Rega's 3 air ambulance jets were used in March to repatriate injured children home to Belgium after a horrific bus crash in Sierre
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The issue of Swiss neutrality is raising its head in parliament with the confirmation by Rega that it has carried out repatriation flights of wounded US soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq, reports RTS public broadcasting.
Rega, which provides emergency medical repatriation flights for a number of clients, notably insurance companies, confirmed the information in response to a 2 May article in Handelszeitung that says the private company has run 17 flights.
Last month Rega celebrated its 60th anniversary, noting that 2011 was a record year in terms of the number of rescue missions, more than 14,000.
Rega has not confirmed any details except to say it has delivered wounded soldiers to the Ramstein air base in Germany and that it has not worked directly for the US armed forces. According to RTS the company says it makes 150 foreign repatriations a year out of 700 total, and fewer than 20 involve soldiers. Rega says it makes no distinction about the side soldiers are fighting on, in line with Swiss neutrality and International Red Cross principles.
The company takes on work outside its main Swiss emergency medical air evacuations in Switzerland mainly outside the tourist season, when its planes and helicopters are not in full use.
The issue comes at a sensitive time for Rega, whose supporters have a bill coming up in parliament to exonerate the non-profit group from paying TVA (value added tax). It was hit in 2010 with a CHF5 million bill for taxes, when the tax office decided its annual dues for members were a form of insurance.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – US President Barack Obama promised to “finish the job” begun in Afghanistan, in a speech pronounced during a surprise visit to a US military base in the country, Wednesday morning 2 May.
The president’s speech, which takes place a year after Osama Bin Laden’s death and broadcast from Bagram Air Base to prime-time audiences in the US, stated that US troops would not be kept in dangerous circumstances “a single day longer than is absolutely required for our national security”, but he pledged to “end this war responsibly”.
Obama had met Afghan president Hamid Karzai in a secret midnight meeting in which the two men signed a long-term strategic partnership valid till 2024, which will deal with issues of internal security and development in Afghanistan.
Six months prior to US Presidential elections, Obama committed in his speech to the withdrawal of 24,000 troops from the country by the end of the summer, and to adhere to its NATO agreement to turn security over to Afghan forces by 2014. Currently, 88,000 US troops are stationed in Afghanistan.
Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for two suicide attacks Wednesday morning on guesthouses in the capital Kabul, in which at least seven people where killed.
Links to other sources: CNN, Washington Post, BBC, Daily News
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – US President Barack Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan 1 May has focused world attention on the country itself, but a two-day conference 2-3 May in Geneva is looking at the ramifications of 30 years of war in Afghanistan for refugees in two neighbouring countries. Some 40 international organizations and representatives from 60 countries are attending the conference, where host UNHCR (UN refugee organization) and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran are unveiling their plans for “a joint strategy to find lasting, coherent and unified solutions to the problem of Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons”, according to Didier Burkhalter, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), who opened the conference Wednesday.
“Participants will be asked to support programmes in Afghanistan to increase the sustainability of refugee returns. The new strategy also seeks the commitment of the international community to support the host countries of the Afghan refugees. This is the first joint action with humanitarian and development actors and will contribute to the stability of the region,” says Bern in a statement.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The decorated but previously injured US soldier who appears to have gone on a solo shooting rampage in Afghanistan will be charged with the deaths of the 17 civilians who died, in addition to other charges, the US Army announced. Robert Bales, 38, was flown to Kuwait a week ago and then to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is imprisoned. The charges will be read to him there Friday. He could face the death penalty, but the trial is widely expected to last months or years, a fact that has upset Afghanistan, which has called for a swift trial.
Bales is accused of entering homes and shooting sleeping villagers the night of 11 March. Afghan witnesses say there was more than one soldier, but there are no other suspects. His lawyer is playing down stories that Bales was drunk the night of the shootings, saying that his client recalls little of that night. The day before the shootings he had seen a friend’s leg blown off. He is the father of two and the family lives in Washington state.
Links to other sites: BBC, AP/Fox News, Guardian, Times of India
Fears incident will rekindle anti-US anger
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A US soldier reportedly walked off his base in southern Afghanistan at 02:00 Sunday 11 March and opened fire on Afghan civilians, possibly killing as many as 16 people, most of them children. Reports on the number of dead and injured conflict, as do local reports that there was more than one soldier, which US officials say is “wrong”. Early Sunday tthere were reportedly “multiple wounded”, according to the Guardian/AP in the UK, butlater reports that he had killed several people then appeared to be unfounded, according to Reuters and other new agencies, and by Sunday evening Swiss time the reports were changing again.
Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said Sunday evening that they were trying to clarify the situation but could not confirm any numbers. Earlier in the day they issued a terse statement early Sunday: “A United States service member was detained today in connection to an incident that resulted in Afghan casualties in Kandahar province. This is a deeply regrettable incident and we extend our thoughts and concerns to the families involved. US Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A), in cooperation with Afghan authorities, will investigate this incident and release additional information as appropriate.”
The incident follows weeks of tension over a 20 February incident where US soldiers burned the Koran at a US base due to what US officials have called “carelessness” rather than Islamaphobia. The US offered a formal apology and said the burning was an accident. Thirty Afghans and five US soldiers are reported to have been killed in protests and attacks in the wake of the incident, which has also sparked partisan debates in the US over the appropriateness of the apology.
GENEVA, SWITZERLEAND -Western leaders’ promises of help to the Afghan government when their troops leave, made Monday at an international conference in Germany, appeared to offer smaller hopes of peace following deadly attacks in Kabul and a city in the north Tuesday 6 December.
Close to 60 people died and 160 were injured when a suicide bomber attacked Shi’ite Muslims at a Kabul shrine crowded with religious observers.The blast was the worst in three years. Several of the wounded are reportedly in critical condition
The Irish Times reports that “a Pakistani militant group with close ties to al-Qaeda said it carried out the attack, although security sources could not confirm the group’s involvement.” Aljazeera says attention is focusing on Sunni groups based in Pakistan, but it is unclear as yet who is to blame.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, Guardian (photo gallery), Irish Times, Reuters
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Pakistan’s foreign minister reportedly had harsh words for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a phone call early Sunday 27 November, in the wake of a Nato airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The soldiers were buried Sunday.
The deaths were the result of a “tragic unintended incident” Saturday, said Nato leader Fogh Rasmussen, but thousands of people protested in the streets of Karachi Sunday after the Pakistan government labeled the incident an “unprovoked assault”, according to Reuters.
The airstrike hit two border posts on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and Pakistan has now closed Nato’s supply routes into Afghanistan, which Reuters says the alliance uses to send nearly half of its land shipments there.
Links to other sites: Associated Press of Pakistan, Dawn, Pakistan, Times of India, Washington Post
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Three staff members died and two others were injured when a suicide bomb went off at the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) head office in Kandahar, Afghanistan about 08:00 Monday morning 31 October.The Geneva-based agency says the functioning of its office in Kandahar has been seriously disrupted.
The agency has “facilitated the return of millions of refugees” since it began working in the country in 1980, it says.
“‘This is a tragedy for UNHCR and for the families of the dead and wounded. It also underscores the great risks for humanitarian workers in
Afghanistan,” says High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres. “I am hugely saddened. All of us at UNHCR stand in solidarity with
the families of those who have died or been injured.”
The UNHCR was still trying to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the attack, it said Monday afternoon.
KABUL – Six Taliban insurgents were killed after a 20-hour standoff in the heart of Kabul’s diplomatic and military enclave.
“The operation just ended and 6 terrorists were killed by police,” spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said on Twitter. The number was updated to seven later in the day. Fifteen others were wounded.
The Taliban-led gunmen shot rockets towards the US and other embassies and the headquarters of NATO-led foreign forces.
The ability of the Taliban to penetrate Kabul’s vaunted was a clear show of strength ahead of a handover of security to Afghan forces slated for 2014.
Links to: Khaleej Times,
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND = The Taliban say they did it but Nato’s ISAF (International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan) says it is looking into what caused the crash of the helicopter that went down 6 August in Afghanistan, killing 31 US troops and 7 other people on board. Many of the soldiers killed were from the US Navy’s Seal team 6, a special forces unit that was involved in killing Osama bin Laden. Fox News says it was told by a Pentagon official that none of those killed were actually involved in the bin Laden attack, however.
ISAF says “the incident represents the highest number of US forces killed during a single event in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.”
Links to other sites: Fox News, ISAF, Reuters
Norwegian media point to lone gunman, naming him and publishing photos
Update 9:20 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The death toll had risen to 87 by Saturday morning in Oslo, Norway, from a bomb at a government office and a gunman’s shooting spree at a youth political camp near the city. It is Europe’s worst attack since the 2004 bombings in Madrid, and Europeans are reacting with shock and worry, given than no group has claimed the concerted attack.
Norwegian media are saying it is the work of a single, lone extremist and they have published his name and photos, although there is no official confirmation of the information (see Sydney Morning Herald‘s report from Australia).
Police ordered people out of the city centre after the 15:30 attacks on the island of Utoya, where the Labour Party’s camp was held, and at the offices of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was out of the office at the time.
The killer at the political camp was dressed as a police office, and entered saying he was checking security immediately after the bomb went off in the city centre. He was arrested, but only after he managed to “methodically” shoot and kill at least 80 people. Authorities in Norway say he is known to them, a 32-year-old Norwegian, and that he never worked for the police force. Norwegian media are speculating that he is a right-wing extremist who has posted online anti-Islam material.
Other European media note that this is the first time Norway has been the focus of such a terrorist attempt and ask if it is linked to Norway’s role in Afghanistan, as a member of Nato, or if the attacks may have been directed at the offices of the country’s largest tabloid, Verdens Gang, whose offices are near the prime minister’s. The Telegraph in the UK cites WikiLeaks cables, saying Norway’s security services have been unprepared for terrorist attacks.
Links to other sites: Guardian, Le Monde (Fr), NZZ (Ger), Telegraph, TSR (Fr)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, the head of Afghanistan’s central bank, has fled to the US, where he has a residence, saying that his investigations into corruption have put his life in danger. The BBC reports a government spokesman in Afghanistan as saying that the resignation amounted to treason, noting that “Waheed Omar, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman, also added that Mr Fitrat was himself under investigation.”
He was named governor of the central bank in 2007.
The Wall Street Journal reports that he launched an investigation into Kabul Bank in 2010, “which brought the nation’s financial industry to its knees last fall. The lender’s politically connected insiders, including shareholders, are suspected of borrowing some $850 million from the bank, or about 94% of its total loans.”
His resignation, according to the New York-based paper, puts in jeopardy IMF (International Monetary Fund) reforms in Afghanistan which could leave millions in donor money in limbo.
An ailing 85-year-old surrounded by her family in a camp for people displaced by floods in Balochistan, Pakistan. The elderly are especially vulnerable to water-borne diseases associated with flooding (photo, ©2011 UNHCR / D Khan, September 2010)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The numbers alone are daunting: 43.7 million displaced persons worldwide, of which 15.4m are refugees, 27.5m are internally displaced refugees and nearly 850,000 are asylum seekers, with one-fifth of asylum seekers in South Africa alone.
The world’s 49 least developed countries hosted some 2 million refugees last year.
Just under 100,000 refugees were admitted for resettlement in 2010, by 22 countries. The United States accounted for 71,000 of these.
The figures are part of the “UNHCR Global Trends 2010″ (2.7 MB pdf) published 20 June to mark World Refugees Day.
The numbers don’t yet include refugees from 2011 conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire, Syria and Libya, among others.
The imbalance in how the world supports refugees, or people who are forcibly displaced, is equally stark and marks this year’s report, says the UN High Commissioner for Refugees agency, based in Geneva: “Pakistan, Iran, and Syria have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.1 million, and 1 million respectively. Pakistan also has the biggest economic impact with 710 refugees for each dollar of its per capita GDP (PPP) followed by Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya with 475 and 247 refugees respectively. By comparison Germany, the industrialized country with the largest refugee population (594,000 people), has 17 refugees for each dollar of per capita GDP.”
Click on charts to view larger
Drawn-out wars taking their toll
Roughly one-quarter of the 15.4m refugees are registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The UNHCR says that of those under its care, 7.2m or about one-third, have been stuck in a refugee situation for more than five years, mainly due to drawn-out wars.
Within view of the Itombwe Massif, a convoy of UNHCR trucks carries Burundian refugees home after years of exile in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (photo, ©2011 UNHCR / M Hofer, December 2010)
The figure is the highest since 2001 and at the same time the lowest number since 1990 have been able to return home, fewer than 200,000.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, comments bluntly that “Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industrialized countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. Meanwhile it’s poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden.”
Some people have been refugees for up to 30 years, with Afghanistan a notable case in point. Afghans were one-third of the world’s refugees in 2001, as they were a decade later, at the start of 2011.
60th anniversary for UNHCR shows dramatic changes
A woman returns to the ruins of her home after violence strikes southern Kyrgyzstan (photo, ©2011 UNHCR / S Schulman, June 2010)
The UNHCR will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its founding in July 2011 and the report notes that the picture today is “of a dratically changed protection environment”. The organization’s early “caseload was 2.1 million Europeans, uprooted by World War Two. Today, UNHCR’s work extends to more than 120 countries and encompasses people forced to flee across borders as well as those in flight within their own countries.”
Two relatively recent developments have been the huge growth in numbers of internally displaced persons and the growing number of stateless persons, or “people lacking the basic safety-net of a nationality”, says the Geneva group, which plans to highlight this group during 2011.
“The number of countries reporting stateless populations has increased steadily since 2004, but differences in definitions and methodologies still prevent reliable measurement of the problem. In 2010, the reported number of stateless people (3.5 million) was nearly half of that in 2009, but mainly due to methodological changes in some countries that supply data. Unofficial estimates put the global number closer to 12 million.”
Actress Angelina Jolie to help tell individual stories for 60th anniversary
The UNHCR’s Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie is helping draw attention to refugees’ stories in a series of videos, including one released 18 June of her visit to Syrian refugees in Turkey. The videos are part of the organization’s efforts to draw attention to refugees by recounting individuals’ stories.
Update 11:15 US President Barack Obama announced in the early hours of Monday 2 May, Swiss time, that Western nemesis and terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was killed in an attack in Pakistan. He was killed in a US raid on the luxury residence near a Pakistani military base where he was staying in Abbottabad, about 150km north of Islamabad.
Reaction in US and the international media has been swift, starting with crowds gathering outside the White House to celebrate the end to a 10-year search for bin Laden. Al Jazeera’s correspondents in Pakistan and Afghanistan say that reaction there has so far been muted, and while the news agency reports US media are saying the body was taken to Afghanistan and dumped at sea, that “having the body may help convince any doubters that bin Laden is really dead.” The White House has not yet confirmed the news, which is being attributed widely to “a US official”.
The Economist notes that “Pakistani officials were not informed of the mission ahead of time, a detail that is likely to exacerbate tensions with the country. While it is not surprising that Mr bin Laden was found in Pakistan, most believed he was hiding out somewhere in the remote tribal areas. That he was found in a relatively large city raises troubling questions about what Pakistan’s spooks actually knew about his location.”
Pakistan’s Nation underscored that Obama had telephoned Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari. The Globe & Mail in Canada in a long report reviews the history of al-Qaeda and bin Laden since 11 September 2001 when terrorism took centre stage in the US. The Guardian details the 40-minute firefight that took bin Laden’s life, where three other people were also killed. They reportedly included a son of bin Laden and his most trusted courier.
National Public Radio in the US carries a biography of bin Laden, reminding readers that the 54-year-old Saudi Arabian citizen was the 17th child of 57 of a millionaire construction company owner, and the son spent his youth playing soccer and riding horses, before discovering radical Islamist ideas at university.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, Economist, Fox News, Nation, Pakistan, The Globe & Mail, Canada, Guardian, UK, NPR
White House video (9 minutes) of Obama announcement of bin Laden death and press briefing transcript at the White House
Source: UNHCR, Geneva, 28 March 2011 (click on image to view larger)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The number of asylum seekers in the world has been halved in the past 10 years, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says in its 2010 annual asylum report issued early Monday 27 March. Whether this is good news or bad is difficult to judge, concedes the Geneva-based organization’s head.
“The global dynamics of asylum are changing. Asylum claims in the industrialized world are much lower than a decade ago while year-on-year levels are up in only a handful of countries,” notes High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres. “We need to study the root causes to see if the decline is because of fewer push factors in areas of origin, or tighter migration control in countries of asylum.”
He notes that developing countries still host the lion’s share of applications, and asks that other countries continue to support countries like Liberia, Tunisia and Egypt who are hosting large numbers of asylum seekers due to conflicts in neighbouring countries.
The report covers 44 countries that are destinations for asylum seekers.
US remains most popular host country
Switzerland was the 8th most popular country, with 13,800 applicants.
The report states that 358,800 asylum applications were made to industrialized countries last year, a 5 percent fall from 2009, and some 42 percent lower than the decade’s peak in 2001, when almost 620,000 asylum applications were made.
The US is the top destination for asylum seekers, for the fifth year in a row, followed by France, Germany, Sweden and Canada. These five countries accounted for 56 percent of all applications.
US numbers of new applicants were boosted by requests for asylum by more Chinese and Mexicans, while France saw an increase in applicants from Serbia, Russia and Congo. Germany saw an influx from Serbia, notably Kosovo, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The UNHCR says the “development is widely attributed to the introduction of visa-free entry to the European Union for nationals of these two countries since December 2009.”
Serbia has highest number of applicants
Serbia was the country with the highest number of applicants, 28,900, which the UNHCR says is almost as high as in 2001, “soon after teh Kosovo crisis”.
Several changes have taken place, including:
- the number of applications from Afghans fell by 9 percent and whereas in the past Norway and the UK were the main destinations, Germany and Sweden have become the top hosts
- Chinese asylum-seekers made up the third-largest asylum group in 2010, partly due to a substantial drop in the number of new applications from Iraq and Somalia
- for the first time since 2005, Iraq was not one of the top two countries of origin of asylum-seekers. It dropped to fourth place, followed by the Russian Federation
- Somalia, which occupied the third spot in 2009, fell to sixth in 2010.
Blast comes as US president meets with Pentagon over pullout
Thirty-six recruits for the army in Afghanistan were killed and 42 injured when a bomb exploded in a suicide attack on an Afghan army recruitment center in the northern province of Kunduz province, government officials said Tuesday 15 March. The attack comes a day after US President Barack Obama met with his defense secretary, Robert Gates, and General David Petraeus to review the situation in Afghanistan.
The meeting, the White House said in a press briefing, included “the effectiveness of the military surge, the growth of the Afghan National Security Forces, and President Karzai’s expected March 21 announcement on beginning transition to Afghan security lead. They also discussed the plan to begin the reduction of U.S. forces this July, and the path to completing the transition to full Afghan responsibility for security by the end of 2014.”
Links to other sites: CNN, White House
Eight people were killed in Afghanistan, three of them foreigners, and several others were injured when a bomb went off in a Finest Supermarket in Kabul’s Wazir Akbar Khan district, Friday 28 January. The area is home to numerous embassies and is popular with foreigners and wealthy Afghans. It is not yet clear if it was the work of a suicide bomber. The Taliban have taken responsibility for the attack, saying they were targeting the head of foreign contractor Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, a major supplier for US military operations. The store is frequented by foreigners.
Links to other sites: The Globe & Mail, McClatchy
The Washington Post reports that the governments of Afghanistan and the United States are now at odds over who gets to tax suppliers working under US programmes in Afghanistan, the latest in a series of disputes between the two countries over details of US involvement in Afghanistan. The US says the suppliers fall into a tax-exempt category but Afghanistan says not, and it has started sending dunning letters to non-Afghan companies that have not paid tax bills sent earlier. “Non-Afghan contractors who have recently received tax bills for work done under US government programs say they have appealed to the Defense and State departments to clarify the matter with the Afghans. But they have been told simply to ignore the bills and ‘stand up for our rights,’ said one official of an American company that has multiple US defense contracts in Afghanistan,” reports the newspaper.
6oth birthday for UNHCR says stateless, displaced are 21st c challenges
The UNHCR has offered the world a magnificent gift as part of its 6oth anniversary: a collection of some of its finest photos showing refugees from around the world, 1950-2010. The complete collection can be viewed on GenevaLunch
Refugees from Kosovo in F.Y.R Macedonia, 1999 (photo ©2010, UNHCR / R LeMoyne)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Sixty years ago today, 14 December 1950, the United Nations General Assembly voted into being a refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to deal with the refugee situation in Europe in the aftermath of the second world war. It opened its doors in Geneva in January 1951.
Its first major international emergency, taking it beyond the original mandate, came in 1956, as thousands fled when Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian Revolution.
Vietnamese boat people, 1978 (photo ©2010, UNHCR / K Gaugler)
The work of the organization has changed to keep pace with the times: in the 1960s, the decolonization of Africa produced “the first of that continent’s numerous refugee crises needing UNHCR intervention,” the Geneva-based group notes in a statement issued for the anniversary. “Over the following two decades, UNHCR had to help with displacement crises in Asia and Latin America. Today it deals with major displacement situations around the world. The global population of refugees, internally displaced people, and asylum seekers stands at 43 million people, most of them under UNHCR’s duty of care.” The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded twice to the UNHCR, in 1954 and 1981.
Mohammad Umer Daudzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff, said 25 November that foreigners should stay out of the delicate negotiations going on between Afghan authorities and the Taliban. “The last lesson we draw from this: International partners should not get excited so quickly with those kind of things. . . . Afghans know this business, how to handle it”, Daudzai said.
A man purporting to be Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, a senior Taliban leader, is actually a shop-keeper from Quetta, Pakistan, according to Afghan intelligence reports. Mansour was helped by Nato forces to meet top Afghan officials, including Karzai. British intelligence officials reportedly arranged the meetings, according to a New York Times article earlier this week, while US officials kept their distance. One Western diplomat is quoted as saying that “we gave him a lot of money”.
Mansour held a post in the Taliban government before it was toppled by the US invasion in 2001. The British embassy in Kabul has refused to comment on the reports.
Links to other sites: BBC, Washington Post
Afghanistan’s troubled history of recent decades, with internal fighting, an invasion by Russia in 1979 and later, Nato troops in the country, served 20 November as the focus of a historic agreement between Nato countries and Russia. The Nato-Soviet military foes of the Cold War saw their world change in 1985 with the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva, but Saturday Nato and Russia agreed in writing that they are not enemies.
Top government officials from the 28 Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) nations and Russia met for the third time as the Nato-Russia Council (NRC) during a key Nato meeting in Portugal 19-20 November. The NRC made a number of important decisions, Nato announced late Saturday, but Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen summed up the NRC meetings with a different focus:”We have agreed, together, on which security challenges Nato nations and Russia actually face today. What’s most significant is what’s not on the list: each other. The Nato nations and Russia have, today, agreed, in writing, that while we face many security challenges, we pose no threat to each other. That, alone, draws a clear line between the past and the future of Nato-Russia relations.”
The agreements reached include, according to Nato statements, reconfirming a shared “determination to assist in the stabilization of Afghanistan and the whole region. In this context, they welcomed broadened transit arrangements through Russian territory for non-lethal ISAF goods, moved to expand the counter-narcotics training and decided to task a development of an NRC Helicopter Maintenance Trust Fund in 2011.”
Broader security issues were part of the agreements:
- “They also endorsed the first ever Joint Review of 21st Century Common Security Challenges, outlining shared views of Russia and Allies on key security questions and ways to address them through practical cooperation
- “They agreed on a joint ballistic missile threat assessment and decided to resume Theatre Missile Defence Cooperation. Moreover, they tasked a development of a comprehensive Joint Analysis of the future framework for broader missile defence cooperation.”
The NRC discussions also covered cooperation on counter-terrorism, and the fight against piracy, according to Nato’s web site.
Afghanistan top of list
Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) member nations are meeting in Lisbon, Portugal 19-20 November in what is widely considered one of the most crucial meetings it has held in years. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will attend, a sign of a significant shift in relations between East and West in recent years. These are the highest-level meetings between the former Cold War adversaries since 2008, when tensions rose over Russian troops moving into Georgia.
The group of heads of state and government expects to approve a new mission statement with a revised strategic concept document that will reflect changes in the security environment since 9/11, Nato says.
The organization’s role in Afghanistan and in particular a timeline for its presence there are high on the agenda, with 2014 as a pullout date being touted Friday. The number of Isaf (Nato’s United Nations-mandated International Security Assistance Force) troops has grown from 5,000 to around 130,400 troops from 48 countries, including all 28 Nato member nations.
Links to other sites: Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR, Ria Novosti, VOA, Xinhua
Latest deaths come on heels of victims interviews report
A US drone missile attack on a house and vehicle in Ghulam Khan village in North Waziristan, Pakistan, early Tuesday 16 November killed 20 people, 16 of them in a house and four in a vehicle suspected of belonging to Taliban insurgents. Al Jazeera reports that 220 people have been killed by drones in Pakistan since early September, at a time when “publication of the results of a survey of opinion within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan show overwhelming popular opposition to the drone strikes , who see it as a threat to sovereignty”, according to journalist Gareth Porter, writing in Al Jazeera. Porter notes that the drone campaign by US forces appears to have shifted from a focus in Pakistan on Al-Qaeda to the war in Afghanistan.
“The new report published by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (Civic) last week [end October 2010] offers the first glimpse of the drone strikes based on actual interviews with civilian victims of the strikes,” writes Porter.
The strike by an unmanned missile is the eighth in November and the 100th in 2010, according to MSNBC, although the US does not routinely confirm drone activity, making it difficult to quantify the number of strikes.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, told TSR, Swiss public television, in a broadcast interview Thursday evening 4 November that he is considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and setting up a Wikileaks foundation in the country to move the operation here.
“We’re seriously considering it,” he says of a new Swiss foundation, citing security considerations.
Assange was speaking to a record crowd of more than 100 journalists at the Swiss Press Club, housed in the International Welcome Centre in Geneva. The Australian was surrounded by bodyguards. His team currently uses 70 percent of its budget for security, he told TSR.
Wikileaks in October published 400,000 documents purportedly giving examples of torture and rape by US troops in Irak. Six months earlier the foundation published 90,000 similar documents related to the war in Afghanistan.
He told TSR that Wikileaks has another 15,000 documents in its possession related to the war in Afghanistan as well as documents related to Russia and other European countries.
Assange is in Geneva as a witness at the first Periodic Review of the United States by the Human Rights Council, which takes place Friday 6 November.
His request for work papers and a residence permit in Sweden were turned down in October. He has been investigated there on rape charges filed recently, which he denies.
Interview in French, TSR
Julian Assange, in Geneva, denounces US abuse of human rights
Reproduced with permission from Intellectual Property Watch
By Catherine Saez
In a police-secured, airless room full of Geneva journalists, Julian Assange, creator and director of Wikileaks, today gave details of what he described as United States abuse of human rights in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as an alleged muzzling of US press on those subjects. The United States will undergo its first Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council tomorrow, 5 November.
Wikileaks, a non-profit media organization that became globally known for releasing highly confidential documents, was invited to speak at the initiative of the International Institute for Peace, Justice and Human Rights, a Geneva-based non-profit organization. Wikileaks, which released 22 October some 400,000 confidential documents revealing human rights abuses covered by the US army during the Iraq war, is under high pressure, according to Assange. “We have never faced such difficulty as in the past three months,” he said.
A Dutch aid worker and his Afghan driver have been captured by about five armed men in Takhar province and taken in the direction of Kunduz, in Afghanistan’s northeast. The two men, who work for an organization that helps people with disabilities, were captured 26 October.
The Taliban is increasingly targeting aid workers in Afghanistan, 22 of whom have been kidnapped in 2010, of whom 11 have been killed. But common criminals are often also involved.
Links to other sites: AFP, Daily Telegraph, New York Times
Omar Khadr, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, has pleaded guilty to charges of murder, terrorism and war crimes in exchange for serving out the rest of his sentence in Canada, in one year’s time. The youngest Guantanamo inmate, Khadr was detained in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old after killing a US soldier.
Long a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration which refused to grant a minor the treatment accorded them under international law, the military commission trial will sentence Khadr, now 24, to one more year in prison. Then he will be sent back to Canada, his country of origin.
Links to other sites: Christian Science Monitor, Globe and Mail, Miami Herald
The high-level peace talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and senior Taliban leaders are little more than “exchanges of cash and prisoners”, according to the Guardian. It is not unusual, experts say, that fighting and talking go on simultaneously, and war has traditionally been conducted this way. Also, the US military needs to show that it is making progress in the war ahead of a strategic review in December, according to Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Taliban expert. He suggested that the extensive media play was in part to confuse the Taliban leadership.
Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration’s senior diplomat to the region, has stated that he has no information regarding the Pakistan army or intelligence services opposing peace talks, according to India Express. He warned in a CNN interview 24 October not to put too much store by the so-called peace talks. The leading US general in Afghanistan, David Petraeus, told the media that Nato and US forces were guaranteeing safe passage of Taliban officials to peace talks.
Pakistani security officials have stressed that there can be no lasting peace in Afghanistan without their input, and have complained that US and Afghan officials have been sidelining them in the peace process. An unnamed high-ranking official told the Washington Post, “We cannot be insignificant in this war. If somebody is trying to keep us out and is striving for sustainable peace, good luck to them.”
Links to other sites: CNN, Guardian, Indian Express, Washington Post
Osama bin Laden is living in relative comfort in a house not far from his deputy in northwest Pakistan, says a senior Nato official familiar with sensitive intelligence in the war in Afghanistan, as reported by CNN 18 October. Interceptions of Taliban and al Qaeda communications indicate that the US cross-border drone attacks on militants have pushed their leaders from vulnerable border areas into more populated towns and even cities, where the risk of collateral damage limits potential attacks.
The Pakistani ambassador to the USA says that the accusation is ludicrous. “Anybody who thinks that … is smoking something they shouldn’t be”, Husain Haqqani was quoted as saying.
Some elements of the Pakistani government and intelligence services are suspected of being sympathetic to the Taliban and al Qaeda, which they see as useful allies against India.
(Video) US media for two days reported that kidnapped British aid worker Linda Norgrove was likely killed when a suicide vest worn by a captor exploded. Now it appears that she may have been killed by a US hand grenade during a bungled operation to free her. UK Prime Minister David Cameron was given the news by phone Monday, by US General David Petraeus, and it appears the mistake is raising questions about a possible cover-up or at the very least, over the role of US media reports, says the BBC.
ITNews, with David Cameron speaking
