Cuaderno De Documentacion

SECRETARIA DE ESTADO DE ECONOMÍA,

MINISTERIO SECRETARÍA GENERAL DE POLÍTICA ECONÓMICA DE ECONOMÍA Y ECONOMÍA INTERNACIONAL Y HACIENDA SUBDIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE ECONOMÍA INTERNACIONAL

CUADERNO DE DOCUMENTACION

Número 94

ANEXO V

Alvaro Espina Vocal Asesor 12 Julio de 2011

ENTRE EL 1 Y EL 15 DE MAYO DE 2011(En sentido inverso)

0 MOISÉS NAÍM ¿Por qué Libia sí y Siria no? Los sirios desafían a los tanques sin más armas que sus deseos de cambio MOISÉS NAÍM 15/05/2011 ¿Cómo explicar que Estados Unidos y Europa estén bombardeando a Trípoli con misiles y a Damasco con palabras? ¿Por qué tanto empeño en sacar al brutal tirano libio del poder y tanto cuidado con su igualmente salvaje colega sirio? Comencemos por la respuesta más común (y errada): es por el petróleo. Libia tiene mucho y Siria, no. Y por tanto, según esta explicación, el verdadero objetivo de la agresión militar contra Libia son sus campos petroleros. Siria se salva por no tener mucho petróleo. El problema con esta respuesta es que, en términos de acceso garantizado al petróleo libio, Gadafi era una apuesta mucho más segura para Occidente que la situación de caos e incertidumbre que ha producido esta guerra. Las empresas petroleras de Occidente operaban muy bien con Gadafi. No necesitaban cambiar nada. Una segunda, y común, manera de contestar la pregunta es denunciando la hipocresía estadounidense: Washington nos tiene acostumbrados al doble rasero y a las contradicciones en sus relaciones internacionales. Esta tampoco es una respuesta muy útil, ya que no nos ayuda a entender las causas de estas contradicciones. ¿Qué protege, entonces al carnicero de Damasco de un tratamiento como el que le está siendo propinado a su homólogo Libio? Las razones humanitarias que justificaron el ataque contra Gadafi -el cual apoyé- son tanto o más validas en el caso de Siria. Tan sorprendente como la brutalidad genocida de la familia Asad es la suicida valentía de los sirios. Desde hace dos meses salen a las calles a enfrentarse a los tanques y las balas sin más armas que sus deseos de cambio. Los masacran, los torturan, encarcelan a sus familiares y, sin embargo... siguen las protestas. Aun en las ciudades asoladas por las atrocidades de los militares y las milicias civiles (las temidas shabia) y declaradas por el Gobierno "en calma" y "bajo control" la gente vuelve a las calles a protestar. Y los vuelven a masacrar. Mientras esto sucede, la reacción de Estados Unidos y Europa es, por decir lo menos, anémica. De nuevo: ¿por qué? 1. Porque Siria es militarmente más fuerte que Libia. Siria cuenta con una de las Fuerzas Armadas más numerosas, mejor equipadas y entrenadas de Oriente Próximo. También cuenta con armas químicas y biológicas y sus fuerzas paramilitares están entre las 13 más grandes del mundo. Este no era el caso de los militares libios, a quien Gadafi mantenía fragmentados y no muy bien equipados. 2. Fatiga. Libia agotó el poco apetito que quedaba en Estados Unidos para involucrarse en guerras que no fuesen motivadas por claras amenazas a sus intereses vitales. Los disidentes sirios pagan las consecuencias de las largas y costosas guerras de Estados Unidos en Afganistán e Irak y de la incursión en Libia. El apoyo militar de Washington a causas remotas será en adelante más limitado y selectivo. Y, en lo que a guerras se refiere, sin Washington Europa no existe. Esto deja muy solos a los heroicos disidentes sirios. 3. Los vecinos. Libia tiene de un lado a Egipto y del otro a Túnez, las joyas de la primavera árabe. Siria limita con Líbano, Israel, Irak, Jordania y Turquía. Está todo dicho. 2

4. Los aliados. Gadafi no tiene aliados y hasta sus propios hijos querían apartarle del poder. En una decisión sin precedentes, la Liga Árabe apoyó la intervención contra él. En cambio, Bachar el Asad tiene poderosos aliados dentro y fuera de la región, comenzando por Irán. Y, por tanto, Hezbolá y Hamás. Ni siquiera está claro que Benjamín Netanyahu y el Gobierno israelí prefieran una caótica transición en Siria o mantener a los Asad en el poder. Hasta la revista Vogue se sintió atraída por esta familia y le hizo un glorioso reportaje a Asma Asad: "La más fresca y magnética de las primeras damas... con sus ojos y cabellera castaños, largo cuello y gracia energizante". Es difícil bombardear a alguien así. 5. No tenemos a quién apoyar y no sabemos quiénes son. Hace poco, dos altos funcionarios de la Casa Blanca declararon que la débil respuesta de su Gobierno a los acontecimientos en Siria se debe en parte a que no tienen interlocutores válidos en la oposición. No saben con quién hablar. Otro alto funcionario estadounidense -que exigió el anonimato- me insistió en que, de caer el régimen sirio, el caos y las matanzas serían mucho peores de lo que ha sido en otros países árabes donde se ha dado una transición. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Libia/Siria/elpepiin1 t/20110515elpepiint_3/ Tes http://www.elpais.com/video2 s/internacional/crecimiento/America/Latina/depende/pase/ China/elpvidint/20110513elpepuint_2/Ves/

3 4 Mai14 Le «clan mafieux» des Ben Ali devant la justice tunisienne Première condamnation pour un neveu de l’ancien président, dont la famille est visée par 44 actions en justice

Auteur Isabelle Mandraud Il est le premier de la famille Ben Ali-Trabelsi à avoir été juge, et condamne. Imed Trabelsi, neveu de Leila Trabelsi, l’épouse de l’ancien président, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, a été condamné le 7 mai par le tribunal de Tunis à deux ans de prison et 2000 dinars d’amende (environ 1000 euros) pour…consommation de cannabis. Ses avocats français, Olivier Metzner et Benjamin Grundler, et Franco-Mauritanien, Jemal Ould Mohamed, et son conseil tunisien Wissem Saidi, ont fait appel. Leur client conteste les résultats du prélèvement urinaire réalisé après son arrestation, le 14 janvier, qui a révélé la trace de stupéfiants et la contre-expertise qui lui a été refusée. Ce n’est pas fini. Imed Trabelsi, 36 ans, homme d’affaires et ancien maire du port de La Goulette, l’une des figures les plus haies de l’ancien régime tunisien, doit faire face à trois autres procédures déclenchées le 26 janvier par le parquet de Tunis pour infraction aux droits de douane et change, trafic d’œuvres d’art et trafic d’armes. En France, l’enquête sur les biens détenus par la famille de l’ancien président déchu a abouti à la saisie de douze comptes appartenant à des proches. Imed Trabelsi possède l’un d’entre eux : 83000 euros déposés dans la succursale française de l’Union tunisienne de banques (UTB). Placé sous séquestre à la demande des autorités tunisiennes, ce compte, pour lequel le neveu du couple présidentiel affirme détenir les autorisations de la banque centrale de Tunis, a motivé sa mise en examen pour détournement de droits de douane et de change. Tout comme les 36 montres, certaines « serties de diamants», selon le rapport de police, d’un poids total de plus de 4 kg, trouvées sur lui le 14 janvier, alors qu’il s’apprêtait à prendre la fuite. Arrêté en fin d’après-midi dans le salon d’honneur de l’aéroport de Tunis-Carthage en même temps que d’autres membres de la famille, Imed Trabelsi est depuis lors incarcéré à la prison militaire de l’Aouina, où il partage la même cellule que son père, Nacer Trabelsi. Sa maison, proche du palais de Carthage, a été pillée. «Je voulais partir à l’étranger, je n’ai pas de billet, pas d’avion… Je cherche… », Avait-il alors expliqué. 4

L’accusation de trafic d’ouvres d’art concernerait la découverte à son domicile, saccage, d’une antiquité romaine. Mais celle relative au trafic d’armes est tombée: Imed Trabelsi ayant produit les licences nécessaires pour la détention de deux pistolets et de deux fusils de chasse trouvés chez lui par la foule qui avait envahi sa demeure, une ordonnance de non-lieu a été rendue. Moyennant quoi, ses avocats dénoncent un dossier «vide». «On veut le dépeindre comme un diable, un mafieux, mais il n’était pas le cœur du pouvoir », affirme Benjamin Grundler. «C’est l’ennemi public numéro un, on le charge de tout, mais il est très loin des autres [Trabelsi], renchérit Jemal Ould Mohamed. Il faut le juger pour ce qu’il a fait et seulement pour cela.» Pratique «familiale» Des arguments difficiles à faire valoir en Tunisie, où le neveu de l’ancien couple présidentiel est l’un des personnages les plus emblématiques de ce que les Tunisiens ne désignent plus que comme le «clan mafieux» qui a régné sur le pays. A tel point que l’audience du 20 avril avait du être reportée. Dans une ambiance surchauffée, en présence de la télévision, des dizaines d’avocats en robe, certains filmant la scène avec leur téléphone portable, scandaient «Perpétuité! Perpétuité !» avant le verdict, qui sera finalement rendu le 7 mai pour consommation de haschich. Connu pour ses frasques et ses excès, Imed Trabelsi l’était aussi pour sa façon de faire des affaires. A la tête d’une holding de dix sociétés, dont huit en activité, il avait été poursuivi en France après s’être approprie le yacht de Bruno Roger, un dirigeant de la banque Lazard, volé en 2006 en Corse. Un compromis ayant été trouvé entre les justices française et tunisienne – relaxe pour Imed Trabelsi et courte peine pour son cousin Moez Trabelsi –, ce dossier, toutefois, ne peut être rouvert sans charges nouvelles. Une autre plainte a été déposée en France, en mai 2010, par l’homme d’affaires Faouzi Mahbouli pour « extorsion avec menaces et violences». Détenteur de la franchise tunisienne de l’enseigne Bricorama, il avait dû céder sous la pression la quasi-totalité de ses parts à Imed Trabelsi. Une pratique familiale courante. Selon une information, non confirmée, M.Mahbouli aurait déposé plainte à Tunis cette fois pour «tentative d’assassinat» en France. En 2008, dans la région de Montpellier, il aurait été la cible d’un coup de feu alors qu’il se trouvait au volant de sa voiture. Reste que la commission mise en place à Tunis pour enquêter sur les affaires de corruption ne s’est pas encore manifestée. Premier juge, Imed Trabelsi ouvre ainsi le chapitre judiciaire de l’exercice du pouvoir par l’ancienne famille dominante: 44 actions en justice visent aujourd’hui l’ancien président, en fuite, et ses proches Le dossier de M. Ben Ali confié à la justice militaire La chambre d’accusation près la cour d’appel de Tunis a décidé, mercredi 11 mai, de déférer devant la justice militaire le dossier de l’ancien président Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, de son ancien ministre de l’intérieur et d’un haut cadre de la sécurité dont le nom n’a pas été précisé. Cette décision a été adoptée «conformément aux règles de la compétence d’attribution», précise le communiqué du ministère de la justice. L’ancien chef de l’Etat, qui vit réfugié en Arabie saoudite depuis sa fuite de Tunis le 14janvier, est visé par dix-huit actions en justice, notamment pour «complot contre la sûreté de l’Etat, homicide volontaire, usage et trafic de drogues». Des accusations passibles de la peine de mort selon le code pénal tunisien.

http://www.sentinelle-tunisie.com/soc5 iete/item/le-%C2%ABclan-mafieux%C2%BB- des-ben-ali-devant-la-justice-tunisienne 5

May 14, 2011 Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand. The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik

Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater6 Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom. Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times. The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro- democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year. The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials. In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion. The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.” Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department. Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years. The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment. For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments. Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name “Kingfish.” But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince’s central role. The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims. Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims. A Lucrative Deal Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion. Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.

The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start- up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said. Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince’s idea to build a foreign commando force for his country. Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials. He is also one of the region’s staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear program. “He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near- obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces,” said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its “pro-business” climate, he got another chance. Mr. Prince’s exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe. The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr. Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant. He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those who signed on as trainers — which eventually included more than 40 veteran American, European and South African commandos — did not know of Mr. Prince’s involvement, the former employees said. Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment. He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in “placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas,” according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.

Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks. To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government. Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses, which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign outside the suite has changed at least twice — it now says Assurance Management Consulting. While the documents — including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints — obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion’s possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment.” One document describes “crowd-control operations” where the crowd “is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones).” People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country’s sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country’s work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern. An Eye on Iran Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves. The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced. In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country’s security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its infrastructure.

Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince’s efforts to bolster the Emirates’ defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.’s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region. “As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.,” said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2’s work. The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. “The overall goal,” the contract states, “is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny.” But former employees said that R2’s leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law? Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities. But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops. Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion’s rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret? Imported Soldiers The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a 13-year veteran of Colombia’s National Police force named Calixto Rincón, 42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and seeing a new part of the world. “We were practically an army for the Emirates,” Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. “They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia.” Mr. Rincón’s visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed him to move through customs and immigration7 without being questioned. He soon found himself in the midst of the camp’s daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. “We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises,” Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training. R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their

American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups. But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. “We didn’t have permission to even look through the door,” Mr. Rincón said. “We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere.” The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians’ military skills fell far below expectations. “Some of these kids couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon. Rethinking Roles As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as “advisers” during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said. Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia, while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct. And R2’s own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks. To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for staging coup attempts or suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops. But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion’s size was reduced to about 580 men. Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince’s next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a “real world mission.” That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment. On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the evening with prostitutes. Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington http://www.nytimes.com/2011/8 05/15/world/middleeast/15prince.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

May 14, 2011 ‘I Am a Man’

By THOMAS9 L. FRIEDMAN Watching the Arab uprisings these days leaves me with a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach. The smile comes from witnessing a whole swath of humanity losing its fear and regaining its dignity. The pit comes from a rising worry that the Arab Spring may have been both inevitable and too late. If you are not feeling both these impulses, you’re not paying attention. The smile? A Libyan friend remarked to me the other day that he was watching Arab satellite TV out of Benghazi, Libya, and a sign held aloft at one demonstration caught his eye. It said in Arabic: “Ana Rajul” — which translates to “I am a man.” If there is one sign that sums up the whole Arab uprising, it’s that one. As I’ve tried to argue, this uprising, at root, is not political. It’s existential. It is much more Albert Camus than Che Guevara. All these Arab regimes to one degree or another stripped their people of their basic dignity. They deprived them of freedom and never allowed them to develop anywhere near their full potential. And as the world has become hyper-connected, it became obvious to every Arab citizen just how far behind they were — not only to the West, but to China, India and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This combination of being treated as children by their autocrats and as backward by the rest of the world fueled a deep humiliation, which shows up in signs like that one in Libya, announcing to no one in particular: “I am a man” — I have value, I have aspirations, I want the rights everyone else in the world has. And because so many Arabs share these feelings, this Arab Spring is not going to end — no matter how many people these regimes kill. It is novelists, not political scientists, who can best articulate this mood. Raymond Stock, who teaches Arabic at Drew University in Madison, N.J., is writing a biography of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. In an essay published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stock pointed out how Mahfouz foreshadowed so many of the feelings driving the Arab Spring in his novel “Before the Throne.” There, Mahfouz puts in the mouth of a rebel firebrand, defending his revolution against the pharaoh, words that could have been heard on any afternoon in Tahrir Square this year: “We have endured agonies beyond what any human can bear. When our ferocious anger was raised against the rottenness of oppression and darkness, our revolt was called chaos, and we were called mere thieves. Yet it was nothing but a revolution against despotism, blessed by the gods.” But that also explains that pit in the stomach. These Arab regimes have been determined to prevent any civil society or progressive parties from emerging under their rule. So when these regimes break at the top, the elevator goes from the palace straight to the mosque. There is nothing else in between — no legitimate parties or institutions. So outsiders face a cruel dilemma: Those who say America should have stood by Hosni Mubarak, or should not favor toppling Bashar al-Assad in Syria — in the name of 12

stability — forget that their stability was built on the stagnation of millions of Arabs, while the rest of the world moved ahead. The Arab people were not offered Chinese autocratic stability: We take your freedom and give you education and a rising standard of living. Their deal was Arab autocratic stability: We take your freedom and feed you the Arab-Israeli conflict, corruption and religious obscurantism. But to embrace the downfall of these dictators — as we must — is to advocate leveling a rotten building with no assurance that it can be rebuilt. That is what happened in Iraq, and it was hugely expensive for us to rebuild a new, and still tenuous, order there. No outsider is going to do that again. So to embrace the downfall of these dictators is to hope that their own people can come together to midwife democracy in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya. But here one must honestly ask: Is the breakdown in these societies too deep for anyone to build anything decent out of? Was the Arab Spring both inevitable and too late? My answer: It’s never too late, but some holes are deeper than others, and we are now seeing that the hole Arab democrats have to climb out of is really, really deep. Wish them well. Again, Stock points us to a passage in Mahfouz’s “Before the Throne,” which is a novel in which each Egyptian leader challenges his successor. In this case, Mustafa al-Nahhas, the head of the liberal Wafd Party, which was crushed when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a military coup in 1952, berates Nasser for eroding Egypt’s constitutional heritage. “Those who launched the 1919 Revolution were people of initiative and innovation in ... politics, economics and culture,” Nahhas tells Nasser. “How your highhandedness spoiled your most pristine depths! See how education was vitiated, how the public sector grew depraved! How your defiance of the world’s powers led you to horrendous losses and shameful defeats! You never sought the benefit of another person’s opinion ... And what was the result? Clamor and cacophony, and an empty mythology — all heaped on a pile of rubble.” THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN ‘I Am a Man’ May 14, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/11 5friedman.html?nl=todaysheadlines&em c=tha212

May 13, 2011 Captive Soldiers Tell of Discord in Libyan Army

By C.1 J. CHIVERS

MISURATA, Libya — The army and militias of Col. Muammar1 el-Qaddafi, who for more than two months have fought rebels seeking to overthrow the Libyan leader, are undermined by self-serving officers, strained logistics and units hastily reinforced with untrained cadets, according to captured soldiers from their ranks. In interviews this week in a rebel-run detention center where more than 100 prisoners from the Libyan military are housed, the prisoners consistently described hardships in the field and officers who deceived or failed them. They spoke bitterly of their lot. While some showed signs of mistreatment or of making statements to ingratiate themselves with their captors, the accounts of their logistical and tactical problems portrayed a Libyan force suffering from growing problems in a war that began as a mismatch, settled into stalemate and has recently shown signs of rebel advance. On one hand, Libyan military units and militias went to war with clear material and organizational advantages, equipped with tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, rockets and vast stores of munitions. They arrived to battle with trained snipers and mortar, rocket and artillery crews. On the other, the Libyan Defense Ministry thickened the ranks with veterans recalled to duty in poor physical condition and cadets with almost no combat training or experience. Then, after facing weeks of airstrikes and a growing rebel force, some of these units were cut off, prisoners said, and officers betrayed the rank and file. “The commanders told us, ‘Stay here and we will be back with more ammunition,’ ” said a cadet who claimed to have been pressed into service as an untrained infantryman last month, and was assigned to the fight for this city’s center. “But they did not come back, and the rebels surrounded us and we had to put down our weapons and quit.” The prisoners’ identities, which were provided by the interviewees, have been withheld to protect them and their families from retaliation. The cadet, who had a shaved head and slender hands protruding from a long black robe, described many forms of disappointment in the Qaddafi military. At the start of the war, he said, he was a second-year cadet, and was told by his instructors that he must go serve. His and his classmates’ first mission, he said, was to search vehicles and check identification cards at one of the country’s myriad checkpoints. There were 11 cadets at the gate of the town where he was assigned, he said.

“After a while they came and said 11 at the gate is too much,” he said. “And they took six of us and gave us Kalashnikovs and took us into Misurata.”

That was in April, when Misurata was the center of Libya1 ’s most pitched fight, a block- by-block contest that cost the lives of hundreds of men on both sides. Inside the city, he said, he found he was in an unknown neighborhood, hidden with others in an apartment building as rebel fighters pressed near and the Libyan Army’s lines of logistics were slowly but persistently severed behind them. Other prisoners described constant deception by their officers. One prisoner, a member of the 32 Reinforced Brigade of Armed People, a unit often called elite and which is led by Khamis Qaddafi, one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, said he was the third contingent of the brigade to be sent from Tripoli to Misurata. The third group was sent, he said, after the first two suffered heavy casualties. He was assigned to the insurance building, a tall office complex that gained notoriety among rebels for the snipers who watched over the streets from its many windows. The captured soldier, scarred on the hand and wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt that read “King of the Town,” said his officers lied to him throughout, telling him he had been sent to put down a foreign-inspired jihad. “When we came here we heard the fighters shouting all the time, ‘Allahu akbar!’ ” he said. “The officers told us the enemy was Al Qaeda and other terror groups from Syria and Tunisia. But we saw that they were Libyans.” The soldier said that he had not put on the uniform to kill Libyans, and, after listening to

Qaddafi mortar crews shell the city with cluster1 munitions, he slipped out of the building and hid in a shop. There he waited, he said, until he heard rebels nearby. Then he surrendered, turning over his rifle and two grenades. Other prisoners described being summoned back to duty after leaving the army two years ago, and finding once they went to battle that there were delays in evacuating the army’s wounded. One man said that in the fight for Benghazi Street, one of the city’s former fronts, three of his friends were killed and three were wounded. The wounded, he said, were bandaged and waited three or four days for a ride out. The detention center that serves as these prisoners’ current home was, until recent weeks, one of Misurata’s public schools. The prisoners live in classrooms in groups of 15 or 20. The school has running water, and part of its courtyard is a kitchen, where the prisoners cook for themselves. The prisoners sleep on mattresses and have blankets, one set of clothes and little else beyond basic toiletries. They also have religious pamphlets and Korans, provided by the de facto warden, a sheik who said that though Misurata was enraged at Colonel Qaddafi, some of these men were pressed unwillingly into service and must be treated with decency and respect. Not all of them have been. Though in private those interviewed said they had been treated well since coming under the sheik’s care, and that the rebels now treated them

well, many had been beaten severely at capture, by largely untrained rebels who had suffered in the siege and who knew little of the laws of war. Several had also been shot through the front of the feet — a crime that was practiced by some rebels at the time these men were captured, apparently designed to keep the prisoners from resisting or running away. There were signs that prison life influenced what these men were willing to say. When six different prisoners were asked separately and in private about how their feet were wounded, each of them gave evasive answers, including two who said, simply but uncomfortably, “I forgot.” In all, at least 138 prisoners were here at the middle of the week, and at least 89 others were at another center. These were the prisoners the Misurata rebels had thus far publicly acknowledged up the point that the city’s airport fell; the number now is almost certainly larger. Two rooms held the wounded — including men with infected limbs, a badly burned young man with dried blood caked to his teeth and one older soldier whose left leg had been amputated. Though their dressings appeared new, the conditions of some of these men were dire. All of the prisoners acknowledged thus far were listed as Libyan citizens, prison officials said, though it was not clear if this was because every Qaddafi soldier captured was Libyan, or if any foreign fighters had been handled elsewhere.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/051 /14/world/africa/14prisoners.html?nl=todaysheadl ines&emc=tha2

1 Los rebeldes libios no consiguen el reconocimiento oficial de la Casa Blanca El responsable de Exteriores del Consejo Nacional de Transición también ha pedido a Washington ayuda económica.- Obama se reúne con Rasmussen para evaluar la misión de la OTAN en Libia

Mahmud Yibril comparece ante la prensa junto al senador John Kerry el 11 de mayo.- CHIP SOMODEVILLA (AFP) AGENCIAS - Washington - 14/05/2011 Una delegación de los rebeldes libios, encabezada por su responsable de Exteriores, Mahmud Yibril, se ha reunido el viernes en Washington con altos funcionarios de la Casa Blanca para pedir que el Consejo Nacional de Transición, su órgano de Gobierno, sea reconocido diplómaticamente, y para soliticar ayuda económica para su causa. EE UU les ha recibido como "un interlocutor legítimo y creíble", pero sin llegar a expresar un reconocimiento oficial como representantes legítimos del pueblo libio, como pedían ellos, según AFP. Otros países, como Francia1 , Italia, Catar1 y Gambia, sí lo han hecho. Tom Donilon, consejero de Seguridad de la Casa Blanca, ha aplaudido -en un comunicado emitido tras la reunión con Yibril- "el compromiso del Consejo con una transición política incluyente y un futuro democrático para Libia". En el encuentro se ha abordado "cómo EE UU y la coalición [de países aliados] pueden aportar apoyo adicional al Consejo de Transición", pero no han trascendido más detalles sobre su conversación.

Lo que sí ha hecho Washington es insistir una vez más en que Muamar1 el Gadafi, el dirigente de Libia, "ha perdido su ligitimidad para gobernar" y debe abandonar el poder de inmediato. Yibril había apuntado en un artículo de opinión enviado a The New York Times, que el reconocimiento diplomático "aislaría aún más al régimen de Gadafi en Trípoli, aumentaría la moral de la oposición y mejoraría el acceso a la ayuda humanitaria y diplomática".

"Lo que necesitamos es que la gente entienda nuestra causa y nos ayude a conseguir nuestros derechos legítimos", ha reivindicado Yibril ante la prensa antes de la reunión. También advirtió de que la falta de fondos podría poner en peligro sus objetivos. Jay Carney, portavoz de la Casa Blanca, ha recordado que el Gobierno estadounidense colabora con los rebeldes modificando las leyes actuales para que se les pueda ceder los activos bloqueados del régimen, que en EE UU son unos 30.000 millones de dólares (21.112 millones de euros). Obama se reúne con Rasmussen Barack Obama, el presidente estadounidense, se reunió en la mañana del viernes con Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretario general de la OTAN, para evaluar el desarrollo de la 2misión militar de la Alianza Atlántica en Libia. Ambos se han mostrado "de acuerdo en que las operaciones de la OTAN ha salvado vidas y en tanto el régimen de Gadafi continúe atacando a la población, la OTAN mantendrá su misión para proteger a los civiles", según ha informado la Casa Blanca tras la reunión. Los medios de comunicación oficiales libios han denunciado el viernes que 11 civiles, la mayoría de ellos clérigos, han muerto y otros 45 han resultado heridos en un ataque aéreo de la Alianza sobre la ciudad de Brega, en el este. La OTAN ha aclarado que su objetivo era "un búnker de mando y control", pero ha añadido que aunque no ha podido confirmar la muerte de los civiles, siente "cualquier muerte de civiles inocentes cuando estas ocurren".

La televisión oficial libia ha emitido también un 2mensaje de audio de Gadafi que pretende acabar con los rumores de que estaba herido o muerto, tras2 casi dos semanas de ausencia en la televisión oficial de su país, desde la2 muerte de su hijo en un bombardeo. "Estoy en un lugar en el que no podéis encontrarme", le ha dicho el dictador a los alidados. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaciona2 l/rebeldes/libios/consiguen/reconocimiento/ oficial/Casa/Blanca/elpepuint/20110514elpepuint_1/Tes

Los2 rebeldes denuncian una nueva ofensiva de las tropas de Gadafi para controlar el puerto de Misrata

Gadafi2 reaparece en televisión días después de la muerte de su hijo

La2 UE abrirá una oficina en Bengasi para apoyar a los rebeldes

Obama2 respaldará de forma inequívoca las protestas en el mundo árabe

Más2 de 1.200 inmigrantes llegan a la isla de Lampedusa en apenas 12 horas

Oscuro3 asesinato de un exmilitar francés en Bengasi

La3 primavera árabe se tiñe de sangre

3 La primavera árabe se tiñe de sangre Las revueltas populares que desataron la ola de cambio en Túnez y Egipto se encallan en un proceso largo y violento en Libia, Siria y el golfo Pérsico Irán y Arabia Saudí son los que mueven su dinero y sus peones en la región Erdogan, héroe en El Cairo, prefiere ahora "preservar la unidad de Siria" ENRIC GONZÁLEZ - Jerusalén - 14/05/2011 La primavera árabe ha costado ya mucha sangre. Y todo apunta a que este es solo el principio de un proceso largo y violento. Libia3 sufre una guerra civil que la intervención extranjera no ha decantado hacia los rebeldes; Siria3 permanece encallada en un círculo de protestas y represión y corre el riesgo de una implosión sectaria de tipo libanés;

Bahréin3 ha sido tomada por tropas saudíes; Yemen3 se hunde en el caos. Incluso Egipto3 , cuya revolución resultó relativamente modélica, padece convulsiones sociales y económicas de consecuencias imprevisibles. Los mismos factores que propiciaron la revuelta obstaculizan un desenlace más o menos pacífico de la misma. La explosión demográfica y la falta de expectativas de una juventud numerosísima, el declive económico, la ausencia de líderes en la oposición y de instituciones sólidas (algo que sí tiene Egipto) y la voluntad de perpetuación de unos regímenes tiránicos hacen difícil que las reivindicaciones básicas de la población árabe, resumibles en dignidad y libertad, puedan verse satisfechas. Los Gobiernos se han apresurado a atribuir la revuelta a grupos terroristas de inspiración religiosa "extranjera". En Bahréin, la familia real vio en las manifestaciones una conspiración chií (las protestas eran mayoritariamente chiíes porque estos musulmanes constituyen la clase menos privilegiada) y pidió3 ayuda militar al Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo, es decir, a Arabia Saudí, la gran potencia regional suní. Ya se ha anunciado que las tropas saudíes seguirán en el país incluso si el 1 de junio se levanta, como está previsto, el estado de emergencia. Eso es algo que Irán, el gigante chií y principal3 enemigo de los saudíes, califica de "ocupación". Religión e intereses geoestratégicos suelen ir unidos. Por encima de las batallas callejeras y de los disparos de las fuerzas de seguridad se libra otro conflicto, diplomático, por el control de la región. Con Estados Unidos casi en fuera de juego (sin alternativas para Libia o Siria, sin otro interés aparente que respaldar a saudíes e israelíes y preservar su base naval en Bahréin, sin credibilidad tras abandonar a su suerte a un aliado tan fiel como el egipcio Hosni4 Mubarak), Irán y Arabia Saudí son quienes mueven su dinero y sus peones: los Hermanos Musulmanes en el caso saudí, grupos como Hezbolá o Yihad Islámica en el caso iraní. Turquía, modelo de "islamismo democrático", venía desarrollando una hábil diplomacia acercándose al dúo Irán-Siria sin dañar sus relaciones con EE UU y Arabia Saudí y sin romper del todo con Israel. Ahora no sabe qué hacer. El temor a una ruptura del vecino sirio que diera alas a las aspiraciones nacionalistas de las minorías kurdas en Siria y

Turquía empujó ayer al primer ministro, Recep4 Tayyip Erdogan, a expresar su apoyo a El Asad porque lo fundamental era, dijo, "preservar la unidad e integridad de Siria". No

era lo que querían oír las masas árabes, que veían a Erdogan como un héroe desde que patrocinó la flotilla contra el bloqueo de Gaza. Siria constituye un caso paradigmático del abismo al que puede asomarse la región si, en efecto, la revuelta adquiere tonos religiosos y sectarios. El4 poder de la familia El Asad pudo consolidarse gracias a la fragmentación religiosa y social del país, que impedía la formación de movimientos opositores de ámbito nacional. La mayoría suní mantiene una tradición de tolerancia hacia las minorías (al menos en comparación con las matanzas perpetradas en países como Turquía o Líbano), pero cuesta creer, pese al cuidado de los manifestantes en no enarbolar banderas religiosas, que una eventual caída del régimen no desembocara ahora en conflictos con los chiíes alauíes y los cristianos que respaldan al Gobierno. El fantasma de la libanización podría hacerse realidad. Los asaltos con tanques y artillería a las ciudades de Deraa, Banias y Homs no impidieron que ayer, en un nuevo4 viernes de ira popular, se reprodujeran las manifestaciones y los disturbios. El Gobierno de Bachar el Asad había anunciado que las fuerzas de seguridad no iban a disparar esta vez contra la multitud, pero al menos tres personas murieron en Homs. Fue un viernes, pese a ello, menos sangriento que los anteriores. También Egipto es una incógnita. La economía se ha desplomado (el Gobierno estima que desde el inicio de la revuelta se han perdido 3.500 millones de dólares por la caída del turismo y el aumento de los intereses sobre la deuda), las continuas huelgas mantienen la producción semiparalizada y reafloran las viejas inquinas entre4 suníes salafistas y cristianos coptos. La caída de Mubarak proporcionó más libertad (incluso bajo una dictadura militar de transición), pero ha complicado las condiciones de vida. El último gran interrogante es el palestino, cuyas dos grandes facciones teóricamente reconciliadas incorporan la batalla estratégica regional (Fatah está con los saudíes, Hamás con los iraníes) y cuya aspiración de conseguir, a partir de septiembre, un Estado propio, podría degenerar en frustración y violencia en caso de concluir, como parece posible, en un fracaso.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/p4 rimavera/arabe/tine/sangre/elpepuint/201 10514elpepiint_9/Tes

4 0 5/13/2011 03:34 PM Terrorists Have Rights Too What International Law Says about the Killing of Bin Laden The elimination of al-Qaida figurehead Osama bin Laden earlier this month was widely celebrated. But was it the right thing for the US to do? International law expert Kai Ambos argues that killing him was both illegal and morally dubious. Terrorists, even Osama bin Laden, are humans. As such, they have rights; human rights. Among these rights are the right to life, the right to humane treatment and the right to a fair trial. Fundamental human rights remain valid even in a state of emergency; they are impervious to such exceptions. In peacetime, the right to life can only be limited in extraordinary circumstances, in particular by reason of self defense. If it is true that Osama bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot, self defense in response to an unlawful attack on the part of entering US Special Forces can be ruled out. Clearly, such an operation takes place under extreme pressure and it is conceivable that the Special Forces acted on the mistaken belief that they were under attack by bin Laden or his people -- criminal lawyers call this "putative self defense" -- but this would not make the killing lawful. It would only cast light on the mental state of the troops in question, and thus their culpability. Yet, these soldiers are especially trained for such an operation, they are the elite of the elite. If we cannot demand restraint in the use of force from them, then we can't demand it from anybody -- not from the ordinary policeman in the street nor from the citizen defending his life or home. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that they shot bin Laden out of fear or by mistake. Rather they knew perfectly well what they were doing and killed him wantonly and willingly. Why Are Al-Qaida Criminals Treated Differently? Here is the problem. A targeted killing of a terrorist does not, contrary to what US President Barack Obama has suggested, do a service to justice; rather, it runs contrary to it. A state governed by the rule of law, treats even its enemies humanely. It arrests terrorists and brings them before a court. This is exactly what Germany did with the Red Army Faction (RAF) and what it does today with al-Qaida members. This is what the US did in Nuremberg with the Nazis and what it promotes all over the world with other criminals against mankind. Why are the criminals of al-Qaida treated differently? Should their guilt be established by way of a fair trial, they can be punished with severe sentences, including in some countries like the US, with the death penalty. The trial must come first, though. A killing in the absence of a fair trial constitutes an extrajudicial or extra-legal execution, which is unworthy of states that uphold the rule of law (Rechtsstaat). Indeed, it is an act for which countries that do not abide by the rule of law (Unrechtsstaaten) are charged before human rights bodies. Those who carry out or approve such extra-judicial killings forfeit the right to reproach authoritarian states for the very same practices.

War, i.e. an "armed conflict" under International Humanitarian Law, presents a different legal situation. In such circumstances, people can lawfully be killed when they directly participate in hostilities. The prohibition on killing is suspended in international armed conflicts for combatants and in non-international armed conflicts for so-called fighters or de facto combatants. These actors can, under specific conditions, also be the subjects of targeted killings. The most important condition is that the principle of proportionality is complied with, i.e. less severe measures (such as arrest) are to be preferred and unnecessary civilian victims must be avoided. If a targeted killing occurs in foreign territory, the territorial state must consent to the operation; otherwise the action amounts to a violation of state sovereignty, prohibited by Public International Law. The Misleading Rhetoric of the "War on Terror" None of the United Nations Security Council resolutions on the fight against international terrorism, and in particular al-Qaida (Res. 1267 of 1999 to Res. 1974 of 2011), authorize the carrying out of operations on foreign territory, nor the arrest, and even less the killing, of (suspected) terrorists. These resolutions can, at best, be read, in line with the various Terrorism Conventions, as allowing the extradition or prosecution (aut dedere aut iudicare) of terrorism suspects. In the case at hand, the targeted killing was not permitted since the US -- contrary to the misleading rhetoric of "the war on terror" -- is not involved in an armed conflict with al- Qaida. A loose and decentralized terrorist network does not fulfil the criteria for classification as a party to a conflict within the context of International Humanitarian Law. It lacks, above all, a centralized and hierarchical military command structure and the control of a defined territory. Were we nevertheless to proclaim an international armed conflict against al-Qaida, the whole world would become a battlefield and the classic understanding of an armed conflict as being on a defined state territory and thus involving limited military confrontation, would be extended so as to know no bounds. While one cannot deny that armed conflicts can entail "spill over effects," such as via the retreat of one of the parties to the conflict into the territory of a neighboring state (as, for example, occurred when the Taliban fled from Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan), the extra-territorial reach of such conflicts always reverts back to the original territorial armed conflict. Ultimately, this would lead to a worldwide "war on terror" involving all states where "terrorists" reside without them ever having entered into a formal armed conflict with the state waging this war. Indeed, this has been the position of the US government since Sept. 11, 2001. To the disappointment of many, the Obama administration has forcefully reconfirmed this position by killing bin Laden and by the killing of many alleged al-Qaida members (and civilians) before him by the increased use of predator drones. Triumphing over the Terrorist Injustice One may be able to understand this position in the light of Sept., 11 and what it did to the self-esteem of the US, the world's only superpower, humiliated as never before. But does this justify carrying out a policy which deliberately sidesteps the recognized principles of international humanitarian law?

Lastly, even if one wanted, for the sake of argument, to suppose the existence of an armed conflict between the US and al-Qaida, only those directly involved in the hostilities could be subject to military attack. They themselves must carry out military operations, command such operations or authoritatively plan them. They must further carry out a "continuous combat function." This is also in no way certain as regards bin Laden, since many believe he was only the spiritual leader of al-Qaida and had no influence on concrete military operations. The video footage recently released by the US seems to confirm this view. Beyond these complex and indeed contentious legal questions, lies the much more fundamental issue as to whether the Western world really wants to deprive their terrorist enemies of their right to life and other fundamental human rights and declare them military fair game. To ask the question is to answer it in the negative. The moral and political superiority of a free and democratic society dictates that it treats its enemies as persons with minimal rights and does not do as the enemy does -- act with barbarism and contempt for mankind. It does not wage "war" against terrorists, but combats them with a fair and proportional criminal law, in line with the rule of law. This does not exclude the use of force and even the killing of terrorists as ultima ratio but only respecting the rules and conditions set out above. This alone ensures the kind of justice that has been promoted particularly by the US since Nuremberg -- a kind of justice which many of us thought President Obama had resuscitated. This is the only foundation from which we can triumph over the terrorist injustice.

URL: http://www.spiegel.de/internatio4 nal/world/0,1518,762417,00.html Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• Interview4 with Richard Clarke: 'Capturing Bin Laden Was Not One of Their Big Priorities' (05/10/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761458,00.html4

• Ottrando's5 Tears: A New York Fireman and Osama's Death (05/10/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761526,00.html5

• German5 Jihad: Homegrown Terror Takes on New Dimensions (05/09/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/internati5 onal/germany/0,1518,761391,00.html

• The5 Search for Bin Laden's Cave: Fifteen Minutes of Fame for a Tiny Pakistani Village (05/09/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761436,00.html5

• Interview5 with Head of German Intelligence: 'Al-Qaida Faces Difficult Times Ahead' (05/09/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/internati5 onal/germany/0,1518,761374,00.html

• 'A5 Time of Great Testing for Al-Qaida': Bin Laden's Death and the Future of Violent Jihad (05/08/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,760938,00.html5

• Interview6 with Terrorism Expert Bruce Riedel: 'The Battle for the Soul of Pakistan Has Begun' (05/07/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761049,00.html6

• US-Pakistani6 Relations: A Forced Marriage Plagued by Ever-Deepening Distrust (05/07/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761190,00.html6

• Interview6 with Former Bush Adviser Andrew Card: 'Obama Has Pounded His Chest a Little Too Much' (05/07/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761162,00.html6

• Outdated6 Ideologies: Does Bin Laden's Death Mark the End of Jihadism? (05/07/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761177,00.html6

• America's6 Inscrutable Partner: Pakistan, Bin Laden and the Fight against Terror (05/04/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,760515,00.html6 23

May 12, 2011 Crime Wave in Egypt Has People Afraid, Even the Police By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK CAIRO — The neighbors watched helplessly from behind locked gates as an exchange of gunfire rang out at the police station. Then about 80 prisoners burst through the station’s doors — some clad only in underwear, many brandishing guns, machetes, even a fire extinguisher — as the police fled. “The police are afraid,” said Mohamed Ismail, 30, a witness. “I am afraid to leave my neighborhood.”

Three months after the ouster of Hosni7 Mubarak, a crime wave in Egypt7 has emerged as a threat to its promised transition to democracy. Businessmen, politicians and human rights activists say they fear that the mounting disorder — from sectarian strife to soccer riots — is hampering a desperately needed economic recovery or, worse, inviting a new authoritarian crackdown. At least five attempted jailbreaks have been reported in Cairo in the past two weeks, at least three of them successful. Other attempts take place “every day,” a senior Interior Ministry official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly.

Newspapers brim with other episodes: the7 Muslim-Christian riot that raged last weekend with the police on the scene, leaving 12 dead and two churches in flames; a kidnapping for ransom of a grandniece of President Anwar el-Sadat; soccer fans who crashed7 a field and mauled an opposing team as the police disappeared; a mob attack in an upscale suburb, Maadi, that hospitalized a traffic police officer; and the abduction of another officer by Bedouin tribes in the Sinai. “Things are actually going from bad to worse,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, the former international atomic energy official, now a presidential candidate. “Where have the police and military gone?” The answer, in part, is the revolution’s legacy. Public fury at police abuses helped set off the protests, which destroyed many police stations. Now police officers who knew only swagger and brute force are demoralized. In an effort to restore confidence after the sectarian riot last weekend, the military council governing the country until elections scheduled for September announced that 190 people involved would be sent to military court, alarming a coalition of human rights advocates. After an emergency cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf reiterated a pledge he made before the riots: The government backed the police in using all legal procedures, “including the use of force,” to defend themselves, their police stations, or places of worship.

It was an extraordinary statement for a prime minister, in part because the police were already expected to do just that. “This may be the first time a government ever had to say that it was fully supporting its police,” said Bahey el-din Hassan, director of the

Cairo7 Institute for Human Rights Studies. “It is an indication of the seriousness of the problem.” Many Egyptians, including at least one former police officer, contend that the police learned only one way to fight crime: brutality and torture. Now police officers see their former leader, Interior Minister Habib el-Adly, serving a 12-year prison term for corruption and facing another trial for charges of unlawful killing. Scores of officers are in jail for their role in repressing the protests. “They treated people like pests, so imagine when these pests now rise up, challenge them and humiliate them,” said Mahmoud Qutri, a former police officer who wrote a book criticizing the force. “They feel broken.” Mr. Hassan, who has spent his career criticizing the police, said he sympathized. Police officers who defended their stations from protesters are in jail, while those who went home to bed are not facing any trial, he said. “So the police are asking, ‘What is expected of us?’ It is a very logical question, and the problem is they don’t have an answer,” he said, blaming higher authorities. Shopkeepers say the police used to demand goods for just half the price. Now, said Mr. Ismail, the witness to the police station jailbreak, the officers who visit his cellphone shop murmur “please” and pay full price. “The tables have turned,” he said. The change in public attitudes is equally stunning, said Hisham A. Fahmy, chief executive of the American7 Chamber of Commerce in Egypt. “It’s: ‘Talk to me properly! I am a citizen!’ ” The spike in crime is a remarkable contrast to life in the Mubarak police state, when violent street crime was a relative rarity and few feared to walk alone at night. “Now it is like New York,” said Mr. Fahmy, adding that his group, which advocates for international companies, had been urging military leaders to respond more vigorously. At a soccer match pitting a Cairo team against a Tunisian team, police officers ringed the field until a referee made a call against an Egyptian goalie. Then the officers seemed to vanish as a mob of fans assaulted the referee and the visiting team. Five players were injured, two of them hospitalized, and the referee fled. “When the violence erupted, the police just disappeared,” said Mourad Teyeb, a Tunisian journalist who covered the game. The one policeman he found told him, “I don’t care, I don’t assume any responsibility,” Mr. Teyeb said, adding that he feared for his life and hid in the Egyptian team’s dressing room. Some see a conspiracy. “I think it is deliberate,” said Dr. Shady al-Ghazaly Harb, an organizer of the Tahrir Square protests, contending that officials were pulling back to invite chaos and a crackdown. “I think there are bigger masterminds at work.” Interior Ministry officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the security situation, said the destruction of police stations had contributed to the disorder. The remaining stations are overcrowded with prisoners from other facilities. Of the 80 escapees from the police station, 60 have been recaptured, an officer said. 25

Mansour el-Essawy, the new interior minister, has called the lawlessness an inevitable legacy of the revolution. Of the 24,000 prisoners who escaped during the revolution, 8,400 are still on the run, and 6,600 weapons stolen from government armories have not been recovered, he said in an interview with an Egyptian newspaper, Al Masry Al Youm. After the revolution, he said, the police justifiably complained of working 16-hour shifts for low pay. Bribery customarily made up for the low wages, critics say. So the ministry cut back the officers’ hours, and as a result also cut the number on duty at any time. And the sudden loss of prestige made it harder to recruit. “People are not stepping forward to join the police,” he complained. Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting. DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Crime Wave in Egypt Has People Afraid, Even the Police May 12, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/7 middleeast/13egypt.html?_r=1&nl=todaysh eadlines&emc=tha2

May 12, 2011 What the Libyan Resistance Needs By MAHMOUD GEBRIL ELWARFALLY IN late February, as the Libyan opposition gained strength, the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi predicted there would be “rivers of blood” and “hundreds of thousands of dead” because of the uprising. At the time, little stood between him and this chilling threat. But thanks to decisive action from the United States and the international community, the pulse of freedom still beats strong in opposition-controlled areas of Libya. Even while fighting for our lives, we have begun to put the building blocks in place for a free society. The interim government, the Transitional National Council, has managed to fight a war, keep the lights on and reopen the schools. The people of Benghazi, the base of our struggle, are participating in traffic control and trash collection, and creating newspapers and radio stations that reflect the new spirit of tolerance and freedom. Policies are debated passionately in open forums. All of this would have been unthinkable three months ago. The council’s 31 members — lawyers, human rights advocates, former military officers and business owners — come from all regions of Libya. Many, like me, were educated in the United States. In our march to freedom, we are strengthened by a belief in peace, justice and equality. The dark days of Colonel Qaddafi’s rule have taught us that a free and democratic society based on a fair and transparent justice system is the only way forward. We will work to ensure that the peaceful transfer of power occurs through ballot boxes and legal institutions. The bedrock of our state will be a constitution written by the Libyan people and endorsed in a public referendum. The lives of too many innocent Libyans have already been lost. The council unequivocally condemns the killing of noncombatant Qaddafi loyalists. When the fighting stops, we will be faced with the difficult task of healing a nation traumatized by decades of violence. The council will not only create institutions based on the rule of law, but also begin a reconciliation process to unify Libyans on both sides of this conflict. We could not have gotten this far without the support of the United States and the international community. For this we are grateful. But Colonel Qaddafi must still be defeated and the key institutions of a new government must be created. For this we will need more help. During my visit to Washington this week, we are asking the Obama administration and Congress to do the following: INTENSIFY NATO OPERATIONS NATO saved our lives, but many Libyans remain in danger. With United States help, NATO needs to maintain the tempo of its actions and provide more support to protect civilians. Even though the opposition just succeeded in taking7 back the airport in Misurata, for example, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces continue to attack civilians and try to prevent the flow of aid into the city. OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZE THE COUNCIL We ask the United States to join France, Gambia, Italy and Qatar in recognizing the council as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people until free elections can be held. This signal would 27

further isolate the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli, heighten opposition morale and improve access to diplomatic and humanitarian assistance. ACCELERATE ACCESS TO FROZEN LIBYAN ASSETS In February, the United States froze $33 billion in assets that the Qaddafi regime had moved outside Libya. In

Rome last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton committed to7 releasing frozen funds or devising an alternative financing plan; this needs to happen expeditiously. Whether through loans, trust funds or other mechanisms, we desperately need this money to provide basic services and humanitarian assistance and to begin rebuilding Libya. SUSTAIN HUMANITARIAN AID The impressive American and international response helped avert an even greater humanitarian crisis. With thousands of displaced persons and widespread destruction, the need for assistance grows. We know it is our fight to win or lose, but there is also much at stake for the international community. If the Libyan revolution stalls or is defeated, a vindictive or resurgent Colonel Qaddafi and his regime will present the world with a greater danger than even Osama bin Laden. The faster the regime comes to an end, the better it will be for Libya and the safer it will be for the world. Mahmoud Gebril ElWarfally, interim prime minister of the Transitional National Council of the Libyan Republic, is the author of “Imagery and Ideology in U.S. Policy Toward Libya, 1969-1982.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/opinion/17 3elwarfally.html?nl=todaysheadlines&e mc=tha212

DÍAS DE CAOS EN YEMEN

Mayo8 2011 [3]

Lourdes8 Romero [4] La situación en Yemen es cada vez más complicada y la sombra de una guerra civil acecha. El miedo se ha apoderado del país que cuenta con conflictos internos, el terrorismo de Al Qaeda y graves problemas económicos. Yemen está estancado. El presidente del país, Alí Abdalá Saleh, no ha firmado, por ahora, el Plan del Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo (CCF), formado por Arabia Saudí, Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Kuwait, Bahréin, Catar y Omán. Este proyecto, que fue en un principio aprobado por el mandatario y la oposición, está basado en un documento elaborado por la embajada estadounidense en Saná, conocido como 30+60, que señala que en un máximo de 30 días el Parlamento debe aprobar la ley de inmunidad para Saleh. Además, éste debe entregar el poder al vicepresidente, que ha de asumir la jefatura de forma provisional hasta que convoque elecciones presidenciales en el plazo de 60 días.

AFP/Gettyimages

Ahora Saleh ha decido no plasmar su rúbrica porque hacerlo le convertiría en un líder derrocado por su pueblo, como le pasó a Mubarak y Ben Alí. Según ha declarado el ex primer ministro del país, Abdul Kareem al Eryani, "una semana o dos es lo máximo para superar esta crisis y poner al país en el camino correcto de una forma segura". Asimismo, ha asegurado que Saleh no ha firmado el acuerdo, porque no quiere hacerlo como jefe de Estado, sino como líder de su partido, para protegerse a sí mismo y al Gobierno.

No obstante, para los ciudadanos esto ha sido un gran golpe, al igual que para la oposición y los promotores extranjeros del proyecto. Los únicos que parecen haberse alegrado por la decisión del presidente ha sido el movimiento juvenil, precursor de las manifestaciones contra el mandatario yemení. Las calles de las principales capitales del país amenazan con volver a hospedar a miles de manifestantes –muchos armados-, que por el momento se han mostrado pacíficos, pero que no descartan optar por la agresión si Saleh arremete contra ellos. Recientemente, los jóvenes se han lanzado a la calle para rechazar abiertamente el plan propuesto por el CCG, con el mensaje directo de “no a la negociación, no al diálogo. Dimite o vete”. Y es que cuando parecía que después de tres meses de protestas, el país más pobre de la Península Arábiga podría encontrar una solución –para algunos- los impulsores de las revueltas han asegurado que este intento solo trata de “salvar al régimen y a sus allegados”. Sus demandas son que el Gobierno se vaya junto con los líderes de la oposición, porque ya no reflejan las necesidades y aspiraciones de la calle, exigen cambios democráticos y llevar a Saleh ante los tribunales. Sin embargo, ellos no están organizados y no tienen una figura clara que les represente. Cuando empezaron las protestas, a los manifestantes yemeníes pronto se les unió el Foro Común, formado por siete grupos opositores, que en un principio rechazaron el plan CCG, pero que después se sumaron a él, aun sabiendo las grandes dificultades que tendrían para convencer a los auténticos impulsores de las revueltas para que aceptaran el documento. Yemen se ha convertido en un auténtico polvorín. El país antes de sumarse a la primavera árabe, ya contaba con una muy difícil situación que se ha visto agravada por el contagio de las revueltas. El Estado yemení cuenta con escenarios más complejos que Túnez y Egipto que ponen en peligro su estabilidad desde hace tiempo. Sufre una grave crisis económica, un complicado sistema tribal, una pobreza incrustada -principalmente en el norte donde no llegan ni abastecimientos suficientes ni recursos sanitarios-, un movimiento separatista en el sur y una insurrección huthi en el norte. Además de la presencia palpable de Al Qaeda y un gran número de desplazados internos.

Además, la oposición no está cohesionada en su totalidad, porque no Las partes tienen un ojo puesto en todo el mundo está en contra del Libia y no quieren que suceda algo presidente. Exigen reformas, pero similar en Yemen muchos no hablan de la marcha del mandatario. Y ahora que parecía que estaban de acuerdo en firmar el pacto, eran muchas las voces opositoras en contra de la iniciativa extranjera por traicionar a la gente de la calle. No obstante, los últimos acontecimientos parecen mostrar que soldados e independentistas se han unido en contra de Saleh, algo antes totalmente insólito. Incluso, que Sur y Norte apoyen al movimiento de juventud. Según, Alí Naser Mohamed, antiguo presidente de Yemen del Sur, existe un riesgo de partición en el pueblo sólo si Saleh se queda en el poder. Por su parte, Haidar Abu Bakr al Attas, también antiguo mandatario en la zona, ha dejado de pedir la independencia para exigir

el cambio de régimen. Pero las preguntas serían: ¿están ahora unidos para separarse después? ¿No piden en el sur la independencia para pedirla más tarde? Lo único que está claro en Yemen es que el caos azota el país. Los tanques salen a las calles de Saná pero vuelven a sus posiciones rápidamente –parece un aviso del Gobierno-, las principales ciudades están siendo víctimas de atropellos entre ambos bandos, la sensación de inseguridad es constante, los ministerios están paralizados, hay embajadas que se han marchado -algunas como la española se fue pero ha regresado recientemente. Los enfrentamientos se han recrudecido y hasta ahora, según la organización International Crisis Group, 150 personas han muerto en el conflicto, aunque esta cifra puede ser mayor, dada la dificultad que se está teniendo para obtener información veraz. Los periodistas internacionales fueron expulsados del país y muy pocos medios extranjeros han conseguido el visado para poder retransmitir. Además, pocas organizaciones humanitarias pueden entrar para actuar en el terreno y socorrer a los civiles. El otro gran problema es la clara presencia de Al Qaeda. Yemen es la base más segura de los terroristas, todo el mundo sabe dónde están y qué hacen. Ahora con las revueltas y la visible situación de caos es un momento idóneo para que ellos puedan conseguir más poder y extenderse. Precisamente, la lucha contra el terrorismo era el argumento que el presidente Saleh utilizaba con las potencias internacionales para obtener dinero extranjero. Claramente, las partes tienen un ojo puesto en Libia y no quieren que suceda algo similar en Yemen, de lo contrario ya se hubieran enfrentado con mucha más fuerza. El problema libio está ralentizando a Yemen, porque realmente los ciudadanos están aterrorizados por el surgimiento de otro conflicto, que podría destruir totalmente al país. No obstante, la sombra de una guerra civil acecha e incluso cabría hablar de los microconflictos que se podrían desatar y dispersar territorialmente entre las tribus. Por ahora, el nuevo plan parece no convencer a nadie. Ni siquiera a las partes implicadas en él. Saleh porque exige inmunidad para él y su familia y conservar su fortuna, estimada en 50.000 millones de dólares (unos 34.000 millones de euros), además de irse con la cabeza alta. La oposición porque no se fía de las intenciones del presidente. Los países de la región precursores del plan como Arabia Saudí, Kuwait o Bahréin tienen sus propias revueltas. EE UU parece querer una salida rápida del dirigente, pero no sabe cómo actuar. Y mientras tanto las reformas no llegan, los manifestantes siguen en la calle, Al Qaeda campa a sus anchas y la violencia parece recrudecerse. La situación se ha estancado y la salida está todavía por ver, y más aún con el rechazo de Saleh, que lleva ya un tercio de siglo gobernando, a firmar el documento. Artículos relacionados

• Yemen:8 un terremoto fértil para Al Qaeda. [5] Edward Burke

• Yemen:8 bienvenidos a 'Qaedastán'. [6] Gregory Johnsen

• Yemen,8 el conflicto olvidado [7] Javier Martín

• 8¿Qué se lee en Yemen? [8] Elisabeth Eaves

• El8 peligro que viene. [9]

http://www.fp-es.org/dias-de-caos-en-yemen8

EUROPA EN EL MUNDO SIRIA-UE Carta blanca para Assad

12 mayo 2011 SME8 BRATISLAVA

¿Qué diferencia hay entre Gadafi y Assad? Tom Determinada a acabar con la violencia de Muamar el Gadafi contra el pueblo libio, Europa ha guardado silencio hasta ahora con respecto al terror ejercido por el régimen de Bachar el Assad en Siria. Y las sanciones contra el mismo anunciadas el 10 de mayo son una prueba más de la impotencia europea.

Peter8 Morvay El rechazo de los aliados occidentales a intervenir en el levantamiento de Siria al igual que han hecho en Libia puede achacarse a una falta de capacidad. Sin embargo, la ofensiva del régimen de Assad contra los manifestantes en Siria apenas es más humana o aceptable que lo que ha hecho y sigue haciendo Gadafi para intentar sofocar los levantamientos de sus súbditos rebeldes. Pero en Siria, cualquier intervención militar sería mucho más compleja y, debido a la situación estratégica del país, en el ojo del huracán de Oriente Próximo, las consecuencias podrían ser incalculables. No es de extrañar que Occidente no tenga ninguna prisa en intervenir, en especial porque parece haberse quedado estancado en un punto muerto en Libia. Tampoco es sorprendente. De hecho, se podría decir que es el resultado lógico ante la incapacidad de determinar con tiempo cómo querían lograr exactamente (y además sería el único modo de hacerlo) el único objetivo coherente de toda esta empresa y que poco a poco están admitiendo: la salida de Gadafi.Los motivos sensatos para no intentar que los tanques sirios dejen de masacrar a los manifestantes no son excusas para la Unión Europea, que en esta última crisis ha fracasado de nuevo completamente e incluso ha sido incapaz de hacer lo poco que podría haber hecho en un tiempo razonable y con sus propios recursos. ¿Cómo es posible que las sanciones más rigurosas contra algunos de los miembros más destacados del régimen sirio se hayan empezado a aplicar ayer y que el líder del régimen, el Presidente Bashar al-Assad, ni siquiera esté en la lista? ¿Cómo es posible

que la Unión diera luz verde a un embargo de armas contra Siria el lunes pasado, casi dos meses después del estallido de los disturbios? Ambos actos puede que sean poco más que gestos. Pero ¿por qué no se han producido antes estos gestos, para transmitir esa auténtica "señal clara y firme" de la que siguen hablando los políticos europeos? El resultado, como de costumbre, es simplemente una prueba más de impotencia. Paradójicamente, una explicación podría ser la denominada creación de una diplomacia europea común. Sin embargo, hasta ahora, la única influencia de esa diplomacia común en el sueño de la Unión de emplear su capacidad militar en la escena internacional ha sido negativa. Las decisiones se siguen tomando del mismo modo que antes: los grandes Estados miembros llegan a un acuerdo entre ellos. Para que la situación no sea tan vergonzosa, ahora se ha añadido una ronda más de deliberación, por pura cortesía y para que así participen Lady Ashton, la jefa de la política exterior de la UE y su grupo. A nadie le sorprende que Bruselas consiga hacer menos cosas que antes.

http://www.presseurop.eu/es/content/ar9 ticle/650641-carta-blanca-para-assad

Reversals challenge hope of Arab Spring By Liz Sly, Friday, May 13, 1:21 AM BEIRUT — When popular rebellions began erupting around the Middle East earlier this year, the outpouring of democratic fervor was quickly dubbed the Arab Spring, a phrase that captured the heady optimism of what appeared to be a new era of freedom and hope. But as spring turns to summer, events across the region are taking an altogether darker and more sinister turn, one in which the prospect of a brighter future no longer seems so readily assured. The swift toppling of the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, in rapid succession, has been followed by months of deepening bloodshed and brutality across the Arab world, underscoring the power that autocrats still wield after decades of dictatorship. “We’re rapidly coming to a fork in the road, where one path leads to change and reform and the other leads to retrenchment and repression,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. “It’s going to be a long and bloody haul, and it could take us over a number of years.” The tiny kingdom of Bahrain has been the first to point the way to a different outcome, having decisively crushed its popular uprising with the help of Saudi troops. Now, human rights groups say, authorities there are engaged in a9 systematic persecution of the mostly Shiite majority that dominated the demonstrations earlier this year.

In Syria, the government headed by President Bashar al-Assad is pursuing a9 remorseless effort to quell a pro-democracy movement, using tanks and artillery to pound neighborhoods that had participated in demonstrations, and detaining by the thousands whole communities of young men. A crucial test could come Friday, the usual day of protests, as authorities watch to see whether the extraordinary repression of the past week will finally succeed in suppressing the revolt. In Libya, where Moammar Gaddafi was the first to unleash the full force of the state against his citizens, an all-out war is raging in which NATO9 fighter jets are taking the lead. In Yemen, a bloody stalemate continues to regularly claim9 the lives of demonstrators seeking the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is stubbornly resisting multiple efforts to persuade him to leave.

In Egypt, deadly sectarian9 clashes between Christians and Muslims in Cairo have come as a sobering reminder that negative as well as positive forces may be unleashed by the removal of dictatorial governments. And even in little Tunisia, which first heralded possibility of change when its president was forced to flee in January, elections promised for July are in doubt and street protests have continued as frustrations build because of the slow pace of change. Yet, although governments may succeed in the short term in holding on to power, few think it likely or even possible for the region to revert to its former self. “Things cannot go back to the way they were before,” said Jordanian political analyst Labib Kamhawi. “We’ve seen a fundamental shift. People have seen freedom, and there is no turning back.” When President Obama delivers a major address on the Middle East next week, ostensibly to mark the capture of Osama bin Laden, many in the region will be hoping to hear a more

decisive condemnation of the levels of force being used against protesters, said Nadim Shehadi of the London-based Chatham House think tank. On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that the United States is considering a more robust response to the crackdown in Syria, after weeks of little more than verbal condemnation. “We are going to hold the Syrian government accountable,” she said during a visit to Greenland. “Syria’s future will only be secured by a government that reflects the popular will of all of the people and protects their welfare,” Clinton said, while still stopping short of calling for Assad to step down. But no matter what steps the United States takes, the reversals of the past three months suggest that the Middle East is destined for a prolonged period of instability, the end result of which cannot be foretold. The regimes still battling to hold popular revolts at bay have warned that change could open the way to Islamist extremism. But some analysts warn that radicalization could just as easily occur if the authorities succeed in crushing the peaceful and spontaneous demonstrations demanding democracy. “If these Arab revolutions do become a footnote, and if people do become frustrated and see no light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t know where it could lead in terms of people thinking of al- Qaeda” or otherwise taking up arms to fight, Shaikh said. Syria is being mentioned as a candidate for civil war, with or without the Assad regime. The Assad family has been in power for 40 years. With chants of “peaceful, peaceful”’ at nearly every demonstration, activists in Syria have insisted that they do not want their country to follow the path of Libya toward armed conflict and international intervention. But Syria also lies in a dangerous neighborhood, wedged between Iraq and Lebanon, where weapons are abundantly available, and there have been numerous reports that arms are starting to find their way across both those borders. In Bahrain, too, the levels of repression by the Sunni monarchy have included the razing of Shiite mosques and the beating and detention of schoolgirls who joined in demonstrations. Analysts say that Shiites there could be driven over time toward the more extremist ideology of nearby Iran. So dizzying have been the changes unleashed across the region in just a few short months that the world’s hesitant and seemingly inconsistent response to the upheaval can be understood, said Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut. And so, too, he said, should the missteps and lapses of the region be forgiven, as it lurches into uncharted territory toward what many there still fervently believe is an irrevocable future. “This is widespread, it’s sincere, and it cannot be put back in the bottle,” Khouri said. “We just have to be realistic about time frames. I’m not saying it will take us 800 years, like it took you in the West, but at least we need more than a few months.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-9 east/reversals-challenge-hope-of-arab- spring/2011/05/12/AFkgcV1G_story.html

9 El expresidente de Túnez será juzgado por un tribunal militar I. CEMBRERO - Madrid - 13/05/2011 Para el derrocado presidente de Túnez, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, exiliado en Arabia Saudí desde enero, las malas noticias se acumulan: sus haberes empiezan a ser incautados y será además juzgado en ausencia por una corte militar. Un tribunal de acusación de Túnez decidió el miércoles transferir la causa a otro castrense, según anunció un comunicado del Ministerio de Justicia publicado por la agencia TAP. Este ministerio presentó, a través de la fiscalía, nada menos que 18 cargos contra Ben Ali, entre los que figuran los de homicidio voluntario, robo, tráfico y consumo de droga. El dictador será juzgado junto con dos de sus colaboradores, el exministro del Interior Rafik Haj Kacem y el exjefe de la seguridad presidencial Ali Seriati. El 14 de enero Seriati le empujó dentro del avión que le llevó al exilio. Ambos están encarcelados y, a diferencia de Ben Ali, sí se sentarán en el banquillo. La primera condena de un miembro del temido clan Ben Ali fue pronunciada el sábado por un tribunal tunecino. Condenó a dos años de cárcel, por consumo de estupefacientes, a Imad Trabelsi, sobrino de Leila Trabelsi, antaño la todopoderosa esposa del presidente. Punta del iceberg La otra mala noticia judicial para Ben Ali se produjo el miércoles por la tarde en París. La justicia francesa embargó las 12 cuentas corrientes de Ben Ali y sus familiares en las que habían depositado 12 millones de euros. La fiscalía de París abrió en enero una investigación tras la denuncia, formulada contra Ben Ali por corrupción, malversación de fondos y blanqueo de dinero por tres ONG (Sherpa, la Comisión Árabe de Derechos Humanos y Transparency International). Hasta ahora "solo se ha visto la punta del iceberg porque el grueso de los bienes [de Ben Ali] son las propiedades inmobiliarias", señaló al presidente de la rama francesa de Transparency International, Daniel Lebègue, al conocer la decisión judicial. Los Ben Ali poseen, según los denunciantes, una treintena de propiedades en Francia, la mayoría en los suburbios elegantes de París. La revista Forbes señaló en 2008 que la fortuna de los Ben Ali ascendía a 5.000 millones de dólares, pero William Bourdon, abogado de Transparency International, calcula que puede llegar hasta los 10.000. I. CEMBRERO El expresidente de Túnez será juzgado por un tribunal militar13/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/expresidente/Tunez/9 sera/juzgado/tribunal/ militar/elpepiint/20110513elpepiint_8/Tes?print=1

9 El Asad ordena no disparar en las protestas de hoy, según la oposición Pese al anuncio, Siria despliega tanques en el sur del país ante las esperadas protestas después de la oración.- La ONU considera creíble que hayan muerto entre 700 y 850 personas por la represión REUTERS - Ammán - 13/05/2011 Como todos los viernes de las últimas ocho semanas, los sirios están llamados tras la oración a una nueva jornada de protestas contra el régimen1 de Bachar el Asad. Pero en esta ocasión, el presidente ha ordenado que las tropas no abran fuego contra los manifestantes, según ha informado la asesora política de El Asad al activista de derechos humanos Louay Huseein. Sin embargo, está por ver cómo se desarrolla la jornada, después de que ayer se desplegaran fuerzas de seguridad con tanques en varias ciudades del sur del país. Entre 700 y 850 personas han muerto en la represión de las manifestaciones y miles han sido detenidas, según cifras que la ONU considera creíbles. "Se han dictado ordenes presidenciales definitivas para no disparar contra los manifestantes, y quienquiera que lo viole correrá con toda la responsabilidad", ha explicado Hussein, citando a la asesora presidencial y a la postre portavoz del régimen Buthaina Shaaban, con quien habló por teléfono ayer. Hussein es uno de los cuatro miembros de la oposición que se reunió con Shaaban este mes para presentarle sus exigencias, entre ellas el fin de la represión de las protestas y la introducción de reformas políticas en el país. Fueron los primeros encuentros entre opositores y altos cargos del régimen desde el comienzo de las protestas en marzo pasado. "Espero que lo veamos mañana (por hoy)", dijo Hussein en referencia a la orden de no disparar. "Todavía hago llamamientos a que se proteste de forma no violenta a pesar de la respuesta de las fuerzas de seguridad", añadió en un comunicado. Sin embargo, el despliegue ayer de fuerzas de seguridad en localidades como Dael, Tafas, Jassem y al-Harra hace temer que este nuevo anuncio sea otra muestra del criticado doble1 lenguaje de El Asad, que ha prometido reformas a la vez que los tanques han ido tomando posiciones. 700 muertos

La represión de las protestas del régimen de El Asad, que comenzaron hace1 casi dos meses, le ha costado la vida a entre 700 y 850 personas, según la ONU. "No podemos verificar estos números, pero hay listas detalladas y creemos que son genuinos", ha dicho hoy el portavoz del Alto Comisionado de Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos, Rupert Colville. También un grupo de juristas con sede en Ginebra (Suiza) ha cifrado los fallecidos en 700. Lo que ocurra este viernes supondrá una prueba importante para comprobar si, como dijo el Gobierno, ha conseguido rebajar la tensión.

A los tanques que1 ya estaban desplegados en las calles de la costa siria, en la región central de Homs, y desde las afueras de la ciudad de Hama hacia el norte, se han sumado ahora los que han sido enviados a la llanura de Hauran, en el sur, y que cubren 37

así buena parte del país de 20 millones de habitantes. La versión oficial que da la agencia SANA es que esas unidades del Ejército están allí para buscar a "grupos terroristas armados", que según dicen, cuentan con el apoyo de islamistas y agitadores extranjeros. Son estos supuestos grupos a los que el Gobierno acusa de organizar las protestas y de haber matado a 100 soldados y policías.

La Comisión1 Internacional de Juristas (ICJ en sus siglas en inglés) ubicada en Suiza sostiene, sin embargo, que según informes que han recibido de abogados y grupos defensores de los derechos humanos, las fuerzas armadas del régimen han matado ilícitamente a unos 700 civiles mientras otros cientos se encuentran desaparecidos, y han violado así el derecho internacional. "El ICJ sigue recibiendo informes creíbles de que se han dejado cadáveres tirados en la calle durante días y se ha impedido que los heridos accedan a centros médicos", ha informado la organización. EE UU se limita a pedir cuentas a El Asad La secretaria de Estado estadounidense, Hillary Clinton, ha asegurado que Washington y sus aliados europeos pedirán cuentas al Gobierno de El Asad por la "represalias brutales" contra los manifestantes y que podrían reforzar las sanciones. No dijo, sin embargo, que el presidente deba dejar el poder.

Se ha criticado mucho a EE UU y Europa por el doble rasero de su actuación en Libia1 , donde la1 OTAN desarrolla una campaña de bombardeos aéreos para forzar la salida de Gadafi del poder, y las leves sanciones que han impuesto a Siria, que incluyen algunos bloqueos económicos a la cúpula del régimen pero excluyen al presidente. Preguntada por la prensa si creía que El Asad había perdido su legitimidad para gobernar, Clinton se mostró recatada y se limitó a afirmar que Washington ha observado "con gran consternación y preocupación los acontecimientos que se han desarrollado bajo su liderazgo".

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1 La muerte de Bin Laden Obama respaldará de forma inequívoca las protestas en el mundo árabe A. C. - Washington - 13/05/2011 Barack Obama dará un respaldo inequívoco a los movimientos de protesta surgidos en el mundo árabe y utilizará la muerte de Osama bin Laden como punto de inflexión en una política norteamericana en Oriente Próximo centrada en la lucha contra el terrorismo, hacia otra que busca la confluencia con los sectores que impulsan la democracia, según han anticipado altos funcionarios sobre el mensaje que el presidente tiene previsto lanzar la próxima semana. "Bin Laden es el pasado; lo que está ocurriendo en la región es el futuro", declaró a The New York Times Ben Rhodes, viceconsejero de Seguridad Nacional. Obama quiere centrar su discurso en lo que ese levantamiento popular representa y dejar claro que cuenta con el apoyo de la Casa Blanca, pese a la inquietud que eso despierta entre algunos de los principales aliados de EE UU en la zona, como Arabia Saudí e Israel. La Administración norteamericana ha respaldado, con algunas contradicciones y dudas, las protestas que derrocaron a Hosni Mubarak en Egipto y forma parte de la coalición que defiende a los rebeldes en Libia, pero no ha dado hasta ahora una indicación global y tajante de qué lado está. EE UU está estrechamente implicado en la defensa de Israel, tiene bases militares en Oriente Próximo y forma parte del equilibrio estratégico que ha sostenido durante décadas a diversos regímenes totalitarios. Una reconsideración de esa estrategia representa, por tanto, una apuesta de enorme trascendencia para el futuro. La Casa Blanca considera que la muerte de Bin Laden es la ocasión propicia de dar ese paso. "Es importante recapacitar y decir que la trayectoria del cambio está en la buena dirección", añade Rhodes. Los asesores del presidente admiten que esa vía tiene riesgos, incluido el que algunos de esos países caigan en manos de regímenes extremistas o proislámicos, pero creen que ese es un riesgo que vale la pena correr. Obama está preparando personalmente su próximo mensaje, consciente de que está en juego una parte esencial de su política exterior y de seguridad. Obama, contradiciendo a veces las recomendaciones del Pentágono o del Departamento de Estado, ha visto desde el primer día las protestas árabes más como una oportunidad que como un peligro, y, según el consejero de Seguridad Nacional, Thomas Donilon, sigue de cerca y de forma muy meticulosa los acontecimientos diarios en Oriente Próximo. "El presidente es la principal fuerza intelectual detrás de estas decisiones y, en muchos casos, el que diseña cómo abordarlas", asegura Donilon. Para que este giro de la política no resulte aún más arriesgado, Washington tendrá que apuntalar sus relaciones con sus aliados. La amistad con Israel y Arabia Saudí se ha enfriado en los últimos meses. El primer ministro israelí, Benjamín Netanyahu, visitará EE UU la próxima semana para abordar ese problema.

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1 Obama propondrá una nueva política sobre Oriente Próximo El presidente quiere adelantarse a las iniciativas de israelíes y palestinos ANTONIO CAÑO - Washington - 12/05/2011 Reforzado por la popularidad y la autoridad ganadas con la muerte de Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama prepara para la próxima semana un mensaje al mundo árabe y musulmán con el que pretende rediseñar la política norteamericana en esa región y presentar nuevas propuestas en relación con el conflicto palestino-israelí. La Casa Blanca confirmó ayer que el discurso irá dirigido a "una audiencia de amplio espectro en Oriente Próximo". Es la iniciativa política más importante que se desprende de la desaparición del líder de Al Qaeda. La Administración estadounidense ha observado con satisfacción que, a diferencia de otras ocasiones, ese episodio no ha despertado reacciones antinorteamericanas en el mundo árabe, sino más bien indiferencia hacia la suerte de Bin Laden, lo que certifica que las protestas prodemocracia han asentado una nueva dinámica en esa parte del mundo. Ambos hechos combinados, la muerte de Bin Laden y la insurrección popular, representan una oportunidad histórica que Obama no quiere dejar pasar para asumir un nuevo protagonismo personal y revitalizar la política estadounidense. La Casa Blanca no ha precisado la fecha del discurso ni su contenido, pero otros datos relacionados con este asunto permiten hacer algunas predicciones. La fecha está vinculada al gran momento político que disfruta Obama -una encuesta de Associated Press elevaba ayer su popularidad hasta el 60%-, pero también a otras circunstancias que le apremian. La principal es la visita que el primer ministro israelí, Benjamín Netanyahu, iniciará la próxima semana en Washington. Netanyahu se entrevistará el día 20 con Obama y cuatro días después hablará ante el Congreso para presentar un nuevo plan de paz. Al primer ministro israelí le urge pasar a la ofensiva rápidamente para abortar el proyecto de la Autoridad Palestina de declarar la independencia en la sesión del próximo septiembre de la Asamblea General de Naciones Unidas. El presidente norteamericano, por su parte, está obligado a hablar antes que Netanyahu para no verse como rehén de la propuesta que su gran aliado ofrezca. Todo el escenario está montado ya para una gran operación de política exterior en los próximos días. La invitación al rey Abdalá de Jordania, el mejor amigo de Washington en el mundo árabe, para acudir al Despacho Oval el próximo martes parece, sin duda, vinculada a ese movimiento. Obama ya emitió un gran mensaje al mundo islámico hace dos años en El Cairo. Desde entonces, la imagen de EE UU en esos países ha mejorado. Eso no se ha visto correspondido con avances concretos en los asuntos que preocupan a los árabes, fundamentalmente la cuestión palestina. El portavoz de la Casa Blanca, Jay Carney, advirtió ayer que este discurso no tiene el mismo destinatario. No se trata tanto de abordar en términos generales el conflicto 40

ideológico y cultural que en los últimos años ha enfrentado a Occidente con los musulmanes, sino la situación política en Oriente Próximo, la posición de EE UU ante el levantamiento democrático y los efectos que debería tener. Las principales dudas que en estos momentos subsisten dentro de la Administración en relación con ese discurso tienen que ver con el grado de concreción de un plan de paz sobre el conflicto palestino-israelí. Una propuesta demasiado específica, con detalles y fechas sobre temas como los refugiados palestinos, los asentamientos judíos o Jerusalén, corre el riesgo de ser rechazada por alguna de las partes. Pero una iniciativa demasiado vaga es difícil que tenga el efecto de marcar un nuevo punto de partida en la solución de ese problema. Otro aspecto que condiciona la fecha del discurso es la posición de los Gobiernos árabes. Algunos, como Siria, han quedado desautorizados por la insurrección. Otros con los que antes se contaba incondicionalmente han ganado prestigio e independencia, particularmente Egipto. La Casa Blanca considera que la muerte de Bin Laden prueba que EE UU posee margen de maniobra en el bando prodemocracia y mucha menos presión del lado de los regímenes autoritarios que sobreviven. ANTONIO CAÑO Obama propondrá una nueva política sobre Oriente Próximo- 12/05/2011 El presidente quiere adelantarse a las iniciativas de israelíes y palestinos http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaci1 onal/Obama/propondra/nueva/politica/Oriente/ Proximo/elpepiint/20110512elpepiint_4/Tes

1 Ola de cambio en el mundo árabe El clan Asad desplaza al presidente sirio Un primo del mandatario, multimillonario, afirma que la familia "está dispuesta a luchar hasta el fin" - Maher, hermano menor de Bachar, dirige la represión ENRIC GONZÁLEZ - Jerusalén - 12/05/2011 Suele decirse que los dictadores están solos. No es el caso del presidente de Siria, Bachar el Asad. Su familia parece haber aprovechado la revuelta popular y el riesgo de una caída del régimen para asumir poderes extraordinarios y convertir la presidencia en un asunto colectivo. Rami Makhlouf, multimillonario primo de Bachar, afirma que las decisiones políticas se toman "de forma conjunta" dentro de la familia, y que la familia "está dispuesta a luchar hasta el fin". La diplomacia estadounidense solía comparar a Hafez el Asad, que dirigió Siria desde 1971 hasta su muerte, en 2000, con Vito Corleone, El Padrino, porque a diferencia de su vecino Sadam Husein no mataba por crueldad y en sus crímenes políticos no había nada personal, "solo negocios". Flynt Leverett, un veterano dirigente de la CIA y del Departamento de Estado que se especializó en Siria y dejó la Administración en 2003, por discrepancias con George W. Bush, retoma ahora la comparación con la saga mafiosa: como en el caso de los Corleone, dice, la muerte del patriarca y del primogénito dejaron el régimen en manos del hijo destinado a estudiar y a vivir al margen de las armas; como en el caso de los Corleone, el sucesor quiso reformar el régimen-negocio para hacerlo legal y viable; como ocurre en El Padrino con Michael Corleone, las presiones internas y externas 41

acaban haciendo del sucesor educado y reformista, Bachar el Asad, un tipo aún más duro y violento que el patriarca.

Manifestación de apoyo al presidente sirio, Bachar el Asad, en Damasco.- HUSSEIN MALLA (ASSOCIATED PRESS) Queda la duda de si Bachar el Asad, que heredó la presidencia solo porque su hermano mayor Basil murió en accidente de coche y porque el hermano menor, Maher, fue descartado por su carácter violento e inestable, ha llegado a asumir realmente el poder. El presidente no es visto en público desde el 30 de marzo, cuando pronunció un discurso ante la Asamblea, y es el clan familiar el que aparece en la prensa siria para defender al régimen. Una noticia difundida por diarios británicos y no confirmada, según la cual la esposa y los hijos del mandatario habrían huido a Reino Unido, ha contribuido a fomentar la incertidumbre sobre la posición de El Asad. Desde el principio de su mandato, Bachar se ha dedicado a prometer reformas y a explicar luego (en privado) que no puede realizarlas por las presiones de la vieja guardia. La vieja guardia, sin embargo, ya no existe. El viejo Hafez el Asad se encargó de acabar con ella antes de morir: envió a su propio hermano, Rifaat, al exilio en España, y sustituyó a los jefes de la muhabarat (servicios secretos) por gente de la generación de Bachar. Bachar, por su parte, envió al exilio en 2005 al vicepresidente Abdul Khaddam, último vestigio del golpe de Estado de 1970. La élite de hoy no es la vieja guardia, sino la clase conocida como aulad al sultah, literalmente "los niños de la autoridad". Son hijos de la vieja guardia, como el presidente, y mantienen estrechas conexiones con la familia presidencial. Algunos de esos niños han hecho fortuna gracias a la corrupción, pero no han cometido grandes crímenes y pueden permitirse gestos aperturistas. Es el caso de Firas Tlas, presidente del Grupo MAS (siglas árabes de En Nombre de Siria), hijo de Mustafá Tlas, ministro de Defensa durante 30 años, y actual suministrador en exclusiva de productos cárnicos para el Ejército. La mayoría de los niños, sin embargo, rechazan cualquier reforma real porque acabaría conduciéndoles a la cárcel o a la horca. Como dice Rami Makhlouf, "si cae uno, caemos todos".

Rami Makhlouf, de 41 años, es el líder indiscutido de los aulad al sultah. El pasado fin de semana tomó la insólita decisión de conceder una entrevista a The New York Times, publicada ayer, en la que asumió el papel de portavoz del régimen y afirmó que las grandes decisiones, como la de reprimir a sangre y fuego la revuelta, no las tomaba el presidente, sino "la familia", "de forma conjunta". Hafez el Asad se casó con Anisa Makhlouf y desde entonces el clan de la primera dama asumió un enorme poder. Rami Makhlouf es la prueba. No solo domina el Banco Inmobiliario, de propiedad estatal, y posee a través de Syriatel el monopolio de las telecomunicaciones (resultado de una privatización a dedo dentro de la familia); los pocos empresarios extranjeros que se aventuran a invertir en Siria coinciden en que es imposible hacer nada sin pagar un porcentaje a Makhlouf. Rami fue el mejor amigo de infancia de Bachar el Asad. El hermano de Rami, Hafez, es el jefe efectivo del Directorio General de Seguridad y máximo responsable de la muhabarat en Damasco. Para completar el círculo, los Makhlouf son el nexo entre los dos miembros de la familia que se llevan mal: Maher el Asad, hermano menor del presidente, jefe de la Guardia Republicana y jefe de la Cuarta División Blindada (además de socio encubierto de Rami Makhlouf en múltiples negocios), y Asef Shawqat, casado con Bushra el Asad, hermana mayor del presidente, y jefe efectivo del Ejército. En 1999, durante una discusión, Maher el Asad disparó contra su cuñado Asef. Siguen enemistados, pero la crisis y la amistad con los Makhlouf les han unido. Maher ha asumido la dirección militar de la represión, y el especialista Flynt Leverett, como la mayoría de los analistas, cree que junto a Rami Makhlouf constituye la voz dominante en la familia. Lo cual parece relegar al presidente Bachar el Asad a una posición de debilidad. ENRIC GONZÁLEZ El clan Asad desplaza al presidente sirio12/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/clan/Asad/desplaza/pres1 idente/sirio/elpepu int/20110512elpepiint_2/Tes

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2e093ec-7c76-11e0-b9e3-1 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M8NR9ciq High prices dent global oil demand By David Blair, Energy Correspondent Published: May 12 2011 10:24 | Last updated: May 12 2011 10:24 Global oil demand was flat in March for the first time since 2009 as high prices began to “dent” consumption, particularly in North America, according to the International Energy Agency.

The monthly Oil1 Market Report, released on Thursday, projects that total oil demand in North America will fall by 194,000 barrels per day in 2011, representing a downward revision of 220,000 b/d. Last year, by contrast, oil product demand in North America rose by 609,000 b/d.

1 1 EDITOR’S CHOICE Oil and fuel prices fall after US supply report - May-12 In depth: Oil - Apr-05 1 1 Shockwaves from Saudi’s crude statistics - Apr-19 Iraq oil output at highest level for a decade, says IEA - 1 1 Apr-11 Energy podcast with Fatih Birol: Oil prices, Iraq, post-Fukushima - Jun-04 Energy Source - Aug- 10 In all, global oil demand was almost unchanged in March, the first month to record near-zero growth since the summer of 2009, although the IEA cautions that this was affected by the timing of Easter holidays and “exceptional events”, notably the earthquake in Japan. “Nonetheless, $4/gallon (€0.73/litre) gasoline is likely to yield an anaemic US driving season. This is the main change to our demand forecast – a weaker 2011 profile in North America,” reads the report. The report notes “weaker prospects for North America, where high oil prices may have finally begun to dent oil demand”. The IEA now forecasts that oil product demand in developed countries will fall this year by 230,000 b/d, a decline of 0.5 per cent, while growth in the developing world will be 1.5m b/d, a climb of 3.6 per cent. This would produce total global demand growth of 1.5 per cent this year, less than half of the 3.3 per cent recorded in 2010. On the supply picture, the IEA estimates that total Opec production has fallen by 1.3m b/d since the onset of Libya’s1 crisis in February. It assumes that Libyan supply, which totalled 1.58m b/d in January, will “remain absent from the market for the rest of 2011”.

Oil1 production in Yemen, which averaged 300,000 b/d in 2010, has also been “significantly curtailed by political unrest”. However, the IEA believes that Opec is unlikely to agree to increase its output when the cartel’s oil ministers hold their next meeting on June 8 in Vienna. The report notes that “most analysts see a change in prevailing production allocations unlikely”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2e093ec-7c76-111 e0-b9e3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX

1 Ola de cambio en el mundo árabe Los países del golfo Arábigo invitan a Marruecos a sumarse a su alianza militar IGNACIO CEMBRERO - Madrid - 12/05/2011 Los ministros de Asuntos Exteriores del Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo Arábigo (CCG) invitaron el martes a Marruecos a incorporarse a su "club de monarquías conservadoras árabes", como lo define Haizam Amirah Fernández, investigador del mundo árabe del Real Instituto Elcano. Reunidos en Riad, los ministros de las ricas monarquías petroleras de Arabia Saudí, Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Omán, Catar, Bahréin y Kuwait dieron también su acuerdo al ingreso de Jordania en su organización. A diferencia de Marruecos, Jordania, que tiene frontera con Arabia Saudí, había cursado una solicitud. Pese a estar a 5.200 kilómetros del Golfo, Rabat acogió con "gran interés" el ofrecimiento, según reza un comunicado de su Ministerio de Exteriores difundido ayer, y se mostró dispuesto a iniciar las conversaciones. El CCG es en buena medida una organización defensiva cuyos miembros deben prestarse auxilio en caso de padecer una agresión exterior. El llamado Cuerpo Escudo de la Península, compuesto por 40.000 hombres, es el brazo armado del CCG. Marruecos podría invocar esa cláusula defensiva para pedir ayuda a sus socios en caso de tensiones con España como sucedió, por ejemplo, en julio de 2002 en el islote de Perejil. Más que un apoyo militar, difícil de proporcionar a tanta distancia, Rabat "podría requerir respaldo diplomático y ayudas financieras del CCG", opina Amirah. El Consejo fue constituido hace 30 años, en torno a Arabia Saudí, "para hacer frente de la amenaza que podían suponer el Irán de Jomeini y el Irak de Sadam Husein", recuerda Amirah. A ojos de los países del CCG la amenaza iraní aún persiste. Marruecos rompió relaciones diplomáticas con Irán en marzo de 2009 a instancias de Arabia Saudí, según los telegramas de la Embajada de EE UU en Rabat difundidos por WikiLeaks. "Esta dimensión defensiva del CCG se orienta ahora hacia los problemas internos" en un mundo árabe plagado de revueltas, prosigue el analista. Tropas saudíes y emiratíes entraron el 14 de marzo en Bahréin para acabar con la rebelión de la mayoría chií. El pretexto oficial de la intervención fue garantizar "la seguridad de las infraestructuras del país de cualquier interferencia extranjera", es decir, de Irán. Amirah duda, sin embargo, de que a la monarquía alauí, que intenta dotarse de una imagen moderna y liberal, le entusiasme incorporarse a ese club conservador por mucho que obtenga compensaciones. "Sabe que a ojos de Europa no causa buen efecto". El brazo armado del CCG mantiene además una estrecha relación militar con EE UU. Francia, principal socio político y económico de Marruecos, tampoco apreciará ese acercamiento de Rabat a un club auspiciado por EE UU. Si se produce se hará en detrimento de los intereses de París.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaciona1 l/paises/golfo/Arabigo/invitan/Marruecos/su marse/alianza/militar/elpepiint/20110512elpepiint_1/Tes

1 Yemeni forces kill 18 and wound hundreds as unrest escalates Worst violence in months sees demonstrators and defected army faction clash with republican guard

Tom1 Finn in Sana'a

The1 Guardian, Thursday 12 May 2011

Anti-government protesters carry a wounded demonstrator to a field hospital during clashes with Yemeni security forces in Sana'a, Yemen. Photograph: Hani Mohammed/AP Yemeni forces have opened fire on demonstrators in three major cities, killing at least 18 and wounding hundreds in one of the fiercest bouts of violence witnessed in nearly three months of popular unrest aimed at toppling President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The clashes between a defected faction of 1Yemen's army and the republican guard, have raised fears that Yemen may be reaching a critical juncture as public fury continues to mount at the president's refusal to step down. Violence broke out in the capital when a throng of 2,000 protesters tore away from the main sit-in area at Sana'a University and surged en masse towards the cabinet building in downtown Sana'a with shouts of "God is great" and "Allah rid us of this tyrant". As they neared their destination they were halted by republican guards who, after trying to disperse them with tear gas and water cannons, began firing live rounds at the crowd. Soldiers positioned on the balconies and roofs of nearby houses rained bullets down on the angry mob of protesters, who responded by hurling chunks of broken-off paving slabs. The standoff, which lasted for around four hours, climaxed when soldiers loyal to a defected general, Major Ali Mohsin, arrived in pickup trucks and began returning fire at Saleh's troops. It was the first time the two sides have clashed in the capital since Mohsin declared his support for the opposition in late March.

Local press reported that a lieutenant colonel, Yahya Muhammad al-Ansi, belonging to the rebel general's first armoured division, was killed in the clashes. Women and children were amongst those caught up in the ensuing mayhem. Bushra Al- Surabi, a prominent female activist, apparently suffered from a bullet wound to the leg. A doctor presiding over a bloodied corpse in the corner of a nearby mosque-turned- field-hospital said he counted nine other bodies and that hundreds of others were suffering from bullet wounds. In the industrial city of Taiz, another centre of popular resistance, two teenage protesters were shot dead by snipers while trying to scale a government building. Protesters retaliated by torching a police building and blockading a number of ministerial offices. In the Red Sea port city of Hudaida, another protester was killed when security forces opened fire on marchers trying to occupy the city mayor's office, witnesses said. With protests entering their consecutive third month and Saleh backing away from a Gulf-brokered initiative which would see him exchange power for immunity, Yemen's youthful protesters have began tightening the bolts on their embattled president. In the past days the country has been brought to a standstill by nationwide strikes as well as blockades of roads and ports. A planned march on the presidential palace is expected on Friday. "Yemen is at a dangerous juncture," says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst from Princeton University. "Every attempt at mediation, including a recently flawed approach by the GCC [Gulf Co-operation Council], has failed, as Saleh stalls and equivocates on public pledges, hoping to somehow survive in power." The shootings suggest that Saleh may have given the army the green light to fire on protesters. "Yemeni Oil-Free blood is apparently invisible to the International Community," said

Ibrahim Mothana, a protest1 leader at Change square. "When will the west condemn this?" Analysts fear that failure to address Yemen's swelling unrest, particularly its rising unemployment, may benefit al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula– an organisation which is already capitalising on lapsed security and an increasingly stretched army. "The last time al-Qaeda had this much time and space in which to operate, it put together the 2009 Christmas Day attack, which narrowly missed bringing down an airliner over Detroit," said Johnsen.

Tom1 FinnYemeni forces kill 18 and wound hundreds as unrest escalates Thursday 12 May 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma1 y/12/yemen-protests-republican-guards- troops/print

1 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bbd079cc-7bf7-11e0-9b16-11 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M7v9dKT1 Club of monarchs to extend Gulf reach By Roula Khalaf in London and Abeer Allam in Riyadh Published: May 11 2011 19:07 | Last updated: May 11 2011 19:07 The Gulf Co-operation Council could be turning itself into the club of Arab monarchies as it considers bringing Jordan and Morocco into its fold, a move that would strengthen the political and economic capacity of the two countries’ leaders to fend off any popular1 challenge. In a surprise announcement late on Tuesday, the GCC, which joins six oil-producing Gulf Arab states, said it was considering a request by Morocco and Jordan to join the bloc, even though the two poorer countries have little in common with existing members.

1 1 EDITOR’S CHOICE Syrian clerical elite fractures - May-11 Assad’s tanks shell 1 residential areas - May-11 Opinion: Why Assad will rise again – and then fall - May-10 1 Shipwrecked migrants say Libya let them sail - May-11 Following a GCC summit in Riyadh, Abdullatif al-Zayani, the secretary-general, said foreign ministers would be holding talks with the two non-Gulf countries to complete the procedures required for membership. It is not yet clear if membership will be granted or in what form. The GCC was formed in 1981 in the wake of the Iranian revolution as an alliance of oil- producing monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. Efforts at economic integration have been only partly successful, undermined by rivalries and political divisions. As republics dominated by family rule have proved most vulnerable to popular revolts this year, however, the GCC has been asserting itself, closing ranks to protect its members from the changes sweeping the region. GCC troops were sent to Bahrain to support the ruling Sunni family, helping it crush a Shia uprising. Meanwhile, the organisation pledged $20bn in financial aid to Bahrain and Oman, another Gulf monarchy that was hit by protests. Saudi Arabia, the heavyweight in the GCC, has also been dismayed by the willingness of the US to abandon long-time allies such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted this year, and to criticise a Bahraini1 intervention, which Riyadh insists was needed to counter Iranian meddling. Diplomats say GCC states have been sending the message that no Gulf ruling family will be allowed to fall – nor will Iran, which is seen as the biggest regional threat, be permitted to take advantage of the unrest in the region.

Khalid al-Khalifa, Bahrain’s foreign minister, said on Twitter that Jordan and Morocco were “clear examples of good, wise governance and real political development”. The GCC, he added, had “a vital interest in joining together with them”. Mustafa Hamarneh, a Jordanian political analyst, said the GCC move was a sign that Jordan belonged to the “conservative monarchy club”. What all the countries had in common, he said, was that “they see eye to eye on all the main issue: on Iran, on Bahrain and on the question of political reforms”. Membership in the GCC would be a boost for the Jordanian monarchy, if it went ahead, but would prove a setback for groups seeking reform, he added. Hassan al-Mostafa, a Saudi writer, said the possible integration of the two countries into the GCC was an attempt to “reshape the region” by creating new alliances at a time when a democratically elected Egyptian government was likely to follow a more independent foreign policy, possibly becoming friendlier with Tehran. “The GCC will also help Jordan and Morocco to avoid pressure or collapse of these regimes,” he said. “But Moroccans and Jordanians are more politically active and won’t accept the GCC dictating foreign policy.” Dris Ben Ali, a Moroccan economist who has been advocating political reforms, said he was concerned about the political rationale behind a potential membership in the GCC, which might be aimed at halting Morocco’s move towards a “democratic, parliamentary monarchy” that could become a model for others in the region. Additional reporting by Tobias Buck in Jerusalem and Eileen Byrne in Tunis

Copyright1 The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Roula Khalaf in London and Abeer Allam Club of monarchs to extend Gulf reach Last updated: May 11 2011 19:07 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bbd079cc-7bf7-11e0-9b16-1 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX

May 11, 2011 A Rite of Torture for Girls By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF HARGEISA, Somaliland People usually torture those whom they fear or despise. But one of the most common forms of torture in the modern world, incomparably more widespread than waterboarding or electric shocks, is inflicted by mothers on daughters they love. It’s female genital mutilation — sometimes called female circumcision — and it is prevalent across a broad swath of Africa and chunks of Asia as well. Mothers take their daughters at about age 10 to cutters like Maryan Hirsi Ibrahim, a middle-aged Somali woman who says she wields her razor blade on up to a dozen girls a day. “This tradition is for keeping our girls chaste, for lowering the sex drive of our daughters,” Ms. Ibrahim told me. “This is our culture.” Ms. Ibrahim prefers the most extreme form of genital mutilation, called infibulation or Pharaonic circumcision. And let’s not be dainty or euphemistic. This is a grotesque human rights abuse that doesn’t get much attention because it involves private parts and is awkward to talk about. So pardon the bluntness about what infibulation entails. The girls’ genitals are carved out, including the clitoris and labia, often with no anesthetic. What’s left of the flesh is sewn together with three to six stitches — wild thorns in rural areas, or needle and thread in the cities. The cutter leaves a tiny opening to permit urination and menstruation. Then the girls’ legs are tied together, and she is kept immobile for 10 days until the flesh fuses together. When the girl is married and ready for sex, she must be cut open by her husband or by a respected woman in the community. All this is, of course, excruciating. It also leads to infections and urinary difficulties, and scar tissue can make childbirth more dangerous, increasing maternal mortality and injuries such as fistulas.

This is one of the most pervasive human rights abuses worldwide, with1 three million girls mutilated each year in Africa alone, according to United Nations estimates. A hospital here in Somaliland found that 96 percent of women it surveyed had undergone infibulation. The challenge is that this is a form of oppression that women themselves embrace and perpetuate. “A young girl herself will want to be cut,” Ms. Ibrahim told me, vigorously defending the practice. “If a girl is not cut, it would be hard for her to live in the community. She would be stigmatized.” Kalthoun Hassan, a young mother in an Ethiopian village near Somaliland, told me that she would insist on her daughters being cut and her sons marrying only girls who had been. She added: “It is God’s will for girls to be circumcised.” For four decades, Westerners have campaigned against genital cutting, without much effect. Indeed, the Western term “female genital mutilation” has antagonized some

African women because it assumes that they have been “mutilated.” Aid groups are now moving to add the more neutral term “female genital cutting” to their lexicon. Is it cultural imperialism for Westerners to oppose genital mutilation? Yes, perhaps, but it’s also justified. Some cultural practices such as genital mutilation — or foot-binding or bride-burning — are too brutish to defer to. But it is clear that the most effective efforts against genital mutilation are grass-roots initiatives by local women working for change from within a culture. In Senegal, Ghana, Egypt and other countries, such efforts have made headway. Here among Somalis, reformers are trying a new tack: Instead of telling women to stop cutting their daughters altogether, they encourage them to turn to a milder form of genital mutilation (often involving just excision of part or all of the clitoris). They say that that would be a step forward and is much easier to achieve. Although some Christians cut their daughters, it is more common among Muslims, who often assume that the tradition is Islamic. So a crucial step has been to get a growing number of Muslim leaders to denounce the practice as contrary to Islam, for their voices carry particular weight. At one mosque in the remote town of Baligubadle, I met an imam named Abdelahi Adan, who bluntly denounces infibulation: “From a religious point of view, it is forbidden. It is against Islam.” Maybe the tide is beginning to turn, ever so slowly, against infibulation, and at least we’re seeing some embarrassment about the practice. In Baligubadle, a traditional cutter named Mariam Ahmed told me that she had stopped cutting girls — apparently because she knows that foreigners disapprove. Then a nurse in the local health clinic told me that she had treated Ms. Ahmed’s own daughter recently for a horrific pelvic infection and urinary blockage after the girl was infibulated by her mother. I confronted Ms. Ahmed. She grudgingly acknowledged cutting her daughter but quickly added that she had intended only a milder form of circumcision. She added quickly: “It was an accident.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/opinion/11 2kristof.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines &emc=tha212

1 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8df2e4dc-7c1e-11e0-a386-1 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M7qN4ztF Libya rebels capture Misurata airport By Michael Peel in Tripoli Published: May 11 2011 23:49 | Last updated: May 11 2011 23:49 Libyan rebels have captured the airport in the besieged city of Misurata, in a boost to the momentum of their near three-month campaign to topple Muammer Gaddafi. Opposition soldiers drove back well-armed regime forces, who had attacked Libya’s third city for almost two months in an attempt to stop the eastern-based rebellion gaining ground in the mostly government-controlled west of Libya.

1 1 EDITOR’S CHOICE Shipwrecked migrants say Libya let them sail - May-11Libyan 1 rebels meet in Abu Dhabi - May-10Libyan regime accused of war crimes - May- 1 1 06Tripoli embassies attacked after air strike - May-01Clans to help shape Libya’s future 1 - May-01Libyan villagers seek refuge in Tunisia - May-01 The rebel military success exploited Nato air strikes and came as opposition political leaders renewed calls – which have failed in the past – for an uprising in Colonel Gaddafi’s strongholds including Tripoli, the capital. Col Gaddafi appeared on state television late Wednesday night, after an absence of more than 10 days from the public eye had led to speculation about his health. He was shown in dark robes and glasses sitting in a chair at a meeting with tribal leaders, in footage government supporters said was filmed that day. Col Gaddafi did not speak as a camera crew filmed him sitting with tribal leaders. He has not appeared on camera in weeks, prompting rumours that he may have been injured in the Nato attack on his compound this month that killed one of his sons. Opposition troops stormed Misurata airport on Wednesday and pushed regime soldiers farther away from the western edge of the city. One rebel quoted by the Associated Press claimed his army was pressing on west to the city of Zlitan, with the aim of continuing the advance to Tripoli. The capture of the airport is a blow to the Gaddafi regime, although previous important rebel gains have quickly been reversed as the conflict has ebbed and flowed. A common pattern is for Nato air strikes to allow the rebels to beat back regime troops, only for the better-equipped and trained Gaddafi forces to hit back once the bombings stop. The rebel National Transitional Council, based in the opposition eastern stronghold of Benghazi, claimed “Libyans across the entire country” would protest on Friday in their latest attempt to force Col Gaddafi to step down after 41 years in power. The council said efforts to “free” Tripoli were being intensified after several days of uprisings in different parts of the city.

It said: “The National Transitional Council reiterates its demand that Gaddafi relinquish power over the…parts of the country that remain under regime control.” While there is clearly opposition to Col Gaddafi in Tripoli, attempts to launch demonstrations have in the past mostly been stifled by heavy security force deployments and – say rights groups – mass arrests of dissenters. Opposition activists’ persistent claims over the past week of uprisings around the city have not been independently verified. Moussa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, dismissed the opposition allegations of unrest in the capital. “They are losing the battle,” he said late on Tuesday. “Their morale is very low.” Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, renewed international calls for the Libyan regime to launch an “immediate, verifiable ceasefire” in the civil conflict and to stop attacking civilians. He said the Gaddafi government had agreed to another visit by a UN special envoy.

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8df2e4dc-7c1e-11e0-a386-1 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX

1 TRIBUNA: JOSEPH S. NYE El poder americano después de Bin Laden EE UU no está en una decadencia absoluta. Su economía es muy competitiva y su política hace reformas JOSEPH S. NYE 11/05/2011 Cuando un Estado es preponderante en cuanto a recursos de poder, los observadores hablan con frecuencia de que se encuentra en una situación hegemónica. En la actualidad, muchos expertos sostienen que el poder en ascenso de otros países y la pérdida de influencia estadounidense en un Oriente Próximo revolucionario indican una decadencia de la "hegemonía americana", pero este término es confuso. Para empezar, la posesión de recursos de poder no siempre entraña que se consigan los resultados deseados. Ni siquiera la reciente muerte de Osama Bin Laden a manos de fuerzas especiales de Estados Unidos indica nada sobre el poder americano en un sentido o en otro. Para entender por qué, piénsese en la situación posterior a la II Guerra Mundial, en la que correspondía a EE UU una tercera parte del producto mundial y este país tenía una preponderancia abrumadora en cuanto a armas nucleares. Muchos lo consideraban un hegemón mundial. No obstante, Estados Unidos no pudo impedir la "pérdida" de China, "hacer retroceder" el comunismo en la Europa Oriental, impedir el punto muerto en la guerra de Corea, derrotar al Frente de Liberación Nacional de Vietnam ni desalojar al régimen de Castro de Cuba. Incluso en la época de la supuesta hegemonía americana, los estudios muestran que solo una quinta parte de las medidas adoptadas por Estados Unidos para imponer cambios en otros países mediante amenazas militares dieron resultado, mientras que las sanciones económicas solo lo hicieron en la mitad de los casos. Aun así, muchos creen que la preponderancia actual de Estados Unidos en cuanto a recursos de poder es hegemónica y que decaerá, como ocurrió antes con la de Gran Bretaña. Algunos americanos tienen una reacción emocional ante esa perspectiva, pese a que sería ahistórico creer que Estados Unidos tendrá eternamente una participación preponderante en los recursos de poder. Pero el término "decadencia" aúna dos dimensiones diferentes del poder: una decadencia absoluta, en el sentido de declive o pérdida de la capacidad para utilizar los recursos propios eficazmente, y una decadencia relativa, en la que los recursos de poder de otros Estados lleguen a ser mayores o a utilizarse más eficazmente. Por ejemplo, en el siglo XVII los Países Bajos prosperaron internamente, pero decayeron en poder relativo, pues otros cobraron mayor fuerza. A la inversa, el Imperio Romano occidental no sucumbió ante otro Estado, sino por su decadencia interna y a consecuencia de los embates de tropeles de bárbaros. Roma era una sociedad agraria con poca productividad económica y un alto grado de luchas intestinas. Si bien Estados Unidos tiene problemas, no encaja en la descripción de decadencia absoluta de la antigua Roma y, por popular que sea, la analogía con la decadencia británica es igualmente engañosa. Gran Bretaña tenía un imperio en el que nunca se ponía el sol, gobernaba a más de una cuarta parte de la humanidad y gozaba de la supremacía naval, pero hay diferencias muy importantes entre los recursos de poder de 54

la Gran Bretaña imperial y los Estados Unidos contemporáneos. Durante la I Guerra Mundial, Gran Bretaña ocupaba tan solo el cuarto puesto entre las grandes potencias en cuanto a personal militar, el cuarto por el PIB y el tercero en gasto militar. Los gastos de Defensa ascendían por término medio a entre el 2,5% y el 3,4% del PIB y el Imperio estaba gobernado en gran parte con tropas locales. En 1914, las exportaciones netas de capital de Gran Bretaña le brindaron un importante fondo financiero al que recurrir (aunque algunos historiadores consideran que habría sido mejor haber invertido ese dinero en industria nacional). De los 8,6 millones de soldados británicos que combatieron en la I Guerra Mundial, casi una tercera parte procedían del imperio de allende los mares. Sin embargo, con el ascenso del nacionalismo, a Londres leresultó cada vez más difícil declarar la guerra en nombre del Imperio, cuya defensa llegó a ser una carga más pesada. En cambio, Estados Unidos ha tenido una economía continental inmune a la desintegración nacionalista desde 1865. Pese a lo mucho que se habla a la ligera del imperio americano, Estados Unidos está menos atado y tiene más grados de libertad que la que disfrutó Gran Bretaña jamás. De hecho, la posición geopolítica de Estados Unidos difiere profundamente de la de la Gran Bretaña imperial: mientras que esta última había de afrontar a unos vecinos en ascenso en Alemania y en Rusia, Estados Unidos se beneficia de los dos océanos y de unos vecinos más débiles. Pese a esas diferencias, los estadounidenses son propensos a creer cíclicamente en la decadencia. Los Padres Fundadores se preocupaban por las comparaciones con la decadencia de la República de Roma. Además, el pesimismo cultural es muy americano y se remonta a las raíces puritanas del país. Como observó Charles Dickens hace un siglo y medio, "de creer a sus ciudadanos, como un solo hombre, están siempre deprimidos, siempre estancados y siempre son presa de una crisis alarmante y nunca ha dejado de ser así". Más recientemente, las encuestas de opinión revelaron una creencia generalizada en la decadencia después de que la Unión Soviética lanzara el Sputnik en 1957 y otra vez durante las sacudidas económicas de la época de Nixon en la década de 1970 y después de los déficits presupuestarios de Ronald Reagan en la de 1980. Al final de aquel decenio, los americanos creían que el país estaba en decadencia; aun así, al cabo de una década creían que Estados Unidos era la única superpotencia. Ahora muchos han vuelto a creer en la decadencia. Los ciclos de preocupación por la decadencia nos revelan más sobre la psicología americana que sobre los cambios subyacentes en cuanto a recursos de poder. Algunos observadores, como, por ejemplo, el historiador de Harvard Niall Ferguson, creen que "debatir sobre las fases de la decadencia puede ser una pérdida de tiempo: lo que debería preocupar más a las autoridades y los ciudadanos es una inesperada caída en picado". Ferguson cree que una duplicación de la deuda pública en el próximo decenio no puede por sí sola erosionar la fuerza de Estados Unidos, pero podría debilitar la fe, durante mucho tiempo dada por supuesta, en la capacidad de Estados Unidos para capear cualquier crisis. Ferguson está en lo cierto al sostener que Estados Unidos tendrá que abordar su déficit presupuestario para mantener la confianza internacional, pero, como muestro en mi libro El futuro del poder, lograrlo entra dentro de lo posible. Estados Unidos disfrutó de un superávit presupuestario hace solo una década, antes de que las reducciones fiscales

de George W. Bush, dos guerras y la recesión crearan una inestabilidad fiscal. La economía estadounidense sigue ocupando uno de los primeros puestos en competitividad, según el Foro Económico Mundial, y el sistema político, a su desorganizado modo, ha empezado a lidiar con los cambios necesarios. Algunos creen que antes de las elecciones de 2012 se podría lograr una avenencia política entre republicanos y demócratas; otros sostienen que es más probable un acuerdo después de las elecciones. En cualquier caso, las declaraciones difusas sobre una decadencia de la hegemonía resultarían una vez más engañosas.

Joseph S. Nye Jr. es profesor en Harvard y autor de The Future of Power (El futuro del poder). Traducción de Carlos Manzano © Project Syndicate, 2011.

Obama:1 "Con la muerte de Bin Laden experimentamos la misma unidad que tras el 11-S"

Una1 ola de patriotismo recorre EE UU

El1 fiscal general de EE UU justifica la operación contra Bin Laden como un acto de "autodefensa nacional"

Estados1 Unidos mata a Osama Bin Laden

El1 Gobierno felicita a EE UU por la operación antiterrorista que ha acabado con Bin Laden

El1 Poder Judicial suspende a Baltasar Garzón por investigar los crímenes del franquismo http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/pode1 r/americano/despues/Bin/Laden/elpepiopi/ 20110511elpepiopi_5/Tes

1 La OIM afirma que Gadafi obliga a los prófugos a embarcarse hacia Europa La cifra de desplazados de Libia por el conflicto aumenta hasta los 746.000, según datos de la organización MIGUEL MORA | Roma 10/05/2011 Las sospechas de que el régimen del dictador libio Muamar el Gadafi no solo está tolerando los desembarcos de inmigrantes hacia Europa sino que los está usando como un arma más de guerra van tomando forma poco a poco. Algunos de los 1.887 prófugos africanos llegados a Lampedusa el último fin de semana han relatado a miembros de la Organización Internacional para las Migraciones (OIM) que soldados libios les obligaron a embarcarse en una barcaza con destino a Italia. La escena relatada por los desplazados se produjo entre el jueves y el viernes, en un puerto situado en las afueras de Trípoli, a solo 15 kilómetros del centro y que según fuentes de los rebeldes libios habría sustituido a la localidad de Zuara como punto de partida de los desembarcos hacia Europa. Una primera barcaza zarpó cargada hasta los topes con 600 pasajeros a bordo, muchos de ellos somalíes y eritreos, y se1 hundió pasados unos minutos por el sobrepeso. Nadie sabe cuántos prófugos sobrevivieron, pero algunos testigos han dicho que solo algunas decenas lograron salvarse nadando hasta la orilla. Casi 2.000 inmigrantes a Lampedusa el fin de semana 56

Durante el fin de semana, 1.871 inmigrantes africanos procedentes de Libia lograron llegar a Lampedusa1 en cinco barcos distintos. Uno de ellos, que llevaba a 528 personas, encalló en las rocas cerca del puerto produciendo momentos de pánico. Gracias un rescate dramático y a la ayuda de militares y civiles, solo se registró la muerte de tres personas. La agencia de Naciones Unidas para los refugiados (ACNUR) llamó el lunes a los barcos militares y pesqueros que navegan por el Mediterráneo cercano a Libia a estrechar la vigilancia y ofrecer ayuda y rescate a cuantas barcazas encuentren en el mar. "Por naturaleza, todos esos barcos están en grave riesgo, aunque pueda parecer que no. Hace falta socorrer a todos", dice Laura Boldrini, portavoz de ACNUR en Italia,"para poner freno a la macabra contabilidad. Las estimaciones a la baja hablan ya de más de mil muertos en tres meses: me parece una cifra suficiente". 746.000 desplazados Mientras tanto, la cifra de personas que abandonan Libia no deja de aumentar, y son ya 746.080 los desplazados. Los últimos datos de la OIM, del 8 de mayo, señalan que Túnez ha recibido más de 360.000 llegadas; Egipto, cerca de 269.000; Níger ha superado los 61.200 desplazados; Chad 25.423; Argelia 18.000, Sudán, 2.800. Mientras, sigue siendo mucho más pequeña la cifra de personas que ha llegado hasta Italia (10.371) y Malta (un millar). La OIM está tratando de prevenir más desembarcos evacuando por mar a muchos inmigrantes atrapados en Misrata, la ciudad torturada por las bombas de Gadafi. Hasta ahora, la ONG ha trasladado por barco hasta Bengasi a 6.263 prófugos y heridos. MIGUEL MORA La OIM afirma que Gadafi obliga a los prófugos a embarcarse hacia Europa10/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/OIM/afirma/Gadafi/obliga/profugos/emba1 rcarse/Europa/elpepuint/20110510elpepuint_8/Tes

1 COMMENT - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f18116b0-7b36-11e0-1 9b06-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M22RzQpe Why Assad will rise again – and then fall By David Lesch Published: May 10 2011 23:39 | Last updated: May 10 2011 23:39 Having met Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, a number of times, I can say with confidence that he was startled when the tumult in the Arab world spread1 into his own country. Like so many autocrats over the years, he truly thought he was secure, and even popular. He liked to say that his country was “different”. He certainly saw it as immune to the uprisings besetting other countries. His regime’s mouthpieces of course echoed this, stressing that these states’ elderly rulers were out-of-touch and corrupt American lackeys. The implication was that Mr Assad, at 45 young by the standards of fellow autocrats, understood the Arab youth, having faced down America and Israel and thus brandishing credentials that played well in the “Arab street”.

1 1 EDITOR’S CHOICE EU imposes sanctions on 13 Syrians - May-10 Gideon Rachman: Into the thickets 1 1 of the Arab spring - May-09 Syria blocks satellite phone communications - May-09 West risks sending 1 1 wrong signal on Assad - May-08 EU split on Assad sanctions - May-05 In depth: Middle East protests - May-01 Only a month ago there was a debate in the west as to whether or not Mr Assad, who had long liked to present himself as different from his hardline father, would sanction a crackdown. Now, of course, that hope is over. He has relied1 on tanks and troops to repress protesters, killing nearly 600 people, according to human rights groups. Given the course of the past few years this should not be a surprise. One encounter I had with him is illuminating. It was in 2007 during the referendum to determine whether or not he would “win” another seven-year term in office. (His name was the only one on the ballot.) Then, amid parades reminiscent of the celebrations for Saddam Hussein, for the first time I felt he had succumbed to the aphrodisiac of power. The sycophants had convinced him Syria’s well-being was synonymous with his and that he must hold on to power at all cost. So he appears now close to a reincarnation of his father, Hafiz al-Assad, who sanctioned the crackdown on Islamic militants in 1982. But now that he seems more confident of restoring control I suspect he believes he can again recover from the pariah status facing him. He did after all survive the fallout of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in Lebanon in 2005 in which Syria was implicated. For now he has withdrawn into a sectarian fortress, apparently intent on maintaining his minority Alawite sect’s hold on power. At critical times in his presidency, he has given in to the hardliners, particularly the Alawite generals who dominate the security apparatus. So how can he manoeuvre his way back to acceptability? As the crackdown continues, the1 international community has given him leeway fearing what might happen in Syria and the region should he fall. He seems to be using it to buy time to quell the uprising. Should the regime survive, I expect he will try to engage in some level of reform, as the generals return to their barracks. But I fear he will continue to focus on economic reform, only throwing protesters some bones of political reform that will fall far short of their demands, and, possibly, draw closer to Iran1 . If this only gets him back to where he was before the uprisings intensified, he will probably be satisfied. A classic authoritarian state is, after all, the regime's default condition. Corruption, institutional inertia and a repressive apparatus ensure that its instinct is to recoil into survival mode. Mr Assad’s hope will be that repression will stamp out the fervour that removed the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. As in the past, he will think he has made significant concessions, but this is a different Middle East today. The momentum of change is harder to reverse in the long term. He may confront a more determined opposition sooner than he realises. He thought Syria was different but he was wrong. The true meaning of the Arab spring is that people are weary of autocrats. The west may for reasons of realpolitik have to pretend to accept his reforms but his people will not. For now he survives. But he is not leading and, eventually, he will join the list of former Arab dictators. The writer is professor of Middle East history at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is author of The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Assad and Modern Syria. David Lesch Why Assad will rise again

– and then fall May 10 2011 23:39 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f18116b0-7b36-11e0-9b06-1 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX 58

May 10, 2011 Killings and Rumors Unsettle a Libyan City By KAREEM FAHIM

Nicole Tung for The New York Times Sa’ad al-Tobouli surveyed the damage to the home of his brother Youssef, a former internal security prison guard, after it was attacked last week in Benghazi, Libya. BENGHAZI, Libya — Three weeks ago, a traveler spotted a man’s body in the farmland on this city’s outskirts, shot twice in the head with his hands and feet bound. He had disappeared earlier that day, after visiting a market. Ten days later, near the same spot, a shepherd stumbled upon the body of a second man, killed with a single bullet to the forehead. Masked, armed men had taken him from his home the night before, without giving a reason, his wife said. The dead men, Nasser al-Sirmany and Hussein Ghaith, had both worked as interrogators for Col. Muammar1 el-Qaddafi’s internal security services, known for their brutality against domestic dissidents. The killings, still unsolved, appeared to be rooted in revenge, the families said, and have raised the specter of a death squad stalking former Qaddafi officials in Benghazi, the opposition stronghold. The killings have unsettled an already paranoid city, where rebel authorities have spent weeks trying to round up people suspected of being Qaddafi loyalists — members of a fifth column who they say are trying to overthrow the rebels. If the violence continues, it will pose a stern challenge to a movement trying to present a vision of a new country committed to the rule of law, while potentially undermining hopes for a peaceful transition if Colonel Qaddafi surrenders power. The rebels say their security forces are not responsible for the killings. Prosecutors here say they are investigating at least four attacks, including another murder in March, and they are exploring the possible involvement of Islamists who were imprisoned by the Qaddafi government and are now settling old scores. “It’s our responsibility to protect people,” said Jamal Benour, the justice coordinator for the opposition in Benghazi. “It’s important the killers are punished. The law is most important.”

But some here dismiss talk of Islamists, saying they believe the killings are being carried out by an armed group allied with the rebels, or possibly Qaddafi loyalists pretending to be. Last week, about a dozen men wearing balaclavas and carrying guns arrived at the house of Youssef al-Tobouli in three pickup trucks. At the time, Mr. Tobouli, a former internal security prison guard who had defected to the rebel side, was at the store. His terrified relatives called friends, and in the gunfight that followed, the room Mr. Tobouli shared with his wife and three children was destroyed by fire. The attackers were eventually routed, and though they did not identify themselves, they left behind a Mitsubishi pickup truck with “February 17th” — the day Colonel Qaddafi’s opponents mark as the beginning of their revolt — painted on the side, Mr. Tobouli’s cousin said. “I am very sorry to say that,” said the cousin, Eissa al-Tobouli, referring to the markings on the truck. He added that his cousin was part of a group of former Qaddafi officials who registered their names with rebel officials in Benghazi, on orders from the new authorities to make their defections official. “He paid the price for being in internal security,” the cousin said.

There may have been other attacks. Dr. Omar Khalid, a forensic1 pathologist at Jalaa Hospital in Benghazi, said the hospital had received at least a dozen bodies of executed men, though it was not clear whether they had worked for the government. The authorities are also investigating the executions of Qaddafi soldiers, said Ali Wanis, the Benghazi district attorney. One victim, whose throat was slashed, has been in the morgue at Jalaa Hospital since mid-April, unidentified. When his body was found in the Guwarsha area outside Benghazi — near where the bodies of Mr. Sirmany and Mr. Ghaith were found — his feet and hands were bound with rope, the morgue’s manager said. The killings in Benghazi are taking place in a city that otherwise seems safer with each passing day. Police stations burned in February have reopened. Legions of young volunteers have recently taken to the streets, to sweep and pick up the trash. The rebel authorities are contemplating reopening schools this month, given the improved security. In the midst of a war, the crime rate in Benghazi is lower than it was before the fighting started, many residents say. Even on calmer streets, the fear of betrayal has led to deadly episodes. Last week, rebel fighters in pickup trucks rushed to the city’s radio station, after an apparently false report that it had been occupied by Qaddafi loyalists. Guns were fired, and a bystander was accidentally killed when a rifle fell off a fighter’s shoulder and went off. “This is a war of rumors,” said Col. Fawzi Omami, who works as a security guard at the radio station. “People are very edgy.” Some elements of the rebel security forces have contributed to the discomfort. Mr. Benour, the justice coordinator, said that his office was investigating abuses, including thefts, by the Force for the Protection of the Feb. 17th Revolution, which has official responsibility for arresting Qaddafi loyalists. He said the leader of the force had been suspended.

He said there was no evidence that rebel security forces were implicated in the killings, but admitted the crimes were still a mystery. Salah al-Hami, who was tortured by Colonel Qaddafi’s security agents in the 1990s, said friends had told him he was suspected in the murders of the former Qaddafi officials. Years ago, members of the Hami family were repeatedly jailed as security agents searched for Mr. Hami’s brother Mohamed, a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the 1990s. An uncle and three of his brothers, including Mohamed, were killed by the security services or died in Colonel Qaddafi’s prisons, he said. Many people here remember the killing of Mohamed al-Hami, on a Benghazi street in 1996. Afterward, the security forces reportedly crucified him before parading his body around Benghazi in the back of a pickup truck. Mr. Hami denied any involvement in the recent killings. “Never,” he said. “Everybody is going to have a fair trial. I’m against any person who would take matters into their own hands and execute people.” It was unclear whether Mr. Sirmany and Mr. Ghaith were minor functionaries or senior officers. Mr. Sirmany served in Libya’s special forces and was an interrogator, but he never talked about his work, his brother said. Mr. Ghaith’s family said he simply recorded the interrogations and was happy to join the revolution. In a mourning tent outside Mr. Ghaith’s house, his wife, Mariam al-Abdali, said: “He didn’t have any enemies. He joined the revolution 20 days after it started.” His son, Abdulrahman Ghaith, said that after his father was abducted, they searched the city until a call came the next day from the hospital. His father had cuts on his head, and on his left hand, which Dr. Khalid, the forensic pathologist, said was a defensive wound. “His clothes were ripped,” his son said, revealing details that his sisters had not heard before. “It looked like he resisted,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/world/1 africa/11benghazi.html?nl=todaysheadlines &emc=tha2

NATO steps up bombing in Libya; rebels report gains

By Michael Birnbaum and Joby1 Warrick, Published: May 10 TRIPOLI, Libya — NATO carried out its most forceful attacks in weeks in Libya on Tuesday, part of an apparently coordinated push with rebel forces to bring an end to Moammar Gaddafi’s 41-year-long rule. NATO warplanes pummeled command-and-control targets in four cities, including Tripoli and Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. U.S. officials said NATO had increased the tempo of its airstrikes throughout the country, and members of the alliance spoke of 61

improved targeting of dug-in loyalist forces, made possible in part by the presence of U.S. Predator drone aircraft. The new assault appeared to reflect increased cooperation between NATO and the rebel army, allowing the rebels to make modest gains on the ground this week, particularly in and around the western city of Misurata. Although it was too early to tell whether the advances would mark a meaningful turning point in a conflict that has left the country divided since February, the progress “shows where the momentum lies,” said a European diplomat privy to NATO’s internal discussions. “It is noteworthy that Gaddafi’s forces have not been able to mount a sustained attack for quite some time,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military operations. He said the rebels’ recent success in Misurata was largely due to the fact that government troops had been forced to abandon entrenched positions, making them vulnerable to ground attack. The official also stressed the importance of Tuesday’s NATO bombings in Tripoli. Several alliance members, eager to avoid a protracted stalemate in Libya, have been pushing NATO to be more aggressive in striking Gaddafi’s center of power, despite concerns about possible civilian casualties. NATO’s mission in Libya is to prevent civilian deaths, and alliance officials have denied targeting Gaddafi. But they bombed his compound just over a week ago, apparently killing one of his sons and three grandchildren. Gaddafi, who has refused to yield power despite massive pressure both internally and internationally, has not been seen in public since that attack. Analysts said Tuesday that they suspected NATO’s stepped-up campaign arose from a feeling that the West needs to intervene more forcefully and cannot rely on the rebels to oust Gaddafi. “I have no doubt the regime is crumbling to some extent,” said Tarik Yousef, dean of the Dubai School of Government and a former professor at Georgetown University. “There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that a scenario is being worked on that doesn’t involve the rebels marching to Tripoli.” Even without rebel troops anywhere near the capital, Gaddafi’s government is struggling to maintain consistent supplies. In Tripoli and all along the route to the border with Tunisia, gas lines stretch in some cases for more than half a mile, testimony to terrible shortages brought on by strict international sanctions. Many Libyans say they have to camp out in their cars for a week to fill their tanks — or face paying 30 times the official government rate on the black market. Command and control The NATO attacks on Tripoli occurred early Tuesday morning. Jets could be heard booming over the city; several large explosions followed. NATO said its airstrikes also hit targets in Mizdah, a town 114 miles south of Tripoli; Sirte, a Gaddafi stronghold on the Gulf of Sidra; and Misurata. The Libyan government took journalists early Tuesday to a hospital in central Tripoli that was next door to an intelligence building that was hit by the attacks.

NATO officials insisted that all the strikes — including the ones in Tripoli — were aimed at military targets and were in line with U.N. mandates limiting military action to protecting civilians. “What we can do is to protect civilians by taking out major parts of the Gaddafi war machine,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution and NPR during a visit to Atlanta. “So, we target critical military capabilities, like tanks and armored vehicles, rocket launchers, ammunition depots, command-and-control centers, and other facilities that can be used to attack the civilian population.” NATO confirmed Tuesday that Predator drones had teamed up with British fighter jets in an attack earlier in the week on a Misurata building that was being used by Gaddafi forces to direct artillery and rocket fire. One of the unmanned planes conducted surveillance of the building and helped guide a pair of Royal Air Force Tornados to the site. The jets fired missiles that knocked out the building’s upper floors, where the loyalists’ spotters were operating, an alliance spokesman said. Still, residents said conditions in Misurata, the closest rebel outpost to the capital, remain miserable. “You still can see a queue of people looking for food, looking for bread. We’ve run out of our medication, and you cannot find vegetables anywhere,” said Aiman, a doctor at the main hospital in Misurata, who asked that only his first name be used because he was concerned about his safety. “Before we think about Tripoli, we have to secure Misurata.” Rebels fighting in eastern Libya have been bogged down for weeks, unable to capture the city of Brega, where there is a major oil terminal. Fighters in the frontline city of Ajdabiya said that in order to take Brega, the rebel army needs more weapons. “We ask the governments of all the Western countries to help us. We ask for more weapons for fighting at the front line,” said a commander at Ajdabiya’s western entrance, Abduljawad al-Badeen. But Badeen said the rebels had recently procured arms from military units that had defected and from abandoned army depots in eastern Libya, giving them access to antitank missiles, rocket launchers and machine guns. “Before, we were fighting with different weapons. Gaddafi had much more,” he explained. “But now we are much more evenly matched.” Warrick reported from Washington. Special correspondent Portia Walker in Benghazi, Libya, and correspondent Simon Denyer in New Delhi contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nato-steps-up-bombing-in-1 libya-rebels-report- gains/2011/05/10/AF8GsehG_story.html?nl_headlines

1 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85165f78-7b20-11e0-9b06-1 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2nNLcPD Old certainties totter in face of Arab Spring By David Gardner in London Published: May 10 2011 17:28 | Last updated: May 10 2011 17:28 It has long been held that in the Middle East the Arabs cannot make war without Egypt and they cannot make peace without Syria. This hoary adage may need regular updating as the1 Arab Spring unfolds, and some of the certainties that seemed embedded in the old order start to crumble. Only weeks after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt has started to reconfigure its foreign policy. Cairo may soon open diplomatic relations with Tehran, broken off after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, restoring state-to-state channels that many countries maintain with a regime they regard as either mischievous or menacing.

1 1 EDITOR’S CHOICE Army scours Damascus suburbs - May-10 Fuel shortages in 1 Libya begin to bite - May-10 Opinion: Why Assad will rise again – and then fall - May- 1 1 10 Political turmoil need not presage economic disaster - May-09 Editorial Comment: 1 Egypt’s revolution at the crossroads - May-10 EU imposes sanctions on 13 Syrians - May-10 Of ultimately more significance to the region is Egypt’s revision of its policy towards Israel.

Even before the revolution of Tahrir Square brought1 down the Mubarak regime, it became obvious that no Egyptian government would any longer simply be able to ignore popular resentment towards Israeli and American policy in the region the way Mr Mubarak had done – especially by colluding in the siege of Gaza imposed by Israel and endorsed by the west after the Islamists of Hamas trounced the nationalist Fatah in the Palestinian elections of 2006. It is highly unlikely that Egypt, still under the institutional tutelage of an army in annual receipt of $1.3bn from the US since the Camp David peace deal of 1979, will abrogate the treaty with Israel. But it is just as unlikely that an Egypt recovering its voice and standing in the Arab world will continue to fall in behind the designs of Israel and the US. Thus, it was the Egyptian army that brokered last week’s Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, intended to lead to a government of Palestinian national unity and the reunification of Gaza and the West Bank. Omar Suleiman, Mr Mubarak’s intelligence chief and a close associate of the US and Israel, had previously mediated these negotiations, pretty much guaranteeing no reconciliation was possible.

His demise, along with a groundswell of Palestinian agitation for unity as the Arab uprisings spread, changed all that. Another factor that helped persuade the Palestinian factions to bury their bitter rivalry was the obduracy of the hard-line government of Benjamin Netanyahu. His government has been unwilling to contemplate the territorial compromises Israel would need to make for peace with the Palestinians.

It is also still in mourning for the Mubarak regime and anxious that the even viler1 tyranny of the Assads in Syria might implode, taking with it the predictability of a measurable and measured adversary. Israel’s discomfiture is understandable. The era in which it competed for regional influence with Turkey and Iran, in a game refereed by the US, with the Arab states watching impotently from the sidelines, is over. Egypt, once the beating heart of Arabism, is back in the game. A leading Israeli strategist caught the mood just after the Mubarak regime fell, saying “our whole structure of analysis just collapsed”. While Egypt is recovering its vigour, Syria is losing its potency as a spoiler. The regime Bashar al-Assad inherited from his father, the late Hafez al-Assad, lacks the critical mass to shape the region in its own image. For all that it declares itself to be the heart of resistance to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and its own Golan Heights, hardly a shot has been fired on the Syrian-Israeli border since the end of the 1973 October or Yom Kippur war. Allied with Iran since 1980, Syria has preferred to needle Israel via irregular proxies such as Hamas and Hizbollah. Yet the civic uprising the Assads are now putting down with such ferocity is already limiting the regime’s room for manoeuvre. Hamas, for example, most of whose politburo is based in Damascus, declined last month to stage a rally of support for the regime. Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement and militia, uses its television station to parrot Syrian accounts of a conspiracy against the regime. But its leaders have been unusually quiet, knocked off stride by the Arab Spring but also anticipating they may be implicated in indictments due next month from a UN tribunal investigating the 2005 killing of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese premier, in which Damascus is widely believed complicit. The Arab Spring so far has only toppled two dictators outright. But it is reshaping events in the region across a much broader spectrum – and it is barely four months old.

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1 1 EDITOR’S CHOICE Army scours Damascus suburbs - May-10 EU imposes sanctions 2 2 on 13 Syrians - May-10 In depth: Middle East protests - May-01 Tripoli rocked by air 2 2 strikes - May-10 Syria blocks satellite phone communications - May-09 Palestinian rivals unite with regional mood - May-09

2 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dd957628-7b36-11e0-9b06-22 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2pcn3CH Egypt’s revolution at the crossroads Published: May 10 2011 23:16 | Last updated: May 10 2011 23:16

The Egyptian2 revolution, which brought down the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, has entered a critical phase. Since Mr Mubarak’s ousting in February, the inter-faith2 violence that has long disfigured Egyptian society has re-emerged. Last weekend saw the bloodiest incident yet, as two2 churches were set alight, 12 Egyptians killed, and more than 230 injured in clashes between Salafist Muslims and Christians in Imbaba, a vast slum on the edge of Cairo. Egyptians must act to stem this rising tide of violence – and quickly. If they do not, the country’s painstaking transition from autocracy to democracy could be undermined. That would not just be a betrayal of the Egyptians who risked their lives to demand a better future. It would also send the wrong signal to seekers of freedom across the Arab world, who draw inspiration from events in its most populous country.

2 EDITOR’S CHOICE Political turmoil need not presage economic disaster - May-09 2 2 Twelve killed in sectarian clashes in Cairo - May-08 Cairo urged to review Israel ties - 2 2 May-05 Egypt’s former interior minister jailed - May-05 Recession fears for Egypt and 2 Tunisia - May-03 Heba Saleh: Egyptians must keep sound policies - May-03 The immediate problem that Egypt’s interim authority, the Supreme Military Council, must address is a security vacuum. The police force has been widely discredited for the brutality it routinely employed to prop up Mr Mubarak. Under attack from citizens seeking retribution, it appears both unwilling and unable to intervene in sectarian conflict. Given this abdication, the military must do more to ensure2 security – for Christians as well as Muslims. That does not just mean protecting churches. The authorities must also undo the decades-old discrimination against the Coptic Christians who make up about 10 per cent of Egypt’s population. The old regime treated violence against this group as a tribal affair, leaving elders to deal with those responsible. This meant attacks on Christians generally went unpunished. The SMC must ensure that instead, perpetrators feel the full force of the law. Egypt’s2 new constitution, when it arrives, must also guarantee minority rights. Just as importantly, Egyptians must use the coming national elections to challenge the benighted ideology of the Salafist elements unearthed by the revolution. For the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, this is a chance to show that they are not the crazed fundamentalists of western caricature. There is reason to hope that an open debate would bring tolerant voices to the fore. One of the most heartening images from the uprising was that of Muslims protecting praying Christians (and vice versa) in Tahrir Square. Egypt’s revolutionaries have the appetite for a more pluralist society. Now the authorities must nourish it.

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2 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ac75807a-7b2b-11e0-9b06-2 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2o9eeOX Fuel shortages in Libya begin to bite By Michael Peel in Tripoli and Javier Blas in London Published: May 10 2011 19:03 | Last updated: May 10 2011 20:38 Long lines of cars queueing for petrol snaked within sight of Libya’s National Oil Corporation headquarters on Tuesday as the country’s fuel shortage deepened and analysts said they saw no immediate end to it. Soldiers have fired warning shots outside petrol stations in the country’s government- controlled west as Muammer Gaddafi’s regime scrambles to deal with a problem that is hobbling Libyans by immobilising their vehicles for days at a time. The troubles show how energy supply difficulties are becoming an increasingly important factor in the near three-month civil war as the authorities – and to some extent their rebel opponents – grapple with falls in oil production, refinery capacity and crude imports. Ben Cahill, north Africa analyst at PFC Energy consultancy, said: “The longer the conflict drags on, the more important this will become for both sides. Fuel shortages could be what finally drags down the regime – or the opposition.” The International Energy Agency, the western countries’ oil watchdog, estimates that before the start of the conflict Libya consumed about 270,000 barrels a day of fuel, with diesel and petrol accounting for about half of the total. The Paris-based agency noted that demand “may actually be boosted by military operations”. The government tightly controls foreign journalists’ movements and has refused to allow them free access to petrol queues to conduct interviews. Libyans who spoke to the Financial Times – including supporters of the regime – said it now took several days to fill up a tank in Tripoli and other parts of the west. The growing tensions and official anxiety caused by the persistent petrol shortage were clear on Monday when soldiers fired warning shots after being faced with a large crowd outside a filling station on the main road west from Tripoli. At another station, where a soldier fired in the air, an official pick-up overtook a bus full of journalists and screeched to a halt in front of it to stop them filming. Analysts say the Tripoli regime faces a “perfect storm” of petrol supply problems linked to the geography, politics and the commercial impact of a civil conflict that began with the mid-February uprising centred on the east of the country. The single functioning refinery under government control – in Zawiya, about 50km from Tripoli – is operating at only about 60 per cent of capacity. Bill Farren-Price, head of UK-based consultancy Petroleum Policy Intelligence, said: “The refinery has for years been in need of renovation but is now in need of short-term maintenance work as well.” 67

Another complication is that the refinery is linked to oilfields deep in the Sahara desert, where output has been extremely low since foreign oil companies all but closed their operations at the start of the fighting. A third problem for Colonel Gaddafi is that he has been struggling to import petrol from the international market, partly because – according to regime officials – shipments are being blocked by Nato vessels. Nato, which is acting under a UN mandate calling for the protection of civilians in Libya, said its interceptions were decided on a case-by-case basis and were governed by whether there was “reliable intelligence” to suggest the cargo would be used to support attacks or threats against non-combatants. Analysts say the rebels have difficulties of their own, as the two working refineries in their area of certain control are “tea-kettle” operations – very simple and old plants unable to produce much petrol or diesel. Opposition leaders are in talks with international oil traders about boosting supplies but so far no deal has been made. The Tripoli government has for some time insisted it is close to resolving the petrol crisis, which it has attributed to poor logistical management. Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya’s National Oil Corporation, did not respond to calls for comment. The corporation’s headquarters appeared quiet on Tuesday afternoon, with no vehicles parked out front and one employee saying that the operation was short of staff and the situation was “not good”. While queues and frustration build in the streets outside, the many Libyans who now eat, sleep and socialise around their stationary vehicles are forced to be stoical about the latest hardship to confront them. Asked how the country would cope if the authorities could not resolve the petrol shortfall, another oil official’s response gave a sense of the lack of solutions available. “We will have to stop our cars,” he said.

Michael Peel in Tripoli and Javier Blas Fuel shortages in Libya begin to bite May 10 2011 20:38 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ac75807a-7b2b-11e0-9b06-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX2

2 Americas2

May 10, 2011 Venezuela Asked Colombian Rebels to Kill Opposition Figures, Analysis Shows By SIMON ROMERO CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombia’s main rebel group has an intricate history of collaboration with Venezuelan officials, who have asked it to provide urban guerrilla training to pro-government cells here and to assassinate political opponents of

Venezuela2 ’s president, according to a new analysis of the group’s internal communications.

The analysis contends that the Revolutionary2 Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was asked to serve as a shadow militia for Venezuela’s intelligence apparatus, although there is no evidence that President Hugo2 Chávez was aware of the assassination requests or that they were ever carried out. The documents, found in the computer files of a senior FARC commander who was killed in a 2008 raid, also show that the relationship between the leftist rebels and Venezuela’s leftist government, while often cooperative, has been rocky and at times duplicitous. The documents are part of a 240-page book on the rebel group, “The FARC Files:

Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archive of Raúl2 Reyes,” to be published Tuesday by the International2 Institute for Strategic Studies in London. While some of the documents have been quoted and cited previously, the release of a CD accompanying the book will be the first time such a large number of the documents have been made public since they were first seized. The book comes at a delicate stage in the FARC’s ties with Venezuela’s government. Mr. Chávez acknowledged last month for the first time that some of his political allies had collaborated with Colombian rebels, but insisted they “went behind all our backs.” The book contradicts this assertion, pointing to a long history of collaboration by Mr. Chávez and his top confidants. Venezuela’s government viewed the FARC as “an ally that would keep U.S. and Colombian military strength in the region tied down in counterinsurgency, helping to reduce perceived threats against Venezuela,” the book said. The archive describes a covert meeting in Venezuela in September 2000 between Mr. Chávez and Mr. Reyes, the FARC commander whose computers, hard drives and memory sticks were the source of the files. At the meeting, Mr. Chávez agreed to lend the FARC hard currency for weapons purchases. A spokesman for Mr. Chávez did not respond to requests for comment. Venezuela’s government has contended that the Reyes files were fabrications. In 2008, Interpol dismissed the possibility that the archive, which includes documents going back to the early 1980s, had been doctored.

Moreover, data from the archive has led to the recovery of caches of uranium in Colombia and American dollars in Costa Rica, and has been the basis of actions by governments including Canada, Spain and the United States. Such uses constitute “de facto recognition” that the archive is authentic, the institute said. “We haven’t begun the dossier with the words ‘J’accuse,’ ” said Nigel Inkster, one of the book’s editors. “Instead we tried to produce a sober analysis of the FARC since the late 1990s, when Venezuela became a central element of their survival strategy.” Recently, Venezuela seems to have cooled toward the FARC, conforming to a pattern described in the book of ups and downs between Mr. Chávez and the rebels. In April, his government took the unusual step of detaining Joaquín Pérez, a suspected senior operative for the FARC who had been living in Sweden, and deporting him to Colombia. This move came amid a rapprochement between Mr. Chávez and Colombia’s president,

Juan2 Manuel Santos, as a response by Mr. Chávez to Colombia’s claims that the FARC was operating from Venezuelan soil. The archive, which opens a window into bouts of tension and even loathing between the FARC and Mr. Chávez’s emissaries, shows that Mr. Chávez has sided with the Colombian government on other occasions, especially when he stood to gain politically.

In November 2002, the book reports, before a meeting between Álvaro2 Uribe, then Colombia’s president, and Mr. Chávez, the FARC asked the Venezuelan Army for permission to transport uniforms on a mule train through Venezuelan territory. The Venezuelan Army granted permission, then ambushed the convoy, seized eight FARC operatives and delivered them to Colombia, allowing Mr. Chávez to inform Mr. Uribe of the operation in person. Such betrayals, as well as unfulfilled promises of large sums of money, generated considerable tension among the rebels over their relationship with Mr. Chávez. A member of the FARC’s secretariat, Víctor Suárez Rojas, who used the nom de guerre Mono Jojoy, once called Mr. Chávez a “deceitful and divisive president who lacked the resolve to organize himself politically and militarily.” Still, periods of tension tended to be the exception in a relationship that has given the rebel group a broad degree of cross-border sanctuary. In some of the most revealing descriptions of FARC activity in Venezuela, the book explains how Venezuela’s main intelligence agency, formerly known by the acronym Disip and now called the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, sought to enlist the FARC in training state security forces and conducting terrorist attacks, including bombings, in Caracas in 2002 and 2003. A meeting described in the book shows that Mr. Chávez was almost certainly unaware of the Disip’s decision to involve the FARC in state terrorism, but that Venezuelan intelligence officials still carried out such contacts with a large amount of autonomy. Drawing from the FARC’s archive, the book also describes how the group trained various pro-Chávez organizations in Venezuela, including the Bolivarian Liberation Forces, a shadowy paramilitary group operating along the border with Colombia.

FARC communications also discussed providing training in urban terrorism methods for representatives of the Venezuelan Communist Party and several radical cells from 23 de Enero, a Caracas slum that has long been a hive of pro-Chávez activity. The book also cites requests by Mr. Chávez’s government for the guerrillas to assassinate at least two of his opponents. The FARC discussed one such request in 2006 from a security adviser for Alí Rodríguez Araque, a top official here. According to the archive, the adviser, Julio Chirino, asked the FARC to kill Henry López Sisco, who led the Disip at the time of a 1986 massacre of unarmed members of a subversive group. “They ask that if possible we give it to this guy in the head,” said Mr. Reyes, the former FARC commander. The book says there was no evidence that the FARC acted on the request before Mr. López Sisco left Venezuela in November 2006. Less is known about another assassination request cited in the book, including whom the target was or whether it took place. But the book makes it clear that the Colombian rebels sometimes found their Venezuelan hosts unscrupulous and deceitful. In one example, Mono Jojoy, who was killed in a bombing raid last year, had harsh words for Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, a former Venezuelan naval officer who has served as a top liaison between Mr. Chávez and the FARC, calling him “the worst kind of bandit.” SIMON ROMERO Venezuela Asked Colombian Rebels to Kill Opposition Figures, Analysis Shows May 10, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/world/am2 ericas/10venezuela.html?hp=&gwh=F1E 9EABA5F81CD02B565F89EAA79823F&pagewanted=print

2 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ade42bce-7a58-11e0-af64-22 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2qVRMJz Political turmoil need not presage economic disaster By Roula Khalaf Published: May 9 2011 18:44 | Last updated: May 9 2011 18:44 A regional banker just returned from Egypt tells me he is impressed by the energy he felt, and is excited about the country’s economic prospects. Outside2 investment is likely to increase once the post-revolution interim period is concluded, he predicts. This hopeful mood prevailed in Cairo and Tunis in the days of the revolution, when businessmen who wanted change reassured those who preferred the status quo that democracy, accountability and transparency were good for business. That same outlook would apply to chaotic, impoverished Yemen and dysfunctional Libya once rulers finally relented in the face of popular will, as they surely will.

2 2 EDITOR’S CHOICE Twelve killed in sectarian clashes in Cairo - May-08 Cairo urged 2 to review Israel ties - May-05 Egypt’s former interior minister jailed - May-05 2 2 Recession fears for Egypt and Tunisia - May-03 Heba Saleh: Egyptians must keep 2 sound policies - May-03 Egypt to open Gaza border in policy shift - Apr-29 The optimism may yet prove justified. But the present is gloomy, and talk of economic progress clashes, day by day, with reality. The post-revolutionary period has been testy, with security trouble erupting regularly – weekend violence2 in Cairo between Christians and Muslims left 12 people dead, and a renewed curfew was imposed in Tunis after days of clashes between protesters and riot police. In Egypt and Tunisia, moreover, the economies have been hard hit by a collapse in tourism revenues and a broader months-long economic paralysis. Those who fought for more jobs – and are still fighting through strikes and sit-ins – are in fact finding that there are now fewer employment opportunities. The full scale of the economic downturn is detailed in a just-released report from the Institute of International Finance. It projects economic growth in Egypt of only 1.5 per cent this economic year and a contraction of 2.5 per cent next year. The budget deficit will widen to 10 per cent of gross domestic product in 2011-12. The report projects increases in subsidies and other social spending and says investigations into alleged corruption of former officials are adding to economic uncertainty. In Tunisia too, the institute says that disruption of economic activity will drag down growth, with a projected contraction of 1.5 per cent this year, and a budget deficit that will increase from 1.3 per cent of GDP in 2010 to 4.5 per cent. Jaloul Ayed, Tunisia’s finance minister, says the challenge is to respond to social demands while keeping the budget under check and ensuring that the deficit does not exceed 5 per cent of GDP. Anything higherthan that will make it more difficult for

Tunisia to tap the capital markets and fund future investment programmes which will undoubtedly be needed, he says. Part of the challenge, he recognises, is to communicate the constraints to the public and convince Tunisians to be patient. “You don’t see on TV much economic debate – you have to explain the choices before people,” he says. No doubt the debate will be more persuasive if led by a legitimately elected government, and in both Tunisia and Egypt elections will be held this year. Elected authorities are more likely to resist the storm of social demands that has erupted since the previous regimes fell. Sure, there is a risk of greater populism emerging out of the ballot box. Already, supporters of the former regimes say a return to socialist policies is inevitable and will prove disastrous. But while future economic policy will undoubtedly be more sensitive to social needs, it could be that it is conducted by more capable and less corrupt economic teams that focus on redirecting existing resources, more targeted subsidies, reviews of the tax system and a clampdown on bureaucratic waste. As the senior banker who has just visited Cairo says, some discipline will also be imposed by outside donors, including multilateral institutions that are expected to support the economic transitions. “Those [in Egypt] who were doing well before are very negative on the outlook but other big businessmen who were not close to the regime are increasing their investment,” says the banker. Today, revolution looks decidedly bad for business. But this is an interim phase – unstable certainly, but necessary if fairer, more inclusive political and economic systems are to be achieved.

Copyright2 The Financial Times Limited Roula Khalaf Political turmoil need not presage economic disaster Last updated: May 9

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2 COMMENT - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/72e4ba5e-7a7e-11e0-2 8762-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2AXd0o9 Into the thickets of the Arab spring By Gideon Rachman Published: May 9 2011 22:58 | Last updated: May 9 2011 22:58

If you spend time talking to western officials about the uprisings2 in the Arab world, you are likely to hear two contradictory views advanced – sometimes by the same person. The first view is that the “Arab spring” is, as one European diplomat puts it, “the best thing that has ever happened in my lifetime in the Arab world”. The second is that this is the most dangerous moment in the Arab world in decades.

2 2 EDITOR’S CHOICESyria blocks satellite phone communications - May-09 West 2 2 risks sending wrong signal on Assad - May-08 EU split on Assad sanctions - May-05 In 2 depth: Middle East protests - May-01 Video: Syria forces make hundreds of arrests - 2 May-07 Hague threatens sanctions against Syria - May-04 The same people can believe both things simultaneously because this is a clash between long-term and short-term views. Look at the great sweep of history, and the maintenance of the status quo in the Arab world was neither possible nor desirable. This was a region mired in dictatorship and poverty. It was the only part of the world that has seen no significant advance for democracy over the past 30 years. It has spawned backward-looking and violent ideologies. Who could want to preserve that? And yet the collapse of the old Arab order threatens, in the here and now, to produce wars, the break-up of states and new opportunities for militant Islamists. This is not a case of that famous glass that can be regarded as half full or half empty. It is more like looking at two glasses side-by-side. The first contains a fine wine that promises to be marvellous to drink in 20 years’ time – but that is not yet ready to consume. The second glass has to be consumed now – its contents look murky and could even prove to be poisonous.

The mood in Washington has been lifted by the killing2 of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But, as they look across the Middle East, western policymakers can see reason for alarm on issue after issue.

It seems absurd that Americans and Europeans are worrying about instability2 in Syria. The Assad government is a brutal dictatorship that has worked closely with Iran and played a malign role in Lebanon. Good riddance, surely? But outsiders are keenly aware that Syria is an ethnically-divided and fragile state, whose break-up could be violent. 74

One European foreign minister calls it “a small Yugoslavia in the Levant”. The Turkish government, which has worked hard on building a close relationship with President Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, is particularly alarmed by the prospect of chaos, bloodshed and refugee flows in a neighbouring country.

The Libyan2 conflict, meanwhile, threatens to degenerate into stalemate. There are those who argue that this is an acceptable outcome – certainly better than the risk of a massacre in Benghazi. But you can already hear a kind of “buyer’s remorse” setting in among western officials, as they realise that Libya is turning into a long slog with unpredictable consequences. As one American puts it: “I don’t think it’s a great idea for us to be involved in yet another war, in yet another Muslim country. We have no significant strategic interests at stake in Libya. And we risk creating a new zone of anarchy, full of loose cash and weapons that could be a safe haven for terrorists.” He pauses, before adding in a deadpan voice: “But I fully support our policy.” There are also worries that political change in Egypt is opening new possibilities for violent militancy. In the aftermath of the fall2 of President Hosni Mubarak, many former terrorists were released from jail – and other ex-jihadists have returned to the country. The Egyptian state security service is in disarray. Meanwhile, Egyptian foreign policy is already changing in ways that the west finds uncomfortable. Egypt’s relations with Iran have warmed up. The Muslim Brotherhood, which will probably be the largest party in the new Egyptian parliament, says it wants to 2 abrogate the peace treaty with Israel. Meanwhile, the interim Egyptian government has just surprised the US by negotiating a deal2 between the rival Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah. Some of the calmer western officials regard this as a positive development, since there can be no Middle East peace deal without a united Palestinian leadership. But, in the short term, it is a big headache. The deal has sent the Israeli government into a panic, making it even less likely to consent to meaningful peace negotiations. Hamas’s refusal to accept the state of Israel also makes the organisation radioactive on Capitol Hill. As one western official put it: “There can be no peace deal without Hamas. But there can be no peace deal with Hamas.” Saudi Arabia, which remains at the centre of American security and energy policy in the Middle East, is also a growing concern. The Saudi-American relationship has deteriorated sharply since the Egyptian revolution. The Saudis accuse the Americans of betraying Mr Mubarak – and now regard the US as a potential threat to their own regime. They have taken to warning the Americans that they might seek to cultivate a new “special relationship” with China, which is already a much bigger customer for

Saudi oil than the US. Most western officials regard this as bluster. But they are still 2 worried by the stability of Saudi Arabia, as well as by the wider role that some Saudis are playing in funding militant ideologies in a newly-destabilised Middle East. In the long run, most western governments are genuinely convinced that the Arab spring is a historic and positive development. The trouble is that, as Keynes put it: “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

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May 9, 2011 The Force of the Deed By ROGER COHEN NEW YORK — Watching the talk shows, thinking about the tumultuous last American decade, reflecting on the death of Osama bin Laden, I feel grateful for many things but not least this: the invisibility of the heroes. For once it is the deed itself that speaks. The deed, so often lost in this age of celebrities and reality shows and Donald Trump’s monumental ego, stands unadorned. In its daring, its professionalism and its effectiveness, the deed is there, making words look cheap. The deed was that of the 79 U.S. commandos, who have met with their commander-in- chief, President Obama, and who are known to one another, but are unknown to us. For secrecy is their covenant. Dispatched from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, at night, into a triangular compound in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad, they contrived, in 38 minutes, and despite the loss of one helicopter, to kill the charismatic face of Al Qaeda and gather the largest intelligence cache on this murderous organization ever found. It was an extraordinary achievement that put to rest a gnawing American self-doubt. I am so grateful that the achievement is not being dissected and adorned in a feeding frenzy of interviews with the Navy Seal forces; that the deed stands whole, not broken down into its component human parts — the work of a team, indivisible and invisible. An America too often blinded by ego and sensation has much to rediscover about teamwork and silent, smart, hard work. So many times these past days, finding myself back in New York beneath skies of a 9/11 blue, I have heard an internal voice saying, “Oh, please.” It was responding to complaints from the chattering classes that this was “murder,” that there was no “justice,” that Bin Laden’s burial in the North Arabian Sea was “disrespectful.” As if turning four planes into missiles and killing almost 3,000 people were not an act of war. If there is greater fatuity than second-guessing the split-second decisions of commandos confronted by gunfire, knowing the compound may be wired to explode, and hunting a serial mass murderer unwilling to surrender, then I am unaware of it. Let post-modern, pacifist Germans agonize, and whoever else wishes to writhe on a pin. The rest of us can be satisfied. More than 1,000 bodies were so pulverized on 9/11 that no trace of them was found, leaving the downtown air filled with their souls. And we are supposed to worry that this killer — of many Muslims, too — may not have gotten appropriate Muslim rites before sliding to his watery grave. I am grateful for something else: that Bin Laden has been humanized. He thought he carried the Prophet’s message and was able, through a charisma pornographic in its

worship of death, to channel an immense Muslim frustration. In taking on America, and staging his own mega-production one September day, he turned himself into myth. Yet, here he is, hunched, gray-bearded, channel surfing with his remote in search of images of himself. And here he is, with his beard dyed black, betraying the very vanity of the black-haired Arab gerontocracy he professed to loath. Bin Laden is very human here — in his boredom, his ego, his foibles and his weariness. That is an important reminder. Bin Laden was not the devil. He was a human being. What happened to him, this gentle-eyed killer, can happen: His transformation into a demon is banal. That is why all of our collective vigilance is needed. Speaking of vigilance, I have to say one word on Pakistan’s blindness. If the country were not nuclear-armed, America would not give it another dime. But it is and America must. Before then, however, Congress is right to demand an answer to this question: Why, of all the places on earth, would Bin Laden choose to live in the very town that houses the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point? His advisers must have told him that was not a problem. They must have had a reason for saying it was not a problem. Their reason is America’s and the world’s problem. Until it is resolved it will do harm. I must end with the deed. It was also Obama’s. He’s the guy who said: “It’s a go.” In the duel of Obama with Osama, there was something of fate. The president kept coming back to him. There is strength in humility. Sometimes you have to keep coming back. Rilke, in a far different context, had this to say of Cézanne’s abiding obsession with apples and wine bottles: “And (like Van Gogh) he makes his ‘saints’ out of such things: and forces them — forces them — to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and all glory, and he doesn’t know whether he has succeeded in making them do it for him. And sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of his work that is calling him again and that beats him and lets him starve.” For America, long starved of the satisfactions sustained purpose brings, the decade-old work is done.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen2 .

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/opinion/10iht-2 edcohen10.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

2 Middle2 East

May 9, 2011 Syria Proclaims It Now Has Upper Hand Over Uprising By ANTHONY SHADID DAMASCUS, Syria — The Syrian government has gained the upper hand over a seven- week uprising against the rule of President Bashar2 al-Assad, a senior official declared Monday, in the clearest sign yet that the leadership believes its crackdown will crush protests that have begun to falter in the face of hundreds of deaths and mass arrests. The remarks by Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to Mr. Assad who often serves as an official spokeswoman, suggested that a government accustomed to adapting in the face of crises was prepared to weather international condemnation and sanctions. Her confidence came in stark contrast to appearances just two weeks ago, when the government seemed to stagger before the breadth and resilience of protests in dozens of towns and cities. “I hope we are witnessing the end of the story,” she said in an hourlong interview, for which a reporter was allowed in Syria2 for only a few hours. “I think now we’ve passed the most dangerous moment. I hope so, I think so.” Her comments were a rare window on the thinking of a government that has barred most foreign journalists from Syria since the start of the uprising, which has threatened 40 years of rule by the Assad family. While much of the world has viewed the unrest as a popular demand for sweeping change in one of the region’s most authoritarian countries, Ms. Shaaban cast it as an armed uprising, a characterization the government has relied on to justify a ferocious crackdown. That crackdown intensified Monday on the outskirts of Damascus, and in three other towns and cities across the country, with security forces raiding hundreds of houses and arresting men between the ages of 18 and 45, human rights groups and activists said. The military has deployed tanks in Baniyas, on the Mediterranean coast; Homs in central Syria, near the Lebanese border; and Tafas, in a restive region in the south, they said.

Baniyas has emerged as a focus of the crackdown. Amnesty2 International said2 Monday that more than 350 people, including 48 women and a 10-year-old child, were arrested there over the previous three days, with scores detained in a soccer field. More raids were carried out in Homs, a city that has proved among the most restive. At least nine soldiers were said to have defected there, though the reports could not be confirmed. “They want to finish everything this week,” a human rights advocate in the city, Syria’s third largest, said by telephone. “No one in the regime has a clear policy. They cannot keep this strategy for a long time. We need political solutions, not more tanks.”

The tumult in parts of the country that have long been neglected by a government short of cash and beholden to unaccountable security forces contrasted with the scenes Monday in Damascus. There were few signs in the capital of a military buildup, except a few extra guards at some embassies and government buildings. Posters echoed the government’s contention that the uprising threatened Syria’s fragile mosaic of a Sunni Muslim majority and minorities of Christians, Kurds and heterodox Muslim sects, a theme often repeated by officials seeking to rally popular support for the broadening crackdown. “No to discord,” one poster proclaimed. “Freedom doesn’t begin with ignorance, it begins with awareness,” another read. Amnesty International said it had documented the names of 580 people killed since the uprising began2 in mid-March. Ms. Shaaban said nearly 100 soldiers and members of security forces were also killed by armed militants, whom she accused of manipulating “the legitimate demands of the people.” While administration officials in the United States and even some activists have acknowledged that some protesters have resorted to arms, they call them a minority. Ms. Shaaban said, “We think these people are a combination of fundamentalists, extremists, smugglers, people who are ex-convicts and are being used to make trouble.” She added later, “You can’t be very nice to people who are leading an armed rebellion, in a sense,” while acknowledging they were not the only factor in the tumult. In a sign that the government remained uncertain over the nature of the uprising, she declined to specify who was behind them, saying only that officials were still investigating. Administration officials have said that Ms. Shaaban and Vice President Farouk al- Sharaa have seemed more receptive to calls for reform, though their influence appears to pale before more aggressive voices in the ruling elite, particularly Mr. Assad’s brother Maher, who heads the elite Republican Guard and Fourth Division. Ms. Shaaban said she had been asked to open talks with dissidents. Last week, she said, she met with Michel Kilo, Aref Dalila, Salim Kheirbek and Louay Hussein, all veteran activists, and held out the prospect of a freer press, political parties and an electoral law. She called it the start of a national dialogue, although some in the opposition have branded it an insincere effort to simply co-opt as many of them as possible. “In the next week or so, we will broaden it,” Ms. Shaaban said. “We want to use what happened to Syria as an opportunity,” she added. “We see it as an opportunity to try to move forward on many levels, especially the political level.” President Assad has long frustrated allies and even foes by promising reforms, then seeming unable or unwilling to carry them out. Despite Ms. Shaaban’s promises, one administration official contended that the government was still fighting for its survival. Even if it wins the upper hand, the official suggested, any change would prove limited. “Assad is not capable of implementing these reforms,” the official said. “He’s not capable. He knows that if he did, it would be the end of him. He would fall.”

But in contrast to Libya, where the United States insists that Col. Muammar2 el-Qaddafi step down, American officials have simply repeated calls for Mr. Assad to meet popular demands, and Ms. Shaaban’s outreach seemed aimed at addressing some calls for

change. But even if the government fails to placate the opposition, she suggested that international condemnation had so far been muted.

She described the statements from President2 Obama and Secretary of State Hillary2

Rodham Clinton as “not too bad” and said that the sanctions themselves — imposed2 by the United States last month and the2 European Union this week — were manageable. “This is a weapon used against us many times,” she said. “Once security is back, everything can be arranged. We’re not going to live in this crisis forever.” Employees of The New York Times in Beirut, Lebanon, and Damascus contributed reporting. Anthony Shadid Syria Proclaims It Now Has Upper Hand Over Uprising May 9, 2011

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May 9, 2011 Protesters chant anti-U.S. slogans during a protest involving about 100 lawyers, outside a government courthouse in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Groups of lawyers across the country have launched a protest against the U.S. Navy SEALs who killed al- Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, as the operation was perceived as an attack on national sovereignty, a protester said. Erik de Castro / Reuters Pakistanis disclose name of CIA operative

By Karin2 Brulliard and Greg2 Miller, Published: May 9 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The public outing of the CIA station chief here threatened on Monday to deepen2 the rift between the United States and Pakistan, with U.S. officials saying they believed the disclosure had been made deliberately by Pakistan’s main spy agency. If true, the leak would be a sign that Pakistan’s powerful security establishment, far from feeling2 chastened by the killing2 of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison city last week, is seeking to demonstrate its leverage over Washington and retaliate for the unilateral U.S. operation. Less than six months ago, the identity of the previous CIA station chief in Islamabad was2 also disclosed in an act that U.S. officials blamed on their counterparts in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The new station chief, who runs one of the largest U.S. intelligence-gathering operations in the world, played an instrumental role in overseeing efforts2 to confirm bin Laden’s location before last week’s raid. 81

The discovery of bin Laden’s presence in a Pakistani city was considered a huge embarrassment for Pakistan’s military. The United States viewed it as an opportunity to press Pakistan, the recipient of billions of dollars in annual American aid, to crack down harder on militants. Outrage among Pakistanis over the operation was also seen as a rare chance for the weak civilian government in Islamabad to stake its claim in foreign and security policy, long the domain of the army. But the nation’s security establishment has reacted with furor, not humility, people familiar with top Pakistani generals’ thinking said Monday. Their response has been two-pronged: to shift blame for the bin Laden episode to the government of President2 Asif Ali Zardari and, according to American officials, to strike back against U.S. allegations that Pakistani spies were either complicit2 in sheltering bin Laden or incompetent. The CIA station chief’s name was first aired by a private Pakistani television station on Friday, and a misspelled version of the name was published the next day in the Nation newspaper, which is considered close to the security establishment. The Washington Post does not typically publish the names of intelligence officers working undercover. Pakistani intelligence officials could not be reached for comment on the U.S. allegation. American officials acknowledged that they had no hard evidence, but a U.S. official said that the suspicion was “based on past history.” The official indicated that evidence has accumulated in recent months that the ISI was behind the exposure of the station chief last year.

In that instance, the CIA pulled2 the officer out of Pakistan. But it is not clear whether the agency will do the same now. The prior chief was nearing the end of his assignment in Pakistan when he was recalled to agency headquarters. The current CIA leader in Islamabad has been there only about five months. He was described as a veteran officer known for his blunt manner and extensive operations experience in Russia. “This is a seasoned CIA veteran who is a professional and someone who knows how to deal with foreign intelligence services very well,” said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Former CIA officials who have worked in Pakistan said station chiefs typically work within the U.S. Embassy compound and could function in the job even if their cover were blown. “You live on the compound, you work on the compound, you walk to work,” said a CIA veteran with extensive experience in Pakistan. Pressure on government Within Pakistan, the bin Laden operation has evolved from a major intelligence failure to a political football. Opposition parties, the media and the army have chastised the unpopular Zardari administration, and some have called2 for resignations. On Monday, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, widely viewed as Pakistan’s most powerful man, cited public dismay over “insufficient formal response” and said, “The people of Pakistan need to be taken into confidence through their honorable elected representatives.” On Monday, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was expected to provide answers for the nation in a televised address to Parliament. Instead, he repeated talking points previously offered by other military and government officials, and he said the army, rather than a civilian body, would investigate possible lapses. 82

Bin Laden’s death, Gillani said, was “justice indeed.” He dismissed as “absurd” accusations that the military was incompetent or complicit and said Pakistanis were incensed by a U.S. raid that they viewed as a violation of sovereignty. “We did not invite al-Qaeda to Pakistan,” Gillani said. “It is disingenuous for anyone to blame Pakistan or any state institution of Pakistan, including the ISI and the armed forces.” Army on the defensive Pakistan’s army, the fifth-largest in the world, has cultivated a reputation here as the ultimate defender of a fragile nation. But the bin Laden raid exposed it to denunciations from commentators, who accused it of not being up to the task of guarding the country’s nuclear arsenal or detecting terrorists. In a meeting last week with Pakistani journalists, the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, “almost choked with anger while complaining that the ISI was facing not just outside challenges but constant criticism from inside,” according to a2 column Monday by one attendee, Syed Talat Hussain, in the English-language daily Dawn. Kayani, he wrote, “was visibly irritated when he said that the civilian government had abandoned the ship of policymaking.” For days, the army seemed paralyzed by the accusations, but it has since focused on what it deems a U.S. violation of sovereignty, a hot-button topic in Pakistan. “They are trying to protect their name, which is in tatters,” said a former senior security official who is familiar with Pakistani military leaders’ thinking. “The feeling among these people is that we have been wronged.” In a measure of the distrust between the United States and Pakistan, the U.S. military prepared for a possible confrontation with Pakistani forces at the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. U.S. officials said that two Chinook helicopters were placed inside Pakistan, ready to help extract the assault team from Abbottabad. Among the considerations, CIA Director

Leon Panetta said in an2 interview with PBS, was, “Could [U.S. forces] be locked into that compound because of the Pakistanis suddenly attacking that compound and putting them in a very difficult position?” The scenario never materialized, but one of the Chinooks was needed for a different reason. It rushed to the compound after a Blackhawk helicopter was disabled after colliding with a compound wall. Privately, Pakistani government officials voice confidence that it is the Pakistan army’s reputation — not that of the civilian administration — that is on the line. Some say they expect that the trove of evidence gathered by U.S. Navy SEALs at bin Laden’s compound will implicate intelligence officials, or at least embarrass the army. “There’s a lot of egg on many people’s faces in Pakistan, but luckily none of those faces are civilian,” said a senior government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Yet even some in the government express concern that Zardari and Gillani — who usually seem occupied with keeping their teetering coalition government afloat — have missed a chance to capitalize on the army’s failures. Some acknowledge that after three years of ceding the national security portfolio to the military, it is difficult for them to take a stance now. 83

“When you have an opening and an opportunity, you have to have someone willing to capitalize on it,” said Cyril Almeida, an editor at Dawn. “And I don’t know whether the present civilian government has the capacity or the will to do anything.”

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Rise in FBI use of national security letters By PETE YOST, Tuesday, May 10, 4:46 AM WASHINGTON — The number of people the FBI targeted with national security letters more than doubled last year to more than 14,000. The letters enable the bureau to collect a large amount of sensitive information like financial and phone records in terrorism and espionage investigations. In 2007, the Justice Department’s inspector general found widespread violations in FBI use of the letters, including demands without proper authorization and information obtained in non-emergency circumstances. The FBI has tightened oversight of the system. The letters are controversial because there is no court scrutiny of the process. In a summary to Congress, the Justice Department said the FBI made 24,287 national security letter requests last year for information regarding 14,212 people. That’s up from 2009 when there were 14,788 requests for information about 6,114 people.

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2 EU slaps arms embargo on Syria but spares President Bashar al-Assad Europe bans travel and freezes assets of 13 officials of Syrian regime and holds them responsible for violent repression

• Ian2 Traynor in Brussels guardian.co.uk,2 Monday 9 May 2011 23.29 BST

Supporters of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad hold his photograph - the EU sanctions failed to penalise him personally for violent repression in Syria. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

An EU arms embargo against Syria2 comes into force today as part of a sanctions

package against Damascus that fails to penalise President Bashar2 al-Assad personally for overseeing the rising tide of repression and violence against his opposition.

Europe2 remained split last night over policy towards Assad, agreeing to a range of sanctions against 13 top figures in the president's security apparatus, but exempting the president and his defence minister from the blacklist which entails a travel ban for the EU and a freeze on their assets. The EU split broadly between the north and south, with Mediterranean countries arguing that channels should be kept open to Assad, while France led the campaign, with Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden, to blacklist the president. Cyprus, backed strongly by Greece, was firmly opposed to sanctioning Assad personally and supported by Italy and Spain. Estonia, fearing retaliation against its nationals kidnapped in recent weeks in Lebanon and now believed to be in Syria, also pleaded for a more cautious approach towards Assad. Seven Estonian cyclists were kidnapped near the Syrian border in Lebanon in March. The decision to target 13 officials while leaving Assad alone was a compromise.

The EU said in a statement that it had decided on "an embargo on exports to Syria of arms and equipment that could be used for internal repression, as well as a visa ban and an assets freeze targeting 13 officials and associates of the Syrian regime who have been identified as being responsible for the violent repression against the civilian population in Syria." The EU decision was taken by ambassadors in Brussels on Friday and was subject to three days of what is known as a "silent procedure", meaning that it comes into force automatically if no one objects within three days. The arms embargo and the selective blacklisting of leading regime figures will disappoint the human2 rights lobby which has been calling for stronger action against the Assad government as the violence in Syria escalates. The head of the EU's security policy thinktank, the EUISS, Alvaro de Vasconcelos, has pointed out that several figures in the regime have European or US citizenship and that they could be prosecuted in the relevant countries or have their passports revoked.

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Syrian President Assad blows his reformist credentials

By Liz2 Sly, Monday, May 9, 1:29 AM BEIRUT — In his almost 11 years in office, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has brought about some remarkable changes to a country formerly run by his notoriously ruthless father, fueling perceptions that he is at heart a reformer, albeit one who has been held back by hard-liners intent on preserving the status quo. Under his rule, Syria has opened its doors to foreign investment and private ownership. Cellphones, Internet service and satellite TV have proliferated. The capital, Damascus, has been transformed from a sleepy socialist backwater into the beginnings of a thriving modern capital, with shiny glass offices, European fashion outlets and trendy cafes serving flavored lattes to a hip new elite. Yet in all those years, the younger Assad has implemented not one measure that would relax the ruling Baath Party’s 48-year-long hold on power, lift the draconian laws that enable the security forces to operate with impunity or ease restrictions on free speech. Now, with the Syrian security forces escalating a brutal and bloody effort to suppress an almost nationwide uprising, it may be too late for Assad to salvage what little remains of his reputation as the thwarted reformist waiting only for a chance to liberalize his country. On Sunday, the army sent tanks into the southern town of Tafas, according to Wissam Tarif of the human rights group Insan. In Homs, he said, 14 people were killed by sharpshooters. But with communications to many parts of the country severed, it was 86

impossible to draw a clear picture of conditions inside the half-dozen or so towns surrounded by the military, Tarif said. Assad’s “reaction to the demonstrations has been the reaction of a dictator,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human rights activist who is a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies. “Even if he dramatically changed his mind and announced reforms now, I don’t think anyone would believe him.” Cultivating his image Assad has assiduously cultivated the reformist image since he ascended to power in 2000 at age 34, promising a new and more open Syria. With his youth, his British training as an eye doctor and his elegant British-born wife, Asma, he presented a starkly different figure compared with his somewhat thuggish father, Hafez, a military officer, and the region’s other aging autocrats. It’s an image that many in the international community have cited in justifying their hesitancy to call directly for Assad’s ouster or to include him in sanctions, despite more than seven weeks of bloodshed in which human rights groups say more than 700 people have been killed. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Assad “a reformer” during the early days of the demonstrations, though she later said she was referring to the opinions of others. Even after Syrian tanks rolled into the town of Daraa in a clear signal of the regime’s intent to crush the uprising by force, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Assad should be given a chance. “You can imagine him as a reformer,” he told the BBC. “One of the difficulties in Syria is that President Assad’s power depends on a wider group of people, in his family and in other members of his government, and I am not sure how free he is to pursue a reform agenda.” That perception also lingers in Damascus, where residents have not joined anti- government demonstrations in any significant number. There, rumors are swirling that Assad’s hands are tied, perhaps by his more ruthless and reputedly erratic brother Maher, who heads the army unit leading the crackdown, or perhaps by his powerful mother, Anisa, who some say is keeping her older son at home in his palace while unleashing other family members to quell the revolt. Yet at no point in the past 11 years has a clear picture emerged of which regime members may be holding Assad back, said Andrew Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who was among those initially convinced of Assad’s reformist credentials during the eight years he lived and worked in Syria, some of them for Asma Assad’s charities. “We’ve heard all the time that the old guard was holding him back, but we’ve never heard who the old guard was or seen evidence of them,” he said. “You’d have a conversation with him, and he’d say what you wanted to hear, but after that it doesn’t happen.” In the first months of Assad’s rule, there was a brief flourishing of freedoms known as the Damascus Spring, followed by a swift crackdown, which gave rise to the narrative that Assad was being held in check by hard-line holdovers from his father’s regime.

But Theodore Kattouf, who was the U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2001 to 2003, suspects the quickly curtailed display of tolerance had more to do with Assad’s inexperience than his inclinations. Although regime old-timers may have helped nudge him back on track, Kattouf said, “he was never a true political reformer.” “What he intended to do was reform within the existing system. He never intended to truly change the political framework in which his father ruled.” Since then, the president has cemented his authority by surrounding himself with members of the younger generation of Assad clan members, who have filled key positions in the security agencies and in the new economy. Among them is Maher, the brother, who heads the powerful Republican Guard. A maternal cousin, Rami Makhlouf, secured the license for Syriatel, the biggest mobile phone company in the country, while Makhlouf’s younger brother Hafez is in charge of the Damascus branch of the intelligence services. Another cousin, Atif Najib, was in charge of Daraa, where the revolt first gained momentum. “Ultimately, this is a family affair,” said Joshua Landis, an associate professor at the

University of Oklahoma who writes the blog Syria3 Comment. “And all the signs are that the family is sticking together, because they know they’re going to have to live together or die together.” There’s also no question that Assad is in full control of the family, said Ayman Abdel Nour, who served as Assad’s adviser from 1997 to 2004 before he turned against the regime and moved to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. “It’s him, and only him, and the family is behind him,” Abdel Nour said. “He is the one in full charge, and he is the one making the decisions.” A widespread revolt Meanwhile, Assad has given no indication that he is prepared to address the unrest by meeting protesters’ demands. One of his only concrete promises, to lift the 48-year-old state of emergency, was implemented the day before Syrian troops fatally shot 112 protesters, Ziadeh said, adding that this undermines any notion that reform is seriously on the agenda.

Yet as the violence escalates, the3 revolt has spread, reaching into towns and villages in almost every corner of the country. Demonstrators who initially confined their demands to reform are now calling for the toppling of the regime. And even in Damascus, where many still cling to the notion that Assad’s reformist inclinations are being cramped by others, people are starting to question the levels of force being used, said a Syrian academic and commentator who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Bashar is bowing to what’s going on, so he’s part of it,” he said. “That makes him responsible, doesn’t it?” http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/syri3 an-president-assad-blows-his-reformist- credentials/2011/05/08/AFbC9GTG_story.html?nl_headlines

"En Tunisie, on est dans la continuité du processus révolutionnaire" LEMONDE.FR | 09.05.11 | 17h24 • Mis à jour le 09.05.11 | 18h21

Des centaines de manifestants défilent dans les rues de Tunis, le 6 mai 2011, pour appeler à une "nouvelle révolution".AFP/FETHI BELAID Le gouvernement tunisien a décrété, samedi 7 mai, un couvre-feu nocturne à Tunis et dans sa banlieue, en réponse aux manifestations antigouvernementales qui ont repris depuis jeudi et qui se sont accompagnées de violences et de pillages. Ce regain de tension est le signe d'un malaise persistant, quatre mois après le renversement du régime de Ben Ali. Vincent Geisser, chargé de recherches au CNRS et auteur de

Dictateurs3 en sursis avec l'homme politique tunisien Moncef Marzouki revient sur les raisons de ces nouvelles manifestations. Qui sont les Tunisiens qui manifestent, et pourquoi descendent-ils dans la rue ? Vincent Geisser : Il y a deux clichés à ce sujet qu'il faut impérativement éviter. Le premier serait d'imaginer qu'il s'agit de réseaux manipulés par l'ancien régime, qui chercheraient à fragiliser le processus de démocratisation. Le deuxième serait de faire de ces manifestants des délinquants, simplement animés par la volonté de casser et de déstabiliser la société tunisienne. Nous sommes en fait encore au cœur de la révolution. Le profond malaise qui avait amené le soulèvement populaire n'a pas disparu avec le départ de Ben Ali. Certains jeunes, souvent diplômés, sont toujours en situation de précarité, qu'ils habitent Tunis, les banlieues, ou bien l'intérieur du pays. Ils ont l'impression que la révolution leur échappe : la jeunesse qui s'est sentie humiliée sous Ben Ali ne se sent pas sortie de cet état, et veut continuer à agir. On est vraiment dans la continuité du processus révolutionnaire. Ce n'est d'ailleurs pas un hasard si la carte des protestations et celle des zones les plus touchées par la précarité correspondent.

Peut-on soupçonner une forme de récupération politique dans ce regain de colère ? Rien ne le prouve. Cela témoigne plutôt du manque de légitimité dont souffre le gouvernement transitoire auprès de ces populations. Deux légitimités s'opposent en Tunisie : celle, technocratique, incarnée par le premier ministre, Béji Caïd Essebsi, et celle, révolutionnaire, qui s'exprime à travers cette jeunesse qui estime ne pas être entendue. Le gouvernement transitoire a-t-il les moyens de satisfaire les attentes des manifestants ? La rue a déjà obtenu beaucoup de choses : la démission du premier gouvernement, le principe d'élection d'une assemblée constituante, l'interdiction de l'ancien parti unique... Cependant, la situation est délicate : on demande au gouvernement de résoudre dans l'urgence des problèmes structurels, comme le chômage et la précarité. Mais il n'est pas en mesure de le faire de par sa nature provisoire. Ses marges de manœuvre sont très faibles. Cela est d'autant plus compliqué que le redémarrage de l'économie est difficile : la Tunisie est par exemple confrontée à une grave crise du tourisme.

Des policiers en civil arrêtent un manifestant à Tunis, le 8 mai 2011, lors de protestations antigouvernementales. Reuters/ZOUBEIR SOUISSI L'une des réponses du gouvernement aux manifestations a été le rétablissement d'un couvre-feu nocturne. Est-ce un mauvais signal envoyé à la population ? On peut le penser mais il faut se souvenir que le premier couvre-feu, instauré après le départ de Ben Ali, a été un succès. Il avait permis un retour au calme et avait été bien accepté par les Tunisiens. Le fait que l'armée, très populaire, ait été chargée de son application avait été bien reçu par la majorité de la population, toutes opinions politiques confondues. Je ne pense donc pas que ce nouveau couvre-feu soit perçu comme un retour en arrière. Reste à savoir s'il sera aussi bien respecté qu'à l'époque, quand régnait une certaine euphorie révolutionnaire au lendemain du départ de Ben Ali. Dimanche 8 mai, pour la première fois, le premier ministre a évoqué un éventuel report des élections législatives, parlant d'"empêchements techniques". Comment interpréter cette déclaration ?

Ce report est demandé par une partie des forces politiques tunisiennes qui veulent avoir le temps de préparer ces élections et estiment qu'une échéance trop proche peut favoriser les partis islamistes et les réseaux de l'ancien parti de Ben Ali. Dans le même temps, en jouant sur le calendrier électoral, le premier ministre donne l'impression de garder la main sur le jeu politique. Puisqu'il ne dispose pas de leviers d'action dans le domaine économique et social, qu'il ne peut qu'en partie influer sur le champ sécuritaire, il peut compter sur les leviers institutionnels et constitutionnels pour exister. Il veut sans doute montrer que bien qu'il ne soit en poste que temporairement, il faudra compter sur lui à l'avenir. Mais cela reste un jeu dangereux car ça risque d'être interprété par de nombreux Tunisiens comme un "mini-coup d'Etat". La seule légitimité de ce gouvernement est d'être temporaire : tout signe qui trahirait une volonté de se maintenir au-delà du temps qui lui est imparti serait compris comme une volonté de confisquer la démocratie. Cela pourrait encore raviver le mouvement protestataire. Propos recueillis par Vincent Matalon http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2011/053 /09/en-tunisie-on-est-dans-la-continuite- du-processus-revolutionnaire_1519010_3212.html

3 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fd9cdc32-7982-11e0-86bd-33 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2fg2pPW West risks sending wrong signal on Assad By Roula Khalaf Published: May 8 2011 16:23 | Last updated: May 8 2011 16:23 Bashar al-Assad should count his blessings. No other Arab leader engaged in a brutal crackdown of popular protests has been given as much leeway.

The US kept the Syrian president out of the list of individuals it slapped3 sanctions on just over a week ago. The European3 Union agreed to do the same on Friday, succumbing to the resistance of some members.

3 3 EDITOR’S CHOICE: Syrian forces crack down in three towns - May-08 Assad to 3 escape European sanctions - May-06 Syrian army attacks Baniyas in new crackdown - 3 3 May-08 Fresh clashes in Tunisia - May-07 Video: Syria forces make hundreds of arrests 3 - May-07 In depth: Middle East protests - May-01 No one had any doubt that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh and Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi were to blame for the violence against protesters. So why is the 45-year-old Mr Assad receiving special treatment? There is a case for acting cautiously, as the lessons from Libya suggest. The referral of

Colonel Gaddafi to the International3 Criminal Court might have been too hasty, complicating attempts to push him into exile. In Syria, sanctions are some of the few pressure tools available, as no one is thinking of intervening militarily. Officials in the US and Europe say Mr Assad will face punitive measures if the repression, which has left hundreds dead, persists. Ayman Abdul Nour, a former ruling Ba’ath party member who became a dissident, says the president’s exclusion is useful. “What they’re doing is giving him a window of opportunity to run away to England with his [British-born] wife. If you leave the door completely closed, he will fight until the end.” But without delivering a shock directly to Mr Assad, the regime will not only ignore the international disapproval but could be left with the wrong message. As many officials in the Middle East who have dealt with the Syrian leader during crises can testify, Mr Assad has a habit of interpreting any wiggle room as a licence to misbehave for a while longer. This would explain why the strongest supporter of targeting Mr Assad himself through sanctions has been France, which knows him best, having been the main advocate of his international rehabilitation in recent years. Mr Assad has also exploited the myth of the lonely reformer surrounded by hardliners. Perhaps because Syria is strategically important and plays a role in the significant conflicts in the region, including the standoff with Iran and the Arab-Israeli dispute, the

myth has had much following abroad. Even now some officials in western capitals are wondering whether Mr Assad, a British-trained eye doctor married to a glamorous former investment banker, is in control, and whether he might want a different path. In the Arab world, meanwhile, another theory is circulating. It says Mr Assad could still stage a “coup” against his own regime – an unlikely course, given that it would mean getting rid of brother, cousins and brother-in-law. Opponents of Mr Assad say this is all wishful thinking. “He’s the president. All decisions are taken in a higher committee and he’s the head of it,” says Mr Abdul Nour. Another long-time observer of Syria believes the debate over Mr Assad’s standing within the regime is now irrelevant. “Whether he is under sanctions or not, he’s been coloured by the repression and hundreds of people have been killed,” says the observer. “Assad is no longer marketable.” The regime’s only strategy for survival now, in any case, appears to be the use of force. Political reforms which could have calmed the streets a few weeks ago would likely precipitate Mr Assad’s downfall. Patrick Seale, biographer of Mr Assad’s father Hafez, says the security crackdown could see the protests petering out. The regime can count on the support of minorities: the Alawite sect to which the president belongs; Christians who are afraid of the alternative of majority Sunni rule; and the middle classes in the big cities of Damascus and Aleppo who have not joined the demonstrations. Others, however, predict the regime’s strategy is accelerating its demise. Diplomats took notice of one alarmist comment last week from Ehud Barak, the defence minister of Israel, an enemy of Syria that watches developments there particularly closely. “The growing brutality is pushing him [Assad] into a corner,” said Mr Barak. “The more people are killed, the less chance Assad has to come out of it.” Roula Khalaf West risks sending wrong signal on Assad May 8 2011 16:23 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fd9cdc32-7982-11e0-86bd-3 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX

Obama calls raid ‘longest 40 minutes of my life,’ says getting bin Laden outweighed any risks By Associated Press, Published: May 8 WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama ordered the commando raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after deciding the risks were outweighed by the possibility “of us finally getting our man” following a decade of frustration, he said in a Sunday broadcast interview. The helicopter raid “was the longest 40 minutes of my life,” Obama told CBS’ ”60 Minutes,” with the possible exception of when his daughter Sasha became sick with meningitis as an infant. Monitoring the commando raid operation in the White House Situation Room a week ago, Obama said he and top aides “had a sense of when gunfire and explosions took place” halfway around the world, and knew when one of the helicopters carrying Navy SEALs made an unplanned hard landing. “But we could not get information clearly about what was happening inside the compound,” he said. Public opinion polls have shown a boost in Obama’s support in the days since the raid, and his re-election campaign was eager to draw attention to the interview. Jim Messina, the president’s campaign manager, emailed supporters encouraging them to watch the program. The note included a link to a listing of all of the network’s local affiliates around the country — and another one requesting donations to Obama’s re- election effort. In the interview, Obama said that as nervous as he was about the raid, he didn’t lose sleep over the possibility that bin Laden might be killed. Anyone who questions whether the terrorist mastermind didn’t deserve his fate “needs to have their head examined,” he said. Obama said bin Laden had “some sort of support network” inside Pakistan to be able to live for years at a high-security compound in Abbottabad, a city that houses numerous military facilities. But he stopped short of accusing Pakistani officials of harboring the man who planned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000. “We don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government.” He said the United States wanted to investigate further to learn the facts, “and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.” Some members of Congress have called for a cessation of U.S. aid to Pakistan, at least until it becomes clear what role, if any, the government played in bin Laden’s ability to avoid detection for years. But Obama said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pakistan has been a strong counter-terrorism partner with us” despite periodic disagreements. The president was guarded in discussing any of the details of the raid, and offered no details that have not yet been made public. 94

Discussing his own role, he said the decision to order the raid was very difficult, in part because there was no certainty that bin Laden was at the compound, and also because of the risk to the SEALs. “But ultimately, I had so much confidence in the capacity of our guys to carry out the mission that I felt that the risks were outweighed by the potential benefit of finally getting our man,” he said. Two influential lawmakers rebutted calls for a cut-off in American aid to Pakistan, an inconstant ally in the long struggle against terrorists. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said: “Everybody has to understand that even in the getting of Osama bin Laden, the Pakistanis were helpful. We have people on the ground in Pakistan because they allow us to have them. “We actually worked with them on certain parts of the intelligence that helped to lead to him, and they have been extraordinarily cooperative and at some political cost to them in helping us to take out 16 of the top 20 al-Qaida leaders with a drone program that we have in the western part of the country,” he said. The senior Republican on the committee, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, said: “Pakistan is a critical factor in the war against terror, our war, the world’s war against it, simply because there are a lot of terrorists in Pakistan.” He also noted that the nation possesses nuclear weapons, and said a cut-off in aid could weaken the United States’ ability to make sure they do not fall into the hands of terrorists. Kerry strongly defended the president’s decision to order the raid, and the shooting death of bin Laden. The administration has offered shifting accounts of the events that unfolded in the 40 minutes the Navy SEALs were inside bin Laden’s compound, most recently saying the terrorist mastermind was unarmed but appeared to be reaching for a weapon when he was shot in the head and chest. “I think those SEALs did exactly what they should have done. And we need to shut up and move on about, you know, the realities of what happened in that building,” Kerry said. National security adviser Tom Donilon said, “I’ve not seen evidence that would tell us that the political, the military, or the intelligence leadership had foreknowledge of — of bin Laden” being in the country. He said the U.S. has asked the Pakistani authorities for access to people whom the SEALs left behind in the compound, including three of bin Laden’s wives. The U.S. also wants access to additional materials collected there, he said. Officials have said the SEALs took voluminous computerized and paper records when they choppered out of bin Laden’s compound. Donilon likened the amount of information retrieved to the size of a small college library. Donilon also sidestepped when asked if waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation of detainees had produced information that led to the successful raid against bin Laden’s compound. “No single piece of intelligence led to this,” he said. The national security adviser appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN and Fox. Lugar was on CNN, and Kerry spoke on CBS. 95

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Associated Press Obama calls raid ‘longest 40 minutes of my life,’ says getting bin

Laden outweighed any risks May 8 http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mining-3 bin-ladens-secrets-shows-his-active-involvement-in-planning-al-qaida- plots/2011/05/08/AFXVtOOG_story.html?nl_headlines

3 MOISÉS3 NAÍM Al Qaeda 2.0 MOISÉS NAÍM 08/05/2011 Tanto Osama bin Laden como su Al Qaeda eran del siglo pasado. La Al Qaeda de ahora, y quienquiera que sea el sucesor de Bin Laden, representan la edición Siglo XXI, Al Qaeda versión 2.0. Esta nueva versión tiene capacidades y limitaciones muy distintas, y enfrenta retos estratégicos también diferentes, a la organización que Bin Laden fundó en 1988. Claro que los espectaculares ataques de 2001 ocurrieron en este siglo y que Osama acaba de morir pero las ideas y las circunstancias que lo moldearon a él y su organización eran del siglo XX. En la década transcurrida desde los ataques del 11-S mucho ha cambiado en el mundo y dentro de la misma Al Qaeda: su organización y líderes operativos, el origen de sus miembros y de sus fuentes de financiación, sus principales teatros de operación, así como sus tácticas, enemigos y competidores. La Al Qaeda original era una organización operativa que, si bien funcionaba en células independientes, mantenía un importante grado de centralización. A quién, cómo y cuándo atacar, la recaudación y el manejo del dinero, el reclutamiento y la promoción de los líderes y las decisiones más importantes las tomaban Bin Laden, su segundo Ayman al Zawahiri y un pequeño grupo de lugartenientes. En cambio, la nueva Al Qaeda es más una inspiración que una organización que actúa siguiendo órdenes emanadas de una sede central. Su influencia y su futuro ya no residen tanto en su capacidad como organización sino en su capacidad de inspirar a nuevos yihadistas para que se organicen, entrenen, planeen y actúen autónomamente contra blancos que ellos mismos seleccionan. Esto no significa que la vieja Al Qaeda haya desaparecido. Osama bin Laden seguía planeando ataques terroristas desde su guarida en Abbottabad. Y seguramente sabremos de Al Qaeda en los próximos días y meses cuando tratará de mostrarle al mundo que la muerte de Bin Laden no implica su muerte como institución. Hace poco, la policía alemana detuvo a un inmigrante de origen marroquí quien, gracias a Al Qaeda, había viajado a la frontera entre Pakistán y Afganistán para entrenarse en el uso de explosivos. Seguramente hay más como él. Pero este ya no es el perfil ideal para Al Qaeda 2.0. Su terrorista ideal nació y aún vive en Estados Unidos o Europa y actúa por su cuenta y, sin jamás haber tenido contacto directo con la organización, hace estallar -en nombre de Al Qaeda- una bomba en un lugar lleno de gente en alguna importante ciudad. El problema que confronta Al Qaeda 2.0 para reclutar estos espontáneos es que ahora enfrenta nuevos y sorprendentes competidores: los movimientos antidictatoriales en el mundo árabe. Antes, el mensaje de Al Qaeda era más fácil: luchamos contra represivos e impíos dictadores en los países árabes, quienes mantienen a sus 96

pueblos en la miseria mientras ellos se enriquecen gracias a su contubernio con el odiado -y más impío aún- imperio estadounidense. Para un joven sin trabajo, sin futuro y sin otros canales por donde encauzar sus energías, frustraciones y esperanzas; esta llamada a la lucha era irresistible. Hoy, ese mismo joven tiene la alternativa de salir a luchar no para matar inocentes en otros países, sino para cambiar las cosas en el suyo. Y su recompensa la puede vislumbrar acá y ahora, no en un más allá poblado con los mártires suicidas de Al Qaeda. El otro problema que confronta Al Qaeda es que tiene que "reparar su marca" en el mundo islámico. Una organización que ha asesinado a más musulmanes que a estadounidenses o europeos tiene mucho que explicar. Una nueva desventaja es que mientras la Al Qaeda del siglo XX pudo contar con el entusiasta y abierto apoyo de algunos países -el Afganistán de los talibanes por ejemplo- o la financiación de ciertos Gobiernos, hoy en día aliarse abiertamente con Al Qaeda es muy mal negocio. Las contorsiones del Gobierno paquistaní para explicar la localización de la guarida de Bin Laden o las contradicciones de los líderes de Hamás con respecto a Al Qaeda son muy reveladoras de la radiactividad política que ha adquirido esta organización. En el caso de Hamás, su líder Ismail Haniya denunció la operación contra Bin Laden diciendo que "condenaba el asesinato de cualquier guerrero musulmán" a pesar de que días antes había ordenado un ataque similar contra una célula de Al Qaeda en Gaza donde resultaron muertos dos de sus integrantes. El menor apoyo gubernamental a Al Qaeda no quiere decir que su ámbito geográfico se haya reducido. De Argelia a Chechenia y de Somalia a Indonesia, la globalización de las células de Al Qaeda ha continuado, aunque ya cada vez menos ayudada por Gobiernos o por sus aliados dentro de ellos. En resumen: Al Qaeda 2.0 seguirá siendo una amenaza. Pero disminuida, desprestigiada y desplazada por ideas y líderes más atractivos. MOISÉS NAÍM Al Qaeda 2.0 08/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaci3 onal/Qaeda/elpepiint/20110508elpepiint_4/Tes

May 7, 2011 End of Mideast Wholesale

By THOMAS3 L. FRIEDMAN If you look into the different “shop” windows across the Middle East, it is increasingly apparent that the Arab uprisings are bringing to a close the era of “Middle East Wholesale” and ushering in the era of “Middle East Retail.” Everyone is going to have to pay more for their stability. Let’s start with Israel. For the last 30 years, Israel enjoyed peace with Egypt wholesale — by having peace with just one man, Hosni Mubarak. That sale is over. Today, post- Mubarak, to sustain the peace treaty with Egypt in any kind of stable manner, Israel is going to have to pay retail. It is going to have to make peace with 85 million Egyptians. The days in which one phone call by Israel to Mubarak could shut down any crisis in relations are over. Amr Moussa, the outgoing head of the Arab League and the front-runner in polls to succeed Mubarak as president when Egypt holds elections in November, just made that clear in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Regarding Israel, Moussa said: “Mubarak had a certain policy. It was his own policy, and I don’t think we have to follow this. We want to be a friend of Israel, but it has to have two parties. It is not on Egypt to be a friend. Israel has to be a friend, too.” Moussa owes a great deal of his popularity in Egypt to his tough approach to Israel. I hope he has a broader vision. It is noteworthy that in the decade he led the Arab League, he spent a great deal of time jousting with Israel and did virtually nothing to either highlight or deal with the conclusions of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report — produced by a group of Arab scholars led by an Egyptian — that said the Arab people are suffering from three huge deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and deficit of women’s empowerment. The current Israeli government, however, shows little sign of being prepared for peace retail. I can’t say with any certainty that Israel has a Palestinian partner for a secure peace so that Israel can end its occupation of the West Bank. But I can say with 100 percent certainty that Israel has a huge interest in going out of its way to test that possibility. The Arab world is going through a tumultuous transition to a still uncertain destination. Israel needs to do all it can to get out of their story, because it is going to be a wild ride. Alas, though, the main strategy of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas will be to drag Israel into the Arab story — as a way of deflecting attention away from how these anti- democratic regimes are repressing their own people and to further delegitimize Israel, by making sure it remains a permanent occupier of Palestinians in the West Bank. Have no illusions: The main goal of the rejectionists today is to lock Israel into the West Bank — so the world would denounce it as some kind of Jewish apartheid state, with a Jewish minority permanently ruling a Palestinian majority, when you combine Israel’s Arabs and the West Bank Arabs. With a more democratic Arab world, where everyone can vote, that would be a disaster for Israel. It may be unavoidable, but it would be

insane for Israel to make it so by failing to aggressively pursue a secure withdrawal option. The second group that will have to pay retail for stability is the Arab monarchies — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco. These governments have for decades bought stability with reform wholesale — by offering faux reforms, like reshuffling cabinets, that never amounted to real power sharing — and by distracting their people with shiny objects. But these monarchies totally underestimate the depth of what has erupted in their region: a profound quest for personal dignity, justice and freedom that is not going away. They will have to share more power. The third group I hope will have to pay retail is Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Under Mubarak, in an odd way, the Brotherhood had it easy. Mubarak made sure that no authentic, legitimate, progressive, modern Egyptian party could emerge between himself and the Muslim Brotherhood. That way, Mubarak could come to Washington once a year and tell the president: “Look, it’s either me or the Muslim Brotherhood. We have no independent, secular moderates.” Therefore, to get its votes, all the Muslim Brotherhood had to say was that “Mubarak is a Zionist” and “Islam is the answer.” It didn’t have to think hard about jobs, economics or globalization. It got its support wholesale — by simply being the only authentic vehicle for protest against the regime. Now the Muslim Brotherhood is going to have to get its votes retail — I hope. This is the key question: Will a united, legitimate, authentic, progressive, modern, nationalist alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood get its act together and challenge the Islamists in the Egyptian elections, and then rule effectively? Woody Allen famously pointed out that 80 percent of life is showing up. Wrong. Eighty percent of life is getting stuff done. The Egyptian centrists from Tahrir Square now need to show that they can form parties to get good stuff done. Nobody pays wholesale anymore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opi3 nion/08friedman.html?ref=opinion

Al Jazeera Global capitalism and 21st century fascism The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together in a web of 21st century fascism.

William3 I. Robinson Last Modified: 08 May 2011 08:59

The TCC has unloaded billions of dollars into food, energy and other global commodities in bond markets worldwide [GALLO/GETTY] The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity. The stakes have never been higher; our very survival is at risk. We have entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes, fraught with dangers - if also opportunities. I want to discuss here the crisis of global capitalism and the notion of distinct political responses to the crisis, with a focus on the far-right response and the danger of what I refer to as 21st century fascism, particularly in the United States. Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour - and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s. Emergent transnational capital underwent a major expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technologies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies, and through new modalities of mobilising and exploiting the global labour force - including a massive new round of primitive 100

accumulation, uprooting, and displacing hundreds of millions of people - especially in the third world countryside, who have become internal and transnational migrants. We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions. Militarised accumulation, financial speculation - and the sacking of public budgets By the late 1990s, the system entered into chronic crisis. Sharp social polarisation and escalating inequality helped generate a deep crisis of over-accumulation. The extreme concentration of the planet's wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment, and dispossession of the majority, even forced participants in the 2011 World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos to acknowledge that the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide is "the most serious challenge in the world" and is "raising the spectre of worldwide instability and civil wars." Global inequalities and the impoverishment of broad majorities mean that transnational capitals cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated. By the 21st century, the TCC turned to several mechanisms to sustain global accumulation, or profit making, in the face of this crisis. One is militarised accumulation; waging wars and interventions that unleash cycles of destruction and reconstruction and generate enormous profits for an ever-expanding military-prison-industrial-security-financial complex. We are now living in a global war economy that goes well beyond such "hot wars" in Iraq or Afghanistan. For instance, the war on immigrants in the United States and elsewhere, and more generally, repression of social movements and vulnerable populations, is an accumulation strategy independent of any political objectives. This war on immigrants is extremely profitable for transnational corporations. In the United States, the private immigrant prison-industrial complex is a boom industry. Undocumented immigrants constitute the fastest growing sector of the US prison population and are detained in private detention centres and deported by private companies contracted out by the US state. It is no surprise that William Andrews, the CEO of the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA - the largest private US contractor for immigrant detention centres - declared in 2008 that: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts … or through decriminalisation [of immigrants]." Nor is it any surprise that CCA and other corporations have financed the spate of neo-fascist anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and other US states.

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The passing of the anti-illegal immigrants law in Arizona sparked national protests and outrage A second mechanism is the raiding and sacking of public budgets. Transnational capital uses its financial power to take control of state finances and to impose further austerity on the working majority, resulting in ever greater social inequality and hardship. The TCC has used its structural power to accelerate the dismantling of what remains of the social wage and welfare states. And a third is frenzied worldwide financial speculation - turning the global economy into a giant casino. The TCC has unloaded billions of dollars into speculation in the housing market, the food, energy and other global commodities markets, in bond markets worldwide (that is, public budgets and state finances), and into every imaginable "derivative", ranging from hedge funds to swaps, futures markets, collateralised debt obligations, asset pyramiding, and ponzi schemes. The 2008 collapse of the global financial system was merely the straw that broke the camel's back. This is not a cyclical but a structural crisis - a restructuring crisis, such as we had in the 1970s, and before that, in the 1930s - that has the potential to become a systemic crisis, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on a host of unknown contingencies. A restructuring crisis means that the only way out of crisis is to restructure the system, whereas a systemic crisis is one in which only a change in the system itself will resolve the crisis. Times of crisis are times of rapid social change, when collective agency and contingency come into play more than in times of equilibrium in a system. Responses to the crisis and Obama's Weimar republic in the United States In the face of crisis there appear to be distinct responses from states and social and political forces. Three stand out: global reformism; resurgent of popular and leftist struggles from below; far-right and 21st century fascism. There appears to be, above all, a political polarisation worldwide between the left and the right, both of which are insurgent forces. A neo-fascist insurgency is quite apparent in the United States. This insurgency can be traced back several decades, to the far-right mobilisation that began in the wake of the crisis of hegemony brought about by the mass struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the Black and Chicano liberation struggles and other militant movements by third world people, counter-cultural currents, and militant working class struggles. Neo-fascist forces re-organised during the years of the George W Bush government. But my story here starts with Obama's election. The Obama project from the start was an effort by dominant groups to re-establish hegemony in the wake of its deterioration during the Bush years (which also involved the rise of a mass immigrant rights movement). Obama's election was a challenge to the system at the cultural and ideological level, and has shaken up the racial/ethnic foundations upon which the US republic has always rested. However, the Obama project was never intended to challenge the socio-economic order; to the contrary; it sought to preserve and strengthen that order by reconstituting hegemony, conducting a passive revolution against mass discontent and spreading popular resistance that began to percolate in the final years of the Bush presidency. The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution to 102

refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to undercut mobilisation from below for more far-reaching transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the co-option of leadership from below; its integration into the dominant project. Dominant forces in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North America are attempting to carry out such a passive revolution. With regard to the immigrant rights movement in the United States - one of the most vibrant social movements in that country -moderate/mainstream Latino establishment leaders were brought into the Obama and Democratic Party fold – a classic case of passive revolution - while the mass immigrant base suffers intensified state repression. Obama's campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilisation and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channelled it into the electoral campaign, and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilised the insurgency from below with more passive revolution. In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response to the crisis - for a project of 21st century fascism - to become insurgent. Obama's administration appears in this way as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis, but rather side-lined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933. 21st century fascism in the United States I don't use the term fascism lightly. There are some key features of a 21st century fascism I identify here: 1. The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power This fusion had been developing during the Bush years and would likely have deepened under a McCain-Palin White House. In the meantime, such neo-fascist movements as the Tea Party as well as neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona's anti- immigrant law, SB1070, have been broadly financed by corporate capital. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as prone to seek fascist political arrangements to facilitate accumulation: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy (particularly petroleum) sector. 2. Militarisation and extreme masculinisation 3. As militarised accumulation has intensified the Pentagon budget, increasing 91 per cent in real terms in the past 12 years, the top military brass has become increasingly politicised and involved in policy making. 4. A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and contradictions In this case, immigrants and Muslims in particular. The Southern Poverty Law Centre recently reported that "three strands of the radical right - hate groups, nativist extremist groups, and patriot organisations - increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22 per cent rise, that followed a 2008-9 increase of 40 per cent." A 2010 Department of Homeland Security report observed that "right wing 103

extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on the fears about several emergency issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right wing radicalisation and recruitment." The report concluded: "Over the past five years, various right wing extremists, including militia and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruitment tool." 5. A mass social base In this case, such a social base is being organised among sectors of the white working class that historically enjoyed racial caste privilege and that have been experiencing displacement and experiencing rapid downward mobility as neo- liberalism comes to the US - while they are losing the security and stability they enjoyed in the previous Fordist-Keynesian epoch of national capitalism. 6. A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats The ideology of 21st century fascism often rests on irrationality - a promise to deliver security and restore stability is emotive, not rational. 21st century fascism is a project that does not - and need not - distinguish between the truth and the lie. 7. A charismatic leadership Such a leadership has so far been largely missing in the United States, although figures such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck appear as archetypes. The mortal circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is the dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population - that portion marginalised and locked out of productive participation in the capitalist economy and constituting some 1/3rd of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in a planet of slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control - otherwise known as "police states". This system becomes ever more violent. Theoretically stated - under the conditions of capitalist globalisation - the state's contradictory functions of accumulation and legitimation cannot both be met. The economic crisis intensifies the problem of legitimation for dominant groups so that accumulation crises, such as the present one, generate social conflicts and appear as spiralling political crises. In essence, the state's ability to function as a "factor of cohesion" within the social order breaks down to the extent that capitalist globalisation and the logic of accumulation or commodification penetrates every aspect of life, so that "cohesion" requires more and more social control. Displacement and exclusion has accelerated since 2008. The system has abandoned broad sectors of humanity, who are caught in a deadly circuit of accumulation- exploitation-exclusion. The system does not even attempt to incorporate this surplus population, but rather tries to isolate and neutralise its real or potential rebellion, criminalising the poor and the dispossessed, with tendencies towards genocide in some cases. As the state abandons efforts to secure legitimacy among broad swathes of the population that have been relegated to surplus - or super-exploited - labour, it resorts to a host of mechanisms of coercive exclusion: mass incarceration and prison-industrial

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complexes, pervasive policing, manipulation of space in new ways, highly repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity through petty consumption and fantasy.

Militarised ideology has intensified the Pentagon's budget, and military officials are increasingly involved in policy-making [GALLO/GETTY] A 21st fascism would not look like 20th century fascism. Among other things, the ability of dominant groups to control and manipulate space and to exercise an unprecedented control over the mass media, the means of communication and the production of symbolic images and messages, means that repression can be more selective (as we see in Mexico or Colombia, for example), and also organised juridically so that mass "legal" incarceration takes the place of concentration camps. Moreover, the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes allows for 21st century fascism to emerge without a necessary rupture in electoral cycles and a constitutional order.

The United States cannot be characterised at this time as fascist. Nonetheless, all of the conditions and the processes are present and percolating, and the social and political forces behind such a project are mobilising rapidly. More generally, images in recent years of what such a political project would involve spanned the Israeli invasion of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, to the scapegoating and criminalisation of immigrant workers and the Tea Party movement in the United States, genocide in the Congo, the US/United Nations occupation of Haiti, the spread of neo-Nazis and skinheads in Europe, and the intensified Indian repression in occupied Kashmir. The counterweight to 21st century fascism must be a coordinated fight-back by the global working class. The only real solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power - downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below. William I. Robinson a professor of sociology and global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

William3 I. Robinson Global capitalism and 21st century fascism 08 May 2011 08:59 http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/20113 /04/201142612714539672.html

Reproducido en: http://www.wisdomblow.com/?p=11353 http://newsessentials.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/3 global-capitalism-and-fascism-xxi-century/ http://alainet.org/active/46914&lang=en3 105

http://capitalismisover.com/global-ca3 pitalism-and-21st-century-fascism/

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3 REPORTAJE: EL MUNDO DESPUÉS DE OSAMA Fulgor y caída de Bin Laden Al Qaeda no ha podido inspirar un movimiento de masas ni derribar gobiernos opresivos. La primavera árabe y la desaparición del líder acentúan el fiasco del sueño criminal ÁNGELES ESPINOSA 08/05/2011 Algunos paquistaníes cuentan que Osama Bin Laden había entregado una pequeña pistola con dos cartuchos a uno de sus guardaespaldas con la orden de que le matara si corría el riesgo de caer en manos del enemigo. El propio líder de Al Qaeda declaró en varias ocasiones su deseo de convertirse en mártir. Eso era en sus tiempos de gloria, cuando todavía podía conceder entrevistas y las mujeres de Jamaat-e-Islami inundaban las calles de Rawalpindi en su defensa. Llegado su momento de la verdad, no hubo tiempo para gestos heroicos y apenas unos cientos de simpatizantes han acudido a los funerales en su memoria. El hombre más buscado del mundo hacía ya tiempo que había perdido relevancia ideológica. En gran medida, Bin Laden fue víctima de su propio éxito. Nada refleja mejor ese cambio que sus guardaespaldas. Frente a las decenas de yihadistas armados que le protegían en vísperas del 11-S, apenas dos fieles le acompañaban en la madrugada del pasado lunes cuando los Seals [equipos especiales de Mar-Aire-Tierra] se descolgaron sobre la finca de la ciudad de Abbottabad en la que se escondía. En el interregno, una vida rocambolesca que empezó cuando el saudí entró en contacto con la guerra que los afganos libraban contra la invasión soviética durante los años ochenta del siglo pasado. Fue allí donde conoció a varios dirigentes islamistas con los que a finales de esa década fundó Al Qaeda (literalmente, La Base) como una especie de paraguas para coordinar actividades, y cuya ideología salafista (una versión extremadamente rigorista del islam que muchos musulmanes consideran una desviación) justificará más tarde sus acciones terroristas. El hecho de que EE UU apoyara aquella batalla contra el comunismo ha llevado a algunos autores a afirmar que Bin Laden fue una creación de la CIA. Nunca se ha probado que existiera contacto directo. De hecho, los estadounidenses gestionaban todas sus relaciones con los afganos a través de los servicios secretos paquistaníes. Pero no cabe duda de que en aquel momento EE UU y el que con el tiempo se convertiría en su enemigo número uno estaban en la misma trinchera. La retirada soviética de Afganistán en 1989 fue asumida como un triunfo propio por los muyahidin (literalmente, los que hacen la yihad, los guerreros santos). Pero no fue hasta un año después cuando Bin Laden vio la posibilidad de transformar esa energía en un ejército capaz de liberar al mundo islámico de su dependencia de Occidente y devolverlo a un pasado de pureza que solo existía en su imaginación. El desencadenante fue la ocupación iraquí de Kuwait y el recurso del rey Fahd de Arabia Saudí a EE UU para que frenara el previsible avance de las tropas de Sadam hacia su país. Bin Laden se ofreció a reclutar a los excombatientes de la yihad afgana para evitar que soldados infieles pisaran la cuna del islam. La familia real saudí rechazó la sugerencia.

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Empezó entonces un enfrentamiento ideológico y verbal que terminaría con Bin Laden refugiado en Sudán y, a partir de 1994, desprovisto de la nacionalidad saudí. Los servicios de espionaje de EE UU fechan su primera acción terrorista el 29 de diciembre de 1992 en Adén, pero son los atentados simultáneos contra las embajadas de EE UU en Kenia y Tanzania en 1998 los que revelaron la existencia de Al Qaeda a la opinión pública mundial e inauguraron un nuevo tipo de terrorismo sin fronteras. Al menos 250 personas resultaron muertas. La prensa descubrió entonces que, seis meses antes, Bin Laden y el líder de la Yihad Islámica egipcia, Ayman al Zawahiri, habían unido sus fuerzas en el Frente Mundial Islámico para la Yihad contra los Judíos y los Cruzados y firmado una fetua que declaraba el asesinato de estadounidenses y sus aliados "un deber individual de cada musulmán" para liberar las mezquitas de Jerusalén y La Meca. Documentos estadounidenses recientemente desclasificados y colgados en la página del Archivo de Seguridad Nacional de la Universidad George Washington el pasado día 2 tipifican a Bin Laden como "uno de los más significativos financiadores de actividades terroristas islámicas en el mundo" ya en 1996. Ese año, el saudí se ve obligado a salir de Sudán y se refugia en Afganistán, donde logra la protección de los talibanes a cambio de financiarlos. Desde entonces hasta los ominosos atentados de 2001 en Nueva York y Washington, Bin Laden tiene la libertad y el tiempo para crear una red de relaciones entre grupos militantes islamistas dispares desde Egipto hasta Filipinas y desde Chechenia hasta Yemen. Con anterioridad, nunca se había atribuido o aceptado la responsabilidad de los atentados que apadrina. Sin embargo, un vídeo encontrado en Kandahar, la capital del sur de Afganistán, tras la llegada de las tropas estadounidenses un par de meses después, muestra su satisfacción por el horror que ha creado el choque de los aviones contra el World Trade Center en Nueva York y el Pentágono en Washington. Las víctimas ya no se cuentan por cientos, sino por miles. Pero su mayor éxito publicitario y mediático se transformó también en el inicio de su caída. Su última aparición pública se remonta al 10 de noviembre de 2001, cuando la presión de las fuerzas norteamericanas le llevó a esconderse en las montañas de Tora Bora. Poco a poco, sus videomensajes se fueron espaciando hasta que, a partir de octubre de 2004, un largo silencio dio lugar a especulaciones sobre su muerte. Significativamente, su primera grabación de audio, 15 meses después, coincide con la fecha en la que ahora se ha sabido que se trasladó al caserón de Abbottabad donde ha encontrado la muerte. Aunque la documentación hallada en su domicilio parece desmentir que las limitaciones para comunicarse le hubieran relegado a un papel simbólico en Al Qaeda, la propia organización estaba perdiendo terreno. Por un lado, los esfuerzos en la lucha antiterrorista no solo de EE UU y Europa, sino también de los países islámicos, han ido debilitando sus estructuras y las de grupos terroristas afiliados con ella. Por otro, a medida que fue ganando influencia en Afganistán, Irak, las zonas tribales de Pakistán y otros lugares del mundo islámico, también fueron creciendo sus enemigos. Incluso los que comparten la ideología salafista que predican han llegado a la conclusión de que su "lucha contra los judíos y los cruzados" ha matado a más musulmanes que norteamericanos. Más importante aún. Como señala el académico John Esposito, "aunque los grupos terroristas son capaces de atraer y reclutar entre pequeñas bolsas de musulmanes, han

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fracasado en inspirar un movimiento de masas o en derribar Gobiernos opresivos". Este fiasco se ha hecho especialmente evidente en los últimos meses con la llamada primavera árabe. Las revueltas populares han logrado un cambio de régimen en Túnez y Egipto, y con distintos grados de intensidad, y casi siempre de forma pacífica, están exigiendo cambios democráticos en el resto de la región. La mayoría de los analistas coinciden en que Bin Laden había perdido su popularidad en el mundo árabe. De ahí la destacada ausencia de reacciones a su muerte en las calles de El Cairo, Casablanca o Saná. Ni siquiera el lanzamiento de su cadáver al mar, que diversos ulemas han considerado no conforme con el islam, ha generado protestas significativas. "La muerte de Bin Laden no significa gran cosa para los árabes con todas estas revoluciones que se han producido y que han dado lugar a nuevos dirigentes sobre el terreno", declara el analista egipcio Diaa Rachwane, citado por la agencia France Presse. Para este experto en movimientos islamistas, su desaparición señala el fin de una época y sirve "para pasar la página de la violencia armada" que tomaba como objetivo a civiles de una forma indiscriminada. De hecho, hace ya tiempo que las actividades de la red de Al Qaeda se habían desplazado a la periferia de esa región que se extiende entre el océano Atlántico y el golfo Pérsico. Más allá del nivel de control que Bin Laden ejerciera sobre ellos, a su muerte los principales focos activos de su multinacional del terror son Al Qaeda en la Península Arábiga (AQPA, nacida de la fusión de las ramas yemení y saudí), con sede en Yemen; Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico, que opera en Argelia, Marruecos, Malí y Mauritania; los múltiples grupos yihadistas que operan en la frontera entre Afganistán y Pakistán, además de los talibanes paquistaníes y los Shabaab de Somalia. Solo un responsable local de AQPA ha jurado vengar la muerte del fundador de la red, cuyo liderazgo se espera que herede el egipcio Al Zawahiri, virtual número dos de Bin Laden y el verdadero ideólogo, a decir de algunos estudiosos. Aunque los partidarios de la vía terrorista se hayan reducido considerablemente, eso no significa que no cuente aún con defensores. El propio presidente de EE UU, Barack Obama, lo ha admitido. "No hay duda de que Al Qaeda continuará sus ataques contra nosotros. Debemos, y lo haremos, permanecer vigilantes dentro y fuera de nuestro país", señaló durante la intervención en la que anunció la operación que acabó con la vida de Bin Laden. La posibilidad de una acción de venganza por parte de sus secuaces ha puesto en alerta a la mayoría de los países. Las embajadas y multinacionales en países sensibles han intensificado discretamente sus medidas de seguridad. Las sedes de algunos organismos internacionales, así como lugares simbólicos, también están sometidos a una mayor vigilancia. En el caso de Pakistán, donde se llevó a cabo la acción de los comandos norteamericanos, se ha sabido que delegaciones del Banco Mundial, el Banco Asiático de Desarrollo y el Fondo Monetario Internacional han cancelado las visitas que tenían previstas. Hay consenso entre los observadores políticos en que la supervivencia de la ideología yihadista significa que se mantiene la amenaza de atentados. Aun así, ese riesgo genérico no debiera llevar a la paranoia. Tal como ha explicado la empresa de análisis y pronóstico Stratfor, "había yihadistas planeando ataques contra EE UU antes de la muerte de Bin Laden y hay yihadistas planeando ataques hoy". Su vicepresidente de 109

información táctica, Scott Stewart, considera que "la idea de que Al Qaeda o una de sus franquicias regionales tiene algún tipo de superataque listo para activar tras la muerte de Bin Laden simplemente no es lógica". El riesgo de que sea descubierto sería muy elevado. El peligro, señalan los expertos, procede más de la posibilidad de que algún espontáneo o pequeño grupo imbuido de su ideología actúe sobre la marcha. Y eso es algo que requiere una estructura logística de la que carece la mayoría. "La decapitación puede que lleve inicialmente a un aumento de los ataques de represalia, pero a largo plazo el impacto de la muerte de Bin Laden tal vez no se registre en la escala Richter", interpreta Mahir Ali, columnista del diario Dawn de Pakistán. El antes mencionado Atwan no descarta "el peligro de que la Al Qaeda post-Bin Laden emerja aún más radical y unida con más fuerza bajo la bandera de un mártir icónico". Por ahora no hay signos de ello y aunque nadie se atreve a escribir el epitafio de la organización, el extremismo religioso que la alimentaba ha pasado a tener un carácter más social que político. La posibilidad de que los islamistas encuentren vías de participación política en los nuevos regímenes que están alumbrando algunos países árabes tal vez constituya el mejor antídoto contra su radicalización. Aún es pronto para saberlo. De momento, las muestras de alegría que desató en Nueva York la noticia de la muerte del temido terrorista no han tenido un contrapunto significativo entre sus seguidores. En los foros de Internet donde se dan cita los simpatizantes de Al Qaeda, algunos celebraron que Bin Laden hubiera alcanzado el martirio, mientras que otros decían rezar para que no fuera cierto. "Si es verdad, debemos agradecer a Dios que Estados Unidos no pudiera capturarle vivo", se leía en un post en el que también se hacía referencia al humillante vídeo difundido tras la captura de Sadam Husein en el que se mostraba al dictador iraquí durante un examen médico. También son numerosos los que, a falta de esa prueba gráfica definitiva, se muestran escépticos con el relato estadounidense y esperan que se confirmen las primeras noticias de Al Qaeda sobre el reconocimiento de la desaparición de su líder. En un submundo plagado de teorías conspiratorias, para estos siempre quedará el recurso de atribuir la bala que al parecer le destrozó el cerebro a la pequeña pistola que Bin Laden supuestamente entregó a su guardaespaldas. Para su mentalidad, que el enemigo norteamericano sea el que ha eliminado físicamente a su jefe es la peor de las hipótesis.

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3 CRÓNICA: CARTA DEL CORRESPONSAL / El Cairo Los egipcios hacen cuentas NURIA TESÓN 08/05/2011 Si hay algo que los egipcios tienen es imaginación y una disposición innata para improvisar. Pero entre sus muchas bondades está, por encima de todo, su asombrosa capacidad de hacer negocios. No hablo del regateo inherente a cualquier transacción (comprar un piso, ir al mercado... todo está sujeto a la ley del tira y afloja), sino de su olfato para el lucro a pequeña escala. Y si a esas virtudes se les añade en un cóctel explosivo la revolución que derrocó al presidente Hosni Mubarak el pasado 11 de febrero, surgirán infinidad de nuevas formas de afrontar la actual situación de precariedad económica. ¿Que desaparecen los turistas (11,5% de los ingresos públicos del país, 11.000 millones de dólares) y no hay a quién venderles momias y sarcófagos de resina? La industria se pone manos a la obra para adecuarse a la demanda: pines, pegatinas, gorras, banderas... todo aludiendo al día que empezó la revuelta, el 25 de enero. Al fin y al cabo, los intrépidos guiris que ya empiezan a serpentear por El Cairo quieren regresar a sus hogares con un souvenir revolucionario. También los guías turísticos podrán llevarles ahora por los vericuetos de la plaza de la Liberación: "Aquí los pro-Mubarak, allá los revolucionarios, allí los francotiradores...". "Libertad, igualdad...", palabras que aparecen juntas por vez primera en camisetas. Y justicia. Una palabra que en el caso de la economía egipcia es la clave de todo. No solo porque gran parte de los dirigentes del Gobierno de Mubarak estén entre rejas, incluidos los dos hijos del líder, sino porque la mayoría lo están acusados de corrupción. Los tribunales andan ocupados estos días con las demandas que piden que empresas públicas vendidas a países extranjeros por precios menores a su coste real sean nacionalizadas. Un aparte merece en las tertulias de café "el asunto del gas". Ese "asunto" se refiere a los contratos por el hidrocarburo que Israel obtenía también por un precio muy inferior al de mercado. Ahora el viejo rais deberá responder de la acusación de haber perjudicado los intereses nacionales por valor de más de 714 millones de dólares, según el fiscal que investiga el caso. La revisión de los acuerdos con su vecino podría traducirse en un alza de los ingresos estimada entre 3.000 y 4.000 millones de dólares, según el primer ministro, Essam Sharaf. Esta semana se ha sabido también que Mubarak tiene en Suiza más de 320 millones de euros. El pasado Primero de Mayo, los trabajadores se manifestaron de nuevo en Tahrir, corazón de la revuelta, para pedir que el salario base suba de 400 libras egipcias a 1.200, es decir, de 50 a 150 euros mensuales. Y los jóvenes, con una tasa de paro del 9,7%, han tenido que reinventarse. Hace unos meses no era difícil charlar en inglés, español, alemán o coreano con un filólogo o un ingeniero que te ofrecía sus baratijas en el zoco de la ciudad. Ahora es posible hacerlo en Tahrir, donde ofrecen su mercancía revolucionaria mientras cuentan sin perder la sonrisa cómo los excesos del régimen han adelgazado hasta la anorexia sus perspectivas de futuro.

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3 REPORTAJE: EL MUNDO DESPUÉS DE OSAMA Anatomía de una imagen El gran secreto de Obama desembocó en esta escena de tensión en la Casa Blanca, mientras una unidad de élite asaltaba la casa de Bin Laden y terminaba con el terrorista más temible de la Historia Los fracasos de otras operaciones anteriores planearon en todas las reuniones previas de Obama con su equipo Langley recibió desde la casa una foto del cadáver. Había un 99,9% de posibilidades de que fuera Bin Laden YOLANDA MONGE | Washington 08/05/2011 Era el secreto mejor guardado de Barack Obama. Nada de cuanto el presidente de Estados Unidos había hecho en los días previos hacía sospechar la inminente operación de una unidad de élite en Pakistán, con semejante objetivo. Y solo un reducido grupo de personas, reunidas en la Sala de Situación de la Casa Blanca, escucharon esta frase el primer domingo de mayo:

-Tenemos3 contacto visual con Gerónimo. La voz era la del director de la CIA, Leon Panetta, que llegaba desde el cuartel general de la CIA al otro lado del Potomac, en Langley, Virginia. El presidente y sus más cercanos colaboradores seguían a través de una pantalla lo que sucedía a miles de kilómetros de distancia en Pakistán. Panetta explicaba a los allí reunidos el asalto a la casa del líder de Al Qaeda, guiándoles sobre el curso de una operación que iba a suponer la consagración o el hundimiento político del presidente de Estados Unidos.

La foto de un instante, dentro de los 403 minutos que duró el asalto que llevó a la muerte de Osama Bin Laden y de otras personas que habitaban la casa, forma ya parte de la historia y puede ser la obra magna del fotógrafo de la Casa Blanca, Pete Souza. La gravedad de los gestos de los presentes en aquella sala hace suponer que el momento recogido por la instantánea fue el determinante en la caza del enemigo público número 1 de Estados Unidos. Quizá se tratara del momento de su muerte a manos de las fuerzas especiales de los Navy Seals, uno de los puntos sobre los que no hay información oficial. El silencio, que dominaba la sala, solo fue roto por otra intervención de Panetta: -Gerónimo EKIA. EKIA son las siglas de enemy killed in action, enemigo muerto en combate. Gerónimo fue el nombre en clave que la CIA decidió utilizar para la operación que tenía como objetivo acabar con Bin Laden -y cuya3 elección ha levantado cierta polémica entre las asociaciones de indios americanos que lo consideran un insulto y un error-. De acuerdo con la última información ofrecida por la Casa Blanca -otras anteriores aportaban distintos datos-, el líder de Al Qaeda estaba desarmado, aunque podía ofrecer resistencia porque cerca de él había un fusil AK-47 y una pistola Makarov. En medio del caos, y en un ambiente de máxima tensión -el cadáver de Bin Laden yacía en el suelo, con al menos un tiro en el ojo izquierdo, que le voló parte de la cabeza, y otro en el pecho- un soldado le hizo una fotografía que fue enviada inmediatamente a 112

Langley para ser sometida a un reconocimiento facial por ordenador. La respuesta llegó enseguida en forma de porcentaje: había un 99,99% de posibilidades de que el cadáver de la foto fuera el de Bin Laden. Posteriores pruebas de ADN arrojaron el mismo resultado: un concluyente 99,99% de coincidencia. -¡Lo tenemos!, exclamó el presidente Obama, la primera persona en romper el silencio en la Situation Room tras el anuncio del director de la CIA. Si todo seguía como estaba previsto, la misión estaba llamada a ser un éxito. Atrás quedó el temor de Obama a sufrir un desastre como los vividos por algunos de sus predecesores en el cargo y que terminaron definiendo sus presidencias. La reelección de un presidente anterior, Jimmy Carter, fracasó en parte por el desastroso intento de rescatar a los rehenes norteamericanos retenidos durante 444 días en la Embajada de EE UU en Teherán, en 1980. Cuando la misión se replegaba, un avión de operaciones especiales chocó en el aire con un helicóptero de la Marina, con el resultado final de ocho militares muertos. Tras aquel fiasco se creó el hoy famoso Equipo 6 de los Navy Seals, el que ha dado muerte al terrorista más buscado de todos los tiempos, causante solo en Estados Unidos de cerca de 3.000 víctimas. Fuentes cercanas a la Administración cuentan que en todas las reuniones que el presidente Obama mantuvo con sus colaboradores entre los días 14 de marzo y 28 de abril surgieron tres palabras malditas que nadie quería oír: Black Hawk down. Una referencia dolorosa, símbolo del fracaso de operaciones estadounidenses en el extranjero, trágicamente relacionada con la batalla de Mogadiscio, en 1993, cuando dos helicópteros Black Hawk -como los utilizados en la misión Gerónimo- fueron derribados y 18 soldados americanos fueron asesinados durante el intento de secuestrar a un señor de la guerra. Las imágenes de los cuerpos de los militares de EE UU arrastrados por las polvorientas calles de la capital de Somalia se convirtieron en un poderoso símbolo en manos de los que se oponían a la participación de Washington en conflictos fuera de sus fronteras. Bill Clinton, entonces al mando en Washington, ordenó la retirada de las tropas en Somalia y prometió no volver a desplegar fuerzas en el extranjero, a menos que se tratase de un caso claro de interés nacional. Ha pasado mucho tiempo desde entonces. En la noche del domingo pasado, poco más de una veintena de miembros de la élite de los Navy Seals aterrizaron en la guarida de Bin Laden. El equipo había partido horas antes a bordo de helicópteros de la base militar de Bagram en Kabul (Afganistán) y, tras una breve parada en Jalalabad, volaron a Pakistán en ruta hacia el lugar donde se encontraba su objetivo. El primer riesgo de la misión era ser detectados y tal vez detenidos por las autoridades paquistaníes, que desconocían la existencia de la operación. Pero la fuerte presencia militar en Abbottabad, una ciudad guarnición que alberga una academia militar, muy cerca de la casa utilizada como escondite por Bin Laden, sirvió de perfecta tapadera para los propósitos de la unidad militar norteamericana, cuyos helicópteros pasaron inadvertidos. No hubo incidentes cuando los soldados se descolgaron hasta el interior del refugio de Bin Laden. Una vez en el suelo sonaron los primeros disparos y, frente a las versiones iniciales ofrecidas por la Casa Blanca, fueron los Seals los que en todo momento tuvieron la situación bajo control. En ningún momento existió fuego cruzado en el edificio principal del complejo, donde estaba Osama Bin Laden. El primero en caer fue Abu Ahmed, el mensajero y hombre de confianza del terrorista, cuya pista había llevado hasta Bin Laden. El nombre del kuwaití Abu Ahmed se obtuvo, a principios de la guerra contra el terrorismo, gracias a las confesiones de prisioneros de 113

Guantánamo a los que se aplicó la tortura que eufemísticamente se conoce como waterboarding, ahogamiento simulado. Años más tarde, con el rastro de Bin Laden perdido y otro inquilino de la Casa Blanca en el poder, agentes paquistaníes al servicio de la CIA identificaron al correo del líder de Al Qaeda en una ruidosa -¿no lo son todas?- calle de Peshawar. Los agentes tomaron nota de la matrícula del Suzuki de color blanco que conducía. En aquel momento, julio del año pasado, se comenzó a escribir el principio del fin de Osama Bin Laden. El domingo pasado, Abu Ahmed disparó contra los Seals cuando se supo descubierto. Pero fue abatido. También cayó bajo las balas una mujer que se encontraba junto a él. Los hombres de las fuerzas especiales iniciaron entonces su acercamiento a la casa principal -estaban en la de invitados- y se toparon con el hermano de Abu Ahmed, a quien también hirieron de muerte cuando creyeron que preparaba un arma para disparar. En el ascenso al piso superior, el segundo, los Seals mataron a Jaled, uno de los hijos de Bin Laden, que se encontraba en la casa. Desde el cuartel general de la CIA en Virginia, Panetta seguía los acontecimientos en directo. Sin embargo, el director de la agencia de espionaje ha reconocido que hubo un periodo de entre 20 y 25 minutos en el que no supieron exactamente qué estaba pasando. Según las autoridades norteamericanas, en el recinto de la casa se encontraban más de 20 personas, incluidas mujeres y niños. Los asaltantes tuvieron que determinar en milésimas de segundo quiénes representaban una amenaza letal y quiénes no. Habían sido advertidos de que cualquiera podía portar chalecos cargados de explosivos. Más arriba, en otro piso, estaba la presa que buscaban. Al entrar en una habitación, los soldados oyeron gritar a una mujer el nombre de Bin Laden. Frente a sus ojos se encontraba el hombre más odiado por los estadounidenses. Los Seals dispararon a matar. La Operación Gerónimo se concibió desde el principio como una misión para matar, por mucho que las autoridades de EE UU insistan en declarar que Bin Laden hubiera sido capturado con vida si se hubiese rendido. Los rostros y las actitudes de los personajes fotografiados por Pete Souza en la Situation Room, de la Casa Blanca, merecen un análisis. La cara del presidente Obama expresa tensión, preocupación, incertidumbre. La secretaria de Estado, Hillary Clinton, se lleva la mano a la boca, ahogando un grito, reprimiendo una emoción. Dicen que el vicepresidente, Joe Biden, estuvo contando las cuentas de su rosario durante el tiempo que duró la operación. De las 13 personas que aparecen en la instantánea -se ve el codo y parte de la corbata de alguien cuyo rostro no forma parte de la historia por haber quedado fuera del encuadre- solo una ocupa un sitio que no le estaba reservado en exclusiva. Se trata del general Marshall B. Webb, número dos del Comando Conjunto de Operaciones Especiales, el hombre cargado de medallas que ocupa la silla destinada al presidente. La decisión más difícil de Obama, esa que tomó a sabiendas de que como mucho había un 60% de posibilidades de que Bin Laden se encontrara en la casa -pudo no haber estado nunca, ya que jamás se le vio-, estaba a punto de traducirse en un éxito que marcará su presidencia y que ya le ha catapultado en las encuestas de popularidad entre sus compatriotas. Sobre el terreno quedaban los supervivientes de la casa, con las manos atadas con bridas de plástico, a disposición de las autoridades paquistaníes, que se hicieron cargo de ellos. 114

Antes de partir, el comando hizo estallar el helicóptero averiado en los momentos del descenso sobre la casa de Bin Laden. Entonces, sin duda, muchos vecinos debieron despertarse, recordaba Panetta estos días. Uno de los dos helicópteros Chinooks, que esperaban como refuerzo en caso de que algo saliera mal, acudió como apoyo para la salida del Equipo 6. Todos los integrantes del grupo encargado de la incursión iban a bordo. No hubo ninguna baja norteamericana. Salían de Pakistán los 24 soldados especiales que habían ejecutado la operación secreta, más el grupo de apoyo. Llevaban también el cadáver de Osama Bin Laden, que horas después sería lanzado al mar desde el portaaviones USS Carl Vinson, situado en el mar Arábigo.

Esta es una foto que pasará a la Historia. La firma Pete Souza, el fotógrafo oficial de la Casa Blanca, y retrata a la plana mayor del entramado político, militar y antiterrorista de Estados Unidos, siguiendo la operación contra Bin Laden.- El equipo de la Sala de Situación Aunque en un primer momento se dijo que Obama y su equipo seguían las evoluciones de la operación en directo, en realidad atendían las explicaciones que iba facilitándoles el director de la CIA, Leon Panetta. Estas son las personas que siguieron los acontecimientos en la llamada Situation Room (Sala de Situación): 1. Joe Biden, vicepresidente de EEUU. 2. Barack Obama, presidente de EE UU. 3. Marshall B. 'Brad' Webb, Adjunto al Comandante en Jefe del Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), la unidad de la que dependen los SEAL, el cuerpo de élite que efectuó el asalto. 4. Mike Mullen, Presidente de la Junta de Jefes de Estado Mayor. 5. Tom Donilon, asesor de Obama sobre Seguridad Nacional. 6. Bill Daley, jefe de gabinete de Obama. 7. Tony Blinken, asesor de Seguridad Nacional de Biden. 8. Audrey Tomason. Directora en la Casa Blanca de la lucha antiterrorista. 9. John Brennan. Asesor de Interior de Obama. 10. James Clapper, director de la Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia. 11. Denis McDonough, adjunto al asesor de Seguridad Nacional. 12. Hillary Clinton, Secretaria de Estado. 13. Robert Gates, Secretario de Defensa. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reporta3 jes/Anatomia/imagen/elpepusocdmg/20110508el pdmgrep_2/Tes

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3 TRIBUNA: TARIQ RAMADAN El fin de Bin Laden y la primavera árabe 08/05/2011 La muerte del líder terrorista no es tan importante. No tenía la menor credibilidad entre los musulmanes La muerte de Bin Laden, un símbolo e icono del terrorismo, no tiene casi importancia para los musulmanes del mundo. Para la mayoría de ellos, sus ideas y sus acciones no eran objeto de imitación ni de respeto, como confirman numerosos sondeos llevados a cabo por Gobiernos occidentales y expertos en antiterrorismo. Se trata, sobre todo, de un acontecimiento importante para Estados Unidos y, en menor medida, para Europa. La escenificación del anuncio, con la firme y meditada declaración del presidente estadounidense emitida en directo por televisión, quiso transmitir una impresión de calma en el momento de la victoria sobre el terrorismo y el enemigo público número uno de Estados Unidos. No hubo hueca fanfarronería. Barack Obama, a quien se ha criticado mucho por su aparente falta de fortaleza en asuntos de seguridad nacional, ha obtenido un poderoso triunfo simbólico que tendrá enormes repercusiones en la opinión pública. No solo continuó la búsqueda de Bin Laden, sino que, en el más absoluto secreto, organizó una delicada operación que logró su objetivo y que sin duda reforzará su imagen como un presidente resuelto, capaz de actuar en los ámbitos cruciales de la seguridad nacional, la defensa y el orgullo patriótico. Las únicas imágenes de las que disponemos hasta la fecha son las del presidente dirigiendo en persona las operaciones desde su despacho: una sucesión de dividendos mediáticos minuciosamente calculados y astutamente concebidos. Pero debemos ir más allá de la exuberancia de la gente que salió a celebrarlo en las calles de Nueva York. ¿Qué futuro aguarda a Oriente Próximo, ante la conjunción de dos realidades contradictorias: las masivas revoluciones pacíficas que están produciéndose en el mundo árabe y la muerte del símbolo del extremismo violento, el líder de unos grupos diminutos, marginales y marginados? Es posible que haya represalias terroristas; debemos preverlas y hacerles frente con la firmeza necesaria. Pero la tarea consistirá en combatir y neutralizar unos actos aislados de provocación que en ninguna circunstancia deben servir para justificar una filosofía de acción política, el rumbo adoptado por el anterior Gobierno de Estados Unidos. Ya es hora de tratar el extremismo violento como lo que es: la acción de unos grupos pequeños que no representan ni al islam ni a los musulmanes, sino unas posturas políticas aberrantes, sin credibilidad entre las mayorías de las sociedades musulmanas. Los elementos de una nueva filosofía política que defina la relación de Occidente con el islam y los musulmanes solo pueden surgir del crisol que representa el amplio movimiento por la justicia, la libertad, la democracia y la dignidad que recorre estos días el norte de África y Oriente Próximo. El renacimiento que estamos presenciando en la región debe interpretarse, en primer lugar, como un llamamiento a que Occidente haga un examen de conciencia crítico. Cuando se apague el júbilo por la eliminación de Bin Laden, el "símbolo del cáncer del terrorismo", Occidente debe empezar a revisar de inmediato sus políticas en la zona. La presencia de EE UU y Europa en Afganistán e 116

Irak y la falta de un compromiso firme de resolver el conflicto entre Israel y Palestina son obstáculos que impiden una evolución positiva. A esta lista hay que añadir cuestiones internas como una legislación discriminatoria que atenta contra la dignidad humana y la libertad personal, la existencia de Guantánamo y el uso de la tortura, unas prácticas que aumentan la desconfianza hacia Estados Unidos y sus aliados. Es necesario replantearse a toda velocidad el apoyo a algunas dictaduras de Oriente Próximo y a los emiratos del petróleo, para que esa estrategia no suscite legítimos interrogantes sobre la sinceridad del respaldo de Occidente al proceso de democratización en el mundo árabe. Las sociedades musulmanas tienen la responsabilidad fundamental de administrar su propio futuro. Hay que subrayar de forma categórica que la inmensa mayoría de la población no se ha dejado seducir jamás por los cantos de sirena de la violencia y el extremismo. Ahora que el pueblo está despertándose, es más importante que nunca que la sociedad civil permanezca movilizada y alerta; que denuncie la corrupción y la ausencia del imperio de la ley y la justicia; que elabore una estrategia genuina para construir sociedades libres y democráticas y que, al final, cree las condiciones para unas relaciones políticas y económicas nuevas con Occidente. Porque la vieja pareja formada por el islam y Occidente ya no es joven; la presencia de nuevos actores del Lejano Oriente, empezando por China, está alterando los parámetros del orden económico mundial. Estados Unidos, como los países de Sudamérica, como China e India a través de Turquía, sabe exactamente qué está sucediendo. Es muy posible que la primavera árabe sea, en realidad, el otoño de las relaciones del mundo árabe con Occidente y la apertura de una nueva vía hacia otra primavera más amplia, en esta ocasión enmarcada por Oriente Próximo y Lejano. Frente a este nuevo panorama geoeconómico, el anuncio de la muerte de Bin Laden tiene tan poca fuerza como un viento debilitado, como un suceso casual. TARIQ RAMADAN El fin de Bin Laden y la primavera árabe 08/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/fin/Bin/Laden/primavera/arabe/elpepuopi/20113 0508elpepiopi_4/Tes

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3 Una ejecución extrajudicial ANA CUEVAS - Zaragoza - 08/05/2011 Hay delitos de Estado, como la ejecución extrajudicial de Bin Laden, que son absolutamente inaceptables desde la moral y las leyes de las que presume cualquier democracia. Como tampoco se puede admitir que se viole el territorio de otro país para buscar terroristas. O que no se haya intentado capturar con vida al líder del integrismo islámico para juzgarle conforme a las garantías que establecen los Gobiernos occidentales. Demencial resulta la desaparición de su cadáver arrojado presuntamente al mar, sin ningún documento gráfico ni prueba material que lo confirme. Pero algunos defensores de la libertad y la justicia responden que el fin justifica los medios ¿No resulta sospechoso que todo esto surgiera ante la necesidad de sofocar el clamor sobre el horror de los métodos usados en Guantánamo? Justo antes de que Obama tuviera que renovar en las urnas. Cuando su popularidad estaba cayendo a causa de las promesas incumplidas y la crisis. Como maná del cielo. Me importa poco si ese teatral acto de venganza acabó o no con el saudí. Vulnera los valores de cualquier sociedad civilizada que se manifiesta a favor de los derechos humanos. Es parte del atrezo que esconde la política del nuevo orden. El fin justifica los medios. El imperio neoliberal ladra esta consigna y sus acólitos europeos corean juntos. Llamazares ha sido el Pepito Grillo del Congreso nacional, Puede que Bin Laden se haya buscado morir así, como dice el presidente Zapatero. Pero un Gobierno con un mínimo de ética reprobaría este asesinato justiciero. El mundo no será más seguro después de su estrambótica cacería. Además, no es bueno echar leña al fuego islámico con charadas de este calibre. Pero lo que sí será, me temo, es más sórdido e irrespirable. Más proclive a justificar las pérdidas de los derechos y libertades de los individuos. Un lugar más injusto y hostil para la mayoría.

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3 LLUÍS BASSETS Ilegalidades irremediables LLUÍS BASSETS 08/05/2011 La primera ilegalidad fue la violación de la soberanía paquistaní. No se puede entrar armado en un país ajeno, asaltar una propiedad privada y secuestrar o matar a uno de sus ocupantes y a quienes pretendan evitarlo. La segunda es la ejecución extrajudicial de un delincuente acreditado, sin juicio ni derecho a la defensa. La tercera es la obtención bajo torturas de parte de la información que ha conducido a la localización del delincuente. La primera ilegalidad era de fácil resolución, bastaba con pedir permiso a Pakistán. La segunda, también: se detiene a Bin Laden en vez de terminar con él en una confusa situación de las que solo nos ha llegado información contradictoria. La tercera tenía difícil resolución retrospectiva: nadie puede ignorar una información útil para defender su vida por el solo hecho de que ha sido obtenida por métodos ilegales. La única aportación que podemos hacer por este lado es que en el eventual juicio no se tengan en cuenta las pruebas obtenidas bajo tortura o detención ilegal. Hay que analizar entonces las dos primeras infracciones. Imaginemos por un momento que Washington ha pedido al Gobierno paquistaní su permiso y su colaboración para detener al megaterrorista saudí. Para hacer algo de este calibre hay que confiar ciegamente en el aliado a quien se le hace tal propuesta. Es seguro que las probabilidades se reducen drásticamente en una eventual acción militar mixta. Es muy extraño que se haya planteado esta opción como una de las tres estudiadas, tal como ha informado la Casa Blanca, porque significaba la garantía de que el pájaro iba a volar antes de que lo cazaran. Si alguien se ha especializado en jugar a dos barajas, este ha sido el Ejército paquistaní y sus poderosísimos servicios secretos. Nos queda la detención y entrega de Bin Laden a un tribunal. ¿Al juez de Nueva York al que corresponde la jurisdicción natural por los atentados del 11-S? ¿Al Tribunal Penal Internacional en La Haya? ¿A una comisión militar que le juzgara sumariamente en Guantánamo o en algún otro limbo legal? La ecuación coste / beneficio es desproporcionada en todos los casos, sobre todo si se parte de la decisión inicial de Obama de terminar con Osama en cuanto tuviera oportunidad. Por eso Estados Unidos ha decidido no seguir unos procedimientos legales que considera poco eficaces para proteger a sus ciudadanos y que ofrecen vías de escape o de propaganda al mayor de los delincuentes. Esta actitud suscita un profundo malestar, sobre todo en Europa, y nos obliga a un espinoso debate; pero es difícil hacer abstracción de que Obama ha actuado en conciencia, por encima de las leyes internacionales, y en todo caso de conformidad con el juramento presidencial que le obliga a proteger la seguridad de sus conciudadanos. LLUÍS BASSETS Ilegalidades irremediables 08/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Ilegalidades/irremediables/elpepusocdgm/20113 0508elpdmgpan_9/Tes

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3 JUAN CRUZ Maldito embrollo JUAN CRUZ 08/05/2011 Es muy difícil hablar del asunto Bin Laden sin que la cabeza te dé vueltas, y sin que sientas que ese vaivén de las dudas siempre puede ser aviesamente utilizado contra ti. Pero vamos allá. Una gran noticia. Había un periodista de EL PAÍS, de los que aquí empezaron hace 35 años ahora, que creía que cuando hubiera noticia así de grande ("como la muerte de Picasso", decía, pero ya se había muerto Picasso) el periódico tenía que dar los titulares apaisados. Y esta de la muerte de Bin Laden es una noticia para darla apaisada. En muchos medios la han dado apaisada, en el sentido de que la han agrandado a su gusto, como si (esto decía Elvira Lindo en su columna del miércoles) ellos mismos hubieran disparado el tiro, o los tiros. Pero, no. No dispararon ellos, aunque hubieran querido, por lo que hemos venido leyendo. Esta ambición primaria del hombre de matar, de liquidar, de eliminar al otro, es más vieja que la tos, por decirlo del modo menos dramático posible. Los hombres siempre hemos querido, en primera instancia, que desaparezca nuestro enemigo, y de hecho lo hemos matado, con nuestras propias manos, con un cuerno de cabra, con veneno, con una pistola. Lo que pasa es que mientras tanto se han ido diluyendo, en nuestra inteligencia y en nuestra memoria, algunos saludables contrafuertes entre los cuales estuvieron los saludables Mandamientos de la ley de Dios, que son como los antecedentes de los Derechos Humanos, salvando todas las distancias que queramos. Los Derechos Humanos, las leyes internacionales y aquellos Mandamientos, cada cosa en su lugar, son en realidad mensajes para que no nos tomemos la justicia por nuestra mano, por muy tenaz y malvado que sea nuestro enemigo. En el libro El holocausto español, de Paul Preston, el historiador británico cuenta, horrorizado, cómo se fue construyendo entre nosotros el odio que acabó en una matanza civil que a veces se basaba en los odios más primitivos, en los odios de vecindad, sin ir más lejos. Esa obra maestra del horrorizado Preston llena ahora nuestros ojos de estupor y nuestra memoria de vergüenza. Pero vayamos otra vez a Bin Laden. Lo que ha hecho este criminal ha cegado de odio a los norteamericanos, y no solo; aquí mismo perpetró una matanza atroz e inolvidable. Y en otros lugares. Lo buscaba Estados Unidos, "vivo o muerto". Lo mató. Aquí hubo una alegría que no se contuvo ni siquiera cuando pasó ese primer instante primario que hacía exclamar: "Por fin lo liquidaron". Lo más curioso es que aquellos que mostraron dudas sobre la legitimidad de la acción (preguntas como las que vienen de los Mandamientos, los Derechos Humanos, etcétera) fueron tachados enseguida de buenistas y de progres trasnochados que andan enredando con las leyes... Por eso decía al principio que me costaba, francamente, abordar estas líneas, porque ahora no sé si soy buenista, y por tanto malo, lo cual es una contradicción inquietante. Como la materia misma de la que estamos tratando. Maldito embrollo.

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3 Muerte en Pakistán Que el líder de Al Qaeda residiese en las cercanías de Islamabad hace pensar que el Gobierno paquistaní, que conocía el hecho, aceptó protegerlo y después optó por entregarlo a EE UU BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY 08/05/2011 Bin Laden ha muerto. En cierto modo, ya estaba muerto. Y hacía tiempo que ya nadie creía en su perspectiva de un islamismo radical capaz de tomar el relevo del comunismo y sus ambiciones planetarias. Esta vez está muerto y bien muerto. El peor asesino en serie de la historia contemporánea, el inventor de la nueva estrategia terrorista, el jefe de una ONG del crimen que, en los últimos diez años, ha matado a miles y miles de civiles ha salido de la escena mundial. Y, evidentemente, es una gran noticia. A partir de aquí, se plantean las siguientes preguntas: 1. ¿Quién ha matado a Bin Laden? Un comando del Joint Special Operations Command estadounidense, por supuesto. Pero también, claro está, la coalición antiterrorista que lo perseguía desde hacía diez años. Y esas masas arábigo-musulmanas que se suponía iban a caer en manos de Al Qaeda pero, finalmente, se libraron mucho de hacerlo y a las que los recientes movimientos democráticos en la región han terminado de curar de esa posible tentación. Bin Laden ha muerto porque la mayoría de los musulmanes renegó de él de inmediato. Y porque, diez años después, la primavera árabe lo había condenado. 2. ¿Qué hizo posible la muerte a Bin Laden? La presencia de las fuerzas especiales norteamericanas cerca de Pakistán. O, hablando claro, en el territorio del vecino afgano. Lo que, para hablar más claro aún, significa que la coalición antiterrorista hizo bien en permanecer en Afganistán y que esta guerra tan denigrada, con tan mala prensa, esta guerra que se suponía perdida y que solía meterse en el mismo saco que la absurda guerra de Irak era una guerra que había que hacer y que hoy da sus frutos de reconciliación y de paz. El acontecimiento es la consecuencia de la presencia de soldados occidentales en Kapisa y Uzbeen. Es la victoria de quienes, desde 2001, se resisten a dejarse impresionar por el derrotismo circundante. Es un revés para la mentalidad muniquesa y su insondable frivolidad. 3. ¿Qué va a pasar a partir de ahora? Naturalmente, esta ha sido una lección para todos los terroristas del mundo y también para los talibanes. A medio y largo plazo, provocará además un inevitable debilitamiento del pequeño ejército del crimen que capitaneaba Bin Laden. Pero ¿y antes de eso? ¿A más corto plazo? ¿En la base de la Base? ¿En esas células que funcionaban como franquicias, que solo mantenían unas relaciones lejanas con él y acaban de perpetrar en Marrakech, en una de las plazas más bellas del mundo, 121

el baño de sangre que todos recordamos? ¿No corremos el riesgo de ver una epidemia de pequeños califas intentando ser califas en lugar del gran Califa? ¿Y no van a lanzarse a una competición para imaginar una revancha a la altura de su demencia? Esta muerte es una victoria. Pero, por desgracia, no es la derrota total del terrorismo. 4. ¿Qué hacer con el cadáver de Bin Laden? La cuestión puede parecer secundaria, pero, en el momento en que escribo estas líneas, apenas unas horas después del anuncio de su muerte, es simbólica y políticamente esencial. ¿Sumergido en el mar de Omán? ¿De veras? En ese caso, existe el riesgo de que florezcan las habituales fantasías complotistas: "En realidad no murió, emir oculto, resurrección, véase la imagen trucada emitida ya por los paquistaníes...". ¿Inhumado, entonces? Pero ¿dónde? ¿Para quién el regalo envenenado? ¿Y en qué cementerio y de qué país, el eventual lugar de peregrinaje? Un verdadero dilema. Y de nuevo la foto. ¿Los estadounidenses habrán tomado la precaución de sacar una verdadera foto de los restos mortales? Sería necesario. Indispensable para poner coto a esos otros rumores que no faltarán a la cita para privar a Obama de su éxito: "Muerte natural..., cortina de humo..., falsa operación..., falsa victoria...". Pero es lo que hicieron antaño, y por la misma razón, con el cuerpo del Che Guevara. Y al hacerlo lo convirtieron en el icono que todos conocemos. ¿Entonces? Muy difícil... 5. Y, finalmente, Pakistán. Comprendo que la operación ha sido posible gracias a la cooperación de este aliado de Estados Unidos que, no hay que olvidarlo, posee la bomba atómica. Pero al mismo tiempo... ¿Cómo no ver al mismo tiempo la otra cara de la verdad? Se decía que el fugitivo se ocultaba en grutas. Que erraba de refugio en refugio. Se suponía que vivía como una fiera acorralada en no sé qué "zona tribal". Pero ahí estaba, en el corazón del país. Vivía a unas decenas de kilómetros de Islamabad, su capital política, en un barrio que yo mismo visité durante mi investigación sobre Daniel Pearl y es una zona residencial para militares retirados. ¿Cómo no concluir que los paquistaníes lo sabían? ¿Que primero aceptaron protegerlo y más tarde decidieron entregarlo? ¿Cómo no hacer la pregunta que yo planteé cada vez que, en el pasado, y en circunstancias siempre análogas, las agencias paquistaníes soltaban a uno de los yihadistas que tenían en reserva? (desgraciadamente, los acontecimientos siempre me han dado la razón). ¿Por qué este cambio de opinión? ¿De acuerdo con los términos de qué trato? ¿Y qué carta conserva uno cuando, en la partida de póquer que es el juego diplomático visto desde Islamabad, se descarta de semejante triunfo? La desaparición de Bin Laden, por afortunada que sea, me reafirma en la idea de que este Pakistán nuclear, yihadizado y bajo la persistente influencia de esos terribles servicios secretos, es hoy, como ayer, uno de los lugares más peligrosos del mundo.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opini3 on/Muerte/Pakistan/elpepusocdgm/20110508elpd mgpan_3/Tes

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3 REPORTAJE: OPINIÓN Es legítimo disparar al jefe de tus enemigos La decisión de Obama, el frío estratega, acabó con la temporada de las tonterías en EE UU BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON 08/05/2011 El domingo por la noche había escrito un artículo sobre Donald Trump que estaba revisando para enviar a EL PAÍS, cuando las cadenas de televisión anunciaron que habían matado a Osama Bin Laden. A diferencia de muchos amigos míos (que son vagamente de centro-izquierda), yo me tomo muy en serio a los "payasos" políticos como Trump. Tal vez sea por mis recuerdos infantiles de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuando los intelectuales se reían de los "payasos" hasta que se dieron cuenta, demasiado tarde. Al menos, Sarah Palin, obsesionada con el lugar de nacimiento de Obama -es decir, lo que se denomina una birther- y reina del movimiento del Tea Party, tiene un límite geográfico, porque su hábitat está en el sur y el suroeste de Estados Unidos. En cambio, Trump no tiene ese límite; cuenta con seguidores entre los miembros del Tea Party por afirmar que Obama no había nacido en Estados Unidos (¡No puede ser! ¡Un negro en la presidencia!). Y en contraste con Sarah Palin, tiene una presencia destacada en los medios de comunicación y se codea con el dinero de la costa este. En los años ochenta aprendió dos lecciones fundamentales: no importa cuánto dinero se pierde (Trump ha perdido mucho) mientras sea una GRAN pérdida. No hay ni bueno ni malo, solo GRANDE. En el mundillo de los nuevos ricos de los años ochenta, Trump y su primera mujer, Ivana, quisieron llenar un vacío y se convirtieron en líderes de aquel grupo. Ahora, Trump estaba utilizando la misma táctica en la política. El Tea Party ha creado un vacío en el Partido Republicano normal, que prácticamente ha dejado de existir. Y Trump se apresuró a saltar al ruedo, esta vez un ruedo político. Le faltó tiempo para presumir de ser quien había conseguido arrinconar a Obama, al obligarle a mostrar de nuevo, esta vez por televisión, su certificado de nacimiento. De la noche a la mañana, Trump se puso en cabeza de las encuestas sobre el candidato republicano a la presidencia. De pronto, además de poner en duda el lugar de nacimiento de Obama, empezó a insinuar que era una especie de espía salido de la profética novela de Philip Roth La mancha humana. Se dedicó a preguntar: ¿alguien había visto alguna vez a Obama en Columbia? ¿Y en Harvard? ¿Cómo había llegado a estar en la redacción de la Harvard Law Review? Trump encarna lo que el destacado historiador Richard Hofstadter, hace mucho, llamó el estilo paranoico de la política estadounidense, que es una mezcla de histeria, desconfianza y racismo. El millonario atacó las leyes de discriminación positiva, que transformaron las universidades de Estados Unidos en la mezcla multicultural que son hoy y que significan que los hijos de los poderosos no tienen ya asegurada automáticamente una plaza en los centros académicos más selectos. Sin embargo, el domingo por la noche, el relato cambió. Obama, el frío estratega -y la estrategia es lo que se le da mejor-, había separado a los niños de los hombres: Bin Laden estaba muerto y las locuras de Trump quedaban como lo que los periodistas están llamando una temporada de tonterías. Ahora, para centrarme en el problema fundamental planteado por EL PAÍS, qué aspectos morales y legales tiene la muerte de Bin Laden, quiero dejar una cosa clara: me opongo por completo a todas las formas de 123

tortura, incluido el waterboarding (ahogamiento simulado), que me parece una salvajada. La cuestión del waterboarding la plantearon el lunes varios miembros aguafiestas del Gobierno de Bush -Rumsfeld y Cheney-, que ahora quieren arrogarse el mérito de haber encontrado a Bin Laden gracias, según dicen, a los éxitos conseguidos con el empleo legítimo de dicha técnica. Pero los "métodos reforzados" como el ahogamiento simulado fueron declarados ilegales hace años, y no me parece posible que unas pizcas de información recibidas tal vez en 2002, como presumen Rumsfeld y Cheney, hubieran esperado a 2011 para mostrar alguna utilidad. Todavía no conocemos la verdadera secuencia de acontecimientos, que se desarrolló durante un periodo de casi 10 años, y desde luego no se explica por qué, si el equipo de Bush estaba en posesión de un dato tan valioso, anuló de pronto la orden de busca y captura de Bin Laden, con el argumento de que ya no era un objetivo importante. ¿Fue legal matar a Bin Laden? Según las leyes, es legítimo disparar al jefe de tus enemigos, y Bin Laden era el líder de Al Qaeda y había ordenado personalmente los atentados del 11-S. El hecho de que el ataque contra Bin Laden se llevara a cabo con un número mínimo de soldados de las fuerzas especiales de la Marina en helicópteros y casi sin bajas es asombroso. Comparémoslo con la destrucción causada por las bombas en numerosos países, entre ellos Libia e Irak: desde luego, a Obama le habría costado mucho menos ordenar el bombardeo de la mansión de Bin Laden que la arriesgada operación de las fuerzas especiales, pero las pérdidas de vidas humanas habrían sido enormes. Y en cuanto a la incursión sin anunciar en Pakistán, ni las personas ni los Gobiernos tienen la obligación de ser masoquistas. Si Obama hubiera informado a Pakistán de sus planes, habría sido una misión suicida. Nuestro problema con Pakistán es muy grave. Les necesitamos. Nos traicionan. Todavía no hemos decidido qué hacer al respecto. - BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON Es legítimo disparar al jefe de tus enemigos08/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/leg3 itimo/disparar/jefe/enemigos/elpepusocdgm/ 20110508elpdmgpan_2/Tes

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3 REPORTAJE: EL MUNDO DESPUÉS DE OSAMA Torturas y agujeros negros de la CIA Setmarian, fundador de Al Qaeda en España, secuestrado desde 2005, permaneció en manos de Estados Unidos y fue entregado a Siria. Lo revelan documentos secretos obtenidos por EL PAÍS El sirio español ha permanecido varios años en cárceles secretas y ha sido interrogado sobre el paradero de Bin Laden Los 11 presos sirios en Guantánamo son discípulos de Setmarian, según se lee en sus fichas penitenciarias JOSÉ MARÍA IRUJO 08/05/2011 Se acabó un misterio, pero prevalece un caso de torturas. Mustafá Setmarian, el fundador de Al Qaeda en España, detenido en 2005 en Pakistán, entregado a la CIA y desaparecido en los siniestros agujeros negros creados por la agencia de inteligencia norteamericana, se encuentra en una prisión de Siria, según reflejan documentos secretos del Departamento de Defensa de EE UU a los que ha tenido acceso EL PAÍS. Este maestro de la yihad global, desaparecido hace seis años, es el paradigma de los métodos empleados por el Ejército norteamericano y la CIA para obtener información en la denominada guerra contra el terror iniciada por la Administración del presidente George W. Bush. Su captura hizo albergar esperanzas de que les condujera hasta la madriguera afgana o paquistaní de Osama Bin Laden, donde este último ha sido finalmente abatido. La tortura a los detenidos para descubrir al jefe de Al Qaeda ha sido reconocida por Leon Panetta, de 72 años, el director de la CIA que ha dirigido la caza y liquidación del emir saudí. Además, los servicios antiterroristas norteamericanos han practicado el secuestro y desaparición de jefes de esta organización como Setmarian, el sirio nacionalizado español, de 52 años, casado con una madrileña y padre de cuatro hijos, que alcanzó el número cuatro de la organización tras diseñar los métodos de combate de la nueva yihad y por el que el Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ofrecía cinco millones de dólares, justo detrás de Bin Laden y Ayman al Zawahiri. Las autoridades de EE UU han declinado facilitar datos sobre el paradero de Setmarian pese a las gestiones de su esposa, Helena Moreno, residente en Doha (Catar), del Gobierno español y de diversas organizaciones de derechos humanos que han denunciado su prolongada desaparición, que todavía continúa. En 2009, el FBI contestó a una comisión rogatoria del juez Baltasar Garzón con una lacónica y ambigua respuesta: "No está en territorio de EE UU". Este servicio retiró la recompensa que ofrecía por el jefe de Al Qaeda y borró su nombre de la lista de los terroristas más buscados pocos días después de su detención. "No hay mayor tortura que la desaparición de una persona. No sabemos nada de él desde hace seis años", repite una y otra vez su esposa en las conversaciones telefónicas mantenidas con este periódico. Durante años, Setmarian ha sido interrogado en agujeros negros de la CIA por si pudiera facilitar pistas sobre el paradero de Bin Laden, de Ayman al Zawahiri y del mulá Mohamed Omar, con los que colaboró durante años en Afganistán. La última pista del terrorista sirio condujo hasta un barco prisión del Ejército norteamericano en su base

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naval y aérea de Diego García, isla británica en el océano Índico donde han permanecido presos yihadistas calificados de alto valor informativo para ellos, según testimonios de varios exagentes de la CIA. "Este barco está haciendo algunas cosas buenas que no puedo revelar", afirmó tras el 11-S el vicealmirante norteamericano David Brewer sobre su criatura preferida, el buque de asalto anfibio USNS Stockham. Semanas después, en las celdas de Guantánamo, el ruso Rustam Akhmiarov y el británico Moazzam Begg recibieron confidencias de compañeros en las que les hablaron de otro limbo más oscuro, de un limbo en el mar, de cárceles flotantes peores que la base en la isla de Cuba. Y les detallaron en qué consistían "las buenas acciones" de las que habló el vicealmirante Brewer: torturas interminables a presos hacinados en las bodegas de varios barcos norteamericanos. Begg, expreso británico, explica ahora las diferencias entre Guantánamo y una cárcel flotante: "El aislamiento es absoluto. Es el limbo de los limbos. No hay abogados ni miembros de la Cruz Roja que puedan visitarte o identificarte". Exactamente lo que le ha ocurrido al pelirrojo Mustafá Setmarian, al que nadie ha visto desde su detención en Quetta, un feudo de Al Qaeda en Pakistán. Las fichas secretas de los 11 presos sirios en Guantánamo elaboradas por el Ejército de EE UU y a las que ha tenido acceso este periódico demuestran que las autoridades norteamericanas sí saben dónde está este presunto jefe de Al Qaeda. Los expedientes están plagados de referencias a Mustafá Setmarian, Abu Musab al Suri, su entrenador y profesor en la asignatura del terror en Afganistán, y en dos de ellas se señala que fue detenido y transferido a Siria. Es la primera vez que sale a la luz un documento oficial norteamericano en el que se recoge el paradero del hombre al que Bin Laden despidió en otoño de 2001 con un abrazo y dos besos en las cuevas de Tora Bora (Afganistán) tras encargarle el diseño de la guerra santa del futuro, según reveló el propio sirio en un manifiesto que hizo público antes de su captura en 2005. El informe de evaluación del preso Ali Husain Shaabaan, de 29 años, uno de los discípulos aventajados de Setmarian, fechado en marzo de 2008, dice que entre diciembre de 2001 y octubre de 2005 el yihadista sirio español desaparecido trabajó "en el diseño estratégico y militar de la futura yihad. Este diseño incluía el uso de armas de destrucción masiva, tanto nucleares como químicas y bacteriológicas, así como la bomba sucia. Abu Musab al Suri fue capturado en octubre de 2005 y transferido a Siria". Esta última frase, donde se reconoce su entrega a las autoridades sirias, va acompañada de una cita en la que aparecen tres informes del FBI. El preso Ali Husain Shaabaan estudió en una escuela de Utayba, localidad siria situada a una hora y media de Damasco; trabajó en la tienda de su padre y viajó a Afganistán atraído por la yihad, donde se alojó en una casa de huéspedes para yihadistas sirios cerca de Kabul, según ha relatado a sus interrogadores en Guantánamo. Cada tres meses recibía un sobre que contenía dinero, mientras estudiaba el Corán, le enseñaban a manejar un rifle AK-47 y a participar en operaciones suicidas. El barbudo Ali Husain se entrenó en el campo afgano de Al Ghuraba que dirigía el propio Setmarian y que estaba ocupado por sirios, en su mayoría pertenecientes a los Hermanos Musulmanes, movimiento integrista perseguido en Siria y con una fuerte implantación en numerosos países árabes. El informe del preso destaca la efervescente actividad de este campo terrorista y define a Setmarian como un estrecho asociado de Bin Laden.

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En la ficha firmada por el contraalmirante de la Marina de EE UU Mark H. Buzby se lee lo siguiente: "Abu Musab al Suri (Setmarian) creó un campo para entrenar árabes. El campo se llamaba Al Ghuraba (los extranjeros) y estaba cerca de Kabul. Allí se enseñaban sistemas electrónicos y preparación de artilugios explosivos accionados a distancia... Abu Musab al Suri es un asociado a Al Qaeda, entrenador de muyahidin, un teórico del islamismo con una larga historia de apoyo a los extremistas islámicos". La ficha de 14 folios de Masun Abdah Muhammad, de 39 años, otro discípulo del desaparecido Setmarian, está fechada en abril de 2008 y recoge parecidas referencias a la anterior, así como la afirmación de que el fundador de Al Qaeda en España fue entregado a las autoridades sirias. Masun fue entrenado en el mismo campo terrorista de Al Ghuraba al que acudieron lamayoría de los sirios recluidos en Guantánamo, casi todos miembros de una célula salafista desarticulada en Damasco. Allí encontraron un buen refugio con el amigo Mustafá. Setmarian vivió durante más de una década en Madrid y Granada bajo la tapadera de vendedor de objetos árabes, estudió en la escuela de idiomas de Madrid y se casó con Helena Moreno. Los padres de esta se negaron a asistir a su boda en una mezquita de Madrid y les costó años recuperar la relación con su hija. En los noventa Mustafá fue vigilado por la policía, grabado en vídeo y fotografiado por sus actividades de proselitismo. "De cabello pelirrojo, 1,70 de altura, ojos verdes, barba de elegante corte, tez clara y aspecto occidental", le define un informe policial. Entonces, su redactor no imaginó que este tipo llegaría hasta la cúpula de Al Qaeda. Mustafá, el hombre que trabajó en Londres dirigiendo la revista del Grupo Islámico Armado (GIA) a las órdenes de Abu Qutada, un palestino icono de los autores del 11-S, fue reconocido recientemente por un testigo protegido como presunto autor del atentado al restaurante El Descanso, en Madrid, en 1985, en el que murieron 18 personas. Su desaparición a manos de la CIA ha impedido que se profundice en el testimonio de esta persona herida en aquel ataque, un testigo que logró la reapertura del caso archivado hasta que se encuentre a los autores. "No tengo ninguna duda de que fue él. Lo reconocí al ver su fotografía en el periódico", afirma ahora la víctima, que perdió en el atentado a dos de las personas que le acompañaban. La entrega secreta de Setmarian a Siria implica que se prolongará la agonía de su familia, ya que las autoridades de ese país tampoco reconocen tenerlo, pese a las reiteradas preguntas de Helena. Su silencio es igual de inquietante que el de las autoridades de EE UU. ¿Seguirá en Siria? ¿Estará vivo? No hay evidencias de nada. "Cuando llegan a Damasco, desaparecen. Lo denuncia Amnistía Internacional", advierte la esposa ceutí de Mohamed Zaher, de 43 años, un sirio residente en Granada que, tras cumplir una pena de ocho años por pertenecer a una célula yihadista, ha recibido la orden de expulsión "por razones de orden público y seguridad ciudadana". "En mi país, si entras a la cárcel ya no ves la luz, desapareces o mueres", afirma Mohamed. ¿Qué es peor: estar desaparecido en un agujero negro (cárcel secreta) como ha permanecido Setmarian o preso en Guantánamo? Jaled Seij Mohamed (KSM), de 46 años, el cerebro del 11-S, pasó por cárceles secretas de la CIA en Tailandia y Polonia hasta reaparecer en 2006 en el penal de la isla cubana. Su ficha penitenciaria no recoge la menor alusión a los interrogatorios que sufrió, al igual que las del resto de reclusos. Pero informes de la CIA aseguran que este paquistaní que se inició en la yihad con 11 años y estudió ingeniería mecánica en la Universidad norteamericana de Carolina del Norte sufrió el waterboarding (simulación de ahogamiento) 183 veces en marzo de 127

2003, días después de su detención en Pakistán. Supuestamente, facilitó en estos u otros interrogatorios el nombre del mensajero kuwaití que acaba de conducir hasta el refugio en Abbottabad de Bin Laden. El mujeriego Jaled, el tipo que cautivó al emir de Al Qaeda con sus terribles proyectos contra EE UU y sus aliados, sigue en Guantánamo. Su expediente en el penal no le atribuye como a la mayoría de los presos un potencial informativo, porque ha sido explotado hasta la médula. Igual suerte corrió Abu Zubaydah, un palestino de 40 años, detenido en 2002 en Faisalabad y reaparecido en 2006 en Guantánamo después de cuatro años engullido por los agujeros negros. El tuerto Zubaydah sufrió 83 simulaciones de ahogamiento hasta que vomitó su "vasta información sobre personal de Al Qaeda, operaciones, planes, finanzas y terroristas", tal como lo valora su ficha personal, fechada en 2008, que le atribuye, al igual que a KSM, alto riesgo y valor de inteligencia. Leon Panetta, director de la CIA, ha sugerido que la tortura a presos como Setmarian, KSM o Zubaydah ha servido para capturar a Bin Laden. "Las técnicas de interrogación coercitiva fueron empleadas contra algunos de estos detenidos. No sabemos si podríamos haber obtenido la misma información a través de otros métodos". ¿Se han incluido en esas técnicas el ahogamiento simulado?, le han preguntado a Panetta, y su respuesta fue tan escueta como rotunda: "Correcto". La duda radica en si es verdad que la pista se obtuvo mediante esas torturas o es un argumento para justificar el horror de Guantánamo. JOSÉ MARÍA IRUJO Torturas y agujeros negros de la CIA08/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reportajes/3 Torturas/agujeros/negros/CIA/elpepusocdmg/ 20110508elpdmgrep_4/Tes

3 REPORTAJE: OPINIÓN Nadie llora a Osama Washington prefirió una mentira de Estado antes que reconocer un asesinato selectivo. El anuncio del respeto al "rito islámico" quiso poner a salvo la condición democrática de EE UU JOSÉ MARÍA RIDAO 08/05/2011 De acuerdo con la versión de la Casa Blanca, el cadáver de Osama Bin Laden fue preparado según "el rito islámico" y, acto seguido, arrojado al mar. Las explicaciones a este proceder se han referido, por lo general, al hecho de no darle sepultura conocida, y el acuerdo ha sido amplio en torno a la idea de que el Gobierno norteamericano quería evitar la creación de un santuario donde acudirían en peregrinación los partidarios del terrorista. Menor atención se ha prestado, sin embargo, a los preparativos religiosos del cadáver, con independencia de que verdaderamente se hayan llevado a cabo o no. La deferencia hacia el enemigo muerto, hecha pública de inmediato, parecía cumplir una doble función: transmitir la imagen de que, pese a haberlo ejecutado, se le había respetado en algún punto y, en segundo lugar, desactivar el rechazo que, de conceder crédito a los manuales de teología y antropología recreativas que han inspirado la guerra contra el terror, provocaría entre los musulmanes sepultar sin preparación un cadáver.

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En la interminable lista de agravios contra los musulmanes perpetrados desde que Bin Laden apareció siniestramente en escena, este no pasará por ser de los menores. ¿De verdad se sigue pensando entre los estrategas de la guerra contra el terror que a un musulmán que haya perdido a su familia a causa de un crimen ordenado por Bin Laden le importa mucho que se vistiera su cadáver con una camisola blanca, se le introdujera en algo parecido a un saco y se le rezaran tres azoras, piadosamente traducidas al árabe por un hablante nativo? ¿Con qué clase de ciudadanos piensan los ideólogos de esta estrategia que están tratando? ¿En qué tipo de seres alucinados por un credo religioso se empeñan en convertirlos al dedicarles el delicado gesto de preparar según "el rito islámico" el cadáver de un repugnante asesino, que ha matado a muchos de sus conciudadanos y ofrecido la coartada para que los repriman dictaduras como las de Túnez o Egipto con el beneplácito general? ¿No debería tomarse nota, con todas sus consecuencias, de que en ningún rincón del mundo ha habido masas fanatizadas lanzándose a las calles para lamentar la muerte de Bin Laden? La teología y antropología recreativas que han abducido el debate político e intelectual desde el 11 de septiembre han jugado malas pasadas a los aventureros que, utilizando el monstruoso atentado como coartada, pretendieron exportar la democracia a bombazos. Pero ahora están a punto de jugársela además a quienes se opusieron a aquella locura, al ocultarles el verdadero significado de que el Gobierno de Estados Unidos asegure haber cumplido con "el rito islámico" antes de arrojar el cadáver de Bin Laden al mar. Con este gesto conseguía marcar diferencias con una práctica -la de arrojar cadáveres al marque inevitablemente evoca el comportamiento, entre otros, de los oficiales de la Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada con los enemigos del golpe de Estado en Argentina. Frente a esa evocación tan inevitable como terrible, la condición democrática de Estados Unidos se ha querido poner a salvo, no evitando incurrir en el mismo comportamiento, sino tomándose la molestia de preparar el cadáver del siniestro terrorista según "el rito islámico". Imagínese por un instante que la Casa Blanca hubiese comunicado, sin el aditamento de la mención religiosa, que el cadáver de Bin Laden había sido arrojado al mar después de abatirlo a tiros en su escondite de Abbottabad... Si la hipocresía es en el fondo un tributo del vicio a la virtud, las contradicciones sobre la muerte de Bin Laden en las que ha incurrido la Administración norteamericana son, por su parte, la paradójica prueba de que, a diferencia de la Argentina de la ESMA, Estados Unidos sigue siendo un país democrático, pese a la inquietante involución de su sistema político provocada por la adopción de la estrategia de la guerra contra el terror. Las primeras informaciones suministradas por el Pentágono hablaban de un tiroteo durante el asalto y la captura; Bin Laden, oponiendo una resistencia numantina, se habría parapetado tras una mujer que también resultaría muerta, al igual que otros tres habitantes del escondite. Si la operación se hubiera desarrollado de este modo, confirmando la versión que circulaba bastantes horas después de los hechos, pocos argumentos servirían para cuestionar la manera en la que se había dado caza al terrorista número uno. Si el Pentágono la puso en circulación en primer término fue, seguramente, porque entre recurrir a una mentira de Estado o reconocer un asesinato selectivo, sus dirigentes debieron de experimentar la vaga sensación de que la primera alternativa les alejaba menos del comportamiento que se espera en un sistema democrático. Pero la versión cambió de un momento para otro, y los argumentos que habían sido desechados hubieron de regresar a la palestra. Bin Laden no iba armado, ni tampoco usó como escudo a la mujer que resultó muerta, según confirmó el Pentágono. El único habitante del escondite que abrió fuego contra los soldados norteamericanos habría sido 129

el correo de confianza que sirvió a los servicios de inteligencia para descubrir el paradero de Bin Laden, Abu Ahmed el Kuwaiti. Nada más conocerse esta nueva versión de los hechos de Abbottabad, la Administración estadounidense todavía intentó ofrecer otra paradójica prueba de que sigue siendo un sistema democrático, pese a la estrategia de la guerra contra el terror. Tanto los portavoces del poder ejecutivo como los del judicial buscaron justificar la actuación de los soldados calificándola como "acto de guerra". Lo más significativo de este intento desesperado de sobreseer un comportamiento que, de acuerdo con la nueva versión, no puede serlo no es que disparar contra unos enemigos sin armas difícilmente encaje en la noción de "acto de guerra"; lo más significativo es que muestra la repugnancia que, por fortuna, por inmensa fortuna, sigue experimentando el actual Gobierno de Estados Unidos a hablar de asesinato selectivo o de ejecución extrajudicial, por más que sea eso, eso exactamente, lo que llevó a cabo. Se dirá, no sin razón, que es una exhibición de hipocresía. Por vía de comparación se podría observar, sin embargo, cómo el vicio volvió a rendir tributo a la virtud: el presidente del Comité de Asuntos Exteriores y de Defensa del Parlamento israelí, Shaul Mofaz, aseguró que Estados Unidos había recurrido a la misma estrategia que emplea su país contra los terroristas y, a continuación, llamó a incrementar los asesinatos selectivos de palestinos, según recogía el Jerusalem Post. No es eso lo que se proponen los dirigentes norteamericanos. Calificando de acto de guerra la muerte de Bin Laden, y anunciando el fin de Al Qaeda - algo que, a todas luces, resulta cuando menos prematuro-, Obama parecía estar transmitiendo un mensaje subterráneo diferente del expreso. Lo que para la Casa Blanca se habría acabado después del asalto al escondite de Abbottabad no es el yihadismo, que podría seguir golpeando mientras exista un solo fanático y un único kilogramo de dinamita, sino la guerra contra el terror como estrategia para combatirlo. El debate sobre la tortura como medio para obtener información que permita dar caza a los terroristas, reabierto en Estados Unidos por Dick Cheney tras la captura y muerte de Bin Laden, es, en realidad, teórico, o, más bien, retrospectivamente exculpatorio: Guantánamo continúa en funcionamiento, no por voluntad, sino por incapacidad de Obama para cerrarlo, pero desde su llegada a la Casa Blanca cesaron las torturas a los detenidos. Cheney y, con él, los partidarios de la estrategia de la guerra contra el terror desean que se les reconozca la parte que supuestamente les correspondería en la captura de Bin Laden. No solo para reivindicar la paternidad del éxito, sino para lavar en él los execrables abusos cometidos. El último de ellos, el deliberado asesinato de Bin Laden en el momento de su captura, es, sin duda, responsabilidad de Obama, no de Bush y sus adláteres. Pero, a diferencia de estos, Obama no escogió entre alternativas aceptables e inaceptables partiendo de cero, sino que se limitó a convalidar la única que ofrecía la lógica siniestra de la guerra contra el terror, con su parafernalia de nuevos conceptos jurídicos, limbos extralegales e impunidad para sus ideólogos y ejecutores. El Gobierno de Estados Unidos tal vez podría haber hecho frente a los riesgos para la seguridad que generaría un Bin Laden vivo y entre rejas, lo mismo que lo hizo mientras estuvo en libertad. Lo que no estaba en condiciones de resolver eran los problemas jurídicos que suscitaba. ¿Qué debería hacer con Bin Laden vivo, recluirlo en Guantánamo como jefe de los "combatientes enemigos" y privarse, así, de someterlo a cualquier género de juicio, justo o injusto, como sucede con el resto de los internos? ¿O debería haberlo entregado a los tribunales de Estados Unidos, incurriendo en la contradicción de ofrecer un juicio justo al máximo jefe de los "combatientes enemigos" mientras se le sigue negando a estos por el derecho 130

que adquirirían a perseguir penalmente a sus captores, desde los presidentes Bush y Obama hasta el último de los carceleros de Guantánamo? La Administración norteamericana ha cometido un asesinato selectivo, y habrá voces que lo justifiquen o que nieguen que lo sea y voces que se limiten a condenarlo invocando los principios. Pero ni una ni otra postura pueden responder al interrogante de por qué lo ha cometido. El simple intento de hacerlo la coloca ante la evidencia de que la estrategia de la guerra contra el terror es un imparable sumidero por el que se despeña la democracia, y del que hasta ahora ningún dirigente ha conseguido ponerla a salvo. La opción no se agota en el aplauso o la condena, sino que debería ser posible compartir entre demócratas el mismo escalofrío. JOSÉ MARÍA RIDAO Nadie llora a Osama 08/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opini3 on/Nadie/llora/Osama/elpepusocdgm/20110508elp dmgpan_1/Tes

3 REPORTAJE: EL MUNDO DESPUÉS DE OSAMA El emir, en familia EL líder terrorista que quiso restaurar un califato en el mundo era también padre de una veintena de hijos, de cinco esposas, que han vivido en condiciones extremas, y miembro de un clan con casi seiscientos miembros y negocios internacionales, obligado a distanciarse de él LOLA GALÁN 08/05/2011 Osama Bin Laden, (Riad, 1957-Abbottabad, 2011), el hombre que enardecía a las masas musulmanas con sermones difundidos en vídeo por todo el planeta, el que mantenía en alerta permanente a los servicios de inteligencia de medio mundo, era también un padre de familia, preocupado por aportar a la yihad sangre propia. En sus 54 años de vida tuvo una veintena de hijos de cinco esposas, a los que ha arrastrado a una existencia extrema. Bin Laden, obsesionado por la reinstauración de un califato, vivía entregado a la lectura del Corán y a la preparación de la guerra santa contra el mundo occidental. A juzgar por las declaraciones de algunas de sus esposas y de uno de sus hijos, jamás se despojó, ni siquiera en privado, de esa coraza integrista que mostraba en sus intervenciones públicas. Su vida familiar estuvo supeditada siempre a las exigencias militares de la gran cruzada emprendida desde los años noventa contra Estados Unidos y la cultura occidental. Con la mirada puesta en ese objetivo, concertó matrimonios políticos para sus vástagos -casó a una de las niñas con un hijo del líder talibán mulá Omar y, en 2001, a su hijo Mohamed, entonces de 19 años, con una niña de 14, hija de uno de sus más estrechos colaboradores, Mohamed Atef- y les obligó a compartir su destino, sin que la mayoría de ellos se rebelara. Pese a la confusión que reina todavía sobre la operación que acabó con su vida, al menos uno de sus hijos, Jaled, encontró la muerte a su lado, en la casa-fortaleza de Abbottabad (Pakistán). El líder terrorista vivía con un grupo de familiares devotos, entre ellos, su quinta esposa, Amal al Sadah, una joven yemení con la que se había casado en 2000, cuando solo tenía 15 años, y varios hijos. Entre ellos, la hija de 12 años, que relató a la policía paquistaní cómo su padre había sido asesinado a sangre fría. Todavía no está claro si fue su quinta esposa la mujer que intentó proteger a su marido del ataque de los soldados estadounidenses. 131

Hasta el final, la vida de la familia de Osama fue una vida de privaciones y sobresaltos sin ninguna de las comodidades que él mismo, nacido en una familia multimillonaria de Arabia Saudita, había tenido en su infancia y primera juventud. El destino de la mayor parte de sus familiares directos ha estado marcado por las decisiones radicales de este hombre autoritario e intratable. A partir de los atentados del 11-S, el apellido fue un lastre para los Bin Laden -la familia, con todos los allegados, suma unas 600 personas-, dueños del Saudí Binladin Group, una corporación con intereses que van desde la construcción, con la principal empresa del ramo en el mundo islámico, hasta la telefonía, o las bebidas no alcohólicas. Y una condena para las esposas y los hijos del enemigo número uno de Occidente. Su primera mujer, su prima siria Najwa Ghanem, con la que se casó a los 17 años (ella tenía 15) en 1974 -y con la que tuvo 11 hijos-, le siguió a Sudán y Afganistán, y tuvo que afrontar las condiciones durísimas de la vida en las montañas de Tora Bora (Afganistán), adonde llegó, en 1996, embarazada de su décimo hijo. Najwa ha contado que vivía sobresaltada por las serpientes que merodeaban por el lugar, en un libro escrito en común con su hijo Omar, el cuarto de los habidos con Osama. El libro, Growing up Bin Laden (Crecer como un Bin Laden), redactado por la escritora Jean Sasson y publicado en 2009 (existe una versión en español editada por el Grupo editorial Norma), describe a Osama como un padre fundamentalista decidido a fortalecer a fuerza de pruebas extremas el carácter de sus hijos, algunos de los cuales, no se han recuperado psicológicamente de esa etapa de pruebas. Pese a la riqueza familiar y a los lujos de la mansión de Yeda (Arabia Saudí), donde nacieron los primeros, Osama no les permitía tener juguetes, ni tomar refrescos, ni consintió que se les tratara con medicinas cuando estaban enfermos. Omar Bin Laden cuenta que su padre les obligaba a realizar extenuantes excursiones por el desierto, sin agua, en un brutal intento de prepararles para la vida de privaciones que les esperaba. Carmen Bin Ladin (parte de la familia ha optado por esta transcripción del apellido), suiza de madre iraní, exmujer de Yeslam, uno de los 54 hermanos de Osama, recordaba en una entrevista concedida a EL PAÍS en 2004 haber sido testigo en Arabia Saudí de la rigidez extrema del líder de Al Qaeda. Osama impidió que se diera agua con un biberón a uno de sus pequeños, pese a que el bebé era incapaz de beberla con cuchara. Carmen no especifica si se trataba del hijo con minusvalía psíquica que tuvo Bin Laden. Para entonces, era ya un rigorista religioso que daba la espalda a las mujeres que no se cubrían la cabeza. El líder terrorista no llegó a saber nunca, probablemente, que una de sus sobrinas, la mayor de las tres hijas de Yeslam y Carmen, Wafa, nacida en Los Ángeles, se exhibió semidesnuda en las páginas de la revista GQ en 2006. Pero es Omar, el cuarto de los hijos del líder de Al Qaeda, que tiene ahora 30 años, el que se ha pronunciado de una forma más rotunda contra el ideario terrorista de su padre. En el libro cuenta las dificultades de convivir con él, especialmente a partir de la llegada a Sudán, a principios de los años noventa, donde el futuro líder de Al Qaeda empezó a rodearse de algunos de los que luego serían sus principales lugartenientes. Gente brutal, según Omar, que se divertía matando a algunas de sus mascotas, el único bien que poseía en la vida austera de Jartún. Omar salió de Afganistán en vísperas del 11-S con su madre y los dos hermanos más pequeños, presumiblemente con destino a Siria, horrorizado por la marcha que tomaban las cosas y la radicalización cada vez mayor de su padre. Osama pretendía que sus hijos se apuntaran también a misiones suicidas.

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La pista de Omar reaparece en Egipto en 2007, donde conoce a Jane Felix-Browne, una británica veinte años mayor que él, con la que se casó en el Reino Unido a los pocos meses. En 2008, el matrimonio se presentó en España, donde solicitó infructuosamente asilo político, alegando que se sentían en peligro en el mundo árabe. Las autoridades españolas no aceptaron sus razones y la pareja terminó por instalarse en Doha. ¿Cómo ha encajado la muerte del padre? La escritora Jean Sasson, que mantiene desde hace años buenas relaciones con Omar, dice que la familia está viviendo horas de duelo y no quiere conceder entrevistas. Tampoco ella quiso responder a las preguntas de este diario. El antagonismo de Omar con Osama era ideológico, pero siempre sintió respeto y afecto por su padre, asegura en su blog. Hace poco que Omar y su madre han podido reunirse con tres de sus hermanos, Osman, Mohamed y Ladin, parte de la familia que había vivido desde el 11-S medio secuestrada en Irán. Otros hijos de Osama llegados en el mismo grupo siguieron caminos diferentes. Fátima, casada con un muyahidin saudí muerto tras la intervención estadounidense en Afganistán, se quedó en Teherán. Imán, que alertó sobre el paradero de la familia al refugiarse en la Embajada de Arabia Saudí en Teherán, se marchó a Siria, donde vive también otro de los hijos de Osama, Abdel Rahman. Bakr, otro de los hermanos, salió del país rumbo a un destino desconocido. Es difícil saber cómo se desarrollaba la vida íntima de Osama con sus esposas y sus hijos, dispersos hoy entre Catar, Siria, Arabia Saudí y Pakistán. Según declaró una de sus mujeres a un semanario en lengua árabe de Londres, Osama vivía frugalmente en Afganistán con sus esposas instaladas en modestas viviendas. "Dos tenían casa en Kandahar. Otra en Kabul y la cuarta en Tora Bora", relataba la joven que solo daba sus iniciales A. S., quizás correspondientes a las de su quinta esposa, Amal, con la que contrajo matrimonio en 2000, y por la que pagó, según algunas fuentes, 5.000 dólares. El líder de Al Qaeda solía visitar una vez por semana a cada una de sus mujeres y nunca hablaba de los golpes que planeaba. Mientras preparaba los terribles atentados del 11-S, el líder de Al Qaeda se ocupaba también de proyectos de construcción en colaboración con Ong, y llevaba una vida frugal, alimentándose de yogures, miel y dátiles. Rara vez comía carne, aunque era aficionado a ir de caza. Según A. S., Osama, con antiguos problemas renales, vivía en perpetua agitación y dormía poquísimo, a veces, solo después de tomar pastillas. En Yeda, donde reside el grueso del clan Bin Laden, liderado hasta 2002 por Abdulá, tío de Osama, parte de la familia había hecho esfuerzos por distanciarse del terrorista más buscado del planeta y preservar así sus negocios con Occidente, especialmente con Estados Unidos, mientras otra parte le apoyaba secretamente y quizás también contribuía con dinero a la causa que le animaba. Steve Coll, periodista estadounidense que ha escrito varios libros sobre los Bin Laden, se declaraba convencido, en una entrevista de 2007, de que el destino de Osama hubiera sido otro de haber vivido más tiempo el más carismático de todos sus hermanos, Salem Bin Laden, el mayor, muerto en accidente aéreo en San Antonio (Tejas) en 1988. Salem, educado en Inglaterra y dueño de varias casas en Europa, era un amante del modo de vida occidental, devoto de la música rock, los aviones y las modelos espectaculares. No era el único en la familia que adoraba Occidente. Hassan, otro de los hermanos, se quedó con las franquicias del Hard Rock Café para Kuwait, Beirut y Turquía. Muerto Salem, tomó el control de la corporación Bakr Mohamed Bin Laden, un hombre discreto.

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La pasión por los aviones y la concentración de accidentes aéreos en la historia familiar es un elemento clave, según Steve Coll, en la vida de Osama. Su padre, Mohamed Bin Laden, murió en Arabia Saudí en 1967, al estrellarse el avión privado en el que viajaba, con un piloto americano a los mandos. Mohamed, un yemení analfabeto que había emigrado a Arabia Saudí antes de que el país existiera como tal, y que al terminar la Segunda Guerra Mundial era dueño de un vasto imperio empresarial, fue en todo caso una figura distante para Osama, que vivió con su madre, Alia Ghanem, de nacionalidad siria, divorciada pronto de su padre, y con el segundo marido de esta. El líder de Al Qaeda tuvo una vida cómoda, como correspondía a un Bin Laden, pero al contrario que sus hermanos no estudió fuera del país, del que, según un reportaje de la revista estadounidense New Yorker, salió solo tres veces en su primera juventud, con destino a Europa, a África y a Estados Unidos. En Yeda acudió a un instituto destinado a la élite, la escuela Al Thagher, repleto de profesores que llevaban lejos la fe wahabita. Cuando llegó a la Universidad Rey Abdul Azizi, de la misma ciudad, Osama era ya un joven extremadamente religioso, con estrechos contactos con los Hermanos Musulmanes. Aunque no llegó a licenciarse, recibió una formación mucho más sólida que la de sus hijos. Omar abandonó la escuela a los 12 años, y vivió sometido a un brutal adoctrinamiento ideológico desde entonces. En su caso, los efectos de esta educación no fueron los esperados, pero otros hijos de Osama, como Jaled, y Saad se convirtieron a su mismo credo belicista. Saad, según las autoridades estadounidenses, llegó a trabajar para Al Qaeda en Irán, a principios de 2000. Luego se marchó a Pakistán. Hasta donde se sabe de esta misteriosa saga familiar, solo el hijo mayor de Bin Laden, Abdulá, se resistió a acompañar a su padre a Afganistán, en 1996, y regresó, con su permiso, a Yeda. Allí, trabajó para la firma familiar y montó después una empresa publicitaria propia. En una entrevista con el diario de lengua árabe Asharq Al-Awsat de Londres, publicada después del 11-S, Abdulá culpaba a los periodistas de dar "una imagen errónea" de su padre, "una persona tranquila y calmada, por naturaleza". De la que procuró alejarse en cuanto le fue posible.

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3 PORTAJE: EL MUNDO DESPUÉS DE OSAMA Lo que Bin Laden dijo sobre el 11-M "Es vuestro castigo por Irak, Afganistán... La manera de devolveros vuestra mercancía" J. M. I. 08/05/2011 España recibió el 11 de marzo de 2004 el legado más sangriento de Osama Bin Laden a Europa: un ataque contra cuatro trenes en Atocha (Madrid) que provocó la muerte de 192 personas y miles de heridos. Fue el primer éxito de una yihad en el continente europeo, después de que las células salafistas lo intentaran y fracasaran en numerosas ocasiones en Francia, Reino Unido, Italia y Alemania. El ataque, según la investigación policial, la sentencia judicial y los informes de las agencias de espionaje de todo el mundo, en especial las de EE UU y Europa, lo protagonizó una célula local de yihadistas inspirada en Al Qaeda. Un calco de las otras células desarticuladas en el hasta entonces seguro y acomodado territorio europeo. El atentado de Madrid no fue ordenado, dirigido o financiado por el emir de Al Qaeda liquidado hace una semana en su refugio de Abbottabad (Pakistán), sino inspirado por él, al igual que la práctica totalidad de los ataques yihadistas que se producen en el mundo y perpetran las células locales de numerosos grupos islamistas asociados a Al Qaeda. En octubre de 2003, Bin Laden había señalado a España como objetivo en un vídeo emitido por la televisión Al Yazira, una advertencia que abrió por fin los ojos de los responsables del Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) que por primera vez, en enero de 2004, incluyeron la amenaza yihadista en su directiva de inteligencia (programa y objetivos de trabajo). Una iniciativa que llegó con años de atraso. El 15 de marzo de 2004, cuatro días después de la matanza, la cadena de televisión árabe Al Arabiya, con sede en Dubai, retransmitió una grabación sonora de Osama Bin Laden en la que el terrorista justificó el ataque y aseguró que "el 11-M es el castigo a España por sus acciones en Irak, Afganistán y Palestina". "Lo que ocurrió el 11 de septiembre y el 11 de marzo es la manera de devolveros vuestra mercancía. Tenéis que saber que la seguridad es necesaria para todos". El mensaje del emir saudí era parecido al vídeo que los autores materiales del 11-M grabaron vestidos de blanco y cargados de explosivos semanas antes de su suicidio colectivo en un piso de Leganés cuando fueron cercados por la policía. Su muerte evitó el baño de sangre que ellos mismos anunciaron: procesiones en Semana Santa, colegios judíos, centros comerciales y hasta la voladura del AVE Madrid-Sevilla que ya habían intentado sin éxito. Ayman al Zawahiri, de 61 años, que ahora toma el mando de Al Qaeda, ha iniciado una nueva cruzada: la "liberación de Ceuta y Melilla". "Tenemos que recuperar los reinos del islam, desde Turkmenistán Oriental hasta Ceuta y Melilla", reclamó hace ocho meses. "Que la cúpula de Al Qaeda se fije en dos ciudades españolas y pida su liberación es lo peor que nos ha podido pasar", reconoce un mando de los servicios secretos españoles. El pediatra egipcio, miembro de una familia burguesa y acomodada, creó su primera célula con 11 años y a orillas del Nilo juró crear un nuevo califato que incluye Al Andalus y los denominados territorios perdidos.

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3 TRIBUNA: MARIO VARGAS LLOSA La hora de la verdad PIEDRA DE TOQUE. La sucia campaña contra Ollanta Humala de los partidarios de Keiko Fujimori hace temer lo que podría ocurrir si la dictadura fuji-montesinista recuperara en la segunda vuelta el poder en Perú MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 08/05/2011 Aunque no soy creyente, tengo muchos amigos católicos, sacerdotes y laicos, y un gran respeto por quienes tratan de vivir de acuerdo con sus convicciones religiosas. El cardenal Juan Luis Cipriani, arzobispo de Lima, en cambio, me parece representar la peor tradición de la Iglesia, la autoritaria y oscurantista, la del Index, Torquemada, la Inquisición y las parrillas para el hereje y el apóstata, y su reciente autodefensa, Los irrenunciables derechos humanos, publicada el 1 de mayo en Lima, justifica todas las críticas que en nombre de la democracia y los derechos humanos recibe con frecuencia y, principalmente, de los sectores católicos más liberales. En su texto, desmiente que dijera jamás que "los derechos humanos son una cojudez" (palabrota peruana equivalente a la española gilipollez) y afirma que, en realidad, a quien aplicó tal grosería fue sólo a la Coordinadora de Derechos Humanos, una institución dirigida por una ex religiosa española, Pilar Coll, que durante los años de las grandes matanzas perpetradas por la dictadura fujimorista llevó a cabo una admirable campaña de denuncia de los crímenes, torturas y desapariciones que se cometían con el pretexto de la lucha contra Sendero Luminoso. (La Comisión de la Verdad, que presidió el ex rector de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Salomón Lerner, ha documentado estas atrocidades). El cardenal Cipriani desmiente, además, que durante la dictadura hubiera guardado silencio frente a uno de los crímenes colectivos más abyectos cometidos por Fujimori y sus cómplices: la esterilización, mediante engaños, de unas 300.000 campesinas a las que, por orden del dictador, los equipos del Ministerio de Salud ligaron las trompas o castraron, asegurándoles que se trataba de simples vacunas o de una medida que sólo temporalmente les impediría concebir. ¿Cómo es que nadie se enteró en el Perú de que el arzobispo había encontrado reprobables estos atropellos? Porque en vez de protestar públicamente ¡se limitó a hacerlo en privado, es decir, susurrando con discreción su protesta en el pabellón de la oreja del dictador! El cardenal no suele ser tan discreto cuando se trata de protestar contra los preservativos y no se diga el aborto, o, para el caso, contra quienes en esta segunda vuelta de las elecciones peruanas apoyamos a Ollanta Humala. Por ejemplo, por haberlo hecho yo, me ha amonestado de manera estentórea y nada menos que desde el púlpito de la catedral de Lima, durante un oficio. Me ha pedido "más seriedad" y ha clamado que cómo me atrevo a dar consejos por quién votar a los peruanos. El cardenal está nervioso y olvida que todavía hay libertad en el Perú y que cualquier ciudadano puede opinar sobre política sin pedirle permiso a él ni a nadie. (Claro que las cosas cambiarán si sale elegida la señora Fujimori, la candidata a la que él bendecía en aquel mismo oficio en el que me prohibía opinar). No sólo el arzobispo de Lima se excede en estos días de campaña y guerra sucia en el Perú. Una connotada fujimorista, también del Opus Dei, como monseñor Cipriani, 136

Martha Chávez, ha amenazado públicamente al presidente del Poder Judicial, el doctor César San Martín, eminente jurista que presidió el Tribunal que condenó a 25 años de cárcel a Fujimori por crímenes contra los derechos humanos, con esta frase profética: "Tendrá que responder en su momento". Pero acaso lo más inquietante sean los intentos de purgar a los medios de comunicación, principalmente los canales de televisión, de periodistas independientes y probos, que se resisten a convertirse en propagandistas de la candidatura de la hija del ex dictador. El caso más sonado ha sido el de Patricia Montero, productora general, y José Jara, productor de un noticiero, ambos del Canal N, despedidos, según ha denunciado la primera de ellos, porque los directivos estimaron que habían "humanizado" al candidato Humala en los boletines (¿pretendían que lo animalizaran, más bien?). Estos despidos han provocado una verdadera tempestad de críticas, entre ellas de los más prestigiosos periodistas del propio Canal N, en defensa de sus colegas, y amenazas de renuncias masivas en caso de que continúe la caza de brujas. Lo cual parece haber paralizado por el momento el despido de la prestigiosa y experimentada periodista del Canal 4, Laura Puertas, a quien se reprocha también, por lo visto, padecer de total ineptitud para el servilismo. Finalmente, una denuncia publicada el miércoles 4 de mayo en el diario La Primera, que dirige César Lévano, precisa que el gobierno, apoyado por empresarios mineros, habría encargado a los servicios de inteligencia del Estado un Plan Sábana, destinado a destruir la campaña de Ollanta Humala con los métodos delictuosos -espionaje telefónico, operaciones calumniosas y escandalosas filtradas a la prensa para minar su prestigio y el de su entorno familiar utilizando mercenarios y provocadores- con que, en 1990, el gobierno conspiró contra mí cuando yo fui candidato a la Presidencia. La denuncia proviene, al parecer, de militares y civiles del servicio de inteligencia indignados de que se los utilice para fines políticos ajenos a su misión específica. Todo esto merece una reflexión. Si estas cosas comienzan a ocurrir ahora, en plena campaña electoral, ¿no es fácil imaginar lo que sucedería en el caso de que la señora Fujimori ganara las elecciones y la dictadura fuji-montesinista recuperara el poder oleada y sacramentada por los votos de los peruanos? Los periodistas decentes y responsables expulsados de sus puestos no serían cinco (también han sido despedidos tres de Radio Líder, Arequipa) sino decenas, y las radios, los canales y los periódicos convertidos, como lo estuvieron durante los ocho años de oprobio que vivió el Perú, en órganos de propaganda encargados de justificar todas las tropelías y tráficos del poder y de cubrir de injurias y calumnias a sus críticos. No sólo el doctor César San Martín sería víctima de su probidad y entereza magisterial. Todo el Poder Judicial se vería una vez más sometido a una criba implacable para apartar de sus cargos, o reducirlos a la total inoperancia, a los jueces que se resistieran a ser meros instrumentos dóciles del gobierno. Reparticiones públicas, Fuerzas Armadas, empresas privadas, serían, otra vez, incorporadas al sistema autoritario para que, de nuevo, el país entero quedara a merced del puñadito de forajidos que, entre los años 1990 y 2000, perpetró el más espectacular saqueo de las arcas públicas y los más horrendos crímenes contra los derechos humanos de nuestra historia. Quienes quieren semejante futuro para el Perú no son muchos, pero sí son poderosos y, como están asustados con la perspectiva de que Humala gane las elecciones y cometa los desafueros y horrores de Hugo Chávez en Venezuela, están dispuestos a cualquier cosa con tal de asegurar el triunfo de Keiko Fujimori. Extraordinaria paradoja: con tal

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de evitar el socialismo, que venga el fascismo. ¡Y todo eso, en nombre de la libertad, de la democracia y del mercado libre! En verdad, la disyuntiva que tiene por delante el Perú en las elecciones del 5 de junio próximo, es la de salvaguardar la imperfecta democracia política que tenemos desde hace 10 años y una política de mercado y de apertura al mundo que ha hecho crecer nuestra economía de manera notable, o volver a un régimen dictatorial que, guardando ciertas formas institucionales, restablecería en el gobierno a quienes, en complicidad con Fujimori y Montesinos, destruyeron el Estado de derecho, se enriquecieron cometiendo las más descaradas pillerías y durante ocho años perpetraron horrendos crímenes con el pretexto de combatir la subversión. A mi juicio en semejante disyuntiva la peor opción es Keiko Fujimori. Ollanta Humala ha hecho un "Compromiso con el Pueblo Peruano" que conviene tener muy presente, no sólo a la hora de votar por él, sino sobre todo una vez que acceda al gobierno, para recordárselo cada vez que parezca apartarse de alguna de sus promesas. No habrá reelección. Se cumplirá con los tratados firmados, no habrá estatizaciones, se respetará el derecho de propiedad y las Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones (AFPs), la lucha contra la corrupción será implacable, habrá una política de apoyo social sostenida, sobre todo en los campos de la educación y la salud pública, para los sectores más desfavorecidos, así como estímulos y facilidades para la formalización de las empresas. El respeto al pluralismo informativo, a la independencia de la prensa y al derecho de crítica será total. Estos puntos han sido expresados, además, de viva voz, en las reuniones que ha celebrado el candidato con la confederación de empresarios y las asociaciones de prensa. Todo esto es perfectamente compatible con la democracia y con las políticas de mercado vigentes y tiende a perfeccionarlas, no a recortarlas ni menos suprimirlas. No sólo depende de la voluntad de Ollanta Humala que este compromiso se cumpla. Depende, sobre todo, de que quienes lo apoyemos en la elección del 5 de junio dejemos claro que es a estas políticas a las que damos nuestro apoyo y que nos mantendremos firmes exigiendo su cumplimento.

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3 TRIBUNA: MILAGROS PÉREZ OLIVA Bin Laden: acatar la versión oficial DEFENSORA DEL LECTOR El suceso muestra la importancia de mantener la distancia respecto de las fuentes y revelar el origen de los datos. Convertir las crónicas en un relato literario añade riesgos A veces caemos en la obsesión de convertir la crónica en un relato MILAGROS PÉREZ OLIVA 08/05/2011 Hay acontecimientos que van directo a la portada, lleguen a la hora que lleguen. La muerte de Osama bin Laden era sin duda uno de ellos. Desde el atentado de las Torres Gemelas de Nueva York, en septiembre de 2001, encontrarle era la máxima prioridad del país más poderoso del mundo. La noticia llegó a horas intempestivas con la urgencia de lo imprevisto y la fuerza de un acontecimiento histórico. Pero la forma en que se produjo contenía todos los ingredientes para convertirla en un ejemplo de lo que el periodista italiano Furio Colombo define como "noticia acatamiento". Son aquellas informaciones tan embridadas por la fuente que el periodista corre el peligro de convertirse en el propagandista de la versión oficial. Para empezar, la naturaleza misma de la operación ha sido objeto de una fuerte controversia. Las palabras no son neutrales. EL PAÍS optó en su titular de portada por un verbo que significaba más que "matar" y menos que "asesinar". Optó por

"liquidar": "EE3 UU liquida a Bin Laden". Al lector Román Ceano no le ha parecido bien: "No creo que 'liquidar' sea una expresión adecuada porque es muy vulgar y propia de rufianes. La expresión neutral es 'matar' como alternativa a 'asesinar' y 'ejecutar', que serían sesgadas pues contienen opinión sobre la legalidad o no de la acción". Giacomo Sinnatti, estudiante de Erasmus, considera en cambio que hemos sido muy tibios a la hora de calificar los hechos y que hemos "legitimado" la versión ofrecida por la Casa Blanca. Soy consciente de la dificultad que entraña relatar o caracterizar lo ocurrido, y por eso quiero subrayar la calidad y corrección de la mayor parte de las crónicas publicadas. Pero dada la tremenda carga ideológica, política y hasta emocional que la noticia tenía, toda cautela era poca. ¿Mantuvo EL PAÍS la necesaria distancia respecto de la versión oficial? No siempre. José María Latorre señala un caso en que no fue así. "¿Justifica EL PAÍS la tortura?", preguntaba en su carta. Se refería a una extensa crónica publicada en la edición digital con el título "Revelada3 la identidad del mensajero que condujo hasta Bin Laden". En ella se decía que en julio de 2010 "las investigaciones dieron un giro radical en la buena dirección", y "ocho meses después del valioso hallazgo y tras un concienzudo trabajo de la inteligencia paquistaní y de duros interrogatorios a detenidos en cárceles secretas de la CIA en Europa del Este, la caza del enemigo público número uno iba a materializarse tras 10 años jalonados de frustraciones y operaciones fallidas. En una noche sin luna, los agentes de las fuerzas especiales (...) pudieron dar con el líder de Al Qaeda y acertar con al menos una bala en su cabeza".Para el lector, de este relato se infería que "la tortura valía la pena". Y que disparar a la cabeza era lo más acertado. El texto es una crónica de urgencia, sin firma y elaborada con informaciones procedentes de múltiples fuentes. En una información de alto voltaje como esta, el

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periodista ha de distanciarse de la versión oficial y no asumir como propias las conclusiones de la fuente, incluso cuando esta pueda tener la máxima presunción de veracidad. Como hemos podido comprobar en este caso, incluso los portavoces de la Casa Blanca han de ser tomados con cautela. Borja Echevarría, subdirector responsable de la edición digital, responde a la queja del lector: "Éramos conscientes de que no trabajábamos con información de primera mano y, sobre todo, de que mayoritariamente era de parte. Eso, salvo que optemos por no informar, supone un riesgo y por eso en esa noticia se repite en múltiples ocasiones 'según la versión de...'. En estos casos hemos de insistir para que el lector sienta y sepa que no hemos podido comprobar los hechos por nosotros mismos. En la edición digital se construyó después una pieza con las contradicciones3 en las que habían incurrido las autoridades estadounidenses en las primeras ruedas de prensa. A día de hoy conocemos la versión oficial, pero no sabemos con certeza si coincide con la real". Al peligro del acatamiento se suma a veces la obsesión por convertir la crónica de lo sucedido en una especie de relato literario. En estos casos, los detalles suelen ser un elemento importante y el cronista puede considerar farragoso y antiestético añadir la apostilla de la fuente detrás de una ingeniosa metáfora. Pero ha de advertir al lector que los datos que ofrece no han sido comprobados. Si no lo hace, esos detalles pueden volverse contra él en caso de que la versión asumida resulte falsa o errónea. Esta falta de cautela nos ha llevado, por ejemplo, a escribir en una crónica-relato3 que Bin Laden "ha muerto empuñando su rifle Kaláshnikov", cuando más tarde se ha sabido que iba desarmado. Otra forma de acatamiento es asumir como propias las justificaciones de la fuente. En otra información hemos asumido la idea de que con la captura y muerte de Bin Laden

"se3 ha hecho justicia", acatando así la expresión que el presidente Barack Obama utilizó en un discurso de tono propagandístico destinado al consumo interno. La frase en cuestión ha provocado una fuerte controversia, pues en un Estado de derecho la justicia es impartida por los tribunales, no por comandos armados, y el mandato legal de las fuerzas de seguridad es hacer lo posible para que incluso el más abyecto de los criminales tenga la oportunidad de ser juzgado conforme a las leyes. No cabe duda de que la muerte de Bin Laden era un acontecimiento que merecía un tratamiento extraordinario. Pero Borja Arrue plantea esta interesante cuestión: "Cuando se producen noticias de gran impacto, la edición digital de su periódico, y también la escrita, nos ofrecen titulares impactantes, con un tamaño de letra extraordinariamente grande, como si quisieran transmitirnos sin contención la emoción o la adrenalina periodística que producen ese tipo de noticias. Y entonces surge un problema: que se cae en el sensacionalismo o la exageración y se diluyen la crítica y el análisis sosegado. El último episodio ha sido la muerte de Bin Laden". El lector compara el tratamiento de la edición digital de EL PAÍS del martes con el que ese mismo día ofrecía la edición3 digital de Le Monde, "mucho más mesurado, sosegado y preocupado por ir más allá de la foto y la noticia impactante. Resulta molesto observar cómo pierde el temple su periódico cuando se trata de contar noticias de cierto alcance. Entiendo que ello responde a una determinada cultura de la información en España". En Francia, añade, "los propios profesionales de los medios analizan, critican y debaten sin cesar. Allí, titulares-espectáculo como los que nos ofrece la prensa española serían criticados de forma inmediata".

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Borja Echevarría responde: "La jerarquización es parte de nuestro trabajo. Considero que la noticia sobre Bin Laden merecía un tratamiento gráfico diferente. Esa misma tipografía se utilizó en el terremoto de Japón o en las filtraciones de Wikileaks. No se trata de espectáculo gratuito, sino de transmitir de manera directa la importancia del acontecimiento. Quizá esos grandes titulares e imágenes tapen el resto, pero debajo había un amplio despliegue con análisis de corresponsales y expertos en terrorismo. En cualquier caso, la sobreactuación es algo que me preocupa. Más (en cantidad o en tamaño) no significa siempre mejor. Lo sustancial es el contenido. En la web es muy sencillo lograr más clics con titulares sensacionalistas. En EL PAÍS hacemos un esfuerzo permanente por no caer en esa trampa, aun a riesgo de no ganar tanta audiencia". Yo no creo que por utilizar caracteres más grandes, un medio sea más sensacionalista. Pero sí que puede ser más espectacular. Y la tendencia a la espectacularidad es uno de los riesgos que hemos de conjurar, especialmente en las ediciones digitales. http://www.elpais.com/articul3 o/opinion/Bin/Laden/acatar/version/oficial/elpepuopi /20110508elpepiopi_5/Tes

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3 Gadafi acecha Tobruk Los habitantes de la estratégica población libia buscan a los infiltrados de Gadafi mientras intentan sobrevivir a una guerra que se antoja infinita MAITE RICO | Tobruk, enviada especial 08/05/2011 Solo el zumbido lejano de la refinería rompe el silencio en Tobruk. A pesar de ser puerto estratégico y paso obligado hacia la frontera con Egipto, esta población libia parece sumida en el sopor. La bandera revolucionaria ondea en las casas polvorientas. En la avenida principal, un policía voluntarioso se afana en ordenar un tráfico inexistente. Bajo su aspecto adormecido, sin embargo, Tobruk está muy alerta. Los hombres de Muamar el Gadafi, dicen los vecinos, siguen al acecho. "Las amenazas telefónicas son continuas. Anteayer nos dejaron una carta, escrita con tinta verde -el color de Gadafi- en la que aseguraban que nos van a asesinar", explica Bubaker Alsaki, empresario de la construcción y miembro del consejo rebelde que dirige ahora la ciudad. "Hace dos semanas, capturamos a un grupo de 23 personas, entre ellas una mujer, con planos de algunos edificios, armas y teléfonos satelitales. Y antes interceptamos a varios infiltrados llegados entre refugiados de Ajdabiya". La revolución iniciada el 17 de febrero triunfó de forma inmediata en Tobruk, cuna de Omar Mujtar, héroe de la resistencia frente a los colonizadores italianos, y residencia durante largos años de Idris, rey de la Libia independiente, expulsado por Gadafi en 1969. La población no dudó en enfrentarse a tiros con las fuerzas del régimen y al día siguiente ya había tomado los edificios oficiales. "Algunos cargos gadafistas escaparon y otros fueron detenidos, pero la mayoría se rindieron", explica Alsaki. El acceso a los archivos de seguridad les facilitó información de primera mano sobre chivatos y colaboradores. "Hemos creado un comité especial para detener a los quintacolumnistas. Están cayendo unos tres al día", explica el abogado Fati Mustafá. Ese sucedáneo de policía secreta está formado por "voluntarios, shabab bien seleccionados". "A los gadafistas", se apresura a añadir, "los enviamos a la cárcel de Bengasi. Allí serán juzgados con todas las garantías". Mustafá forma parte del consejo rebelde, junto a Alsaki y otros tres miembros de las fuerzas vivas de Tobruk. "Gente honesta y con buena imagen", dice, elegida por aclamación popular. El gobierno provisional tiene su sede en el edificio de la compañía aérea libia. Junto con la seguridad, la economía es la principal preocupación de las autoridades rebeldes. "De momento, los funcionarios, sobre todo policías y soldados, están cobrando sus salarios, porque hemos recibido dinero del Banco Central de Libia en Bengasi. Los represaliados por el régimen también han sido restituidos y pagados", comenta Alkasi. "Pero nuestra economía depende de los ingresos del puerto y la refinería, aunque los impuestos se los llevara Trípoli. Ahora está todo muerto". Cerradas las plantas petrolíferas de Brega y Ras Lanuf, Tobruk se encarga de abastecer de gas y diésel a las poblaciones del este de Libia. El crudo le llega de los campos de

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Sarir, en el sur, que han sufrido ataques recientes del Ejército. Las exportaciones de crudo están en la estacada a causa de las sanciones. Y el puerto languidece. "Antes de la revuelta llegaban entre 10 y 20 buques al mes. Desde el 17 de febrero, han entrado muy pocos. Los armadores no quieren usarlo porque al estar considerado zona de guerra, los seguros son caros", se lamenta su director, Gait al Tokumi. Así, "el mejor puerto natural del norte de África" apenas ha recibido en estos tres meses tres cargueros y cinco barcos con desplazados del oeste. Por no haber, no hay ni actividad pesquera. Los pescadores, egipcios en su mayoría, han regresado a su país. Cuesta imaginar hoy que esta población amodorrada fuera uno de los lugares más disputados del frente norteafricano durante la II Guerra Mundial. Fue aquí, en Tobruk, donde las tropas aliadas resistieron ocho meses de asedio alemán. Y donde el mariscal Rommel, al frente del Afrika Korps, se consagró como genio de la estrategia militar. De la dimensión de aquellas batallas en suelo libio dan perfecta idea los cuatro cementerios que rodean Tobruk, que acogen a más de 20.000 soldados de todas las nacionalidades. Uno de los barcos que llegó a Tobruk justo antes de la revuelta traía, precisamente, a un grupo de turistas. "Gadafi nunca se preocupó por el desarrollo de esta zona. La carretera a Bengasi es de la época de Idris. Tenemos playas sin explotar, los cementerios de guerra... Las posibilidades son enormes. Y lo vamos a poner en marcha. De momento, lo que tiene que hacer la comunidad internacional es descongelar los fondos libios", dice Mustafá, que piensa a lo grande. "Y si además nos dan armas para equipararnos a la gente de Gadafi, podremos conquistar el país".

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3 Referéndum en Ecuador Correa avanza con su revolución ciudadana en Ecuador El presidente saca adelante por referéndum una reforma de la justicia clave para reforzarlo en el poder DANIELA CREAMER | Quito 08/05/2011 Las propuestas que Rafael Correa sometió a referéndum en Ecuador ayer han resultado aprobadas. Es el tercer plebiscito en sus pocos más de cuatro años de mandato y lo refuerza en el poder. La consulta proponía una gran reforma judicial que permitirá al Ejecutivo tener un mayor control sobre el sistema, y la creación de un órgano de vigilancia para la prensa que también le será útil al Gobierno para limitar la libertad de expresión. Aunque el referéndum presentaba 10 preguntas que iban desde la gran reforma judicial hasta la prohibición de los toros o los juegos de azar, la polarización política de Ecuador lo terminó convirtiendo en un examen sobre la gestión de Correa, y el presidente lo superó con holgura. El Consejo Nacional Electoral del país ha señalado que tras un "recuento rápido" el sí se ha impuesto. El primer conteo ha dado un margen más estrecho que el registrado en el sondeo realizado a pie de urna por una empresa privada. Oscila entre un 44 y un 49% para el sí, en función de la pregunta. De momento Correa solo se ha posicionado respecto a los resultados difundidos por la empresa privada que lanzó el sondeo, divulgada a las cinco de la tarde local (doce de la noche en España) y que apuntaba a la victoria del "sí" con un 60% de las voces en nueve de las 10 propuestas presentadas. "Hemos ganado por más de 20 puntos", señaló. "El pueblo ecuatoriano ha vencido, la verdad ha triunfado", añadió. Ese ha sido poco más o menos el discurso de Correa durante todo el proceso. "El poder constituyente solo le pertenece al pueblo y nadie le puede arrebatar ese derecho. Los ciudadanos y ciudadanas ejercen su derecho a transformar el presente y el futuro. Es la nueva democracia radical que vive el país", dijo el presidente al inicio de la consulta. También instó durante toda la campaña a la ciudadanía a seguir "confiando en el Gobierno de manos limpias" y prometió continuar su labor en favor de la justicia social. Una consulta controvertida La tercera consulta de Correa no solo ha sido cuestionada por la oposición, sino también por muchos de los aliados o exaliados del presidente. El Movimiento Popular Democrático (MPD) y la Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Conaie) dijeron: "Esta vez no, señor prepotente". El proyecto presidencial tampoco tuvo acogida entre los antiguos ideólogos de la "revolución ciudadana" y reconocidas figuras determinantes para el régimen. Alberto Acosta, exdirigente del oficialista Movimiento Alianza País, exministro de Energía y expresidente de la Asamblea Constituyente que aprobó la Constitución vigente, criticó severamente al mandatario: "No hay duda que Correa está dispuesto a pagar cualquier precio con tal de poder controlar la justicia: no le importa reeditar las prácticas de los gobiernos oligárquicos, solo que ahora contaría con la complicidad del pueblo ecuatoriano". Con similar criterio, Gustavo Larrea, exministro de Gobierno, coordinador de la campaña "Esta vez No", aseguró que este referéndum viola las libertades individuales. Afirmó que esto "ni va a resolver el tema de injusticia, delincuencia y crimen organizado, ni tampoco el tema de la administración de justicia. Lo que sí implica es prohibiciones a las libertades ciudadanas y atenta contra la libertad de expresión, los derechos humanos y la presunción de inocencia". 144

Además, "se pretende meter la mano a la justicia y atentar contra la independencia judicial". "¿Quién va a controlar ahora abusos del poder? ¿Acaso nombrar a dedo jueces no implicara controlar la justicia y, por lo tanto, que en el país reine la impunidad?", señaló. No obstante, para Rolando Panchana, vicepresidente de la Asamblea Nacional, las expresiones de Acosta no son más que "soberbia intelectual", ya que "no puede admitir que se equivocó, no puede admitir la realidad. Y que hayamos tenido que recurrir a esta consulta popular para corregir errores de la Constitución dictada en Montecristi cuando él era presidente de la Asamblea. Por ende, se ha vuelto necesario hacer reformas". En el caso de las críticas de Larrea, para Panchana se explican porque "trata de aprovechar la ocasión para reconciliarse con la prensa, tras el linchamiento mediático y su consecuente pérdida de credibilidad cuando se lo vinculó con las FARC y otros grupos subversivos de Colombia". Más reformas Convencido de la victoria en la consulta, el Gobierno de Correa se prepara para acelerar las reformas con las cuales intenta sacar a Ecuador de lo que llama "la larga noche neoliberal" y consolidar el "socialismo del siglo XXI". "Resta ahora cumplir las tareas lo más pronto posible, en beneficio del pueblo", aseguró Panchana. "Y eso es lo que haremos inmediatamente". El ministro de Exteriores Ricardo Patino señaló que, desde este lunes ya se comenzarán a ver los cambios en temas como justicia y derechos para los trabajadores. Y enfatizó que "el Gobierno continuará realizando cuantas consultas sean necesarias para lograr el avance del pueblo". El expresidente Oswaldo Hurtado (Democracia Popular), y principal figura de una oposición incapaz de engendrar nuevos líderes creíbles, ha dicho hoy que "el fraude electoral del Siglo XXI, ya no se hace como antes metiendo votos en las urnas. Se lo hace antes de las elecciones. La propaganda del Gobierno sin límites es una forma de fraude electoral. Las cadenas infames de televisión de los últimos días calumniando a los medios de comunicación para conseguir votos a favor del Sí, es una forma de fraude electoral". En3 una reciente tribuna en el diario Hoy, Hurtado escribió: "Correa se encuentra empeñado en poner bajo su mando a dos instituciones que todavía no controla enteramente: la Justicia y la prensa". Ni toros ni casinos Con la consulta popular de hoy el Gobierno ecuatoriano también pretende prohibir los negocios dedicados a juegos de azar, tales como casinos y salas de juego, con el objetivo de evitar que estas prácticas "se conviertan en un problema social, especialmente en los segmentos más vulnerables de la población". Además, se preguntará a los ecuatorianos si están de acuerdo con que se prohíban los espectáculos que tengan como finalidad dar muerte al animal. La cuestión es una de las que más consenso parece haber generado entre la población y se prevé que la propuesta oficial obtenga un amplio respaldo. Con ello quedarán prohibidas en Ecuador las corridas de toros, un espectáculo que lleva más de 400 años en el país andino. Esta misma semana, muchos toreros y aficionados a la tauromaquia se manifestaron en la histórica Plaza Grande de Quito frente al Palacio de Gobierno para exigir que se respete su derecho al trabajo, su libertad y que prime la tolerancia y el respeto a una fiesta que muchos consideran de las más tradicionales.

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3 Monde33 08/05/2011 à 09h16 Le couvre-feu de retour à Tunis

Lors d'une manif anti-gouvernement, le 5 mai, à Tunis. (REUTERS) Le gouvernement a décrété samedi un couvre-feu nocturne à Tunis et dans sa banlieue après des «violences et pillages», signe d’un malaise persistant en Tunisie quatre mois après le renversement du régime autoritaire du président Ben Ali. Dans la journée, la justice tunisienne a prononcé sa première sentence contre un membre de l’ex-famille présidentielle en condamnant Imed Trabelsi, neveu de l’épouse du président déchu en janvier, à deux ans de prison. Pour une durée indéterminée Le couvre-feu instauré dans la soirée s’applique de 21 heures à 5 heures et est en place pour une durée indéterminée, ont déclaré les ministères de l’Intérieur et de la Défense dans un communiqué cité par la télévision et l’agence TAP. Selon une habitante, des jeunes ont saccagé et pillé un grand magasin d’électro- ménager, une pharmacie et ont incendié plusieurs véhicules dans la banlieue défavorisée d’Ethadamen, où des manifestations s’étaient déroulées en janvier, avant la chute du président Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, le 14 janvier. Des informations non confirmées font aussi état de violences dans la ville de Gabes, dans le Sud, et à Sidi Bouzid, dans le centre, d’où était parti le mouvement de contestation en décembre. Avenue Bourguiba, dans le centre de Tunis et épicentre de la contestation, aucun véhicule à part quelques voitures de police ne circulait samedi soir. Des barbelés bloquaient les accès au ministère de l’Intérieur, a constaté une journaliste de l’AFP.

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(Reuters) Des manifestations anti-gouvernementales se sont déroulées chaque jour depuis jeudi à Tunis. Samedi, un rassemblement a réuni plusieurs centaines de personnes avant d’être dispersé au gaz lacrymogène par les forces de l’ordre. Massés devant le ministère de l’Intérieur, les manifestants scandaient des slogans comme «Gaz lacrymogènes et cartouches, les Tunisiens n’ont pas peur», «Peuple tunisien révolte-toi», «ministère de l’Intérieur, ministère terroriste». La veille et l’avant-veille, la police avait violemment dispersé des manifestants qui réclamaient la «démission» du gouvernement transitoire et «une nouvelle révolution». Quinze journalistes couvrant ces événements ont été brutalisés par des policiers, selon le syndicat national des journalistes tunisiens. Un couvre-feu avait été imposé en Tunisie le 12 janvier alors que la contestation était à son apogée. Il avait été levé sur tout le territoire le 15 février. Imed Trabelsi, ennemi public Parallèlement, un tribunal de Tunis a condamné samedi Imed Trabelsi à deux ans de prison et à 2.000 dinars (environ 1.000 euros) d’amende pour consommation de stupéfiants. Arrêté le 14 janvier, jour de la fuite de l’ancien dirigeant en Arabie Saoudite, Imed Trabelsi est sans doute après l’ex-président Ben Ali et son épouse Leïla l’un des hommes les plus détestés de Tunisie. «Cette condamnation ne va pas calmer le peuple qui réclame justice surtout dans cette période difficile», a commenté un militant des droits de l’homme, Mokhtar Yahyaoui, soulignant l’importance d«’informer les Tunisiens sur les autres implications d’Imed Trabelsi et leur faire comprendre qu’il ne s’agit que d’une première condamnation». Imed Trabelsi avait été poursuivi sans succès en France pour «vols en bande organisée» pour s’être approprié en 2006 le prestigieux yacht de Bruno Roger, l’un des dirigeants de la Banque Lazard et proche de l’ex-président Jacques Chirac et de l’actuel chef de l’Etat Nicolas Sarkozy. Sa première apparition le 20 avril devant la justice tunisienne, cheveux gominés et costume-cravate, entourés de policiers avait déclenché une vague de haine dans le public.

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Le 20 avril/ AFP (Source AFP)

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3 Monde33 08/05/2011 à 08h35 (mise à jour à 10h35) Violents affrontements entre musulmans et chrétiens au Caire Le premier bilan fait état de neuf morts et de plus d’une centaine de blessés. Le Premier ministre convoque une réunion d'urgence.

Au Caire, cette nuit. (REUTERS) Le Premier ministre égyptien Essam Charaf a convoqué une réunion de crise du cabinet et reporté une visite aux Emirats arabes unis au lendemain de violents affrontements au Caire entre musulmans et chrétiens qui ont fait neuf morts. Les principaux affrontements se sont produits autour d’une église du quartier d’Imbaba, attaquée par des musulmans au motif qu’une chrétienne supposée vouloir se convertir à l’islam y serait enfermée. Un autre église a été incendiée dans ce quartier, où d’importants effectifs de soldats et de policiers anti-émeutes ont été déployés. L’agence officielle Mena a fait état tôt dimanche matin de neuf morts et plus d’une centaine de blessés, sans donner de répartition par confession. Un prêtre, le père Hermina, a déclaré à l’AFP qu’au moins cinq Coptes avaient été tués lors d’une attaque «par des voyous et des salafistes (un mouvement fondamentaliste islamiste ndlr) qui ont tiré sur nous».

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Un corps recouvert d’un drap sur lequel était posé un évangile reposait dans l’église Saint-Mina, dont le sol portait des traces de sang. Des militaires ont tiré en l’air pour tenter de séparer les deux camps. Des musulmans ont quant à eux lancé des cocktails molotov sur les chrétiens, a constaté un journaliste de l’AFP. «Ce sont eux qui ont commencé à tirer sur nous. Nous étions pacifiques», a quant à lui assuré Mamdouh, un manifestant musulman. L’armée égyptienne assure toujours la direction du pays L’armée égyptienne a promis d’agir fermement contres les responsables de ces violences. Un général, s’exprimant dans la nuit sur la chaîne privée ON-TV, a promis que l’armée «ne permettra pas à quelque courant que ce soit d’imposer son hégémonie en Egypte». L’officier a souligné que toute personne arrêtée sur les lieux était susceptible d’être jugée en vertu d’une nouvelle loi sur le banditisme, qui prévoit des sanctions renforcées. L’armée égyptienne assure la direction du pays depuis la chute du président Hosni Moubarak le 11 février dernier à la suite d’une révolte populaire. L’une des plus hautes autorités musulmanes d’Egypte, le grand mufti Ali Gomaa, a appelé à «ne pas jouer avec la sécurité du pays» et a assuré que les troubles «ne pouvaient pas émaner de gens vraiment religieux, qu’ils soient musulmans ou chrétiens». Les Coptes, ou chrétiens d’Egypte, représentent entre 6 et 10% de la population égyptienne, qui compte au total plus de 80 millions de personnes. Ils constituent la plus importante minorité chrétienne du Moyen-Orient. Des polémiques alternant accusations et démentis sur des chrétiennes coptes qui serait cloîtrées pour les empêcher de se convertir à l’islam alimentent depuis des mois une montée des tensions entre communautés. Plusieurs manifestations à l’appel de salafistes ont eu lieu ces dernières semaines sur ce thème. La dernière, vendredi au Caire, a tourné au soutien à Oussama Ben Laden, le chef d’Al-Qaïda tué dans une opération commando américaine au Pakistan. La communauté copte avait été visée par un attentat dans la nuit de la Saint-Sylvestre contre une église copte à Alexandrie (nord de l’Egypte) qui a fait 21 morts. Les Coptes, présents en Egypte depuis les premiers temps du christianisme, avant l’ère islamique, se plaignent de discriminations et de marginalisation croissante dans une société égyptienne en grande majorité musulmane sunnite. Leur sentiment d’insécurité s’est aggravé depuis la chute du président Moubarak, qui s’est traduite par une visibilité accrue du mouvement fondamentaliste salafiste. (Source AFP)

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3 Monde3 08/05/2011 à 12h15 En Libye, les rebelles attendent des armes D’intenses combats ont repris dimanche près de Misrata, assiégée par les forces gouvernementales alors que les rebelles à Benghazi doivent recevoir des armes en provenance de l'Italie.

Photo prise le 7 mai dans la localité de Nalout, en Libye. (REUTERS) D’intenses combats ont repris dimanche près de Misrata, ville rebelle de l’Ouest libyen assiégée par les forces gouvernementales, alors que les rebelles à Benghazi attendaient des armes de l’Italie. Les combats se déroulaient à l’ouest de Misrata, grande ville côtière à 200 km à l’est de Tripoli, dans la localité de Bourgueya, selon un correspondant de l’AFP. Dans le port, une immense colonne de fumée noire se dégageait toujours des dépôts de carburant en flamme après un bombardement samedi matin. Une roquette Grad s’était abattue sur l’un des réservoirs de gasoil près du port, et l’incendie s’est propagé aux dépôts voisins. Essence, pain: craintes de pénurie Par crainte de pénurie, des queues commençaient à se former devant les stations-service. Les forces loyalistes «ont détruit seulement les réservoirs qui étaient pleins», a déclaré Ahmed Montasser, un combattant rebelle. «Quelqu’un a signalé les coordonnées exactes des réservoirs à détruire», a-t-il ajouté, dénonçant la présence d’une «cinquième colonne» pro-Kadhafi dans la ville. Dans la nuit de jeudi à vendredi, un hélicoptère pro-Kadhafi a lancé au moins 26 mines, pourvues de parachutes, qui ont atterri sur l’entrée et les quais du port, selon le correspondant de l’AFP. Les rebelles ont fait exploser la plupart d’entre elles. L’Otan avait confirmé samedi qu’un hélicoptère avait violé la zone d’exclusion aérienne jeudi, sans pour autant expliquer pourquoi ses forces chargées de faire respecter cette zone n’étaient pas intervenues.

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Pour les habitants, il n’était pas encore question de rationnement, mais obtenir du pain nécessite déjà de patienter longuement devant les boulangeries. «On ne peut acheter que 20 pains par personne, donc j’amène trois enfants avec moi pour obtenir suffisamment de pain», a expliqué un habitant, qui a accueilli chez lui plusieurs familles vivant dans la périphérie de Misrata et réfugiées dans le centre en raison des combats. Les rebelles attendent des armes de l'Italie A Benghazi, le vice-président du Conseil national de transition (CNT), organe politique de la rébellion, Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, a affirmé samedi soir que l’Italie allait fournir des armes à la rébellion. «Nous allons les recevoir très bientôt», s’est-il réjoui. A Rome, des sources au ministère des Affaires étrangères ont précisé que l’Italie allait fournir «du matériel d’auto-défense» aux rebelles, dans le cadre de la résolution 1973 du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, qui impose cependant un embargo sur les armes. Les rebelles réclament régulièrement des armes pour faire face aux forces gouvernementales, qu’elles combattent depuis la mi-février. Tout comme la France et le Royaume-Uni, l’Italie a déjà envoyé une poignée de conseillers militaires à Benghazi (est), siège du CNT, pour aider les rebelles à s’organiser. Selon M. Gogha, le nombre de combattants rebelles engagés à travers le pays ne dépasse cependant pas 3.000 personnes. Obus libyens sur le sol tunisien Samedi, les insurgés ont perdu au moins neuf de leurs combattants lors de violents combats près de Zenten, dans les montagnes berbères au sud-ouest de Tripoli. Une cinquantaine d’autres ont été blessés, dont plusieurs très grièvement, selon un correspondant de l’AFP et des sources médicales. Un peu plus à l’ouest, au poste-frontière de Dehiba, de nouveaux obus libyens sont tombés sur le sol tunisien, provoquant la colère du gouvernement de Tunis, qui a assuré qu’il prendrait les dispositions «nécessaires» pour «préserver l’intégrité de son territoire». Selon les rebelles, les pro-Kadhafi ont aussi continué leurs attaques éclairs dans les villes-oasis du désert. Samedi, deux convois ont ainsi attaqué Jalo et Ojla, et vendredi, six rebelles avaient été tués dans des affrontements à un poste de contrôle entre Jalo et Al-Koufra. Le conflit libyen a déjà fait des milliers de morts, selon le procureur de la Cour pénale internationale, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Et plus d’un demi-million de personnes, essentiellement des travailleurs étrangers, ont fui le pays depuis la mi-février. Certains ont tenté de le faire par bateau. La petite île italienne de Lampedusa a accueilli dimanche 1.300 nouveaux réfugiés de Libye, après en avoir reçu près de 850 samedi.

L’une3 de leurs embarcations s’est échouée dans la nuit, mais tous ses passagers ont pu être secourus. (Source AFP) Pour aller plus loin:

- Lire le reportage de notre envoyé spécial «Migrants3 en Libye: du rêve à la réalité».

- Et retrouver tous nos reportages et analyses, dans notre dossier spécial, ici3 .

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3 3 Mai08 «La laïcité de l’Etat ne menace en aucun cas l’identité d’un peuple» Entretien avec l'écrivaine et l’intellectuelle Sophie Bessis

Propos recueillis par Hanene Zbiss "Sophie Bessis, écrivaine et intellectuelle tuniso-française d’origine juive est une des figures militantes de la gauche tunisienne et du mouvement féministe dans le Maghreb. En témoigne ses livres :Femmes du Maghreb : l'enjeu , (avec Souhayr Belhassen, éd. Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris, 1992), Les Arabes, les femmes, la liberté (éd. Albin Michel, Paris, 2007). Elle a également écrit une biographie de Bourguiba avec Souhayr Belhassen (éd. Jeune Afrique, 1988, qui va être republiée en septembre aux éditions Elyzad). Son attachement à son pays natal est sans faille même si elle n’y réside que partiellement depuis longtemps. La Tunisie est omniprésente dans ses écrits dont le dernier en date est Dedans, Dehors (édition Elyzad 2010). Dans ce livre, elle revient justement sur sa relation complexe avec sa patrie, ses souvenirs de jeunesse et de militantisme au sein de la gauche, tout en évoquant le parcours de certains de ses compagnons de route. Et alors que ce livre se ferme sur une note de nostalgie et de pessimisme, et au moment même où elle était venue le présenter à Tunis, à El Teatro, survenait la révolution et, avec elle, un nouvel espoir. Sophie Bessis se trouve encore une fois témoin des changements historiques qui bouleversent le pays. Mieux, elle y prend partie en participant à la manifestation du 14 janvier. Aujourd’hui, elle est membre de la Haute Instance pour la réalisation des objectifs de la révolution, de la réforme politique et de la transition démocratique. Elle participe, de ce fait, au façonnage de la nouvelle Tunisie". 1-Comment avez-vous vécu cette révolution?

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D'abord comme un très grand bonheur. Depuis décembre, j'étais évidemment à l'affût de toute information venant de Tunisie. Puis je suis arrivée à Tunis début janvier, et j'ai eu la chance de voir de mes yeux les Tunisiennes et les Tunisiens se lever partout avec la ferveur et le courage que l'on sait pour réclamer la dignité et la liberté, et mettre fin de la dictature. J'étais avenue Bourguiba le 14 janvier, et cette journée restera comme un des grands moments de ma vie. Je suis fière de pouvoir dire : j'y étais. 2- Vous qui avez écrit sur les femmes et qui avez contribué à l'adoption au sein de la Haute instance pour la réalisation des objectifs de la révolution, d'une loi électorale qui institue la parité, pensez-vous que les acquis de la femme tunisienne seraient préservés dans le futur et qu'elle aurait la possibilité d'en avoir plus? En matière de condition féminine, la Tunisie a une histoire particulière. Grâce au Code du statut personnel promulgué dès 1956, les Tunisiennes jouissent de droits qui n'existent nulle part ailleurs dans le monde arabe. Et elles occupent au sein de la société une place qui n'a pas d'équivalent ailleurs dans la région. Pour autant, la loi tunisienne n'est pas égalitaire. Les femmes doivent donc se battre non seulement pour sauvegarder les acquis qui sont les leurs, mais pour obtenir que la législation consacre l'égalité totale des sexes dans tous les domaines. La revendication de la parité dans les listes électorales fait partie de ce combat, et une bataille importante vient d'être remportée avec son obtention. Mais tout n'est pas gagné pour autant. D'abord parce que les conquêtes ne sont jamais irréversibles, que des franges non négligeables de la société demeurent conservatrices, et qu'elles n'ont pas accepté de gaîté de cœur les acquis des cinquante dernières années. Le fait, par exemple, que sur les quelque 13 représentants des régions à la Haute Instance ne figure pas une femme, alors qu'elles ont joué dans tout le pays un rôle déterminant au cours du processus révolutionnaire, montre qu'il reste encore bien des Bastilles à prendre.Mais la Tunisie a aussi une vieille liaison avec la modernité, qui a commencé avant la colonisation. C'est pourquoi le débat public peut aujourd'hui avoir lieu sur les questions liées aux femmes et, plus largement sur l'ensemble des sujets qui engagent l'avenir du pays. Face à la permanence du conservatisme et à un retour du religieux qui n'est guère favorable à l'émancipation des femmes, des secteurs importants de la société sont prêts, je crois, à franchir le pas de l'égalité des sexes.Au point de vue sociétal, la Tunisie a totalement changé au cours du dernier demi-siècle. La loi doit suivre. Mais les femmes ne doivent pas oublier que chaque conquête est le résultat d'un combat. Dans l'immédiat, il faut obtenir que le gouvernement de transition propose de lever la totalité des réserves à la Convention des Nations unies sur toutes les formes de discrimination à l'égard des femmes (Cedaw). Lors d'une première tentative en janvier, le gouvernement précédent s'était heurté à de fortes oppositions en son sein même. Cela montre le travail qui reste à accomplir. 3- Que pensez-vous de la polémique sur la laïcité aujourd'hui en Tunisie et estimez- vous qu'il sera possible de l'inscrire dans la nouvelle Constitution? C'est une question complexe. Je ne pense pas, d'ailleurs, que ce soit une polémique. C'est un vrai débat, et il est sain qu'il ait lieu. Dans l'idéal, je suis partisane de la laïcité qui, ne l'oublions pas, n'a rien à voir avec l'athéisme, comme certains voudraient le faire croire. La loi française de 1905 est fondée sur le fait que l'Etat a un devoir de neutralité par rapport à tous les cultes. La laïcité est donc d'abord une modalité publique du vivre ensemble. De plus, l'instauration de la laïcité me semble être la seule façon de mettre sur un pied total d'égalité tous les citoyens, à quelque confession qu'ils appartiennent, ou qu'ils n'en aient aucune. La liberté de conscience qu'elle implique va bien au-delà de la

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simple liberté de culte. Aucune norme religieuse ne devrait avoir le pouvoir de régir la sphère publique.A mon sens, la laïcité de l'Etat ne menace en aucun cas l'identité d'un peuple. Et il est évident que l'arabité et l'islam sont consubstantantiels de l'identité tunisienne, même si elle ne se réduit pas à ces deux composantes. L'histoire de la Tunisie, et c'est ce qui fait sa richesse, est ancienne, plurielle, faite d'apports multiples qui ont créé cette subtile alchimie que certains appellent la tunisianité. Ce constat n'occulte en rien la place prépondérante qu'occupe l'islam dans la construction de l'identité tunisienne. De fait, et en dehors du cas turc, la laïcité existe dans plusieurs pays où la religion majoritaire est l'islam. Prenez le cas du Sénégal. Ce pays à près de 95% musulman a eu pendant vingt ans pour chef de l'Etat Léopold Sédar Senghor, de confession catholique. Que je sache, cela n'a pas mis l'islam sénégalais en danger, à aucun moment. 4- Considérez-vous qu'il est nécessaire de garder l'article 1 de la Constitution, et de donner donc raison à ceux qui le considèrent comme garant de l'identité arabo- musulmane du pays? Il faut être réaliste. On ne peut probablement pas brûler les étapes et il se peut que les Tunisiens, dans leur majorité, ne soient pas prêts à faire le saut vers une Constitution laïque. Ils doivent d'abord faire le chemin qui mène à la compréhension de ce qu'est la laïcité. L'islam devra donc être, d'une façon ou d'une autre, présent dans le nouveau texte constitutionnel. C'est dans ce contexte que doit être posée la question de l'article I. Dans l'idéal toujours, il serait souhaitable de reformuler sa seconde partie. Il pourrait, en matière religieuse, adopter la formulation suivante : "l'islam est la religion de la majorité des Tunisiens", ce qui correspond à la stricte réalité. Si le consensus n'est pas obtenu sur une telle modification, il conviendra alors d'assortir cet article demeuré en l'état d'une sorte d'avenant empêchant qu'il ne soit utilisé pour justifier quelque discrimination de quelqu'ordre que ce soit. Il faudra empêcher que l'article I puisse fournir à certains l'occasion de confessionnaliser la loi tunisienne dans quelque domaine que ce soit.Dans cette optique, l'abrogation de l'article indiquant que le président de la république doit obligatoirement être musulman serait un signe fort. Cela ne changerait rien dans les faits puisque plus de 99,9% de la population tunisienne est musulmane - croyante ou pas -, mais ce serait un grand pas symbolique vers l'égalité. Comme pour la parité, la Tunisie pourrait être fière de montrer le chemin vers l'universalité. 5- Dans votre dernier livre "Dedans, dehors", vous vous disiez à l'intérieur de ce pays et en même temps à l'extérieur, où vous situez-vous aujourd'hui? Comme pour beaucoup d'individus issus de minorités ethniques ou confessionnelles dans la tourmente du XXe siècle, mon histoire personnelle est le fruit des vicissitudes de la grande histoire. L'hégémonie du nationalisme arabe dans les années cinquante et soixante, la question d'Israël, ont fait que les juifs - dans leur grande majorité - ont quitté le monde arabe. Pas tous, et pas tous de la même manière. En ce qui me concerne, même si je bénéficie de la double nationalité depuis les années 80, je me suis toujours considérée avant tout comme tunisienne. Et mon lien avec mon pays ne s'est jamais distendu. J'y ai mes racines, j'en ai fait un objet de travail et d'études, et c'est dans le cadre tunisien que j'ai mené un parcours militant. Mais la vie m'a aussi conduite en France, qui m'est devenu un pays familier. C'est dans la langue française que je pense et que j'écris. Mes pas m'ont aussi conduite en Afrique subsaharienne, qui m'a adoptée. Je suis donc tunisienne et citoyenne du monde. C'est ma richesse. Mais aujourd'hui, je me sens certainement plus "dedans" qu'il y a quelques mois. A l'étouffement de la dictature

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succède la respiration de la vie. J'ai envie de participer, dans la mesure de mes moyens et de ce que je peux apporter, à la construction d'une Tunisie démocratique, peuplée de citoyens et de citoyennes libres et ouverts sur le monde. 6- Au fil des souvenirs que vous évoquez dans le livre, vous revenez sur l'expérience de la gauche tunisienne et plus précisément sur celle de "Perspectives", selon vous pourquoi les jeunes de votre époque ont échoué dans leur révolution, alors ceux d'aujourd'hui ont réussi? Votre question mériterait un livre entier. J'essaye donc juste de donner quelques éléments de réponse. D'abord, l'histoire a un ryhtme et des étapes. Dans les années 60 et 70, la Tunisie sortait à peine de l'époque coloniale, la lutte pour l'indépendance était proche et le temps n'était probablement pas venu pour une révolution. D'autre part, quels qu'aient été ses excès autoritaires, le régime de Bourguiba n'était pas celui de Ben Ali. S'ils pouvaient être sceptiques ou même hostiles à certaines de ses initiatives, comme l'a montré entre autres l'échec de l'expérience collectiviste, les Tunisiens n'avaient pas forcément envie de congédier leurs dirigeants qui avaient encore à leurs yeux une légitimité. Et, pour l'extrême-gauche de l'époque, la révolution était plus une figure de rhétorique qu'une perspective concrète. Elle était un horizon, pas un programme. C'est cela que Bourguiba a feint de ne pas comprendre, considérant comme un crime toute critique de sa politique et de sa personne.En 2011, la Tunisie indépendante a plus d'un demi-siècle. La lutte de libération appartient à l'histoire, et les jeunes qui ont fait la révolution ne se sentent plus redevables aux vieilles générations. Leur indépendance à eux, c'est la conquête de la liberté et d'un travail digne, maintenant. Plusieurs facteurs se sont conjugués pour qu'un changement radical de système puisse avoir lieu aujourd'hui. Il s'agit désormais pour la jeunesse de transformer l'essai révolutionnaire réussi en construction concrète d'une Tunisie libre et démocratique. D'une certaine façon, c'est à partir du 14 janvier que les difficultés ont commencé. 7- Vous qui avez écrit un livre sur Bouguiba avec Souhayr Belhassan, comment voyez -vous cette vénération aujourd’hui du combattant suprême, tout en cherchant à taire tout ce qu'il a infligé à ses opposants de votre génération? Elle me semble logique, car elle est à la mesure du silence et du déni dans lequel Ben Ali a enseveli le premier président tunisien. Revenir aujourd'hui à Bourguiba est une façon pour les Tunisiens d'enterrer les 23 ans de benalisme. Tous les peuples ont besoin de figures fondatrices et il est évident que Bourguiba en a la stature. Quelles qu'aient ses dérives, il demeurera donc au panthéon de la mémoire tunisienne. Mais, après ce juste retour en grâce, il faudra en effet reconnaître qu'il est le créateur de l'Etat autoritaire. Au risque de déplaire aux bourguibiens purs et durs, il faudra rappeler que Ben Ali n'aurait pu instaurer la dictature brutale qui caractérisa son long passage au pouvoir si son prédécesseur ne lui avait préparé le terrain. Le « Combattant Suprême » lui a laissé en héritage des juridictions d'exception pour juger ses adversaires, des polices parallèles et des milices pour les terroriser, une presse habituée à chanter les louanges du Chef. Son successeur a fait fructifier cette face sombre de l'héritage. Bourguiba eût été un vrai grand homme s'il avait accompagné son pays, qu'il aimait tant et qu'il a tant modelé, sur le chemin de la démocratie. Il n'a su, pas voulu. Les Tunisiens ont payé longtemps cette hypothèque qu'il leur a laissée.

Source Réalités3

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http://www.sentinelle-tunisie.com/societe/ite3 m/«la-laicite-de-letat-ne-menace-en-aucun- cas-lidentite-dun-peuple»

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3 07/05/2011 à 09h42 L'armée syrienne entre dans la ville de Banias Au lendemain d'une forte journée de protestation ayant fait au moins 26 morts, les chars de l'armée ont pénétré tôt ce matin dans l’un des foyers de la contestation du régime dans le nord-ouest du pays. L’armée syrienne est entrée samedi à bord de chars à Banias, l’un des foyers de la contestation du régime dans le nord-ouest du pays, alors que les communications et l’électricité y ont été coupées, ont indiqué des militants des droits de l’Homme. Les chars ont pénétré tôt le matin à Banias et tentent de se diriger vers les quartiers sud de la ville, bastion des manifestants, ont ajouté ces militants joints au téléphone par l’AFP à Nicosie. Des habitants ont «formé des boucliers humains» pour empêcher les chars d’avancer vers ces quartiers, ont-ils affirmé.Les communications et l’électricité ont été coupées dans la ville, alors que des bateaux de l’armée patrouillent au large face aux quartiers sud, selon les mêmes sources. En outre, des chars encerclent le village voisin de Bayda, selon les militants.La ville de Banias est encerclée par l’armée depuis plus d’une semaine. Mercredi soir, les forces de sécurité avaient renforcé le siège de Banias où des milliers de personnes avaient manifesté contre le régime. «Il semble qu’ils s’apprêtent à attaquer la ville comme ils l’ont fait à Deraa», une ville du sud où est née le mouvement de contestation et où l’armée a pénétré le 25 avril avant de commencer à s’en retirer jeudi, avait indiqué l’un de ses militants. Vendredi, des chars ont pris position dans le centre de Homs et dans des quartiers périphériques de cette importante cité industrielle à 160 km au nord de la capitale, selon des militants. Le même jour, au moins 26 manifestants protestant contre le régime ont été tués par les forces de sécurité dans plusieurs villes du centre et de l’ouest, dont 16 à Homs. Les autorités ont annoncé de leur côté la mort de 10 soldats et policiers dans une attaque «terroriste» à Homs. En outre, Riad Seif, l’une des principales figures de l’opposition âgé de 64 ans et souffrant d’un cancer, a été arrêté à Damas, selon des militants. Le ministère de l’Intérieur avait appelé les Syriens à «s’abstenir de participer à tout sit- in ou manifestation» à l’occasion de la journée baptisée «Vendredi du défi» par les opposants.«La violence qui empire toujours, les arrestations massives et les mauvais traitements infligés aux détenus n’ont fait que renforcer la détermination des manifestants à travers le pays», a estimé Amnesty International. La Syrie est en proie à une contestation sans précédent du régime du président Bachar al-Assad qui a succédé au pouvoir à son père décédé en 2000 Hafez el-Assad.Selon des ONG, depuis le début de la révolte le 15 mars, des milliers de personnes ont été arrêtées et plus de 600 ont été tuées. (Source AFP) http://www.liberation.fr/monde/01012336027-3 en-syrie-l-armee-gagne-du-terrain

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3 EE UU responde con más amenazas de sanciones a la nueva ola de represión siria El régimen mata a decenas de opositores y detiene a dos destacados líderes en otro viernes de la ira. -La ONU presiona para enviar observadores de la situación humanitaria ENRIC GONZÁLEZ | Jerusalén 07/05/2011 El régimen sirio actúa ya como una dictadura acorralada. Además de masacrar a su población, intenta descabezar cualquier posibilidad de alternativa democrática. 3 La policía detuvo ayer al empresario Riad Seif y al teólogo Muaz el Jatib, dos personalidades de gran relieve que podían erigirse en líderes de la revuelta. Como cada viernes, pese a los ametrallamientos, al despliegue de tanques y a la devastación ejemplar infligida en la ciudad rebelde de Deraa, decenas de manifestaciones exigieron en todo el país la caída del presidente Bachar el Asad. La represión violenta produjo al menos 20 muertos. EE UU ha respondido a esta nueva ola de intimidaciones amenazando al régimen sirio con "medidas adicionales" a menos que cese el uso de la violencia y las detenciones contra los manifestantes que reclaman reformas democráticas en el país árabe.

El presidente estadounidense, Barack Obama, ya firmó3 el pasado 29 de abril una orden ejecutiva que impone sanciones contra entidades y personalidades del Gobierno sirio. Ayer el portavoz de la Casa Blanca, Jay Carney, insistió en que el Gobierno de Damasco, dijo el portavoz, "continúa siguiendo la pauta de su aliado iraní al recurrir a la fuerza bruta y las violaciones flagrantes de los derechos humanos para suprimir las protestas pacíficas". De persistir en esa actitud, "EE UU y sus socios internacionales adoptarán pasos adicionales", dijo Carney. El portavoz concluyó que ha quedado claro que la campaña de seguridad del Gobierno sirio "ni restablecerá la estabilidad ni detendrá las demandas de cambio en Siria", y que la represión no satisface las exigencias de cambio de la población. En esta misma línea, la Unión Europea acordó sancionar a 13 personalidades sirias por la violenta represión de las protestas. Aunque no se revelaron los nombres, fuentes diplomáticas indicaron que el listado no incluye ni al presidente ni al ministro de Defensa, informa desde Bruselas Ricardo M. de Rituerto. Intimidar y reprimir La detención de Riad Seif demostró, igual que el asalto militar a Deraa, que Bachar el Asad quería intimidar además de reprimir. Seif, empresario y antiguo parlamentario, rompió con el régimen y en 2005 fue el primer firmante de la Declaración de Damasco, un texto con el que 250 personalidades sirias reclamaron reformas democráticas. En 2001, poco después de que Bachar el Asad sustituyera a su padre y de que este aplastara la efímera primavera política inspirada por el relevo, Seif fue condenado a cinco años de cárcel por "desafiar al Estado". En 2008 fue encarcelado otra vez por "intentar derrocar al Gobierno". Ahora, gravemente enfermo de cáncer y arruinado, llevaba unos meses en libertad. 158

La policía también detuvo en su casa de Damasco al religioso Muaz el Jatib, un teólogo suní de prestigio que imparte clases en diversas universidades extranjeras y en los últimos años se ha vinculado a la oposición reformista y a los esfuerzos por aglutinar a las diversas confesiones religiosas en que se divide Siria. En cierta forma, el Gobierno se desmintió a sí mismo con el encarcelamiento de las dos personalidades. Desde el principio de la revuelta popular, a mediados de marzo, afirma combatir una "sublevación armada de islamistas". Ni Seif ni El Jatib tienen nada de extremistas religiosos. El conflicto sirio, en el que según Amnistía Internacional han muerto ya más de 550 personas (es imposible comprobar las cifras porque la prensa tiene prohibido actuar en el país), podría adquirir una dimensión internacional con la entrada de equipos de Naciones Unidas destinados a comprobar la situación humanitaria. El secretario general de la ONU, Ban Ki-moon, pidió el jueves que se dejara actuar a esos equipos y ayer anunció haber obtenido la autorización de Damasco. El Gobierno permaneció en silencio. El ingreso de observadores internacionales supondría un hito en un país tradicionalmente opaco al escrutinio de las organizaciones internacionales.

Tras la devastación de Deraa, ocupada3 por las tropas de Maher el Asad, hermano del presidente, ayer fueron Homs y Hama las ciudades donde las fuerzas de seguridad se emplearon con más violencia. En Homs, rodeada de tanques, miles de manifestantes trataron de ocupar el centro urbano y fueron dispersados a tiros. Murieron 10 personas, según informó Ammar Qurabi, director de la Organización para los Derechos Humanos en Siria. En Hama las víctimas mortales fueron seis. Las cifras podrían ascender porque el caos en las calles y los cortes de comunicaciones hacían muy difíciles los recuentos. En Deraa, donde comenzó la revuelta, apenas hubo ayer protestas debido a la enorme presencia militar, reforzada con blindados y helicópteros. Al menos 60 personas murieron durante las pasadas dos semanas en la ciudad, un núcleo agrícola y empobrecido cercano a la frontera con Jordania. La Cruz Roja anunció que uno de sus vehículos, con suministros médicos, logró entrar en Deraa para prestar los primeros auxilios a una población sometida al corte de energía eléctrica y a escasez de agua. También en Damasco se formó una pequeña manifestación en el barrio céntrico de Midan que fue rápidamente disuelta con gases y cargas policiales. En Banias, una ciudad portuaria a la que desde el miércoles afluían columnas de tanques y tropas, varios miles de personas, según activistas locales, marcharon con ramos de olivo y banderas sirias al grito de "el pueblo exige la caída del régimen", popularizado en las revueltas de Túnez y Egipto. ENRIC GONZÁLEZ EE UU responde con más amenazas de sanciones a la nueva ola de represión siria Jerusalén 07/05/2011http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/EE/UU/responde/amenazas/san3 ciones/nueva/ola/represion/siria/elpepuint/20110507elpepuint_4/Tes

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May 7, 2011 Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy. I want memory, and justice, and revenge. When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response. We briefly celebrated one of the few clear-cut military victories we’ve had in a long time, a win that made us feel like Americans again — smart and strong and capable of finding our enemies and striking back at them without getting trapped in multitrillion- dollar Groundhog Day occupations. But within days, Naval Seal-gazing shifted to navel-gazing. There was the bad comedy of solipsistic Republicans with wounded egos trying to make it about how right they were and whinging that George W. Bush was due more credit. Their attempt to renew the debate about torture is itself torture. W. preferred to sulk in his Dallas tent rather than join President Obama at ground zero in a duet that would have certainly united the country. Whereas the intelligence work that led to the destruction of Bin Laden was begun in the Bush administration, the cache of schemes taken from Osama’s Pakistan house debunked the fanciful narrative that the Bush crew pushed: that Osama was stuck in a cave unable to communicate, increasingly irrelevant and a mere symbol, rather than operational. Osama, in fact, was at the helm, spending his days whipping up bloody schemes to kill more Americans. In another inane debate last week, many voices suggested that decapitating the head of a deadly terrorist network was some sort of injustice. Taking offense after Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said he was “much relieved” at the news of Bin Laden’s death, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, posted the Twitter message: “Ban Ki-moon wrong on Osama bin Laden: It’s not justice for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.” I leave it to subtler minds to parse the distinction between what is just and what is justified. When Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said she was “glad” Bin Laden had been killed, a colleague called such talk “medieval.” Christophe Barbier, editor of the centrist French weekly L’Express, warned: “To cry one’s joy in the streets of our cities is to ape the turbaned barbarians who danced the night of Sept. 11.”

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Those who celebrated on Sept. 11 were applauding the slaughter of American innocents. When college kids spontaneously streamed out Sunday night to the White House, ground zero and elsewhere, they were the opposite of bloodthirsty: they were happy that one of the most certifiably evil figures of our time was no more. The confused image of Bin Laden as a victim was exacerbated by John Brennan, the Obama national security aide who intemperately presented an inaccurate portrait of what had happened on the third floor in Abbottabad. Unlike the president and the Navy Seals, who performed with steely finesse, Brennan was overwrought, exaggerating the narrative to demonize the demon. The White House had to backtrack from Brennan’s contentions that Osama was “hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield” and that he died after resisting in a firefight. It may be that some administration officials have taken Dick Cheney’s belittling so much to heart that they are still reluctant to display effortless macho. Liberal guilt may have its uses, but it should not be wasted on this kill-mission. The really insane assumption behind some of the second-guessing is that killing Osama somehow makes us like Osama, as if all killing is the same. Only fools or knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non- violently. President Obama was prepared to take a life not only to avenge American lives already taken but to deter the same killer from taking any more. Aside from Bin Laden’s plotting, his survival and his legend were inspirations for more murder. If stealth bombers had dropped dozens of 2,000-pound bombs and wiped out everyone, no one would have been debating whether Osama was armed. The president chose the riskiest option presented to him, but one that spared nearly all the women and children at the compound, and anyone in the vicinity. Unlike Osama, the Navy Seals took great care not to harm civilians — they shot Bin Laden’s youngest wife in the leg and carried two young girls out of harm’s way before killing Osama. Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest. We have nothing to apologize for. MAUREEN DOWD Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil May 7, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion3 /08dowd.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_ MST_FB

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May 7, 2011 Why We Celebrate a Killing By JONATHAN HAIDT Charlottesville, Va. A MAN is shot in the head, and joyous celebrations break out 7,000 miles away. Although Americans are in full agreement that the demise of Osama bin Laden is a good thing, many are disturbed by the revelry. We should seek justice, not vengeance, they urge. Doesn’t this lower us to “their” level? Didn’t the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say, “I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy”? (No, he did not, but the Twitter users who3 popularized that misattributed quotation last week found it inspiring nonetheless.) Why are so many Americans reluctant to join the party? As a social psychologist I believe that one major reason is that some people are thinking about this national event using the same moral intuitions they’d use for a standard criminal case. For example, they ask us to imagine whether it would be appropriate for two parents to celebrate the execution, by lethal injection, of the man who murdered their daughter. Of course the parents would be entitled to feel relief and perhaps even private joy. But if they threw a party at the prison gates, popping Champagne corks as the syringe went in, that would be a celebration of death and vengeance, not justice. And is that not what we saw last Sunday night when young revelers, some drinking beer, converged on Times Square and the White House? No, it is not. You can’t just scale up your ideas about morality at the individual level and apply them to groups and nations. If you do, you’ll miss all that was good, healthy and even altruistic about last week’s celebrations. Here’s why. For the last 50 years, many evolutionary biologists have told us that we are little different from other primates — we’re selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves. But in the last few years there’s been a growing recognition that humans, far more than other primates, were shaped by natural selection acting3 at two different levels simultaneously. There’s the lower level at which individuals compete relentlessly with other individuals within their own groups. This competition rewards selfishness. But there’s also a higher level at which groups compete with other groups. This competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense. Early humans found ways to come together as well, but for us unity is a fragile and temporary state. We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees. Just think of the long lines to give blood after 9/11. Most of us wanted to do something — anything — to help.

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This two-layer psychology is the key to understanding religion, warfare, team sports and last week’s celebrations. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim even went so far as to call our species Homo duplex, or “two-level man.” Durkheim was writing a century ago, as organized religion was weakening across Europe. He wanted to know how nations and civil institutions could bind people into moral communities without the aid of religion. He thought the most powerful glue came from the emotions. He contrasted two sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level. At the lower level, sentiments like respect and affection help individuals forge relationships with other individuals. But Durkheim was most interested in the sentiments that bind people into groups — the collective emotions. These emotions dissolve the petty, small-minded self. They make people feel that they are a part of something larger and more important than themselves. One such emotion he called “collective effervescence”: the passion and ecstasy that is found in tribal religious rituals when communities come together to sing, dance around a fire and dissolve the boundaries that separate them from each other. The spontaneous celebrations of last week were straight out of Durkheim. So is collective effervescence a good thing, or an ugly psychological relic from tribal times? Some of those who were disturbed by the celebrations fear that this kind of unity is dangerous because it makes America more warlike and prejudiced against outsiders. When celebrants chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and sang “God Bless America,” were they not displaying a hateful “us versus them” mindset? Once again, no. Many social psychologists distinguish patriotism — a love of one’s own country — from nationalism, which is the view that one’s own country is superior to other countries and should therefore be dominant. Nationalism is generally found to be correlated with racism and with hostility toward other countries, but patriotism by itself is not.

The psychologist Linda Skitka studied3 the psychological traits that predicted which people displayed American flags in the weeks after 9/11. She found that the urge to display the flag “reflected patriotism and a desire to show solidarity with fellow citizens, rather than a desire to express out-group hostility.” This is why I believe that last week’s celebrations were good and healthy. America achieved its goal — bravely and decisively — after 10 painful years. People who love their country sought out one another to share collective effervescence. They stepped out of their petty and partisan selves and became, briefly, just Americans rejoicing together. This hive-ish moment won’t last long. But in the communal joy of last week, many of us felt, for an instant, that Americans might still be capable of working together to meet threats and challenges far greater than Osama bin Laden. Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” JONATHAN HAIDT Why We Celebrate a Killing May 7, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opi4 nion/08haidt.html?ref=opinion

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Syria sends tanks to coastal town as protests spread

Syrians4 stage widespread protests Protesters sustaining their seven-week-old revolt against the government despite crackdown.

By Liz4 Sly, Published: May 6 | Updated: Saturday, May 7, 1:05 PM BEIRUT — The Syrian military sent tanks into the northern coastal town of Baniyas early Saturday in a further escalation of violence against anti-government protesters, according to human rights groups and a witness. Tanks began rolling into the town’s darkened streets at around 2 a.m., a day after thousands of people in the town had gathered in response to a call from activists to observe a nationwide “day of defiance” against the regime’s ongoing efforts to brutally crush protesters, according to a resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After that, communications to the town were cut off and the few reports that emerged were sketchy. One report said gunboats had been deployed off the coast and that the town was completely besieged. It now seems clear that the regime headed by President Bashar al-Assad is determined to crush with force the burgeoning opposition movement, even as Syrians appear equally determined to continue to defy their government. On Friday, Syrian troops used heavy machine guns and artillery to quell anti- government protests in the key city of Homs, as tens of thousands of Syrians yet again braved the threat of bullets and tanks to take to the streets around the country. At least 30 people were killed when security forces opened fire on demonstrators, 11 of them in Homs, human rights groups said. Eyewitnesses reached by telephone in Homs Friday evening said they could hear what appeared to be pitched battles in several neighborhoods, prompting speculation that some members of the security forces had defected. Syrian state television reported that 10 members of the security forces had been killed in Homs by “armed gangs,” the term used by the government to describe the protesters. However, there have been no indications that any members of the seemingly spontaneous and mostly leaderless protest movement are armed. In Washington, the White House threatened tougher measures against Syria if the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators continues. A week after announcing sanctions against Syrian intelligence and security officials, it issued a statement that blasted the repression and warned that Western countries would “adjust their relations with Syria according to the concrete actions” undertaken by Damascus.

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“Syria’s deplorable actions toward its people warrant a strong international response,” the statement read. The statement also said the United States welcomes further sanctions against Syrian leaders announced Friday by the European Union. The clashes in Homs came amid further signs that Syrians have not been cowed by the hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests carried out in recent weeks in an effort to suppress the biggest challenge to the regime headed by al-Assad since his father brutally suppressed an armed revolt in 1982. That crackdown, in which as many as 40,000 people died, earned the Syrian regime a reputation as one of the most repressive in the Middle East, and when revolts4 began rippling around the region earlier in the year, many predicted that Syrians would not dare join the swelling clamor for change. But although Syrians came relatively late to the game, with no significant protests reported until mid-March, their opposition movement seems only to have swelled in the face of the government’s increasingly brutal crackdown. Human rights groups say more than 500 people have been killed, most of them at demonstrations, and at least 5,000 arrested. Friday marked the seventh week since protesters first took to the streets, initially in small numbers and to call only for reforms. But as the government has responded to the unrest with escalating force, so has the protest movement persisted and spread, and it now seems clear that much of the country is in open revolt against the regime. Responding to calls by activists to stage a “day of defiance” to protest the security crackdown, people swarmed out of mosques after noontime prayers in dozens of locations around the country, many of them calling for the overthrow of the regime.

In Damascus, which4 has remained largely immune from the unrest, security forces detained veteran opposition activist Riad Seif as he emerged from a mosque. Security forces dispersed a small demonstration there Friday with tear gas and ammunition. There was no indication that this week’s protests were any larger than those on the previous two Fridays, when troops also used live fire to disperse protesters. The death toll was also lower than it was on the past two Fridays. That may have been because tanks and security forces blocked major roads, making it impossible for people to gather in large numbers in central locations, said Wissam Tarif of the human rights group Insan. Instead, he said, they staged smaller protests in individual neighborhoods. “What is amazing is that it is happening in so many towns and villages around the country,’’ he said. Demonstrations were reported also in the northern coastal town of Latakia, the predominantly Kurdish northeastern town of Qamishli, Abu Kamal on the Iraqi border and in several small villages around the besieged southern city of Daraa, where the protest movement started. But it was in Homs that the violence was worst, and it appeared to intensify after nightfall. The government cut land lines to three neighborhoods in the city, several artillery shells had exploded and the sound of gunfire was “almost continuous,” according to a resident contacted by telephone, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety.

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“There is shooting in all districts of Homs,” he said, adding that it appeared the fighting was taking place between rival factions in the security forces. A split in the security forces is the regime’s worst nightmare, given the role the army played in securing the downfall of the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia earlier in the year. But this is also not the first time that there have been indications of defections. When the government sent tanks to suppress the4 uprising in Daraa nearly two weeks ago, there were numerous reports that some soldiers had been shot for refusing to fire on protesters. The crackdown nonetheless proceeded, and it is feared that hundreds may have been killed and many more detained in the southern rural city, which has been besieged by troops for the past 12 days. Most reports from Syria cannot be independently verified, because foreign journalists have been denied visas. Among the thousands detained in the crackdown is a journalist for the al-Jazeera network, Dorothy Parvez, an Iranian Canadian who was taken into custody after she flew into the country from Qatar last week. Many Syrians say they have only been galvanized by the brutality, and in some areas troops have not moved to crush the demonstrators. In the town of Baniyas, ringed by tanks for more than a week, several thousand people demonstrated Friday carrying olive branches and roses, which they intended to give to the army should it enter, a student activist said. The troops stayed away. “The tanks could come to crush us at any time,” said the protester, who asked that his name not be used for his safety. “But we are not afraid, and we will continue our protest.” Staff writer Joby Warrick in Washington contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/syrians-defy-crackdown-stage-widespread-4 protests/2011/05/06/AFH8DB8F_story.html?nl_headlines

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4 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5dc1c454-77f5-11e0-ab46-4 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M7roK53w Libyan regime accused of war crimes By Michael Peel in Tripoli Published: May 6 2011 16:58 | Last updated: May 6 2011 16:58 Libyan armed forces may have committed war crimes in the besieged rebel-held city of Misurata, Amnesty International said on Friday, stepping up the pressure on a regime already facing the threat of prosecution by the world human rights court. Amnesty’s report said fighters for Muammer Gaddafi had unlawfully killed civilians in indiscriminate attacks that included the use of heavy artillery, rockets, cluster bombs and sniper fire in civilian areas.

4 4 EDITOR’S CHOICE Tripoli embassies attacked after air strike - May-01 Clans to help shape 4 4 Libya’s future - May-01 Libyan villagers seek refuge in Tunisia - May-01 In depth: Libya 4 4 uprising - May-01 Allies prepare ground for long haul in Libya - Apr-26 Libya declares sea blockade of rebel port - Apr-30 The claims come as the International Criminal Court decides whether to pursue a case against a regime accused of widespread human rights abuses in its efforts to crush the rebellion that began in February. Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s senior adviser, said: “The scale of the relentless attacks that we have seen by Gaddafi forces to intimidate the residents of Misurata for more than two months is truly horrifying. It shows a total disregard for the lives of ordinary people and is in clear breach of international humanitarian law.” Since Misurata, Libya’s third city, joined the uprising in its early days, pro-Gaddafi forces had launched “relentless indiscriminate attacks into the city’s residential neighbourhoods”, Amnesty alleged. Scores of civilians had been killed by mortars, artillery shells and long-range rockets – none of which are allowed under international law to be used in residential areas. The Amnesty report – which was researched between April 14 and 20 – said Ibrahim Ahmad al- Dernawi, 33, was killed, apparently by a sniper, as he sat in his parents’ house with his six- month old son on his lap. Researchers said they had also found evidence of the use of cluster bombs and human shields – both violations of humanitarian law. Amnesty said it supported the Libyan investigation by the International Criminal Court. Its prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the UN security council this week that he would seek warrants against three un-named individuals over crimes against humanity allegedly committed in the country. The Libyan government could not immediately be reached for comment. Michael Peel Libyan regime accused of war crimes May 6 2011 16:58 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5dc1c454-77f5-11e0-ab46-4 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX

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4 05/06/2011 06:48 PM Author Peter Bergen on Bin Laden's Death 'The War on Terror Should Be Retired' By Gregor Peter Schmitz US author and security expert Peter Bergen, 48, discusses this week's killing of Osama bin Laden and why it is time to end the US-led war on terror. The al-Qaida leader's death, he argues, is likely to fuel a debate in Congress over the Afghanistan deployment and future aid for Pakistan. SPIEGEL: After President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, you declared the end of the war on terror. Isn't that premature? Bergen : It is hard to think of two events that would more suggest that the war on terrorism should be retired as a kind of operating concept. One is the Arab4 Spring which undercuts al-Qaida's ideology, and the second is the death of bin Laden, which undercuts al-Qaida as an organization. There will never be a Treaty of Versailles with al-Qaida -- and, in the absence of that, these two events suggest that it is time to move on. The world and the United States have other issues to contend with, like climate change, China and globalization. SPIEGEL: So you don't think there is anyone within al-Qaida who could be lined up to replace bin Laden? Bergen : There will be replacements, but it would be as if Hermann Göring had replaced Adolf Hitler. There are a lot of differences between bin Laden and Hitler, but the one similarity is that when you joined elite Nazi organizations, you pledged a personal allegiance to Hitler, not to Nazism. When you join al-Qaida, you pledge a personal allegiance to bin Laden. That is also true of the affiliates of al-Qaida. Without bin Laden in the picture, it is hard to imagine that Ayman al-Zawahari, or any of the others that we know, would command the same loyalty. SPIEGEL: Why has it been so difficult to track down bin Laden? Bergen : It took 15 years after the Holocaust for the Israelis to find Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the extermination of the Jews, but not for a lack of trying. They put a lot of resources into that search. SPIEGEL: But the Americans have access to better technology. Could the world's best- outfitted intelligence service really be unable to find a fleeing man with kidney trouble for almost 10 years? Bergen : Bin Laden was off the grid, not communicating electronically. It actually made him harder to track down because the United States is so reliant on signals intelligence. SPIEGEL: But they came close many times. Bergen : The closest they came to it in the past was probably between Dec. 10 and Dec. 14, 2001, when bin Laden was surrounded in the Battle of Tora Bora -- his left shoulder had been wounded and there were multiple strands of intelligence indicating he was there. 168

SPIEGEL: How would it have changed the war on terror if bin Laden had been captured or killed back then? Bergen : It might have been easier to declare victory and move on. Of course, the Bush administration was very keen to invade Iraq, which was a huge strategic blunder that obliterated Muslim support for our search for bin Laden. I think they probably would have wanted to do that whether he was around or not. SPIEGEL: Obama prides himself on the fact that he made the search for the top terrorist a top priority again. Is it an exaggeration to say that his predecessor, George W. Bush, was no longer very interested? Bergen : The Bush administration more or less closed the bin Laden file in 2005. The CIA decided back then that the fight against new terrorist cells was more urgent than the search for the al-Qaida4 chief. Obama came in and re-energized things. But that isn't to say that Bush and (then-Vice President Dick) Cheney didn't really want to find bin Laden too. If you look at the drone strikes, they really began rapidly accelerating in the last six months of Bush's second term, so they wanted to leave office having captured or killed him, but it didn't happen. SPIEGEL: Even before bin Laden was killed this week, your assessment of al-Qaida had already declined. Bergen : If you look at polling data in countries like Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world, support for al-Qaida, bin Laden and suicide bombing has been dropping like a stone for years now. The Arab Spring just underlines the fact that they were losing the war of ideas. Bin Laden's death now is the final nail in the coffin. SPIEGEL: Must the West fear retaliation for bin Laden's death? Or is al-Qaida so weakened that its supporters are no longer capable of executing major attacks? Bergen : There will still be events with al-Qaida or jihadist terrorists, like the suspected jihadist who shot two American soldiers at the Frankfurt Airport in March. The difference now is that their large-scale public support and their ability to conduct large- scale attacks has eroded over time. SPIEGEL: These days, the Americans appear to be more worried, for example, by the effects of a high national deficit than by terrorism. Will bin Laden's death speed up this trend? Bergen : There's going to be a very healthy public debate about how much we continue to spend in Afghanistan, given our limited resources. Members of Congress are already asking pressing questions about the sense of our billions of dollars in support for Pakistan. SPIEGEL: Did the Pakistani government truly not know that bin Laden has been living for years in a conspicuous mansion right in the middle of Abbottabad, a garrison city? Bergen : Lots of people live in compounds like this in Pakistan with high walls, and I think it's very credible that very few people knew. He never went out. The United States didn't know if he was there until they had actually entered the building. SPIEGEL: And until they did they didn't share any details of their plan with Pakistani authorities. Has the level of distrust fallen that deep?

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Bergen : They didn't tell the British or the Afghans, either. They didn't tell very many people in their own government. That is how secret missions work. SPIEGEL: But this mission was conducted in Pakistan -- allegedly a US ally in the war on terror. Bergen : The Pakistanis didn't want to be told anyway. If this thing blew up in their faces, they had plausible deniability. They didn't want that fingerprints all over it. In fact, they're happy they weren't told. Interview conducted by Gregor Peter Schmitz

URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,761082,00.html4 Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• SPIEGEL4 360: The Death of Osama bin Laden

http://www.spiegel.de/interna4 tional/topic/osama_bin_laden/

• Treasure4 Trove for Spooks: What Bin Laden's Seized Data Stash Could Reveal (05/06/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int4 ernational/world/0,1518,761116,00.html

• 'We4 Will Remain a Curse': Al-Qaida Confirms Bin Laden's Death (05/06/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int4 ernational/world/0,1518,761148,00.html

• The4 World from Berlin: Obama's Message -- 'We Don't Need a Trophy or a Scalp' (05/06/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int4 ernational/world/0,1518,761102,00.html

• 'Tacky4 and Undignified': Judge Files Complaint against Merkel over Bin Laden Comments (05/06/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/i4 nternational/germany/0,1518,761077,00.html

• Few4 Facts, Lots of Imagination: Bin Laden's Death Fuels Conspiracy Theories (05/05/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int4 ernational/world/0,1518,760742,00.html

• A4 Symbol of the Nation's Mood: 'Europeans Find the Ground Zero Celebrations Somewhat Embarrassing' (05/04/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int4 ernational/world/0,1518,760565,00.html

• German4 Terrorism Expert: 'No One in Al-Qaida Can Replace Bin Laden' (05/04/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int4 ernational/world/0,1518,760589,00.html

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IDEAS DEBATE

Tom4 Vandyck El populismo transatlántico

6 mayo 2011 DE4 MORGEN BRUSELAS

Andrzej Krauze 4 | 4 La subida de los partidos populistas en nuestro continente parece hacerse eco del éxito del Tea Party en Estados Unidos. Pero los dos movimientos no tienen el mismo recorrido, explica el corresponsal en Washington de De Morgen. Incluso si el resultado es similar: el riesgo de parálisis de los gobiernos. Extractos.

Tom4 Vandyck En los medios de comunicación estadounidenses, se ha hablado recientemente del "Tea Party europeo". El Viejo Continente habría conocido este movimiento desde la victoria de los Verdaderos4 Finlandeses en las elecciones de este país y con los resultados, de momento en los sondeos, de Marine4 Le Pen, presidenta del Frente Nacional, en Francia. Al parecer, se habrían exportado a Europa los sentimientos que fomentan el Tea Party. Así, cuando llueve en Washington, llovizna en Helsinki, en París y en Flandes. Y cuando el Tea Party estadounidense se rebela contra Washington, el Tea Party europeo se subleva contra Bruselas. Seamos claros: aparte de algunos casos aislados que tienen una página en Facebook, la noción de "Tea Party europeo" no tiene estrictamente ningún sentido. Es precisamente lo contrario. El Tea Party es la expresión estadounidense de los sentimientos que en Europa desde hace años encuentran una válvula de escape en partidos como el Vlaams Blok convertido en el Vlaams Belang [VB, partido nacionalista flamenco de extrema derecha] en Flandes, el Frente Nacional en Francia, la Lista Pim Fortuyn [disuelta en 2008] en Países Bajos o la Liga del Norte en Italia. Philip Dewinter, jefe del VB, ya pronunciaba sus discursos cuando [la musa de los Tea Parties estadounidenses] Sarah Palin aún se contentaba con ayudar a su marido en su empresa de pesca en Wasilla, Alaska. Por lo tanto, estamos en nuestro derecho de reivindicar la paternidad de lo que ocurre en nuestro continente. Los orígenes del resentimiento son parecidos 171

También cabe destacar que lo que se denomina "Tea Party europeo" se preocupa por mantener los derechos sociales adquiridos, mientras que la versión estadounidense está repleta de pavor ante la idea de un Estado del bienestar basado en el modelo europeo. [El presidente estadounidense Barack] Obama no puede tomar ninguna iniciativa por mínima que sea en el ámbito social sin que se exclame que el comunismo se está implantando en el país. Por lo tanto, las diferencias son enormes. Lo que no impide que los orígenes del resentimiento sean muy parecidos. En el fondo, sigue siendo una cuestión de las angustias existenciales de los trabajadores blancos y de la clase media. A ambos lados del océano Atlántico, el ciudadano blanco teme ver cómo se adueñan de su país, teme ser excluido por los inmigrantes y asistir a la desaparición de un mundo en el que había vivido cómodamente durante tanto tiempo. Además, en ambos lugares existe esa aversión propia de todos los tipos de élites arrogantes que observan con desprecio a las personas normales y desdeñan sus propias características nacionales. A ambos lados del océano, la derecha populista mantiene además numerosos contactos telefónicos. Hace poco, Tim Phillips, presidente de Americans for Prosperity, uno de los lobbies republicanos en la sombra del Tea Party, estuvo en Noruega para enseñar al Partido del Progreso, una formación de extrema derecha, cómo hacer surgir en nada de tiempo un movimiento "espontáneo" que parta de la base. Son también conocidos los vínculos de Vlaams Belang con Estados Unidos. El líder nacionalista flamenco Bart De Wever se inspira en el periodista británico Theodore Dalrymple, cuya prosa es muy apreciada entre los círculos del Tea Party estadounidense. Y el consejero personal de Geert Wilders [jefe del PVV, partido populista neerlandés] es Paul Beliën, esposo de Alexandra Colen, diputada del Vlaams Belang, partido que posee excelentes contactos con la derecha de Estados Unidos. Una paranoia anti-islámica El punto en común es una paranoia anti-islámica. La teoría de "Eurabia", según la cual los inmigrantes musulmanes son la quinta columna de la islamización de Europa, es muy popular a ambos lados del océano. En varios Estados americanos, existe una serie de iniciativas cuyo fin es prohibir la aplicación de la sharia [ley islámica] en los tribunales, algo que, por otro lado, nunca se produciría. Esto indica que el Tea Party se encuentra más cerca de personas como Geert Wilders y Philippe De Winter de lo que podría pensarse. No debería sorprendernos. Ya en 1964, el historiador estadounidense Richard Hofstadter describía a estas élites que regían todo en la sombra en su ensayo convertido luego en clásico, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Mientras que los miembros de los Tea Parties piensan que Obama es un agente secreto islámico, sus colegas europeos están convencidos de que en Bruselas intentan poner en pie un súper Estado europeo dictatorial. Tanto allí como aquí, temen una serie de complots contra el indefenso ciudadano blanco. Además, se entiende que la situación ha dado un giro total en todo Occidente. Jamás regresará el viejo mundo en el que nos sentíamos seguros. A ambos lados del Atlántico, la gran recesión se ha cobrado víctimas. Abunda el paro, la pobreza y la incertidumbre con respecto al futuro. Se plantean problemas de inmigración. A esto se añade una serie de revueltas con un desenlace incierto en Oriente Próximo. Todo esto cuanto menos nos inquieta.

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Escenarios de catástrofe Esta situación provoca en un creciente número de países reacciones hostiles del electorado, que, invocando un pasado idílico que en la imaginación se sitúa hacia los años cincuenta, intenta convencerse de que todo sería mejor sin el resto del mundo. Todos los que no comparten esta opinión son intelectuales alejados del pueblo, "malos flamencos" o que no son "verdaderos" estadounidenses o finlandeses. De este modo, la agitación legítima ante el estado del mundo amenaza con convertirse en reacciones irracionales que lo único que hacen es agravar la situación. A ambos lados del Atlántico, lo que sí amenaza con producirse es un círculo vicioso autodestructor. Es muy probable que los que apoyan actualmente a los populistas adopten un comportamiento aún más hostil en el momento de acudir a las urnas, lo que permitirá a los populistas seguir ganando terreno y hará que resulte más difícil encontrar soluciones racionales a problemas que no son menos reales. Mientras, por no hablar de posibles catástrofes, la situación se traduce cada vez más en todos los sentidos por la imposibilidad de gobernar, por una creciente impotencia para actuar y resolver las grandes cuestiones del día. Es lo que se observa tanto en Washington como en Helsinki o en La Haya y en las encarnaciones europeas y belgas de Bruselas.

Tom4 Vandyck El populismo transatlánticoDE4 MORGEN BRUSELAS 6 mayo 2011 http://www.presseurop.eu/es/content/artic4 le/640601-el-populismo-transatlantico

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4 Del cambio social a la transformación del régimen: individualización y acción colectiva de una nueva generación de jóvenes en Marruecos (ARI)

Thierry Desrues ARI 85/2011 - 06/05/2011 Tema: Desde hace varias semanas, las movilizaciones que miles de jóvenes protagonizan en Marruecos hacen que se pueda hablar de una nueva generación, la del “Movimiento del 20 de Febrero”. Resumen: En posiciones desaventajadas, propias de una sociedad caracterizada por el peso del patriarcado y las desigualdades sociales y económicas, los jóvenes marroquíes son, al mismo tiempo, el producto del cambio social y uno de los principales actores de dicho cambio. En este análisis se presentan las representaciones y concepciones dominantes de estos jóvenes sobre las principales instituciones sociales, como son la familia y la religión, y sobre la política. Asimismo, se insiste en el factor educativo como motor del cambio social y, en particular, en la condición de las nuevas generaciones de mujeres. Por último, se resalta la participación de los jóvenes en el ámbito cultural como posible antesala de las movilizaciones actuales. Análisis: Los jóvenes marroquíes de entre 18 y 29 años representan el mayor grupo de edad de la población marroquí (24%). Desde hace varias semanas, las movilizaciones que miles de ellos protagonizan hacen que se pueda hablar de una nueva generación, la del “Movimiento del 20 de Febrero”. Ésta se compone de los hermanos pequeños y los hijos de los adultos que tienen hoy entre 35 y 55 años y que en su momento fueron identificados con la generación del rey Mohamed VI. El contexto actual de efervescencia social y política se nos presenta como una oportunidad para reflexionar sobre las condiciones de los jóvenes en el país vecino. La familia: transformación de la morfología y los valores La juventud se define a menudo como una fase transitoria en la que la persona se va desligando del hogar en el que ha crecido y del que terminará yéndose para fundar su propia familia. Esta dimensión transitoria hace que las relaciones en el seno de la familia se conviertan en un indicador para apreciar la existencia o no de cambio social por parte de una determinada generación de jóvenes. A lo largo del último cuarto de siglo, la familia en Marruecos está experimentando un doble cambio: en su dimensión, con la reducción del número de hijos; y en su composición, con el paso del hogar pluri- generacional (37,3%) al hogar nuclear (60,3%). La familia que el adulto funda actualmente es la mitad de numerosa (dos a tres hijos) de lo que fue la suya (cuatro a seis hijos). Con esta reducción, la dimensión afectiva de los niños en la familia se incrementa y la convicción de la necesaria escolarización y formación de los hijos tiende a generalizarse en detrimento de su temprana contribución a la economía

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doméstica. Además de los cambios en su morfología, su composición y en la percepción del papel de los hijos, la familia se enfrenta a otro fenómeno como es la presencia cada vez más duradera de jóvenes adultos en su seno. Tanto la prolongación de los estudios de los jóvenes como la situación del mercado de trabajo, caracterizada por el paro de este grupo generacional, y en particular de los diplomados,[1] hacen que en su mayor parte éstos dependan de sus familias y aplacen su salida del hogar familiar. En las encuestas consultadas, la familia aparece como una institución fundamental con la que los jóvenes pueden contar, pero su permanencia en el hogar familiar no está exenta de conflictos entre las distintas generaciones. Las discrepancias entre unos padres, que desean inculcar valores de obediencia, y sus hijos, que buscan una mayor autonomía, se perciben en la resistencia de los varones a la hora de seguir las directivas de una figura paterna percibida como autoritaria según una encuesta del diario L’Économiste.[2] Ante esta situación de dependencia, lógicamente, los jóvenes se casan más tarde y el número de adultos jóvenes solteros crece (el 54,1% de los jóvenes entre los 25 y los 29 años). El retraso de la edad del matrimonio (27 años para las chicas y 31 para los chicos), motivado por la escolarización de las chicas y la prolongación de los estudios, es una de las principales causas del aumento del celibato. Entran en juego también los cambios en los valores de los jóvenes, que en su mayoría desean elegir su cónyuge sin interferencias paternales. De ahí que las relaciones amorosas constituyan otra de las fuentes de tensión entre generaciones y hermanos en el seno de la familia marroquí. Independientemente de que el matrimonio se considere una norma universal, la condición de soltero ya no es siempre transitoria, como lo evidencia el hecho de que en 2004 había tres veces más mujeres que llegaban a los 49 años solteras que en 1994. Esta condición de los jóvenes modifica las antiguas certidumbres. Aunque para los adalides de la moral conservadora e islámica, el matrimonio temprano constituye la solución a la problemática presencia de las jóvenes fuera de la esfera doméstica, como son las instancias educativas y los lugares de trabajo o de ocio, lo cierto es que entre muchas solteras se encuentran voces que esperan encontrar en el matrimonio una mayor autonomía o que al estar disfrutando de cierta autonomía por haberse marchado del hogar familiar por motivos educativos o profesionales están poco dispuestas a renunciar a la libertad que disfrutan. El acceso a la educación y la presencia de las mujeres en el espacio público En las dinámicas analizadas hasta ahora, el factor educativo y la movilidad geográfica que supone la escolarización, al conllevar la salida del hogar e incluso de la localidad de origen, se imponen de forma acusada en las transformaciones que afectan a la posición de los jóvenes, y, sobre todo, de las mujeres. A pesar de las altas tasas de analfabetismo que siguen existiendo en Marruecos y de las dificultades que encuentran las chicas en el medio rural para mantenerse en el sistema escolar tras el primer ciclo (6-11 años), los progresos en materia de educación realizados desde la independencia son reales.[3] Hoy en día, la generalización de la escolarización en primaria está cerca de cumplirse y la enseñanza superior pública ha conocido un desarrollo exponencial del número de estudiantes, pasando de tener alrededor de 7.000 estudiantes en 1963 para alcanzar la cifra de 290.000 en 2003. Así, es importante señalar que las jóvenes representaban el 46,5% de los estudiantes de la enseñanza superior pública en 2007 (HCP, 2008) o que el número de diplomadas se ha triplicado entre 1990 y 2004, pasando de 46.000 a 146.000. Tras haber logrado su presencia en los ciclos educativos, las nuevas generaciones de 175

mujeres luchan ahora por incorporarse al mercado de trabajo formal y al espacio público, en particular en el campo político. En esta lucha cotidiana están acompañadas por las organizaciones en pro de los derechos de las mujeres y el impulso del rey Mohamed VI que, desde su entronización en 1999, considera una prioridad la reducción de las desigualdades por razón de género y el incremento de la presencia de las mujeres en la vida pública. La reforma del Código de la Familia en 2004 representa un cambio normativo al introducir la elevación de la edad mínima de las mujeres para contraer matrimonio de 15 a 18 años, equiparándola con la del varón (art. 19), la autonomía por parte de las mujeres mayores de edad a la hora de contraer matrimonio y el principio de igualdad entre los cónyuges (art. 4 y art. 51). Con los resultados de las últimas elecciones de junio de 2009 se ha empezado a poner fin a la situación de extrema marginalización de la representación política de las mujeres en el ámbito local. En los comicios comunales de 2003, sólo fueron elegidas 127 mujeres de un total de 23.286 ediles. En 2009, 3.406 mujeres entraron en los consejos comunales (12,3%) y de las 20.458 candidatas que se presentaron entonces, más de la mitad tenía menos de 35 años (52,5%). Por tanto, la feminización del panorama político ha contribuido a rejuvenecer la militancia política. Evidentemente, se puede discutir la validez de la política de cuotas y el interés de las mujeres por la política, en particular, en el mundo rural.[4] No obstante, este escenario ha creado un precedente que ha permitido y legitimado la presencia de una nueva generación de mujeres que, tras haberse incorporado a la educación formal y al mercado de trabajo, ve legitimada su reivindicación de una representación política en términos de igualdad. El rechazo del campo político actual La falta de integración política de los jóvenes ha sido planteada de forma recurrente por el Rey como un problema público. La mayor parte de los jóvenes declara no confiar en la política y, de hecho, el porcentaje que menciona en las encuestas haber participado en las últimas elecciones comunales de junio de 2009 (30%) se sitúa por debajo de la tasa global de participación (51%). El compromiso partidista de los jóvenes es un fenómeno minoritario y, por lo tanto, atípico (lo que en sí mismo no es exclusivo de Marruecos). Entre la veintena de partidos políticos existentes, solamente el islamista Partido de la Justicia y el Desarrollo (PJD) y, en menor medida, la Unión Socialista de Fuerzas Populares y el Istiqlal, cuentan con juventudes lo suficientemente numerosas y vertebradas para poder pretender influir en la vida del partido. Estas secciones de juventud son a menudo una fuerza discrepante frente a la tibieza de las direcciones nacionales, a las que reprochan su acomodo poco glorioso con un régimen autoritario que quieren transformar o la falta de democracia que rige el funcionamiento interno de sus respectivos partidos.[5] En los partidos que cuestionan abiertamente la naturaleza del régimen, el factor miedo es otro obstáculo a la militancia ante la sombra de la represión. En suma, el desinterés por la política marroquí y la abstención de muchos jóvenes son, a menudo, una muestra consciente de su inconformidad con la realidad política reinante en el país. La religión: conformismo público y tolerancia privada En contraposición con el desinterés expresado por la política, los jóvenes marroquíes entrevistados por los antropólogos El Ayadi, Rachik y Tozy valoran muy positivamente el islam.[6] Si bien son menos practicantes, menos ortodoxos y más tolerantes ante las 176

desviaciones o el incumplimiento de algunas prescripciones que los grupos de mayor edad, cuando se compara con estudios anteriores, los jóvenes de hoy en día son más practicantes que los jóvenes de las generaciones precedentes. Siguiendo con dicho estudio, los jóvenes encuestados parecen recelar de la transgresión explícita de los preceptos religiosos en público, pero se muestran más tolerantes con los comportamientos no-conformistas en el ámbito privado.[7] Ello evidencia una tendencia entre los jóvenes (45%) a concebir la relación hacia la religión como un asunto personal. En esta dirección se enmarcan las motivaciones que inducen a las jóvenes a llevar el velo. Para unas jóvenes, llevar velo supone la prolongación de un compromiso religioso, para otras, una militancia política, y, para un último grupo, el conformismo con el entorno familiar o social (amistades, vecindario, entorno profesional, etc.). Asimismo, la mayor parte de los analistas coincide en que la adopción del velo por parte de las mujeres de las nuevas generaciones parece mayor que unos decenios atrás, lo que estaría en sintonía con una mayor presencia de las mujeres en el ámbito público. En este sentido, el velo refleja el cambio social del que hablamos. Así lo confirma la funcionalidad del velo para que las jóvenes puedan existir de forma autónoma en el espacio público y contornar el acoso masculino o la dimensión sumamente estética del uso del hiyab en detrimento de los criterios de modestia que impone la moral islámica.[8] La nueva ola cultural: ¿antesala de la contestación social y política? En el ámbito cultural, la constitución de la juventud como categoría social se plasma en la efervescencia de Nayda,[9] un movimiento de cultura urbana que ha sido impulsado por la multiplicación de los festivales y el acceso a las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación. Este movimiento ha sido portador de dos importantes cambios simbólicos: la apropiación del espacio público, de las plazas y las calles por los jóvenes con ocasión de concentraciones multitudinarias, y la legitimación de la cultura urbana juvenil. Esta cultura ha importado aspectos propios de los grandes flujos globales al tiempo que los fusiona con elementos locales, por lo que el resultado es fundamentalmente marroquí, pero abierto al mundo. El hip hop es el estilo que ha calado con mayor fuerza, quizá por la sencillez de las formas musicales o el lugar privilegiado que este estilo otorga a la palabra, en una sociedad en la que la tradición oral sigue muy vigente. Si bien no todos los textos son portadores de mensajes o de protestas que denuncian el paro o la corrupción, sí que cuentan las vivencias de la juventud con sus problemas y esperanzas. Este auge musical es también el reflejo y el producto de la transformación de los medios de comunicación. Con la introducción de las antenas parabólicas, al inicio de los años noventa, irrumpieron los video-clips, mientras que más tarde, a partir de 2000, con el acceso a Internet, la “blogósfera”, “Youtube” y “Daily Motion” tomaron el relevo y transformaron el horizonte de difusión, producción o acceso a la música u otro tipo de creación artística. En paralelo a la música, el cine aparece estos últimos años como el testimonio visual de las experiencias vitales de los jóvenes, en particular de las generaciones urbanas, con películas que han suscitado polémicas y sufrido la amenaza de la censura, tanto por parte de conservadores e islamistas como de ciertos funcionarios del gremio. No obstante, la calidad de las realizaciones y la conexión con la realidad de muchos jóvenes

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ha garantizado cierto éxito comercial y el reconocimiento internacional a películas como Marock (2005), Casanegra (2008) y Amours voilés (2009). Las acusaciones de satanismo a bandas de heavy metal,[10] de “anti-marroquinidad” y libertinaje a los participantes en macro-conciertos, o de injurias a la religión y pornografía a algunas películas,[11] no han conseguido mermar el entusiasmo de los miles de jóvenes que se sienten identificados con este movimiento, ciertamente más hedonista que revolucionario, pero más contestatario que resignado. “El Movimiento del 20 de Febrero”: impertinentes y ciudadanos En la senda de las manifestaciones que se produjeron en Túnez y Egipto a principios de 2011, el “Movimiento del 20 de Febrero” ha revelado algunos aspectos de las transformaciones sociales en curso en Marruecos desde hace algunos años. Algunos jóvenes se han dirigido al Rey vía Facebook para hablar de reformas democráticas, de la destitución del gobierno y la disolución del parlamento, de la independencia de la justicia, de la oficialización de la lengua tamazigh, de la liberación de los prisioneros políticos y de la lucha contra las desigualdades sociales y la garantía de una vida digna para todos. En consecuencia, los promotores de estas reivindicaciones se muestran impertinentes para los guardianes de la etiqueta majzení, al tiempo que evidencian una sensibilidad próxima a la izquierda con la que tienen que acomodarse los islamistas de al-Adl Wal Ihsan (Justicia y Espiritualidad). El movimiento no tiene un centro de gravedad, sino que está deslocalizado y diseminado por todo el país. Se vertebra de forma horizontal y reticular, a medida que progresa la experimentación del día a día. En su seno, el individuo se convierte en actor y mantiene su centralidad dentro de la acción colectiva mediante la interconexión, casi continua, con las diversas redes involucradas en la movilización. Heterogéneo en su composición, las coordinaciones locales funcionan de un modo asambleario y deliberativo, por lo que se observa cierta autonomización de los activistas hacia las direcciones políticas de las distintas organizaciones sociales y políticas que les acompañan. Si bien parece prematuro efectuar un balance de las movilizaciones iniciadas hace varias semanas, cabe resaltar, no obstante, que éstas han proporcionado voz en el espacio público a un colectivo desoído, los jóvenes, y que han publicitado una agenda reformista en ruptura con la confidencialidad y la tibieza a las que nos tenían acostumbrados los memorándums que los partidos políticos entregaban a Palacio. Asimismo, han transgredido las distancias ideológicas con el establecimiento del diálogo entre sectores laicos, islamistas, izquierdistas y amazigh. Teniendo en cuenta el contexto internacional, el riesgo de una inminente crisis gubernamental y el reinicio de las negociaciones con las partes implicadas en el contencioso del Sáhara Occidental, las movilizaciones han empujado a la Monarquía a abrir un proceso de revisión constitucional que, independientemente de su alcance definitivo, modificará la configuración del régimen en la dirección de una mayor democratización. Estos apuntes sobre el éxito del “Movimiento del 20 de Febrero” no impiden que haya que reconocer que no ha conseguido –aún– arrastrar a la mayor parte de la población joven, la cual sigue resignada, a la expectativa o se pronuncia en contra. Así, llama la atención la escasa presencia de la militancia sindical y de los jóvenes de las clases populares.[12] Parece ser que los años de represión han permitido interiorizar los recelos hacia la política y la acción colectiva en amplias capas de la población. Esto lo

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han comprendido los adversarios del movimiento que han agitado el espectro de la manipulación (las acusaciones de servir a los intereses de Argelia y del Frente Polisario), la violencia (los destrozos de bienes por algunos elementos incontrolados y la represión de manifestaciones) y el extremismo (la presencia del islamismo ilegal de al-Adl wal Ihsan). Conclusiones: Los límites del “Movimiento del 20 de Febrero”, desde un punto de vista cuantitativo, no deben hacernos perder de vista ni sus logros ni el hecho de que sus reivindicaciones representan la vanguardia de la agenda reformista y la punta del iceberg de unos cambios sociales que atraviesan la sociedad marroquí desde hace algunos años. En efecto, ese movimiento es revelador de una verdadera ruptura generacional que cuestiona las jerarquías tradicionales inspiradas en el modelo patriarcal. Dicha ruptura se plasma a distintos niveles. En primer lugar, en el proceso de individualización que, si bien se entiende como la afirmación del individuo, muestra la posibilidad de su reconexión con la acción colectiva para la promoción y defensa de bienes públicos. Eso se diferencia del individualismo volcado en exclusiva hacia la búsqueda de la felicidad privada. En segundo lugar, en el manejo de las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación por una generación que sabe aprovechar el poder de instrumentos disponibles en Internet, como Facebook, para crear redes sociales de autocomunicación en el ciberespacio, y sabe conectar estas redes con múltiples blogs y páginas web. En tercer lugar, la constitución de los jóvenes como grupo social y político autónomo con voz legítima ante unos mayores que han desistido, que poco les pueden enseñar y que poco tienen en su haber activista para glorificarse. En cuarto lugar, en el protagonismo y la visibilidad de las mujeres en las movilizaciones, aunque sean minoritarias, que se convierten así en un símbolo de la lucha inter e intrageneracional, por la redefinición de los papeles de varones y mujeres. En quinto y último lugar, el patriotismo como síntesis de una ciudadanía responsable, activa y altruista dentro del descubrimiento de renovadas afinidades panarabistas, conectada con los grandes flujos de la globalización, pero alérgica a cualquier rebufo neocolonial. Cuando el ascensor social no funciona y se pone fin a la esperanza de un futuro mejor que el de los padres, cuando el destino social parece incierto, se impone la lucha por ser reconocido. Por ello, detrás de la reforma política global que moviliza a una parte de la juventud marroquí subyace una misma demanda: la recuperación de la dignidad inherente al estatus de ciudadano en un país de súbditos en el que las relaciones sociales siguen mediatizadas, con demasiada frecuencia, por la sumisión o por el conformismo de una parte de la relación a la otra. La recuperación de la autoestima va acompañada del derecho a participar, opinar y deliberar en pie de igualdad, ya que entre esta nueva generación de jóvenes nada se impone por sí mismo: ni la tradición, ni las normas del grupo de pertenencia. En la sociedad que desea esta nueva generación, todo puede someterse al debate, a la discusión y a la experimentación. Thierry Desrues: Científico titular del Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Córdoba

Thierry Desrues Del cambio social a la transformación del régimen: individualización y acción colectiva de una nueva generación de jóvenes en Marruecos (ARI) ARI 85/2011 -

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4 EDITORIAL ¿Amigos palestinos? Con o sin reconciliación entre Al Fatah y Hamás, los acontecimientos debilitan la posición israelí 06/05/2011 La reconciliación escenificada en El Cairo por las dos principales facciones palestinas es solo el comienzo de una carrera de obstáculos con todo por precisar. El documento firmado por Al Fatah y Hamás -acogido con desconfianza por Washington y con abierta hostilidad por Israel- anuncia un Gobierno tecnocrático que organizará en un año elecciones parlamentarias y presidenciales en los ahora divididos territorios palestinos. Pero no ofrece respuesta a ninguna de las cuestiones clave que enfrentan a los moderados del presidente Mahmud Abbas, que con la ayuda occidental dirige Cisjordania, con los islamistas radicales dueños de la franja de Gaza. En la iniciativa, apadrinada por un Egipto que ya no escribe al dictado de Washington, no se establece cómo se conjugarán las fuerzas de seguridad rivales. Tampoco la manera de zanjar las enormes diferencias entre ambos grupos sobre Israel, en el corazón mismo de su cisma; o la articulación, composición y poderes de su órgano temporal de liderazgo. Hace falta entusiasmo para imaginar una política común entre Hamás, que no reconoce el derecho a la existencia de Israel, proclama la lucha armada y exalta a Bin Laden como un mártir; y Al Fatah, comprometida con la negociación con el Estado judío y que celebra oficialmente la aniquilación del jefe de Al Qaeda. El acuerdo interpalestino, fruto de la necesidad más que de la convicción, es hijo de los acontecimientos que sacuden Oriente Próximo: básicamente, de la caída de Mubarak, vicario de Washington y patrón de Abbas, y del volcán sirio, que amenaza descabalgar al déspota Bachir el Asad, decisivo protector con armas y dinero de Hamás. Unos y otros buscan como primer rédito de su armisticio el reconocimiento de un Estado palestino por la próxima Asamblea General de la ONU, iniciativa a la que se oponen EE UU e Israel. A Netanyahu, noqueado por los terremotos de Egipto y Siria, le ha faltado tiempo para calificar el compromiso como una victoria del terrorismo que hace imposible la paz. Los palestinos no pueden ser mantenidos al margen del despertar árabe que reclama libertad y dignidad para sus pueblos. Acusarles por buscar soluciones a la interminable ocupación israelí de las tierras que deben formar parte de su futuro Estado -como ocurre bajo el Gobierno del intransigente Netanyahu, con el silencio de Obama- es además de inmoral insoportablemente cínico. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Amigos/palestinos/elpepuopi/20110506elpepio4 pi_2/Tes

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4 JOSÉ IGNACIO TORREBLANCA La muerte de Bin Laden Anestesia moral Europa, España, no están en "guerra contra el terror", sino en "lucha contra el terrorismo" 06/05/2011 JOSÉ IGNACIO TORREBLANCA 06/05/2011 Da la impresión de que entre los 10 años, millones de dólares, cientos de miles de horas y miles de personas empleadas en localizar a Bin Laden, nadie dedicó un minuto a pensar qué se haría después de su muerte, ni con su cadáver, ni con sus fotos. Tampoco parece que se dedicara mucho tiempo a afinar la estrategia de comunicación para que el relato de su desaparición reforzara la imagen de Estados Unidos en el mundo, y no la debilitara, como está camino de ocurrir. Que la revista New Yorker haya rescatado la historia de la ejecución del Che Guevara a manos de la CIA después de haber sido apresado vivo lo dice todo sobre cómo la destrucción de un mito puede contribuir a reforzarlo. Así que, la noticia de la década va camino de convertirse en un desastre de relaciones públicas de proporciones incalculables. Para ello, han debido aliarse la ausencia de plan previo alguno y las confusas, contradictorias y cambiantes explicaciones dadas a posteriori sobre todo lo acontecido. Conociendo Estados Unidos, y recordando lo que ocurrió con la ejecución de Sadam Husein, hay que temer que acabaremos viendo las fotos borrosas de su muerte o el vídeo de mala calidad de su singular entierro marino, ceremonia islámica incluida, obtenidas vía el teléfono móvil de algún participante en la operación. Nada resume mejor el desastre de comunicación de este último acto del drama que comenzó en septiembre de 2011 con el atentado contra las Torres Gemelas que dar a Bin Laden el nombre en clave de "Gerónimo", el mítico jefe apache que pasó a la historia americana por (léase bien) su feroz espíritu de resistencia frente a un enemigo superior. Sus biógrafos dicen que durante sus 23 años de confinamiento en la reserva de San Carlos fue sometido a numerosas humillaciones, entre ellas el ser exhibido como un trofeo en la ceremonia inaugural del presidente Theodore Rooselvet y, peor aún, ser obligado a abrazar públicamente la fe cristiana. Así que si de algo habla la biografía de Gerónimo es de cómo la superioridad tecnológica de un pueblo no necesariamente implica su superioridad moral. Por tanto, ese nombre en clave debería haber funcionado como una advertencia de que, en ocasiones, la nobleza sobre el papel de una causa pueda ser extrañamente compatible con la anestesia moral de aquellos que la tienen que defender sobre el terreno. Algunos de los escalofriantes sucesos en los que se han visto envueltas las tropas estadounidenses en Irak y Afganistán, el más reciente un espeluznante relato de asesinatos premeditados a civiles y mutilaciones que publica esta semana la revista Rolling Stone, remiten esa hipersensibilidad con las actuaciones de Estados Unidos al hecho de que su imagen esté bastante enfangada por las torpezas y abusos cometidos desde el 11 de septiembre. El júbilo popular en Times Square y otros lugares públicos de Estados Unidos solo se puede entender si uno comprende que, psicológicamente, ese país sigue inmerso en una guerra. Probablemente Obama pensara en algún momento en la necesidad de desplazar esa guerra desde la CIA y el Pentágono hasta el Departamento de Estado y el FBI, pero da la impresión de que ese objetivo fue abandonado hace tiempo, como prueba el incremento de los ataques con aviones no tripulados en Pakistán bajo su mandato y la 181

reticencia a cerrar Guantánamo. El contraste entre las percepciones a ambos lados del Atlántico es evidente: cuesta imaginar que en España se celebrara en las calles la captura de los jefes del aparato militar de ETA o de los responsables últimos de los atentados de Atocha. Europa, España, no están en "guerra contra el terror", sino en "lucha contra el terrorismo". No son juegos de palabras, sino diferencias que, como vemos, tienen importantes consecuencias. El desconcierto de la Casa Blanca ante las preguntas que se formulan refleja bien esa diferencia: desde la lógica de la guerra, que Bin Laden muriera armado, desarmado o que se le disparara un misil mientras dormía da absolutamente igual, pues era un objetivo legítimo; desde la lógica de la justicia, sin embargo, los detalles son importantes. Con todo, hay un abismo entre hacer preguntas incómodas, pero necesarias en una democracia, y calificar la muerte de Bin Laden como un asesinato extrajudicial. El problema es que, como revela la decisión de dar a Bin Laden el nombre en clave de un apache escapado de una reserva, Obama no ha roto con el legado tejano que George W. Bush le dejó encima de la mesa. [email protected] JOSÉ IGNACIO TORREBLANCA Anestesia moral. Europa, España, no están en "guerra contra el terror", sino en "lucha contra el terrorismo" 06/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaci4 onal/Anestesia/moral/elpepuint/20110506elpep iint_5/Tes

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Why do Americans still dislike atheists? By Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, Friday, April 29, 7:11 PM Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests. Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens. Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close. A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic4 questions of morality4 and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti- Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious. Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.

As individuals, atheists4 tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal4 ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice4 safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought. While many studies show that secular Americans don’t fare as well as the religious when it comes to certain indicators of mental health or subjective well-being, new scholarship is showing that the relationships among atheism, theism, and mental health and well-being are complex. After all, Denmark, which is among the least religious countries in the history of the world, consistently rates as the happiest of nations. And 183

studies of apostates — people who were religious but later rejected their religion — report feeling happier, better and liberated in their post-religious lives.

Nontheism isn’t all balloons and ice cream. Some studies suggest that suicide4 rates are higher among the non-religious. But surveys indicating that religious Americans are better off can be misleading because they include among the non-religious fence-sitters who are as likely to believe in God, whereas atheists who are more convinced are doing about as well as devout believers. On numerous respected measures of societal success — rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug use and crime, as well as economics — high4 levels of secularity are consistently correlated with positive outcomes in first-world nations. None of the secular advanced democracies suffers from the combined social ills seen here in Christian America.

More than 2,000 years ago, whoever wrote Psalm4 14 claimed that atheists were foolish and corrupt, incapable of doing any good. These put-downs have had sticking power. Negative stereotypes of atheists are alive and well. Yet like all stereotypes, they aren’t true — and perhaps they tell us more about those who harbor them than those who are maligned by them. So when the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich engage in the politics of division and destruction by maligning atheists, they do so in disregard of reality. As with other national minority groups, atheism is enjoying rapid growth. Despite the bigotry, the number4 of American nontheists has tripled as a proportion of the general population since the 1960s. Younger generations’ tolerance for the endless disputes of religion is waning fast. Surveys designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans — a fifth of the population — are not believers. Our nonreligious compatriots should be accorded the same respect as other minorities.

More from The4 Washington Post

Spirited Atheist: The4 road to papal sainthood

On Faith: Do4 Atheists need a bible?

Spirited Atheist: Bin4 Laden’s death and the madness of the crowds Gregory Paul is an independent researcher in sociology and evolution. Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, is the author of “Society Without God.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini4 ons/why-do-americans-still-dislike- atheists/2011/02/18/AFqgnwGF_story.html

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4 COMMENT http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f1149b08-773e-11e0-aed6-4 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1PWQ9jiaC The promise of a post-jihad world By Philip Stephens Published: May 5 2011 22:46 | Last updated: May 5 2011 22:46

For a decade the west has looked at the Arab world through the prism of a struggle to defend liberal democracy against the march of violent Islamism. The geopolitical landscape is now being remade by the clamour for accountable government in the Middle East. The desire for freedom at home has trumped enmity towards the west.

4 EDITOR’S CHOICE Opinion: Bin Laden killing buries 9/11 trauma - May-03 4 4 Editorial Comment: A chance to shape Mideast - May-03 Opinion: ISI must end 4 4 Pakistan’s duplicity - May-03 Lex: Bin Laden and the markets - May-03 In depth: After 4 bin Laden - May-03 Cameron backs Pakistan on bin Laden - May-03 The Arab spring, as significant a moment as any since the collapse of communism, demands a leap of imagination: a mindset adjusted to see beyond an array of threats to the flowering of a great opportunity. The west has expended vast amounts of blood and treasure fighting wars. What is needed now are resolve and resources to nurture democracy. The narrative of a generational clash of civilisations looked badly worn long before the killing by the US of Osama4 bin Laden. Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism was a serious threat. It remains so even after the death of its prophet. Anyone who cares about security has only to look at, say, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia. Yet the myriad frustrations, grievances and aspirations of Muslims across the greater Middle East never fitted a single frame. The west’s answer to the terrorist outrage of September 2001 – invasion of Iraq and war in Afghanistan – gave the seething discontents an illusory coherence.

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The hesitant western response to this year’s uprisings4 betrays the same misconception. If friendly despots fall, the whispered argument runs, the likely winners are the ideological bedfellows of bin Laden. Sunni and Shia, nationalists and advocates of a caliphate, jihadis and students in Tahrir Square; all have been heaped together as foot soldiers, real or potential, in the battalions of extremists. “Better the devil you know…” is a mantra heard too often in too many foreign ministries. Thankfully, it is too late for that, in spite of the murderous efforts of Bashir al-Assad’s regime to silence protests4 in Syria. Those who once styled themselves foreign policy realists have been left flat-footed and embarrassed by the brave young idealists taking on the tyrants. William Hague put it eloquently this week in a speech reflecting on the strategic implications of the uprisings. Britain’s foreign secretary observed that some had seen the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as the true expression of Muslim grievance. But the real voice of the Muslim world had been heard “in Tahrir Square in 2011, not at Ground Zero in 2001”. Doubtless some of the darker fears of sceptics will be realised. The transition to open societies in states accustomed to decades of repression cannot be anything but chaotic.

The brutality employed by Mr Assad and the standoff in Libya4 speak to the potential for more violent upheaval. In some places the despots may survive for a time: shameful though it is to say, you do not have to press western policymakers too hard before they suggest that life might be that much easier were Mr Assad to hold on. No one talks about political emancipation in Saudi Arabia. Yet the momentum is unmistakable. To quote Mr Hague again: “No government on earth can resist democratic change for ever if their people want it and demand it.” That is why a profound change in the western mindset is so important. As long as stability is seen as synonymous with the old order, the west will at once surrender moral authority in the region and undermine its own strategic security.

This week’s agreement between Fatah4 and Hamas to hold fresh Palestinian elections presents one immediate test. The old reflex would be to say that the deal should be dismissed out of hand. The west does not treat with terrorists; and, as long as Hamas pursues its aims by killing Israelis, then a two-state solution is in any case a chimera. Look through another lens and there is the glimmer of an opportunity. A durable peace deal requires reconciliation between Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas is not quite the monolithic organisation of “they-are-all-jihadis” myth. And terrorists have been known to renounce violence in return for a place at the table. The political composition of the Palestinian Authority hardly matters if there is a shared willingness to make peace with Israel on the basis of two states whose borders and security are permanently assured. Benjamin Netanyahu takes another view. The Israeli prime minister has sabotaged every effort by the US administration to promote talks. He has set himself against the Arab insurgency. The calculation seems plain enough. An elected Palestinian Authority ready to renounce violence would claim international legitimacy. Mr Netanyahu prefers deals with Arab tyrants. 186

The choice left to Israel’s friends – above all to the US – is between being held hostage by Mr Netanyahu and setting out a framework for a fair settlement: between playing the old Middle East game of double standards or showing they are now ready to be even handed. The essential parameters of such a settlement are well known: two states based on 1967 borders, a shared capital in Jerusalem, absolute guarantees of Israel’s security and a negotiated agreement on refugees. What is required is formal ratification at the UN Security Council. For more than half a century the charge of double standards has been the west’s enemy in the Middle East. The Arab spring presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to banish it. The immediate danger is that the economic expectations of the pro-democracy movements have run far ahead of their capacity to deliver. Western governments have spent many billions invading Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan. Surely they can now offer aid, trade and investment to reformist Arab governments? The signals so far have been mixed. Mr Hague suggests an offer by the European Union of a free trade area and, eventually, a customs union. That would be a small start. Were the US and Europe to invest even a 10th of what has been spent on bombs, the effect would be transformative. Ten years ago, history was hijacked by democracy’s Islamist enemies. Now it is being written afresh by Muslim cheerleaders for freedom. This is no time to hesitate over choosing sides.

[email protected] Philip Stephens The promise of a post-jihad world May 5 2011 22:46 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f1149b08-773e-11e0-aed6-4 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1PWHpWoAx

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4 TRIBUNA: ANDRÉ GLUCKSMANN Un intelectual molesto Bernard-Henri Lévy tiene el mérito de haber señalado el peligro que corrían los insurgentes libios Después de Bosnia y Ruanda, el riesgo era una no intervención egoísta y cobarde ANDRÉ GLUCKSMANN 05/05/2011 No es muy querido. Ocupa el primer plano desde hace tiempo, es además un rico heredero desde la cuna y agita al todo París por su empuje de estrella de rock y por su reputación, discutida como corresponde, de filósofo. En resumen, lo preciso para repeler a los espíritus tristes. A pesar de sus profesiones de fe socialista repetidas hasta la saciedad, los puros y los duros del partido no ceden: aunque vote siempre "bien", a veces piensa bastante mal. Un sobrino mío me ha confesado que hay en provincias salas de profesores en las que se siguen echando pestes contra "les nouveaux philosophes" que desacreditaron al marxismo entonces dominante: 40 años más tarde, eso no se nos perdona, tanto él como yo seguimos siendo unos apóstatas infectos. Así que cabe comprender, sin por ello justificar, que la intervención militar de Francia, Inglaterra, etcétera, parezca girar más en torno a Bernard-Henri Lévy que en torno a la suerte de los civiles de Bengasi y de Misrata. Cuando se le señala el mundo exterior, el ingenuo mira al dedo. Se parlotea en los cafés, los diplomáticos se ofenden, los consejeros del príncipe denuncian al intruso, hay ministros que se sienten marginados... en cuanto a los libios, amenazados con una masacre, esa es la menor de las preocupaciones del gacetillero. ¡Socorro, un intelectual pisotea parterres reservados! En el extranjero se sorprenden: decididamente los intelectuales franceses no pueden parar quietos. ¡Si al menos se pusieran todos de acuerdo! Pero no, en cuanto hay uno que se compromete los otros se contra-comprometen. Mediante una ilusión retrospectiva creemos que los filósofos de la Ilustración formaban un frente unido. Lo cierto es que Voltaire y Diderot por un lado y Rousseau por otro se enfrentaban cuchillo en ristre, no escatimando ni un chisme, denunciándose recíprocamente a las autoridades y movilizando a sus amigos ingleses para tramar oscuros complots. Desde siempre, París es una jungla, "un reino animal del espíritu" según el gran Hegel, quien comparte la repulsa de los serios y ponderados universitarios alemanes por las broncas de sus vecinos del otro lado del Rin. Así y todo, la libertad de pensar, de romper, de inventar, parece tener ese precio. El mundo cambia más deprisa que las instituciones que pretenden evaluarlo y gestionarlo. En menos de medio siglo, el mapa de Europa nunca había sufrido una transformación mayor: adiós a Yalta y adiós al telón de acero. En 30 años, 1.300 millones de chinos han abandonado la economía comunista y sueñan con la libertad. A día de hoy, el horizonte "infranqueable" del marxismo (Sartre) ha sido perfectamente franqueado, malque les pese a algunos nostálgicos. Semejante aceleración de la historia fastidia. Nuestro venerable Quai d'Orsay no se apercibió de las disidencias del Este que llevaron a la caída del muro de Berlín ni tampoco lo ha hecho con las revueltas árabes. Los mamuts administrativos franceses tienen el pensamiento lento, y raro, de ahí la necesidad de un debate público sin ellos, o incluso contra ellos. De ahí la utilidad de los impertinentes.

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Se diga lo que se diga, el problema no es Bernard-Henri Lévy. Este último tiene el mérito de haber señalado con el dedo la peligrosa soledad de los insurgentes de Bengasi frente a las promesas sanguinarias proferidas por Gadafi e hijo, y de haber sido oído después por un presidente a veces audaz. Es de lamentar que ningún diplomático o político haya tomado la iniciativa; después de Srebrenica, Grozny, Ruanda y Darfur era evidente el riesgo de una no-intervención egoísta, cobarde y deshonrosa. Incluso la ONU, poco proclive a arañar en la sacrosanta soberanía de los Estados, homologa, siguiendo a Kouchner, una necesidad de protección internacional de los civiles. Nada hay menos improvisado, irreflexivo o angelical que la intervención en Libia: por una vez se previene el crimen antes que deplorarlo hipócritamente a posteriori. Un compromiso de intelectuales resulta necesariamente limitado. No les corresponde preparar -y mucho menos condu-cir- las operaciones militares y diplomáticas. Se equivoquen o no, su responsabilidad se limita al papirotazo inicial que hace evidentes los riesgos y las urgencias. La autoridad que ellos reivindican, quiérase o no, no reposa sobre diplomas ni títulos académicos, se sostiene por la sola consideración, tan desnuda como lúcida, de un estado de cosas. Y por las consecuencias que frente a él implica nuestra actuación o nuestra apatía. Maurice Clavel bautizaba antaño como "periodismo trascendental" esa voluntad de mantener los ojos abiertos sin ceder al qué dirán... Simone Signoret, más prosaicamente, hablaba de "recordadores". Nada hay en ello que obedezca a una conducta misionera. Los conflictos de hoy día no enfrentan a ángeles o a buenos contra malos o demonios. En la I Guerra Mundial, de 10 millones de muertos el 80% fueron soldados. En la II, las víctimas militares y las civiles se repartieron al 50%. Desde entonces, la proporción de muertos sin uniforme se ha invertido y alcanza entre el 80% y el 90%. Las matanzas actuales son principalmente guerras contra los civiles, las mujeres y los niños primero. De ahí la necesidad superior de retener, si es posible, el brazo de los asesinos. En cuanto al porvenir que les corresponda a quienes hayamos ayudado a sobrevivir, ese es asunto suyo. Al consagrar todo un lienzo, que se haría célebre, a la masacre de Gernika (1937), su pintor suprimió todo referente político. Ni un puño alzado, ni una bandera. Algunos años más tarde, el público comprendió: Coventry, Varsovia, Oradour e innumerables ciudades mártires se anunciaban en el Guernica. Todos somos hijos de Picasso.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/in4 telectual/molesto/elpepiopi/20110505elpepiop i_4/Tes

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4 TRIBUNA: SERGIO BITAR ¿Paralelismos entre Mubarak y Pinochet? En Egipto existen condiciones favorables para un proceso de democratización con una impronta cívica y secular. Las transiciones en América Latina pueden aportar pistas y ejemplos interesantes a los egipcios SERGIO BITAR 05/05/2011 Las transiciones de dictadura a democracia tienen ciertos rasgos comunes. Las de América del Sur pueden servir a la transición egipcia. Tuve la oportunidad de observar sus primeros momentos en directo, con los ojos de quien vivió entera la transición chilena y fuera invitado a exponer sus enseñanzas. Me reuní con dirigentes de las principales fuerzas políticas y sociales en El Cairo, y fui sometido a muchas preguntas que me permitieron constatar la existencia de paralelos relevantes. A primera vista, uno tiende a descartar las similitudes. Hay tradiciones democráticas e institucionales muy distintas; en Egipto las religiones inciden de manera muy compleja en la política, coptos, suníes y chiíes deben equilibrar sus convivencias; es una zona estratégica delicada, con Israel en su frontera y el petróleo en la yugular de Occidente. Sin embargo, también existen coincidencias sustantivas. Me atrevo a afirmar que en Egipto existen condiciones favorables para un proceso de democratización, con una impronta cívica y secular. El rumbo me parece irreversible. Se abrió un enorme cauce ciudadano por la libertad y la dignidad, que cambio el horizonte de lo posible en la mente de los egipcios. Aquí valen los paralelos. Después de Tahrir, que puso término al Gobierno de Mubarak, y del plebiscito que dijo no a Pinochet, los procesos abiertos guardan similitud. Los dos riesgos más temidos -un giro al fundamentalismo o la ingobernabilidad- me parecen improbables. Respecto del primero, los Hermanos Musulmanes han reiterado su decisión de constituirse como partido, hasta ahora prohibido, de no presentar candidato presidencial, integrar una coalición por elecciones libres y participar en un Gobierno de transición. Acaba de escindirse un grupo (Wasat). Se señala frecuentemente en Egipto que ellos pueden ganar las elecciones por ser los más organizados. Es posible que inicialmente crezcan, pero distinto es ser movimiento que partido, y luego competir con varias otras opciones, en libertad. En cuanto al riesgo de ingobernabilidad, las fuerzas armadas son organizadas, poderosas y apreciadas por la ciudadanía. Egipto cuenta con un Estado más consolidado, un poder judicial con cierta autonomía e instituciones capaces de gobernar. Creo que el peligro es otro: un empantanamiento de la transición por la debilidad y dispersión de las fuerzas emergentes. Y aquí surge un primer paralelo: las transiciones exitosas lograron conformar amplias coaliciones democráticas. El futuro de la democracia egipcia dependerá de la capacidad de conformar tal coalición. Existen numerosos partidos pequeños y frágiles, sin coordinación ni implantación territorial; y grupos de jóvenes líderes sin articulación permanente y con una capacidad de movilización en descenso. Ellos pueden presionar pero no conducir. Los líderes sociales jóvenes, hombres y mujeres, representan una fuente inspiracional de la revolución. Son una nueva generación, más educada y de cultura democrática. Su conocimiento de las tecnologías de comunicación puede ser una importante innovación para la diseminación 190

de ideas. La calidad de la transición egipcia dependerá de la forma como ellos se articulen para preservar ese rasgo único de la transición: la activa participación ciudadana. En estos ámbitos hay espacio para intercambiar experiencias de América del Sur, Europa del Sur, Europa Central, Indonesia o Turquía. Las coaliciones que nacen para afrontar una transición suelen focalizarse en tres metas inmediatas: condiciones para elecciones libres y limpias, acuerdo electoral para elegir una mayoría en el Congreso y respaldo al primer Gobierno democrático. Si logran éxito, se vuelcan luego a temas estratégicos, priorizando el fortalecimiento de las instituciones, el crecimiento de la economía y la inclusión social. Este proceso recién comienza en Egipto y puede acelerarse. Hay ciertas reglas y procedimientos, ya probados, que pueden ser parte de una colaboración internacional. Una segunda cuestión crítica es la relación con las fuerzas armadas. En Egipto los militares acompañaron la "revolución", no la propiciaron ni impidieron. Han realizado el referéndum aprobatorio de las primeras enmiendas constitucionales y fijado el calendario electoral de Parlamento y presidente durante 2011. Han encargado nuevas propuestas de Ley Electoral y Ley de Partidos. Es un hecho positivo, si se compara con las dictaduras sudamericanas. En América del Sur, la transición se inició contra las dictaduras militares. Aun reconociendo la diferencia del rol de los militares en Egipto y Chile, hay un segundo paralelo. Al partir, en ambos países el poder total estaba o está en manos de las Fuerzas Armadas y, cuando la contraparte civil es débil las fuerzas castrenses podrían extender su presencia en el Gobierno, involucrándose en la gestión cotidiana, que es azarosa. Una buena transición supone el progresivo alejamiento de las Fuerzas Armadas de la gestión de Gobierno. Solo puede facilitarlo una fuerza democratizadora capaz de una negociación entre interlocutores civiles válidos y militares. Una coalición con voz única es esencial. La relación cívico militar debe apuntar a la subordinación de las fuerzas armadas a la autoridad civil y a manejar dos temas complejos. El primero es la demanda ciudadana por justicia (violación de derechos humanos o corrupción). Debe institucionalizarse pronto, con instancias como la Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, creada en Chile y replicada en Sudáfrica años después, y luego dejar las investigaciones en manos del Poder Judicial. Las sanciones deben ser ejemplarizantes, incluso recurriendo a tribunales internacionales, para prevenir su repetición y disuadir retornos a la arena política. Esta es una gran lección de América del Sur. El otro tema para una política militar en una transición es asegurarles el financiamiento adecuado para que cumplan y se atengan a sus funciones profesionales. Un tercer paralelo es la participación de la coalición democrática en la conformación de un bloque electoral que concuerde un programa de gobierno, elija y luego otorgue respaldo en el Parlamento al primer Gobierno democrático. En Egipto la velocidad de los acontecimientos ha sido muy rápida para hacerlo a tiempo, pero cuanto antes se articule mejor será. Las nuevas demandas afloran muy rápido y los adversarios no dan tregua. No basta con elegir un buen presidente, se le debe otorgar respaldo para que gobierne bien y así se legitime la transición. En este terreno vale la pena destacar dos enseñanzas traspasables para ejercer el primer Gobierno: se requiere asegurar el orden público y aplicar un programa económico serio y sostenible. El orden público debe garantizarse para disipar el temor. El miedo juega

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contra los cambios. La policía debe ser reorientada, pasar del acoso a la protección de la gente. En Egipto, es prioritario el orden para restablecer el turismo, gran generador de empleo. La salida de capitales o el aumento del desempleo deben anticiparse. Las transiciones exitosas han de generar confianza con políticas macroeconómicas sensatas, programas especiales de empleo, mientras se complementa progresivamente una red de protección social. En estas materias, América del Sur posee experiencias útiles. Sin embargo, el éxito requiere una actitud innovadora y veloz de los organismos financieros multinacionales, especialmente el FMI y el Banco Mundial, para ayudar a sortear la reducción de reservas y el déficit fiscal. No sería comprensible actuar con premura para solventar una crisis financiera en naciones desarrolladas y con lenidad para asistir el despegue de una democracia en un país emergente, vital en la región. Chile y Egipto son distintos, Mubarak y Pinochet también. Pero hay rasgos comunes en las transiciones, y un intercambio de experiencias de sudamericanos, europeos, asiáticos, contando lo que funcionó y lo que no, puede hacer una diferencia. La revolución egipcia es una gran esperanza para la democracia y la paz en el mundo. Así como los eventos de Túnez se propagaron como vendaval, así también el ejemplo egipcio puede difundirse veloz. Para ello ha de contar con el respaldo de todos los demócratas de verdad.

Sergio Bitar, político chileno, fue ministro de Allende. Tras sufrir prisión y exilio durante la dictadura, contribuyó a crear la Concertación y fue ministro de los presidentes Lagos y Bachelet. Actualmente es un senior visiting fellow del Inter American Dialogue, Washington.

SERGIO BITAR¿Paralelismos entre Mubarak y Pinochet? 05/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Pa4 ralelismos/Mubarak/Pinochet/elpepiopi/2011 0505elpepiopi_11/Tes

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In killing Osama bin Laden, U.S. had the law on its side By Editorial, Wednesday, May 4, 8:07 PM

SOME ARE questioning the legality of the raid in Pakistan that resulted in the4 death of Osama bin Laden. Was it lawful for a team of Navy SEALs to launch a mission in Abbottabad without permission from Pakistani leaders? Did they comply with international strictures when they killed the al-Qaeda leader rather than capturing him and bringing him before a court of law? In a word: yes. The analysis must begin with the events of Sept. 11, 2001, when about 3,000 innocents were murdered by Osama bin Laden and his forces. There was no guesswork involved in pinpointing the culprits: He took credit for the bloodshed and reiterated his call for attacks against the United States and its allies. In passing the Authorization4 for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) just one week later, Congress explicitly empowered the president to take all appropriate and necessary action against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and all those who helped or harbored them. It was, in short, a declaration of war, and Osama bin Laden was rightly targeted for his central role in the atrocities. Absent a surrender, there is no question that U.S. forces would have been entitled to shoot him on sight had they encountered him on an Afghan battlefield. But that is not where the terrorist leader spent his time. After lengthy and intricate intelligence- gathering, the Obama administration tracked him to a heavily4 secured mansion in a city outside Islamabad populated by military officers and the country’s elite military academy. With suspicions high that Osama bin Laden enjoyed some semblance of official protection, the Obama administration rightly decided to proceed without notifying Pakistan. International law recognizes a country’s inherent right to act in self-defense, and it makes no distinction between vindicating these rights through a drone strike or through a boots-on-the-ground operation. Administration officials have described the raid as a “kill or capture” mission and asserted that the SEALs would have taken Osama bin Laden alive had he surrendered and presented no threat to U.S. personnel or the others in the compound that night. This, according to official accounts, did not happen.

Much has been made of the disclosure that Osama4 bin Laden was unarmed, but this, too, is irrelevant in determining whether the operation was lawful. The SEALs entered the compound on a war footing, in the middle of the night, prepared to encounter hostile fire in what they believed to be the enemy leader’s hideout. They reported that they became embroiled in a firefight once inside; they had no way of knowing whether Osama bin Laden himself was armed. Even if he had signaled surrender, there is no reason to believe that danger had evaporated. As Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said4 during a congressional hearing on Wednesday: “From a Navy SEAL perspective, you 193

had to believe that this guy was a walking IED,” prepared to blow up himself and those around him or possibly to detonate an explosive that would have engulfed the entire house. It is easy in the light of day to second-guess decisions made in the heat of war. It is particularly easy for those who refuse to acknowledge that war in the first place. Based on information released by the administration, the covert military operation that brought down the most wanted terrorist in the world appears to have been gutsy and well executed. It was also lawful. © 2011 The Washington Post Company Editorial In killing Osama bin Laden, U.S. had the law on its side May , 8:07 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-killing-osama-bin-laden-us-had-the-law-4 on-its-side/2011/05/04/AFFCvRrF_story.html

Posted at 12:15 PM ET, 05/02/2011 Bin Laden’s death and the madness of crowds By Susan Jacoby

People cheer and wave U.S. flags outside the White House as President Barack Obama delivers remarks to the nation on the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, in Washington May 1, 2011. Al Qaeda's elusive leader Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion outside the Pakistani capital Islamabad, Obama said. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST) (JIM YOUNG - REUTERS) I suppose that someone, somewhere in the United States finds it ethically repugnant that our government hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. I am not that someone. It is just and necessary that this evil man was finally punished for the mass murders he 194

engineered on September 11, 2001. But I am repelled by the scenes of mindless jubilation, from Times4 Square to the 4 park in front of the White House, that erupted after

President4 Obama delivered the news in a properly sober tone Sunday night. I am even more repelled by the pundits who began blathering Monday morning about the renaissance of patriotism they discerned in the crowds of young people (mainly men) who materialized on the streets to chant “USA…USA,” on the mall to strip off their clothes in the reflecting pool, and near the bars around Times Square to lift a few cold ones after literally wrapping themselves in the flag. On NBC’s4 Morning Joe, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal did everything but crow when she declared that the killing of Bin Laden sends a wonderful message to children because it demonstrates that “bad guys do get caught.” Mike Barnicle, another regular member of the commentariat at the table, saw the can-do spirit of America resurrected and predicted that regular guys looking for jobs would resume the search with more of a spring in their steps. This is the sort of sentimental hogwash that has elevated unreason to a fundamental principle of American public life. “Bad guys do get caught.” One very bad guy was caught in this instance by years of intelligence work and by the Navy SEALs, the most elite military unit in the nation’s armed forces. That’s it. The episode says nothing about the general competence or achievements of Americans as a people or America as a nation. I’m wondering if all of those patriotic young people will be motivated to actually vote in the next election. And I didn’t notice any lines Monday morning outside military recruiting offices. Talking about national pride is cheap, and today’s young Americans have an absolute assurance that they will not have to risk their lives for their country unless they choose to do so. What we saw in the streets Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday morning was a demonstration of unearned joy. Far from home, a superbly trained military unit did what professional warriors do—took out an enemy of this country. Nothing less, nothing more. I was watching the New York Mets play the Philadelphis Phillies when the first rumors about Bin Laden’s death reached the stadium. You could see people getting the news from their cellphones and passing it to their neighbors, as the first chants of “USA” began in the crowd. This scene—people attending a sporting event while seeking additional diversion on their personal digital devices—is more than a metaphor for the way we conduct war now. It is the way we conduct war now. If there is a moral here, it is emphatically not the childish mantra that “bad guys do get caught.” It is that unearned happiness is a fleeting, unreliable commodity that has nothing to do with reason, justice, or what it takes to build a decent society and a decent world. By Susan Jacoby | 12:15 PM ET, 05/02/2011 Susan Jacoby Bin Laden’s death and the madness of crowds12:15 PM ET, 05/02/2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/spirite4 d-atheist/post/bin-ladens-death-and-the- madness-of-crowds/2011/05/02/AFqhEPZF_blog.html

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4 05/04/2011 04:01 PM The World from Berlin President Barack Obama's 'Retaliatory Justice' While relief that Osama bin Laden has finally been eliminated is widespread, many in Europe and Germany are concerned about the implications of the targeted killing. German commentators on Wednesday say celebrating the al- Qaida leader's death is a blunder. The first reactions in the US, Europe and elsewhere were euphoria and relief. Osama bin Laden, author of some of the worst terror attacks the world has ever seen was dead. Justice, said US President Barack Obama, had been done. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that she was pleased that the prince of terror had been killed. In the three days since bin Laden's demise in his villa not far from Islamabad, however, some have begun having second thoughts about the US Special Forces operation. Europe, and particularly Germany, are uncomfortable with what looks increasingly like a targeted killing. Reports that bin Laden was not armed at the time of his death have only served to reinforce such unease. Merkel herself has come under fire from politicians across the political spectrum in Germany for her initial reaction. And Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has likewise warned that too much crowing over bin Laden's death might not ultimately be helpful to relations between the West and the Muslim world. Some German commentators on Wednesday are likewise uncomfortable with the implications the US operation has for international law. Others voice doubt as to whether the strike will, in the end, improve Obama's chances at re-election in 2012. Financial daily Handelsblatt writes: "Osama bin Laden was a criminal. Thus, from a political perspective there are reasons for seeing his killing as unavoidable. But that Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama celebrated bin Laden's death in his speech with the words 'justice has been done,' and that the German chancellor supported this with an expression of her happiness over his death are shameful blunders. They place approval on an act that violates both the international prohibition of force and humanitarian law." "The justice that Barack Obama seeks is a retaliatory justice. However if future global justice is realized not in constitutional proceedings where criminals receive a trial, but instead through quick targeted killings, then what French philosopher Jacques Derrida prophesied will come true. In relation to the techniques with which they operate, terrorist networks and state systems will become indistinguishable." The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes: "Love thy neighbor as thyself, says one of the most important basic precepts of Christianity. This principle is one of the hardest to follow, much more difficult to uphold than the ban on murder." "Just how thinly the layer of Christian culture coats the low, archaic instincts of humans rarely shows itself as clearly as it did the day after the liquidation of the Islamist terrorist leader Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces. President Obama, a Christian, said in all seriousness that with bin Laden 'justice had been done,' as though there were no American constitution, no justice, no law." 196

"The US violated a number of principles of human rights with its operation against bin Laden. This is supposed to be an example to Arab democracies? Obama also threw overboard much freshly earned trust by tossing Osama bin Laden's corpse overboard from the USS Carl Vinson into the Arabian Sea. In his 2009 Cairo speech he called for respect for the human rights of the individual and for tradition.... To misrepresent dumping a corpse as a proper Muslim ceremony is a mockery." The mass-circulation tabloid Bild writes: "'I cannot eat as much as I'd like to vomit.' These strong old words from the painting genius Max Liebermann best express the feelings that arise when one hears the latest statements by the Greens about the death of Osama bin Laden." "Osama's death was probably an 'execution,' criticizes Hans-Christian Ströbele. An 'act of war,' says parliamentarian Tom Koenigs. Excuse me? Western armies --including the Bundeswehr -- have been hunting the worst terrorist in the world for years with much bloodletting. And in the end his death stirs the Green sense of justice." "What chance did Osama's killers give the people in the World Trade Center? Those burned, shattered, or who jumped from the 100th floor in a panic? For bin Laden, a human life was nothing." "No, Mr. Ströbele, the chancellor is right. It is right that this misanthrope is dead." The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes: "Officially it was a sea burial, but it was more of an ocean dumping of political hazardous waste: US soldiers threw the body of the al-Qaida chief into the sea. That is ugly, but comprehensible. The grave of the terror leader could have become a pilgrimage site for his followers. But does bin Laden leave the Arab-Muslim world anything behind to hold onto?" "Anyone who celebrates the death of the al-Qaida leader as a victory over militant Islam is mistaken. The terror group could be dying off, but new forms of jihad could arise under certain conditions. Only just, modern social conditions provide protection from bin Laden's legacy in Muslim nations. With the Arab Spring, the people are moving in this direction, without help from the West." "The victory over al-Qaida -- if it comes -- will be far more than the success of American high-tech warriors. It will also be to the credit of the Muslims in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya." The Financial Times Deutschland writes: "Bin Laden's death presents a big chance. US President Barack Obama must now keep his promises to build bridges to the Muslim world. Above all he must push for a fair and neutral agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. At the same time the West must define itself as a hearty friend of the Arab society that is rising from the ruins of dictatorship." "Bin Laden became famous as the Muslims were seeking a way out of their dependence on the West. But he wanted to take them several hundred years into the past. The Muslims must now find a way out of this political cul-de-sac. The heroes of extremism are dead or dying, the ideology is bankrupt."

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The conservative Die Welt writes: "Mission accomplished? The goals of the last 10 years of fighting, dying and killing have not been reached objectively." "Afghanistan is and remains a country without any reliable governing power, where terrorists continue to find refuge." "Revenge for 9/11 -- that was the logic of Operation Enduring Freedom for many Americans. The death of bin Laden is enough for them now. Election campaigns and budgetary restraints are also an issue. The West's long-planned retreat from Afghanistan will likely be accelerated. Bin Laden would have been pleased." The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes: "The domestic political outcomes of the death of Public Enemy Number One are likely easier to predict than in foreign and security policy: They will probably be limited." "George H. W. Bush lost to the widely unknown democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 despite his shining victory against Saddam Hussein, because the economy failed to gain momentum. For Obama the gutsy operation against bin Laden will mean little in the face of the enormous federal debt, the gaping budget deficit and high unemployment." "In a paradoxical turn, America's waning fear of terrorism after bin Laden's death could reduce Obama's chance of re-election. The saying, 'It's the economy stupid!' got Clinton into the White House in 1992. The message will be the same in 2012." -- Kristen Allen URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,760604,00.html4 Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

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• President5 Barack Obama's Speech: 'Justice Has Been Done' (05/02/2011)

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5 05/04/2011 12:49 PM German Terrorism Expert 'No One in Al-Qaida Can Replace Bin Laden' The death of Osama bin Laden hits al-Qaida hard: The terrorist network hasn't played any role in the Arab revolutions, and now its charismatic leader is gone. Terrorism expert Guido Steinberg explains who will try to fill the void, and why this is a major success for President Obama. SPIEGEL ONLINE: What does the death of Osama bin Laden mean for the democracy movement in the Arab world? Guido Steinberg: It affirms one result of the revolutions: We have seen that al-Qaida has played no role whatsoever in all of these countries over the past few months, because the organization has become fully irrelevant politically. Bin Laden's death puts an exclamation point on that. In the future, al-Qaida will be even less capable of influencing the fate of the region. SPIEGEL ONLINE: But won't al-Qaida have to try, now more than ever, to play a role in the unrest? Steinberg: They won't succeed. The revolutionary movements will be carried out by opponents of al-Qaida: secularists, women, democrats and mainstream Islamists. Their creed is non-violence. With that, for example, they achieved the downfall of Mubarak's regime in Egypt, which al-Qaida also had tried, but failed to achieve. Without bin Laden the organization will be even less noticable. But that does not apply to the terrorist branch. Al-Qaida will continue to carry out attacks, and that will possibly even escalate. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why? Steinberg: Because the conditions for al-Qaida carrying out operations in many Arab countries have improved due to this phase of unrest. SPIEGEL ONLINE: So could it be that the feared revenge attacks directly affect these Arab states? Steinberg: The most important goal of al-Qaida will now, of course, be to strike at American targets. And naturally in Egypt and Tunisia there are US facilities. Even when they are well-guarded, one could assume that al-Qaida would target such locations for retaliation, particularly in Yemen, where the organization has a very strong branch. Nevertheless, I do not believe that violent terrorism will surpass the level we have had in past years. Al-Qaida is no longer capable of that. SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the end, bin Laden was no longer the operational head of the network. What kind of difference will his death make for al-Qaida's potential force? Steinberg: In the short-term it won't really change anything. The network's planners and operational chiefs have directed terrorism in recent years from North Waziristan, probably without any influence from bin Laden. And the regional branches of the 199

organization handle the terrorist activities in Iraq, Yemen, or Algeria largely independently. This threat, for Germany and for other Western countries, will persist even after bin Laden's death. In the long run, the loss of bin Laden means a giant weakening of al-Qaida. As long as he opposed the Americans, he encouraged the movement. That is now over. Moreover, there is no one in al-Qaida who can replace bin Laden's charismatic leadership. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who will move into his position? Steinberg: Of course there are some candidates. But they will not be fully able to fill the void, because bin Laden was an important unifying figure for al-Qaida. There were always conflicts in the organization, such as over the dominance of the Egyptians. Ayman al-Zawahiri, for example, is not a unifying figure. He is the head of the Egyptian group, and, on top of that, he is not a charismatic person. Nevertheless, I see him as bin Laden's successor. Then there is the most important religious authority of al- Qaida, Abu Yahia al-Libi. Since his 2005 escape from the US prison compound at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the Libyan has played a very important role as the network's propagandist. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Will anything change for the security situation and threat level of the Western military alliance in Afghanistan? Steinberg: No. Al-Qaida only plays a supporting role in Afghanistan: The organization provides terrorism know-how to the insurgents, finances attacks and trains attackers. Bin Laden had no influence on that. SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the United States, the death of Bin Laden is being celebrated, as if terrorism has been defeated. What does the loss of the al-Qaida leader really mean? Steinberg: For the US it is without a doubt the greatest success in the war on terrorism, even when this won't be over for a long time. One of the primary problems with the American war on terror is that the country lost its focus in 2002. It pulled a lot of intelligence personnel and special forces units out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and instead concentrated on Iraq. The Bush administration always spoke of the war on terror, but it primarily waged war against Iraq. The Obama administration corrected that and has delivered a great success. SPIEGEL ONLINE: So is this a personal achievement for President Obama? Steinberg: Absolutely. His priorities were correctly the opposite those of his predecessor -- and it was the only way that bin Laden could be eliminated. Interview conducted by Florian Gathmann

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5 05/04/2011 01:55 PM A Symbol of the Nation's Mood 'Europeans Find the Ground Zero Celebrations Somewhat Embarrassing' The death of Osama bin Laden has raised important questions about how far a country can go in the desire for revenge. In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, German political scientist Herfried Münkler discusses whether democracies can carry out targeted killings and talks about the "unthinking naïveté" of the American celebrations at Ground Zero.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Münkler, US special forces have killed5 al-Qaida leader

Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Can a democratic country kill someone like this, without5 due process or a trial? Münkler: The answer is an unqualified yes. A democracy is, like a monarchy or an aristocracy, a form of rule. As such, it is justified in resolutely protecting the lives of its citizens as a matter of course and being prepared to take the lives of its enemies. But when it comes to the killing of Osama bin Laden, this question doesn't even arise. If you believe the US government's version of events, US special forces asked bin Laden to surrender. He refused, and therefore met with the same fate that would befall, for example, a mafia boss in Germany or Italy in the same situation. SPIEGEL ONLINE: German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted by saying she was "glad" that the US had managed to kill bin Laden. She is now being criticized in Germany for expressing satisfaction at his death. Is it acceptable to celebrate the death of a man, even if he was a mass murderer? Münkler: The question of revenge did not play a major role for Ms. Merkel, in my opinion. She just happened to express herself in an unfortunate way. Her statement shows the semantic insensitivity of a trained scientist. (Eds note: Merkel is a physicist by training.) Instead, Merkel could have said something like: 'I am pleased that the problem of Osama bin Laden being at liberty has been solved' or 'I am pleased that my colleague Obama has achieved such a success.' SPIEGEL ONLINE: How should politicians deal with the desire for revenge? Münkler: Two thousand years ago, a Roman politician would have been able to publicly express his pleasure at getting his revenge. The crucial difference is that Western politicians today are people who are influenced by Christianity, people who are bound to the idea of mercy. Only someone who believes in the existence of 'evil' and who does not explain 'evil' in terms of an unhappy childhood, someone who upholds the 201

Old Testament principle of an eye for eye and a tooth for tooth, is justified in publicly expressing their joy at the death of an enemy and their satisfaction at getting revenge. The Americans' reactions to bin Laden's death therefore mainly reflect the fact that they have different values (from Europeans). SPIEGEL ONLINE: At Ground Zero in New York, people openly rejoiced about the death of bin Laden. The images were reminiscent of Muslims celebrating in the Gaza Strip after the 9/11 attacks. Do you think that is acceptable? Münkler: For European observers, these kinds of public gatherings are indeed somewhat embarrassing, because they demonstrate a kind of unthinking naïveté, and also because there is something provocative about them. But it was only a small number of Americans who demonstrated their feelings so openly, just as in 2001 it was only a few Muslims who were happy about the thousands who were killed in the terror attacks. Nevertheless, the photos of the revelers at Ground Zero have now become the definitive symbol of the entire nation's mood. That is something that cannot be changed, unfortunately. Interview conducted by Anna Reimann. URL: A Symbol of the Nation's Mood 'Europeans Find the Ground Zero Celebrations Somewhat

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• America's5 Inscrutable Partner: Pakistan, Bin Laden and the Fight against Terror (05/04/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,760515,00.html

• Justice,5 American Style: Was Bin Laden's Killing Legal? (05/03/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,760358,00.html

• 'I5 Simply Can't Believe It': A Visit to Bin Laden's Neighborhood (05/02/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,760226,00.html

• Taking5 Out Bin Laden: An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth (05/02/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,760166,00.html

• Al-Qaida5 Loses Its Leader: Osama Bin Laden, Prince of Terror (05/02/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,760072,00.html

5 05/04/2011 04:35 PM Refugee Crisis in Niger Sub-Saharan Africans Risk Everything to Flee Libya By Jan Puhl Tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans have fled Libya since the rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi began. Far from the eyes of the world's media, a refugee crisis is building in Niger, where truckloads of migrants arrive every day after a dangerous journey through the Sahara Desert. The sky blurs into the horizon. The thermometer reads 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade, not that there is much shade to be found. Three police officers have sought refuge under the tin roof of their guard post on the edge of Agadez, a city in Niger. They are wearing combat fatigues and blue flip-flops. An ancient-looking Kalashnikov rifle is propped up against a wall made of clay bricks. The area is a military security zone, one of the last outposts of Nigerien state power on the edge of the seemingly endless Sahara Desert.

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Every now and again, one of the officers steps out into the sun, lifts a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and scans the horizon from northwest to northeast. This is where they always come from. "There are more and more of them," he says. "They are now traveling in bigger convoys. That way they're not such an easy target for the bandits." That evening, he does indeed spot a small cloud of light yellow dust heading out of the brown desert. The spot is followed by another, then another, and more still, coming ever closer. Half an hour later, an old Mercedes truck pulls up in front of the police station. The driver has tied a can of Coke under the hood to keep it propped open; the cooling system is clearly unable to cope with the heat. The back of the truck is packed with bales of clothing and barrels. Canisters, chairs and even a mountain bike are hanging off the sides. Perched on top are the people. They wear Bedouin headscarves and sunglasses to protect themselves against the red-brown dust that covers them from head to foot. They have traveled thousands of kilometers through the desert, with not enough food or water. Now they throw up their arms and cheer, elated to have escaped Moammar Gadhafi's army, the fighting and the bandits. The dusty clay city of Agadez is their sanctuary. In Search of a Better Life On this evening alone, more than 5,000 sub-Saharan Africans will arrive from Libya. Originally from Niger, Nigeria, Chad or Burkina Faso, they had moved north in search of better fortunes in the country of Moammar Gadhafi. They had worked in Libya, and many of them had hoped to brave the passage to the Italian island of Lampedusa, located just off the African coast, and make it into the European Union. But the route to the coast is now blocked, because it leads directly through the zone in which Libyan rebels are fighting pro-Gadhafi forces. The migrant workers had therefore decided to travel back through the desert -- back south. Lawrence Zadie from Nigeria is one of them. Zadie, 31, is a construction worker and has an athletic physique that many Europeans of his age would be envious of. He worked for a Greek construction company in the Libyan city of Sabha for two years. But then Gadhafi's soldiers came. Zadie says he had originally gone to the north to earn "a pot of gold." Today he is a refugee, just like all the others who have traveled to Agadez by truck. Niger may be the world's fifth poorest country, but by early April 30,000 sub-Saharan Africans had fled there from Libya. The International Organization for Migration believes that figure will rise to 60,000. About half that number is also expected in Algeria. Up to 20,000 are thought to have traveled to Chad, while more than 200,000 have escaped to Egypt. The foreign workers all want to return home, to places such as Ghana, Guinea, Liberia or Congo. Hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans have moved from the south to the north since the 1990s. Only a few of them attempted the dangerous crossing over the Mediterranean to Europe. The revolutions throughout North Africa have now reversed the migratory trend. European Union officials have already argued about what to do with the almost 30,000 refugees who have entered the EU via Lampedusa and Malta. And yet these are just a fraction of the people fleeing the fighting in Libya. A far greater number is beating a 203

passage south. As result, one of the poorest regions of the world, already racked by drought, desertification, bad government, corruption, war, starvation, AIDS and malaria, suddenly has to cope with a flood of tens of thousands of people who had left this same area years ago -- precisely because the situation was so hopeless. Waved Through At first the police officers on the outskirts of Agadez diligently stamped everyone's passport. Now they just wave them through. That evening, more than 30 trucks packed with people and their worldly belongings rumble through, heading for the customs post of this city of 120,000. There they unload their cargo. Agadez is a flat town of brick buildings and unpaved roads. In the past, it was popular with tourists who came to take pictures of the proud Tuareg in their headscarves, before traveling by motorcycle into the Aïr Mountains. But few whites have ventured into the area since al-Qaida terrorists began kidnapping employees of a French5 company that mines uranium in Niger. That's one of the reasons why the mass exodus from Libya into this desolate region has gone largely unnoticed up to now. Agadez currently has a bazaar, a historic mosque and a cattle market, where goats and camels are traded. Few of the houses have electricity or running water. It is not the kind of city that can cope with large numbers of refugees. The newcomers camp out with their possessions on the dirt roads between the houses, and try to sell some of their things to finance the next leg of their journey. But just how many compact stereos, mobile phones or woolen blankets does a desert city need? Although the authorities have set up a refugee commission, there's still not enough food and water to go round. Saudi Arabia has donated 30 white tents for the refugees, and these have been put up next to the soccer stadium. The Saudis had the inscription "Kingdom of Humanity" printed on the sides of the tents. 'At Least I'm Alive' Lawrence Zadie has managed to find shelter with the Red Cross, which only takes in the sick. He got in because his legs had been scraped as a result of being tossed to and fro on the back of the truck during his long journey. In actual fact, he's not really in bad shape physically. So he hangs around, immobile and resigned, in the shadows of his temporary shelter. Zadie has experienced something far worse than mere physical injury: His dream of a better life has been shattered. The trip to Agadez cost him 170 dinars (around €96 or $143). In Libya he worked six days a week laying roads. "I'm now poorer than I was when I arrived in Libya," he says. "But at least I'm alive." Three weeks earlier, soldiers' boots had kicked against the door of Zadie's portacabin in Sabha. Gadhafi's men pushed him and his friends around, and rummaged through their belongings. They confiscated a laptop, a telephone and two pairs of Levi's jeans. "Either you help us fight those spies and traitors, the rebels, or there'll be trouble," they said. Zadie lays asphalt for a living. He has no idea how to use a gun. He was in Libya to build roads, and had no intention of fighting other people's wars. He was also scared of the rebels, who almost overran Sabha. For weeks, rumors had been circulating that opposition forces would slaughter any blacks they found because Gaddafi had allegedly hired mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa.

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Stranded for 13 Days in the Desert When the soldiers left, Zadie packed his two bags and headed for the outskirts of the city, to where the Mercedes trucks heading to Niger waited. Soldiers stopped the vehicle just a few miles down the road. They levied a supposed "fine" for an invented crime, and pocketed hundreds of dollars from every passenger. The truck passed countless roadblocks like this on its journey. Some of them were manned by uniformed men, some by robbers. Some of the armed men even claimed to be members of al-Qaida in the Maghreb. And every time, Zadie and his fellow passengers had to pay up. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the truck broke an axle. Fortunately, the driver had a satellite phone and could call back to Sabha for a replacement. Unfortunately, the delivery times for Mercedes parts are long in the no-man's-land between Libya and Niger. Zadie and the others used their blankets to build makeshift tents. They rationed their food and waited -- for 13 days. Three of them didn't survive, dying of hunger, thirst or perhaps of some illness. Zadie doesn't really know. "We buried them with our bare hands," he says. Dying for a Dream Refugee organizations say an estimated 600 people a year drown because the overloaded or ramshackle boats carrying them across the Straits of Gibraltar or over to Lampedusa or the Canaries capsize. Nobody knows how many more die in the desert of thirst, at the hands of thieves or as a result of accidents. Lawrence Zadie will travel home with the two suitcases he still has. He wants to go back to work for his former employer, even if he will only earn half of what he did in Libya. But he hasn't given up his dream of improving his lot. "My boss in Sabha promised to bring me back when the situation calms down." Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt URL: Jan Puhl Refugee Crisis in Niger. Sub-Saharan Africans Risk Everything to Flee Libya05/04/2011

04:35 PM http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,760280,00.html5 Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• Photo5 Gallery: Migrant Workers Leaving Libya

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-67508.html5

• Are5 Assad's Days Numbered?: Syria's Neighbors Fear Regime Change (05/03/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,760113,00.html

• Egypt's5 Man in the Moon: The Watchdog of Tahrir Square Fears for the Revolution (04/29/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,759025,00.html

• A5 Boost for Sarkozy and Berlusconi: Support Broadens for Border-Free Travel Changes (04/28/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/internatio5 nal/europe/0,1518,759499,00.html

• 'Is5 This Your Democracy?': Refugee Influx Exposes Limitations of European Solidarity (04/18/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/internatio5 nal/europe/0,1518,757666,00.html

• SPIEGEL5 Interview with NATO Head Rasmussen: 'There Is No Military Solution to the Libya Conflict' (04/13/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,756575,00.html

• Uranium5 Mining in Niger: Tuareg Activist Takes on French Nuclear Company (04/02/2010)

http://www.spiegel.de/interna5 tional/world/0,1518,686774,00.html

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Who is Obama? Now we know.

By E.J.5 Dionne Jr., Wednesday, May 4, 8:47 PM Barack Obama is not the man many Americans thought he was. This sudden realization has transformed American politics.

The sheer audacity of the5 successful operation against Osama bin Laden has forced Obama’s friends and foes alike to reassess what they make of a chief executive who defies easy categorization and reveals less about himself than politicians are typically drawn to do. Obama is hard to understand because he is many things and not just one thing. He has now proved that he can be bold at an operational level, even as he remains cautious at a philosophical level. His proclivity to gather facts and weigh alternatives does not lead automatically, in the venerable phrase, to the paralysis of analysis. It can also end in daring action tempered by prudence — for example, making sure that additional5 helicopters were available to our Navy SEALs. The president’s rhetoric has often emphasized caring, compassion and community, the language one expects from a moderately liberal politician. Yet as one of his close aides told me long ago, there is inside a very cool, tough, even hard man. Obama is not reluctant to use American military power. He was not at all queasy about authorizing the killing of an American enemy and the disposal of the body at sea to ensure that there would be no memorial to rally bin Laden’s followers.

Obama told us who he is in one5 of the most celebrated statements he made — about the war in Iraq — before he ran for president. His listeners tended to pay far more attention to the war he criticized than to his reasons for criticizing it. “I am not opposed to all wars,” he declared in 2002. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Note when it comes to armed conflict, the word “dumb” is not typically part of the lexicon of a moralist. The fact that Obama is not a moralist has led to many of the frustrations vented about him over the past 27 months. Liberals don’t get why it takes him so long to get around to taking on the political right over the fundamental purposes of government and the requirements of social justice. Advocates of democracy and human rights ask why he was so slow to invoke the word “democracy” as a touchstone of his foreign policy, and why he was so guarded in his initial response to the Arab Spring. Supporters of a muscular and interventionist American foreign policy suspect him of believing that the decline of the United States is unavoidable and of seeing himself primarily as a steward whose task is to manage our steady loss of influence. It is this last claim that took such a profound blow when Obama approved the operation against bin Laden and chose the riskiest option involving a face-to-face confrontation with American commandos — on the orders of the president of the United States.

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Obama’s conceptual complexity means that he rejects the idea that there are just two alternatives: the United States as the world’s sole superpower or an America slinking off into weakness and irrelevance. Binary choices are not for him. Instead, he sees a world in which new powers — China most obviously, but also India and, someday, Brazil — inevitably rise to challenge American dominance. The United States’ task is not to prevent the ineluctable emergence of other strong nations. Its imperative is to remain an enormously powerful force fully capable of shaping the globe’s new arrangements, defending its interests and values, and prospering in an ever more competitive environment. And anyone who doubted our willingness to project our might as we see fit will have second thoughts after the events in Abbottabad. This single action does not “change everything,” because nothing ever changes everything. Killing one man does not settle two messy wars. Obama’s political standing will ultimately rise or fall largely on the basis of domestic issues and economic circumstances. The president’s supporters will again experience bouts of frustration when his philosophical caution prevails over his bold streak in the less martial work of negotiating budgets and promoting the general welfare at home. His opponents will not suddenly embrace his priorities. But because he ordered this attack, and because it was successful, no one will ever view Barack Obama in quite the same way again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opi5 nions/obama-the-bold-now-we- know/2011/05/04/AFmmUorF_story.html

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A cautionary tale for Mideast peace By David Ignatius, Wednesday, May 4, 8:45 PM As Washington buzzes about yet another restart for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, I have been reading a book that summarizes the past 44 years of botched peacemaking, blown opportunities and, sometimes, sheer folly. The book is a posthumous memoir by Jack O’Connell, a former CIA operative who was for many years King Hussein’s “case officer” in Jordan. Yes, you read that right: When O’Connell was station chief in Amman from 1963 to 1971, he dropped off monthly envelopes of cash at the palace as part of a long-running CIA covert action code-named “NOBEEF.” O’Connell was one of the savviest Middle East hands I ever encountered. He was a burly guy from South Dakota who had gone to Notre Dame to play football. Like so many smart young people in the 1950s, he found his way to the CIA. He was soft- spoken and unfailingly polite, like the king, but O’Connell was as clear-eyed about the Middle East as any American I’ve known. (We first met at a conference in Britain in the late 1980s and talked occasionally after that.) O’Connell first went to Amman in 1958 to help the king (then just 22) crack a coup plot uncovered by FBI wiretaps on the Jordanian Embassy in Washington. They got confessions from 22 conspirators — not by using the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of recent years but through prison interviews, deception and outright bluffs. O’Connell became the young king’s closest adviser and sometimes the only person Hussein fully trusted. When O’Connell left as station chief, he became the king’s personal lawyer in Washington. He tells a lot of secrets here, especially about Hussein’s diplomatic machinations, but he took many more to the grave when he died last year.

I recommend “King’s5 Counsel” not just as a cautionary tale about peacemaking (to which I will return) but as a reminder of what the CIA is really all about. This week, we are so enamored of the CIA-led5 commando operation that killed Osama bin Laden that it’s easy to forget that a spy service exists primarily to collect intelligence, not to conduct paramilitary operations. O’Connell was old-fashioned in that sense. He hated political “covert action” and the fancy Ivy Leaguers who ran it, whom he derided as “phony elitists.” He thought congressional oversight would never work and that the CIA had never recovered from the public flaying of the 1970s. Discretion was all: He had hundreds of pictures of Hussein, he notes, but not one of them together. O’Connell always stayed in the shadows. What anguished O’Connell was watching Hussein struggle in vain for four decades to recover the West Bank from Israel. The sorry tale began with the king’s foolish decision to ally with Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser on the eve of the June 1967 war, which gave the Israelis a reason to attack. O’Connell warned the king that Israel would strike, and the king passed the intelligence to Nasser. But they were too infatuated with 208

Arab propaganda to take the warning seriously. The king also had advance warning of the 1973 war, again for naught. The bungles continue, year to year: Hussein allows the PLO to put down deep roots in Jordan and is repaid with a civil war in 1970 that nearly topples him; he charms a string of Israeli prime ministers in secret meetings, who want peace with him but balk at returning territory; he tries to placate Arab radicals, most disastrously by allying with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein on the eve of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait; he beseeches U.S. presidents to help him recover territory, but they never deliver. The diminutive monarch is like Charlie Brown kicking the football, making a brave run each time only to see Lucy pull it away. At the king’s funeral in 1999, O’Connell met Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad chief who was also, in his way, Hussein’s case officer. “You had a leader here with his hand out,” he bluntly tells Halevy. “I think you blew it.” Reading this book, it’s hard to disagree with that judgment. What’s the lesson of O’Connell’s memoir for today, when President Obama is contemplating a speech soon laying out one more American peace plan? Simply this: Don’t play games. State the U.S. parameters for negotiation as clearly and unambiguously as possible. The heart of this deal is the same as it was in 1967: An exchange of occupied territory in return for a just peace that recognizes Israel’s right to exist. Get it done this time, or don’t try. David Ignatius A cautionary tale for Mideast peace May 5, 8:45 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini5 ons/a-cautionary-tale-for-mideast- peace/2011/05/03/AFvJxnrF_story.html

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5 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/611d1dfc-7669-11e0-b05b-55 00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1M2rPnfs3 Comment: Lay foundations for jobs now Masood Ahmed Published: May 4 2011 17:52 | Last updated: May 4 2011 18:16 The Middle East and north Africa region is going through a period of historical transformation. Policymakers now have an opportunity to respond to the widespread calls for change, including by laying the foundations for faster and more socially inclusive growth to provide jobs for a young and restless labour force.

5 5 EDITOR’S CHOICE In depth: Middle East protests - May-01 Outcry fails to halt 5 5 Syria violence - Apr-28 Gunmen attack Egyptian gas terminal - Apr-27 Assad’s family 5 picked up by west’s radar - Apr-27 Editorial: Arab spring economics - Apr-24

The oil-importing5 countries in the region also confront a more immediate challenge: maintaining social cohesion while preserving macroeconomic stability amid multiple pressures. As in other parts of the world, the region’s energy importers have been hit hard by the sharp rise in oil prices, compounded with a near doubling in that of wheat – MENA countries are among the world’s largest importers. The extra cost of food and fuel imports alone will add $15bn (3 per cent of gross domestic product) to this year’s combined import bill of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Syria.

These countries are also experiencing a5 drop in tourism and investment flows, both held back by unrest and uncertainty. While the drop has been sharpest in Tunisia and Egypt – tourists were down by about 40 per cent in the first two months of this year – the ripples are being felt across the region. And finally, the same uncertainty has caused financial markets to raise risk premiums, and hence borrowing costs, for most countries across the Middle East. In addition, governments are faced with increased social pressures and chronically high youth unemployment, and have responded with an expansion of fuel and food subsidies, civil service wage and pension rises, additional cash transfers and other spending as well as tax reductions. Some additional spending in the near term is understandable and necessary to ensure social cohesion but it risks straining public finances already stretched by the measures to mitigate the global financial crisis. The combined 2011 fiscal deficit of the region’s emerging markets will probably reach 8 per cent of GDP, or about $40bn. Domestic capital markets can provide part of these funds, albeit at a higher cost but for some countries timely external financial support will be central to maintaining social cohesion without risking macroeconomic and financial instability. The International Monetary Fund could allocate about $35bn if requested by the emerging markets of the region. 210

Going forward, widening fiscal and current account imbalances need to be addressed so as not to hamper the long-term job-creating growth agenda. Specifically, some of the spending will need to be reversed, more revenues raised from those who evade taxes, subsidies targeted towards the most needy, and wasteful public spending reduced. Increased public spending on subsidies and transfers responds to the immediate quest for social peace. But it is not a substitute for more fundamental reforms and modernisation of economic policies and institutions that will generate decent jobs, better governance and social protection of the needy and vulnerable. Moving from generalised fuel and food price subsidies, which cost MENA governments about 8 per cent of GDP, to targeted, and more cost-effective, social safety nets is part of that agenda. So, too, is taking early action on reducing bureaucratic regulations that make it harder for small- and medium-sized businesses to thrive without connections or corruption. And while a more sustainable and inclusive growth model will need time to develop, governments can begin now to define its elements in close dialogue with the population and – as needed – with the engagement of regional and international partners. The months ahead will be challenging and marked by setbacks. But the region has many strengths: a dynamic and young population, vast natural resources, a large regional market and an advantageous geographic position with access to key markets. It is vital that any threat to macroeconomic stability be quickly stopped in its tracks through sound policies and, where needed, with the help of the inter-national community. In this way, confidence will be maintained and the pursuit of a new social agenda can progress. Masood Ahmed is the director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department Masood Ahmed Comment: Lay foundations for jobs now Published: May 4 2011 17:52 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/611d1dfc-7669-11e0-b05b-5 00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M1yCSwwX

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Obama’s Russian lessons: How the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan By Artemy Kalinovsky, Friday, April 29, 5:52 PM Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union’s client regime in Afghanistan was starting to unravel. For two years, Mohammed Najibullah, the latest leader the Soviets had helped install, had been trying to keep his country together without the Soviet 40th Army — relying on a combination of crack troops, Soviet weaponry, patronage, and the divisions and overconfidence of his enemies. His tenacity had even impressed President George H.W. Bush, who in mid-1990 told U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar that “I was dead wrong about Najibullah; I thought he would fall when the Soviet troops withdrew.” But with the Soviet Union itself crumbling and crucial financial support for Kabul drying up, Afghanistan’s prospects of emerging as a semblance of a stable state were beginning to look hopeless. The cliches about Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires — an ungovernable mix of ethnic groups, tribes and harsh terrain where conquering armies find themselves lost and unable to fight committed insurgents — are familiar and perhaps too fatalistic. Even so, as President Obama approaches the initial July 2011 deadline that5 he set a year and a half ago to begin scaling down forces in Afghanistan, he and his advisers would do well to look back on how the Soviets grappled with their own decision to withdraw from their decade-long war in that country. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev made leaving Afghanistan a priority as soon as he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 — but three years later, more than 100,000 Soviet troops were still there. Records of Politburo discussions show a pattern of deadlines set and then abandoned; one or two more years and then we’re out, Gorbachev insisted in 1985. He said the same in 1986 and again in 1987. Gorbachev may have disagreed with his predecessors’ decision to intervene in Afghanistan in the first place, but he was committed to preserving the Soviet Union’s great-power status. He did not have the chauvinistic or xenophobic patriotism of some of his colleagues, but Gorbachev did believe in the achievements of the Soviet Union and the promise of socialism. He viewed the Afghan war through this prism and could not countenance, at least in his early years in power, the notion of defeat. Certainly, there were real security considerations as well — Afghanistan was the Soviets’ southern neighbor, after all — but the collapse of central authority in Kabul would make the Soviet Union look like a poor ally indeed: all those years of fighting, only to abandon ship. Throughout the occupation, Soviet leaders launched a series of initiatives aimed at helping their Afghan allies stand on their own feet — to gain domestic and international legitimacy and to develop the wherewithal to fight off insurgent campaigns. This would

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in turn allow the Soviets to withdraw honorably. Each effort was announced with great fanfare, implemented and eventually found wanting. Years of economic and development aid — employing thousands of Soviet specialists and costing billions of rubles — were found to have been largely wasted because of poor planning and corruption, and programs were pared back. The advisers the Soviet Union had placed at every level of the Afghan government, military and ruling party were doing the Afghans’ work for them, rather than developing competent and independent bureaucratic cadres, and Gorbachev withdrew them. Ambassadors were changed, generals shuffled, military strategies adjusted. Special forces were used with increasing frequency, and there was an effort to push the Afghan military into taking a more prominent role in operations — an effort made more difficult because Soviet officers often didn’t trust the Afghans. And early in 1987, the Afghans announced a “policy of national reconciliation,” advocated and planned by Soviet officials, in the hope of facilitating some accommodation between the communist government, its various political opponents and insurgents. Soviet representatives even sought out top mujaheddin leaders and conducted meetings with them. But by the fall of 1987, Gorbachev and many of his top advisers thought that none of their efforts to salvage Afghanistan were going to work. Their last hope was an agreement with the United States that would at least stop American aid to the mujaheddin while letting Moscow continue to supply Kabul with arms. (A deal was eventually reached but proved too vague to be effective.) At this point, though, Moscow had lost faith in being able to achieve anything in Afghanistan, and senior Soviet officials seemed to be mentally preparing for Najibullah’s defeat. Today, the Obama White House seems to be going through a similar process regarding its5 own Afghan war. Recent5 books and news reports about the administration’s decision-making reveal that the president came to office well aware that Afghanistan had been neglected at the expense of the war in Iraq and was sliding into chaos. And since then, the administration’s debates and initiatives echo the Soviets’ in the waning years of their conflict. From pretending the Taliban was a spent force, the United States has moved to talks not just with minor commanders but with the group’s leadership. The appointment of the late ambassador Richard Holbrooke as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan was reminiscent of Gorbachev’s appointment of veteran diplomat Yulii Vorontsov as a sort of Afghanistan factotum. And an early small- footprint approach has given way to a troop surge through which the U.S. military — with decreasing NATO support — is hoping to break the back of the insurgency, even as the date that a reliable Afghan army will be ready moves further into the future. A cynic might say that Obama has doubled down in Afghanistan because he is afraid of domestic criticism should that country collapse on his watch. And Gorbachev’s concerns about how failure in Afghanistan could be used against him no doubt figured into his calculations as well. Yet it is likely that, for both men, worries about defeat centered on what it would mean for their country’s power and prestige. Like the Soviet Union, the United States is not just a country but an idea and a mission; like Gorbachev, Obama wants to fulfill rather than discredit his country’s promise.

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What enabled Gorbachev to ultimately withdraw the troops — and to do so with almost no domestic opposition — was the shared realization that all policies had failed and that if peace were to come to Afghanistan, the Afghans themselves would have to make it happen, with Moscow playing only a supporting role. I suspect that any remaining optimism about the Afghan war is fading within the Obama administration. Meanwhile, the deadlines have shifted: 2014 seems like the real date for a drawdown, rather than this summer. When this administration or another one decides to withdraw, it will not be because the war is too costly but because it no longer makes sense. At that point, perhaps, the president will say, as Gorbachev did to his colleagues: “We are not going to save the regime. We’ve already transformed it.” It is worth remembering that for a while, at least, the regime did manage to hold out on its own. As for the Soviet withdrawal, it was a popular move, perhaps the last uncontroversial and universally well-received decision Gorbachev made in the Soviet Union’s twilight years. Artemy Kalinovsky is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and the author of “A5 Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan.” Artemy Kalinovsky Obama’s Russian lessons: How the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan

April 29, 5:52 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini5 ons/obamas-russian-lessons-how- the-soviets-withdrew-from-afghanistan/2011/04/29/AFd4ZUGF_story.html

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Adm. William McRaven: The terrorist hunter on whose shoulders Osama bin Laden raid rested By Craig Whitlock, Wednesday, May , 5 9:19 PM As U.S. helicopters secretly entered Pakistani airspace Sunday, the Joint Operations Center at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan was under the control of a square-jawed admiral from Texas who had labored for years to find Osama5 bin Laden’s elusive trail. Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, one of the most experienced terrorist hunters in the U.S. government, had tapped a special unit of Navy SEALs for the mission two months earlier. A5 former SEAL himself, McRaven had overseen weeks of intensive training for a covert operation that could cripple al-Qaeda if it worked, or strain an already5 troubled alliance with Pakistan5 if it went awry.

The search for bin Laden was led by the CIA, which painstakingly5 pieced together scraps of intelligence that eventually pointed to a high-walled6 compound in Abbottabad,6 Pakistan. But when President Obama gave the authorization to invade the site, CIA Director Leon Panetta delegated the raid to McRaven, who had been preparing for such a moment for most of his career. He has worked almost exclusively on counterterrorism operations and strategy since 2001, when as a Navy captain he was assigned to the White House shortly after the

Sept. 11 attacks. The author of a textbook titled “Spec6 Ops,” McRaven had long emphasized six key requirements for any successful mission: surprise, speed, security, simplicity, purpose and repetition. For the especially risky bin Laden operation, he insisted on another: precision. “He understands the strategic importance of precision,” said a senior Obama administration official who worked closely with McRaven to find bin Laden, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation. “He demands high standards. That’s why we’ve been so successful.” As leader of the military’s highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command, McRaven has overseen a rapid escalation of manhunts for Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda figures around the world. Although he’s a three-star admiral, the muscular 55-year-old still sometimes accompanies his teams on snatch-and-grab missions. On Friday, McRaven received the green light from Panetta to launch the raid at the earliest opportunity. Later that day, he met with a six-member congressional delegation that was coincidentally visiting Afghanistan. He gave the lawmakers a tour of the Bagram operations center that — unbeknownst to them — was gearing up for the critical mission.

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“Little did we know he had already given the order to take out Osama bin Laden,” said Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), who led the delegation. McRaven had been just weeks away from leaving Afghanistan for a new assignment. He had led the Joint Special Operations Command since 2008, when he succeeded Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whose team helped turn the tide of the war in Iraq by relentlessly targeting insurgent leaders, including al-Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, Abu

Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was6 killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006. “Nobody thought it would be possible, frankly, to take that command beyond what Stan McChrystal did, but he has,” said Michael G. Vickers, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “He has taken what was already a very integrated, interagency organization and taken it to another level.” Vickers has known McRaven since he was a Navy SEAL lieutenant commander and Vickers an Army Special Forces captain. They’ve worked especially closely over the past four years, when Vickers6 served as the Pentagon’s top civilian official overseeing Special Operations forces, including units hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. “Bill is a great leader but also a pretty big thinker,” Vickers said. “It’s a rare balance of these two skills.” McRaven returned to Washington after bin Laden’s death and briefed lawmakers in a closed session Wednesday on Capitol Hill. He declined to be interviewed for this article. He grew up as the son of an Air Force colonel who flew British Spitfires during World War II and played briefly in the NFL. McRaven graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied journalism, in 1977. His 1995 book analyzed eight famous moments in special-operations history, including the Israeli raid to free hostages on a hijacked airliner at Entebbe, Uganda. Unlike some high-ranking military officers, McRaven is “definitely not a yeller- screamer,” said a former Special Operations official who has known him for years and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the clandestine nature of their work. “He’s a guy that I think you can look at as a modern-day SEAL, a post-Vietnam-era SEAL — guys that are quiet, humble, smart.” Under his leadership, the Joint Special Operations Command has expanded its reach beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. In September 2009, McRaven negotiated an agreement with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to conduct secret missions with Yemeni troops against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of bin Laden’s network that some officials say has become the primary terrorist threat to the United States. But McRaven has spent most of his time in Afghanistan, where JSOC efforts have greatly intensified. His forces have killed or captured hundreds of insurgent leaders over the past year, primarily in nighttime raids, according to U.S. military officials. They have portrayed the raids as a cornerstone of their war strategy. Although they acknowledge that such raids alone cannot defeat the Taliban, “the results have been staggering,” said the senior Obama administration official. But the nighttime operations have strained relations with the Afghan government, which says that the raids often target the wrong individuals and that U.S. forces are not held accountable for lethal mistakes.

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In October, Special Operations forces accidentally killed a kidnapped British aid worker with a grenade during a botched mission. U.S. officials at first blamed the death on the

Taliban but were 6 forced to retract the assertion. Also last year, after Special Operations forces killed five innocent Afghan civilians in another bungled raid, McRaven admitted that his team had committed “a terrible mistake” and visited the victims’ relatives to ask for forgiveness. Paying homage to tribal honor codes, McRaven took two sheep to the village in Paktia province and offered to sacrifice them in a mercy-seeking gesture. Village elders spared the sheep but did accept a cash payment of about $30,000, according to an6 eyewitness account reported by the Times of London. “I am a soldier,” McRaven told the father of two of the victims. “I have spent most of my career overseas, away from my family, but I have children as well, and my heart grieves for you.” In an attempt to minimize further casualties, McRaven ordered the reinstallation of bright-white spotlights on AC-130 gunships that often accompany assault forces on the nighttime raids. Military officials describe the lights as an intimidating factor that encourages insurgents to give up, or at least not to flee and grab a weapon. In March, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he was recommending McRaven for promotion to four-star admiral and leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa. The move is subject to Senate approval. But Shuster, the congressman, said that given McRaven’s role in bin Laden’s capture, “they won’t be able to confirm him quickly enough.” Staff writers Greg Miller, Dana Priest and Karen Tumulty

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/adm-6 william-mcraven-the-terrorist-hunter-on- whose-shoulders-osama-bin-laden-raid- rested/2011/05/04/AFsEv4rF_story.html?nl_headlines

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6 Libyan leaders may face UN arrest warrants for war crimes Reports suggest warrants could include Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam in move intended to increase pressure on Tripoli

Ian6 Black and Jill6 Treanor

The6 Guardian, Wednesday 4 May 2011

The UN security council voted unanimously in February to refer Gaddafi's violent crackdown against anti-government demonstrators (above). Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images Senior Libyan officials face international arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, the United Nations security council will be told today. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, is to brief the council about crimes committed by Muammar6 Gaddafi's forces since the Libyan uprising began in mid-February. Western diplomats say the move is intended to ratchet up international pressure on Tripoli. Ocampo revealed that up to five warrants are likely to be issued in the next few weeks with the approval of the ICC's pre-trial chamber. No names have been disclosed. But Al-Arabiya TV reported that the warrants could include Gaddafi himself and his son, the discredited reformist Saif al-Islam, who has strong UK links. It said others being targeted include Libya's6 former foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, who defected to the UK, and Abu Zeyd Omar Dorda, director general of the Libyan External Security Organisation. Koussa is the most important defector from the regime so far, and British officials had hoped his defection might persuade other key Libyans to abandon Gaddafi, although observers warn of the potential for a clash between a pragmatic approach to weakening the regime and a principled commitment to international criminal law. 218

The security council voted unanimously in February to refer Gaddafi's violent crackdown against anti-government demonstrators to The Hague-based ICC. That move was widely criticised as premature, leaving the Libyan leader and other key officials no exit strategy as the international response to the crisis escalated into the armed action now being undertaken by Nato. "We have strong evidence on the beginning of the conflict, the shooting of civilians," Ocampo told Reuters. "Also, we have strong evidence of the crime of persecution." Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Gaddafi to step down "immediately," echoing calls by Barack Obama, David Cameron and France's Nicolas Sarkozy. Switzerland, meanwhile, has frozen assets worth up to £585m connected to Gaddafi and the former presidents of Egypt and Tunisia. Micheline Calmy-Rey, Switzerland's president and foreign minister, disclosed that of the total amount of frozen assets, 957m in Swiss francs, some SFr360m (£246m) is linked to Gaddafi and his associates, SFr410m (£280m) is tied to Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president who stood down in February after 18 days of protests, and SFr60m (£41m) to Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian president who fled in January after an uprising. In Cairo, Mubarak's sons, Gamal and Alaa, face renewed questioning by a public prosecutor on their roles during their father's 30-year rule. Mubarak is being treated for a heart condition in a hospital in Sharm al-Sheikh, where the family has remained since February. "These amounts are frozen in Switzerland following blocking orders by the Swiss government related to potentially illegal assets in Switzerland," said the Swiss authorities. "It is not just money, there are real estate assets." The UK has only provided an update on its efforts to freeze the assets of the Gaddafi regime. Speaking in March, David Cameron said £12bn had been frozen by the UK after the Libyan Central Bank and the Libyan Investment Authority were added to the asset-freezing list. No updates have been provided on Mubarak or Ben Ali, although the sums are expected to be smaller because neither has sovereign wealth funds of the size run by the Libyan Investment Authority. The fate of billions in public funds alleged to have gone missing is a talking point in all three countries. The US has so far seized $34bn (£20.5bn) in assets connected to Gaddafi, although it has yet to act against any assets linked to Ben Ali or Mubarak and their associates. Calmy-Rey did not give details of the banks holding the assets. Switzerland is trying to become more open about its banking, in part because of pressure from the US three years ago on Swiss bank UBS to reveal the identities of 20,000 clients. Officials said that the decision to reveal the sums frozen indicated that the Swiss felt they were unlikely to uncover many more assets linked to the three. Although amounts have been revealed, none of the assets has been released, as there is insufficient proof they were obtained illegally. While Tunisia and Egypt have begun steps to reclaim the assets, Gaddafi remains in the control of Libya's government. Switzerland has begun returning assets to Haiti, 25 years after freezing money belonging to Jean-Claude Duvalier, its former leader. The Swiss said they believed

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some SFr5.8bn (£4bn) had been frozen and that it could now "initiate forfeiture proceedings".

The precise wealth of the three Middle6 East leaders is unclear. Forbes estimated in 2008 that the Tunisian president's fortune was $5bn. In February, officials in the Serious Organised Crime Agency began the process of tracing the bank accounts of Mubarak and his cabinet in the UK, while Britain froze the assets of Gaddafi and his five children amid reports the Libyan leader had moved £3bn to Britain. Some £900m of Libyan currency in storage at a secure compound in the north-east of England was impounded.

Ian6 Black and Jill6 Treanor Libyan leaders may face UN arrest warrants for war crimes4 May 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/6 may/04/libya-war-crimes-icc-un/print

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6 May 3, 2011 After Bin Laden: Let’s Stop Playing His Game Posted by John Cassidy

While my colleagues have been commenting expertly on many aspects of the bin Laden story, I have been thinking about history: personal history, political history, military history. Like many New Yorkers, I find it a bit hard to separate one from the other. Driving to J.F.K. on Sunday evening to pick up my wife, who was flying back from Europe, I was struck by the dry, brisk air and blue cloudless sky. My mind went back, as it often does in such conditions, to the morning of September 11, 2001, when, on Duane and Greenwich, a reporter’s notebook in hand, I watched the South Tower tumble into a great dust cloud that quickly enveloped the corner on which I was standing. (I filled up a Styrofoam cup with some of the detritus: it is still in my desk drawer.) Such ghoulish thoughts were but fleeting: before I got to the airport, I had put them out of my mind completely. After arriving home we retired early and missed the announcement from the White House. Bin Laden’s entry onto the world historical stage, I saw close up; the dramatic news of his exit, I slept through. Perhaps that was all to the good. Too much exposure to history-in-the-making can lead to trouble. Look at what it did to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their neocon advisers, who decided that the appropriate response to an opportunistic attack by a geographically scattered group of religious fanatics was to launch a “War on Terror,” and then to invade Iraq, the biggest secular country in the Middle East. Eight years after the beginning of that immensely costly diversion it was old-fashioned police (intelligence) work and a small-scale special-forces operation that produced the desired result. Mulling all this over, I was reminded of the warnings issued in the aftermath of 9/11 by Sir Michael Howard, the British military historian. An admirer of the United States (he lived and taught here for several years) and no peacenik (as a young man, he served in the Coldstream Guards), Howard said that adopting war terminology in response to the criminal threat posed by Al Qaeda could lead to a century-long conflict. The gravest threat to world peace—and to America’s long-term security interests—Howard argued, was the possibility of the wounded superpower lashing out indiscriminately. 221

Of course, this is precisely what bin Laden had in mind by encouraging his followers to bring their twisted and maniacal cause to the streets of New York and Washington. In his writings on Al Qaeda, Lawrence Wright has quoted al-Zawahari saying this almost exactly: 9/11 was a spectacular provocation, designed to draw the United States and its allies into open warfare. Bush and Tony Blair followed bin Laden’s script as if reading from a screenplay. Which is why, in historical terms, the dissident Saudi’s violent campaign, even though it engendered the breakup of his organization and, ultimately, his own violent death, was a certain kind of success. The overreaction by the United States and its allies to 9/11 confirmed in the minds of many alienated Muslim youths (and a good many not- so-youthful devotees) the fateful notion that the world, as represented by the United States and other Western powers, was their implacable enemy. The killing of Bin Laden won’t change this mindset; it could conceivably strengthen it. From the perspective of most peace-loving Westerners, a despicable human being has been eliminated and justice has been served. To many radicalized Muslims, the Navy SEALs have created another martyr. It is to be fervently hoped that that bin Laden’s death will dishearten his followers and further disrupt what remains of Al Qaeda. Still, it is depressingly likely that some day soon a group of committed jihadis will seek to avenge his death with more bloodshed. As Howard predicted, the “War on Terror” could well go on and on—an endless cycle of action and reaction, which some commentators almost seem to revel in. “(T)he fight against al-Qaeda is not over, and it is far from our only enemy,” an editorial in the National Review declared on Monday. “September 11 thrust the United States into a generation-long conflict: It is our Thirty Years’, perhaps our Hundred Years’ War.” What a nightmarish prospect. Now that bin Laden is gone, surely it is time to challenge the logic of eternal conflict that he expounded—to quit playing the game he wanted us to play. A good place to begin might be with the speech that Howard gave in London in October 2001, when construction crews were still clearing Ground Zero of human remains. “To declare war on terrorists or, even more illiterately, on terrorism, is at once to accord terrorists a status and dignity that they seek and that they do not deserve,” Howard said. The U.S. Air Force was busy bombarding Afghanistan, a military campaign that Howard likened to “trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blow torch.” Even more disastrous, he went on, would be an extension of the U.S. military campaign “through other rogue states, beginning with Iraq, to eradicate terrorism for good and all. I can think of no policy more likely, not only to indefinitely prolong the war, but to ensure that we can never win it.” At this remove, who can say for sure that Howard was in error? American troops, by the tens of thousand, are still on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The covert U.S. military footprint grows ever larger. As of the latest counting, the Pentagon has launched missile attacks against targets in four other Muslim countries: Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. (The latter strike wasn’t officially part of the War on Terror.) Despite it all, the violent threat of radical Islam remains—not least from jihadis who were homegrown in the United States, Britain, Holland, and other Western countries.

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As of yet, I haven’t even mentioned economics. In 2001, the defense budget stood at about $300 billion: today it is more than $700 billion. Even allowing for inflation, this represents roughly a doubling in outlays. Twenty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States is spending more money on soldiers and armaments than the rest of the world combined. How long can this go on? For a debt-ridden colossus that depends on Beijing and other foreign capitals for day-to-day funding, it smacks of the imperial overstretch that another British historian, Paul Kennedy of Yale, warned about way back in 1987—before virtually anybody in the West had heard of bin Laden. So, all credit to President Obama for authorizing a successful mission and to the Navy SEALs for carrying it out. But where do we go from here? In May 2011, we can’t rerun history. We can try and alter its future course. Bin Laden’s death and the looming anniversary of 9/11 provide a fitting occasion to embark on such an effort.

(Postscript: Reading Ryan6 Lizza’s latest post, it seems that some people in the administration, including the President, are thinking along broadly similar lines to these. If Ryan’s right—and he usually is—that’s encouraging news.)

Read6 David Remnick, Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright, Jon Lee Anderson, Dexter Filkins, Hendrik Hertzberg, George Packer, and more of our coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death.

Photographs6 by Gilles Peress/Magnum, originally run in6 the September 24, 2001, issue of the magazine. Keywords

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• Osama6 bin Laden POSTED IN

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6 05/03/2011 04:22 PM Are Assad's Days Numbered? Syria's Neighbors Fear Regime Change

By Clemens6 Höges, Samiha Shafy and Bernhard6 Zand Despite its brutality, the Assad dynasty which has ruled Syria for 40 years is valued by the West because of its predictability. But the regime's days may be numbered as unrest continues. The country's neighbors are greatly concerned about the future of the strategically important state. Of course he wants to talk about what is happening in Homs, where he lives. But it's complicated. He has to keep himself hidden and conceal his intentions, the man says hoarsely on the phone, because he is being watched. "Call me Abu Kamil. I'm about 60 years old." Abu Kamil was at the large demonstrations in Homs last week, as were tens of thousands of other people -- including a friend of his who was shot in the head and is now at home. "I can't take him to the hospital," says Abu Kamil. "Anyone who is brought to the hospital with a bullet wound will be arrested." Instead, he called a doctor he trusts. The doctor said that the friend needed surgery, but explained that could only be done in the hospital. "Now he'll die at home," Abu Kamil says quietly. Heba, 37, also attended the protest, spending 12 hours on the square. "The mood was friendly at first," she says. "We did not expect the security forces to attack us so brutally." On the next morning Heba, a mother of three children, wanted to go the hospital to donate blood for the wounded. "But the police had blocked off the hospital," she says. "They were literally waiting for the wounded so that they could arrest them." Doctors complained that the 25 people who died on that day could not be identified, because their relatives did not contact them. "The parents of people who were shot to death were forced to go on television and state that their children were radical Islamists," says Heba. "That's why no one is coming forward anymore." Unexpected Brutality The Arab revolution reached Syria unexpectedly late -- and the regime is striking back with unexpected brutality. More than 80 people died on April 22 alone, a casualty figure not seen in the region since the bloodiest days in Baghdad. Human rights activists have counted over 550 people dead since the unrest began about six weeks ago. They are painstakingly examining the trickle of information still coming from cities like Daraa, Latakia, Banias and Homs. Just on Sunday, 10 people were killed by security forces in Daraa and almost 500 arrested in house-to-house raids, according to an army spokesman. Syrian tanks shelled the old quarter of Daraa on Sunday, which has been under siege since Monday of last week. On Tuesday, a leading Syrian human rights activist told the Associated Press that authorities had arrested over 1,000 people in raids since Saturday.

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Not even Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has sealed off his country from the international media quite as thoroughly as Syrian President Bashar Assad, a supposedly modern-minded ophthalmologist who has ruled Syria as a police state for the last 11 years. The wall of silence lends credibility to the accounts of the activists communicating via Skype and Facebook, who ask: If the regime has nothing to hide, why is it hiding? Reports by independent observers have become rare. One of them has been given by Günter Gloser, a member of the German parliament for the center-left Social Democrats and a former senior Foreign Ministry official. He returned to Germany from a trip to Syria last Wednesday. According to Gloser, intelligence agents are everywhere, and there are roadside checks on the edges of restive neighborhoods like Duma in northeast Damascus. But the country did not feel like it was in an all-out civil war, Gloser said. "The center of the capital was still quiet, and so was Aleppo, another major city," he said, adding that pictures of Assad were on display in many places there. "Assad is not equally hated by everyone. Many Christians, for example, view the possible demise of the regime with concern." Based on his conversations with people in Syria, Gloser concludes: "We cannot close our eyes to what is happening in Syria. The West should announce sanctions." But simply saying Assad must go, as in the case of Gadhafi, doesn't do much good, Gloser believes. "He should be given a chance to implement the reforms he has announced." 'Not Too Late' British Foreign Minister William Hogue said the same thing last week (before uninviting the Syrian ambassador from the royal wedding), noting that it was "not too late" for Assad to implement reforms. Even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was still defending Assad in late March against comparisons with his notorious father, Hafez Assad. A German government spokesman was just as ambiguous when he referred to the Assad government as a "brutally oppressive regime," while at the same time warning against cutting off ties altogether. Russia's and China's decision to block a United Nations resolution against Damascus may be a result of their economic interests in Syria. But there is a fundamental reason why the Europeans and Americans will be unwilling to go beyond the sanctions announced on Friday: Syria may be much smaller than Egypt, have less oil than Libya and be farther away from Europe than Tunisia -- but its importance in terms of stability in the Middle East is enormous. The events of last week alone show how almost all lines of conflict in the region come together in Damascus. Last Wednesday, the two warring Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, made the surprising6 announcement that they intended to pursue reconciliation. This is partly because the Hamas leadership doesn't know how much longer it can hold on in Damascus, where it enjoys Assad's protection. The agreement between Hamas and Fatah puts pressure on Israel, because the reconciliation brings the Palestinians closer to their goal of achieving recognition for a Palestinian state by the United Nations. On Thursday, Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), announced that a complex of buildings on the Euphrates River in Syria which the Israeli Air Force bombed in 2007 was indeed a nuclear reactor under construction. 225

This show how strong the Syria-Iran axis already is, and how far along Damascus was in developing its own nuclear program. Also on Thursday, Egypt announced that it was normalizing its relations with Iran, a country that has had only one Arab ally until now: Syria. Cairo also plans to open its borders to the Gaza Strip, which will weaken Israeli control over the area. It is clear that Egypt is beginning to play a new diplomatic role that will no longer necessarily take the interests of the United States and other Western countries into account. It's a role that could change the entire balance of the Middle East. 'The Assads Run Syria as a Family Business' How will this affect the Assad regime and its alliances? Damascus supports the radical Islamic group Hezbollah, the key political force in Lebanon, but the Iraqi leadership also has very close ties to Damascus, where Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lived in exile for several years. Saudi Arabia's princes are looking to Syria with concern, because many of them own weekend homes there. The Israeli military is also worried, because they cannot be sure how much longer the cease-fire in the Golan Heights, in effect since 1973, will last. For years, Bashar Assad threatened the West with chaos if it attempted to bring about regime change in Damascus. Now the possibility of his ouster has indeed triggered uncertainty, at least temporarily. Governments in the West have long known who they are dealing with in Syria. Diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Damascus, which were leaked to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks last year, paint a picture of a power elite so shameless that the fury of the protesters makes immediate sense. But they also raise the question of why it didn't erupt in January, when the first Arab regime fell, in Tunis. "The Assads run Syria as a family business," reads a classified diplomatic cable from 2006. The country, according to the cable, was "dominated by a 'corrupt class' who use their personal ties to members of the Assad family and the Syrian security services to gain monopolistic control over most sectors of the economy, while enriching themselves and their regime benefactors." 'The Poster Boy of Corruption' The Americans describe Bashar's cousin Rami Makhlouf as "the poster boy of corruption in Syria." According to the diplomatic cables, his family has built "a vast financial empire," with Makhlouf exploiting his connections to his cousin, the president, and squeezing out his competitors, for example in the case of a power-plant construction project worth €430 million ($632 million). "Having previously obtained exclusive rights to represent Siemens, Rami profited again when additional power infrastructure projects were awarded to the German company," reads an embassy cable from January 2008. According to one of the cables, the president uses four confidants to "make and move money." One of them is apparently Makhlouf's father Mohammed, who is Assad's uncle. "If Rami is the face of corruption, Mohammad is the brain," reads the cable. A US report on a case that happened in the summer of 2008 indicates the sums of money involved, even among marginal figures in Assad's circles. A security adviser to the president had been shot, and when the police searched his house, they found $80 million -- in cash. 226

It should be noted that the US State Department has had this information for years. Nevertheless, Washington continued to favor the Assad regime. The Europeans were also aware of the clan's shady dealings. Rami Makhlouf, for example, was once a guest of the Berlin-based German-Arab Association. Nevertheless, the West has counted on the Assads until now, and is having a tough time separating itself from a dynasty that was a relatively predictable force in the Middle East for 40 years. But the more blood that is shed in Homs, Daraa and Latakia, the more imminent is the fall of the House of Assad. And unless the regime changes course drastically, the remaining lifespan of the government will probably be measured in weeks rather than months or years. 'A Beacon of Culture and Secularism' As recently as February, when former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was already in exile and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had been deposed, the magazine Vogue published a profile of Assad's wife Asma. One of the world's top photographers had traveled to Damascus to photograph the Syrian first lady, a woman who, according to the magazine, "is on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism in a powder-keg region -- and to put a modern face on her husband's regime." Eight weeks later, a paragraph at the end of the Vogue story, in which Asma's husband joins the conversation, appears to take on a whole new meaning. When asked why he became an eye surgeon before embarking on his political career, Assad replied: "Because it's very precise, it's almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood." Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760113,00.html Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• SPIEGEL6 Interview with Former Syrian Vice President: 'A Boundless Fury Has Been Building Up' (05/03/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760116,00.html

• The6 World from Berlin: 'Nothing But Bad News for the Middle East Peace Process' (04/29/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,759751,00.html

• The6 World from Berlin: 'Assad Has Proven His Regime is Incapable of Reform' (04/26/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,759024,00.html

• Syria6 on the Edge of the Abyss: Assad's Regime Escalates Crackdown on Protesters (04/25/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,758905,00.html

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6 05/03/2011 01:16 PM America's Lost Decade Bin Laden's Death Comes 10 Years Too Late A Commentary by Gregor Peter Schmitz America is celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, and the nation is once again sure of its own strength. But aside from President Barack Obama, few people have reason to celebrate. The threat the al-Qaida leader posed had diminished, and America's lost decade cannot be regained.

President Barack Obama smiled as he announced the death6 of Osama bin Laden. It was a satisfied smile at a moment in which America was once again sure of its own power. It was a historic picture, just like the images of the flag-waving celebrants in front of the White House. It looked like America truly did win the war on terror, 10 years later. The photos will take their place in the long list of iconic images that this decade of terror has produced: the American flag on Ground Zero after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq, and later the Iraqi dictator cowering in a hole in the ground; the faces of Afghani women who were being allowed to vote for the first time; and in between, naturally, the warlord George W. Bush in his bomber jacket in front of the sign reading "Mission Accomplished." Unfortunately, all of these images have one thing in common: They all are simply snapshots, good for appearances, nothing more. The mission was not accomplished. And even the death of Osama bin Laden will not provide a happy ending for America's tale of woe. Because America is no longer the country it was before 9/11. That's something not even a courageous team of Navy Seals can change. Not a Real Breakthrough That is partially because the dead bin Laden is no longer the biggest trophy in the war against terror. There was a time when he really did appear to be the most dangerous man in the world, when the West feared every new message. Those were the months, maybe years, when no attack appeared impossible, and no airport, train station, or nuclear power plant appeared safe enough. But those times are long gone. In the meantime, the one-time prince of terror had become just a curious relic of another age. When he appeared in his videos, clearly aged, he was no longer able to influence US elections. His network had little to do with the recent Arab Revolution; his terror veterans have few connections to the Internet sites that have now become so important. What has become known about his final hiding place only reinforces the dreariness of bin Laden's recent existence. There was no telephone, and no Internet, and he had to burn his own garbage in order not to leave behind any evidence. America learned a long time ago how to live with his threat. New York Times columnist

Ross Douthat writes6 : "They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us ... But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat."

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This view is actually a positive development. But it also means that the death of bin Laden cannot be viewed as a real breakthrough. A Beleaguered America "We are a beleaguered America," the columist Howard Fineman summed up in the Huffington Post after the operation in Abbottabad. As proof, one simply needs to add up the numbers. At least 3,000 people died at the hands of mass-murderer bin Laden, and all efforts were justified to find him. But Washington didn't just begin a search for a criminal. Instead, it launched one of the largest campaigns for retribution in history. On the American side, there have been about 6,000 dead US soldiers, not to mention $1.3 trillion in new federal debt that is attributed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the real costs will likely be much higher. The US has accumulated a total debt burden of over $14 trillion, even though it was running a budget surplus just 10 years ago. The seemingly most powerful country in the world has to be worried about the prospect of having to officially declare insolvency before too long. America has become so caught up in a culture of fear and anxiety that it spends more on defense than all other countries put together. And it is caught up in wars that it cannot win -- and which it no longer wants to fight, if one believes American opinion polls about the war in Afghanistan. Greater Fear of Debt than of Terrorism Of course, security is a country's most important right. But in the search of it, the United States has so far overshot the mark that its citizens have long had a greater fear of debt than of terrorism. And while America was busy crippling itself, China racked up annual economic growth of almost 10 percent. According to the IMF, China, America's primary rival, will become the world's biggest economy sooner than expected, by 2016. Beijing has plenty of time to make strategic decisions, such as investing in green technologies. America is still debating in Congress whether or not climate change is real or imagined. The US is still at the forefront of spending on election campaigns. The next US president will need about $1 billion to spend on aggressive advertising spots and smear campaigns against rivals, partly because the 9/11 attacks did not unify the country, but rather further drove the people apart. And while he was working out the final details of the bin Laden operation, Obama had to publicly release his full birth certificate last week, to dispel his detractors' claims that he is not a real American. Amid the joyful frenzy in the US, all of this can be temporarily forgotten, and even Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney is now showing Obama respect. The president's triumph will bring him a short political breather. But he can't undo the lost American decade. Perhaps the decade would have gone a little differently if US soldiers had killed bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001. But the prince of terror disappeared for 10 years. And with his escape, he likely caused the Americans more damage than through anything else since 9/11.

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URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760344,00.html Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

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• 'I6 Simply Can't Believe It': A Visit to Bin Laden's Neighborhood (05/02/2011)

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• Al-Qaida6 Loses Its Leader: Osama Bin Laden, Prince of Terror (05/02/2011)

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• Applying6 the Law in Guantanamo: 'The Government's Narrative Was a Lie' (05/02/2011)

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• Reactions6 to Bin Laden's Death: A Victory For the US, Justice and the War on Terror (05/02/2011)

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• President6 Barack Obama's Speech: 'Justice Has Been Done' (05/02/2011)

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6 05/03/2011 05:49 PM SPIEGEL Interview with Former Syrian Vice President 'A Boundless Fury Has Been Building Up' Exiled former Syrian Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam tells SPIEGEL about his firsthand experience with President Bashar Assad's hunger for power and forecasts the end of his regime as the brutal suppression of the Syrian opposition continues. SPIEGEL: President Bashar Assad is attacking his own people with tanks. Is this the beginning of the end for his regime? Khaddam: The president is politically dead. Although he is grimly determined to stay in power, the Syrians have already made a fundamental decision: They want to overthrow this regime. SPIEGEL: When will Assad give up? Khaddam: Perhaps in as little as a few weeks. The Syrians have suffered under the dictator for four decades. A boundless fury has been building up, and now it can no longer be contained. SPIEGEL: The regime claims that the protesters are armed and have shot soldiers. Khaddam: That's a lie. But there are destructive forces from abroad, countries that are meddling. SPIEGEL: To whom are you referring?

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Khaddam: I'm referring to Iran. Anyone who believes that political decisions in Damascus are made without Iran these days is mistaken. Bashar and his brother Maher ... SPIEGEL: ... who commands the Presidential Guard ... Khaddam: ... have become vicarious agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Many Syrian intelligence officers were trained in Iran. There has been close military and security-policy cooperation between our countries for years. But Iran's cultural influence is also growing. Branches of Iranian foundations are active in Syria, and Iranian pilgrims are coming to the Umajjaden Mosque in Damascus on certain occasions and are daring to flagellate themselves, a bloody ritual that rarely happened in Syria in the past. SPIEGEL: You were a member of the Assad regimes for decades. Khaddam: I distanced myself from Bashar years ago. Syrians know that. And the fact that I was taken in by his father Hafez is one the greatest regrets of my life. SPIEGEL: You were a member of the regime when the Syrian army mowed down more than 20,000 civilians during the Hama massacre in 1982. What role did you play? Khaddam: The responsibility for the Hama massacre lies with Hafez's brother, Rifaat al-Assad ... SPIEGEL: ... who lives in exile in London. Khaddam: I and other leading members of the Baath Party didn't find out what had really happened until later. SPIEGEL: Hama is one of the darkest chapters in the history of Syria. Could such a massacre happen again? Khaddam: What is happening now in Daraa is moving in the same direction. Civilians are also being murdered there. But today we have the Internet, and today the entire world finds out about these things within a very short time. SPIEGEL: As someone who knows the family, did you see Bashar Assad as a great hope for the country? Khaddam: He promised reforms, and he wanted to open up the country. I believed him, as did many other Syrians. But in fact Bashar did nothing but postpone his promises. He wanted to become like his father. But the differences between the two couldn't be more striking. Hafez was a true political pro, a strategist who always knew when he had to make a momentous decision. By contrast, Bashar is volatile, unstable and prepared to change his mind at any time. A man without charisma, without vision. SPIEGEL: How powerful are the Assads? Khaddam: Extremely powerful. We are really talking about less than 20 people who are dividing up Syria's riches. This applies to a dozen members of the Assad family and their relatives, the Makhlouf clan. Rami Makhlouf, for example… SPIEGEL: ... Bashar's rich cousin ... Khaddam: ... controls a network of companies that makes up a substantial portion of the Syrian gross domestic product.

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SPIEGEL: It has been repeatedly claimed that Assad is merely a figurehead, and that others hold the reins -- like the head of the powerful intelligence services, for example. Khaddam: No, Bashar is clearly the ruler. Immediately after taking office, he placed people of his choice -- from the Presidential Guard, in particular -- in key positions. For example, the head of military intelligence comes from the Presidential Guard. SPIEGEL: Assad has more power than Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had? Khaddam: Indeed. Mubarak controlled politics and dominated the economy, but there were clear boundaries when it came to the armed forces. This also explains why the Egyptian military -- and the Tunisian military, for that matter -- protected the revolutionaries. In Syria, on the other hand, the army is willing to shoot at fellow Syrians. Why? Because the senior officers are hand-picked. SPIEGEL: Does the Baath Party, of which you were a member for several decades, still have a future? Khaddam: Today's Baath Party no longer has anything in common with the Baath Party at the time of its establishment. The regime has not retained any of the party's key principles, like the sanctity of the individual and a democracy based on free elections. SPIEGEL: The Muslim Brotherhood, which was part of the opposition to the Assad regime from the beginning, will also have a voice in a new Syria. What role will the Islamists assume? Khaddam: Our revolution is a nationwide uprising and not a revolt by a specific region or ethnic group. We all have one goal: To liberate Syria from this regime. SPIEGEL: Does that include the Muslim Brotherhood? Khaddam: Of course, as long as they abide by democratic rules. SPIEGEL: The West fears that religious extremists could come into power. Khaddam: Tell me about a single case in which extremists conducted campaigns in Syria! SPIEGEL: Are you denying that there are Islamists prepared to use violence in Syria? Khaddam: No, they do exist. But the regime established these groups, and then their members were sent abroad, to Iraq, for example. Some also went to Lebanon, to the Nahr al-Barid Palestinian camp, for example, to sow the seeds of chaos. SPIEGEL: Is the Assad regime inciting unrest in Lebanon? Khaddam: Syria has been the link between Iran and Lebanon since 1979. Tehran sees Syria as its de facto strategic base, allowing it to expand its influence in the Arab world. Iran also took over the Palestinian organizations Hamas and Al-Jihad al-Islami with Syrian help. Iran jeopardizes our revolution. SPIEGEL: What happens if the regime in Damascus collapses? Khaddam: Bashar's overthrow will have a positive impact on all neighboring countries. A new democratic system will maintain close relations with revolutionary Egypt, and the Syrian-Egyptian alliance will rise again. The result is that Iran's strategic ambitions will be limited to within its borders in the future. SPIEGEL: And what happens to Israel if the Assad regime falls?

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Khaddam: Every future government will abide by the Arab peace plan, to which the Arab League gave its blessing. That plan also calls for the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. SPIEGEL: But the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't want to recognize Israel. Khaddam: Public opinion in Syria demands that we coordinate our policy with all partners. Naturally, if the Arab nations agree to a peace with Israel, Syria will participate. SPIEGEL: How can Europe help? Khaddam: With measures that strangle the regime. It should adopt sanctions and freeze the accounts of the Assad clique. SPIEGEL: Should the West also intervene militarily? Khaddam: Looking on as the Syrian people are massacred is unacceptable. If necessary, all means must be employed to put an end to the atrocities. That includes military means. Interview conducted by Daniel Steinvorth and Volkhard Windfuhr Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760116,00.html Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• Are6 Assad's Days Numbered?: Syria's Neighbors Fear Regime Change (05/03/2011)

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• The6 World from Berlin: 'Assad Has Proven His Regime is Incapable of Reform' (04/26/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,759024,00.html

• Syria6 on the Edge of the Abyss: Assad's Regime Escalates Crackdown on Protesters (04/25/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,758905,00.html

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6 05/03/2011 03:21 PM Justice, American Style Was Bin Laden's Killing Legal?

An Analysis by Thomas6 Darnstädt Is this what justice looks like? Al-Qaida boss Osama bin Laden was killed on Sunday in a secret military operation in Pakistan. Americans are celebrating, but there are serious doubts about whether the targeted killing was legal under international law and the laws of war. US President Barack Obama gets precious few opportunities to announce a victory. So it's no wonder he chose grand6 words on Sunday night as the TV crews' spotlights shone upon him and he informed the nation about the deadly strike against Osama bin Laden. "Justice has been done," he said. It may be that this sentence comes back to haunt him in the years to come. What is just about killing a feared terrorist in his home in the middle of Pakistan? For the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and for patriotic Americans who saw their grand nation challenged by a band of criminals, the answer might be simple. But international law experts, who have been grappling with the question of the legal status of the US-led war on terror for years, find Obama's pithy words on Sunday night more problematic. Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is "not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial." Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person. These developments can also lead to tragic and inevitable escalations of the justice process. It is unfortunate. And it is certainly no reason for the indescribable jubilation that broke out on Sunday night across America -- and especially not for applause inside the CIA's operations center. Not Everything the US Declares To Be War Really Is But Obama and his predecessor Bush never sought the kind of justice that would have seen bin Laden tried in an international court. As early as his election campaign in 2008, Obama swore he would "kill bin Laden" and finish the job begun by his predecessor after 9/11. "We went to war against al-Qaida to protect our citizens, our friends and our allies," the president explained on Sunday night. A US national security official didn't beat around the bush, telling Reuters, "This was a kill operation." And why shouldn't it be? The very goal of war is the defeat of the opponent, the killing of enemies through legal means. War is war. In truth, it isn't quite that simple. And not everything that the United States declares to be war really is. Legal experts like Kress say it is "questionable whether the USA can still claim to be engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaida."

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It was certainly still war when Bush began the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Operation Enduring Freedom targeted the Taliban government in Kabul as well as Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization which it backed. At the time, al-Qaida maintained bases and training camps in Afghanistan -- just like a warring party, in fact. The war on terror was understood to be an "asymmetrical war," and the laws of war also permit the targeted killing of non-state combatants, provided they are really combatants who are organized in units with a military-like character, and that they are integrated into those units either as armed fighters or as a leader who issues commands. Was Bin Laden Still Even Giving Orders? For years, Osama bin Laden was, without a doubt, a combatant according to the latter definition. Many terror experts today, however, doubt that definition still applied to him in the end. "Al-Qaida has obviously had a network structure for some time. In a network, it isn't clear who gives the orders in individual instances," Kress says. "Outsiders also know very little about al-Qaida's structures in the Pakistani border areas. It is in no way certain that bin Laden still had the authority to issue commands as head of a quasi-military organization." But if bin Laden was no longer a leader, it would no longer be permissible to treat him as an enemy combatant or kill him. Nor is it clear which conflict this operation was actually part of. The operation didn't take place on the actual battlefield of Operation Enduring Freedom, i.e. in Afghanistan, but rather on Pakistani territory. On this point, too, the official American view of international law also diverges from that of most experts on the subject. The commanders of the war on terror consider the entire world to be a battlefield. The US would seek to justify a military operation like the one that took place Sunday anywhere it believes the enemy is hiding -- regardless whether it be in Europe or Islamabad. Kress and the vast majority of other experts on the law of armed conflict find this view unacceptable. "The theater of an asymmetrical conflict is regularly confined to the territory of the country in, or from, which the non-governmental actors act in quasi- military ways," says Kress. "Anything else would lead to the incalculable escalation of the use of force." Or is another asymmetrical war raging on Pakistani territory today, with al-Qaida waging war against the government there? If so, what role does the Taliban play in this conflict? Or bin Laden, for his part? "It is in no way clear that bin Laden, at the time of his killing, commanded an organization that was conducting an armed conflict either in or from Pakistan," Kress says. What Business Did the US Have in Pakistan? And what business did the United States even have acting within the territory of Pakistan, a foreign power? A military strike that crosses national borders, barring acts of self-defense, is generally viewed as an infringement on sovereignty -- unless Pakistan's government requested help from the Americans. Did Islamabad actually make that request? Obama sought to gloss over the subject on Sunday night. "Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts. They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations." But was Sunday a good day for justice? 235

For years, the very principle of international law has been to pursue justice rather than war. On Sunday, Obama said that bin Laden's fate is a "testament to the greatness of our country." If the United States had used the same power it deployed during the invasion of Iraq to force tyrants such as Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gadhafi -- not to mention the mass murderer Osama bin Laden -- into the dock of an international court, one might have believed him. URL: Thomas Darnstädt Justice, American Style Was Bin Laden's Killing Legal? 05/03/2011 03:21 PM http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,760358,00.html6 Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• The6 World from Berlin: 'In Obama, Terror Has Finally Met Its Match' (05/03/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760295,00.html

• America's6 Lost Decade: Bin Laden's Death Comes 10 Years Too Late (05/03/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760344,00.html

• President6 Barack Obama's Speech: 'Justice Has Been Done' (05/02/2011)

http://www.spiegel.de/int6 ernational/world/0,1518,760065,00.html

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CARTOON HACHFELD

Cayó la pieza

2 mayo 2011 NEUES6 DEUTSCHLAND BERLÍN

VIÑETISTA

Nacido6 en Ludwigshafen en 1939, Rainer Hachfeld es un dramaturgo y caricaturista político alemán. Tras finalizar sus estudios de arte en Berlín, empezó su carrera como caricaturista en 1966 en el Spandauer Volksblatt y pasó después al EXTRA-Blatt. Tambi... Diez años después de los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001, fuerzas especiales de

EEUU han6 matado a Osama Bin Laden el 1 de mayo, en el edificio que le servía de escondrijo en Pakistán.

HACHFELD Cayó la pieza 2 mayo 2011 NEUES6 DEUTSCHLAND BERLÍN 2 mayo 2011

http://www.presseurop.eu/es/content/cartoon/6296 141-cayo-la-pieza

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EL ALMANAQUE DE AL QAEDA

Junio-Julio6 2010 [3]

Peter6 Bergen y Katherine Tiedemann [4] En diciembre de 2007, el número dos de Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, mostró, en un gesto casi inadvertido, que era consciente de que la popularidad de su organización estaba descendiendo: solicitó a los participantes en un foro yihadista que intervinieran con él en una sesión de preguntas y respuestas. Parecía una táctica desesperada para recuperar apoyos, y es lo que era. Desde los atentados del 11 de septiembre, la organización terrorista y sus filiales habían matado a miles de musulmanes: un número incontable en Irak y centenares en Afganistán y en Pakistán sólo en ese año. Para un grupo que pretendía defender la umma islámica, esas matanzas habían asestado un golpe devastador a su credibilidad. Al Zawahiri sabía que los fieles estaban perdiendo la fe en Al Qaeda.

La sesión de Al Zawahiri en Internet no salió bien. Al preguntarle cómo podía justificar la matanza de civiles musulmanes, respondió a la defensiva, con fragmentos densos y complicados que remitían a otras declaraciones también densas y complicadas sobre el tema. Ahora bien, como una serpiente arrinconada, una Al Qaeda debilitada no es menos peligrosa. Foreign Policy ofrece aquí el primer examen exhaustivo de este tipo, 238

el Almanaque de Al Qaeda, una descripción detallada de cómo han cambiado los miembros, los métodos y las estrategias de La Base en el último decenio, y de cómo pueden evolucionar. El resultado es la imagen de una vanguardia terrorista que está perdiendo la guerra de las ideas en el mundo islámico, pese a que sus atentados violentos aumenten. No es porque los estadounidenses estén ganando; la mayoría de los musulmanes sigue teniendo una actitud muy negativa hacia Estados Unidos por sus guerras en el mundo islámico y su historial de malos tratos a los presos. Es porque los musulmanes, en gran parte, se han vuelto en contra de la siniestra ideología de Osama Bin Laden. Los índices de aprobación del líder terrorista y los atentados suicidas que propugna bajaron a la mitad en los dos países islámicos más poblados, Indonesia y Pakistán, entre 2002 y 2009. En Irak, la despiadada campaña de violencia sectaria de Abu Musab al Zarqaui eliminó todo el apoyo con el que contaba Al Qaeda e hizo un tremendo daño a su nombre en todo el mundo árabe. Además, la yihadha fracasado de forma espectacular en la consecución de sus objetivos fundamentales. El fin primordial de Bin Laden ha sido siempre el cambio de régimen en Oriente Medio, acabar con todos los gobiernos desde El Cairo hasta Riad y sustituirlos por un gobierno de estilo talibán. Quiere que las tropas y la influencia occidentales desaparezcan de la región, y piensa que atacar al “enemigo lejano”, Estados Unidos, hará que se desmorone el “enemigo cercano”, los regímenes árabes respaldados por Washington. Sin embargo, pese a sus dotes de líder y a su carisma, Bin Laden ha conseguido lo contrario de lo que se proponía. Casi diez años después del 11-S, sus últimos refugios seguros en las montañas del Indu Kush están siendo atacados, y los soldados estadounidenses patrullan las calles de Kandahar y de Bagdad. Aunque parezca que estamos ante una victoria en la llamadaguerra contra el terror, es una victoria incompleta. Los yihadistasdirigidos por Bin Laden han demostrado ser muy resistentes, y Al Qaeda sigue siendo una amenaza importante para los intere-ses occidentales. Todavía puede llevar a cabo un atentado capaz de matar a cientos de personas, como se demostró en el atentado fallido de Times Square de Nueva York. La historia nos enseña que los grupos pequeños, pero decididos, pueden mantener su actividad sanguinaria durante años casi sin apoyo de la población. Los dirigentes de Al Qaeda, desde luego, creen que su lucha épica contra Occidente en defensa del verdadero islam durará generaciones. —Peter Bergen

Las bases La definición de “combatiente” de Al Qaeda es variable. Los miembros permanentes son relativamente pocos –unos cien en Afganistán en 2009, frente a 200 en 2001, según los servicios de inteligencia– y prestan un juramento religioso de lealtad personal (bayat) a Bin Laden. En el núcleo de trabajo de Al Qaeda –ahora centrado en Pakistán–, hay varios centenares más de extranjeros libres, sobre todo árabes y uzbecos, que son, “aunque no se llamen así oficialmente, personal de Al Qaeda”, dice un agente de los servicios de inteligencia estadounidenses. Otra capa más es la que forman varios miles de militantes procedentes de las tribus pastunes, con cuyas familias se han casado algunos de los extranjeros.

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COMBATIENTES DE AL QAEDA HOY EN PAKISTÁN

Descargar6 imagen ampliada [5]

NÚMERO de combatientes entrenados en los campos de Al Qaeda entre 1996 y el 11 de septiembre de 2001: de 10.000 a 20.000. Estrategia de Relaciones Públicas El brazo de Al Qaeda dedicado a los medios de comunicación, As Sahab(Las Nubes, en árabe), es un maestro en aprovechar las oportunidades. Con una mínima estructura operativa, As Sahab trata de llegar a los aliados ideológicos y geográficos –“de Kabul a Mogadiscio”, como decía el título de una declaración de Zawahiri en febrero de 2009– y se atribuye de forma oportunista las acciones de los militantes yihadistas en todo el mundo. Los comunicados suelen ser declaraciones de individuos concretos, documentales o vídeos en los que se elogian atentados y ataques militantes.

COMUNICADOS POR AÑO COMUNICADOS POR TEMA

Descargar6 imagen ampliada [6] Descargar6 imagen ampliada [7]

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COMUNICADOS POR FUENTE

¿Y dónde está Bin Laden? Preguntemos a la CIA

PORTER GOSS DIRECTOR DE LA CIA “Tengo una idea excelente de dónde está [Bin Laden]”. 22 de junio de 2005 JOHN KRINGEN SUBDIRECTOR DE INTELIGENCIA DE LA CIA “Nosotros, como ustedes, seguimos pensando que Osama Bin Laden está vivo. Aún creemos que probablemente está en las zonas tribales de Pakistán”. 11 de julio de 2007 MICHAEL HAYDEN DIRECTOR DE LA CIA “¿Qué pasa con Bin Laden? ¿Por qué no le hemos matado ni le hemos capturado? Cualquiera que conozca la región fronteriza entre Afganistán y Pakistán sabe que es un 241

terreno escarpado e inaccesible”. 13 de noviembre de 2008 LEON PANETTA DIRECTOR DE LA CIA “Osama Bin Laden y su número dos, Ayman al Zawahiri, se esconden “o en las zonas tribales septentrionales [de Pakistán] o en Waziristán del norte, o en algún lugar próximo”. 17 de marzo de 2010 ¿Y después de Bin Laden? Cuando era adolescente, Osama Bin Laden era tan devoto que otros chicos no decían palabrotas ni contaban chistes verdes si él estaba delante. Esa religiosidad acabó convirtiéndose más tarde en un odio fanático. “Todo musulmán, desde que comprende de corazón la diferencia, odia a los americanos, odia a los judíos y odia a los cristianos”, declaró a Al Yazira en una entrevista de 1998. “Esto forma parte de nuestra fe y nuestra religión”. Hoy, Bin Laden ejerce un control personal y casi absoluto sobre los miembros de Al Qaeda, patente en el juramento de lealtad que le prestan, el bayat. Varios seguidores suyos han descrito su primer encuentro con el líder de Al Qaeda como una intensa experiencia espiritual, y han calificado como amor su sentimiento hacia él. Pese a los rumores persistentes sobre su salud, que incluyen una enfermedad mortal de riñón, existen numerosas pruebas de que continúa vivo y mandando en Al Qaeda. Desde el 11-S, ha emitido una sucesión constante de grabaciones de audio y vídeo en las que habla de la actualidad; en la más reciente elogiaba el atentado fallido de Navidad. En una grabación de 2007, el líder de Al Qaeda llegó a teñirse de negro su barba canosa, lo cual indica que el militante saudí no es inmune a cierta vanidad a medida que envejece. ¿Quién podría sucederle si desaparece? Uno de los más probables es Abu Yahya al Libi, el teólogo del grupo, joven, implacable y amigo de los medios de comunicación. Otro es Mustafa Abu al Yazid, un egipcio y miembro original de la shura directiva de Al Qaeda, que ejerce el mando del grupo en Afganistán. También podrían ser cruciales varios hijos de Bin Laden; desde luego, el líder de Al Qaeda les ha inculcado su ideología desde niños. Terroristas suicidas ¿Quiénes son los hombres y las mujeres tan entregados a Al Qaeda que están dispuestos a renunciar a todo? En Afganistán, la nueva zona caliente para los atentados suicidas, casi todos los terroristas proceden de la frontera oriental. Jóvenes, poco formados y procedentes, sobre todo, de las madrazas paquistaníes, los terroristas no están motivados por ninguna causa concreta, según un estudio de la ONU de 2007. Se cree que intervienen varios factores: la religión, la seguridad, el nacionalismo y las preocupaciones personales por la deshonra. En Irak también eran mayoría los terroristas extranjeros, casi ninguno era local. Mohammed Hafez, autor del autorizado estudio Suicide Bombers in Iraq, llegó a la conclusión de que, de los 139 terroristas suicidas “conocidos” en Irak hasta 2006, 53 eran saudíes y sólo 18 iraquíes, mientras que los demás procedían de otros países árabes, e incluso de Europa.

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[9]6Amplia Descargar6 imagen ampliada [8] [10] 6Descargar imagen ampliada [9] da [10]

Las tramas frustradas En la mayoría de las tramas terroristas importantes dirigidas contra países occidentales desde 2004, los autores obedecían órdenes o habían recibido entrenamiento de grupos yihadistas establecidos en la frontera Afganistán-Pakistán. En los dos últimos años, por el contrario, en las regiones tribales de Pakistán se han unido más reclutas occidentales a los aliados de Al Qaeda que a la organización propiamente dicha, con lo que han aumentado los cauces por los que la red terrorista puede enviar agentes a cometer atentados a Occidente. Las tramas importantes son las que causaron la muerte de 10 personas o más, las que habrían matado a un número importante si los explosivos no hubieran sufrido fallos o en las que los miembros de una célula adquirieron materiales para la fabricación de bombas sin ayuda de informadores ni agentes de los servicios del orden trabajando clandestinamente. Datos de Paul Cruickshank Bombas de fertilizantes Blanco: Londres, un club nocturno y un centro comercial. Conspiradores: cinco. 2001: Omar Khyam y cuatro colegas británicos contactan con Al Qaeda en la frontera entre Afganistán y Pakistán. 2003: los cinco conspiradores reciben entrenamiento en el noroeste de Pakistán para fabricar bombas. Marzo de 2004: la policía británica detiene a los cinco extremistas. Abril de 2007: culpables de conspirar para provocar explosiones y condenados a cadena perpetua.

Los aviones británicos Blanco: siete aviones transatlánticos.

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Conspiradores: al menos seis. Muertes posibles: 1.500. 2005-2006: unos terroristas de origen británico viajan a la región de las FATA (las áreas tribales paquistaníes). 9 de agosto de 2006: la policía británica detiene a 24 hombres. Septiembre de 2008: tres son declarados culpables por conspiración para el asesinato. Septiembre de 2009: tres son condenados de conspirar para hacer estallar unos aviones.

Metro de Nueva York Blanco: el metro de Nueva York. Conspiradores: al menos tres. Muertes posibles: docenas. Otoño de 2008: Al Qaeda entrena a Najibullah Zazi, antiguo encargado de un puesto de café en Wall Street y ciudadano estadounidense, y otros dos presuntos conspiradores, en las FATA de Pakistán. Septiembre de 2009: Zazi es detenido en Denver. Febrero de 2010: Zazi se declara culpable de conspirar para cometer un atentado en el metro de Nueva York.

Opinión Pública El número creciente de atentados suicidas, primero en Irak, luego en Afganistán y ahora en Pakistán, demuestra sin duda cuánto se han extendido las tácticas de Al Qaeda. Pero ese triunfo ha tenido un coste elevado: Al Qaeda está perdiendo partidarios a medida que mueren civiles musulmanes en la refriega.

Descargar6 imagen ampliada [11]

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Ataques de aviones no pilotados

Son la piedra angular de la labor antiterrorista del presidente Barack Obama en Pakist án; su Gobierno autorizó más durante su primer año que el de George W. Bush en sus ocho años de mandato. ¿Pero sirven para algo? A juzgar por la violencia sobre el terreno en 2009, quizá no. El año pasado, Pakistán y Afganistán sufrieron unos niveles sin precedentes de violencia de los talibanes y otros insurgentes, que son claramente capaces de absorber las pérdidas constantes de militantes de base. Sin embargo, dada la oposición de las autoridades paquistaníes a la presencia de soldados estadounidenses en su territorio, es de suponer que los ataques con aviones no pilotados seguirán siendo un arma del Gobierno de Obama. Abu Khabab al Masri PRINCIPALES BAJAS 8 de diciembre de 2009: Saleh al Somali, jefe de operaciones externas de Al Qaeda y enlace entre la organización en Afganistán y en Pakistán y la organización en otros países. 28 de julio de 2008: Abu Khabab al Masri, experto de Al Qaeda en armas de destrucción masiva. 29 de enero de 2008: Abu Laith al Libi, que organizó en 2007 un atentado suicida contra el vicepresidente estadounidense Dick Cheney durante su visita a la Base Aérea de Bagram.

Descargar6 imagen ampliada [12]

Franquicias de Al Qaeda

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Talibanes Miembros: 25.000 en Afganistán; decenas de miles en Pakistán. Líder: el mulá Omar. Hay unos 25.000 combatientes en Afganistán y decenas de miles en Pakistán, pero sólo el 10% de la población de dichos países apoya el movimiento. En Pakistán, los talibanes financian sus actividades recaudando decenas de millones mediante secuestros, robos de bancos, extorsión e impuestos ilegales que gravan las joyas, la madera y a las minorías locales. Al otro lado de la frontera, los servicios de inteligencia creen que los talibanes en Afganistán obtienen entre 70 millones y 300 millones de dólares al año (entre 55 y 234 millones de euros) del lucrativo cultivo de amapolas, y alrededor de 106 millones de dólares anuales en donaciones de fuentes extranjeras, seguramente del Golfo Pérsico. Al Qaeda en Irak Miembros: en su apogeo, varios miles de iraquíes, además de 100 combatientes extranjeros importados al mes. Líder: Abu Omar al Baghdadi. Al Qaeda en Irak (AQI) se formó en octubre de 2004, cuando el ex convicto jordano Abu Musab al Zarqawi juró lealtad a Bin Laden en nombre de su grupo militante, Tawhid wal Jihad (Monoteísmo y Yihad). Zarqawi murió durante una incursión aérea estadounidense en junio de 2006; hoy, Al Qaeda utiliza el nombre de Estado Islámico de Irak y tiene como jefe titular a Abu Omar al Baghdadi, una figura misteriosa que quizá sea un personaje inventado para dar al grupo un tono más iraquí. Desde su periodo de más poder en 2006 y 2007, AQI ha pasado a la clandestinidad debido a la presión de las milicias tribales suníes, el Ejército de Estados Unidos y las fuerzas de seguridad iraquíes. Al Qaeda en la Península Arábiga Miembros: entre 200 y 300. Líder: Nasir Abd al Karim al Wahayshi. Al Qaeda en la Península Arábiga saltó a la fama el año pasado con el atentado fallido de Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab el día de Navidad. Tiene poco más de un año: se formó oficialmente cuando las filiales saudí y yemení de Al Qaeda se fusionaron por la intensa presión del Gobierno saudí sobre Al Qaeda en todo el reino. El jefe del grupo, Nasir Abd al Karim al Wahayshi, es un yemení de treinta y tantos años que combatió en Afganistán durante la batalla de Tora Bora en diciembre de 2001, y se cree que trabajó directamente con Bin Laden. Nº 3 de Al Qaeda: El trabajo más peligroso del mundo Si se compara la lista actual de los terroristas más buscados con otra de 2001, es inevitable ver todos los número tres de Al Qaeda que han ido al encuentro del Creador (o al menos del carcelero).

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MUERTOS

Mohammed Atef Nacionalidad: egipcio. Causa de la muerte: ataque de un avión no pilotado en Afganistán en noviembre de 2001. Puesto en Al Qaeda: comandante militar. Hamza Rabia Nacionalidad: egipcio. Causa de la muerte: ataque de un avión no pilotado en Waziristán del Mohammed Atef Abu Laith al Libi Norte en noviembre de 2005. Puesto en Al Qaeda: jefe de operaciones internacionales. Abu Laith al Libi Nacionalidad: libio. Causa de la muerte: ataque de un avión no pilotado en Waziristán del Norte en enero de 2008. Puesto en Al Qaeda: comandante de operaciones y portavoz. DETENIDOS

Saif al Adel Nacionalidad: egipcio. Capturado: en Irán, 2003; hoy sometido a arresto domiciliario. Puesto en Al Qaeda: comandante militar. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Nacionalidad: paquistaní, nacido en Kuwait. Capturado: en Pakistán, 2003; espera juicio en EE UU. Khalid Sheikh Puesto en Al Qaeda: comandante de Saif al Adel Mohammed operaciones de los atentados del 11-S. Abu Faraj al Libi Nacionalidad: libio. Capturado: en Pakistán, 2005; hoy prisionero en Guantánamo. Puesto en Al Qaeda: comandante de operaciones, sucesor de Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

HUÍDOS Abu Yahya al Libi 247

Nacionalidad: libio. Presunto escondite: región fronteriza entre Afganistán y Pakistán. Puesto en Al Qaeda: portavoz. Mustafa Abu al Yazid Nacionalidad: egipcio. Presunto escondite: Afganistán. Puesto en Al Qaeda: jefe de Al Qaeda en Afganistán, enlace con los talibanes.

Agradecimientos: IntelCenter, Daniel Kimmage, Paul Cruickshank, Barbara Sude, Stephen Tankel y Brian Fishman.

Source URL: http://fp-es.org/el-almanaque-de-al-qaeda6 Links: [1] http://fp-es.org/temas/terrorismo [2] http://fp-es.org/secciones/en-cifras [3] http://fp-es.org/junio-julio-2010 [4] http://fp-es.org/autor/peter-bergen-y-katherine-tiedemann [5] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque1.jpg [6] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque2.jpg [7] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/Almanaque3.jpg [8] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque6.jpg [9] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque7.jpg [10] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque8.jpg [11] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque4.jpg [12] http://fp-es.org/images/jun_jul_2010/almanaque5.jpg

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¿QUIÉN ES LA OPOSICIÓN ISLAMISTA EN ARABIA SAUDÍ?

Oriente6 Medio [1] ¿QUIÉN ES LA OPOSICIÓN ISLAMISTA EN ARABIA SAUDÍ?

Guillaume6 Fourmont [2] Un repaso de las voces que piden reformas en el reino Al Saud. Las revueltas en el mundo árabe y, en concreto, en Bahrein, Yemen y Omán, han asustado a Arabia Saudí. Antes de que la crisis llegue hasta Riad, el rey Abdalá Al Saud ha ofrecido a sus súbditos miles de millones de dólares en ayudas sociales y económicas. Nada peor, para un musulmán, que la fitna, la división y el caos. Sin embargo, el Corán también dice que un soberano debe consultar a su gente, algo que no hacen las autoridades saudíes, que creen que comprar la paz social es suficiente. La paradoja política de Arabia Saudí consiste en que el islam sirve tanto a algunas voces disidentes para pedir reformas como al régimen para reprimirlas. En los últimos años, las redes sociales en Internet, las asociaciones feministas (Baladi, Saudi Women Revolution) y los centros de defensa de los derechos humanos (Saudi Centre of Human Rights) han dado la imagen de una sociedad que se plantea cada vez más pensar en la res publica; es decir, que critica a la todo poderosa familia real y que cree tener un papel en la gestión de los asuntos públicos del reino. Una visión que no está dispuesto a aceptar un Gobierno que se considera el padre de la nación. El problema de Arabia Saudí es que nació en 1932 con un férreo contrato social: yo gobierno y te protejo, tú me obedeces. ¿Quién vigilará el valor de ese contrato? Alá.

AFP/Gettyimages

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Fue precisamente en el nombre de los valores islámicos que varios intelectuales empezaron, en los 90 y tras la Guerra del Golfo, a criticar el poder. No hay que olvidar que el monarca es oficialmente el líder de los creyentes y protector de los lugares santos del islam. La reacción del rey Fahd en aquel momento fue represión interior, reforma exterior; es decir, adoptó una serie de cambios para satisfacer a la comunidad internacional, mientras encerraba a los intelectuales. Lo mismo pasó en 2003 y 2004 cuando una serie de peticiones llamaban a una profunda reforma de las instituciones. Esa vez, por miedo a represalias, los firmantes siempre insistieron en su lealtad a la familia Al Saud y en su deber religioso, islámico, de pedir reformas. Se habló entonces de la primavera de Riad. En un país donde no existen los partidos políticos, es difícil hablar de oposición. En un país donde el única texto de ley es el Corán, escasas son las voces que no sean islamistas. El islamismo saudí nació en los 70 cuando el reino se convirtió en un pilar de la estrategia estadounidense contra el comunismo. La sumisión política y militar de Arabia Saudí a EE UU, el control de la esfera religiosa por el poder político y un desarrollo económico que generó excesos y corrupción fueron los principales argumentos de los primeros disidentes. El islamismo encontró cierto eco en una sociedad piadosa y se convirtió en un movimiento y una ideología importante. En 1993, nació el Comité por la Defensa de los Derechos Legítimos (CDDL), cuyos líderes fueron encarcelados o se exiliaron a Londres. El CDDL perdió a lo largo de los años contacto con la realidad saudí, una debilidad que se confirmó cuando una parte del CDDL formó el Movimiento para la Reforma Islámica en Arabia (MIRA). Ambos movimientos apenas tienen eco entre la sociedad y Riad consiguió, gracias al respaldo de la comunidad internacional, desacreditarlos. Otros líderes pasaron años en la prisión de Al Hayir, en Riad, conocido centro de debates entre las principales fuerzas, entre yihadistas e islamistas leales a los Al Saud. Fue también donde se radicalizaron muyahidines saudíes de Afganistán. Algunos fomentaron la acción violenta, como el más famoso de ellos, Osama Bin Laden. Los yihadistas de la actualidad no son los viejos muyahidines, sino jóvenes de buena educación y en su mayoría licenciados que ven en la lucha armada una manera de volver a los orígenes del islam. En un país donde no existe ningún tipo de grupo corporativo, la yihad puede ser una afirmación de identidad. No les interesa ser saudí ni formar parte de la sociedad. El Ministerio del Interior saudí calcula que unas 10.000 personas son capaces de llevar a cabo acciones violentas. La incógnita es la importancia y amplitud de este fenómeno.

Las críticas vienen también desde el interior. El caso del incendio en una escuela de niñas en 2002 es un ejemplo En un país donde no existe ningún de los excesos de la policía religiosa. tipo de grupo corporativo, la yihad

Los mutawa son cada vez más criticados puede ser una afirmación de por la sociedad que empieza a ver en identidad ellos una mala influencia. Una de las consecuencias de esa debilidad del clérigo es la aparición de neoislamistas que adoptaron como estrategia acercarse al poder. Además de contar con tecnócratas y hombres de negocios seculares, la familia Al Saud empezó a rodearse de neoislamistas, más conocidos bajo el nombre de Sahwa (“el despertar”, en árabe), que criticaron las

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prácticas de la familia real y del clérigo, aunque sean leales a los Al Saud. Los líderes de Sahwa son dos jeques conocidos: Safar Al Haualí y Salmán Al Auda, firmantes de las peticiones de 1991. Tras salir de la cárcel, ambos desempeñaron un papel importante en la mediación de las autoridades con los yihadistas y los religiosos más radicales. Sahwa pretende reestructurar el liderazgo religiosos del país, siempre apoyándose sobre los valores islámicos como única vía de la sociedad. Por eso, respaldan las reformas políticas de Abdalá, aunque no las sociales. Los representantes de Sahwa son criticados por los islamoliberales, que no distinguen entre reformas sociales y políticas, por considerarlas necesarias. Pero el mayor problema del reino es la cerrazón de las autoridades, que siguen considerando que sólo ellos pueden encarnar el pueblo en nombre Alá. No quieren renunciar al sistema actual y asegurarse del control de las fuerzas políticas. Las elecciones municipales de 2005 fueron una reforma cosmética destinada a valorar la gestión de la familia real ante la opinión pública occidental y calmar las esperanzas locales. Mientras, varios actores que participaron a la apertura de la escena pública fueron detenidos. El nacionalista árabe Matruk Al Fatih, el islamista Abdalá Al Hamid y el comunista Alí Al Dumayni suelen ser condenados por “desobediencia al soberano” y encarcelados. No son los únicos; es muy difícil saber cuántos opositores hay en las cárceles del país (entre 2.000 y 10.000, según las fuentes). Las revueltas en el mundo árabe poco han inspirado a los saudíes, que no se manifestaron en masa contra el régimen. El rey Abdalá ha recibido en los últimos meses muchas cartas de intelectuales que piden reformas políticas, pero no buscan cambiar el marco actual. Artículos relacionados

• Arabia6 Saudí, protegida por el 'oro negro'. [3] Guillaume Fourmont

• Los6 señores del reino. [4] Christopher Davidson

• 6¿Es la familia real saudí la solución? [5] Guillaume Fourmont

• Primavera6 silenciosa en Arabia Saudí. [6] Toby Jones

• El6 atrevido viraje del reino del desierto. [6] Jean-François Seznec y Afshin Molavi

• Depende:7 Egipto [7] Blake Hounshell

• Salvar7 a Arabia Saudí. [8] F. Gregory Gause III

• Oriente7 Medio

Source URL: http://www.fp-es.org/quien-es-la-opos7 icion-islamista-en-arabia-saudi Links: [1] http://www.fp-es.org/regiones/oriente-medio [2] http://www.fp-es.org/autor/guillaume-fourmont [3] http://www.fp-es.org/arabia-saudi-protegida-por-el-oro-negro [4] http://www.fp-es.org/los-senores-del-reino [5] http://d6.fp-es.org/es-la-familia-real-saudi-la-solucion [6] http://www.fp-es.org/el-atrevido-viraje-del-reino-del-desierto [7] http://www.fp-es.org/depende-egipto [8] http://www.fp-es.org/salvar-arabia-saudi

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7 Egypt’s changing foreign policy

Hassan7 Nafaa Tue, 03/05/2011 - 14:54 There have been clear shifts in Egypt’s foreign policy since the ouster of ex-President Hosni Mubarak, long considered a “strategic treasure” by Israel, in February. The speed of these changes has come as a surprise to many. Egypt is most visibly shifting its foreign policy on three issues: bilateral relations with Iran, the Palestinian reconciliation process, and the Israeli blockade on Gaza. Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi has publicly expressed Egypt’s willingness to restore normal relations with Iran, including an exchange of ambassadors between the two countries. On Palestinian reconciliation, Egypt has adopted a more even-handed approach in its efforts to mediate between Fatah and Hamas. The result has been rapid success. An Egypt-brokered deal to end the divisions between the rival Palestinian factions has paved the way for a comprehensive reconciliation agreement, to be officially signed at the Arab League headquarters on Wednesday. With regards to the Gaza, Egypt’s has announced its intention to permanently open the Rafah border crossing soon, effectively ending its complicity in the Israeli-imposed siege. These quick changes in Egypt’s foreign policy are deeply disturbing for Israel, which has portrayed them as a warning sign that new Egyptian government may violate its obligations under its 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. But none of these policy shifts constitute a breach of Egypt’s international obligations. The treaty does not grant Israel the right to dictate the nature of Egypt’s relations with other countries. Israel has no authority to determine Egypt’s allies and foes, nor should it receive preferential treatment from Egypt. Instead, these shifts reflect a serious attempt on the part of Cairo to repair its foreign policy. Former President Hosni Mubarak needed Israeli support for his plan to transfer power to his son Gamal. In return, Mubarak agreed to do Israel’s bidding. He refused to improve relations with Iran and agreed to sign a Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ) agreement with Israel. He helped Israel impose an unjust siege on the Gaza Strip, and facilitated its war on Hamas. Mubarak voluntarily offered these concessions without any justification. He calculated that these gestures would help ensure the passage of his succession plan.

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The failure of Mubarak's succession plan in the wake of the 25 January revolution has severely weakened Israel’s ability to manipulate Egyptian foreign policy. Egypt’s desire to normalize relations with Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizbollah reflects a genuine wish for good relations with some of the most influential players in the Middle East. This does not mean that Egypt seeks an unconditional alliance with these governments and political forces, or that it will adopt their respective regional agendas. Instead, the collapse of the succession scheme, which served as the main force behind Egypt’s foreign policy decisions, means that the country's foreign policy can be guided first and foremost by its national interests. This is a very important development that will help Egypt formulate a new vision for its regional and international role. The present shifts in Egypt’s foreign policy are only the beginning and promise to be followed by larger transformations. Translated from the Arabic Edition.

Hassan7 Nafaa Egypt’s changing foreign policy 03/05/2011 - 14:54 http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/4222987

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May 3, 2011 Farewell to Geronimo

By THOMAS7 L. FRIEDMAN There is only one good thing about the fact that Osama bin Laden survived for nearly 10 years after the mass murder at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that he organized. And that is that he lived long enough to see so many young Arabs repudiate his ideology. He lived long enough to see Arabs from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Syria rise up peacefully to gain the dignity, justice and self-rule that Bin Laden claimed could be obtained only by murderous violence and a return to puritanical Islam. We did our part. We killed Bin Laden with a bullet. Now the Arab and Muslim people have a chance to do their part — kill Bin Ladenism with a ballot — that is, with real elections, with real constitutions, real political parties and real progressive politics. Yes, the bad guys have been dealt a blow across the Arab world in the last few months — not only Al Qaeda, but the whole rogues’ gallery of dictators, whose soft bigotry of low expectations for their people had kept the Arab world behind. The question now, though, is: Can the forces of decency get organized, elected and start building a different Arab future? That is the most important question. Everything else is noise. To understand that challenge, we need to recall, again, where Bin Ladenism came from. It emerged from a devil’s bargain between oil-consuming countries and Arab dictators. We all — Europe, America, India, China — treated the Arab world as a collection of big gas stations, and all of us sent the same basic message to the petro-dictators: Keep the oil flowing, the prices low and don’t bother Israel too much and you can treat your people however you like, out back, where we won’t look. Bin Laden and his followers were a product of all the pathologies that were allowed to grow in the dark out back — crippling deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and education across the Arab world. These deficits nurtured a profound sense of humiliation among Arabs at how far behind they had fallen, a profound hunger to control their own futures and a pervasive sense of injustice in their daily lives. That is what is most striking about the Arab uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia in particular. They were almost apolitical. They were not about any ideology. They were propelled by the most basic human longings for dignity, justice and to control one’s own life. Remember, one of the first things Egyptians did was attack their own police stations — the instruments of regime injustice. And since millions of Arabs share these longings for dignity, justice and freedom, these revolutions are not going to go away. For decades, though, the Arab leaders were very adept at taking all that anger brewing out back and redirecting it onto the United States and Israel. Yes, Israel’s own behavior at times fed the Arab sense of humiliation and powerlessness, but it was not the primary cause. No matter. While the Chinese autocrats said to their people, “We’ll take away your freedom and, in return, we’ll give you a steadily rising education and standard of living,” the Arab autocrats said, “We’ll take away your freedom and give you the Arab- Israel conflict.”

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This was the toxic “out back” from which Bin Laden emerged. A twisted psychopath and false messiah, he preached that only through violence — only by destroying these Arab regimes and their American backers — could the Arab people end their humiliation, restore justice and build some mythical uncorrupted caliphate. Very few Arabs actively supported Bin Laden, but he initially drew significant passive support for his fist in the face of America, the Arab regimes and Israel. But as Al Qaeda was put on the run, and spent most of its energies killing other Muslims who didn’t toe its line, even its passive support melted away (except for the demented leadership of Hamas). In that void, with no hope of anyone else riding to their rescue, it seems — in the totally unpredictable way these things happen — that the Arab publics in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere shucked off their fears and decided that they themselves would change what was going on out back by taking over what was going on out front. And, most impressively, they decided to do it under the banner of one word that you hear most often today among Syrian rebels: “Silmiyyah.” It means peaceful. “We will do this peacefully.” It is just the opposite of Bin Ladenism. It is Arabs saying in their own way: We don’t want to be martyrs for Bin Laden or pawns for Mubarak, Assad, Gaddafi, Ben Ali and all the rest. We want to be “citizens.” Not all do, of course. Some prefer more religious identities and sectarian ones. This is where the struggle will be. We cannot predict the outcome. All we can hope for is that this time there really will be a struggle of ideas — that in a region where extremists go all the way and moderates tend to just go away, this time will be different. The moderates will be as passionate and committed as the extremists. If that happens, both Bin Laden and Bin Ladenism will be resting at the bottom of the ocean.

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May 3, 2011 Cool Hand Barack

By MAUREEN7 DOWD WASHINGTON No wonder the president’s top generals call him “a Cool Hand Luke.” After giving the order for members of a Navy Seals team to execute a fantastically daring plan to, let’s be honest, execute Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama put on a tuxedo and gave a comedy speech Saturday night in a Washington ballroom of tippling journalists and Hollywood stars. If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters. Just substitute “Leave the copter, take the corpse” for “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” The president’s studied cool and unreadable mien have sometimes distanced him from the public at moments of boiling crisis. But in the long-delayed showdown with Public Enemy No. 1, these qualities served him perfectly. The timing was good, blunting the infelicitous remarks made recently to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza by an Obama adviser, who described the president as the un-John Wayne ushering a reviled and chastened America away from the head of the global table. The unnamed adviser described the Obama doctrine on display in Libya as “leading from behind,” which sounds rather pathetic. But now the president has shown he can lead straight-on and that, unlike Jimmy Carter, he knows how to order up that all-important backup helicopter. He has said that those who call him a wimp are mistaken, that there is often muscular purpose beneath his diffident surface. Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, who was so tacky that she didn’t mention Obama’s name in her congratulations, tried to draw credit to the Bush administration. But there can be no doubt that justice for the families of the 9/11 victims was agonizingly delayed because the Bush team took a megalomaniacal detour to Baghdad. A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan. To justify the switch to Saddam and the redeployment of troops to Iraq, W. and his circle stopped mentioning Osama’s name and downplayed his importance. When the White House ceases to concentrate on something, so does the C.I.A. The hunt got so cold by 2005 that the Bin Laden unit at the C.I.A. was disbanded and overhauled. Four years after the monster felled the twin towers, the Bush team finally put more officers on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In his East Room address Sunday night, President Obama made it clear that he had shooed away the distracting Oedipal ghosts. 256

“Shortly after taking office,” he said, “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda.” Many famous invaders throughout history, from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane to Babur, have marched along the same route the Navy Seals took on their moonless flight, going from Kabul to Jalalabad to Peshawar. The mesmerizing narrative stitched together by The Times’s Mark Mazzetti, Helene Cooper and Peter Baker begins with C.I.A. agents getting the license plate of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier in Peshawar. Peshawar is the ultimate mystery town, famous for secrets and falsehoods. It’s known for its bazaars, especially the Story Tellers Bazaar. And that is exactly where President Obama now finds himself. He will now have to sort through the bazaar of Pakistan’s deceptive stories and deal with lawmakers angry about giving $20 billion since 9/11 to a country where Osama was comfortably ensconced. For years, top Pakistanis have said that Osama was dead or in Afghanistan. Even Condi Rice proclaimed she was shocked to find “Geronimo” settled in Abbottabad for six years, living in plain sight in a million-dollar house in an affluent suburb near a military base and the Pakistani version of West Point. As one of Osama’s neighbors put it: “It’s the closest you can be to Britain.” At a House homeland security subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Representative Patrick Meehan asked the question about Pakistan that is ricocheting through Washington: “Does it reflect to some extent some kind of divided loyalty or complicity in some part, or incompetence or both?” Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, who used to advise the U.S. military in Afghanistan on Al Qaeda, replied with equal bluntness: “Whether there was complicity, or incompetence, at the very least there has not been a high priority in targeting the senior Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Based on the threat streams coming from this area, those interests have to change.”

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May 3, 2011 My Sister, My Grief By ROBERT KLITZMAN “AFTER someone has been murdered, their family members often feel peace when the murderer has been executed,” a friend called to tell me on Monday. “Do you feel peace?” Another friend asked, “Are you going to dance in the streets now and celebrate?” On Sept. 11, 2001, my sister Karen died while working at the World Trade Center. In the weeks that followed, my family and I held a memorial service for her, and emptied and sold her apartment. Then, my body gave out. For weeks, I couldn’t get out of bed. I lost all interest in watching TV, listening to music or reading. I thought I had the flu, but friends told me my symptoms were all due to grief. I had trained as a psychiatrist, but grief and the sense of dread I experienced were far more physical than I would have ever expected. Over the months that followed, I began to feel better. My friends asked periodically if I’d had closure. But I did not fully. I still felt haunted. My remaining family spent more time together, feeling closer than we had since my sisters and I were children. Every year since, we have gone on long family vacations, and come to appreciate one another more. We have managed to move on with our lives — though Karen will always remain with us in some way. Then, out of the blue, we learned that Osama bin Laden had died. We were surprised at the large numbers of phone calls and e-mails we received, asking how we felt. We phoned one another. How did we feel? Decidedly mixed. “It’s anti-climactic,” one of my two surviving sisters said. Yes, the body of the man who, more than anyone else, had caused my sister’s death 10 years ago was now at the bottom of the sea. I was glad for that, and that Americans were the ones who had found him and ended his life, and that years of planning had finally succeeded. But the news of his death still feels surreal. I realize now how much our loss is both personal and political. I suppose people who ask us about our reactions are often uncertain how to react themselves — how much to celebrate or still fear. But we do not want to be simply emblems of grieving family members. Still, I understand that in the chaos of any act of destruction, people need something tangible to hold onto, an embodiment, a story. They need to know who is responsible, and they want to know the responses of those most affected: Have the deaths of 9/11 now been sufficiently avenged? Is it over? Bin Laden’s death was cathartic — his terrorist attacks traumatized all of us — but in large part it is only a symbolic victory. Al Qaeda may even have more cells and members than it did 10 years ago, though no one knows. Certainly, Islamic extremists are vowing to avenge his death. “An eye for an eye” perpetuates a never-ending cycle of destruction. Dangers continue. My family has struggled to adapt and move forward, and so, too, has everyone else. In the past decade, the world has, of course, drastically changed. As a result of the deaths of my sister and the thousands of others at the trade center and Pentagon, George W. 258

Bush invaded Afghanistan, and then under false pretenses invaded Iraq. Thousands of American and foreign soldiers and untold thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded. Politicians have exploited the deaths on 9/11 for their own ends. When the members of Al Qaeda attacked on 9/11, Americans wondered, “Why do they hate us so much?” Many here believe they dislike us for our “freedom,” but I think otherwise. There are lessons we have not yet learned. I feel Karen would share my concerns that underlying forces of greed and hate persevere. American imperialism, corporate avarice, abuses of our power abroad and our historical support of corrupt dictators like Hosni Mubarak have created an abhorrence of us that, unfortunately, persists. We need to recognize how the rest of the world sees us, and figure out how to change that. Until we do that, more Osama bin Ladens will arise, and more innocent people like my sister will die. I hope that the death of Bin Laden will bring closure and peace. I am relieved that this chapter is over, somewhat, for me. But I fear the war will not end. Robert Klitzman is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and the author of “When Doctors Become Patients.”

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May 2, 2011 The End of the Jihadist Dream By ALI H. SOUFAN TO the Qaeda members I interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the aftermath of 9/11, Osama bin Laden was never just the founder and leader of the group, but also an idea. He embodied the belief that their version of Islam was correct, that terrorism was the right weapon, and that they would ultimately be victorious. Bin Laden’s death did not kill that idea, but did deal it a mortal blow. The immediate reaction of Al Qaeda members to Bin Laden’s death will be to celebrate his martyrdom. The group’s ideology champions death for the cause: Songs are composed, videos made and training camps named in honor of dead fighters. Bin Laden’s deputies will try to energize people by turning him into a Che Guevara-like figure for Al Qaeda — a more effective propaganda tool dead than alive. But it won’t take long for Al Qaeda to begin wishing that Bin Laden wasn’t dead. He not only was the embodiment of Al Qaeda’s ideology, but also was central to the group’s fund-raising and recruiting successes. Without him, Al Qaeda will find itself short on cash — and members. Bin Laden’s fund-raising (especially through his connections to fellow wealthy Saudis) and his personal story (his decision to give up a life of luxury and ease to fight in a holy war) had brought him to prominence during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and later secured his position as Al Qaeda’s leader. He further cultivated that image by trying to model his ascetic life on that of the Prophet Muhammad — by dressing similarly and encouraging his followers to ascribe divine powers to him. Bin Laden regularly hinted at this when discussing Al Qaeda’s strikes against America and his ability to withstand Washington’s wrath. Not only has Al Qaeda lost its best recruiter and fund-raiser, but no one in the organization can come close to filling that void. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-

Zawahri, who will probably try to take over, is a divisive figure. His7 personality and leadership style alienate many, he lacks Bin Laden’s charisma and connections and his Egyptian nationality is a major mark against him. Indeed, one of the earliest things I discovered from interrogating Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Yemen as well as Guantánamo was the group’s internal divisions; the most severe is the rivalry between the Egyptians and members hailing from the Arabian Peninsula. (Even soccer games pit Egyptians against Persian Gulf Arabs.) While Egyptians typically travel to the Gulf to work for Arabs there, in Al Qaeda, Egyptians have traditionally held most of the senior positions. It was only the knowledge that they were ultimately following Bin Laden — a Saudi of Yemeni origin, and therefore one of their own — that kept non-Egyptian members in line. Now, unless a non-Egyptian takes over, the group is likely to splinter into subgroups. Someone7 like Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American who is a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is a likely rival to Mr. Zawahri.

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Bin Laden was adept at convincing smaller, regional terrorist groups that allying with Al Qaeda and focusing on America were the best ways to topple corrupt regimes at home. But many of his supporters grew increasingly distressed by Al Qaeda’s attacks in the last few years — which7 have killed mostly Muslims — and came to realize that Bin Laden had no long-term political program aside from nihilism and death. The Arab Spring, during which ordinary people in countries like Tunisia and Egypt overthrew their governments, proved that contrary to Al Qaeda’s narrative, hated rulers could be toppled peacefully without attacking America. Indeed, protesters in many cases saw Washington supporting their efforts, further undermining Al Qaeda’s claims. But we cannot rest on our laurels. Most of Al Qaeda’s leadership council members are still at large, and they command their own followers. They will try to carry out operations to prove Al Qaeda’s continuing relevance. And with Al Qaeda on the decline, regional groups that had aligned themselves with the network may return to operating independently, making them harder to monitor and hence deadlier. Investigations, intelligence and military successes are only half the battle. The other half is in the arena of ideas, and countering the rhetoric and methods that extremists use to recruit. We can keep killing and arresting terrorists, but if new ones are recruited, our war will never end. Our greatest tool, we must remember, is America itself. We have suffered a great deal at the hands of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and we will never forget those killed in attacks like the 1998 bombings on United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer Cole, 9/11 and the service members killed since then in the war against Al Qaeda. Many terrorists whom I interrogated told me they expected America to ultimately fold. What they didn’t understand is that as powerful as the Bin Laden idea was to them, America’s values and liberties are even greater to us. Effectively conveying this will bury the Bin Laden idea with him. Ali H. Soufan, an F.B.I. special agent from 1997 to 2005, interrogated Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

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May 2, 2011 What Drives History By DAVID BROOKS Osama Bin Laden’s mother was about 15 at the time of his birth. Nicknamed “The Slave” inside the family, she was soon discarded and sent off to be married to a middle manager in the Bin Laden construction firm. Osama revered the father he rarely got to see and adored his mother. As a teenager, he “would lie at her feet and caress her,” a family friend told Steve Coll, for his definitive biography “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.” Like many people who go on to alter history, for good and evil, Bin Laden lost his father when he was about 9. The family patriarch was killed in a plane crash caused by an American pilot in the Saudi province of Asir. (Five of the Sept. 11 hijackers would come from that province. His brother was later killed in a plane crash on American soil.) Osama was an extremely shy child, Coll writes. He was an outsider in his new family but also the golden goose. His allowance and inheritance was the source of his family’s wealth. He lived a suburban existence and was sent to an elite school, wearing a blue blazer and being taught by European teachers. As a boy he watched “Bonanza” and became infatuated by another American show called “Fury,” about a troubled orphaned boy who goes off to a ranch and tames wild horses. He was a mediocre student but religiously devout. He made it to university, but didn’t last long. He married his first cousin when she was 14 and went into the family business. I repeat these personal facts because we have a tendency to see history as driven by deep historical forces. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it is driven by completely inexplicable individuals, who combine qualities you would think could never go together, who lead in ways that violate every rule of leadership, who are able to perpetrate enormous evils even though they themselves seem completely pathetic. Analysts spend their lives trying to anticipate future threats and understand underlying forces. But nobody could have possibly anticipated Bin Laden’s life and the giant effect it would have. The whole episode makes you despair about making predictions. As a family man, Bin Laden was interested in sex, cars and work but was otherwise devout. He did not permit photography in his presence. He banned “Sesame Street,” Tabasco sauce and straws from his home. He covered his eyes if an unveiled woman entered the room. He liked to watch the news, but he had his children stand by the set and turn down the volume whenever music came on. As Coll emphasized in an interview on Monday, this sort of devoutness, while not everybody’s cup of tea, was utterly orthodox in his society. He was not a rebel as a young man. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he organized jihadi tourism: helping young, idealistic Arab fighters who wanted to spend some time fighting the invaders. He was 262

not a fighter himself, more of a courier and organizer, though after he survived one Soviet bombardment, he began to fashion a self-glorifying mythology. He was still painfully shy but returned with an enormous sense of entitlement. In 1990, he wanted to run the Saudi response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He also thought he should run the family business. After he was shot down for both roles, the radicalism grew. We think of terrorism leaders as hard and intimidating. Bin Laden was gentle and soft, with a flaccid handshake. Yet his soldiers have told researchers such as Peter Bergen, the author of “The Longest War,” that meeting him was a deeply spiritual experience. They would tell stories of his ability to avoid giving offense and forgive transgressors. We think of terrorists as trying to build cells and organizations, but Bin Laden created an anti-organization — an open-source set of networks with some top-down control but much decentralization and a willingness to embrace all recruits, regardless of race, sect or nationality. We think of war fighters as using violence to seize property and power, but Bin Laden seemed to regard murder as a subdivision of brand management. It was a way to inspire the fund-raising networks, dominate the news and manipulate meaning. In short, Osama Bin Laden seemed to live in an ethereal, postmodern world of symbols and signifiers and also a cruel murderous world of rage and humiliation. Even the most brilliant intelligence analyst could not anticipate such an odd premodern and postglobalized creature, or could imagine that such a creature would gain such power. I just wish there were a democratic Bin Laden, that amid all the Arab hunger for dignity and freedom there was another inexplicable person with the ability to frame narratives and propel action — for good, not evil. So far, there doesn’t seem to be, which is tragic because individuals matter.

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May 2, 2011 4 Questions He Leaves Behind By JOE NOCERA To give the devil his awful due, Osama bin Laden was the greatest terrorist of the modern age. He took what had been disparate, disorganized terrorist groups and reshaped them into a disciplined and immensely ambitious organization, Al Qaeda, with the singular goal of waging jihad on the West in general and the United States in particular. Its terrorist prowess was never more evident than on that horrible day of Sept. 11, 2001. Now that Bin Laden is dead, the most pressing question we need to ask is: Will his death make a difference? It is, of course, symbolically important that the United States hunted down the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And it will have political ramifications for President Obama, which I leave to others to debate. But the thing that matters most right now is whether the world today is safer than it was on Sunday, when Bin Laden was still among the living. Though it is not an easy question to answer, it seems to me that there are four areas where it ought to be asked: THE ARAB SPRING The commentariat was quick to note the delicious irony that Bin Laden’s death coincided with the citizen uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere. The Arab Spring has shown that millions of Muslims have zero interest in the hard-line theocracy favored by Al Qaeda. What they yearn for instead is freedom and democracy. Bin Laden’s death merely put an exclamation point on the fact that his influence in the region had diminished considerably in the decade since 9/11. But Lawrence Wright, the author of “The Looming Tower,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning book about Al Qaeda, goes a step further. He’s convinced that Bin Laden’s death could help prevent the Arab Spring from sputtering out. “As long as he was around, he created an alternative narrative,” said Wright. “When the moment comes that the democratic movement falters — and there always is such a moment — Al Qaeda could say: We told you so. The fact that he is gone makes it more likely for the Arab Spring to complete its reformation cycle.” THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN Ever since he came into office, President Obama has insisted that our presence in Afghanistan was directly related to the ongoing threat from Al Qaeda. Ten years in, though, the war has no end in sight and dwindling public support. Liberal groups like the Brave7 New Foundation are already saying that Bin Laden’s death has “ended the rationale” for the war. It’s not just liberals, either. James Lindsay, a senior vice president of that establishment bulwark Council on Foreign Relations, wrote7 that the president could use Bin Laden’s death to say that America’s “goal has been achieved” — and use it as an excuse to wind down the war. Whether the president will take such a step is unclear. But it’s now at least feasible.

TERRORISM ITSELF Michael7 Nacht, a former Defense Department official who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that Bin Laden’s death will diminish the terrorist threat to the United States. Nacht compared terrorism in the 264

Bin Laden era to a “fatal disease.” Now, he says, it’s more like a chronic illness: “It can still cause you trouble, but it’s not a mortal theat.”

But this may turn out to be wishful thinking. The7 Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda had maybe 200 members; today, it is vaster and “more far-reaching than before the U.S. sought to take it down.” Independent offshoots have sprung up in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. New terrorist leaders include Nasir al-Wahishi, who leads Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has been involved in several terrorist plots, including the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day in 2009. Although America does a much better job of rooting out planned attacks, the threat remains very real, with or without Bin Laden. RELATIONS WITH THE MUSLIM WORLD Let’s face it: Much of the Muslim world today is deeply distrustful of anything America does. For this, certainly, a good portion of the blame goes to the misguided invasion of Iraq and its aftermath — which, in turn, was a response to 9/11 and Bin Laden. In that sense, America played right into Bin Laden’s hands. The clock can’t be turned back just because he’s dead. The distrust remains strong. A friend who recently returned from Turkey — a Muslim country that is ostensibly a close ally — told me that the Turkish media were united in their virulent opposition to NATO’s actions in Libya, even though those actions were intended to prevent a cruel dictator from killing his own people. “The image of Westerners dropping bombs on Muslims is very hard for Muslims to accept,” he said. One hopes that this is not Bin Laden’s enduring legacy. But that’s something only we can fix.

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7 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Bin Laden’s Dead. Al Qaeda’s Not. By RICHARD A. CLARKE Published: May 2, 2011 Related

Times Topic: The7 Death of Osama bin Laden

Room7 For Debate: The War on Terror After Osama Bin Laden

Room7 For Debate: Why Did It Take So Long to Find Bin Laden? THE United States needed to eliminate Osama bin Laden to fulfill our sense of justice and, to a lesser extent, to end the myth of his invincibility. But dropping Bin Laden’s corpse in the sea does not end the terrorist threat, nor does it remove the ideological motivation of Al Qaeda’s supporters. Often forgotten amid the ugly violence of Al Qaeda’s attacks was that the terrorists’ declared goal was to replace existing governments in the Muslim world with religiously pure Islamist states and eventually restore an Islamic caliphate. High on Al Qaeda’s list of targets was Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. The protesters of Tahrir Square succeeded in removing him without terrorism and without Al Qaeda. Thus, even before Bin Laden’s death, analysts had begun to argue that Al Qaeda was rapidly becoming irrelevant. With Bin Laden’s death, it is even more tempting to think that the era of Al Qaeda is over. But such rejoicing would be premature. To many Islamist ideologues, the Arab Spring simply represents the removal of obstacles that stood in the way of establishing the caliphate. Their goal has not changed, nor has their willingness to use terrorism. In the months ahead, Bin Laden’s death may encourage Al Qaeda to stage an attack to counter the impression that it is out of business. The more significant threat, however, will come from Al Qaeda’s local affiliates. Bin Laden and his deputies designed Al Qaeda as a network of affiliated groups that could operate largely independently to attack America, Europe and secular governments in the Middle East in order to establish fundamentalist regimes. Once in place, the network no longer needed Bin Laden and, in fact, has been proceeding with minimal direction from him for several years. The affiliates that Bin Laden helped to create, including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al Shabab in Somalia, are still recruiting and financing terrorists and training them for attacks. Neither the events of Tahrir Square nor the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout is likely to significantly diminish the appeal of Islamist extremism to those who have been receptive to it. In many Muslim societies, there remains a radical stratum born of a sense of victimization by the West, fueled by inefficient and corrupt governments, and carried forward by an enormous youth population. Al Qaeda was and is simply a pressure 266

valve, an early form of connective social media that allowed young, militant jihadists fed up with the West and their own governments to organize and vent their anger. Believing that their religion requires them to act violently against nonbelievers in the West and impure, apostate Muslim elites, the Islamist extremists will not be stopped by the elimination of Al Qaeda’s leader or even by the eradication of Al Qaeda itself. They will continue their struggle, refusing to renounce violence or accept more democratic, less corrupt regimes as a substitute for the caliphate. Just because we do not always know the identities of their leaders or see a named and hierarchical organization does not mean that Islamist extremists are not working hard to seize the fruits of the Arab Spring. The challenge for the United States is not merely to take advantage of the intelligence gained in the Pakistan raid to further erode Al Qaeda, but to assist moderate Muslims in creating a counterweight to violent extremism, with both an appealingly articulated ideology and an effective organizational structure. The government that was overthrown in Egypt was corrupt and feckless, as are the regimes now under siege in Libya, Syria and Yemen, but the groups poised to take advantage of the upheaval in those countries include many who share Bin Laden’s vision for repressive religious rule. Similar situations exist in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moderate, tolerant and even some secular groups exist, but they often do not have a comprehensive alternative vision, know how to communicate it or have the organizational skills to promote it. American and European experts can assist them in building politically viable organizations, but to succeed these new groups must be homegrown and tap into the Arab and Islamic traditions that speak to many Muslim youth. Moreover, without investment to create jobs, new governments in these countries will fail under the weight of youth unemployment. Unless corruption is replaced with efficiency, investment will either not materialize or be wasted. Without alternative movements with vision, appeal, and the ability to deliver change, existing organized extremist groups will fill the void. And despite his death, Bin Laden’s goal may yet be achieved. Richard A. Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator at the National Security Council from 1993 to 2001, is the author of “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.”

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May 2, 2011 The Post-Bin Laden World By ROGER COHEN BENGHAZI, LIBYA — Osama Bin Laden is dead — and so is an old Middle East. That they died together is fortuitous and apt. Bin Laden lived to propel history backward to the reestablishment of a Muslim caliphate. He died a marginal figure to the transformation fast-forwarding the Arab world toward pluralism and self-expression. He came of age as the Arab world shifted from Nasserite nationalism to the discovery of identity in political Islamism. It was a potent form of anti-Western defiance. His death comes as post-Islamist revolutions from Tunis to Cairo topple despotism in the name of democratic values long denied Arabs, who, in their vast majority, now seek a reasonable balance between modernity and their faith. Arab pride has disentangled itself from the complex of the West. Bin Laden’s Holy War drew sustenance from “Westoxification” — the sense of humiliation among Arabs at perceived Western dominance and aggression. Bin Laden whipped that resentment into Al Qaeda’s capacity for nihilistic mass murder. He died as Arabs en masse move away from the politics of rage and revenge, directed mainly outward, toward a new politics of responsibility and representative government, directed mainly inward. It is not only the timing of his death at the hands of U.S. forces that is apt, but also its location — far from a Middle East with which he had lost touch. He died in Pakistan. Or rather he died in the so-called AfPak theater where a decade of war has fed jihadist ideology even as it has lost appeal for Web-savvy Arab youth in the region of its birth. An era has passed. It was a painful decade of disorientation and American whiplash. The mass murder so agonizing it had to be distilled to three digits — 9/11 — poisoned a new century at its outset. Bin Laden was that poison’s slow drip. I was in New York City that day, at the bottom of Atlantic Avenue, by the East River, when a guy next to me said, “Hey, look, the World Trade Center’s on fire.” So, on a clear day, began the pulverizing horror that turned human beings to dust and shook Americans’ most basic assumptions about the land that morphed into a “homeland.” Today I’m in Benghazi, where brave Libyans determined to forge a decent society battle an Arab despot, Muammar al-Qaddafi, the sometime terrorist and slayer of Americans who then claimed anti-Qaeda credentials to secure the support of the West. In fact, of course, his tyranny, which must end, has fed the very extremism he claimed to oppose. Bin Laden thrived on Arab despotism and on the American hypocrisy involved in supporting that repression. He died as President Obama’s America has made democratization in the Arab world at least a semi-serious U.S. objective for the first time. Effective counterterrorism does not lie in starving a whole region of basic rights. That much has been learned.

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There is hope in this passage from the suicidal Arab rage of 9/11 to the brave resistance of Libya’s 2/17 Benghazi revolution — and the other revolutions and uprisings sweeping the region. A long road is left to travel — Al Qaeda is not dead — but the first step was the hardest: the breaking of the captive Arab mind, the triumph of engagement over passivity, the defeat of fear. Bin Laden’s rose-tinged caliphate was the solace of the disenfranchised, the disempowered and the desperate. A young guy with a job, a vote and prospects does not need virgins in paradise. America initially nourished Bin Laden’s ideology as a means to defeat the Soviet empire, before becoming its target. Neglect and end-of-history euphoria preceded devastating blowback. In the decade since then, there has been further blowback — from two punishing wars and from mistaken policy. This is a triumphant day for a young American president who changed policy, retiring his predecessor’s horrible misnomer, the Global War on Terror or G.W.O.T., in order to focus, laser-like, on the terrorists determined to do the United States and its allies harm. Bin Laden had enticed George W. Bush’s flailing America into his web. Obama saw the need for extraction and engagement — extraction from the wars and engagement with the moderate Muslim majority. The passage has been uneven but his achievements unquestionable. Open societies have this going for them over circles of fanatical conviction: they learn from mistakes. How then to complete the work and make a corpse not only of Bin Laden but his movement? Oust Qaddafi with ruthlessness and in short order. Steer the Arab revolutions into port with consistent political support and funding. Arab democracy must also mean Arab opportunity. End the war in Afghanistan as soon as America’s basic security requirements are met. Make America’s closest regional ally, Israel, understand that a changed Middle East cannot be met with unchanging Israeli policies. Palestine, like Israel, must rise to the region’s dawning post-Osama era of responsibility and representation. The 2012 campaign just got less interesting. Obama, as I’ve written before, is a lucky man. I suspect luck and purposefulness do a two-term president make. Obama got Osama because he turned a wider tide.

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May 2, 2011 Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden By MARK MAZZETTI, HELENE COOPER and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — For years, the agonizing search for Osama7 bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central7 Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate.

Reuters President Obama and members of his national security team receiving an update on Sunday. A classified document in front of Hillary Rodham Clinton was blurred before this photo was released. More7 Photos » The man in the car was Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and over the next month C.I.A. operatives would track him throughout central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles from the Pakistani capital. On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, the officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy7 Seals snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition program.

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And just like that, history’s most expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over. The inert frame of Osama bin Laden, America’s enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of finality, at least in this one difficult chapter. For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin Laden’s killing brought a measure of redemption. For a military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And for a president whose national security leadership has come under question, it proved an affirming moment that will enter the history books. The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, including the interrogation7 of C.I.A. detainees in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what was. Intelligence agencies eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mails of the courier’s Arab family in a Persian Gulf state and pored over satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad to determine a “pattern of life” that might decide whether the operation would be worth the risk. As more than a dozen White House, intelligence and Pentagon officials described the operation on Monday, the past few weeks were a nerve-racking amalgamation of what- ifs and negative scenarios. “There wasn’t a meeting when someone didn’t mention ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ” a senior administration official said, referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in which two American helicopters were shot down and some of their crew killed in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980 also loomed large. Administration officials split over whether to launch the operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring until they were more sure that Bin Laden was really there, or whether to go for a less risky bombing assault. In the end, President7 Obama opted against a bombing that could do so much damage it might be uncertain whether Bin Laden was really hit and chose to send in commandos. A “fight your way out” option was built into the plan, with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as backup in case of trouble. On Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded. Much of the time was spent in silence. Mr. Obama looked

“stone faced,” one aide said. Vice President Joseph7 R. Biden Jr. fingered his rosary beads. “The minutes passed like days,” recalled John7 O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched

Leon7 E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan. “They’ve reached the target,” he said. Minutes passed. “We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said. A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.” 271

Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room. Finally, the president spoke up. “We got him.” Filling in the Gaps Years before the Sept. 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden into the world’s most feared terrorist, the C.I.A. had begun compiling a detailed dossier about the major players inside his global terror network. It wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Qaeda operatives — and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons — that they finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Bin Laden relied on. Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid7 Shaikh Mohammed; and Al7 Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure. As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using waterboarding7 and other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture. By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National7 Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself. It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather, it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. He was, said Mr. Brennan, the White House official, “hiding in plain sight.” Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary7 Rodham Clinton and

Defense Secretary Robert7 M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other. That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place.

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“It was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.” There was guesswork about whether Bin Laden was indeed inside the house. What followed was weeks of tense meetings between Mr. Panetta and his subordinates about what to do next. While Mr. Panetta advocated an aggressive strategy to confirm Bin Laden’s presence, some C.I.A. clandestine officers worried that the most promising lead in years might be blown if bodyguards suspected the compound was being watched and spirited the Qaeda leader out of the area. For weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed photographs, and the N.S.A. worked to scoop up any communications coming from the house. It wasn’t easy: the compound had neither a phone line nor Internet access. Those inside were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather than put it on the street for collection. In February, Mr. Panetta called Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of the

Pentagon’s Joint Special7 Operations Command, to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to give him details about the compound and to begin planning a military strike. Admiral McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had written a book on American Special Operations, spent weeks working with the C.I.A. on the operation, and came up with three options: a helicopter assault using American commandos, a strike with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the mission hours before the launch. Weighing the Options On March 14, Mr. Panetta took the options to the White House. C.I.A. officials had been taking satellite photos, establishing what Mr. Panetta described as the habits of people living at the compound. By now evidence was mounting that Bin Laden was there. The discussions about what to do took place as American relations with Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor imprisoned for shooting two Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore in January. Some of Mr. Obama’s top aides worried that any military assault to capture or kill Bin Laden might provoke an angry response from Pakistan’s government, and that Mr. Davis could end up dead in his jail cell. Mr. Davis was ultimately released on March 16, giving a freer hand to his colleagues. On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinions on the options. Mr. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the American officials be certain that they had killed Bin Laden? “It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have given us a body,” said one American intelligence official. A helicopter assault emerged as the favored option. The Navy Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at training facilities on both American coasts, which 273

were made up to resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target might be until later. Last Thursday, the day after the president released his long-form birth certificate — such “silliness,” he told reporters, was distracting the country from more important things — Mr. Obama met again with his top national security officials. Mr. Panetta told the group that the C.I.A. had “red-teamed” the case — shared their intelligence with other analysts who weren’t involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden was probably in Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide. Around the table, the group went over and over the negative scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And then, finally, Mr. Obama spoke: “I’m not going to tell you what my decision is now — I’m going to go back and think about it some more.” But he added, “I’m going to make a decision soon.” Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut them off. “It’s a go,” he said. The earliest the operation could take place was Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover in the area meant that Sunday was much more likely. The next day, Mr. Obama took a break from rehearsing for the White House Correspondents Dinner that night to call Admiral McRaven, to wish him luck. On Sunday, White House officials canceled all West Wing tours so unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities wouldn’t accidentally run into all the high-level national security officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon monitoring the feeds they were getting from Mr. Panetta. A staffer went to Costco and came back with a mix of provisions — turkey pita wraps, cold shrimp, potato chips, soda. At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the C.I.A. director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed into Pakistan,” he said. Across the Border The commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base in Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan. The goal was to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the breach of their territory by what were to them unknown forces and reacted with possibly violent results. In Pakistan, it was just past midnight on Monday morning, and the Americans were counting on the element of surprise. As the first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes, neighbors heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two miles away said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a Pakistani military installation. Her husband said no one had any clue Bin Laden was hiding in the quiet, affluent area. “It’s the closest you can be to Britain,” he said of their neighborhood. The Seal team stormed into the compound — the raid awakened the group inside, one American intelligence official said — and a firefight broke out. One man held an unidentified woman living there as a shield while firing at the Americans. Both were killed. Two more men died as well, and two women were wounded. American authorities later determined that one of the slain men was Bin Laden’s son, Hamza, and the other two were the courier and his brother.

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The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing the local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a shalwar kameez, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid. The American government gave few details about his final moments. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” said Mr. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official, briefing on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden “was killed by U.S. bullets.” American officials insisted they would have taken Bin Laden into custody if he did not resist, although they considered that likelihood remote. “If we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden alive, if he didn’t present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that,” Mr. Brennan said. One of Bin Laden’s wives identified his body, American officials said. A picture taken by a Seals commando and processed through facial recognition software suggested a 95 percent certainty that it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with relatives found a 99.9 percent match. But the Americans faced other problems. One of their helicopters stalled and could not take off. Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the commandos moved the women and children to a secure area and blew up the malfunctioning helicopter. By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory. “They had no idea about who might have been on there,” Mr. Brennan said. “Thankfully, there was no engagement with Pakistani forces.” As they took off at 1:10 a.m. local time, taking a trove of documents and computer hard drives from the house, the Americans left behind the women and children. A Pakistani official said nine children, from 2 to 12 years old, are now in Pakistani custody. The Obama administration had already determined it would follow Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours to avoid offending devout Muslims, yet concluded Bin Laden would have to be buried at sea, since no country would be willing to take the body. Moreover, they did not want to create a shrine for his followers. So the Qaeda leader’s body was washed and placed in a white sheet in keeping with tradition. On the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker, according to the senior Pentagon official. The body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased into the sea. Only a small group of people watching from one of the large elevator platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck were witness to the end of America’s most wanted fugitive. Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, Charlie Savage and Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Adam Ellick from New York, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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May 2, 2011 Obama Finds Praise, Even From Republicans

By JEFF7 ZELENY and JIM7 RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON — President7 Obama drew praise from unlikely quarters on Monday for pursuing a risky and clandestine mission to kill Osama7 bin Laden, a successful operation that interrupted the withering Republican criticism about his foreign policy, world view and his grasp of the office.

7 Doug Mills/The New York Times President Obama talked with families after making remarks about Osama Bin Laden during a ceremony for the Medal of Honor recipients in the White House on Monday.

More7 Photos »

Former Vice President Dick7 Cheney declared, “The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation.” New York’s former mayor, Rudolph7 W.

Giuliani, said, “I admire the courage of the president.” And Donald7 J. Trump declared, “I want to personally congratulate President Obama.” As fleeting as it might prove to be, the positive tone stood in blunt contrast to the narrative Republicans have been working to build in the opening stages of the 2012 presidential campaign. The argument that most potential Republican candidates have been making — that Mr. Obama is an indecisive leader, incapable of handling rapidly evolving events around the world — suddenly became more complicated. And the boost in stature for Mr. Obama, even if temporary, comes when a number of Republicans are deciding whether to commit themselves to the presidential race, and offered fresh evidence that he might be less vulnerable than his opponents thought. The development came at a good time for Mr. Obama, who received the worst foreign policy rating of his presidency in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, with 276

46 percent of respondents saying they disapproved of his handling of international affairs. But the implications for the president, who will visit the World Trade Center on Thursday, were impossible to predict. The nation’s unemployment rate remains relatively high, and the economic recovery has yet to gain traction. High gasoline prices are pinching consumer budgets and eroding confidence. Seventy percent of Americans in the Times/CBS poll last month said the country was on the wrong track, and the White House is heading into what could be a bitter fight with Republicans about spending and raising the debt limit. But at a minimum, Mr. Obama has been dealt another high-profile opportunity to try to position himself above the bitter partisan fray and offer a voice of reasoned compromise — a theme consistent with his strategy over the past six months of shedding Republican efforts to cast him as a partisan liberal out of touch with the country’s values. “The world is safer; it is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Obama said Monday. “Today, we are reminded that, as a nation, there’s nothing we can’t do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we work together, when we remember the sense of unity that defines us as Americans.” The terrorist attacks that Bin Laden masterminded in New York and Washington a decade ago caused a significant shift in the nation’s politics. It remained to be seen to what extent his killing — dramatic as it was — would reorder the political landscape. The developments came at a big moment in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, with new prospective candidates like Gov. Mitch7 Daniels of Indiana facing pressure to jump in. Jon7 M. Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor who just returned from two years as ambassador to China to open a presidential run, found his efforts to trumpet his foreign policy experience immediately overshadowed. “The president deserves and will receive credit for Bin Laden being killed on his watch,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid. “Like Sept. 11 and its aftermath, this is a moment that transcends politics.”

Karl7 Rove, the Republican strategist for President George7 W. Bush, said that party’s crop of presidential aspirants would be wise to not be “churlish.” But he said he did not believe Bin Laden’s death would be a deciding issue in the 2012 campaign. “This will tend to cause a lot of people to say we got our job done,” Mr. Rove said, noting a similar reaction when Saddam7 Hussein was captured in 2003. “This is a moment that will require him to say, ‘Here’s what needs to be done to prevail in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, in the broader war on terror.’ ” For Mr. Obama, the killing of Bin Laden represented a significant mark in his evolution as a national political leader, a career that has developed entirely in the decade since 9/11. He was initially warned against seeking higher office because his name looked and sounded like Bin Laden’s. His campaign assertions that he would unilaterally act against “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan were met with charges of naïveté from rivals — including Hillary7 Rodham Clinton — for telegraphing such a move. The president’s advisers declined to discuss the political ramifications of the Bin Laden killing. But they said that they were mindful of the lessons of 1992, when the approval ratings of President George Bush rocketed after the Gulf War. 277

Samuel K. Skinner, the White House chief of staff at the time, remembered how Mr.

Bush emerged with approval ratings of around 90 percent only to lose to Bill7 Clinton the following year. “Everybody was shocked at how quickly things had dropped, precipitously,” Mr. Skinner said in an interview Monday. “Because of economic issues — and people’s perspectives of where the economy was — we were basically down south of 50 percent by October and November, and we were never able to recover.” More recently, the bump in the polls that George W. Bush received after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 evaporated within months. In his first presidential campaign, Mr. Obama reaped considerable political benefit from his anti-Iraq war candidacy. In his second, he is hoping that he reaps the same level of benefit from his established role as a commander in chief who sent more troops to Afghanistan, authorized military strikes on Libya and signed off on the mission to kill Bin Laden. John Ullyot, a former Marine intelligence officer who served as a Republican spokesman on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the operation was “a gutsy call because so much could have gone wrong.” “The fact that Obama approved this mission instead of the safer option of bombing the compound was the right call militarily,” Mr. Ullyot said, “but also a real roll of the dice politically because of how quickly it could have unraveled.”

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La deuxième mort du fondateur d’Al-Qaida | 02.05.11 | 11h23 • Mis à jour le 02.05.11 | 12h06 Le hasard fait, parfois, bien les choses. L'homme qui a incarné le djihadisme international meurt au moment où le "printemps arabe" vient de porter un coup à ce fantasme totalitaire. Dès lors que les peuples arabes se révoltent au nom de la démocratie et non de l'islamisme ou du retour au califat prônés par Al-Qaida, Oussama Ben Laden était un moribond politique. C'est presque la deuxième mort du fondateur d'Al-Qaida qu'a annoncée dimanche soir 1er mai le président Barack Obama, en indiquant qu'un commando américain avait tué Ben Laden au Pakistan. Le premier avis de décès, politique celui-ci, du dissident saoudien, on pouvait le lire dans les slogans des manifestants de Tunis et du Caire. Y transparaissaient non pas la haine de l'Occident, "des croisés et des juifs", la haine de l'Amérique, cris de ralliement habituels de Ben Laden, mais un désir de liberté et de démocratie, deux "valeurs" abhorrées par le chef djihadiste. Dans le monde arabe, au moins, Ben Laden avait perdu la bataille : la révolte en cours ne célèbre pas l'islamisme, cette illusion mortelle que portait le chef d'Al-Qaida selon laquelle le retour au califat et à l'islam des origines est la réponse à tous les problèmes des pays musulmans – voire à ceux du monde entier. Ben Laden meurt au moment où la capacité de mobilisation et d'entraînement de l'islamisme est sur le déclin. Cela ne veut pas dire qu'il n'y aura plus d'attentats. Ni même qu'Al-Qaida et ses filiales maghrébine et sahélienne ne séviront plus. Il y aura toujours des groupes se réclamant de la marque pour tuer et enlever, ici et là. Le Maroc vient d'en faire l'expérience. Ce culte de la violence la plus aveugle n'est pas le seul héritage laissé par Ben Laden. L'homme qui disparaît a profondément marqué – pour le pire – ce début de XXIe siècle. Oussama Ben Laden, ce fils d'une riche famille saoudienne qui fit ses premières armes dans la lutte contre les Soviétiques en Afghanistan, a façonné le paysage stratégique qui est le nôtre. Parce qu'ils ont cru devoir répondre par la guerre aux attentats du 11 septembre 2001, les Etats- Unis sont toujours empêtrés dans deux conflits : en Irak et, surtout, en Afghanistan. Ces aventures les ont épuisés militairement, budgétairement ; elles ont durablement terni leur image dans le monde arabo-musulman. M.Obama va pouvoir tirer profit aux Etats-Unis de l'élimination de Ben Laden; il n'en reste pas moins enlisé dans l'imbroglio afghan. L'héritage encore : Al-Qaida a prouvé qu'un petit groupe pouvait perpétrer un crime de masse. Si Ben Laden, doté d'une arme chimique ou biologique, avait pu tuer non pas 3 000 mais 3 millions de personnes à New York, il l'aurait fait. Cette perspective a posé la lutte contre le terrorisme en priorité absolue. Et, au nom de celle-ci, en Amérique, en Europe et ailleurs, l'obsession sécuritaire a conduit à limiter les libertés publiques. On n'en a pas tout à fait fini avec Ben Laden. La deuxième mort du fondateur d’Al-Qaida 02.05.11 http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/05/02/la-deuxieme-mort-du-fondateur-d-7 al-qaida_1515588_3232.html

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Essam Draz/Balkis Press/SIPA FREEDOM FIGHTER Osama bin Laden in 1989 with anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan as he was building his terrorism network, with American help.

May 2, 2011 The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism

By KATE7 ZERNIKE and MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

Osama7 bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Monday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century. With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler7 and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters. He gloated on videotapes, taunting the United States and Western civilization.

“Do you want Bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked President George7 W. Bush six days after the Sept. 11 attacks. “I want him — I want justice,” the president answered. “And there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ” It took nearly a decade before that quest finally ended in Pakistan with the death of Bin Laden in a firefight with American forces who attacked a compound where officials said he had been hiding. He was generally believed to be 54. The manhunt was punctuated in December 2001 by a battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his allies 280

were hiding. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, Bin Laden escaped. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be holed up somewhere in Pakistan and plotting new attacks. Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man — what a longtime C.I.A.7 officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to the Philippines, under the banner of

Al7 Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam. Terrorism before Bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. From 1996 to 2001 he bought the protection of the Taliban7 , then the rulers of Afghanistan, and used the time and freedom to make Al Qaeda — which means “the base” in Arabic — into a multinational enterprise for the export of terrorism. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the names Al Qaeda and Bin Laden spread to every corner of the globe. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali and blew up passenger trains in Spain. To this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members Al Qaeda could truly count on, how many countries its cells had penetrated — and whether, as Bin Laden had boasted, he was seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. He waged holy war with modern methods. He sent fatwas — religious decrees — by fax and declared war on Americans in an e-mail beamed by satellite around the world. Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CDs and communicated through encrypted memos on laptops, leading one American official to declare that Bin Laden possessed better communications technology than the United States. He railed against globalization, even as his agents in Europe and North America took advantage of a globalized world to carry out their attacks, insinuating themselves into the very Western culture he despised. He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire’s son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause. But he was media savvy and acutely image-conscious. Before a CNN crew that interviewed7 him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out, but like the most controlling of C.E.O.’s he insisted on receiving written questions in advance. His reedy voice seemed to belie the warrior image he cultivated, a man whose constant companion was a Kalashnikov rifle that he boasted he had taken from a Russian soldier he had killed. The world’s most threatening terrorist, he was also known to submit to dressings down by his mother. While he built his reputation on his combat experience against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, even some of his supporters questioned whether he had actually fought. And though he claimed to follow the purest form of Islam, many scholars insisted that he was glossing over the faith’s edicts against killing innocents and civilians. Islam draws boundaries on where and why holy war can be waged; Bin Laden declared the entire world as fair territory. Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard. 281

“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian7 children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the

United7 Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish7 Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.” The Turning Point For Bin Laden, as for the United States, the turning point came in 1989, with the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. To the United States, which had supported the Afghan resistance with billions of dollars in arms and ammunition, the Soviet retreat was the beginning of the end of the cold war and the birth of a new world order; to Bin Laden, who had supported the resistance with money, construction equipment and housing, it was an affirmation of Muslim power and an opportunity to recreate Islamic political power and topple infidel governments through jihad, or holy war.

He declared7 to an interviewer in 1998, “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.” In its place he built his own legend, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad, who in the seventh century led the Muslim people to rout the infidels, or nonbelievers, from North Africa and the Middle East. Just as Muhammad saw the Koran revealed to him amid intense persecution, Bin Laden regarded his expulsions from Saudi Arabia and then Sudan in the 1990s as signs that he was a chosen one. In his vision, he would be the “emir,” or prince, in a restoration of the khalifa, a political empire extending from Afghanistan across the globe. “These countries belong to Islam,” he told the same interviewer, “not the rulers.” Al Qaeda became the infrastructure for his dream. Under it, he created a web of businesses — some legitimate, some less so — to obtain and move the weapons, chemicals and money he needed. He created training camps for his foot soldiers, a media office to spread his word and even “shuras,” or councils, to approve his military plans and his fatwas. Through the 1990s, Al Qaeda evolved into a far-flung and loosely connected network of symbiotic relationships: Bin Laden gave affiliated terrorist groups money, training and expertise; they gave him operational cover and furthered his cause. Perhaps the most important alliance was with the Taliban, who rose to power in Afghanistan largely on the strength of Bin Laden’s aid, and in turn provided him refuge and a base for holy war. Long before Sept. 11, though the evidence was often thin, Bin Laden was considered in part responsible for the killing of American soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia; the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and a foiled plot to hijack a dozen jets, crash a plane into the C.I.A. headquarters and kill President Bill7 Clinton.

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In 1996, American officials described Bin Laden as “one7 of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremism in the world,” but he was not thought of as someone capable of orchestrating international terrorist plots. When the United States put out a list of the most wanted terrorists in 1997, neither Bin Laden nor Al Qaeda was on it. Bin Laden, however, demanded to be noticed. In February 1998, he declared it the duty of every Muslim to “kill Americans wherever they are found.” After the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Clinton declared Bin Laden “Public Enemy No. 1.” The C.I.A. spent much of the next three years hunting him. The goal was to capture Bin Laden using recruited Afghan agents or to kill him with a precision-guided missile, according to the7 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission and the memoirs of George7 J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence from July 1997 to July 2004. The intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. By the summer of 2001, the C.I.A. was convinced that Al Qaeda was on the verge of a spectacular attack. But no one knew where or when it would come. The Early Life Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and 17th child, among 50 or more, of his father, people close to the family say. Many experts believe he was born in March of that year, though Steve Coll, in his book “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” reported that Bin Laden himself said he was born in January 1958. His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had immigrated to what would soon become Saudi Arabia in 1931 from the family’s ancestral village in a conservative province of southern Yemen. He found work in Jidda as a porter to the pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca; years later, when he owned the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, he displayed his porter’s bag in the main reception room of his palace as a reminder of his humble origins. The elder Bin Laden began his family’s rise by skillfully navigating the competing interests within and around the House of Saud in the 1950s. He first built palaces for the royal family and was then chosen to renovate holy sites, including those at Medina and Mecca. In 1958, when several Arab countries set about to renovate the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, on one of the holiest sites in Islam, he won the bid for the Saudis by offering to do the job at a loss. In interviews years later, Osama bin Laden would recall proudly that his father had sometimes prayed in all three holy places in one day. By the 1960s, King Faisal decreed that all construction projects be awarded to the Bin Laden group. All of the Bin Laden children were required to work for the family company, meaning that Osama spent summers working on road projects. Muhammad bin Laden died in a plane crash in 1967, when Osama was 10. The siblings each inherited millions — the precise amount was a matter of some debate — and led a life of near-royalty. Osama — the name means “young lion” — grew up playing with Saudi princes and had his own stable of horses by age 15.

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But some people close to the family paint a portrait of Bin Laden as a misfit. His mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was from Syria, and was the only one not from Saudi Arabia. The elder Bin Laden had met her on a vacation, and Osama was their only child. Within the family, she was said to be known as “the slave” and Osama “the slave child.” Within the Saudi elite, it was rare to have both parents born outside the kingdom. In a profile7 of Osama bin Laden in The New Yorker, Mary Anne Weaver quoted a family friend who suggested that he had felt alienated in a culture so obsessed with lineage. “It must have been difficult for him,” the family friend said. “Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and within the family his mother was a double outsider as well — she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian.” According to one of his brothers, Osama was the only Bin Laden child who never traveled abroad to study. A biography of Bin Laden provided to the PBS7 television7 program “Frontline” by an unidentified family friend asserted that Bin Laden had never traveled outside the Middle East. That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans. They took over the family business, estimated to be worth billions, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagens and Disney products across the Middle East. On Sept. 11, 2001, several Bin Laden siblings were living in the United States. Bin Laden had been educated — and, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are — in Wahhabism, a puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. Even years later, he so despised the Saudi ruling family’s coziness with Western nations that he refused to refer to Saudi Arabia by its modern name, instead calling it “the Country of the Two Holy Places.” Newspapers have quoted anonymous sources — particularly an unidentified Lebanese barber — about a wild period of drinking and womanizing in Bin Laden’s life. But by most accounts he was devout and quiet, marrying a relative, the first of his four wives, at age 17. Soon afterward, he began earning a degree at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda. It was there that he shaped his militancy. He became involved with the Muslim7 Brotherhood, a group of Islamic radicals who believed that much of the Muslim world, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, lived as infidels, in violation of the true meaning of the Koran. And he fell under the influence of two Islamic scholars: Muhammad Quttub and Abdullah Azzam, whose ideas would underpin Al Qaeda. Mr. Azzam became a mentor to the young Bin Laden. Jihad was the responsibility of all Muslims, he taught, until the lands once held by Islam were reclaimed. His motto was, “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue.” The Middle East was becoming unsettled in 1979, when Bin Laden was at the university. In Iran, Shiite Muslims mounted an Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah and made the United States a target. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. And as the year ended, Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan. Bin Laden arrived in Pakistan-Afghanistan border within two weeks of the occupation. He said later that he had been asked to go by Saudi officials, who were eager to support the resistance movement. In his book “Taliban,” the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid 284

said that the Saudis had originally hoped that a member of the royal family might serve as an inspirational leader in Afghanistan, but that they settled on Bin Laden as the next closest thing when no princes volunteered. He traveled more like a visiting diplomat than a soldier, meeting with leaders and observing refugees coming into Peshawar, Pakistan. As the family friend said, it “was an exploratory rather than an action trip.” He returned twice a year for the next few years, in between finishing his degree and lobbying family members to support the Afghan mujahedeen. Bin Laden began traveling beyond the border into Afghanistan in 1982, bringing with him construction machinery and recruits. In 1984, he and Mr. Azzam began setting up guesthouses in Peshawar, which was the first stop for holy warriors on their way to Afghanistan. With the money they had raised in Saudi Arabia, they established the Office of Services, which branched out across the world to recruit young jihadists. The recruits were known as the Afghan Arabs, though they came from all over the world, and their numbers were estimated as high as 20,000. By 1986, Bin Laden had begun setting up training camps for them as well, and he was paying roughly $25,000 a month to subsidize them. To young would-be recruits across the Arab world, Bin Laden’s was an attractive story: the rich young man who had become a warrior. His own descriptions of the battles he had seen, how he had lost the fear of death and slept in the face of artillery fire, were brushstrokes of an almost divine figure. But intelligence sources insist that Bin Laden actually saw combat only once, in a weeklong barrage by the Soviets at Jaji, where the Arab Afghans had dug themselves into caves using Bin Laden’s construction equipment. “Afghanistan, the jihad, was one terrific photo op for a lot of people,” Milton Bearden, the C.I.A. officer who described Bin Laden as “the North Star,” said in an interview on “Frontline,” adding, “There’s a lot of fiction in there.” Still, Jaji became a kind of touchstone in the Bin Laden myth. Stories sent back from the battle to Arab newspaper readers, and photographs of Bin Laden in combat gear, burnished his image. The flood of young men following him to Afghanistan prompted the founding of Al Qaeda. The genesis was essentially bureaucratic; Bin Laden wanted a way to track the men so he could tell their families what had happened to them. The documentation that Al Qaeda provided became a primitive database of young jihadists. Afghanistan also brought Bin Laden into contact with leaders of other militant Islamic groups, including Ayman7 al-Zawahri, the bespectacled doctor who would later appear at Bin Laden’s side in televised messages from the caves of Afghanistan. Ultimately Dr. Zawahri’s group, Egyptian Jihad, and others would merge with Al Qaeda, making it an umbrella for terrorist groups. The Movement Through the looking glass of Sept. 11, it seemed ironic that the Americans and Osama bin Laden had fought on the same side against the Soviets in Afghanistan — as if the Americans had somehow created the Bin Laden monster by providing arms and cash to

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the Arabs. The complex at Tora Bora where Qaeda members hid had been created with the help of the C.I.A. as a base for the Afghans fighting the Soviets. Bin Laden himself described the fight in Afghanistan this way: “There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.” In truth, the Americans did not deal directly with Bin Laden; they worked through the middlemen of the Pakistani intelligence service. In the revisionism of the Bin Laden myth, his defenders would say that he had not worked with the Americans but that he had only tolerated them as a means to his end. As proof, they insisted he had made anti-American statements as early as 1980. Bin Laden would say in retrospect that he was always aware who his enemies were. “For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers,” he told a French journalist in 1995. “I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against Communism or Western oppression. The urgent thing was Communism, but the next target was America.” Afghanistan had infused the movement with confidence. “Most of what we benefited from was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden told an interviewer. “Slumber and fatigue vanished, and so was the terror which the U.S. would use in its media by attributing itself superpower status, or which the Soviet Union used by attributing itself as a superpower.” He returned to Saudi Arabia, welcomed as a hero, and took up the family business. But Saudi royals grew increasingly wary of him as he became more outspoken against the government. The breaking point — for Bin Laden and for the Saudis — came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bin Laden volunteered to the Saudis that the men and equipment he had used in Afghanistan could defend the kingdom. He was “shocked,” a family friend said, to learn that the Americans — the enemy, in his mind — would defend it instead. To him, it was the height of American arrogance. The United States, he told an interviewer later, “has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.” The Saudi government restricted him to Jidda, fearing that his outspokenness would offend the Americans. Bin Laden fled to Sudan, which was offering itself as a sort of haven for terrorists, and there he began setting up legitimate businesses that would help finance Al Qaeda. He also built his reserves, in 1992, paying for about 500 mujahedeen who had been expelled from Pakistan to come work for him. The Terrorism It was during that time that it is believed he honed his resolve against the United States.

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Within Al Qaeda, he argued that the organization should put aside its differences with

Shiite terrorist groups like Hezbollah7 in Lebanon, the better to concentrate on the common enemy: the United States. He called for attacks against American forces in the Saudi peninsula and in the Horn of Africa. On Dec. 29, 1992, a bomb exploded in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had been staying while on their way to Somalia. The troops had already left, and the bomb killed two Austrian tourists. American intelligence officials came to believe that it was Bin Laden’s first attack. On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in a truck driven into the underground garage at the World Trade Center, killing six people. Bin Laden later praised Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the bombing. In October of that year, in Somalia, 18 American service members were killed — some of their bodies dragged through the streets — while on a peacekeeping7 mission; Bin Laden was almost giddy about the deaths. After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were “like the Russians,” he told an interviewer. “The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat,” he said. “And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order, and after a few blows, they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.” By 1994, Bin Laden had established new training camps in Sudan, but he became a man without a country. The Saudi government froze his assets and revoked his citizenship. His family, which had become rich on its relations with the royal family, denounced him publicly after he was caught smuggling weapons from Yemen.

This seemed to make him only more zealous. He sent an open letter to King7 Fahd outlining the sins of the Saudi government and calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks to drive Americans from Saudi Arabia. Three months later, in November 1995, a truck bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard training center operated by the United States in Riyadh, killing seven people. That year, Belgian investigators found a kind of how-to manual for terrorists on a CD. The preface dedicated it to Bin Laden, the hero of the holy war. The next May, when the men accused of the Riyadh bombing were beheaded in Riyadh’s main square, they were forced to read a confession in which they acknowledged the connection to Bin Laden. The next month, June 1996, a truck bomb destroyed Khobar Towers, an American military residence in Dhahran. It killed 19 soldiers. Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan that summer after Sudan expelled him under pressure from the Americans and Saudis, and he forged an alliance with Mullah7 Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. In August 1996, from the Afghan mountain stronghold of Tora Bora, Bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.” “Muslims burn with anger at America,” it read. The presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf states “will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on

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their religion, feelings, and prides and pushes them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land.” The imbalance of power between American forces and Muslim forces demanded a new kind of fighting, he wrote, “in other words, to initiate a guerrilla war, where sons of the nation, not the military forces, take part in it.” That same month in New York City, a federal grand jury began meeting to consider charges against Bin Laden. Disputes arose among prosecutors and American law enforcement and intelligence officers about which attacks against American interests could truly be attributed to Bin Laden — whether in fact he had, as an indictment eventually charged, trained and paid the men who killed the Americans in Somalia. His foot soldiers, in testimony, offered different pictures of Bin Laden’s actual involvement. In some cases he could be as aloof as any boss with thousands of employees. Yet one of the men convicted of the bombings of the embassies said that Bin Laden had been so involved that he was the one who had pointed at surveillance photographs to direct where the truck bomb should be driven. Bin Laden was becoming more emboldened, summoning Western reporters to his hide- outs in Afghanistan to relay his message: He would wage war against the United States and its allies if Washington did not remove its troops from the gulf region. “So we tell the Americans as a people,” he told ABC News, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef and others did. This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands or their honor.” In February 1998, he issued the edict calling for attacks on Americans anywhere in the world, declaring it an “individual duty” for all Muslims. In June, the grand jury that had been convened two years earlier issued its indictment, charging Bin Laden with conspiracy to attack the United States abroad, for heading Al Qaeda and for financing terrorist activities around the world. On Aug. 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the United States order sending troops into the gulf region, two bombs exploded simultaneously at the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Nairobi bomb killed 213 people and wounded 4,500; the bomb in Dar es Salaam killed 11 and wounded 85. The United States retaliated two weeks later with strikes against what were thought to be terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which officials contended — erroneously, it turned out — was producing chemical weapons for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden had trapped the United States in a spiral of tension, where any defensive or retaliatory actions would affirm the evils that he said had provoked the attacks in the first place. In7 an interview with Time magazine that December, he brushed aside President Clinton’s threats against him, and referred to himself in the third person, as if recognizing or encouraging the notion that he had become larger than life.

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“To call us Enemy No. 1 or Enemy No. 2 does not hurt us,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty.” In January 1999, the United States government issued a superseding indictment that affirmed the power Bin Laden had sought all along, declaring Al Qaeda an international terrorist organization in a conspiracy to kill American citizens. The Aftermath After the attacks of Sept. 11, Bin Laden did what had become routine: He took to Arab television. He appeared, in his statement to the world, to be at the top of his powers. President Bush had declared that the nations of the world were either with the Americans or against them on terrorism; Bin Laden held up a mirror image, declaring the world divided between infidels and believers. Bin Laden had never before claimed or accepted responsibility for terrorist attacks. But in a videotape found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar weeks after the attacks, he did precisely that, reveling in the horror of Sept. 11. “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he said. “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.”

In7 the videotape, showing him talking to followers nearly two months after the attacks, Bin Laden smiles, hungers to hear more approval and notes proudly that the attacks let loose a surge of interest in Islam around the world. He explained that the hijackers on the planes — “the brothers who conducted the operation” — did not know what the mission would be until just before they boarded the planes. They knew only that they were going to the United States on a mission of martyrdom. Bin Laden’s voice continued to be heard, off and on, for almost the next 10 years as he issued threats, warnings and pronouncements on video and audiotape from wherever he was hiding. As recently as October he appealed for aid for flood victims in Pakistan and blamed the West for causing climate7 change. Bin Laden long eluded the allied forces in pursuit of him, moving, it was said, under cover of night with his wives and children, at first between mountain caves. Yet he was determined that if he had to die, he too would die a martyr’s death. His greatest hope, he told supporters, was that if he died at the hands of the Americans, the Muslim world would rise up and defeat the nation that had killed him. Michael T. Kaufman, a foreign correspondent, reporter and columnist for The Times, died in 2010; Tim Weiner contributed reporting. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 2, 2011 An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of the restorations of the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem and mosques at Medina and Mecca by Bin Laden's father

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/02osama-bin-laden-7 obituary.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

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May 1, 2011 Death of a Failure By ROSS DOUTHAT For months after 9/11, people watched planes. They watched skyscrapers. They looked over their shoulders in crowded places — at baseball games, college graduations, New Year’s celebrations. They eyed bearded men on planes and trains, glanced nervously at suspicious packages in shopping malls, and listened for the lilt of Arabic in airports and bus stations. They profiled relentlessly and shamelessly, and waited for the next attack to come. I moved to Washington, D.C., a year after the twin towers fell, and there was a touch of London during the blitz in the way that people carried themselves in those days. My friends and neighbors rode the Metro with stiff upper lips, kept calm and carried on as they headed to work at the Pentagon or the State Department (or a minor think tank or political magazine, for that matter), and generally behaved as if even the most everyday activities were taking place in the valley of the shadow of death. We felt as if we were living with targets on our backs. We assumed that it was only a matter of time until Al Qaeda struck again. Ten years later, we’re still waiting. There have been many plots, certainly, foiled by good intelligence work or good police work or simple grace and luck. There have been shoe bombers and there have been underwear bombers and Times Square bombers — and others still, presumably, that were cut short before they reached the headlines. But the wave of further violence that seemed inevitable in those fraught months after 9/11 never materialized within our borders. And what seemed like the horrifying opening offensive in a new and terrifying war stands instead as an isolated case — a passing moment when Al Qaeda seemed to rival fascism and Communism as a potential threat to our civilization, and when Osama bin Laden inspired far more fear and trembling than his actual capabilities deserved. Now the man is dead. This is a triumph for the United States of America, for our soldiers and intelligence operatives, and for the president as well. But it is not quite the triumph that it would have seemed if bin Laden had been captured a decade ago, because those 10 years have taught us that we didn’t need to fear him and his rabble as much as we did, temporarily but intensely, in the weeks when ground zero still smoked. They’ve taught us, instead, that whatever blunders we make (and we have made many), however many advantages we squander (and there has been much squandering), and whatever quagmires we find ourselves lured into, our civilization is not fundamentally threatened by the utopian fantasy politics embodied by groups like Al Qaeda, or the mix of thugs, fools and pseudointellectuals who rally around their banner.

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They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us. They can goad us into tactical errors and strategic blunders. But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat. This was not clear immediately after 9/11. On that day, they took us by surprise. They took advantage of our society’s great strength — its openness and freedom, the welcome it gives to immigrants and the presumption of innocence it extends. And in the wake of their attack, we did not know what they were capable of, or how they might follow up their victory. Now we know. We know because bin Laden is finally dead and gone, but in a sense we knew already. We learned the lesson in every day that passed without an attack, in every year that turned, and in the way our eyes turned, gradually but permanently, from the skies and the sky-scrapers back to the ordinary things of life. We learned when the planes landed safely, when the malls stayed open, when the commencements came and went, when one baseball season gave way to another. Day after day, hour after hour, we learned that we were strong and they were weak. One of bin Laden’s most famous quotations (there were not many in his oeuvre) compared the United States and Al Qaeda to racing horses. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” he told his acolytes over table talk, “by nature, they will like the strong horse.” In his cracked vision, America was the weak nag, and Al Qaeda the strong destrier. But the last 10 years have taught us differently: In life as well as death, Osama bin Laden was always the weak horse. ROSS DOUTHAT Death of a Failure May 1, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/opinion/07 2douthat.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc =thab1

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May 1, 2011 Bin Laden Is Dead, Obama Says By PETER BAKER, HELENE COOPER and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — 7Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President7 Obama announced. In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A.7 operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the leader of Al7 Qaeda, who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea. The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the ground zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.!” In New York City, crowds sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night. “For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement broadcast around the world. “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.” Bin Laden’s demise is a defining moment in the American-led fight against terrorism, a symbolic stroke affirming the relentlessness of the pursuit of those who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it galvanizes Bin Laden’s followers by turning him into a martyr or serves as a turning of the page in the war in Afghanistan and gives further impetus to Mr. Obama to bring American troops home. How much his death will affect Al Qaeda itself remains unclear. For years, as they failed to find him, American leaders have said that he was more symbolically important than operationally significant because he was on the run and hindered in any meaningful leadership role. Yet he remained the most potent face of terrorism around the world, and some of those who played down his role in recent years nonetheless celebrated his death. Given Bin Laden’s status among radicals, the American government braced for possible retaliation. A senior Pentagon official said late Sunday that military bases in the United States and around the world were ordered to a higher state of readiness. The State Department issued a worldwide travel warning, urging Americans in volatile areas “to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations.” The strike could deepen tensions with Pakistan, which has periodically bristled at American counterterrorism efforts even as Bin Laden evidently found safe refuge

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on its territory for nearly a decade. Since taking office, Mr. Obama has ordered significantly more drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Pakistan, stirring public anger there and prompting8 the Pakistani government to protest. When the end came for Bin Laden, he was found not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army. The compound, only about a third of a mile from the academy, is at the end of a narrow dirt road and is roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, but had no telephone or Internet connections. When American operatives converged on the house on Sunday, Bin Laden “resisted the assault force” and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior administration official said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning. The official said that military and intelligence officials first learned last summer that a “high-value target” was being protected in the compound and began working on a plan for going in to get him. Beginning in March, Mr. Obama presided over five national security meetings at the White House to go over plans for the operation and on

Friday morning, just before leaving Washington to tour tornado8 damage in

Alabama, gave the final order for members of the Navy8 Seals and C.I.A. operatives to strike. Mr. Obama called it a “targeted operation,” although officials said one helicopter was lost because of a mechanical failure and had to be destroyed to keep it from falling into hostile hands. In addition to Bin Laden, three men were killed during the 40-minute raid, one believed to be his son and the other two his couriers, according to an American official who briefed reporters under White House ground rules forbidding further identification. A woman was killed when she was used as a shield by a male combatant, the official said, and two others wounded. “No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers.

The whereabouts of Ayman8 al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, were unclear. Bin Laden’s death came nearly 10 years after Qaeda terrorists hijacked four American passenger jets, crashing three of them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. The fourth hijacked jet, United Flight 93, crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers fought the militants. “This is important news for us, and for the world,” said Gordon Felt, president of the group, Families of Flight 93. “It cannot ease our pain, or bring back our loved ones. It does bring a measure of comfort that the mastermind of the September 11th tragedy and the face of global terror can no longer spread his evil.” The mostly young people who celebrated in the streets of New York and Washington saw it as a historic moment, one that for many of them culminated a worldwide manhunt that started when they were children. 293

Some climbed trees and lampposts directly in front of the White House to cheer and wave flags. Cigars and noisemakers were common. One group started singing, “Osama, Osama, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.” Maureen Hasson, 22, a recent college graduate working for the Justice Department, came down to Lafayette Square in a fuchsia party dress and flip-flops. “This is full circle for our generation,” she said. “Just look around at the average age here. We were all in middle school when the terrorists struck. We all vividly remember 9/11 and this is the close of that chapter.”

Sam Sherman, 18, a freshman at George8 Washington University originally from New York, also rushed down to the White House. “The feeling you can’t even imagine, the feeling in the air. It’s crazy,” he said. “I have friends with parents dead because of Osama bin Laden’s plan, O.K. So when I heard this news, I was coming down to celebrate.” Mr. Obama said Pakistan had helped develop the intelligence that led to Bin Laden, but an American official said the Pakistani government was not informed about the strike in advance. “We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” the official said. Mr. Obama recalled his statements in the 2008 presidential campaign when he vowed to order American forces to strike inside Pakistan if necessary even without Islamabad’s permission. “That is what we’ve done,” he said. “But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.”

Relations with Pakistan had fallen8 in recent weeks to their lowest point in years. Adm.

Mike8 Mullen, the chairman of the Joint8 Chiefs of Staff, publicly criticized the Pakistani military two weeks ago for failing to act against extremists allied to Al Qaeda who shelter in the tribal areas of North Waziristan. Last week, Gen. Ashfaq8 Parvez Kayani, head of the Pakistani Army, said Pakistan had broken the back of terrorism on its territory, prompting skepticism in Washington.

Mr. Obama called President Asif8 Ali Zardari of Pakistan to tell him about the strike after it was set in motion, and his advisers called their Pakistani counterparts. “They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations,” Mr. Obama said. The city of Abbottabad where Bin Laden was found has had other known Al Qaeda presence in the past. A senior Indonesian militant, Umar Patek, was arrested there earlier this year. Mr. Patek was protected by a Qaeda operative, a clerk who worked undercover at the main post office, a signal that Al Qaeda may have had other operations in the area. The Pakistani military cordoned off the roads and alleys leading to the compound Monday. But residents of the middle-class area who were reached by phone said they had not been suspicious about the residents of the house, despite its size and the fact that very few people ever seemed to leave the compound. As the operation’s start approached, many American officials at the United States consulate in Peshawar, the capital of the northwest area of Pakistan, were told suddenly to depart last Friday, leaving behind only a core group of essential staff. The American officials said they had been told to leave because of fears of kidnapping but were not tipped off to the operation. 294

Analysts said Bin Laden’s death amounted to a double blow for Al Qaeda, after its sermons of anti-Western violence seemed to be rendered irrelevant by the wave of political upheaval rolling through the Arab world. “It comes at a time when Al Qaeda’s narrative is already very much in doubt in the

Arab world,” said Martin8 S. Indyk, vice president and director of foreign policy at the

Brookings8 Institution. “Its narrative was that violence was the way to redeem Arab honor and dignity. But Osama bin Laden and his violence didn’t succeed in unseating anybody.” Al Qaeda sympathizers reacted with disbelief, anger and in some cases talk of retribution. On a Web site considered an outlet for Qaeda messages, forum administrators deleted posts by users announcing Bin Laden’s death and demanded that members wait until the news was confirmed by Qaeda sources, according to the SITE8 Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors radicals. Even so, SITE said, sympathizers on the forum posted messages calling Bin Laden a martyr and suggesting retaliation. “America will reap the same if the news is true and false,” said one message. “The lions will remain lions and will continue moving in the footsteps of Usama,” said another, using an alternate spelling of Bin Laden’s name. In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, said it welcomed Bin Laden’s death. “As we have stated repeatedly since the 9/11 terror attacks, Bin Laden never represented Muslims or Islam,” the group said in a statement. “In fact, in addition to the killing of thousands of Americans, he and Al Qaeda caused the deaths of countless Muslims worldwide.”

Mr. Obama called to inform his predecessor, George8 W. Bush, who started the war against Al Qaeda after Sept. 11, yet was frustrated in his efforts to capture Bin Laden “dead or alive,” as he once put it. Mr. Bush released a statement saying, “this momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.” “The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” he added. Mr. Obama used similar language and warned that the war against terrorists had not ended. “We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies,” he said. “We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to Al Qaeda’s terror, justice has been done.” The president was careful to add that, as Mr. Bush did during his presidency, the United States is not at war with Islam. “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims,” Mr. Obama said. “Indeed, Al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.” Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Goodridge, Scott Shane, Ben Werschkul, Mark Landler and Michael Shear from Washington; Jane Perlez from Sydney, Australia; Pir Zubair Shah from New York; and Salman Masood from Abbottabad, Pakistan.

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8 TRIBUNA: ANTONIO ELORZA Revoluciones inacabadas Las televisiones árabes, con Al Yazira al frente, han alimentado el fuego de las revueltas Sería más preciso hablar de revoluciones a-islamistas ANTONIO ELORZA 02/05/2011 Recuerdo una conversación sostenida con Julio Caro Baroja en su casa familiar de la calle de Alfonso XII, en el curso de la cual me mostró su extrañeza ante la escasa atención que los historiadores, y en particular los historiadores de inspiración marxista, prestábamos a los cambios en la tecnología. Caro Baroja tenía toda la razón. Por ceñirnos al tema, la historia de las revoluciones contemporáneas es inseparable de la evolución de los transportes y de los medios de comunicación social, por no hablar del armamento en ambas direcciones: la ametralladora y la dinamita. La reciente secuencia de revueltas árabes viene a probarlo una vez más. Eran todas ellas sociedades sometidas a regímenes dictatoriales, y hasta hace poco una tupida red de vigilancia, más el control de los media y de los teléfonos, bastaba para que literalmente nadie pudiera moverse. Era además un mundo compartimentado en cuanto a la información. Técnicamente la umma no podía existir. Todo esto ha estallado literalmente con la mundialización de las comunicaciones: con Al Yazira al frente. A los cordones sanitarios de aislamiento tradicionales sucede la imagen televisiva cotidiana, difundida las 24 horas, de la movilización frente a la injusticia, y también de la brutalidad de las represiones. Desde enero las televisiones árabes han mantenido el fuego sagrado de la revuelta. Otro tanto cabe decir de Internet, y en particular de Facebook y de los SMS. De poco valen los cierres informativos en radio, televisión y prensa si los ciudadanos logran crear una red de comunicación paralela, dirigida a la movilización de masas. Ciertamente, solo un sector de la población, eso sí creciente, tiene acceso directo a tales recursos, pero la sociabilidad cubre tal insuficiencia sin dificultades en el mundo árabe, por lo menos, en lo que concierne a la población masculina. Además, el uso de esa red de comunicaciones frente a un poder considerado arbitrario da ya la sensación de libertad, como sucedió para los manifestantes de izquierda en vísperas del 14-M. Posibilidad de libertad y, claro es, posibilidad de manipulación. Escasa en las manifestaciones de Egipto, Libia o Túnez, puesto que estaba ahí la visibilidad de la dictadura y de su orla de corrupción. Han sido movilizaciones de jóvenes en Túnez o en Egipto, de forma menos clara en Yemen o en Bahréin, donde las formas de oposición latentes se encontraban ya consolidadas. En unas circunstancias económicas difíciles, especialmente precarias en Egipto, la conciencia juvenil se moviliza tanto por la situación del presente como por "motilidad", es decir, por las expectativas de movilidad social en el futuro, y estas en tales países, aligual que en Argelia o en Marruecos, son abiertamente desfavorables. La movilización se apoya sobre la esperanza de un cambio, del mismo modo que luego puede desvanecerse y dar paso a otras formas de protesta, incluso contra un eventual poder democrático fruto de la revuelta. De momento, las experiencias egipcia y tunecina tienen altas posibilidades de ser resueltas a corto plazo mediante relevos parciales en el interior de unas elites que ya ejercían el poder dentro de las respectivas sociedades. Sería el conocido balance gatopardiano de que todo cambia para que todo siga igual, y sin mejoras económicas mal podrá la democracia acallar la insatisfacción. Movilizaciones antidictatoriales no equivale necesariamente a movilizaciones democráticas.

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Lo importante en todo caso es que en el curso del proceso de movilización tuvo lugar, en Siria y en Libia, como en Egipto y en Túnez, un aprendizaje de la libertad. Se ha dicho que entre los manifestantes de la plaza de Tahrir en El Cairo circulaban copias parciales en árabe del libro De la dictadura a la democracia, obra del politólogo gandhiano Gene Sharp, con sus recomendaciones puntuales sobre las tácticas a adoptar en el desarrollo de la lucha no violenta contra un dictador. Pero Sharp insiste en otro aspecto de no menor importancia, y que puede ser el más relevante de cara al futuro: al consolidarse la acción no-violenta, esta es en sí misma generadora de un proceso de liberación, al convencer a los participantes de la necesidad del mismo, incluso al precio de sufrir represiones y la muerte. Es lo que está sucediendo de modo trágicamente ejemplar en Siria, conjugando "la pérdida del miedo y el control de sí mismo". Los obstáculos en todo caso están ahí. Octavio Paz proponía una útil distinción entre la revuelta, movilización acéfala contra el poder, la rebelión, con dirección y adversario definidos, y revolución, cambio radical en las relaciones de poder. Los movimientos del mundo árabe son revueltas, también rebeliones en cuanto tienen objetivos definidos sobre la destrucción de un poder personal, pero no lo son al operar como revueltas acéfalas, y, por supuesto, por ahora son prolegómenos de revoluciones sin resultado previsible. Pensemos en las grandes dificultades con que tropezaron los alzados de la Cirenaica para crear algo parecido a un gobierno frente a Gadafi. Esta es una debilidad casi generalizada y anunciadora de fracasos. Y está el obstáculo principal: la resistencia que puedan oponer las dictaduras de acuerdo con su naturaleza política. Allí donde existían organizaciones larvadas pero actuantes en la sociedad civil, casos de Egipto y Túnez, a pesar de la brutal represión de partida, las grietas del poder autoritario se abrieron. No sucedió lo mismo en los lugares donde las dictaduras constituían "neosultanismos", regímenes con poder ilimitado en manos del dictador, dispuesto él (o su entorno heredado del padre, en el caso de Bashir al Assar) a ejercer una represión sin límites. Aquí la estrategia de Gene Sharp sirve hasta que tropieza con la barrera de una acción represiva susceptible de arrastrar al país a la guerra civil, como así ha sucedido en Libia. No menos sólidas se han mostrado la teocracia iraní frente al regreso de la revolución verde, buena advertencia para quienes insisten en la angelización sin más del islamismo, y el sultanismo estricto de Arabia Saudí al ejercer la represión en Bahréin. El impulso por la libertad no lleva necesariamente a su consecución, y menos si la voluntad de apoyo de Occidente tiene lugar con tanta inseguridad y en la noche lúgubre que ha vivido desde el punto de vista estratégico Barack Obama. Por último, ¿revoluciones posislamistas? Sería más preciso hablar de revoluciones a- islamistas. La piedra de toque principal es hasta ahora y será en lo sucesivo Egipto, con unos Hermanos Musulmanes que supieron amoldar su participación a la revuelta, olvidar de momento que "el Corán es su Constitución" e ingresar en el círculo de poder con su tradicional habilidad. Las causas de las revueltas no eran religiosas; ello no significa que el islamismo se haya evaporado de la realidad política.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/8 Revoluciones/inacabadas/elpepuopi/20110502el pepiopi_4/Tes

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8 Estados Unidos mata a Osama Bin Laden El presidente Obama anuncia de madrugada que un comando de fuerzas especiales eliminó de un tiro al líder de Al Qaeda en una localidad cercana a la capital de Pakistán.- El terrorista saudí huía de las fuerzas norteamericanas desde 2001

• Hillary8 Clinton: "Bin Laden también atacó a inocentes en Londres, Madrid, Bali o Estambul"

• Al8 Rabat Ba Ashen, el pueblo de Bin Laden

• Noche8 histórica no apta para cardiacos

• Mi8 vecino Osama

• El8 Gobierno felicita a EE UU por la operación antiterrorista que ha acabado con Bin Laden

• Aguirre:8 "Bin Laden nunca ha reconocido el 11-M"

• Las8 siete vidas del emir Osama

• Objetivo:8 matar a Osama Bin Laden

• Bin8 Laden, el hombre que odia

• ¿Qué8 sabes de Osama Bin Laden?

• Bin8 Laden resiste

• Bin8 Laden: "El 11-M es el castigo a España por sus acciones en Irak, Afganistán y Palestina"

• Bin8 Laden podría haber muerto de tifus

• El8 mundo en vilo a la espera de las represalias de Bush

• La8 larga sombra del príncipe del terror

• Un8 asalto de 40 minutos en un barrio de lujo

• El8 fortificado bastión del fugitivo número uno

• El8 régimen sirio arresta a centenares de activistas mientras bombardea Deraa

• La8 caza de la ballena blanca

• Un8 sueño de terror cumplido

• Nueva8 York celebra la muerte de Bin Laden

• Cómo8 se encontró y mató a Bin Laden

• Un8 sueño de terror cumplido

• Obama8 pudo con Osama

• "¡Esto8 es como Tahir Square!"

• Misión8 cumplida para la CIA YOLANDA MONGE / ANTONIO CAÑO / SANDRO POZZI | Washington / Nueva York 02/05/2011 Estados Unidos ha puesto fin a su peor pesadilla. Osama bin Laden ha muerto. Elaborada durante muchos años, estudiada al milímetro durante los últimos meses, una operación de las fuerzas especiales de élite estadounidenses Navy Seals ha matado al líder8 de Al Qaeda. Así lo anunció en torno a las once y media de la noche (cinco y media de la mañana en España) el presidente de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama. Los agentes abatieron a disparos al líder de Al Qaeda en la localidad8 de Abottabad -a8 80 kilómetros de Islamabad y en el norte de Pakistán- en una operación en la que no hubo bajas estadounidenses. En el día siguiente al anuncio, en un acto de condecoración de veteranos militares, Obama ha afirmado: "Es un gran día para América, el mundo es más seguro y mejor a causa de la muerte de Osama bin Laden". "Estamos todos de acuerdo en que es un buen día para Estados Unidos", ha dicho hoy Obama durante una comparecencia en la Casa Blanca en el acto de homenaje a dos soldados fallecidos en la Guerra de Corea. El presidente estadounidense, que confirmó anoche el fallecimiento del líder terrorista, ha asegurado que la operación demuestra que 298

"no hay nada que no se pueda hacer" si Estados Unidos trabaja de forma coordinada. "Somos afortunados por tener a ciudadanos que han dedicado sus vidas a protegernos (...) Como comandante en jefe, no podría estar más orgulloso", ha aplaudido Obama, quien ha felicitado de forma especial a las autoridades militares y de inteligencia que organizaron y perpetraron el operativo, en particular al8 secretario de Defensa saliente, Robert Gates. El asesor de seguridad de la Casa Blanca John Brennan ha detallado posteriormente en rueda de prensa desde Washington que la operación, seguida en "tiempo real" desde EE UU, se llevó a cabo sin informar a Pakistán, país aliado en la guerra contra el terrorismo. Brennan ha manifestado que es "inconcebible" que Bin Laden haya estado escondido tanto tiempo en Pakistán sin ayuda de dentro del país. "No voy a especular con el apoyo en Pakistán", ha contestado Brennan a los periodistas en relación al posible conocimiento de las autoridades paquistaníes de la localización del terrorista saudí. Islamabad supo de la operación solo después de abandonar el espacio aéreo las fuerzas estadounidenses. El consejero de la Casa Blanca ha calificado la decisión tomada por Obama como "una de las más valientesque jamás haya adoptadoningún presidente". Según Brennan, las pruebas sobre la estancia de Bin Laden en esa casa eran "circunstanciales", aunque la confianza de la CIA era "creciente". El asesor estadounidense ha dicho también que tras 15 años persiguiéndole, ya incluso antes del 11-S, Obama aprovechó la "oportunidad" y aprobó la operación. Sepultura según el rito islámico Brennan ha aclarado además que el líder de Al Qaeda ha sido enterrado en el mar de acuerdo con la práctica musulmana. El8 ritual islámico requiere que el cuerpo se entierre en las 24 horas posteriores a su fallecimiento. Según fuentes oficiales, la decisión se tomó porqueresultaba complicado encontrar un país dispuesto a sepultar al terrorista más buscado del mundo. Fuentes oficiales han informado asimismo que las pruebas de ADN confirman que murió en el ataque militar a la residencia donde estaba. A preguntas de los reporteros acreditados en la Casa Blanca, Brennan ha añadido que EE UU "no va a bajar la guardia" en la lucha contra Al Qaeda. La muerte de su mentor, Osama bin Laden, brinda "una oportunidad para destruir la organización", ha afirmado Brennan. El asesor de seguridad ha explicado además que el número dos de la red terrorista, el médico egipcio, Ayman al Zawahiri, cuenta con "detractores" dentro de la organización. En la operación militar, ejecutado por los Navy Seals en varios helicópteros,murieron cuatro personas más: un hijo mayor de edad del terrorista, su mensajero y un hermano de este y una mujer que, segúnla Casa Blanca,era una de lasesposas. Fuentes del Gobierno de Pakistán han asegurado al servicio de BBC en el país que durante el asalto cinco guardias de Bin Laden cayeron también y cuatro más han sido detenidos, pero no ha podido ser confirmado. La cadena Al Arabiya ha informado además que dos esposas y cuatro hijos de Bin Laden han sido detenidos. Las propias fuerzas estadounidenses destruyeron uno de los aparatos en los que volaron hasta la zona tras detectar un problema mecánico, según varias fuentes oficiales. Un complejo residencial El terrorista más buscado por Washington se encontraban en el interior de un complejo de lujo fortificado. La residencia de Abottabad constaba de muros de más de tres 299

metros, alambres de espino y solo dos puertas de entrada. Carecía de ventanas y no tenía ni acceso telefónico ni conexión a Internet. Bin Laden murió de un disparo en la cabeza tras un tiroteo entre las fuerzas de asalto norteamericanas y el grupo que se encontraba con el líder de Al Qaeda. En su alocución desde la Casa Blanca, Obama afirmó anoche que, tras haber estado recibiendo desde agosto informaciones de inteligencia fiables sobre el lugar donde se encontraba Bin Laden, la8 semana pasada dio la orden de atacar y ayer "un pequeño grupo" estadounidense condujo la operación, en la que, tras un intercambio de fuego, se hizo con el cuerpo del terrorista. En una comparecencia8 llena de dramatismo, Obama homenajeó a todas las víctimas del atentado8 del 11 de septiembre de 2001 contra las Torres Gemelas, que causó casi 3.000 muertos. "Esta noche se ha hecho justicia", aseguró. El presidente agradeció a todos los agentes que participaron en la operación y a los que han ayudado durante estos años a perseguir al terrorista. "EE UU ha lanzado un mensaje inequívoco: no importa cuánto tiempo haga falta, se hará", concluyó el presidente estadounidense. En el día siguiente a la muerte de Bin Laden, Estados Unidos ha amanecido invadido por la euforia pero la secretaria de Estado, Hillary Clinton, ha asegurado que "EE UU continuará su lucha contra los talibanes en Afganistán". "Esto es un hito en la lucha contra el terrorismo, pero la batalla contra Al Qaeda continúa y no terminará con la muerte de Bin Laden", ha señalado. La secretaria de Estado ha atribuido en parte el éxito de la operación militar que culminó con la muerte del líder terrorista a la "estrecha relación" de Estados Unidos "con Pakistán". Clinton8 ha recordado que no solo hubo ataques contra Estados Unidos sino también "en Londres, Madrid, Bali, Estambul y otras muchas partes hubo inocentes, en su mayoría musulmanes, atacados en mercados y mezquitas, en estaciones de tren y en aviones". 10 años después del 11 S La muerte del padre del terrorismo islamista internacional llega 10 años después de los atentados de Nueva York. Eliminar a Osama8 bin Laden se había convertido en una obsesión para Estados Unidos y había8 sido objeto de numerosas operaciones internacionales. Se8 especuló en diversas ocasiones con su muerte y se ofrecieron

8millonarias recompensas por cualquier pista sobre su paradero, pero Bin Laden seguía ahí, presente en las pesadillas de Washington. Para el orgullo de EE UU resultaba una herida demasiado profunda desconocer el paradero de un tipo alto y desgarbado de 54 años, normalmente retratado sosteniendo un Kaláshnikov con su brazo izquierdo. Casi un anciano que se apoyaba en un bastón, dormía en el suelo de una gruta y se alimentaba de verduras, yogur, sopa y pan afgano.

Aunque8 hiciera tres años que no aparecía en público, Bin8 Laden seguía siendo un símbolo. El hombre que había logrado lo que una década atrás parecía una quimera: internacionalizar la yihad y extender el terror mediante alianzas con grupos asociados en todo el mundo. Decenas de células locales, inspiradas en el discurso de Bin Laden, atormentan a los jefes de inteligencia de varios continentes. "Estoy aquí para convertirme en un testigo de la Historia. Mi novio será enviado al extranjero con los marines la semana que viene. Por eso estoy tan orgullosa por lo que ha hecho nuestro Ejército", contaba eufórica a las puertas de la Casa Blanca Laura

Vogler, una alumna de la Universidad Americana en Washington. Las8 celebraciones por la muerte de Bin Laden han tomado las inmediaciones de la Casa Blanca. 300

Poco antes de las once de la noche locales la emisión en televisión se interrumpió para adelantar que el presidente iba a comparecer con un anuncio de vital importancia relativo a la seguridad nacional. Las especulaciones se desataron y a los pocos minutos algunos medios anunciaban de forma no oficial la muerte del terrorista. Ya en ese momento los estadounidenses comenzaron a salir a la calle. Pronto Washington, Nueva York y las principales ciudades se han llenado de espontáneas muestras de alegría. La zona cero de Manhattan, en la que se erigían las dos torres que derribó Al Qaeda, se ha convertido en uno de los puntos en los que más ciudadanos se han concentrado. Turistas, miembros del cuerpo de bomberos (más de 300 de ellos murieron en las labores de rescate tras los atentados) y neoyorquinos de todo pelaje se aglomeraron ante las cercanas pantallas de Times Square desde que aparecieron los primeros rumores de la noticia. La concentración se hizo multitudinaria después del anuncio. Muchas de las reacciones han sido muy duras. "Había soñado con este momento, pero la muerte creo que es demasiado buena para él", asegura desde Anne Marie Borcherdng, que perdió a su novio el 11-S en las Torres Gemelas. "Lo que le gustaría a mucha gente que está aquí hoy es tener su cadáver para poder escupirle". Michael Bloomberg, alcalde de Nueva York, fue de los primeros en reaccionar al anuncio de la Casa Blanca: "Los neoyorquinos hemos esperado casi 10 años esta noticia"."La muerte de Osama bin Laden es una importante victoria y un tributo para los que luchan por nuestro país", añadió. El senador neoyorquino Charles Schumer declaró: "El corazón de los neoyorquinos sigue roto por la tragedia del 11-S, pero [la muerte de Osama Bin Laden] aporta algo de consuelo a las víctimas". Reacciones en todo el mundo El expresidente de Estados Unidos George W. Bush ha declarado pocos minutos después de la noticia que la muerte de Osama Bin Laden es una8 "victoria para Estados Unidos". Bush, bajo cuya presidencia se produjeron los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001 y que en sus memorias declaró que uno de sus mayores pesares ha sido el de no lograr capturar a Bin Laden, "vivo o muerto", emitió a través de su página en Facebook nada más conocerse la noticia, un comunicado en el que dijo que el presidente Barack Obama le informó de la operación. "Esta noche, el presidente Obama me llamó para informarme de que las fuerzas estadounidenses mataron a Osama Bin Laden, el líder de Al Qaeda que atacó Estados Unidos el 11 de septiembre de 2001", dijo Bush. Bill Clinton también reaccionó enseguida a la noticia. El expresidente de Estados Unidos ha asegurado que la muerte de Bin Laden es un momento "profundamente importante" para las personas de todo el mundo que buscan un "futuro común de paz y libertad". David Cameron, el primer ministro británico, ha asegurado que se trata de "un gran alivio para el mundo". "Bin Laden es responsable de las peores atrocidades terroristas que ha visto el mundo, muchos de los cuales han costado la vida a miles de personas, muchas de ellas británicas", ha opinado Cameron. En la misma línea, el primer ministro israelí, Benjamin Netahyahu, ha declarado que la muerte de Bin Laden es "un triunfo atronador para las naciones democráticas que combaten el terrorismo". El8 Gobierno español ha felicitado a Washington por el éxito de la operación antiterrorista.

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Precaución a todos los estadounidenses De inmediato la diplomacia estadounidense ha pedido prudencia respecto a las consecuencias en la lucha sobre Al Qaeda que podría tener el descabezamiento de la organización. El Departamento de Estado ha alertado a todos sus ciudadanos en el mundo después de dar a conocer la noticia. Hay un "elevado potencial de violencia antiamericana", especificó un comunicado de prensa. Las reacciones que la muerte de este personaje pueden provocar en el mundo son impredecibles. Por si acaso, el presidente norteamericano insistió ayer en que Bin Laden no era un líder musulmán y en que Estados Unidos no está en guerra contra esa confesión religiosa. "Dada la incertidumbre y la volatilidad de la actual situación", asegura el Departamento de Estado, "urgimos a los ciudadanos estadounidenses en áreas donde estos acontecimientos pueden causar violencia antiestadounidense a limitar sus viajes fuera de sus casas y hoteles y a evitar concentraciones y demostraciones masivas". Por lo pronto, el Gobierno norteamericano puso en estado de alerta a todas sus embajadas ante el riesgo de que sean blanco de posibles represalias. En varias ciudades estadounidenses se ha aumentado la vigilancia sobre puntos sensibles. Por ejemplo, el diario Los8 Angeles Times informa que la policía de la ciudad extrema las precauciones en los alrededores de centros religiosos. Para confirmar las sospechas estadounidenses, los yihadistas han lanzado las primeras amenazas. "Osama puede ser asesinado, pero su mensaje de la Yihad, no morirá jamás. Hermanos y hermanas, esperar y ver, su muerte será una bendición disfrazada", es un mensaje que se repite en varios foros de internet, como informa la agencia Reuters. Padre del yihadismo internacional

La base del pensamiento8 de Bin Laden era similar a los talibanes: interpretaciones ultraortodoxas del islam suní, al que desea purificar de influencias occidentales. Su ideología, sus hombres, fogueados en acciones de combate, y el muy abundante dinero le permitieron financiar una oscura trama de grupos radicales que actúan contra intereses occidentales, preferentemente estadounidenses, allí donde tienen oportunidad.

Osama Bin Laden nació8 en Arabia Saudí en el año 1957, en el seno de una acaudalada familia saudí. Su padre fue un importante magnate de la construcción en su país. Estudió Religión y Ciencias Económicas, graduándose en la Universidad Abdul Aziz. Desde 1979 apoyó a los rebeldes afganos en su guerra contra la URSS, organizando el reclutamiento de miles de voluntarios de todo el mundo árabe, entre otras acciones. Desde 1986 participó personalmente en los combates. Acabada la guerra, regresó a su país. Como consecuencia del apoyo saudí a las tropas de EE UU durante la Guerra del Golfo de 1991, rompió su relación con el régimen saudí y con su propia familia. Se exilió en 1991 en Sudán, donde dirigió una empresa que EE UU consideraba una tapadera terrorista. Con la inaudita planificación de los ataques del 11-S, Bin Laden y Al Qaeda sacudieron con fuerza los cimientos en los que EE UU basaba su política de seguridad y pusieron en evidencia la necesidad de buscar un nuevo enfoque para reforzar sus fronteras. Casi inmediatamente después, EE UU lanzó una serie de ataques aéreos contra los talibanes en la frontera entre Afganistán y Pakistán. Ante la negativa de los talibanes a entregar al terrorista, EE UU inició en octubre de 2001 una guerra en Afganistán que aún continúa, aunque los ataques permitieron derribar al régimen fundamentalista que gobernaba el país. 302

Tras su experiencia en la guerra de Afganistán, Bin Laden aprendió a vivir como un ermitaño,8 una habilidad que le sirvió para mimetizarse en el terreno de la misma forma que lo hacen las serpientes. Una y otra vez el8 líder de Al Qaeda logró escabullirse y salir indemne de los ataques lanzados por EE UU y sus aliados internacionales, lo que hizo que quedara en entredicho la capacidad de inteligencia y militar del país más poderoso del mundo. Desde8 que la pista de Bin Laden desapareció definitivamente en las montañas de Tora Bora en el invierno de 2001 después de que EE UU depusiera por las armas a los talibanes, solo había una certeza: estaba8 escondido en Pakistán. La comunidad de inteligencia barajaba muchas hipótesis: que se encontraba en una región remota o confundido con la masa en Karachi, que solo podría ser abatido por la traición en su círculo más próximo o con un ataque por misiles, pero estaba claro que se había desplazado al país vecino de Afganistán. Durante años, los aviones no tripulados dotados de misiles han sobrevolado las distintas zonas tribales de Pakistán, el lugar más peligroso y volátil de la tierra. Han matado a decenas de militantes de Al Qaeda, también a civiles, y se han acercado mucho a sus líderes, sobre todo al egipcio Ayman Al Zawari, pero al final ha sido un grupo de comandos el que ha cerrado una parte de la historia.

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8 Un asalto de 40 minutos en un barrio de lujo La muerte de Bin Laden no solo termina con el principal autor intelectual del 11-S, sino que se descabeza al terrorismo islámico ANTONIO CAÑO | Washington 02/05/2011

"Se8 ha hecho justicia", dijo Barack Obama al anunciar, al filo de la medianoche en Washington, que Osama Bin Laden, el líder de Al Qaeda y el inspirador del movimiento terrorista que ha tenido en jaque a Estados Unidos y el mundo durante más de una década, ha8 muerto en una acción militar norteamericana en Pakistán. Las fuerzas estadounidenses tienen la custodia de su cadáver. "Estoy en condiciones de anunciar al mundo que una operación militar conducida por Estados Unidos ha conseguido matar a Bin Laden", declaró Obama desde la East Room de la Casa Blanca, sin duda una de las frases más importantes que pronuncia desde que es presidente, unas palabras que marcarán su gestión y que abren una nueva era en una guerra contra el terrorismo que ha consumido las energías de Estados Unidos y ha definido sus relaciones internacionales de forma decisiva. Con la caída de Bin Laden no solo se acaba con el principal autor intelectual del 11-S, sino que se descabeza al terrorismo islámico. Obama informó que las primeras pistas que apuntaban hacia la localización de Bin Laden llegaron el mes de agosto de 2010, y que la semana pasada ordenó lanzar la operación de captura una vez comprobado que las pruebas de que se disponía sobre su situación eran concluyentes. Fuentes oficiales norteamericanos añadieron que el fundador y líder de Al Qaeda resultó muerto en8 una residencia situada en la ciudad de Abottabad, en Pakistán.

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Aunque no se conocen aún todos los detalles de la operación, se ha informado que Bin

Laden murió como consecuencia de los8 disparos realizados durante el asalto del comando norteamericano a una casa situada en un barrio de mansiones de lujo en el que viven varios oficiales retirados del Ejército paquistaní. La acción duró unos 40 minutos y participaron en ella únicamente miembros de las agencias de seguridad de Estados Unidos. El comando norteamericano utilizó helicópteros para realizar el ataque y encontró poca resistencia. Algunos de los colaboradores de Bin Laden murieron junto a él, entre ellos uno de sus hijos. Ninguno de los estadounidenses que participaron en el ataque, al parecer dirigido por la CIA, resultó muerto o herido. Estados Unidos tan solo perdió un helicóptero, al parecer debido a problemas de carácter técnico. Obama afirmó que su país contó en esta misión con la cooperación de Pakistán, cuyo gobierno, dijo, comparte con el de Estados Unidos, la satisfacción por el resultado de la operación. Los agentes que seguían la pista de Bin Laden disponían, aparentemente, de información procedente de alguno de los individuos que rodeaban al líder terrorista en los últimos días. La prueba última de que se encontraba en esa residencia horas antes del asalto fue la detección de un significativo volumen de mensajes hacia su interior. El espionaje norteamericano ha confirmado que esa residencia, en una ciudad de los alrededores de Islamabad, existe desde hace cinco años, aunque no conoce desde hacía cuánto tiempo estaba siendo utilizada por Bin Laden.

El anuncio8 de su muerte, que sorprendió a los norteamericanos en8 las últimas horas de una noche de domingo, supone una enorme reivindicación para los cientos de soldados norteamericanos que han perdido la vida estos años en la guerra contra el terrorismo y los miles que han participado en las campañas de Irak y Afganistán. Pero, especialmente, representa el momento más esperado por los familiares de los cerca de 3.000 muertos en los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001 en Nueva York, Washington y Pennsylvania. Varios grupos de personas, especialmente jóvenes, se concentraron anoche frente a la Casa Blanca para cantar el himno nacional y celebrar la noticia. Obama advirtió que, probablemente, Al Qaeda seguirá intentando atacar a Estados Unidos después de la muerte de su líder. Pero es evidente que la desaparición del hombre que concibió esa red y tuvo la osadía de atacar los símbolos más claros del poder militar y económico de Estados Unidos -el Pentágono y las Torres Gemelas- significa un golpe moral para el entramado que justificaba el terrorismo en nombre de la defensa del Islam. El presidente norteamericano insistió ayer en que Bin Laden no era un líder musulmán y en que Estados Unidos no está en guerra contra esa confesión religiosa. Es imprevisible, no obstante, las reacciones que la muerte de este personaje, un auténtico mito entre una corriente radical del pensamiento islámico, pueden provocar en el mundo. El Gobierno norteamericano puso en estado de alerta a todas sus embajadas ante el riesgo de que sean blanco de posibles represalias. Obama mencionó en su intervención el nombre de George Bush, el presidente que primero declaró la caza de Bin Laden, misión a la que consagró su presidencia. No pudo, sin embargo, atraparlo cuando, poco después de la invasión de Afganistán, el líder de Al Qaeda se encontraba acorralado en las montañas de Tora-Bora, en ese país.

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Desde aquel momento, Bin Laden consiguió huir a Pakistán, donde se cree que ha permanecido durante todo este tiempo protegido por sus secuaces y por los simpatizantes que Al Qaeda tiene en un territorio en el que el extremismo islámico ha crecido considerablemente en los últimos años. Es difícil anticipar el impacto definitivo que la muerte de Bin Laden puede tener en el terrorismo internacional. Al Qaeda había evolucionado últimamente como una especie de franquicia de la que formaban parte distintos grupos extremistas unidos únicamente por su fanatismo y su odio a Estados Unidos. No se conoce hasta qué punto las órdenes de Bin Laden eran obedecidas por todo ese complejo entramado. Pero lo que sí es indudable es que su figura constituía, además de un banderín de enganche para nuevos terroristas, un punto de referencia que le daba coherencia y vitalidad a todo ese movimiento. La muerte de Bin Laden, por otra parte, le da sentido, como recordó ayer Obama, a la guerra de Afganistán, de donde Estados Unidos empezará la retirada el próximo mes de julio sin que hasta ahora hubiera signos evidentes que hicieran sentir que ese esfuerzo militar había valido la pena. Finalmente, la desaparición de Bin Laden es un momento crucial de la presidencia de Obama. Aunque su muerte es el fruto, seguramente, de muchos años de un meticuloso y silencioso esfuerzo de espionaje, Obama será el presidente que pasará a la historia como el que abatió al enemigo que más daño causó a Estados Unidos en su propio territorio continental en toda la historia.

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8 Diez años de mensajes amenazadores Osama Bin Laden ha retado a EE UU durante la última década con mensajes desde sus escondites que probaban que seguía vivo EL PAÍS 02/05/2011 Durante los diez años de huida de las fuerzas norteamericanas, desde los atentados a las Torres Gemelas, Bin Laden ha ido emitiendo mensajes desde paraderos desconocidos. En diciembre de 2001, EE UU divulgó un vídeo en que se congratulaba por los ataques del 11-S. En el primer aniversario del 11-S, nombró en un mensaje sonoro a los 19 perpetradores y alabó su acción, en una aparente reivindicación de esos atentados. En octubre de 2003, en una nueva grabación, amenazó con atacar los países que participasen en la ocupación de Irak, entre ellos España. En abril de 2004, en una cinta magnetofónica, reivindicó implícitamente los atentados del 11-S y del 11-M en Madrid: "es vuestra propia mercancía, que os ha sido devuelta". En octubre siguiente, irrumpió en la campaña electoral de EEUU con un vídeo (el último con imágenes suyas), en el que lee una carta al pueblo norteamericano. Por primera vez explica las causas y las consecuencias del 11-S: "Fue ideado en 1982, cuando EEUU permitió a Israel invadir el Líbano". También advirtió a los estadounidenses de que eran conducidos "de forma errónea" por el presidente Bush.

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Dos meses después, afirmó en una grabación sonora que el jordano Abu Mosab al Zarqaui era el líder de Al Qaeda en Irak, e instó a los iraquíes a boicotear las elecciones de enero 2005. En enero de 2006, ofreció, en un mensaje sonoro "al pueblo americano", una tregua a largo plazo, mientras amenazaba con más ataques en territorio estadounidense. Sobre el conflicto de Darfur (Sudán), pidió, en un mensaje sonoro en abril siguiente, que los muyahidin se preparasen para una "larga guerra contra los cruzados" y acusó a EEUU de pretender "robar el petróleo sudanés". En mayo 2006, aseguró en una grabación sonora en internet, que el francés Zacarias Moussaui no tenía nada que ver con el 11-S. Dijo que él mismo había encargado "a los 19 hermanos" los atentados terroristas en Nueva York y Washington, y que "Mousaui no fue uno de ellos". En otra cinta, de junio de 2006, lamenta la muerte de Al Zarqaui, al que llamó "león de la yihad". En septiembre de 2007, en el sexto aniversario del 11-S, Bin Laden emitió un vídeo de 30 minutos en que aparece con su habitual chilaba y turbante pero, a diferencia de los anteriores, con la barba completamente negra. Son las últimas imágenes filmadas del líder de Al Qaeda. Desde entonces, ha emitido una docena de mensajes, la mayoría sonoros y algunos montajes de vídeo sobre fotos fijas, en internet o en Al Yazira. En algunos, se refiere a acontecimientos políticos recientes. En noviembre de 2007, instó a los europeos a concluir su participación en Afganistán y reafirmó su responsabilidad en los atentados del 11-S. En el quinto aniversario de la invasión de Irak, en marzo 2008, amenazó a Europa por su actitud ante las "caricaturas insultantes" de Mahoma y arremetió contra el papa Benedicto XVI. La situación en la Franja de Gaza fue el tema principal de sus mensajes en 2008, en el 60 aniversario de la creación de Israel, y en 2009, cuando calificó de "holocausto" el ataque israelí contra Gaza de diciembre anterior. El 3 de junio de 2009, acusó al presidente Barack Obama de sembrar "nuevas semillas de odio y de venganza" siguiendo "el camino de su predecesor".

En8 su último mensaje, el 21 de enero de este año, el líder de la red terrorista Al Qaeda amenazó, en una grabación de audio emitida por la televisión catarí Al Yazira, con matar a los rehenes franceses que sean secuestrados por su grupo, si los soldados de este país no se retiran de Afganistán. "Nuestro mensaje a vosotros ayer y hoy es el mismo, y es que la liberación de vuestros rehenes de las manos de nuestros hermanos está condicionada a la salida de vuestros soldados de nuestro país", advirtió el líder saudí de origen yemení en la grabación emitida por la cadena y cuya autenticidad no pudo ser verificada.

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8 Mi vecino Osama El consultor en informática Sohaib Athar, de 33 años, relató en Twitter, sin saberlo, los detalles de la operación que culminó con la muerte de Bin Laden VERÓNICA CALDERÓN - Madrid - 02/05/2011 "Un helicóptero sobrevuela Abottabad a la una de la mañana. Es extraño". "Vete, helicóptero, antes de que saque mi matamoscas gigante". Sohaib Athar, un consultor en informática pakistaní de 33 años, relató8 en directo, a través de Twitter, los primeros pasos de la operación estadounidense que culminó con la8 muerte de Osama Bin Laden.

Su casa está en Abottabad8 (Pakistán). Athar vivía, sin saberlo, a dos kilómetros del líder de Al Qaeda. "No me di cuenta del helicóptero hasta que el ruido comenzó a ser irritante", describe

Athar, conocido en Twitter como 8@reallyvirtual. Los primeros mensajes que escribió son para contactar a sus amigos. "¿En qué parte de Abottabad estás?". "Vivo cerca del auditorio Jalal Baba". Rápidamente amplió información: hasta recogió el testimonio de un taxista. "[Me ha dicho que] el Ejército ha cerrado el área y están inspeccionando casa por casa", contó a los cientos de seguidores que tenía en ese momento. Ahora son miles y crecen por minuto. En el tiempo que llevó escribir este párrafo aumentaron en 1.500.

El8 analista político Munzir Naqvi, también pakistaní, descansaba en su casa en Denver (EE UU) y es uno de aquellos seguidores originales. "Leí en su perfil que había escuchado una gran explosión cerca de su casa. Ahí supe que algo estaba ocurriendo", relata a través de un mensaje en Facebook. "Dos helicópteros, uno se ha estrellado", tuiteó Athar poco después. "Y ahora, un avión". Los pocos pakistaníes que leían atenta los sucesos en Abottabad dedujeron entonces que algo grande estaba ocuriendo. "Rumores interesantes sobre los acontecimientos de hoy", escribió en Abottabad. Unos minutos más tarde, Barack8 Obama apareció en televisión. "Osama Bin Laden muerto en

Abottabad, Pakistán. Cómo está el barrio", fue su reacción. Abottabad es el8 último lugar de Pakistán en que esperaba que viviera", relata. El barrio que Athar y Bin Laden compartían cuenta con un campo de golf, un complejo de tiendas y hasta un campo de entrenamiento del ejército pakistaní. El consultor en informática se pregunta si la muerte del terrorista más buscado del mundo afectará su comunidad, hasta ahora (comprensiblemente) una de las más tranquilas de Pakistán.

Athar lamenta la excesiva atención que ha recibido de la noche a la mañana. Su8 nombre se convirtió en un trending topic (uno de los temas más comentados en Twitter) en pocas horas. "No pensé que mi nombre sería famoso hasta que sacara dos álbumes de rock y algunos premios por programación de software". El informático, que en su página web se describe como "un consultor que ha buscado refugio en las montañas" hoy ha recibido centenares de correos electrónicos, llamadas por Skype y menciones en Twitter. "Soy el que blogueó la muerte de Bin Laden sin darse cuenta, nada más", explica. "Soy solo un tuitero. Lo que pasa es que que no hay muchos usuarios de Twitter en Abottabad. Aquí son más de Facebook".

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8 REPORTAJE: Ola de cambio en el mundo árabe "No tenemos nada que perder, la lucha sigue" El grupo juvenil 20 de Febrero intenta mantener viva la llama reformista ANDREA RIZZI, ENVIADO ESPECIAL - Marraquech - 02/05/2011 Delicada, menuda, pero animada por una arrolladora energía vital, Imane Dahuane recorría ayer las calles de Marraquech indiferente a la torrencial lluvia que las inundaba. Desperdiciar una mano para sujetar un paraguas cuando había tantas octavillas prodemocracia por repartir en un día de manifestación es una idea que probablemente ni siquiera llegó a contemplar. Bióloga, de 31 años, Imane sabe que el momento es decisivo, que es indispensable echar el resto ahora para mantener viva la llama del cambio en Marruecos. La lluvia no es desde luego el elemento más hostil al que se enfrentan los jóvenes marroquíes que reclaman democracia. La trayectoria vital que condujo ayer a Imane hasta la plaza del Ayuntamiento enfundada en una camiseta blanca con un logo del Movimiento 20 de Febrero y a exigir libertad a gritos por las calles de su ciudad son a la vez un calvario personal y un paradigma generacional. Terminada la carrera, entró en un túnel de pasantías no retribuidas, empleos precarios y paro. "No solo los salarios son miserables, sino que además en alguna ocasión han llegado a exigirme condiciones intolerables para renovarme un contrato, como que me comprometiera a no casarme durante cuatro años", explica indignada. "Solo los hijos de papá avanzan. Estamos hartos de la falta de meritocracia, hartos de la corrupción, hartos de estos políticos en los que ya no tenemos ninguna fe", espeta. Los compañeros de Imane, reunidos ayer en una de las marchas organizadas por el Primero de Mayo, tienen un perfil homogéneo. Se trata mayoritariamente de estudiantes o jóvenes con buena formación. Algunos, como Amine A., de 21 años, pronuncian palabras contundentes. "Vivimos bajo un sistema dictatorial. Esto tiene que cambiar. Si no lo hacemos nosotros, nadie lo hará. No me amedrentaré", dice. Otros se atreven a cantar, en la concentración, "abajo la tiranía". La policía observa sin intervenir. Los sindicalistas se muestran mucho más prudentes, y algunos hasta corean "¡viva el rey!". Sin embargo, las reivindicaciones públicas de los jóvenes son generalmente moderadas. Piden monarquía constitucional, seguridad jurídica, oportunidades de trabajo. Pero aunque el denominador común sea asumible por muchos, la formación de un frente más amplio se está revelando tarea complicada. La manifestación de ayer en Marraquech lo evidencia. Aunque la fuerte lluvia desanimó a gente, solo unos pocos centenares de personas respondieron a la convocatoria. Además, en un síntoma de escasa unidad, los diversos actos sindicales no confluyeron en un punto de encuentro final. Eso no fue culpa del temporal. "En nuestras filas hay también sindicalistas, pero la relación con las centrales no es del todo fluida", reconoce Imane, que viste un ligero velo blanco que no cubre todo el pelo. No es quizá la distancia más grave que queda por salvar. Sobre todo, el movimiento no parece haber logrado todavía atraer a las clases bajas. En otros casos -Egipto, Túnez- el odio al dictador hizo de coagulante, propulsó la protesta. A falta de ese ingrediente, en

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Marruecos el frente reformista juvenil es todavía un movimiento de reducido espectro social. Así se deducía en Marraquech. A todo ello, hay naturalmente que añadir el fantasma de la represión, ahora avivado por el atentado del jueves. Los chavales temen que el Estado endurezca su actitud, y de paso deje de tolerar sus peticiones. Un grupillo minoritario llegó a corear: "El atentado es una pièce teatral". Pese a las adversidades, parecen muy motivados para insistir. Algunos, como Amine o Zakaria Lazmat, estudiante de 20 años, se declaran inspirados por los logros de sus colegas egipcios y tunecinos. Otros manifiestan impulsos más personales. "Yo no tengo nada que perder. No tengo ni siquiera un poco de dinero para emigrar. Así que seguiré luchando", promete Imane. Y es francamente difícil no sentir simpatía y admiración ante la perseverancia con la que distribuye sus octavillas e intenta mantener viva la llama reformista bajo la inusual fría lluvia de Marraquech.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaciona8 l/tenemos/nada/perder/lucha/sigue/elpepuint /20110502elpepiint_4/Tes

8 Ola de cambio en el mundo árabe Marruecos grita sí al cambio y no al terrorismo Las manifestaciones del Primero de Mayo se convierten en una reivindicación de una transición política pacífica 02/05/2011 IGNACIO CEMBRERO - Rabat - 02/05/2011 El Primero de Mayo se convirtió ayer en Marruecos en una sorprendente amalgama de reivindicaciones sociales tradicionales y otras de nuevo cuño, que piden un cambio de sistema político, entremezcladas todas ellas con el rechazo al terrorismo que el jueves pasado golpeó en Marraquech, la capital turística, causando 16 muertos. "No al terrorismo, sí a las reformas", rezaban varios carteles resumiendo un sentimiento mayoritario en las manifestaciones. Los principales sindicatos -UMT, CDT y FDT- secundaron, a grandes rasgos, las demandas de los jóvenes del Movimiento 20 de Febrero que desde hace más de dos meses se manifiestan en todo el país denunciando la corrupción y por la instauración de un sistema auténticamente democrático. "La clase obrera forma parte del Movimiento del 20 de Febrero", se podía leer en una gran banderola con la que los sindicatos dejaban claro su alineamiento. "Por la disolución del Parlamento y del Gobierno", exigía otra pancarta enarbolada por los militantes de la Unión Marroquí de Trabajadores, que se sumaban así a una exigencia recurrente de los jóvenes. Los jóvenes participaron en los cortejos del Primero de Mayo en las grandes ciudades, en los que las centrales no entremezclan sus afiliados, sino que desfilan en bloques separados. Entre ellos se colaron trabajadores de diversas empresas con sus reivindicaciones específicas o asociaciones de licenciados en paro. Durante un rato la manifestación de Rabat estuvo incluso encabezada por los empleados de la Royal Air Maroc (RAM), la aerolínea de bandera marroquí, con sus azafatas uniformadas.

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Si los eslóganes diferían a veces, el rechazo al terrorismo era un grito unánime. "La clase obrera condena los actos terroristas de Marraquech", señalaban varias pancartas. Los jóvenes contestatarios coreaban su particular lema: "El terrorismo teme una Constitución democrática". El rey Mohamed VI propuso, el 9 de marzo, una reforma de la Carta Magna, pero ellos consideran que es una revisión tímida del texto y rehusaron incluso colaborar con la comisión que prepara la nueva Constitución. Horas antes de que el cortejo arrancase, Amal el Amri, una de las responsables de la UMT, reiteró una sospecha generalizada: "El momento elegido nos induce a pensar que hay sectores que se resisten a que Marruecos avance desde un punto de vista democrático o económico". El ministro del Interior, Taieb Cherkaoui, declaró el viernes que el bombazo era "del estilo de Al Qaeda", pero aún no ha sido reivindicado y el país se pregunta angustiado quién puede haberlo instigado y por qué en este momento de reformas. El Movimiento 20 de Febrero ha convocado un acto nacional de repulsa al terrorismo el próximo domingo en Marraquech. En la capital, unas 12.000 personas se echaron ayer a la calle, según fuentes independientes, mientras que en Casablanca fueron algunas menos. Un pequeño sindicato, la Unión General de Trabajadores Marroquíes (UGTM), canceló en esta ciudad su desfile anual porque, probablemente, no quería verse involucrado en reivindicaciones políticas. Lo dirige Hamid Chabat, alcalde de Fez y responsable del Istiqlal, el partido nacionalista que encabeza la coalición gubernamental. La afluencia no fue muy elevada por dos razones. La primera, el mal tiempo que azota casi todo Marruecos. En Rabat llovió intensamente a lo largo del día. La segunda es que el 26 de abril, Gobierno y sindicatos alcanzaron un acuerdo que concede a los funcionarios y a los jubilados las mayores subidas salariales del reinado de Mohamed VI. Es probable que la medida anunciada por el monarca haya desmovilizado a un buen número de militantes. El acuerdo prevé una subida lineal de 55 euros mensuales a los 810.000 funcionarios de Marruecos, incluidos los militares. Para los sueldos más bajos (185 mensuales), el aumento es del 30%. Las pensiones mínimas, que cobran unos 111.000 jubilados, se incrementarán en un 70% al mes, de los 600 dirhams (55 euros) a los 1.000 (90 euros). El pacto obliga además al sector privado a subir el salario mínimo interprofesional en un 15% de aquí al 1 de enero, un porcentaje muy superior al de la inflación. El Ejecutivo ha dado a entender que financiará estas medidas recortando los gastos de funcionamiento de la Administración. Pero difícilmente las maltrechas arcas del Tesoro marroquí van a poder soportarlas. Hacienda ya hace un costoso gasto para evitar que el incremento del barril de petróleo repercuta sobre los consumidores, que siguen pagando la misma cantidad en la gasolinera. IGNACIO CEMBRERO Marruecos grita sí al cambio y no al terrorismo. Las manifestaciones del Primero de Mayo se convierten en una reivindicación de una transición política pacífica 02/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Marruecos/grita/cambio/terrorismo/elpepu8 int/20110502elpepiint_3/Tes

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8 EE UU trata de abortar la declaración de un Estado palestino en la ONU Washington se moviliza ante un giro radical del conflicto de Oriente Próximo ANTONIO CAÑO - Washington - 02/05/2011 La diplomacia norteamericana se ha movilizado intensamente ante unos meses que se anuncian decisivos para el problema palestino-israelí y que podrían culminar en septiembre con el respaldo de la ONU a la declaración de un Estado independiente en Palestina. Esa fecha es el límite que se han puesto todas las partes para conseguir un acuerdo, esta vez definitivo y concreto, que resuelva un conflicto sobre el que gira toda la política de Oriente Próximo. El levantamiento popular en varios países de esa región ha creado un nuevo sentido de urgencia entre los principales protagonistas. Los palestinos lo ven como una oportunidad; los israelíes, como una necesidad, ante los nuevos peligros potenciales, y EE UU se siente obligado a un mayor protagonismo. "El statu quo entre palestinos e israelíes no es más sostenible que los sistemas políticos que han sucumbido en los últimos meses", declaró hace dos semanas la secretaria de Estado, Hillary Clinton, al anunciar inminentes iniciativas de la Casa Blanca sobre ese asunto. La frustración por el fracaso de todas las negociaciones anteriores y el escepticismo sobre las posibilidades de un arreglo han dado paso en los últimos días a la expectativa de que algo importante puede ocurrir pronto. Esa sensación está en parte motivada por las palabras que Barack Obama pronunció ante la Asamblea General de la ONU en septiembre pasado: "Cuando volvamos aquí el año próximo podemos tener un acuerdo que nos conduzca hacia un nuevo miembro de Naciones Unidas, un Estado palestino soberano e independiente viviendo en paz con Israel". Aunque las negociaciones no han progresado en absoluto desde aquella fecha, los palestinos han decidido dar por buena la cita de septiembre. El presidente de la Autoridad Palestina, Mahmud Abbas, ha ordenado la redacción de una Constitución para antes de ese mes, y el primer ministro de su Gobierno, Salam Fayad, ha asegurado que "septiembre será el certificado de nacimiento" del Estado de Palestina. El propósito palestino es el de someter su deseo de creación de un Estado independiente a votación de la Asamblea General. Aunque una propuesta así debería tener en algún momento la ratificación del Consejo de Seguridad, existen mecanismos legales para proceder a una votación en la Asamblea, donde la iniciativa saldría adelante con toda seguridad. Los palestinos pretenden, no solo ganar la votación, sino hacerlo de forma aplastante, con el apoyo de los principales países europeos, de forma que quede patente a los ojos del mundo el aislamiento diplomático en que queda Israel. Esa posibilidad ha alarmado a Israel y ha provocado gran preocupación en EE UU. Ambos países tratan ahora de evitar esa votación en medio de un clima de gran controversia que se ve afectado por las malas relaciones que, desde el comienzo de su mandato, mantiene Obama con el primer ministro israelí, Benjamín Netanyahu.

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Israel, que considera el propósito palestino una flagrante violación de los acuerdos firmados en el pasado con los dirigentes de esa comunidad, está tratando de convencer a los países sobre los que tiene cierta influencia de que no respalden la iniciativa en la ONU. No tiene gran confianza en conseguirlo. Por eso, la principal respuesta del Gobierno israelí a ese intento de votación será la presentación de un nuevo plan de paz. La fecha prevista para hacerlo es la del próximo 24 de mayo, cuando Netanyahu pronuncie un discurso ante el Congreso de EE UU al que ha sido invitado por el presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, John Boehner. De esa manera, con la ayuda de los republicanos, Netanyahu intentará al mismo tiempo convencer al mundo de su voluntad negociadora y contrarrestar cualquier intento de Obama, de quien desconfía, de asumir la iniciativa. Aún no se conoce lo que el primer ministro israelí anunciará en esa ocasión, pero fuentes diplomáticas israelíes han anticipado que, sin entregar todas las cartas, será lo suficientemente audaz como para impedir cualquier excusa palestina para no regresar a la mesa de negociaciones. EE UU tampoco quiere llegar a la votación de la ONU sin un acuerdo previo. Entre otras razones, porque no quiere ser la única nación de peso que levante la mano en contra del Estado palestino. Portavoces norteamericanos han declarado recientemente que Washington se opone "a cualquier acción unilateral". La diplomacia norteamericana va a tratar de evitar la acción en la Asamblea General, pero no cree posible que una mera iniciativa de Netanyahu pueda convencer a los palestinos de que renuncien a esa estrategia. Al mismo tiempo, EE UU no quiere verse absolutamente condicionado por la propuesta del primer ministro israelí, a la que no podrá oponerse abiertamente debido a las relaciones excepcionales que mantiene con ese país. Así pues, la Casa Blanca está considerando presentar su propio plan de paz, uno con el que los palestinos puedan simpatizar y que los israelíes no puedan rechazar. Hillary Clinton ha anunciado que Obama hablará extensamente sobre este tema en los próximos días, pero todavía no parecen resueltas las dudas sobre qué hacer exactamente y cuándo hacerlo, antes o después del discurso de Netanyahu. Por un lado, la Administración estadounidense no puede quedarse de brazos cruzados ante las perspectivas dramáticas que se deducen de una votación en la ONU sin un acuerdo previo -las represalias de Israel podrían ser considerables-. Pero la presentación de un plan de paz sin un consenso suficiente para garantizar su éxito puede arruinar el prestigio de Estados Unidos durante años. ANTONIO CAÑO EE UU trata de abortar la declaración de un Estado palestino en la ONU Washington se moviliza ante un giro radical del conflicto de Oriente Próximo 02/05/2011

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8 Israel redobla la presión económica AGENCIAS - Jerusalén - 02/05/2011 El Gobierno israelí suspendió ayer la transferencia a la Autoridad Palestina de 300 millones de shekels (60 millones de euros) de impuestos y gravámenes que, conforme a los acuerdos de paz, recauda en su nombre porque quiere asegurarse de que el dinero no acabará en manos de Hamás. Fatah, el partido que gestiona la Autoridad Palestina en Cisjordania, y los islamistas de Hamás, que controlan Gaza, tienen previsto sellar su reconciliación esta semana. El ministro de Economía israelí, Yuval Steinitz, advirtió: "Creo que la carga de la prueba está en los palestinos, [ellos] deben darnos garantías de que el dinero entregado por Israel no va a Hamás, una organización terrorista". El primer ministro palestino, Salam Fayad, pidió a la comunidad internacional que intervenga para que Israel le transfiera el dinero, unos fondos que suponen el 70% de los ingresos de la Autoridad Palestina. "Las amenazas no impedirán que concluyamos nuestro proceso de reconciliación", aseguró Fayad. Israel ha congelado en varias ocasiones durante los últimos 10 años las transferencias a los palestinos.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaciona8 l/Israel/redobla/presion/economica/elpepuin t/20110502elpepiint_8/Tes

All the Queen’s Children Ian Buruma 2011-05-02 NEW YORK – Does monarchy – constitutional monarchy, that is, not the despotic kind – have any redeeming features left? The arguments against maintaining kings and queens are mostly quite rational. It is unreasonable in this democratic age to pay special deference to people solely on the basis of their birth. Are we really supposed to admire and love modern monarchies, such as the British House of Windsor, even more so today, just because some new princess has been plucked from the middle class? Monarchy has an infantilizing effect. Witness how otherwise sensible adults are reduced to nervously grinning sycophants when they are granted the privilege of touching an extended royal hand. At great monarchical displays, such as the royal wedding in London, millions become enthralled by child-like dreams of a “fairy-tale” marriage. The 313

mystique of immense wealth, noble birth, and great exclusivity is further sustained by the global mass media that promote these rituals. Now, one might argue that the dignified pomp of Queen Elizabeth II is preferable to the tawdry grandiosity of Silvio Berlusconi, Madonna, or Cristiano Ronaldo. In fact, the British monarchy, especially, has been reinventing itself by adopting many of the most vulgar features of modern showbiz or sports celebrity. And the worlds of royalty and popular fame often overlap. For example, David Beckham and his ex-pop-star wife Victoria, live out their own dream of royalty, aping some of its gaudiest aspects. They also happened to be among the favored guests at the latest royal wedding. Similarly, while Britain has many outstanding musicians, the favorite of the royal court is Elton John. Infantile or not, there is a common human craving for taking vicarious pleasure in the lives of kings, queens, and other shining stars. To call these people’s ostentatious displays of extravagance wasteful is to miss the point: a world of glittering dreams that must remain entirely beyond our grasp is precisely what many people want to see. But there is another, darker side to this craving, which is the wish to see idols dragged through the mud in vicious gossip magazines, divorce courts, and so on. This is the vengeful side of our fawning, as though the humiliation of worshipping idols must be balanced by our delight in their downfall. Indeed, to subject people who are born into royal families, or people who marry into them, to lives in a fishbowl, where they are on constant display, like actors and actresses in a continuous soap opera, where human relations are distorted and stunted by absurd rules of protocol, is a terrible form of cruelty. The current Japanese empress and her daughter-in-law, both from non-aristocratic families, have had nervous breakdowns as a result. Likewise, movie stars often fall victim to alcohol, drugs, and breakdowns, but at least they have chosen the lives they live. Kings and queens, on the whole, have not. Prince Charles might have been far happier as a gardener, but this was never an option. One thing to be said for monarchs is that they provide people with a sense of continuity, which can be useful in times of crisis or radical change. The King of Spain provided stability and continuity after the end of Franco’s dictatorship. During World War II, European monarchs kept a sense of hope and unity alive among their subjects under Nazi occupation. But there is something else, too. Monarchies are often popular with minorities. Jews were among the most loyal subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Franz Joseph I stood up for his Jewish subjects when they were threatened by German anti-Semites. To him, Jews, Germans, Czechs, or Hungarians were all his subjects, wherever they lived, from the smallest Galician shtetl to the grand capitals of Budapest or Vienna. This offered some protection to minorities at a time of rising ethnic nationalism. In this sense, monarchy is a little like Islam, or the Catholic Church: all believers are supposed to be equal in the eyes of God, or the Pope, or the Emperor – hence the appeal to the poor and the marginalized. This might explain some right-wing populists’ animus against monarchy. The Dutch populist leader Geert Wilders, for example, has denounced Queen Beatrix on several occasions as a leftist, elitist, and multiculturalist. Like the new wave of populists 314

worldwide, Wilders promises to take his country back for his followers, to stop immigration (especially of Muslims), and to make the Netherlands Dutch again, whatever that means. Beatrix, like Franz Joseph, refuses to make ethnic or religious distinctions between her subjects. That is what she means when she preaches tolerance and mutual understanding. To Wilders and his supporters, this is a sign of her molly-coddling of aliens, of appeasing Muslims. To them, the queen seems almost anti-Dutch. To be sure, like all European royal families, the origins of the Dutch royal family are decidedly mixed. The emergence of kings and queens as specifically national figureheads is a relatively recent historical development. Empires contained many nations, after all. Queen Victoria, mostly of German blood, did not regard herself as a monarch of Britons alone, but of Indians, Malays, and many other peoples, too. This aristocratic tradition of standing above the narrow strains of ethnic nationalism may be the best argument to hang on to royalty a little longer. Now that many European nations have become increasingly mixed in terms of ethnicity and culture, the only way forward is to learn to live together. If monarchs can teach their subjects to do so, then let us give at least one cheer for the remaining kings and queens. Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at Bard College. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.

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2011-05-02

Todos9 los hijos de la Reina Ian Buruma

NUEVA YORK - ¿Le quedan aspectos positivos a la monarquía (la monarquía constitucional, no el tipo despótico)? Los argumentos contra la permanencia de reyes y reinas son en su mayoría bastante racionales. No es razonable en esta era democrática dar un trato especial a personas específicas únicamente debido a su cuna. ¿Realmente se supone que debemos admirar y amar las monarquías modernas, como la Casa Británica de Windsor, más aún hoy en día, sólo porque una nueva princesa ha sido seleccionada de entre la clase media? Monarquía tiene un efecto infantilizante. Prueba de ello es cómo personas adultas, normalmente razonables y de buen juicio, se reducen a sonreír nerviosa y aduladoramente cuando se les concede el privilegio de tocar una mano de la realeza. En 315

las grandes muestras de fasto monárquico, como la boda real en Londres, millones quedaron fascinados por sueños, como de niños, de una boda de "cuento de hadas". La mística de una inmensa riqueza, un nacimiento de sangre azul y gran exclusividad se ve alimentada por los medios de comunicación globales que promueven estos ritos. Ahora bien, uno podría argumentar que la digna pompa de la Reina Isabel II es preferible a la grandiosidad de mal gusto de Silvio Berlusconi, Madonna o Cristiano Ronaldo. De hecho, la monarquía británica, sobre todo, se ha reinventado a sí misma mediante la adopción de muchas de las características más vulgares del moderno mundo del espectáculo o la celebridad deportiva. Y a menudo los mundos de la realeza y la fama popular se superponen. Por ejemplo, David Beckham y Victoria, su esposa ex-estrella del pop, viven su propio sueño de realeza, imitando algunos de sus aspectos más llamativos. También fueron unos de los privilegiados invitados en la última boda real. Del mismo modo, si bien Gran Bretaña tiene muchos músicos destacados, el favorito de la corte real es Elton John . Infantil o no, existe un deseo común en los seres humanos por solazarse con los detalles de las vidas de reyes, reinas y otras estrellas fulgurantes. Llamar una extravagancia inútil las muestras de ostentación de estas personas es perder el punto: un mundo de sueños relucientes que debe permanecer totalmente fuera de nuestro alcance es precisamente lo que mucha gente quiere ver. Pero hay otro lado más oscuro de este deseo, que es el ansia de ver a los ídolos arrastrados por el barro de las sucias revistas de chismes, los tribunales de divorcio y demás. Es el lado vengativo de nuestra adulación, como si la humillación de adorar a los ídolos debiera equilibrarse con nuestro deleite por su caída. De hecho, obligar a las personas que nacen en familias reales, o a quienes se casan en ellas, a vivir en una pecera donde están en exhibición permanente, como actores y actrices de una eterna telenovela en que las relaciones humanas están distorsionados y sujetas a absurdas normas de protocolo, es una terrible forma de crueldad. La emperatriz japonesa actual y su nuera, ambas procedentes de familias no aristocráticas, han sufrido crisis nerviosas como consecuencia de ello. Del mismo modo, a menudo las estrellas de cine son víctimas del alcohol, las drogas y las crisis emocionales, pero al menos han elegido la vida en que viven. En general, no es así en el caso de los reyes y reinas. El Príncipe Carlos podría haber sido mucho más feliz como jardinero, pero eso nunca fue una opción para él. Una cosa que se puede decir de los monarcas es que proporcionan a las personas un sentido de continuidad que puede ser útil en tiempos de crisis o cambios radicales. El Rey de España dio estabilidad y continuidad tras el fin de la dictadura de Franco. Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, los monarcas europeos mantuvieron vivo un sentido de esperanza y unidad entre sus súbditos bajo la ocupación nazi. Pero hay algo más: las monarquías suelen ser populares entre las minorías. Los judíos fueron algunos de los súbditos más leales del emperador austro-húngaro. Francisco José I defendió a sus súbditos judíos cuando fueron amenazados por los antisemitas alemanes. Para él, todos eran iguales, ya fueran judíos, alemanes, checos o húngaros, dondequiera que vivieran, desde el más pequeño shtetl de Galitzia a las grandes capitales de Budapest o Viena. Esto daba cierta protección a las minorías en momentos de un creciente nacionalismo étnico. 316

En este sentido, la monarquía es un poco como el Islam o la Iglesia Católica: se supone que todos los creyentes son iguales a los ojos de Dios, el Papa o el Emperador: de ahí que los pobres y los marginados se sientan protegidos por ellos. Esto podría explicar cierta animosidad populista de derechas contra la monarquía. El líder populista holandés Geert Wilders, por ejemplo, ha denunciado a la reina Beatriz en varias ocasiones como una elitista y multiculturalista de izquierdas. Al igual que la nueva ola de populistas en todo el mundo, Wilders promete recuperar su país para sus seguidores, detener la inmigración (especialmente de musulmanes) y hacer que Holanda vuelva a ser holandesa, sea lo que sea que ello signifique. Beatriz, al igual que Francisco José, se niega a hacer distinciones étnicas o religiosas entre sus súbditos. Eso es lo que quiere decir cuando predica la tolerancia y la comprensión mutuas. Para Wilders y sus partidarios, esto es una señal de debilidad ante los extranjeros y los musulmanes. La reina les parece casi anti-holandesa. Al igual que todas las familias reales europeas, los orígenes de la familia real holandesa son decididamente mixtos. La aparición de los reyes y reinas como representantes específicamente nacionales es un rasgo histórico relativamente reciente. Después de todo, los imperios incluían muchas naciones. Reina Victoria, cuya sangre era mayormente alemana, no se consideraba una monarca sólo de los británicos, sino también de los indios, malayos y muchos otros pueblos. Esta tradición aristocrática de estar por encima de las estrechas limitaciones del nacionalismo étnico puede ser el mejor argumento para aferrarse a la realeza un poco más. Ahora que muchos países europeos se han vuelto cada vez más variados en términos de etnicidad y cultura, la única forma de avanzar es aprender a vivir juntos. Si los monarcas pueden enseñar a sus súbditos a hacerlo, entonces demos al menos un saludo a los reyes y reinas restantes. Ian Buruma es profesor de Democracia y Derechos Humanos en el Bard College. Su último libro es Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (“Amansar a los dioses. Religión y democracia en tres continentes”).

Ian Buruma Todos9 los hijos de la Reina 2011-05-02 http://www.project-9 syndicate.org/commentary/buruma50/Spanish

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9 THE POLITICAL SCENE THE CONSEQUENTIALIST How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy by Ryan Lizza MAY 2, 2011

Obama has said that his foreign-policy ideas defy traditional categories and ideologies. Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

Keywords (Pres.)9 Barack Obama; Foreign9 Policy; Hillary9 Clinton; Middle9 East;

Samantha9 Power; Richard9 Holbrooke; Robert9 Gates Barack Obama came to Washington just six years ago, having spent his professional life as a part-time lawyer, part-time law professor, and part-time state legislator in Illinois. As an undergraduate, he took courses in history and international relations, but neither his academic life nor his work in Springfield gave him an especially profound grasp of foreign affairs. As he coasted toward winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, in 2004, he began to reach out to a broad range of foreign-policy experts––politicians, diplomats, academics, and journalists. As a student during the Reagan years, Obama gravitated toward conventionally left- leaning positions. At Occidental, he demonstrated in favor of divesting from apartheid South Africa. At Columbia, he wrote a forgettable essay in Sundial, a campus publication, in favor of the nuclear-freeze movement. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he focussed on civil-rights law and race. And, as a candidate who emphasized his “story,” Obama argued that what he lacked in experience with foreign affairs he made up for with foreign travel: four years in Indonesia as a boy, and trips to Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Europe during and after college. But there was no mistaking the lightness of his résumé. Just a year before coming to Washington, State Senator Obama was not immersed in the dangers of nuclear Pakistan or an ascendant China; as a provincial legislator, he was investigating the dangers of a toy known as the Yo-Yo Water Ball. (He tried, unsuccessfully, to have it banned.) Obama had always read widely, and now he was determined to get a deeper education. He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman. He met with Anthony Lake, who had left the Nixon Administration over 318

Vietnam and went on to work in Democratic Administrations, and with Susan Rice, who had served in the Clinton Administration and carried with her the guilt of having failed to act to prevent the Rwandan genocide. He also contacted Samantha Power, a thirty-four-year-old journalist and Harvard professor specializing in human rights. In her twenties, Power had reported from the Balkans and witnessed the campaigns of ethnic cleansing there. In 2002, after graduating from Harvard Law School, she wrote “A Problem from Hell,” which surveyed the grim history of six genocides committed in the twentieth century. Propounding a liberal-interventionist view, Power argued that “mass killing” on the scale of Rwanda or Bosnia must be prevented by other nations, including the United States. She wrote that America and its allies rarely have perfect information about when a regime is about to commit genocide; a President, therefore, must have “a bias toward belief” that massacres are imminent. Stopping the execution of thousands of foreigners, she wrote, was, in some cases, worth the cost in dollars, troops, and strained alliances. The book, which was extremely influential, especially on the left, won a Pulitzer Prize, in 2003. Critics considered her views radical and dangerously impractical. After reading “A Problem from Hell,” Obama invited Power to dinner. He said he wanted to talk about foreign policy. The meal lasted four hours. As a fledgling member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and an ambitious politician with his sights set on higher office, Obama agreed to have Power spend a year in his office as a foreign-policy fellow. In his first news conference after winning election to the Senate, the press asked whether he intended to run for President, but he assured reporters, as well as his aides, that he would not even consider it until 2012 or 2016. He knew that he could not have a serious impact on issues like Iraq or the Sudan as a junior committee member, but he was determined to learn the institution and to acquire, as Hillary Clinton had, a reputation not for celebrity but for substance. In foreign affairs, as in so much else, he was determined to break free of the old ideologies and categories. But he would take it step by step. Obama entered the Senate in 2005, at a moment of passionate foreign-policy debate within the Democratic Party. The invasion of Iraq was seen as interventionism executed under false pretenses and with catastrophic consequences. Many on the left argued that liberal interventionists, particularly in Congress and in the press, had given crucial cover to the Bush Administration during the run-up to the war. Hillary Clinton, who often sided with the humanitarian hawks in her husband’s White House, and who went on to vote for the Iraq war, in 2002, seemed to some to be the embodiment of all that had gone wrong. One reaction among liberals to the Bush years and to Iraq was to retreat from “idealism” toward “realism,” in which the United States would act cautiously and, above all, according to national interests rather than moral imperatives. The debate is rooted in the country’s early history. America, John Quincy Adams argued, “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all,” but the “champion and vindicator only of her own.” In 1966, Adams’s words were repeated by George Kennan, perhaps the most articulate realist of the twentieth century, in opposing the Vietnam War. To Kennan and his intellectual followers, foreign-policy problems are always more complicated than Americans, in their native idealism, usually allow. The use of force to 319

stop human-rights abuses or to promote democracy, they argue, usually ends poorly. In the fall of 2002, six months before the invasion of Iraq, Kennan said, “Today, if we went into Iraq, as the President would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.” As Obama sorted through the arguments, other foreign-policy liberals were determined to prevent Iraq from besmirching the whole program of liberal internationalism. Humanitarian intervention—which Power helped advance, though she vigorously opposed the Iraq War—should not be abandoned because of the failures in Baghdad. Nor should American diplomacy turn away from emphasizing the virtues of bringing the world democracy. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of international affairs at Princeton and a Democrat, wrote in the liberal journal Democracy that an overreaction to the Bush years might mean that “realists could again rule the day, embracing order and stability over ideology and values.” After little more than a year in the Senate, Obama was bored, and began to take seriously the frequent calls to run for President. To be a candidate, he needed to distinguish himself from his foremost potential opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as from President Bush. One of the clearest paths to distinction, especially in the primaries, was to emphasize his early opposition, as a state senator, to the Iraq war. He started to move away from the ideas of people like Power and Slaughter. He pointedly noted that George H. W. Bush’s management of the end of the Cold War was masterly. The President had sometimes kept quiet about the aspirations of pro- democracy activists in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, in order to maintain the confidence of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin. It was just the sort of political performance to which Obama aspired. In making the case against Hillary Clinton, Obama slyly argued that the George W. Bush years were in some ways a continuation of the Bill Clinton years, and that the United States needed to return to the philosophy of an earlier era. The proselytizing about democracy and the haste to bomb other countries in the name of humanitarian aid had “stretched our military to the breaking point and distracted us from the growing threats of a dangerous world,” Obama said in a speech in 2006, a few weeks before he announced his Presidential candidacy. He spoke of “a strategy no longer driven by ideology and politics but one that is based on a realistic assessment of the sobering facts on the ground and our interests in the region. This kind of realism has been missing since the very conception of this war, and it is what led me to publicly oppose it in 2002.” In 2007, Obama called Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national-security adviser and the reigning realist of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. Obama told him that he had read his recent book, “Second Chance,” in which Brzezinski criticized Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and their handling of the post-Cold War world. They began to speak and exchange e-mails about policy, and Brzezinski travelled with Obama during a stretch of the campaign. In September, 2007, Brzezinski introduced Obama at an event in Clinton, Iowa, where the candidate discussed the failures in Iraq. “I thought he had a really incisive grasp of what the twenty-first century is all about and how America has to relate to it,” Brzezinski told me. “He was reacting in a way that I very much shared, and we had a meeting of the minds—namely, that George Bush put the United States on a suicidal course.”

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As he campaigned in New Hampshire, in 2007, Obama said that he would not leave troops in Iraq even to stop genocide. “Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have three hundred thousand troops in the Congo right now, where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife, which we haven’t done,” he said. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done.” At a campaign event in Pennsylvania, Obama said, “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan.” In the end, Barack Obama overcame Hillary Clinton’s campaign warnings that he was too callow, too naïve about dealing with rogue regimes, too untested to respond to the “3 A.M.” emergencies from all corners of the globe. Obama entered the White House at a moment of radical transition in global politics, and one of his most significant appointments was Clinton as his Secretary of State. Although he had made plain in the campaign that he disagreed with some of her foreign-policy views, he admired her discipline and believed that, as a member of the Cabinet, she wouldn’t publicly break with the President. And he would need her. Obama faced economic catastrophe at home and American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; serious regional threats from Pakistan and Iran; global terrorism; the ascendance of China and India; and a situation that was almost impossible to discuss—a vivid sense of American decline. American values and interests are woven together, and no President is always either an idealist or a realist. Officials who identify with the same label often disagree with one another. Humanitarian interventionists were divided over the Iraq war; Cold War realists had split over détente with the Soviet Union. The categories describe only broad ideological directions and tendencies. But, as Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, observed, “the battle between realists and idealists is the fundamental fault line of the American foreign-policy debate.” After the Inauguration, the realists began to win that debate within the Administration. The two most influential foreign-policy advisers in the White House are Thomas Donilon, the national-security adviser, and Denis McDonough, a deputy national-security adviser. Donilon, who is fifty-five, is a longtime Washington lawyer, lobbyist, and Democratic Party strategist. McDonough started out as a congressional staffer and campaign adviser to Obama, a role that has given him a reputation as a non- ideological political fixer. The National Security Council is a bureaucracy that helps the President streamline decision-making, and Donilon seems to have thought extensively about how that system works. Like the President, he values staff discretion. His rule for hiring at the N.S.C. is to find people who are, in his words, “high value, low maintenance.” Obama’s N.S.C. adopted the model of the first Bush Administration. “It’s essentially based on the process that was put in place by General Brent Scowcroft and Bob Gates in the late nineteen-eighties,” Donilon told me, speaking of Bush’s national-security adviser and his deputy, the current Secretary of Defense. The most important feature, Donilon said, is that the N.S.C., based at the White House, controls “the sole process through which policy would be developed.”

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One of Donilon’s overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and China’s unchecked influence in the region. America was “overweighted” in the former and “underweighted” in the latter, Donilon told me. “We’ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years,” Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said. “And our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.” In December, 2009, Obama announced that he would draw down U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of his first term. He also promised, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last year, that he was “moving toward a more targeted approach” that “dismantles terrorist networks without deploying large American armies.” “The project of the first two years has been to effectively deal with the legacy issues that we inherited, particularly the Iraq war, the Afghan war, and the war against Al Qaeda, while rebalancing our resources and our posture in the world,” Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s deputy national-security advisers, said. “If you were to boil it all down to a bumper sticker, it’s ‘Wind down these two wars, reëstablish American standing and leadership in the world, and focus on a broader set of priorities, from Asia and the global economy to a nuclear-nonproliferation regime.’ ” Obama’s lengthy bumper-sticker credo did not include a call to promote democracy or protect human rights. Obama aides who focussed on these issues were awarded lesser White House positions. Samantha Power became senior director of multilateral affairs at the N.S.C. Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor who believes that the U.S. should make democracy promotion the heart of its foreign policy, landed a mid-level position at the White House. Most of the foreign-policy issues that Obama emphasized in his first two years involved stepping away from idealism. In the hope of persuading Iran’s regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, Obama pointedly rejected Bush’s “axis of evil” terminology. In a video message to Iranians on March 20, 2009, he respectfully addressed “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” In order to engage China on economic issues, Obama didn’t press very hard on human rights. And, because any effort to push the Israelis and Palestinians toward a final settlement would benefit from help from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, Obama was not especially outspoken about the sins of Middle Eastern autocrats and kings. Despite the realist tilt, Obama has argued from the start that he was anti- ideological, that he defied traditional categories and ideologies. In Oslo, in December of 2009, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama said, “Within America, there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists—a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.” The speech echoed Obama’s 2002 address to an antiwar demonstration in Chicago’s Federal Plaza. In Chicago, he had confounded his leftist audience by emphasizing the need to fight some wars, but not “dumb” ones, like the one in Iraq. In Oslo, he surprised a largely left- leaning audience by talking about the martial imperatives of a Commander-in-Chief overseeing two wars. Obama’s aides often insist that he is an anti-ideological politician interested only in what actually works. He is, one says, a “consequentialist.” 322

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned her department into something of a haven for the ideas that flourished late in the Clinton Administration. She picked Anne-Marie Slaughter as her director of policy planning—a job first held by George Kennan, in the Truman Administration. She also brought in Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser and a scholar on issues concerning human rights and democracy. Walking around the mazelike building in Foggy Bottom, you get the sense that if you duck into any office you will find earnest young women and men discussing globalization, the possibility that Facebook can topple tyrannies, and what is called “soft power,” the ability to bend the world toward your view through attraction, not coercion. Not long ago, I met with Kris Balderston, the State Department’s representative for global partnerships. He started working with Clinton ten years ago, when he guided her through the politics of upstate New York during her Senate race. Now he works on an array of entrepreneurial projects that complement traditional diplomacy. He talked excitedly about working with Vietnamese-Americans to build stronger ties to Vietnam and about distributing vaccines in partnership with Coca-Cola. He pointed to a bookcase stocked with devices that looked like a cross between a lantern and a paint bucket. These were advanced cookstoves. “This is a problem that the Secretary saw when she was First Lady,” Balderston said, explaining how lethal cooking smoke can be. “One half of the world cooks in open fires. Two million people die a year from it—that’s more than malaria and tuberculosis combined, and nearly as much as H.I.V.” On a trip to Congo in 2009, Clinton met a woman in a refugee camp who had been raped in the jungle on the outskirts of the camp while gathering wood for her stove. Telling the story at the State Department, Clinton was angrier than Balderston had ever seen her. “We have got to do something about this,” she said. Balderston spends much of his time trying to build a market for inexpensive, clean-burning cookstoves in the developing world. But Clinton’s involvement in soft-power initiatives was matched by the kind of hardheadedness about foreign policy she had displayed during her Presidential campaign. She has repeatedly aligned herself with the most consistent realist in the Obama Administration: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who was deputy national- security adviser in the first Bush Administration and Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush. Clinton’s advisers told me that, during her first two years in Foggy Bottom, Clinton agreed with Gates on every major issue. “Secretary Clinton can push the agenda she pushes because she is tough and people know she is tough,” Slaughter said. “It’s very interesting—you’ve had three women Secretaries of State, and she’s the first one who can stand up and say publicly, ‘We are going to empower women and girls around the world. We are going to make development a priority of foreign policy. We are going to engage people as well as governments.’ “Madeleine Albright believed in the importance of those issues, but she could never have made it the core of her public agenda. She was the first woman Secretary of State, which meant that she had to out-tough the tough guys. She did that on the Balkans. Condi Rice helped double foreign aid, but she was first and foremost a Cold Warrior, and she could throw around ‘I.C.B.M.’s and ‘S.L.B.M.’s and ‘MIRV’s with the best of them. That was the only way she could make it, not only as a woman in the nineteen- eighties but as an African-American woman. You had to be way tougher and way more

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knowledgeable about weapons than any man.” A former Administration official said, “Hillary has to guard her flank. And one of the ways she guards her flank is she rarely deviates from Gates. If she and Gates both weigh in, they are much more likely to get their way.” Obama’s first test at managing the clashing ideologies within his Administration came during the review of Afghanistan policy in 2009. During the campaign, Obama said that he would add troops in Afghanistan, a war, he argued, that Bush had neglected. But Obama’s campaign promise bumped hard against the judgment of several new advisers, including Richard Holbrooke, who tried to convince the President that sending forty thousand more troops to Afghanistan, as the military urged, was counterproductive. It would prevent Obama from rebalancing American foreign policy toward the Pacific, and it would have little impact on Al Qaeda, which is based largely in Pakistan. Obama had appointed Holbrooke his Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Holbrooke, a brash and influential diplomat, found himself in the unusual circumstance of being ignored. He wanted to send far fewer troops and reënergize regional diplomacy, including reconciliation talks with the Taliban. He believed that the lesson of Vietnam was that the diplomats, rather than the generals, needed to be in charge, but he could rarely penetrate the insular world of Obama’s White House to make that case to the President. Holbrooke had been a devoted supporter of Hillary Clinton during the Presidential campaign, and she protected him from Obama aides who viewed with suspicion his sizable ego and stream of positive press clippings. When a top official at the White House tried to push Holbrooke out, in early 2010, Clinton intervened on his behalf. But Holbrooke still could not get a one-on-one meeting with the President. And at the crucial national-security meetings on Afghanistan Clinton did not adopt Holbrooke’s views. She sided with Gates and the generals in calling for the maximum number of soldiers to surge into Afghanistan. Obama agreed to send thirty thousand more troops, although he insisted that they would start coming home in July, 2011. Holbrooke’s widow, the writer Kati Marton, who has been reviewing her husband’s memos and archives, told me that they “tell a dramatic story of a fractured relationship between the State Department and White House.” On December 11, 2010, while meeting with Clinton at the State Department, Holbrooke suffered a split aorta, and he died forty-eight hours later. Bill Clinton spoke at Holbrooke’s memorial service, held on January 14th at the Kennedy Center. “I loved the guy—because he could do,” Clinton said. “Doing in diplomacy saves lives.” He went on, “And I never did understand how people would let a little rough edges, which to me was so obvious what he was doing, it was so obvious why he felt the way he did—I could never understand people who didn’t appreciate him.” Several people told Marton they thought that Bill Clinton was sending a message to Obama. In the end, Obama made a decision about Afghanistan that was at odds with his own goal of rebalancing toward Asia and the Pacific. “The U.S. has been on a greater Middle East detour largely of its own choosing through a war of choice in Iraq and what became a war of choice in 2009 in Afghanistan,” Haass said. “Afghanistan is entirely inconsistent with the focus of time and resources on Asia. If your goal is to reorient or refocus or rebalance U.S. policy, the Administration’s commitment to so doing is at the moment more rhetorical than actual.”

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Obama came into office emphasizing bureaucratic efficiency, which he believed would lead to wise rulings. But the Afghanistan decision, like all government work, was driven by politics and ideology. Obama’s eagerness to keep his campaign promise, the military’s view that reducing troops meant a loss of face, Clinton’s decision to align with Gates, and Holbrooke’s inability to influence the White House staff all ultimately conspired to push Obama toward the surge. Obama’s other key campaign promise—to engage with the leaders of countries hostile to the U.S.—sometimes meant deëmphasizing democracy and human rights, which had been tainted by Bush’s “freedom agenda” in the Middle East. Tyrannical regimes are less likely to make deals with you if you talk persistently about overthrowing them. Obama’s speech in Cairo, delivered on June 4, 2009, and devoted to improving America’s relationship with the Muslim world, was organized as a list of regional priorities. He discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Arab-Israeli peace, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He then gave a hesitant endorsement of America’s commitment to democracy in the region. He began, “I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” A week later, however, a disputed Presidential election in Iran triggered large demonstrations there, which were soon labelled the Green Revolution. For the first five months after his Inauguration, Obama had tried to engage with the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an effort to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Now he faced the choice between keeping his distance and coming to the aid of the nascent pro-democracy movement, which was rallying behind Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who had finished second behind Ahmadinejad. Obama chose to keep his distance, providing only mild rhetorical support. In an interview with CNBC after the protests began, he said that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.” During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department who worked for Slaughter, contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference. White House officials “were so mad that somebody had actually ‘interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,” the former Administration official said. “Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. To the Secretary’s credit, she realized, I think, before other people, that this is ridiculous, that we had to change our line.” The official said that Cohen “almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.” Clinton did not betray any disagreement with the President over Iran policy, but in an interview with me she cited Cohen’s action with pride. “When it came to the elections, we had a lot of messages from people inside Iran and their supporters outside of Iran saying, ‘For heaven’s sakes, don’t claim this as part of the democracy agenda. This is indigenous to us. We are struggling against this tyrannical regime. If you are too 325

outspoken in our support, we will lose legitimacy!’ Now, that’s a tough balancing act. It’s easy to stand up if you don’t worry about the consequences. Now, we were very clear in saying, ‘We are supporting those who are protesting peacefully,’ and we put our social-media gurus at work in trying to keep connections going, so that we helped to provide that base for communicating that was necessary for the demonstrations.” One suggestion that came up in interviews with Obama’s current and former foreign-policy advisers was that the Administration’s policy debates sometimes broke down along gender lines. The realists who view foreign policy as a great chess game— and who want to focus on China and India—are usually men. The idealists, who talk about democracy and human rights, are often women. (White House officials told me that this critique is outlandish.) Slaughter, who admired Clinton but felt alienated by people at the White House, resigned in February, and in her farewell speech at the State Department she described a gender divide at the heart of Obama’s foreign-policy team. She argued that in the twenty-first century America needed to focus on societies as well as on states. “Unfortunately, the people who focus on those two worlds here in Washington are still often very different groups. The world of states is still the world of high politics, hard power, realpolitik, and, largely, men,” she said. “The world of societies is still too often the world of low politics, soft power, human rights, democracy, and development, and, largely, women. One of the best parts of my two years here has been the opportunity to work with so many amazing and talented women—truly extraordinary people. But Washington still has a ways to go before their voices are fully heard and respected.” On August 12, 2010, Obama sent a five-page memorandum called “Political Reform in the Middle East and North Africa” to Vice-President Joseph Biden, Clinton, Gates, Donilon, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the other senior members of his foreign-policy team. Though the Iranian regime had effectively crushed the Green Revolution, the country was still experiencing sporadic protests. Egypt would face crucial parliamentary elections in November. The memo began with a stark conclusion about trends in the region. “Progress toward political reform and openness in the Middle East and North Africa lags behind other regions and has, in some cases, stalled,” the President wrote. He noted that even the more liberal countries were cracking down on public gatherings, the press, and political opposition groups. But something was stirring. There was “evidence of growing citizen discontent with the region’s regimes,” he wrote. It was likely that “if present trends continue,” allies there would “opt for repression rather than reform to manage domestic dissent.” Obama’s analysis showed a desire to balance interests and ideals. The goals of reform and democracy were couched in the language of U.S. interests rather than the sharp moral language that statesmen often use in public. “Increased repression could threaten the political and economic stability of some of our allies, leave us with fewer capable, credible partners who can support our regional priorities, and further alienate citizens in the region,” Obama wrote. “Moreover, our regional and international credibility will be undermined if we are seen or perceived to be backing repressive regimes and ignoring the rights and aspirations of citizens.” Obama instructed his staff to come up with “tailored,” “country by country” strategies on political reform. He told his advisers to challenge the traditional idea that

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stability in the Middle East always served U.S. interests. Obama wanted to weigh the risks of both “continued support for increasingly unpopular and repressive regimes” and a “strong push by the United States for reform.” He also wrote that “the advent of political succession in a number of countries offers a potential opening for political reform in the region.” If the United States managed the coming transitions “poorly,” it “could have negative implications for U.S. interests, including for our standing among Arab publics.” The review was led by three N.S.C. staffers: Samantha Power, Gayle Smith, who works on development issues, and Dennis Ross, a Middle East expert with a broad portfolio in the White House. Soon, they and officials from other agencies were sitting in the White House, debating the costs and benefits of supporting autocrats. A White House official involved said the group studied “the taboos, all the questions you’re not supposed to ask.” For example, they tested the assumption that the President could not publicly criticize President Hosni Mubarak because it would jeopardize Egypt’s coöperation on issues related to Israel or its assistance in tracking terrorists. Not true, they concluded: the Egyptians pursued peace with Israel and crushed terrorists because it was in their interest to do so, not because the U.S. asked them to. They tested the idea that countries with impoverished populations needed to develop economically before they were prepared for open political systems—a common argument that democracy promoters often run up against. Again, they concluded that the conventional wisdom was wrong. “All roads led to political reform,” the White House official said. The group was just finishing its work, on December 17th, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a vegetable vender in Tunisia, set himself on fire outside a municipal building to protest the corruption of the country’s political system––an act that inspired protests in Tunisia and, eventually, the entire region. Democracy in the Middle East, one of the most fraught issues of the Bush years, was suddenly the signature conflict of Obama’s foreign policy. On January 25th, the first, crucial day of the protests in Egypt, and eleven days after the removal of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in Tunisia, Secretary Clinton declared her support for free assembly, but added, “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” That evening, Obama delivered his State of the Union address, in which he praised the demonstrators in Tunisia, “where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator,” and expressed support for the “democratic aspirations of all people.” But he did not mention Egypt. Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the leaders of the coalition that started the Egyptian revolution, told me that the message the protesters got from the Obama Administration on the first day of the revolution was “Go home. We need this regime.” A number of familiar ex-diplomats and politicians, led by Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, criticized the treatment of Mubarak, and Israel and Saudi Arabia called on the Administration to stick with him. But, as the protests strengthened, it became clear that Mubarak was doomed. According to a senior Administration official, “The question in our mind was ‘How do you manage that?’ ” Obama’s instinct was to try to have it both ways. He wanted to position the United States on the side of the protesters: it’s always a good idea, politically, to support brave 327

young men and women risking their lives for freedom, especially when their opponent is an eighty-two-year-old dictator with Swiss bank accounts. Some of Obama’s White House aides regretted having stood idly by while the Iranian regime brutally suppressed the Green Revolution; Egypt offered a second chance. Nonetheless, Obama wanted to assure other autocratic allies that the U.S. did not hastily abandon its friends, and he feared that the uprising could spin out of control. “Look at all the revolutions in history, especially the ones that are driven from the ground up, and they tend to be very chaotic and hard to find an equilibrium,” one senior official said. The French Revolution, for instance, he said, “ended up in chaos, and they ended up with Bonaparte.” Obama’s ultimate position, it seemed, was to talk like an idealist while acting like a realist. This wasn’t an easy balance to maintain, and the first major problem arose when State Department officials learned that if Mubarak stepped down immediately, the Egyptian constitution would require a Presidential election in sixty days, long before any of the moderate parties could get organized. Egyptian officials warned the Administration that it could lead to the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking over power. “My daughter gets to go out at night,” Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt’s then foreign minister, told Secretary Clinton during one conversation. “And, God damn it, I’m not going to turn this country over to people who will turn back the clock on her rights.” Obama decided not to call for Mubarak to step down. Instead, the U.S. would encourage a transition led by Mubarak’s newly installed Vice-President, Omar Suleiman. The strategy was to avoid the constitutional process that the State Department feared would lead to chaos. The senior official told me in the midst of the crisis, “I don’t think that because a group of young people get on the street that we are obliged to be for them.” On January 29th, the White House made two major decisions: the U.S. would announce that it supported a transition in Egypt, and Obama would send an emissary to Mubarak to explain that, in the judgment of the United States, he could not survive the protests. The emissary would tell Mubarak that his best option was to try to leave a positive legacy by steering the country toward a real democratic transformation. Frank G. Wisner, the former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, who has long known Mubarak well, would deliver the message. The next day, Clinton appeared on five Sunday-morning talk shows to announce that Obama supported an “orderly transition” in Egypt. That afternoon, Wisner boarded a U.S. government plane for Cairo. On January 31st, Wisner met with Mubarak in Cairo. The next day, word leaked out that Mubarak would address the country. That afternoon, Obama’s national-security advisers met in the Situation Room to discuss two issues: whether Obama should call Mubarak and whether Obama should make a public statement. Obama joined the meeting unexpectedly. As the discussion continued, Mubarak’s speech appeared on television, and the President and his aides paused to watch. “I am now careful to conclude my work for Egypt by presenting Egypt to the next government in a constitutional way which will protect Egypt,” Mubarak said. “I want to say, in clear terms, that in the next few months that are remaining of my current reign I will work very hard to carry out all the necessary measures to transfer power.” In Tahrir Square, the protesters erupted in rage at the meandering and confusing speech. Obama now seemed to be uncomfortable taking an attitude of cool detachment from the people in the street. He called Mubarak, and tried to find a graceful way for the Egyptian President to exit that would also take care of the constitutional concerns 328

Egyptian officials kept raising. He asked Mubarak if there was a way to alter the constitution to allow for a stable transition. He asked if there was a way to set up a caretaker government. A White House official summarized Mubarak’s response as: “Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood.” Obama then made a public statement that was more confrontational: “An orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.” The urgent message alienated Israel and Saudi Arabia, among other allies. It also startled some people in the State Department. Clinton “walked a very narrow line and managed to do it without making the Egyptians too angry on either side,” a senior State Department official said. “After the President gave his statement, the people surrounding Mubarak began to get quite angry.” The inherent contradictions of an Administration trying to simultaneously encourage and contain the forces of revolution in Egypt broke into the open on February 5th, when Wisner, who was then in New York, participated via videoconference in an international-affairs conference in Munich. After outlining the constitutional argument for keeping Mubarak in power, he said, “I therefore believe that President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical; it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy. He’s given sixty years of his life to the service of his country.” According to friends, Wisner, who had talked with Obama before he went to Cairo, believed that his statement was consistent with the policy he was told to follow. Clinton was at the conference in Munich, and, shortly after Wisner made his remarks, a senior Administration official gathered the press corps travelling with her in a small dining room at the Charles Hotel to brief us on the Secretary’s meetings. The official hadn’t heard Wisner’s comments, but when a reporter read a long excerpt off his BlackBerry the official blanched, his mouth agape. “Wisner,” the official said, “was not speaking for the U.S. government or the Obama Administration. He was speaking as a private citizen.” The public and private components of the Administration’s Egypt policy were at odds, and Wisner had risked blowing everything up. His tenure as an envoy was over. “They threw me under the bus,” a close friend remembers him saying. Wisner referred dismissively to the “reëlection committee” at the White House, according to the friend. But in this case Obama’s political interests—needing to be seen as on the side of the protesters—aligned with the policy views of the idealists. An Obama adviser declared, “Obama didn’t give the Tahrir Square crowds every last thing they sought from him at the precise moment they sought it. But he went well beyond what many of America’s allies in the region wished to see.” In March, I travelled to Cairo with Secretary Clinton. One evening, she was scheduled to meet with Egyptians who had been prominent in the protests that brought down Mubarak. However, one group, called the Coalition of Youth Revolution, which includes leaders from the activist movements and opposition parties in Egypt, boycotted the meeting. As Clinton talked with other civil-society members upstairs at the Four Seasons Hotel, four members of the abstaining coalition agreed to talk with me and three other journalists in the lobby. I asked why they weren’t upstairs with the Secretary of State. “Hillary was against the revolution from the beginning to the last day, O.K.?” Mohammed Abbas, of the Muslim Brotherhood, said. “Obama supported this revolution. She was against.” 329

Abbas and Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, a member of the liberal Democratic Front Party, said that if Obama was upstairs they would meet with him. Abbas lit up at the idea. “We respect Obama’s attitude toward our revolution, and when we were in Tahrir Square we were following all of the leaders all over the world and what were their views,” Abbas said. “His speeches were more understanding and more appreciative of what we were doing, especially his second one,” el-Ghazaly Harb said, referring to Obama’s demand that the transition “begin now.” He added, “We were in Tahrir Square and people were cheering for Obama’s speech, because they felt he was saying that we”—America— “were inspired by the Egyptian people and we understand what the teen-agers were saying. Maybe he’s using us, but that’s what I see.” Later, when I relayed these comments to Clinton, she told me she didn’t take the snub personally. She said, “Many years ago, I was active against the Vietnam War, and I was involved in all kinds of student politics, and so I understand there’s always a full range of people in movements like this. And I remember refusing to meet with people.” She was unmoved by the fact that these protesters had been integral to starting the revolution. “The people who start revolutions may or may not be the people who actually end up governing countries.” The activists she did meet with were not as organized as she had hoped. “As incredibly emotional and moving and inspiring as it was,” she said, speaking of the demonstrations, “I looked at these twenty young people around the table, and they were complaining about how the elections are going to be held, and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists are so well organized, and the remnants of the old National Democratic Party are so well organized. I said, ‘So, well, are you organizing? Do you have an umbrella group that is going to represent the youth of Egypt? Do you have a political agenda?’ And they all looked up and said no. It made my heart sink.” On March 16th, Clinton flew from Cairo to Tunis to continue her tour of revolutionary North Africa. The route took us over the Mediterranean just off the coast of Libya. The G.P.S. maps in the cabin of Clinton’s Air Force plane lit up with the name “Benghazi,” reminding everyone that, on the ground, Muammar Qaddafi’s men were marching on that city. Earlier in the day, Qaddafi had gone on the radio to warn the citizens of Benghazi. “It’s over. We are coming tonight,” he said. “We will find you in your closets.” Protesters had started to gather in Benghazi on February 15th. Qaddafi’s security forces reacted with violence four days later, firing on a crowd of some twenty thousand demonstrators in Benghazi and killing at least a hundred of them. On February 26th, the United Nations passed a resolution that placed an arms embargo and economic sanctions on the Libyan regime and referred Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court. Two days later, the U.S., through lobbying led by Clinton and Power, helped remove Libya from its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. By tightening an economic noose around Qaddafi and isolating him diplomatically, Obama and the international community were beginning to use the tools that Power had outlined in “A Problem from Hell.” The debate then narrowed to whether the United States and others should intervene militarily. The principal option was to set up a no-fly zone to prevent Libyan planes from attacking the protest movement, which had quickly turned into a full-scale

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rebellion based in the eastern half of the country. The decision about intervention in Libya was an unusually clear choice between interests and values. “Of all the countries in the region there, our real interests in Libya are minimal,” Brent Scowcroft told me. For a President whose long-term goal was to extricate the U.S. from Middle East conflicts, it was an especially vexing debate. Within the Administration, Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, was the most strenuous opponent of establishing a no-fly zone, or any other form of military intervention. Like Scowcroft, Gates objected to intervention because he did not think it was in the United States’ vital interest. He also pointed out a fact that many people didn’t seem to understand: the first step in creating a no-fly zone would be to bomb the Libyan air defenses. Clinton disagreed with him and argued the case for intervention with Obama. It was the first major issue on which she and Gates had different views. The days leading up to Obama’s decision were perplexing to outsiders. American Presidents usually lead the response to world crises, but Obama seemed to stay hidden that week. From the outside, it looked as though the French were dragging him into the conflict. On March 14th, Clinton arrived in Paris, but she had no firm decision to convey. According to a French official, when Clinton met with President Nicolas Sarkozy she declined to endorse the no-fly zone, which Sarkozy interpreted as American reluctance to do anything. “We started to wonder where, exactly, the Administration was going,” the official said. Late that evening, at her suite at the Westin hotel in Paris, Clinton met for forty-five minutes with Mahmoud Jebril, a representative from the Libyan opposition. I waited in the lobby with a number of reporters, hoping to talk to Jebril after the meeting. But all we got was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, who had taken up the cause of the Libyan opposition and was shepherding Jebril to his meetings with diplomats. We later learned that Jebril was dejected by Clinton’s unwillingness to commit to the no-fly zone and, not wanting to face the press, left the hotel by another exit. The next evening, Obama held a meeting in the Situation Room. By then, it had become clear that the rebels, who had once seemed on the verge of sweeping Qaddafi out of power, were weak, and poorly armed; they had lost almost all the gains of the previous days. In New York, the Lebanese, the French, and the United Kingdom had prepared a U.N. resolution to implement a no-fly zone, and the world was waiting to see if Obama would join the effort. The White House meeting opened with an assessment of the situation on the ground in Libya. Qaddafi’s forces were on the outskirts of Ajdabiyah, which supplies water and fuel to Benghazi. “The President was told Qaddafi is going to retake Ajdabiyah in twenty-four hours,” a White House official who was in the meeting said. “And then the last stop on the train is Benghazi. If he got there, he would complete the military offensive, and that could be the place where he goes house to house and where a massacre could occur.” Obama asked if a no-fly zone would prevent that grim scenario. His intelligence and military advisers said no. Qaddafi was using tanks, not war planes, to crush the rebellion. Obama asked his aides to come up with some more robust military options, and left for dinner. At a second meeting that night, he was presented with the option of pushing for a broader resolution that would allow for the U.S. to protect the Libyan rebels by bombing government forces. He instructed Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., to pursue that option.

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On March 17th, I interviewed Clinton in Tunis. She was sitting under a canopy by the hotel pool, eating breakfast. Although she had been noncommittal with the diplomats in France two days earlier, she now made it clear that the Obama Administration had made a decision. It was well known that she favored intervention, but she was frank about the difficulty in making such decisions. “I get up every morning and I look around the world,” she said. “People are being killed in Côte d’Ivoire, they’re being killed in the Eastern Congo, they’re being oppressed and abused all over the world by dictators and really unsavory characters. So we could be intervening all over the place. But that is not a—what is the standard? Is the standard, you know, a leader who won’t leave office in Ivory Coast and is killing his own people? Gee, that sounds familiar. So part of it is having to make tough choices and wanting to help the international community accept responsibility.” Clinton insisted that the U.S. had to have regional support before it took action, and emphasized that it was crucial that U.N. action had been supported by the Arab League. “So now we’re going to see whether the Security Council will support the Arab League. Not support the United States—support the Arab League. That is a significant difference. And for those who want to see the United States always acting unilaterally, it’s not satisfying. But, for the world we’re trying to build, where we have a lot of responsible actors who are willing to step up and lead, it is exactly what we should be doing.” The French and the British were shocked by the quick turn of events. Instead of the President announcing the Administration’s position from the East Room of the White House, the U.N. envoy quietly proposed transforming a tepid resolution for a no-fly zone into a permission for full-scale military intervention in Libya. Some officials thought it was a trick. Was it possible that the Americans were trying to make the military options appear so bleak that China and Russia would be sure to block action? Gradually, it became clear that the U.S. was serious. Clinton spoke with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, who had previously told her that Russia would “never never” support even a no-fly zone. The Russians agreed to abstain. Without the cover of the Russians, the Chinese almost never veto Security Council resolutions. The vote, on March 17th, was 10–0, with five abstentions. It was the first time in its sixty-six years that the United Nations authorized military action to preëmpt an “imminent massacre.” Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, wrote, “It was, by any objective standard, the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history.” As the bombs dropped on Libyan tanks, President Obama made a point of continuing his long-scheduled trip to South America. He wanted to show that America has interests in the rest of the world, even as it was drawn into yet another crisis in the Middle East. This spring, Obama officials often expressed impatience with questions about theory or about the elusive quest for an Obama doctrine. One senior Administration official reminded me what the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said when asked what was likely to set the course of his government: “Events, dear boy, events.” Obama has emphasized bureaucratic efficiency over ideology, and approached foreign policy as if it were case law, deciding his response to every threat or crisis on its

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own merits. “When you start applying blanket policies on the complexities of the current world situation, you’re going to get yourself into trouble,” he said in a recent interview with NBC News. Obama’s reluctance to articulate a grand synthesis has alienated both realists and idealists. “On issues like whether to intervene in Libya there’s really not a compromise and consensus,” Slaughter said. “You can’t be a little bit realist and a little bit democratic when deciding whether or not to stop a massacre.” Brzezinski, too, has become disillusioned with the President. “I greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: ‘You must do this,’ ‘He must do that,’ ‘This is unacceptable.’ ” Brzezinski added, “He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes.” The one consistent thread running through most of Obama’s decisions has been that America must act humbly in the world. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Obama came of age politically during the post-Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment. Obama believes that highly visible American leadership can taint a foreign-policy goal just as easily as it can bolster it. In 2007, Obama said, “America must show—through deeds as well as words—that we stand with those who seek a better life. That child looking up at the helicopter must see America and feel hope.” In 2009 and early 2010, Obama was sometimes criticized for not acting at all. He was cautious during Iran’s Green Revolution and deferential to his generals during the review of Afghanistan strategy. But his response to the Arab Spring has been bolder. He broke with Mubarak at a point when some of the older establishment advised against it. In Libya, he overruled Gates and his military advisers and pushed our allies to adopt a broad and risky intervention. It is too early to know the consequences of these decisions. Libya appears to be entering a protracted civil war; American policy toward Mubarak frightened—and irritated—Saudi Arabia, where instability could send oil prices soaring. The U.S. keeps getting stuck in the Middle East. Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.” ♦ Ryan Lizza How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy MAY 2, 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/9 05/02/110502fa_fact_lizza?printable=true Ryan Lizza is The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent. He covers the 2012 Presidential campaign and national politics. Lizza joined The New Yorker after working at The New Republic, where he was a political correspondent from 1998 to 2007, covering the White House and Presidential politics. He was formerly a correspondent for GQ and a contributing editor for New York. He has also written for the New York Times, Washington Monthly, and the Atlantic Monthly. Lizza lives in Washington, D.C

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9 BOOKS THE INNER VOICE Gandhi’s real legacy. by Pankaj Mishra MAY 2, 2011

Gandhi’s legend too often obscures the audacious radicalism of his ideas.

Keywords Mohandas9 Gandhi; “Great9 Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with

India” (Knopf; $28.95); Joseph9 Lelyveld; “The9 Cambridge Companion to Gandhi”

(Cambridge; $90); Judith9 M. Brown; Anthony9 Parel; Biographies9 Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure? The possibility is usually overshadowed by his immense and immensely elastic appeal. Even Glenn Beck recently claimed to be a follower, and Gandhi’s example has inspired many globally revered figures, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi. Gandhi, rather than Mark Zuckerberg, may have been the presiding deity of the Arab Spring, his techniques of resistance—nonviolent mass demonstrations orchestrated in the full glare of the world’s media—fully absorbed by the demonstrators who prayed unflinchingly on Kasr al-Nil, in Cairo, as they were assaulted by Hosni Mubarak’s water cannons. And yet the Indian leader failed to achieve his most important aims, and was widely disliked and resented during his lifetime. Gandhi was a “man of many causes,” Joseph Lelyveld writes in “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India” (Knopf; $28.95). He wanted freedom not only from imperial rule but also from modern industrial society, whose ways Western imperialists had spread to the remotest corners of the globe. But he was “ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world.” How can one square such quasi-Shakespearean tragedy with Gandhi’s enduring influence over a wide range of political and social movements? Why does his example continue to accumulate moral power? There are some bracing answers in “The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi,” edited by Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel, a 334

new collection of scholarly articles, examining particular aspects of Gandhi’s life, ideas, and legacy (Cambridge; $90). Still, Lelyveld relates the more compelling story of how a supremely well-intentioned man struggled, through five decades of activism, with a series of evasions, compromises, setbacks, and defeats.

9 Lemming: conejo de Noruega As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa’s small Indian minority against racial discrimination. But the hierarchies of South Africa did not start to be dismantled until nearly a century later. After his return to India, in 1915, Gandhi sought to fight the social evil of untouchability in India, but Lelyveld shows that his attempts were of mostly symbolic import and were rebuffed even by the low-caste Hindus who were the presumed beneficiaries. Gandhi’s advocacy of small-scale village industry and environmentally sustainable life styles was disregarded by his own disciple and political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, who, as Prime Minister, made India conform to a conventional pattern of nation- building: rapid industrialization and urbanization, the prelude to India’s ongoing, wholly un-Gandhian, and unsustainable attempt to transform 1.2 billion people into Western-style consumers. Lelyveld also shatters the attractive myth, burnished by Richard Attenborough’s bio-pic, of the brave little man in a loincloth bringing down a mighty empire. As early as the mid-nineteen-thirties, Gandhi had largely retired from politics, formally resigning from the Congress Party to devote himself to the social and spiritual renewal of India’s villages. And by the time independence came, the British, exhausted by the Second World War, were desperate to get rid of their Indian possessions. Their hasty retreat led to one of the twentieth century’s greatest fiascoes: the partition of British India, in August, 1947, into Hindu- and Muslim-majority states. The accompanying fratricide—it involved the murder and uprooting of millions of Hindus and Muslims—condemned India and Pakistan to several destructive wars and a debilitating arms race. It was the cruellest blow to Gandhi. Liberation from colonial rule meant little to him if the liberated peoples did not embody a higher morality of justice and compassion. Appropriately, Gandhi’s last major act was a hunger strike protesting the Indian government’s attempt to deny Pakistan its due share of resources. By then, as Lelyveld writes, he was longing for death. Having refused all police protection, he was shot dead in January, 1948, by a Hindu patriot who feared that Gandhi’s faith in such irrational things as individual conscience would prevent independent India from pursuing its national interest with full military vigor. 335

Gandhi’s ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. Born in 1869 in a backwater Indian town, he came of age on a continent pathetically subject to the West, intellectually as well as materially. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats were free to transport millions of Asian laborers to far-off colonies (Indians to South Africa, Chinese to the Caribbean), to exact raw materials and commodities from Asian economies, and to flood local markets with their manufactured products. Europeans, convinced of their moral superiority, also sought to impose profound social and cultural reforms upon Asia. Even a liberal figure like John Stuart Mill assumed that Indians had to first grow up under British tutelage before they could absorb the good things—democracy, economic freedom, science—that the West had to offer. The result was widespread displacement: many Asians in their immemorial villages and market towns were forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family, and tradition amid rumors of powerful white men fervently reshaping the world, by means of compact and cohesive nation-states, the profit motive, and superior weaponry. Dignity, even survival, for many uprooted Asians seemed to lie in careful imitation of their Western conquerors. Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English. He studied law in London and, on his return to India, in 1891, tried to set up first as a lawyer, then as a schoolteacher. But a series of racial humiliations during the following decade awakened him to his real position in the world. Moving to South Africa in 1893 to work for an Indian trading firm, he was exposed to the dramatic transformation wrought by the tools of Western modernity: printing presses, steamships, railways, and machine guns. In Africa and Asia, a large part of the world’s population was being incorporated into, and made subject to the demands of, the international capitalist economy. Gandhi keenly registered the moral and psychological effects of this worldwide destruction of old ways and life styles and the ascendancy of Western cultural, political, and economic norms. He was not alone. By the early twentieth century, modern Chinese and Muslim intellectuals were also turning away from Europe’s universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, which they saw as a moral cover for unjust racial hierarchies, to seek strength and dignity in a revamped Confucianism and Islam. (These disenchanted Confucianists and Islamic modernists were later pushed aside by hard-line Communists and fundamentalists, respectively.) The terms of Gandhi’s critique, however, were remarkably original. He set out his views in “Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule,” a book written feverishly, in nine days, in November, 1909. Gandhi opposed those of his revolutionary Indian peers who—inspired by Marx, Herbert Spencer, Russian nihilists, and nationalists in Italy and Ireland—saw salvation in large-scale emulation of the West. Many of these were Hindu nationalists, intellectual ancestors of Gandhi’s assassin, determined to unite India around a monolithic Hinduism. Gandhi saw that these nationalists would merely replace one set of deluded rulers in India with another: “English rule,” as he termed it, “without the Englishman.” Gandhi’s indictment of modern civilization went further. According to him, the industrial revolution, by turning human labor into a source of power, profit, and capital, had made economic prosperity the central goal of politics, enthroning machinery over men and relegating religion and ethics to irrelevance. As Gandhi saw it, Western political philosophy obediently validated the world of industrial capitalism. If liberalism vindicated the preoccupation with economic growth at home, liberal imperialism abroad made British rule over India appear beneficial for Indians—a view many Indians 336

themselves subscribed to. Europeans who saw civilization as their unique possession denigrated the traditional virtues of Indians—simplicity, patience, frugality, otherworldliness—as backwardness. Gandhi never ceased trying to overturn these prejudices of Western modernity. He dressed as an Indian peasant and rejected all outward signs of being a modern intellectual or politician. True civilization, he insisted, was about moral self-knowledge and spiritual strength rather than bodily well-being, material comforts, or great art and architecture. He upheld the self-sufficient rural community over the heavily armed and centralized nation-state, cottage industries over big factories, and manual labor over machines. He also encouraged satyagrahis to feel empathy for their political opponents and to abjure violence against the British. For, whatever their claims to civilization, the British, too, were victims of the immemorial forces of human greed and violence that had received an unprecedented moral sanction in the political, scientific, and economic systems of the modern world. Satyagraha might awaken in them an awareness of the profound evil of industrial civilization. Hostile interpretations of Gandhi’s acts stalked him throughout his life. Muslims accused him of being the harbinger of Hindu “Raj”; Hindu nationalists accused him of being insufficiently dedicated to their cause. Left-wing Indians suspected that he was cunningly preëmpting class conflict on behalf of India’s big businessmen. Most of Gandhi’s European interlocutors regarded him with fear and distaste; Winston Churchill wanted Gandhi to be “bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” A confidential government report on Gandhi’s years in South Africa declared that “the workings of his conscience . . . his ethical and intellectual attitude . . . baffles the ordinary processes of thought.” The British press as well as the government routinely took this disdainful view of India’s leading anti-colonial campaigner. Gandhi was not only the most prolific of modern thinkers—his “Collected Works” will run to a hundred volumes—but also the most globalized and ecumenical, and, a century later, it’s still not easy to place him. His closest friends in South Africa were Jewish intellectuals from England and Germany. After trying vainly to turn himself into an English gentleman, he was initiated into Hindu philosophy by a Russian Theosophist. And he borrowed as much from the New Testament, Ruskin, Thoreau, G. K. Chesterton, and Tolstoy (the polemical Christian rather than the novelist) as from the Bhagavad Gita, whose affirmation of righteous war he reinterpreted as a parable of nonviolence. Though known as a devout Hindu, Gandhi rarely visited temples, and was generally repelled by the rituals and customs of organized religion. He disclaimed all responsibility for what his followers and detractors called “Gandhism,” declaring that any ideological “ ‘ism’ deserves to be destroyed.” Though he drew upon the language of modern anti-imperialism, he professed no faith in constitutional democracy, Communism, industrialization, or other forms of self-strengthening embraced by Indian and Asian anti-imperialists. He preferred, as his exasperated and articulate assassin put it, such “old superstitious beliefs” as the “power of the soul, the inner voice, the fast, the prayer and the purity of the mind.” Gandhi’s nonconformist ways tend to appall and alienate secular-minded observers. George Orwell confessed to an “aesthetic distaste” for his “anti-human and reactionary” aims. “Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of 337

all things,” Orwell warned, correctly. In a recent review of Lelyveld’s book, which describes Gandhi’s intense friendship with a German Jewish man in South Africa, the right-wing British historian Andrew Roberts accused him of being a “sexual weirdo.” (Amplified by the British tabloid press, Roberts’s review provoked a ban on the book in the Indian state of Gujarat last month.) Roberts is not entirely wrong to allege that Gandhi was “a political incompetent, and a fanatical faddist.” Advising European Jews to practice nonviolent resistance against Hitler, he was guilty of a grotesque misunderstanding of the Third Reich. Many of his acts were deeply selfish: he did not consult his wife before imposing his vow of celibacy on her. Yet the British historian Judith Brown exaggerates only slightly when she claims, in her introduction to “The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi,” that “anyone who considers many of the fundamental issues of human life, its goals, its capacities, and the nature of men and women in public communities, issues of violence and cooperation, and of ends and means, will find that Gandhi has been there before, and struggled with them.” Lelyveld, minutely tracking Gandhi’s main journeys and detours through India and South Africa, rarely zooms out to a broader picture, one that would allow us to locate Gandhi in our own world. Gandhi’s name, after all, is frequently and wistfully invoked in many conflict zones today; sometimes, the widely felt yearning for a Palestinian or Israeli Gandhi seems proof of the moral superiority of his nonviolent politics. He diagnosed many maladies of our interdependent world in ways that seem prescient. His ecological world view—summed up by his homily “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed”—and forays into organic farming no longer seem as eccentric as they did when hardly anyone had a private car and only a fraction of the world’s population regularly ate meat. Petra Kelly, a co-founder and the first leader of Germany’s increasingly powerful Green Party, credited Gandhi for the now commonplace belief that having an ecologically oriented society “reduces the risk that policies of violence will be pursued in our name.” Gandhi’s greatest contribution to the arsenal of political activism, however, is his theory and practice of bringing together great masses of highly motivated and disciplined protesters in public spaces. Here his spiritual beliefs were crucial: the assumption, in particular, that, regardless of the regime people lived under—democracy or dictatorship, capitalist or socialist—they always possessed a freedom of conscience, an inner capacity to make moral choices in everyday life. As his mass campaigns often proved, and the recent Arab uprisings have affirmed, such strongly self-aware individuals acting coöperatively in the spotlight of the world media could come to wield an astonishing amount of moral authority—the “authentic, enduring power” of people that, as Hannah Arendt wrote in her analysis of the Prague Spring of 1968, a repressive regime or government could neither create nor suppress through the use of terror, and before which it must eventually surrender. Gandhi did not see his own political activism as a means to a predetermined end, and exhorted his old Congress Party to dissolve itself after India’s independence instead of becoming the new ruling class. Gandhi felt politics to be too important to be left to professional politicians, or to the technocrats and journalists who shape government policy and influence public opinion. Indeed, as the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami points out in a stimulating essay in “The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi,” he recoiled from such instrumentalist categories of statecraft and politicking as “populations” and

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“citizenry.” For him, working and bonding with other flesh-and-blood men and women was the most satisfying way of being in the world. As such, political and social activism was an end in itself. Bilgrami describes Gandhi as a greater “anti-imperialist theorist” than Lenin and Frantz Fanon. This seems right. Unlike them, Gandhi didn’t just single out Western imperialists, or blame capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for new markets and resources for European expansionism in Asia and Africa. In his view, organized exploitation of people and resources was a feature of all industrial civilization; and he did not spare its eager imitators in Asia, such as Japan, and their obsession with achieving national strength at the expense of the weak. He could never have advocated or endorsed something like the Great Leap Forward—Mao’s attempt to catch up with the industrialized West, which consumed between thirty and forty-five million lives. India, he was convinced, would be “a curse for other nations, a menace to the world,” once it became industrialized. Bilgrami shows how finely Gandhi integrated his religious beliefs and his political ones. According to him, Gandhi intuited that the triumph of a scientific world view over a religious one had “desacralized nature and made it prey without impunity to the most ruthlessly systematic extractive political economies—of mining, deforestation, plantation agriculture (what we now call agribusiness), and so on.” Defining humanity in terms of “gains and utilities,” the modern outlook “could not see the world itself as containing anything that made moral or normative demands on one,” and led East and West alike into a “cognitive enslavement.” For Gandhi, genuine anti-imperialism lay in devising a mode of politics and economy that did not lead millions of Indians into the iron cage of a “decadent and utilitarian modernity.” The audacious radicalism of Gandhi’s ideas is too often lost in the blandly universal reverence his name evokes. It’s true that a lot of his arguments can seem like the ravings of a Luddite: his accusation, for instance, that modern lawyers and doctors make people more irresponsible and greedy. But they are not without a kernel of truth: a century later, we are more receptive to his idea that the profit motive makes lawyers divide rather than reconcile people, or that the lucrative business of modern medicine often treats symptoms while ignoring the real causes of disease. Dwight Macdonald claimed to love Gandhi precisely because he lacked respect for “railroads, assembly-belt production and other knick-knacks of liberalistic Progress” and did not make speeches about democracy and Fascism. “He was the last political leader in the world who was a person, not a mask,” Macdonald wrote in a tribute after Gandhi’s assassination, “the last leader on a human scale.” But Gandhi’s refusal to endorse one or another of the many secular and rational ideologies of collective redemption (liberal capitalism, socialism, nationalism) also makes it difficult for us to enter his unique world view. As a figure, the spiritually minded, sagelike thinker long ago faded from the mainstream of modern societies, together with religious faith, which used to prescribe ethical responsibilities and duties. Such traditional forms of authority have been displaced by ideologies, laws, and institutions, and the secular world views of science and commerce. It has been left to relatively marginal religious writers and philosophers such as Simone Weil, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Czeslaw Milosz to reckon with the difficulty of being moral men and women in complex, immoral societies. Gandhi, trying to devise a way of living ethically in the midst of the most violent century in history, 339

now seems the most distinguished figure in this countercultural tradition; and if some part of his message rings true it is because we share his anxieties about the public life of our societies, which seems possessed of an irrational momentum all its own. States grow ever more machine-like, men are transformed into statistical choruses of voters, producers, patients, tourists or soldiers. In politics, good and evil, categories of the natural world and therefore obsolete remnants of the past, lose all absolute meaning; the sole method of politics is quantifiable success. Power is a priori innocent because it does not grow from a world in which words like guilt and innocence retain their meaning. This could be Gandhi; it is actually Václav Havel, in his early essay “Politics and Conscience,” describing the political consequences of the desacralized world—the loss of the human scale in Western democracies as well as in Communist dictatorships. Reflecting on the ideological standoffs of the Cold War, Havel was convinced that “a genuine, profound and lasting change for the better . . . can no longer result from the victory of any particular traditional conception.” Instead, it would have to “derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationships to themselves and each other, and to the universe.” This sounds like a very tall order. But it was what Gandhi set his sights on, pitting himself against every political and social trend of the past two hundred years. Defeat was ordained. Yet there were many moments of redemptive glory in his great struggle. Emerging in the early nineteen-thirties from one of Gandhi’s most brilliantly choreographed campaigns, Jawaharlal Nehru confessed, “What the future will bring I know not, but . . . our prosaic existence has developed something of epic greatness in it.” Many more people since then have known this exhilaration of effecting change through individual acts of courage and empathy. It is what young Egyptians and Tunisians feel today, and their Yemeni counterparts may experience tomorrow: the ever renewable power of coöperative action, which is a truer measure of Gandhi’s legacy than his many failures. ♦ “The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi,” (2011) edited by Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel“ (Cambridge U. P. mayo). http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledg9 e/isbn/item5738849/?site_locale=en_GB Joseph Lelyveld 2011 “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India” (Knopf; $28.95), Marzo Pankaj Mishra THE INNER VOICE Gandhi’s real legacy. MAY 2, 2011 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics9 /books/2011/05/02/110502crbo_books_mishra?p rintable=true

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9 El desaire de Saleh hace temer un baño de sangre en Yemen Los impulsores de la revuelta contra el presidente amenazan con reanudar las marchas si fracasa el acuerdo ÁNGELES ESPINOSA | Saná (Enviada especial) 01/05/2011

Los ciudadanos de Yemen aún trataban el domingo de salvar el9 plan para que Ali

Abdalá Saleh deje el poder. El9 desaire del presidente al negarse a firmarlo el día anterior hizo temer que se desatara un nuevo baño de sangre. Las calles de Saná amanecieron tomadas por las fuerzas de seguridad, en especial en los aledaños al palacio presidencial. Los jóvenes impulsores de la revuelta vivieron el desplante de Saleh como un triunfo y planeaban intensificar sus protestas. "El Consejo expresa su esperanza de eliminar los obstáculos que todavía bloquean el acuerdo final, y su secretario general volverá a Saná con ese propósito", afirmó un comunicado de los ministros de Exteriores del Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo (CCG) tras reunirse en Riad. Más tarde el organismo (que agrupa a Arabia Saudí, Kuwait, Catar, Bahréin, Emiratos Árabes Unidos y Omán) aclaró que la visita será hoy mismo. El sábado, el secretario del CCG se fue de la capital yemení con las manos vacías. "El gran peligro ahora es que vaya a por los manifestantes", interpretaba un observador occidental, temeroso de "una jugada a la bahreiní". El rey de Bahréin aplastó sin contemplaciones la revuelta de su país en marzo. Pero a diferencia de ese país, en Yemen, los manifestantes cuentan con el apoyo de una parte del Ejército y la población está armada. Aunque desde el principio los activistas han insistido en el carácter pacífico de su protesta, reconocen que las cosas podrían cambiar en caso de agresión. "Vamos a mantener nuestra contestación pacífica, pero si llega el momento en que la revolución encuentra una respuesta agresiva tendremos que tomar nuevas decisiones", reconoció a este diario Tawakul Kerman. Esta dirigente juvenil no ocultaba su satisfacción por la forma en que había actuado Saleh. "Estamos muy contentos porque vamos a seguir con nuestra revolución. La comunidad internacional no nos creyó cuando dijimos que el presidente no iba a dejar el poder", explica.

Fuentes diplomáticas occidentales conceden que el presidente está9 buscando pretextos para esquivar el acuerdo. Sin embargo, se agarran a la esperanza de que las presiones de los vecinos de Yemen, en especial de Arabia Saudí, logren un pacto de mínimos que evite que los partidos de oposición se alineen con el movimiento juvenil y que el enfrentamiento político degenere en una guerra civil. Ese riesgo se ve exacerbado por la existencia de una insurrección en el norte, un movimiento separatista en el sur y la infiltración de Al Qaeda en las regiones del este. De ahí que EE UU, que el año pasado duplicó su ayuda militar a Yemen hasta 150 millones de dólares para mantener la presión sobre ese grupo terrorista, haya trabajado entre bambalinas en una estrategia para la transferencia ordenada del poder.

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La conocida como iniciativa del Golfo establecía que Saleh cediera el poder en el plazo de un mes a cambio de inmunidad para él y sus allegados. Dos meses más tarde se convocarían elecciones. El presidente y sus adversarios políticos, entre los que hay tanto islamistas como izquierdistas, dieron el visto bueno al plan hace diez días. No obstante, el sábado, Saleh se negó a firmar. Lo que los mediadores internacionales presentan como la primera solución pacífica a una revuelta árabe, para él constituye un golpe que le convertiría en el tercer líder árabe derrocado por un movimiento popular. De ahí que primero rechazara rubricar el documento en calidad de presidente o que el mismo domingo, cuando los miembros del CCG aceptaron que lo hiciera como secretario general del partido gobernante, añadiera la condición de que cesen las protestas. Ese es un objetivo que nadie en la oposición puede garantizar. Aunque las manifestaciones crecieron notablemente cuando sus seguidores se unieron, el corazón de la revuelta es un movimiento juvenil que, a pesar de su falta de cohesión, cada vez está más estructurado. Además, el respaldo de los insurrectos del norte y de los separatistas del sur le da mayor proyección. "Es una batalla de voluntades", admitía Tawakul, la activista. "Nada va a parar la voluntad de la gente en su lucha pacífica contra el viejo sistema. Nadie quiere una revolución a medias, por eso no hemos respaldado la iniciativa del Golfo. El presidente es ya un cadáver político y ese plan equivale a una maniobra para resucitarle".

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/desaire/Sal9 eh/hace/temer/bano/sangre/Ye men/elpepuint/20110501elpepuint_9/Tes

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9 El presidente de Yemen se niega a ceder el poder Saleh se resiste a firmar el acuerdo de renuncia pactado con la oposición ÁNGELES ESPINOSA | Saná (Enviada especial) 01/05/2011

El presidente de Yemen, Ali9 Abdalá Saleh, se negó ayer en el último momento a firmar el acuerdo9 para entregar el poder que habían apadrinado el Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo (CCG), Estados Unidos y la UE. Saleh sorprendió al secretario general del CCG, Al Zayani, con la noticia. Intensas gestiones diplomáticas no lograron convencerle de que cambiara de opinión. Al Zayani abandonó Saná dejando en el aire el futuro inmediato de Yemen. Saleh, que solo aceptó la iniciativa del Golfo ante la presión de EE UU y la UE, no ha dejado de buscar excusas para descolgarse del plan ultimado hace una semana. Según el borrador, el presidente yemení se comprometía a dimitir en el plazo de un mes a cambio de inmunidad para él y los suyos, y dos meses después se celebrarían elecciones. Pero ayer se reunió con varios centenares de altos cargos del Gobierno, del Parlamento y el partido gobernante, que le convencieron de que no debía ceder. Así se lo dijo a Al Zayani cuando le recibió por la tarde. En medios diplomáticos cundió el pánico. Existe la convicción de que si Saleh, que lleva 32 años al frente de Yemen, no acepta transferir el poder, el país se encamina hacia una guerra civil. Desde hace tres meses un 9movimiento popular contesta su legitimidad en la calle y la mayoría de la élite dirigente ha llegado a la conclusión de que la única salida pacífica a la crisis es que el presidente abandone el cargo. Pero ni los esfuerzos del secretario general del CCG, que volvió a reunirse con Saleh a última hora, ni los de los diplomáticos de EE UU y de la UE, sirvieron para convencer al presidente yemení. Al Zayani se marchó anoche de Saná sin su firma, lo que vacía de contenido la ceremonia prevista hoy en Riad. Incluso si un representante de Saleh firmara el acuerdo con la oposición, el documento no tendría el mismo valor simbólico ni legal. "El presidente tiene que firmar. Es lo que da contenido y credibilidad al acuerdo. No es el partido el que va a decirle que deje el poder, es un compromiso que él ha adquirido personalmente", declaró a este diario una fuente diplomática europea. Algunos observadores opinan que se9 ha perdido mucho tiempo esperando una semana para ratificarlo. Mientras tanto, en Adén, la capital del sur, dos policías resultaron muertos y otros dos heridos cuando hombres armados atacaron una comisaría en el barrio de Mansura. Poco después, las fuerzas de seguridad desalojaban la acampada anti-Saleh instalada desde hace semanas en ese mismo barrio y donde los agentes sospechaban que se habían escondido sus atacantes. Entre dos y cuatro manifestantes, según las fuentes, resultaron muertos y medio centenar más heridos. Residentes en la zona contaron que carros de combate y vehículos blindados vigilaban las calles.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internaciona9 l/presidente/Yemen/niega/ceder/poder/elpep uint/20110501elpepuint_1/Tes

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9 REPORTAJE: LAS REVOLUCIONES ÁRABES La plaza de la Liberación Todo parecía atado y bien atado hasta que llegaron las revoluciones árabes. El ciberespacio fue un instrumento decisivo, pero ¿cómo pasar del mundo virtual al real? • Junto a la recuperación de libertades abolidas, del Golfo al Atlántico ha explotado el humor sobre los viejos líderes • Las inmensas fotos de los sátrapas en Túnez o en la gran plaza cairota parecen indemnes al paso de los años • Un chico humilde señala el billete que sobresale de mi bolsillo. No quiere que alguien lo robe y me lleve mala impresión • Me muestran el lugar en que se diseñó la revuelta, con ordenadores en comunicación constante con las redes sociales • Los ataques de los salafistas a templos y ermitas sufíes constituyen un serio motivo de inquietud • Ni Egipto, ni ningún país árabe podrá avanzar hacia la democracia sin igualdad plena de los dos sexos JUAN GOYTISOLO 01/05/2011 Como escribe con gracia un escritor y bloguero saudí, el vendaval de libertad que con mayor o menor fuerza sacude los países árabes, derriba uno tras otro a sus dictadores y arruina sus esperanzas de perpetuarse en el poder en forma de dinastías republicanas ha desconcertado a los Gobiernos de la Unión Europea hasta tal extremo que, según él, suplican a aquellos que sus revueltas guarden su turno y se sucedan con orden en vez del presente barullo que les trae de cabeza y no les da tiempo de reflexionar.

Manifestantes anti Mubarak en la plaza de Tahrir Manifestantes anti Mubarak durante una de las jornadas de protesta en la (El Cairo) durante el rezo, el viernes 11 de plaza Tahrir de El Cairo.- EMILIO MORENATTI / AP febrero de 2011.- TARA TODRAS / WHITEHILL / AP

Pues, junto a la libertad de opinión y la recuperación de las palabras abolidas, la revolución provocada por el hartazgo de los pueblos de tanto desprecio, corrupción y endiosamiento de sus líderes ha originado asimismo gracias a Internet, Facebook, Twitter y Al Yazira una explosión de humor que se extiende del Golfo al Atlántico. 344

Como los blogueros magrebíes, los egipcios difunden montajes de los ídolos caídos o que llevan camino de serlo en una serie de cuadros escénicos de alegre causticidad: el anciano monarca de Arabia Saudí con cuatro bebés cabezotas, Ben Alí sentado en sus rodillas, Mubarak arrimado a su vera, un Gadafi revoltoso jugando con un plumero, un Buteflika envejecido y enfermo; los gerontócratas de Túnez, Egipto y Libia pidiendo limosna; Gadafi dando el pecho a un grotesco Saif el Islam o vestido de bailarina para presentar su álbum de bunga bunga. Los filmes montados por Al Yazira sobre el ascenso, esplendor y caída de los dictadores sorprenden al espectador no tanto por el envanecimiento sin límites de los personajes y clanes que los protagonizan como por su magnificencia caricaturesca: trajes oscuros de recargada elegancia, vistosas corbatas de seda, bandas de un rojo chillón cruzadas sobre el pecho, peluquín engominado, sonrisa perenne, un rostro petrificado al hilo del tiempo. Las promesas iniciales de apertura democrática, elecciones limpias y libertad de prensa se truecan pronto en culto al jefe, corrupción omnívora en provecho del clan, Estado policiaco diseñado para acallar cualquier expresión de disentimiento. Las inmensas fotos de los sátrapas en la avenida Burguiba de Túnez o en la gran plaza cairota parecen indemnes al paso de los años: son las de un bufonesco Dorian Gray. La obsequiosidad y sonrisa beatífica de quienes les rodean se reflejan asimismo en las ovaciones y salvas de aplausos captadas en los telediarios. Quienes en estrecha y reñida competencia palmotean con fuerza y convicción parecen hacerlo para las cámaras de vigilancia que registran la intensidad y duración de su estrepitoso fervor, con el secreto temor a que quienes manifiesten menos entusiasmo sean delatados por ellas y se conviertan en sospechosos de tibieza, cuando no de desafección. Los servidores del régimen aguardan con ansia el instante en que el jefe consagrará al joven Gamal o a la expeluquera Trabelsi herederos de la nueva dinastía de impecables credenciales democráticas... Todo parece atado y bien atado, pero las malditas revueltas populares del 17 de diciembre y del 25 de enero desvanecen cruelmente el sueño de una gloria perpetua. ¡Los aplaudiómetros no han servido de nada! * * * Recuerdo la reflexión del novelista Alaa al Aswany publicada en estas páginas en plena revuelta egipcia: "Un régimen tiránico puede privar al pueblo de libertad y, a cambio de ello, ofrecerle una vida aceptable. Un régimen democrático puede ser incapaz de acabar con la pobreza, pero la gente disfruta de libertad y dignidad. El régimen egipcio ha quitado todo a sus ciudadanos, incluidas la libertad y dignidad, y no ha cubierto sus necesidades básicas". Dichas palabras explican la tensión extrema que se había fraguado en el interior de los manifestantes congregados en la plaza de la Liberación (Tahrir) hasta su estallido del pasado 25 de enero durante los 18 días que precedieron a la caída de Mubarak, y cuya capacidad de presión sobre el Consejo Supremo de las Fuerzas Armadas que asume hoy el poder de hecho no ha disminuido un ápice. La huida apresurada del dictador el 11 de febrero dejaba también incólume la estructura jerárquica del Partido Nacional Democrático en el que se apoyaba y sus temibles servicios secretos. El Gobierno provisional de Ahmed Shafik, cuya desdeñosa entrevista televisiva con el autor de El edificio Yacobian le desacreditó definitivamente como posible piloto de la 345

transición democrática que exigían los manifestantes de la plaza, cayó al día siguiente en el muladar de la historia. El nuevo primer ministro Essam Sharaf acudió entonces al encuentro de la multitud de ciudadanos reunidos en el epicentro del seísmo revolucionario para afirmar que su verdadera legitimidad procedía de ellos y que no traicionaría sus demandas de libertad, democracia y justicia social. Algo nunca visto desde las grandes revueltas cairotas de 1919, 1952 y 1977: los manifestantes que se congregaban en la plaza de la Liberación procedían lo mismo de los barrios pobres de la capital -Imbada, Shobra, Bulak, apiñados en viviendas míseras, a menudo sin alcantarillado, agua ni electricidad- que de las zonas acomodadas de Zamalek, Dokki o Heliópolis, cuya juventud de diplomados en paro tampoco soportaba el régimen que se eternizaba en el poder y que gracias a Internet, Facebook, Twitter y los teléfonos móviles informaban al mundo de cuanto ocurría y galvanizaban el descontento del conjunto de la sociedad. Durante los 18 días que precedieron al derrocamiento de Mubarak, mientras escuchaba a través de Al Yazira las declaraciones de los jóvenes de la Coalición del 25 de Enero o del Movimiento Todos Somos Jalid Sayid -el muchacho de Alejandría que grabó el vídeo del soborno a unos policías, lo colgó en la Red y a causa de ello fue salvajemente torturado y asesinado, aunque, con el cinismo común a todas las dictaduras, un comunicado oficial atribuyó su muerte a una alta dosis de droga-, imaginaba la asfixia a la que habían vivido sometidos y sus ansias de libertad: "Vivíamos con la efigie del tirano de la mañana a la noche -siempre impecable, siempre sonriente- en los inmensos retratos plantados en avenidas y calles principales, en ministerios y oficinas públicas, en restaurantes, peluquerías y bazares, incluso en quioscos y tenduchos de mala muerte. Se perpetuaba, no envejecía. Lo encontrabas sin falta en los periódicos, televisiones y semanarios. Pensábamos que nos sobreviviría". "Al final se colaba en los sueños, permanecía grabado en la retina, como cuando cierras los ojos ante una luz demasiado intensa. Aún ahora nos cuesta desprendernos de él. Nacimos después de que accediera al poder. Nos preguntábamos si algún día nos dejaría definitivamente en paz". * * * Mi utopía de hace más de treinta años plasmó durante 18 días en la visión de la otra gran plaza que contemplaba en Marraquech en la pantalla del televisor: "Ágora, representación teatral, punto de convergencia: espacio abierto y plural, vasto ejido de ideas... Contacto inmediato entre desconocidos, olvido de las coacciones sociales, identificación en la plegaria y la risa, suspensión temporal de jerarquías, gozosa igualdad de los cuerpos". Licenciados en paro, profesionales, obreros, comerciantes, familias en pleno, jóvenes, viejos, mujeres veladas o con el cabello suelto, funcionarios, profesores, analfabetos, musulmanes, cristianos, ateos, interponían sus cuerpos como escudos contra balazos o botes de humo, afrontaban las incursiones de jinetes y camelleros, el ruido amenazante de los helicópteros no les amedrentaba, sabían que el futuro les pertenecía, que aquello era la oportunidad de su vida y debían resistir, que todo se jugaba allí y no había término medio, o bien el faraón, o bien ellos. » En la plaza

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En las jornadas que precedieron a mi llegada a El Cairo el domingo 10 de abril, los cambios en la estructura del poder se sucedieron a un ritmo constante: detención del odiado exministro del Interior Habib el Adly el 17 de febrero; del magnate del acero Ahmed Ezz, encarnación con Gamal Mubarak de la cleptocracia y del fraude electoral; caída del primer ministro Ahmed Shafik el 3 de marzo; destitución y procesamiento de varios exmiembros del Gobierno y de la cúpula del partido presidencial, cuyo edificio chamuscado en la cornisa del Nilo, a poca distancia del Museo Egipcio, es hoy el símbolo vivo de la revolución. La limpieza de corruptos se extendió a los dirigentes de los medios informativos públicos y de la prensa oficial que intentaron ocultar en vano las imágenes de la revuelta filmadas en directo y de atribuir la agitación a provocadores pagados por Irán y Hezbolá; al barón del Partido Nacional Democrático que organizó la correría de jinetes y camelleros desde el puente del Nilo hasta la playa captada por todas las televisiones del mundo; a los sindicatos, bancos y ministerios cuyos directores y responsables fueron barridos por su propio personal. La tentativa de quemar los archivos comprometedores en diversas comisarías de policía provocó el asalto a las mismas y se saldó con la muerte de varios manifestantes. Conscientes de que solo la presión de la calle puede impulsar el cambio, los movimientos y agrupaciones surgidos a partir del 25 de enero reclaman la liberación de todos los presos políticos y de quienes fueron detenidos durante la revuelta, en especial la de Michaël Nabil, el internauta que había divulgado en su web los nombres de los responsables de los abusos cometidos por los militares en El Cairo, Suez y Alejandría. El referendo constitucional del 19 de marzo, apoyado por los Hermanos Musulmanes con el claro propósito de lavar su imagen extremista, pero criticado no solo por los movimientos de los jóvenes, sino también por los candidatos presidenciales Mohamed el Baradei, premio Nobel de la Paz, y por Ayman Nur, firme opositor laico a la dictadura de Mubarak y encarcelado por ello, fue aprobado por el 77% de los electores, aunque únicamente votó el 44% del censo. Considerado por muchos como un paso en la buena dirección, no satisfizo en absoluto las aspiraciones de la clase política ni de los millones de manifestantes de Al Tahrir. Sin dejar de expresar su solidaridad con los militares y reclutas de la policía presentes en el lugar, reclamaban a gritos el arresto, enjuiciamiento y congelación de las cuentas de Mubarak y su familia, así como los de los componentes del llamado Eje del Mal: Zakaría Azmi, exjefe de su Estado Mayor; Fathi Sorour, el portavoz parlamentario del partido presidencial, y del secretario general del mismo, Safwat el Sherif. Las declaraciones de Hosni Mubarak transmitidas el jueves 7 de abril por el canal Al Arabiya desde su jaula dorada de Sharm el Sheik, en las que denegaba todas las acusaciones de corrupción y malversación de fondos y amenazaba querellarse con los "calumniadores", prendieron fuego a la mecha de la indignación popular. El día 8, bautizado como el Viernes de la Purificación, la plaza explotó. Como en las jornadas gloriosas de la revolución, la multitud que la abarrotaba exigió la detención de Mubarak y su clan familiar. A pesar del toque de queda impuesto por la cúpula militar de dos a cinco de la madrugada, varios millares de acampados en la plaza permanecieron en ella. El Ejército cargó contra quienes desafiaban la prohibición de permanecer en Tahrir con disparos al aire, hubo 70 heridos y el balazo de un francotirador apostado en una azotea acabó con la vida de un manifestante. El primer ministro Essam Charaf ordenó una investigación de lo acaecido -muchos testigos afirman que el objetivo del desalojo era detener a los oficiales que se habían unido a la multitud-, pero la coalición de los

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jóvenes decidió mantener la protesta y convocó otra gran manifestación para el viernes 15 de abril. * * * El lunes 11, la plaza sigue ocupada por centenares de jóvenes y sus accesos permanecen cortados por alambres de espino. Al asomarme a ella reconozco inmediatamente cuanto vi en la televisión catarí: el monigote ahorcado con la figura de Mubarak, los restos calcinados del autobús al que los manifestantes volcaron y prendieron fuego. Numerosos vendedores ambulantes ofrecen una vastísima gama de productos: refrescos, habas guisadas, bocadillos, pegatinas, medallas conmemorativas del 25 de enero y de la bandera de los rebeldes libios, camisetas estampadas con las fotos de los mártires y caricaturas de los dictadores árabes. El espacio comprendido entre el chaflán de Talaat el Harb y la calle del Nilo, enfocado siempre durante la revuelta por los canales informativos de todas las televisiones del mundo, acoge a grupos de jóvenes que discuten apasionadamente. Reconozco el Kentucky Fried Chicken, ahora cubierto de proclamas revolucionarias; el viejo café Wadi al Nil, con sus impasibles fumadores de narguile; la ajada oficina de Iberia. Compro algunos recuerdos, y al meter el cambio en el bolsillo superior de la chaqueta no advierto que un billete de diez libras sobresale de él. Un muchacho de aspecto humilde me lo señala con el dedo. Creo que me pide dinero, pero mi acompañante aclara el equívoco: el joven dice que lo oculte, no sea que alguien lo robe y me lleve una mala impresión de la conquistada libertad de la plaza. "Aquí somos todos honrados y dignos", agrega. En el arranque de Talaat el Harb más de un centenar de personas discuten a viva voz: los comerciantes del lugar exigen a los manifestantes que acaben de una vez con la acampada, los clientes habituales y los turistas han desertado de la zona, y no ganan para comer. Sigo por la que fue la calle más elegante de El Cairo en la época del protectorado británico y el reinado de Faruk: allí están el café Groppi, mi vieja querencia del Riche, el edificio Yakubián, el robusto quiosquero de la esquina de Hoda Sharawi a pocos metros del restorán Felfela. Cuando vuelvo sobre mis pasos, hay una pelea: alguien acusa a un joven de ser un chivato de la policía política. El martes 12, un puñado de manifestantes protestan por la decisión de la cúpula militar de abrir la plaza al tráfico. Horas después los reclutas de la policía y los guardias con boinas rojas quitan las alambradas de espino y canalizan el río de automóviles por el espacio caótico de Tahrir. Corre la noticia de que el primer ministro va a anunciar decisiones importantes. Los coordinadores de la Coalición del 25 de Enero han decidido, no obstante, mantener la convocatoria del viernes 15 hasta que el Gobierno provisional y el Ejército satisfagan sus demandas. El día siguiente, centenares de reclutas y de jóvenes manifestantes barren las aceras y pintan sus bordillos de negro y blanco. El civismo de la población cairota en situaciones de emergencia sorprende a los más escépticos. Estaba en la capital el día del apagón que sumió en la oscuridad a todo Egipto y caminé desde la avenida Adly Pashá -me hallaba en la entonces minúscula sede del Cervantes, situada frente a la sinagoga- hasta mi hotel en Zamalek sin más luz que la de los faros de los automóviles y, contrariamente a lo que acaeció en Nueva York en 1977, no hubo agresiones, pillajes ni incendios. Un sentimiento colectivo de dignidad prevaleció sobre la tentación de aprovechar la circunstancia fortuita, sin ninguna causa social ni política, para apropiarse de cuanto veda a los desfavorecidos la inicua estructura social del país.

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* * * La misma noche, el embajador de España, Fidel Sendagorta, me ha organizado un encuentro con los jóvenes de la Coalición del 25 de Enero en la sede de la Academia Democrática Egipcia en Dokki. Un comunicado del Gobierno provisional acaba de anunciar la detención del dictador y de sus dos hijos. "Explosión de júbilo por la prisión preventiva de Mubarak", titulará El Ahram. En mi opinión -compartida por los chabab (jóvenes)-, se trata de un paso decisivo en el proceso de transición bajo la custodia del Ejército. Ya no hay posible vuelta atrás, ni mubaraquismo sin Mubarak. Pese a sus reservas respecto de los militares, los organizadores de la coalición tienen bien claro que solo la convivencia con estos puede llevar la revolución a buen puerto. Me acomodo en una mesa rectangular con seis jóvenes y dos muchachas entre veinte y treinta años. Tras un intercambio de saludos, Husam Eldin al Esraa, Abdel Fataf Rashed y Ahmed Ghoniem responden a mis preguntas. Acaban de desconvocar la gran manifestación del viernes 15 dado que el Gobierno ha satisfecho su principal demanda: el arresto de Mubarak y sus hijos por orden de la Fiscalía, acusados de corrupción y abuso de poder. Entre las candidaturas presidenciales aireadas por la prensa de Amr Musa, secretario general de la Liga Árabe, El Baradei y Ayman Nur, rechazan la del primero, "pues fue un hombre de Mubarak", y no piensan oponerse, mas tampoco apoyar a sus competidores. A mi pregunta sobre sus prioridades en el proceso de transición en curso señalan: la liberación de todos los presos políticos, bloqueo de las cuentas del dictador y su entorno, disolución del mal llamado Partido Nacional Democrático en el poder, acabar con la pirámide de corrupción creada por Sadat y Mubarak, educar a la población mediante el diálogo con el Ejército para que vuelva pacíficamente a los cuarteles después de las elecciones. Bajo Mubarak, me dicen, las universidades eran una fábrica de diplomados en paro, no un centro de formación cultural y científica. (Según las encuestas del Instituto Internacional de la Paz neoyorquino -IPI en siglas inglesas-, la mayoría de los votantes en las elecciones presidenciales lo harían por Amr Musa, muy por encima de sus rivales. Respecto a las intenciones de voto en las legislativas, el partido liberal Wafd -la Delegación, llamada así por la que fue enviada a Londres en 1919 después de la violenta revuelta independentista contra Inglaterra reprimida a sangre y fuego por los ocupantes-, alcanzaría sorprendentemente el primer puesto, seguido por el de los Hermanos Musulmanes, los naseristas y el comunista Tagamú. Existen aún otra cuarentena de partidos, pero, como dice con humor un amigo, "algunos de ellos caben en un taxi"). Concluida la charla, los jóvenes me muestran las oficinas del dúplex en las que se diseñó la estrategia de la revuelta: docenas de ordenadores en comunicación constante con las redes sociales de Twitter y Facebook, los micrófonos a través de los cuales se transmitían las consignas del día y se fijaban los puntos de concentración en todos los barrios y arrabales de El Cairo... "¿Cuándo alquilaron el local?", les pregunto. "Dos meses antes del 25 de enero", responden. "Sentíamos que la situación había llegado al borde del estallido y la revuelta tunecina nos convenció de que teníamos razón". Curiosamente, la historia se repite. Tres días después fui al café restaurante Riche, en donde solía cenar un cuarto de siglo atrás. Recuerdo todavía a sus camareros de película, entre los que un saidi (del Alto Egipto) entrado en años alejaba suavemente con un varal a los gatos que se apiñaban junto a las mesas de un extremo a otro del 349

local, pero sin expulsarlos jamás, pues su ganapán iba ligado al merodeo de aquellos entre las piernas de los clientes. Ahora el restaurante ha cerrado, pero el café acoge a una de esas tertulias político-literarias a las que los cairotas son tan aficionados. Por indicación del director del Instituto Cervantes, bajo al elegante bar del sótano en donde se exhibe la vieja imprenta con la que difundieron sus manifiestos el grupo de Oficiales Libres artífices del golpe de Estado del 23 de julio de 1952 que derrocó al rey Faruk. La bella pared de madera del bar gira sobre sus goznes y oculta un habitáculo que sirvió de escondrijo a los conspiradores. Ese día 17, ya en el aeropuerto, me entero de que el Tribunal Supremo ha ordenado la disolución del partido oficial de Mubarak y la confiscación de sus bienes. » Los retos de la democracia egipcia Imponer una dictadura resulta a menudo fácil: basta encabezar un golpe militar, decir "quien manda aquí soy yo" y formular vagas promesas de cambio. La democracia, al revés, requiere aventurarse por un camino muy largo en el que se acumulan toda clase de obstáculos. La historia de España desde las Cortes de Cádiz hasta la Constitución de 1978 es un buen ejemplo de ello, y la de Egipto de la época de Mehmet Alí a la caída del último rais no lo es menos. Hace solo unas décadas, los pesimistas comparábamos nuestra historia con el Bolero de Ravel, y algunos egipcios escépticos asumen también dicha comparación. Todo les evoca un déjà vu: toque de queda, gases lacrimógenos, fuego real. Cuando el ya tambaleante Mubarak, en su segundo discurso del pasado mes de febrero, apelaba al sentimentalismo patriótico egipcio al recordar su hoja de servicios al país y su deseo de morir y ser enterrado en su sagrado suelo, tenía en la mente sin duda el que pronunció Gamal Abdel Nasser tras su humillante derrota en la Guerra de los Seis Días. El héroe de la lucha antiimperialista, con su orgullo herido, anunciaba su dimisión al pueblo, y este, conmovido por el gesto, le reiteró la confianza entre vítores, sollozos y lágrimas. Pero la variación sinfónica de la música no surtió efecto. Mubarak no tenía el carisma de Nasser, había perdido el contacto con la realidad y era detestado por el pueblo. * * * En el diálogo público que mantuve con el novelista Alaa al Aswany cité las palabras que pone en boca de uno de sus personajes, símbolo de la corrupción sin límites que caracteriza la era de Mubarak: "Hay pueblos que se alzan y rebelan, pero el egipcio baja siempre la cabeza para comer su pedazo de pan. De todos los pueblos del mundo, el egipcio es el más fácil de gobernar". ¿Qué pasó para que levantara la cabeza y gritara "lárgate" al déspota el día 25 de enero?, pregunté. Vivía humillado, sin futuro alguno, y Mubarak y los suyos no le daban siquiera este trozo de pan, repuso el autor de El edificio Yakubian. El ciberespacio, pensé tras mi entrevista con los jóvenes de la Coalición del 25 de Enero, fue un instrumento decisivo en la caída del déspota, mas ¿cómo pasar del mundo virtual al real? La tarea a la que se enfrenta la nueva clase política egipcia, dispersa en multitud de partidos desconocidos aún por la mayor parte de la población, es titánica, y muchos nubarrones se acumulan ya en el horizonte. Inquietudes y preguntas: ¿cabe fiarse del Ejército al que pertenecieron Sadat y Mubarak? Si la actual situación se descontrola y se le escapa de las manos, ¿recurrirá al consabido estado de emergencia "para restablecer el orden"? ¿Cuál va a ser el papel de los Hermanos Musulmanes 350

durante los próximos meses y después de las elecciones de septiembre? ¿Cómo sacar a flote la economía egipcia, duramente castigada por los acontecimientos, y ofrecer los servicios sociales y educativos que reclama el pueblo? ¿De qué modo se podrá devolver la confianza a este en un sistema en el que la promoción social y económica no se basa en la formación profesional y el conocimiento, sino en el enchufismo y las buenas conexiones con los mandamases de una Administración que no ha cambiado desde su cáustico retrato por Naguib Mahfuz y otros novelistas de la pasada centuria? Es más fácil proclamar la democracia que deshacerse del lastre de la antaño todopoderosa policía política y del fanatismo oscurantista de los grupos radicales. La disolución de los servicios secretos dirigidos por Omar Suleimán ha dejado en la calle a millares de agentes que, sumados a los baltaguiyín o matones, intentan sembrar el caos y avientan el fuego de una guerra civil. El incendio intencionado de la iglesia copta situada al pie del barranco del Muqattam, junto a mi querida Ciudad de los Muertos, quería provocar el enfrentamiento entre musulmanes y cristianos, y lleva el sello inconfundible de la antigua policía política y de los delincuentes soltados por ella durante el fragor de la revuelta. La respuesta del Ejército, cuyos reclutas reedificaron el templo en un mes, es una muestra alentadora, no obstante, del espíritu cívico del que se enorgullece la juventud egipcia sedienta de unos valores democráticos de validez universal. * * * La agrupación de los Hermanos Musulmanes -creada en los años veinte del pasado siglo y cuyo fundador, Hassan el Banna, fue ejecutado en 1948 por orden del rey Faruk- sufrió, pese al cambio de régimen, el acoso implacable de Nasser y de su sucesor Sadat. Unos oficiales del Ejército seguidores de su rama más radical asesinaron al último durante un desfile militar el 6 de octubre de 1981 -atentado del que su heredero, Hosni Mubarak, escapó milagrosamente: ¡las malas lenguas sostienen que estaba al corriente de la tentativa de magnicidio y abandonó la tribuna de honor momentos antes de los disparos!-, y la hermandad permaneció desde entonces al margen de la ley, aunque mantuvo una fuerte presencia en la sociedad, especialmente entre los más indigentes, merced a sus vastas redes caritativas. Si bien apostó por participar en el trucado juego electoral de Mubarak con presuntos candidatos independientes, se mantuvo en un limbo legal, estrechamente vigilado por los esbirros del régimen. En el curso de la revuelta del 25 de enero, sus simpatizantes participaron masivamente en la acampada de la plaza e hicieron suyas las consignas de libertad, dignidad y democracia de los jóvenes. Nadie gritó como en Argelia a comienzos de los noventa "la solución es el islam". El fracaso rotundo de la línea extremista en los demás países árabes y el desvarío yihadista del que se alimenta Al Qaeda les impuso un cambio de rumbo con un programa más moderado y pragmático. Sus actuales dirigentes no concurren a las elecciones presidenciales de septiembre ni postulan la creación de un Estado islámico regido por la sharia. Su nueva referencia es el partido de Erdogan en Turquía. No obstante eso, los partidos laicos mantienen sus reservas respecto de sus objetivos a largo plazo y sospechan de la existencia de una agencia oculta. Si los Hermanos Musulmanes inquietan a un buen sector de la sociedad egipcia, el rigorismo de los salafistas suscita un franco rechazo. En el sugerente libro titulado El Cairo, la ciudad victoriosa -una radiografía panorámica de esta en la línea de las obras maestras de Richard Burton y de Edgard William Lane-, su autor, Max Rodenbeck, 351

menciona la fetua de un imán que exigía la demolición de la Torre de El Cairo, cuya forma fálica podría excitar a las mujeres, y en mis paseos por Midan el Tahrir, la hija del gran hispanista Mahmud Makki evocó la reciente intervención televisiva de otro jurisconsulto con la brillante propuesta de cubrir la cabeza de las estatuas en bronce de los padres de la independencia egipcia con fundas de plástico que disimularan sus rasgos conforme a los preceptos de la ley islámica. Pero si estas extravagancias incitan a la risa, los recientes ataques de los salafistas a templos y ermitas sufíes, cuyo ceremonial juzgan herético e impío, pese a que los seguidores de esta rama pacífica y abierta del islam suman más de veinte millones en Egipto, constituyen un serio motivo de inquietud. La discordia interreligiosa y un posible enfrentamiento sectario serían el caldo de cultivo propicio a la contrarrevolución, y ello explica la mediación apresurada de los propios Hermanos Musulmanes en un conflicto que amenaza la libertad política tan duramente conquistada. * * * Mientras hago las maletas, me pregunto cuál será el papel de la mujer en el nuevo escenario político creado por la revolución. Ninguna de ellas encabeza la candidatura de los partidos más conocidos, y las valientes feministas egipcias, en la vanguardia del mundo árabe, no ocupan aún el lugar que les corresponde pese a que sus hermanas aventajan en cantidad y calidad a los varones en numerosas profesiones y estudios universitarios. El viernes 15 de abril me había reunido con el doctor Mohamed Abuelata en el Centro Nacional de Traducción que él dirige, y me llevé la grata sorpresa de descubrir que quienes vierten al árabe diez obras mías no son traductores, sino traductoras, cuyo extraordinario nivel cultural e idiomático me maravilló. Durante la cena hablamos de los clásicos españoles y árabes, de Sahrazad y de su fecunda inventiva. Al despedirme de ellas, pensé en Rimbaud y su visión profética del final de la servidumbre femenina. Ni Egipto ni ningún país árabe podrán avanzar por el camino de la democracia sin la plena igualdad legal de los dos sexos, cuando las mujeres asuman su propio destino y tomen libremente la palabra. JUAN GOYTISOLO La plaza de la Liberación01/05/2011 http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reporta9 jes/plaza/Liberacion/elpepusocdmg/20110501elp dmgrep_12/Tes

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9 A test for the Muslim Brotherhood

Amr9 el-Shobaki Sun, 01/05/2011 - 13:33 Since the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining valuable political experience by participating is student and trade union union activism, as well as parliamentary elections. This level of engagement political affairs was unknown to the Brotherhood prior to the July 1952 revolution, when the group had virtually no parliamentary or trade union representation. At the time, the Brotherhood organized social and religious activities and maintained a strong presence in student circles, but had no political representation. Over the last 30 years, the Brotherhood has faced the challenge of maintaining an institutional framework, established by its founder Hassan Al-Banna in 1928, that combines political activism and religious outreach. As a result, the Brothers have viewed political activism as central to their work. The Brotherhood’s recent decision to form a political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, is a step toward separating its political and religious activities; it marks the beginning of the movement’s “second founding.” There are some indications that the Freedom and Justice Party will operate simply as a political arm of the movement, remaining under the Brotherhood’s organizational jurisdiction. Despite these discouraging signs, the establishment of a political party will eventually lead to a historic transformation in the movement’s membership. For the first time in Brotherhood history, new members will join on the basis of political convictions, not as a result of religious outreach. Ordinary Egyptians will thus be able to influence the party’s future and shape its relationship with the Brotherhood movement. As it moves forward, the Freedom and Justice Party will face two major challenges. First, the party must maintain the broader movement’s values without adopting its organizational program. It must strive to uphold Islamic principles without simply becoming the Brotherhood’s political arm. Many political parties in the United States and other democratic countries have been influenced by strong religious, social and political movements. But wherever political parties have emerged as mere extensions of religious movements (i.e. in Sudan and Afghanistan) they have been unsuccessful. By contrast, the Turkish and Malaysian experiences suggest that Islamist parties who maintain some autonomy from the movements from which they emerged are more likely to achieve political success.

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Second, the Freedom and Justice Party faces the challenge of establishing a civilian and democratic party with a religious frame of reference. The party will be subject to all civilian and democratic rules governing the political process, after decades of political failure for which both successive Egyptian regimes and Islamist movements are to blame. The Muslim Brotherhood has a unique opportunity that has not been afforded to other ideological currents, such as the leftists and nationalists. The unprecedented democratic wave in the Arab world offers a historic opportunity for the peaceful integration of Islamist currents, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, within a democratic framework. The only condition for integration is that Islamist movements respect the democratic rules of the game and the tenets of a civil state, as well as recognize the priorities of the Egyptian people —namely, securing bread, dignity, freedom, and national independence. Any party with a religious frame of reference can successfully contribute to Egypt’s renaissance if it respects democratic and civil principles. Such parties must also recognize that their religious character does not grant them privileged status over other parties. Such status can only be afforded on the basis of a party's political program. Much like other political forces, the Brotherhood is at a crossroads. The movement can either contribute to Egypt’s renaissance or become entangled in an ideological battle that takes it back to the pre-revolutionary era. The Brotherhood must recognize that it can only gain the trust of the Egyptian people by offering tangible solutions to the myriad political and economic problems facing post-Mubarak Egypt. Translated and abridged from the Arabic Edition.

Amr9 el-Shobaki A test for the Muslim Brotherhood 01/05/2011 - 13:33 http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/4193939

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9 REPORTAJE: LAS REVOLUCIONES ÁRABES Israel y la primavera árabe El Estado judío, la única democracia de Oriente Próximo, no puede dudar a la hora de dar la bienvenida a los países vecinos que intentan abrazar los valores que él mismo ha ejemplificado La excesiva cautela y la pusilanimidad colocarían a los herederos del sueño sionista en una posición insostenible ¿Puede haber una solución peor para Israel que este Gadafi que ha financiado el terrorismo y ha hecho volar sinagogas?

BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY 01/05/2011 He oído decir aquí y allá que a Israel le "preocupa" el viento de democracia que sopla en el mundo árabe. Comprendo esa preocupación. Sé que, al menos en dos ocasiones -Argelia, 1991, y Gaza, 2006-, unas elecciones libres engendraron la peor pesadilla posible. Y soy demasiado consciente del hecho de que, en este terreno, Israel no puede permitirse el más mínimo error, ni menos tomarse a la ligera el riesgo de ver cómo las revoluciones egipcia, libia y, tal vez mañana, siria dan lugar a un mundo aún más peligroso. La preocupación, no obstante, es algo que exige lucidez, desconfianza respecto a las ilusiones líricas y vigilancia. Pero la excesiva cautela, la pusilanimidad y la reprobación muda colocarían a los herederos del sueño sionista en una posición insostenible e indigna de su historia.

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Cuesta imaginar, en efecto, que un país que se enorgullece desde hace tanto tiempo, y con razón, de ser la única democracia de Oriente Próximo dude en dar la bienvenida a sus vecinos cuando estos intentan abrazar, a costa de heroicos combates, los valores que él mismo ha ejemplificado. No puedo imaginar que Israel, solo entre las grandes democracias, se encierre en no sé qué reserva y alimente la sospecha (pues Dios sabe que los rumores, las teorías complotistas y, por tanto, la sospecha, circulan deprisa en esta parte del mundo) de haber apostado al caballo equivocado por miedo a un futuro incierto y -error imperdonable en el despiadado mundo de la realpolitik- haber tomado partido por los vencidos. Y ¿qué imagen daría entonces de sí mismo un pueblo que, otra vez con razón, no cesa de repetir: "Nuestro problema no son los pueblos árabes (con los que, a poco que ellos también lo deseen, estamos dispuestos a vivir en paz y en armonía), sino los neonazis (Hamás, Hezbolá, etcétera)" y, sin embargo, en el momento en que una juventud se alza, inmadura sin duda, pero, según parece, dispuesta a escoger la libertad contra todas las dictaduras (incluida la de los Hermanos Musulmanes y otros fascislamistas), dudase en tenderle la mano y en concederle al menos una oportunidad? Pero hay algo más. Sea cual sea el mérito de Hosni Mubarak, que supo mantener el tratado de paz firmado por Anuar el Sadat, su predecesor, existe una ley simple pero constante: qué frágil es un contrato que solo depende de la voluntad de un hombre -un dictador, por añadidura- que no solo es mortal sino, como sabemos ahora, vulnerable; qué sólido será ese mismo contrato si, como parece el caso en El Cairo, es validado, ratificado y legitimado por las élites, el ejército y, tal vez mañana, una clase media a la que ya no le será presentado como una obligación, un mal trago, un castigo. Sea cual sea el orden que suceda al desorden y la arbitrariedad que hasta ahora imperan en Libia, sea cual sea el nivel de persistencia de un antisemitismo cuyos eslóganes fueron machaconamente repetidos por un régimen que, durante largas y calamitosas décadas, tampoco se privó de difundir su literatura (Los protocolos de los sabios de Sión, éxito de ventas en todas las librerías...), me parece que tenemos la memoria extraordinariamente corta, pues, a fin de cuentas, ¿puede haber una solución peor para Israel que este Gadafi, que ha financiado el terrorismo, ha hecho volar sinagogas, ha concedido asilo político o distinciones a los negacionistas más infectos y, recientemente, y pese a que algunos creían que se había moderado, ha multiplicado las provocaciones y las amenazas? (Dos ejemplos entre mil: el episodio del nuevo barco a Gaza enviado el 10 de julio para "vengar" a la "flotilla humanitaria" turca y, un mes después, durante la inauguración de la cumbre de la Unión Africana en Trípoli, el discurso en el que el Guía tronaba que los israelíes forman un "gang", son responsables de "todos los males de África" y hay que cerrar sus embajadas urgentemente y a la fuerza.) Y más teniendo en cuenta que estas revoluciones árabes ya han producido otro efecto al menos tan importante como la eventual manipulación del movimiento por un Irán a cuyos tejemanejes, dicho sea de paso -una guerra geopolítica es una guerra geopolítica-, nada nos impide oponernos sin tardanza: esos hombres subyugados y sometidos, desde hace 42 años a un mortífero bombardeo desinformativo, esos pueblos a los que convencieron de que todas las desgracias del mundo venían de un Israel metódicamente

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satanizado, descubren ahora que tenían otro adversario infinitamente más temible y era su propio Estado y su brutalidad mercenaria. De repente, eso lo cambia todo. Este regreso a un mundo real en el que un líder árabe promete ahogar a sus "hermanos" en "ríos de sangre" es un acontecimiento trágico, pero considerable. Y sin aventurar lo que pueda traer el futuro, sin excluir que otros demagogos vuelvan a invocar cualquier día al hombre del saco, tiendo a pensar que hemos cruzado un umbral y que, en adelante, será más difícil, en este aspecto y en otros, embaucar a un pueblo que ha descubierto la verdad en el combate. Si he tomado partido por la Libia libre, ha sido antes que nada por amor al derecho y odio a la tiranía. Pero también porque, como dije en el mismo Bengasi ante unos auditorios a los que nunca les oculté mi pertenencia a una de las tribus más antiguas del mundo, creo que esta revolución sirve a la causa de la paz.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reportajes/9 Israel/primavera/arabe/elpepusocdmg/201105 01elpdmgrep_13/Tes

9 REPORTAJE: LA ULTRADERECHA EN EUROPA Nuevos populismos para la Vieja Europa La ultraderecha ha renovado sus formas. Y ahora cosecha grandes triunfos electorales con un discurso euroescéptico y xenófobo • Marine Le Pen y Geert Wilders azuzan el temor a la llamada Eurabia, al desembarco de musulmanes • Hay analistas que llaman a los extremistas 'partidos protesta' porque su misión es cosechar el desencanto ANA CARBAJOSA 01/05/2011 Cuando un partido populista, eurófobo y antimigrantes triunfó en las elecciones generales de Finlandia hace un par de semanas, muchos se preguntaron qué había pasado en uno de los países símbolo de la tolerancia y del Estado de bienestar. Cuando miraron alrededor, se dieron cuenta de que los finlandeses no estaban solos. Vieron que en el mapa de Europa proliferaban partidos que en el pasado hubieran sido apestados políticos por su extremismo, pero que hoy cautivan a buena parte del electorado. En varios países europeos se han convertido en la tercera fuerza más votada. En otros, como en Francia, las encuestas les auguran un futuro muy prometedor. Finlandia, Holanda, Noruega, Suecia, Italia, Francia... La lista de países que registran un auge de los partidos populistas y de extrema derecha es larga. Y más alargada es aún la sombra que proyectan esas formaciones sobre los partidos tradicionales, que crecientemente adoptan algunas de las tesis extremistas a la caza de los votos que sienten les roban los populistas, advierten los expertos. El populismo y la derecha extremista presentan formas muy distintas a lo largo del continente. Hay, sin embargo, denominadores comunes, entre los que destacan el 357

euroescepticismo y la xenofobia, que tiende a cebarse con los inmigrantes musulmanes. Es común también la presencia en sus filas de un nuevo tipo de líderes, que poco tienen que ver con sus predecesores. Los nuevos políticos populistas son más jóvenes -la mayoría rondan los cuarenta-, más modernos y mejor parecidos. Son carismáticos y tienden a ser grandes oradores a los que se atribuye en buena medida el tirón de sus partidos. Consiguen además desmarcarse del turbio pasado de sus formaciones cuidando su lenguaje, con el que son capaces de transmitir ideas xenófobas sin incurrir en el lenguaje zafio y racista del pasado. Han conseguido en definitiva hacer aceptables y digeribles ideas que hasta hace poco tenían escasa cabida en el debate político. "Las ideas políticas más radicales son crecientemente aceptables, también entre los partidos tradicionales, que ahora coquetean con las ideas de extrema derecha. Eso es porque los partidos extremistas son ahora más sofisticados y apelan a un electorado más amplio que ya no se avergüenza de votar a la extrema derecha", sostiene Simon Tilford, economista jefe del Center for European Reform con sede en Londres. "Por eso suponen un desafío mucho mayor que la extrema derecha tradicional de los años ochenta y de los noventa", añade Tilford. Los extremistas han sabido capitalizar el hastío de un electorado con los partidos tradicionales, que han perdido la capacidad de conectar con la ciudadanía. Hay analistas que incluso los llaman "partidos protesta" porque su misión fundamental es cosechar el desencanto de otros. Y se atreven con las polémicas que los partidos de siempre prefieren esquivar. Ni a la derecha ni a la izquierda les ha ahorrado dolores de cabeza ni fracasos electorales evitar temas espinosos como la inmigración. Al contrario. Porque los votantes quieren que les hablen de lo que les preocupa, y la inmigración parece ser uno de esos temas. Políticos como Marine Le Pen en Francia o Geert Wilders en Holanda han hecho del debate migratorio su bandera y no tienen reparos a la hora de apelar a emociones como el miedo. Azuzan el temor a la llamada Eurabia, es decir, a un desembarco masivo de musulmanes capaces de poner en peligro lo que consideran la identidad europea. Su mérito es doble, porque consiguen infundir miedo en un momento en el que se da la paradoja de que la integración de los trabajadores extranjeros es relativamente exitosa en varios países europeos. Estos políticos fijan los últimos clavos del ataúd del multiculturalismo que, dicen, no funciona y defienden en cambio un modelo asimilacionista, según el cual los inmigrantes que quieran vivir en Europa lo deberán hacer siguiendo las normas y costumbres de los europeos, dejando de lado la herencia cultural de sus países de origen. Las revueltas en el mundo árabe y el desembarco de norteafricanos en las costas europeas han supuesto un golpe de suerte para los extremistas que ahora hacen su agosto. Marine Le Pen, flamante líder del Frente Nacional francés heredado de su padre, el ultraderechista Jean Marie, visitó el mes pasado la isla italiana de Lampedusa, donde miles de tunecinos han arribado después de la revuelta. "Europa es impotente y no ha encontrado una solución ", dijo. Y a continuación añadió: "Europa debe acercarse lo más posible a las costas de donde parten los barcos clandestinos y enviarlos de vuelta". "Somos testigos de una catástrofe". Los partidos tradicionales, celosos del éxito populista, dejan a menudo que los más extremistas marquen el paso. Cuestiones como la prohibición del burka, que afectan directamente a un número ínfimo de europeas, han ocupado momentáneamente un lugar

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central en la vida política y parlamentaria de algunos países, por delante de temas como el desempleo o el adelgazamiento del Estado de bienestar. La eurofobia es la otra gran pata del banco de los extremistas, que consideran a la Unión Europea fuente de todo mal. De nuevo es un mensaje que cala con facilidad entre un electorado que no siente las instituciones de Bruselas como propias y que, por tanto, no acaba de entender por qué hay que financiarlas. Jean-Dominique Giuliani, presidente de la Fundación Robert Schuman, añade que el momento que atraviesa Bruselas tampoco ayuda. "La UE no está en buena forma. La crisis económica, la ampliación y la incapacidad para alcanzar consensos de forma rápida en un mundo cambiante contribuyen a la frustración de los ciudadanos". Y apunta otra idea. "La población europea envejece, y los mayores se repliegan sobre aquello que conocen mejor y que poseen. Tienen miedo a perder sus pensiones y todo lo que han conseguido en su vida". Los partidos clásicos no han encontrado todavía la fórmula idónea para lidiar con los nuevos actores políticos que juegan con ventaja, porque se desmarcan de las reglas de un juego político del que, sin embargo, se benefician. Juegan la carta antisistema, critican a las instituciones y a los gobernantes, y les funciona. En países como Bélgica, hace años se optó por el llamado cordón sanitario, por el que se aísla al extremista Vlaams Belang en un vano esfuerzo de contención. El resultado es que en la oposición, alejados del desgaste del poder, los extremistas flamencos no han dejado de crecer. En otros países europeos piensan, por el contrario, que es mejor dejar gobernar a los antisistema, porque creen que sus discursos no son sostenibles en la cima del poder, que inevitablemente minará su popularidad. A primera vista, podría parecer que la crisis económica y financiera que ha sembrado el miedo ante un futuro poco prometedor podría jugar a favor de los extremistas. No es, sin embargo, este un factor decisivo, explican los expertos. Basta con analizar en qué países el resurgir populista cobra más fuerza. Holanda, Finlandia, Noruega o Alemania, donde los discursos antiinmigración triunfan como nunca, no se han visto apenas golpeados por la crisis financiera que sí ha destrozado otras economías europeas. Por eso, dicen los analistas, el verdadero problema surgirá el día en que los extremismos cobren fuerza en países más afectados por la crisis como España, Grecia o Reino Unido. "Si en esos países los niveles de desempleo siguen tan altos como hasta ahora y si en los próximos años no se producen mejorías económicas, el terreno estará abonado para que extremismos -tanto de izquierda como de derecha- florezcan", augura Tilford.

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9 Esa derecha extrema que nos asusta LLUÍS BASSETS 01/05/2011 Nunca nos bañamos dos veces en el mismo río. Por más que se quiera buscar semejanzas con otros tiempos, esa derecha extrema que avanza en toda Europa y que en algunos casos incluso consigue entrar en los Gobiernos poco tiene que ver con las extremas derechas que protagonizaron la década de los años treinta, aquella época en la que se apagaron las luces de Europa, en los años de preparación de la mayor matanza de la historia del mundo. 359

No es el viejo fascismo de Mussolini, ni el nazismo de Hitler. Ni siquiera se trata de las versiones redivivas y nostálgicas con las que un puñado de sus herederos pretendieron mantener la llama autoritaria durante la época de expansión de la democracia en los años sesenta y setenta. No es mucho consuelo que este nuevo extremismo hostil con los inmigrantes, con frecuencia islamófobo, antieuropeo casi siempre y sistemáticamente enemigo de los impuestos, nada tenga que ver, al menos en las formas, con las escuadras de porristas y pistoleros que perseguían a sindicalistas, judíos y comunistas en los años treinta. Y no lo es por sus efectos políticos, puesto que su aparición está cambiando, y no precisamente para bien, los mapas parlamentarios y condicionando los debates políticos y las agendas de los Gobiernos. Su magnetismo sobre los electorados tradicionales, a derecha e izquierda, es proporcional al crecimiento de las pulsiones antipolíticas y a la crisis de las correspondientes ideologías y partidos que han conformado el espacio público europeo en el último siglo. Pero una de las diferencias más visibles con los partidos fascistas de hace 80 años, actores de la época de los extremos según la expresión del historiador británico Eric Hobsbawn, es precisamente su monopolio del extremismo; entonces había otro extremo, que era el comunismo; ahora están ellos solos en la cancha. Aunque construyen sus propuestas como si se enfrentaran a una peligrosa ideología izquierdista, lo cierto es que crecen precisamente sobre el vacío y la ausencia de la izquierda. De ahí el uso reiterado de una fraseología antiprogresista y antiizquierdista, centrada sobre todo en la denuncia de lo políticamente correcto, que les sirve para animar ese muñeco inexistente que tanto les excita. De todas las formaciones políticas que avanzan sus peones con las banderas desplegadas del miedo al extranjero, la fobia a la unidad europea y la reducción drástica de los impuestos y de la solidaridad, solo una está directamente emparentada con el tronco retorcido y añejo del fascismo. Es el Frente Nacional francés, amalgama fundada en 1972 donde se juntó lo mejor de todas las familias del extremismo derechista: el populismo pujadista de los años cincuenta, el petainismo colaboracionista, el neonazismo pagano, los militantes derrotados del imperio colonial, los católicos ultras e incluso los nostálgicos de la monarquía, encuadrados bajo la labia y la virulencia de un líder con madera de jefe fascista como Jean-Marie Le Pen, capaz de alcanzar casi el 18% del electorado en unas elecciones presidenciales. La extrema derecha francesa ha sabido hacer un relevo generacional con dos peculiaridades: su carácter dinástico, puesto que es Marine Le Pen quien ha sucedido a su padre, Jean-Marie, y su capacidad para renovar su lenguaje y sus formas, enlazando con las nuevas derechas extremas del resto de Europa y apuntando a resultados electorales incluso mejores que los del fundador y progenitor de la actual líder. Esas nuevas derechas extremas tienen todas ellas un curioso punto en común: son muy nacionales y nacionalistas, y eso mismo es lo que las hace tan europeas a pesar de su fobia a la idea de la unión política de los europeos. Paradójicamente, también es lo que las asemeja al Tea Party estadounidense, movimiento que busca sus raíces en la rebelión contra los impuestos británicos en la época colonial, al igual que el Fidesz húngaro reivindica la corona de San Esteban, el Frente Nacional un republicanismo laico en el que jamás creyó en su anterior avatar histórico y todos ellos una autenticidad que sirva para enarbolar el supremacismo de la propia identidad y excluir las ajenas. No nos bañamos en el mismo río, pero siempre nos persigue el fantasma de una historia que amaga con la repetición de similares tragedias.

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9 REPORTAJE: LA ULTRADERECHA EN EUROPA Umberto Bossi o el odio al diferente Demagogia y xenofobia como razón de Estado. Caídos los sátrapas del norte de África, los ultras italianos se quedan sin los aliados que hacían el trabajo sucio con la inmigración MIGUEL MORA 01/05/2011 El siempre creativo laboratorio político italiano, que en los años veinte del siglo pasado inventó y luego exportó a Europa el totalitarismo negro, continúa bullendo y renovándose casi un siglo después. Desterrada del uso común la palabra fascismo, y reconvertidos los posfascistas de Fini en un pequeño señorío liberal y proisraelí, la extrema derecha parece haber quedado reducida a algunos grupos ultras asociados al fútbol, a los 10.000 afiliados de Fuerza Nueva y Casa Pound, y a algunos socios minoritarios del Gobierno de Silvio Berlusconi legitimados por el jefe del Ejecutivo, como La Destra de un tal Storace y la nietísima Alessandra Mussolini. En realidad, la exclusiva de las señas de identidad modernas, o mejor dicho posmodernas, de la derecha extrema la tiene desde hace 25 años la Liga Norte. Paradójicamente, los señores del Carroccio afirman que quieren ser como los catalanes, aspiran a la secesión de la inexistente Padania y combaten por una república federal similar a la de Estados Unidos. Bajo esos latidos de supuesta sensatez, su aliento reformista y su fuerte ideología territorial, identitaria y cristiana, las huestes verdes de Umberto Bossi -todavía activo y al frente pese al ictus sufrido hace unos años- han hecho del populismo, la demagogia, el antieuropeísmo y el odio al diferente una razón de Estado. Aunque algunos sigan viéndolos como una agrupación folclórica y ocurrente, la Liga es desde hace una década el partido que decide la gobernabilidad del país. No solo controla miles de ayuntamientos desde Toscana hasta Suiza y gobierna las regiones de Piamonte y Véneto: es sobre todo el sostén crucial de Berlusconi, en el poder durante 9 de los últimos 11 años. Esos energúmenos que chillan "Roma ladrona", que piden ametrallar a los inmigrantes y que desertan de los festejos de la unidad italiana son el partido importante más antiguo (siempre en torno al 11% de los votos) de Italia. La Liga tiene tres asientos en el Gobierno de Roma. Bossi, ministro para el Federalismo; Roberto Calderoli, de Simplificación Legislativa, y Roberto Maroni, de Interior. Sus grandes iniciativas de esta legislatura han sido la reforma federalista, actualmente en curso, y la Ley de Seguridad. Impulsada por Maroni, y aprobada en 2008, la norma concedió poderes especiales a los alcaldes y jefes de policía para mantener el decoro de las ciudades. Eso legitimó una ofensiva étnica en toda regla. Al censo de la población romaní, menores incluidos, se sumaron desmantelamientos de chabolas sin alternativa de realojamiento, malos tratos, vejaciones policiales, reglas contra la mendicidad que contemplaban la tutela de los menores por parte del Estado, nula integración escolar... La persecución de los gitanos y la lucha contra la inmigración clandestina forman un mismo bloque en el ideario de la Liga Norte. "Su racismo de taberna puso primero en el 361

punto de mira al terrone, al paleto meridional; luego, a los albaneses, los negros, los gitanos; finalmente, a los árabes", recuerda el cineasta y periodista Claudio Lazzaro, autor del documental Camisas verdes. Los desalojos de gitanos siguen a la orden del día en Milán, Florencia o Roma, y, a pesar de las condenas del Parlamento Europeo, han logrado su objetivo principal: echar del país a los gitanos, rumanos sobre todo. Según estima Roberto Malini, director de la ONG EveryOne, de los 165.000 gitanos que había en Italia en 2008, "hoy no deben quedar más de 30.000, italianos incluidos". Pero el núcleo central del paquete seguridad era la conversión en delito de la inmigración ilegal y su consideración como una agravante penal. Dos años después, el Tribunal Constitucional rechazó la parte de la agravante, y la Corte de Justicia de la UE acaba de anular el delito de clandestinidad al sentenciar que las penas de prisión para los sin papeles son incompatibles con las normas europeas. Tras la sentencia, la oposición ha recordado que la política migratoria de Maroni es el hazmerreír de Europa y ha destacado su alto componente propagandístico y su ineficacia. Lo cierto es que la xenofobia de Maroni y Bossi parece contar todavía con un elevado consenso mediático y social, más en el norte que en el sur del país, aunque el tiempo ha demostrado lo que muchos temían: que vulnera el derecho comunitario y las convenciones de derechos humanos, y que solo puede funcionar si colaboran los países del norte de África. De hecho, la política de Maroni ha durado lo que los acuerdos bilaterales con los dictadores Gadafi (Libia) y Ben Ali (Túnez), que permitían devolver en alta mar a los inmigrantes incumpliendo así las leyes que regulan el derecho de asilo. Caídos los sátrapas, el presunto rigor de la Liga se ha deshecho como un azucarillo, y el Gobierno se ha visto totalmente desbordado por la llegada, en tres meses, de 25.000 tunecinos a la isla de Lampedusa. Dado que su propia ley era inaplicable, Maroni pidió ayuda a esa Europa a la que insulta. Al no obtenerla, tuvo la ocurrencia de dar permisos de residencia temporales a los tunecinos para que se fueran a Francia, que no picó el anzuelo.

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9 REPORTAJE: LA ULTRA DERECHA EN EUROPA Wilders juega de árbitro en Holanda El líder antimusulmán es imprescindible para la coalición de centro-derecha en el poder ISABEL FERRER 01/05/2011 Un día seré primer ministro, algo muy bueno para que Holanda deje de arrodillarse ante el islam". La frase es de Geert Wilders, líder de la derecha populista y antimusulmana holandesa, que navega con aplomo por la escena política nacional. En cinco años, su fuerza política, el Partido de la Libertad, se ha convertido en la tercera fuerza del país, con el 15,45% de los votos, a escasa distancia de la democracia cristiana (16,61%), que gobierna en coalición con los liberales (20,49%). La socialdemocracia (PvdA) encabeza la oposición (19,63% del voto).

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El tirón del Partido de la Libertad y de su líder poco tiene que ver con su propio pasado de diputado liberal, especializado en escribir discursos para los jefes de filas. Wilders es ahora el campeón de las críticas contra la sociedad multicultural y los inmigrantes que no proceden de países occidentales, ni son cristianos o judíos, las dos tradiciones religiosas que considera "nuestras". Apoyándose en afirmaciones rotundas como su ya famoso: "Solo soy intolerante con la intolerancia", su popularidad no ha dejado de crecer. En gran parte, porque ha sabido explotar con éxito las contradicciones de la arraigada tolerancia nacional holandesa, que ignoró durante décadas la integración de sus minorías por temor a verse tachada de racista. El actual Gabinete de centro-derecha, formado por liberales y democristianos, no es ajeno a esta especie de ocaso de la tolerancia que parece afectar a Holanda. Pero la coalición en el poder se encuentra en minoría, y para gobernar necesita de los 24 escaños de Wilders (en un Parlamento de 150). A cambio, él quiere marcar el paso en inmigración y seguridad. En estos momentos, pelea para deportar al mayor número posible de personas en situación ilegal. El ministro de Inmigración, Gerd Leers (democristiano), tiene todo el día a Wilders en el cogote. Por ejemplo, se debate qué hacer con varias niñas afganas, totalmente occidentalizadas, a las que el Gobierno dudaba si expulsar o no. Al final han pactado que se queden las que tienen entre ocho y dieciocho años; según Wilders, esto abre la vía a que cualquier otro inmigrante alegue que está muy occidentalizado y se llegue a la situación de no poder echar a nadie. A la vez que presiona en esa dirección, su defensa de los derechos de los homosexuales y de las mujeres es inequívoca. Pero su rechazo al islam es rabioso y concreto. Asegura que "no odia a los musulmanes; solo a su religión retrógrada". Sus soflamas le han valido un juicio por incitación al odio y la discriminación, que denuncia como un atentado a la libertad de expresión. Amenazado de muerte por el integrismo islámico, Wilders no ceja, y prepara la segunda parte de Fitna, el cortometraje de 2008 donde calificaba al islam de ideología violenta. Tal vez su talón de Aquiles sea su propia fuerza. Su partido no admite militantes, carece de congreso anual y las únicas órdenes son suyas. Una situación paradójica y antidemocrática difícil de mantener. Por el momento, en el Gobierno, y por ende en el Congreso, nada se mueve a espaldas de Wilders. La situación es menos clara en el Senado, aunque esta semana se ha comprobado el grado de influencia ejercido por el político radical. Las elecciones a la Cámara Alta son indirectas en Holanda, y el reparto definitivo de senadores se decidirá en mayo. Como el Gobierno no puede quedarse en el aire, el primer ministro liberal, Mark Rutte, invitó a Wilders a su despacho para que le ayudara a buscar apoyos. Así garantizarían un número suficiente de senadores leales. Acosado por las críticas, Rutte ha reconocido luego que el lugar no era el más adecuado para una cita de esta índole. De todos modos, sigue creyendo legítimo "haber estudiado maneras de velar por la buena salud y la continuidad" de su Gobierno.

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9 REPORTAJE: LA ULTRADERECHA EN EUROPA Le Pen ya compite por la presidencia

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Nadie conoce cuál es su techo electoral. Un sondeo reciente afirma que el extremista Frente Nacional se ha convertido en la primera opción de voto entre los obreros de Francia ANTONIO JIMÉNEZ BARCA 01/05/2011 La extrema derecha en Francia posee un rostro definido, victorioso y amenazante, el de Marine Le Pen, hija de Jean Marie, el veterano fundador del Frente Nacional, y actual presidenta de la formación. Desde hace meses, no hay semana en que Le Pen no aparezca a la cabeza -o al menos en la zona alta- de un sondeo, para certificar su imparable ascenso político. El último se publicaba la semana pasada en el Journal du Dimanche, que bautizaba a Le Pen como "la campeona del voto obrero". En enero pasado, Marine Le Pen fue elegida heredera política de su padre en un congreso celebrado en Tours. Ahora, su formación política, según esa encuesta, sería la hipotética receptora del 36% de los votos de las clases trabajadoras francesas en las futuras elecciones presidenciales de 2012. Los obreros votarían más al Frente Nacional que al presumible candidato socialista, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, actual director general del Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), con un 33% y, sobre todo, mucho más que a Nicolas Sarkozy, con un rácano 15% de sufragios obreros. En la anterior campaña, un por entonces pujante Sarkozy apelaba a "los franceses que se levantan pronto" y a aquellos "que quieren trabajar más para ganar más". Todo apunta ahora -dada la mísera popularidad que arrastra el actual presidente de la República- que muchos de los que confiaron entonces en él han decidido ahora apoyar al Frente Nacional. El resultado de las elecciones locales celebradas en marzo pasado también confirma este trasvase: el Frente Nacional obtuvo en 14,7% de los votos frente al 16,3% de la UMP de Sarkozy. Marine Le Pen, de 44 años, abogada de formación, inteligente, omnipresente, con una cuota mediática considerable, amiga de pisar la calle y proclive a meter el dedo en la llaga y luego salirse por la tangente, ha conseguido resucitar un partido que en 2007 se encontraba al borde de la extinción, fagocitado precisamente por la vigorosa campaña de Sarkozy. Por un lado, se ha desembarazado aparentemente de la cáscara amarga, antipática, rancia y racista de su padre, barnizando el mensaje de su partido de cierta modernidad generacional. Por otro, ha sabido aprovecharse del malestar de los franceses, que ven cómo su país sale muy poco a poco de la crisis económica a pesar de las promesas incesantes de un Sarkozy que parece moverse hacia todos los sitios sin llegar a ninguna parte. Por eso los sondeos no hacen sino confirmar lo que muchos politólogos franceses habían advertido meses atrás: el Frente Nacional juega en la primera división de la política francesa. En otras palabras: solo tres formaciones serían capaces de superar la segunda vuelta de la elección presidencial de 2012: la UMP de Nicolas Sarkozy; el Partido Socialista francés (PS), con el candidato que salga de las primarias de otoño... y el Frente Nacional, de Marine Le Pen. Un ex primer ministro socialista, Laurent Fabius, denunció hace meses la táctica perversa y eficaz que la presidenta del Frente Nacional aplica con precisión y frecuencia: "Señala cierto problema y aporta soluciones poco creíbles". Es cierto: fue el primer -y único- dirigente político francés en acudir a la isla de Lampedusa a visitar los centros de acogida de inmigrantes. Y antes de que estallara la reciente crisis franco- italiana sobre el asunto, Marine Le Pen ya había criticado el Tratado de Schengen y propuesto su abandono. También se adelantó a Sarkozy (o Sarkozy se inspiró en ella) a

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la hora de denunciar el hecho de que los musulmanes recen en la calle. La izquierda critica a Sarkozy por ir a rebufo siempre de las propuestas extremistas de Le Pen y advierten que esta táctica -en principio encaminada a evitar la huida de votantes- es contraproducente y solo sirve para reforzar a la formación del Frente Nacional: "Entre la copia y el original, la gente siempre prefiere la original", repiten. Ella rechaza que la consideren de extrema derecha, asegurando que ese calificativo la reduce y la caricaturiza. Su programa es una mezcla difusa de ideas populistas -rechazo de las élites, propuestas de nacionalizaciones de bancos- y de soluciones xenófobas: propuso hace semanas que la Armada francesa, en alianza con la italiana, se ocupe de devolver directamente los barcos de inmigrantes a sus puertos de origen. Nadie sabe a ciencia cierta cuál es su techo electoral. Pero ella sí que parece conocer su objetivo político. En una reciente rueda de prensa con corresponsales extranjeros comenzaba la mayoría de sus respuestas con la misma e invariable fórmula: "Cuando yo sea presidenta".

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9 REPORTAJE: LA ULTRADERECHA EN EUROPA El ocaso de la tolerancia nórdica La retórica eurófoba y contra la inmigración cala en Escandinavia ADRIÁN SOTO Y ANA CARBAJOSA 01/05/2011 La victoria electoral de los Auténticos Finlandeses ha supuesto una pequeña revolución en el país nórdico, pero sobre todo ha hecho saltar todas las alarmas en una región en la que hasta hace bien poco era casi impensable escuchar argumentos tan extremistas como los que ahora circulan por los Parlamentos nacionales de la zona. Los partidos de extrema derecha y populistas nórdicos ya no pueden ser ignorados porque les respalda una parte del electorado nada despreciable. En Finlandia y en Dinamarca han sido la tercera fuerza más votada. En Suecia han aflorado de la semioscuridad y han entrado en la cámara parlamentaria. La última gran victoria y tal vez la más sorprendente ha sido precisamente la de los Auténticos Finlandeses, que hace dos semanas obtuvieron un 19% de los votos, es decir, siete veces más que en la anterior cita electoral. Los analistas atribuyen parte del triunfo al carismático líder del partido, el europarlamentario Timo Soini. Sus tesis eurófobas y en contra de los rescates financieros de países como Portugal han convencido a muchos finlandeses. Si Soini es el rostro amable del partido, Jussi Halla-aho es la cabeza pensante de los Auténticos Finlandeses y el que hace de poli malo; es decir, el que no duda en emplear un lenguaje racista y sobre todo islamófobo. Este académico de lenguas eslavas saltó a la palestra a través de la blogosfera, desde donde critica duramente la política de inmigración de Finlandia y el multiculturalismo. Hace tres años, Halla-aho, el segundo parlamentario más votado en la capital, fue condenado por incitar a la violencia y al odio religioso. En uno de sus escritos calificó al profeta Mahoma de pedófilo y afirmó que "el islam promueve la pedofilia". Como muchos otros políticos de corte populista, Halla-aho es un ideólogo que se vuelve pragmático cuando el guion lo exige. "Da lo mismo si los cambios que queremos son producto de las propuestas de los Auténticos Finlandeses o si son adoptados por otros partidos", escribía recientemente. Una filosofía parecida es la que aplica el Partido Popular Danés, dirigido por Pia Kjaersgaard, la formación que a finales de los noventa rompió la tradicional armonía política nórdica al colocarse a la derecha de los conservadores. En las últimas elecciones parlamentarias de 2007, los populares daneses se convirtieron en la tercera fuerza. El Popular Danés es un partido nacionalista, dedicado a combatir el multiculturalismo y a defender la monarquía y la Iglesia luterana danesa. A pesar de que su táctica ha sido mantenerse al margen del Gobierno, muchas de las políticas diseñadas por el Partido Popular Danés acaban siendo implementadas por el Ejecutivo. Dinamarca cuenta en la actualidad con una de las legislaciones más duras sobre inmigración. El éxito de los extremistas daneses fue un precedente, y su catálogo ideológico ha sido emulado por los países vecinos. En Suecia, un partido con raíces neonazis, que hasta el año pasado permaneció en la periferia política, logró el año pasado el 5,7% de los votos. Sus tesis islamófobas les catapultaron a la fama. Los Demócratas Suecos piensan que las políticas de inmigración e integración en Suecia han sido un rotundo fracaso. Ahora se muestran exultantes ante la victoria de sus colegas finlandeses. "Claro que podemos pensar en líneas de trabajo conjuntas, ya sea en el Consejo Nórdico o en la Unión 366

Europea. También podemos mantener relaciones informales donde podemos aprender de nuestras experiencias mutuas", declaró recientemente un dirigente de los Demócratas Suecos.

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9 Austria, a la derecha de Alemania Frente al éxito del populismo austriaco, los demócratas alemanes rechazan al NPD JUAN GÓMEZ 01/05/2011 Además del idioma, Alemania y Austria comparten el episodio más negro de sus respectivas historias. Cuando los nazis alemanes acabaron con el régimen austrofascista de 1934 para anexionarse el país natal de Adolf Hitler en 1938, masas de austriacos pangermanistas los recibieron con entusiasmo. La guerra y el genocidio que alemanes y austriacos emprendieron juntos tienen hoy un efecto bien distinto en la vida política de los dos vecinos. En Alemania hay un partido neonazi, el Nacionaldemocrático (NPD) - con representación parlamentaria en los länder orientales Sajonia y Mecklemburgo- Pomerania Anterior-, que está aislado por los demás partidos. Mientras que en el Parlamento austriaco coexisten dos fuerzas de derecha populista: tanto el Partido Liberal (FPÖ) como la Alianza por el Futuro de Austria (BZÖ) juegan con éxito las cartas de la xenofobia y el euroescepticismo. Bajo el liderazgo de Jörg Haider, que lo dirigió entre 1986 y 2000, el FPÖ austriaco consiguió su mayor éxito electoral, con el 27% de los votos, en las generales de 1999. El FPÖ accedió al Gobierno en una coalición con los democristianos (ÖVP). En 2005 dejaron el Gobierno. Un año después, Haider había abandonado el partido y presentado la nueva BZÖ como alternativa de la derecha populista. Entre ambas formaciones rivales obtuvieron el 28% de los votos en 2008, lo cual les permitió controlar 55 de los 183 escaños parlamentarios en Viena. Pese a su división, y a la muerte de Haider, esta derecha populista conserva un gran peso en Austria. En el caso de Alemania, los partidos democráticos, con escasas excepciones, han rechazado cualquier colaboración con el NPD. No obstante, hubo varios intentos de fundar grupos populistas a la derecha de los democristianos. El llamado "partido de Schill", por ejemplo, llegó a gobernar Hamburgo junto a los democristianos entre 2001 y 2004. El reciente éxito del libro xenófobo del socialdemócrata Thilo Sarrazin demuestra que hay caldo de cultivo para estas posiciones. Según el politólogo berlinés Hajo Funke, "es posible que hasta el 40% de los alemanes puedan ser receptivos a estas ideas, pero un populismo de derechas organizado topa aún con la memoria de cuando llevamos esas ideologías a la práctica, hace 70 años". A esto hay que añadirle razones meramente pragmáticas y de imagen: el populismo derechista que a menudo se perdona a austriacos u holandeses haría saltar las alarmas internacionales si proviniese de una potencia económica y política como Alemania.

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9 JOSEP RAMONEDA ¿Dónde está la extrema derecha? JOSEP RAMONEDA 01/05/2011 Ante los buenos resultados de la extrema derecha en algunos países europeos, se repite a menudo una pregunta: ¿por qué en España no hay una extrema derecha con peso electoral? Sí la hay. Está en el Partido Popular. La unificación de la derecha española fue el gran mérito de José María Aznar que le llevó a la presidencia del Gobierno. Su ambición iba más lejos, llegó a pensar en una especie de confederación de derechas autónomas con CiU y con el PNV. Y este era el espíritu del pacto del Majestic. Pero fracasó, como era previsible, por la cuestión nacional y por el pacto de Estella que llevó al gran enfrentamiento con el PNV. La extrema derecha está en el Partido Popular. Con un coste principal: la derecha española no ha desarrollado un proyecto ideológico moderno, que no viva a remolque de las exigencias de la Iglesia católica, de los ecos de la cultura franquista que durante tantos años fue la de buena parte de los suyos, y de la patrimonialización del nacionalismo español. La integración de la derecha en un macropartido tiene mucho que ver con el sistema electoral. La política española -a diferencia de algunas comunidades autónomas- es claramente bipartidista. En más de 30 años de democracia todavía no ha habido un gobierno de coalición. La derecha sabe perfectamente que si se divide perderá muchísimas posibilidades de gobernar. Por eso, los duros de la derecha nunca han osado dar el paso de romper con el partido y el núcleo dirigente siempre ha estado dispuesto a tantas concesiones como fuera necesario para dar satisfacción a los que disfrutan saliendo a pasear con los obispos y acusando a los socialistas de romper la patria y de aliarse con terroristas. Aznar, que venía directamente de la tradición franquista de la derecha, supo manejar a la vez el fundamentalismo constitucional, fruto de su conversión tardía a la Constitución, y la asunción de los valores de la derecha española más alejados del liberalismo cultural. Con la intransigencia instalada siempre en su cuerpo, fue capaz de desarrollar a la vez el discurso del bien y del mal que le llevó a la guerra de Irak y al conflicto de civilizaciones, y la intransigencia democrática, que utilizaba la Constitución como instrumento de exclusión. Fueron los años del patriotismo constitucional. Los años en que el Partido Popular exhibía a su jefe arropado por Rodrigo Rato -el dinero-, Mayor Oreja -la conspiración-, Acebes -la insolencia- y Rajoy, que andaba por ahí. De todos ellos, oficialmente, ya solo queda precisamente Mariano Rajoy en sus puestos de mando. El principal atributo de Rajoy es el silencio. El silencio de Rajoy quiere decir que ha llegado hasta donde está sin haber hecho nunca una propuesta política. Rato intentó buscar el voto de los militantes para suceder a Aznar. Mayor Oreja tiene una sola idea, pero la repite hasta la saciedad. Rajoy, simplemente, estaba por ahí. Y fue el elegido, porque Aznar buscaba a un sucesor, no a un líder, confiando en ganar él, por persona interpuesta. Toda la estrategia de Rajoy se resume en una idea: no asustar a la población para que el miedo a la derecha no insufle nueva vida a un PSOE moribundo. Pero por mucho que Rajoy evite a los periodistas, el miedo a la derecha revivirá si la extrema derecha monopoliza el discurso del Partido Popular. Y es lo que está ocurriendo. 368

Para no tener problemas, Rajoy ha dejado que las listas electorales se pringuen de corruptos. Ha dejado que el PP vuelva a la ignominiosa utilización política del terrorismo que ya le ha costado perder dos elecciones. Ha dejado que Aznar vuelva a explicar su buena nueva por las Españas, cada vez más cargada de resentimiento. Y no ha dudado en apoyar a Sánchez Camacho cuando en Cataluña se ha hecho adalid del discurso anti-inmigración, eterno y miserable recurso, que hasta la extrema derecha francesa está dejando de lado. Al consentir todos estos movimientos Rajoy se entrega al sector más reaccionario de su partido. No se sorprenda después si vuelve el miedo a la derecha. Sus silencios quizás no asustan, pero tampoco entusiasman. Ahí está su valoración. Con todos estos ingredientes, esparcidos estos días en abundancia por los reaparecidos Aznar y su vieja guardia, si en España no hay un partido explícitamente de extrema derecha es porque no hace falta: ya existe el PP para cobijarla. Quizás es menos aparatosa que en otros países, pero mucho más poderosa e influyente.

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9 LLUÍS BASSETS Vísperas palestinas LLUÍS BASSETS 01/05/2011 La primavera árabe no deja rincón sin barrer. Ahora alcanza a los territorios palestinos. Fatah y Hamás, los hermanos peleados a muerte, han decidido hacer las paces, tal como les exigían los jóvenes palestinos, ellos también movilizados en las calles y en las redes sociales como los egipcios, tunecinos, sirios o yemeníes. La decisión de los dirigentes de las dos ramas divorciadas del nacionalismo palestino no tiene que ver únicamente con las exigencias de las jóvenes generaciones, tantas veces desatendidas. El viento de libertad sopla también en las calles de Ramala y de la franja, pero cuenta ante todo el desplazamiento de poder que se está produciendo en todo el mundo árabe, donde han sido derrotados los aliados más fieles de Washington y se abren nuevos espacios de influencia para las distintas ramas de los Hermanos Musulmanes, para el islamismo moderado turco e incluso para el magnetismo que sigue ejerciendo el fundamentalismo de los ayatolás iraníes, sobre todo en los países con población chiita. Las revueltas árabes significan la apertura de un mercado político después de la época de bloqueo y autarquía. Será feroz y despiadada la competencia entre las distintas tendencias, y lo mejor que cabe esperar es que se produzca de acuerdo a las reglas que sirven para conformar sociedades abiertas y plurales. Aunque es de desear que las corrientes laicistas jueguen un buen papel, a nadie se le escapa el lugar central que ocupará un islamismo probablemente más templado que el que ha combatido desde la clandestinidad a los regímenes autocráticos, tentado con frecuencia por el extremismo y la violencia. Este cuadro de indeterminación es el que explica la reconciliación palestina. Tiene toda la lógica que estén inquietos los partidarios del inmovilismo, como es el caso de la derecha israelí. No gusta la caída de enemigos feroces y previsibles como Bachar el Asad. Tampoco que los palestinos se presenten unidos ante la comunidad internacional para exigir el reconocimiento de un Estado propio. No era posible hacer la paz cuando 369

estaban divididos, y ahora Netanyahu no quiere hacer la paz porque están unidos con Hamás, un grupo terrorista que quiere destruir a Israel. Hamás puede salir de la zona de influencia iraní y regresar a la matriz egipcia de los Hermanos Musulmanes. Pero Netanyahu prefiere ver esta partida como el retroceso de Obama ante los ayatolás, a los que declara vencedores del cambio político en el mundo árabe y musulmán. Por eso todo son preparativos para una tercera Intifada, quizás en otoño, cuando los palestinos vean impedidos sus esfuerzos por crear el Estado propio, ya sea en Naciones Unidas por un éxito diplomático israelí ahora improbable o sobre el terreno en caso de que la Asamblea General dé luz verde a esa Palestina todavía nonata.

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9 Atentado en Marruecos El salafismo enturbia la transición Los islamistas aprovechan la mayor tolerancia del Estado marroquí para ganar peso - La dimensión social del integrismo es patente en los barrios humildes ANDREA RIZZI (ENVIADO ESPECIAL) - Marraquech - 01/05/2011 Instalada en un garaje remozado frente a la mezquita Bukar, la librería salafista de la avenida Yakub el Mansur de Marraquech se presenta al visitante como un potente símbolo del papel del islamismo radical en Marruecos. Invisible desde la calle, con un portal propio de un taller mecánico, la tienda ofrece al final de una larga rampa descendiente paredes repletas de libros religiosos expuestos con extraordinario orden. En el vientre de Marruecos, bajo la superficie, un meticuloso fundamentalismo religioso se esfuerza en moldear almas conforme a sus creencias radicales. Se trata de un actor clave en la transición del país. El atentado de Marraquech -las dudas sobre su autoría e intención- ha situado en el centro del debate el papel de los salafistas. El nerviosismo es palpable. En la librería, dos encargados con barbas cuya longitud se corresponde a años más que a meses sin frecuentar la tijera, dejan entender claramente que del tema no les apetece hablar. Tras el abortado intento de diálogo, vuelven a colocar libros en las estanterías. La librería recibe gratuitamente volúmenes desde organizaciones saudíes, que luego pone a la venta en Marruecos. Un par de manzanas más al norte, sentado en un tranquilo café a lado de la mezquita Anwar, Abuluz Abdelhakim ofrece su punto de vista sobre el movimiento con conocimiento de causa. Abdelhakim, investigador universitario de 37 años, estuvo casi seis infiltrado en un grupo salafista no violento de Marraquech, que culminaron en 2009 con la publicación de una tesis doctoral. "La librería de El Mansur es uno de los muchos síntomas que retratan la reapertura del Estado marroquí al salafismo, en su vertiente no yihadista. La tienda fue cerrada después de los atentados de Casablanca de 2003. Pero las autoridades permitieron su reapertura en 2008", explica Abdelhakim. Esa dinámica tuvo su clímax a mediados de abril, cuando el rey Mohamed VI indultó a 190 presos, entre ellos decenas de salafistas. Además, un importante líder ha regresado a Marruecos últimamente tras años de exilio en Arabia Saudí. A falta de estadísticas fiables, es difícil saber si el movimiento vive una fase expansiva o no. Pero el ablandamiento de la represión ha permitido un florecimiento del proselitismo en los barrios humildes de Marruecos. Abdelhakim muestra un mapa, fruto de sus investigaciones, en el que el plano de Marraquech aparece constelado de puntos que indican centros salafistas. ¿Qué pasará después del golpe de Marraquech? ¿Será seguido de una represión parecida a la que se produjo tras el de Casablanca? En las filas del movimiento el temor es grande. Fuera de la librería, en la avenida El Mansur, salpicada de comercios de simpatizantes salafistas, la gente deja entender que no está por la labor de tratar con extraños de temas políticos. El atentado ha tensado la situación. Abdelhakim explica que la débil proyección política del salafismo no violento es una de las causas principales del aperturismo. "Creo que el Estado ha tenido un interés en dejarles 371

respirar, porque el proselitismo salafista resta adeptos a otros movimientos islamistas con un discurso político más articulado", dice. El problema es que el salafismo es una ideología radical, y la distancia entre su vertiente social y las células yihadistas es una frontera muy borrosa. El investigador cree también que al Gobierno le interesa la labor social de las asociaciones salafistas, que a menudo suple la ausencia de las instituciones estatales y aplaca así el malestar social. Pero aunque estos grupos no tengan un discurso político articulado ni especial interés en el rediseño de la arquitectura constitucional del país, el temor es que su paulatino fortalecimiento les otorgue, además de la influencia social, mayor influencia política. En la librería de El Mansur hay casi exclusivamente textos religiosos. La política no parece tener derecho de ciudadanía aquí, al igual que las mujeres, que, sea por regla no escrita o casualidad, ayer por la mañana no entraban. Pero bajo la superficie se encuentran realidades inesperadas. Como cuando Abdelhakim descubrió con suma sorpresa, en el grupo en el que se infiltró, que entre los discursos del jeque a los discípulos figuraban detalladas explicaciones acerca de cómo dar placer sexual a las mujeres. Al margen del salafismo yihadista, la dimensión social del movimiento es una realidad que tanto el Estado marroquí como los activistas prodemocracia tendrán que tomar en cuenta con extraordinaria atención. Empezando por lo que se mueve bajo la superficie.

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9 Atentado en Marruecos Marruecos busca a los terroristas Sindicatos y opositores llaman a rechazar el terrorismo en las manifestaciones de hoy - Mohamed VI es aclamado en su visita al lugar del atentado en Marraquech IGNACIO CEMBRERO - Rabat - 01/05/2011 Tres días después del atentado de Marraquech, Marruecos se pregunta angustiado por qué ahora que se adentraba sin grandes sobresaltos por la senda de las reformas democráticas ha sufrido su mayor ataque terrorista desde hace ocho años. La pregunta, que se hacen todos los actores políticos, aún no tiene respuesta porque ninguna pista conocida conduce a los autores de la tragedia. "Nos preguntamos sobre el momento elegido para este vil acto", indica el comunicado del Foro Verdad y Justicia, una ONG de expresos políticos de izquierdas, que resume las dudas obsesivas que asaltan a la sociedad marroquí. Hoy, 1 de mayo, sus militantes, los de otras ONG y los jóvenes que desde hace más de dos meses exigen en las calles, con un cierto éxito, un cambio de sistema político volverán a manifestarse. Unirán sus fuerzas a los sindicatos, que acaban de arrancar al Gobierno unos aumentos sin precedentes de sueldos de los funcionarios y de las pensiones más modestas. A sus reivindicaciones tradicionales se añadirá ahora un no rotundo al terrorismo expresado ya a través de múltiples concentraciones espontáneas.

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Con una carga explosiva activada a distancia, un terrorista voló el jueves el café Argana, en la célebre plaza Yemaa el Fna de Marraquech. Causó la muerte de 16 personas, en su mayoría extranjeros, e hirió a otras 25, a las que el rey Mohamed VI visitó ayer en los hospitales. Antes recorrió el edificio semiderruido del café Argana. Desde la terraza saludó a una muchedumbre que le aclamaba, en un gesto con el que quiso infundir seguridad a su pueblo. La mayoría de las víctimas mortales son de nacionalidad francesa -una de ellas, una niña de 10 años- porque de esa nacionalidad son la mayoría de los turistas que visitan Marruecos. Pero entre ellas también hay camareros marroquíes, dos canadienses, un holandés y el escritor británico Peter Moss, de 59 años, autor de libros de viaje. También figuran entre los fallecidos una mujer israelí embarazada, Mijal Weizman, de 30 años, y su marido judío, de 32, pero cuya nacionalidad no ha sido divulgada. Después de que lo hiciera el ministro del Interior marroquí, Taieb Cherkaoui, su homólogo francés, Claude Guéant, también desmintió ayer que el atentado fuese obra de un suicida. "Alguien colocó una mochila en el suelo del local y la hizo estallar de lejos", declaró al semanario Journal du Dimanche. Pero Guéant fue menos contundente que Cherkaoui cuando se le preguntó sobre la autoría de la rama magrebí de Al Qaeda: "Hay que esperar a la reivindicación", que tres días después sigue sin llegar. El ministro marroquí afirmó, en cambio, que el atentado era "del estilo de Al Qaeda". París ha enviado a Marraquech a diez agentes de su brigada antiterrorista, que se añaden a los investigadores españoles y estadounidenses que trabajan codo con codo con la policía marroquí. Gracias a un turista holandés, se ha elaborado un retrato robot del asesino. El turista y su esposa salieron del café Argana minutos antes de la explosión. Como lo hizo el terrorista, que, según ellos, llevaba colgado un aparato MP3. A la ausencia de reivindicación, a la inexistencia del kamikaze, a la reprobación de la música por los barbudos, se añade otro dato que resta fuerza a la hipótesis de la autoría islamista sin invalidarla. La represión policial y el rechazo de la sociedad habrían acabado en Marruecos con las redes del islamismo violento, cuyo último zarpazo, hace cuatro años en Casablanca, fue un fracaso. Hasta los integristas más radicales parecen aborrecer ahora el atentado. Una quincena de presos islamistas condenados por terrorismo lograron concentrarse el viernes en una celda de la cárcel de Salé, grabar un vídeo y difundirlo a través de Internet. En él rechazan el atentado. El 14 de abril el monarca excarceló a un centenar de presos islamistas y se esperaba que, con motivo de la Fiesta del Trono, en julio, muchos otros iban a ser liberados. Aún permanecen unos 500 integristas detrás de los barrotes, según Anassir, la asociación que reúne a sus familiares. Casi ninguno tiene las manos manchadas de sangre, aunque muchos profesan ideas radicales. Vestido con un polo verde y con un tocado de peregrino musulmán, el islamista que lee el texto ante la cámara acaba comparando la explosión de Marrakech con la que sacudió, el pasado 1 de enero, una iglesia copta de Alejandría, causando 21 muertos. "Las fuerzas que se resisten al cambio luchan por sobrevivir", dice Ahmed Benseddik, un intelectual de Casablanca. "Intentan abortar la dinámica puesta en marcha por los jóvenes y, sobre todo, asustar a los ciudadanos, al rey y a Occidente", advierte.

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'Vacaciones' para el secretario real Los manifestantes llevaban más de dos meses pidiendo a gritos su destitución. "Majidi, dégage" (Majidi, lárgate), se leía en muchas pancartas o coreaban los manifestantes marroquíes adaptando un eslogan de la revolución tunecina. Mounir Majidi, de 47 años, es uno de los dos más estrechos colaboradores del rey Mohamed VI -el otro es Fouad Ali el Himma- y el hombre que más poder económico acumula en Marruecos. No en balde es secretario particular del monarca y preside desde 2001 Siger, el holding al que pertenecen todas las empresas de la familia real alauí. Juntas representan un 34% de la capitalización de la Bolsa de Casablanca. Majidi y su familia están desde el sábado 23 de abril de vacaciones en Florida (EE UU) y no tienen fecha de regreso a Marruecos, según revelaron ayer dos webs informativas marroquíes, Lakome y Demain Online, y confirmaron otras fuentes. Fue el monarca quien le pidió que se alejara, aunque no se sabe si lo hizo cediendo a la presión de la calle o por otros motivos. El secretario particular es el único de los colaboradores del soberano que no estudió con él en el Colegio Real. Un cable redactado en 2009 por el consejero comercial del Consulado de EE UU en Casablanca, revelado por Wikileaks, señala que Majidi ha aprovechado su posición para sacar provecho personal de inversiones extranjeras en el sector inmobiliario en Marruecos. Al margen de presidir Siger, posee sus propias empresas en el sector de la publicidad y la comunicación.

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9 Los sindicatos marroquíes secundan las reivindicaciones políticas de los jóvenes "La clase obrera forma parte del Movimiento del 20 de Febrero", rezaba una gran pancarta sindical en la manifestación del 1 de mayo en Rabat IGNACIO CEMBRERO / ANDREA RIZZI - Rabat / Marraquech - 01/05/2011 Los sindicatos marroquíes han secundado hoy, con algunos matices, las reivindicaciones de los jóvenes que desde hace dos meses piden en las calles un cambio de sistema político. "La clase obrera forma parte del Movimiento del 20 de Febrero", rezaba una gran pancarta sindical en la manifestación del 1 de mayo en Rabat. "Por la disolución del Parlamento y del Gobierno", exigía otra banderola esgrimida por el cortejo de la Unión Marroquí de Trabajadores, una de las dos grandes centrales. Esta es una de las peticiones recurrentes del Movimiento del 20 de Febrero cuya cabeza más visible son los jóvenes. Pero en el cortejo también habían algún que otro retrato del rey Mohamed VI. Aunque los desfiles del 1 de Mayo contaron con la participación de varios centenares de jóvenes de ese movimiento siguieron siendo ante todo sindicales. En su seno se había introducido obreros y empleados de empresas con reivindicaciones específicas y durante un tiempo los trabajadores de la línea aérea Royal Air Maroc lograron colocarse al frente de la manifestación de Rabat.

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Rechazo al terrorismo El rechazo al terrorismo, cuatro días después del atentado de Marraquech que causó 16 muertos, también figuraba en los carteles que llevaban los militantes. "El terrorismo teme una Constitución democrática", coreaban los jóvenes que consideran insuficiente la reforma de la Carta Magna propuesta por el monarca alauí en su discurso del 9 de marzo. En la capital unas 12.000 personas se echaron a la calle, según fuentes independientes, un número no muy elevado comparado con otros años. Hay, probablemente, dos razones para ello. Ayer llovía intensamente sobre gran parte del país. El 26 de abril los sindicatos alcanzaron un acuerdo con el Gobierno que contempla sustanciales aumentos de los sueldos de los funcionarios y una fuerte revalorización de las pensiones de jubilación más bajas. Las concentraciones en Marraquech En Marraquech, algunos centenares de personas han salido a la calle en diversas concentraciones organizadas por sindicatos y el movimiento reformista 20 de febrero. Las reivindicaciones de los manifestantes trascendieron los asuntos laborales motivo de la convocatoria, instando a las autoridades a que aceleren el paso de las reformas y condenando el terrorismo. Los jóvenes del grupo 20 de febrero encabezaron una marcha reducida con respecto a los planes iniciales a causa de la intensa lluvia que azota hoy Marraquech. "Marruecos libre", "Los gobiernos cambian, todo sigue igual, queremos libertad" fueron los esloganes más repetidos. También se escucharon por parte de algunos sectores juveniles gritos de "abajo la tiranía", a los que desde las filas sindicalistas se ha contestado con algunos "Viva el rey". También hubo coros de repulsa al terrorismo -que golpeó una cafetería de Marraquech el pasado jueves, matando a 16 personas- y algunos significativos "Los atentados son una obra de teatro", en referencia a la sospecha de que actores internos a Marruecos lo perpetraron para frenar el cambio. La coordinación entre los grupos no fue total, así que las centrales sindicales no confluyeron todas en un mismo acto inificador. Las fuerzas de seguridad observaron los actos, que se desarrollaron pacíficamente, sin intervenir

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9 Gadafi tensa la calle con el anuncio de la muerte de su hijo y la ONU anuncia su marcha de Trípoli entre disturbios Londres expulsa al embajador libio en respuesta al ataque a su Embajada.- El vicario apostólico de Trípoli confirma la muerte de Saif el Arab.- El régimen sostiene que el bombardeo aliado mató además a tres nietos del dictador y la OTAN responde que no tiene a personas individuales entre sus objetivos AGENCIAS / JUAN MIGUEL MUÑOZ | Trípoli /Bengasi 01/05/2011

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La televisión estatal libia ha mostrado cuatro cadáveres tapados, pertenecientes a dos adultos y dos niños, que supuestamente son los de tres nietos del dictador Muamar el Gadafi y el de su hijo menor, Saif el Arab el Gadafi. Las imágenes, que no muestran los rostros de los fallecidos, son hasta ahora la principal prueba que ha aportado el régimen de esas muertes, anunciadas ayer por un portavoz del Gobierno de Trípoli y atribuidas a un ataque aéreo de la OTAN. El vicario apostólico de Trípoli, quien aparece en las imágenes de la televisón libia rezando con otros religiosos junto a los cadáveres, ha confirmado la muerte de Saif el Arab. "Sí, el hijo de Gadafi está muerto y también la televisión y la radio libia lo han confirmado", ha afirmado el obispo Giovanni Innocenzo Martinellia a una televisión italiana. Desde que el régimen diera a conocer la noticia, la tensión en las calles de Trípoli ha aumentado, lo que ha derivado en ataques a algunas Embajadas como las de Reino Unido o Italia. Londres ha anunciado la expulsión del embajador libio en respuesta al ataque a su Legación, mientras que Naciones Unidas ha anunciado la retirada de su personal internacional. "La ONU se está preparando para abandonar Trípoli", ha anunciado Stephanie Bunker, portavoz de la Oficina de Coordinación de Asuntos Humanitarios de Naciones Unidas (OCHA, por sus siglas en inglés). "Aparentemente ha habido disturbios en Trípoli y ellos [el personal de Naciones Unidas en la ciudad] han decidido irse". La decisión no afecta al personal local de la organización. Según cuenta la BBC, algunos edificios de Naciones Unidas fueron objetivo de grupos pro-Gadafi enfadados por el último bombardeo de la OTAN. Tampoco se han librado de los disturbios varias Embajadas. "La Convención de Viena exige que Gadafi proteja a las misiones diplomáticas en Trípoli. Al no hacerlo, el régimen ha incumplido de nuevo con sus responsabilidades y obligaciones internacionales", ha señalado en un comunicado el responsable británico de Exteriores, William Hague. Reino Unido, que sacó a su embajador de Trípoli al principio del conflicto pero mantuvo a un pequeño número de empleados, ha dado 24 horas al embajador libio para abandonar su territorio. Testigos citados por la agencia Reuters han visto una columna de humo saliendo del edificio de la Embajada de Italia en Trípoli. Además, el régimen ha anunciado un ataque de sus militares sobre el puerto de Misrata, la tercera ciudad del país y única del oeste bajo control de los rebeldes. Según estos, el bombardeo se produjo mientras se estaba desembarcando un cargamento de ayuda humanitaria. Por su parte, la televisión estatal libia ha afirmado que la ofensiva tiene como objetivo impedir que las "bandas armadas criminales" reciban armamento. Respuesta de la OTAN Los ataques contra los edificios diplomáticos son supuestamente muestras de la ira popular tras recibir el anuncio de la muerte de los familiares del dictador en los últimos bombardeos de la coalición internacional. Un anuncio al que los aliados tardaron varias horas en reaccionar. "La OTAN continuó anoche con sus ataques de precisión contra instalaciones militares del régimen en Trípoli, incluyendo edificio de mando en el barrio de Bab al Aziziyah", ha señalado la Alianza en un comunicado en el que no detalla si ese edificio podría ser la residencia del hijo menor del dictador, como afirma el régimen. Gadafi y su esposa se encontraban en la casa de Saif al Arab durante el bombardeo, pero resultaron ilesos, según la versión difundida por Trípoli.

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"Todos los objetivos de la OTAN son de naturaleza militar (...) no tenemos a personas individuales como objetivo", señala en el texto el lugarteniente general Charles Brochard."Estoy al corriente de las informaciones no confirmadas de que algunos familiares de Gadafi podrían haber muerto. Lamentamos cualquier muerte", ha añadido. Un portavoz de la oposición libia ha asegurado que duda de la veracidad del suceso. "No creemos que sea cierto", ha dicho en Bengasi Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, miembro del parlamento del Consejo Nacional de Transición libio (CNT). "Son todo disparates del régimen en un intento desesperado de recabar alguna simpatía internacional. Este régimen miente y sigue mintiendo". Por si acaso, los rebeldes celebraron en Bengasi la noticia disparando al aire con todo lo que tenían y haciendo sonar los cláxones por el paseo marítimo de la ciudad. "Gadafi quiere presionar así a la OTAN" para que detenga sus ataques sobre la capital, aseguró a Efe Yalal al Galal, portavoz del Consejo Nacional de Transición (CNT), máximo órgano de los rebeldes. Edificio en ruinas Soldados libios han conducido a periodistas internacionales a la casa, en un barrio acomodado de Trípoli y que aparecía golpeada al menos por tres misiles. La propiedad estaba completamente destruida, pero no se han visto cuerpos. "Parece mentira que alguien pudiera sobrevivir en la vecindad, la casa está absolutamente devastada, alcanzada por dos bombas, con un gran cráter", 9 aseguraba un reportero de CNN en conexión telefónica desde Trípoli. De confirmarse, la muerte de Saif el Arab podría tener consecuencias legales. A principios de la semana el embajador de Estados Unidos para Libia, Gene Cretz, reconoció que las leyes estadounidenses sancionarían cualquier intento de atacar a Gadafi. "No creo que ningún grupo creíble o individuo contemple que la solución al problema libio sea posible sin deponer a Gadafi de una forma u otra", dijo. "Pero nuestro trabajo y nuestra meta son encontrar una solución política utilizando los medios que nos permiten nuestras leyes". Dirigentes políticos estadounidenses pedían el pasado fin de semana que se acabara con la vida del dictador, aunque la resolución de Naciones Unidas no autoriza a ello. Rusia y China se han opuesto abiertamente a la persecución personal de Gadafi y a las operaciones militares de la OTAN más allá de la zona de exclusión aérea. En cualquier caso, no es la primera vez que Gadafi está en el centro de un ataque aéreo. En 1986 Ronald Reagan ordenó el bombardeo de su complejo palaciego de Bab el Azizia, y este viernes , mientras el dictador daba su discurso por televisión, los aliados bombardearon un edificio cercano al estudio.

Según9 la CNN, miembros del círculo íntimo de Gadafi han estado llamando a representantes del Gobierno de Estados Unidos para anunciarles que "alguien importante" del régimen ha muerto, sin especificar quién. "Esto es la ley de la jungla", aseguraba Mussa Ibrahim, el portavoz del Gobierno, tras dar la noticia a la prensa. "Después de esto nos parece que está claro para todo el mundo que lo que está pasando en Libia no tiene nada que ver con la protección de los civiles", dijo Ibrahim. "Si hace falta, lucharemos y lucharemos. El líder le ofreció la paz ayer a la

OTAN, y la OTAN la ha rechazado", subrayó en relación al discurso9 del viernes por la

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noche en el que el dictador tendía una mano a los aliados siempre que estos respetaran su poder en Libia y se retiraran del país. Un hijo polémico Saif el Arab el Gadafi, el hijo del dictador libio supuestamente muerto a consecuencia de un ataque de los aliados a su casa de Trípoli, nació en 1982. Su madre era la segunda esposa de Muamar, Safia Farkash.

Benjamín de los Gadafi, Saif el Arab 9mostraba una propensión a los grandes escándalos notable incluso para una familia9 con tendencia al desbarre. Al mismo tiempo, era el que tenía menos peso en el esquema de poder del régimen. Prueba de su interés por el poder es que no tenía formación militar ni ejercía cargos públicos como varios de sus hermanos. Él prefirió estudiar Ciencias. Empezó la universidad en Alemania en 2006. Ese mismo año desencadenó un conflicto diplomático entre Berlín y Trípoli después de que la policía germana le abriera una investigación por intentar intimidar a un portero que quiso expulsarle de una discoteca cuando su novia comenzó a desvestirse en la pista de baile. Al Arab amenazó con arrojarle ácido en la cara y el portero acudió a la policía. Su padre respondió a la ofensa de la denuncia nombrando al hijo parte de la delegación diplomática libia en el país europeo. Fue la presentación en sociedad de un joven que hasta entonces había mostrado un perfil público bajo: no había intentado 9molir a palos a nadie, ser estrella9 del fútbol (dopada), 9 productor de películas en Hollywood ni convertirse9 en doctor con una tesis universitaria falsa, por citar algunas de las razones por las que son conocidos los cachorros del dictador. A partir de ese momento, el nombre de Saif el Arab se prodigó en la prensa alemana. El excesivo ruido de su Ferrari hizo que la policía de Múnich volviera a detenerlo y se incautara del coche. En 2008 le investigaron por la sospecha de que había transportado un rifle de asalto de Múnich a París en un coche con matrícula diplomática. Finalmente los cargos se retiraron por falta de pruebas. Por otra parte, hoy se han enfrentado Fuerzas leales a Gadafi y milicias de los sublevados cerca de la frontera entre Liba y Túnez, según ha informado un corresponsal de Reuters desde el propio lugar de los hechos. Declaración del Gobierno libio

Esto es lo que Mussa9 Ibrahim, el portavoz del Gobierno libio, ha declarado por televisión sobre el supuesto ataque de la OTAN a la casa de Saif el Islam el Gadafi: "Saif El Arab Muamar el Gadafi, conocido como Ruba por la mayoría de los libios, el más joven de los hijos del líder, fue atacado esta noche. Gadafi y su esposa estaban allí, igual que otros familiares y amigos. El resultado del ataque fue el martirio del hermano Saif el Arab, de 29 años, y de tres de los nietos del líder. El lider mantiene su buena salud, no resultó herido, al igual que su esposa, y otras personas si fueron malheridas en el ataque. Se trata de una operación directa destinada a asesinar al lider de este país. Eso no está permitido por las leyes internacionales, ni por ningún principio. Si la gente clama sobre la protección de la población, hemos declarado repetidamente que estamos preparados para la negociación, para las hojas de ruta para la paz, para la transición política, para las elecciones, para el referéndum. A la OTAN no le preocupa comprobar nuestras promesas, ni a Occidente el comprobar nuestras declaraciones, solo se ocupa de

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robarnos nuestra libertad, de robarnos nuestra riqueza, que es el petróleo y nuestro derecho a decidir nuestro futuro como libios". Rusia y Venezuela condenan el ataque El Parlamento ruso ha condenado el asesinato (que la OTAN no ha confirmado y que los rebeldes niegan) del hijo menor de Gadafi y tres de sus nietos por parte de las fuerzas aliadas. "Es la confirmación del uso indiscriminado de la fuerza de la coalición anti-Libia", ha declarado hoy el parlamentario ruso Konstantin Kosachev a la agencia de noticias Interfax. "La coalición no protege a los civiles", ha declarado. El primer ministro ruso, Vladimir Putin, ha criticado en varias ocasiones a los países Occidentales por su actuación en Libia. El presidente de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, ha condenado hoy las muertes, que ha tachado de "asesinatos", y ha pedido el cese de los ataques. "Matan a inocentes en Libia. ¿A nombre de quién? Nuestra humilde posición es que se haga un alto al fuego allí y que se respete la soberanía de la nación árabe y de su pueblo y su gobierno. ¿Hasta cuándo se van a creer los yanquis y sus aliados de la OTAN con derecho a bombardear al mundo?", indicó el mandatario en declaracones recogidas por la Agencia Venezolana de Noticias.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Gadafi/tensa/calle9 /anuncio/muerte/hijo/O NU/anuncia/marcha/Tripoli/disturbios/elpepuint/20110501elpepuint_2/Tes

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9 Ola de cambio en el mundo árabe Los islamistas de Egipto forman un partido político NURIA TESÓN - El Cairo - 01/05/2011 Los Hermanos Musulmanes presentaron ayer en sociedad a los que serán los líderes de su nueva formación política, denominada Partido de la Libertad y la Justicia, con la que vuelven a la legalidad democrática después de medio siglo proscritos. Esta nueva formación, que anunciaron el pasado 21 de febrero, no será un partido religioso, sino "civil con un referente islámico". Así lo aseguró durante una rueda de prensa celebrada en la nueva sede de la organización el secretario general de los Hermanos Musulmanes, Mohamed Mahmud Hussein, quien anunció que Mohamed Mursi, del ala más moderada y reformista, será el nuevo presidente de la formación; ha sido diputado como independiente en el Parlamento egipcio y portavoz del grupo islamista durante la legislatura de 2000 a 2005. La decisión ha sido tomada por el centenar de miembros que forman parte del máximo órgano, durante las reuniones celebradas este fin de semana. El Partido de la Libertad y la Justicia tiene previsto presentar candidatos a la mitad de los escaños en las elecciones parlamentarias de septiembre, según el comunicado leído ayer. Sin embargo, no presentarán ningún aspirante a las presidenciales. Ilegales, pero tolerados Hasta las pasadas elecciones, celebradas en diciembre de 2010 y marcadas por el fraude, los Hermanos Musulmanes eran la principal fuerza opositora de la Cámara baja. Habían conseguido hacerse con el 20% de los parlamentarios presentándose como independientes. Eran ilegales, pero estaban tolerados. Su paso a la legalidad como nueva formación política abre la incógnita sobre el tipo de perfil que presentarán. Los Hermanos se niegan a que un cristiano o una mujer asuman la presidencia de Egipto y no han aclarado cuál será la postura de la Libertad y la Justicia. Sin embargo, han asegurado que el partido incluirá a coptos. Y que cumplirá con lo establecido en la Constitución egipcia, que sigue prohibiendo los eslóganes religiosos. No se han pronunciado sobre si pedirán la aplicación de la sharia o ley islámica. Junto a Mursi, estará en la vicepresidencia Essam el Arian, además de Saad Katatni, su secretario general. Los tres formaban parte hasta el momento de la cúpula política de los Hermanos Musulmanes y deberán coordinar sus posiciones con la hermandad, aunque manteniendo su independencia orgánica.

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9 El presidente de Yemen se niega a ceder el poder Saleh se resiste a firmar el acuerdo de renuncia pactado con la oposición ÁNGELES ESPINOSA | Saná (Enviada especial) 01/05/2011

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Egypt’s workers: On the political precipice 01/05/2011 - 10:25 Lina Attala Sun, 01/05/2011 - 10:25

Photographed by other9 “We joined [the union] because our rights are lost,” says Fahmy Adel Fahmy, a member of the Independent Bakers’ Union. “We never resorted to protesting or having strikes; we demand retirement plans and a better minimum wage.” Fahmy’s union is one of 12 that have already joined the newly founded Egyptian Federation for Independent Unions, which stands in parallel to the official Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions, a state-controlled entity. Fahmy, who works at a bakery in Cairo’s Shubra al-Khaima, says that his demands and those of his fellow workers could be more effectively addressed with better organization. “We joined the [independent] union because no one listens to us. We’ve been mistreated by the [official] federation. Membership fees are automatically deducted from our pay slips and we get nothing in return.” Fahmy’s pleas, like those of millions of Egyptian workers, have been on the forefront of the 25 January revolution, whose seminal chant was “dignity, freedom, social justice.” But for many, the plea remains outside the framework of political discourse in Egypt, as the current military rulers insist that the workers’ demands are “class-based” and do not concern the wider nation. For the workers themselves, they walk the fine line between effectively applying pressure on politicians and honoring their pledge to stay out of politics. “Before the revolution, workers were wary of the separation between the political and the economic,” says Nadine Abdalla, a PhD candidate at the Institute for Political Science in Grenoble, France. The common belief was that the fallen regime was more tolerant of workers calling for better working conditions than 382

they were of those calling for political reform. The workers “distanced themselves from calling for political change because they would be punished,” adds Abdalla, who studies the labor movement in the Delta of Egypt. “This is what happened on 6 April 2008 when the demands got political, which led to the violent dispersal of the Mahalla strike.” In 2008, workers on strike in a Delta-based state-run textile factory coordinated with political groups outside Mahalla. They chanted against rising food prices and low wages before the police violently broke up the protest and arrested many of them. Attempts to promote national solidarity on behalf of the workers, by staging protests and enacting a day of civil disobedience, failed due to the staunch security response. Union leaders recall the experience with bitterness, attributing it to the absence of a strong political party caring about workers’ issues. But Abdalla reckons that after the 25 January revolution, workers were emboldened and hence became more politicized. For her, there is a sense of recognition that worker strikes in the last days of the uprising significantly contributed to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Since 9 February, worker strikes have erupted throughout Egypt. Employees in public and private sectors - public transportation employees, communication technicians, nurses, and others - also staged protests, bringing the nation’s economy at halt. In a reversal of longstanding tendencies to keep out of politics, protesters chanted against corrupt leadership in addition to calling for improved working conditions. Beyond its demands, the labor movement seeks better organization. The Egyptian Federation for Independent Unions was quick to act as a truly representative body, in contrast to the state-controlled Egyptian Federation for Trade Unions. “The union and its members are independent from political parties, the state-controlled federation, the government and employers,” says Kamal Abbas, a co-founder of the independent union and a worker himself. He reiterates that independence from all such bodies is a key element of the new union. The decision to distance itself from politics is a strategic choice by the labor movement, according to Akram Ismail, a member of the Association of Progressive Youth, which has embraced workers’ pursuit for independent unions. “The independent union is wary of not engaging in political issues such as the toppling of the official state-run federation,” notes Ismail. “The real battle now is to create an independent union on the ground that embraces workers’ causes, organizes them and strategically negotiates on their behalf.” The choice to remain apolitical has come at a cost, and some accuse the movement of lacking appeal to the broader public. Khaled Ali, head of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and an advocate for workers rights, believes one must differentiate between politics and political parties. “The independence of labor unions from political parties, which could direct them one way or the other, is indispensable,” says Ali, pointing to the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of how political parties may evolve to control professional syndicates.

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For years, the Muslim Brotherhood, once banned but tolerated by Egypt’s toppled regime, has worked to penetrate professional syndicates and transform them into loyal strongholds, especially during elections time. “However, there needs to be a link between the workers’ discourse and that of political groups,” Ali adds. “For years, labor constituted the social heart of the progressive political movement, which in turn served as the political brain for labor. That was important for the labor movement to articulate its discourse and negotiate its demands.” What’s uncontested, beyond the movement’s self-perception of being either economic or political, is that the act of creating a union is political by nature. Behind the Independent Bakers’ Unions stands a long history of bread riots in 1977 when masses took to the streets against the cancellation of government subsidies on basic foodstuffs. In 2007, shortages in subsidized bread and rising food prices spearheaded instability and led to deadly feuds in bread queues. “The bread supply can only be improved when our conditions are improved,” Fahmy concluded confidently. Lina Attala Egypt’s workers: On the political precipice 01/05/2011 - 10:25 http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/4191559

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The New Geopolitics of Food From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars. BY LESTER R. BROWN | MAY/JUNE 2011

In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true with rice. If the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in your neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled rice on an Indonesian family's dinner table.

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Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we've seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet's poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute -- and it has -- to revolutions and upheaval. Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months. With this year's harvest predicted to fall short, with governments in the Middle East and Africa teetering as a result of the price spikes, and with anxious markets sustaining one shock after another, food has quickly become the hidden driver of world politics. And crises like these are going to become increasingly common. The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more volatile -- and a whole lot more contentious -- than it used to. Scarcity is the new norm. Until recently, sudden price surges just didn't matter as much, as they were quickly followed by a return to the relatively low food prices that helped shape the political stability of the late 20th century across much of the globe. But now both the causes and consequences are ominously different. In many ways, this is a resumption of the 2007-2008 food crisis, which subsided not because the world somehow came together to solve its grain crunch once and for all, but because the Great Recession tempered growth in demand even as favorable weather helped farmers produce the largest grain harvest on record. Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively driven by unusual weather -- a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. Such events were always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry. Each night, there are 219,000 additional people to feed at the global dinner table. More alarming still, the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of shortages. In response to previous price surges, the United States, the world's largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away from potential catastrophe. From the mid- 20th century until 1995, the United States had either grain surpluses or idle cropland that could be planted to rescue countries in trouble. When the Indian monsoon failed in 1965, for example, President Lyndon Johnson's administration shipped one-fifth of the U.S. wheat crop to India, successfully staving off famine. We can't do that anymore; the safety cushion is gone. That's why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it? Get ready, farmers and foreign ministers alike, for a new era in which world food scarcity increasingly shapes global politics.

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THE DOUBLING OF WORLD grain prices since early 2007 has been driven primarily by two factors: accelerating growth in demand and the increasing difficulty of rapidly expanding production. The result is a world that looks strikingly different from the bountiful global grain economy of the last century. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity? Even at this early stage, we can see at least the broad outlines of the emerging food economy. On the demand side, farmers now face clear sources of increasing pressure. The first is population growth. Each year the world's farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. The world's population has nearly doubled since 1970 and is headed toward 9 billion by midcentury. Some 3 billion people, meanwhile, are also trying to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, and eggs. As more families in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better. But as global consumption of grain-intensive livestock products climbs, so does the demand for the extra corn and soybeans needed to feed all that livestock. (Grain consumption per person in the United States, for example, is four times that in India, where little grain is converted into animal protein. For now.)

At the same time, the United States, which once was able to act as a global buffer of sorts against poor harvests elsewhere, is now converting massive quantities of grain into fuel for cars, even as world grain consumption, which is already up to roughly 2.2 387

billion metric tons per year, is growing at an accelerating rate. A decade ago, the growth in consumption was 20 million tons per year. More recently it has risen by 40 million tons every year. But the rate at which the United States is converting grain into ethanol has grown even faster. In 2010, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain, of which 126 million tons went to ethanol fuel distilleries (up from 16 million tons in 2000). This massive capacity to convert grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil. So if oil goes to $150 per barrel or more, the price of grain will follow it upward as it becomes ever more profitable to convert grain into oil substitutes. And it's not just a U.S. phenomenon: Brazil, which distills ethanol from sugar cane, ranks second in production after the United States, while the European Union's goal of getting 10 percent of its transport energy from renewables, mostly biofuels, by 2020 is also diverting land from food crops. This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites. Take climate change: The rule of thumb among crop ecologists is that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the growing season optimum, farmers can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010 heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country's grain harvest by nearly 40 percent. While temperatures are rising, water tables are falling as farmers overpump for irrigation. This artificially inflates food production in the short run, creating a food bubble that bursts when aquifers are depleted and pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. In arid Saudi Arabia, irrigation had surprisingly enabled the country to be self-sufficient in wheat for more than 20 years; now, wheat production is collapsing because the non-replenishable aquifer the country uses for irrigation is largely depleted. The Saudis soon will be importing all their grain. Saudi Arabia is only one of some 18 countries with water-based food bubbles. All together, more than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling. The politically troubled Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where grain production has peaked and begun to decline because of water shortages, even as populations continue to grow. Grain production is already going down in Syria and Iraq and may soon decline in Yemen. But the largest food bubbles are in India and China. In India, where farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are falling and the wells are starting to go dry. The World Bank reports that 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping is concentrated in the North China Plain, which produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn. An estimated 130 million Chinese are currently fed by overpumping. How will these countries make up for the inevitable shortfalls when the aquifers are depleted? Even as we are running our wells dry, we are also mismanaging our soils, creating new deserts. Soil erosion as a result of overplowing and land mismanagement is undermining the productivity of one-third of the world's cropland. How severe is it? Look at satellite images showing two huge new dust bowls: one stretching across northern and western China and western Mongolia; the other across central Africa. Wang Tao, a leading Chinese desert scholar, reports that each year some 1,400 square miles of land in northern China turn to desert. In Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests have shrunk by half or more over the last few decades. North Korea and Haiti are also

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suffering from heavy soil losses; both countries face famine if they lose international food aid. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves. Beyond the changes in the environment that make it ever harder to meet human demand, there's an important intangible factor to consider: Over the last half-century or so, we have come to take agricultural progress for granted. Decade after decade, advancing technology underpinned steady gains in raising land productivity. Indeed, world grain yield per acre has tripled since 1950. But now that era is coming to an end in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, where farmers are already using all available technologies to raise yields. In effect, the farmers have caught up with the scientists. After climbing for a century, rice yield per acre in Japan has not risen at all for 16 years. In China, yields may level off soon. Just those two countries alone account for one-third of the world's rice harvest. Meanwhile, wheat yields have plateaued in Britain, France, and Germany -- Western Europe's three largest wheat producers. IN THIS ERA OF TIGHTENING world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the common good. The first signs of trouble came in 2007, when farmers began having difficulty keeping up with the growth in global demand for grain. Grain and soybean prices started to climb, tripling by mid-2008. In response, many exporting countries tried to control the rise of domestic food prices by restricting exports. Among them were Russia and Argentina, two leading wheat exporters. Vietnam, the No. 2 rice exporter, banned exports entirely for several months in early 2008. So did several other smaller exporters of grain. With exporting countries restricting exports in 2007 and 2008, importing countries panicked. No longer able to rely on the market to supply the grain they needed, several countries took the novel step of trying to negotiate long-term grain-supply agreements with exporting countries. The Philippines, for instance, negotiated a three-year agreement with Vietnam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. A delegation of Yemenis traveled to Australia with a similar goal in mind, but had no luck. In a seller's market, exporters were reluctant to make long-term commitments. Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China, took the unusual step in 2008 of buying or leasing land in other countries on which to grow grain for themselves. Most of these land acquisitions are in Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per year. Among the principal destinations were Ethiopia and Sudan, countries where millions of people are being sustained with food from the U.N. World Food Program. That the governments of these two countries are willing to sell land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad commentary on their leadership. By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these "land grabs" reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved -- an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to

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irrigate crops in Ethiopia or Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt must negotiate. The potential for conflict -- and not just over water -- is high. Many of the land deals have been made in secret, and in most cases, the land involved was already in use by villagers when it was sold or leased. Often those already farming the land were neither consulted about nor even informed of the new arrangements. And because there typically are no formal land titles in many developing-country villages, the farmers who lost their land have had little backing to bring their cases to court. Reporter John Vidal, writing in Britain's Observer, quotes Nyikaw Ochalla from Ethiopia's Gambella region: "The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands." Local hostility toward such land grabs is the rule, not the exception. In 2007, as food prices were starting to rise, China signed an agreement with the Philippines to lease 2.5 million acres of land slated for food crops that would be shipped home. Once word leaked, the public outcry -- much of it from Filipino farmers -- forced Manila to suspend the agreement. A similar uproar rocked Madagascar, where a South Korean firm, Daewoo Logistics, had pursued rights to more than 3 million acres of land. Word of the deal helped stoke a political furor that toppled the government and forced cancellation of the agreement. Indeed, few things are more likely to fuel insurgencies than taking land from people. Agricultural equipment is easily sabotaged. If ripe fields of grain are torched, they burn quickly. Not only are these deals risky, but foreign investors producing food in a country full of hungry people face another political question of how to get the grain out. Will villagers permit trucks laden with grain headed for port cities to proceed when they themselves may be on the verge of starvation? The potential for political instability in countries where villagers have lost their land and their livelihoods is high. Conflicts could easily develop between investor and host countries. These acquisitions represent a potential investment in agriculture in developing countries of an estimated $50 billion. But it could take many years to realize any substantial production gains. The public infrastructure for modern market-oriented agriculture does not yet exist in most of Africa. In some countries it will take years just to build the roads and ports needed to bring in agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and to export farm products. Beyond that, modern agriculture requires its own infrastructure: machine sheds, grain-drying equipment, silos, fertilizer storage sheds, fuel storage facilities, equipment repair and maintenance services, well-drilling equipment, irrigation pumps, and energy to power the pumps. Overall, development of the land acquired to date appears to be moving very slowly. So how much will all this expand world food output? We don't know, but the World Bank analysis indicates that only 37 percent of the projects will be devoted to food crops. Most of the land bought up so far will be used to produce biofuels and other industrial crops. Even if some of these projects do eventually boost land productivity, who will benefit? If virtually all the inputs -- the farm equipment, the fertilizer, the pesticides, the seeds --

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are brought in from abroad and if all the output is shipped out of the country, it will contribute little to the host country's economy. At best, locals may find work as farm laborers, but in highly mechanized operations, the jobs will be few. At worst, impoverished countries like Mozambique and Sudan will be left with less land and water with which to feed their already hungry populations. Thus far the land grabs have contributed more to stirring unrest than to expanding food production. And this rich country-poor country divide could grow even more pronounced -- and soon. This January, a new stage in the scramble among importing countries to secure food began to unfold when South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, announced that it was creating a new public-private entity that will be responsible for acquiring part of this grain. With an initial office in Chicago, the plan is to bypass the large international trading firms by buying grain directly from U.S. farmers. As the Koreans acquire their own grain elevators, they may well sign multiyear delivery contracts with farmers, agreeing to buy specified quantities of wheat, corn, or soybeans at a fixed price. Other importers will not stand idly by as South Korea tries to tie up a portion of the U.S. grain harvest even before it gets to market. The enterprising Koreans may soon be joined by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other leading importers. Although South Korea's initial focus is the United States, far and away the world's largest grain exporter, it may later consider brokering deals with Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other major exporters. This is happening just as China may be on the verge of entering the U.S. market as a potentially massive importer of grain. With China's 1.4 billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to compete with U.S. consumers for the U.S. grain harvest, cheap food, seen by many as an American birthright, may be coming to an end. No one knows where this intensifying competition for food supplies will go, but the world seems to be moving away from the international cooperation that evolved over several decades following World War II to an every-country-for-itself philosophy. Food nationalism may help secure food supplies for individual affluent countries, but it does little to enhance world food security. Indeed, the low-income countries that host land grabs or import grain will likely see their food situation deteriorate. AFTER THE CARNAGE of two world wars and the economic missteps that led to the Great Depression, countries joined together in 1945 to create the United Nations, finally realizing that in the modern world we cannot live in isolation, tempting though that might be. The International Monetary Fund was created to help manage the monetary system and promote economic stability and progress. Within the U.N. system, specialized agencies from the World Health Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) play major roles in the world today. All this has fostered international cooperation. But while the FAO collects and analyzes global agricultural data and provides technical assistance, there is no organized effort to ensure the adequacy of world food supplies. Indeed, most international negotiations on agricultural trade until recently focused on access to markets, with the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina persistently pressing Europe and Japan to open their highly protected agricultural markets. But in the first decade of this century, access to supplies has emerged as the overriding issue as the world transitions from an era of food surpluses to a new politics of food scarcity. At the same time, the U.S. food aid program that once worked to fend off famine wherever it threatened has largely been replaced by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), where 391

the United States is the leading donor. The WFP now has food-assistance operations in some 70 countries and an annual budget of $4 billion. There is little international coordination otherwise. French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- the reigning president of the G-20 -- is proposing to deal with rising food prices by curbing speculation in commodity markets. Useful though this may be, it treats the symptoms of growing food insecurity, not the causes, such as population growth and climate change. The world now needs to focus not only on agricultural policy, but on a structure that integrates it with energy, population, and water policies, each of which directly affects food security. But that is not happening. Instead, as land and water become scarcer, as the Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. Land grabbing, water grabbing, and buying grain directly from farmers in exporting countries are now integral parts of a global power struggle for food security. With grain stocks low and climate volatility increasing, the risks are also increasing. We are now so close to the edge that a breakdown in the food system could come at any time. Consider, for example, what would have happened if the 2010 heat wave that was centered in Moscow had instead been centered in Chicago. In round numbers, the 40 percent drop in Russia's hoped-for harvest of roughly 100 million tons cost the world 40 million tons of grain, but a 40 percent drop in the far larger U.S. grain harvest of 400 million tons would have cost 160 million tons. The world's carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) would have dropped to just 52 days of consumption. This level would have been not only the lowest on record, but also well below the 62-day carryover that set the stage for the 2007-2008 tripling of world grain prices. Then what? There would have been chaos in world grain markets. Grain prices would have climbed off the charts. Some grain-exporting countries, trying to hold down domestic food prices, would have restricted or even banned exports, as they did in 2007 and 2008. The TV news would have been dominated not by the hundreds of fires in the Russian countryside, but by footage of food riots in low-income grain-importing countries and reports of governments falling as hunger spread out of control. Oil- exporting countries that import grain would have been trying to barter oil for grain, and low-income grain importers would have lost out. With governments toppling and confidence in the world grain market shattered, the global economy could have started to unravel. We may not always be so lucky. At issue now is whether the world can go beyond focusing on the symptoms of the deteriorating food situation and instead attack the underlying causes. If we cannot produce higher crop yields with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will cease to be viable. And this goes far beyond farmers. If we cannot move at wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the hungry will almost certainly continue to expand. The time to act is now -- before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food?print= yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

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Why Recessions Are Good for Freedom Democracy is best served with a side of economic stagnation. BY CHARLES KENNY | MAY/JUNE 2011

"The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy," wrote American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in 1959, crystallizing the idea, now a received wisdom, that wealth is the inevitable handmaiden of political freedom. But recent events may be starting to topple this notion. In the Middle East and North Africa, it certainly isn't miracle growth rates that lie behind the stunning recent outburst of fervor for political rights. Average per capita GDP growth across the Middle East has limped along at a little higher than 1 percent a year over the past 30 years. And far from the development of a large, independent middle class of entrepreneurs, the region has seen sclerotic private-sector growth, with business opportunities limited to a privileged, increasingly elderly elite. All this should have kept conditions ripe for authoritarians, oligarchs -- anyone but democrats. And then along came Mohamed Bouazizi, a downtrodden fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, whose self-immolation set the Arab world on fire.

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So is the inverse true? Does lack of economic opportunity set the conditions for democratic upheaval? Economic growth is, of course, a source of popular contentment and stability in countries democratic and autocratic alike. But if you really want to spark a transition from autocracy to democracy, your best bet may be economic stagnation mixed with the flow of ideas. A much more plausible story linking economic performance to political change in the Middle East and beyond is that governments tend to fall after creating expectations in a bulging youth population that they then singularly fail to meet. Consider this: College enrollment in Egypt has climbed from 14 to 28 percent in the last two decades, and from 8 to 34 percent in Tunisia over the same period. But unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds in the Middle East and North Africa is the highest in the world, averaging more than 25 percent. In Egypt and Tunisia the numbers are even higher. To the extent that the economy played a role in recent events, it was by fanning a sense of injustice at hardship -- not by creating a class of bourgeois de Tocqueville fans. Nor is the Arab world an outlier. In a 2009 study, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues concluded that "high levels of income per capita do not promote transitions to democracy from non-democracy, nor do they forestall transitions to non-democracy from democracy." In fact, if the last century's worth of global evidence suggests anything, it is that countries seeing a decline in incomes move toward democracy considerably faster than countries that have seen income growth. The Soviet Union fell apart while the economy was shrinking, not in the 1950s when growth was rapid. Newly independent African states moved toward autocracy in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of comparatively successful economic performance. They moved back toward democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, when growth had slowed markedly. To say that recessions speed the fall of odious regimes is not to say that they are a necessary prerequisite; the overall link between economic shocks and political instability is still subject to debate. And Twitter, Facebook, and satellite TV surely played an important role in spreading the revolutionary fervor. But perhaps the real champions of liberty are the oligarchs and autocrats who promised opportunity and then failed to deliver. Surely they should understand: It's the economy, stupid. Charles Kenny, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, is author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More. His column, "The Optimist," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com. CHARLES KENNY Why Recessions Are Good for Freedom Democracy is best served with a side of economic stagnation. MAY/JUNE 2011 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/why_recessions_are_good_for_freed om

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ELIZABETH DICKINSON The Future Of Food Leading Experts Tell Us What They Think Is Coming Next. MAY/JUNE 2011 COMPILED BY ELIZABETH DICKINSON | MAY/JUNE 2011 Three years ago, as markets were heading toward collapse, one set of prices made a startling and disruptive leap: food. With rice and wheat more than doubling, riots broke out from Haiti to Bangladesh, to Cameroon to Egypt. Then oil prices went down and the crisis waned. Today, however, it seems that was only a temporary reprieve. Inflation in the developing world is pushing up food prices again, floods and fires last year destroyed a significant chunk of the world's wheat harvest, and oil is shooting back up as well, bringing with it the cost of fertilizer and shipping. Worse, with the world's population set to hit 9 billion by 2050 on an increasingly arid globe, what we now call crisis may become the status quo. How did things get so bad? And is there any turning back?

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Survey participants (58): Hakan Altinay, Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, Emmanuel Asmah, Christopher A. Bailey, Robert Bates, David Beckmann, Andrew Bent, Pascal Bergeret, Nancy Birdsall, Masum Burak, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, David Byrne, Jake Caldwell, Edward Cameron, Hank Cardello, Paul Collier, Richard Conant, Raj Desai, Dickson D. Despommier, Shenggen Fan, Ted Friend, Julian Gaspar, Wenonah Hauter, Kjell Havnevik, Peter Hazell, Eric Holt-Giménez, Charles Hurburgh, Sallie James, Monty Jones, Calestous Juma, Charles Kenny, Homi Kharas, Mwangi S. Kimenyi, Russell Libby, Will Martin, Peter Matlon, Jeffrey McNeely, David Michel, Todd Moss, Dambisa Moyo, Johanna Nesseth Tuttle, Raymond C. Offenheiser Jr., Robert Paarlberg, Gregory Page, Carlo Petrini, Norman Piccioni, James Roth, Sara J. Scherr, Glen Shinn, Iain Shuker, Fawzi Al-Sultan, Yurie Tanimichi Hoberg, Mark Tercek, Carl-Gustaf Thornström, Camilla Toulmin, Kristin Wedding, Patrick C. Westhoff, Steve Wiggins. Data sources: “The Future of Food and Farming” (2011), Government Office for Science, London; U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Elizabeth Dickinson The Future Of Food Leading Experts Tell Us What They Think Is Coming Next. May/June 2011 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_future_of_food?print=yes&hidec omments=yes&page=full

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More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World But what if the experts are wrong? BY ABHIJIT BANERJEE, ESTHER DUFLO | MAY/JUNE 2011

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic 400

colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice. But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits- all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage. Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap." Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them. But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly's with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies. The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments. In this sense, the aid pessimists are actually quite optimistic about the way the world works. According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap. This debate cannot be solved in the abstract. To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials -- similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug -- to understand what works and what doesn't in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we'd have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives. Take, for example, Pak Solhin, who lives in a small village in West Java, Indonesia. He once explained to us exactly how a poverty trap worked. His parents used to have a bit of land, but they also had 13 children and had to build so many houses for each of them and their families that there was no land left for cultivation. Pak Solhin had been working as a casual agricultural worker, which paid up to 10,000 rupiah per day (about $2) for work in the fields. A recent hike in fertilizer and fuel prices, however, had forced farmers to economize. The local farmers decided not to cut wages, Pak Solhin 401

told us, but to stop hiring workers instead. As a result, in the two months before we met him in 2008, he had not found a single day of agricultural labor. He was too weak for the most physical work, too inexperienced for more skilled labor, and, at 40, too old to be an apprentice. No one would hire him. Pak Solhin, his wife, and their three children took drastic steps to survive. His wife left for Jakarta, some 80 miles away, where she found a job as a maid. But she did not earn enough to feed the children. The oldest son, a good student, dropped out of school at 12 and started as an apprentice on a construction site. The two younger children were sent to live with their grandparents. Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on fish he caught at a nearby lake. His brother fed him once in a while. In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three. Pak Solhin appeared to be out of options, and he clearly attributed his problem to a lack of food. As he saw it, farmers weren't interested in hiring him because they feared they couldn't pay him enough to avoid starvation; and if he was starving, he would be useless in the field. What he described was the classic nutrition-based poverty trap, as it is known in the academic world. The idea is simple: The human body needs a certain number of calories just to survive. So when someone is very poor, all the food he or she can afford is barely enough to allow for going through the motions of living and earning the meager income used to buy that food. But as people get richer, they can buy more food and that extra food goes into building strength, allowing people to produce much more than they need to eat merely to stay alive. This creates a link between income today and income tomorrow: The very poor earn less than they need to be able to do significant work, but those who have enough to eat can work even more. There's the poverty trap: The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer and eat even better, and get stronger and even richer, and the gap keeps increasing. But though Pak Solhin's explanation of how someone might get trapped in starvation was perfectly logical, there was something vaguely troubling about his narrative. We met him not in war-infested Sudan or in a flooded area of Bangladesh, but in a village in prosperous Java, where, even after the increase in food prices in 2007 and 2008, there was clearly plenty of food available and a basic meal did not cost much. He was still eating enough to survive; why wouldn't someone be willing to offer him the extra bit of nutrition that would make him productive in return for a full day's work? More generally, although a hunger-based poverty trap is certainly a logical possibility, is it really relevant for most poor people today? What's the best way, if any, for the world to help? THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY has certainly bought into the idea that poverty traps exist -- and that they are the reason that millions are starving. The first U.N. Millennium Development Goal, for instance, is to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger." In many countries, the definition of poverty itself has been connected to food; the thresholds for determining that someone was poor were originally calculated as the budget necessary to buy a certain number of calories, plus some other indispensable purchases, such as housing. A "poor" person has essentially been classified as someone without enough to eat. So it is no surprise that government efforts to help the poor are largely based on the idea that the poor desperately need food and that quantity is what matters. Food subsidies are ubiquitous in the Middle East: Egypt spent $3.8 billion on food subsidies in the 2008 402

fiscal year, some 2 percent of its GDP. Indonesia distributes subsidized rice. Many states in India have a similar program. In the state of Orissa, for example, the poor are entitled to 55 pounds of rice a month at about 1 rupee per pound, less than 20 percent of the market price. Currently, the Indian Parliament is debating a Right to Food Act, which would allow people to sue the government if they are starving. Delivering such food aid is a logistical nightmare. In India it is estimated that more than half of the wheat and one-third of the rice gets "lost" along the way. To support direct food aid in this circumstance, one would have to be quite convinced that what the poor need more than anything is more grain. But what if the poor are not, in general, eating too little food? What if, instead, they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of nutrients needed to be successful, healthy adults? What if the poor aren't starving, but choosing to spend their money on other priorities? Development experts and policymakers would have to completely reimagine the way they think about hunger. And governments and aid agencies would need to stop pouring money into failed programs and focus instead on finding new ways to truly improve the lives of the world's poorest. Consider India, one of the great puzzles in this age of food crises. The standard media story about the country, at least when it comes to food, is about the rapid rise of obesity and diabetes as the urban upper-middle class gets richer. Yet the real story of nutrition in India over the last quarter-century, as Princeton professor Angus Deaton and Jean Drèze, a professor at Allahabad University and a special advisor to the Indian government, have shown, is not that Indians are becoming fatter: It is that they are in fact eating less and less. Despite the country's rapid economic growth, per capita calorie consumption in India has declined; moreover, the consumption of all other nutrients except fat also appears to have gone down among all groups, even the poorest. Today, more than three-quarters of the population live in households whose per capita calorie consumption is less than 2,100 calories in urban areas and 2,400 in rural areas -- numbers that are often cited as "minimum requirements" in India for those engaged in manual labor. Richer people still eat more than poorer people. But at all levels of income, the share of the budget devoted to food has declined and people consume fewer calories. What is going on? The change is not driven by declining incomes; by all accounts, Indians are making more money than ever before. Nor is it because of rising food prices -- between the early 1980s and 2005, food prices declined relative to the prices of other things, both in rural and urban India. Although food prices have increased again since 2005, Indians began eating less precisely when the price of food was going down. So the poor, even those whom the FAO would classify as hungry on the basis of what they eat, do not seem to want to eat much more even when they can. Indeed, they seem to be eating less. What could explain this? Well, to start, let's assume that the poor know what they are doing. After all, they are the ones who eat and work. If they could be tremendously more productive and earn much more by eating more, then they probably would. So could it be that eating more doesn't actually make us particularly more productive, and as a result, there is no nutrition-based poverty trap? One reason the poverty trap might not exist is that most people have enough to eat. We live in a world today that is theoretically capable of feeding every person on the planet. In 1996, the FAO estimated that world food production was enough to provide at least 2,700 calories per person per day. Starvation still exists, but only as a result of the way 403

food gets shared among us. There is no absolute scarcity. Using price data from the Philippines, we calculated the cost of the cheapest diet sufficient to give 2,400 calories. It would cost only about 21 cents a day, very affordable even for the very poor (the worldwide poverty line is set at roughly a dollar per day). The catch is, it would involve eating only bananas and eggs, something no one would like to do day in, day out. But so long as people are prepared to eat bananas and eggs when they need to, we should find very few people stuck in poverty because they do not get enough to eat. Indian surveys bear this out: The percentage of people who say they do not have enough food has dropped dramatically over time, from 17 percent in 1983 to 2 percent in 2004. So, perhaps people eat less because they are less hungry. And perhaps they are really less hungry, despite eating fewer calories. It could be that because of improvements in water and sanitation, they are leaking fewer calories in bouts of diarrhea and other ailments. Or maybe they are less hungry because of the decline of heavy physical work. With the availability of drinking water in villages, women do not need to carry heavy loads for long distances; improvements in transportation have reduced the need to travel on foot; in even the poorest villages, flour is now milled using a motorized mill, instead of women grinding it by hand. Using the average calorie requirements calculated by the Indian Council of Medical Research, Deaton and Drèze note that the decline in calorie consumption over the last quarter- century could be entirely explained by a modest decrease in the number of people engaged in heavy physical work. Beyond India, one hidden assumption in our description of the poverty trap is that the poor eat as much as they can. If there is any chance that by eating a bit more the poor could start doing meaningful work and get out of the poverty trap zone, then they should eat as much as possible. Yet most people living on less than a dollar a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories. But they do not. In an 18-country data set we assembled on the lives of the poor, food represents 36 to 79 percent of consumption among the rural extremely poor, and 53 to 74 percent among their urban counterparts. It is not because they spend all the rest on other necessities. In Udaipur, India, for example, we find that the typical poor household could spend up to 30 percent more on food, if it completely cut expenditures on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals. The poor seem to have many choices, and they don't choose to spend as much as they can on food. Equally remarkable is that even the money that people do spend on food is not spent to maximize the intake of calories or micronutrients. Studies have shown that when very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don't put everything into getting more calories. Instead, they buy better-tasting, more expensive calories. In one study conducted in two regions of China, researchers offered randomly selected poor households a large subsidy on the price of the basic staple (wheat noodles in one region, rice in the other). We usually expect that when the price of something goes down, people buy more of it. The opposite happened. Households that received subsidies for rice or wheat consumed less of those two foods and ate more shrimp and meat, even though their staples now cost less. Overall, the caloric intake of those who received the subsidy did not increase (and may even have decreased), despite the fact that their purchasing power had increased. Nor did the nutritional content improve in any other sense. The likely reason is that because the rice and wheat noodles were cheap but not particularly tasty, feeling richer might actually have made them consume less of

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those staples. This reasoning suggests that at least among these very poor urban households, getting more calories was not a priority: Getting better-tasting ones was. All told, many poor people might eat fewer calories than we -- or the FAO -- think is appropriate. But this does not seem to be because they have no other choice; rather, they are not hungry enough to seize every opportunity to eat more. So perhaps there aren't a billion "hungry" people in the world after all. NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY that the logic of the hunger-based poverty trap is flawed. The idea that better nutrition would propel someone on the path to prosperity was almost surely very important at some point in history, and it may still be today. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel calculated that in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, food production did not provide enough calories to sustain a full working population. This could explain why there were large numbers of beggars -- they were literally incapable of any work. The pressure of just getting enough food to survive seems to have driven some people to take rather extreme steps. There was an epidemic of witch killing in Europe during the Little Ice Age (from the mid- 1500s to 1800), when crop failures were common and fish was less abundant. Even today, Tanzania experiences a rash of such killings whenever there is a drought -- a convenient way to get rid of an unproductive mouth to feed at times when resources are very tight. Families, it seems, suddenly discover that an older woman living with them (usually a grandmother) is a witch, after which she gets chased away or killed by others in the village. But the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for the occasional lack of food to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty on a large scale. This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has shown, most recent famines have been caused not because food wasn't available but because of bad governance -- institutional failures that led to poor distribution of the available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere. As Sen put it, "No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press." Should we let it rest there, then? Can we assume that the poor, though they may be eating little, do eat as much as they need to? That also does not seem plausible. While Indians may prefer to buy things other than food as they get richer, they and their children are certainly not well nourished by any objective standard. Anemia is rampant; body-mass indices are some of the lowest in the world; almost half of children under 5 are much too short for their age, and one-fifth are so skinny that they are considered to be "wasted." And this is not without consequences. There is a lot of evidence that children suffering from malnutrition generally grow into less successful adults. In Kenya, children who were given deworming pills in school for two years went to school longer and earned, as young adults, 20 percent more than children in comparable schools who received deworming for just one year. Worms contribute to anemia and general malnutrition, essentially because they compete with the child for nutrients. And the negative impact of undernutrition starts before birth. In Tanzania, to cite just one example, children born to mothers who received sufficient amounts of iodine during pregnancy completed between one-third and one-half of a year more schooling than their siblings who were in

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utero when their mothers weren't being treated. It is a substantial increase, given that most of these children will complete only four or five years of schooling in total. In fact, the study concludes that if every mother took iodine capsules, there would be a 7.5 percent increase in the total educational attainment of children in Central and Southern Africa. This, in turn, could measurably affect lifetime productivity. Better nutrition matters for adults, too. In another study, in Indonesia, researchers tested the effects of boosting people's intake of iron, a key nutrient that prevents anemia. They found that iron supplements made men able to work harder and significantly boosted income. A year's supply of iron-fortified fish sauce cost the equivalent of $6, and for a self-employed male, the yearly gain in earnings was nearly $40 -- an excellent investment. If the gains are so obvious, why don't the poor eat better? Eating well doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive. Most mothers could surely afford iodized salt, which is now standard in many parts of the world, or one dose of iodine every two years (at 51 cents per dose). Poor households could easily get a lot more calories and other nutrients by spending less on expensive grains (like rice and wheat), sugar, and processed foods, and more on leafy vegetables and coarse grains. But in Kenya, when the NGO that was running the deworming program asked parents in some schools to pay a few cents for deworming their children, almost all refused, thus depriving their children of hundreds of dollars of extra earnings over their lifetime. Why? And why did anemic Indonesian workers not buy iron-fortified fish sauce on their own? One answer is that they don't believe it will matter -- their employers may not realize that they are more productive now. (In fact, in Indonesia, earnings improved only for the self-employed workers.) But this does not explain why all pregnant women in India aren't using only iodine-fortified salt, which is now available in every village. Another possibility is that people may not realize the value of feeding themselves and their children better -- not everyone has the right information, even in the United States. Moreover, people tend to be suspicious of outsiders who tell them that they should change their diet. When rice prices went up sharply in 1966 and 1967, the chief minister of West Bengal suggested that eating less rice and more vegetables would be both good for people's health and easier on their budgets. This set off a flurry of outrage, and the chief minister was greeted by protesters bearing garlands of vegetables wherever he went. It is simply not very easy to learn about the value of many of these nutrients based on personal experience. Iodine might make your children smarter, but the difference is not huge, and in most cases you will not find out either way for many years. Iron, even if it makes people stronger, does not suddenly turn you into a superhero. The $40 extra a year the self-employed man earned may not even have been apparent to him, given the many ups and downs of his weekly income. So it shouldn't surprise us that the poor choose their foods not mainly for their cheap prices and nutritional value, but for how good they taste. George Orwell, in his masterful description of the life of poor British workers in The Road to Wigan Pier, observes: The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of

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the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn't forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food. Poor people in the developing world spend large amounts on weddings, dowries, and christenings. Part of the reason is probably that they don't want to lose face, when the social custom is to spend a lot on those occasions. In South Africa, poor families often spend so lavishly on funerals that they skimp on food for months afterward. And don't underestimate the power of factors like boredom. Life can be quite dull in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall. And not a lot of work, either. In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agriculture and about 30 days in construction that year. Otherwise, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. All three men lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find enough money to give their children a good education. But they each had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone. This is something that Orwell captured as well, when he described how poor families survived the Depression: Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by reducing their standards. But they don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way around -- the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased. These "indulgences" are not the impulsive purchases of people who are not thinking hard about what they are doing. Oucha Mbarbk did not buy his TV on credit -- he saved up over many months to scrape enough money together, just as the mother in India starts saving for her young daughter's wedding by buying a small piece of jewelry here and a stainless-steel bucket there. We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it. We asked Oucha Mbarbk what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better-tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his 407

family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!" http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are _hungry_in_the_world?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

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Think Again: Dictators Arab autocrats may be tottering, but the world's tyrants aren't all quaking in their steel-toed boots. BY GRAEME ROBERTSON | MAY/JUNE 2011

"Dictatorships are all about the dictator." Rarely, if ever. In the first months after the Arab revolutions began, the world's televisions were filled with instantly iconic images of a crumbling old order: the Ben Ali clan's seaside villa on fire in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak's stilted pre-resignation speeches in Egypt, Muammar al-Qaddafi's rambling, defiant diatribes from a bombed-out house in Libya. They were a reminder that one of the most enduring political archetypes of the 20th century, the ruthless dictator, had persisted into the 21st. How persistent are they? The U.S. NGO Freedom House this year listed 47 countries as "not free" -- and ruled over by a range of authoritarian dictators. Their numbers have certainly fallen from the last century, which brought us quite a list: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Khomeini, and a host of others now synonymous with murderous, repressive government. But invoking such tyrants, while a useful shorthand in international politics, unfortunately reinforces a troublesome myth: that dictatorships are really only about dictators. The image of a single omnipotent leader ensconced in a mystery-shrouded Kremlin or a garishly ornate presidential palace took hold during the Cold War. But dictatorships don't just run themselves. Performing the basic tasks expected of even a despotic government -- establishing order, levying taxes, controlling borders, and overseeing the economy -- requires the cooperation of a whole range of players: businessmen, 409

bureaucrats, leaders of labor unions and political parties, and, of course, specialists in coercion like the military and security forces. And keeping them all happy and working together isn't any easier for a dictator than it is for a democrat. Different dictatorships have different tools for keeping things running. The communist regimes of the 20th century relied on mass-membership political parties to maintain discipline, as did some non-communist autocracies. The authoritarian system that ruled Mexico for 70 years -- what Peruvian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa once called "the perfect dictatorship" -- was orchestrated by the nationalist Institutional Revolutionary Party, a massive organization whose influence extended from the president's compound in Los Pinos to the local seats of government in every tiny village. Egypt's recently departed Hosni Mubarak was similarly buttressed for three decades by his National Democratic Party. Then there's the junta option: a military-run dictatorship. These have advantages -- discipline and order, and the capacity to repress opponents, among them -- but also drawbacks, most notably a small natural constituency that doesn't extend far beyond the epaulet-wearing classes. The generals who ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 solved this problem by offering controlled access to a parliament in which economic elites and other powerful interests could voice their demands and participate in governance. However, this proved to be a difficult balancing act for a military that found it hard to manage elections and the pressures of a public increasingly dissatisfied with its record on the economy and human rights, and the generals ultimately headed back to their barracks. At the extreme, some authoritarian governments do approximate the dictator-centric regimes of the popular imagination. Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for more than 30 years, and the Duvalier dynasty in Haiti are classic examples. Here, order is maintained largely by distributing patronage through personal or other networks: clans, ethnic groups, and the like. But paradoxically, these are the most unstable dictatorships. Keeping a government operating smoothly is difficult in the absence of a broad organizational or institutional base, and the whole system rises and falls with the fate of one man. BULENT KILIC/AFP/GETTY IMAGES "The power of the masses can topple autocrats." Not by itself. In 1989, people power swept across Eastern Europe. Mass strikes in Poland brought the country's communist rulers to the table to negotiate their way out of power. After hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Prague's Wenceslas Square, one of Eastern Europe's most brutal communist regimes crumbled and handed over power in Czechoslovakia to a motley crew of playwrights, priests, academics, and friends of Frank Zappa. In East Germany, teeming crowds simply walked out of communism's westernmost showpiece to seek asylum in, and then reunification with, the West. And people power, as Ferdinand Marcos found to his dismay in the Philippines in 1986, was not limited to communism or Eastern Europe. But there was far more to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and autocratic regimes elsewhere than the impressive moral authority of crowds. As the Chinese showed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, capitulating to pro-democracy activists in the streets is hardly the only option. There have been plenty of other places where people power has failed disastrously in the face of a well-organized military response. In 410

Hungary, the popular uprising of 1956 was brutally crushed by Red Army tanks. Burma's 2007 Saffron Revolution produced little more than life sentences for the country's dissident Buddhist monks; Iran's 2009 Green Revolution fell to the batons of the Basij two years later. What distinguishes people power's successes from its failures? Size, of course, matters, but autocrats tend to fall to crowds only when they have first lost the support of key allies at home or abroad. The Egyptian military's decision to abandon Mubarak and protect the protesters gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square, for instance, was crucial to the president's downfall this February. How can demonstrators persuade regime stalwarts to jump ship? In Eastern Europe, the geopolitical sea change engineered by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his allies obviously helped -- but you can't exactly bring down the Iron Curtain again. Regimes with professionalized militaries separate from civilian authorities might be more vulnerable to defections; regimes based on highly ideological political parties are less likely to see their members break ranks. The credible threat of ending up at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague or having your Swiss bank accounts frozen can work wonders as well. But unfortunately for protesters, predicting authoritarian reactions to uprisings is far from an exact science -- which is little consolation when your head is being cracked by a riot cop. "The more brutal the dictator, the harder to oust." Unfortunately, true. Reflecting on the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the "most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform." What was correct in the 18th century is, sadly, still true in the 21st. It is probably not a coincidence that the list of authoritarians removed by street protest in recent years is largely populated by rulers whose regimes allowed at least a modicum of political opposition. Tyrants like Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, Georgia's Eduard Shevardnadze, Kyrgyzstan's Kurmanbek Bakiyev, and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak may have been horrible in many ways, but their regimes were undoubtedly more permissive than those of many who have held onto power to this day. If this is true, why do any dictators allow opposition in the first place? And why don't they simply go the full Tiananmen at the first sign of protest? Because running a truly ghastly dictatorship is tougher today than it used to be. The interconnections of 21st-century civilization make it harder to control information and far more difficult and costly to isolate a country from the outside world than it was in the 20th. The death of communism, meanwhile, has robbed leftists and right-wing strongmen alike of a cover story for their anti-democratic practices. In the past decade, rulers of countries such as Uzbekistan and Yemen have used the West's newfound fear of militant Islam -- and the logistical necessities of the United States' post-9/11 wars -- to similar ends, but they number far fewer than the ideological tyrants who divvied up whole continents under Cold War pretexts a generation ago. The result is that in more and more places, rulers are compelled to justify their practices by adding a touch of "democracy." Vladimir Putin chose to stand down -- though not far down -- in 2008 rather than break Russia's constitutional ban against a third consecutive presidential term, and even the Chinese Communist Party allows some competitive elections at the town and village levels. There are exceptions to this trend, of course: Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Burma spring to mind. But such regimes feel 411

increasingly like remnants of the late, unlamented 20th century, rather than harbingers of things to come. "Personality cults are crazy." Crazy like a fox. Do North Koreans really believe that Kim Jong Il can change the weather based on his mood? Do Libyans think Qaddafi's Green Book is a brilliant work of political philosophy? Do Turkmen really think that the Ruhnama, the religious text authored by their late post-Soviet dictator -- and self-styled spiritual leader -- Saparmurat Niyazov, is a sacred scripture on par with the Quran and the Bible? Probably not, but for the dictators' purposes, they don't have to. As political scientist Xavier Márquez has argued, personality cults are as strategic as they are narcissistic. Part of the problem that dictators' would-be opponents face is figuring out who else opposes the leader; compelling the populace to publicly embrace preposterous myths makes that harder still. Official mythmaking is also a means of enforcing discipline within the regime. Stalin -- the progenitor of the modern dictator personality cult -- understood well that his self-mythologizing would be too much for some of his old comrades to swallow; Lenin, after all, had specifically warned against it. But those who might have objected were swiftly dispatched. For the apparatchiks who remained, submitting to the cult was humiliating -- and humiliation is a powerful tool for controlling potential rivals. But personality cults, like most authoritarian technologies, have their drawbacks. The bigger the cult, the bigger the challenge of succession. Heirs to the throne really have just two options: dismantle the cult or go one better. The former is perilous; in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev's famous 1956 secret speech -- the posthumous critique of Stalin that gave us the term "personality cult" -- was, after all, secret, deemed too explosive for the Soviet public. Today, North Korea's ruling Kim family illustrates the hazards of the alternative: Now that the official newspapers have already reported that the current Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, has mastered teleportation, what's his son and newly designated heir, Kim Jong Un, supposed to do for an encore? "Sometimes it takes a dictator to get the job done." Actually it doesn't. The past two years have not done much to advertise the abilities of the Western democratic model of government to take large and painful but necessary actions. Frustrated over everything from a failure to balance budgets to an apparent inability to face up to the challenges of climate change, more than a few Westerners have turned their gaze wistfully toward the heavy-handed rule of the Communist Party in China. "One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks," the New York Times' Thomas Friedman wrote in a 2009 column. "But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages." This March, Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times about how "China has achieved greatness." This romanticizing of authoritarianism is not new; Augusto Pinochet's murderous regime in 1970s Chile was once cheered by many in Washington as an ugly but necessary instrument of economic reform. Yearning for a strong hand, however, is rooted in several fallacies. First, it conflates the failings of one form of democracy -- in Friedman's case, the gridlocked American version -- with an entire category of governance. Second, it assumes that dictators are more able than democrats to undertake unpopular but essential reforms. But unpopular decisions don't simply become popular 412

because an autocrat is making them -- just remember the late North Korean finance chief Pak Nam Gi, who ended up in front of a firing squad following the public backlash against the confiscatory currency reform the Kim regime pushed through in 2009. In fact, authoritarians, lacking the legitimacy of popular election, may be even more fearful of upsetting the apple cart than democrats are. In Putin's Russia, for instance, leaders are unable to dial back the massive military expenditures that keep key constituencies quiet but that even their own ministers recognize to be unsustainable. Besides, suggesting that dictators can force better policies upon their people assumes that a dictator is likely to know what those better policies are. The idea that there are technocratic solutions to most economic, social, and environmental problems might be comforting, but it is usually wrong. Such questions rarely have purely technical, apolitical answers -- and only in a democracy can they be aired and answered in a way that, if not entirely fair, is at least broadly acceptable. "Digital revolutions are bad news for autocrats." Not necessarily. New technologies -- from the fax machine to the Internet to Facebook -- have invariably been heralded as forces for upending dictatorial regimes. And of course, if cell phones and Twitter made no difference at all, then pro-democracy activists wouldn't use them. But the real test of technology is its ability to shift the balance of power between dictators and those trying to unseat them -- to make revolutions more frequent, faster, or more successful. And though it's too early to know for sure, the arc of revolutions in 2011 doesn't look that different so far from the lower- tech upheavals of 1989, or, for that matter, 1848. What makes a difference is how quickly authoritarians can work out how to counter a new innovation, or use it themselves. Sometimes this happens quickly: The barricades invented in Paris that made the revolutions of 1848 possible were briefly useful, but militaries soon figured out how to use cannons against them. Similarly, today's authoritarians are already learning how to use cell phones and Facebook to identify and track their opponents. In Iran, for instance, Facebook posts, tweets, and emails were used as evidence against protesters in the wake of the failed Green Revolution. As it happens, some of the most enduring innovations have been the least technological. Mass protests, petitions, and general strikes, though now ubiquitous tactics, were at first ideas as novel as Twitter, and they have continued to play a crucial role in spreading democracy and civil rights around the world. It's a useful reminder that not all the new tools that matter come in a box or over a Wi-Fi connection. "Dictatorship is on the way out." Not in our lifetime. The recent upheavals in the Middle East, though inspiring, have happened against a gloomy backdrop. Freedom House reported that in 2010, for the fifth year in a row, countries with improving political and civil rights were outnumbered by ones where they were getting worse -- the longest such run since the organization started collecting data in 1972. Two decades after the Soviet Union's collapse, democracy may be robust in formerly communist Central Europe, Latin America, and even the Balkans, but most former Soviet states remain quite authoritarian. And though a few Arab countries are newly freed of their tyrants, they are still very much in transition. Being poor or corrupt, as Egypt and Tunisia are, does not rule out being democratic -- think of India -- but it does make it harder to build a stable democratic system. 413

Nevertheless, the Arab revolutions have offered a spark of hope, one that has clearly worried dictators in places as far off as Moscow and Beijing. The question is what the world's liberal democracies should do, or not do, to push things along. Survey the United States' long history of democracy-promotion successes and failures, and the inescapable lesson, even setting aside recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that less is usually more. Providing aid -- as the United States did to the opposition in places like Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia -- or simply setting an example are better means of toppling a dictator than actually doing the toppling. But in either case, it's important to remember that powerful Western friends aren't everything. After all, the lesson of Tunisia and Egypt is that dictators sometimes fall despite, not because of, American help. GRAEME ROBERTSON Think Again: Dictators. Arab autocrats may be tottering, but the world's tyrants aren't all quaking in their steel-toed boots. MAY/JUNE 2011 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/think_again_dictators?print=yes&hid ecomments=yes&page=full

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