political chief, called on Monday for the urgent creation of a humanitarian corridor for aid to be delivered in Kyrgyzstan.

During a briefing to the Security Council on the situation in the Central Asian state, members of the 15-nation body condemned violence in Kyrgyzstan and called for calm, the council president said.

A UN statement said Pascoe told the council that the United Nations was trying to help people affected by the violence and by shortages of food, water and electricity, especially in Osh. A UN emergency global appeal was expected to be launched this week, it said.

“In light of the security situation in the South, Pascoe said the creation of a humanitarian space or corridor in Kyrgyzstan for the UN and others to deliver assistance to people in need is an urgent necessity,” the statement said.

“We talked about the need to get something in there right away to make it so we could get the humanitarian stuff through,” Pascoe told reporters after the meeting.

“It’s also a great concern of ours about the refugees — whether they can get across the border,” he added, referring to the Uzbekistan border to where thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have fled.

On Tuesday, Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry announced plans to send three planes loaded with humanitarian aid to Kyrgyzstan on Wednesday, RIA-Novosti reported.

A group of ex-Soviet states on Monday proposed sending helicopters and equipment to help Kyrgyzstan’s government stop the ethnic violence, and suggested that troops could follow.

The violence in the southern region could spread to the capital, Bishkek, and move further north, Almazbek Atambayev, deputy leader of the interim government, said on Tuesday.

“The events in Osh were so premeditated … that now we should await some sort of provocative acts in Chui region and Bishkek, but we are well prepared for this,” Atambayev told reporters.

The threat of civil war has tested the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which dominated by Russia but strained by rivalries, in dealing with conflict in one of its member states.

Read more here.

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The former Portuguese colony of ‘Guiné’ Bissau in Western Africa (36,125 sq.km., approximately one million inhabitants) is situated between Gambia and the former French Guinea, now called République de Guinée (but the  latter too had been explored and temporarily possessed by Portugal). The Bissau  should not be mistaken with Repùblica de Guinea Ecuatorial, a former Spanish possession, population less than 400 thousand. Many West-African countries are dominated by corrupt politicians and chieftains, and are bases for the international drug trade. But for some reason the evil role of Guinea Bissau seems more exalted; anyway, it has been better investigated, thanks in particular to James Traub of the New York Times.

The former Portuguese Guinea has become a Garden of Eden for South American drug dealers, who send there the cocaine destined to Europe, now a continent that has overtaken the U.S. as a market for said drug. Inevitably the value of the substance which transits Guinea Bissau is higher than the local Gross National Product. Being weaker and worse managed that other West African states, the republic is the ideal environment for the operation of criminal dealers. It seems they have been even able to buy some islands that accomodate nicely the logistics of the trade.

The country has the inevitable military establishment, whose top officers are commonly believed to be involved in drugs. Of course the very notion of a Chief of Staff, of at least one general and one admiral, is incongrous for such a small and poor country, whose police force is said to lack vehicles, weapons, handcuffs, flashlights, even shoes. The problem of law enforcement is made insolvable by the political chaos: coups and assassination are frequent. Two founding fathers of the republic, including president Vieira,were killed on March lst, 2009. The United Nations, the  European Union, the Economic Community of West Africa, a number of European governments and the United States have been assisting Guinea Bissau (also other nations of the Black Continent) in the effort to fight the narco-traffic.

The results are so poor as to confirm the now established truth- a return to colonial status would greatly help unlucky populations such as the one of Guinea Bissau, conditionally upon the purpose of colonial domination being the opposite of the traditional one: charitable, not exploitative.

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A three-member United Nations commission investigating the events and circumstances surrounding Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has blamed the government of former president Pervez Musharraf for the murder, saying it failed to provide adequate security cover to the former prime minister, reports Dawn.com.

Although no functionary of the former government has been accused of complicity in the murder, the 65-page report has blamed Pervez Musharraf’s government, particularly its police and security network of negligence.

It said the present government was free to carry out further investigations and bring those responsible for the crime as well as negligence to justice.

The three-member panel, headed by Chilean ambassador Heraldo Munoz, submitted its report to UN Secretary General Ban ki Moon on Thursday afternoon. He immediately handed it over to Pakistan’s UN envoy Hussain Haroon. However, at the eleventh hour Islamabad decided against making its content public before the findings were studied by senior government officials.

Senior officials of Pakistan’s mission had earlier indicated that on receiving the UN Commission’s report Ambassador Hussain Haroon would share its findings at a news conference.

However, the media event was postponed at the last minute and it was announced that the findings would now be made public in Islamabad by senior members of the government. Still, the UN secretariat decided that it was too important a report to be kept hidden from the public, and at a hurriedly arranged news conference made the report public.

As people in Pakistan waited eagerly for the release of the findings of the UN probe body, security in the country was beefed up, with United Nations mission in Pakistan advising its staff to act cautiously and avoid going to public places.

Though details contained in the report were not known, UN officials stationed in Pakistan were not prepared to take any chances, fearing a possible backlash.

Pakistani officials said police and paramilitary troops were on high alert, and security was being stepped up outside the foreign missions and UN office, but only as a precautionary measure.

In Islamabad, a senior official earlier said there were no startling revelations in the report. The 3-member probe body headed by the Chilean ambassador to the UN has mostly relied on evidence collected by talking to the same set of officials and other people who had already made their views public. Analysts say its hard to believe that the Un panel would clear state its views on any major conspiracy involving state or non-state actors in the assassination.

The UN panel was to hand over its report on March 30 but on the request of the Pakistani authorities it delayed release by two weeks.

An official of the UN told the media in New York that despite this delay no fresh detatils were inserted into the report.

• UN probe was “hampered” by Pakistani intelligence

• Police failure to probe the assassination “deliberate”

• Security arrangements were “fatally insufficient”

• Several conspiracy theories have been circulating since the assassination

• Need for criminal investigation to look into the role of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and what is known in Pakistan as “establishment”

• Declaration by government that Benazir was killed by a hatch of the vehicle, and that Baitullah Mehsud was responsible were premature, and before proper investigation

• Hosing of the area of bomb blast and failure to conduct post-mortem badly affected investigation. Officials and their superior responsible

• Responsibility of the present government to carry out serious investigation to bring the conspirator and perpetrator of the crime to justice.

Read the full report here.

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Iran’s defense minister says a review of US nuclear policy which allows the use of nuclear weapons against Iran has revealed a weakness in Washington.

The new US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) purportedly restricts the use of its nuclear arms against most states, except Iran and North Korea.

Unlike North Korea, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has also stressed that its nuclear program is only for the civilian applications of the technology.

“The enemies say we adopt the policy of deterrence regarding Iran’s nuclear issue … this is a sign of weakness,” Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi said in a Tuesday speech marking the national Army Week.

The new US nuclear policy has been slammed by Iranian lawmakers and senior officials, who stress that the threat is in clear violation of United Nations and international laws.

Tehran says it plans to submit a formal complaint to the UN.

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Securing justice for the victims of genocide and preventing future atrocities are the best ways to honour the hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in Rwanda 16 years ago, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed today as the United Nations observes a global day of remembrance for the tragedy.
More than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutus were murdered in the tiny African nation, mostly by machete, during a period of less than 100 days beginning in April 1994.

In a message to commemorate the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, observed annually on 7 April, Mr. Ban said the UN is fully committed to securing justice and to preventing future atrocities.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), he noted, delivered the first-ever verdicts in relation to genocide by an international court. “These and similar actions from the halls of justice have sent a clear message to the genocidaires and would-be genocidaires. Simply put, their heinous crimes will not go unpunished.”

The Secretary-General urged Member States to cooperate with the tribunal, which is based in the Tanzanian city of Arusha, to arrest and hand over the remaining 11 fugitives as the court continues to deliver justice and ensure accountability.

“Together, let us pledge our determination to prevent genocide as the best way to remember those who lost their lives so tragically in Rwanda,” said Mr. Ban.

This year’s commemoration features a candle-lighting ceremony at UN Headquarters in New York with music performed by young Rwandan and international musicians.

The film As We Forgive, a documentary about the power and pain of reconciliation in Rwanda, will also be screened.

The UN Office in Geneva is marking the Day with a ceremony featuring statements by, among others, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Ceremonies, film screenings and panel discussions are also taking place around the world, from Accra and Antananarivo to Bogotá and Brazzaville.

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Amid US-led efforts for fresh sanctions against Tehran, China said Thursday that it would continue to work towards a “peaceful resolution” of the Iranian nuclear case.

“On the Iranian nuclear issue, China will continue to endeavor toward a peaceful resolution,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.

“We have always and will continue to push for a peaceful settlement of this issue,” Qin said, adding that the standoff should be resolved by “diplomatic means”.

Qin’s remarks come as US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said Wednesday that “China has agreed to sit down and begin serious negotiations” over imposing fresh sanctions against Iran.

The US, which accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, has been lobbying for more UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against Tehran.

US-led calls have, however, received a chilly reception mainly from China, one of the five veto-wielding members of the UNSC, which insists that diplomacy can still work to solve the Iranian nuclear issue.

Iran says any punitive measures against the country are legally baseless as Tehran’s peaceful nuclear energy program is being fully monitored by UN nuclear watchdog, IAEA.

Read more here.