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Volume 1, Issue
13
April - May, 2004
In this Newsletter:
About The Prism Group
The Prism
Group continues to focus on several key issues and is pleased to
see that its efforts are causing “spectrums of awareness” in
many places. This month’s newsletter widens our scope throughout
the Middle East. We look forward to your feedback.
Massacres
The Middle East has been
replete with stories of massacres, actual and claimed, over the
past decades. To name but a few: the deaths of nearly 600
Christians in Damour in 1976 at the hands of Palestinian
combatants; the slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Homs, Syria, in
1982; the false claims that Israel killed 500 Palestinians in
Jenin in 2002; and the horrific excesses of Saddam Hussein’s
regime.
The following is a summary
of events did not receive wide media attention or even comment
in the UN. You are encouraged to write to your local papers and
demand proper coverage of world events. Write to your elected
representatives, church leaders and to human rights
organizations. Ask them to take a firm stand.
Fallujah
is a Sunni town, 35 miles west of Baghdad.
According to US Brig. Gen. Mark
Kimmitt: "This was a city that profited immeasurably ... under
the former regime. They have a view that somehow the harder they
fight, the better chance they have of achieving some sort of
restorationist movement”.
The situation in Fallujah took a turn for the
worse on March 30 when four US private contractors were ambushed
and murdered. Indymedia.com reported that there were hundreds of
civilian deaths and the Coalition partners were horrified.
The facts are somewhat different.
As reported by BBC Radio on April 29, the regions of Fallujah
and Najaf, have been identified as planning centers for many of
the atrocities carried out against Iraqi citizens, Coalition
troops and others. In order for Iraq not to be victimized by
another despotic Hussein-style regime, the country must be drawn
towards the axis of democracy.
Sadoun al-Dulame, a Baghdad-based political
scientist,
has noted
that:
"You can never forget that in this area
retaliation is the fundamental element of the tribal system, its
focal point. This is a revenge culture where insults to people's
honor will always be repaid with violence."
Syrian Football massacre.
Al Jazeera reported that on March 14, 14 Kurds
were killed when violence broke out in the northern Syrian town
of Qameshli during a
football match. The
next day, at demonstrations held to protest the murders, five
more Kurds were killed by riot police.
A website
called Rojname.com explained that during the football match some
fans began waving a Kurdish flag. (About 160,000 Kurds have been
denied Syrian nationality, meaning they cannot vote, own
property, go to state schools or get government jobs.)
Syrian state
broadcasting reported that the government had appointed a
committee to investigate reasons behind the rioting. It said the
riots damaged "the stability and security of the homeland and
the citizens" and were the fault of "some intriguers" who had
adopted "exported ideas".
However, this does not explain the home video shown on
a few television channels days later. The video showed Syrian
security forces opening fire randomly on unarmed citizens
frantically fleeing the area.
(This
newsletter was written as reports came in about explosions in
Damascus).
A New Palestinian Massacre.
The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG)
has been highly critical of Israel’s activities in recent years.
In April 2004, PHRMG turned its attention to internal
Palestinian violence. (see
http://www.phrmg.org/intrafada.htm).
It noted that although hundreds of Palestinians have been killed
or injured since 1993 by local Palestinian militia, the
statistics include the dead and injured in attacks blamed on
Israel. However, the
American Humanist Association reported
that this type of statistical skewing has been common since the
first Intifada.
Sudan.
And the list goes on. Estimates show that thousands of native
black Africans, mostly settled farmers, have been killed in an
apparent ethnic-cleansing policy that has been recently
instituted in Western Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of black
Africans have been uprooted from their villages and forced to
abandon their traditional farmland to lighter-skinned Muslim
Arab Sudanese citizens. Nevertheless, Sudan has just been
elected to the UN Human Rights Commission.
Aid for the Poor
The new UNRWA
director in Lebanon, Richard Cook, recently announced that there
are no plans to reduce services to Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon – despite media reports to the contrary. Lebanon’s Daily
Star on line quotes Cook as saying: “We have no measures and no
policy on the reduction of services. Far from it, in Lebanon of
this year we have increased our services…. This year it is the
highest funding that we have ever got…. But it’s not keeping
pace with the costs…”
At the same
time, Cook is earnestly trying to ensure that donors’ money is
being used appropriately. In a brave break with previous UNRWA
traditions, Cook is demanding the political slogans be removed
from UNRWA run schools. It has also been reported that he has
dismissed UNRWA officials for stealing food rations.
These policy
initiatives are to be welcomed, especially compared to the
disastrous arrangements in the Gaza region. Here, there are
documents and pictures showing how UNRWA resources have been
consistently misappropriated over years by local Palestinian
mafia. UNRWA facilities have been used by gunmen and schools
have become recruiting grounds for combatants.
The Prism
Group, which has written on UNRWA in the past (e.g. see
http://www.theprismgroup.org/UNWRAPA.htm), supports Cook’s
efforts.
Food-for-thought
On March 17 the New York Times printed an article
by the venerable William Safire reporting how Claudia Rosett,
another Times journalist had exposed a cover-up in the office of
the U.N. secretary general -- a multibillion dollar financial
fraud that has become known as the Iraqi oil-for-food program.
According
to Rosett, U.N.'s secretive oversight of more than $100 billion
in Iraqi oil exports and supposed humanitarian imports was "an
invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and smuggling
done under cover of relief operations."
Kofi
Annan's right-hand man, Benon Sevan, headed the oil-for-food
program. When confronted, Sevan cited a hundred audits in five
years, but he refused to give any details.
Now, the
whole scam has been brought to light by free Iraqis in Baghdad.
Detailed accounts have been reported by The Times, The Wall
Street Journal, and London's Daily Telegraph.
Assistant
Secretary General Sevan, now on an extended vacation until his
retirement next month, denied through a spokesman "that I had
received oil or oil monies from the former Iraqi regime".
However, The Journal produced a document in Arabic suggesting
Sevan received 1.8 million barrels of oil.
It seems
that nearly 75% of the program suppliers raised their prices to
pay a 10% kickback. These included European manufacturers, Arab
trade brokers, Russian factories and Chinese state-owned
companies. Estimates of the corruption cost: $2.3 billion.
Annan's
office was stonewalling the press until an irate Iraqi Governing
Council hired the accountants KPMG and a law firm to investigate
what its advisers called "one of the world's most disgraceful
scams."
Financial Mismanagement
In early
March 2004 the Brussels-based European Institute for Research on
the Middle East reported that Britain and other European states
gave the Palestinians more than 20 million Euros to provide
legal and technical advice for final status negotiations with
Israel. Britain, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway
paid the funds to the PLO Negotiations Aid Department’s (NAD)
Negotiations Support Unit (NSU), which in the absence of peace
negotiations, was accused of pursuing a propaganda campaign
which proposed policies frequently contradicting the five
countries' stated foreign policy objectives.
The
Institute asked several of the states for details of the
targeted aid they provided to the PLO for the final status
negotiations. According to its research director, Dr. Nick
Lambert: "Various ministries sought to block our investigation,
and some refused to cooperate altogether, yet still claimed a
policy of transparency- until we uncovered classified reports
which suggested the opposite."
Lambert
says financial aid to the PA created a situation in which
European countries continue to fund activities which often run
directly counter to other areas of their governments’ foreign
aid strategies. Lambert also notes, following the NSU funding
exposure, its legal advisor, Diana Buttu, in an April interview
with the BBC, continued to make false statements, presenting
Hamas as neither a terrorist organization nor committed to a
charter which seeks to destroy Israel. She appeared to ignore
the fact that Hamas’ bombing campaign had caused her own
international benefactors to declare Hamas a terrorist
organization several months earlier.
The Prism Group Website
Please visit
our site and help direct others to the existing fact sheets. If
you have ideas for fact sheets that you believe we should
investigate and compile, please write to us at:
info@theprismgroup.org.
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