A summit has been set up between Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan for the initialling of a deal to build a $3.2 bn. pipeline from Turkmenistan down to South Asia. It is scheduled for Dec. 26-27 in the Turkmenistan capital of Ashkabad (Ashgebot). The pipeline would stretch from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Gwadar, and will be funded in part by the World Bank. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai will be there but it is unclear who will represent Pakistan.



India in particular is an emerging market for this gas, and Pakistan has already waived any objections to the pipeline going over to India, as well. Afghanistan and Pakistan would collect substantial tolls on the gas, and desperately poor Turkmenistan would get some much needed income.



Dawn reports that "The project has seven stages including feasibility, survey, design and engineering, construction, commissioning, operation and maintenance and installation of gas processing plant in Gwadar."



The obstacles to this pipeline plan are formidable. There has been heavy fighting for months around Shindand between Herat warlord Ismail Khan's forces and those of a rival. Gas pipelines are especially vulnerable to terrorism and sabotage, in which the Taliban and al-Qaeda specialized. Given that the US has not yet provided order to Afghanistan and that fair numbers of Taliban and al-Qaeda are still in the country, it seems to many observers that this pipeline project is no more than a pipe dream.



Certainly, Afghanistan will need a lot more order and security before it will become feasible, and achieving that goal seems to me at least a decade or perhaps more into the future.

     The more the Kuwaiti government thinks about it the less it likes the speech Saddam Hussein gave the day before yesterday. All though it appeared to contain an grudging apology for the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it also contained lots of other, more sinister language.



     The Kuwaiti officials now read it as a series of threats against them, and they have therefore sent a memo of protest to the United Nations. They see it as accusing them of treason against the Arab world for hosting US troops, and they read it as a threat against Westerners in Kuwait.



     They also worry that it was meant to create a division between the Kuwaiti people (many of whom, while they despise Saddam, are uneasy about cooperating in an attack on a fellow Arab country launched unilaterally by the US, a Western power). As a result, the Kuwaitis are setting up popular demonstrations against Saddam's letter. Even the Islamic party will join in this endeavor (since Saddam is a secular nationalist, they have reason to despise him, but surely are also torn by their dislike of the US and any projection of its power in the region.

     Stinger shoulder-launched missiles are being sold in the bazaars of Kabul for $200,000 according to foreign observers in that city. The geniuses in the Reagan administration (who we now have with us at the top of the government, like Paul Wolfowitz) gave Islamic extremists about 400 stingers in the 1980s to use against Soviet helicopter gunships.



     While this move may have been brilliant militarily, it was highly problematic with regard to long-term U.S. security. These deadly weapons have floated around arms markets ever since. Kuwait bought a fair number before 1990, so presumably some of those were confiscated by the Iraqis when they invaded. That's what we needed, Saddam with stingers. (Though it is not as if the original warlord recipients of this Reagan largesse were much better).



     The recent use of old Soviet SA-7s by al-Qaeda terrorists to attempt to shoot down a US fighter jet in Saudi Arabia (last winter) and now an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa reminds us of how absolutely devastating those weapons could be in the wrong hands.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been freed from prison by an Egyptian appeals court, which nullified his earlier sentence of seven years of hard labor. But, it ordered a retrial rather than simply freeing him. (He was out for `Id al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan). A human rights activist, Saad has been an inspiration to us all. President Bush had complained about his treatment in a letter to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, which is something of a milestone in the evolution of US-Egyptian relations. The reaction of prickly Egyptian parliamentarians was that they would not accept foreign meddling. One thing they did not seem to grasp was the in a globalizing world we are all open to influences from abroad. The European Union puts pressure in various ways on the US to abolish the death penalty, e.g. The other is that a gross injustice had been done, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been violated. As a member of the UN, Egypt is signatory to covenants enshrining freedom of speech, and so was in violation of its own law. Why should other UN members not say so?



The thing that worries me is the prospect of another trial. Saad's health is not good, and he may not be able to take it. I think the notion of a retrial is a broad hint to him to leave Egypt and go abroad, but so far he has been too stubborn and principled to take such hints. For all we know he will be convicted again in the new trial. It reminds me of the ending of the Bonfire of the Vanities, where the protagonist had become a perpetual defendant even though he had never been shown to have committed an actionable crime. On the other hand, his poor health may be a cause for the courts not to go forward with the retrial. Let us hope they have this sense and decency.



The defense demonstrated that the Ibn Khaldun Center had not illegally received donations from abroad, since the funding from the European Union had been awarded as a sort of contract, and had not consisted of donations in the legal sense at all. Likewise they demonstrated that the military court had misconstrued the law forbidding the besmirching of Egypt's honor. (This is a ridiculous law to have on the books in any case. A country, the honor of which is so fragile that it needs such a law has already lost its reputation; and jailing its foremost thinkers is calculated to strip it of any honor it has left.)



Congratulations to Saad for this great victory, and let us all hope Egypt has taken a step toward becoming a more humane and democratic society.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim's case will be decided today by the appeals court, which can set aside or confirm his sentence of seven years of hard labor. If the appeal is turned down and Saad Eddin serves that sentence, there is some question about whether his health will collapse altogether long before he is released. Hosni Mubarak will then be guilty of judicial murder, and I don't think he realizes how little the world community and those of us concerned with human rights will forgive him for it.



Saad Eddin, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, was railroaded from beginning to end, and is basically in jail for helping peasants learn how to vote intelligently and for criticizing Hosni's plan of turning the country over to his son in a dynastic manner. I studied with Saad Eddin, and have long admired him. If this is what happens to people who work peacefully for democracy and human rights, Mubarak is only inviting the extremists into the arena. The wind is blowing against authoritarian military regimes in the Middle East, and Egypt's ruling elite should stop being so complacent. Giving Saad Eddin his liberty would be a first step in the sort of reforms that might save their necks.

It's "Not Back to School" for Palestinian Children





Children continue to be among the chief victims of the continuing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Although it is natural to concentrate on the toll in lives taken by the struggle, among its biggest impacts have been psychological and educational.



Over a million and a half Palestinian children live under harsh Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Months into the school year, most still cannot move about freely or attend school. Over a fifth of them are acutely or chronically malnourished, in large part as a result of the Israeli lockdown. UNICEF estimated last summer that 317,000 Palestinian children were in "desperate need of assistance due to financial hardship."



All this is not to deny the real impact of violence. In the past two years, about 250 Palestinian children and 72 Israeli children have been killed in the conflict, according to Amnesty International. Literally thousands more have been traumatized by the direct experience of violence and by the loss of loved ones.



Palestinian suicide bombers have in some cases clearly chosen targets, such as dance clubs or pizzerias, where they knew many of their Israeli victims would be children. For their part, the Israeli armed forces have begun throwing caution to the wind in their pursuit of Palestinian fighters, injuring many civilians, and have responded with excessive force to the rock-throwing of protesting children.



UNICEF special representative to the Occupied Territories, Pierre Poupard, is worried about another dimension of the conflict. He says that, in contravention of international law, "a generation of Palestinian children is being denied its right to an education." His organization recently estimated that over 226,000 children and more than 9,300 teachers cannot get to their regular classrooms.



Under the tight Israeli curfew, about 580 schools have been closed. The United Nations noted last summer that "Checkpoints, closures and curfews severely impede access to medical care, education and employment."



In the first week of October, Palestinian children in Nablus defied the 24-hour curfew imposed by the Israelis last summer to go to school. They risked life and limb to do so. Just before they opened their schools, a 12-year-old boy was critically wounded when Israeli troops opened fire at a taxi-driver who was driving around when he should not have been. A 15-year-old boy was shot dead October 4 in a similar incident.



Curfews have long formed a key part of the repertoire of colonial states attempting to keep local populations under control. Curfews, checkpoints and restrictions on movement were routinely employed by the South African government in application of its racist Apartheid policies. Rhodesia imposed two major curfews in the early 1980s, in its attempt to continue to monopolize the country's wealth and resources for a small class of white colonialists. Ominously, these curfews served to prevent news from leaking out, of massacres of local populations. Although Israeli policies within Israel are largely democratic, its behavior in the West Bank and Gaza is increasingly that of a colonial power.



Israeli incursions, as at Khan Yunis on October 6, which killed 13 Palestinian civilians, including four children, have been on a much smaller scale and come in response to acts of terrorism. But Israel has violated the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians in occupied territories, as well as the United Nations convention on the rights of the child.



Strict Israeli control of media reporting from the Occupied Territories has had the effect of keeping the full horror of life under curfew from public awareness in the West. It is not hidden to Arabs and Muslims, however. The Kuwaiti men who shot American marines there in October gave as one reason for their rage the loss of innocent life in the Israeli attack at Khan Yunis.



Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorists, by police work. But collective punishment of a whole people, especially of innocent children, is wrong. Can anyone imagine the outcry if the British government had attempted to place the entire Irish population under such a curfew because of terrorist attacks in Belfast?



Now that the Labor Party in Israel has ended its national unity coalition with the far rightwing Likud, its leaders should make every effort to end the policy of military re-occupation and harsh curfews.



Israel cannot hope to win peace by such policies nor by fostering ignorance and poverty in the next generation of its Palestinian neighbors. Nor can the United States government hope to achieve important diplomatic goals in the region if it continues to treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with benign neglect.

At the request of a number of friends, I'm reprinting this piece here.



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Chronicle of Higher Education



Tuesday, July 16, 2002



OPINION



Why We Should Not Boycott Israeli Academics

By JUAN COLE



I thought the divestiture movement and the boycott of academic institutions in the old racist South Africa a good idea, and was cheered to see students at the University of

Michigan demonstrating against apartheid in the 1980s. I do not feel the same way about boycotting Israeli academics, as has been called for by hundreds of European scholars since April. Nor is this a matter on which I have the luxury of not taking a stand. As a historian of the modern Middle East, I am sometimes invited to conferences hosted at least in part by Israeli institutions. I edit the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the flagship publication of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, which receives large numbers of submissions from academics in Israel and sometimes has Israeli scholars on its editorial board.



In April, I was happily making airplane reservations for an Istanbul conference, which had partial Israeli sponsorship, on the 20th-century historiography of the Middle East. Despite the sound of the topic, dull as antique scissors, it promised to be an intellectually engaging experience. And I would hate to miss Istanbul's Ottoman architecture, the priceless museums, the chance to practice my Turkish, and the play of spring light on the Golden Horn. Then one of the invited conference participants, himself an Israeli living in the United States, sent out an e-mail message saying that he would avoid the conference and urging others to do so, too. He cited the European boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and said he could not in good conscience participate in the wake of the early April Israeli army actions at Jenin and elsewhere in the West Bank.



For many faculty members in the United States, where the political culture is strongly pro-Israel, this question would provoke no soul-searching. Indeed, a petition against the boycott idea has garnered thousands of signatures from intellectual luminaries here. While I strongly support Israel's right to exist within secure and peaceful borders, I reached my decision about the Istanbul conference only after days of hard thinking and consultation with conscientious and progressive friends.



Unlike most Americans, I find the political and military behavior of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza appalling and contrary to the Geneva Conventions and other instruments of international law. The United Nations charter, to which Israel is a signatory, forbids the acquisition of territory by military conquest. Some Israelis argue that they may do as they please with the West Bank and Gaza because of the territories' unclear status, but this position ignores the rights of the Palestinian residents.



The massive usurpation of land and water resources since the Israeli capture of the territories in 1967, the illegal settling of about 200,000 colonists there, and the harsh and humiliating treatment of an essentially colonized population has provoked a good deal of Israel's problems with the Palestinians. Although much of the Palestinian population has now been nominally put under the Palestinian Authority, the major roads remain under Israeli control, the often-armed colonists remain in place, and the Israeli army frequently reoccupies the territories, destroying PA infrastructure and imposing curfews and other harsh measures in response to the terrorist actions of a few. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appears to envision annexing large swaths of the West Bank.



Like any human being with a heart, I too feel the helpless rage, the sickened despair, at seeing the serial murders by pitiless bombers who take the lives of innocent Israeli victims as well as their own. I understand the Israeli public's demand for an end to these monstrosities, and the willingness to use force for that purpose. Still, the Geneva Conventions were enacted with precisely such heated situations in mind, and Israel is not exempt from them by grief.



The second Palestinian uprising that began in October of 2000 and Israeli attempts to put it down have tragically claimed the lives of more than 525 Israelis and more than 1,450 Palestinians, according to the Israel-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism. The institute calculates that more than 420 of the Israeli dead were noncombatants, whereas about 568 of the Palestinians were. It is clear that the radical Palestinian forces are guilty of actively targeting civilians -- which is morally heinous -- and that the Israeli army has, at best, been careless in avoiding the deaths of Palestinian civilians. More likely, Israel has been cavalier in taking the lives of innocents in its narrow pursuit of enemies. This behavior, on both sides, is a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions, which were formulated to apply to wars of national liberation as well as to conventional warfare.



The Human Rights Watch report on Israeli-government actions at Jenin described how Israeli forces bulldozed buildings to make way for tanks in the labyrinthine refugee camp, sometimes giving insufficient notice to residents or refusing to wait when informed that a civilian (in one case a paralytic) was still inside the building.



When a group of Palestinian guerrillas put up a fight that killed 13 Israeli soldiers in the Hawashin district, the Israelis riposted and most residents fled. The Israeli army bulldozed 140 buildings and extensively damaged 200 others, leaving as many as 4,000 camp residents homeless. That action was a form of collective punishment. Throughout the West Bank, civilians who have inadvertently, or because of an emergency, gone outside during curfews have sometimes been shot dead by Israeli soldiers -- again, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.



That isn't the narrative put forth by the Likud Party, but it is, more or less, the way the European news media presented the situation. If some European academics thought international law was being consistently flouted by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government, then it is not hard to understand why they proposed a boycott in early April. The European Union treats Israel as a European country for the purposes of scientific and academic exchange, a practice that the European academics sought to end as long as Sharon continued his hard-line policies.



While I understand the impulse, the shunning of Israeli academic institutions seems to me entirely the wrong place to begin. The supporters of the European academic boycott often make an analogy to South Africa and its apartheid policies. Yet while Arab Israelis are discriminated against in many ways in Israeli society, there is nothing like apartheid. Baruch Kimmerling, an anthropology professor at Hebrew University, wrote in a piece for the Independent Media Center that not "all the members of the Israeli academy are great humanists or support the idea of self-determination of the Palestinian people. We are a highly heterogeneous community." He points out, however, that while South African academic institutions generally gave vigorous support to the apartheid government and sanctioned dissident faculty members, the Israeli academy, on the whole, shows great independence. Israeli universities have Arab-Israeli students and have conducted hundreds of joint projects with their counterparts in the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.



Israeli academics tend to be left of center, and finding one who expresses something other than deep distaste for Sharon is no easy task. It seems especially inappropriate to punish academics for the actions of a government they largely oppose. Many Israeli academics have been involved in the peace movement, which, although badly damaged by the suicide bombings, struggles on.



It is surely that movement which, however dark its prospects now seem, holds the greatest hope for a better future. Kimmerling says that an increasingly chauvinistic Israeli public militates against the independence of journalists, whereas tenured faculty retain the ability to speak out on human-rights abuses.



Hillel Shuval, a professor of environmental sciences, also at Hebrew University, was quoted in The Chronicle warning that the boycott would harm projects in which he has been involved that get Europeans, Israelis, and Palestinians to work together. It should be remembered that the Oslo peace process itself originated with back-channel meetings of Israelis and Palestinians at a university in Norway. The current boycott call would forestall important new developments deriving from such exchanges.



As for the recent sacking of Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University from the editorial boards of the British journals The Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts, respectively, here individuals are being sanctioned for the policies of their government, and that is wrong. Ironically, Shlesinger is a prominent Amnesty International activist who has been highly critical of Israeli government policies in the West Bank. In contrast, I could support the divestment campaign at some American campuses, aimed at university investments in Israeli firms, because the business elite in Israel is both more powerful and more entangled in government policy than the academics.



I am not unaware, of course, that in some circles such a position would immediately raise the question of anti-Semitism. For those of us actually involved in the Middle East, that reaction is simply unhelpful. Israel is a state -- just as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are -- and it is not exempt from censure for illegal or unethical behavior because it is Jewish. I would argue that treating the Sharon government with kid gloves in order to tiptoe around the issue of anti-Semitism would itself be a form of anti-Semitism, a way of cordoning off all Jews as somehow unlike other human beings. In any case, this non-issue was irrelevant to my own thinking, which was more pragmatic. An academic boycott is a political act with a political goal, and if it is unsuited to the purpose then it is bad politics.



I recently appointed an Israeli academic at Hebrew University to the editorial board of the journal I edit. At the Istanbul conference I attended with my Israeli academic colleagues, they promptly led others in working up a petition to protest the policies of the Sharon government in the West Bank and Gaza. I signed it in solidarity with them. Refusing to meet and talk with a concerned party to an epochal set of political and cultural negotiations is the farthest thing from a progressive act.



Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and is the author of Sacred Space and Holy War (I.B. Tauris, 2002).



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Lawrence Davidson has written an interesting rebuttal of my piece at:



http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0248.html