U.S. President Bush Gets Bill to End Blocks to Mandela

30 June 2008

By William C. Mann

Congress sent President Bush a bill on Friday that once signed into law will allow Nelson Mandela to visit the United States without the secretary of state having to certify that he is not a terrorist.

Negotiators from the Senate and the House agreed Thursday night on a final version of the bill to remove from U.S. databases the names of the former South African president and anybody else marked only because of a relationship with the African National Congress.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told lawmakers in April that she was embarrassed by the situation.

The ANC has been South Africa's ruling party since the country's rebirth in 1994 as a majority-ruled democracy rather than a white-ruled state where the vote was based on race. The ANC was removed from the State Department's list of terror organizations years ago, but its members have remained on U.S. immigration watch lists. During the Cold War, the West considered the ANC a communist organization that wanted to bring down pro-Western South Africa.

The Mandela situation came up as Rice testified in a legislative hearing in April.

"It is frankly a rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart -- the foreign minister of South Africa -- not to mention the great leader, Nelson Mandela," Rice said.

Mandela was awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with then-South African Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk for peacefully ending the apartheid segregation system and bringing the vote to all South Africans. He easily won the nation's first election where everyone could vote in 1993 and became president.

Mandela turns 90 on July 18. He spent 27 years in prison for his work with the ANC, which the apartheid government banned in 1960.

The State Department alluded to the sensitivity of the ANC situation in a report last year on global terrorism.

In speaking of South African help against terrorists, the report noted: "The South African government is sensitive to distinctions between 'terrorist organizations' and 'liberation movements,' since the ruling African National Congress was long branded a terrorist group during the struggle against apartheid."

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) introduced the bill to remove the stigma from Mandela and other ANC members.

"The Senate and House have now both affirmed that America's place is on the side of those who fought against apartheid, and there should be no discrimination in our legal code based on their ANC association alone," he said after announcing agreement on the final legislation.

Tutu Visits Palestine for Fact Finding Over 2006 Killings

27 May 2008

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Tuesday held talks with Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya in the Gaza Strip where he led a UN fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinian civilians in an 2006 Israeli artillery attack.

Sources close to Tutu's delegation said the Anglican former archbishop of Cape Town planned to call during the talks for an end of rocket attacks on Israel, and stress that all attacks against civilians -- whether against Palestinians or against Israelis -- should be condemned.

Other sources stressed, that the only attacks by rocket fire are by Mahmoud Abbas’s terrorist organization and the necessity for this to stop is important.

On Wednesday, the team led by Tutu was due to visit Beit Hanun, where the 2006 killings occurred, to interview witnesses and survivors of the attack.

They will prepare a report to present to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, UN officials said.

The Israeli raid on Beit Hanun on November 8, 2006, was widely condemned by the international community for killing 19 civilians, including five women and eight children, in their homes.

In February, the Israeli army announced that no charges would be brought against Israeli soldiers over the attack. After conducting an internal investigation, Israel concluded that the bombing of the civilians' homes was "a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system."

The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel, but due to the technical problem, the shells instead hit two homes.

The UN Human Rights Council had decided to send a team to Gaza to investigate the killings in 2006, but Israel refused to grant visas.

Tutu circumvented Israeli restrictions by driving to the Palestinian territory through Egypt on Tuesday.

Tutu to visit Gaza

25 May 2008

GENEVA — South African Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu will this week visit the Gaza Strip city of Beit Hanun on a fact-finding mission into the deaths of 19 Palestinians killed in a 2006 attack, the UN said yesterday.

Tutu and academic Christine Chinkin will meet with survivors of the November 8 attack and will file a report for the Human Rights Council.

Treasure trove found in 500-year-old Shipwreck off Africa

1 May 2008

By DONNA BRYSON

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins — and cannons to fend off pirates. But it had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of inhospitable African coast, and it sank 500 years ago. Now it has been found, stumbled upon by De Beers geologists prospecting for diamonds off Namibia.

"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or later you'll find a wreck," archaeologist Dieter Noli said in an interview Thursday.

Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture of the government of Namibia and De Beers, first reported the April 1 find in a statement Wednesday, and planned a news conference in the Namibian capital next week.

The company had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed, building an earthen wall to keep the water out so geologists could work. Noli said one of the geologists saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then the team found what looked like cannon barrels.

The geologists stopped the brutal earth-moving work of searching for diamonds and sent photos to Noli, who had done research in the Namibian desert since the mid-1980s and has advised De Beers since 1996 on the archaeological impact of its operations in Namibia.

The find "was what I'd been waiting for, for 20 years," Noli said. "Understandably, I was pretty excited. I still am."

Noli's original specialty was the desert, but because of Namdeb's offshore explorations, he had been preparing for the possibility of a wreck, even learning to dive.

After the discovery, he brought in Bruno Werz, an expert in the field, to help research the wreck. Noli has studied maritime artifacts with Werz, who was one of his instructors at the University of Cape Town.

Judging from the notables depicted on the hoard of Spanish and Portuguese coins, and the type of cannons and navigational equipment, the ship went down in the late 1400s or early 1500s, around the time Vasco de Gama and Columbus were plying the waters of the New World.

"Based on the goods they were carrying, it's almost certain that it dates from that time," said John Broadwater, chief archaeologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"This find is very exciting because very few vessels from that period have been discovered," he said, adding that many early ships were thought to have wrecked in that area.

It was, Noli said, "a period when Africa was just being opened up, when the whole world was being opened up."

He compared the remnants — ingots, ivory, coins, coffin-sized timber fragments — to evidence at a crime scene.

"The surf would have pounded that wreck to smithereens," he said. "It's not like `Pirates of the Caribbean,' with a ship more or less intact."

He and Werz are trying to fit the pieces into a story. They divide their time between inventorying the find in Namibia and doing research in museums and libraries in Cape Town, South Africa, from where Noli spoke by phone Thursday.

Eventually, they will go to Portugal or Spain to search for records of a vessel with similar cargo that went missing.

"You don't turn a skipper loose with a cargo of that value and have no record of it," Noli said.

The wealth on board is intriguing. Noli said the large amount of copper could mean the ship had been sent by a government looking for material to build cannons. Trade in ivory was usually controlled by royal families, another indication the ship was on official business.

On the other hand, why did the captain have so many coins? Shouldn't they have been traded for the ivory and copper?

"Either he did a very, very good deal. Or he was a pirate," Noli said. "I'm convinced we'll find out what the ship was and who the captain was."

What brought the vessel down may remain a mystery. But Noli has theories, noting the stretch of coast was notorious for fierce storms and disorienting fogs.

In later years, sailors with sophisticated navigational tools avoided it. The only tools found on the wreck were astrolabes, which can be used to determine only how far north or south you have sailed.

"Sending a ship toward Africa in that period, that was venture capital in the extreme," Noli said. "These chaps were very much on the edge as far as navigation. It was still very difficult for them to know where they were."

Noli has found signs that worms were at work on the ship's timber, and sheets of lead used to patch holes, indications the ship was old when it went down.

Imagine a leaky, overladen ship caught in a storm. The copper ingots, shaped like sections of a sphere, would have sat snug, he said. But the tusks — some 50 have been found — could have shifted, tipping the ship.

"And down you go," Noli said, "weighed down by your treasure."

Iran calls for restructuring of UN, Security Council

16 April 2008

Tehran-Iran has called on Wednesday for restructuring the United Nations and the Security Council at the 118th Inter-Parliamentary Union session in Cape Town, South Africa.

"As two major international bodies, the UN and the Security Council have seriously suffered from US unilateralism," said Majlis Vice-Speaker Mohammad Mohsen Abu-Torabi in his address to the IPU session.

The IPU meeting opened on Sunday.

Some 1,500 representatives from 140 member states have taken part in the ongoing week-long event.

Abu-Torabi said that IPU member states could "resists to the US unilateralism and pave the way for the UN reinforcement."

He stressed that the IPU member states could, through cooperation and making joint efforts, help international security and find solution for current challenges facing the contemporary world.

He urged all regional and international bodies to make joint efforts and find due responses to the current international challenges including the spread of weapons of mass destruction, international terrorism, poverty, environmental crisis and organized crimes.

Israel Decides to Shun Conference on Racism

Pro-Palestinian protestors marching through Durban during a UN conference on racism in 2001. (AP)

26 February 2008


RAMALLAH, West Bank, Fearing from being criticized over its attacks against Palestinians, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced that her state will boycott the United Nations Durban II conference on human rights and racism which is scheduled to take place in early 2009 at a still undecided venue in South Africa.

Israeli media sources quoted Livni while speaking at the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem that participation in this conference legitimizes hate, extremism and anti-Semitism. Israel will not support this sort of behavior.”

Livni added that Israel would not consider the UN summit legitimate unless it receives proof that the venue will not serve once again as a platform for anti-Semitic or anti-Israel activity.

According to the sources, the decision followed an assessment by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and other Western governments, that it will be impossible to prevent the conference from turning into a festival of anti-Israeli attacks.

The forum, which is meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday and yesterday, focused on anti-Semitism worldwide, but added a specific focus on rampant anti-Semitic messages in Arab and Muslim media and religious institutions. The forum hosted 280 participants, including ministers and parliamentarians from 45 countries.

South Africa hosted the first Durban conference in the summer of 2001 under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. It was titled “The World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, but most of the discussions revolved around Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

The United States and Israel responded by lowering the level of their diplomatic representation and eventually quit the conference, which culminated in a resolution equating Zionism and racism.

That conference also provided a framework for a global convention of nongovernmental organizations, which became a platform for delegitimizing Israel.

For the past few months, the media sources said, a coalition of Israeli and global Jewish organizations, together with government representatives, tried to prepare a joint policy for the follow-up conference.

Livni to Erdogan: Israel Probing Fuel Tanks Found in Turkey

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. (Reuters Archives)

27 September 2007

By Shlomo Shamir and Barak Ravid

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met on Wednesday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The issue that took center-stage at the meeting was the Israel Air Force strike allegedly carried out on Syria on September 6, which Turkey complained left two fuel tanks on its territory.

Erdogan asked Livni for clarification on the tanks found next to the city of Hatay, near the Syrian border. Livni told Erdogan that "an investigation on the matter is still taking place," and that "at the end of the investigation, we will answer all questions."

After the incident, Israel's envoy to Ankara was summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry and given a diplomatic protest regarding the alleged IAF flyover of Syrian air space.

Livni meets with Tunisian FM for talks on peace process with PA

Livni also met Wednesday with her Tunisian counterpart Abdelwaheb Abdullah at the United Nations headquarters, in what was the first meeting between Israeli and Tunisian officials since then foreign minister Silvan Shalom visited Tunisia approximately three years ago.

The meeting was held at Livni's request, despite the fact that the countries do not have diplomatic relations. The two foreign ministers discussed the negotiations with the Palestinians.

Livni stressed the importance of moderate Arab states providing support for and getting involved in the peace process, including through direct negotiations with Israel.

The foreign minister is also scheduled to meet with her Moroccan counterpart Mohammed Ben Aissa.

Earlier Wednesday, Livni hosted the representatives of 20 African states for breakfast. Among those present was the South African deputy foreign minister, whose country holds a seat on the UN Security Council. The South African envoy to the UN has spearheaded a hostile policy towards Israel in debates on the Middle East.

Livni briefed the participants on the recent developments in relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including preparations for November's U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace summit in Washington, D.C.

Later Livni met with Republican presidential candidate and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani for talks that focused on the Iranian nuclear program.

Giuliani said that, if he were still mayor of New York, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would not have been granted such free access to the city and such prominent exposure.

Mandela 'survives' Bush Gaffe

21 September 2007

Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by US President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

"It's out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush's comments received worldwide coverage.

In a speech defending hi administration's Iraq policy, Bush said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussain's brutality had made it impossible for a unifying leader to emerge and stop the sectarian violence that has engulfed the Middle Eastern nation.

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussain killed all the Mandelas," Bush said in Washington on Thursday.

A Double Standard on Academic Freedom

Palestinian schoolboys sitting on the steps of their school in Gaza City, September 2007. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

18 September 2007

by George Bisharat

Two hundred thousand Palestinian children began school in the Gaza Strip this month without a full complement of textbooks. Why? Because Israel, which maintains a stranglehold over this small strip of land along the Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from there in 2005, considers paper, ink and binding materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs."

Israel, attempting to throttle the democratically elected Hamas government, generally permits only food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually no Palestinian exports to leave. Lately, it held up delivery of materials needed for printing textbooks. As a result, Gaza students began the year facing a 30 percent shortage of texts.

No full-page advertisements in major American newspapers have publicized Israel's violations of Palestinian children's right to an education. No editors, syndicated columnists or presidents of major universities in this country have denounced this callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no remedial action. Instead, they continue, verbally and materially, to support Israel in its near-total blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids and all.

Israel's trampling of Palestinian students' right to education -- the key to a lifetime of opportunity -- has rarely evoked official protest from American leaders. The Israeli army has closed Palestinian universities for years at a time. Israeli military authorities have barred Palestinian occupational therapy students from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital clinical training.

Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks can turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian schoolchildren sitting in their classrooms. None of these offenses has merited so much as a congressional resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb Israeli behavior, such as government-imposed sanctions.

In response to this policy double standard -- complete indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and indifference to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand -- a movement has emerged for a citizens' boycott of Israel. Churches, unions and professional associations in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel Israel's compliance with international law.

American Presbyterians have studied divesting church funds from firms that profit from continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United Kingdom's 1.3 million-member union of public servants, voted in June to boycott Israeli goods. In May, a British union of professors opened a yearlong debate over a possible boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The latter action provoked particularly indignant protest by Israel's US supporters as an offense against "academic freedom." Yet many Israeli academic institutions either benefit from or participate in Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian rights.

Tel Aviv University sits in part over land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in March 1948. These and other Palestinian refugees have been denied their right to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their seized properties.

Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses more than 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar-Ilan University has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

The threatened boycott would target Israeli institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research and other agreements with Israeli universities would be suspended. But invitations to Israeli professors to join conferences or to publish in foreign journals would continue.

Nonetheless, it is likely that the boycott would impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli academics. Is this fair?

Boycotts are always somewhat blunt tools, and they inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving of them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which applied to all academics -- as well as athletes, businesspeople, artists and others. At the time, the international community weighed the cost to academic freedom against the advancement of justice and equal rights for black South Africans, and the choice was clear.

Two hundred thousand Palestinian schoolchildren are wondering how the world will respond faced with a similar choice today.

George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.

Boycott Movement Targets Israel

16 August 2007

by George Bisharat

When does a citizen-led boycott of a state become morally justified?

That question is raised by an expanding academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel. The movement joins churches, unions, professional societies and other groups based in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. It has elicited dramatic reactions from Israel’s supporters. U.S. labor leaders have condemned British unions, representing millions of workers, for supporting the Israel boycott. American academics have been frantically gathering signatures against the boycott, and have mounted a prominent advertising campaign in American newspapers - unwittingly elevating the controversy further in the public eye.

Israel’s defenders have protested that Israel is not the worst human-rights offender in the world, and singling it out is hypocrisy, or even anti-Semitism. Rhetorically, this shifts focus from Israel’s human rights record to the imagined motives of its critics.

But “the worst first” has never been the rule for whom to boycott. Had it been, the Pol Pot regime, not apartheid South Africa, would have been targeted in the past. It was not — Cambodia’s ties to the West were insufficient to make any embargo effective. Boycotting North Korea today would be similarly futile. Should every other quest for justice be put on hold as a result?

In contrast, the boycott of South Africa had grip. The opprobrium suffered by white South Africans unquestionably helped persuade them to yield to the just demands of the black majority. Israel, too, assiduously guards its public image. A dense web of economic and cultural relations also ties it to the West. That — and its irrefutably documented human-rights violations — render it ripe for boycott.

What state actions should trigger a boycott? Expelling or intimidating into flight a country’s majority population, then denying them internationally recognized rights to return to their homes? Israel has done that.

Seizing, without compensation, the properties of hundreds of thousands of refugees? Israel has done that.

Systematically torturing detainees, many held without trial? Israel has done that.

Assassinating its opponents, including those living in territories it occupies? Israel has done that.

Demolishing thousands of homes belonging to one national group, and settling its own people in another nation’s land? Israel has done that. No country with such a record, whether first or 50th worst in the world, can credibly protest a boycott.

Apartheid South Africa provides another useful standard. How does Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians compare to former South Africa’s treatment of blacks? It is similar or worse, say a number of South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, U.N. special rapporteur in the occupied territories John Dugard, and African National Congress member and government minister Ronnie Kasrils. The latter observed recently that apartheid South Africa never used fighter jets to attack ANC activists, and judged Israel’s violent control of Palestinians as “10 times worse.” Dual laws for Jewish settlers and Palestinians, segregated roads and housing, and restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement strongly recall apartheid South Africa. If boycotting apartheid South Africa was appropriate, it is equally fair to boycott Israel on a similar record.

Israel has been singled out, but not as its defenders complain. Instead, Israel has been enveloped in a cocoon of impunity. Our government has vetoed 41 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli actions — half of the total U.S. vetoes since the birth of the United Nations — thus enabling Israel’s continuing abuses. The Bush administration has announced an increase in military aid to Israel to $30 billion for the coming decade.

Other military occupations and human-rights abusers have faced considerably rougher treatment. Just recall Iraq’s 1990 takeover of Kuwait. Perhaps the United Nations should have long ago issued Israel the ultimatum it gave Iraq — and enforced it. Israel’s occupation of Arab lands has now exceeded 40 years.

Iran, Sudan and Syria have all been targeted for federal and state-level sanctions. Even the City of Beverly Hills is contemplating Iran divestment actions, following the lead of Los Angeles, which approved Iran divestment legislation in June. Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran has never attacked its neighbors nor occupied their territories. It is merely suspected of aspiring to the same nuclear weapons Israel already possesses.

Politicians worldwide, and American ones especially, have failed us. Our leaders, from the executive branch to Congress, have dithered, or cheered Israel on, as it devoured the land base for a Palestinian state. Their collective irresponsibility dooms both Palestinians and Israelis to a future of strife and insecurity, and undermines our global stature. If politicians cannot lead the way, then citizens must. That is why boycotting Israel has become both necessary and justified.

This article appeared on page B9 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.

Woman convicted in baby contract killing

May 7, 2007

By CLARE NULLIS, Associated Press Writer

CAPE TOWN, South Africa -A woman was convicted Monday of hiring a hit squad to murder her lover's baby daughter, ending a trial that had dominated headlines for months with details of South Africa's first known contract killing of an infant.

Dina Rodrigues was found guilty of murder for orchestrating the June 2005 killing of 6-month-old Jordan-Leigh Norton — her then-boyfriend's child from a previous relationship.

Cheers erupted as the verdict was read in the packed Cape Town court room, where Norton family supporters wore pink in sympathy with the victim. Jordan's body, still dressed in pink, was found in a drain in Pretoria.

"We are glad for the decision," the baby's grandfather, Vernon Norton, told the South African Press Association, adding that the family hoped Rodrigues would be sentenced to life in prison at the next hearing in June.

The case has riveted South Africa — where an estimated 1,100 children are killed each year — in part because both the baby and Rodrigues were white and from privileged backgrounds. Most cases involving violence against children involve black and underprivileged defendants and victims.

High Court Judge Basheer Waglay also convicted four men of murder and robbery in the case.

The four had been hired by Rodrigues for a total of $1,500 to commit the crime, and posed as delivery men to gain access to the home of Jordan's grandparents, prosecutors said.

They stabbed the infant in the neck and tried to make the murder look like a botched robbery, prosecutors said.

Rodrigues' lawyer argued that it had been an attempted kidnapping gone wrong.

But the judge rejected the argument, noting testimony from the baby's father, Neil Wilson, that Rodrigues had phoned him to tell him she got rid of the baby.

Cases such as Jordan's have led to a recent campaigns drawing attention to the problem of violence against children.

Also Monday, five youths made a brief appearance in a Soweto court to face charges of raping, stabbing and stoning to death 14-year-old Thato Radebe, whose body was found on waste land.

"We have never had to deal with this level, intensity or numbers of crime against children," Childline head Joan van Niekerk said, noting her charity receives about 1 million phone calls from children reporting abuse each year. "Every year I start the year by saying it cannot get worse, and it does."

The newly formed Protect Our Children campaign donated 200 teddy bears Monday to a Pretoria police station to be given to young victims. Last week, the Solidarity trade union collected more than 1,100 bears — to mark the annual number of child murders in this country of 43 million — after the body of an 8-year-old girl was found in a sewer.