JFP News, 5/26 - HRW: Pakistani Civilians Face Catastrophe
Just Foreign Policy News
May 26, 2009
IraqTortureGate: Powell Denies Knowing He Used Tortured Evidence for UN Case
The Senate Intelligence Committee knows that al-Libi’s false, tortured testimony was part of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. Human Rights Watch knows it. Powell’s former deputy Lawrence Wilkerson knows it. And you know it. But supposedly Colin Powell doesn’t know it. Is this credible?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/26-12
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Human Rights Watch said hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis trapped by an offensive against the Taliban in Swat face catastrophe and authorities should lift a curfew to enable them to get out and for help to get in, Reuters reports. The offensive in Swat has sparked an exodus of 2.3 million people, but about 200,000 people are believed to be still in the valley. Severe shortages of food, water and medicine were creating a major humanitarian crisis for the trapped civilians, HRW said.
2) On its present course, Obama’s Iran policy will not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the US and Iran, argue Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett in the New York Times. Iran will not be persuaded of US seriousness if Washington acquiesces to Israeli insistence on a deadline for successful US engagement with Iran. President Obama said, after his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, that he wants to see "progress" in nuclear negotiations before the end of the year. Secretary Clinton has been pushing the other permanent members of the Security Council to intensify multilateral sanctions against Iran if Tehran has not agreed to limit the expansion of its nuclear-fuel cycle program by the time the General Assembly convenes at the end of September. This diplomatic approach is guaranteed to fail. Getting America’s Iran policy "right" would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like. The president would have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan - a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.
3) Forced into the arms of the International Monetary Fund, the Latvian government is now slashing its budget and the wages of state employees, the New York Times reports. Latvia is racing to halve a government budget deficit, estimated at 12 percent of gross domestic product, even as its economy is expected to contract by 16.5 percent this year. That is a condition of the $10 billion bailout by the I.M.F.
4) Defense Secretary Gates said US public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves "a perceptible shift in momentum," the Wall Street Journal reports. Gates said the momentum in Afghanistan is now with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country.
Afghhanistan
5) US intelligence agencies have launched an intensive effort to examine the various tribes linked to the Taliban to determine whether some can be broken off through diplomatic and economic initiatives, the Boston Globe reports. "You have a whole spectrum of bad guys that sort of get lumped into this catch-all term of Taliban . . . because they’re launching bullets at us," said a senior defense official. "There are many of the groups that can probably be peeled off." But one analyst cautioned that sending more troops might make it more difficult to reach accommodations.
Iraq
6) U.S. forces in Iraq have been holding Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam without charge, evidence or trial since Sept. 2, despite an Iraqi court order that he be released, Liz Sly reports in the Los Angeles Times. She notes that the US has harshly criticized other countries for detaining journalists, while "routinely" holding journalists without charge in Iraq. The decision to release him or transfer him to the Iraqi legal system will be made by the Iraqi government "by the end of the year."
Iran
7) Polls show that Mir Hussein Moussavi is the most serious threat to President Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential election, the New York Times reports. Ahmadinejad still has considerable support among many poor Iranians.
Israel/Palestine
8) The party led by Israel’s Foreign Minister plans to introduce a bill making Israeli citizenship contingent on an oath of allegiance, a move targeting the country’s Arab minority, AP reports. The bill follows a separate proposal by the same party that would make it illegal for Arabs to mourn the "catastrophe" - the term Palestinians use to describe the exile caused by Israel’s founding.
Panama
9) A trade accord with Panama won’t be submitted to Congress for approval until President Obama offers a new "framework" for trade, Bloomberg reports. The AFL-CIO’s John Sweeney had said unions would oppose a rush to ratify the deal, and 55 House Democrats told Speaker Pelosi to reject the Panama accord unless it is renegotiated.
Colombia
10) UNHCR said it is concerned about a wave of death threats in Colombia against human rights workers and social activists, AP reports. UNHCR said it couldn’t name the source of the threats for fear of putting its workers at risk.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Pakistanis trapped in Swat face catastrophe: group
Reuters, Tuesday, May 26, 2009 3:59 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052600285.html
Islamabad - Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis trapped by an offensive against the Taliban in Swat face catastrophe and authorities should lift a curfew to enable them to get out and for help to get in, a rights group said.
The offensive in the Taliban bastion of Swat, about 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, has sparked an exodus of 2.3 million people, according to government figures, but about 200,000 people are believed to be still in the valley.
Severe shortages of food, water and medicine were creating a major humanitarian crisis for the trapped civilians, the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch said.
"People trapped in the Swat conflict zone face a humanitarian catastrophe unless the Pakistani military immediately lifts a curfew that has been in place continuously for the last week," said Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director. "The government cannot allow the local population to remain trapped without food, clean water, and medicine as a tactic to defeat the Taliban," Adams said in a statement on Tuesday.
[…]
Human Rights Watch said it was getting persistent reports of civilian casualties from army shelling and aerial bombardments as well as reports of summary executions of civilians by the Taliban.
"The Pakistani government should take all possible measures including air drops of food, water, and medicine to quickly alleviate large-scale human suffering in Swat," Adams said. "Both sides should allow a humanitarian corridor that would let civilians escape the fighting and for impartial humanitarian agencies to evacuate and aid civilians at risk," he said.
[…]
A top U.N. official said on Monday the United Nations was considering asking the military to temporarily halt its offensive to enable aid to get to trapped civilians. "A humanitarian pause is a subject of discussion … it is obviously something that we would not shy away from asking for," Manuel Bessler, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan, told AlertNet.
2) Have We Already Lost Iran?
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, New York Times, May 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24leverett.html
President Obama’s Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed. On its present course, the White House’s approach will not stop Tehran’s development of a nuclear fuel program - or, as Iran’s successful test of a medium-range, solid-fuel missile last week underscored, military capacities of other sorts. It will also not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the United States and Iran - a posture that for 30 years has proved increasingly damaging to the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
This judgment may seem both premature and overly severe. We do not make it happily. We voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and we still want him to succeed in reversing the deterioration in America’s strategic position. But we also believe that successful diplomacy with Iran is essential to that end. Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough.
[…]
In conversations with [Dennis] Ross before Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past "diplomacy" would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.
Iranian officials are fully aware of Ross’s views - and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, "an offer we can’t accept," simply to gain international support for coercive action.
[…]
Tehran will certainly not be persuaded of American seriousness if Washington acquiesces to Israeli insistence on a deadline for successful American engagement with Iran. Although the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, had told reporters that no such deadline would be imposed, President Obama himself said, after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, that he wants to see "progress" in nuclear negotiations before the end of the year. He also endorsed the creation of a high-level Israeli-American working group to identify more coercive options if Iran does not meet American conditions for limiting its nuclear activities.
More specifically, Secretary Clinton and Ross have been pushing the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany to intensify multilateral sanctions against Iran if Tehran has not agreed to limit the expansion of its nuclear-fuel cycle program by the time the United Nations General Assembly convenes in New York at the end of September.
This diplomatic approach is guaranteed to fail. Having a deadline for successful negotiations will undercut the perceived credibility of American diplomacy in Tehran and serve only to prepare the way for more coercive measures. Obama’s justification for a deadline - that previous American-Iranian negotiations produced "a lot of talk but not always action and follow-through" - is incorrect as far as Iranian behavior was concerned. For example, during talks over Afghanistan after 9/11 in which one of us (Hillary) took part, Tehran deported hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban operatives who had sought sanctuary in Iran, and also helped establish the new Afghan government. It was Washington, not Tehran, that arbitrarily ended these productive talks.
Beyond the nuclear issue, the administration’s approach to Iran degenerates into an only slightly prettified version of George W. Bush’s approach - that is, an effort to contain a perceived Iranian threat without actually trying to resolve underlying political conflicts. Obama administration officials are buying into a Bush-era delusion: that concern about a rising Iranian threat could unite Israel and moderate Arab states in a grand alliance under Washington’s leadership.
President Obama and his team should not be excused for their failure to learn the lessons of recent history in the Middle East - that the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics and that even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation. The notion of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is not only delusional, it would leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in free fall. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.
[…]
What is really hard is that getting America’s Iran policy "right" would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like.
To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan - a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.
It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of failed policy toward the People’s Republic of China and to reorient America’s posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America’s interests extremely well for more than 30 years. That took strategic vision, political ruthlessness and personal determination. We hope that President Obama - contrary to his record so far - will soon begin to demonstrate those same qualities in forging a new approach toward Iran.
3) Latvia Races to Cut Deficit to Keep to Its Bailout Deal
Carter Dougherty, New York Times, May 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/europe/24latvia.html
Riga - Many countries in the world have felt the sting of the economic crisis, but few can match Latvia for sheer pain. A harrowing contraction in the economy is reordering expectations for the future as the country’s leaders grapple with a credit-fueled boom turned to bust.
Two brothers, Matiss and Oskars Barkoviskis, see it every day as they make their rounds here in their borrowed Mazda pickup truck. In the three months since they founded a charity for feeding the poor, they have discovered a strong and growing demand for their services.
In just that time, the number of families they visit each week has nearly doubled, with new ones answering ads in Riga’s free newspaper every day. They started by delivering groceries down the dirt roads outside Riga and into decrepit, Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings. But now they find themselves helping out families who live in apparently comfortable surroundings, but who can no longer afford to feed themselves.
[…]
It is not hard to grasp what stands behind the sour mood in Latvia. Forced into the arms of the International Monetary Fund, the Latvian government is now slashing its budget and the wages of state employees in a bid to rebalance a society that had run badly out of whack.
Austerity is rippling down the social hierarchy, as the affluent cancel vacations, middle-class people fret about social descent, and Dickensian scenes of destitution multiply.
In Riga, the capital, abandoned construction sites, vast lots of repossessed cars and a new, utterly empty shopping mall testify to the misery. But the government’s tough medicine for the crisis, stiffer than Black Balsam, the syrupy herbal liqueur that is the country’s national drink, has defined the times.
Latvia is racing to halve an enormous government budget deficit, now estimated at 12 percent of gross domestic product, even as its economy is expected to contract by 16.5 percent this year. That is a condition of the $10 billion bailout by the I.M.F. that the European Union, of which Latvia is a member, also supported.
4) Gates Says Taliban Have Momentum In Afghanistan
Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329472631452687.html
American public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves "a perceptible shift in momentum," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview.
Gates said the momentum in Afghanistan is with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country.
The defense chief has been moving aggressively to salvage the war in Afghanistan, signing off on the deployments of 21,000 American military personnel and recently taking the unprecedented step of firing the four-star general who commanded all U.S. forces there. Gates, speaking in his cabin on an Air Force plane, said the administration is rapidly running out of time to turn around the war.
"People are willing to stay in the fight, I believe, if they think we’re making headway," he said. "If they think we’re stalemated and having our young men and women get killed, then patience is going to run out pretty fast."
Afghhanistan
5) US Probes Divisions Within Taliban
Wants to detach tribes willing to share power
Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, May 24, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/05/24/us_probes_divisions_within_taliban
US intelligence agencies have launched an intensive effort to examine the various tribes linked to the Taliban to determine whether some can be broken off through diplomatic and economic initiatives, mirroring the successful strategy employed by General David H. Petraeus in Iraq, according to Defense Department officials.
Top military and intelligence officials say they know far too little about the disparate groups they are fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and believe many fighters have been incorrectly labeled as the Taliban, lumping those who pose the greatest threat with others who may be willing to share power with the Afghan and Pakistani governments.
"You have a whole spectrum of bad guys that sort of get lumped into this catch-all term of Taliban . . . because they’re launching bullets at us," said a senior defense official involved in the effort who like others was not authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters. "There are many of the groups that can probably be peeled off."
The initiative, which involves hundreds of intelligence operatives and analysts in the United States and overseas, is expected to culminate later this year in a detailed, highly classified analysis of the different factions of the Taliban and other groups. The overall effort is considered crucial to the long-term success of President Obama’s goal of crushing the remnants of the Al Qaeda terrorist network and bringing stability to large swaths of the two countries that have become incubators for anti-US violence.
"This is the key to moving forward," said Peter Bergen, a specialist on radical Islamic terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. "The easiest way to end an insurgency is to get people to stop being insurgents."
[…]
The first step, officials said, will be identifying the remnants of the Afghan Taliban who ruled Afghanistan until it was overthrown by US-led forces in late 2001 for harboring the planners of the 9/11 attacks.
They include leaders possibly open to dialogue, such as Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Afghans who are believed to be potential rivals for power with the more radical Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar, who escaped the US onslaught in 2001. Some Taliban leaders are reportedly talking through intermediaries about a potential peace deal with the Afghan government.
[…]
But Bergen, who has spent considerable time in the region, warned that reaching durable agreements with more moderate elements will prove more difficult than it was in Iraq - especially when they see the 21,000 additional American military forces that Obama is sending this year to Afghanistan.
"It’s going to be more complex to do deals with the Taliban than people think," Bergen said. In their view, "more brigades are not coming to make peace deals. They are going to kill a lot of people."
Iraq
6) U.S. Holds Journalist Without Charges In Iraq
Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam has been held since September. The U.S. military rejected a court order to release him, saying he is a ‘high security threat.’ No evidence has been presented.
Liz Sly, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-journalist24-2009may24,3,7048082.story
Baghdad - The soldiers came at 1:30 a.m, rousing family members who were sleeping on the roof to escape the late-summer heat. They broke down the front door. Accompanied by dogs, American and Iraqi troops burst into the Jassam family home in the town of Mahmoudiya south of Baghdad. "Where is the journalist Ibrahim?" one of the Iraqi soldiers barked at the grandparents, children and grandchildren as they staggered blearily down the stairs.
Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for the Reuters news agency, stepped forward, one of this brothers recalled. "Take me if you want me, but please leave my brothers." The soldiers rifled through the house, confiscating his computer hard drive and cameras. And then they led him away, handcuffed and blindfolded. That was Sept. 2.
Jassam, 31, has been in U.S. custody ever since. His case is the latest of a dozen detentions the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has documented since 2001.
No formal accusations have been made against Jassam, and an Iraqi court ordered in November that he be released for lack of evidence. But the U.S. military continues to hold him, saying it has intelligence that he is "a high security threat," said Maj. Neal Fisher, spokesman for detainee affairs.
The Obama administration harshly criticized Iran for its imprisonment of Roxana Saberi, the U.S.-Iranian journalist who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison before being freed two weeks ago. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Iran’s treatment of Saberi as "non-transparent, unpredictable and arbitrary."
Washington also has called upon North Korea to expedite the trial of two U.S. journalists being held on spying charges.
Yet the U.S. has routinely used the arbitrary powers it assumed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks to hold journalists without charge in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.
None of the detained journalists has been convicted of any charge, undermining the United States’ reputation when it comes to criticizing other countries on issues of press freedom, committee executive director Joel Simon said. "The U.S. has a record of holding journalists for long periods of time without due process and without explanation," he said. "Its standing would be improved if it addressed this issue."
Reuters has expressed disappointment over Jassam’s detention and has said there is no evidence against him.
[…]
Jassam is the only Iraqi journalist still in U.S. custody, the last to be detained under wartime rules that predated a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement signed in December. Under the new accord, U.S. forces must obtain a warrant before they can arrest an Iraqi citizen.
[…]
The CPJ’s Simon said it was possible for someone to use the cover of journalism to conduct other activities. "No one is suggesting that journalists should have a get- out-of-jail-free card," he said. "But if you accuse someone of something there needs to be a fair legal process. That’s what we said in the Roxana Saberi case, and that’s what we say in the Ibrahim Jassam case."
Jassam will have to wait for the requirements of the security pact to play out before he gets another day in court or his freedom. The agreement states that the U.S. is to release low-threat detainees in a "safe and orderly" way and refer "high threat" cases to the Iraqi Justice Ministry for review.
The decision to release him or transfer him to the Iraqi legal system will be made by the Iraqi government. The only timetable for that step is "by the end of the year," Fisher said. By that time, Jassam will have been in custody for more than a year.
Jassam’s brother, Walid, visited him recently in Camp Bucca, the desolate, tented U.S. prison camp in the desert in southern Iraq, and found him close to the breaking point. "He used to be handsome, but now he’s pale and he’s tired," said Walid, who says his brother had no ties to insurgents. "Every now and then while we were talking, he would start crying. He was begging me: ‘Please do something to get me out of here. I don’t know what is the charge against me.’
Iran
7) Support for Moderate a Challenge to Iran’s Leader
Nazila Fathi, New York Times, May 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/world/middleeast/26iran.html
Tabriz, Iran - The strongest challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attracted an unusually large and exuberant crowd of supporters on Monday during a campaign speech in this northwest city near the candidate’s birthplace, with only a few weeks before national elections that the incumbent stands a serious chance of losing.
The crowd for the challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, was extraordinary not only for its size - an estimated 30,000 - but also because the supporters were not paid, given free food, bused in or ordered by their workplaces to attend, a tactic sometimes used by Ahmadinejad’s campaign.
[…]
Moussavi, a former prime minister whose moderate views have won him support from other reformers in Iran including former President Mohammad Khatami, has positioned himself as the strongest challenger to Ahmadinejad, a religious conservative whose backing by the Islamic authorities here has weakened and who is now widely criticized for Iran’s economic malaise.
If elected, Moussavi told supporters here, he would enforce the constitutional law that allows the ethnic languages of different regions to be taught at schools, something Ahmadinejad has not done. Moussavi told the voters, "Your vote is crucial in the elections."
His wife, Zahra Rahnavard, who has been at the forefront of his campaign, said in a meeting with women that she favored monogamy - although polygamy is allowed under the law - and more rights for women. She is the first candidate’s wife to campaign since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
[…]
Moussavi is considered the most serious threat to Ahmadinejad’s re-election among the three challengers. The other two, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist candidate, and Mohsen Rezai, a former leader of the Revolutionary Guards, have lagged in voter opinion polls.
Ahmadinejad still has considerable support among Turkish speakers, especially in poor rural villages. Many low-income Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad four years ago because of his pledges to raise their standards of living.
Hassan Nazari, 75, a supporter of Ahmadinejad in Tabriz, said Monday that he would vote for Ahmadinejad’s re-election because Nazari’s salary had increased nearly five times and the lives of people in rural areas had improved.
Israel/Palestine
8) Israeli Bill Would Impose Loyalty Oath on Arab Citizens
Matti Friedman, Associated Press, May 25, 2009 07:55 AM
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/639832
Jerusalem - An ultranationalist Israeli party headed by the country’s foreign minister said today it plans to introduce a bill making Israeli citizenship contingent on an oath of allegiance, a move targeting the country’s Arab minority.
The bill follows a separate proposal Sunday by the same party that would make it illegal for Arabs to mourn the "catastrophe" - the term Palestinians use to describe the exile caused by Israel’s founding.
Both proposals by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party focus on the perceived disloyalty of the country’s Arab citizens, who form roughly one-fifth of the population. The legislation, which must still pass several hurdles to win final approval, drew harsh criticism from opposition legislators and civil rights groups.
Yisrael Beitenu swept to third place in recent parliamentary elections with a message that suggested Israel’s Arabs were an internal threat to the country. It is a senior partner in the coalition government. The loyalty oath was one of its main campaign pledges.
The new legislation would make citizenship contingent on an oath of loyalty to Israel as a "Jewish, Zionist and democratic state," party spokesman Tal Nahum said. The bill would also allow the government to revoke the citizenship of anyone who does not comply or perform some form of military or national service.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has yet to express a position on the matter.
[…]
The bills appear not have the support necessary to win parliamentary approval. Nonetheless, they drew furious reactions from Arab parties and civil rights groups. Arab lawmaker Hana Swaid called Miller’s bill "racist," saying it "eliminates the right of Palestinian Arab citizens to pronounce their identity and national feelings."
Panama
9) Obama Delays Panama Trade Pact After Unions Object
Mark Drajem and Eric Sabo, Bloomberg, May 21
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aHclwpTOYGmU
A U.S. trade accord with Panama, which is opposed by labor unions, won’t be submitted to Congress for approval until President Barack Obama offers a new "framework" for trade, an administration official said.
The decision, announced by Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Everett Eissenstat at a Senate Finance Committee hearing today, is a reversal from statements in March that the U.S. wanted to pass the accord soon. Eissenstat said today the administration wants to outline how trade fits with other priorities such as assistance for unemployed workers and health care.
"It’s clear that trade agreements in the last few years have been much too divisive," Eissenstat told the panel. "We want to make sure that Panama doesn’t contribute to that divisiveness."
Trade accords with Panama, Columbia and South Korea were reached by President George W. Bush and are awaiting congressional approval. Unlike the other two deals, Panama is "relatively non-controversial," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said April 22.
Both chambers of Congress must approve legislation implementing the tariff cuts and investment rules before the accords can take effect. A delay for Panama may also postpone accords with Colombia and South Korea.
Eissenstat’s comments follow remarks by John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO labor federation, that unions would oppose a rush to ratify the deal. Also today, 55 House Democrats told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reject the Panama accord unless it is renegotiated.
Colombia
10) U.N. refugee agency concerned about Colombia threats
Associated Press, Fri, May. 22, 2009
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/AP/story/1060623.html
The U.N. refugee agency said Friday it is concerned about a wave of death threats in Colombia against human rights workers and social activists.
One armed group distributed pamphlets around the country this week threatening to kill government officials and activists, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.
UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic declined to name the group for security reasons. "We can’t use the name of the group because we would put our own staff at risk," he said.
Targets of the threats include Colombia’s national office charged with overseeing human rights abuses in the country, UNHCR said. Colombia has 3 million internal refugees from years of conflict between government forces and armed groups, the Geneva-based agency said.
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Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
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