Group items tagged

France's foreign minister held talks Friday with a Hezbollah legislator in the latest European outreach to the Iranian-backed militant group. The European Union and Britain have also sought to engage Lebanon's Hezbollah in recent months to encourage the group to abandon violence and play a constructive political role in the deeply divided country. The United States, however, shuns the group, which it considers a terrorist organization.

Kouchner defended his meeting with Hezbollah, which fought the 2006 Second Lebanon War with Israel and is armed and trained by Iran. "Hezbollah is part of the parties that participated in the recent parliamentary elections. It is natural to meet with its representatives," Kouchner told reporters.

Last month, the European Union's foreign affairs chief, Javier Solana, held talks in Beirut with another Hezbollah legislator in the first meeting between a senior EU diplomat and an official of the militant group.

Saudi Arabia denied on Monday a report that it has agreed to allow Israeli planes to fly through the kingdom's airspace to attack Iran's nuclear sites.   "Of course this is not true. We don't have any kind of relationship with the Israelis," Osama Nugali, spokesman for the Saudi foreign ministry, told AFP.  

President Shimon Peres said on Monday that Syrian President Bashar Assad must understand that Israel would not hand over the Golan Heights on a "silver platter" so long as Damascus continued its ties with Iran and Hezbollah. Peres told visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that a true peace process between the long time enemies would have to take place at the negotiating table, without preconditions or mediation.

Syrian officials last month threatened to take back the Golan Heights by force if a peace agreement involving the return of the strategic plateau is not reached with Israel. Advertisement A group calling itself the Syrian Committee for the Freedom of the Golan said it would take steps to regain control of the territory, adding that Israel has not shown willingness to achieve peace or to return what they called "Syrian land."

Just prior to that, Assad rejected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's offer to resume peace talks between the two countries from "point zero." Assad said the negotiations should resume from the point at which they stopped under former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, when the two sides had planned to formulate mutual commitments that would enable the talks to move to a direct negotiations stage.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has returned home to what has officially been described as a sensational welcome. This follows his controversial speech at a UN anti-racism conference.

European delegates walked out when he described Israel as a racist state. France called his address a "hate speech", while the US called it "vile". Some countries had boycotted the conference because the Iranian president was appearing. But Iranian state media described Mr Ahmadinejad as the superstar of the conference.

One pro-government paper said the president had shot the last bullet into the brain of the West.

Barack Obama extended an olive branch to the Muslim world from the floor of Turkey's parliament yesterday by declaring the US was not "at war with Islam" but instead sought its partnership to pursue common goals.

Mindful of Turkey's offer to mediate in settling America's 30-year-old dispute with Iran, he reiterated his previous offer of rapprochement to the leadership in Tehran but warned it must abandon any ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.

Turkish television channels emphasised Obama's supposed links to Islam throughout the day yesterday by repeatedly referring to his middle name, Hussein.

The Bush administration spent years trying to isolate people the Turkish government thought should be engaged—Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas, to name a few. The Obama administration broadly endorses engagement. Turkish-American relations are therefore about to change from being good despite fundamental disagreement to being a genuine meeting of minds.

From Turkey's perspective, the most important item on the agenda is what it does not want: official U.S. recognition that what happened to the Armenians was genocide. I doubt Obama would have accepted an invitation to visit Turkey now if he was not planning to oppose a congressional resolution on the subject, or if he intended to use the G word on April 24, when he will make a statement commemorating the Armenian massacres of 1915

Like Tony Blair and Tayyip Erdogan, Obama is thought to recognize that Hamas can no longer be ignored, though he cannot possibly say so publicly. Turkey's leaders (and their advisers) can provide Obama with valuable insights, and help start the ball rolling. This would allow Obama to avoid political exposure in Washington for "talking to terrorists" until he has a sense of the other side's position.

The Taepodong-2 rocket flew twice as far as any previous North Korean missile.

Although Obama described the action as a "provocation", the US and Japan have so far failed to win support from China and Russia for a statement condemning Pyongyang and tightening existing sanctions.

The Japanese foreign minister, Hirofumi Nakasone, today admitted there were divisions in the security council."China and Russia share the concern that this is a threat to the region, but they appear reserved and cautious as of now," he told reporters in Tokyo.

Barack Obama has outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons in a major speech in Europe. The US president called for a global summit on nuclear security and the forging of new partnerships to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. He said he hoped to negotiate a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

Speaking to a 20,000-strong crowd in front of Prague's historic castle, Mr Obama said the US had a moral responsibility to act in ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

"The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War," he said.

Mr. Netanyahu, the leader of the hawkish Likud Party, stopped short of endorsing a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a potential point of friction with the United States. President Obama has called the advancement of the two-state solution “critical.” Mr. Netanyahu opposes the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state, proposing a more limited form of self-rule instead.

Hours before he was sworn in, Mr. Netanyahu said his new government would “work toward peace on three tracks: economic, security and political.” “We do not want to exercise our power over the Palestinians,” he said. “Under the final settlement, the Palestinians will have all the rights to govern themselves except those that endanger the security and existence of the state of Israel.”

The biggest threat to humanity and to Israel comes from the possibility of a radical regime armed with nuclear weapons,” he said, alluding to Iran.

The Justice and Development Party scored an impressive re-election in 2007 after pursuing market-oriented policies that brought economic growth and more trade ties with the European Union. That conservative Muslim party also expanded human rights and brought Turkish law closer to European standards.

Those reforms have since stalled — partly because of opposition from civilian nationalists and generals who still wield too much clout. (The trial of 86 people accused of plotting a military coup is a reminder of the dark side of Turkish politics.)

But Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also seems to have lost enthusiasm for the European Union bid and the reforms that are the price of admission.

Despite his hard-line and inflammatory rhetoric, however, Lieberman may be a pragmatist. Unlike many on Israel's right — including Netanyahu — Lieberman supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a Ha'aretz interview after taking office, Lieberman said Israel should abide by the 2002 Roadmap, which calls for a Palestinian state.

The Roadmap obliges the Palestinians to stop violence and dismantle the capabilities of terror organizations, and reform their political institutions, before any movement toward the creation of a Palestinian state. But, in the same phase, it obliges Israel to freeze settlement construction and dismantle all settlement outposts built since March 2001.

Lieberman appears to recognize those obligations, and in the Ha'aretz interview, he mocked Olmert and his team as hypocrites who advocated peace but did little to achieve it. "How many outposts did Olmert, Barak and Livni evacuate?" he said.

the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are not part of the North-West Frontier Province. The two are separate entities in almost every sense of the word. While the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) is, well, a province with an elected assembly, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are geographically separate areas governed through “political agents” who are appointed by the president and supported by the governor of NWFP (who is also a presidential appointee). Residents of NWFP technically live according to the laws drafted by the Parliament in Islamabad, while the only nontribal law applicable to residents of FATA is the Frontier Crimes Regulations, a colonial-era dictate sanctioning collective punishment for tribes and subtribes guilty of disrupting the peace. Within FATA, there are seven “agencies” and six “frontier regions.” The agencies are Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan and South Waziristan; the somewhat more governed frontier regions (FRs) cling like barnacles to the eastern edge of FATA and include FR Peshawar, FR Kohat, FR Bannu, FR Lakki, FR Tank, and FR Dera Ismail Khan, each of them named after the “settled” districts they border.

All residents of FATA and the vast majority of those in NWFP are ethnically Pashtuns. Pashtuns also make up the majority in Baluchistan, the vast province bordering Iran and Afghanistan, which is named after the minority Baluch. Besides NWFP and Baluchistan, there are two other provinces in Pakistan; Punjab is populated mostly by ethnic Punjabis, and Sindh was historically dominated by Sindhis until millions of Muslims migrated from India at the time of Partition and settled in Sindhi cities such as Karachi and Hyderabad. Now, Sindh is composed of ethnic Sindhis and the descendents of these migrants, known as mohajirs.

Foreigners are prohibited from entering FATA without government permission. If you see a newspaper dateline from a town inside FATA, chances are that the Pakistani Army organized a field trip for reporters. Those traveling unaccompanied into, say, South Waziristan have either a death wish or a really good rapport with the Taliban, who effectively run North and South Waziristan and large portions of the other agencies and frontier regions.

China has denied involvement in the electronic spy network which researchers say infiltrated computers in government offices around the world. The spokesman of the Chinese embassy in London said that there was no evidence to show Beijing was involved. He suggested the findings were part of a "propaganda campaign" by the Tibetan government in exile.

They said ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan appeared to have been targeted.

It was only Barack Obama's telephone diplomacy -- which came in the form of a call to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- that solved the problem. In the end, the two agreed that Turkey would not blackball Fogh Rasmussen in return for reportedly gaining an important seat in the alliance and a pledge to start procedures to shut down the Danish television station Roj TV, which Turkey accuses of having ties to the Kurdish militant group PKK.

Turkey is a very important strategic partner for the US, a fact which already led presidents Clinton and Bush to give vocal support to Ankara's ambitions to join the EU.

Another fact is that Turkey's army -- which alone has 1,200 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan -- is the second largest among those of NATO's member states.

An enormous electronic espionage programme run from servers in China has been used to spy on computers in more than 100 countries, according to two reports published at the weekend.

The reports name the system GhostNet, and claim that it has been used to attack governments in south and south-east Asia as well as the offices of the Dalai Lama. In two years, the reports suggest, the operation infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

While one of the reports remains mute on the identity of the perpetrators, the other has no such qualms, warning that the Chinese government ran a series of cyber attacks on Tibetan exile groups.

When President Barack Obama comes to London next week, he will find one great power missing at the world's summit table: Europe. Five of the 20 leaders at the G20 meeting will be Europeans, representing France, Germany, Britain, Italy and the EU, but the whole will be less than the sum of its parts. There will be plenty of Europeans but no Europe.

Obama's European trip, which continues to the Nato summit and then an EU-US meeting in Prague, will also be about foreign and security policy. Here, Europe is even less of a single player. To be fair, Europeans have got their act together on diplomacy with Iran, though it remains to be seen whether that European unity would survive an American request for more economic sanctions on Tehran. On most of the other big issues on Obama's agenda - Afghanistan, Pakistan, relations with Russia and China, nuclear proliferation - there is no Europe. There are individual European countries.

Unlike George W Bush at the beginning of his first term, President Obama is both ideologically and pragmatically predisposed to work with a stronger, more united Europe. But even he can't work with something that doesn't exist.

Israeli warplanes bombed a convoy of trucks in Sudan in January that was believed to be carrying arms to be smuggled into Gaza, according to American officials.

Israeli officials refused to confirm or deny the attack, but intelligence analysts noted that the strike was consistent with other measures Israel had taken to secure its borders.

Two American officials who are privy to classified intelligence assessments said that Iran had been involved in the effort to smuggle weapons to Gaza. They also noted that there had been intelligence reports that an operative with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had gone to Sudan to coordinate the effort. But one former official said that the exact provenance of the arms that were being smuggled via Sudan was unclear.