Region

WASHINGTON — In its last-ditch attempt to get moderate Syrian opposition groups to the negotiating table, the Obama administration faces the prospect that a no-show wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

With less than two weeks to go before a long-planned peace conference in Switzerland, the main Western-backed moderate political group seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad has still not decided if it will attend. It’s the latest frustration for the US and allies who have spent the last 18 months trying to negotiate a transition of power from Assad to a new, representative government.

But even if the Syrian National Coalition agrees to attend the January 22 peace meeting — as Secretary of State John Kerry will push this weekend in Paris with the coalition’s newly re-elected president — analysts say it does not have enough credibility with other Syrian groups to sit as an official counterbalance to Assad’s regime. And it might not matter, in the long run, if they don’t show.

“If the expectations to begin with are very low, then you can’t really fail — can you?” Kamran Bokhari, a Toronto-based expert on Mideast issues for the global intelligence company Stratfor, said Friday. “The constraints that the US has are clear to the international community, and it’s not going to be a surprise.

“What would be a surprise is if they are able to make a difference,” Bokhari said. “So nobody has too high of expectations.”

Coalition council President Ahmad Al Jarba, who was re-elected last week, heads a shaky alliance of opposition groups that is sharply divided on whether to attend the conference, designed to begin a negotiated peace after three years of civil war. At least 45 members have temporarily suspended their membership over the impasse. Most of its leaders are in exile outside of Syria and have been accused by rebel fighters and other activists inside the war-torn country of being ineffective and out of touch.

An estimated 180 representatives of opposition groups to Assad met in southern Spain on Friday to seek common ground.

In the meantime, Assad has stabilised his grasp on areas of Syria he still controls and shows no sign of stepping down in the war that has left at least 120,000 people dead.

Persuading Al Jarba and the coalition to attend the peace conference in Montreux, Switzerland, will be a top priority for Kerry and 10 other diplomats from Western countries and Sunni-dominated Arab states meeting Sunday in Paris.

For Syrian coalition members, the conference in Switzerland offers their first opportunity to face the Syrian administration face to face.

A senior State Department official said Friday that US officials believe the Syrian coalition will be at the negotiating table in Montreux in spite of difficulties along the way because the coalition won’t want to miss the unique opportunity the conference offers them.

“We have always said that we would like to see a representative delegation including the armed opposition,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “We remain engaged with the opposition and we look forward to the opposition naming a representative delegation in the days ahead.”

Iran, which is allied with Assad, will not attend the peace conference, US officials said. That clears at least one objection of the moderate coalition. But the coalition also has asked that the peace conference set a time frame for an end to the fighting as its main focus, which US officials have rejected.

Kerry also will likely discuss the possibility of resuming nonlethal aid to moderate rebel groups as a part of the talks in Paris.

The aid, which included medical supplies and communications equipment and was halted in December amid fears it was being used by insurgents among the rebel groups, could be used as a bargaining point with Al Jarba. A senior State Department official said no decision has been made to do so, but that it is debated frequently with improving security within some parts of Syria. The official was not authorised to speak by name and requested anonymity.

Whether or not Jarba’s group attends, Bokhari said the main purpose of the peace conference likely will aim to bring together the disparate backers of the regime and opposition groups to hammer out an agreement on moving forward. That is particularly important now as sectarian violence in Syria is spilling over into neighboring Iraq and Lebanon.

“If you can’t make progress in resolving the conflict, can you make progress in dealing with the amount of human suffering and spillover into other counties from the conflict?” said Anthony Cordesman, a Mideast scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The whole idea that somehow a dialogue between the rebels and the people at the meeting would produce a political solution, or progress toward one, is literally almost the art of the incredible at this point, whether they show up or not,” Cordesman said Friday. “On the other hand, there will be a lot of people there who could do more about at least making some progress on humanitarian issues.”

SANAA — Yemeni troops began to deploy in the northern province of Saada on Saturday to monitor a ceasefire between Shiite rebels and hardline Sunni Salafists, a security official said.

The deal brokered late Friday by a presidential commission ends fighting that erupted in late October centred on a Salafist mosque and Koranic school in the town of Dammaj.

But the deadly conflict had spread in the northern provinces, embroiling Sunni tribes wary of the Shiite rebels, known as Huthis, who have been accused of receiving support from Iran.

“Forces have begun deploying in the areas surrounding Dammaj,” the Saada-based security official told AFP, adding some gunmen had not yet vacated their posts.

The deal stipulated the two sides would withdraw from the areas around Dammaj to be replaced by army troops who would monitor the ceasefire, said Yahya Abu Isba, head of the presidential mediation commission.

“This agreement ends the military conflict between the Huthis and the Salafists in Dammaj... and prevents a sectarian war that was looming over Yemen,” he told state television.

The Huthis, named after their late leader Abdel Malek Al Huthi, are part of the Zaidi Shiite community.

They rose up in 2004 in their stronghold of Saada against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government, complaining of marginalisation.

They accuse radical Sunnis in Dammaj of turning the town centre into “a real barracks for thousands of armed foreigners”, a reference to the Dar Al Hadith Koranic school, where foreigners study.

The security official said a plane was expected to evacuate “foreign students” and the leader of the Salafists in Dammaj, Yahya Al Hujuri, on Saturday.

Sources in the mediation commission told AFP that Hujuri had requested President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi decide on a solution for the Koranic school and its foreign students, while providing protection for the town.

Dammaj has a population of about 15,000 people.

The Red Cross said it evacuated 25 casualties from Dammaj on Saturday after the ceasefire.

The wounded, some of whom are in a critical condition, have been airlifted from Saada airport to Sanaa, the spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen, Marie Claire Feghali told AFP.

The ICRC said on Monday it evacuated 34 critically wounded casualties from Dammaj, taking advantage of an earlier truce, as it has done five times since fighting resumed in the area on October 24.

On Wednesday, a presidential commission also brokered a ceasefire between the Huthis and gunmen from the powerful Hashid tribes, ending two days of clashes in the northern province of Amran.

TUNIS — Riots over Tunisia’s economy flared overnight in towns around the country, leaving one dead and posing an immediate challenge to the new prime minister and the country’s path to democracy.

Crowds protested late Friday outside the government finance buildings in the low-income neighbourhood of Ettaddamon over new taxes levied by the outgoing government described as necessary to fill yawning holes in the country’s budget.

The tax hikes were hastily suspended by the outgoing prime minister, but the decision failed to calm angry crowds and casts doubt on future government efforts to rein in spending and raise revenues.

Police reported that local criminals took advantage and began looting stores and clashing with authorities. They were dispersed with tear gas, interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said Saturday.

Nearly 50 people were arrested in clashes in suburbs of Tunis, Aroui said.

In another clash, one young protester was killed and a police officer was injured in the town of Bouchebka on the Algerian border, Aroui said. He said an investigation is under way into what happened.

The latest riots came hours after a new caretaker prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, was charged with forming a technocratic Cabinet to guide the country to new elections.

“I will do everything in my power to confront the challenges, overcome the obstacles and restore stability and security to Tunisia,” the new prime minister told reporters after the swearing-in.

Since Tunisia overthrew its authoritarian president in 2011 and set off revolutions around the Arab world, this small Mediterranean country’s economy has suffered, fuelling social unrest.

In the restive aftermath of Tunisia’s revolution, tourists fled, factories were shuttered by strikes, investment evaporated and inflation soared, worsening most residents’ daily lives. International ratings agencies downgraded the country’s credit rating to junk status, making borrowing on the international markets more difficult.

After the economy shrank 2 per cent in 2011, growth returned at 2.7 per cent in 2013, but that is far below the level needed to create jobs. Unemployment hovers at 17 per cent.

RAMALLAH — Palestinians on Saturday hailed the death of former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon, describing him as a “criminal” but regretting that he is now permanently beyond the reach of the law.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) also lamented the fact Sharon was never prosecuted, particularly over his role in the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.

“It’s a shame that Sharon has gone to his grave without facing justice for his role in Sabra and Shatilla and other abuses,” HRW’s Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.

“For the thousands of victims of abuses, Sharon’s passing without facing justice magnifies their tragedy.”

Sharon had been in a coma for the past eight years since suffering a massive stroke on January 4, 2006, just months after pulling all troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip. His condition worsened last week and he died at a hospital near Tel Aviv on Saturday.

The news prompted an outburst of celebration in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, where around a hundred Islamic Jihad members burned pictures of him and handed out sweets, a spokesman said.

For the ruling Islamist Hamas movement, which seized power in Gaza in 2007, just two years after the Israeli pullout, Sharon’s death “is a lesson for all tyrants”.

“Our people are living at a historic moment with the disappearance of this criminal whose hands were covered with the blood of Palestinians and their leaders,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.

Among those killed by Israel during Sharon’s term in office was Hamas’ wheelchair-bound spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was killed in an air strike on Gaza City in 2004.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the West Bank, where a senior official also blasted him as a “criminal” and accused Sharon of being responsible for the mysterious death in the same year of veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

“Sharon was a criminal, responsible for the assassination of Arafat, and we would have hoped to see him appear before the International Criminal Court as a war criminal,” said Jibril Rajub, a senior official of the ruling Fateh Party.

Arafat was Sharon’s nemesis and the burly Israeli leader often expressed regret at not killing him during the 1982 invasion of Beirut.

After the Palestinian leader fell mysteriously ill while under a tight Israeli siege in 2004, dying in France several weeks later, rumours swirled that Israel had poisoned him.

Israel has repeatedly denied the allegations.

A history ‘written in Palestinian blood’

“We had hoped he would be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a war criminal,” said Rajub, who was head of the Palestinian security services when Sharon sent troops to the West Bank in a mass operation to wipe out militant groups in 2002.

“Sharon’s history is blackened by his crimes and written in the blood of the Palestinians,” said Jamal Huweil, a former militant from the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed offshoot of Fateh.

“The curse of our blood will follow him to his grave,” said Huweil who is now a member of the Palestinian parliament, the PLC.

Human Rights Watch said that the failure to bring Sharon to justice had in no way helped the search for peace.

“His passing is another grim reminder that years of virtual impunity for rights abuses have done nothing to bring Israeli-Palestinian peace any closer. For the thousands of victims of abuses,” Whitson said.

As minister of defence, Sharon was forced to resign following the Beirut camp killings of 1982 after an Israeli commission of inquiry found he had been “indirectly responsible” for the massacre.

The commission found that Sharon had disregarded the “serious consideration... that the Phalangists were liable to commit atrocities”, recommending that he be dismissed as defence minister, HRW said.

DUBAI — Security forces in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have detained three Iranians suspected of kidnapping a British-Iranian businessman who went missing in Dubai in June, the Dubai government said on Thursday.

Britain’s Foreign Office said in August it was in touch with the Dubai and Iranian governments over the case of Abbas Yazdi, who went missing in June in Dubai. His wife had told a UAE newspaper that he may have been kidnapped by “elements in Iran”.

The Dubai government press office said that the state security service arrested the three on suspicion of kidnapping Yazdi, a 44-year-old businessman who owns a general trading company in the Gulf Arab emirate.

“The security apparatus identified the group members and... was able to uncover the method they had used to kidnap the suspect,” the statement said.

It quoted Dhahi Khalfan, Dubai’s deputy chairman of police and general security, as saying that the three were about to dispose of some personal effects of Yazdi that had been under surveillance when they were arrested.

The three were being questioned to find out the whereabouts of Yazdi, it said.

Yazdi went missing on June 25 and his wife, Atena, told the 7Days newspaper that she feared he may have been kidnapped by Iranian intelligence officers.

Foreign Secretary William Hague raised Yazdi’s disappearance with his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi during a telephone conversation on July 31.

Britain is among Western nations at odds with Iran over its nuclear programme and other issues. It shut its embassy in Tehran after what it called “an attack by government-sponsored militias” on the mission in November 2011. Iran’s embassy in London was also closed.

7Days cited Yazdi’s wife as saying the 44-year-old trader and investor was a close childhood friend of the son of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Atena Yazdi was quoted as saying that her husband had been detained in Iran in 1993 and held in solitary confinement by the intelligence service for six months. He had later travelled to London and obtained British citizenship, she said.

BERLIN — Germany said Thursday it had accepted a UN request to destroy remnants of Syria’s chemical weapons on its own soil as part of a bid to eliminate the arsenal by June 30.

The foreign and defence ministries said in a joint statement that the move was intended to speed up the scrapping of all of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks and thus advance the peace process.

“The government decided, following a request by the UN-Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), that Germany is prepared to make a substantial contribution to the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons,” they said in the statement.

“The government is willing and able to destroy in Germany remnants created in the course of irreversibly neutralising chemical weapons from Syria and which resemble industrial waste.”

State-owned company GEKA based in the northern town of Munster will handle the mission “in full compliance with environmental regulations”, the ministries added.

“The destruction of the chemical weapons could be the first, decisive step in defusing the Syria conflict,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.

“The international community has a duty to ensure their disposal. No one who takes his international responsibilities seriously should refuse.”

Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen added: “Germany has safe technology and a lot of experience with destroying remnants of chemical arms. It is sensible for us to use this capability for the sake of the international community and with it, make a worthy contribution to the peace process.”

Syria’s most dangerous chemicals were meant to have been moved out of the country by December 31. Under a UN-backed plan, all of Syria’s declared 1,290 tonne arsenal should be destroyed by June 30. But the country’s worsening conflict has caused holdups.

Sigrid Kaag, the head of the OPCW, which is monitoring the operation, said Wednesday that the June deadline could still be met despite delays moving the most dangerous chemicals.

“Everything is ready, investment is made and the authorities have shown that first movements have started to happen,” she added, describing the loading of the first chemicals onto a ship in the Syrian port of Latakia on Tuesday as “an important first step”.

On top of battles between President Bashar Assad’s forces and opposition rebels, a customs strike in neighbouring Lebanon and heavy snow in Syria had blocked the delivery of necessary equipment, Kaag said.

Containers of Class A chemicals from Syria’s arsenal were put on a Danish vessel in Latakia on Tuesday which is now being guarded at sea by an international fleet.

After more chemicals have been loaded, the consignment will be taken to Italy to be transferred to a US Navy vessel for destruction to start.

Kaag said an international tender for companies to destroy lower level chemicals in the arsenal would be completed within weeks.

RAMALLAH –– West Bank villagers who beat up a group of Jewish settlers then locked them inside a building were on Thursday hailed by the Palestinian government as acting in “self-defence”.

“Citizens of Qusra village, who were subjected to numerous assaults by settlers during the past months, acted in self -defence,” said government spokesman Ihab Bseiso in a statement.

On Tuesday, around a dozen settlers from the Esh Kodesh settlement outpost entered Qusra, some wearing masks, but were beaten up by local Palestinians who then shut them up in a house.

Israeli troops eventually negotiated the release of the settlers but police placed seven of them under house arrest pending an investigation into why they had entered the village in the first place.

Qusra is just a few kilometres north of Esh Kodesh and is the scene of frequent clashes between settlers and Palestinians.

“Citizens of Qusra village were able to stand in the face of settler groups who assaulted farmers from the village and tried to sabotage their land; they chased them out of the fields and trapped them in a building under construction,” Bseiso said.

The villagers had “provided the settlers with water and wipes to clean their wounds” then contacted local officials who got in touch with the army, he said, demanding the international community to “intervene to provide protection” for Palestinians in the face of settler violence.

Bseiso said Qusra had suffered “continuous assaults” by local settlers, including shooting attacks, burnt crops and olive trees uprooted; three villagers were still suffering from serious injuries and one person had been shot dead by troops in 2011 in one such attack.

Palestinian daily Al Quds said the detention of settlers by ordinary civilians was “a unique precedent and an example of passive resistance”.

On Wednesday, Israel’s Peace Now settlement watchdog sent a letter to the government demanding it dismantle Esh Kodesh, saying the residents had “repeatedly attacked” Palestinians in the area.

“Esh Kodesh is an outpost that serves as launching ground for severe unlawful activity, and as such... it creates severe friction that causes harm to people and their property, and therefore heavily burdens the security authorities,” said the letter, a copy of which was seen by AFP.

The watchdog slammed the government for failing to carry out existing demolition orders against wildcat outposts — settlements which have not been formally approved and are therefore illegal.

Under international law, all settlement building in the Palestinian territories is illegal.

WASHINGTON –– More than a majority of US senators support a bill to impose new sanctions on Iran should the Islamic Republic break an agreement to curb its nuclear programme, aides said on Thursday, but there was no plan yet to debate the measure.

The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, and Iran says last November’s nuclear deal struck in Geneva would be dead if the US Congress imposes new sanctions.

The “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act” is now supported by at least 54 senators in the 100-member chamber, according to a congressional record, with six senators joining on Wednesday. A Senate aide said two more joined on Thursday, to bring the total to 56.

It is uncertain whether the bill will be introduced on the Senate floor and whether backers can win the two-thirds majority to overcome a veto by President Barack Obama.

A senior Senate Democratic aide said there were no plans yet for advancing the bill to the Senate floor, despite the growing list of co-sponsors.

The bill would also place sanctions on Iran if it does not agree to a comprehensive deal later this year or next. The United States and five other world powers agreed to a six-month interim deal with Iran in Geneva in November, that can be extended to a year.

Under last year’s interim agreement, Iran will get access to billions of dollars worth of funds that had been cut off by sanctions in return for limiting enrichment of uranium.

At least 15 Democrats support the bill introduced in December by Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an advocacy group with strong ties to many lawmakers, has said it supports new sanctions that would take effect if Iran violates the interim pact or does not agree to an “acceptable” comprehensive deal.

The bill seeks to cut Iran’s oil exports to zero two years after implementation. It also puts limits on the Obama administration’s ability to waive sanctions.

There is tough resistance to the measure by many other Democrats, however. A bloc of 10 Democratic senators, all leaders of committees, sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last month expressing their opposition to the bill.

The aide said more support could come soon from the bloc of Democrats. “At least two that I know of are inching toward public support for the bill,” the aide said on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the talks.

There has been no public indication from any of the 10 that they were leaning toward shifting position on the issue.

Nine senior foreign policy experts, including Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Israel and the United Nations, this week urged Menendez and Kirk to not pass the new sanctions, saying they could potentially move the United States closer to war.