Showing posts with label Sudan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sudan. Show all posts

Zionist-American plot for unrest Blamed For Unrest In Sudan

 "Zionist institutions" are at fault for fanning anti-government protests as it tries to snuff out disturbances which echo Arab Spring unrest elsewhere.

For two weeks, anti-austerity protesters have been calling for the resignation of the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, one of Africa's longest serving leaders.

Sudan lost three-quarters of its oil revenue after South Sudan gained independence last year, forcing the government to impose cuts that have hit Sudanese who were already grappling with soaring inflation and a weakening currency.

"Zionist institutions inside the United States and elsewhere... are exploiting the latest economic decisions to destabilize the security and political situation," the state-linked Sudanese Media Centre quoted presidential assistant Nafie Ali Nafie as saying.

Nafie said the government had evidence of collusion between rebel groups in Darfur, politicians in arch-foe South Sudan and Zionist institutions in the United States to sabotage Sudan. 

The demonstrations have rarely gathered more than a few hundred people at a time, but have been an added pressure for Bashir's government, already trying to contain the economic crisis and multiple armed insurgencies.

Police used teargas to put down protests in Khartoum on Friday.

The Sudanese Commission for Defence of Freedoms and Rights estimated on Sunday that 1,000 people had been arrested since the protests began.

Demonstrators have chanted the widespread Arab Spring refrain: "The people want the downfall of the regime".

Unusually, there was no official ceremony on Saturday to mark the 23rd anniversary of Bashir's bloodless coup.

Instead, Bashir attended the opening of a shopping mall in central Khartoum. Sudanese media reported the state would donate 20 percent of revenues from the mall to the poor.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur, charges Sudan has dismissed as baseless and politically motivated.
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Sudan, another war for Israel: Will Nile water go to Israel?

http://atheonews.blogspot.com
Medical supplies to be sent to Gaza arrive at Khartoum airport, January 2009

North Sinai Pipelines And The Politics Of Scarcity
by Ronald Bleier (rbleier@igc.org)

The vital importance of the Nile to Egypt, the river's furthest downstream state, is widely accepted and well documented. Throughout recent history Egypt has exerted the greatest degree of control over the Nile both politically and physically. Egypt's dominance over the Nile is a function of the influence of colonial agreements, the shifting, yet timely alliance and support from global superpowers, and the power of Egypt relative to the instability of the upstream states. As a result, Egypt has been able to make unilateral decisions regarding out-of-basin use of Nile water.

Unfortunately some of these decisions have put into question the responsibility and justice of Egypt's stewardship of Nile waters. Indeed, under the pressure of a burgeoning population, as well as for political reasons, the Egyptian government has for two decades embarked on a misguided program of diverting billions of cubic meters of precious Nile water out of basin and into land reclamation and development projects in the Sinai desert.

One of the most costly and politically and economically dubious of these efforts is a huge land reclamation project in the North Sinai desert called the North Sinai Agricultural Development Project ( NSADP). The North Sinai development is currently estimated to cost about $1.5 billion (about 5 billion Egyptian pounds) and is going forward despite the warnings of its own environmental impact study. Since 1987 this project has been diverting Nile water to agricultural development plots west of the Suez Canal.

However, in an even more dangerous and politically sensitive development, for the first time, plans are in place and work has already begun to facilitate the diversion of Nile water to the North Sinai desert east of the Suez Canal by means of tunnels underneath the Canal. The project was given dramatic confirmation in November 1996 when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, addressing Arab journalists in Cairo, announced the opening of a third tunnel underneath the Suez Canal.(BBC November 22, 1996, quoting the Mena News Agency) In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported that "[I]n October [1997], Nile water will ... begin flowing through the Peace Canal ... and will irrigate 600,000 acres in the [North] Sinai desert."( "Egypt Faces Problem It Has Long Dreaded: Less Control of the Nile," Wall Street Journal, August 22, 1997)

The last leg of the project will bring Nile water just south of the North Sinai town of El Arish, only 40 km away from the border of the Gaza Strip at Rafah. Most alarming to many in the region are t he rumors that the project will ultimately bring Nile water to Israel. As a matter of fact, a similar project was envisioned as early as 1974 by Israeli water expert, Elisha Kally, as a way of satisfying Israeli water needs.

Opposition to such a venture would doubtless be fierce. In 1981, Subhi Kahhlen, an Egyptian journalist, summarized two of the main objections to sending water from the Nile to Israel. Kahhlen wrote that the Nile is an "international waterway and Egypt cannot dispose of its waters unilaterally without the agreement of its partners: Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire." Most of these states, he noted, "have already expressed reservations" about the proposal, "viewing it as violation of international law."

In 1994, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al Bashir complained about a visit to Israel by the leader of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA). President Al Bashir claimed that Israel had its eyes on the untapped natural resources in Southern Sudan and on the sources of the Nile as an effective leverage over Egypt (InterPress Services, April 14, 1994). ...

The History of the Nile Diversion Project:

Zionist interest in the possibility of diverting Nile water across the Sinai desert began decades before the establishment of the State of Israel. As early as 1903, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, visited Egypt and authorized a technical report on the transfer of Nile water across the Suez Canal. The project had to be dropped soon afterwards when British and Egyptian authorities turned him down. (Bashir Sherif Albarghothy, "The Israeli Ambitions in the Waters of Palestine and Neighboring Arab Countries")

More recently, Dr. Elisha Kally, from 1964 to 1976 the head of the Long-Range Planning Group of TAHAL, the Israeli water planning agency, published a study in 1974 in which he argued for the feasibility of Nile water going to Gaza. He has repeated his arguments in subsequent reports and in his books, The Struggle for Water (2nd ed. 1978) and Water in Peace (1989). His 1986 paper includes a map which shows the El Salaam Canal beginning near the mouth of the Nile, crossing the Suez Canal (through an underground tunnel), heading east across the North Sinai desert past El Arish and reaching Gaza and the Israeli National Water Carrier.

In his 1991/92 paper, "Options for Solving the Palestinian Water Problem in the Context of Regional Peace," Kally writes: "The Nile is the preferred foreign source for supplying the Gaza Strip with water because of physical and political reasons. It is, however, a less obvious choice for supplying the West Bank. For the West Bank, the Yarmuk [River on the border of Jordan, Syria, and Israel] and perhaps the Litani [River in Lebanon], are preferable sources."

Full article

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Israel and the North Sinai Agricultural Development Project


The North Sinai Agricultural Development Project (NSADP) implications far exceeds the boundaries of Egypt. The main danger of this project (and the more recent Tushka project) is that it may lead to an environmental (water) war between Egypt on one hand and other Nile riparian countries; particularly Sudan and/or Ethiopia. Part of this war would be because of the perceived purpose of the project, i.e. transferring Nile water to Israel and connecting the Nile to the National Israeli Water Carrier as promised by President Sadat when he ordered the feasibility studies for the project. This is also supported by the Israeli request for 1% of the Nile waters during the peace negotiations with Egypt. The Israeli pressures are still mounting. In an article published in Al-Akhbar daily newspaper (January 3, 2000) on Israel's attempts to obtain Nile water from Egypt, Galal Dowidar wrote:

"Although, Egypt has pronounced the request as illegal, since it was committed to quota agreements signed with the African Nile-basin countries, Israelis still persist. It would be beneficial, however, to call Israel's attention to one case in point. In the not-too-far past, Libya, an Arab-African country, made a similar request, when it asked that the Nile course be extended into its territories so as to benefit by the water surplus which poured into the Mediterranean. The request was denied for the same reason: Egypt was bound to international agreements which it has to honor."

Full article

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Israel Killed 39 in Attack on Sudan Convoy January Strike Destroyed Several Trucks, Injured Civilians



Answering accusations from a Sudanese minister that the US Air Force had killed 39 people in a January attack in that nation, US officials say that in fact it was the Israeli military that launched the attack on a convoy of trucks northwest of Port Sudan city.

Reportedly, the Israeli planes used a US base in Djibouti to stage the attacks, as part of the agreement between Israel and the outgoing Bush Administration made in mid January. Israeli officials would neither confirm nor deny the attacks.

The trucks attacked were said to be smuggling small arms to Hamas, and while an exact date for the attack was not given it appears to have been shortly (perhaps just days) after the Israeli military halted its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. Everyone in the trucks, said to include Ethiopians and Eritreans, was reported killed, and an unknown number of civilians were also said to be wounded in the attack.

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Behind arresting Al-Bashir


The West is attempting to do in Sudan by criminal indictment what it did by force in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine
Galal Nassar

The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), or perhaps we should call it the Western political criminal court, for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir is not meant to exact justice for the acts it claims were perpetrated against Sudanese people in Darfur. Nor is its purpose to bring Al-Bashir, Ahmed Haroun and Ali Koshib to trial in order to uphold and restore respect for international and humanitarian law and justice. Rather, it is a stage in the process of the political and moral assassination of the Sudanese president and the Sudanese government in implementation of a strategy of "constructive chaos" or recourse to "soft force" as an alternative means to bring about regime change. This is the crux of the West's assault against Sudan, spearheaded by the prosecutor of the ICC, and it is this that should shape a counter-strategy.The warrant, which is the latest phase of developments that have passed through the UN Security Council to the court, raises a number of legal and procedural issues. For one, Sudan is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that led to the creation of the ICC. Secondly, there is the question of the legality of the Security Council filling in this missing legal link. Thirdly, there is the matter of the Security Council's ability to defer the pursuit of the Sudanese president for a year after the issuance of the warrant.

Much more importantly, this is the first such case to be tried before the ICC since it was formed in 2002. All other cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity -- from those perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia to those in Rwanda -- were tried before specially formed tribunals. Indeed, even the preliminary investigations into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri took place outside of the framework of the ICC.

This brings to the fore the dangerous political and strategic aspects of the proceedings against Al-Bashir. On the one hand, it represents an extension of the criminal military actions the West has undertaken against the societies and leaderships of Arab and Islamic countries, as it is pushing in the same direction as the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Palestine. On the other hand, it underscores the hypocrisy of the proceedings: there was not even the hint of a hunt for the officials in the US, Britain, Israel and Ethiopia responsible for the crimes perpetrated in those wars.

Let us not forget, too, that the Sudanese leadership has long been in the Western crosshairs. But whereas the Israeli incursion into Ramallah succeeded in eliminating Yasser Arafat, and the US invasion of Iraq succeeded in eliminating Saddam Hussein, the ICC has been brought in to assassinate President Al-Bashir. In like manner, whereas invasion and occupation succeeded in toppling leaders, destroying states and tearing societies apart, the ICC is threatening to do the same in Sudan by means of the warrant for and possible apprehension of the Sudanese head of state.

In Iraq, these aims became clear very soon after the invasion. The declared aim was to topple Saddam but soon it became apparent that there was a systematic drive to dismantle the entire edifice of the state, to plunder and efface Iraq's collective historic memory, and to partition Iraq into several petty statelets. In Sudan, the aims are the same and the ICC has offered the key to achieving them.

THE DISMANTLEMENT OF THE STATE: The Sudanese government is very unique in its composition and powers. Western planners who turned the ICC's sights on Sudan's president obviously studied it well in order to come up with the best method of demolishing it.

The people of Sudan refer to their president as the head of state, summing up both his position in the hierarchy and his function in government. The Sudanese president also serves as prime minister, adding to both his importance and his duties. However, the apparatus of government has long been one of Sudan's most serious problems, impeding political, social and economic development.

Historically, this apparatus has always been frail, disjointed and incapable of performing the tasks of a modern state, from controlling borders to securing its administrative and security control over the whole of Sudanese land. The Sudanese government has also historically lacked a cohesive vision and, indeed, the cohesion of its constituent parts and members, reflecting the country's patchwork of tribal, sectarian and regional allegiances.

The rebellion in the south actually began within one of the most important instruments of the state: the armed forces. Following the Torit uprising of 1954, southern soldiers and officers fled the army to join up with the insurrectionist movement in the south. The same instrument of government was also the source of many coups and countercoups, sometimes leading to popular uprisings in order to overthrow military rule and reinstate civil government.

The ICC decision against Omar Al-Bashir must be intended to propel Sudan back to the weakness and disintegration that had prevailed before the National Salvation revolution, one of the major accomplishments of which was to reconstruct the state apparatus, develop it and bring more areas and people under its umbrella, expanding its coverage to vast tracts of the country in which the government and its services had had neither political nor practical presence.

Although the current government has been accused of approving the secessionist drive of the south by signing the Nifasha Agreement, it must be said in its defence that one of its justifications for this was that unifying identity in Sudan should not rely on coercion, which had been the practice of military governments in the past, but rather on deepening the concept of the unified identity of the Sudanese state. One can, thus, conclude that the architect of the drive to hunt down Al-Bashir has a thorough grasp of the historic weak points of the state.

It could be that very close to the presidency is the head of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (the southern rebel movement) Salva Kiir and others whose proximity to that post is the consequence of agreements signed by Khartoum with the rebel movements in the south and west of the country. Or it could be because the current president stands to gain uncontested legitimacy in the presidential elections scheduled in a few months from now. Whatever the case, the architects of the scheme to dismantle Sudan chose to set the fuse at this particular moment when the detonation could stand an excellent chance of rolling back the successes that the people of Sudan had accomplished through the mediating efforts that led to existing agreements, and of obstructing the current mediating efforts that show promise of reaching agreements among Sudanese loyalists, which would strengthen the government and the state, and weaken the rebels who are serving French, American, British and Israeli aims and agendas.

Are those agendas not what brought the dismantlement of the state and edifice of government in Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit through the application of direct military force?

THE DISMANTLEMENT OF SOCIETY: For many reasons, Sudan's social situation offers a unique case of ethnic, cultural, sectarian and tribal plurality. The very difficulties that have stood in the way of national assimilation were also one of the main sources of the problems that plagued the country in its modern history.

Nor is there any doubt that this very diversity offered fertile ground for endless foreign intervention in Sudanese affairs. It helped little that successive governments failed to devise a formula for constructive diversity, as opposed to divisive tension and conflict, whether because they resorted almost exclusively to the language of force and coercion or simply because they were too weak to resolve the "battle" in favour of the unified state.

Outside intervention has taken numerous forms. At one stage, it took the form of encouraging rebel movements with supplies of arms and money and training. Indeed, one of the complaints of the Sudanese army was that the rebel forces had more sophisticated arms than it did. At a subsequent phase, the supporters of the rebels came out into the open. Now as they continued to abet rebellion, they asserted pressure on the Sudanese government through various negotiations in which their official role was mediator!

Today, intervention has escalated to a new and even more sophisticated phase, in the form of the ICC's targeting of President Al-Bashir. The purpose, as mentioned, is to undermine or obviate agreements aimed at deepening understanding and integration between Sudan's diverse ethnic and regional groups and to plunge the country into a complex vortex of civil strife.

CONFRONTATION: As in every crisis of this nature, it is not only important to know the aims and objectives of the ICC scheme, but also to devise a plan to thwart it. If the scheme, as it would appear, is to sow domestic tension and to alienate Sudan and its government from its Arab and African environs, the general thrust of the counter-plan seems clear. It is to stimulate and deepen domestic bonds of allegiance, rallying the largest possible assembly of social and political forces behind the national flag.

In addition, all possible pains must be taken to sustain the substance of all existing agreements, apart from those that do not serve the interest of the united Sudanese state and people, by ensuring their implementation through the relevant government agencies, thereby conferring upon them institutionalised legitimacy. What is important is to move beyond mere rhetoric, demonstrations and pro-Bashir rallies. At the foreign policy level, there must be an urgent drive to strengthen Sudan's relations with its neighbours and other African and Arab countries in general, especially those opposed to Western domination over international institutions.

In this regard, it is possible to envision an international political and media campaign against the bias and tendentiousness of the ICC action. Sudanese planners would also be well advised to direct their media sights beyond the domestic to the global audience, where the most important psychological battle is taking place. This battle is the fight to convey the truth about recent developments, to foil the attempts on the part of Khartoum's enemies to distort Sudan's image, and to disseminate a deeper understanding of the country of which there is such widespread ignorance and misconception about its identity and character.
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China is thirsty too !!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090304/eu-international-court-darfur/images/a5f0cd7e-1cd1-4466-b747-250c7f8588d5.jpg
Not only the USA , needs the Oil....!!



When Sudanese shoots at other Sudanese
in Darfour , or anywhere else.......
the International Criminal Court takes action,
against the President of Sudan.

But when Israelis shoot at their own victims
whom they have already robbed and exiled
and besieged and re-bombed
the International Criminal Court takes action ,
against the President of Sudan,



When the USA bombs Iraq under false pretexts
When the USA invades Iraq under false pretencions
When the USA invades Afghanistan under any excuse
the International Criminal Court takes action,
against the President of Sudan.


If the President of Sudan
would have sold his Oil to the USA
instead of selling it to China.......
I would not be writing this,
and the International Criminal Court
would have been rather jobless...
(and President Bashir would get a Nobel-Prize
for planting blue-roses in his back garden)


Eng . Moustafa Roosenbloom
Oil-broker for Justice
eighth day of the third month in 2009
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Report from Adel Hamad’s Home

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Adel Hamad arrived in Khartoum in the early morning of December 13th, 2007. His lawyers called him at his house late that same afternoon. The celebration was still going on. Over the din of music Hamad told his lawyers: "I thank God almighty and express my gratefulness to you. I can finally see the light after the darkness." But while expressing his happiness at being home, he also expressed the desire to have his name cleared. "I still want justice," he said. His lawyers will fight to have Hamad's new Combatant Status Review Tribunal move forward.

Read the full account of that phone coversation >>

Hamad's release received an enormous amount of media attention. Below are links to some of the best articles and videos surrounding his return to Sudan:

The International Herald Tribune wrote a great piece about the campaign for Adel Hamad's freedom, calling the campaign "particularly well organized" and specifically citing the website and the YouTube campaign as examples. This article quickly was picked up around the world.

Read the article >>

The USA Today's article focused on Hamad's account of the health of Sami Al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, who has been on hunger strike for nearly the last year at Guantanamo.

Read the article >>

British journalist and author of The Guantanamo Files, Andy Worthington, wrote the best retrospective article from Hamad's arrest to his release, using a lot of Hamad's own words describing the events.

Read the article >>

English Al Jazeera has the most detailed description of his actual homecoming and the most wonderful picture of Hamad with his 6 year old daughter, who was only months old when he was arrested. When we first started this project we had just a few blurry pictures of him to work with to get an artist's sketch of his face. It is great to see all these new pictures of him. Particularly this one.

Read the article >>

There is a fantastic video of Adel Hamad's homecoming in Sudan. You can see the first meeting of Hamad with his daughter, and hear Hamad speak about being home again. Not to miss.

Watch the video >>

We will be posting any new developments at our blog:

http://projecthamad.org/blog

Thanks again for all your support. Particularly all of the blogger- members who kept Adel Hamad's name alive in the blogosphere and all of you who wrote letters to him (and to our representatives) so that Hamad knew that he had not been forgotten.

David, Laura, and Ben
Project Hamad

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