International and Bilateral Issues

Nepal seeks to deepen ‘development partnership' with India

Dr. Bhattarai will urge India to provide a $1-billion line of credit for infrastructure projects, assistance in construction of hospitals, bridges, embankments and canals, creation of world class engineering and medical colleges.
In the late 90s, India diversified its assistance to small grassroots projects, where the focus area was infrastructure and capacity building in the areas of education, health and community development. These include projects below Rs. 5 crore.
A major emphasis has been on enhancing cross-border connectivity. This includes the Tarai Road Projects, which would upgrade 1450 km of postal and feeder roads in the plains next to the border with India, integrated check posts at four points on the border and building cross-border railway links.
Since 2003, work has been under way in 411 large and small projects.
The sole role of the Government of India (GoI) is to release the funds after due inspection of the projects but not a single contract for a small development project has been granted to any Indian contractor, while both Indian companies as well as joint ventures are eligible to bid in the larger GoI projects.

ISAF fiddles the figures

International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan
The two researchers, who live in Kandahar, focussed on ISAF's kill-or-capture policy.
Their first conclusion is that, while ISAF has reduced its use of kill-or-capture, it has not ended the practice.
Secondly, the strategy is supposed to be targeted at ‘leaders' and ‘facilitators' but in a total of 3,157 incidents, including 2,365 kill-or-capture raids, only 174 ‘leaders' and 25 ‘facilitators' were killed.
Thirdly, ISAF itself muddies the data by often putting ‘facilitators' in the ‘leaders' category; and its aggregated data sometimes do not match the figures in the press releases.
This means that accuracy is not an issue and the data cannot be trusted.
Obvious parallels arise with Iraq, where U.S. troops and their allies began releasing body counts without formal clearance from Washington — but had their figures challenged by eyewitnesses and survivors.
Both the invasion of Iraq and the war of aggression against Viet Nam were completely unlawful. ISAF, by contrast, has a United Nations mandate but by fiddling the figures it is undermining even its own formal legitimacy.

Beyond the ‘Arab Spring'

The ‘Arab Spring' is a misnomer. The media use it to describe the uprising that the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi unleashed in Tunisia on December 18, 2010, against police corruption and ill-treatment.
But it was in Egypt that the computer-literate working class youth and their supporters among middle-class college students, created a veritable revolution, fanned by a whirlwind of rights activists, trade unionists, professors, lawyers, and unemployed youth. The demonstrations continued in Tahrir Square, until President Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign after 18 days of protests, ending his 30-year presidency. Tahrir Square turned into a battlefield as the Army moved in to disperse the activists, beating and firing at them.
The police shot and killed Coptic Christians protesting against Islamists who had set fire to churches. (The Coptic Patriarch, Chenouda III, was awarded the 2000 UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence for encouraging interfaith dialogue.)
The Islamic retrogression is a far cry from the secular flowers that blossomed during the Arab Spring with the establishment of the Ba {minute}ath Party in 1946.
It was a movement founded in Damascus by two Syrian intellectuals: Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian (1910-1989), and Salah al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim (1912-1980).
They promoted Ba {minute}athist ideology within a nationalist-secular political framework that rejected faith-based orientation. These ideas of protecting the minority status of non-Muslims found favour with the progressive leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement such as Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Tito in Yugoslavia and Sukarno in Indonesia: the secular ideology helped them stabilise the ethnic and communal conflicts in their newly independent countries.
They formed governments in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Egypt briefly when Syria merged with Egypt in 1958, to become the United Arab Republic.
They conceived their respective religions as a mere appendix attached to the Greek and Phoenician classical antiquity that spread across the Mediterranean region from 1550 BC to 300 BC.
It was in ancient Iraq that the first literate societies developed in the Fourth Millennium BC. They developed the first cities and complex state bureaucracies, using a sophisticated writing system. Their scholars compiled historical, juridical, economical, mathematical, astronomical, lexical, grammatical and epistolary treatises. They invented two-wheeled carts and built roads, earlier than 3000 BC.
Taha Hussein (1889-1973) was the senior mentor of Aflaq and Bitar, known as the pioneer of the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. His vision of Egyptian secular culture was embedded in what he called “Pharaonism.” He strived to make education secular.
As the U.S. alliance with bin Laden's Mujahideen destroyed the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1989, and dismantled the secular Ba {minute}ath administrations in Iraq for the benefit of Al-Qaeda jihadists, the abortion of the 2011 Arab Spring has given the Anglo-Americans another opportunity to install Islamists in the Arab world.
These vultures are now hovering over Syria, the last bastion of Ba {minute}athism, under the pretext of democracy, to tear apart the Muslim and Christian communities.
So the Arab Spring has become the Trojan horse to supply arms to dissidents and escalate the conflict into an emergency to isolate Syria by imposing U.N. sanctions.
The Arab Springers seem well on their way towards subscribing to the Sunni majoritarian culture and becoming another “epicentre of terrorism” like Pakistan, where even the moderate civilians are throwing rose petals on the assassin of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, hit for defending a Christian woman condemned to die for insulting Islam.

Kenya's move into Somalia is brave

Kenya's military intervention in southern Somalia marks an important and hazardous moment for African peacekeeping.
But despite their superior firepower, Kenya's armed forces may struggle, like the Ethiopians and Ugandans before them, to decisively defeat the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab Islamist militia whose depredations prompted the incursion.
For Kenya and other neighbours, not least fragile Yemen, Somalia has become a vortex of instability, suffering and terror that radiates outwards to affect those within its orbit, even hundreds of miles out to sea.
Kenya has become home to the world's biggest refugee camp, at Dadaab, where 460,000 Somalis have sought shelter.
Al-Shabab forces largely pulled out of Mogadishu in August. They said it was tactical but it was more likely the product of pressure from Somali government troops and the U.N.- and African Union-backed peacekeeping mission, Amisom, plus growing public hostility.
It has also reportedly been weakened by internal disputes
Experts suggest instead that Nairobi will seek to support Somali government forces and arm local militia antipathetic to al-Shabab. There has been talk in the past of creating a buffer zone.
African countries that step up to tackle an African problem, rather than sitting back and complaining when the West tries to do it for them, are to be applauded.