Blog

r is introduced, the problem will remain and could worsen as PA control continues to deteriorate,” it says. […]

According to the US-based Middle East Media Research Institute, Basem Eid, the man who set up the PHRMG after years investigating Israeli human rights abuses, has struggled to find funding because his former backers were concerned about the political implications of being seen to support a group that exposes Palestinian abuses.

Yesterday, MEMRI’s director, Yigal Carmon, said that as soon as Basem Eid decided to investigate Palestinian abuses as well as Israeli abuses, his support dried up.

mid-ranking government official earns 2,700 won. A worker at a state farm earns in the region of 1,700 won, a kindergarten teacher 1,700 won and a pensioner gets between 700 and 1,500 won. A seamstress in a successful factory with export contracts can earn 5,000 won a month.

Accommodation, healthcare and schooling are free and in Pyongyang officials get double food rations to everyone else, but still, there is a mystery here.

With such tiny wages how come so many people seem to have the money for (imported) televisions in the Tongil market that cost some 72,000 won? And what about other items? An average North Korean made man’s jacket costs 4,500 won. Who has such money if most people are earning 2,700 won a month?

And here is another mystery. Pyongyang is full of restaurants and they are often full. The food is good too. But again, the price of a meal is an average month’s salary.

Clearly, an unknown number of North Koreans have access to foreign currency, especially those with family in Japan or South Korea. Some people are making money too, either because they are getting paid more or because they are doing some sort of business. But who is driving the Mercedes and yakking into mobile phones? Foreigners are obliged to leave theirs at the airport.

Foreign journalists are accompanied by government minders at all times when they visit North Korea _ and mine admitted that the question of who had money was “a riddle.” I asked him to tell me the answer to it and he said: “Write good things about us first and then we will allow you back and then we’ll tell you.”

rab media’s double standard – i.e., exhaustive coverage of the misdeeds of American soldiers yet complete silence on the spread of the phenomenon of torture in prisons throughout the Arab world.

Here’s Syrian columnist Hayan Nayouf:

“After the scandal of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers, the Arab media handled this affair in a way arousing ridicule, proving that the Arab media and intellectuals possess everything but objectivity, transparency, and disclosure of the truth and the facts.

“There is no one who does not condemn this damage to prisoners’ rights. There are international agreements that the Americans and others must honor. But in this article, I want to talk about the American president’s apology, and about how this apology was treated by the Arab media and intellectuals.

“The American president, the president of the most powerful country in the world and the most developed with regard to science, art, culture, and democracy, apologized for the deeds of the American soldiers, and all the Americans also apologized for this shameful deed. And then the Arab intellectuals came, with their mocking, idiotic, and illogical media, and ridiculed this apology.

“The question arises whether Saddam or any other Arab leader [ever] apologized. Did Saddam apologize to the Iraqi people for burying a million Iraqis in the ground, for expelling millions of Iraqis, for murdering innocents in his prisons, for his crimes in neighboring countries, for invading Kuwait, and for murdering the Kuwaiti prisoners?

“Enough of your foolishness, Arabs! Hundreds of Kuwaiti prisoners fell victim to Saddam’s crimes. Where were the Arab satellite channels, and why did no Iraqi official apologize?…

“Anyone who reads the Arab media [can get] an attack of madness. Had it not been for American democracy and the uncovering of the torture scandal by the American media, would the Arab media [ever] had heard about it? [Why?] Because [the Arab media] is preoccupied [with encouraging] ethnic [discord] and incitement to violence and terrorism!”

r_1_8_1/202-5403596-8940647″>Cruelty and Silence. Here‘s an interview with him, mainly about the Iraq Memory Foundation, which he was instrumental in setting up (via Milt’s File). He also makes some more general remarks:

Arab political culture is “infected,” as Makiya puts it, and is now at its lowest ebb ever. He speculates that defeat in the Six Day War of 1967 was so painful that Arabs are in denial about their society. For him it is crucial that no more generations are brought up on “the cruelties of Arab nationalism.” We are now “at a turning-point,” he says, “The West could engage with the Arab world without supporting dictatorships.” Democracy is “doable,” in a favorite word of his. All the same, current violence has obliged him to postpone his return to Baghdad. “I’m on all sorts of death lists: Ex-Baathists, foreign Arab insurgents, and so on would like to kill me.”

The violence in Fallujah, as he sees it, was essentially a local issue involving small numbers of Iraqis and non-Iraqis. Events in Najaf, in contrast, can jeopardise the country’s future. Makiya unhesitatingly calls the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr a thug. “Moqtada is totally the product of the Baathist system and its criminal elements, he’s using the only methods he knows, and he can’t be allowed to get away with it. Otherwise he’ll go on to represent the remnants of the old regime among the Shiites, and reproduce it.” Moqtada’s henchmen murdered the rival and moderate Ayatollah al-Khoie – one of the killers is in American custody – and this has to be a matter for the courts. The Shiites must resolve the confrontation with Moqtada for themselves, “in-house,” to use another favorite word of Makiya’s. “You can’t expect the Sunnis to participate, and the Kurds have a specific agenda. The burden of the country lies with wise and responsible Shiite leadership.” He’s not going to criticise American policy except to say, “Lack of reliance on Iraqis is the problem.”

The programme he originally sketched out for Chalabi and the INC still stands, he hopes: expand and re-jig the Governing Council after June 30, choose a prime minister, find a cabinet, devise tripartite power-sharing between the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, hold elections next year for a Constituent Assembly – that’s the really critical step – appoint a committee out of it to approve the constitution, and then have a referendum to legitimise what’s been done. It’s doable.

I have no strong feelings about London’s Olympics bid for 2012, except insofar as it would mean some welcome money would be ploughed into the East End. The Olympics themselves, on the whole, bore me rigid. With London’s decaying transport systems coming in for criticism from the Olympics committee, it looks like Paris will win anyway. And there’s always the suspicion with the Olympics that the winner is basically the city which puts together the best bribes package.

I was concerned about the possibility, mentioned in the Standard yesterday (can’t find a link now), that Hackney Marshes would be the site of a velodrome. They can’t do that! I think what they mean is the area south of Hackney Marshes, round the old Hackney dog track. At least I hope that’s what they mean.

What they should do is use the Dome. It would make a brilliant velodrome. It’s no use for anything else. In fact if the government weren’t so pathetic about the Dome, terrified of getting ridiculed everytime it’s mentioned, they would have marked it out for sports a long time ago.

Maths North Korean style (via NK Zone):

[A] quiz from a North Korean math textbook: “Three soldiers from the Korean People’s Army killed 30 American soldiers. How many American soldiers were killed by each of them, if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?”

At last it all makes sense, thanks to the new improved Guardian. [Via Backward]

Update: don’t miss out on this must-read article on Poot pootpoot.

This hasn’t received as much coverage as it should have (via The Religious Policeman):

Why did the Government of Saudi Arabia frame seven westerners for a series of car bombings they didn’t commit?

Those car bombings, which began in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November 2000, killed three members of the expatriate community and severely injured several others. To western observers, they were clearly the work of Islamic fundamentalists.

But the Saudis were not about to admit that. So five Britons, a Canadian and a Belgian found themselves arrested, systematically tortured into false confessions and eventually convicted of those bombings.

Since the release of the men from a Saudi Arabian jail last summer, it’s emerged that the Saudis were secretly using them as pawns in a bigger game – a game that for two of the men almost ended in a terrible death.

The Saudis, meanwhile, are shocked at the suggestion that torture could take place in their kingdom:

A Saudi high court judge has dismissed as “baseless” allegations by four Britons that they were tortured at a Riyadh prison to extract confessions.

Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Khudairy said the six Westerners — four Britons, a Canadian and a Belgian — were convicted after 13 judges had looked into the case.

Three of them were sentenced to death while two others were given jail terms for carrying out a series of blasts in Riyadh and Alkhobar in 2001, Okaz newspaper reported.

The court convicted the five after they confessed their crimes on Saudi Television. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd later pardoned them at the request of their families.

“The case had been looked into by three judges in the first phase before it was taken up by five judges of the cassation court and five judges from the Supreme Judiciary Council,” Khudairy said.

He said the five Westerners were given access to all judicial facilities including freedom to talk, simultaneous translation and defense lawyers. “No coercion or torture was used to extract their confessions. They revealed the source of the explosives they used to carry out the blasts,” he said.

Khudairy denied the prisoners complained about torture in Hair Prison at the time. “The judges asked the prisoners whether they had been tortured to extract confessions, but they said no,” he said.

So that’s cleared that up. And the clincher:

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Otaibi, a security and political affairs adviser, said the issue was being raised now to deflect attention from the torture of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers.

Thanks for that Piers: now walking away with a cool £1,500,000 pay-off.

Ann Clwyd in Baghdad:

Civic society is flourishing. There are 91 TV and radio stations, 106 newspapers are regularly published, hundreds of Iraqi journalists are being trained to question rather than parrot regime press releases. Voluntary organisations such as the Free Prisoners’ Association are proliferating. It gathers documents detailing the atrocities of the fallen regime to help to inform those who are still trying to trace their relatives. They have recorded 120,00 killings so far with a mountain of documents to work through. For them the grief and the suffering under Saddam is not yet in the past.

I asked the founder of the Free Prisoners’ Association, Ibrahim Idrissi, imprisoned 11 times, whether he had been interviewed by Al-Jazeera, the TV channel hated by so many Iraqis. Yes, he said, they have come to our offices three times but local people have always kicked them out. Why, I asked: “Because they say it is the voice of Saddam.” Yet another example of Iraqis asserting their new-found freedom.

There is little nostalgia for Saddam and a mixture of apprehension and optimism about the future. The task of rebuilding Iraq was never going to be easy. The years of brutalisation and deprivation brought Iraqis to their knees. I asked Dr Ali Allawi, the new Minister for Defence, what Britain could do now. His answer was swift: “Just stay the course.”

The New Statesman leads this week with an article on America’s gulag. It turns out that it’s based in Syria and Egypt: to be honest not places that immediately come to mind as locations for vast US prison camps, but it just goes to show how cunning the bastards are. Next week, those American concentration camps in North Korea.

It’s not all serious though. Terry Eagleton brings a light touch to his diary (they’ll only let you view one article without a subscription):

Two days into a lecture tour of Turkey, and I crack the problem of the missing WMDs. Where best to hide something but brazenly out in the open? There are a few of these elusive weapons stationed outside every mosque, slim, deadly missiles cunningly disguised as minarets. But the US neo-cons don’t know the meaning of such fancy foreign words, so the Muslim world has got clean away with it. Get ready to put your foot down as you drive past a mosque, in case the things slowly start to take off.

I confide my theory to a Turkish friend well practised in English whimsy, who informs me that the words “minaret” and “weapon” aren’t all that unrelated. So there we are. Yet more testimony to fiendish Oriental ingenuity. And religion is indeed the most powerful Muslim armoury against western materialism. You may conquer a country in which millions of ordinary men and women fervently practise a faith at odds with your own, but you can never defeat it.

Just when you’ve finished chuckling at this, Eagleton’s wit hits you again:

In the oil refinery town of Batman (I couldn’t resist asking them if they had one called Robin as well)…

Hey, first time they’ve heard that one, for sure! Who said the left has no sense of humour?