ISRAEL-SYRIA: Golan’s Druze community divided over protests

Photo: Phoebe Greenwood/IRIN

Shefa Abu Jabal, an activist from Majdal Shams, risks social and religious exclusion by supporting the protests in Syria

GOLAN, 17 May 2011 (IRIN) – When thousands of Palestinian refugees gathered on the Syrian border with Israel near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights recently, local villagers were stunned. It was the first time in more than 20 years that there had been trouble on this border.
 
As the crowd surged towards Israeli territory, the Israeli military shot eight protesters dead – on 15 May, the anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, a date known as `Nakba’ (catastrophe) by Palestinians.
 
“IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] forces opened fire in order to prevent the violent rioters from illegally infiltrating Israeli territory; a number of rioters have infiltrated and are violently rioting in the village,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
 
Around 200 Palestinian refugees living in Syria managed to push through the Israeli-guarded border into the nearby village of Majdal Shams where they gathered to protest in the main square, sources said.
 
But the 15 May incident was only the latest sign of unrest in the usually calm hilltops of Golan. Since protests began in Syria in March, the Druze community in Golan has been divided between those who support the current regime of President Bashar al-Assad and those who support the protesters.

The Druze are a small monotheist religious sect found in several Middle East countries. In Golan, the local leadership is firmly pro-Assad and has taken a tough line against anyone supporting the protesters or criticizing the government, threatening social and religious exclusion. Opponents within the community disagree.
 
“They [those who speak out] are fighting for a just cause,” said local activist Shefa Abu Jabal, 25, who risks being thrown out of the Druze community for supporting the protesters inside Syria.
 
“There are generations [in Syria] who know nothing about politics, nothing about freedom of speech, nothing about elections,” she added. “YouTube and every single Israeli website is blocked. They deserve freedom.”

Hard to verify information
 
It is difficult for foreign journalists to enter Syria, so it is hard to verify what is happening, but rights groups say at least 850 people, including women and children, have been killed in more than two months of protests. At least 8,000 have been arrested.
 
More than a million Druze people live in Syria. By far the biggest community is in Jabal al-Druze, a hilly volcanic region near the border with Jordan. It is the closest town to Deraa, a southern hub of the Syrian uprising.
 

Photo: Phoebe Greenwood/IRIN

The Druze village of Majdal Shams in Israeli-occupied Golan is separated from Syria by a mountain range

Deraa, according to Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is an impoverished region where 32 percent of the population live below the poverty line, earning US$2 a day or less.
 
The Golan region has been occupied by Israel since June 1967. In December 1981, Israel unilaterally annexed the area and introduced its laws, jurisdiction and administration.
 
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), basing its view on international humanitarian law, considers Golan an occupied territory and, as such, subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and to rules of customary law as reflected in the Hague Regulations of 1907.
 
No government has endorsed the Israeli annexation of Golan. An area of about 1,200sqkm, Golan is home to about 22,000 Syrians and 19,000 Israelis, according to the ICRC, but it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the vast majority of Syrians living in Golan to have exchanges with the rest of their country.
 
Fearful of Syrian retribution
 
Despite the restrictions, activists like Shefa are in touch with friends, family and fellow activists across Syria via Facebook. She says their reports of violence have been staggering but that many are too afraid of government retribution to publish details of what they have witnessed on the Internet.
 
“Every [other] person in Syrian is a security person,” Abu Jabal claimed. “They [the protesters] have seen the violence. There is something to be afraid of. Even for us – the people who just show our support on the Internet – we are afraid.”
 
While characteristically secretive and autonomous, the Druze are also famed for their loyalty to the nation in which they live, but the community in Golan considers itself Syrian, despite more than 40 years of Israeli occupation.
 
Local religious leader Sheikh Hussam, 35, said his community’s loyalty to the Syrian government should be understood as an expression of loyalty to Syria rather than its president.
 
“Most people here – 90 percent – support the [Syrian] government,” he explained. “But this is more pro-Syria than pro-Assad. It is a matter of holding the principles of being a Syrian Arab under occupation.”
 
Shefa insists there is more to it. She claims that a fear of retribution, both at home and for relatives abroad, is preventing her community from speaking out. “They believe somehow that belonging to Syria is belonging to the regime,” she said. “But the main reason [they support Assad] is fear, and that is something I can understand.”
 
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source www.irinnews.org

NIGERIA: Nailing the perpetrators of violence

Photo: UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz

Analysts have low expectations for a government inquiry into post-election violence announced by President Goodluck Jonathan (file photo)

KANO, 17 May 2011 (IRIN) – Following post-election violence in which an estimated 800 people were killed and 65,000 displaced, according to Human Rights Watch, state prosecutors need to follow through on arrests to try perpetrators and seek justice, rather than initiating new commissions of inquiry that will go nowhere, say civil society and human rights groups.

“These crimes were state-level crimes – a federal-level inquiry is useless,” said Innocent Chukwuma, director of the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN) in Lagos. According to Chukwuma, the governor of Bauchi State in the north recently announced that 600 people involved in violence there had been arrested. “If you have arrested this many, why set up an investigative panel – the next stage is to take them to court and try them,” he told IRIN.

Violence broke out in northern Nigeria on 17 April as election results emerged announcing incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan in the lead, causing supporters of opposition presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim from the Congress for Progressive Change, to protest. Protests degenerated into sectarian and ethnic riots in northern states.

The impetus for much of the violence was at least partly driven by widespread anger among northern youths who feel marginalized by their leaders, say analysts. “The ugly situations is a combination of poverty, loss of public confidence in elections… with the electorate feeling they would not get justice from election tribunals, and the inability of political leaders to manage communal and interfaith relations,” said Iheoma Obibi, director of NGO Alliance for Africa, and an accredited election observer.

Most of the victims were killed in three days of rioting in 12 northern states – Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara.

Commissions of inquiry

President Jonathan has set up a 22-person commission of inquiry into the violence, but analysts remain sceptical it will lead to anything.

Numerous committees and commissions of inquiry set up by state and federal governments to investigate election-related killings over the past decade have resulted in few to no prosecutions, according to Human Rights Watch and other groups. 

Some 300 people were killed after the 2007 elections, but only a few were tried, reports Human Rights Watch.

The government sets up commissions so that it can be seen to be doing something, CLEEN’s Chukwuma told Human Rights Watch. “Panels of inquiry have become a tunnel through which the government runs away from their responsibility to bring the culprits of violence to book”… ”Going to these panels buys the government time and when the problems drop from the headlines they go back to business as usual.”

By supplanting police investigations into the violence, these government panels risk doing more harm than good, Eric Guttschuss, researcher with Human Rights Watch, told IRIN.

Police accountability

A number of the deaths in Kaduna State were attributed to the police and military, according to Kaduna-based human rights group, the Civil Rights Congress.

In Kaduna’s capital, Zaria, residents alleged that on 19 April, soldiers and police stormed into homes rounding up young men suspected of taking part in the riots following tip-offs; shooting them, and dumping their bodies in hospital morgues. Sabiu Mohammed, a resident who was among volunteers who went around hospitals in the city, said they recovered 19 bodies in four hospitals.

Precedent indicates most of the police and military involved will not be charged, reports Human Rights Watch.

Of the 700 who died following Jos elections in 2008, military and police leaders were thought to have been involved in 133 cases of unlawful killing, but no one was prosecuted, said Guttschuss.

Police and military were again involved in extrajudicial killings, including public executions outside police headquarters, in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, in July 2009 during a crackdown on the supporters of radical religious group Boko Haram. Not a single police officer was prosecuted, said Guttschuss.

In the April 2011 violence, rights groups heard accounts of police and soldiers in Kaduna, Gombe and Bauchi states systematically beating people they had rounded up after the riots, according to Civil Rights Congress.

Security sector reform to improve accountability in the sector has been attempted by the government but it has been “half-hearted” and “episodic” said CLEEN’s Chukwuma. 

Spokespersons from the police and military have repeatedly stressed they were just doing their job to keep the peace. Kaduna State governor spokesperson Reuben Buhari dismissed reports of police violence: “These accusations are without basis and are a deliberate attempt to smear the image of the security personnel who have done an excellent job of restoring and maintaining peace in the state,” he told IRIN.

To break the cycle of impunity, states and security sector leaders should put their own houses in order, rather than rely on politicized government-led investigations, Chukwuma told IRIN.

One precedent with evidence of success was an internal panel of inquiry set up by the deputy commissioner of police following the killing of traders in the capital, Abuja, in 2005. It identified individual police officers behind the killings and put them on trial; while the government paid compensation to the victims.

Such internal investigations are more likely to produce results than politicized, government-led investigations, he added.

aa/aj/cb source www.irinnews.org

SWAZILAND: Government coffers running dry

Photo: James Hall/IRIN

Public service salaries support one-tenth of the population

MBABANE, 16 May 2011 (IRIN) – Swaziland’s deepening financial crisis has already eroded public services, but those services may shut down entirely if the government fails to find money to pay its wage bill.

Finance minister Majozi Sithole told a state-run radio station on 9 May that the government would struggle to pay public service salaries at the end of the month, and that no money would be available for June or beyond unless the World Bank and the African Development Bank grant the loans the government has requested.

Civil servants and nurses’ unions have already threatened to stop working if salaries are not paid on time.

“A security threat with regional implications comes when government cannot pay the army, police and the correctional services,” said Manqoba Ginindza, who works at a local investment institution. “The slow deterioration of services we have seen all year will become an abrupt end to all services.”

The average Swazi wage earner supports 10 individuals, so 100,000 people – one-tenth of the population – would be directly affected if the country’s 10,000 civil servants were not paid.

If the largest group of wage earners stopped spending or investing, retailers could be left with unsold goods, and banks saddled with delinquent loans. Analysts said the knock-on effects to the economy could be far-reaching.

In January 2011 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made a number of recommendations aimed at staving off economic disaster in Swaziland. Chief among them was that the bloated public sector workforce be cut to a size more suited to a small country’s needs.

The government announced that it would cut 7,000 public service jobs during 2011, but so far has cut none. Even without the cuts, Swaziland’s unemployment rate stands at 40 percent and more jobs have been lost since the beginning of the year as businesses that relied on government contracts have closed down.

Feeling the pinch

Swazis started feeling the pinch of the financial crisis in March, when the government suspended pensions for the elderly in order to pay school fees for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

Although the pensions have been reinstated, the Ministry of Education is still faced with a shortfall, which has delayed the payment of fees for the children’s second term of school.

Nurses at the country’s largest medical facility, the Mbabane Government Hospital, have announced that starting on 16 May they will hold daily pickets to protest the shortage of drugs and basic medical supplies like bandages.

The relatives of patients with wounds that need dressing have been forced to buy bandages at pharmacies, and nurses complain that they have exhausted the ways of stretching scarce resources.

Local media recently reported that the government did not have the money to maintain its large fleet of vehicles, which includes ambulances and tractors, and that many vehicles are likely to be taken out of service when they need new tyres and other spare parts.

Low hopes for recovery

Putting an end to the financial crisis and turning around the economy would take the kind of fundamental growth that Swaziland has not seen since the mid-1990s. Foreign direct investors have tended to shun the country in favour of its neighbours – the economically rebounding Mozambique and the regional powerhouse, South Africa.

When the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a US preferential trade act, was launched a decade ago, it was hailed as a means of expanding Swaziland’s economy by boosting the industrial sector.

Cyril Kunene, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Trade, recently told a press briefing that it had been a disappointment because the businesses that took advantage of AGOA were mainly Asian garment makers seeking entrance into the US market via Swaziland.

Their taxes were deferred as an inducement for investing in the country but the jobs their factories provided were unskilled and low-paying.

Swaziland’s non-governmental sector is attempting to fill many of the gaps created by poor public service delivery, but the expectation that they will provide more is growing just as donor support for many such organizations is shrinking.

“When the money runs out government services will stop,” the CEO of an Mbabane-based NGO, who declined to be named, told IRIN. “This means NGOs will be required to do even more to meet the health and social welfare needs of Swazis.”

ks/he source www.irinnews.org