ISRAELI EXECUTION – CENSORED

Today there was some excellent reporting in the Financial Times of an extraordinary incident in the West Bank. Apart from a brief mention in the Independent, which simply relayed the official Israeli government line, the FT seems to have been the only national paper to have covered the story in the UK.

This is what the Independent inserted into the end of a piece headlined ‘Defeated Peretz to be kingmaker for Labour’ (all about political maneouverings in the Israeli Labour Party):

‘In Ramallah, undercover Israeli troops shot dead an al-Aqsa militant during a gunfight which erupted after the soldiers raided a restaurant in search of him. The troops had to call for reinforcements when local people threw stones at them.’ (Independent, 31 May)

Harvey Morris of the FT put together a comprehensive account, with several eyewitnesses, the opinion of the Palestinian information minister, who was in an office nearby when the incident took place, doctors’ reports, and a comment from a Palestinian human rights group. It’s 21 paragraphs long and well worth reading.

As with any real journalism, the story is summarized in the first sentences:

‘An Israeli undercover squad shot dead an off-duty Palestinian security man at point-blank range during a daylight raid on Ramallah in what Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian information minister present at the scene, on Wednesday described as an extrajudicial execution.

‘Uniformed soldiers then fired into the body of Mohamed Abdul-Halim, 24, and kicked him to make sure he was dead, according to witnesses who have given statements to a local human rights organisation.’

The details carefully collected together in the FT story contradict the official line recycled by the Independent.

So Mohamed Abdul-Halim was an official security man working for a unit ‘loyal to Mahmoud Abbas’, not necessarily an al-Aqsa militant; there was no gunfight (he had not drawn his weapon when he was shot in the back); and the incident took place outside the restaurant, not inside it.

An important point is made in the subheading to the FT story: ‘Palestinian shot 24 times by soldiers’. In the back.

The story is important (though Mohamed Abdul-Halim was not the only Palestinian to be killed by Israeli forces on Tuesday). The lack of coverage in the mainstream British papers is revealing.

AFGHANISTAN – POPPY ERADICATION

Yesterday the FT carried another important story, this time about Afghanistan. (There’s a letter in today’s paper in response, see below.)

The story is about how the US-led occupation is handling the problem of poppy growing and opium production in Afghanistan (which had been eradicated under the Taliban).

Part 1 was about the Afghan Government’s ‘Counternarcotics Trust Fund’ (CNTF) which has been struggling; it’s spent less than 5 per cent of the $42m it’s received from donor governments over the past 18 months. The FT writes:

‘A flagship Afghan government fund has failed to distribute millions of dollars in aid to opium farmers despite the country’s surging drugs problem. All donor governments have now halted contributions to the fund.’

The problem is reported as being a mixture of incompetence, inexperience and bureaucratic infighting.

**

The more important Part II was about the divisions among the occupiers over poppy eradication.

Mirwais Yasini, a member of the Afghan parliamentary committee on counter-narcotics, said: ‘The entire situation is a mess and a complete embarrassment. There is no united front from the west and there is not a concrete plan from the government either. Foreign countries can do a certain amount but we can’t blame them for all of our failures.’

Yasini put some of the blame on ‘corruption involving police chiefs, governors and some levels of the central government.’

The response to the ‘mess’ and ‘embarassment’ in Washington is to press for aerial spraying of the poppy fields, to eradicate 25 per cent of the crop (enough to ‘persuade’ farmer to switch crops, apparently).

There has been an alarmed reaction to these proposals.

Mirwais Yasini said: ‘Aerial eradication will maximise the antagonism against the government.’

General Dan K. McNeill, commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said that ISAF is not ready to carry out such a task, and that spraying could be counter-productive: ‘We are not manned, we are not equipped and we are not trained. Eradication done improperly is counter-intuitive to running the counter-insurgency because it will alienate people and you may have more insurgent people appearing than you had before.‘

Habibullah Qaderi, Afghan minister for counter-narcotics, told the FT in Kabul: ‘So far our policy stands. If we have no other choice we will do spraying, but it is the last resort. For the time being we still say no.‘

The FT has clearly received a discreet briefing from the British Government, reporting:

‘For the UK, which has the international mandate to deal with narcotics in Afghanistan, the more aggressive US approach – which also stresses the interdiction and prosecution of drug traffickers – is troubling.’

That’s it. No other word of the British worries.

The FT continues:

‘Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution expert on the nexus between military conflict and illicit economies, says the US believes the British are “going wobbly” and has set up parallel counter-narcotics institutions to push harder for eradication.’

So Britain is trying to resist, and they are getting steamrollered.

‘William Wood, the new US ambassador to Kabul who oversaw US-backed coca-eradication programmes in Colombia, is understood to have told the Europeans spraying will begin next year.‘

Vanda Felbab-Brown of the liberal Brookings Institution comments: ‘The scenario that you suppress cultivation and they [insurgents] go bankrupt has not happened anywhere.’

She told the FT that ‘the vast majority of poor poppy growers, facing the loss of their livelihood, would resort to desperate measures, including selling their daughters to pay debts, ending up in servitude or fleeing to Pakistan.’

If US policy results in young women being sold into slavery of one kind or another, we may rest assured that this phenomenon will be converted by the mainstream press into another propaganda weapon against the Taliban.

If US policy alienates the Afghan people still further, creating more armed resistance, we may rest assured that this violence will be converted by the mainstream press into further justification for the occupation of Afghanistan.

**

In today’s FT, there’s a letter from Dennis Kux and Karl F. Inderfurth, former senior officials in the State Department with responsibility for South Asian affairs.

Kux and Inderfurth respond to the opium stories from yesterday:

‘There are no silver bullets that can quickly rid this war-ravaged land of the interrelated curse of narcotics, corruption, weak governance, a poor economy and low levels of education and healthcare. But, if implemented, the US proposal for large-scale aerial eradication of opium poppies reported by you (“US plans to destroy Afghan opium poppies”, May 26) will be a silver bullet – for the Taliban.

‘... in the long run, large-scale aerial eradication will have a disastrous impact. It will alienate thousands of Afghan farmers who plant poppy and offer the Taliban a golden opportunity to exploit to their advantage.

‘Yes, Afghanistan’s soaring drug production is a severe problem, but it should be addressed, as the United Nations and the World Bank have proposed, through a combination of: selective manual eradication, more vigorous interdiction of traffickers, stiffer anti-corruption measures, a more sustained effort to offer Afghan farmers alternative livelihoods, and patience.

‘Flawed, short-term fixes such as large-scale aerial eradication are not the answer.’