Lebanon protests: Thousands demand the fall of regime
Protests have been raging across Lebanon for days over proposed new taxes despite assurances by Prime Minister Saad Hariri that his government will work to solve the country's economic crisis.
On Friday, the protests devolved into violence in the capital Beirut that saw riot police in vehicles and on foot clashing with demonstrators.
Here are a few things you need to know about the biggest protests in Lebanon in years:
What seems to be spontaneous anti-government protests erupted late on Thursday in the wake of austerity measures and a slew of new taxes that included charges on WhatsApp calls.
The government reversed the tax on WhatsApp calls but the protests have spread to other parts of the country with demand for better living conditions and an end to endemic corruption.
Protesters also took to the streets in the eastern Bekaa Valley and Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest city.
Riots were also reported in the Roumieh and Zahle prisons.
The protests, the largest since 2015 'You Stink' campaign, come as the most serious challenge to Hariri's national unity government which came to power less than a year ago.
Public anger surged after parliament passed an austerity budget in July, and on Thursday it flowed into the streets over plans to introduce a $0.20 tax on calls via messaging apps, widely used in Lebanon.
The government scrapped the proposal within hours, but demonstrations carried on into the night before security forces dispersed them on Friday.
Lebanese have been suffering from dire economic conditions in the heavily indebted country and from tax increases, with anti-government protests erupting several times in recent months.
Despite tens of billions of dollars spent since the 15-year-long civil war ended in 1990, Lebanon still has crumbling infrastructure, including daily electricity cuts, rubbish piles in the streets and often sporadic, limited water supplies from the state-owned water company.
The protesters are demanding a sweeping overhaul of Lebanon's political system, citing grievances ranging from austerity measures to poor infrastructure.
After Hariri's speech, clashes flared in central Beirut's Riyadh al-Solh Square between demonstrators and security personnel, who fired tear gas canisters to clear the plaza.
Riot police rounded up protesters. They used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Beirut's commercial district. Dozens of people were wounded and detained.
Lebanon's internal security apparatus said 52 police were injured on Friday and its forces arrested 70 people.
Two Syrian workers died after they were trapped in a shop that was set on fire by protesters in Beirut on Friday.
Some protesters, including men in black hoods, blocked roads, set tyres on fire and used iron bars to smash storefronts in Beirut's posh downtown district.
As fires blazed, some streets in the capital looked like a battlefield, strewn with rubber bullets, smashed up cars, broken glass and torn billboards. Firefighters struggled late into the night to douse the flames.
In a country fractured along sectarian lines, the unusually wide geographic reach of the protests highlights the deepening anger.
Cutting across sectarian and religious lines, Lebanese have come out on to the streets, waving banners and chanting slogans urging Hariri's government to go.
The Middle East country is divided on sectarian lines, with each of the main sects holding a position in government - the president must be Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim and so on.
Reflecting the scale of public anger, rare demonstrations were reported in neighbourhoods dominated by powerful Shia movement Hezbollah, not used to the opposition in its own bastions.
In an unprecedented move, Shia protesters also attacked the offices of their deputies from the influential Hezbollah and Amal movements in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon's prime minister has given his coalition partners a 72-hour ultimatum to back his reform agenda amid growing nationwide protests.
In a televised speech on Friday evening, Hariri said he understood their anger and was trying to push through change.
He called on his coalition partners to give a "clear, decisive and final response to convince me, the Lebanese people and the international community ... that everyone has decided on reforms, or I will have something else to say".
It seems to me that the Lebanese do not want to hear promises but to see actual change.
Inside Story: What is the solution for Labaon economical crisis?
KURDS
The hypocritical Israelis do not miss a chance to use their hasbara to buy sympathy and to try to whitewhash their unending crimes.
Messages of solidarity and support for the Kurdish people have dominated Israeli discourse since Turkey’s invasion of Rojava in northern Syria last week. A day after Turkey launched its attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on Twitter: “Israel strongly condemns the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas in Syria and warns against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey and its proxies. Israel is prepared to extend humanitarian assistance to the gallant Kurdish people.”
For decades, Israeli politicians have echoed this relationship between the Jewish and Kurdish people. The dominant Israeli narrative presents a seemingly strong political and moral partnership with the Kurds. A closer look, however, shows that Israel’s alliance is one of pure convenience.
Throughout the 2000s, Israel militarily supported Kurdish forces, including training in Syria and Iraq. Around the same time, it sold 170 M60T tanks, worth $688 million, to Turkey, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Arms Transfers Database.
The year this sale was announced — 2002 — was the same year that then-Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit outlawed classes in the Kurdish language at schools and universities across the country. More than 100 Kurds were arrested for protesting against this change. Also that year, Turkey’s broadcasting watchdog banned a pro-Kurdish television station for a year, and the EU added the PKK — the Kurdish separatist party that has been fighting an armed insurgency against Turkey since the early 80s — to its list of black-listed terrorist organizations at Turkey’s request. All with no criticism from Israel.
In 2009, Turkey was Israel’s top arms client. This was the same year the Turkish constitutional court banned the Democratic Society Party, the main Kurdish nationalist party in Turkey, and subsequently put its leaders on trial for terrorism. Overall, 1,400 DTP members were arrested and 900 detained in the government crackdown against the party.
However, it was not the crackdown on Kurdish nationalism that severed the military ties between Israel and Turkey that year. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was vocal in his opposition to Operation Cast Lead, going so far as to say that the war would harm military relations between the countries. Israel continued exporting weapons to Turkey in 2010, but by 2011 there was another drop in sales, following the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla, which led to the killing of eight Turkish nationals, subsequently suspending Israeli-Turkish diplomatic relations. As such, it was specific Israeli military attacks against Palestinians and their supporters that lead to the severing of Israeli-Turkish military ties, and not the constant violence of the Turkish state against the Kurds.
How can we explain this Israeli support for the Kurdish people in both practice and rhetoric, while it simultaneously arms one of the main forces oppressing Kurdish people? The answer is rather simple: Israeli governments have supported the Kurdish people when it has been convenient, and backed their oppressors when that better served Israel’s political and economic interests. At times — during most of the 2000s, for example — Israel did both at the same time.
If supporting the Kurdish authorities in Iraq serves Israel’s interest of weakening Syrian and Iranian influence in the region, great. If Israel can profit off selling Turkey drones, including Heron drones used in a Turkish invasion of Kurdish northern Iraq in 2008, great.
Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked clearly stated her support for the Kurds, saying: “We must openly call for the establishment of a Kurdish state that separates Iran from Turkey, one which will be friendly towards Israel.” Why support a Kurdish state? So that it will be a friendly ally to Israel between Iran and Turkey. This call for independence for an occupied people is extremely ironic coming from Israel, which denies the right of self-determination to millions of Palestinians that it controls under occupation.
This should serve as a reminder that Israel’s position on the Kurds is not motivated by morality, but self-interest. As long as Israel continues to occupy millions of Palestinians, it cannot fight for the liberation of other nations and claim that it’s driven by the desire to “do the right thing.”
PALESTINA
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called for elections in the Occupied Territories is a political ploy. There will be no true, democratic elections under Abbas’ leadership. The real question is: why did he make the call in the first place?
On September 26, Abbas took on the world’s most important political platform, the United Nations General Assembly, to call for “general elections in Palestine – in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip”.
The Palestinian leader prefaced his announcement with a lofty emphasis on the centrality of democracy in his thinking. “From the outset, we have believed in democracy as a foundation for the building of our State and society,” he said with unmistakable self-assurance. But, as it turned out, it was only Hamas – not Israel, and certainly not the PA’s own undemocratic, transparent and corrupt legacy – that made Abbas’ democratic mission impossible.
Upon his return from New York, Abbas formed a committee, whose mission, according to official Palestinian media, is to consult with various Palestinian factions regarding the promised elections.
Hamas immediately accepted the call for elections, though it asked for further clarifications. The core demand for the Islamic group, which controls the besieged Gaza Strip, is a simultaneous election that includes the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the PA presidency and, most importantly, the Palestine National Council (PNC) – the legislative component of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
While the PLO has fallen under the tight grip of Abbas and a clique within his own Fatah party, the remaining institutions have operated without any democratic, popular mandates for nearly 13 years. The last PLC elections were held in 2006, followed by a Hamas-Fatah clash that resulted in the current political rift between the two parties. As for Abbas’ own mandate, that, too, expired sometime in 2009. It means that Abbas, who supposedly believes “in democracy as the foundation for the building of our State” is an undemocratically reigning president without any real mandate to rule over Palestinians.
Not that Palestinians are shying away from making their feelings clear. Time after time, they have asked Abbas to leave. But the 83-year-old is bent on remaining in power – however one defines “power” under the yoke of Israeli military occupation.
The prevalent analysis following Abbas’ call for elections is that such an undertaking is simply impossible, considering the circumstances. To begin with, after winning US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Israel is unlikely to allow the Palestinians to include occupied East Jerusalem in any future vote.
Hamas, on the other hand, is likely to reject the inclusion of Gaza if the elections are limited to the PLC, and exclude Abbas’ own position and the PNC. Without a PNC vote, the reordering and resurrection of the PLO would remain elusive, a belief that is shared by other Palestinian factions.
Being aware of these obstacles, Abbas must already know that the chances of real, fair, free and truly inclusive elections are negligible. But his call is the last, desperate move to quell growing resentment among Palestinians, at his decades-long failure to utilize the so-called peace process to achieve his people’s long-denied rights.
There are three, main reasons compelling Abbas to make this move at this, specific time.
First, the demise of the peace process and the two-state solution, through a succession of Israeli and American measures, has left the PA, and Abbas in particular, isolated and short on funds. Palestinians who supported such political illusions no longer constitute the majority.
Second, the PA constitutional court resolved, last December, that the president should call for an election within the next six months, that is, by June 2019. The court, itself under Abbas’ control, aimed to provide the Palestinian leader with a legal outlet to dismiss the previously elected parliament – whose mandate expired in 2010 – and create new grounds for his political legitimacy. Still, he failed to adhere to the court’s decision.
Third, and most importantly, the Palestinian people are clearly fed up of Abbas, his authority and all the political shenanigans of the factions. In fact, 61 percent of all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza want Abbas to step down, according to a public opinion poll held by the Palestinian Center for Political and Polling Research in September.
The same poll indicates that Palestinians reject the entire political discourse which has served as the foundation for Abbas and his PA’s political strategies. Moreover, 56 percent of Palestinians oppose the two-state solution; up to 50 percent believe that the performance of the current PA government of Mohammed Shtayyeh is worse than that of his predecessor; and 40 percent want the PA to be dissolved.
Tellingly, 72 percent of Palestinians want legislative and presidential elections held throughout the occupied territories. The same percentage wants the PA to lift its share of the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.
Abbas is now at his weakest political position since his advent to leadership, many years ago. With no control over political outcomes that are determined by Tel Aviv and Washington, he has resorted to making a vague call for elections that have no chance of success.
While the outcome is predictable, Abbas hopes that, for now, he would once more appear as the committed leader who is beholden to international consensus and the wishes of his own people.
It will take months of wasted energy, political wrangling and an embarrassing media circus before the election ploy falls apart, ushering in a blame game between Abbas and his rivals that could last months, if not years.
This is hardly the strategy that the Palestinian people – living under brutal occupation and a suffocating siege – need or want. The truth is that Abbas, and whatever political class he represents, have become a true obstacle in the path of a nation that is in desperate need of unity and a meaningful political strategy. What the Palestinian people urgently require is not a half-hearted call for elections, but a new leadership, a demand they have articulated repeatedly, though Abbas refuses to listen.
One must nor forget: Gaza 2014 is the same of 2019
BRASIL
Gosto muito de futebol. Mas só torço por um time, a Seleção.
Simpatizava com o Corinthians do Sócrates.
Mas em outubro de 2019, foi o Santos que me atraiu com um tweet admirável que impõe respeito de qualquer democrata.
"Nossa arquibancada é espaço para quase todos: temos santistas de todas as raças, idades, origens, moradores de todas as partes do Brasil, gêneros, diferentes posições políticas, opções, gostos e credos. Só não temos espaço para preconceituosos."
Quem disse que futebol não rima com posicionamento político inteligente e inclusivo?
A base dos males é a ignorância e o preconceito.
Se o Sócrates estivesse vivo, estaria certamente na primeira linha contra o malefício neofascista que tomou conta de Brasília e de uma camada ignorante e egoísta da sociedade brasileira.
Bravo Santos!
AOS FATOS:Todas as declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
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