His Majesty the King, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa’s suggestion to establish a railway link between the GCC states and Turkey has been welcomed by observers as a strategic vision for a bright economic and political future for the region.
Half of the ambitious project would be carried out by Saudi Arabia while the rest would be taken care of by the other GCC states which will enact laws and put in place mechanisms to implement the suggestion.
During his recent visit to Turkey, King Hamad laid the moral cornerstone for the economic integration with Turkey through the project connecting Turkey with the Arabian Gulf.
Observers did not expect such a suggestion and said it was the perfect time to start working on it thanks to the economic and political options offered by Turkey and the GCC states.
There is a proposal to set up a link from Oman, the uae, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi, Kuwait, Iraq and then to Turkey. Another proposal suggests the network to start from Oman, the uae, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria to Turkey.
The King Fahad Causeway will be the integral part in either project to reach Turkey.
The gcc states set up a financial plan for the project by signing an agreement to establish a free trade zone with Turkey in May, 2005 in Bahrain. Negotiations are expected to start to implement the agreement.
Bahrain has signed agreements with Turkey on avoidance of dual taxation and tax evasion to provide suitable atmosphere to attract investment.
During the dinner banquet hosted in King Hamad’s honour, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said HM the King’s visit was a turning point in friendly ties between both countries.
Gul said Istanbul paid great attention to the agreement on promoting strategic dialogue between Turkey and the gcc states.
Turkish people believe that their economic potential meets the region’s demands and their country is a secure place for investment.
King Hamad highlighted Turkey’s importance in the region and said the country links Asia and Europe and seeks peace, freedom and development for all which is the goal of every body in the Gulf.
Syrian authorities have arrested two Kurdish leaders and charged one with a capital offence, as part of a campaign to crush political dissidents that has triggered international protests.
The two men were arrested ahead of a visit by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to the Syrian capital on Wednesday.
Sarkozy has been trying to convince President Bashar al-Assad to release leading political prisoners who have been campaigning for minority rights and a democratic constitution as an alternative to four decades of Baath Party rule.
Talal Mohammad of the banned Wifaq party, an offshoot of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which is also active in Turkey and Iraq, was arrested without warrant in northeastern Syria last week and not heard from since, according to the National Organisation of Human Rights in Syria.
Authorities earlier arrested Mashaal Tammo, an official in Future Movement, which like all opposition parties in Syria is banned.
Future Movement advocates democracy and equal rights for Syria’s one million Kurdish minority.
The Kurdish language is not allowed to be taught in schools and tens of thousands of Kurds were denied citizenship after a 1960s census.
Tammo had said before his arrest that Syrian policy toward the Kurds risked a repeat of riots that killed 30 people in Syria in 2004. The riots started in a Kurdish region.
Tammo was charged on August 27 with committing aggression and arming Syrians to start civil war, an accusation that carries the death penalty and is rarely directed against well-known political activists.
Other charges regularly used against dissidents were also levelled at Tammo, including belonging to an organisation that aims to change the basis of society and causing racial and sectarian tension.
Denies charges
Tammo has denied the charges and human rights lawyer Mohannad al-Hassani said it would require a great deal of evidence to prove that Tammo, who renounces violence, had wanted to start civil war.
“The authorities cannot resort to such fearsome charges just because they disagree with someone’s opinions,” he said.
The U.S. State Department denounced Tammo’s arrest, saying he was held incommunicado for 15 days before he was charged.
“We condemn the detention of Tammo and other Syrian prisoners of conscience and call for their immediate release,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in a statement.
“We encourage the international community to join us in calling on the Syrian government to stop its policy of arresting critics of the regime and to comply with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
Syria, which has been controlled by the Baath Party since it took power in a 1963 coup and imposed emergency law, has thousands of political prisoners, human rights lawyers say.
Assad said during a visit to Paris last month authorities only arrest those suspected of violating the constitution and that criticism of his rule was permitted.
Under Turkish pressure, Syria has cracked down on the PKK, which it once backed.
A security court handed several PKK members long sentences in 2006 in trials branded illegitimate by international human rights groups.
“What is this? You armed us and now you imprison us,” one defendant shouted at the judges before he was sentenced to seven years in jail.
<I class=annotation>Syria says it’s ready to put a Russian missile system on its soil as a counterweight to U.S. plans to deploy a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The offer was made during a meeting between Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad and President Dmitry Medvedev in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Meanwhile, Moscow is considering a request from Syria for more Russian-made weapons.
It was the first meeting between the two leaders, and President Al-Assad was keen to show Syria’s support for Russia.
“We understand what is behind Russia’s position … We believe this is a response to Georgian provocation. We support Moscow in this and are against any attempts to blacken Russia,” Al-Assad said.
Many expected a tit-for-tat response after the U.S. sealed a deal to deploy interceptors in Poland as a part of their missile defence system.
Ahead of the visit, there were reports that Russia might deploy a missile system in Syria, in particular, the Iskander system. It’s something Syria has been requesting for a long time. After Friday’s meeting, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia is ready “to consider the offers of the Syrian government in connection to the delivery of new weapons, only for defence purposes”.
Moscow has temporarily suspended cooperation with NATO. It follows NATO’s criticism of Russia’s actions in South Ossetia and threats to shut down the NATO-Russia Council. Lavrov was clear on Russia’s course: “We are not going to slam the door on NATO. NATO could slam this door, though. Everything depends on NATO’s priorities: if the priorities are absolutely supportive of Saakashvili’s bankrupt regime to the detriment of partnership with Russia, then it is not our fault,” he said.
Meanwhile, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the conflict zone is well under way. There will be at least 500 peacekeepers deployed in the so-called security zone near the border. The rest of the peacekeepers will remain within the de facto borders of South Ossetia. The rest of the troops in the area will return to Russia.
Russia says it’s fully committed to the six principles of the cease-fire, but, according to Lavrov, some countries are resorting to diplomatic tricks.
Both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia’s two separatist regions, have again asked Moscow to recognise their independence.
So the McCain campaign is attacking an Obama adviser, and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, for going to an American Bar Association conference in Damascus and calling on the Syrians to make peace with Israel. I guess to the McCain campaign, anyone that calls for peace through negotiations instead of “peace” through war is asking to be attacked. But this seems like a really dumb thing to do for two reasons.1. If McCain is attacking Kurtzer (and therefore the Obama campaign) for being an appeaser, doesn’t that mean that McCain also thinks that the Israelis are Chamberlin-like appeasers? The Israeli government is after all engaged in very public negotiations with Syria. In fact the Israeli military is one of the chief advocates of trying to negotiate a deal with Syria. Additionally, Assad recently had a very public meeting with Olmert and Sarkozy at the Mediterranean Conference where Olmert expressed hope that negotiations would develop. Does McCain oppose these efforts to negotiate peace? And if so doesn’t that once again put McCain squarely in line with the Bush administration.
2. McCain himself once upon a time advocated talking to Syria. McCain is forgetting what he said about Colin Powell’s trip to Damascus five years ago. On the Today Show on April 18th 2003 McCain said that despite Syria being a state sponsor of terrorism, he was glad Powell was going there.
LAUER: Let me ask you about Syria.
Mr. McCAIN: Sure.
LAUER: They have denied possessing weapons of mass destruction, they’ve also denied harboring any senior members of the Iraqi leader. The US administration says they have evidence to the contrary. How would you proceed with that situation?
Mr. McCAIN: I think it’s very appropriate that Colin Powell is going to Syria. I think we should put diplomatic and other pressures on them. It’s also a time for Mr. Asad Bashar to realize that he should be more like his father was. I think he’s too heavily influenced by a lot of the radical Islamic elements and–and militant groups.
LAUER: Do you think Syria meets the criteria set forth by the president in his post-9/11 address to Congress that they pose an imminent threat to the US in that they are either sponsoring or harboring terrorists?
Mr. McCAIN: I think they’re–they’re sponsoring and harboring terrorists. I think they have been occupying Lebanon, which should be free and independent for a long time, but I don’t think that that means that we will now resort to the military action. We–we can apply a lot of pressure other than military–than the military action. So what I’m saying, we’re a long way away from it.
LAUER: Under what circumstances–under what circumstances would you back military action?
Mr. McCAIN: When we’ve exhausted all other options. And we have a lot of options to–to exercise. And I’m glad Colin Powell’s going there, but the Syrians have got to understand there’s a new day in the Middle East.
RIYADH (Reuters) – A Turkish soap opera that flopped when first broadcast in its native Turkey three years ago has taken the Arab world by storm, provoking a flood of Gulf Arab tourists to Turkey that even includes royalty.
“Noor” became an immediate hit when Saudi-owned MBC satellite television began airing it earlier this year, partly because of its unconventional usage of colloquial Arabic dubbing — and because its blond-haired, blue-eyed leading man had women swooning.
Turkey is expecting the number of Saudi tourists this year to top 100,000, including King Abdullah’s wife Hissa al-Shaalan, who has been the subject of YouTube videos showing her swanning through the markets and sweet-shops of Istanbul.
“From 41,000 (tourists) last year to 100,000 this year — the same year this show became phenomenally successful,” said Turkish diplomat Yasin Temizkayn. [sic.] “It’s more than just a coincidence.”
Spanish-language soap operas have been shown on Arab television in the lucrative Saudi and Gulf markets in recent years with classical Arabic voice-overs.
But with “Noor” — the main character whose name means “light” — the names of the characters in the original Turkish soap “Gumus” have been swapped for Arabic, and Syrian vernacular has replaced the formal classical Arabic of modern media and religion.
“I don’t like all that Maria Mercedes nonsense,” says Dania Nugali, 16, referring to a popular Mexican soap. “I feel like I am in Arabic literature class when I watch Mexican shows. But when I watch Noor, I definitely feel that it is entertainment.”
Yet the main pull has been the co-star Muhannad, 24-year-old Turkish actor and model Kivanc Tatlitu.
“It seems most viewers are female,” said Hana Rahman, who runs an Arab entertainment blog (waleg.com). “They’re so swept away by the main character. He’s become a heartthrob here! He has even caused divorce cases in Saudi Arabia.”
The drama, which made poor ratings when first shown in Turkey in 2005, centres around a family whose patriarch strives to ensure his sons focus on the family business and maintain cohesion without straying into romantic temptation.
“We made the series with a Turkish audience in mind,” Tatlitu told al-Arabiya Television during a recent visit to Dubai. “The fact that it has amassed such a following in the Arab world just proves how much our cultures have in common.”
Many Saudi women explained their devotion to the show as a form of escapism from stifling, love-less marriages.
“Our men are rugged and unyielding,” quipped a 26-year-old house-frau who preferred to remain unnamed. “I wake up and see a cold and detached man lying next to me, I look out the window and see dust. It is all so dull. On Noor, I see beautiful faces, the beautiful feelings they share and beautiful scenery.”
(Editing by Summer Said and Mary Gabriel)
Source: Reuters, Jul 26, 2008
[2]
Saudi cleric slams Turkish soaps as “wicked”
RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s top religious figure has slammed Turkish soap operas as “wicked” and “malevolent”, despite the wild popularity of one show, a paper said on Sunday.
Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al al-Shaikh told a seminar in conservative Saudi Arabia this week that Arabic television channels airing the soaps were un-Islamic.
“Any channel that helps to further perpetuate the popularity of these shows is ultimately a warrior against God and his Prophet,” he said in comments cited by al-Watan newspaper.
“It is not permitted to watch Turkish series … They are replete with wickedness, evil, moral collapse and war on virtues that only God knows the truth of.”
He said he was speaking in the name of the Higher Council of Religious Scholars, the government body charged with advising on religious affairs.
It was not clear what specific objection the Mufti had to the programmes. Saudi clerics demand gender segregation in public places and women are not allowed to drive cars.
They have previously objected to young Saudis taking part in popular music talent shows along the lines of American Idol.
The show “Noor” this year became an overnight sensation in the Arab world when it was first aired on Saudi-owned satellite channel MBC. It it was a flop when first shown in Turkey in 2005 with the title Gumus.
It has since spurred a large number of Gulf Arab tourists to visit Turkey, including the Saudi first lady Princess Hissa Al-Shaalan. Its blonde and blue-eyed star Kivanc Tatlitu has become a heart-throb for many Arab women.
By Christopher Hudson
Last updated at 11:46 PM on 24th July 2008
Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer.
Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.
In his white raincoat, surrounded by his generals, Hitler stood for a long time gazing down at his hero, his cap removed in deference.
Dictator: Napoleon was responsible for thousands of executions
He was said later to have described this moment as ‘one of the proudest of my life’.
The next day, during his official sightseeing tour of Paris, Hitler again visited Napoleon’s tomb to salute him.
Conscious that his hero was known to the world simply as Napoleon, Hitler boasted that he would not need a rank or title on his gravestone. ‘The German people would know who it was if the only word was Adolf.’
Throughout the war, Hitler had sandbags placed around Napoleon’s tomb to guard against bomb damage.
Wooden floorboards were laid across the marble floor of Les Invalides so that they would not be scarred by German jackboots.
Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.
But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France’s greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler’s worst crimes against humanity.
These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon’s greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon’s Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.
A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.
Hitler
Admiration: Hitler had a great respect for Napoleon – and perhaps his killing ways, it has now emerged
During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.
There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust.
Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government’s human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon’s bloodcurdling record for some years.
He accuses him of being a racist and an anti-Semite who persecuted Jews and reintroduced widespread slavery just a few years after it had been abolished by the French government.
The most startling of these findings, the attempted massacre of an entire population over the age of 12 by methods which included gassing them in the holds of ships, relate to the French Caribbean colony of Haiti at the turn of the 19th century.
In Ribbe’s words, Napoleon, then First Consul, was the man who, for the first time in history, ‘asked himself rationally the question how to eliminate, in as short a time as possible, and with a minimum of cost and personnel, a maximum of people described as scientifically inferior’.
Haiti around 1800 was the world’s richest colony, a slave-powered export factory which produced almost two-thirds of the world’s coffee and almost half its sugar.
The black slaves were lashed and beaten to work and forced to wear tin muzzles to prevent them from eating the sugar cane.
If the slaves were fractious, they were roasted over slow fires, or filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces.
When the slaves began to fight for their freedom, under the leadership of a charismatic African military genius called Toussaint L’Ouverture, Napoleon sent 10,000 crack troops under the command of his brother-inlaw, General Leclerc, to crush Toussaint and restore slavery.
In 1802, a vast programme of ethnic cleansing was put in place. Napoleon banned inter-racial marriages and ordered that all white women who’d had any sort of relationship with a black or mulatto (person of mixed race) be shipped to France.
He further commanded the killing of as many blacks in Haiti as possible, to be replaced by new, more docile slaves from Africa.
The French troops were under orders to kill all blacks over the age of 12. However, younger children were also killed – stabbed to death, put in sandbags and dropped into the sea.
The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804.
Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads.
Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre.
Allegdly on Napoleon’s orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships – more than 100,000 of them, according to records.
The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.
Auschwitz victims: Did Hitler learn genocide from Napoleon?
‘We varied the methods of execution,’ wrote Metral. ‘At times, we pulled heads off; sometimes a ball and chain was put at the feet to allow drowning; sometimes they were gassed in the ships by sulphur.
‘When the cover of night was used to hide these outrages, those walking along the river could hear the noisy monotone of dead bodies being dropped into the sea.’
A contemporary historian, who sailed with the punitive expedition, wrote that: ‘We invented another type of ship where victims of both sexes were piled up, one against the other, suffocated by sulphur.’
These were prison ships with gas chambers called etouffiers, or ‘chokers’, which asphyxiated the blacks, causing them terrible suffering.
Even at the time, there were French naval officers who were appalled at this savagery, claiming they would rather have braved a court martial than have forgotten the laws of humanity.
But from the Emperor’s point of view, gassing was a way of cutting costs. Ships continued to transport prisoners out to sea to drown them, but corpses kept being washed up on beaches or tangled in ships’ hulls.
Toussaint, who called himself the Black Napoleon, was kidnapped after accepting an invitation to parlay with a French general and shipped back to France in chains, where he died of pneumonia after being imprisoned in a cold stone vault.
Guadeloupe, an island to the east, suffered a similar fate to Haiti’s.
Once again choosing not to recognise France’s abolition of slavery, Napoleon in 1802 promoted a comrade of his, Antoine Riche-panse, to the rank of General, and sent him with an expeditionary force of 3,000 men to put down a slave revolt on the island.
During his purge, General Richepanse slaughtered any men, women and children he encountered on his route to the capital. Then he worked through a plan of extermination apparently approved by the First Consul.
A military commission was set up to give what followed a veneer of legality. Some 250 ‘rebels’ were shot in Guadeloupe’s Victory Square. Another 500 were herded down to the beach and shot there.
Richepanse and Lacrosse, the former colonial governor now restored to power, thought of piling up the dead in vast mounds to intimidate the islanders, but gave up the plan for fear of starting a disease epidemic.
Instead, using a technique which the French were to copy during the Algerian War, they sent death squads into every part of Guadeloupe to track down farmers who were absent from their homes.
These men were treated as rebels. A bounty was promised for each black man captured, and the rebels were summarily shot or hanged. The ferocity of the repression sparked another uprising, which Lacrosse subdued with the most barbarous methods yet.
‘Being hung is not enough for the crimes they have committed,’ he said. ‘It is necessary to cut them down alive and let them expire on the wheel [prisoners were bound to a cart wheel before having their arms and legs smashed with cudgels].
‘The jails are already full: it is necessary to empty them as quickly as possible.’ In this he was successful, hanging, garotting and burning the rebels and breaking their limbs on the wheel.
Lacrosse developed possibly the most fiendish instrument of slow execution ever created.
The prisoner was thrust into a tiny cage and had a razor-sharp blade suspended between his legs. In front of him was a bottle of water and bread, neither of which he could reach.
He was stood in stirrups, which kept him just above the blade, but if he fell asleep or his legs tired, he was sliced by the blade. Neither fast nor economical, it was pure sadism.
After four months in Guadeloupe, the French lost patience with the islanders, and the ferocity of their repression reached new heights.
Blacks with short hair were shot out of hand, since the expeditionary force considered short hair to be a sign of rebellion. Orders were given that ‘the type of execution should set a terrifying example’.
The soldiers were encouraged ‘to cut open insurgents, to strangle and to burn them’. French officers spoke proudly of creating ‘torture islands’.
In a letter to Napoleon, his brother-in-law Leclerc wrote: ‘It is necessary to destroy all the negroes of the mountain . . . do not leave children over the age of 12.’
Ribbe, in his work in progress, sees continual affinities between Napoleon and Hitler. He argues that many of Napoleon’s actions were later echoed in Nazi Germany, right down to his enthusiasm for slavery reflecting the grim message ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Sets You Free’), which appeared over the gates of Auschwitz.
Napoleon, like Hitler, also used his own army like cannon fodder when the occasion demanded.
His retreat from Moscow in 1812 squandered the lives and courage of 450,000 soldiers of the Grande Armee; many of them were found frozen to death while embracing each other to harvest a last flicker of warmth, in what was one of the bitterest winters in living memory.
Nothing shows more clearly the contempt the Emperor showed for his minions than the bulletin announcing the destruction of his Army.
Napoleon blamed his horses and ended by declaring that his health had never been better.
As theatres for Napoleon’s callousness, Haiti and Guadeloupe were too far away to attract much public notice, let alone condemnation.
Syria was a different matter. In the war between France and the Ottoman Empire (most of it modern-day Turkey), Napoleon led the siege of the ancient walled city of Jaffa, whose harbour he needed as a vital shelter for his fleet.
The city fell on the fourth day, whereupon Napoleon’s troops ran amok through the town, slaughtering Christians, Jews and Muslims indiscriminately.
To escape the slaughter, part of the garrison locked themselves into a large keep.
Napoleon sent his officers, who negotiated their surrender and marched them back to the French camp.
Rations were short, so Napoleon now decided that he had been too magnanimous.
For three days he kept the 4,000 mostly Turkish prisoners with their arms tied behind their back; then the massacre began.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 men were slaughtered there and then, either by shooting them or by running them through with bayonets.
Shortly afterwards plague broke out, decimating the troops on both sides. With real courage, Napoleon led his general staff on a tour of the plague-infested hospitals.
It did not deter him from suggesting to the doctors that seriously ill French troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of the opiate laudanum. The doctors forced him to back down.
From Jaffa, Napoleon marched to Acre, a city constructed on a peninsula and therefore impregnable, given that there was British control of the seas. Napoleon launched seven major assaults; each one failed. Marching back to Cairo, Napoleon left 2,200 of his troops dead, and 2,300 more seriously ill or wounded.
As far as Napoleon was concerned, these wounded were already dead men. Most of them he left behind, knowing that the Turks would cut off their heads as soon as his army left. They did their best to follow his retreat, crying out not to be abandoned.
They straggled along, their throats parched in the debilitating heat, which reduced their cries to a croak. Injured officers were thrown from their litters and left to die in the dunes.
Soldiers were abandoned in the cornfields, which were still smouldering in the devastation of crops and villages ordered by Napoleon. In all, some 5,000 Frenchmen lost their lives.
If Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon, one must have been that victory required callousness, not just in the leader but in those around him.
‘Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon’s killing did so with little thought to morality,’ Claude Ribbe says today. ‘There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.’
So is Napoleon to be feted as a great leader or denounced as a dictator? A poll published in Le Figaro in 2005 found that nearly 40 per cent of Frenchmen regarded Napoleon as ‘a dictator who had used all means to satisfy his thirst for power’.
However, considering what was done in Napoleon’s name in Haiti and Guadeloupe, there is one memorial which deserves to be added.
Next to the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe should be erected the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.
• Le Crime de Napoleon, by Claude Ribbe (Editions Priv & Egrave;).
