Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:57 PM EDT
Fabled Timbuktu falls under rebel control in escalating war
GEOFFREY YORK
For centuries, Timbuktu was a mythical city of the imagination, too remote for explorers to reach, its very name a symbol of exotic mystery.
Even recently, a survey by a travel agency found that a majority of Britons were convinced that Timbuktu did not exist.
But it does exist. And today the 1,000-year-old city on the edge of the Sahara is on the frontlines of a suddenly escalating war against Islamist radicals in West Africa. It’s a war that the radicals seem to be winning.
Two days ago, Mali’s soldiers fled from Timbuktu, and the city fell to a rebel alliance. Then on Monday an Islamist faction seized control of the city, raising their black flag over the city, imposing sharia law and ordering women to wear veils.
Today there are reports that the Islamists in Timbuktu now include several leaders of the notorious terrorist group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has kidnapped dozens of foreigners across West Africa – including Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay.
One of the AQIM leaders who has reportedly gained a share of power in Timbuktu is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, commander of the terrorist gang that held Mr. Fowler and Mr. Guay hostage in Mali’s northern desert for more than four months.
Mr. Belmokhtar, sometimes known as “The Uncatchable” or “The Emir of the Masked Battalion,” entered Timbuktu on Monday with the Islamist faction that evicted the Tuareg rebels, according to a report today by AFP.
If true, it means a substantial rise in power for AQIM, giving it a role in the new ruling elite in northern Mali, even though the Tuareg rebels have denied any official links to AQIM.
When I visited Timbuktu in 2009, a few months after the Fowler kidnapping, the town was peaceful and dusty. There were a handful of intrepid tourists among the ancient mud-brick mosques and the sand dunes. There were libraries filled with thousands of historic Arabic manuscripts. There was a bar where a Malian band was blasting out American blues mixed with African rhythms.
Link to this post
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 6:50 PM EDT
Is Washington undermining Israel’s campaign against Iran?
PAUL KORING
A secret Israeli-Azerbaijan pact giving the Jewish state use of old Soviet air bases to attack Iran’s nuclear sites revealed by Foreign Policy magazine exposed a bold military option to the vexed problem of getting bomb-heavy warplanes to their distant targets.
Or was the story all part of a complex and devious disinformation campaign by the Obama administration to box Israel in, or one targeted at the president?
From a military standpoint, the strategy was simple, if audacious. Israeli warplanes would refuel in Azerbaijan before the final low-level dash across the Caspian to targets in Iran.
Predictably, Israeli and Azeri officials flatly denied the story which – according to Foreign Policy – was based on senior U.S. intelligence and military sources.
Another denial came from a similarly unidentified Obama administration official, who said the White House had “no interest” in leaks of that type, adding it would “gladly prosecute” those who divulged the details supposed Israeli attack option using Azeri air bases – if they knew who they were.
For some that seemed a touch too disingenuous.
In the murky and multi-layered world of deliberate leaks and pressure by disinformation, the White House denial was interpreted as a clever piece in the Obama administration complex strategy to box Israel in. In that scenario, the message is that Washington – first by leaking details and then denying it was leaking – knows what Israel is up to and wants no part of it, at least until after the November elections.
Monday, April 2, 2012 10:53 AM EDT
India signals a softer stand on suicide
Stephanie Nolen
India took a step toward decriminalizing suicide this week, when a New Delhi court refused to jail an impoverished man who survived an attempted drug overdose.
Suicide attempts are punishable with a year’s imprisonment or a fine or both; India inherited the law from the British colonial rulers, although the statute on which it was based was repealed more than 40 years ago in the United Kingdom.
India’s law review commission recommended four years ago that the government change the law but this legislative reform, like many others, has stalled in a fractious parliament. Now, as with other social issues such as decriminalizing homosexuality, it seems the law will be rewritten not in parliament, but through court verdicts.
“Attempts to commit suicide are made due to extreme poverty and helplessness. There is no justification for imposing severe punishment on such convicts,” wrote Additional Sessions Judge Ramesh Kumar in his verdict. He convicted Satish Jain for the attempt, but sentenced him to prison for only the token time that the court remained in session. “The case like the present one in which the accused attempted to commit suicide due to poverty, helplessness, economic conditions and other pressing circumstances should be taken liberally and lesser sentences should be awarded to them.”
Friday, March 30, 2012 1:33 PM EDT
‘Dr. Death’ hearing stirs up painful apartheid memories in South Africa
Geoffrey York
The man known as “Dr. Death” says he was just following orders. But as he fights to keep his medical license, the case of Wouter Basson is stirring up memories of apartheid-era atrocities, including a germ-warfare program that targeted black opponents of the white-minority regime.
Dr. Basson, the former commander of South Africa’s notorious 7th Medical Battalion and head of its secret biological and chemical weapons program, is now a successful cardiologist in an affluent suburb of Cape Town with 9,000 heart patients.
A decade ago, he was acquitted of murder and fraud charges in one of the most controversial court decisions of its time. But now the Health Professions Council of South Africa is holding a disciplinary hearing to decide whether to revoke his medical license, on the grounds that his apartheid-era activities were unprofessional and unethical.
From 1981 to 1993, Dr. Basson was head of Project Coast, a unit of South Africa’s military security service, which used secret laboratories and front companies to develop a terrifying arsenal of chemical and biological agents, including sarin, salmonella, mustard gas, and 45 types of anthrax.
Thursday, March 29, 2012 1:29 PM EDT
Panic buying, conspiracy theories as Britain faces possible fuel-truck driver strike
Doug Saunders
Even before I got out of bed, I could tell Britain had entered one of its periodic national crises of stiff-upper-lip, everybody-pull-together stoicism. I could tell because BBC Radio 1 was patiently explaining to listeners how to store large quantities of petroleum in your house, and urging people to avoid a complete societal breakdown.
Walking onto the main street, it was quickly apparent that Britain had entered a fuel panic. My local gas station, usually quiet, had a lineup outside, including people carrying plastic containers to store fuel at home.
Elsewhere things were less civil. In the southern English city of Bournemouth police had to close a gas station because tempers flared when motorists began to “argue over queue-jumping” in a half-mile lineup outside the station.
Garages reported an 81 per cent increase in fuel sales, and department stores reported a 500 per cent increase in sales of jerry cans, with the director of one chain, Halfords, telling reporters that “it is clear that there is an element of panic buying, with customers telling us they want to be prepared.”
The ostensible reason for the panic is a possible strike by fuel-truck drivers, part of a wave of industrial action that has hit Britain during the country’s deep economic downturn. While the government has insisted that it is training soldiers to deliver the fuel, the British public seem to have been hit with an apocalyptic sensibility.
Friday, March 30, 2012 4:59 PM EDT
Will Marco 'The American Dream' Rubio be Romney's GOP running mate?
Konrad Yakabuski
When Mitt Romney played word association with Jay Leno on Tuesday night, he may have betrayed the worst kept secret of his strategy to win the White House.
As Mr. Leno threw out the names of potential Republican vice-presidential candidates, Mr. Romney reserved the most coveted descriptor of them of all for Marco Rubio.
For Mr. Romney, the first-term Florida senator represents “the American dream.”
Mr. Rubio, considered by many Republicans as the party’s great Hispanic hope, returned the compliment on Wednesday by formally endorsing Mr. Romney for the nomination.
“There's no way that anyone can convince me that having a floor fight at the convention in Tampa in August is a recipe for victory,” Mr. Rubio told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “I'm endorsing Mitt Romney...He offers such a stark contrast to the president's record.”
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 9:56 AM EDT
Cameron and his ‘party of the rich’ struggle to shake elitist image
DOUG SAUNDERS
David Cameron is a rich guy. That is one thing the British people know about their Prime Minister – and, much to the disadvantage of his Conservative Party, it is increasingly the only thing they know.
A poll released Tuesday morning shows that two-thirds of Britons believe that Mr. Cameron’s Tories are “the party of the rich” - - precisely the image he has spent three years struggling to erase.
Those results arrive in a week dominated by a fundraising scandal in which a sting by the Sunday Times caught Mr. Cameron’s chief fundraiser offering private lobbying access to the Prime Minister in exchange for a donation of 250,000 pounds.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Cameron released a list of similar big-ticket donors who were given private dinners at Mr. Cameron’s residence - - full of embarrassing details such as the fact that Mr. Cameron often personally cooked them dinner in 10 Downing Street’s kitchen.
He might have got away with all this, if it hadn’t happened only a week after he released a controversial budget – in the midst of a harsh budget-cutting austerity drive – that offered a tax cut to the wealthiest Britons while freezing benefits for the elderly.
It was not meant to be that way. Mr. Cameron came into politics as the figurehead of the “Notting Hill” Tories - - a group of socially liberal, urban Conservatives known by the name of the formerly slummy London neighbourhood (and Hugh Grant movie location) that Mr. Cameron and several of his current ministers called home.
They were pro-gay, environmentalist, broadly favourable toward immigration and ethnic minorities, and not interested in the bring-back-hanging, ditch-the-European-Union, legalize-fox-hunting bloviations of the semi-aristocratic “shire” Tories or the obsessions with abortion, sexuality and family values embraced by the party’s social-conservative Cornerstone Group.
But the association with big money was hard to escape. During the election campaign, he struggled to dodge reports that his personal wealth was 30 million pounds and embarrassing photos that showed him at exclusive Oxford University drinking clubs with clusters of aristocrats sporting trashy ‘80s haircuts.
He was able to dodge it, though, and his coalition government has generally seen solid support (in good part because the opposition Labour Party has been collapsing into disarray).
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 12:21 PM EDT
Horn OK Please? - Extra-loud car horns lead to growing problem of hearing loss in India
STEPHANIE NOLEN
If you have spent time in India and boggled at the sheer scale of traffic noise - convinced that horns on Indian vehicles honk at a higher volume than those back home - it appears you were quite right.
The director of Indian operations for the German car maker Audi has revealed something of an industry secret: the company designs special extra-loud, ultradurable horns for the vehicles it sells here.
“Obviously for India, the horn is a category in itself,” he told the Indian financial newspaper Mint. “You take a European horn and it will be gone in a week or two. With the amount of honking in Mumbai, we do on a daily basis what an average German does on an annual basis.”
Audi, in fact, specially tests its Indian horns - with two continuous weeks of honking.
Honking does not denote anger or aggression, in the Indian rules of the road, but rather a driver's intentions. Transport trucks are emblazoned with the slogan “Horn OK Please” across their back end, to indicate to drivers behind them that they should alert the trucker to their presence (since he will often lack mirrors to do so.)
But while Audi and other carmakers may simply be providing drivers what they need to be “safe”, India also has a rapidly growing problem with hearing loss, and traffic noise is causing a significant portion of it. There are laws on the books about maximum decibel levels, but studies continually find these are wildly exceeded. One such look at Calcutta, for example, found a honk every three seconds at key urban intersections, leading to a decibel level above the threshold for human pain. Another study of traffic officers in southern Indian cities found that three-quarters of them had permanent damage to their hearing from working in traffic.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 10:35 AM EDT
Accused Florida shooter is America’s dead man walking
Paul Koring
Now there’s a $10,000 ‘bounty’ on his head.
Denounced as a ‘vigilante,’ accused of hunting down an unarmed black teenager and portrayed as a wannabe-cop who morphed his volunteer neighbourhood-watch job into a gun-toting power trip, George Zimmerman, 28, may be America’s dead man walking.
In cyberspace, there’s a poster with his face marked with the words “Wanted Dead or Alive.”
The one-time Virginia altar boy, now in hiding, is at the vortex of an enflamed, divisive, national furor that has reached the Oval Office and threatens to leave lasting wounds on America’s psyche.
Huge demonstrations and belated and overlapping investigations have transformed the scarcely-noticed killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin a month ago into a bitter national debate on race relations and gun laws in the United States.
Mr. Zimmerman hasn’t been heard from since he killed Mr. Martin after some sort of a confrontation last month. But he has been all-but-convicted in fevered public outcries.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 6:58 AM EDT
In Jordan, Syrian refugees find a home away from home
Patrick Martin
“We’re looking for the Syrian refugee camp,” my driver shouted out the window toward a man who had just emerged from a modest stucco house in an area just outside this town on the Jordanian-Syrian border.
“We’re all Syrians here,” the man replied with a beaming smile, his arms stretched out wide, taking in the whole neighbourhood.
We were hunting for a specific camp Jordan is quietly, unofficially, constructing; one to house several thousand refugees that are anticipated soon. But, in hundreds of Jordanian homes and apartments in a stretch of 50 kilometres alongside the Syrian border from Irbid to Mafraq already live several thousand Syrians, refugees from the fighting that has engulfed the country just a few kilometres to the north.
Many in this semi-desert region are from widespread clans and tribes that were split 90 years ago with the drawing of the border between Jordan and Syria. Most of the refugees from these groups are bunking with distant relatives. Those who’ve come from further north in Syria are renting rooms or houses in the towns.
Officially, there are some 5300 Syrians registered as refugees in Jordan, but tens of thousands more are believed to be living here, including 500-600 former Syrian soldiers who, diplomats say, are being held in a prison, for their own protection, in the Jordan valley town of Salt.
Half the kids in the Mafraq playground are Syrian; their idle fathers watching the kids play.
Kamal Abdul Karim, his wife and their four children, all under 12, arrived 10 days ago, relieved to be far from the fighting in their home town of Homs, 265 kilometres north of the border, on the far side of Damascus. Their house, in the Karam a-Zeitun neighbourhood, was among many destroyed in shelling over the past three weeks, they said. Ten-year-old Firaz says he’s very happy to have gotten away. “No one hurts us here,” he said, bluntly.
His three-year-old brother isn’t quite sure what’s happening. Alternately clinging like a baby in his mother’s arms and throwing himself down on the ground crying, he seems pretty traumatized. “He’s wetting the bed.” his mother says.
The Shami family, from Latakia, more than 450 kilometres away, crossed into Jordan from Syria three days ago. The family of four say they lost their home too, though Latakia, a mixed city of Muslims and Alawites, has been less heavily bombarded.
The two families, 10 people in all, are sharing two large rooms and a small cooking area above a store for about $165 a month.
“We can’t afford to stay here for long,” said Mr. Abdul Karim, who was a butcher in Homs, but hasn’t yet found any work other than something that pays very little and is a long way from town.
As the families generously share juice with visitors, they recline on the half dozen mattresses along the walls of one of the rooms. The husbands speak cautiously, the children are curious and the wives both talk at the same time.
Connect with us
Follow The Globe and Mail's foreign correspondents for breaking news and analysis from around the world.
Worldview Contributors
Affan Chowdhry
Affan Chowdhry is the Globe’s multimedia reporter specializing in foreign news. Prior to joining the Globe, he worked at the BBC World Service in London creating international news and current affairs programs and online content for a global audience.
Read more from Affan and follow him on Twitter @AffanChowdhry
Paul Koring
Paul Koring, the Globe’s Washington-based International Affairs and Security Correspondent, has covered conflicts and crises from the Cold War to Afghanistan, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.
Read more from Paul and follow him on Twitter @PaulKoring
Mark MacKinnon
Based in Beijing, Mark was previously Middle East correspondent and before that Moscow correspondent for The Globe and Mail.
Read more from Mark and follow him on Twitter @MarkMacKinnon
Patrick Martin
Covering the region since 2008, this is Patrick’s second tour as Middle East correspondent. His first assignment was from 1991-95. In between, he served as The Globe’s Foreign Editor and as Comment Editor.
Read more from Patrick and follow him on Twitter @globepmartin
Stephanie Nolen
Stephanie Nolen is the Globe's South Asia correspondent. She has reported from more than 40 countries and is a five-time winner of the National Newspaper Award for coverage that has taken her from war zones to AIDS clinics to camel races, and a four-time winner of the Amnesty International Media Award.
Read more from Stephanie and follow her on Twitter @snolen
Doug Saunders
Doug Saunders is the chief of the Globe and Mail's London-based European Bureau, writes the weekly Reckoning column in the Focus section as well as daily reports and weekly features on European issues and international social and political trends.
Read more from Doug and follow him on Twitter @DougSaunders
Graeme Smith
Graeme Smith is a foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail. Based in Istanbul, he has recently focused on Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
Read more from Graeme and follow him on Twitter @smithjournalist
Sonia Verma
Sonia Verma writes about foreign affairs for The Globe and Mail. Based in Toronto, she has recently covered economic change in Latin America, revolution in Egypt, and elections in Haiti.
Read more from Sonia and follow her on Twitter @SoniaVerma
Konrad Yakabuski
Konrad Yakabuski is The Globe and Mail's chief U.S. political writer, based in Washington. He covers all aspects of the American political scene, including relevant social and cultural issues.
Read more from Konrad and follow him on Twitter @KonradYakabuski
Geoffrey York
Geoffrey York is The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent. He has been a foreign correspondent for the newspaper since 1994, including seven years as the Moscow bureau chief and seven years as the Beijing bureau chief.
Read more from Geoffrey and follow him on Twitter @GeoffreyYork
