From: Mazin Qumsiyeh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [AM] Palestine round-up -Amnesty International Press Release: Injustice and repression are not the answer -Agence France Presse: Hobeika taped "evidence" against Sharon before assassination -The New York Times: Playing Into Sharon's Hands By Robert Malley What can you do? Write letters to editor or opinion pieces and send to American newspapers and other media outlets. Some of the major US media outlets are now the last bastion (vs 140 other countries) releasing misinformation that is prolonging this conflict needlessly and letting Palestinians and Israelis continue to suffer. Mazin Qumsiyeh ____________________________________ AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE 24 January 2002 AI Index MDE 15/010/2002 - News Service Nr. 15 Israel/Occupied Territories/Palestinian Authority: Injustice and repression are not the answer Two days after the latest arbitrary armed attack on Israelis Amnesty International condemned the attack and urged the Israeli authorities to change their policy. "Injustice and repression have proved that they cannot stop these attacks," said Amnesty International delegates leaving today for Jerusalem. "Justice and human rights are the only way forward and we call on Israel to choose it." Israel has consistently committed grave violations of human rights including unlawful killings when no life was in imminent danger, house demolitions and administrative detention. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has sealed off the Gaza Strip with a high wire fence and closed every town and village in the West Bank behind concrete blocks, piles of earth and barriers manned by soldiers. These closures have not stopped members of Palestinian armed groups from escaping closed areas to carry out arbitrary attacks on civilians on the roads of the West Bank and in crowded places within Israel. In the latest armed attack, on 22 January 2002, a single gunman gunned down passers by in Jerusalem's main shopping street killing two Israelis and wounding 14. The attack was claimed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, apparently a faction close to Fatah. This was in retaliation for the killing of four Hamas members in Nablus and the occupation of Tulkarem. "The way out of a cycle of violence and repression is not more violence and more repression. It is a return to justice," Amnesty International said, reiterating its call for international human rights observers to be deployed in Israel. Background After three weeks of relative ceasefire, on 10 and 11 January, the IDF demolished 59 Palestinian houses in Rafah and damaged some 200 other houses. The Israeli government alleged that this was because Palestinians had constructed tunnels to smuggle arms but the demolitions were apparently in reprisal for an attack the previous day on an Israeli army post. Three days later, on 14 January, the IDF apparently extrajudicially executed an alleged Fatah leader said to be responsible for a December attack on a bus carrying Israeli settlers in the West Bank which killed 10 people. Over the next two days, the Palestinian armed groups killed four Israelis in the West Bank, including a 72 year-old man. On 18 January, in another random shooting of civilians claimed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed gunman killed six and wounded 33 in a Bat Mitzvah celebration in Hadera within Israel. *** Amnesty International will begin a mission to Israel, the Occupied Territories and the areas under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority today, 24 January 2002. The delegation is composed of two staff members of the organization's International Secretariat, Elizabeth Hodgkin and Maartje Houbrechts; Maria del Pozo, a staff member of the Spanish Section of Amnesty International; Karen Kennedy, a coordinator from the US Section of Amnesty International; and David Holley an independent military adviser. Delegates will investigate human rights concerns in Israel, the Occupied Territories and the areas under the jurisdiction of Palestine Authority, including unlawful killings of Palestinians and Israelis, closures and house demolitions. For more information please call Amnesty International's press office in London, UK, on +44 20 7413 5566 Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW web :http://www.amnesty.org ____________ Hobeika taped "evidence" against Sharon before assassination: Beirut press Agence France Presse January 25, 2002 BEIRUT, Jan 25-- Former Christian warlord Elie Hobeika taped "evidence" on the Sabra and Shatila massacres during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon before he was assassinated, a Beirut newspaper reported Friday. The Daily Star said the evidence allegedly implicated Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was defence minister at the time of the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut. "On a pair of occasions ..., including one just two months ago, Hobeika told editors from this newspaper that he has recorded his account of Sabra and Shatila," said the Daily Star. It said Hobeika, a former minister and intelligence chief of the Lebanese Forces militia who was killed in a Beirut car-bomb attack on Thursday, had told the newspaper that he "entrusted copies of the tape to lawyers." "According to him, he had evidence that would implicate Sharon even more directly than is widely believed," said the English-language daily. An Israeli commission of inquiry in 1983 found Sharon "indirectly responsible" for the camp massacres in which Christian militiamen slaughtered between 800 and 2,000 Palestinian refugees in September 1982. It charged that Hobeika ordered the massacres, which took place as the Israeli army held positions near the two camps. "Hobeika feared being assassinated" because of the trial being filed against Sharon in Belgium by survivors of the massacres, said An-Nahar, another Lebanese daily. "What will become of his secrets?" It also asked what "revelations" he could have made to a delegation of Belgian senators he met secretly in Beirut earlier this week. "Assassination of Hobeika, the man who knew too much," headlined L'Orient Le Jour. "He was in the front row of the (Lebanese civil) war and without doubt held many of its secrets, which history will now have more trouble unearthing." Israel has slammed Lebanese accusations that it had a hand in the assassination of Hobeika. Sharon himself said the "allegations do not even merit a reaction from Israel." Lebanese President Emile Lahoud implicitly accused Israel of being behind the killing in a bid to prevent Hobeika from testifying against Sharon. A Belgian court is studying whether it can accept a case brought against the Israeli premier, who resigned from the post of defence minister as a direct result of the massacres. A Belgian senator, Josy Dubie, said after the killing that Hobeika told him and a colleague Tuesday he had new evidence on the camp massacres and would be prepared to testify in any trial against Sharon. ________________________________ Playing Into Sharon's Hands The New York Times January 25, 2002 By Robert Malley; Robert Malley is director of the International Crisis Group's Middle East program. He was special assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs under President Bill Clinton. AMMAN, Jordan--To hear the Israeli government tell it, the reason behind the enduring conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people is one man -- Yasir Arafat. Hence, Israel's approach to the problem is confining the Palestinian leader to his Ramallah headquarters, destroying the symbols of the Palestinian Authority he leads and gradually reoccupying its territory. The United States also says the onus is on Mr. Arafat and passively looks on -- occasionally dispatching its special envoy when the situation looks better, keeping him home as soon as events take a turn for the worse. Today, this is what passes for policy. But one has only to consider the growing number of victims on both sides to realize that far from being a path to peace, this approach is an almost certain recipe for catastrophe. There is an oddly abstract quality to the current reaction to Palestinian belligerence, as if that belligerence were devoid of context. Of course, it is not. The Palestinian people will have to think long and hard about how their actions led them to the edge of the abyss. But regardless of how the current intifada began, it has by now become a mutually reinforcing cycle of Palestinian violence and terror on the one hand and devastating Israeli military attacks on the other. As evidenced by the increasing number of Palestinians protesting even halfhearted efforts by Yasir Arafat to detain his militants, for the Palestinian Authority to crack down on its own people while Israel maintains its aggressive military action is politically and practically implausible. Of course, the United States is justified in pressuring Chairman Arafat to act against Palestinian terrorists. But so, too, must it admonish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to cease those policies that inflame the Palestinian public and paralyze its security services: the targeted assassinations, home demolitions, suffocating closures and creeping reoccupation. By his actions, and not without considerable help from the Palestinians, Mr. Sharon has done all in his power to make it unfeasible for them to meet their obligations. For Mr. Arafat to play into Mr. Sharon's hands in this, alas, has come to be expected. But for the rest of us? There is a broader political context as well. The intifada is the latest chapter in a conflict that opposes two peoples living on the same land and struggling over it. Any end to violence will depend on taking steps to end the conditions that helped produce it -- the pervasive and persistent military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech last November, evoking the prospect of a Palestinian state, was forceful, eloquent and insufficient. What is needed is a clear vision plus the will to implement it. Otherwise the arithmetic, to paraphrase a former Israeli security chief, is gruesome in its simplicity: kill a terrorist when political hope exists and have one terrorist less; kill a terrorist in the absence of such hope, and create 10 terrorists more. Inherent in the current approach is the notion that a weakened Yasir Arafat will be either forced to do right or forced out. But one need not defend Mr. Arafat to grasp that his humiliation and virtual house arrest make it less likely that he will stop the violence. And one need not defend his failings to recognize what his fall would mean. Unwilling to make hard decisions, creative with the truth and at best vacillating in his attitude toward the use of violence -- Mr. Arafat is all that, and then some. But he is also the embodiment of the Palestinian nation and of its aspirations. He is the first Palestinian leader to recognize Israel, relinquish the objective of regaining all of historic Palestine and negotiate for a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 boundaries. And he remains for now the only Palestinian with the legitimacy to sell future concessions to his people. For him to be crushed by Mr. Sharon -- whose unswerving goals have been, for the last 30 years, to vanquish Mr. Arafat, and more recently, to undo the foundations of the Oslo agreement -- under the world's passive gaze, would send a distressing message to all Palestinians, guarantee a succession that is in the interest neither of peace nor of Israel, and produce a generation of scarred and vengeful Palestinians. The true test of any policy is whether it is working. Palestinian terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and Hadera, Israeli military operations in Ramallah, Tulkarem and Nablus, and ever mounting loss of life on both sides ought to be enough to convince the Bush administration that this policy does not work. Still, the belief in Washington appears to be that engaging in more of the same -- escalating pressure on Mr. Arafat, giving a muted response to Mr. Sharon's destructive tactics and adopting a hands-off policy on the ground -- somehow will yield the desired outcome. The killings occurring daily are omens of an even greater disaster waiting to happen. As the Mideast inexorably drifts toward chaos and more bloodshed, the United States can either take action or take a pass. Can this really be that difficult a choice? http://www.nytimes.com ------------------------ Yahoo! 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