“Lebanon hangs in the balance”

Baltimore Sun 18 January 2008

After a week of whirlwind travel throughout the Middle East, President Bush returns to the U.S. today hoping that his trip has secured the support of Persian Gulf states in America’s drive to counter Iran’s regional ambitions. But while Mr. Bush worked to draft Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into a reinvigorated containment strategy for Iran, and while U.S. and Iranian warships played chicken in the Strait of Hormuz, another conflict between Washington and Tehran was quietly unfolding in Lebanon.

There, a stalemate between the pro-Western government of Fouad Siniora and the Hezbollah-led, Iran- and Syria-backed opposition threatens to throw the country into turmoil. Yesterday’s deadly explosion targeting a U.S. Embassy vehicle in Beirut was just the latest reminder of how volatile the situation there is.

The implications for the U.S. of the political power play in Lebanon are huge. Hezbollah’s push to undermine Lebanon’s U.S.-supported government has the group’s Iranian and Syrian backers poised to expand their influence westward and to turn Lebanon into another major regional battlefield in the cold war between Washington and the Tehran/Damascus axis. Unfortunately, there may be little that Mr. Bush can do to stabilize Lebanon. He is determined not to negotiate, and dialogue with the likes of Syrian President Bashar Assad is not without risks. Sustained diplomatic isolation coordinated by the U.S. and France may stand the best chance of preventing Syria from meddling further in Lebanese affairs.

As things stand, it does not appear that any resolution to the crisis is on the horizon. After the departure from power in late November of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, the Hezbollah-led opposition, known as the March 8 Alliance, has consistently blocked the election of his successor, demanding a veto-yielding vote in parliament before it agrees to allow a president to be selected. Realizing that granting the opposition this veto power would give Syria and Iran a greater voice in the decisions of the Lebanese government, the pro-Western majority in power has refused to relent. Thus, Lebanon remains without a president and is left in an unstable and dangerous vacuum.

“Border tensions”

The Guardian 11 October 2007

Though still reluctant to invade Iraq, Turkey is set to apply more pressure on the Kurdish fighters.

After a series of deadly attacks by the PKK earlier this week, Turkey again appears on the brink of a major military intervention in northern Iraqi Kurdistan, the mountainous home-away-from-home of the resurgent terrorist organisation. With 15 soldiers dead in only two days – the highest casualties the Turkish military has suffered in over a decade – this week’s attacks led Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan to call an emergency counterterrorism meeting on Tuesday, where he gave the green light to the military for limited operations in Iraq against the group.

This week’s crisis should not come as a surprise; the PKK has long staged audacious cross-border attacks in Turkey, to which Ankara has unflinchingly responded with the threat of massive military retaliation. Just last summer, a series of PKK attacks inside Turkey led to the mobilisation of up to 100,000 troops on the Iraqi border.

But, as was seen during the summer, tactical considerations will keep the Turks out of Iraq as long as possible: the mountains where the PKK is camped are notoriously difficult to penetrate and invading Turkish troops would face the double threat of well-armed PKK guerrillas and Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Furthermore, given staunch US opposition, a major incursion into Iraq would be a diplomatic nightmare for Ankara that would strain relations with Washington and would damage its long-term goals of joining the European Union.

In the place of full-scale invasion, Turkey has traditionally restricted its operations in Iraq to limited “hot pursuits” of PKK rebels across the border and the occasional shelling of their positions in the mountains. It seems unlikely that Erdogan, who has long been adverse to the idea of invasion, will stray far from these tactics now.

But as the patience of both the Turkish military and the public wears thin, pressure is mounting on the government to find a solution to the PKK issue before more lives are lost. Accordingly, prime minister Erdogan – without committing himself to invasion – has promised this week a new strategy for dealing with Turkey’s restless neighbours to the south.

“Inside the spider’s web”

The Guardian 15 August 2007

Last night Hizbullah was celebrating its ‘divine victory’ over Israel and thousands have been flocking to its war museum.

[credit: James Martin]

In Dahia, a predominantly Shia suburb of Beirut, an estimated 50,000 Lebanese turned out last night to celebrate the one year anniversary of the end of last summer’s 34-day war with Israel. Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivered a televised speech to the throngs of Lebanese Shia in attendance, glorifying his group’s “divine victory” against Israel and warning Jewish leaders that another attack on Lebanon would prove even more costly next time around.

His words were received with raucous approbation by the crowd, who kept the Shia neighborhood up until late at night: bare-chested men drove motorcycles through the streets, waving Hizbullah flags and cheering; fireworks and celebratory gunshots erupted from rooftop to rooftop; and jeeps barrelled through the street overflowing with ecstatic revellers, who chanted and held high into the air enormous Iranian flags.

Not all in Beirut were celebrating last night. A year after the war, which caused over 1,000 deaths and an estimated $5 billion of damage in Lebanon, the country’s political and economic woes have reached crisis level: Fouad Siniora’s western-backed government, stuck in a crippling deadlock with the Hizbullah-led opposition and reeling from a recent string of targeted assassinations, is teetering on the brink of collapse. The economy lies in tatters and the Lebanese army has been bogged down summer-long in a fierce battle with the al-Qaida-linked Fatah al-Islam group in the northern Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

But in Dahia last night there were no signs of woe to be found: children, draped in Hizbullah flags, played with balloons adorned with the visage of the wildly popular Nasrallah, while men and women together cheered their support for the leader. Green posters clogged the streets proclaiming the August 14 date as a day of triumph for Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s speech last night was only the culminating moment in a summer marked by Hizbullah’s celebration of its “divine victory” last year. The group even opened a museum last month in Dahia that commemorates its war efforts against the Israelis. Thousands of Lebanese have visited in recent weeks.

The museum’s main exhibit – which is entitled “The Spider’s Web” – is a macabre testament to Hizbullah’s ongoing fascination with battling the Jewish state. At the entrance, children pose with badly-damaged Israeli armoured vehicles, adorned with placards giving the name of their model and the date of their destruction by the “resistance”.

“Beirut power play”

The Guardian 7 August 2007

A hotly contested byelection in Lebanon foreshadows a much bigger struggle over the presidency this autumn.

Lebanon’s political stalemate reached a boiling point last weekend, as opposition candidate Camille Khoury won a hotly contested parliamentary seat in Metn, a predominantly Christian area north of Beirut.

Sunday’s byelection, which was to fill a seat left vacant by the assassination of Christian MP Pierre Gemayel last November, pitted Pierre’s father – former president Amin Gemayel - against the relatively unknown Mr Khoury, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) which is led by another prominent Christian, Michel Aoun. Since forming an alliance with Hizbullah last year, Aoun’s party has played a key role in the opposition to Fouad Siniora’s ruling coalition, taking part in massive anti-government protests last December that shut down Beirut and left the government teetering.

The results of Sunday’s election in Metn could be a prelude to more chaos: with Syrian-backed President Emile Lahoud scheduled to step down by November 23, the presidency – a post that has to be filled by a Maronite Christian – will be left open for contest between Siniora’s forces and the opposition. With many predicting that the victorious party of Metn’s elections will hold the key to winning the presidency in the autumn, Khoury’s success seems to bode well for the ambitions of Aoun. With Aoun as president, the opposition would be firmly ensconced in the state and could thus be emboldened to force a complete takeover of the government.

But not everyone in Beirut is convinced that Khoury’s victory will translate into success for Aoun in the autumn. Given that Gemayel’s defeat came by less than 500 votes, it is far from clear that Lebanon’s Christians have given the FPM a clear mandate to rule; in fact, the elections saw a huge drop in popularity for Aoun’s party, which won 70% of the Christian vote in parliamentary elections in 2005. Furthermore, given low support for the FPM in Sunday’s vote among Maronite Christians, Lebanon’s largest Christian minority, Aoun’s claim to being the indispensable Christian candidate no longer seems credible to many. Gemayel himself took this line in a Beirut news conference yesterday, saying that a “majority of Maronites voted for us, 75%, and only 34% for Aoun … So now let us talk about the true Christian representative.”

“The battle for Kirkuk”

The Guardian 3 August 2007

Amid continuing ethnic tensions, Kurdish leaders may have to compromise on the future of Iraq’s oil-rich city.

Last Tuesday, Massoud Barzani, the president of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, warned fellow Iraqis that a failure to reach a decision on the future of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk by the end of this year would lead to “real civil war”.

Barzani could not have timed his comments more perfectly: Tuesday marked the scheduled completion date of a census that was to be held in Kirkuk in anticipation of a referendum in December on whether the city will remain within a Baghdad-led Iraq or join Iraqi Kurdistan. The tally, if it had been held, would have determined the number of eligible voters within the city’s different ethnic communities – Kurdish, Turkoman, and Sunni and Shia Arab – and would have been a crucial step towards laying the groundwork for December’s referendum.

It is widely believed that Kirkuk, which boasts a Kurdish majority, will vote to join Iraqi Kurdistan if such a referendum is held. Accordingly, Baghdad has been unwilling to help the Kurds organise and prepare for the vote: by sacrificing Kirkuk to the Kurds, Baghdad would lose an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil, roughly 40% of Iraq’s proven reserves, that lie beneath the city and its environs. But without Baghdad’s help, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) will not be able to complete the crucial preparatory work necessary before a fair and legitimate referendum on Kirkuk can be held in December. And given how little time is left for this work to be done, it seems increasingly unlikely that the future of Kirkuk will be decided before the end of this year.

For the Kurds, this is a nightmare rivalled in seriousness only by Turkey’s recent threats to invade: if the constitutionally-mandated referendum does not happen on time, they fear they will lose their best chance of annexing Kirkuk to Kurdish territory. And without the city’s abundant natural resources, the prospects of an economically viable independent Kurdish state in the future look bleak. Unsurprisingly, Kurdish leaders refuse to budge on the issue: as Nawzad Hadi Mawlood, the governor of Erbil, recently told me, the KRG would not negotiate on a postponement of the referendum. Barzani has merely upped the ante this week by promising Baghdad hell if the referendum is not carried out according to the timetable agreed upon in Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution.

Perhaps, however, it is not such a bad thing that Baghdad is dragging its feet. Given explosive ethnic tensions within Kirkuk, and concern throughout the region that its oilfields do not become part of Iraqi Kurdistan, a delay in the implementation of the referendum may be the only way to keep the city from becoming the next major flashpoint in Iraq’s ever-widening bloodbath.

“Border brinkmanship”

The Guardian 20 July 2007

Turkey has been massing troops along its frontier with Iraq but it won’t invade – at least, not yet.

With 100,000-plus Turkish troops amassed along the northern border of Iraq, media buzz that they are poised to attack has been causing concern in foreign policy circles, with both US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and secretary of defence Robert Gates firmly warning Turkey to to keep out of Iraq.

Guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – now operating freely out of mountainous northern Iraq – frequently attack inside Turkey. Clearing them out has long been a strategic goal of Turkey but foreign minister Abdullah Gul and the Turkish military know that a full-scale invasion is out of the question – at least for now.

Simply finding and shutting down PKK bases in Iraq would be a monumental task. The area where the rebels are camped out is high in the Kandil mountains, a remote region long known as a popular hideout for guerrillas. Once PKK troops see the Turks coming, they will scatter as quickly as the nomadic shepherds with whom they share the land, only to regroup once the military is in retreat. And given the carnage throughout the rest of the country, the Turkish military would be more than reluctant to commit forces to a long-term occupation of Iraqi Kurdistan. With good reason: one Kurdish man recently told me over beers in Erbil that he would be willing to send his whole family to fight the Turks if they dared cross into Iraq.

So what are Turkish troops doing on the border if they know invasion would be a tactical nightmare? Everyone that I’ve spoken to in northern Iraq has offered a different theory. But they all agree: Turkey is not coming to Kurdistan.

“The forgotten victims”

Al-Ahram Weekly 28 June – 4 July 2007

Realising justice for the Kurds, including compensation from the international community for having supplied the Iraqi regime with chemical weapons, continues to be an uphill battle, reports James Martin from Halabja

In Sulaimaniya, a predominantly Kurdish city in northeastern Iraq, the news of Ali Hassan Al-Majid’s conviction on Sunday was greeted with loud celebration. Trucks barrelled down the city’s main road playing loud music and honking their horns, and people smiled at the sight of Al-Majid in court, wrapping their hands around their necks to show the universal sign of death by strangulation and their approval of his sentence. “My pleasure cannot be described, seeing him humbled in the courtroom like this,” said Kurdish schoolteacher Fakhruddin Haji Salim, 58, after hearing the verdict. Al-Majid, the former Baath Party official infamously known as “Chemical Ali”, was found guilty on Sunday of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes and was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in orchestrating the massacre of up to 180,000 Iraqi Kurds during the Al-Anfal Campaign of the late 1980s. The campaign, a systematic programme of execution and forced dislocation directed against Iraq’s Kurdish minority, culminated in the use of chemical weapons against certain Kurdish towns along the Iranian border during the final months of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.

But in Halabja, a town one hour southeast of Sulaimaniya where an estimated 5,000 people died in one of these chemical attacks, the mood was markedly more subdued the morning after Al-Majid’s conviction. While happy to hear that Al-Majid would finally be punished, survivors expressed frustration that he would not be tried specifically for their case. The Anfal Case, in which a total of three former Baath Party officials, including Al-Majid, were sentenced to death on Sunday, did not take into consideration Al-Majid’s role in the Halabja attack. A separate trial, which will focus specifically on Halabja, is scheduled for an unspecified later date. Many in Halabja fear Al-Majid’s execution will come before he can be tried in this separate case, however, and that his role in directing this attack will never fully be uncovered.

“We want the Anfal and the Halabja trials to be together,” said Mohamed Faraj, who lost 35 family members on the day of the attack and now works as director of the Halabja Chemical Attack Victims Association. “I would’ve liked to read the verdict myself. We want Ali [Al-Majid] to be executed in Halabja.” Alwan Ali Mahmoud, 27, who lives alone with her sister after losing both of her parents and three siblings to the gassing, agrees. “While we are happy to see Ali die, his trial was not related to the Halabja case. This attack was the biggest event that happened in Iraq in the 20th century and I want everyone to know about it. Anybody from Halabja would be upset our case was not addressed in the court.”