A Lebanese girl waves a Hizbollah flag in front of a poster of Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during a rally in a Beirut suburb September 22, 2006.

Both Lebanon and the Palestinian territories are in crisis. Superficially, their respective problems appear very different, but, in fact, they are similar in more ways than one. The troubles of both Arab nations in large part stem from divisions deliberately engendered by major powers for their own ends.
Divisions in Lebanon have virtually paralyzed the country. The government is rudderless, disunited and, according to the opposition, unconstitutional due to the Shiite bloc’s walkout. It cannot even agree on who should fill the void left when Emile Lahoud moved out of the presidential palace last November.
The Hariri coalition insists the army chief Gen. Michel Suleiman should be president. Hezbollah is rooting for the Free Patriotic Party’s Michel Aoun, who accuses the US of blocking his candidacy. Stalemate! Laws needing to be passed are left pending while the economy totters. Rampant inflation has triggered strikes and violent demonstrations.
The capital’s beating heart, Downtown, has been taken over by opposition protesters complete with tents and primus stoves. Tourism, once a money spinner, is practically nonexistent. Donor countries that pledged huge sums in aid to Lebanon at last January’s Paris conference are reluctant to cough up due to the unstable environment.
The pro-Western March 14 coalition, led by Saad Hariri and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, blame Hezbollah and its foreign backers for the country’s woes. Conversely, Hezbollah accuses March 14 leaders of being Washington’s puppets. Stalemate!
It’s a similar story with the Palestinians, who, unlike the Lebanese, were united against a common enemy until the death of their former president Yasser Arafat in 2004.
Nobody can say he was faultless but he was the glue that kept Palestinians together, perhaps because his patriotism and his credentials as a freedom fighter were never in question. Arafat had, albeit reluctantly, anointed Mahmoud Abbas as his successor and to the latter’s credit he managed a reasonably seamless succession.
Then, in 2005, along came the so-called international community that takes its marching orders from the US. Palestinians must have free, fair and internationally monitored elections, said the Westerners.
The Palestinians enthusiastically fell into line and the result was a massive parliamentary victory for Hamas. Well done on your fair and free elections was the international community’s verdict with the caveat ’Sorry, we can’t accept the result. Hamas is, after all, a terrorist organization’.
Worse, it then orchestrated a deliberate campaign to bring down Hamas based on bringing the Palestinian people to their knees. It backed the losing side Fatah and encouraged its leader Mahmoud Abbas to confront Hamas in a power struggle with devastating results in terms of division and bloodshed.
The labeling of Hezbollah and Hamas as “terrorist“ by Washington and its allies is the crux of the problem in both Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Both are groups that emerged in answer to Israel’s respective occupation of Palestine and southern Lebanon. Both are committed to freeing their lands from occupation.
Furthermore, both Hezbollah and Hamas boast large followings and cannot be written off as inconsequential splinter organizations. So when they are treated as terrorist, so are their followers, who make up a large percentage of Lebanese and Palestinian populations.
Such Western-imposed labeling stands as a barrier to unity governments in Lebanon and Palestine, and pits one side against the other without providing any channels for dialogue. In both countries under discussion the side that is backed by the US is either forbidden from accepting olive branches from the other or decline to do so for fear they will be internationally tarred with the same brush. Stalemate!
Political and economic inertia in Lebanon, and the separation of the West Bank, governed by Fatah from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip plays right into the hands of Israel. As long as the Lebanese and the Palestinians are busy warring against one another, they remain perpetually weak and ineffectual.
Certainly keeping Palestinians divided is in Israel’s interests because it can shore up international good will with gestures toward the creation of a Palestinian state and, at the same time, bemoan the fact it doesn’t have a credible peace partner. There also remains the possibility that Israel is following another agenda: the creation of a nonthreatening mini Palestinian entity on the West Bank with Gaza left to fend for itself or turned over to Egypt.
There will be no light at the end of the tunnel for either the Lebanese or the Palestinians unless they can free themselves from foreign interference and bury their differences. Ideally, they need leaders in the mold of Nelson Mandela able to inspire all factions and persuade them to adopt a policy of forgiveness and reconciliation. If not, the crack between the secular progressives and the religious ideologues will widen until it becomes an eternally impassable chasm.
The strategy of divide and rule, perfected by the British, is one of the oldest known to mankind. It’s time Lebanese and Palestinians recognize they are currently its victims before it’s too late to turn back the bloody tide of hatred and despair.
ARABNEWS.COM

Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the World Economic Forum, January 23.

Last year was one of Afghanistan’s bloodiest since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. The embattled Afghan president, speaking with NEWSWEEK’s Lally Weymouth on the sidelines of the economic conference in Davos, complained of Pakistani “complicity“ with the resurgent rebels but said he saw a new seriousness about fighting Islamist terrorists from Pakistan’s isolated ruler, Pervez Musharraf. Karzai also called the Bush administration surprisingly understanding about his government’s warm ties with Iran--and hinted that he might run for another term in 2009. Excerpts:
Weymouth: How are the Taliban affecting you in Afghanistan?
Karzai: By trying to prevent progress, by trying to prevent reconstruction, by killing our people, by [preventing] our children in southern Afghanistan from going to school, by killing the community leaders, the religious leaders, intimidating cultural leaders. By all the means.
How strong are they now?
They would not be strong without support.
From Pakistan?
I’ve just had a very good trip to Pakistan, so what I would say is that Pakistan and Afghanistan and the United States and the rest of the world must join hands in sincerity in order to end this problem. They have to take [action].
The last time I interviewed Musharraf, I thought he was very angry. It’s really a crazy situation [in Pakistan].
Yes, very much. I found him to be more cognizant of the problems of extremism and terrorism. And that’s a good sign, and I hope we will continue in that direction.
Do you think Musharraf will do something about it, send forces into the problematic areas?
We have to end extremism. We have to end support to extremism in the region. Unless we do that, the picture is one of doom and gloom--for Pakistan, and as a consequence for Afghanistan.
When I interviewed Benazir Bhutto in December [the Pakistani opposition leader was assassinated 15 days later], she said to me, “I feel they are going to come knocking at my door one night.“
Unfortunately, her death, the way it happened, proves her point. That’s the irony. That’s the sad thing about her death. She predicted something, and she was proved right in that prediction. So it must be listened to. We cannot use extremism as a tool for any purpose. It will hurt us eventually, as it has begun to hurt Pakistan.
The United States is sending 3,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Will that help?
I’m happy about that, yes, yes. The American contribution to the war against terrorism is fundamental and strong.
Will it make a difference?
It will make a difference when the Americans are clear and straightforward about this fight.
What do you mean by that, Mr. President? “When the Americans are straightforward about the fight“?
[When] they mean what they say. [When] they do what they say.
Do you think the U.S. is sending the right type of troops? Should they be Special Operations troops?
That’s a professional issue. It has to be addressed by the military.
How much influence does Iran have in your country right now, Mr. President?
We have had a particularly good relationship with Iran the past six years. It’s a relationship that I hope will continue. We have opened our doors to them. They have been helping us in Afghanistan. The United States very wisely understood that it was our neighbor and encouraged that relationship.
So in other words, you don’t agree with President Bush’s assessment of Iran?
On which question?
He called it part of the “axis of evil.“ And there’s been a lot of discussion about an Iranian nuclear program É
We don’t like a nuclear region, of course. Nobody wants nuclear weapons. Who wants to have weapons of destruction around their homes? Nobody. But the United States has been very understanding and supportive that Afghanistan should have a relationship with Iran.
Are you going to run for another term in 2009?
Well, I have things to accomplish. What was that line from Robert Frost? “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.“
NEWSWEEK.COM

Kenya’s struggles are not rooted in any deep-seated ethnic hatred, although no one would deny that, as this crisis has mounted, growing fear and, latterly, a lust for vengeance has driven a wedge between communities. But there is no doubt at all that the violence has been purposefully fostered by those whose political interests it serves.
No event has revealed this more starkly than Were’s callous murder. This was an old-fashioned political assassination. He was gunned down by two armed men as he drove his car up to his Nairobi home.
Were was victorious in the December elections in the hotly contested Nairobi seat of Embakasi. As well as being the largest constituency in the country, with 250,000 registered voters, Embakasi is renowned for a rough and violent politics in which the gangsters and thugs known as Mungiki have long played a prominent role.
Mungiki are criminal gangsters who take an ethno-centric view of Kenyan society. They have lingered in the shadows of Kenya politics for more than a decade, becoming increasingly important, and increasingly dangerous, as Kikuyu political solidarities have been undermined by the strengthening of democracy.
Mungiki make their money from the extortion and protection rackets they run against the city’s businesses. Shops and transport are their principal targets. They prefer to prey upon their own Kikuyu people, seeking to chase away those of other ethnicities so as to bring in their own “compliant“ Kikuyu traders who are prepared to pay for the “protection“ that is offered.
And in Kenya’s politics, it has become the norm for politicians to hire thugs to do their dirty work, especially at election time. On its grandest scale, this was seen in the elections of 1992 and 1997, when government ministers employed vast armies of hired thugs to attack the homes of voters in opposition strongholds. On a smaller, and more mundane scale, every serious political contender arranges to be “protected“ by a group of so-called “youth-wingers“. In this way, since the early 1990s, violence has become a normalised part of Kenyan politics.
When violence exploded in the Rift Valley towns of Nakuru and Naivasha last weekend, Mungiki supporters were in the thick of it. Their criminal fraternity has long been strong in both towns, and early last week Mungiki leaders from Nairobi visited the area to speak with local followers.
Some have portrayed Mungiki as the agents of Kikuyu interest, and therefore the supporters of Mwai Kibaki and the PNU. This is far too simple an assumption. During 2007, one of Kibaki’s senior ministers, John Michuki, led a crackdown against Mungiki. On the other hand, in the 2002 election, Uhuru Kenyatta, now Kibaki’s new vice-president, curried the support of Mungiki.
And this brings us back to the murder of Were. Mungiki violence has flared up in Embakasi in previous elections, and on this occasion there were again accusations of intimidation of voters and rigging in which the gangsters were again implicated. Crime in Embakasi is the highest of any part of Nairobi, and at election time it always worsens.
It was not surprising, then, that when the local police commented on Were’s murder, they dismissed it as just another criminal act. As crowds gathered at Were’s home later in the day to mourn the dead politician, police harassed them and eventually fired tear gas canisters to disperse them.
To those who know Nairobi’s politics, none of this was surprising. Embakasi’s police have long been in the pockets of the local gangs, notably Mungiki.
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK