More on the Kashmiri Intifada

The NY Times hesitates to use the "torture" word when it comes some of the Cheney/Rove monsters.  But, "intifada" comes easy to the paper.  Not that it is an inappropriate word to describe the situation in Kashmir; hey, even I have been blogging along those lines! 

Anyway, peace in Kashmir looks so difficult from so far away.  The photo on the left is from the NY Times story: "Aabid Nabi, right, sat next to his brother Fida Nabi, who was shot in the head during a protest, in a hospital in Srinagar. Mr. Nabi later died from his injury."

“What we are seeing today is the complete rebound effect of 20 years of oppression,” said Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, the chief cleric at Srinagar’s main mosque and a moderate separatist leader. Kashmiris, he said, are “angry, humiliated and willing to face death.”
This summer there have been nearly 900 clashes between protesters and security forces, which have left more than 50 civilians dead, most of them from gunshot wounds. While more than 1,200 soldiers have been wounded by rock-throwing crowds, not one has been killed in the unrest, leading to questions about why Indian security forces are using deadly force against unarmed civilians — and why there is so little international outcry.

 This is certainly looking more and more like the Gaza situation where a generation has known nothing but internal unrest, and a sense of hopelessness.

Over at the BBC, Soutik Biswas echoes nearly identical sentiments:

Things are looking grimmer than ever before. It's a summer that could turn out to be another defining point in the valley's tortured history. A whole generation of children of the conflict - Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer evocatively calls it their "war of adolescence" - who grew up in the days of militancy and violence in the early 1990s are driving the protests today. (Seven out of 10 Kashmiris are below 25.) Growing up in the shadow of the gun and what they say is "perpetual humiliation" by the security forces, they are angry, alienated and distrustful of the state. As prominent opposition leader Mehbooba Mufti tells me when I visit her at her heavily secured home overlooking the stunning Dal lake: "If these young men are not given something to look forward to, God help Kashmir." The valley, most residents say, is in the early stages of an intifada.

 Biswas ends his report on a tough emotional note, which conveys the urgency of the Kashmir issue:

One mother emptied a cupboard and a suitcase full of of her 14 yr-old boy's belongings for me. Wamiq Farooq had gone to play in the neighbourhood when a tear gas shell fired by the troops exploded on his head. Doctors tried to revive him for an hour at the hospital before declaring him dead.

Now, sitting on a brown rug in a modest family home, his mother brings out Wamiq's red tie, red belt, white cap, fraying blue uniform, half a dozen school trophies, report cards, school certificates and then his pithy death certificate. "He is sure to be a face in the crowd," writes his school principal on one certificate praising Wamiq, the Tom and Jerry cartoons and science-loving teenaged son of a street vendor father. Then she slowly puts back Wamiq - his life and death - back into the suitcase and the cupboard and tells me, her eyes welling up: "I never understood why Kashmiri people demand freedom. After Wamiq's death, I do. I want freedom too. So that my children can return home unharmed and in peace."

Is Israel losing it? ...

Prior to the elections that brought Netanyahu back as the prime minister, I had hoped that Tzipi Livni would win.  I didn't know much about Livni, but never cared for Netanyahu ... If Livini had become the PM, there is a good probability that incidents such as the metaphorical slap on Joe Biden's face, or the crazy Dubai killing, or the latest one--the commando assault on the Gaza aid flotilla--might not have happened ...


Like we didn't have enough problems already!!!
Turkey is ready to sever diplomatic ties with Israel.  The US is in one hell of a tough spot now: it will find it difficult to condemn Israel's actions.  If it is not categorical in critiquing Israel, then the US will lose that much more ground in the Islamic world.  This will make the US' job in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan even more difficult.  I would assume that by now Obama's big time speech in Cairo has been thrown into the trash ...

Meanwhile, the Israel-Palestinain two-state issue

Thomas Friedman makes a lot of sense when he is not being a master manipulator of metaphors.  The fewer the metaphors, the more powerful and succinct his argument.

Consider this for instance, from his column:

We’re getting perilously close to closing the window on a two-state solution, because the two chief window-closers — Hamas in Gaza and the fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank — have been in the driver’s seats. Hamas is busy making a two-state solution inconceivable, while the settlers have steadily worked to make it impossible.

If Hamas continues to obtain and use longer- and longer-range rockets, there is no way any Israeli government can or will tolerate independent Palestinian control of the West Bank, because a rocket from there can easily close the Tel Aviv airport and shut down Israel’s economy.

And if the Jewish settlers continue with their “natural growth” to devour the West Bank, it will also be effectively off the table. No Israeli government has mustered the will to take down even the “illegal,” unauthorized settlements, despite promises to the U.S. to do so, so it’s getting hard to see how the “legal” settlements will ever be removed. What is needed from Israel’s Feb. 10 elections is a centrist, national unity government that can resist the blackmail of the settlers, and the rightist parties that protect them, to still implement a two-state solution.

And, in case you want to see for yourself what Friedman is referring to, well, here is a Sixty Minutes take on it:

Hey, good luck to you, George Mitchell, on getting that prized job as the Middle East Envoy!

Eyeless in Gaza

Roger Cohen's short piece in the NY Review of Books has a title that is a play on the old idea that an eye for an eye will end up leaving everybody blind.  Actually, Cohen has an even better metaphor to describe the tragic and atrocious Israeli military campaign in Gaza: "As Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations and former soldier in the Israeli army, has observed, the Gaza offensive "seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash."

Cohen writes that: 

Only in the Middle East do the dead rule. As Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, once observed, the dead vote in Jerusalem. Their demand for blood is, it seems, inexhaustible. Their graves will not be quieted. Since 1948 and Israel's creation, retribution has reigned between the Jewish and Palestinian national movements. 

Figting over land: Gaza, and Eelam

The conflict (war?) in Gaza is to the Israeli government the final push to silence Hamas and its acts of terrorism.  Meanwhile, in another part of the planet, the Sri Lankan government is in what might be the final stages of the push to silence the Tamil Tigers and put an end to the civil war that started in 1983.

Land, as we all know, is finite, and a good example of what economists describe as a private good--owning a piece of land means that the owner can exclude somebody else from owning it.  Of course, we could also peacefully co-exist ....

The Economist points out:

The Jews and Arabs of Palestine have been fighting off and on for 100 years. In 1909 the mostly Russian socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed group, Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages in Palestine from Arab marauders. Since then has come the dismal march of wars—1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and now 2009—each seared by blood and fire into the conflicting myths and memories of the two sides. The intervals between the wars have not been filled by peace but by bombs, raids, uprisings and atrocities. Israeli settlers in Hebron today still cite, as if it were yesterday, the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929. The Arabs of Palestine still remember their desperate revolt in the 1930s against the British mandate and Jewish immigration from Europe, and the massacres of 1948.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see article). But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade to decade.

Violent days ahead?

Wednesday the 7th is Ashura. As much as a holy day it is for Muslims--the Shiites in particular--it has also been punctuated with violence:

On June 20, 1994 explosion of a bomb in a prayer hall of Imam Reza shrine
in Mashhad[31] that killed at least 25 people.[32] The Iranian government
officially blamed Mujahedin-e-Khalq for the incident to avoid sectarian conflict
between Shias and Sunnis.[33] However, the Pakistani daily The News
International reported on March 27, 1995, "Pakistani investigators have
identified a 24-year-old religious fanatic Abdul Shakoor residing in Lyari in
Karachi, as an important Pakistani associate of Ramzi Yousef. Abdul Shakoor had
intimate contacts with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and was responsible for the June 20,
1994, massive bomb explosion at the shrine Imam Ali Reza in Mashhad."[34]

The 2004 (1425 AH) Shi'a pilgrimage to Karbala, the first since Saddam Hussein was removed from power in Iraq, was marred by bomb attacks, which killed and wounded hundreds despite tight security.

On January 19, 2008, 7 million Iraqi Shia pilgrims marched through Karbala city, Iraq to commemorate Ashura. 20,000 Iraqi troops and police guarded the event amid tensions due to clashes between Iraqi troops and members of a Shia cult, the Soldiers of Heaven, which left around 263 people dead (in Basra and Nasiriya).[35]

Juan Cole has a neat post on this; he starts with the following observation:

The Gaza War is coming at a poignant time for the Shiite world, since the opening 10 days of the first month of the Muslim year, Muharram, are a time of mourning for the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Husayn b. Ali. The tenth of the
month, called Ashura, is especially sacred. Some Shiites hold public processions and beat, whip or cut themselves in grief that Husayn was struck down by forces of evil. It is therefore a season of heightened emotionalism, in which the focus is on grieving for the weak, cut down by powerful forces of oppression.