A key ally of Nepal's Maoist-led government has withdrawn from the governing coalition in protest at the dismissal of the army chief.
The Communist UML party withdrew after Gen Rookmangud Katawal was sacked for defying government orders to integrate former rebel fighters into the army.
He was sacked during a special cabinet meeting which saw other parties protest by walking out.
The withdrawal leaves the Maoists with only a slender parliamentary majority.
Correspondents say the row could undermine the peace process which ended the civil war in 2006.
Anti-government protests were staged after the general's sacking
Communist UML general secretary Ishwar Pokharel said: "The party has decided to leave the coalition and withdraw support to the Maoists."
The government wants to integrate former Maoist rebel fighters into the army, and accused Gen Katawal of defying government orders to stop hiring new recruits and to get rid of eight generals.
The army chief has been refusing to integrate former Maoist fighters that he views as politically indoctrinated.
The Maoists fought the army for more than a decade before giving up their armed revolt, and the relationship between the two sides has been tense since the former rebels came into power last year.
Thirteen-thousand people died in the conflict.
The Nepalese army fought Maoists rebels for more than a decade
In March, the Nepalese Supreme Court ordered the defence ministry to put on hold its decision to retire the eight generals from the army.
Several coalition representatives walked out of the cabinet meeting in protest at the proposed sacking, but a vote went ahead.
"We have been insisting that the decision on the army chief should be taken through consensus among all political parties but the prime minister decided to ignore us," said Deputy Prime Minister Bamdev Gautam, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Gen Katawal was due to retire in four months.
The army's second-in-command, Kul Bahadur Khadka
Sunday, May 3, 2009
WHO warns against flu complacency
The World Health Organization says countries must not lower their guard in the response to the swine flu outbreak.
Almost 900 cases had been confirmed across five continents, the WHO said, and authorities had to remain vigilant.
Viruses increased and decreased in activity, it said, and it was too early to tell whether the outbreak had peaked where it emerged in Mexico.
The warning came after health officials in Mexico said that cases of the virus appeared to be declining.
In Mexico, just over 100 people are thought to have died from the swine flu strain, although only 19 cases have been confirmed.
But on Sunday Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said that the virus appeared to have peaked between 23-28 April.
"The evolution of the epidemic is now in its declining phase," he told a news conference.
The WHO said authorities should remain on alert.
The current "round of activity" might have peaked, WHO official Gregory Hartl said, but that did not mean it was over.
"There is a high possibility that this virus will come back, especially in colder periods," he said.
Health experts in the US, meanwhile, say swine flu could soon be present throughout their country, as cases have been confirmed in more than half of all states.
Outside Mexico, the effects of the virus do not appear to be severe.
In other developments:
• El Salvador says it has confirmed its first two cases of the virus, AFP reports, citing the country's health minister
• Egypt says it will continue slaughtering pigs as a precaution against swine flu, following clashes on Sunday with farmers that left 12 people injured
• A number of Mexicans remain under quarantine in cities in China, triggering a diplomatic row
'Widespread'
Late on Sunday - before the apparent confirmation from El Salvador - the WHO said it had found 898 cases of the virus across 18 countries.
Person-to-person transmission has been confirmed in six countries.
In the US, the number of confirmed cases rose from 160 to 226. Officials said this was because the results of lab tests were now coming through, rather than because of a new surge in cases.
But an expert from America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus was fairly widespread.
"Virtually all of the United States probably has this virus circulating now," Dr Anne Schuchat said. "That doesn't mean that everybody's infected, but within the communities, the virus has arrived."
She said she expected cases to become more severe and to lead to deaths. She stressed that this in itself would not be unusual as every year 36,000 people die in the US after contracting seasonal flu.
WHO food safety scientist Peter Ben Embarek, meanwhile, said increased surveillance was necessary after the virus was found to have infected pigs in Canada.
But he said there was no recommendation to cull animals, and pork remained safe to eat.
"From a consumer point of view there is no risk from consuming cooked pork products," he said
Almost 900 cases had been confirmed across five continents, the WHO said, and authorities had to remain vigilant.
Viruses increased and decreased in activity, it said, and it was too early to tell whether the outbreak had peaked where it emerged in Mexico.
The warning came after health officials in Mexico said that cases of the virus appeared to be declining.
In Mexico, just over 100 people are thought to have died from the swine flu strain, although only 19 cases have been confirmed.
But on Sunday Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said that the virus appeared to have peaked between 23-28 April.
"The evolution of the epidemic is now in its declining phase," he told a news conference.
The WHO said authorities should remain on alert.
The current "round of activity" might have peaked, WHO official Gregory Hartl said, but that did not mean it was over.
"There is a high possibility that this virus will come back, especially in colder periods," he said.
Health experts in the US, meanwhile, say swine flu could soon be present throughout their country, as cases have been confirmed in more than half of all states.
Outside Mexico, the effects of the virus do not appear to be severe.
In other developments:
• El Salvador says it has confirmed its first two cases of the virus, AFP reports, citing the country's health minister
• Egypt says it will continue slaughtering pigs as a precaution against swine flu, following clashes on Sunday with farmers that left 12 people injured
• A number of Mexicans remain under quarantine in cities in China, triggering a diplomatic row
'Widespread'
Late on Sunday - before the apparent confirmation from El Salvador - the WHO said it had found 898 cases of the virus across 18 countries.
Person-to-person transmission has been confirmed in six countries.
In the US, the number of confirmed cases rose from 160 to 226. Officials said this was because the results of lab tests were now coming through, rather than because of a new surge in cases.
But an expert from America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus was fairly widespread.
"Virtually all of the United States probably has this virus circulating now," Dr Anne Schuchat said. "That doesn't mean that everybody's infected, but within the communities, the virus has arrived."
She said she expected cases to become more severe and to lead to deaths. She stressed that this in itself would not be unusual as every year 36,000 people die in the US after contracting seasonal flu.
WHO food safety scientist Peter Ben Embarek, meanwhile, said increased surveillance was necessary after the virus was found to have infected pigs in Canada.
But he said there was no recommendation to cull animals, and pork remained safe to eat.
"From a consumer point of view there is no risk from consuming cooked pork products," he said
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Rahul calls for LF defeat in WB to bring change
A day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's stinging criticism of the Left parties, AICC leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday followed it up saying the communist government in West Bengal had 'failed' to work for the poor and called for bringing about change in the state.
"They (communists) talk big and oppose us in Delhi. But the communist government here has failed to utilise the money sent from Delhi for welfare schemes for the poor and backward," Gandhi told an election meeting in Domkal.
Attacking the Left in its backyard, Gandhi on the second leg of campaign in the state said, "You have to think afresh and defeat the Left Front government to bring a change here."
Rahul said that the Centre had sent Rs 250 crore to the state to tackle arsenic pollution but the money was not spent. He said that Rs 18 crore was also sent from Delhi for housing for the poor, but it remained unused.
Earlier, speaking at another meeting at Domkal, Gandhi said he thought that LF government was one for the poor. "But I was surprised to see that against eight lakh job cards only 60 were given jobs (under the NREGS)."
"They (communists) talk big and oppose us in Delhi. But the communist government here has failed to utilise the money sent from Delhi for welfare schemes for the poor and backward," Gandhi told an election meeting in Domkal.
Attacking the Left in its backyard, Gandhi on the second leg of campaign in the state said, "You have to think afresh and defeat the Left Front government to bring a change here."
Rahul said that the Centre had sent Rs 250 crore to the state to tackle arsenic pollution but the money was not spent. He said that Rs 18 crore was also sent from Delhi for housing for the poor, but it remained unused.
Earlier, speaking at another meeting at Domkal, Gandhi said he thought that LF government was one for the poor. "But I was surprised to see that against eight lakh job cards only 60 were given jobs (under the NREGS)."
Bofors! no, don’t turn the page. I know your eyes glaze over every time you see the word, and that the people of India have been bored to death by 25 years of a scandal that has reached no kind of conclusion.
But I come to bury Bofors, not to praise it.
There was a phase in my life when I was what you might call a Bofors junkie. I was obsessed with the case. I knew every last detail of the deal. I could tell you exactly how much money was paid into each of the three accounts that received the commissions/kickbacks.
I interviewed CBI directors about the investigation. I went to Guildford in Surrey to trace the office of AE Services, one the three companies in question. I asked the Hindujas for their side of the story. I did one of the first interviews with Win Chaddha. I followed the libel case filed by Ajitabh Bachchan in London against a Swedish newspaper which claimed that he received the kickbacks.
But now, I am as fed up as you are.
If Bofors means nothing to you — and I suspect that’s probably true — then a brief history lesson may be in order. I promise I’ll try and keep it as short and simple as possible.
The case dates back to 1985 when India ordered howitzers from a Swedish company called Bofors. Nobody disputes that the weapons are good but the case took a different turn when Bofors itself was the subject of a corruption scandal in Sweden. As part of its investigations into this scandal, Swedish Radio reported, in early 1987, that Bofors had paid bribes to get the Indian contract.
In the arms business, the difference between illegal bribes and legitimate commissions can be difficult to discern. But clearly some money had been paid out. Chitra Subramaniam of The Hindu found documents proving that three companies had received money from Bofors: Svenska, Pitco and AE Services.
We know now that Svenska was run by Win Chaddha who was Bofors’ official agent in India. Pitco was a Hinduja company. But the identity of the owner of AE Services remains a mystery.
Even if Chaddha and the Hindujas received money from Bofors, this is not a big deal. Companies pay commissions all the time. It is not corruption unless you can prove that a) this money was passed on to a politician or an official and b) that it influenced the purchase decision
So, the Government of India’s investigators focused on AE Services which, Bofors had claimed, was a “legitimate consultant”. It was no such thing. I traced its registered office to a post box in a lawyers’ firm in Surrey. I tried to find its owners but the trail led to a secret trust registered in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
The government’s investigators had their own theory — backed by gut instinct rather than evidence. They thought that AE Services was a Congress front which had been set up by Arun Nehru (by then Nehru had switched sides, so perhaps he told them this) and then, after Nehru left the party, been taken over by Satish Sharma or Ottavio Quattrocchi or Ajitabh Bachchan.
Twenty-five years later, we still haven’t solved that mystery. Arun Jaitley, who has investigated Bofors since 1989, says that he has proof that Quattrocchi was the beneficiary of the AE Services accounts. (But he also had ‘proof’ at one stage that Ajitabh was the beneficiary).
Perhaps Arun is right. But the Bofors investigators face three problems.
One, the ‘proof’ against Quattrocchi has not convinced courts of law in two countries. The BJP government tried to extradite Quattrocchi from Malaysia, but four different Malaysian courts threw out the evidence as not being good enough. The CBI tried again when Quattrocchi was located in South America. Once again, the courts decided there was no merit in the case.
Two, even if Quattrocchi took the money, this is not proof of corruption. Quattrocchi was a boastful, wheeling-dealing kind of guy who represented an Italian infrastructure projects company. Allegations that he made deals were routinely levelled by the Opposition in the 1980s.
To prove corruption, you need to prove that he was more than just a wheeler-dealer. You need to prove that he passed the money on to Rajiv Gandhi or somebody else in a position of authority. So far, there’s not a shred of evidence to support that claim.
Three, even if you can’t prove that Quattrocchi passed the money on to an official or a minister, you must be able to show how a bribe influenced the decision to buy Bofors.
It’s here that the Opposition runs into its biggest problem. The Army headquarters (and not the government) chose the Bofors gun over its rivals. From the time that the Army’s recommendation reached the government to the time that the decision was taken, only 24 hours elapsed.
So, even if it can be proved that Quattrocchi took the money, he could not possibly have influenced the decision unless he bought off the Indian Army as well.
And I don’t see the BJP making that allegation.
Why, then, is the Opposition still so obsessed with Bofors? Why has it lost interest in Chaddha or the Hindujas? Why is it focusing only on Quattrocchi, against whom the case seems so weak that it keeps being thrown out by courts?
Let me ask you a counter-question. Supposing the alleged beneficiary of the AE Services account had been called Golu Mittal or Mottu Singh, would the BJP have cared so much?
I think we know the answer.
The only reason they go on and on about Quattrocchi is because he is an Italian.
That, they think, is one way of getting at Sonia Gandhi. As Narendra Modi suggests, sons of the soil are persecuted while sons of spaghetti run free.
It’s a nasty, xenophobic agenda based on little more than innuendo, gossip, speculation and rumour. The case itself is full of gaps and holes.
And how much money are we talking about? Well, the entire kickback amount was Rs 64 crore. I think AE Services got something like a third of that. That’s not huge by the standards of today’s multi-crore scams.
The government has probably spent more money investigating Bofors than the beneficiary of AE Services ever earned from the deal!
It is nobody’s case that we ignore a scam only because people are bored of it. But surely, after 25 years of fruitless inquiry, we should admit that this case is never going to get anywhere? Every day the people of India are ripped off by some corrupt politician. And yet we go on and on about this relatively minor league deal from a quarter century ago.
Does this make sense?
To the BJP it does: because it keeps the Italian issue alive.
But for the rest of us?
Well, I’ll go back where I started. Yes, Bofors is a tiresome irrelevance.
And it’s no wonder that our eyes glaze over when it is mentioned.
as published in THE HINDUSTAN TIMES
But I come to bury Bofors, not to praise it.
There was a phase in my life when I was what you might call a Bofors junkie. I was obsessed with the case. I knew every last detail of the deal. I could tell you exactly how much money was paid into each of the three accounts that received the commissions/kickbacks.
I interviewed CBI directors about the investigation. I went to Guildford in Surrey to trace the office of AE Services, one the three companies in question. I asked the Hindujas for their side of the story. I did one of the first interviews with Win Chaddha. I followed the libel case filed by Ajitabh Bachchan in London against a Swedish newspaper which claimed that he received the kickbacks.
But now, I am as fed up as you are.
If Bofors means nothing to you — and I suspect that’s probably true — then a brief history lesson may be in order. I promise I’ll try and keep it as short and simple as possible.
The case dates back to 1985 when India ordered howitzers from a Swedish company called Bofors. Nobody disputes that the weapons are good but the case took a different turn when Bofors itself was the subject of a corruption scandal in Sweden. As part of its investigations into this scandal, Swedish Radio reported, in early 1987, that Bofors had paid bribes to get the Indian contract.
In the arms business, the difference between illegal bribes and legitimate commissions can be difficult to discern. But clearly some money had been paid out. Chitra Subramaniam of The Hindu found documents proving that three companies had received money from Bofors: Svenska, Pitco and AE Services.
We know now that Svenska was run by Win Chaddha who was Bofors’ official agent in India. Pitco was a Hinduja company. But the identity of the owner of AE Services remains a mystery.
Even if Chaddha and the Hindujas received money from Bofors, this is not a big deal. Companies pay commissions all the time. It is not corruption unless you can prove that a) this money was passed on to a politician or an official and b) that it influenced the purchase decision
So, the Government of India’s investigators focused on AE Services which, Bofors had claimed, was a “legitimate consultant”. It was no such thing. I traced its registered office to a post box in a lawyers’ firm in Surrey. I tried to find its owners but the trail led to a secret trust registered in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
The government’s investigators had their own theory — backed by gut instinct rather than evidence. They thought that AE Services was a Congress front which had been set up by Arun Nehru (by then Nehru had switched sides, so perhaps he told them this) and then, after Nehru left the party, been taken over by Satish Sharma or Ottavio Quattrocchi or Ajitabh Bachchan.
Twenty-five years later, we still haven’t solved that mystery. Arun Jaitley, who has investigated Bofors since 1989, says that he has proof that Quattrocchi was the beneficiary of the AE Services accounts. (But he also had ‘proof’ at one stage that Ajitabh was the beneficiary).
Perhaps Arun is right. But the Bofors investigators face three problems.
One, the ‘proof’ against Quattrocchi has not convinced courts of law in two countries. The BJP government tried to extradite Quattrocchi from Malaysia, but four different Malaysian courts threw out the evidence as not being good enough. The CBI tried again when Quattrocchi was located in South America. Once again, the courts decided there was no merit in the case.
Two, even if Quattrocchi took the money, this is not proof of corruption. Quattrocchi was a boastful, wheeling-dealing kind of guy who represented an Italian infrastructure projects company. Allegations that he made deals were routinely levelled by the Opposition in the 1980s.
To prove corruption, you need to prove that he was more than just a wheeler-dealer. You need to prove that he passed the money on to Rajiv Gandhi or somebody else in a position of authority. So far, there’s not a shred of evidence to support that claim.
Three, even if you can’t prove that Quattrocchi passed the money on to an official or a minister, you must be able to show how a bribe influenced the decision to buy Bofors.
It’s here that the Opposition runs into its biggest problem. The Army headquarters (and not the government) chose the Bofors gun over its rivals. From the time that the Army’s recommendation reached the government to the time that the decision was taken, only 24 hours elapsed.
So, even if it can be proved that Quattrocchi took the money, he could not possibly have influenced the decision unless he bought off the Indian Army as well.
And I don’t see the BJP making that allegation.
Why, then, is the Opposition still so obsessed with Bofors? Why has it lost interest in Chaddha or the Hindujas? Why is it focusing only on Quattrocchi, against whom the case seems so weak that it keeps being thrown out by courts?
Let me ask you a counter-question. Supposing the alleged beneficiary of the AE Services account had been called Golu Mittal or Mottu Singh, would the BJP have cared so much?
I think we know the answer.
The only reason they go on and on about Quattrocchi is because he is an Italian.
That, they think, is one way of getting at Sonia Gandhi. As Narendra Modi suggests, sons of the soil are persecuted while sons of spaghetti run free.
It’s a nasty, xenophobic agenda based on little more than innuendo, gossip, speculation and rumour. The case itself is full of gaps and holes.
And how much money are we talking about? Well, the entire kickback amount was Rs 64 crore. I think AE Services got something like a third of that. That’s not huge by the standards of today’s multi-crore scams.
The government has probably spent more money investigating Bofors than the beneficiary of AE Services ever earned from the deal!
It is nobody’s case that we ignore a scam only because people are bored of it. But surely, after 25 years of fruitless inquiry, we should admit that this case is never going to get anywhere? Every day the people of India are ripped off by some corrupt politician. And yet we go on and on about this relatively minor league deal from a quarter century ago.
Does this make sense?
To the BJP it does: because it keeps the Italian issue alive.
But for the rest of us?
Well, I’ll go back where I started. Yes, Bofors is a tiresome irrelevance.
And it’s no wonder that our eyes glaze over when it is mentioned.
as published in THE HINDUSTAN TIMES
Ex-Spy Sits Down With Islamists and the West
TALKING to Islamists is the new order of the day in Washington and London. The Obama administration wants a dialogue with Iran, and the British Foreign Office has decided to reopen diplomatic contacts with Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here.
But for several years, small groups of Western diplomats have made quiet trips to Beirut for confidential sessions with members of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist groups they did not want to be seen talking to. In hotel conference rooms, they would warily shake hands, then spend hours listening and hashing out accusations of terrorism on one side and imperial arrogance on the other.
The organizer of these back-door encounters is Alastair Crooke, a quiet, sandy-haired man of 59 who spent three decades working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He now runs an organization here called Conflicts Forum, with an unusual board of advisers that includes former spies, diplomats and peace activists.
Mr. Crooke has spent much of his career talking to Islamists. In the 1980s, as a young undercover agent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he helped funnel weapons to jihadists fighting the Soviets. Later, he spent years working with Hamas and Fatah as a negotiator for the European Union, and helped broker a number of cease-fires with Israel between 2001 and 2003. He earned a reputation for courage and tenacity, but in person he is disarmingly polite and mild-mannered, a slight-figured man with a beaky, impish smile.
The mission of Conflicts Forum, which he founded in 2004, resembles a kind of blueprint for the Obama administration’s current outreach efforts: to “open a new relationship between the West and Muslim world” through dialogue and better mutual understanding.
Yet Mr. Crooke, who is legendary for his deep network of contacts among Islamist groups across the Middle East, is not sanguine about the prospects for mere dialogue, especially with Iran.
“I think there is a real fear there will be a process of talking past each other,” Mr. Crooke said. “The Iranians will say, ‘we want to talk about justice and respect.’ The U.S. will say, ‘are you willing to give up enrichment or not?’ ”
To get past that impasse with Iran, and with Islamist groups generally, the West will need to change its diplomatic language of threats and rewards, Mr. Crooke said, and show more respect for their adversaries’ point of view.
Mr. Crooke has spent the past few years trying to explain that to suspicious Westerners, in a stream of articles, speeches and conferences. Although not an Arabist by training, he has developed a deep knowledge of modern Islamist movements, and launches easily into analyses of Palestinian politics, or even of medieval Islamic philosophy.
Recently, he has taken his explanatory efforts a bit further. In a new book, “Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution,” he deliberately avoids the most controversial subjects, like Israel and the status of women in the Islamic world. Instead, he focuses on what he calls the core of the Islamist revolution, which he defines as a metaphysical resistance to the West’s market-based definition of the individual and society. He invokes European social critics like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, endorsing their critiques of Western thinking and arguing that Islamism offers a more holistic model.
NOT surprisingly, the book has received some stinging reviews, and renewed accusations that Mr. Crooke has gone native. Even some of his fellow board members at Conflicts Forum say they are a little baffled — not by his sympathy for Islamists, but by the book’s broad philosophical themes.
Mr. Crooke says the book grew out of his own efforts to find common ground with Islamists, and to look beyond the usual stumbling blocks.
“It seemed to me there was a real need to understand what was happening inside Islamism better, and to valorize what they were saying in ways that could be understood in the West,” he said.
That project seems inseparable from his broader argument about dialogue. To illustrate it, Mr. Crooke describes an episode from the conflict in Northern Ireland in which the British put two opposing factions into a room for talks, “naïvely imagining that talking would help.” It did the opposite, reinforcing their anger. So the negotiators tried another approach: they asked both sides to write down their history and vision for the future on a piece of paper. After three more years of talks, the factions finally reached the point at which they acknowledged the legitimacy of the other side’s piece of paper.
“George Mitchell once said to me, ‘you don’t even have a political process until you accept that the other side has a legitimate point of view,’ ” Mr. Crooke said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and relating it to the many obstacles between the United States and Iran.
“Does America have the will and the patience for that?” he said. “I’m not sure we’re there yet.”
Patience, by all accounts, is something Mr. Crooke possesses. Mark Perry, the co-director of Conflicts Forum, describes an episode in Gaza in 2002 when the two men tried to establish a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian factions. After weeks of negotiations, Israel dropped a bomb on the Hamas leader whose signature they needed, shattering their efforts.
“We were exhausted,” Mr. Perry recalled. “The next day in the hotel room, I looked at Alastair and said ‘what do we do now?’ He just said, ‘We try again.’ ”
It is not entirely clear where that steadfastness comes from. He is a little evasive about his own life and career, perhaps by training. Born in Ireland, he grew up mostly in Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, and was educated at a Swiss boarding school and at St. Andrew’s in Scotland, obtaining a degree in economics. Before joining MI6, he worked in finance in London.
“It’s a dangerous area to work in,” he said of his years as a banker, without apparent irony, “because it’s so easy to get caught up in enrichment.”
He is barred by law from discussing his service with MI6, which included years of diplomatic work on the Israel-Palestine issue. As a negotiator in the Palestinian territories, he is said to have traveled alone, by taxi, eschewing the armed security convoys of many Western diplomats. Colleagues who worked with him say Yasir Arafat and the leaders of Hamas trusted Mr. Crooke completely, as did some high-level Israeli officials.
SOME Israelis, however, apparently complained that he was too close to Hamas. In late 2003, he was recalled to London — he had reached retirement age — and quietly ushered out of government service, with a commendation. He says he has no regrets, but some of his colleagues in Conflicts Forum say he retains some bitterness about the way he was treated.
In 2005, he moved to Beirut, where he lives with his partner, Aisling Byrne, and their 1-year-old child, Amistis, in an elegant, old French mandate-era apartment, working out of a home office.
Mr. Crooke smiles at the suggestion that Conflicts Forum may offer him a back-door route back to diplomacy, but does not entirely deny it. “We’re not implementers," he said. “What we’re trying to do is catalyze and create ideas. The second part is, how do you multiply something done by a small number of people in one room into something larger?”
But for several years, small groups of Western diplomats have made quiet trips to Beirut for confidential sessions with members of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist groups they did not want to be seen talking to. In hotel conference rooms, they would warily shake hands, then spend hours listening and hashing out accusations of terrorism on one side and imperial arrogance on the other.
The organizer of these back-door encounters is Alastair Crooke, a quiet, sandy-haired man of 59 who spent three decades working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He now runs an organization here called Conflicts Forum, with an unusual board of advisers that includes former spies, diplomats and peace activists.
Mr. Crooke has spent much of his career talking to Islamists. In the 1980s, as a young undercover agent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he helped funnel weapons to jihadists fighting the Soviets. Later, he spent years working with Hamas and Fatah as a negotiator for the European Union, and helped broker a number of cease-fires with Israel between 2001 and 2003. He earned a reputation for courage and tenacity, but in person he is disarmingly polite and mild-mannered, a slight-figured man with a beaky, impish smile.
The mission of Conflicts Forum, which he founded in 2004, resembles a kind of blueprint for the Obama administration’s current outreach efforts: to “open a new relationship between the West and Muslim world” through dialogue and better mutual understanding.
Yet Mr. Crooke, who is legendary for his deep network of contacts among Islamist groups across the Middle East, is not sanguine about the prospects for mere dialogue, especially with Iran.
“I think there is a real fear there will be a process of talking past each other,” Mr. Crooke said. “The Iranians will say, ‘we want to talk about justice and respect.’ The U.S. will say, ‘are you willing to give up enrichment or not?’ ”
To get past that impasse with Iran, and with Islamist groups generally, the West will need to change its diplomatic language of threats and rewards, Mr. Crooke said, and show more respect for their adversaries’ point of view.
Mr. Crooke has spent the past few years trying to explain that to suspicious Westerners, in a stream of articles, speeches and conferences. Although not an Arabist by training, he has developed a deep knowledge of modern Islamist movements, and launches easily into analyses of Palestinian politics, or even of medieval Islamic philosophy.
Recently, he has taken his explanatory efforts a bit further. In a new book, “Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution,” he deliberately avoids the most controversial subjects, like Israel and the status of women in the Islamic world. Instead, he focuses on what he calls the core of the Islamist revolution, which he defines as a metaphysical resistance to the West’s market-based definition of the individual and society. He invokes European social critics like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, endorsing their critiques of Western thinking and arguing that Islamism offers a more holistic model.
NOT surprisingly, the book has received some stinging reviews, and renewed accusations that Mr. Crooke has gone native. Even some of his fellow board members at Conflicts Forum say they are a little baffled — not by his sympathy for Islamists, but by the book’s broad philosophical themes.
Mr. Crooke says the book grew out of his own efforts to find common ground with Islamists, and to look beyond the usual stumbling blocks.
“It seemed to me there was a real need to understand what was happening inside Islamism better, and to valorize what they were saying in ways that could be understood in the West,” he said.
That project seems inseparable from his broader argument about dialogue. To illustrate it, Mr. Crooke describes an episode from the conflict in Northern Ireland in which the British put two opposing factions into a room for talks, “naïvely imagining that talking would help.” It did the opposite, reinforcing their anger. So the negotiators tried another approach: they asked both sides to write down their history and vision for the future on a piece of paper. After three more years of talks, the factions finally reached the point at which they acknowledged the legitimacy of the other side’s piece of paper.
“George Mitchell once said to me, ‘you don’t even have a political process until you accept that the other side has a legitimate point of view,’ ” Mr. Crooke said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and relating it to the many obstacles between the United States and Iran.
“Does America have the will and the patience for that?” he said. “I’m not sure we’re there yet.”
Patience, by all accounts, is something Mr. Crooke possesses. Mark Perry, the co-director of Conflicts Forum, describes an episode in Gaza in 2002 when the two men tried to establish a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian factions. After weeks of negotiations, Israel dropped a bomb on the Hamas leader whose signature they needed, shattering their efforts.
“We were exhausted,” Mr. Perry recalled. “The next day in the hotel room, I looked at Alastair and said ‘what do we do now?’ He just said, ‘We try again.’ ”
It is not entirely clear where that steadfastness comes from. He is a little evasive about his own life and career, perhaps by training. Born in Ireland, he grew up mostly in Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, and was educated at a Swiss boarding school and at St. Andrew’s in Scotland, obtaining a degree in economics. Before joining MI6, he worked in finance in London.
“It’s a dangerous area to work in,” he said of his years as a banker, without apparent irony, “because it’s so easy to get caught up in enrichment.”
He is barred by law from discussing his service with MI6, which included years of diplomatic work on the Israel-Palestine issue. As a negotiator in the Palestinian territories, he is said to have traveled alone, by taxi, eschewing the armed security convoys of many Western diplomats. Colleagues who worked with him say Yasir Arafat and the leaders of Hamas trusted Mr. Crooke completely, as did some high-level Israeli officials.
SOME Israelis, however, apparently complained that he was too close to Hamas. In late 2003, he was recalled to London — he had reached retirement age — and quietly ushered out of government service, with a commendation. He says he has no regrets, but some of his colleagues in Conflicts Forum say he retains some bitterness about the way he was treated.
In 2005, he moved to Beirut, where he lives with his partner, Aisling Byrne, and their 1-year-old child, Amistis, in an elegant, old French mandate-era apartment, working out of a home office.
Mr. Crooke smiles at the suggestion that Conflicts Forum may offer him a back-door route back to diplomacy, but does not entirely deny it. “We’re not implementers," he said. “What we’re trying to do is catalyze and create ideas. The second part is, how do you multiply something done by a small number of people in one room into something larger?”
Communists’ Land Plan Could Backfire in India
Promising land to the landless, the Communists won Abdul Bakir Shah’s heart decades ago. Under an ambitious land reform drive, Mr. Shah, a sharecropper all his life, got title to nearly one fertile acre. His village and others like it have voted Communist since, keeping the party in power for an uninterrupted 32 years here in West Bengal State.
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Villagers who once supported the Communists have become disillusioned. They showed a ration card to explain the shift.
But things went topsy-turvy two years ago. As Bengal belatedly joined India’s slow but inexorable march to capitalism, the Communist-run state government sought to scoop up this entire cluster of mud-and-thatch hamlets to make way for the construction of a multinational chemical industrial complex. The Communists, under whose leadership factory after factory had been shuttered across this state, said it was time to bring private industry and jobs back to Bengal.
“Reform or perish,” became their rallying cry.
That is when the Communists lost Mr. Shah’s trust.
“We don’t have any faith in them anymore,” he said.
Now, in the parliamentary elections under way, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) faces one of the toughest political fights of its long history. It is a party divided between the pull of industrial capitalism — not unlike in China — and its tradition of championing the rural poor. That struggle reflects much of the conflict that has bedeviled India in recent years, and bitter discord over land acquisition has broken out in many parts of the country.
How the Communists perform here in their stronghold of West Bengal will, to a large extent, determine how much influence they have over the next government of India, and by extension, over the nation’s economic and foreign policy.
Even though the Communists here are unabashedly capitalist, at the level of the central government they hew to more traditional ideology, blocking a slew of economic reforms and raising a ruckus over India’s deepening friendship with the United States.
In the past five years, controlling one in 10 seats in India’s 543-member Parliament, they have been particularly influential. This time, they may not be, having been made vulnerable by the turn away from their old core principles. The fight for the hearts of men like Mr. Shah is at the heart of their challenge.
“Our basic constituency is the rural poor,” insisted Mohammad Salim, a veteran member of Parliament in the party. “Their thought processes were hijacked by a powerful coterie, by big noise.”
Much of that “big noise” has come, on the one side, from the feisty political opposition leader, Mamata Banerjee, who has usurped the Communist Party rhetoric and cast herself as the savior of the rural poor.
On the other side, Maoist guerrillas have begun gaining ground, particularly among indigenous people in remote, destitute corners of the state. The other day, wielding bows and arrows, hundreds of them blocked traffic in the center of the state capital, Calcutta.
As Bengal’s voters went to the polls on Thursday, suspected Maoists planted bombs, ambushed a car, killing three election workers and imposed a fairly successful boycott call in pockets of the state.
Acquiring the land of folks who know no other life is difficult any way. But here in Bengal, the fury is even greater than elsewhere. The land is fertile and exceptionally crowded — with an average of 904 people in each square kilometer — and, as Mr. Salim acknowledged, all the more coveted by those who were landless for so long.
Ms. Banerjee has seized on that anxiety, and has succeeded in blocking several industrial projects that the Communists sought.
A factory to build the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, was forced to move out of the state. Plans for a nuclear power plant have been scrapped. The same has happened to the would-be chemical plant, which the state proposed relocating near the Sunderbans delta; that, too, has faced protests. A steel plant farther east is a target of Maoist attacks.
Ms. Banerjee, for her part, once aligned with the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, has turned herself into a friend of the have-nots. “You used to say, ‘Long live Karl Marx,’ ” she said of the Communists while on the campaign stump the other day. “Now you say, ‘Long live Tata, Karl Marx, you go.’ ”
She promises reopening factories shuttered under the Communists. She pledges more money for those who lose land. She accuses the Communists of intimidating voters. Ms. Banerjee is often seen on television scuffling with the police at street protests.
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
A rally in a West Bengal village for Mamata Banerjee, who has usurped the Communists and cast herself as the savior of the poor.
The New York Times
In West Bengal, Communism has lost luster with rural poor.
“Today they will take your vote, tomorrow they will take your land, the third day they will ask for your daughter, your son,” she warned darkly. “This fight is for your survival.”
Her critics call her an opportunist. A Communist Party campaign billboard, in the center of Calcutta, shows a young man with a briefcase and his head hung low, and a slogan that blames Ms. Banerjee for driving jobs out of the state.
Another, a cartoon, shows a portly Ms. Banerjee, holding a begging bowl and placards that read: “No Industry,” “No Progress,” “No Roads.”
Each party accuses the other’s cadres of murder and mayhem. Their campaign posters contain graphic images of maimed, charred bodies.
Part of the problem is that Bengal, after more than 30 years of leftist leadership, remains among the country’s most destitute and dysfunctional states. It has one of the highest school drop-out rates. Nearly half the poor do not have access to public food subsidies, as they are supposed to. Land reform slowed to a crawl in the last decade.
In Nandigram, discontent had piled up against the government. It exploded over its bid for the land. In the spring of 2007, at the height of the troubles, at least 14 people died in clashes between Communist Party supporters and opponents.
A year later, Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress Party swept the local village council elections for the first time in more than three decades. So tense does it remain that in one hamlet, a conversation with visiting journalists nearly brought supporters of the two rival parties to blows.
The people of Mr. Shah’s hamlet were all once Communists. Now, the few Communist holdouts cluster together on one side of the main road. They say they are forbidden from the tea shop on the main road. They are afraid to vote. They seethe at Ms. Banerjee for having driven a potential factory from their area.
“She just wants the poor to stay poor,” said Zahidul Mullick, who guessed his age to be around 18. He said he dropped out of school after the fifth grade and worked as a tailor, as most of the men in the hamlet do.
“Look, we are not educated,” said Halima Begum, 22, balancing a baby on her hips. “We couldn’t work in the factory. But we could clean the houses of the people who come to work there.”
Across the street, Mr. Shah said he was immediately suspicious of the proposed chemical complex. He was terrified of being displaced. For the first time in more than 30 years, he and his neighbors turned against the Communists.
“They thought the party was so strong we would do whatever they say,” said one of his neighbors, Atibul Shah, 22.
His family, he said, had voted Communist for three generations. This time, he had ridden the train for two days from Mumbai, where he works in a garment factory, for the chance to vote the Communists out.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Villagers who once supported the Communists have become disillusioned. They showed a ration card to explain the shift.
But things went topsy-turvy two years ago. As Bengal belatedly joined India’s slow but inexorable march to capitalism, the Communist-run state government sought to scoop up this entire cluster of mud-and-thatch hamlets to make way for the construction of a multinational chemical industrial complex. The Communists, under whose leadership factory after factory had been shuttered across this state, said it was time to bring private industry and jobs back to Bengal.
“Reform or perish,” became their rallying cry.
That is when the Communists lost Mr. Shah’s trust.
“We don’t have any faith in them anymore,” he said.
Now, in the parliamentary elections under way, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) faces one of the toughest political fights of its long history. It is a party divided between the pull of industrial capitalism — not unlike in China — and its tradition of championing the rural poor. That struggle reflects much of the conflict that has bedeviled India in recent years, and bitter discord over land acquisition has broken out in many parts of the country.
How the Communists perform here in their stronghold of West Bengal will, to a large extent, determine how much influence they have over the next government of India, and by extension, over the nation’s economic and foreign policy.
Even though the Communists here are unabashedly capitalist, at the level of the central government they hew to more traditional ideology, blocking a slew of economic reforms and raising a ruckus over India’s deepening friendship with the United States.
In the past five years, controlling one in 10 seats in India’s 543-member Parliament, they have been particularly influential. This time, they may not be, having been made vulnerable by the turn away from their old core principles. The fight for the hearts of men like Mr. Shah is at the heart of their challenge.
“Our basic constituency is the rural poor,” insisted Mohammad Salim, a veteran member of Parliament in the party. “Their thought processes were hijacked by a powerful coterie, by big noise.”
Much of that “big noise” has come, on the one side, from the feisty political opposition leader, Mamata Banerjee, who has usurped the Communist Party rhetoric and cast herself as the savior of the rural poor.
On the other side, Maoist guerrillas have begun gaining ground, particularly among indigenous people in remote, destitute corners of the state. The other day, wielding bows and arrows, hundreds of them blocked traffic in the center of the state capital, Calcutta.
As Bengal’s voters went to the polls on Thursday, suspected Maoists planted bombs, ambushed a car, killing three election workers and imposed a fairly successful boycott call in pockets of the state.
Acquiring the land of folks who know no other life is difficult any way. But here in Bengal, the fury is even greater than elsewhere. The land is fertile and exceptionally crowded — with an average of 904 people in each square kilometer — and, as Mr. Salim acknowledged, all the more coveted by those who were landless for so long.
Ms. Banerjee has seized on that anxiety, and has succeeded in blocking several industrial projects that the Communists sought.
A factory to build the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, was forced to move out of the state. Plans for a nuclear power plant have been scrapped. The same has happened to the would-be chemical plant, which the state proposed relocating near the Sunderbans delta; that, too, has faced protests. A steel plant farther east is a target of Maoist attacks.
Ms. Banerjee, for her part, once aligned with the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, has turned herself into a friend of the have-nots. “You used to say, ‘Long live Karl Marx,’ ” she said of the Communists while on the campaign stump the other day. “Now you say, ‘Long live Tata, Karl Marx, you go.’ ”
She promises reopening factories shuttered under the Communists. She pledges more money for those who lose land. She accuses the Communists of intimidating voters. Ms. Banerjee is often seen on television scuffling with the police at street protests.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
A rally in a West Bengal village for Mamata Banerjee, who has usurped the Communists and cast herself as the savior of the poor.
The New York Times
In West Bengal, Communism has lost luster with rural poor.
“Today they will take your vote, tomorrow they will take your land, the third day they will ask for your daughter, your son,” she warned darkly. “This fight is for your survival.”
Her critics call her an opportunist. A Communist Party campaign billboard, in the center of Calcutta, shows a young man with a briefcase and his head hung low, and a slogan that blames Ms. Banerjee for driving jobs out of the state.
Another, a cartoon, shows a portly Ms. Banerjee, holding a begging bowl and placards that read: “No Industry,” “No Progress,” “No Roads.”
Each party accuses the other’s cadres of murder and mayhem. Their campaign posters contain graphic images of maimed, charred bodies.
Part of the problem is that Bengal, after more than 30 years of leftist leadership, remains among the country’s most destitute and dysfunctional states. It has one of the highest school drop-out rates. Nearly half the poor do not have access to public food subsidies, as they are supposed to. Land reform slowed to a crawl in the last decade.
In Nandigram, discontent had piled up against the government. It exploded over its bid for the land. In the spring of 2007, at the height of the troubles, at least 14 people died in clashes between Communist Party supporters and opponents.
A year later, Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress Party swept the local village council elections for the first time in more than three decades. So tense does it remain that in one hamlet, a conversation with visiting journalists nearly brought supporters of the two rival parties to blows.
The people of Mr. Shah’s hamlet were all once Communists. Now, the few Communist holdouts cluster together on one side of the main road. They say they are forbidden from the tea shop on the main road. They are afraid to vote. They seethe at Ms. Banerjee for having driven a potential factory from their area.
“She just wants the poor to stay poor,” said Zahidul Mullick, who guessed his age to be around 18. He said he dropped out of school after the fifth grade and worked as a tailor, as most of the men in the hamlet do.
“Look, we are not educated,” said Halima Begum, 22, balancing a baby on her hips. “We couldn’t work in the factory. But we could clean the houses of the people who come to work there.”
Across the street, Mr. Shah said he was immediately suspicious of the proposed chemical complex. He was terrified of being displaced. For the first time in more than 30 years, he and his neighbors turned against the Communists.
“They thought the party was so strong we would do whatever they say,” said one of his neighbors, Atibul Shah, 22.
His family, he said, had voted Communist for three generations. This time, he had ridden the train for two days from Mumbai, where he works in a garment factory, for the chance to vote the Communists out.
Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism
Although the civil rights movement gave Samuel Sallis equality under the law a long time ago, he was left wanting most of his life, he says, for the subtle courtesies and respect he thought would come with it. Being a working-class black man downtown here meant being mostly ignored, living a life invisible and unacknowledged in a larger white world.
"You literally saw people of all kinds of backgrounds finding common ground," said Alan Ingram, a Web site designer in Milwaukee, with Nicole Nelson, a law student.
Then Mr. Sallis, 69, noticed a change.
“I’ve been working downtown for 30 years, so I’ve got a good feeling for it,” Mr. Sallis said. “Since President Obama started campaigning, if I go almost anywhere, it’s: ‘Hi! Hello, how are you, sir?’ I’m talking about strangers. Calling me ‘sir.’ ”
He added: “It makes you feel different, like, hey — maybe we are all equals. I’m no different than before. It’s just that other people seem to be realizing these things all around me.”
In dozens of interviews in seven states over the last several days, black men and women like Mr. Sallis said they were feeling more optimistic about race relations than even a year ago, when Mr. Obama emerged as a serious presidential contender after a string of primary and caucus victories. Many whites said they were feeling better, too, expressing an invigorated sense of openness toward people of other races.
Yet no one claims that racial prejudice has disappeared.
In a recent report to law enforcement agencies, the Homeland Security Department warned that right-wing extremists could use Mr. Obama’s election as a recruiting tool. And the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, reported finding 926 active groups in the United States in 2008, up 50 percent from 2000.
Still, Mr. Sallis said, “it feels like there’s a possibility now that wasn’t there before.”
In Tampa, Fla., Milton Patrick, 33, an auditor who is black, went to a baseball game this spring for the first time at the invitation of his white colleagues. In Karen Jackson’s multiracial Los Angeles office, where race, politics and religion were once taboo subjects, Ms. Jackson, a black woman, said people were engaging her in friendly and meaningful discussions. And in Brooklyn, Shel Harris, a black man, said he dropped his “skeptical, more on guard” attitude toward whites after working alongside so many on the Obama campaign.
“Whenever they said something, I was always looking out for their ulterior motives,” said Mr. Harris, 62, a retired phone company worker. “Now I find that I take white people’s statements more on face value.”
The interviews reflect findings in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, in which two-thirds of Americans said race relations were generally good, with the percentage of blacks who said so doubling since July.
In just over 100 days, Mr. Obama’s presidency seems to have done much to alter the greater American public’s perception of race relations.
And perhaps, in some cases, even the reality.
“I feel a lot more comfortable starting up a conversation with people of other races on the streets now than I did before,” said Mitch Hansch, 29, a white waiter in New York City. “Since Obama was elected, racial tensions seem a little lower. I think it’s fantastic.”
Northeast of Los Angeles, M. J. J. Schmidt, 62, a real estate executive who is white, said he also felt something different.
“I go to a gym where there are a number of black people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We don’t often communicate. They tend to have their own circle of friends. But now, there’s been more communication. Now you have an opener. After the election, I started saying hello. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think of Obama, about our new president?’ ”
The power of positive images of the Obama family has no doubt played a role for both races.
“From my vantage point, what contributes to African-American numbers is just the outright awesome pride we feel when we see President Obama stand up with world leaders,” said Clifford Whitby, 46, a black real estate developer in Macon, Ga., referring to the poll. “That does a great deal for the psyche of African-American people. If those numbers weren’t as high as they are, I would think there was something wrong with the polls.”
Some whites pointed to a slightly different dynamic
"You literally saw people of all kinds of backgrounds finding common ground," said Alan Ingram, a Web site designer in Milwaukee, with Nicole Nelson, a law student.
Then Mr. Sallis, 69, noticed a change.
“I’ve been working downtown for 30 years, so I’ve got a good feeling for it,” Mr. Sallis said. “Since President Obama started campaigning, if I go almost anywhere, it’s: ‘Hi! Hello, how are you, sir?’ I’m talking about strangers. Calling me ‘sir.’ ”
He added: “It makes you feel different, like, hey — maybe we are all equals. I’m no different than before. It’s just that other people seem to be realizing these things all around me.”
In dozens of interviews in seven states over the last several days, black men and women like Mr. Sallis said they were feeling more optimistic about race relations than even a year ago, when Mr. Obama emerged as a serious presidential contender after a string of primary and caucus victories. Many whites said they were feeling better, too, expressing an invigorated sense of openness toward people of other races.
Yet no one claims that racial prejudice has disappeared.
In a recent report to law enforcement agencies, the Homeland Security Department warned that right-wing extremists could use Mr. Obama’s election as a recruiting tool. And the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, reported finding 926 active groups in the United States in 2008, up 50 percent from 2000.
Still, Mr. Sallis said, “it feels like there’s a possibility now that wasn’t there before.”
In Tampa, Fla., Milton Patrick, 33, an auditor who is black, went to a baseball game this spring for the first time at the invitation of his white colleagues. In Karen Jackson’s multiracial Los Angeles office, where race, politics and religion were once taboo subjects, Ms. Jackson, a black woman, said people were engaging her in friendly and meaningful discussions. And in Brooklyn, Shel Harris, a black man, said he dropped his “skeptical, more on guard” attitude toward whites after working alongside so many on the Obama campaign.
“Whenever they said something, I was always looking out for their ulterior motives,” said Mr. Harris, 62, a retired phone company worker. “Now I find that I take white people’s statements more on face value.”
The interviews reflect findings in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, in which two-thirds of Americans said race relations were generally good, with the percentage of blacks who said so doubling since July.
In just over 100 days, Mr. Obama’s presidency seems to have done much to alter the greater American public’s perception of race relations.
And perhaps, in some cases, even the reality.
“I feel a lot more comfortable starting up a conversation with people of other races on the streets now than I did before,” said Mitch Hansch, 29, a white waiter in New York City. “Since Obama was elected, racial tensions seem a little lower. I think it’s fantastic.”
Northeast of Los Angeles, M. J. J. Schmidt, 62, a real estate executive who is white, said he also felt something different.
“I go to a gym where there are a number of black people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We don’t often communicate. They tend to have their own circle of friends. But now, there’s been more communication. Now you have an opener. After the election, I started saying hello. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think of Obama, about our new president?’ ”
The power of positive images of the Obama family has no doubt played a role for both races.
“From my vantage point, what contributes to African-American numbers is just the outright awesome pride we feel when we see President Obama stand up with world leaders,” said Clifford Whitby, 46, a black real estate developer in Macon, Ga., referring to the poll. “That does a great deal for the psyche of African-American people. If those numbers weren’t as high as they are, I would think there was something wrong with the polls.”
Some whites pointed to a slightly different dynamic
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