United Nations

Israeli artillery shells struck the U.N. headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, setting a food warehouse ablaze and drawing a sharp rebuke from the visiting U.N. chief who called it an "outrage." Another Israeli bombardment killed Hamas' head of security.

The attack added to a day of deadly chaos pitting Israeli troops against Islamic militants. Terrified residents huddled in shelters and stairwells, or scooped up toddlers and fled on foot.

After nightfall, shells landed near Gaza City's Quds Hospital, where many families had sought refuge, and the building caught fire, forcing staff to evacuate hundreds of people. According to a hospital medic, some patients were pushed down the street on gurneys; a few held white flags.

A UN official in the Gaza Strip claimed Israeli forces on Thursday fired on a truck on a UN aid mission in northern Gaza, killing the driver. He said the UN coordinated the delivery with Israel, and the vehicle and was marked with a UN flag and insignia when it was shot.

Dear Israel: you picked wrong boat to mess with. Israeli patrol boats have rammed into and nearly capsized a relief vesssel sailing in international waters, bearing humanitarian medical aid to Gaza.

Accompanying the international doctors and aid workers who comprised the heart of the mssion were several politicians, including former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, as well as several international journalists, such as Karl Penhaul of CNN and Othman Abu Battiri of Al Jazeera, who have used mobile video reporting to refute Israel's claims that the damage was somehow caused by those leading the relief mission.

Two interesting comments:

Let's say you live, through no fault of your own, in a defacto war zone. By an accident of birth, let's say. Every four or five years forces out of your control mount and literally destroy all the economic and social machinery you need to have an secure existence. It is an ethnic conflict that marks you from birth. By the fact of who you are.

Sounds like living in Israel. For both sides.

Except one side, the Palestinian side, is utterly impoverished. The political community that manages the order for your society is under siege AND run by what the world considers to be a criminal organization. And in many ways this is literally true. Your government is a crime syndicate that is hemmed in by the world at large and the state that surrounds it. From the legislatures on down local mayors, police, and city councils your public servants are corrupt. And where it isn't criminal it is devoutly and extremely rigidly religious. And everywhere is economic ruin. Few jobs. Little working infrastructure. No chance for class advancement.

And here is the problem.

You have NOWHERE to turn.

One night you get a knock on your door and three guys with Kalashnikovs and green headscarves show up. For better or worse these guys have been the only ones keeping social order and keeping the larger criminal class off your back. When it isn't them that is shaking you down, that is. You cousins. Maybe your brother, though you may disagree, has joined this group. Many people you know have in one capacity or another been involved simply becuase they are the only show in town. To secure loans. To provide medical care. To settle legal disputes (with lower bribes).

So these guys show up at your door. With guns. And they ask you if they can cache some stuff at your house. They ask nice at first.

You say no? And risk what? Being ostracized by your community as a snitch? Shunned from the only thing that offers you any sort of relif from the unending misery that is your life. Shunned from your Mosque. Or maybe you risk a bunch more. Like: Getting your head cut off on a YouTube video? What?

There is NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRALITY. In place like Gaza you don't get to choose who your friends are. Get that through your head.

When you got NOTHING — and these people in Gaza have nothing — they are utterly choked off from any kind of economic machinery (other than working as a low wage servile class for people they view as oppressors), when you got nothing and no legal authority to protect you and gunmen come to your house and ask you for a favor... you say yes. Or you die.

These are your terrorists. They are everyday people with nothing. So nothing to lose. They are people desperate to survive just one more fucking day. And they are caught in the middle.

The Israelis DO have a choice on how they deal with it. Dropping bombs on innocent women and children is not the choice a moral society makes - no matter who their "friends" are.

and:

The Israeli government recently apprehended Richard Falk, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, detaining him for twenty hours, before expelling him from Israel.

Falk is a Jewish-American citizen who has every legal right to be in Israel. The UN's top Human Rights official condemned Falk's expulsion from Israel, calling it "unprecedented" and "deeply regrettable".

Professor Falk, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”

“It is macabre … I don’t know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times.” . . . The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law … warrant the characterisation of a crime against humanity.”

Falk, while condemning the rocket attacks by the militant group Hamas, which he points out are also criminal violations of international law, goes on to say that “such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people.”

“It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the entire 1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive in terms of their health. . . This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live.”

"The people of Gaza are victims of geopolitics at its inhumane worst: producing what Israel itself calls a 'total war' against an essentially defenseless society that lacks any defensive military capability whatsoever and is completely vulnerable to Israeli attacks mounted by F-16 bombers and Apache helicopters. What this also means is that the flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, as set forth in the Geneva Conventions, is quietly set aside while the carnage continues and the bodies pile up. It additionally means that the UN is once more revealed to be impotent when its main members deprive it of the political will to protect a people subject to unlawful uses of force on a large scale. Finally, this means that the public can shriek and march all over the world, but that the killing will go on as if nothing is happening. The picture being painted day by day in Gaza is one that begs for renewed commitment to international law and the authority of the UN Charter, starting here in the United States, especially with a new leadership that promised its citizens change, including a less militarist approach to diplomatic leadership."

Thousands of people took the streets of Sudan's tense capital Sunday in a carefully choreographed protest against the expected request for an arrest warrant on war crimes charges for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Monday.

Students and members of the ruling National Congress Party were bussed into central Khartoum, where they waved banners denouncing the I.C.C. and the United Nations. Sudan's government met in an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss how to respond to the announcement of a request for an arrest warrant for Mr. Bashir, who has ruled Sudan since taking power in a military coup nearly 20 years ago.

The news that the US has completely withdrawn from the Human Rights Council spread like wildfire Friday afternoon (June 6) through the corridors of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. There was general consternation amongst diplomats and NGOS. Reached by phone, the American mission in Geneva neither confirmed nor denied the report. Although unofficial, the news comes at a time of long opposition by the Bush administration to the reforms which created the Human Rights Council in June 2006. Washington announced from the beginning that the US would not be an active member but its observer status would mean that it could intervene during the sessions. To date even this has rarely happened.

...

But Eric Sottas, director of the International Organisation against Torture sees it as a a political gesture. "The US has always clearly shown its opposition to the Council. This is a slightly more public way of putting pressure on it in order to raise the stakes. What is more the Bush dynasty is coming to the end of its mandate," he said. "It reminds me of the time when the Nixon administration, which backed Pinochet in Chile, chastized the UN for criticising the Chilean dictator. But when Carter was elected in 1977, the American government took the floor at the Human Rights Commission to ask forgiveness. After a presidency like that of Bush, you can expect some important changes in US policy on human right."

A_B_... is a geopolitical survey of the 192 member states of the United Nations with regard to the quantitative degree to which each contributes to peace and terror in the world. The project is a dual-sided poster where the A_ side displays measures of peace, while the B_ side, measures of terror. For each of the A_B_ measures, the graph is divided into 3 rings (3 separate indexes for peace and 3 separate indexes for terror) that are themselves individual quantitative measures obtained from researchers working in the field of geopolitics. The quantitative variation for the peace and terror measures is represented as variation in line thickness: thin line=low value, thick line=high value.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal cleared Kosovo's former prime minister on Thursday of persecuting Serbs in a 1998-99 separatist war, a move expected to fan tensions simmering over Kosovo's secession.

Ramush Haradinaj, a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) considered a hero by Kosovo Albanians, was acquitted of torture, murder, rape and deportation after judges found prosecutors had failed to prove a deliberate campaign to kill and expel Serb civilians from Kosovo.

"This is a verdict that strengthens Kosovo. We endured a difficult liberation struggle that cost many lives. Today we are a free and sovereign nation," Haradinaj said in a statement, adding he would dedicate his life to equal opportunities to all.

Kosovo's 90 percent Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia in February. The United Nations has run the province since 1999 when NATO drove out Serb forces to halt the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in a two-year war against KLA guerrillas.

U.S. envoy Jendayi Frazer said Wednesday the violence in Kenya's Rift Valley was "clear ethnic cleansing," aimed at chasing out President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu people.

Frazer said she did not consider the eruption of ethnic clashes in Kenya a genocide.

Because if it was considered genocide, they'd be obligate to intervene.

Myanmar's government ordered the expulsion of the United Nations' top diplomat in the country today, after his office issued a critical statement urging the ruling generals to heed the voices of protesters.

The diplomat, Charles Petrie, was handed a letter ordering his expulsion at the end of a meeting with government officials today in Naypyidaw, the country’s capital.

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On Oct. 24, Mr. Petrie's office issued a statement urging the government to listen to dissenting voices in Myanmar and warning of a "deteriorating humanitarian situation." It concluded with a reference to the protests, which erupted after a fuel price hike in August and developed into a wider movement calling for political change, before troops moved in to suppress them in late September.

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"Many of the issues that were raised over the last two months by monks and others were exactly the same issues that we were trying to raise for the last four to five years," he said.