Hitch's Thought For The Day: Feb 18, 2012

Perhaps the reason so many rich and powerful people attend international conferences to lecture on poverty, is not because they understand - but because they have caused so much of it.

Somalia: Mogadishu bombing - al-Shabab, disguising themselves as returning residents

Police say latest bombing in Mogadishu is work of al-Shabab, who are disguising themselves as returning residents.

Iran: Ahmadinejad accuses foreigners of creating regional problems

Source: IRNA

Islamabad, Feb 17, IRNA -- Iranian President Mehmood Ahmadinejad said on Friday that several of the problems have been imposed on the region by outside forces.

“There are countries which have targeted our region for their dominance,” the Iranian President said at a joint press conference along with Afghan and Pakistani presidents at the conclusion of a trilateral summit.

“We should oppose to outsiders' intervening in our affairs,” Ahmadinejad said, adding that there is no problem among the three countries and the ‘problems are coming from the outside’.

There are no problems among the regional countries. We should stand together against foreign intervention,” he insisted.

He said the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari are committed to work jointly to resolve problems. “We are determined to move in that direction,” he said.

The Iranian President advocated for enhancing regional cooperation and putting in use all resources to address these problems.

He said the Summit in Islamabad and the next to be held in Kabul are going to have very positive impacts for peoples of the three countries.

He said that Iranian people greatly value their brotherly relations with Pakistan and hoped these will further augment in future.

Speaking on the occasion President Asif Ali Zardari emphatically stated that the relationship between the three countries can not be undermined by the international pressure of any kind.

About international pressure on Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project, President Zardari said that Pakistan is lobbying the world and its point of view has been looked at and accepted.

“Iran and Pakistan are neighbors and we need to inter-depend on each other for prosperity of the region”.

Responding to a question, President Zardari denied the notion that Pakistan's armed forces are directly or indirectly involved in what is happening in Afghanistan.

“There is a residue in Pakistan of the cold war era”.

He said drug trade worth billions of dollars is going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan has extended full support to the Afghan brothers to deal with the issue.

Responding to a question, Afghan President Hamid Karzai the impediments in the way of Pakistan-Afghanistan cooperation needs to be removed sooner rather than later.

He said the recent engagements between the two countries have been fruitful and deep in understanding each other's point of view.

Expressing satisfaction over his yesterday's meetings with Pakistani leadership, Hamid Karzai said today's tripartite summit was futuristic oriented recognizing the opportunities and dangers that surround the region. He emphasized the need for evolving an actionable policy to deal with all the confronting issues.

President Zardari thanked the visiting Presidents for coming to Pakistan to attend the trilateral summit. He invited the Iranian President to make a bilateral visit to Pakistan at the earliest.

Earlier the three Presidents had held wide ranging talks on cooperation in diverse fields focusing on cooperation in counter terrorism and transnational organized crimes including drug and human trafficking, border management and trade.

Iranian President Mehmood Ahmadinejad has also held separate meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The Iranian President will be leaving Islamabad for Tehran on Friday evening.

Indonesia: The Deadly Cost of Poor Policing

International Crisis Group

Indonesian communities are increasingly turning to violence to retaliate against the police for abuses, real or perceived. Some 40 attacks on police stations and personnel since August 2010 are clear evidence that community policing, the centrepoint of the police reform agenda, is not working; police are too quick to shoot, usually with live ammunition; and little progress has been made toward police accountability. In the absence of urgent reforms and mechanisms to address local grievances, public hostility is likely to grow. Police are supposed to be helping prevent conflict but too often they are contributing to its outbreak.

Cultural, structural, individual, financial and educational barriers within the institution hinder behavioural change. Applicants join the police to wield power and earn money, and once on the force, there are few incentives, financial or professional, to build rapport with the communities they are supposed to serve. Policy directives on community policing from 2005 and 2008 have not trickled down to the sub-district precincts (kepolisian sektor, polsek), and those field officers who are committed to building good relations have limited impact because of frequent rotations.

Community hostility is the cumulative result of police brutality; unwarranted demands for money; perceived arrogance; and lack of accountability, especially in cases of fatal shootings. Failure to investigate or punish errant officers triggers mob action, often involving arson, while community resistance to the arrest of those responsible for such violence intensifies if the police in question go free.

The problem is compounded by the staffing of precincts with poorly-trained graduates of provincial police schools who receive inadequate firearms training, let alone instruction in community policing. In many cases, local elected officials have to take on the burden of negotiating a way out of the police-community standoff because there are no available institutional mechanisms to resolve grievances.

This report looks in detail at three cases of community attacks on police stations that occurred in 2010 and 2011. All started from complaints about excessive use of force.

In Buol, Central Sulawesi, citizens destroyed police facilities and forced police families to leave town after seven men were shot dead during a mass protest against the death of a teenager in police custody. This is one of the few cases in which officers were brought to court, but only because of the high death toll and media attention. One was acquitted, two were given slap-on-the-wrist sentences, and some two dozen others faced minor disciplinary sanctions. Many questions remain unanswered.

In Kampar, Riau, residents vandalised a precinct after the arrest and beating of an innocent clan elder at a market. He was accused of illegal gambling because he was jotting numbers on a piece of paper, when in fact he was noting product prices. Trivial arrests like this frequently occur because police are rewarded for favourable crime statistics: the more arrests they make, regardless of the severity of the crime, the better they are seen to be doing their job.

In Bantaeng, South Sulawesi, villagers attacked a precinct after a deadly police raid on alleged gamblers at a wedding party that killed one. The raiders did not come from that precinct, but it was the nearest one to the dead man’s home. Police claim they opened fire because they believed anger among the wedding guests over the gambling arrests put their commander’s life in danger. In fact they seem to have shot wildly in the dark without being able to see what they were shooting at.

These incidents are emblematic of a much broader problem; the Indonesian government should stop treating them as isolated incidents. They represent a systemic failure which will continue to undermine the credibility of the police pledge to “serve and protect” the people and encourage further deadly violence unless the underlying causes of community hostility are addressed.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Indonesian authorities:

To address the underlying causes of community hostility to the police

1. Apply far stricter oversight and auditing to the police budget;

2. Impose higher standards and stricter requirements for officers’ acquisition and use of firearms;

3. Institute better training in non-lethal methods of crowd control;

4. Set up tangible incentives and a merit system that encourage better relations with the public and stronger teaching of community policing;

5. Review autopsy procedures for cases involving police to ensure independence and transparency;

6. Devote serious attention to improving the curriculum and training methods in the national police academy and even more importantly in provincial police schools, including eliminating all use of corporal punishment;

7. Establish a civilian oversight commission that can receive and aggressively act on public complaints; and

8. Make more use of the criminal courts rather than disciplinary proceedings in cases where serious police abuse is alleged.

Defense: The Arms Trade – Rich Sellers, Poor Buyers, Failing Regulation

Source: ISN

The world's leading arms exporters are firmly located in the United States, Europe and Russia. But to maintain a healthy defense industry, many governments continue to sanction the long-term sale of arms to buyers that reject democratic norms and values.

Prepared by: ISN staff

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As part of our broad discussion on defense economics this week, we have described how defense expenditures are driven to a large extent by prevailing economic conditions. In the case of developed states, for example, the most recent economic crisis has led to tumbling defense budgets. A fair sample of developing countries, in contrast, have recovered more quickly from their economic woes and have pursued a fresh round of defense spending. Not surprisingly, most of their ‘big ticket’ purchases, as in the past, come from major defense contractors in the West, which permits Western governments to maintain a healthy defense-industrial base and to better balance their imbalanced import-export ledgers. These benefits, of course, come at a Faustian price – too many Western states, in their pursuit of the short-term ‘bottom line’, continue to sanction the long-term sale of arms to governments that reject their own democratic values and norms.

Who Gets What and Why?

The above slideshow quickly reinforces an uncomfortable truth – i.e., the leading arms exporters of the world are firmly located in the United States, Europe and Russia. Between 2000 and 2010 these countries and region accounted for 90% of all global weapons exports, the overwhelming majority of which then went to the developing world. Well, is this ‘natural’?

We know that ‘natural’ has nothing to do with it. The West’s traditional dominance of the global arms trade does not mean that the developing world should have automatic access to their weapons. International sanctions exist that forbid the sale of arms to states that fail to comply with global norms. But, as Amnesty International reminds us, international arms trade controls are often circumvented by suppliers and recipients alike. Consequently, the sale of arms to emerging nations is not only driven by economic considerations but also by distinct geopolitical calculations. This is most apparent in the Middle East, as our slideshow demonstrates.

Indeed, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria respectively are made upon the basis of each state’s strong diplomatic ties with those nations that are home to the world’s biggest defense companies. Saudi Arabia, to cite just one example, is one of the United States’ most important allies in the Middle East and continues to rely heavily on its arms companies, as illustrated by the Royal Saudi Air Force’s recent $29.4 billion purchase of top-of-the-line F-15 fighter aircraft. (According to the Congressional Research Service [CRS], this purchase dwarfs all previous arms sales to Riyadh.) At the same time, while Syria remains on the margins of the international system, it continues to look to Russia for its arms. One of Moscow’s largest pending orders involves the proposed sale of 24 MiG-29M2 fighter aircraft to Damascus. As the contract would benefit Russia’s defense industry to the tune of $6 billion (not to mention ensuring access to the Russian Navy’s base at Tartus), it helps to explain why Moscow is so critical of proposed UN resolutions calling for Bashar al Assad to step down as the leader of Syria.

Blatant Disregard

So, if we all worshiped at the altar of arithmetic, arms sales should be relatively simple things. In truth, however, the political and economic interests that underscore them do not always run according to easy-to-follow or pre-planned scripts. Like Syria, Iran is also a major recipient of Russian arms transfers. Between 2000 and 2010, for example, Moscow exported approximately $1.5 billion-worth of arms to Iran. Yet Moscow remains sufficiently concerned about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions to support international sanctions against the current regime. Germany provides another interesting example. Despite some comparatively tight export regulations, it has repeatedly been criticized for exporting arms to countries in the Middle East. Indeed, the very fact that Heckler and Koch’s G36 assault rifle was extensively used during the Libyan uprising vindicates Amnesty International’s conviction that existing arms export controls, “with all their loopholes,” do little to safeguard human rights and security.

Unfortunately, our slideshow does not show the impact of worldwide arms transfers on specific intra-state conflicts or political upheavals. Neither can we claim to have the complete picture regarding global arms sales. Many Western governments not only defy arms control regulations, they quite often fail to declare arms transfers in accordance with international treaties and legislation. Such blatant disregard for international agreements appears to be setting a precedent for emerging powers to follow. According to Amnesty UK’s Kate Allen, China continues to defy UN embargoes on supplying attack helicopters, fighter aircraft, light weapons and ammunition that could be used in the Darfur region of Sudan. This makes it increasingly likely that this sub-Saharan region alone will receive more than 1.5% per cent of all global arms exports, as previously estimated by SIPRI.

As ugly as these facts may be, how exactly do we solve the problem of global defense contractors overlooking international norms and facilitating arms sales or transfers to the more unstable regions of the world? After all, such sales 1) guarantee that the West will remain a significant actor within a transforming international system, 2) help bolster geopolitical allies, regardless of how unprogressive they might be, and 3) remain very good for business, especially as Western nations attempt to stagger their way towards economic recovery. Given these temptations and needs, our unhappy conclusion is that disregard for international norms and laws is likely to cloud global arms sales and transfers for the foreseeable future.