MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

pas

quarta-feira, 8 de setembro de 2021

The Resistant: Zakaria Zubeidi

O Exército israelense de ocupação está prendendo os familiares e parentes dos seis resistentes que escaparam da prisão de alta segurança. Addamer, a ONG palestina de apoio aos cinco mil prisioneiros políticos detidos em masmorras israelenses, junto com outras ONGs de Direitos Humanos, denunciaram hoje as barbaridades que os soldados israelenses estão cometendo na Cisjordânia como desforra pelo vexame.

Sobretudo com os próximos a Zakaria Zubeidi.

As Forças Armadas israelenses já destruíram a casa da família de Zakaria duas vezes e a maioria dos homens da família já foram presos em Israel nos últimos trinta anos.

Soldados israelenses assassinaram a mãe de Zakaria a balas em uma das invasões à sua casa. Frustrados por não conseguirem executá-lo, mataram a mãe. Ele escapou coberto de feridas de estilhaços.

A maior parte do campo de refugiados de Jenin foi destruída pelo exército de ocupação em 2002.

Israel está preparando uma invasão da cidade, que está esperando o massacre e pronta para enfrentar os invasores messmo desarmados.

A fuga de Zakaria e sua história de combate à ocupação faz de sua família o maior alvo de agressões "retaliativas" de Israel pela humilhação pública internacional. Porém, seu status, em Jenin e na Palestina inteira, alcançou proporções jamais vistas desde Yasser Arafat, a quem foi fiel na chefia da organização militar do Fatah em Jenin até a morte do líder palestino.

Zakaria, de 46 anos, e seus cinco companeiros ainda estão fora de alcance do exército israelense que mobilizou centenas de soldados que estão escarafunchando a Cisjordânia inteira e aumentando os checkpoints (já existem cerca de 300!). Se os seis resistentes conseguirem sair desta escapada histórica, apesar dos sisraelenses estaem vasculhando todas as cidades e vilarejos além de estarem monitorando com drones e seu sistema de espionagem a Palestina inteira, vão ser consagrados. Zakaria já é herói da Segunda Intifada. Falta livrar-se desta para virar lenda.

Que Deus os proteja!

Israeli Ocuppation army is arresting relatives of Palestinian prisoners on the run after their brazen escape from a high-security prison in Israel.

Addameer, the Palestinian prisoner support and human rights association, said on Wednesday at least seven family members of the escapees were detained by Israeli soldiers throughout the occupied West Bank, though some were held only briefly.

Zakaria Zubeidi’s family home had been destroyed twice by Israeli forces and most of the male family members had been arrested and imprisoned in Israel.

Zakaria’s mother was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on one of the occasions they tried to assassinate him, while he suffered a serious arm injury and shrapnel to his face.

Most of the camp was levelled by the Israeli military in 2002 during the Second Intifada.

But it is Zakaria’s escape and his history of fighting against the occupation that makes the family a prime target for Israeli retaliation. His status has reached legendary proportions in the camp and in the whole Palestinian community in the occupied territories and abroad.

A former member of the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades he, together with the other five escapees from Islamic Jihad, has continued to elude the hundreds of Israeli security forces scouring West Bank villages and towns, while soldiers are concentrated at, and surveillance cameras monitor, entry points into Israel.

Para entender Zakaria Zubeide, leia os blogs de 16/12/2012 e 30/12/2012,

e assista o documentário abaixo, legendado em espanhol

To understand Zakaria Zubaide

Arna's Children / Os filhos de Arna

English, legenda em espanhol

https://youtu.be/7peJ_2Bkbp0

Jenine Freedom Theater

https://youtu.be/sWhJ6hI3p9g

Interviews in Arabic and English

https://youtu.be/eC0exSdQT6c

https://youtu.be/zcg82D_hDGoss.

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

segunda-feira, 6 de setembro de 2021

Shawshank Redemption in Palestine!

"Six Palestinian political prisoners reportedly escaped the Israeli occupation Gilboa prison overnight on Monday, 6 September, liberating themselves. Israeli occupation forces reported that six Palestinian political prisoners were absent at the 4 am roll call and found a tunnel dug by hand with an exit outside the prison.
According to Palestinian media, the six liberated prisoners are Zakaria Al-Zubaidi, Munadil Yaqoub Naf’at, Muhammad Qasim Ardah, Yaqoub Mahmoud Qadri, Ayham Fouad Kamamji, and Mahmoud Abdullah Ardah. Occupation forces are searching for the six liberated prisoners and they have so far remained free.
This is breaking news and we will provide further updates.
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network sends its salutes to these six liberated Palestinian prisoners seeking justice and liberation and their fellow 4,750 Palestinians jailed by the Israeli colonial occupation. Palestinian detainees are routinely subjected to torture, abuse, and lengthy imprisonment for their commitment to a free Palestine. Freedom now for all Palestinian prisoners and for all of Palestine, from the river to the sea!"
Zakaria is considered an icon of the Intifadaw within coccupied Palesstine. His evasion is inspirational and spread joy all over Palesstine, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Stip.
Zakaria, 46 years old, surved under Yasser Arafat as the commander of the al-Aqsa Brigades in Jenine, during the Second Intifada. He had his amnesty revoked for unknown reasons in 2011 after willfully disarming in 2007, lleading to multiple arrests.
This is a massive blow to the Israeli establishment and may lead them to further escalate tensions in the occupiend territories and attack Jenine, and Gaza, again.

Where it began

Where it ended

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

domingo, 5 de setembro de 2021

Reality check on Afghanistan XII

For twenty years, two dominant narratives have shaped our view of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and neither one of these narratives would readily accept the use of such terms as ‘illegal’, ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation.’

The framing of the US ‘military intervention’ in Afghanistan, starting on October 7, 2001, as the official start of what was dubbed as a global ‘war on terror’ was left almost entirely to US government strategists. Former President, George W. Bush, his Vice President, Dick Cheney, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and an army of spokespersons, neoconservative ‘intellectuals’, journalists and so on, championed the military option as a way to rid Afghanistan of its terrorists, make the world a safe place and, as a bonus, bring democracy to Afghanistan and free its oppressed women.

For that crowd, the US war in an already war-torn and extremely impoverished country was a just cause, maybe violent at times, but ultimately humanistic.

Another narrative, also a western one, challenged the gung-ho approach used by the Bush administration, argued that democracy cannot be imposed by force, reminded Washington of Bill Clinton’s multilateral approach to international politics, warned against the ‘cut and run’ style of foreign policymaking, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.

Although both narratives may have seemed at odds, at times, in actuality they accepted the basic premise that the United States is capable of being a moral force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Whether those who may refer to themselves as ‘antiwar’ realize this or not, they, too, subscribe to the same notion of American exceptionalism and ‘Manifest Destiny’ that Washington continues to assign to itself.

The main difference between both of these narratives is that of methodology and approach and not whether the US has the right to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of another country, whether to ‘eradicate terrorism’ or to supposedly help a victim population, incapable of helping themselves and desperate for a western savior.

However, the humiliating defeat suffered by the US in Afghanistan should inspire a whole new way of thinking, one that challenges all Western narratives, without exception, in Afghanistan and throughout the world.

Obviously, the US has failed in Afghanistan, not only militarily and politically – let alone in terms of ‘state-building’ and every other way – the US-Western narratives on Afghanistan were, themselves, a failure. Mainstream media, which for two decades have reported on the country with a palpable sense of moral urgency, now seem befuddled. US ‘experts’ are as confused as ordinary people regarding the hasty retreat from Kabul, the bloody mayhem at the airport or why the US was in Afghanistan in the first place.

Meanwhile, the ‘humanistic interventionists’ are more concerned with Washington’s ‘betrayal’ of the Afghan people, ‘leaving them to their fate’, as if the Afghans are irrational beings with no agency of their own, or as if the Afghan people have called on the Americans to invade their country or have ‘elected’ American generals as their democratic representatives.

The US-Western propaganda, which has afflicted our collective understanding of Afghanistan for twenty years and counting, has been so overpowering to the point that we are left without the slightest understanding of the dynamics that led to the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country. The latter group is presented in the media as if entirely alien to the socio-economic fabric of Afghanistan. This is why the Taliban’s ultimate victory seemed, not only shocking but extremely confusing as well.

For twenty years, the very little we knew about the Taliban has been communicated to us through Western media analyses and military intelligence assessments. With the Taliban’s viewpoint completely removed from any political discourse pertaining to Afghanistan, an alternative Afghan national narrative was carefully constructed by the US and its NATO partners. These were the ‘good Afghans’, we were told, ones who dress up in Western-style clothes, speak English, attend international conferences and, supposedly, respect women. These were also the Afghans who welcomed the US occupation of their country, as they benefited greatly from Washington’s generosity.

If those ‘good Afghans’ truly represented Afghan society, why did their army of 300,000 men drop their weapons and flee the country, along with their President, without a serious fight? And if the 75,000 poorly-armed and, at times, malnourished Taliban seemed to merely represent themselves, why then did they manage to defeat formidable enemies in a matter of days?

There can be no argument that an inferior military power, like that of the Taliban, could have possibly persisted, and ultimately won, such a brutal war over the course of many years, without substantial grassroots support pouring in from the Afghan people in large swathes of the country. The majority of the Taliban recruits who have entered Kabul on August 15 were either children, or were not even born, when the US invaded their country, all those years ago. What compelled them to carry arms? To fight a seemingly unwinnable war? To kill and be killed? And why did they not join the more lucrative business of working for the Americans, like many others have?

We are just beginning to understand the Taliban narrative, as their spokespersons are slowly communicating a political discourse that is almost entirely unfamiliar to most of us. A discourse that we were not allowed to hear, interact with or understand.

Now that the US and its NATO allies are leaving Afghanistan, unable to justify or even explain why their supposed humanitarian mission led to such an embarrassing defeat, the Afghan people are left with the challenge of weaving their own national narrative, one that must transcend the Taliban and their enemies to include all Afghans, regardless of their politics or ideology.

Afghanistan is now in urgent need of a government that truly represents the people of that country. It must grant rights to education, to minorities and to political dissidents, not to acquire a Western nod of approval, but because the Afghan people deserve to be respected, cared for and treated as equals. This is the true national narrative of Afghanistan that must be nurtured outside the confines of the self-serving Western mischaracterization of Afghanistan and her people.

John Pilger, on Afghanistan

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL

sábado, 28 de agosto de 2021

Reality check on Afghanistan XI

What's going on behind the scenes?

Days after the Taliban drove into Kabul on August 15, its representatives started making inquiries about the “location of assets” of the central bank of the nation, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which are known to total about $9 billion. Meanwhile, the central bank in neighboring Uzbekistan, which has an almost equivalent population of approximately 34 million people compared to Afghanistan’s population of more than 39 million, has international reserves worth $35 billion. Afghanistan is a poor country, by comparison, and its resources have been devastated by war and occupation.

The DAB officials told the Taliban that the $9 billion are in the Federal Reserve in New York, which means that Afghanistan’s wealth is sitting in a bank in the United States. But before the Taliban could even try to access the money, the U.S. Treasury Department has already gone ahead and frozen the DAB assets and prevented its transfer into Taliban control.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had recently allocated $650 billion Special Drawing Rights (SDR) for disbursement around the world. When asked if Afghanistan would be able to access its share of the SDRs, an IMF spokesperson said in an email, “As is always the case, the IMF is guided by the views of the international community. There is currently a lack of clarity within the international community regarding recognition of a government in Afghanistan, as a consequence of which the country cannot access SDRs or other IMF resources.”

Financial bridges into Afghanistan, to tide the country over during the 20 years of war and devastation, have slowly collapsed. The IMF decided to withhold transfer of $370 million before the Taliban entered Kabul, and now commercial banks and Western Union have suspended money transfers into Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s currency, the Afghani, is in a state of free fall.

Over the last decade, Afghanistan’s formal economy struggled to stay afloat. Since the U.S.-NATO invasion of October 2001, Afghanistan’s government has relied on financial aid flows to support its economy. Due to these funds and strong agricultural growth, Afghanistan experienced an average annual growth rate of 9.4 percent between 2003 and 2012, according to the World Bank. These figures do not include two important facts: first, that large parts of Afghanistan were not in government control (including border posts where taxes are levied), and second, that the illicit drug (opium, heroin, and methamphetamine) trade is not counted in these figures. In 2019, the total income from the opium trade in Afghanistan was between $1.2 billion and $2.1 billion, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “The gross income from opiates exceeded the value of the country’s officially recorded licit exports in 2019,” stated a February 2021 UNODC report.

During the past decade, aid flow into Afghanistan has collapsed “from around 100 percent of GDP in 2009 to 42.9 percent of GDP in 2020.” The official economic growth rate between 2015 and 2020 fell to 2.5 percent. The prospects for an increase in aid seemed dire in 2020. At the 2020 Afghanistan Conference, held in Geneva in November, the donors decided to provide annual disbursements rather than aid in four-year packages. This meant that the Afghan government would not be able to sufficiently plan their operations. Before the Taliban took Kabul, Afghanistan had begun to recede from the memory of those countries that had invaded it in 2001-2002.

During the past 20 years, the United States government spent $2.26 trillion toward its war and occupation of Afghanistan. European countries spent nothing close to what the United States spent (Germany spent $19.3 billion by the end of 2018, of which $14.1 billion was to pay for the deployment of the German armed forces).

The money coming from all the donors into Afghanistan’s burgeoning aid economy had some impact on the social lives of the Afghans. Conversations with officials in Kabul over the years are sprinkled with data about increased access to schools and sanitation, improvements in the health of children and greater numbers of women in Afghanistan’s civil service. But it was always difficult to believe the numbers.

In 2016, Education Minister Assadullah Hanif Balkhi said that only 6 million Afghan children attended the country’s 17,000 schools, and not 11 million as reported earlier (41 percent of Afghanistan’s schools do not have building s). As a result of the failure to provide schools, the Afghan Ministry of Education reports that the total literacy rate in the country was 43 percent in 2020, with 55 percent being the literacy rate for men and 29.8 percent being the literacy rate for women. Donors, aid agencies, and the central government officials produced a culture of inflating expectations to encourage optimism and the transfer of more funds. But little of it was true.

Meanwhile, opposite to USSR's 10 years occupation (24 december 1979 to 15 February 1989) building roads, schools and hospitals, it is shocking to note that there was barely any construction of infrastructure to advance basic needs during these 20 years USA occupation. Afghanistan’s power company—Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS)—reports that only 35 percent of the population has access to electricity and that 70 percent of the power is imported at inflated rates.

Half of Afghanistan lives in poverty, 14 million Afghans are food insecure, and 2 million Afghan children are severely hungry. The roaring sound of hunger was combined—during these past 20 years—with the roaring sound of bombers. This is what the occupation looked like from the ground.

In a 2013, the New York Times article, a U.S. official said, “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.” Dollars flowed into the country in trunks to be doled out to politicians to buy their loyalty. Contracts to build a new Afghanistan were given freely to U.S. businessmen, many of whom charged fees that were higher than their expenditure inside Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani, who fled into exile hours before the Taliban took control of Kabul, took office making a lot of noise about ending corruption. When he fled the country, press secretary of the Russian embassy in Kabul Nikita Ishchenko said that his people drove four cars filled with money to the airfield. “They tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” according to a Reuters report. Corruption at the top spilled down to everyday life. Afghans reported paying bribes worth $2.25 billion in 2020—37 percent higher than in 2018.

Part of the reason for the Taliban’s rapid advance across Afghanistan over the course of the past decade lies in the failure of the U.S.-NATO-backed governments of both Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021) to improve the situation for Afghans. Surveys regularly found Afghans saying that they believed corruption levels were lower in Taliban areas; similarly, Afghans reported that the Taliban would run schools more effectively. Within Afghanistan, the Taliban portrayed themselves as more efficient and less corrupt administrators.

None of this allows anyone to assume that the Taliban have become moderate. Their agenda regarding women is identical to what it was at its founding in 1994. In 1996, the Taliban drove into Kabul with the same argument: they would end the civil war between the mujahideen, and they would end corruption and inefficiency. The US and its Western allies had 20 years to advance the cause of social development in Afghanistan. Its failure opened the door for the return of the Taliban.

The United States has begun to cut off Afghanistan from its own money in U.S. banks and from financial networks. It will use these means to isolate the Taliban. If US government deserved any trust, one could believe that perhaps this is a means to force the Taliban into a national government with former members of the Karzai-Ghani governments. Otherwise, these tactics may be plainly vindictive and will only backfire against the West – Daesh has just showed who the real enemy is and who Westerners, and Afghans, should be.afraid of.

PALESTINA

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

BRASIL