Que Ditador Árabe Sou Eu?

Um bocadinho diferente dos meus posts habituais... mas espero que gostem.

Filme "O Ditador" com Sacha Baron Cohen 

Com a chegada da Primavera Árabe apercebemos-nos de como os diferentes ditadores do Médio Oriente reagiram perante a pressão pública, os media internacionais, as grandes potências do mundo e a religião. Todos tiveram comportamentos diferentes, e os resultados - para os próprios e para os seus povos - também não são iguais...

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Palestinian Refugees: From the Frying Pan into the Fire

Fonte: Uprooted Palestinians

Forced to flee, denied entry to Arab countries, and unable to return to their homeland, former Palestinian residents of Iraq are on the Iraqi-Syrian border, still waiting for somewhere to go.

The appeal arrived via Facebook. It was like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea with little hope. The sender said he was living in a camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border along with some 200 other Palestinian refugees. They had been left stranded on the dangerous frontier between a country that is facing a combined civil war and foreign onslaught, and another that has been occupied and now persecutes them as “Saddam remnants.”

The place is called al-Hol camp. The Palestinian embassy in Lebanon said it knew nothing about these Palestinians. UNRWA said they were not registered with it. How come?

We contacted the young man, named Firas Saidam, to ask. A few days later – the web in Syria is not in good shape – we succeeded. He replied that after Israel occupied Palestine in 1948, the Iraqi government undertook to care for Palestinians in its territory, in return for not contributing to UNRWA.
And so it was.

In the 1970s, after the Baath party came power, the Palestinians were accommodated at public expense in state-owned housing in the al-Baladiyat district and some other parts of Baghdad. But after Iraq was subjected to sanctions in 1990, Firas explained, living conditions worsened badly for Iraqis. Yet Saddam continued to boast of his support for the Palestinians, publicly pledging in 2002, for example, to donate one billion euros to Palestine, at a time when Iraqis were going hungry. “People became very poor,” he said, “and so they started hating us.”

Then came the American occupation, followed by anarchy and the outbreak of sectarian violence, especially after the bombing of Shia shrines. “The Palestinians were in trouble twice over. They were Sunni, and they were ‘Saddam’s pets.’ Either way, we had to escape,” he said.

Did they flee in fear, or actually face reprisals? He sighed and replied: “My dear, out of the two hundred people currently here, 90 percent have had relatives kidnapped or killed.”

Three refugee camps were initially established on the Iraqi-Syrian border: Al-Waleed camp on the Iraqi side; al-Tanf camp in the no-man’s land in between the two countries’ territories, and al-Hol some ten kilometers inside Syria and 50 kilometers east of the town of al-Hasaka.

“We are the left-over people from al-Tanf,” said Firas. He was referring to the closure of the al-Tanf camp by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in early 2010, after it arranged for the resettlement of most of the inhabitants to third countries. Others were moved to al-Hol, where 215 people remain today, including around 100 who have no solution to their cases in sight, according to Firas.

As Firas and fellow Palestinian refugees in Iraq were not placed under UNRWA’s jurisdiction in 1948, they are being dealt with by UNHCR. It provides refugees with one of three possible solutions: return to the country they came from, settlement in the host country, or resettlement in a third. Many of the displaced Palestinians in the border camps opted for the third option after 2006, when the Arab League signed an agreement with UNHCR stating that this would not prejudice their right of return to Palestine. But according to Firas, the resettlement program was discontinued when there were only some 200 cases left to process, due to a change of priorities at UNHCR.

What about returning to Iraq? “That would be impossible,” Firas said. “We heard news just a couple of days ago that they were still raiding our homes in al-Baladiyat and other areas ... Our lives are still in danger there. We cannot.”

How about settling in Syria? “We are grateful to the Syrians for hosting us for seven years even though they were not obliged to,” he said. “But Syria in its current state is not a solution.” Al-Hol camp is adjacent to a Syrian army base that recently came under attack from gunmen (on the night of April 28). Residents are in real danger, and living conditions are poor, with plastic sheets used as roofing. They feel abandoned by UNHCR.

According to Firas, the Commission only began paying serious attention to the plight of the refugees at al-Hol after they staged a strike in 2008. Resettlement then began to places like Canada, Australia and Sweden – as no nearer country was prepared to take them. A handful of the al-Hol camp’s residents have been there since 2006, and are still waiting for countries to accept them.

But with the issue of the Iraqi-Palestinian refugees fading from the media and the international public eye, fewer potential host-states countries have been prepared to consider taking them in. More than two thirds of the 215 remaining at al-Hol are women and children.

UNHCR reportedly tried to promote the idea of arranging for them to be moved permanently to Damascus. But this fell through as a result of events in Syria. While it is unclear if the Commission is indeed still seeking such a solution, it is one the remaining refugees themselves strongly oppose – for legal, practical, personal reasons.

Firas charged that the UNHCR had conveyed the false impression that all the cases in the camp had been resolved. In 2010, it offered some of them a chance of going to the United States, but many turned that down because they had been detained by US forces during the occupation, and for other reasons related to immigration procedures. He said the refugees had tried to reason with UNHCR, but facing an unknown future and worsening conditions, they decided to stage an open-ended protest, possibly leading to a hunger strike.

Their principal demand is to be resettled in countries where they have relatives – mostly outside the Arab world, as the supposedly “fellow” Arab states have refused to receive them, and they cannot go back to their occupied homeland.

In the meantime, they want to be moved to a safe location outside Syria, where having already fled persecution and death in Iraq, they now face new dangers.

Their case, incidentally, has not been taken up by any Palestinian agency, official or unofficial.

By: Doha Shams

Published Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Mubarak não é um ditador

Joe Biden - Vice Presidente dos EUA

A diplomacia dos bons e dos maus. os bons são sempre bons mesmo quando matam, torturam, violam e oprimem. os maus são sempre maus mesmo que não tenhamos qualquer prova.

Por exemplo, Saddam era muito mau porque tinha utilizado armas de destruição massiva em cima do seu próprio povo e porque torturava os adversários, tal como disse Tony Blair no parlamento inglês a 25 de Fevereiro de 2003 (três semanas antes do início da invasão):

(...) the tens of thousands imprisoned, tortured or executed by his barbarity every year. The innocent die every day in Iraq—victims of Saddam—and their plight, too, should be heard.

(...) To those who say we are rushing to war, I say this: we are now 12 years after Saddam was first told by the UN to disarm; nearly six months after President Bush made his speech to the UN accepting the UN route to disarmament; nearly four months on from resolution 1441; and even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament through the UN. I detest his regime—I hope most people do—but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully [1].

Quando as potências ocidentais invadiram o Iraque utilizando urânio empobrecido e torturando em Abu Graib, Guantánamo, Diego Garcia e outras prisões da CIA, não o fazem por serem maus. Fazem-no porque o inimigo é mau e os obriga a isso. É uma lógica retorcida (e que já agora, podia ser utilizada por ambos os lados), mas aparentemente aceite desde o mais comum dos mortais até aos grandes líderes do mundo. Curiosamente o facto de Saddam Hussein ter utilizado armas químicas e biológicas sobre os iranianos de Ayatollah Khomeini (durante a guerra Irão-Iraque nos anos 80 [2]) não é nunca dado como exemplo da vilania do ditador iraquiano. É que afinal de contas, os maus - nessa altura - eram os iranianos. O Saddam era dos bons e tinha o apoio da Arábia Saudita, dos estados do golfo e das potências ocidentais. As armas químicas utilizadas por Saddam tinham sido produzidas com o apoio da Alemanha, Itália, França, Brasil, Estados Unidos da América, Reino Unido, Áustria, Singapura, Holanda, Egipto, Índia, Luxemburgo, Espanha e China [3]. Como se pode ver, os telhados de vidro são amplos e cobrem quase todos os cantos do mundo.

Aqui temos mais um caso que demonstra que esta hipocrisia continua viva e de boa saúde. Em plena Primavera Árabe, com um milhão de pessoas na praça Tahrir no Egipto prestes a destituirem o ditador Hosni Mubarak que durante décadas torturou e corrompeu o berço da civilização mundial, o vice presidente americano Joe Biden é alvo da seguinte pergunta:

PBS: (...) should Mubarak be seen as a ditactor?

JB: Look [haaaa....] Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. He has been very responsible on relative to geo political interest in the region... [haaaa....] [haaaa...] [haaaa...] [he...] middle east peace... [he...] [he..] [ha...] efforts... [he...] [ha...] the actions Egypt is taking relative to [ha...] [ha...] normalize relationship with [ha...] with Israel [hum...] and I... I think that [ha...] [hum...] it would be... I... I would not refer to him as a ditactor.

Obviamente Joe Biden sabe melhor do que qualquer um de nós que Mubarak era mesmo um ditador. Que a sua polícia secreta - a temida Mukhabarat - comete violações dos direitos humanos numa base diária. Que as eleições eram totalmente falsificadas. Que os oponentes políticos eram presos e torturados. Que era líder de um país totalmente corrupto e em que ele próprio era um líder desse mesmo crime organizado. Que tinha uma fortuna acumulada de dezenas de milhares de milhões de dólares que não podem ser explicados pelo salário dele enquanto presidente, etc. Mas era um ditador útil. E por isso não pode ser chamado pelo que ele é. Mesmo quando nesse preciso momento a sua polícia reprimia violentamente manifestações no Cairo, Alexandria, Suez e outros pontos do Egipto com um nível de violência quase ilimitado. 

Esta frase fez-me ainda recordar um momento extremamente infeliz de Franklin D. Roosevelt, presidente americano durante a segunda guerra mundial, que terá dito a seguinte frase sobre o ditador da Nicarágua, e aliado anti-comunista, Somoza, em 1939:

"Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch"

A única coisa que faz sentido na frase de Joe Biden é a dificuldade que ele tem em dizer tamanha mentira. Contei cada uma das hesitações e marquei-a no texto acima com os sons haaaa, he, ha e hum. São só 62 segundos. Vale a pena ver. E não esquecer.