Israeli arms sales to Rwandan Genocidaires should be no Surprise
by Jimmy Johnson – 24 June, 2012

A 24 June 2012 article in Maariv brought to light some new information about arms shipments from Israel to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Most of the basics about these transactions have been publicly available since 1999 when Brian Wood and Johan Peleman published The Arms Fixers. They reported, “Seven large cargoes of small arms worth $6.5 million were flown from Tirana [Albania] and Tel Aviv between mid-April and mid-July 1994 to the [Interahamwe] forces as they carried out the genocide, even during the time when the mass killings were being reported daily by the international news media.” The flights from Tirana were supervised by Israeli personnel. Sarah Leibowitz’s article in Maariv adds a few names as well as information about Israelis training Rwandan military and paramilitary forces and earlier arms sales in 1992 and 1993.

What is most surprising about the whole affair is that anyone would be surprised at all. Israeli arms―whether government sanctioned or black market, from multinational arms corporations or individual dealers and mercenaries―can be found in nearly every locale where human rights are violated. Anyone paying attention to Israeli arms production and exports over the last few decades would not be surprised by the latest revelations about Rwanda.

A History of Arming Authoritarians

Israel began training the Iranian Shah’s notorious internal security force, the SAVAK, in 1954 and selling Uzis to the Imperial National Guard in 1959. In 1963, Israel helped advise Iran’s counterinsurgency operation against dissident tribes in the south, and in 1964 sold the Iranian army Uzis. Israel famously sold the Islamic Republic hundreds of millions worth of ammunition, artillery and other arms through the 1980s. Private dealers like Nahum Manbar, Eli Cohen and Avichai Weinstein sold the Khameini regime tanks, chemical weapons, armored vehicle parts and missile wires during the 1990s and 2000s.

Elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, Israel assisted Sultan Qaboos ibn Said’s totalitarian regime in Oman in its counterinsurgency efforts in Dhofar province during the 1970s, and joined with Saudi Arabia and Iran in supporting the royalists against the republicans during the 1962-70 Yemeni civil war. Israel more recently sold weapons to the Saleh regime, against which the Yemeni people have been rebelling since 2011.

In Latin America, Israel sold small arms in 1957 to Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, and began arming Nicaragua’s Somoza regime the same year. Israel would continue to arm successive Somoza dictatorships with small arms, aircraft, tanks and counterinsurgency training until the Sandinistas overthrow the younger Somoza in 1979. From there Israel shipped arms and advisors to the anti-Sandinista Contras as they attempted to overthrow Nicaraguan democracy during the 1980s. Israeli mercenaries provided small arms and military training to Colombian paramilitaries and narcotraffickers in the 1980s, and from the 1980s to present, counterinsurgency training, aircraft, missiles and small arms to the Colombian government – widely regarded as the worst human rights abuser in the Western Hemisphere.

Israeli arms and training were key in the Guatemalan, El Salvadoran and Honduran repressions of indigenous, labor and progressive organizations and rebels from the 1960s through the 1980s. Between the three countries, hundreds of thousands were killed. Israel also was a major supplier of arms and training to a series of Argentine military juntas and Chile’s Pinochet regime in the 1970s and 1980s.

Israel first sold Uzis to apartheid South Africa in 1955. A decade later the country became a strategic ally. Israeli firms were building apartheid South Africa’s border fences almost thirty years before the West Bank separation barrier. Israel supported South Africa with arms, training, advisors, technology and even tritium to boost the yield of South Africa’s nuclear arsenal until the apartheid regime fell. …more

Media: “Web Can Forment Openness As Corrupt Regimes Fall” – WSJ
Ben Rooney – Wall Street Journal – 28 June, 2012

Throughout the short history of the Web plenty of commentators have spouted some pretty good nonsense about it. Nicholas Negroponte, the then head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory, predicted that the Net would bring world peace by breaking down national borders.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels in 1997 he told the credulous audience, in 20 years time children “are not going to know what nationalism is.”

To be fair to the utopian Mr. Negroponte he was following in a long, and inglorious, tradition of over-imbuing technology with near mystical properties. A century earlier the transoceanic cable was seen as an equal harbinger of fraternal love. “It unites distant nations, making them feel that they are members of one great family… By such strong ties does it tend to bind the human race in unity, peace, and concord,” wrote one commentator in 1880.

But was Mr. Negroponte as wrong as all that? For while the Internet may not have brought world peace, what it can do is help countries emerging from conflict build the sort of institutions that build new democracies.

One of the things that the Internet is good at is bringing a measure of transparency and sunlight to historically dark places.

Dark places like prerevolution Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. How were billions of dollars of net worth able to be accumulated by Moammar Gadhafi, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Hosni Mubarak? It is because of the lack of transparency within financial systems, within government tenders, within significant sectors of the Libyan, Tunisian and Egyptian governments.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, a country that has very successfully made the transition from Soviet vassal to Western democracy partly through huge investment in technology, said he believes e-government can help root out corruption.

“The big problem is not toppling the dictator and going home from the city square,” he said. “It is what do you do after that. Do you have effective institutions? You get rid of one dictator and if you don’t build the institutions you pretty soon have another.

“One of the ways of building institutions is through e-governance, where you can implement transparency, reduce all the rent-seeking behavior of people who come into power, because however noble they may be, suddenly they realize ‘I can handle this tender…’.”

Mr. Ilves wants to use the experiences of his country to help others, particularly those in North Africa attempting to make the transition. He is working on plans to establish a center in Estonia to help emerging democracies embrace open government and technology. …more

Bahrain: Ongoing detention and ill-treatment of Freelance journalist after commenting to media channels
29 June, 2012 – Bahrain Center for Human Rights

Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) express concerns over the ongoing detention as well as the cruel arrest of yet another journalist and pro-democracy activist in Bahrain for merely exercising his right to freedom of expression. Journalist Ahmed Radhi (35) was arrested without a warrant, he was tortured and insulted and held incommunicado for 10 days. He was also denied access to a lawyer.

Ahmed Radhi was arrested on May 16 2012 after a raid on his house in Sanabis at 4:30 in the morning. No warrant was presented at the time of the arrest. His family believes that his arrest is a result of comments he made on international media channels including BBC and London-based Bahrain Lulu TV criticising the proposed union between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. He has also blogged about Bahrain and used social media channels to make his comments public.

After his arrest, his family were not notified of his whereabouts nor allowed to see him for 10 days. At the current time they are allowed regular visits, but Ahmed’s lawyer was not allowed to meet him until the first week of June, nor was she told what Ahmed was accused of.

Torture

BCHR has received a letter wrote by Ahmed Radhi in which he stated that he was beaten on his head and chest by security forces and that he was verbally insulted. He was thrown on cold and hard floor handcuffed with his hands behind his back and blindfolded for 48 hours while held at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) custody in Adliya. He said he was physically and psychologically tortured by “Isa Al-Majali” and his team to force him to confess. Ahmed was not even allowed to pray. He was interrogated several times and was beaten, humiliated and insulted each time. Later he was taken to the public prosecution where he has recorded a complaint. He was also interrogated at the public prosecution in the absence of a lawyer.

His family has said that Ahmed was forced to record a confession on camera. He is currently held at the dry dock detention centre. …more

Iran “to equip Gulf ships with missiles”
29 June, 2012 -Al Akhbar

Iran expects to equip its ships in the Strait of Hormuz soon with shorter-range missiles, a Revolutionary Guards commander was quoted as saying, in the latest apparent warning to the West not to attack it over its disputed nuclear program.

The Islamic Republic has threatened to shut the Strait, the conduit out of the Gulf for 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil trade, if Western sanctions aimed at curbing its nuclear works block its own crude exports.

The European Union plans to impose a total embargo on Iranian oil from Sunday and has told Tehran that more punitive steps could follow if it keeps defying UN demands for limits nuclear activity that could be of use in developing bombs.

“We have already equipped our vessels with missiles with a range of 220 km and we hope to introduce missiles with a range of over 300 km soon,” Ali Fadavi said, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Friday.

“We could target from our shores all areas in the Persian Gulf region, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman.”

Iran is about 225 km at its nearest point from Bahrain, where the U. Fifth Fleet is based, and about 1,000 km from its arch-enemy Israel. Tehran’s longest-range missile, the Sajjil-2, can fly up to 2,400 km.

Iran’s military and security establishment often asserts its strength in the region, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil transit channel carrying supplies from Gulf producers to the West.

But it has increasingly flexed its military muscle in the face of US and Israeli warnings that last-resort military action against Iran cannot be ruled out if diplomacy and sanctions fail to resolve the nuclear dispute.

In January, the Islamic Republic said it had successfully test-fired what it called two long-range missiles.

Iran denies Western suspicions that it is trying to develop technology and material required to produce nuclear weapons, saying it is generating electricity. …source

Shia Pilgrims Bus attacked by a Rocket near Quetta , 13 Martyred over 30 injured
29 June, 2012 – Jafria News

JNN 29 June 2012 QUETTA: A blast in the Hazarganji area of Quetta targeted a bus carrying Shia pilgrims from Taftan to the provincial capital on Thursday, Express News reported. 14 people were Martyred and 30 were injured as a result of the blast.

Eyewitnesses said that the bus was carrying pilgrims from Taftan and it was targeted when it was passing near a fruit market in the Hazarganji area. Around 15-20kg explosives were used in the blast. A woman and a policeman are also among the dead.

Some eyewitnesses have also claimed that the blast was a suicide attack, officials have not confirmed this as yet.

Casualties could rise because of serious condition of the injured victims. The victims are reported to be mostly Shia Hazaras .

Initial reports also state that four policemen on the mobile were injured after the blast.

There is no confirmation on the nature of the blast as yet.

It has also been reported that the bus was destroyed as a result of the blast.

The injured were shifted to Civil hospital and Bolan Medical Complex.

Almost all the Shia Organisations and Leaders have condemned the attack , while the Allama Raja Nasir Abbas Jafri ,General Sec of Majlis e Wahdat e Muslimeen , have announced a three day Official Mourning in respect for the martyred and the Injured Victims , While the Hazara Democratic Party have announced a Shutter down Strike on Friday , to be observed in Quetta and adjacent areas. The Tehrik e Jafria Pakistan have also condemned the attack and have asked the Government to take a swift action against the detoriating Law & Order Situation of Balochistan , and especially the Shia Target Killing , which have escalated in the recent Past , as there is no Law and Order in whole of the Balochistan Province , as it looks that the Government have lost its writ , and the terrorist have the freedom to invoke all kinds of terrorist acts in the Province.