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| Middle East Chaos |
In Libya when one might have thought the mess there could not have gotten worse, it has. The latest round in the multidimensional chaos that has prevailed since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi was initiated by an ex-general named Khalifa Hiftar, who was trained in the Soviet Union, participated as a junior officer in the coup that brought Gaddafi to power in 1969, later broke with the Libyan dictator, and lived for years in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where he apparently also became a U.S. citizen.
Hiftar returned to Libya after Gaddafi was ousted. Now he has put together a force he calls the “Libyan National Army” and aims at removing the interim parliament in Tripoli.
So probably also for Libya there is a new dictatorship in the making?
Israel and the Palestinians were back to square one in the peace process last Friday after the Jewish state torpedoed US-sponsored talks in response to a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation deal.
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the tone, telling the BBC that
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas could "have peace with Israel or a
pact with Hamas (but) he can't have both".
"As long as I'm prime minister of Israel, I will never negotiate with a Palestinian government that is backed by Hamas terrorists that are calling for our liquidation," he added.
The former Prime Minister branded the situation in Syria an “unmitigated disaster” and insisted the West should intervene in such conflicts.
“We are now in a position where both Assad staying and the Opposition taking over seem bad options,” he said in a speech at Bloomberg HQ in central London.
“Repugnant though it may seem, the only way forward is to conclude the best agreement possible even if it means in the interim President Assad stays for a period.”
Egypt : In a statement dripping with cynicism, the White House said that Obama was “deeply troubled” by the recent mass death sentences in Egypt.
“While judicial independence is a vital part of democracy, this verdict cannot be reconciled with Egypt’s obligations under international human rights law,” the White House statement read. It appealed to Sisi and his fellow military rulers to “take a stand against this illogical action.”
Whom do they think they’re kidding? The niceties of “judicial independence” are hardly an issue in Egypt.
The hanging judge Youssef—popularly known as “the butcher”—was installed in a special court created by the junta to do precisely what he is doing. Moreover, the draconian sentences have a very clear logic: they are an act of state terror designed to intimidate the Egyptian masses.
The statement continued: “Since the January 25 Revolution, the Egyptian people have aspired to be represented by a government that rules justly, respects their dignity, and provides economic opportunities. The United States supports these aspirations and wants Egypt’s transition to succeed.”
It seems hardly a coincidence that these mass death sentence came only days after Washington approved the provision of 10 Apache attack helicopters on top of some $650 million in military aid already approved for the Egyptian junta this fiscal year.
This is half of what the administration wanted to supply to the country’s repressive forces, the other half being held up by laws restricting aid to regimes brought to power through military coups.
Obviously the helicopter deal was correctly interpreted by the Egyptian junta as a green light to escalate its brutal crackdown.
All this disaster unfortunately is only the top of the Iceberg when one looks at the total Middle East picture. Maybe only one word to describe this is: total chaos .
EU-Digest
