RIA Novosti
30 January 2010
Iran is building a 51-km railway linking its southwestern city of Khorramshahr and the southern Iraqi city of Basra, national media reported Saturday.
Iranian Railways Director Abbas Nazari told Mehr news agency that nearly 90% of the first phase of the project inside Iran (about 16 km) was complete.
He said Iran was currently in talks with the Iraqis over the construction of the Iraqi section of the line.
The project will improve transport links between Iraq and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
According to Press TV, Iran has allocated $1 billion for Iraq's reconstruction.
"A portion of the amount is allotted to railway construction projects," it said.
30 January, 2010
Russia, Libya sign $1.8 bln arms deal - PM Putin.
Reuters
30 January 2010
Libya has signed an arms deal with Russia worth 1.3 billion euros ($1.8 billion), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"Only yesterday we signed a contract worth 1.3 billion euros," Putin said, according to RIA Novosti.
"And it's not only small arms," he added, without specifying which weapons Libya intended to purchase.
Interfax news agency quoted a military-diplomatic source as saying Libya was prepared to buy around 20 fighter planes and S-300PMU2 air defense systems.
The agency said on Tuesday that Libya also may acquire T-90S tanks, and modernize more than 140 T-72 tanks and other weapons.
The deal was signed after talks with Libyan defense minister, Major General Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, earlier this week in Moscow.
It comes days after the Libyan Investment Authority bought into the Hong Kong IPO of UC RUSAL, the world's biggest aluminum producer.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Michael Roddy)
30 January 2010
Libya has signed an arms deal with Russia worth 1.3 billion euros ($1.8 billion), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"Only yesterday we signed a contract worth 1.3 billion euros," Putin said, according to RIA Novosti.
"And it's not only small arms," he added, without specifying which weapons Libya intended to purchase.
Interfax news agency quoted a military-diplomatic source as saying Libya was prepared to buy around 20 fighter planes and S-300PMU2 air defense systems.
The agency said on Tuesday that Libya also may acquire T-90S tanks, and modernize more than 140 T-72 tanks and other weapons.
The deal was signed after talks with Libyan defense minister, Major General Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, earlier this week in Moscow.
It comes days after the Libyan Investment Authority bought into the Hong Kong IPO of UC RUSAL, the world's biggest aluminum producer.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Michael Roddy)
Georgian “Patriotic Lessons” Military Plan Raises Grave Concern.
IWPR
By Anna Kandelaki
29 January 2010
Georgian children will start “military-patriotic” lessons to prepare them for future attacks on the country, according to a programme announced by President Mikhail Saakashvili.
Saakashvili, speaking to teachers in Batumi recently, said the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 showed children needed to be prepared, but teachers and experts were concerned the lessons might whip up aggression and bring no benefit.
“Military-patriotic education is necessary so that children at least know about their country. If this should happen again, then Georgians have to be able to defend their villages, their regions,” he said.
“There will be in Georgia a system for defending the country that will include all citizens. Just 16, 20 or 22,000 soldiers cannot defend a country of five million.”
Education Minister Dmitry Shashkin, speaking to teachers later, expanded on the nature of the plan.
“When in 2008 Georgian territory was bombarded with cluster bombs, it was not written in a single textbook that children should stay away from them, and children must know this. That is what the president had in mind,” Shashkin said.
Saakashvili has significantly reformed the Georgian army since he became president in 2003. He increased its budget, scrapped conscription and recruited new soldiers, and the new lessons could turn out to be part of his remodelling of the system, although details are still hazy.
It is currently unclear from what age the lessons would start, how many hours a week they would take up, who will teach them, and what they will teach.
A group of experts assembled by the education ministry will present a detailed plan and lessons will start in Tbilisi from September.
In Soviet times, schoolchildren underwent several hours of military education every week. Although the lessons were not labelled “patriotic” as these will be, Georgians who went through the system can recall how teachers, aside from assembling and dismantling machine guns, would repeat, “The Soviet Union is undefeatable. It has a deadly enemy in America and every Soviet citizen must be prepared to repel its aggression.”
Georgians who grew up in the Soviet era cannot help comparing these new lessons with what they were taught.
“They taught us that America is the enemy. Now our children’s brains will be filled with the fact that the enemy is Russia. Today Russia is the enemy of Georgia, but why does a child have to grow up with a constant feeling that someone will attack? Should a child think about enemies, or do his lessons?” asked Vakhtang, a 54-year-old Tbilisi resident.
His opinion finds echoes throughout society and has also been reflected on internet discussion sites like Facebook.
“A child could imbibe the information from these lessons incorrectly and become a racist, a Russophobe or a misanthrope,” said one poster called Marina, although others approved of the president’s plan.
“Russia is our enemy and every Georgian must know this from childhood. I don’t see anything bad in this,” wrote another poster called Lada.
Opinion polls would suggest that Lada’s viewpoint is more widely-held in society than Marina’s more cautious one. Some 64 per cent of respondents to a talk-show on public television said they approved of military-patriotic lessons being taught in Georgian schools.
And Giorgi Baramidze, the state minister for Euro-Atlantic integration and a former defence minister, said more work needed to be done to teach Georgians about their country and the threats it faces.
“The country must sense that great tasks lie before it. Greater mobilisation is necessary, and there must be more patriotism in our daily life. You do not see this if you go onto the street, into a restaurant, or a public building,” he said.
But teachers were more sceptical of the scheme than the public at large. Levan Gigineishvili, a Georgian-language teacher at the American Academy, was very doubtful of its success.
“You cannot inject children with patriotism,” he said.
“We previously taught patriotism as a separate subject, but the methods did not prove successful. It was too artificial, and the children sensed its artificial nature and were disappointed by it.”
Mzia Bolkvadze, a teacher at public school number 20, also wondered if it was possible to teach patriotism separately. She said she had inculcated her children with patriotic values during Georgian language and literature lessons, and worried that military-patriotic lessons might prove dangerous.
“I am worried that children might become more aggressive. They might start thinking about creating the appearance of an enemy,” she said.
And other experts worried that the government, in introducing the ideas of citizens’ defence under the cover of lessons in patriotism, was actually teaching the children its own ideology and militarised propaganda.
“Any political ideology, even if it is held unanimously by the whole country, must be a subject for free discussion, and not accepted unquestioningly,” said Simon Janashia, a professor at Tbilisi ’s Ilia Chavchavadze University .
Other commentators went even further, contrasting the introduction of such lessons with the democratic rhetoric with which the president came to power seven years ago.
“The introduction of military-patriotic training means that the president has finally given up on liberal values,” said Zaal Andronikashvili, a professor of philosophy.
“Military patriotism is a form of extreme nationalism, which uses external threats to mobilise the masses. And military-patriotic preparation is a typical totalitarian practice, which was used by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks with equal enthusiasm.”
By Anna Kandelaki
29 January 2010
Georgian children will start “military-patriotic” lessons to prepare them for future attacks on the country, according to a programme announced by President Mikhail Saakashvili.
Saakashvili, speaking to teachers in Batumi recently, said the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 showed children needed to be prepared, but teachers and experts were concerned the lessons might whip up aggression and bring no benefit.
“Military-patriotic education is necessary so that children at least know about their country. If this should happen again, then Georgians have to be able to defend their villages, their regions,” he said.
“There will be in Georgia a system for defending the country that will include all citizens. Just 16, 20 or 22,000 soldiers cannot defend a country of five million.”
Education Minister Dmitry Shashkin, speaking to teachers later, expanded on the nature of the plan.
“When in 2008 Georgian territory was bombarded with cluster bombs, it was not written in a single textbook that children should stay away from them, and children must know this. That is what the president had in mind,” Shashkin said.
Saakashvili has significantly reformed the Georgian army since he became president in 2003. He increased its budget, scrapped conscription and recruited new soldiers, and the new lessons could turn out to be part of his remodelling of the system, although details are still hazy.
It is currently unclear from what age the lessons would start, how many hours a week they would take up, who will teach them, and what they will teach.
A group of experts assembled by the education ministry will present a detailed plan and lessons will start in Tbilisi from September.
In Soviet times, schoolchildren underwent several hours of military education every week. Although the lessons were not labelled “patriotic” as these will be, Georgians who went through the system can recall how teachers, aside from assembling and dismantling machine guns, would repeat, “The Soviet Union is undefeatable. It has a deadly enemy in America and every Soviet citizen must be prepared to repel its aggression.”
Georgians who grew up in the Soviet era cannot help comparing these new lessons with what they were taught.
“They taught us that America is the enemy. Now our children’s brains will be filled with the fact that the enemy is Russia. Today Russia is the enemy of Georgia, but why does a child have to grow up with a constant feeling that someone will attack? Should a child think about enemies, or do his lessons?” asked Vakhtang, a 54-year-old Tbilisi resident.
His opinion finds echoes throughout society and has also been reflected on internet discussion sites like Facebook.
“A child could imbibe the information from these lessons incorrectly and become a racist, a Russophobe or a misanthrope,” said one poster called Marina, although others approved of the president’s plan.
“Russia is our enemy and every Georgian must know this from childhood. I don’t see anything bad in this,” wrote another poster called Lada.
Opinion polls would suggest that Lada’s viewpoint is more widely-held in society than Marina’s more cautious one. Some 64 per cent of respondents to a talk-show on public television said they approved of military-patriotic lessons being taught in Georgian schools.
And Giorgi Baramidze, the state minister for Euro-Atlantic integration and a former defence minister, said more work needed to be done to teach Georgians about their country and the threats it faces.
“The country must sense that great tasks lie before it. Greater mobilisation is necessary, and there must be more patriotism in our daily life. You do not see this if you go onto the street, into a restaurant, or a public building,” he said.
But teachers were more sceptical of the scheme than the public at large. Levan Gigineishvili, a Georgian-language teacher at the American Academy, was very doubtful of its success.
“You cannot inject children with patriotism,” he said.
“We previously taught patriotism as a separate subject, but the methods did not prove successful. It was too artificial, and the children sensed its artificial nature and were disappointed by it.”
Mzia Bolkvadze, a teacher at public school number 20, also wondered if it was possible to teach patriotism separately. She said she had inculcated her children with patriotic values during Georgian language and literature lessons, and worried that military-patriotic lessons might prove dangerous.
“I am worried that children might become more aggressive. They might start thinking about creating the appearance of an enemy,” she said.
And other experts worried that the government, in introducing the ideas of citizens’ defence under the cover of lessons in patriotism, was actually teaching the children its own ideology and militarised propaganda.
“Any political ideology, even if it is held unanimously by the whole country, must be a subject for free discussion, and not accepted unquestioningly,” said Simon Janashia, a professor at Tbilisi ’s Ilia Chavchavadze University .
Other commentators went even further, contrasting the introduction of such lessons with the democratic rhetoric with which the president came to power seven years ago.
“The introduction of military-patriotic training means that the president has finally given up on liberal values,” said Zaal Andronikashvili, a professor of philosophy.
“Military patriotism is a form of extreme nationalism, which uses external threats to mobilise the masses. And military-patriotic preparation is a typical totalitarian practice, which was used by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks with equal enthusiasm.”
Ugandan politician denies any plan to overthrow Pres. Kagame.
Rwandan News Agency
25 January 2010
A senior advisor to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has rubbished reports that he is backing the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda to overthrow President Paul Kagame’s government – a plot which purportedly includes senior Rwandan military and political officials, RNA reports.
Dr. John Nagenda says the reports published on December 23 on a new website www.256news.com and several other news websites and blogs are not true. He also distances himself from the top Rwandan military officers and politicians named. Dr. Nagenda also says he intended to visit Rwanda but no longer plans to do so.
According to the information which is also circulating around here, a leaked security brief addressed to President Kagame names several of his former and current close allies as planning to use the Green Party to topple his government.
Those named include: former African Union Commission Vice President Mr. Mazimpaka Patrick; former envoy to Japan Dr. Emile Rwamasirabo – now a doctor with the elite King Faisal hospital; Senator Colonel Dr. Joseph Karemera; Col. Deogene Mudenge – head of RURA; exiled former state minister Mr. Sam Nkunsi; and Police Commissioner General, Brig. Gen. Charles Gasana.
Others named are former Rwandan ambassador to Ethiopia Mr. Pascal Ngonga; troubled Dr. Maj. Ben Karenzi; vocal Senator Aloysia Inyumba; current envoy to India Maj. Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa; Brig. General Richard Rutatina; and other senior officers.
To date, none of them have come forward to say anything about the purported intelligence dossier and government has also not reacted to the rumors. The local papers UMUSESO (No. 386 of 14th to 21st December 2009) and UMUVUGIZI (Vol.66 of December 18th – 27th 2009) originally published the list.
Another allegation is that Dr. Nagenda is a long-time close friend to Mr. Charles Kabanda, who is the Green party's general secretary, and Major Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa. It is also claimed the Dr. Nagenda is an uncle to youthful Mr. Frank Habineza – the head of the Green Party.
About the dossier, Dr. Nagenda writes, “My first and abiding sentiment was one of total incredulity. How preposterous a notion!”
Writing in the Ugandan newspaper New Vision (which is a public company but partly owned by government), Dr. Nagenda says he met General Nyamwasa only once.
“As for Kabanda, his name doesn’t ring a bell, although I might have talked to him without remembering the name. It was all a long time ago, and in another country,” writes Nagenda.
“Frank Habineza I know, he worked in my house at Namutamba on our estate, perhaps 20 years ago. I did help with his school fees. A maternal uncle of his, I have never been. Since he left for Rwanda, I have seen him a few times; the last of which he brought his fiancée for introduction,” Nagenda says.
He adds: “It is, however, true that from time-to-time he sent me e-mails about his life in Rwanda, latterly one or two about the Green Party. I must confess I have not taken his party very seriously. I dimly recall some years ago advising Habineza to stick to work and forget politics. He never struck me as a leader of men, as the saying went!”
“Funnily enough I was thinking of visiting Rwanda (where I was born in ‘38 when my parents were missionaries there). Oh well, another time perhaps.”
All the named people are alleged to be disgruntled members of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) providing finances and moral support to the Green Party. The yet-to-registered party has also denied any links to these people many times saying it only knows them like other Rwandans.
25 January 2010
A senior advisor to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has rubbished reports that he is backing the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda to overthrow President Paul Kagame’s government – a plot which purportedly includes senior Rwandan military and political officials, RNA reports.
Dr. John Nagenda says the reports published on December 23 on a new website www.256news.com and several other news websites and blogs are not true. He also distances himself from the top Rwandan military officers and politicians named. Dr. Nagenda also says he intended to visit Rwanda but no longer plans to do so.
According to the information which is also circulating around here, a leaked security brief addressed to President Kagame names several of his former and current close allies as planning to use the Green Party to topple his government.
Those named include: former African Union Commission Vice President Mr. Mazimpaka Patrick; former envoy to Japan Dr. Emile Rwamasirabo – now a doctor with the elite King Faisal hospital; Senator Colonel Dr. Joseph Karemera; Col. Deogene Mudenge – head of RURA; exiled former state minister Mr. Sam Nkunsi; and Police Commissioner General, Brig. Gen. Charles Gasana.
Others named are former Rwandan ambassador to Ethiopia Mr. Pascal Ngonga; troubled Dr. Maj. Ben Karenzi; vocal Senator Aloysia Inyumba; current envoy to India Maj. Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa; Brig. General Richard Rutatina; and other senior officers.
To date, none of them have come forward to say anything about the purported intelligence dossier and government has also not reacted to the rumors. The local papers UMUSESO (No. 386 of 14th to 21st December 2009) and UMUVUGIZI (Vol.66 of December 18th – 27th 2009) originally published the list.
Another allegation is that Dr. Nagenda is a long-time close friend to Mr. Charles Kabanda, who is the Green party's general secretary, and Major Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa. It is also claimed the Dr. Nagenda is an uncle to youthful Mr. Frank Habineza – the head of the Green Party.
About the dossier, Dr. Nagenda writes, “My first and abiding sentiment was one of total incredulity. How preposterous a notion!”
Writing in the Ugandan newspaper New Vision (which is a public company but partly owned by government), Dr. Nagenda says he met General Nyamwasa only once.
“As for Kabanda, his name doesn’t ring a bell, although I might have talked to him without remembering the name. It was all a long time ago, and in another country,” writes Nagenda.
“Frank Habineza I know, he worked in my house at Namutamba on our estate, perhaps 20 years ago. I did help with his school fees. A maternal uncle of his, I have never been. Since he left for Rwanda, I have seen him a few times; the last of which he brought his fiancée for introduction,” Nagenda says.
He adds: “It is, however, true that from time-to-time he sent me e-mails about his life in Rwanda, latterly one or two about the Green Party. I must confess I have not taken his party very seriously. I dimly recall some years ago advising Habineza to stick to work and forget politics. He never struck me as a leader of men, as the saying went!”
“Funnily enough I was thinking of visiting Rwanda (where I was born in ‘38 when my parents were missionaries there). Oh well, another time perhaps.”
All the named people are alleged to be disgruntled members of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) providing finances and moral support to the Green Party. The yet-to-registered party has also denied any links to these people many times saying it only knows them like other Rwandans.
UNAMIR's Col. Luc Marchal Refutes the Mutsinzi Report.
A PDF of the document (en francais) can be found at the link below.
http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/2/93/44/38/Analysse_du_rapport_Mutsinzi_Marchal.pdf
http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/2/93/44/38/Analysse_du_rapport_Mutsinzi_Marchal.pdf
29 January, 2010
The Family of late President Habyarimana's Personal Doctor to Sue Rwanda’s The New Times for Defamation.
256 News
29 January 2010
By Godwin Agaba
The family of the late Dr. Emmanuel Akingeneye has threatened to sue The New Times, a mouthpiece newspaper of the ruling RPF party, 256news.com has
learnt.
Dr. Akingeneye was the personal physician of late Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana. The two men were killed together in the 1994 attack on the presidential plane at Kanombe airport in Kigali on April 6, 1994.
The family of Dr. Akingeneye is to sue The New Times, arguing that a
commentary the paper published in Issue No. 2025 of 28th January 2010
claiming that Dusabe Therese, the mother of Rwandan opposition presidential aspirant, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was Dr. Akingeneye’s concubine.
According to The New Times, the Gacaca court of Butamwa has already
sentenced Ms Dusabe Therese in absentia to life imprisonment for her
role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
According to The New Times, Dr. Akingeneye fathered Ingabire
Victoire’s young sister, Uwineza, Regine who later married an Ex-FAR
Captain. The same commentary alleged that Mrs. Ingabire was
able to get employment in the Finance Ministry (Customs Department)
through the influence of Dr. Akingeneye.
The commentary titled “Ms. Ingabire Victoire, an ardent advocate for
racial politics, now resorts to the victimization card,” by Felix
Muheto, was intended to give a background to Mrs. Ingabire.
A daughter of Dr. Akingeneye and a family lawyer called 256news.com last
night and informed it that the lawyer is travelling to Rwanda
next week to sue The New Times for allegedly defaming their deceased father.
“This is a totally false story. Our family has no relation whatsoever
with Ingabire and we don’t know her. The story was only intended to
tarnish the reputation of the family. That’s why we want the author to
provide evidence in court to support his allegations,” said Dr.
Akingeneye’s daughter who spoke on behalf of the family over the phone
from Brussels.
The case is expected to raise temperature in Rwanda since it is the first time the official government mouthpiece is sued for defamation.
29 January 2010
By Godwin Agaba
The family of the late Dr. Emmanuel Akingeneye has threatened to sue The New Times, a mouthpiece newspaper of the ruling RPF party, 256news.com has
learnt.
Dr. Akingeneye was the personal physician of late Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana. The two men were killed together in the 1994 attack on the presidential plane at Kanombe airport in Kigali on April 6, 1994.
The family of Dr. Akingeneye is to sue The New Times, arguing that a
commentary the paper published in Issue No. 2025 of 28th January 2010
claiming that Dusabe Therese, the mother of Rwandan opposition presidential aspirant, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was Dr. Akingeneye’s concubine.
According to The New Times, the Gacaca court of Butamwa has already
sentenced Ms Dusabe Therese in absentia to life imprisonment for her
role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
According to The New Times, Dr. Akingeneye fathered Ingabire
Victoire’s young sister, Uwineza, Regine who later married an Ex-FAR
Captain. The same commentary alleged that Mrs. Ingabire was
able to get employment in the Finance Ministry (Customs Department)
through the influence of Dr. Akingeneye.
The commentary titled “Ms. Ingabire Victoire, an ardent advocate for
racial politics, now resorts to the victimization card,” by Felix
Muheto, was intended to give a background to Mrs. Ingabire.
A daughter of Dr. Akingeneye and a family lawyer called 256news.com last
night and informed it that the lawyer is travelling to Rwanda
next week to sue The New Times for allegedly defaming their deceased father.
“This is a totally false story. Our family has no relation whatsoever
with Ingabire and we don’t know her. The story was only intended to
tarnish the reputation of the family. That’s why we want the author to
provide evidence in court to support his allegations,” said Dr.
Akingeneye’s daughter who spoke on behalf of the family over the phone
from Brussels.
The case is expected to raise temperature in Rwanda since it is the first time the official government mouthpiece is sued for defamation.
Beyond the Praise for President Paul Kagame.
Pulse
29 January 2010
By Andrew Oxford
Rwandan Tutsi leader turned President Paul Kagame is a popular man in the West. And why not? In his ten years in office he has lead his war-ravaged nation through a period of unprecedented economic growth which has turned Rwanda into a playground for foreign investors. At the same time, he emphasizes self-reliance and efficient government while supporting populist spending programs that could make Rwanda the only African nation to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals (not that he is a fan of the UN, which he frequently criticizes for its response to the 1994 civil war). His administration in Kigali has admittedly wracked up a deficit that would ordinarily draw frowns from World Bank bureaucrats but in the case of Rwanda, the organization that usually demands drastic budget cuts is underwriting a litany of government programs. It helps that some of Kagame’s greatest admirers are Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz (1). American evangelist Rick Warren (2) considers him something of an inspiration and even Bill Gates has invested in what has been called Africa’s success story. Yes, Western liberals, reactionary evangelicals, and capitalist carpetbaggers alike tout Paul Kagame as the herald of a new, self-reliant African prosperity.
Of course, nothing in Rwanda is ever so clear cut. Kagame’s regime has benefited from more than its fair share of political repression. This prompted his challenger in the 2003 election, Faustin Twagiramungu, to denounce the poll citing harassment and restrictions that inhibited any effective campaign efforts (3). An earlier opponent, Pasteur Bizimungu (who Kagame replaced as Prime Minister) attempted to form a party at the beginning of the last decade which was promptly banned. What’s more, the formation of new groups is often hampered by Kigali authorities. Reporters Without Borders has also expressed concern at the restrictions on the press which have included the shuttering of critical newspapers and new fees for launching media outlets (4). Even The Economist took exception with his heavy-handed domestic policies and accused the new hero of Clinton and Blair as being more repressive than Robert Mugabe (5).
Most alarming is the integral roll that Kigali has played in the Second Congolese War (6) which has claimed upward of three million lives. The Rwandan government has been lending significant support to rebels within the Congo, especially in the mineral-rich north. There, the objective is widely considered to be securing the valuable resources of the region which have been trafficked through Rwanda during the conflict. While some press attention has been given to the horrendous plight of women in the area and the massive and mounting casualty figures, little connection seems to be drawn between Kagame and his complicit fans in Europe and North America.
Kagame, however, maintains innocence. While never outright denying his support for murderous combatants in the Congo or his imposition of restrictive policies on journalists, he counters that his critics are merely stoking ethnic divisions. That, of course, is a serious charge in Rwanda. It is also a strange one coming from a man who boasts that he has put the past behind him. Not far enough, as it would turn out, to trust the democratic process with criticisms or challenges. Nor far enough to shut down the parasitic black-market trafficking of minerals and resources — reminiscent of the lecherous European occupations of other centuries — that have enriched some foreign and local entrepreneurs while leaving little more than funeral bills for the Congolese (7).
There are bigger issues at play in Rwanda and the DRC than this one man but what is remarkable about Paul Kagame is the support he has received from both conservatives and liberals in the West. It is no surprise that foreign investors have so embraced a man who is willing to put aside the rule of law or the mandate of the ballot. What is surprising is how quiet the left has been in challenging the blatantly backward praise Kagame has so vocally received while stoking one of the most tragic and violent conflicts of the present day and rolling out plans to sell his nation to the highest bidders. It is time to connect the dots in Africa.
NOTES
(1) “Rwanda Rising: A New Model of Economic Development.” Fast Company, Wednesday, March 18, 2009. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/special-report-rwanda-rising.html
(2) This comes on the heels of reports that Rick Warren and his reactionary cohorts where involved with neighboring Uganda’s efforts to execute homosexuals. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/rick-warren-silent-enabler-of-hatred.html
(3) This BBC report is from the end of the election when Faustin Twagiramungu called on Kagame to “accept freedom of speech and association and also to accept democracy.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3104092.stm
(4) Reporters Without Borders profile of Paul Kagame (http://www.rsf.org/en-predateur13640-Paul_Kagame_.html) and also a brief report on the issue of fees for free press (http://www.rsf.org/Government-to-demand-exorbitant.html).
(5) “A Flawed Hero”, The Economist, August 21, 2008
(6) The New York Review of Books printed an extensive article on the matter by Howard W. French in their September 24, 2009 issue (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23054). The UN has also issued annual reports on the Second Congo War every year which allude to the influence Kagame has played in the conflict.
(7) “Looted Wealth Fuels Congo Conflict”, Financial Times, November 30, 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8ae76ab0-dde6-11de-b8e2-00144feabdc0.html
29 January 2010
By Andrew Oxford
Rwandan Tutsi leader turned President Paul Kagame is a popular man in the West. And why not? In his ten years in office he has lead his war-ravaged nation through a period of unprecedented economic growth which has turned Rwanda into a playground for foreign investors. At the same time, he emphasizes self-reliance and efficient government while supporting populist spending programs that could make Rwanda the only African nation to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals (not that he is a fan of the UN, which he frequently criticizes for its response to the 1994 civil war). His administration in Kigali has admittedly wracked up a deficit that would ordinarily draw frowns from World Bank bureaucrats but in the case of Rwanda, the organization that usually demands drastic budget cuts is underwriting a litany of government programs. It helps that some of Kagame’s greatest admirers are Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz (1). American evangelist Rick Warren (2) considers him something of an inspiration and even Bill Gates has invested in what has been called Africa’s success story. Yes, Western liberals, reactionary evangelicals, and capitalist carpetbaggers alike tout Paul Kagame as the herald of a new, self-reliant African prosperity.
Of course, nothing in Rwanda is ever so clear cut. Kagame’s regime has benefited from more than its fair share of political repression. This prompted his challenger in the 2003 election, Faustin Twagiramungu, to denounce the poll citing harassment and restrictions that inhibited any effective campaign efforts (3). An earlier opponent, Pasteur Bizimungu (who Kagame replaced as Prime Minister) attempted to form a party at the beginning of the last decade which was promptly banned. What’s more, the formation of new groups is often hampered by Kigali authorities. Reporters Without Borders has also expressed concern at the restrictions on the press which have included the shuttering of critical newspapers and new fees for launching media outlets (4). Even The Economist took exception with his heavy-handed domestic policies and accused the new hero of Clinton and Blair as being more repressive than Robert Mugabe (5).
Most alarming is the integral roll that Kigali has played in the Second Congolese War (6) which has claimed upward of three million lives. The Rwandan government has been lending significant support to rebels within the Congo, especially in the mineral-rich north. There, the objective is widely considered to be securing the valuable resources of the region which have been trafficked through Rwanda during the conflict. While some press attention has been given to the horrendous plight of women in the area and the massive and mounting casualty figures, little connection seems to be drawn between Kagame and his complicit fans in Europe and North America.
Kagame, however, maintains innocence. While never outright denying his support for murderous combatants in the Congo or his imposition of restrictive policies on journalists, he counters that his critics are merely stoking ethnic divisions. That, of course, is a serious charge in Rwanda. It is also a strange one coming from a man who boasts that he has put the past behind him. Not far enough, as it would turn out, to trust the democratic process with criticisms or challenges. Nor far enough to shut down the parasitic black-market trafficking of minerals and resources — reminiscent of the lecherous European occupations of other centuries — that have enriched some foreign and local entrepreneurs while leaving little more than funeral bills for the Congolese (7).
There are bigger issues at play in Rwanda and the DRC than this one man but what is remarkable about Paul Kagame is the support he has received from both conservatives and liberals in the West. It is no surprise that foreign investors have so embraced a man who is willing to put aside the rule of law or the mandate of the ballot. What is surprising is how quiet the left has been in challenging the blatantly backward praise Kagame has so vocally received while stoking one of the most tragic and violent conflicts of the present day and rolling out plans to sell his nation to the highest bidders. It is time to connect the dots in Africa.
NOTES
(1) “Rwanda Rising: A New Model of Economic Development.” Fast Company, Wednesday, March 18, 2009. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/special-report-rwanda-rising.html
(2) This comes on the heels of reports that Rick Warren and his reactionary cohorts where involved with neighboring Uganda’s efforts to execute homosexuals. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/rick-warren-silent-enabler-of-hatred.html
(3) This BBC report is from the end of the election when Faustin Twagiramungu called on Kagame to “accept freedom of speech and association and also to accept democracy.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3104092.stm
(4) Reporters Without Borders profile of Paul Kagame (http://www.rsf.org/en-predateur13640-Paul_Kagame_.html) and also a brief report on the issue of fees for free press (http://www.rsf.org/Government-to-demand-exorbitant.html).
(5) “A Flawed Hero”, The Economist, August 21, 2008
(6) The New York Review of Books printed an extensive article on the matter by Howard W. French in their September 24, 2009 issue (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23054). The UN has also issued annual reports on the Second Congo War every year which allude to the influence Kagame has played in the conflict.
(7) “Looted Wealth Fuels Congo Conflict”, Financial Times, November 30, 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8ae76ab0-dde6-11de-b8e2-00144feabdc0.html
France's Total seeks stake in Uganda oil.
The New Vision
28 January 2010
By Ibrahim Kasita
Total, a French oil company, has confirmed its interest to join the Uganda oil and gas industry.
Thierry Desmarest, Total’s board chairman, said on Bloomberg Television that they would be interested in working on a project in Uganda with Tullow.
“We have indicated that it could be interesting, but of course as usual, there is competition. To my knowledge, nothing has been signed,” he said yesterday.
Total and China National Offshore Oil Corporation are the top bidders likely to team up with Tullow, Paul McDade, Tullow’s chief operations manager, told The New Vision on Wednesday.
The two potential partners are due to make presentations to the Uganda Government in the next few weeks, he added. The Government has to approve any new entrant.
The Total boss considered the Ugandan project, which includes refining the oil in Uganda, economically viable.
Crude oil prices in the region of $70 to $80 a barrel are ‘‘really convenient,’’ Desmarest said.
“In terms of costs of imports for oil-consuming countries, it would be sustainable and for foreign producers, it would justify continuing to invest.’’
He believes that there will be an increase in the oil price in the mid-term.
Total is one of the six “Supermajor” oil companies in the world, operating in more than 130 countries.
Its businesses cover the entire oil and gas chain, from crude oil and natural gas exploration and production to power generation, transportation, refining, petroleum product marketing and trading.
28 January 2010
By Ibrahim Kasita
Total, a French oil company, has confirmed its interest to join the Uganda oil and gas industry.
Thierry Desmarest, Total’s board chairman, said on Bloomberg Television that they would be interested in working on a project in Uganda with Tullow.
“We have indicated that it could be interesting, but of course as usual, there is competition. To my knowledge, nothing has been signed,” he said yesterday.
Total and China National Offshore Oil Corporation are the top bidders likely to team up with Tullow, Paul McDade, Tullow’s chief operations manager, told The New Vision on Wednesday.
The two potential partners are due to make presentations to the Uganda Government in the next few weeks, he added. The Government has to approve any new entrant.
The Total boss considered the Ugandan project, which includes refining the oil in Uganda, economically viable.
Crude oil prices in the region of $70 to $80 a barrel are ‘‘really convenient,’’ Desmarest said.
“In terms of costs of imports for oil-consuming countries, it would be sustainable and for foreign producers, it would justify continuing to invest.’’
He believes that there will be an increase in the oil price in the mid-term.
Total is one of the six “Supermajor” oil companies in the world, operating in more than 130 countries.
Its businesses cover the entire oil and gas chain, from crude oil and natural gas exploration and production to power generation, transportation, refining, petroleum product marketing and trading.
Doubts on the veracity of Mutsinzi Report.
Pambazuka News
Letters - Issue 467
28 January 2010
By Dr. Rene Lemarchand
Anyone familiar with the basic provisions of the Arusha Accords of 18 August 1992 (which among other things describes the composition of the transitional institutions agreed upon by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) and the Habyalimana government) is impelled to call into question Gerald Caplan's credentials in commenting on the merits of the Mutsinzi report. I refer to the crisply titled ‘Report of the Investigation into the Causes and Circumstances and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/94 against the Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidential Aeroplance, Registration Number 9x9-NN’.
Dr Caplan writes ‘It's never been entirely clear what motive Kagame would have had for murdering Habyarimana at the very moment when the president intended to implement the Arusha Accords. The RPF had been the huge winner at Arusha, about to receive substantial political and military power. Conversely, Habyarimana's officials were the great losers.’
I read the implications of article 55 and 62 of the protocol on the sharing of power very differently. In the Broadly Based Transitional Government (BBTG) the FPR and the pro-Habyalimana MRN Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement (MRND) each get five portfolios, Hutu-dominated Mouvement Democratique Republicain (MDR) and Parti Social Democrate (PSD), respectively four and three, the pro-Tutsi but ethnically split Parti Liberal (PL), three and the Hutu-led Parti Democrate Chretien (PDC) one. Furthermore the MRND ended up with the key ministries, i.e. Defense, Civil Service, Planning, whereas the FPR ended up with Interior, Health, Transport and Communication, Youth and Social Movements, Rehabilitation and Social Integration. With five ministerial chairs out of 21 it is hard to see how the FPR could be described as the big winner. So also with regard to its control of the armed forces, where the FPR ended up controlling 40 per cent of the troops and 50 per cent of higher ranks.
In the Transitional Assembly the FPR, MRND, MDR, PSD, PL each received 11 seats, and the PDC four. Which in effect made it impossible for the FPR to block a piece of legislation, much less an amendment to the Arusha charter.
Crucially, Article 22 of the final protocol, dealing with ‘diverse questions and final disposition’, stipulates that the transition will last 22 months after the inauguration of the BBTG, only to be prolonged after a three-fifths majority of the Assembly. At the end of the transitional period multiparty elections were to be held, which in all likelihood would have given the Hutu parties an overwhelming majority.
Is this what Gerald Caplan calls the FPR's ‘huge victory’ at Arusha?
I beg to differ. I also disagree that it was ‘extremely functional’ for Hutu extremists to shoot down Habyarimana's plane unless he means that killing some of the key members of the Akazu, including the Chief of Staff, was to the advantage of Hutu extremists. His logic evades my grasp.
I have yet to read the Mutsinzi report from beginning to end, but, pending a more sustained exploration, the misinformation conveyed by Dr Gerald Caplan is enough to cast the strongest doubts on its veracity.
* René Lemarchand is emeritus professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The evidence points in one direction only
Pambakuza News
by Gerald Caplan
2010-01-28, Issue 467
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/61832
Gerald Caplan responds to Professor René Lemarchand's criticism of his article on the Mutsinzi Report into the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana in 1994.
Professor Lemarchand is the doyen of the historians of Rwanda and Burundi, and we are all in his debt for his pioneering work.
But in recent years he has been arguing, to the surprise of many of his admirers, that the evidence was leading him to believe that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had attacked Habyarimana's plane.
Now I'm equally surprised that he would launch this criticism of me without having read the full Mutsinzi Report. If he had done so, he would have found, among other things, testimony from an abundance of eyewitnesses that leading Hutu extremists hated the Arusha Accords, were determined they never be implemented, and were ready to kill the president if he softened on this issue. Which is exactly what happened after Habyarimana formally declared on 2 April that he intended in six days to swear in the new broadly-based transitional government agreed at Arusha.
Many in the military were especially vexed by the key Arusha article that Professor Lemarchand himself describes in his letter: ‘with regard to its control of the armed forces... the FPR ended up controlling 40 per cent of the troops and 50 per cent of higher ranks.’ As the report of the OAU-appointed International Panel of Eminent Personalities stated: ‘On the all-important question of military strength, the accords seemed a complete capitulation by the government team to the RPF. The two parties agreed to integrate the two armies [Habyarimana's FAR 35,000, the RPF's 20,000] into a single force of 19,000. 60 per cent were to be FAR, 40 per cent RPF. The officer corps were to be split 50-50. This meant that more than 2/3 of FAR troops faced demobilisation’ and fully half its officers would lose their positions.
The report continues: ‘No one in the [Habyarimana] army, whether hardliners or not, would ever accept such a move. Indeed, the government's military advisers in Arusha made their disdain for the agreement abundantly clear at the time, and observers had little doubt they would do all in their power to prevent its implementation.’ I was present when a senior Tanzanian officer who had monitored the Arusha negotiations told the International Panel that FAR officers made little attempt to disguise their determination that the agreement would never be implemented. The RPF, by contrast, seemed quite satisfied with the outcome. After all, many in the two opposing camps saw everything in black-and-white ethnic/racial terms. From this perspective, the Tutsi, some 10-15 per cent of the population, had pulled off a gigantic coup. Hutu extremists were only too aware of this remarkable and unacceptable development.
Professor Lemarchand wonders why some key extremist Hutu leaders were on the plane when it went down, if their own fellow plotters were responsible. I asked the same sensible question myself in my analysis. If they knew the plane was to be attacked, why did they make the trip at all? I have no good answer. It's not implausible that the attackers considered giving up the lives of a few colleagues a small price to pay for getting rid of the president. As for the unlucky victims, perhaps they thought the plane wouldn't be attacked with them on it, and perhaps they had no alternative but to board if the president ordered them to. Had they demurred, they would have given the plot away. But this is mere speculation, and I criticised the Mutsinzi commission for not addressing this question.
Finally, as Professor Lemarchand will find when he actually reads the report, and as I stressed in my Pambazuka analysis, the commission treated their mandate as a typical criminal investigation. Who most plausibly had the motive, the opportunity and the means to attack the president's plane? Whose behaviour showed unusual, suspicious patterns? Whatever questions linger, such as why extremist leaders were aboard the doomed flight, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence points in one direction only. It was not towards the RPF.
* Gerald Caplan has a PhD in African history. He recently published The Betrayal of Africa.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rwandans Deserve Better Than This
Pambazuka News
2010-01-28, Issue 467
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/61831
Given Rwanda's history of the elite manipulation of the past for political
gain, Gerald Caplan's analysis of the Mutsinzi Report is dangerous and thoughtless, writes Susan Thomson.
It remains shocking to me that reports like Dr Caplan's are given such priority in respected publications. This is the type of incendiary reporting that characterises the Rwanda socio-political landscape. Much of what Caplan writes is unbalanced in favour of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and is a dangerous thing as the RPF tightens its grip on political life in Rwanda in advance of the August 2010 presidential elections.
The Mutsinzi Report raises as many questions as it claims to resolve. Caplan supports the independence of the report without remarking on the one-sideness of the available evidence. As an academic, this is abhorrent. Good critical research is contextually situated and historically balanced. Instead, Caplan treats as solid the evidence ‘proving’ the complicity of Hutu extremists with little regard for any written or oral evidence pointing in the direction of the RPF.
Knowing that the political situation in Rwanda is tense, and the free speech is virtually non-existent, it is difficult to accept wholesale the testimony of the hundreds of witnesses. Note the RPF's silencing of Joshua Ruzibiza, the man who claims to have affected Kagame's order to shoot down the plane. He was harassed and threatened into submission in late 2008. His recanting is available on YouTube. His book is titled, "Rwanda: L’histoire secrète," and was published in 2005 by Editions du Panama.
Of identified informants, at least two dozen are members of the former government army, were interviewed under extreme pressure in the presence of RPF officials, in full awareness of what they were expected to say, and of the price to be paid if they did not. The validity of the narratives gathered by the report needs to be considered by any serious academic.
The Mutsinzi Report sets up a straw man and then proceeds to attack Hutu extremists. This is exact same tactic that was used by those in power before the genocide to argue for its implementation! Caplan is but fodder in this debate that presents half-truths as facts and fails to substantiate any of its claims.
Given Rwanda's history of the elite manipulation of the past for political
gain, Caplan's analysis is dangerous and thoughtless. Rwandans deserve
better than this.
* Susan Thomson is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa.
Letters - Issue 467
28 January 2010
By Dr. Rene Lemarchand
Anyone familiar with the basic provisions of the Arusha Accords of 18 August 1992 (which among other things describes the composition of the transitional institutions agreed upon by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) and the Habyalimana government) is impelled to call into question Gerald Caplan's credentials in commenting on the merits of the Mutsinzi report. I refer to the crisply titled ‘Report of the Investigation into the Causes and Circumstances and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/94 against the Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidential Aeroplance, Registration Number 9x9-NN’.
Dr Caplan writes ‘It's never been entirely clear what motive Kagame would have had for murdering Habyarimana at the very moment when the president intended to implement the Arusha Accords. The RPF had been the huge winner at Arusha, about to receive substantial political and military power. Conversely, Habyarimana's officials were the great losers.’
I read the implications of article 55 and 62 of the protocol on the sharing of power very differently. In the Broadly Based Transitional Government (BBTG) the FPR and the pro-Habyalimana MRN Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement (MRND) each get five portfolios, Hutu-dominated Mouvement Democratique Republicain (MDR) and Parti Social Democrate (PSD), respectively four and three, the pro-Tutsi but ethnically split Parti Liberal (PL), three and the Hutu-led Parti Democrate Chretien (PDC) one. Furthermore the MRND ended up with the key ministries, i.e. Defense, Civil Service, Planning, whereas the FPR ended up with Interior, Health, Transport and Communication, Youth and Social Movements, Rehabilitation and Social Integration. With five ministerial chairs out of 21 it is hard to see how the FPR could be described as the big winner. So also with regard to its control of the armed forces, where the FPR ended up controlling 40 per cent of the troops and 50 per cent of higher ranks.
In the Transitional Assembly the FPR, MRND, MDR, PSD, PL each received 11 seats, and the PDC four. Which in effect made it impossible for the FPR to block a piece of legislation, much less an amendment to the Arusha charter.
Crucially, Article 22 of the final protocol, dealing with ‘diverse questions and final disposition’, stipulates that the transition will last 22 months after the inauguration of the BBTG, only to be prolonged after a three-fifths majority of the Assembly. At the end of the transitional period multiparty elections were to be held, which in all likelihood would have given the Hutu parties an overwhelming majority.
Is this what Gerald Caplan calls the FPR's ‘huge victory’ at Arusha?
I beg to differ. I also disagree that it was ‘extremely functional’ for Hutu extremists to shoot down Habyarimana's plane unless he means that killing some of the key members of the Akazu, including the Chief of Staff, was to the advantage of Hutu extremists. His logic evades my grasp.
I have yet to read the Mutsinzi report from beginning to end, but, pending a more sustained exploration, the misinformation conveyed by Dr Gerald Caplan is enough to cast the strongest doubts on its veracity.
* René Lemarchand is emeritus professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The evidence points in one direction only
Pambakuza News
by Gerald Caplan
2010-01-28, Issue 467
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/61832
Gerald Caplan responds to Professor René Lemarchand's criticism of his article on the Mutsinzi Report into the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana in 1994.
Professor Lemarchand is the doyen of the historians of Rwanda and Burundi, and we are all in his debt for his pioneering work.
But in recent years he has been arguing, to the surprise of many of his admirers, that the evidence was leading him to believe that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had attacked Habyarimana's plane.
Now I'm equally surprised that he would launch this criticism of me without having read the full Mutsinzi Report. If he had done so, he would have found, among other things, testimony from an abundance of eyewitnesses that leading Hutu extremists hated the Arusha Accords, were determined they never be implemented, and were ready to kill the president if he softened on this issue. Which is exactly what happened after Habyarimana formally declared on 2 April that he intended in six days to swear in the new broadly-based transitional government agreed at Arusha.
Many in the military were especially vexed by the key Arusha article that Professor Lemarchand himself describes in his letter: ‘with regard to its control of the armed forces... the FPR ended up controlling 40 per cent of the troops and 50 per cent of higher ranks.’ As the report of the OAU-appointed International Panel of Eminent Personalities stated: ‘On the all-important question of military strength, the accords seemed a complete capitulation by the government team to the RPF. The two parties agreed to integrate the two armies [Habyarimana's FAR 35,000, the RPF's 20,000] into a single force of 19,000. 60 per cent were to be FAR, 40 per cent RPF. The officer corps were to be split 50-50. This meant that more than 2/3 of FAR troops faced demobilisation’ and fully half its officers would lose their positions.
The report continues: ‘No one in the [Habyarimana] army, whether hardliners or not, would ever accept such a move. Indeed, the government's military advisers in Arusha made their disdain for the agreement abundantly clear at the time, and observers had little doubt they would do all in their power to prevent its implementation.’ I was present when a senior Tanzanian officer who had monitored the Arusha negotiations told the International Panel that FAR officers made little attempt to disguise their determination that the agreement would never be implemented. The RPF, by contrast, seemed quite satisfied with the outcome. After all, many in the two opposing camps saw everything in black-and-white ethnic/racial terms. From this perspective, the Tutsi, some 10-15 per cent of the population, had pulled off a gigantic coup. Hutu extremists were only too aware of this remarkable and unacceptable development.
Professor Lemarchand wonders why some key extremist Hutu leaders were on the plane when it went down, if their own fellow plotters were responsible. I asked the same sensible question myself in my analysis. If they knew the plane was to be attacked, why did they make the trip at all? I have no good answer. It's not implausible that the attackers considered giving up the lives of a few colleagues a small price to pay for getting rid of the president. As for the unlucky victims, perhaps they thought the plane wouldn't be attacked with them on it, and perhaps they had no alternative but to board if the president ordered them to. Had they demurred, they would have given the plot away. But this is mere speculation, and I criticised the Mutsinzi commission for not addressing this question.
Finally, as Professor Lemarchand will find when he actually reads the report, and as I stressed in my Pambazuka analysis, the commission treated their mandate as a typical criminal investigation. Who most plausibly had the motive, the opportunity and the means to attack the president's plane? Whose behaviour showed unusual, suspicious patterns? Whatever questions linger, such as why extremist leaders were aboard the doomed flight, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence points in one direction only. It was not towards the RPF.
* Gerald Caplan has a PhD in African history. He recently published The Betrayal of Africa.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rwandans Deserve Better Than This
Pambazuka News
2010-01-28, Issue 467
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/61831
Given Rwanda's history of the elite manipulation of the past for political
gain, Gerald Caplan's analysis of the Mutsinzi Report is dangerous and thoughtless, writes Susan Thomson.
It remains shocking to me that reports like Dr Caplan's are given such priority in respected publications. This is the type of incendiary reporting that characterises the Rwanda socio-political landscape. Much of what Caplan writes is unbalanced in favour of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and is a dangerous thing as the RPF tightens its grip on political life in Rwanda in advance of the August 2010 presidential elections.
The Mutsinzi Report raises as many questions as it claims to resolve. Caplan supports the independence of the report without remarking on the one-sideness of the available evidence. As an academic, this is abhorrent. Good critical research is contextually situated and historically balanced. Instead, Caplan treats as solid the evidence ‘proving’ the complicity of Hutu extremists with little regard for any written or oral evidence pointing in the direction of the RPF.
Knowing that the political situation in Rwanda is tense, and the free speech is virtually non-existent, it is difficult to accept wholesale the testimony of the hundreds of witnesses. Note the RPF's silencing of Joshua Ruzibiza, the man who claims to have affected Kagame's order to shoot down the plane. He was harassed and threatened into submission in late 2008. His recanting is available on YouTube. His book is titled, "Rwanda: L’histoire secrète," and was published in 2005 by Editions du Panama.
Of identified informants, at least two dozen are members of the former government army, were interviewed under extreme pressure in the presence of RPF officials, in full awareness of what they were expected to say, and of the price to be paid if they did not. The validity of the narratives gathered by the report needs to be considered by any serious academic.
The Mutsinzi Report sets up a straw man and then proceeds to attack Hutu extremists. This is exact same tactic that was used by those in power before the genocide to argue for its implementation! Caplan is but fodder in this debate that presents half-truths as facts and fails to substantiate any of its claims.
Given Rwanda's history of the elite manipulation of the past for political
gain, Caplan's analysis is dangerous and thoughtless. Rwandans deserve
better than this.
* Susan Thomson is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa.
The Habyarimana Family categorically rejects the Mutsinzi Report.
Communiqué from the family of the late Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana concerning the recently issued Rwandan Report by “the Committee of Independent Experts” on the terrorist attack of 6 April 1994.
Following the release of the “Mutsinzi Report” on the 6 April 1994 attack which took the lives of 12 fathers from Rwanda, Burundi and France*; we, the family of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, feel an obligation to warn the public of the attempted manipulations of and diversions from the reality of this terrorist act that took our father from us. We want first of all to impeach the objectivity of this “Independent Committee of Experts,” whose use of the word ‘independent’ is a mere embellishment for its desperate need to get across. Everyone knows that Mr. Jean Mutsinzi, head of the Commission, is a founding member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF, currently holding state power) and the former Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court, also under the same RPF regime. His proximity to Paul Kagame is even better known and we do not expect that this Commission he leads is going to cast any suspicion on the party of which he is a founding member or on his colleagues and comrades-in-arms, including President Kagame, himself, though they have been found, by international judicial investigations, to be the instigators and commanders of this attack.
We wish to draw the public’s attention to the fact that besides the dubious independence of this Rwandan Commission, it was only conceived in April 2007 and set up by the Rwandan government in November 2007 to begin its work in December of that year, or nearly 14 years after the fact. This is incontrovertible evidence of the indifference of the Rwandan government, since the RPF came to power, on the subject of finding the truth behind this terrorist act. This indifference was even confirmed by Paul Kagame, himself, at the end of 2006 when he stated on the international airwaves (on the BBC’s Hard Talk and on RF1) that he is not at all interested in clearing up the death of President Habyarimana; he said he could not care less about it.
The authorities in Kigali claim to have written to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) demanding the establishment of an international commission of inquiry and that their demand was never followed up on. We can just imagine the insistence with which the RPF administration must have made this demand! We believe that if the Kigali government had really wanted an international inquiry, that inquiry would have taken place and Paul Kagame would not be talking about how such an investigation into the death of President Habyarimana did not interest him at all. Moreover, out of respect for the Burundian people, whose president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, also died in the attack and, therefore, on Rwandan soil, this same government would normally have had to recognize its duty to see that such an international investigation were initiated.
It is well known that the Rwandan genocide was triggered by the 6 April 1994 attack. For 15 years, Paul Kagame and his forces have been unwilling to shed any light on this terrorist act, without which Rwanda and, doubtlessly, the whole of the Great Lakes region would never have descended into chaos. This paralysis due to the indifference of the Rwandan government has shown that the RPF wants to avoid, at all costs, that its responsibility in the genocide be revealed in any definitive way. Since 1998, a French anti-terrorist court has been investigating this attack. Contrary to what is stated in the Mutsinzi Report and by those who would deny the truth, the French investigation was begun in response to a complaint filed by one of the families of a French victim in the attack and not ordered by the French authorities. The independence, objectivity and professionalism with which the French judiciary led this investigation could only be questioned by those who were directly involved in this attack or those who want the history of the Rwandan genocide to continue as a perversion of reality. The French investigation, in which we took part as plaintiffs, is to this day the only credible judicial investigation into this attack. To ridicule and minimize more than 11 years of work by men and women who specialize in such investigations, and the struggle against international terrorism, would be an insult to the victims as well as to the justice after which we all strive.
We must remember that the French judges were not the only ones to have demonstrated and substantiated the involvement of Paul Kagame and the RPF in this attack. Well before the French, Mr. Michael Hourigan, an Australian investigator assigned to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), filed a report in May 1997 with the UN and the ICTR. This report clearly assigned responsibility for, and named Paul Kagame and the RPF as the authors of, the 6 April 1994 attack. As soon as the new rulers of Kigali were found to be responsible, Hourigan and his team were ordered to halt their investigation.
After years spent in charge of the investigations of the ICTR and feeling the impossibility of getting to the truth while charging only Hutus, Mme Carla Del Ponte revealed her desire to investigate the crimes committed by the RPF. She was especially interested in shedding light on the attack of 6 April 1994 and aligned herself with those who believed that this attack fell within the mandate of the ICTR. She said: “If it turns out the RPF was behind this attack, the whole history of the genocide would have to be rewritten.” This expressed intention to bring justice for all the victims cost her her job as Chief Prosecutor at the ICTR after pressure from Paul Kagame was applied to the UN.
The Spanish justice system, which also investigated the genocidal crimes committed in Rwanda and the DRC, likewise designated Paul Kagame and the RPF as the instigators of this attack. The Mutsinzi Report assigns responsibility for the attack to the government forces at that time (ex-FAR), particularly to superior officers [Col. Théoneste] Bagosora, [Major Aloys] Ntabakuze and [Lt-Col. Anatole] Nsengiyumva. These officers were being prosecuted at the ICTR and are being held in Arusha. It must be noted that throughout their trial, these officers diligently demanded that the ICTR open an investigation into the assassination of the Rwanda head of state so that the responsibility for the genocide could be brought to light. Their conscientiousness was never respected!
We wondered, therefore, how people already being tried for genocide and after fighting for years to prove their innocence, could put the rope around their own necks by demanding that the ICTR investigate a crime that they, themselves, were alleged to have committed? We believe that if these officers had actually been responsible for this terrorist act, the event that triggered such a monstrous tragedy, the ICTR would immediately have taken up the case.
The number of witnesses heard by the Mutsinzi Commission (557 of them) does not give any credibility to its conclusions. Any informed person knows that Rwanda is a country where personal freedoms are violated on a daily basis and disappearances have become banal. To have a difference of opinion or to point a finger is enough to wind one up in prison or dead. The International Organizations in Defense of Human Rights that never cease to challenge the RPF regime can testify to this. Under these conditions, how can we ignore the pressure and fear that these different witnesses, ex-FAR for the most part, suffered through to give testimony clearing the RPF and incriminating their brothers in arms?
We also must recall that within our family there are two direct witnesses to the attack who were at our home in Kanombe at the time it took place. They are both absolutely positive: The missiles were fired from the hill in Masaka (or from the valley next to it). These eye-witnesses were facing the hill in Masaka at the moment the presidential plane was making its final approach, and Camp Kanombe was to their right and just behind them. Obviously, neither one was interviewed by the Mutsinzi Commission. So, unless the geography or topography of this part of Rwanda has changed since April 1994, the conclusions of the Mutsinzi Report on this subject are nothing but brazen lies.
The Mutsinzi Report produces as evidence some photographs of the wreckage of the president’s plane, photos taken by one of the president’s sons who was an eye-witness to the attack, and yet it does not include his testimony. We recall that this witness, Jean-Luc Habyarimana, gave his version of the facts while testifying before the “Bruguière” investigation and twice to the ICTR.
But what is completely unbearable for us is to have our mother accused of being responsible for the murder of her husband. The Mutsinzi Report indicates that at the end of March 1994, President Mobutu of Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of Congo) informed Mme Habyarimana of preparations for an attack on her husband and that she did not convey this information to the President despite the insistence of the Zairian president. Even if absurdity cannot kill, it is difficult to imagine anything more cynical. Did this Commission question Presidents Mobutu and Habyarimana before their deaths? Was this information unexpected by Mme Habyarimana? Why did President Mobutu choose to inform his Rwandan counterpart through his wife when he knew he would be meeting with President Habyarimana in Gbadolité on 4 April 1994?
Then the Report specifies that Mme Habyarimana confessed all this over the telephone to French President Mitterand on 6 April at 9:30 pm, when the French president called to express his condolences! Mme Habyarimana never spoke to President Mitterand that night.
Such baseness on the part of this Commission and its false witnesses can only reinforce the negative view we have of it.
To us, the conclusions of the Mutsinzi Report were known in advance because its authors could not stray from the mission, to whitewash the RPF and its chief, assigned them by the Rwandan government.
We will renew our confidence in French justice to shed light on this act of terrorism and continue to deplore the International Community’s foot-dragging on this issue, now 15 years down the road from the event.
Without a serious and credible elucidation of the attack of 6 April 1994, the Rwandan genocide will continue to be instrumentalized by those who have no interest in the truth’s ever being known. We take this opportunity to remind the International Community that it has a duty to aid all the victims in obtaining real justice. This will permit all the people of Rwanda to begin to work for the sort of remembrance that will bring them true reconciliation.
--Done in Paris, 25 January 2010--
For the family of Juvénal Habyarimana:
Léon Habyarimana
Bernard Habyarimana
Jean-Luc Habyarimana
Editor's Note: Mr. Jean-Luc Habyarimana and Jean-Marie Aimee Habyarimana's ICTR testimony in the trial of Protais Zigiranyirazo is available upon request at BarouD@Hush.com.
*********************
* List of the victims of the 6 April 1994 terrorist attack:
1. Major-General Juvénal HABYARIMANA, President of the Republic of Rwanda;
2. Mr. Cyprien NTARYAMIRA, President of the Republic of Burundi;
3. Mr. Bernard CIZA, Burundian Minister of Planning, Development and Reconstruction;
4. Mr. Cyriaque SIMBIZI, Burundian Minister of Communication and government spokesman;
5. Major-General Déogratias NSABIMANA, Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army;
6. Ambassador Juvénal RENZAHO, Diplomatic Adviser to the Rwandan President;
7. Colonel Elie SAGATWA, Personal Secretary and Chief of Security to the Rwandan President;
8. Doctor Emmanuel AKINGENEYE, Personal Physician to the Rwandan President;
9. Major Thaddée BAGARAGAZA, Aide de Camp to the Rwandan President and Second in Command of the Presidential Guard;
10. Major Jacky HERAUD, Pilot of the Presidential Falcon 50 aircraft;
11. Commander Jean-Pierre MINABERRY, Copilot of the Presidential plane;
12. Chief Adjutant Jean-Michel PERRINE, Navigator/Flight Engineer on the Presidential plane.
Following the release of the “Mutsinzi Report” on the 6 April 1994 attack which took the lives of 12 fathers from Rwanda, Burundi and France*; we, the family of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, feel an obligation to warn the public of the attempted manipulations of and diversions from the reality of this terrorist act that took our father from us. We want first of all to impeach the objectivity of this “Independent Committee of Experts,” whose use of the word ‘independent’ is a mere embellishment for its desperate need to get across. Everyone knows that Mr. Jean Mutsinzi, head of the Commission, is a founding member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF, currently holding state power) and the former Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court, also under the same RPF regime. His proximity to Paul Kagame is even better known and we do not expect that this Commission he leads is going to cast any suspicion on the party of which he is a founding member or on his colleagues and comrades-in-arms, including President Kagame, himself, though they have been found, by international judicial investigations, to be the instigators and commanders of this attack.
We wish to draw the public’s attention to the fact that besides the dubious independence of this Rwandan Commission, it was only conceived in April 2007 and set up by the Rwandan government in November 2007 to begin its work in December of that year, or nearly 14 years after the fact. This is incontrovertible evidence of the indifference of the Rwandan government, since the RPF came to power, on the subject of finding the truth behind this terrorist act. This indifference was even confirmed by Paul Kagame, himself, at the end of 2006 when he stated on the international airwaves (on the BBC’s Hard Talk and on RF1) that he is not at all interested in clearing up the death of President Habyarimana; he said he could not care less about it.
The authorities in Kigali claim to have written to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) demanding the establishment of an international commission of inquiry and that their demand was never followed up on. We can just imagine the insistence with which the RPF administration must have made this demand! We believe that if the Kigali government had really wanted an international inquiry, that inquiry would have taken place and Paul Kagame would not be talking about how such an investigation into the death of President Habyarimana did not interest him at all. Moreover, out of respect for the Burundian people, whose president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, also died in the attack and, therefore, on Rwandan soil, this same government would normally have had to recognize its duty to see that such an international investigation were initiated.
It is well known that the Rwandan genocide was triggered by the 6 April 1994 attack. For 15 years, Paul Kagame and his forces have been unwilling to shed any light on this terrorist act, without which Rwanda and, doubtlessly, the whole of the Great Lakes region would never have descended into chaos. This paralysis due to the indifference of the Rwandan government has shown that the RPF wants to avoid, at all costs, that its responsibility in the genocide be revealed in any definitive way. Since 1998, a French anti-terrorist court has been investigating this attack. Contrary to what is stated in the Mutsinzi Report and by those who would deny the truth, the French investigation was begun in response to a complaint filed by one of the families of a French victim in the attack and not ordered by the French authorities. The independence, objectivity and professionalism with which the French judiciary led this investigation could only be questioned by those who were directly involved in this attack or those who want the history of the Rwandan genocide to continue as a perversion of reality. The French investigation, in which we took part as plaintiffs, is to this day the only credible judicial investigation into this attack. To ridicule and minimize more than 11 years of work by men and women who specialize in such investigations, and the struggle against international terrorism, would be an insult to the victims as well as to the justice after which we all strive.
We must remember that the French judges were not the only ones to have demonstrated and substantiated the involvement of Paul Kagame and the RPF in this attack. Well before the French, Mr. Michael Hourigan, an Australian investigator assigned to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), filed a report in May 1997 with the UN and the ICTR. This report clearly assigned responsibility for, and named Paul Kagame and the RPF as the authors of, the 6 April 1994 attack. As soon as the new rulers of Kigali were found to be responsible, Hourigan and his team were ordered to halt their investigation.
After years spent in charge of the investigations of the ICTR and feeling the impossibility of getting to the truth while charging only Hutus, Mme Carla Del Ponte revealed her desire to investigate the crimes committed by the RPF. She was especially interested in shedding light on the attack of 6 April 1994 and aligned herself with those who believed that this attack fell within the mandate of the ICTR. She said: “If it turns out the RPF was behind this attack, the whole history of the genocide would have to be rewritten.” This expressed intention to bring justice for all the victims cost her her job as Chief Prosecutor at the ICTR after pressure from Paul Kagame was applied to the UN.
The Spanish justice system, which also investigated the genocidal crimes committed in Rwanda and the DRC, likewise designated Paul Kagame and the RPF as the instigators of this attack. The Mutsinzi Report assigns responsibility for the attack to the government forces at that time (ex-FAR), particularly to superior officers [Col. Théoneste] Bagosora, [Major Aloys] Ntabakuze and [Lt-Col. Anatole] Nsengiyumva. These officers were being prosecuted at the ICTR and are being held in Arusha. It must be noted that throughout their trial, these officers diligently demanded that the ICTR open an investigation into the assassination of the Rwanda head of state so that the responsibility for the genocide could be brought to light. Their conscientiousness was never respected!
We wondered, therefore, how people already being tried for genocide and after fighting for years to prove their innocence, could put the rope around their own necks by demanding that the ICTR investigate a crime that they, themselves, were alleged to have committed? We believe that if these officers had actually been responsible for this terrorist act, the event that triggered such a monstrous tragedy, the ICTR would immediately have taken up the case.
The number of witnesses heard by the Mutsinzi Commission (557 of them) does not give any credibility to its conclusions. Any informed person knows that Rwanda is a country where personal freedoms are violated on a daily basis and disappearances have become banal. To have a difference of opinion or to point a finger is enough to wind one up in prison or dead. The International Organizations in Defense of Human Rights that never cease to challenge the RPF regime can testify to this. Under these conditions, how can we ignore the pressure and fear that these different witnesses, ex-FAR for the most part, suffered through to give testimony clearing the RPF and incriminating their brothers in arms?
We also must recall that within our family there are two direct witnesses to the attack who were at our home in Kanombe at the time it took place. They are both absolutely positive: The missiles were fired from the hill in Masaka (or from the valley next to it). These eye-witnesses were facing the hill in Masaka at the moment the presidential plane was making its final approach, and Camp Kanombe was to their right and just behind them. Obviously, neither one was interviewed by the Mutsinzi Commission. So, unless the geography or topography of this part of Rwanda has changed since April 1994, the conclusions of the Mutsinzi Report on this subject are nothing but brazen lies.
The Mutsinzi Report produces as evidence some photographs of the wreckage of the president’s plane, photos taken by one of the president’s sons who was an eye-witness to the attack, and yet it does not include his testimony. We recall that this witness, Jean-Luc Habyarimana, gave his version of the facts while testifying before the “Bruguière” investigation and twice to the ICTR.
But what is completely unbearable for us is to have our mother accused of being responsible for the murder of her husband. The Mutsinzi Report indicates that at the end of March 1994, President Mobutu of Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of Congo) informed Mme Habyarimana of preparations for an attack on her husband and that she did not convey this information to the President despite the insistence of the Zairian president. Even if absurdity cannot kill, it is difficult to imagine anything more cynical. Did this Commission question Presidents Mobutu and Habyarimana before their deaths? Was this information unexpected by Mme Habyarimana? Why did President Mobutu choose to inform his Rwandan counterpart through his wife when he knew he would be meeting with President Habyarimana in Gbadolité on 4 April 1994?
Then the Report specifies that Mme Habyarimana confessed all this over the telephone to French President Mitterand on 6 April at 9:30 pm, when the French president called to express his condolences! Mme Habyarimana never spoke to President Mitterand that night.
Such baseness on the part of this Commission and its false witnesses can only reinforce the negative view we have of it.
To us, the conclusions of the Mutsinzi Report were known in advance because its authors could not stray from the mission, to whitewash the RPF and its chief, assigned them by the Rwandan government.
We will renew our confidence in French justice to shed light on this act of terrorism and continue to deplore the International Community’s foot-dragging on this issue, now 15 years down the road from the event.
Without a serious and credible elucidation of the attack of 6 April 1994, the Rwandan genocide will continue to be instrumentalized by those who have no interest in the truth’s ever being known. We take this opportunity to remind the International Community that it has a duty to aid all the victims in obtaining real justice. This will permit all the people of Rwanda to begin to work for the sort of remembrance that will bring them true reconciliation.
--Done in Paris, 25 January 2010--
For the family of Juvénal Habyarimana:
Léon Habyarimana
Bernard Habyarimana
Jean-Luc Habyarimana
Editor's Note: Mr. Jean-Luc Habyarimana and Jean-Marie Aimee Habyarimana's ICTR testimony in the trial of Protais Zigiranyirazo is available upon request at BarouD@Hush.com.
*********************
* List of the victims of the 6 April 1994 terrorist attack:
1. Major-General Juvénal HABYARIMANA, President of the Republic of Rwanda;
2. Mr. Cyprien NTARYAMIRA, President of the Republic of Burundi;
3. Mr. Bernard CIZA, Burundian Minister of Planning, Development and Reconstruction;
4. Mr. Cyriaque SIMBIZI, Burundian Minister of Communication and government spokesman;
5. Major-General Déogratias NSABIMANA, Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army;
6. Ambassador Juvénal RENZAHO, Diplomatic Adviser to the Rwandan President;
7. Colonel Elie SAGATWA, Personal Secretary and Chief of Security to the Rwandan President;
8. Doctor Emmanuel AKINGENEYE, Personal Physician to the Rwandan President;
9. Major Thaddée BAGARAGAZA, Aide de Camp to the Rwandan President and Second in Command of the Presidential Guard;
10. Major Jacky HERAUD, Pilot of the Presidential Falcon 50 aircraft;
11. Commander Jean-Pierre MINABERRY, Copilot of the Presidential plane;
12. Chief Adjutant Jean-Michel PERRINE, Navigator/Flight Engineer on the Presidential plane.
Main points of agreement from the London Afghanistan conference.
AFP
28 January 2010
Key points from the final communique of a major international conference on the future of Afghanistan in London on Thursday:
* The participants welcomed the Afghan government’s plans to persuade moderate Taliban fighters to renounce violence with a promise of a new start through jobs.
* They described it as offering “an honourable place in society to those willing to renounce violence, participate in the free and open society and respect the principles that are enshrined in the Afghan constitution, cut ties with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and pursue their political goals peacefully”.
* They also committed to establish a peace and reintegration trust fund to finance the Afghan reintegration project. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said $140 million was pledged for the first year on Thursday.
* On the transfer of responsibility for security from international to Afghan forces (the ANSF), the communique said both sides were committed to making this happen “as rapidly as possible”.
* “This is with a view to a number of provinces transitioning to ANSF lead, providing conditions are met, by late 2010/early 2011, with ISAF (the NATO-led
* International Security Assistance Force) moving to a supporting role within those provinces,” it said.
* The communique welcomed the Afghan government’s stated goal of conducting the majority of operations in the insecure areas of Afghanistan within three years “and taking responsibility for physical security within five years”.
* International forces committed to support the Afghan security forces with the goal of boosting them to about 300,000 by October 2011.
* World powers agreed to raise the proportion of development aid delivered through the Afghan government budget from about a third to half in two years, as long as efforts were made to tackle corruption and boost good governance.
* Outside experts will be invited for an independent “monitoring and evaluation mission” within three months to audit the scale of corruption in Afghanistan.
28 January 2010
Key points from the final communique of a major international conference on the future of Afghanistan in London on Thursday:
* The participants welcomed the Afghan government’s plans to persuade moderate Taliban fighters to renounce violence with a promise of a new start through jobs.
* They described it as offering “an honourable place in society to those willing to renounce violence, participate in the free and open society and respect the principles that are enshrined in the Afghan constitution, cut ties with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and pursue their political goals peacefully”.
* They also committed to establish a peace and reintegration trust fund to finance the Afghan reintegration project. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said $140 million was pledged for the first year on Thursday.
* On the transfer of responsibility for security from international to Afghan forces (the ANSF), the communique said both sides were committed to making this happen “as rapidly as possible”.
* “This is with a view to a number of provinces transitioning to ANSF lead, providing conditions are met, by late 2010/early 2011, with ISAF (the NATO-led
* International Security Assistance Force) moving to a supporting role within those provinces,” it said.
* The communique welcomed the Afghan government’s stated goal of conducting the majority of operations in the insecure areas of Afghanistan within three years “and taking responsibility for physical security within five years”.
* International forces committed to support the Afghan security forces with the goal of boosting them to about 300,000 by October 2011.
* World powers agreed to raise the proportion of development aid delivered through the Afghan government budget from about a third to half in two years, as long as efforts were made to tackle corruption and boost good governance.
* Outside experts will be invited for an independent “monitoring and evaluation mission” within three months to audit the scale of corruption in Afghanistan.
Kenya MPs opt to scrap prime minister position.
BBC News
28 January 2010
Kenyan MPs have agreed to scrap the position of prime minister in a draft constitution being drawn up as part of a power-sharing deal.
The role was created following post-election riots in 2007 to allow coalition partners to share power.
But analysts say the hybrid system - with a president and prime minister at the helm - has proved unwieldy.
Instead a parliamentary committee has opted for parliamentary checks on the president and to devolve government.
Following Kenya's general elections in December 2007 there were bloody riots across Kenya between supporters of President Mwai Kibaki and his rival, the current Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The violence left 1,300 people dead and 300,000 homeless.
As part of of a power-sharing deal they signed to end the riots, the pair agreed to come up with a new constitution.
Imperial presidents
The latest process to come up with a draft was concluded by a parliamentary committee representing all political parties after two weeks of talks in a retreat outside the capital, Nairobi.
We think we have really crossed a major threshold
Mohamed Abdi Kadir
Parliamentary committee chairman
"We had to work towards a consensus and we did that, and we are confident that we have really crossed the largest hurdles so far," said Mohamed Abdi Kadir, the chairman of the parliamentary committee.
The draft constitution will be submitted to parliament for debate before being put to a national referendum.
The BBC's Peter Greste, in Nairobi, says Kenya has been bruised by a series of imperial presidents, which is why the new constitution creates parliamentary checks to the president's authority.
The draft document also recommends:
• Power be devolved to a senate and a network of local counties
• The president should no longer be able to appoint judges
• MPs appointed to a cabinet position would have to give up their parliamentary seat.
There is still a long way to go before the draft becomes law, but Mr Kadir believes it is a major step forward.
"We think we have really crossed a major threshold," he said.
28 January 2010
Kenyan MPs have agreed to scrap the position of prime minister in a draft constitution being drawn up as part of a power-sharing deal.
The role was created following post-election riots in 2007 to allow coalition partners to share power.
But analysts say the hybrid system - with a president and prime minister at the helm - has proved unwieldy.
Instead a parliamentary committee has opted for parliamentary checks on the president and to devolve government.
Following Kenya's general elections in December 2007 there were bloody riots across Kenya between supporters of President Mwai Kibaki and his rival, the current Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The violence left 1,300 people dead and 300,000 homeless.
As part of of a power-sharing deal they signed to end the riots, the pair agreed to come up with a new constitution.
Imperial presidents
The latest process to come up with a draft was concluded by a parliamentary committee representing all political parties after two weeks of talks in a retreat outside the capital, Nairobi.
We think we have really crossed a major threshold
Mohamed Abdi Kadir
Parliamentary committee chairman
"We had to work towards a consensus and we did that, and we are confident that we have really crossed the largest hurdles so far," said Mohamed Abdi Kadir, the chairman of the parliamentary committee.
The draft constitution will be submitted to parliament for debate before being put to a national referendum.
The BBC's Peter Greste, in Nairobi, says Kenya has been bruised by a series of imperial presidents, which is why the new constitution creates parliamentary checks to the president's authority.
The draft document also recommends:
• Power be devolved to a senate and a network of local counties
• The president should no longer be able to appoint judges
• MPs appointed to a cabinet position would have to give up their parliamentary seat.
There is still a long way to go before the draft becomes law, but Mr Kadir believes it is a major step forward.
"We think we have really crossed a major threshold," he said.
UDF Party Response to Latest Article in The New Times.
Ever since Mrs. Ingabire Victoire set foot in Rwanda on 16th January 2010, the Rwandan daily newspaper “The New Times” has spared no efforts in tarnishing her image. Indeed, after a crude distortion of her statement at the Gisozi Genocide Memorial, calls for her arrests and subsequent hate editorials, the newspaper has come out with a new charge of family criminal records in its issue of January 28th 2010.
The content of this article betrays the true agenda of the paper and denotes a total disregard of the respect of individual privacy. The loose narration of the so-called Gacaca trial of Mrs. Ingabire's mother in Butamwa is an eye-opener on the professional standards of the paper. For the sake of the truth, to the best of my knowledge, Mrs. Ingabire's mother is not a fugitive and had nothing to do with the wild allegations leveled against her. Mrs Ingabire's mother has never been summoned to any hearing and is ready to clear her name.
The newspaper tries, through cheap propaganda, to imply that genocide ideology is a family-rooted crime to which every member has to answer for in a court. In a nutshell, the newspaper tries to sway the people into believing that Mrs. Ingabire is guilty of genocidal ideology because her mother was tried and sentenced by a Gacaca court. By extension, Mrs. Ingabire would not be clean of any wrongdoing during the genocide of the Tutsi and is thereby not fit for the presidential race. This is the sinister agenda of the paper, a newspaper whose stated mission is to "become an exemplary and constructive media house".
The statement of Mrs. Ingabire on the gacaca courts reflects the party's position, not her own feelings. As for the so-called "clean bill of health given to gacaca by renowned scholars", I refer readers to the latest reports by the United Nations Humans Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch, Lawyers Without Borders and the Commonwealth Human Rights Committee's statements, to mention a few.
In a healthy democracy, discussion should be focused on the issues, not individuals. Mrs. Ingabire is in Rwanda to defend a political program, not to promote her own interests. But once for all, let's address the recurrent issues that the paper writes on.
The so-called substantial evidence gathered by the United Nations Group of Experts on the alleged collaboration between FDLR and Mrs. Ingabire is nothing but hearsay. Even the neighbouring Tanzanian and Burundian governments issued strongly worded statements describing the report as lacking in many areas. The UDF party dwelled extensively on that report in a press release. The "experts" based their allegations on a meeting that took place in Barcelona to which the FDLR was invited. The meeting indeed took place. It was organised within the framework of the inter- Rwandan dialog, which brings together Rwandans of different shades and ethnic groups. The paper deliberately fails to mention that the meeting was also attended by a delegation from Rwanda, including well-known members of the RPF ruling party whose names can be revealed if necessary. Is that the "substantial evidence" that the paper holds?
The report states that Mrs. Ingabire is a sister to the military leader of FDLR . This is absolute rubbish. Mrs Ingabire has absolutely no family relationship with him at all.
The paper also talks also about the RDR roots of Mrs. Ingabire. Mrs. Ingabire is the president of UDF/FDU, to which the RDR is a party. The RDR is not a criminal organisation as insinuated by the paper. The RDR is a legitimate opposition party. Holding divergent opinions in a democratic society is not criminal. The RDR has its own leadership. Should the paper have a case with the RDR, it should address the issue itself to its political leadership, not to Mrs. Ingabire as a person. She is in Rwanda in her capacity as the Chairperson of the UDF, not the RDR.
Last, but not least, the paper may not agree with Mrs. Ingabire on different issues. However, Mrs. Ingabire is far from being "controversial". She is a flag bearer of a legitimate party's political program which may hurt newspapers bent on courting the establishment. The New Times is doing a disservice to democracy and reconciliation by attempting to silence a dissenting voice at the very time when the country wants to show to the world in general and the Commonwealth and East Africa in particular, that it is fit to be a full member of these honourable bodies and shares their cherished values.
Done on 28 January 2008
Chris Nzabandora
UDF party member
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ingabire’s mother a fugitive-Gacaca boss
The New Times
28 January 2010
By Edwin Musoni
The mother to Presidential hopeful Victoire Ingabire was sentenced to life imprisonment for her role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi by a Gacaca Court in Butamwa in the Western Province.
According to Gacaca officials, Theresa Dusabe, Ingabire’s biological mother, was sentenced in absentia twice in different cases for her role in the Genocide.
“Dusabe was sentenced to 30 years in jail by a Gacaca court for disembowelling pregnant Tutsi women and removing the foetuses which she would smash to death in a horrendous manner,” Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, Executive Secretary of Gacaca jurisdictions told The New Times.
She added that in a separate trial, Dusabe was jointly sentenced to life alongside one Sebastian Muhizina, for their role in masterminding the Genocide by calling for meetings and sensitizing the Interahamwe militias to kill Tutsis.
Muhizina is currently serving his sentence in Kigali Central Prison and has been one of the many key witnesses against Dusabe.
Victoire Ingabire’s mother is said to have fled the country immediate after the Genocide and went to Zaire (now DRC) from where she managed to find her way to Europe, allegedly with the assistance of her daughter.
Ingabire’s mother was a medical practitioner during the Genocide working with Butamwa Health Centre.
Pundits have closely linked Ingabire’s criticism of the Gacaca courts to the fact that her own mother is a convict wanted by the very courts.
“She is of course a bitter lady who knows well that her own mother is not clean. That’s why she has no moral authority to criticise gacaca which incidentally has been (Gacaca) given a clean bill of health by renown scholars,” Evelyn Uwantege, a survivor of Genocide told The New Times.
She has on several occasions vowed to close down all Gacaca courts once she gets into power.
A United Nations Group of Experts report issued last year, gathered substantial evidence on existing collaboration between FDLR rebels and FDU-Inkingi.
Though the controversial presidential hopeful denies the claims, the UN report singles her out in November 23, 2009 as one the key collaborators of the rebel outfit.
The authors of the report called for international action on individuals and organisations behind FDLR, a rebel movement categorised as a terrorist group by the US government.
The content of this article betrays the true agenda of the paper and denotes a total disregard of the respect of individual privacy. The loose narration of the so-called Gacaca trial of Mrs. Ingabire's mother in Butamwa is an eye-opener on the professional standards of the paper. For the sake of the truth, to the best of my knowledge, Mrs. Ingabire's mother is not a fugitive and had nothing to do with the wild allegations leveled against her. Mrs Ingabire's mother has never been summoned to any hearing and is ready to clear her name.
The newspaper tries, through cheap propaganda, to imply that genocide ideology is a family-rooted crime to which every member has to answer for in a court. In a nutshell, the newspaper tries to sway the people into believing that Mrs. Ingabire is guilty of genocidal ideology because her mother was tried and sentenced by a Gacaca court. By extension, Mrs. Ingabire would not be clean of any wrongdoing during the genocide of the Tutsi and is thereby not fit for the presidential race. This is the sinister agenda of the paper, a newspaper whose stated mission is to "become an exemplary and constructive media house".
The statement of Mrs. Ingabire on the gacaca courts reflects the party's position, not her own feelings. As for the so-called "clean bill of health given to gacaca by renowned scholars", I refer readers to the latest reports by the United Nations Humans Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch, Lawyers Without Borders and the Commonwealth Human Rights Committee's statements, to mention a few.
In a healthy democracy, discussion should be focused on the issues, not individuals. Mrs. Ingabire is in Rwanda to defend a political program, not to promote her own interests. But once for all, let's address the recurrent issues that the paper writes on.
The so-called substantial evidence gathered by the United Nations Group of Experts on the alleged collaboration between FDLR and Mrs. Ingabire is nothing but hearsay. Even the neighbouring Tanzanian and Burundian governments issued strongly worded statements describing the report as lacking in many areas. The UDF party dwelled extensively on that report in a press release. The "experts" based their allegations on a meeting that took place in Barcelona to which the FDLR was invited. The meeting indeed took place. It was organised within the framework of the inter- Rwandan dialog, which brings together Rwandans of different shades and ethnic groups. The paper deliberately fails to mention that the meeting was also attended by a delegation from Rwanda, including well-known members of the RPF ruling party whose names can be revealed if necessary. Is that the "substantial evidence" that the paper holds?
The report states that Mrs. Ingabire is a sister to the military leader of FDLR . This is absolute rubbish. Mrs Ingabire has absolutely no family relationship with him at all.
The paper also talks also about the RDR roots of Mrs. Ingabire. Mrs. Ingabire is the president of UDF/FDU, to which the RDR is a party. The RDR is not a criminal organisation as insinuated by the paper. The RDR is a legitimate opposition party. Holding divergent opinions in a democratic society is not criminal. The RDR has its own leadership. Should the paper have a case with the RDR, it should address the issue itself to its political leadership, not to Mrs. Ingabire as a person. She is in Rwanda in her capacity as the Chairperson of the UDF, not the RDR.
Last, but not least, the paper may not agree with Mrs. Ingabire on different issues. However, Mrs. Ingabire is far from being "controversial". She is a flag bearer of a legitimate party's political program which may hurt newspapers bent on courting the establishment. The New Times is doing a disservice to democracy and reconciliation by attempting to silence a dissenting voice at the very time when the country wants to show to the world in general and the Commonwealth and East Africa in particular, that it is fit to be a full member of these honourable bodies and shares their cherished values.
Done on 28 January 2008
Chris Nzabandora
UDF party member
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Ingabire’s mother a fugitive-Gacaca boss
The New Times
28 January 2010
By Edwin Musoni
The mother to Presidential hopeful Victoire Ingabire was sentenced to life imprisonment for her role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi by a Gacaca Court in Butamwa in the Western Province.
According to Gacaca officials, Theresa Dusabe, Ingabire’s biological mother, was sentenced in absentia twice in different cases for her role in the Genocide.
“Dusabe was sentenced to 30 years in jail by a Gacaca court for disembowelling pregnant Tutsi women and removing the foetuses which she would smash to death in a horrendous manner,” Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, Executive Secretary of Gacaca jurisdictions told The New Times.
She added that in a separate trial, Dusabe was jointly sentenced to life alongside one Sebastian Muhizina, for their role in masterminding the Genocide by calling for meetings and sensitizing the Interahamwe militias to kill Tutsis.
Muhizina is currently serving his sentence in Kigali Central Prison and has been one of the many key witnesses against Dusabe.
Victoire Ingabire’s mother is said to have fled the country immediate after the Genocide and went to Zaire (now DRC) from where she managed to find her way to Europe, allegedly with the assistance of her daughter.
Ingabire’s mother was a medical practitioner during the Genocide working with Butamwa Health Centre.
Pundits have closely linked Ingabire’s criticism of the Gacaca courts to the fact that her own mother is a convict wanted by the very courts.
“She is of course a bitter lady who knows well that her own mother is not clean. That’s why she has no moral authority to criticise gacaca which incidentally has been (Gacaca) given a clean bill of health by renown scholars,” Evelyn Uwantege, a survivor of Genocide told The New Times.
She has on several occasions vowed to close down all Gacaca courts once she gets into power.
A United Nations Group of Experts report issued last year, gathered substantial evidence on existing collaboration between FDLR rebels and FDU-Inkingi.
Though the controversial presidential hopeful denies the claims, the UN report singles her out in November 23, 2009 as one the key collaborators of the rebel outfit.
The authors of the report called for international action on individuals and organisations behind FDLR, a rebel movement categorised as a terrorist group by the US government.
28 January, 2010
DRC Diamond Core and Rio Tinto Create JV to explore for iron and diamonds in DRC's Orientale Province.
Press Release
BRC DiamondCore Ltd.
January 28, 2010, 1:20 pm
BRC DiamondCore Ltd. ("BRC" or the "Company") (TSX - BCD; JSE - BCD) is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into an agreement (the "JV Agreement") with Rio Tinto Minerals Development Limited ("Rio Tinto") for the exploration for iron ore in areas within the Province Orientale, Democratic Republic of the Congo (the "DRC"). These areas total approximately 4,550 square kilometres and are covered by exploration permits (the "Permits") in which the diamond and iron ore rights had been controlled by the Company. Under the JV Agreement, which is in the form of a shareholders' agreement, the Company will own 25% of the share capital of the joint venture company which holds the Permits, with Rio Tinto owning 75% of the share capital. This structure is expected to implemented by the end of February 2010. BRC has retained the diamond rights.
Under the JV Agreement, all iron ore exploration up to and including the completion of any feasibility study will be funded by Rio Tinto. The Company will not suffer any dilution during this period, such that the Company's 25% interest in the properties will be maintained during this period. The exploration will be carried out by Rio Tinto (or one of its affiliates) as operator. After the completion of any feasibility study, funding for the project is to be provided by Rio Tinto and BRC pro rata based on their respective interests in the joint venture company.
Initial geological research and exploration indicates that the Permit areas, which are largely unexplored using modern exploration methods, are highly prospective for the discovery of iron ore deposits. As part of the 2010 exploration program, Rio Tinto plans to undertake a reconnaissance drill program over the Permit areas.
Commenting on the JV Agreement, Dr. Mike de Wit, President of BRC, said: "This strengthens the existing relationship between the two companies. We are very pleased to have Rio Tinto as our partner in the DRC for both our diamond and now iron ore exploration programs and that these programs are well funded through the Rio Tinto/BRC joint ventures."
BRC DiamondCore Ltd.
January 28, 2010, 1:20 pm
BRC DiamondCore Ltd. ("BRC" or the "Company") (TSX - BCD; JSE - BCD) is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into an agreement (the "JV Agreement") with Rio Tinto Minerals Development Limited ("Rio Tinto") for the exploration for iron ore in areas within the Province Orientale, Democratic Republic of the Congo (the "DRC"). These areas total approximately 4,550 square kilometres and are covered by exploration permits (the "Permits") in which the diamond and iron ore rights had been controlled by the Company. Under the JV Agreement, which is in the form of a shareholders' agreement, the Company will own 25% of the share capital of the joint venture company which holds the Permits, with Rio Tinto owning 75% of the share capital. This structure is expected to implemented by the end of February 2010. BRC has retained the diamond rights.
Under the JV Agreement, all iron ore exploration up to and including the completion of any feasibility study will be funded by Rio Tinto. The Company will not suffer any dilution during this period, such that the Company's 25% interest in the properties will be maintained during this period. The exploration will be carried out by Rio Tinto (or one of its affiliates) as operator. After the completion of any feasibility study, funding for the project is to be provided by Rio Tinto and BRC pro rata based on their respective interests in the joint venture company.
Initial geological research and exploration indicates that the Permit areas, which are largely unexplored using modern exploration methods, are highly prospective for the discovery of iron ore deposits. As part of the 2010 exploration program, Rio Tinto plans to undertake a reconnaissance drill program over the Permit areas.
Commenting on the JV Agreement, Dr. Mike de Wit, President of BRC, said: "This strengthens the existing relationship between the two companies. We are very pleased to have Rio Tinto as our partner in the DRC for both our diamond and now iron ore exploration programs and that these programs are well funded through the Rio Tinto/BRC joint ventures."
Tullow May Sell Half Ugandan Assets to CNOOC or Total.
by James Herron
Dow Jones Newswires
1/27/2010
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=86473
Development of Uganda's fledgling oil sector looked set to kick into a higher gear Wednesday as U.K.-based Tullow Oil PLC said it would bring either Total SA or China National Offshore Oil Company as a partner into the country, and raised GBP925 million in extra funds for African investment.
The move signals Tullow's confidence that it will successfully acquire Heritage Oil PLC's Uganda oil assets for up to $1.5 billion --pre-empting a previous sale agreement with Italy's Eni SpA -- and accelerate the commercial development of around one billion barrels of oil discovered in Uganda's Lake Albert region.
Ugandan government approval for that pre-emption is still pending, but President Yoweri Museveni has clearly stated that the government will respect Tullow's contractual rights in this case, said Tullow Chief Executive Aidan Heavey.
Uganda's government has shown signs of splits over whether to let Tullow or Eni take over the Heritage assets. The Minister of Energy and Minerals, Hilary Onek, publicly backed Eni last week and wrote to inform Tullow that the government would veto its pre-emption rights, according to a letter seen by Dow Jones Newswires. The government has since rescinded this decision, people familiar with the matter told Dow Jones Newswires.
If its pre-emption is successful, Tullow will own 100% of the three license blocks containing the Lake Albert oil discoveries. Half of these blocks would then be sold on to either Cnooc or Total, both of whom are committed to entering Uganda, Heavey said.
Cnooc, Total and Eni declined to comment Wednesday.
"We are happy with both companies, they are top class...absolutely superb at midstream and downstream development," Heavey said. Tullow is working closely with the government to decide which company would be the best partner and a final decision is expected mid-February, he added.
"The plan is to accelerate very quickly the development of the Lake Albert basin," Heavey said, adding that the Ugandan government is considering proposals that would allow for a significant increase on the 150,000 barrel a day plateau production profile currently planned for the region.
Tullow's new partner would entirely fund the development of a 1,200 kilometer pipeline to export Uganda's oil to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The downstream development plan is also likely to include a refinery, the size of which will be determined by a feasibility study in late March or early April, Heavey said. Tullow would lead exploration and upstream development in the Lake Albert area, he said.
Heavey would not comment on financial terms of the deal.
Following the sale, Tullow will likely be left with a larger stake in the Lake Albert blocks than it had previously planned, resulting in additional capital expenditure of up to $600 million over the next three years, Tullow said in a statement. Tullow will also spend an extra $100 million in Ghana over the next 12 months, after an appraisal well last week that showed the offshore Tweneboa field to be a significant oil and gas condensate reservoir. Tullow expects its 2010 capital expenditure to be $1.6 billion.
"The scale of the additional potential in Ghana [and] the planned acceleration of development in the Lake Albert Rift Basin...requires additional investment and funding capability," so Tullow was placing just over 80 million new shares, equivalent to 10% of the company's existing share capital, Tullow said.
The shares were placed at a price of 1,150 pence, a 5.4% discount to the closing price of 1216 pence on Tuesday.
"Today's equity placing and planned Uganda farm-down will ensure we have the right capital structure," to develop the entire portfolio, said Chief Executive Aidan Heavey.
The placing was conducted through an accelerated book-building process led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland Group unit Hoare Govett. BNP Paribas SA and Calyon are also joint bookrunners and Natixis is a co-lead manager of the placing.
(Geraldine Amiel in Paris and Liam Moloney in Rome contributed to this article.)
Dow Jones Newswires
1/27/2010
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=86473
Development of Uganda's fledgling oil sector looked set to kick into a higher gear Wednesday as U.K.-based Tullow Oil PLC said it would bring either Total SA or China National Offshore Oil Company as a partner into the country, and raised GBP925 million in extra funds for African investment.
The move signals Tullow's confidence that it will successfully acquire Heritage Oil PLC's Uganda oil assets for up to $1.5 billion --pre-empting a previous sale agreement with Italy's Eni SpA -- and accelerate the commercial development of around one billion barrels of oil discovered in Uganda's Lake Albert region.
Ugandan government approval for that pre-emption is still pending, but President Yoweri Museveni has clearly stated that the government will respect Tullow's contractual rights in this case, said Tullow Chief Executive Aidan Heavey.
Uganda's government has shown signs of splits over whether to let Tullow or Eni take over the Heritage assets. The Minister of Energy and Minerals, Hilary Onek, publicly backed Eni last week and wrote to inform Tullow that the government would veto its pre-emption rights, according to a letter seen by Dow Jones Newswires. The government has since rescinded this decision, people familiar with the matter told Dow Jones Newswires.
If its pre-emption is successful, Tullow will own 100% of the three license blocks containing the Lake Albert oil discoveries. Half of these blocks would then be sold on to either Cnooc or Total, both of whom are committed to entering Uganda, Heavey said.
Cnooc, Total and Eni declined to comment Wednesday.
"We are happy with both companies, they are top class...absolutely superb at midstream and downstream development," Heavey said. Tullow is working closely with the government to decide which company would be the best partner and a final decision is expected mid-February, he added.
"The plan is to accelerate very quickly the development of the Lake Albert basin," Heavey said, adding that the Ugandan government is considering proposals that would allow for a significant increase on the 150,000 barrel a day plateau production profile currently planned for the region.
Tullow's new partner would entirely fund the development of a 1,200 kilometer pipeline to export Uganda's oil to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The downstream development plan is also likely to include a refinery, the size of which will be determined by a feasibility study in late March or early April, Heavey said. Tullow would lead exploration and upstream development in the Lake Albert area, he said.
Heavey would not comment on financial terms of the deal.
Following the sale, Tullow will likely be left with a larger stake in the Lake Albert blocks than it had previously planned, resulting in additional capital expenditure of up to $600 million over the next three years, Tullow said in a statement. Tullow will also spend an extra $100 million in Ghana over the next 12 months, after an appraisal well last week that showed the offshore Tweneboa field to be a significant oil and gas condensate reservoir. Tullow expects its 2010 capital expenditure to be $1.6 billion.
"The scale of the additional potential in Ghana [and] the planned acceleration of development in the Lake Albert Rift Basin...requires additional investment and funding capability," so Tullow was placing just over 80 million new shares, equivalent to 10% of the company's existing share capital, Tullow said.
The shares were placed at a price of 1,150 pence, a 5.4% discount to the closing price of 1216 pence on Tuesday.
"Today's equity placing and planned Uganda farm-down will ensure we have the right capital structure," to develop the entire portfolio, said Chief Executive Aidan Heavey.
The placing was conducted through an accelerated book-building process led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland Group unit Hoare Govett. BNP Paribas SA and Calyon are also joint bookrunners and Natixis is a co-lead manager of the placing.
(Geraldine Amiel in Paris and Liam Moloney in Rome contributed to this article.)
PetroChina Consortium Seals Iraqi Oil Deal.
Total SA
1/28/2010
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=86492
Within the framework of Iraq's second petroleum bidding round organized by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on December 12th, 2009, a PetroChina-led consortium signed on January 27, 2010 a 20-year Development and Production Service Contract with Missan Oil Company for the development of the Halfaya oil field.
Total E&P Iraq holds a 18.75% interest in the consortium, alongside the operator PetroChina (37.5%) and partners Petronas Carigali Sdn. Bhd. (18.75%) and the State Partner South Oil Company (25%).
The Halfaya oil field is located in the Missan governorate, 35 kilometers southeast of Amara city, and spreads across 30 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide. The consortium intends to increase the current oil field production from 3,100 barrels of oil per day to 535,000 barrels of oil per day.
1/28/2010
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=86492
Within the framework of Iraq's second petroleum bidding round organized by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on December 12th, 2009, a PetroChina-led consortium signed on January 27, 2010 a 20-year Development and Production Service Contract with Missan Oil Company for the development of the Halfaya oil field.
Total E&P Iraq holds a 18.75% interest in the consortium, alongside the operator PetroChina (37.5%) and partners Petronas Carigali Sdn. Bhd. (18.75%) and the State Partner South Oil Company (25%).
The Halfaya oil field is located in the Missan governorate, 35 kilometers southeast of Amara city, and spreads across 30 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide. The consortium intends to increase the current oil field production from 3,100 barrels of oil per day to 535,000 barrels of oil per day.
Gazprom Neft Signs Deal For Iraq Oil Field.
RIA Novosti
28 January 2010
Russian state-run oil company Gazprom Neft signed on Thursday a contract to develop the Badra oil field in Iraq, the company announced.
A consortium of companies led by Gazprom Neft was declared the winner of a tender for the deposit's development in December 2009. The consortium also includes Korea's Kogas, Malaysia's Petronas and Turkey's TPAO.
Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of energy giant Gazprom, will hold 30% in the project, Kogas 22.5%, Petronas 15% and TPAO 7.5%, while the Iraqi government represented by Oil Exploration Company will have a 25% stake.
The Badra oil field will be developed over 20 years with the possibility of a 5-year prolongation and will have a production capacity of 170,000 barrels per day. Work is expected to start in 2010 and investment in the project will reach about $2 billion.
"The implementation of the project to develop the Badra deposit is a key stage in the company's development on international markets. With the start of work in Iraq, Gazprom Neft is making yet another step in fulfilling its long-term plan of output expansion by 2020," Gazprom Neft Board Chairman Alexander Dyukov said.
LUKoil, Russia's largest independent crude producer, also won a tender in December 2009 to develop Iraq's West Qurna-2 oil field.
28 January 2010
Russian state-run oil company Gazprom Neft signed on Thursday a contract to develop the Badra oil field in Iraq, the company announced.
A consortium of companies led by Gazprom Neft was declared the winner of a tender for the deposit's development in December 2009. The consortium also includes Korea's Kogas, Malaysia's Petronas and Turkey's TPAO.
Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of energy giant Gazprom, will hold 30% in the project, Kogas 22.5%, Petronas 15% and TPAO 7.5%, while the Iraqi government represented by Oil Exploration Company will have a 25% stake.
The Badra oil field will be developed over 20 years with the possibility of a 5-year prolongation and will have a production capacity of 170,000 barrels per day. Work is expected to start in 2010 and investment in the project will reach about $2 billion.
"The implementation of the project to develop the Badra deposit is a key stage in the company's development on international markets. With the start of work in Iraq, Gazprom Neft is making yet another step in fulfilling its long-term plan of output expansion by 2020," Gazprom Neft Board Chairman Alexander Dyukov said.
LUKoil, Russia's largest independent crude producer, also won a tender in December 2009 to develop Iraq's West Qurna-2 oil field.
France ex-PM Villepin cleared of Sarkozy smear.
BBC News
28 January 2010
Editor's Note: Mr. DeVillepin, a Gaullist and protege of Jacques Chirac, was strongly against the Iraq war. When the US made its case before the UN, DeVillepin told Sec. of State Powell and his entourage that it would be ill-advised to attack Iraq because the costs of occupation were too great. France, as a former colonial power, learned this lesson the hard way, especially in Vietnam. This was in contrast to Pres. Sarkozy, who publicly opposed the Iraq War, but generally supported the right-wing neoconservatives in the US. Mr. Chirac was Pres. Sarkozy's rival after a falling out in 1995, during a period of cohabitation. Mr. DeVillepin may challenge Pres. Sarkozy in France's 2012 elections. However, Mr. DeVillepin is considered by some in French policy circles to be to "pro-Arab." Interestingly, Mr. DeVillepin was born in Morocco.
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Former French PM Dominique de Villepin has been cleared of plotting to discredit President Nicolas Sarkozy when he was the interior minister.
He had been accused of failing to stop the Clearstream corruption inquiry into Mr Sarkozy, despite knowing the claims against his rival were false.
Both men had been hoping to succeed Jacques Chirac as president in the 2007 election.
Several other defendants in the case were found guilty on various charges.
The judge said there was no proof Mr De Villepin had acted in bad faith, and he was cleared on all four counts of complicity to slander, to use forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust.
THE CLEARSTREAM VERDICTS
Dominique de Villepin: Former PM, 55. Acquitted on charges of complicity in slander and forgery.
Jean-Louis Gergorin: Former EADS vice-president, 63. Sentenced to 15 months in jail and a fine of 40,000 euros (£34,500; $56,000) for slander and use of false documents. Admitted leaking the fake list to investigators.
Imad Lahoud: Computer expert, 42. Sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 40,000 euros for slander and use of false documents. Confessed to adding Sarkozy's name to the list.
Florian Bourges: Accountant, 31. Guilty of theft and breach of trust for obtaining the original Clearstream documents. Given a four-month suspended sentence.
Denis Robert: Journalist and author who broke the story, 41. Acquitted of dealing in stolen property and breach of trust
Murky tale behind French PM's trial
There were cheers outside the courtroom as the verdict was read out, but Mr De Villepin showed little emotion, says the BBC's Emma Jane Kirby in Paris.
After the verdict, he said outside the courtroom: "After many years of ordeal, my innocence has been recognised. I was hurt by the image of politics that was portrayed, of the commitment that I have made over the past 30 years.
"I am now looking to the future to serve the French people and contribute in a spirit of unity to the recovery of France."
The former prime minister is now likely to relaunch his political career and to challenge President Sarkozy in the next general election in 2012, our correspondent says.
His acquittal will be a bitter blow to Mr Sarkozy, who celebrates his 55th birthday on Thursday, and who had promised he would "hang from a butcher's hook" for trying to smear his name, she adds.
Complex investigation
In 2004, Mr Sarkozy's name appeared on a list of top politicians and businessmen who were wrongly linked to an illegal bank account in Luxembourg.
It was alleged those named on the list had received bribes from international arms sales.
The list was sent to people including Mr De Villepin, who was accused of failing to stop the conspiracy.
During the investigation, Mr De Villepin admitted he knew of the documents - but the court found no evidence to prove he had known they had been faked.
At the trial, prosecutors had called for him to receive an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of 45,000 euros (£39,000).
Three other defendants were convicted, including a former executive of the EADS aerospace group, Jean-Louis Gergorin, who admitted leaking the fake list to investigators, and Imad Lahoud, a computer specialist, who confessed to adding Mr Sarkozy's name to the list.
Both men were fined 40,000 euros (£34,500; $56,000). Gergorin must serve 15 months in prison and Lahoud must serve 18 months.
A fifth defendant was cleared.
28 January 2010
Editor's Note: Mr. DeVillepin, a Gaullist and protege of Jacques Chirac, was strongly against the Iraq war. When the US made its case before the UN, DeVillepin told Sec. of State Powell and his entourage that it would be ill-advised to attack Iraq because the costs of occupation were too great. France, as a former colonial power, learned this lesson the hard way, especially in Vietnam. This was in contrast to Pres. Sarkozy, who publicly opposed the Iraq War, but generally supported the right-wing neoconservatives in the US. Mr. Chirac was Pres. Sarkozy's rival after a falling out in 1995, during a period of cohabitation. Mr. DeVillepin may challenge Pres. Sarkozy in France's 2012 elections. However, Mr. DeVillepin is considered by some in French policy circles to be to "pro-Arab." Interestingly, Mr. DeVillepin was born in Morocco.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Former French PM Dominique de Villepin has been cleared of plotting to discredit President Nicolas Sarkozy when he was the interior minister.
He had been accused of failing to stop the Clearstream corruption inquiry into Mr Sarkozy, despite knowing the claims against his rival were false.
Both men had been hoping to succeed Jacques Chirac as president in the 2007 election.
Several other defendants in the case were found guilty on various charges.
The judge said there was no proof Mr De Villepin had acted in bad faith, and he was cleared on all four counts of complicity to slander, to use forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust.
THE CLEARSTREAM VERDICTS
Dominique de Villepin: Former PM, 55. Acquitted on charges of complicity in slander and forgery.
Jean-Louis Gergorin: Former EADS vice-president, 63. Sentenced to 15 months in jail and a fine of 40,000 euros (£34,500; $56,000) for slander and use of false documents. Admitted leaking the fake list to investigators.
Imad Lahoud: Computer expert, 42. Sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 40,000 euros for slander and use of false documents. Confessed to adding Sarkozy's name to the list.
Florian Bourges: Accountant, 31. Guilty of theft and breach of trust for obtaining the original Clearstream documents. Given a four-month suspended sentence.
Denis Robert: Journalist and author who broke the story, 41. Acquitted of dealing in stolen property and breach of trust
Murky tale behind French PM's trial
There were cheers outside the courtroom as the verdict was read out, but Mr De Villepin showed little emotion, says the BBC's Emma Jane Kirby in Paris.
After the verdict, he said outside the courtroom: "After many years of ordeal, my innocence has been recognised. I was hurt by the image of politics that was portrayed, of the commitment that I have made over the past 30 years.
"I am now looking to the future to serve the French people and contribute in a spirit of unity to the recovery of France."
The former prime minister is now likely to relaunch his political career and to challenge President Sarkozy in the next general election in 2012, our correspondent says.
His acquittal will be a bitter blow to Mr Sarkozy, who celebrates his 55th birthday on Thursday, and who had promised he would "hang from a butcher's hook" for trying to smear his name, she adds.
Complex investigation
In 2004, Mr Sarkozy's name appeared on a list of top politicians and businessmen who were wrongly linked to an illegal bank account in Luxembourg.
It was alleged those named on the list had received bribes from international arms sales.
The list was sent to people including Mr De Villepin, who was accused of failing to stop the conspiracy.
During the investigation, Mr De Villepin admitted he knew of the documents - but the court found no evidence to prove he had known they had been faked.
At the trial, prosecutors had called for him to receive an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of 45,000 euros (£39,000).
Three other defendants were convicted, including a former executive of the EADS aerospace group, Jean-Louis Gergorin, who admitted leaking the fake list to investigators, and Imad Lahoud, a computer specialist, who confessed to adding Mr Sarkozy's name to the list.
Both men were fined 40,000 euros (£34,500; $56,000). Gergorin must serve 15 months in prison and Lahoud must serve 18 months.
A fifth defendant was cleared.
Uganda starts oil production this year.
The New Vision
27 January 2010
By Ibrahim Kasita
Uganda will start producing crude oil this year, Tullow Oil, the Irish firm exploring for oil and gas in Uganda, disclosed.
Speaking to journalists in Kampala yesterday, Paul McDade, the chief operations officer, announced that initial oil production will be 500-1,000 barrels per day, which will progressively rise to 10,000 barrels next year and to 150,000 barrels in 2015.
“We will start producing about 500 to 1,000 barrels a day in the middle of this year,” he said.
“This is not economically significant but it is a great step forward for Ugandans to know that their oil is being used for industrial use.”
Mr. McDade said the oil will be produced from the Kasamene field in Buliisa and will be used for the local industry and power generation.
Kasamene is located in block 2, which is fully owned by Tullow Oil. The other two oil fields, blocks 1 and 3A, are jointly owned with Heritage, which is in the process of selling off its 50% stake.
“We would like to produce oil on a test basis to see how the oil wells behave and how the crude can be transported by truck since it is waxy. We will have to heat the oil to keep it flowing,” McDade explained.
Tullow plans to invest between $300m and 400m in this initial phase but raise the amount to $5b to produce 150,000 barrels per day.
McDade disclosed that the two companies which Tullow preferred to work with were the Chinese state-owned CNOOC and French Total.
“The Chinese are best in building refineries and they move fast. CNOOC has just built a big refinery in China which can refine the same quality of oil as in Uganda. They built it in a period of two years.”
He added that they are also looking forward to work with the Ugandan national oil company that is in the process of being formed.
Reacting to criticism that they have not delivered on the early production scheme, the Tullow boss said they preferred drilling more wells to assess the total oil reserves rather than spending all their money on one small oil field.
“A refinery is a very expensive project for both the private and public sector. You cannot put in place a refinery unless you are sure that you have enough oil supply for 20 or more years.”
He said Tullow together with its partner, Heritage, has invested so far about $700m in Uganda.
The London-listed company yesterday also announced that they placed 80 million new shares on the London stock exchange to fundraise for its operations in Uganda and Ghana.
27 January 2010
By Ibrahim Kasita
Uganda will start producing crude oil this year, Tullow Oil, the Irish firm exploring for oil and gas in Uganda, disclosed.
Speaking to journalists in Kampala yesterday, Paul McDade, the chief operations officer, announced that initial oil production will be 500-1,000 barrels per day, which will progressively rise to 10,000 barrels next year and to 150,000 barrels in 2015.
“We will start producing about 500 to 1,000 barrels a day in the middle of this year,” he said.
“This is not economically significant but it is a great step forward for Ugandans to know that their oil is being used for industrial use.”
Mr. McDade said the oil will be produced from the Kasamene field in Buliisa and will be used for the local industry and power generation.
Kasamene is located in block 2, which is fully owned by Tullow Oil. The other two oil fields, blocks 1 and 3A, are jointly owned with Heritage, which is in the process of selling off its 50% stake.
“We would like to produce oil on a test basis to see how the oil wells behave and how the crude can be transported by truck since it is waxy. We will have to heat the oil to keep it flowing,” McDade explained.
Tullow plans to invest between $300m and 400m in this initial phase but raise the amount to $5b to produce 150,000 barrels per day.
McDade disclosed that the two companies which Tullow preferred to work with were the Chinese state-owned CNOOC and French Total.
“The Chinese are best in building refineries and they move fast. CNOOC has just built a big refinery in China which can refine the same quality of oil as in Uganda. They built it in a period of two years.”
He added that they are also looking forward to work with the Ugandan national oil company that is in the process of being formed.
Reacting to criticism that they have not delivered on the early production scheme, the Tullow boss said they preferred drilling more wells to assess the total oil reserves rather than spending all their money on one small oil field.
“A refinery is a very expensive project for both the private and public sector. You cannot put in place a refinery unless you are sure that you have enough oil supply for 20 or more years.”
He said Tullow together with its partner, Heritage, has invested so far about $700m in Uganda.
The London-listed company yesterday also announced that they placed 80 million new shares on the London stock exchange to fundraise for its operations in Uganda and Ghana.
27 January, 2010
‘CAST LEAD’: INDEPENDENT INQUIRY ON WAR CRIMES CANCELED.
MISNA
26 January 2010
Israel shall not establish any independent commission to verify the accusations of war crimes, presented in the UN commission report prepared by South African judge Richard Goldstone on the crimes perpetrated during the Cast Lead offensive of January 2009, costing more than 1400 Palestinian lives. The Israeli information minister Yuli Edelstein said as much during an interview in New York after meeting the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon to inform him of the Israeli government’s decision on the matter. Edelstein said that Israel would deliver a document to the UN featuring the results of am internal survey compiled by the armed forces during Cast Lead. Like clockwork, Israeli leaders sharply criticized the Goldstone report, which, among other things, suggests that the International Criminal Court should be examine ‘Cast Lead’ itself, unless Israel and Hamas authorize – within the next six months – independent inquiries over episodes related to the war crimes allegations as discussed in the report.
26 January 2010
Israel shall not establish any independent commission to verify the accusations of war crimes, presented in the UN commission report prepared by South African judge Richard Goldstone on the crimes perpetrated during the Cast Lead offensive of January 2009, costing more than 1400 Palestinian lives. The Israeli information minister Yuli Edelstein said as much during an interview in New York after meeting the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon to inform him of the Israeli government’s decision on the matter. Edelstein said that Israel would deliver a document to the UN featuring the results of am internal survey compiled by the armed forces during Cast Lead. Like clockwork, Israeli leaders sharply criticized the Goldstone report, which, among other things, suggests that the International Criminal Court should be examine ‘Cast Lead’ itself, unless Israel and Hamas authorize – within the next six months – independent inquiries over episodes related to the war crimes allegations as discussed in the report.
UDPF Deploys in Namatala wetland.
The New Vision
26 January 2010
By Daniel Edyegu
Editor's Note: The same day Pres. Museveni and Moi visit Mbale, the UPDF deploys in the district.
Thearmy and the Police have deployed in Namatala wetland at the border between Mbale and Budaka districts.
This follows the escalating ethnic clashes that claimed three people last week.
Namatala wetland is the centre of a raging border dispute between the Bagwere and Bagisu farmers with each claiming the other was cultivating beyond the district boundary.
Six Bagwere and three Bagisu have been hacked to death since the conflict began in 2007.
The eastern regional Police spokesperson, Iddi Ssenkumbi, on Monday explained that the army reinforced the Police to deter farmers on either side from accessing the wetland.
On January 18, over 150 Bagwere from Kamonkoli sub-county in Budaka raided Namatala wetland and hacked to death James Makhosi, a rice farmer from Bungokho-Mutoto sub-county in Mbale.
In retaliation, the Bagisu raided Kamonkoli sub-county the following day and hacked to death two Bagwere identified as Muloki David, 40, an ex-UPDF soldier from Naynaza cell and Asuman Kiirya from Namuyago village.
The Bagisu also injured four other Bagwere while three Bagisu sustained injuries.
"To prevent further bloodshed, security organs from both districts resolved to declare the wetland a no-go-zone for farmers from either side until the dispute is resolved," Ssenkumbi stated.
"We are making arrangements to have farmers with crops in the wetland to remove them," he added.
Ssenkumbi said a man from Nasenyi village in Budaka was arrested and is held at Mbale central Police station over the weekend while attempting to sneak in to the wetland to access his garden.
He noted that they had opened a file to probe some local political leaders for inciting the clashes.
26 January 2010
By Daniel Edyegu
Editor's Note: The same day Pres. Museveni and Moi visit Mbale, the UPDF deploys in the district.
Thearmy and the Police have deployed in Namatala wetland at the border between Mbale and Budaka districts.
This follows the escalating ethnic clashes that claimed three people last week.
Namatala wetland is the centre of a raging border dispute between the Bagwere and Bagisu farmers with each claiming the other was cultivating beyond the district boundary.
Six Bagwere and three Bagisu have been hacked to death since the conflict began in 2007.
The eastern regional Police spokesperson, Iddi Ssenkumbi, on Monday explained that the army reinforced the Police to deter farmers on either side from accessing the wetland.
On January 18, over 150 Bagwere from Kamonkoli sub-county in Budaka raided Namatala wetland and hacked to death James Makhosi, a rice farmer from Bungokho-Mutoto sub-county in Mbale.
In retaliation, the Bagisu raided Kamonkoli sub-county the following day and hacked to death two Bagwere identified as Muloki David, 40, an ex-UPDF soldier from Naynaza cell and Asuman Kiirya from Namuyago village.
The Bagisu also injured four other Bagwere while three Bagisu sustained injuries.
"To prevent further bloodshed, security organs from both districts resolved to declare the wetland a no-go-zone for farmers from either side until the dispute is resolved," Ssenkumbi stated.
"We are making arrangements to have farmers with crops in the wetland to remove them," he added.
Ssenkumbi said a man from Nasenyi village in Budaka was arrested and is held at Mbale central Police station over the weekend while attempting to sneak in to the wetland to access his garden.
He noted that they had opened a file to probe some local political leaders for inciting the clashes.
U.S. special forces teams, intelligence agencies deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes.
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 27, 2010; A01
U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network.
As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.
The broad outlines of the U.S. involvement in Yemen have come to light in the past month, but the extent and nature of the operations have not been previously reported. The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen.
The collaboration with Yemen provides the starkest illustration to date of the Obama administration's efforts to ramp up counterterrorism operations, including in areas outside the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.
"We are very pleased with the direction this is going," a senior administration official said of the cooperation with Yemen.
Obama has ordered a dramatic increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama's administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush, according to a military officer who tracks the attacks.
Obama also has sent U.S. military forces briefly into Somalia as part of an operation to kill Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan sought in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya.
Republican lawmakers and former vice president Richard B. Cheney have sought to characterize the new president as soft on terrorism after he banned the harsh interrogation methods permitted under Bush and announced his intention to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Obama has rejected those two elements of Bush's counterterrorism program, but he has embraced the notion that the most effective way to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates is to work closely with foreign partners, including those that have feeble democracies, shoddy human rights records and weak accountability over the vast sums of money Washington is giving them to win their continued participation in these efforts.
In the case of Yemen, a steady stream of high-ranking officials has visited Saleh, including the rarely seen JSOC commander, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven; White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan; and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command.
A Yemeni official briefed on security matters said Tuesday that the two countries maintained a "steadfast cooperation in combating AQAP, but there are clear limits to the U.S. involvement on the ground. Information sharing has been a key in carrying out recent successful counterterrorism operations." AQAP is the abbreviation for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate operating in Yemen.
In a newly built joint operations center, the American advisers are acting as intermediaries between the Yemeni forces and hundreds of U.S. military and intelligence officers working in Washington, Virginia and Tampa and at Fort Meade, Md., to collect, analyze and route intelligence.
The combined efforts have resulted in more than two dozen ground raids and airstrikes. Military and intelligence officials suspect there are several hundred members of AQAP, a group that has historical links to the main al-Qaeda organization but that is thought to operate independently.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told a Navy War College class in early January that the United States had "no plans" to send ground troops to Yemen and that he had been concerned about the growing al-Qaeda presence there "for a long time now."
"We have worked hard to try to improve our relationships and training, education and war-fighting support," Mullen said. "And, yet, we still have a long way to go."
Saleh has faced pressure not only from the United States but also his country's main financial backers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to gain better control over its lawless northern border. In August, Saleh asked U.S. officials to begin a more in-depth conversation over how the two countries might work together, according to administration officials. The current operation evolved from those talks.
"President Saleh was serious about going after al-Qaeda and wasn't going to resist our encouragement," the senior official said.
The Obama administration's deepening of bilateral intelligence relations builds on ties forged during George J. Tenet's tenure as CIA director.
Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Tenet coaxed Saleh into a partnership that would give the CIA and U.S. military units the means to attack terrorist training camps and al-Qaeda targets. Saleh agreed, in part, because he believed that his country, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, was next on the U.S. invasion list, according to an adviser to the Yemeni president.
Tenet provided Saleh's forces with helicopters, eavesdropping equipment and 100 Army Special Forces members to train an antiterrorism unit. He also won Saleh's approval to fly Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles over the country. In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.
Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.
The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."
Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.
Intelligence officials say the New Mexico-born imam also has been linked to the Army psychiatrist who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, Tex., although his communications with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan were largely academic in nature. Authorities say that Aulaqi is the most important native, English-speaking al-Qaeda figure and that he was in contact with the Nigerian accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi said in Washington last week that his government's present goal is to persuade Aulaqi to surrender so he can face local criminal charges stemming from his contacts with the Fort Hood suspect. Aulaqi is being tracked by the country's security forces, the minister added, and is now thought to be in the southern province of Shabwa.
Staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 27, 2010; A01
U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network.
As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.
The broad outlines of the U.S. involvement in Yemen have come to light in the past month, but the extent and nature of the operations have not been previously reported. The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen.
The collaboration with Yemen provides the starkest illustration to date of the Obama administration's efforts to ramp up counterterrorism operations, including in areas outside the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.
"We are very pleased with the direction this is going," a senior administration official said of the cooperation with Yemen.
Obama has ordered a dramatic increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama's administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush, according to a military officer who tracks the attacks.
Obama also has sent U.S. military forces briefly into Somalia as part of an operation to kill Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan sought in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya.
Republican lawmakers and former vice president Richard B. Cheney have sought to characterize the new president as soft on terrorism after he banned the harsh interrogation methods permitted under Bush and announced his intention to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Obama has rejected those two elements of Bush's counterterrorism program, but he has embraced the notion that the most effective way to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates is to work closely with foreign partners, including those that have feeble democracies, shoddy human rights records and weak accountability over the vast sums of money Washington is giving them to win their continued participation in these efforts.
In the case of Yemen, a steady stream of high-ranking officials has visited Saleh, including the rarely seen JSOC commander, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven; White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan; and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command.
A Yemeni official briefed on security matters said Tuesday that the two countries maintained a "steadfast cooperation in combating AQAP, but there are clear limits to the U.S. involvement on the ground. Information sharing has been a key in carrying out recent successful counterterrorism operations." AQAP is the abbreviation for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate operating in Yemen.
In a newly built joint operations center, the American advisers are acting as intermediaries between the Yemeni forces and hundreds of U.S. military and intelligence officers working in Washington, Virginia and Tampa and at Fort Meade, Md., to collect, analyze and route intelligence.
The combined efforts have resulted in more than two dozen ground raids and airstrikes. Military and intelligence officials suspect there are several hundred members of AQAP, a group that has historical links to the main al-Qaeda organization but that is thought to operate independently.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told a Navy War College class in early January that the United States had "no plans" to send ground troops to Yemen and that he had been concerned about the growing al-Qaeda presence there "for a long time now."
"We have worked hard to try to improve our relationships and training, education and war-fighting support," Mullen said. "And, yet, we still have a long way to go."
Saleh has faced pressure not only from the United States but also his country's main financial backers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to gain better control over its lawless northern border. In August, Saleh asked U.S. officials to begin a more in-depth conversation over how the two countries might work together, according to administration officials. The current operation evolved from those talks.
"President Saleh was serious about going after al-Qaeda and wasn't going to resist our encouragement," the senior official said.
The Obama administration's deepening of bilateral intelligence relations builds on ties forged during George J. Tenet's tenure as CIA director.
Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Tenet coaxed Saleh into a partnership that would give the CIA and U.S. military units the means to attack terrorist training camps and al-Qaeda targets. Saleh agreed, in part, because he believed that his country, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, was next on the U.S. invasion list, according to an adviser to the Yemeni president.
Tenet provided Saleh's forces with helicopters, eavesdropping equipment and 100 Army Special Forces members to train an antiterrorism unit. He also won Saleh's approval to fly Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles over the country. In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.
Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.
The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."
Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.
Intelligence officials say the New Mexico-born imam also has been linked to the Army psychiatrist who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, Tex., although his communications with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan were largely academic in nature. Authorities say that Aulaqi is the most important native, English-speaking al-Qaeda figure and that he was in contact with the Nigerian accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi said in Washington last week that his government's present goal is to persuade Aulaqi to surrender so he can face local criminal charges stemming from his contacts with the Fort Hood suspect. Aulaqi is being tracked by the country's security forces, the minister added, and is now thought to be in the southern province of Shabwa.
Staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Sri Lanka's president re-elected.
Al-Jazeera
27 January 2010
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the incumbent Sri Lankan president, has been re-elected, the election commission says.
The elections commissioner said on Wednesday that Rajapakse had secured 57.9 per cent of the vote, while his rival, Sarath Fonseka, won 40.1 per cent.
The announcement came as troops were already surrounding the Cinnamon Lakeside hotel in the capital Colombo, where Fonseka, the former army chief, was staying along with some of his supporters.
Fonseka told reporters that the government was plotting to have him killed by removing his personal security guards and exposing him to assassination.
"They are behaving like murderers," he said.
"We will never accept this result. We will petition (the court) against it."
Mano Ganeshan, Fonseka's spokesman, said he wanted foreign protection.
"I am going to meet a diplomat of a neighbouring country to seek assurances of the safety of Sarath Fonseka," Mano Ganeshan said in an apparent reference to India.
Hotel encircled
Sri Lankan troops had surrounded Fonseka's hotel since the morning, with the government saying that the move had been taken for the former army chief's own protection.
Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera's correspondent, reporting from close to the Cinnamon Lakeside hotel, said that the neighbourhood had effectively become a military area.
"There are hundreds of troops on the street outside the hotel. There are blockades by buses in the roads leading to the hotel," he said.
"To come through we had to go through the cordon of the troops, a search by the troops of our vehicle - certainly its a very, very intense military presence outside the hotel where Sarath Fonseka and his entourage are staying."
Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the Sri Lankan military spokesman, said the troops had been deployed following information that army deserters were among about 400 people inside the hotel.
"We don't know what's their motive and as a protective measure, we have deployed troops around the hotel and people who go in and come out are being checked," he was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.
In the final days of the campaign, Fonseka had said the government harboured plans to either steal the vote or arrest him should he win.
Government allies, for their part, suggested that Fonseka's supporters might take to the streets, or that he might try to engineer a coup with his own loyalists in the army if he lost the vote.
'Some irregularities'
Both sides have rejected the other's allegations and the election, which took place on Tuesday, was largely peaceful.
Susan Hayward, a Sri Lanka analyst at the US Institute for Peace, told Al Jazeera that there had been reports of some irregularities.
"The Centre for Monitoring Election Violence has given some reports of rigging," she said.
Some people have questioned the results of postal votes, which showed Rajapaksa with a slight lead, she said.
Meanwhile, Fonseka has found himself in the embarrassing position of having to state that he "may have voted".
He did not want to say clearly on Tuesday if he had, citing "security reasons".
Fonseka later admitted he was not on the country's voter rolls.
His supporters said he was too busy leading the war with the Tamil Tigers in 2008 when registration for the elections closed.
The government announced after polls closed that it would seek court action to disqualify Fonseka from the race.
However, the country's electoral commissioner later issued a statement saying his status on the voter rolls was irrelevant to his candidacy.
27 January 2010
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the incumbent Sri Lankan president, has been re-elected, the election commission says.
The elections commissioner said on Wednesday that Rajapakse had secured 57.9 per cent of the vote, while his rival, Sarath Fonseka, won 40.1 per cent.
The announcement came as troops were already surrounding the Cinnamon Lakeside hotel in the capital Colombo, where Fonseka, the former army chief, was staying along with some of his supporters.
Fonseka told reporters that the government was plotting to have him killed by removing his personal security guards and exposing him to assassination.
"They are behaving like murderers," he said.
"We will never accept this result. We will petition (the court) against it."
Mano Ganeshan, Fonseka's spokesman, said he wanted foreign protection.
"I am going to meet a diplomat of a neighbouring country to seek assurances of the safety of Sarath Fonseka," Mano Ganeshan said in an apparent reference to India.
Hotel encircled
Sri Lankan troops had surrounded Fonseka's hotel since the morning, with the government saying that the move had been taken for the former army chief's own protection.
Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera's correspondent, reporting from close to the Cinnamon Lakeside hotel, said that the neighbourhood had effectively become a military area.
"There are hundreds of troops on the street outside the hotel. There are blockades by buses in the roads leading to the hotel," he said.
"To come through we had to go through the cordon of the troops, a search by the troops of our vehicle - certainly its a very, very intense military presence outside the hotel where Sarath Fonseka and his entourage are staying."
Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the Sri Lankan military spokesman, said the troops had been deployed following information that army deserters were among about 400 people inside the hotel.
"We don't know what's their motive and as a protective measure, we have deployed troops around the hotel and people who go in and come out are being checked," he was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.
In the final days of the campaign, Fonseka had said the government harboured plans to either steal the vote or arrest him should he win.
Government allies, for their part, suggested that Fonseka's supporters might take to the streets, or that he might try to engineer a coup with his own loyalists in the army if he lost the vote.
'Some irregularities'
Both sides have rejected the other's allegations and the election, which took place on Tuesday, was largely peaceful.
Susan Hayward, a Sri Lanka analyst at the US Institute for Peace, told Al Jazeera that there had been reports of some irregularities.
"The Centre for Monitoring Election Violence has given some reports of rigging," she said.
Some people have questioned the results of postal votes, which showed Rajapaksa with a slight lead, she said.
Meanwhile, Fonseka has found himself in the embarrassing position of having to state that he "may have voted".
He did not want to say clearly on Tuesday if he had, citing "security reasons".
Fonseka later admitted he was not on the country's voter rolls.
His supporters said he was too busy leading the war with the Tamil Tigers in 2008 when registration for the elections closed.
The government announced after polls closed that it would seek court action to disqualify Fonseka from the race.
However, the country's electoral commissioner later issued a statement saying his status on the voter rolls was irrelevant to his candidacy.
Morocco taps devolution to break W. Sahara deadlock.
Mail & Guardian
27 January 2010
By Lamine Ghanmi
Editor's Note: Back in early 2008, individuals in Frence and Spain were reporting that AFRICOM was interested in building a headquarters near the port city of Tam Tam following a meeting between the DIA, Morocco's DGED, and the US Embassy in Rabat's Office of Defense Operations. The US had reportedly scouted a 1000 hecare site at the mouth of the Draa River and a site farther inland to the southeast near the Tam Tam airport. It is not too far from the capital El Aaium. The area is called the Cap Draa Training Area. US forces have used this area for multi-nation training exercises in Africa.
Currently holding an offshore oil license from Morocco for prospecting in Western Sahara are Dallas-based Kosmos Energy, and Norway's Fugro-Geoteam. Ireland's Island Oil and Gas has an onshore license in the northeast and the Tarfaya area. The EU is paying Morocco to fish off the coast of Western Sahara.
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Plans by Morocco to devolve some power to its regions appear unlikely to convince independence campaigners in Western Sahara to accept Moroccan sovereignty over the desert territory.
A decades-old dispute over Western Sahara's future is fuelling tension between Morocco and neighbour Algeria that has scuppered attempts to create an EU-style political and economic union to drag swathes of North Africa out of poverty.
Europe and the United States also fear it is stopping Morocco and Algeria working together to contain al-Qaeda-linked militants trying to impose strict Islamic rule in North Africa.
Morocco has been offering limited autonomy for Western Sahara but Algeria-backed independence movement Polisario insists on a referendum with independence as one option. Three years of United Nations-backed talks have gone nowhere.
Morocco's plan for more regional government is designed to address frustrated hopes for more democracy in the kingdom and show Sahrawis deeply suspicious of the authorities in Rabat that they are serious about sharing power, analysts say.
"Autonomy and regionalisation are the same thing. The regionalisation would be autonomy for Western Sahara and a different thing for other regions," said Taoufik Bouachrine, editor of Moroccan daily paper Akhabar al Maghrib.
"Were the plan successful, I think Sahrawis would accept it, but I think regionalisation would just redeploy the same system monopolising wealth and power that we have in Rabat," he said.
Diplomatic push?
Morocco has poured people and money into Western Sahara, a tract of desert the size of Britain which has lucrative phosphate reserves and potentially large offshore oil reserves.
No country formally recognises Rabat's claim to the territory, but its allies France, Spain and the United States have pushed its autonomy proposal as a promising starting point.
27 January 2010
By Lamine Ghanmi
Editor's Note: Back in early 2008, individuals in Frence and Spain were reporting that AFRICOM was interested in building a headquarters near the port city of Tam Tam following a meeting between the DIA, Morocco's DGED, and the US Embassy in Rabat's Office of Defense Operations. The US had reportedly scouted a 1000 hecare site at the mouth of the Draa River and a site farther inland to the southeast near the Tam Tam airport. It is not too far from the capital El Aaium. The area is called the Cap Draa Training Area. US forces have used this area for multi-nation training exercises in Africa.
Currently holding an offshore oil license from Morocco for prospecting in Western Sahara are Dallas-based Kosmos Energy, and Norway's Fugro-Geoteam. Ireland's Island Oil and Gas has an onshore license in the northeast and the Tarfaya area. The EU is paying Morocco to fish off the coast of Western Sahara.
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Plans by Morocco to devolve some power to its regions appear unlikely to convince independence campaigners in Western Sahara to accept Moroccan sovereignty over the desert territory.
A decades-old dispute over Western Sahara's future is fuelling tension between Morocco and neighbour Algeria that has scuppered attempts to create an EU-style political and economic union to drag swathes of North Africa out of poverty.
Europe and the United States also fear it is stopping Morocco and Algeria working together to contain al-Qaeda-linked militants trying to impose strict Islamic rule in North Africa.
Morocco has been offering limited autonomy for Western Sahara but Algeria-backed independence movement Polisario insists on a referendum with independence as one option. Three years of United Nations-backed talks have gone nowhere.
Morocco's plan for more regional government is designed to address frustrated hopes for more democracy in the kingdom and show Sahrawis deeply suspicious of the authorities in Rabat that they are serious about sharing power, analysts say.
"Autonomy and regionalisation are the same thing. The regionalisation would be autonomy for Western Sahara and a different thing for other regions," said Taoufik Bouachrine, editor of Moroccan daily paper Akhabar al Maghrib.
"Were the plan successful, I think Sahrawis would accept it, but I think regionalisation would just redeploy the same system monopolising wealth and power that we have in Rabat," he said.
Diplomatic push?
Morocco has poured people and money into Western Sahara, a tract of desert the size of Britain which has lucrative phosphate reserves and potentially large offshore oil reserves.
No country formally recognises Rabat's claim to the territory, but its allies France, Spain and the United States have pushed its autonomy proposal as a promising starting point.
Rwandan National Police Respond to Green Party Letter.
Rwandan National Police
BP 6304
Kigali, Rwanda
22/01/2010
From: Office of the Commissioner General
No. 2765/NP/EKG/CGP/BK/10
To: Mr.Frank Habineza
Tel: 0788563039
Kigali, Rwanda
Subject: Response to Your Letter
Mr. Habineza,
In reference to your letter dated 23rd Nov 2009, I would like to inform you that the National Police do not have as one of its duties a responsibility to grant permissions to hold meetings of any kind, but has a duty to ensure the security of the people and their property in general.
Permission to have a meeting must be granted by the district authorities where you would like to have your congress.
Wishing you good comprehension,
Signed and stamped,
Emmanuel K. Gasana
CGP
Commissioner General of Police
BP 6304
Kigali, Rwanda
22/01/2010
From: Office of the Commissioner General
No. 2765/NP/EKG/CGP/BK/10
To: Mr.Frank Habineza
Tel: 0788563039
Kigali, Rwanda
Subject: Response to Your Letter
Mr. Habineza,
In reference to your letter dated 23rd Nov 2009, I would like to inform you that the National Police do not have as one of its duties a responsibility to grant permissions to hold meetings of any kind, but has a duty to ensure the security of the people and their property in general.
Permission to have a meeting must be granted by the district authorities where you would like to have your congress.
Wishing you good comprehension,
Signed and stamped,
Emmanuel K. Gasana
CGP
Commissioner General of Police
Bagram: The First Ever Prisoner List (The Annotated Version)
By Andy Worthington
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/bagram-the-first-ever-prisoner-list-the-annotated-version/
Please visit his site for much more information.
On Friday January 15, 2010, the Pentagon responded to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU last April, and released the first ever list of 645 prisoners held, as of September 22, 2009, in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (the Bagram Theater Internment Facility).
In the hope of making the list more readily accessible — and searchable — than it is through a poorly photocopied Pentagon document, I reproduce it below, with commentary on some the prisoners I have been able to identify. This is very much a work-in-progress, of course, as the state of knowledge regarding Bagram is akin to that regarding Guantánamo back in 2005, before the prisoner lists and 8,000 pages of documents were released that allowed me to research and write my book The Guantánamo Files, and to begin a new career as a full-time journalist on Guantánamo and related issues.
In an article accompanying the publication of this list, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined what the list — which contains only the prisoners’ names, and not their nationalities or the date and place of their capture — reveals about the small number of foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, three of whom are currently waiting to see if the Court of Appeals will overturn the right to habeas corpus that was granted to them by Judge John D. Bates last March, and raise questions about the whereabouts of other known “ghost prisoners” who do not appear to have been included on the list.
In an article to follow, I’ll examine how the list reveals not only that around 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram in the last six years, but also how the majority of the prisoners listed here were seized in 2008 and 2009 — and I’ll examine what this means with regard to the US administration’s detention policies and the Geneva Conventions, which were discarded by George W. Bush and have clearly not been reintroduced by Barack Obama.
Although I believe that I have had some success tracking down the stories of some of the 100 or so prisoners on the list who have been held at Bagram for between three and seven years, I have found few clues as to the identities of the majority of those listed, who, as mentioned above, were seized in the last two years. Most reports — by the US military or the media — of raids or skirmishes that led to the capture of those held have not furnished the names of those seized, and on the rare occasion that names have been provided it has tended to be because they are regarded as significant figures.
I have no idea whether the allegations against these men are true, but, more importantly, I have not failed to notice that the majority of the prisoners (often men identified by only one name) are clearly not significant figures at all, and my fear — which, I have no doubt, will be confirmed when more information emerges — is that many of them will be revealed to be victims of the same chaotic approach to the capture of prisoners that has done so much to lose the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq for the last eight years, and which, with regard to the 218 prisoners seized in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2003 and sent to Guantánamo, I chronicled in The Guantánamo Files.
A clear sign that this is indeed the case came in August 2009, when Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, commissioned by Gen. David Petraeus to review detention policies in Afghanistan, produced a report in which he estimated that “as many as 400 of the 600 held at Bagram can be released,” explaining that “many of these men were swept up in raids” and “have little connection to the insurgency.”
If you have any further information about any of these men, please feel free to email me, and I will incorporate the information into the list.
Bagram: the prisoner list
The first three prisoners listed are referred to by their prisoner numbers at Guantánamo. All three were seized after their release from Guantánamo and imprisoned in Bagram.
459: Gul Zaman. He was released from Guantánamo in April 2005. The circumstances of his recapture are unknown. In The Guantánamo Files, I wrote, “Three members of a family of farmers — 59-year old Abib Sarajuddin, his 30-year old son Gul Zaman and his 39-year old brother Khan Zaman — were captured by US soldiers in a village near Khost in January 2002, allegedly because someone had fired on them, although the men, who were released in 2005 and 2006, said that the soldiers, who arrived at night by helicopter, broke into their houses and arrested them for no reason.”
831: Khadan Kadir. Also identified as Qadir Khandan, he was released from Guantánamo in October 2006. The circumstances of his recapture are unknown. In The Guantánamo Files, I wrote, “Arrested at his home in September 2002 and accused of running a safe house for a bomb-making cell, Khandan pointed out that he was working for the Karzai government in the National Security Office in Khost, and that, as a pharmacist, bombs were ‘truly against my ideology.’ He also explained that he was badly abused by American soldiers in a prison in Khost. ‘They put tight round glasses around my eyes, had my ears shut with plugs and I was covered with a bag,’ he said, adding, ‘I was ordered to stand up 24 hours for 20 days in a row. I had blood coming out of my body and my nose for days because I was tortured so much.’ Describing what appear to be otherwise unreported murders in US custody, he also said, ‘I saw four people die right in front of me.’”
1001: Hafizullah Shabaz Khail. Also identified as Hafizullah Shabaz Khiel, he was released from Guantánamo in December 2007. A 56-year old pharmacist from Zormat, south of Gardez, he had been approached by the town elders after Hamid Karzai first came to power as the head of the interim post-Taliban government, and served as the mayor for six months until an official appointment was made. He then continued to help out with security. “While I was mayor in Zormat,” he said, “there were no problems with the Americans. I met with American commanders several times … We even took pictures together.” He was apparently seized by US forces because of false information provided by a rival, Abdullah Mujahid Haq (who also ended up in Guantánamo).
On his return, he was cleared of all charges by the Afghan government, but in February 2009 the Associated Press reported that he had been seized again during a nighttime raid on his home in September 2008, and noted, pointedly that his story “shows just how difficult it is for the US to determine who is guilty and who is not in Afghanistan, where corruption rules and grudges are held for years, if not decades.”
This time around, he was accused of “treating sick Taliban as a pharmacist,” but as the AP noted, “Some Afghans claim the US is far too quick to arrest people without understanding the complexities of the culture.” Ishaq Gailani, a member of President Hamid Karzai’s government, explained, “We are fed up. Bagram is full of these people who are wrongly accused. They arrest everyone — a 15-year-old boy and a 61-year-old man. They arrest them because they run away from their helicopters … I would run away too if I saw them. They don’t know who is the terrorist and who is not.” As the AP described it, “Zormat elders, leading clerics, the provincial governor, the National Reconciliation Bureau and two members of Parliament have signed documents attesting to Hafizullah’s innocence.” The report also explained, “Family members fear a decades-old feud involving a distant cousin, Fazle Rabi, may have been behind the nighttime raid on Hafizullah’s home.”
For the rest of the Bagram prisoners, their prisoner numbers appear to have carried on from the last numbers given to prisoners sent to Guantánamo. The last was Mohammed Mussa, sent to Guantánamo in November 2003, and his detainee number was 1165.
1207: Haji Pacha Wazir. A Pakistani living in the United Arab Emirates, where he ran an international chain of hawalas, Wazir was suspected of being a major money handler for al-Qaeda. In September 2002, as described by Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine, the UAE government froze millions of dollars of his assets and informed him that he was under investigation by the FBI. Although Wazir asked to meet with FBI representatives to persuade them that he was innocent, he was kidnapped by CIA agents en route to the meeting.
After failing to provide useful information under interrogation in the UAE, his brother was then seized, but he provided no useful information either. The CIA then kidnapped two of Wazir’s employees operating a store in Karachi, Pakistan, replacing them with CIA agents of Pakistani descent, who allegedly secured information leading to the capture of “dozens” of key figures. Wazir and the other three men were apparently rendered to a CIA black site, but only Wazir surfaced at Bagram, and the whereabouts of the others is unknown.
In July 2009, Haji Wazir’s habeas corpus petition was denied by US District Court Judge John D. Bates.
1209: Lutfi al-Arabi al-Gharisi. According to a report compiled by Abu Yahya al-Libi, a prisoner who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, one of the prisoners who was held with him was a Tunisian, Abou Houdayfa, whose first name, according to al-Libi, was Lotfi. Captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the end of 2002, he was reportedly held in several CIA prisons in Afghanistan, including the “Dark Prison,” before being moved to Bagram. It’s also probable that he is “Hudeifa,” a Tunisian prisoner mentioned by Marwan Jabour, who was also held in several secret prisons, but was released in 2006. He later told his story to Human Rights Watch, who published it as a report, “Ghost Prisoner,” in February 2007.
1220: Arsala Khan
1282: Saifullah Abdul Wali
1286: Malang Zafar. A man of this name was seized in December 2003 by Gurkhas, and was described as a “chief of operations” for Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), a fiercely anti-US group headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran warlord who, ironically, received the lion’s share of CIA funding in the 1980s, via Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). According to a report in the Independent in December 2003, he was “suspected of organizing a bus bombing in June that killed four German soldiers” and the circumstances of his capture were described as follows: “Attempting to escape from a police checkpoint in Kabul, Malang Zafar Khan drove his pick-up truck straight at the gunpoints of the British Army Gurkhas. They had been waiting for the man sent to blow up the loya jirga, the national constitutional assembly that starts today.”
1287: Gulam Rabbani Abu Bakr. A man of this name was seized in 2003 by Afghan forces and a West Midlands regiment of Territorial Army soldiers, and was reportedly a HIG commander “believed to have been behind a series of car bombings in Kabul.”
1288: Qalam. A man of this name was seized with four others in a raid in Kabul in September 2003, and was reportedly a former HIG commander. An Associated Press report explained: “Khalil Aminzada, deputy chief of police of Kabul, said Tuesday that two suspects were arrested in the capital on Monday by Afghan authorities acting with some foreigners. Aminzada was not sure if the foreigners were from ISAF or the United States. He identified one suspect as Qalam, allegedly a former commander of rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but did not name the other and or elaborate on what they were suspected of plotting.” Pakistan’s Daily Times reported that Qalam was seized with four other men.
1432: Ahmad Dilshad. A man named Dilshad Ahmad, an alleged leader of the proscribed Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, was “arrested in Iraq by British forces, and then given over to the US for interrogation,” according to a report in Asia Times in July 2004, which noted that the first report of his capture was in April 2004, and that he “went under several aliases, including Danish Ahmad and Abdul Rehman al-Dakhil.” SATP added that he was seized in Baghdad with four other men.
1433: Salah Mohammad Ali. This may be the man identified by Abu Yahya al-Libi (an al-Qaeda member who escaped from Bagram in July 2005) as Salah Din al-Bakistani, who lived in Doha, Qatar. According to al-Libi, he was seized in Iraq in 2004, and was apparently held in Abu Ghraib and another “torture prison.” Salah Din was identified by the legal action charity Reprieve as Salahuddin and was apparently seized by British forces and transferred to Bagram with another Pakistani, a rice merchant named Amanatullah Ali. However, no one of that name is on the Bagram prisoner list, even though it is clear, from letters received by his family, that Amanatullah Ali is being held at Bagram.
According to Reprieve, Salahuddin, who was brought up in the Gulf states, “has not been able to contact his family or even reassure them that he is alive.” Reprieve also noted that, through various sources, they have been told that, “as a result of his abuse in UK and US custody, Salahuddin is in catastrophic mental and physical shape, and now spends most of his time in the mental health cells at Bagram.”
1442: Haji Ghulam Farooq
1456: Moez Bin Abdul Qadir Fezzani. From his name, it appears that this prisoner is Tunisian, but what is confusing is that a prisoner with the same name (Moez Ben Abdelkader Fezzani, also identified as Abou Nassim) is held in Guantánamo, where he appears to be identified as Abdul bin Mohammed bin Ourgy. On December 20, following the transfer of two Tunisians from Guantánamo to Italian custody (one of whom, Adel Ben Mabrouk, was also identified in June as Moez Fezzani), Italian TV stations reported that Fezzani was “being moved to Italy to face international terrorism charges for having allegedly recruited fighters for Afghanistan,” although the transfer has not yet taken place.
1464: Mohammed Amin al-Bakri (Yemeni). Seized in Thailand at the end of 2002, he was reportedly held in three secret CIA prisons before Bagram, according to Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda leader who escaped from Bagram in July 2005. In March 2009, his habeas corpus petition was granted by US District Court Judge John D, Bates, but as of January 2010 the ruling is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals. In his habeas petition, he is identified as Amin Mohammed Abdallah al-Bakri.
1466: Ridha Ahmad Najjar (Tunisian). Seized in Karachi, Pakistan in May 2002, he was reportedly held in four secret CIA prisons before Bagram, according to Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda leader who escaped from Bagram in July 2005. In March 2009, his habeas corpus petition was granted by US District Court Judge John D, Bates, but as of January 2010 the ruling is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals. In his habeas petition, he is identified as Redha al-Najar.
1474: Amal Khan
1503: Noor Agha
1658: Zahir Jan
1691: Mohammed Ayoob
1718: Hafezullah Jan
1815: Fadi Ahmed. Presumably this is Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni, seized in 2004, who was sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram, according to Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda leader who escaped from Bagram in July 2005. In March 2009, his habeas corpus petition was granted by US District Court Judge John D, Bates, but as of January 2010 the ruling is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals.
1869: Hamidullah
1877: Abdul Rahman
1897: Fazel Karim. This is a long shot, but a man named Fazal Karim, apparently a former mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan, was in custody in Pakistan, in February 2003, in connection with the murder of Daniel Pearl. As Reuters explained, “Two LeJ members, Naeem Bokhari and Fazal Karim, both in undeclared custody, are suspected of helping in Pearl’s kidnap and murder, intelligence sources say.” In his autobiography, President Musharraf described Karim as a “militant activist,” and stated that he was captured in May 2002, and that he led investigators to Pearl’s body, and also helped direct them to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s alleged involvement in the killing. Musharraf stated that Karim did not know who KSM was — only that he was “Arab-looking” — but this may have been enough for the US authorities to wish to interrogate him in Afghanistan. Also see this report in TIME.
2273: Molvia Hamidullah
2284: Abdul Basset Zadran
2321: Babarak
2343: Samiullah
2369: Jamshir Khan
2401: Mohammad Anwar
2421: Raiz. A man of this name — Haji Raiz, described as “a key terrorist leader” — was captured in July 2007. A report explained, “Police searches also confiscated bomb-making material from Raiz, described by coalition forces as a major improvised explosive device facilitator for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
2422: Abdul Kabir
2463: Dost Mohammed
2505: Abdul Alim
2521: Sayed Gulab. A man of this name was seized in May 2007. A report explained, “Afghan Border Police, advised by Coalition forces, detained a Taliban leader in the Pachir Wa Agam district of Nangarhar province during an operation May 24. After receiving information on the whereabouts of Sayed Gulab, a notorious Nangarhar Taliban area commander and improvised explosive device cell facilitator, ABP members quickly moved to the village of Shir Wagan and detained him. Gulab is currently being held for questioning in a Coalition detention facility.”
2615: Sham Ali Khan
2619: Shafiq
2633: Enayatullah
2634: Mohammed Agha
2635: Sher Jan
2638: Mullah Abdullah
2650: Shad Gul
2660: Abdul Ghafor
2667: Haji Said Nabi
2689: Zabit Yasin
2720: Mohammed Rahim Noori
2724: Mohammed Yosef Noori
2737: Lalay Mohammed
2773: Noor Wali
2784: Niyaz
2802: Wali Jan
2825: Farooq
2827: Gulam Farooq
2842: Keramat
2904: Mohammed Layaq
2908: Haji Najmuddin
2910: Abdul Wali
2965: Abdul Ghafar
2974: Feroz Khan
2977: Enamullah
2978: Ali Sadar
3014: Abdul Karim
3015: Palik Jan
3028: Mohammed Wali
3034: Abdul Qadir
3066: Abdul Zahir
3068: Mohammed Kadir
3070: Hamid Gul
3086: Rahmatullah
3088: Bismullah Abdullah
3094: Mohammed Hassan Khan
3096: Awal Noor
3111: Gul Agha
3112: Akhtar Gul
3154: Qari Mohmand
3160: Nazir Khan
3167: Gul Shezad Khan
3170: Akbar Shah
3197: Sultan Ghul
3205: Hadaytullah
3207: Noor Hassan
3222: Saleh al-Afghani
3226: Ghulam Sawar Jamili
3246: Abdul Raziq
3264: Haji Mohammed
3273: Said Wali Jan
3278: Haji Qayum Boi
3279: Maulawi Hafizullah
3281: Aka Khan
3303: Mohammed Gul
3305: Shadi Khan
3306: Nur Bacha
3308: Kahn Muhamad
3310: Gul Mar Jan
3314: Maulawi Ahmad Jan. A man of this name was seized on September 9, 2007. CJTF-82 reported in a press release, “Afghan National Police, advised by Coalition forces, detained the Taliban district commander of Andar, Ghazni and four others in an operation designed to disrupt insurgent activities in Ghazni Province early this morning. Maulawi Ahmad Jan is known to be extensively involved in the coordination of insurgent activities in Ghazni Province. He has directed IED and ambush attacks against ANSF and Coalition forces throughout the region. During the search of Ahmad Jan’s compound, ANP discovered a weapons and ammunition cache. No shots were fired during the operation and no non-combatants were harmed. ‘With Ahmad Jan now detained, Ghazni will be a less dangerous place,’ said Army Maj. Chris Belcher, a Combined Joint Task Force-82 spokesperson. ‘Information gained as a result of Ahmad Jan’s capture will undoubtedly result in further interdiction of Taliban fighters and leaders in the area.’”
3316: Mullah Abdul Malik Akund
3343: Gologai
3345: Gul Hanan
3346: Alam
3355: Gul Zaman
3362: Izatullah
3363: Hazrat Wali
3364: Mullah Qadim
3366: Ali Mohammed
3378: Qari Said Daud
3383: Hajji Abdul Rahman Hoteq
3400: Sher Rahman
3401: Abdul Qadir
3402: Haji Amir
3404: Malik Azizurahman
3406: Gawhar Ali
3409: Abdul Satar
3410: Akeeb Khan
3417: Rohullah
3418: Daud Zahir
3422: Maulawi Ahmad Zahir Arab
3437: Momen Khan
3438: Gul Inam Toryalay
3439: Mohammad Daud Gulzar
3444: Juma Gul
3445: Pacha Khan
3446: Nasimullah Khan
3447: Mohammad Zahir
3451: Amanullah Khal
3452: Sakhi Jan
3453: Saleh Mohammad
3454: Ismail Malim
3463: Shams Khan
3464: Rais Mohammad
3466: Haji Zeni Khel
3468: Mullah Shabir. A man of this name was described in a military report in March 2008 as “a Taliban leader detained during a Feb. 25 joint operation in Ghazni province,” who “is believed to have provided intelligence, logistical support and improvised explosive devices to Taliban forces. He also is believed to be responsible for recent rocket attacks throughout Ghazni province, officials said.”
3469: Khan Mohammad
3470: Abdul Anan
3474: Torakay
3479: Qari Arif
3483: Mak Mali Jan
3484: Mohammed Hussein
3485: Qari Abdul Wali
3486: Abdul Nafi
3494: Hayatullah
3496: Khan Gul
3497: Nik Mohammad
3498: Sheikh Yousef Soup
3499: Shaswar Mohammad Nader
3503: Mohammad Ghanam
3505: Sher Bader
3509: Izatullah
3510: Hajj Abdul Majid Khan. A man of this name was detained in March 2008. On April 30, 2008, CJTF-82 announced in a press release, “Coalition forces have released the identity of an insurgent detained during an operation conducted last month to disrupt militant operations in Zabul province. The insurgent, Hajji Abdul Majid Khan, was apprehended during the operation in Qalat District. Khan, 55, was detained March 3 during an operation targeting him. Khan, aka Majid Khan, was a Taliban financier and IED facilitator in Zabul province. He is known to have planned and conducted IED attacks against Coalition forces, harbored and facilitated suicide bombers and raised finances for Taliban operations.”
3511: Wali Gul
3569: Mir Khan
3570: Abdul Ghafar
3572: Ajab
3574: Mujahid Farooq
3575: Mujib Rahman
3578: Mullah Zarbat
3580: Mahajir Ziarahman. A man of this name was detained in April 2008. On April 25, 2008, it was reported: “US-led coalition forces on Friday said two militants detained in the south-eastern province of Khost who were behind suicide bombing targeting Afghan and coalition forces, were identified as members of the Haqanni network, a former mujahideen party that fought invading Russian troops. The two militants, identified as Baitullah and Mahajir Ziarahman, were apprehended during an operation in Sabari district targeting the Haqanni network and improvised explosive device (IED) cells, said a military statement issued from the US base in Bagram. Baitullah, 34, was the target of the operation. He was a member of a Haqanni network based in Sabari that conducted the suicide bombing of the Sabari District Centre last month. According to the statement, Siraj Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani Network, claimed responsibility for the bombing, added the statement. Mahajir Ziarahman, 23, was also a member of the same Sabari-based IED cell and is Biatullah’s brother. Ziarahman has emplaced IEDs targeting Afghan Security Forces and coalition forces in Khowst province, the statement added.” It is not known what happened to Baitullah.
3582: Mullah Toor Jan
3583: Mullah Hamayun Akhund
3584: Qazi Khan
3585: Sadar Wali
3586: Gul Khan
3587: Montaz
3588: Arifullah
3590: Mulla Salim
3594: Safatullah
3595: Mullah Dabazoray
3596: Shah Khalid
3600: Suhabi Rahman
3601: Zhar Mohammad
3603: Mohammad Ismael Saqib
3605: Mohammad Gul
3606: Peera Jan
3607: Akbar Khan
3608: Shah Khan
3609: Aziz Ur-Rahman
3610: Farooq
3612: Haji Satar
3614: Rais Khan
3615: Abdul Haq
3616: Agha Mohammad
3617: Wali Jan
3618: Mir Qalim
3620: Tariq
3622: Mohamaad Yousef
3624: Sibghatullah Jalazai
3625: Abdul Basir
3626: Rhamatullah
3629: Abdul Khaliq
3632: Rashid Ahmed
3633: Samiullah Jalalzai
3634: Mulvi Nasim
3636: Fazel Gul
3637: Mullah Mohammad Akram
3639: Abdul Baghi
3641: Gul Maroof
3643: Mullah Faizoni
3645: Karimullah Sherzai
3646: Qari Yousef
3647: Hajji Nabeeb
3648: Mohammad Shah
3658: Hamidullah
3659: Jamal
3660: Syeddullah
3661: Rahim
3662: Gul Rahman
3663: Abdul Sattar
3664: Abdul Malik
3665: Yacoub
3666: Mullah Hakim Noor
3670: Sadik
3672: Hamza
3673: Mohammad Rahamatullah
3674: Zabiullah
3675: Sayed Mansour
3676: Mehraban
3677: Husonullah
3678: Sher Agah
3680: Mullah Abdul Basir
3681: Mira Khan
3684: Naim Khan
3685: Nasratullah
3686: Ghulam Yaya
3687: Nazar Mohammad
3688: Gul Ahmad
3690: Osman
3691: Noor Ahmad
3698: Shaki
3701: Naqibullah
3704: Farhad
3707: Mohammad Daud
3708: Sayed Rahman
3709: Hazrat Mohammad
3710: Naim Jan
3711: Abdul Qadir
3712: Mohammad Amin Osmani
3713: Asmattulah Meragan Wardak
3714: Amir Mohammad
3715: Pir Mohammad
3717: Fateh Khan
3718: Hamidullah
3719: Sabil Suleyman
3720: Mohammad Nabi Khan
3721: Aminullah
3723: Mohammad Daud
3724: Noor Zaman
3725: Yusuf
3728: Abdul Qayum
3729: Noor Khan
3730: Abdullah Jamsheed
3733: Atiqullah
3736: Hafez Zainullah
3743: Mullah Mohammad
3744: Haji Kashmir
3747: Eid Mar Khan
3748: Shahbodin
3749: Majimuddin Yildaz
3750: Janat Gul
3751: Mir Sahib Jan
3752: Amir Khodaidad
3754: Lal Mohammad
3755: Wazir Khan
3756: Habib Shah
3757: Rai Khan
3758: Abdul Wakil
3760: Eid Wali
3761: Mohammad Raqib
3763: Maulawi Nasir
3764: Shoaib Khan
3765: Khalid Funayis Sayid al-Qahtani
3766: Abd al-Aziz Riaz
3767: Mansour al-Mansour
3770: Mullah Ibrahim
3771: Fazel Rahman
3772: Gul Mohammad
3773: Hazratullah
3774: Hajji Zahar Shah
3775: Abdul Salim
3776: Gul Haidar
3777: Mullah Zahir
3778: Haji Khodaidad
3779: Nawar Khan
3782: Nek Marjan
3783: Ahktar Mohammad
3784: Baitullah
3785: Mohammad Sharif
3787: Qari Rafiullah
3788: Sher Agha
3789: Shah Wali
3791: Shirin Agha
3799: Sultan Shah
3800 Mohammad Ismael
3801: Mohammad Nasir
3802: Rahmatullah
3804: Mohammad Yousef
3805: Dawar Gul
3806: Amin Shir
3807: Mullah Sharif
3808: Wakil
3809: Iqbal
3810: Mohammad Wali
3811: Rais Khan
3812: Hiadullah
3813: Amanullah
3814: Qari Aminullah
3815: Abdul Samad
3816: Bakht Mohammad
3817: Hanif Shah
3818: Gullistan
3819: Gul Badshah
3820: Bismullah
3821: Mohammad Rahim
3822: Abdul Janan
3823: Sadullah
3824: Idris
3825: Khalilullah
3826: Ahmad
3827: Sanullah
3828: Mohibullah
3829: Bakhtyar
3830: Rohullah
3831: Mullah Heidar
3832: Jawid Eqval
3833: Ghafoor
3834: Bakhteh Mohammad
3835: Rashid Noor
3836: Boorhomadin
3837: Fazal Ahad
3838: Mohammadullah
3839: Mohammad Azim
3840: Wali
3841: Rohullah
3842: Musa Khan
3843: Abdul Mohammad
3844: Naimullah
3845: Sher Agha
3847: Badshah Khel
3848: Laek Shah
3849: Sadiqullah
3850: Ezat Shah
3851: Rahim Kham
3852: Mohammad Nasim
3853: Khanullah
3854: Qari Asil Hassan
3856: Mohammadullah
3857: Masoom Khan
3859: Abdul Halim
3860: Abdul Hanan
3861: Rozee Khan
3862: Abdul Aziz
3863: Maulawi Nazim
3865: Haji Abdul Zahar
3866: Basirullah
3867: Juma Guhl Khan
3868: Maulawi Salim
3869: Gul Agha
3870: Ziauddin
3871: Omar Sadiq
3872: Kaifayatullah
3874: Hiatullah
3876: Qari Ahmadullah
3877: Shamsuddin Ul-Rahman
3881: Hamidullah
3882: Taj Mohammad
3883: Mullah Ismael
3884: Bilal
3885: Abas Khan
3886: Janat Khan
3887: Zia Rahman
3888: Tahlimin
3891: Iman Gul
3893: Gul Salam
3894: Hakim Jan
3895: Qasim Khan
3896: Shahkarin
3897: Omar Khan
3898: Mohammad Rahman
3899: Haji Abdul Aziz
3900: Abdul Rahman
3901: Abdul Wahid
3906: Sayed Qalam
3907: Said Alim
3908: Zia Ul-Haq
3909: Naqib Ahmad
3910: Hidayatullah
3911: Qandi Agha
3912: Totee Agha
3913: Kaiser Duhr
3914: Mohammed Ibrahim
3915: Sayed Din Mohammad
3917: Mir Salam Khan
3918: Abdullah Jan
3919: Adil
3920: Mohammad Ayoub
3921: Tawiz Khan
3922: Haji Khiawa Jan
3923: Qasim
3924: Zarin Gul
3925: Miram Jan
3926: Saleh Bad Shah
3927: Mobarak Khan
3928: Alludeen
3929: Abdul Jalal
3930: Haji Abdul Baqi
3932: Bahram Jan
3933: Noor Wali
3934: Sahar Gul
3935: Sultan Ali
3936: Noor Ali
3937: Abgul Ghafour
3938: Abdullah
3939: Noor Alam
3940: Abdul Zatar
3941: Haji Musa Kalim
3943: Hekmatullah
3944: Barakatullah
3945: Salim
3947: Ahmad Noor
3948: Khiali Gul
3949: Janan
3950: Eid Mohammad
3951: Mustafa al-Madani
3952: Taj Gul
3953: Mohammad Akbar
3954: Shamsul Rahman
3955: Baz Gul
3956: Gholam Nabi
3958: Chinar Gul
3959: Munib
3960: Abdul Wahab
3961: Raz Mohammad
3962: Qari Israel
3965: Jahan Gir
3966: Khanai Mohammad
3967: Jawal Shah
3968: Mullah Abdul Raouf
3969: Abdul Ahad
3970: Zarin Gul
3971: Haji Nazair Mohammad
3972: Haji Abdul Ghani
3973: Muhammed
3974: Qari Azizullah
3976: Safir
3977: Abdul Nafi
3978: Haji Katlai
3980: Mikhail Ibrahim Barbur
3981: Sayeed Amin
3982: Hajji Kheyl Mohammad
3983: Shafiq Rahman
3984: Lahur Gul
3985: Murad Khan
3986: Saheb Rahman
3987: Sur Gul
3988: Bismullah
3989: Alam Gul
3990: Abdul Samad
3991: Abdul Haq
3994: Haji Gul Hakim
3995: Hajji Agha Jan
3997: Ajmal Shamsher
3998: Neyamat Gul
3999: Allah Noor
4000: Naqibullah
4001: Khan Dan
4004: Ibrahim Ahmedkhan
4005: Abdullah
4006: Sharif Noor
4007: Sher Hassan
4008: Sefatullah
4009: Baktullah
4011: Saidullah
4013: Wali
4014: Abdullah Kuchi
4016: Matiullah
4017: Abdul Rahman
4018: Rahmat
4019: Munawar Khan
4020: Painda Gul
4021: Adam Jan Popalzai
4022: Abdullah
4023: Rouzi Mohammad
4024: Saleh Mohammad
4025: Ghazi Marjan
4026: Mohammad Hashim
4027: Said Agha
4028: Shamal
4029: Zirat Gul
4030: Abdul Basir
4031: Mullah Bashir
4032: Wakil
4033: Haqmal Saifi
4034: Mohammad Sadiq
4035: Jamaluddin
4036: Atiquallh
4037: Atiqullah
4038: Gulab Shah
4039: Qari Nazar
4040: Abu Bakar
4041: Mohammad Yusef
4042: Musa Khan
4043: Wantan Jan
4044: Mohammad Na’imi
4045: Mohammad Yunus
4046: Sayid Muhammad
4047: Safiullah
4048: Abdul Karim
4051: Ahmedullah
4052: Mirza Khan
4054: Hirullah
4056: Sayed Anwar
4057: Said Jamaluddin
4058: Abdul Fatah
4059: Mohammad Kasim
4060: Khan Wali
4061: Akbar Jan
4062: Said Anwar
4063: Abdul Kareem
4064: Mullah Jalani
4065: Maulawi Qabil. A man of this name was detained in June 2009. According to a report in September 2009, “Maulawi Qabil, a Salafist commander in Konar province was captured June 13. Qabil led multiple attacks against coalition and ANSF forces and transported IEDs within the province.”
4066: Mohammad Osman
4067: Hafizullah
4068: Gholam Sakhi
4069: Ajmal Khan
4070: Lambat
4071: Fazal Rahim
4072: Noorullah
4073: Abdul Qayum
4074: Khan Wali
4075: Jumadin
4076: Mullah Mutalib
4077: Abdul Rahim
4078: Edullah
4079: Ayoub Shah
4080: Shah Mohammad
4081: Sadiqullah
4082: Mohammad Tahir
4083: Shafiullah
4084: Mohammad Agul
4085: Abdul Alim
4086: Abdul Muktar
4087: Mohammad Ghows
4088: Abdul Habib
4089: Sayed Ahmad
4090: Noor Ahmad
4091: Mohammad Karim
4092: Ahmadullah
4093: Juma Jan
4094: Faiz Mohammad
4095: Abdul Raziq
4096: Mohammad Nawabe
4097: Salim
4098: Hokuran
4099: Saifullah
4100: Sar Gul
4101: Bakhtyar Gul
4102: Abdul Ghazni
4103: Mir Weis
4104: Qari Adel
4105: Awaldeen
4106: Sali Mohammad
4107: Lal Mar Jan
4108: Gul Mohammad
4109: Abdul Hadi
4110: Mahmoud
4111: Asil Khan Sultan Khan
4112: Rahmat Wali
4113: Pasta Khan. This may be Masta Khan, who, according to a report in September 2009, is “a foreign fighter and weapons facilitator as well as IED emplacer in Terzayi district, Khost province who was captured July 9.”
4114: Mujahed
4115: Fazil Rahman
4116: Zakariya
4117: Mohammad Qasim
4118: Musa
4119: Abdul Rahman
4120: Mullah Hamadullah
4121: Abdul Malik
4122: Abdul Ghani
4123: Abdullah Jan
4124: Bakhty Gul Turav
4125: Mullah Karim. A man of this name was detained in August 2009. According to a CJTF-82 press release in November 2009, “Mullah Karim was detained Aug. 5. Karim facilitated logistics and safe havens for Taliban commanders in Andar district, Ghazni province. He is responsible for IED and direct attacks against Afghan and coalition forces.”
4126: Mullah Naim
4127: Hajji Wahed
4128: Shamsaullah
4129: Ezatullah
4130: Esmatullah
4131: Naimat Yamatullah
4132: Mohammed Sultan
4133: Janan
4134: Ali Gul
4135: Saidullah
4136: Rahmatullah
4137: Zalmai
4138: Abdul Wasay
4139: Abdul Karim
4140: Mullah Said Ahmad
4141: Mohammad Yaqoub
4142: Rahmatullah
4143: Mohammad Aslam
4144: Ghulam Mohammad
4145: Mohammad Nabi
4146: Toor Jan
4147: Nasr Aldin
4148: Ahbul Bari
4149: Shir Mohammad
4150: Abdul Manan
4151: Niaz Mohammad
4152: Khani Lun
4153: Haji Maulawi Agha
4154: Rafiq
4155: Noor Sayed Ahmad
4156: Muhammad Elyas
4157: Mir Wais
4158: Hawatullah
4159: Hedayatullah
4160: Abdul Ahad
4161: Rahim Dad
4162: Sayed Mohammad
4163: Sardar Wali
4164: Mohammad Rahim
4165: Mullah Bashir
4166: Mohammed
4167: Nawab Khan
4168: Sakhi Jan
4169: Alam Khan Shah Mahamoud
The following numbering system is not explained, although it may be a new system, just introduced:
20001: Mir Wali Khan
20002: Zarghun
20003: Rahmatullah
20004: Maroof
20005: Adel Gul
20006: Hasan Khan
20008: Abdul Hadi
20009: Abdul Rahman
20010: Hayat Khan
20011: Haji Hanbali
20012: Mohammad Hamza
20013: Lal Jan
20014: Mohammad Hashim
20015: Mohammad Fazil
20016: Daud Agha
20017: Abdul Rahim
20019: Abdul Ghafur
20021: Abdul Satar
20022: Mohammad Dawood. A man of this name was detained in September 2009. According to a report , “Mohammad Dawood, a Taliban commander in Gelan district, Ghazni province was detained Sept. 1.”
20023: Mahmood
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/bagram-the-first-ever-prisoner-list-the-annotated-version/
Please visit his site for much more information.
On Friday January 15, 2010, the Pentagon responded to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU last April, and released the first ever list of 645 prisoners held, as of September 22, 2009, in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (the Bagram Theater Internment Facility).
In the hope of making the list more readily accessible — and searchable — than it is through a poorly photocopied Pentagon document, I reproduce it below, with commentary on some the prisoners I have been able to identify. This is very much a work-in-progress, of course, as the state of knowledge regarding Bagram is akin to that regarding Guantánamo back in 2005, before the prisoner lists and 8,000 pages of documents were released that allowed me to research and write my book The Guantánamo Files, and to begin a new career as a full-time journalist on Guantánamo and related issues.
In an article accompanying the publication of this list, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined what the list — which contains only the prisoners’ names, and not their nationalities or the date and place of their capture — reveals about the small number of foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, three of whom are currently waiting to see if the Court of Appeals will overturn the right to habeas corpus that was granted to them by Judge John D. Bates last March, and raise questions about the whereabouts of other known “ghost prisoners” who do not appear to have been included on the list.
In an article to follow, I’ll examine how the list reveals not only that around 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram in the last six years, but also how the majority of the prisoners listed here were seized in 2008 and 2009 — and I’ll examine what this means with regard to the US administration’s detention policies and the Geneva Conventions, which were discarded by George W. Bush and have clearly not been reintroduced by Barack Obama.
Although I believe that I have had some success tracking down the stories of some of the 100 or so prisoners on the list who have been held at Bagram for between three and seven years, I have found few clues as to the identities of the majority of those listed, who, as mentioned above, were seized in the last two years. Most reports — by the US military or the media — of raids or skirmishes that led to the capture of those held have not furnished the names of those seized, and on the rare occasion that names have been provided it has tended to be because they are regarded as significant figures.
I have no idea whether the allegations against these men are true, but, more importantly, I have not failed to notice that the majority of the prisoners (often men identified by only one name) are clearly not significant figures at all, and my fear — which, I have no doubt, will be confirmed when more information emerges — is that many of them will be revealed to be victims of the same chaotic approach to the capture of prisoners that has done so much to lose the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq for the last eight years, and which, with regard to the 218 prisoners seized in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2003 and sent to Guantánamo, I chronicled in The Guantánamo Files.
A clear sign that this is indeed the case came in August 2009, when Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, commissioned by Gen. David Petraeus to review detention policies in Afghanistan, produced a report in which he estimated that “as many as 400 of the 600 held at Bagram can be released,” explaining that “many of these men were swept up in raids” and “have little connection to the insurgency.”
If you have any further information about any of these men, please feel free to email me, and I will incorporate the information into the list.
Bagram: the prisoner list
The first three prisoners listed are referred to by their prisoner numbers at Guantánamo. All three were seized after their release from Guantánamo and imprisoned in Bagram.
459: Gul Zaman. He was released from Guantánamo in April 2005. The circumstances of his recapture are unknown. In The Guantánamo Files, I wrote, “Three members of a family of farmers — 59-year old Abib Sarajuddin, his 30-year old son Gul Zaman and his 39-year old brother Khan Zaman — were captured by US soldiers in a village near Khost in January 2002, allegedly because someone had fired on them, although the men, who were released in 2005 and 2006, said that the soldiers, who arrived at night by helicopter, broke into their houses and arrested them for no reason.”
831: Khadan Kadir. Also identified as Qadir Khandan, he was released from Guantánamo in October 2006. The circumstances of his recapture are unknown. In The Guantánamo Files, I wrote, “Arrested at his home in September 2002 and accused of running a safe house for a bomb-making cell, Khandan pointed out that he was working for the Karzai government in the National Security Office in Khost, and that, as a pharmacist, bombs were ‘truly against my ideology.’ He also explained that he was badly abused by American soldiers in a prison in Khost. ‘They put tight round glasses around my eyes, had my ears shut with plugs and I was covered with a bag,’ he said, adding, ‘I was ordered to stand up 24 hours for 20 days in a row. I had blood coming out of my body and my nose for days because I was tortured so much.’ Describing what appear to be otherwise unreported murders in US custody, he also said, ‘I saw four people die right in front of me.’”
1001: Hafizullah Shabaz Khail. Also identified as Hafizullah Shabaz Khiel, he was released from Guantánamo in December 2007. A 56-year old pharmacist from Zormat, south of Gardez, he had been approached by the town elders after Hamid Karzai first came to power as the head of the interim post-Taliban government, and served as the mayor for six months until an official appointment was made. He then continued to help out with security. “While I was mayor in Zormat,” he said, “there were no problems with the Americans. I met with American commanders several times … We even took pictures together.” He was apparently seized by US forces because of false information provided by a rival, Abdullah Mujahid Haq (who also ended up in Guantánamo).
On his return, he was cleared of all charges by the Afghan government, but in February 2009 the Associated Press reported that he had been seized again during a nighttime raid on his home in September 2008, and noted, pointedly that his story “shows just how difficult it is for the US to determine who is guilty and who is not in Afghanistan, where corruption rules and grudges are held for years, if not decades.”
This time around, he was accused of “treating sick Taliban as a pharmacist,” but as the AP noted, “Some Afghans claim the US is far too quick to arrest people without understanding the complexities of the culture.” Ishaq Gailani, a member of President Hamid Karzai’s government, explained, “We are fed up. Bagram is full of these people who are wrongly accused. They arrest everyone — a 15-year-old boy and a 61-year-old man. They arrest them because they run away from their helicopters … I would run away too if I saw them. They don’t know who is the terrorist and who is not.” As the AP described it, “Zormat elders, leading clerics, the provincial governor, the National Reconciliation Bureau and two members of Parliament have signed documents attesting to Hafizullah’s innocence.” The report also explained, “Family members fear a decades-old feud involving a distant cousin, Fazle Rabi, may have been behind the nighttime raid on Hafizullah’s home.”
For the rest of the Bagram prisoners, their prisoner numbers appear to have carried on from the last numbers given to prisoners sent to Guantánamo. The last was Mohammed Mussa, sent to Guantánamo in November 2003, and his detainee number was 1165.
1207: Haji Pacha Wazir. A Pakistani living in the United Arab Emirates, where he ran an international chain of hawalas, Wazir was suspected of being a major money handler for al-Qaeda. In September 2002, as described by Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine, the UAE government froze millions of dollars of his assets and informed him that he was under investigation by the FBI. Although Wazir asked to meet with FBI representatives to persuade them that he was innocent, he was kidnapped by CIA agents en route to the meeting.
After failing to provide useful information under interrogation in the UAE, his brother was then seized, but he provided no useful information either. The CIA then kidnapped two of Wazir’s employees operating a store in Karachi, Pakistan, replacing them with CIA agents of Pakistani descent, who allegedly secured information leading to the capture of “dozens” of key figures. Wazir and the other three men were apparently rendered to a CIA black site, but only Wazir surfaced at Bagram, and the whereabouts of the others is unknown.
In July 2009, Haji Wazir’s habeas corpus petition was denied by US District Court Judge John D. Bates.
1209: Lutfi al-Arabi al-Gharisi. According to a report compiled by Abu Yahya al-Libi, a prisoner who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, one of the prisoners who was held with him was a Tunisian, Abou Houdayfa, whose first name, according to al-Libi, was Lotfi. Captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the end of 2002, he was reportedly held in several CIA prisons in Afghanistan, including the “Dark Prison,” before being moved to Bagram. It’s also probable that he is “Hudeifa,” a Tunisian prisoner mentioned by Marwan Jabour, who was also held in several secret prisons, but was released in 2006. He later told his story to Human Rights Watch, who published it as a report, “Ghost Prisoner,” in February 2007.
1220: Arsala Khan
1282: Saifullah Abdul Wali
1286: Malang Zafar. A man of this name was seized in December 2003 by Gurkhas, and was described as a “chief of operations” for Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), a fiercely anti-US group headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran warlord who, ironically, received the lion’s share of CIA funding in the 1980s, via Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). According to a report in the Independent in December 2003, he was “suspected of organizing a bus bombing in June that killed four German soldiers” and the circumstances of his capture were described as follows: “Attempting to escape from a police checkpoint in Kabul, Malang Zafar Khan drove his pick-up truck straight at the gunpoints of the British Army Gurkhas. They had been waiting for the man sent to blow up the loya jirga, the national constitutional assembly that starts today.”
1287: Gulam Rabbani Abu Bakr. A man of this name was seized in 2003 by Afghan forces and a West Midlands regiment of Territorial Army soldiers, and was reportedly a HIG commander “believed to have been behind a series of car bombings in Kabul.”
1288: Qalam. A man of this name was seized with four others in a raid in Kabul in September 2003, and was reportedly a former HIG commander. An Associated Press report explained: “Khalil Aminzada, deputy chief of police of Kabul, said Tuesday that two suspects were arrested in the capital on Monday by Afghan authorities acting with some foreigners. Aminzada was not sure if the foreigners were from ISAF or the United States. He identified one suspect as Qalam, allegedly a former commander of rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but did not name the other and or elaborate on what they were suspected of plotting.” Pakistan’s Daily Times reported that Qalam was seized with four other men.
1432: Ahmad Dilshad. A man named Dilshad Ahmad, an alleged leader of the proscribed Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, was “arrested in Iraq by British forces, and then given over to the US for interrogation,” according to a report in Asia Times in July 2004, which noted that the first report of his capture was in April 2004, and that he “went under several aliases, including Danish Ahmad and Abdul Rehman al-Dakhil.” SATP added that he was seized in Baghdad with four other men.
1433: Salah Mohammad Ali. This may be the man identified by Abu Yahya al-Libi (an al-Qaeda member who escaped from Bagram in July 2005) as Salah Din al-Bakistani, who lived in Doha, Qatar. According to al-Libi, he was seized in Iraq in 2004, and was apparently held in Abu Ghraib and another “torture prison.” Salah Din was identified by the legal action charity Reprieve as Salahuddin and was apparently seized by British forces and transferred to Bagram with another Pakistani, a rice merchant named Amanatullah Ali. However, no one of that name is on the Bagram prisoner list, even though it is clear, from letters received by his family, that Amanatullah Ali is being held at Bagram.
According to Reprieve, Salahuddin, who was brought up in the Gulf states, “has not been able to contact his family or even reassure them that he is alive.” Reprieve also noted that, through various sources, they have been told that, “as a result of his abuse in UK and US custody, Salahuddin is in catastrophic mental and physical shape, and now spends most of his time in the mental health cells at Bagram.”
1442: Haji Ghulam Farooq
1456: Moez Bin Abdul Qadir Fezzani. From his name, it appears that this prisoner is Tunisian, but what is confusing is that a prisoner with the same name (Moez Ben Abdelkader Fezzani, also identified as Abou Nassim) is held in Guantánamo, where he appears to be identified as Abdul bin Mohammed bin Ourgy. On December 20, following the transfer of two Tunisians from Guantánamo to Italian custody (one of whom, Adel Ben Mabrouk, was also identified in June as Moez Fezzani), Italian TV stations reported that Fezzani was “being moved to Italy to face international terrorism charges for having allegedly recruited fighters for Afghanistan,” although the transfer has not yet taken place.
1464: Mohammed Amin al-Bakri (Yemeni). Seized in Thailand at the end of 2002, he was reportedly held in three secret CIA prisons before Bagram, according to Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda leader who escaped from Bagram in July 2005. In March 2009, his habeas corpus petition was granted by US District Court Judge John D, Bates, but as of January 2010 the ruling is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals. In his habeas petition, he is identified as Amin Mohammed Abdallah al-Bakri.
1466: Ridha Ahmad Najjar (Tunisian). Seized in Karachi, Pakistan in May 2002, he was reportedly held in four secret CIA prisons before Bagram, according to Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda leader who escaped from Bagram in July 2005. In March 2009, his habeas corpus petition was granted by US District Court Judge John D, Bates, but as of January 2010 the ruling is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals. In his habeas petition, he is identified as Redha al-Najar.
1474: Amal Khan
1503: Noor Agha
1658: Zahir Jan
1691: Mohammed Ayoob
1718: Hafezullah Jan
1815: Fadi Ahmed. Presumably this is Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni, seized in 2004, who was sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram, according to Abu Yahya al-Libi, the al-Qaeda leader who escaped from Bagram in July 2005. In March 2009, his habeas corpus petition was granted by US District Court Judge John D, Bates, but as of January 2010 the ruling is being reviewed by the Court of Appeals.
1869: Hamidullah
1877: Abdul Rahman
1897: Fazel Karim. This is a long shot, but a man named Fazal Karim, apparently a former mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan, was in custody in Pakistan, in February 2003, in connection with the murder of Daniel Pearl. As Reuters explained, “Two LeJ members, Naeem Bokhari and Fazal Karim, both in undeclared custody, are suspected of helping in Pearl’s kidnap and murder, intelligence sources say.” In his autobiography, President Musharraf described Karim as a “militant activist,” and stated that he was captured in May 2002, and that he led investigators to Pearl’s body, and also helped direct them to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s alleged involvement in the killing. Musharraf stated that Karim did not know who KSM was — only that he was “Arab-looking” — but this may have been enough for the US authorities to wish to interrogate him in Afghanistan. Also see this report in TIME.
2273: Molvia Hamidullah
2284: Abdul Basset Zadran
2321: Babarak
2343: Samiullah
2369: Jamshir Khan
2401: Mohammad Anwar
2421: Raiz. A man of this name — Haji Raiz, described as “a key terrorist leader” — was captured in July 2007. A report explained, “Police searches also confiscated bomb-making material from Raiz, described by coalition forces as a major improvised explosive device facilitator for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
2422: Abdul Kabir
2463: Dost Mohammed
2505: Abdul Alim
2521: Sayed Gulab. A man of this name was seized in May 2007. A report explained, “Afghan Border Police, advised by Coalition forces, detained a Taliban leader in the Pachir Wa Agam district of Nangarhar province during an operation May 24. After receiving information on the whereabouts of Sayed Gulab, a notorious Nangarhar Taliban area commander and improvised explosive device cell facilitator, ABP members quickly moved to the village of Shir Wagan and detained him. Gulab is currently being held for questioning in a Coalition detention facility.”
2615: Sham Ali Khan
2619: Shafiq
2633: Enayatullah
2634: Mohammed Agha
2635: Sher Jan
2638: Mullah Abdullah
2650: Shad Gul
2660: Abdul Ghafor
2667: Haji Said Nabi
2689: Zabit Yasin
2720: Mohammed Rahim Noori
2724: Mohammed Yosef Noori
2737: Lalay Mohammed
2773: Noor Wali
2784: Niyaz
2802: Wali Jan
2825: Farooq
2827: Gulam Farooq
2842: Keramat
2904: Mohammed Layaq
2908: Haji Najmuddin
2910: Abdul Wali
2965: Abdul Ghafar
2974: Feroz Khan
2977: Enamullah
2978: Ali Sadar
3014: Abdul Karim
3015: Palik Jan
3028: Mohammed Wali
3034: Abdul Qadir
3066: Abdul Zahir
3068: Mohammed Kadir
3070: Hamid Gul
3086: Rahmatullah
3088: Bismullah Abdullah
3094: Mohammed Hassan Khan
3096: Awal Noor
3111: Gul Agha
3112: Akhtar Gul
3154: Qari Mohmand
3160: Nazir Khan
3167: Gul Shezad Khan
3170: Akbar Shah
3197: Sultan Ghul
3205: Hadaytullah
3207: Noor Hassan
3222: Saleh al-Afghani
3226: Ghulam Sawar Jamili
3246: Abdul Raziq
3264: Haji Mohammed
3273: Said Wali Jan
3278: Haji Qayum Boi
3279: Maulawi Hafizullah
3281: Aka Khan
3303: Mohammed Gul
3305: Shadi Khan
3306: Nur Bacha
3308: Kahn Muhamad
3310: Gul Mar Jan
3314: Maulawi Ahmad Jan. A man of this name was seized on September 9, 2007. CJTF-82 reported in a press release, “Afghan National Police, advised by Coalition forces, detained the Taliban district commander of Andar, Ghazni and four others in an operation designed to disrupt insurgent activities in Ghazni Province early this morning. Maulawi Ahmad Jan is known to be extensively involved in the coordination of insurgent activities in Ghazni Province. He has directed IED and ambush attacks against ANSF and Coalition forces throughout the region. During the search of Ahmad Jan’s compound, ANP discovered a weapons and ammunition cache. No shots were fired during the operation and no non-combatants were harmed. ‘With Ahmad Jan now detained, Ghazni will be a less dangerous place,’ said Army Maj. Chris Belcher, a Combined Joint Task Force-82 spokesperson. ‘Information gained as a result of Ahmad Jan’s capture will undoubtedly result in further interdiction of Taliban fighters and leaders in the area.’”
3316: Mullah Abdul Malik Akund
3343: Gologai
3345: Gul Hanan
3346: Alam
3355: Gul Zaman
3362: Izatullah
3363: Hazrat Wali
3364: Mullah Qadim
3366: Ali Mohammed
3378: Qari Said Daud
3383: Hajji Abdul Rahman Hoteq
3400: Sher Rahman
3401: Abdul Qadir
3402: Haji Amir
3404: Malik Azizurahman
3406: Gawhar Ali
3409: Abdul Satar
3410: Akeeb Khan
3417: Rohullah
3418: Daud Zahir
3422: Maulawi Ahmad Zahir Arab
3437: Momen Khan
3438: Gul Inam Toryalay
3439: Mohammad Daud Gulzar
3444: Juma Gul
3445: Pacha Khan
3446: Nasimullah Khan
3447: Mohammad Zahir
3451: Amanullah Khal
3452: Sakhi Jan
3453: Saleh Mohammad
3454: Ismail Malim
3463: Shams Khan
3464: Rais Mohammad
3466: Haji Zeni Khel
3468: Mullah Shabir. A man of this name was described in a military report in March 2008 as “a Taliban leader detained during a Feb. 25 joint operation in Ghazni province,” who “is believed to have provided intelligence, logistical support and improvised explosive devices to Taliban forces. He also is believed to be responsible for recent rocket attacks throughout Ghazni province, officials said.”
3469: Khan Mohammad
3470: Abdul Anan
3474: Torakay
3479: Qari Arif
3483: Mak Mali Jan
3484: Mohammed Hussein
3485: Qari Abdul Wali
3486: Abdul Nafi
3494: Hayatullah
3496: Khan Gul
3497: Nik Mohammad
3498: Sheikh Yousef Soup
3499: Shaswar Mohammad Nader
3503: Mohammad Ghanam
3505: Sher Bader
3509: Izatullah
3510: Hajj Abdul Majid Khan. A man of this name was detained in March 2008. On April 30, 2008, CJTF-82 announced in a press release, “Coalition forces have released the identity of an insurgent detained during an operation conducted last month to disrupt militant operations in Zabul province. The insurgent, Hajji Abdul Majid Khan, was apprehended during the operation in Qalat District. Khan, 55, was detained March 3 during an operation targeting him. Khan, aka Majid Khan, was a Taliban financier and IED facilitator in Zabul province. He is known to have planned and conducted IED attacks against Coalition forces, harbored and facilitated suicide bombers and raised finances for Taliban operations.”
3511: Wali Gul
3569: Mir Khan
3570: Abdul Ghafar
3572: Ajab
3574: Mujahid Farooq
3575: Mujib Rahman
3578: Mullah Zarbat
3580: Mahajir Ziarahman. A man of this name was detained in April 2008. On April 25, 2008, it was reported: “US-led coalition forces on Friday said two militants detained in the south-eastern province of Khost who were behind suicide bombing targeting Afghan and coalition forces, were identified as members of the Haqanni network, a former mujahideen party that fought invading Russian troops. The two militants, identified as Baitullah and Mahajir Ziarahman, were apprehended during an operation in Sabari district targeting the Haqanni network and improvised explosive device (IED) cells, said a military statement issued from the US base in Bagram. Baitullah, 34, was the target of the operation. He was a member of a Haqanni network based in Sabari that conducted the suicide bombing of the Sabari District Centre last month. According to the statement, Siraj Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani Network, claimed responsibility for the bombing, added the statement. Mahajir Ziarahman, 23, was also a member of the same Sabari-based IED cell and is Biatullah’s brother. Ziarahman has emplaced IEDs targeting Afghan Security Forces and coalition forces in Khowst province, the statement added.” It is not known what happened to Baitullah.
3582: Mullah Toor Jan
3583: Mullah Hamayun Akhund
3584: Qazi Khan
3585: Sadar Wali
3586: Gul Khan
3587: Montaz
3588: Arifullah
3590: Mulla Salim
3594: Safatullah
3595: Mullah Dabazoray
3596: Shah Khalid
3600: Suhabi Rahman
3601: Zhar Mohammad
3603: Mohammad Ismael Saqib
3605: Mohammad Gul
3606: Peera Jan
3607: Akbar Khan
3608: Shah Khan
3609: Aziz Ur-Rahman
3610: Farooq
3612: Haji Satar
3614: Rais Khan
3615: Abdul Haq
3616: Agha Mohammad
3617: Wali Jan
3618: Mir Qalim
3620: Tariq
3622: Mohamaad Yousef
3624: Sibghatullah Jalazai
3625: Abdul Basir
3626: Rhamatullah
3629: Abdul Khaliq
3632: Rashid Ahmed
3633: Samiullah Jalalzai
3634: Mulvi Nasim
3636: Fazel Gul
3637: Mullah Mohammad Akram
3639: Abdul Baghi
3641: Gul Maroof
3643: Mullah Faizoni
3645: Karimullah Sherzai
3646: Qari Yousef
3647: Hajji Nabeeb
3648: Mohammad Shah
3658: Hamidullah
3659: Jamal
3660: Syeddullah
3661: Rahim
3662: Gul Rahman
3663: Abdul Sattar
3664: Abdul Malik
3665: Yacoub
3666: Mullah Hakim Noor
3670: Sadik
3672: Hamza
3673: Mohammad Rahamatullah
3674: Zabiullah
3675: Sayed Mansour
3676: Mehraban
3677: Husonullah
3678: Sher Agah
3680: Mullah Abdul Basir
3681: Mira Khan
3684: Naim Khan
3685: Nasratullah
3686: Ghulam Yaya
3687: Nazar Mohammad
3688: Gul Ahmad
3690: Osman
3691: Noor Ahmad
3698: Shaki
3701: Naqibullah
3704: Farhad
3707: Mohammad Daud
3708: Sayed Rahman
3709: Hazrat Mohammad
3710: Naim Jan
3711: Abdul Qadir
3712: Mohammad Amin Osmani
3713: Asmattulah Meragan Wardak
3714: Amir Mohammad
3715: Pir Mohammad
3717: Fateh Khan
3718: Hamidullah
3719: Sabil Suleyman
3720: Mohammad Nabi Khan
3721: Aminullah
3723: Mohammad Daud
3724: Noor Zaman
3725: Yusuf
3728: Abdul Qayum
3729: Noor Khan
3730: Abdullah Jamsheed
3733: Atiqullah
3736: Hafez Zainullah
3743: Mullah Mohammad
3744: Haji Kashmir
3747: Eid Mar Khan
3748: Shahbodin
3749: Majimuddin Yildaz
3750: Janat Gul
3751: Mir Sahib Jan
3752: Amir Khodaidad
3754: Lal Mohammad
3755: Wazir Khan
3756: Habib Shah
3757: Rai Khan
3758: Abdul Wakil
3760: Eid Wali
3761: Mohammad Raqib
3763: Maulawi Nasir
3764: Shoaib Khan
3765: Khalid Funayis Sayid al-Qahtani
3766: Abd al-Aziz Riaz
3767: Mansour al-Mansour
3770: Mullah Ibrahim
3771: Fazel Rahman
3772: Gul Mohammad
3773: Hazratullah
3774: Hajji Zahar Shah
3775: Abdul Salim
3776: Gul Haidar
3777: Mullah Zahir
3778: Haji Khodaidad
3779: Nawar Khan
3782: Nek Marjan
3783: Ahktar Mohammad
3784: Baitullah
3785: Mohammad Sharif
3787: Qari Rafiullah
3788: Sher Agha
3789: Shah Wali
3791: Shirin Agha
3799: Sultan Shah
3800 Mohammad Ismael
3801: Mohammad Nasir
3802: Rahmatullah
3804: Mohammad Yousef
3805: Dawar Gul
3806: Amin Shir
3807: Mullah Sharif
3808: Wakil
3809: Iqbal
3810: Mohammad Wali
3811: Rais Khan
3812: Hiadullah
3813: Amanullah
3814: Qari Aminullah
3815: Abdul Samad
3816: Bakht Mohammad
3817: Hanif Shah
3818: Gullistan
3819: Gul Badshah
3820: Bismullah
3821: Mohammad Rahim
3822: Abdul Janan
3823: Sadullah
3824: Idris
3825: Khalilullah
3826: Ahmad
3827: Sanullah
3828: Mohibullah
3829: Bakhtyar
3830: Rohullah
3831: Mullah Heidar
3832: Jawid Eqval
3833: Ghafoor
3834: Bakhteh Mohammad
3835: Rashid Noor
3836: Boorhomadin
3837: Fazal Ahad
3838: Mohammadullah
3839: Mohammad Azim
3840: Wali
3841: Rohullah
3842: Musa Khan
3843: Abdul Mohammad
3844: Naimullah
3845: Sher Agha
3847: Badshah Khel
3848: Laek Shah
3849: Sadiqullah
3850: Ezat Shah
3851: Rahim Kham
3852: Mohammad Nasim
3853: Khanullah
3854: Qari Asil Hassan
3856: Mohammadullah
3857: Masoom Khan
3859: Abdul Halim
3860: Abdul Hanan
3861: Rozee Khan
3862: Abdul Aziz
3863: Maulawi Nazim
3865: Haji Abdul Zahar
3866: Basirullah
3867: Juma Guhl Khan
3868: Maulawi Salim
3869: Gul Agha
3870: Ziauddin
3871: Omar Sadiq
3872: Kaifayatullah
3874: Hiatullah
3876: Qari Ahmadullah
3877: Shamsuddin Ul-Rahman
3881: Hamidullah
3882: Taj Mohammad
3883: Mullah Ismael
3884: Bilal
3885: Abas Khan
3886: Janat Khan
3887: Zia Rahman
3888: Tahlimin
3891: Iman Gul
3893: Gul Salam
3894: Hakim Jan
3895: Qasim Khan
3896: Shahkarin
3897: Omar Khan
3898: Mohammad Rahman
3899: Haji Abdul Aziz
3900: Abdul Rahman
3901: Abdul Wahid
3906: Sayed Qalam
3907: Said Alim
3908: Zia Ul-Haq
3909: Naqib Ahmad
3910: Hidayatullah
3911: Qandi Agha
3912: Totee Agha
3913: Kaiser Duhr
3914: Mohammed Ibrahim
3915: Sayed Din Mohammad
3917: Mir Salam Khan
3918: Abdullah Jan
3919: Adil
3920: Mohammad Ayoub
3921: Tawiz Khan
3922: Haji Khiawa Jan
3923: Qasim
3924: Zarin Gul
3925: Miram Jan
3926: Saleh Bad Shah
3927: Mobarak Khan
3928: Alludeen
3929: Abdul Jalal
3930: Haji Abdul Baqi
3932: Bahram Jan
3933: Noor Wali
3934: Sahar Gul
3935: Sultan Ali
3936: Noor Ali
3937: Abgul Ghafour
3938: Abdullah
3939: Noor Alam
3940: Abdul Zatar
3941: Haji Musa Kalim
3943: Hekmatullah
3944: Barakatullah
3945: Salim
3947: Ahmad Noor
3948: Khiali Gul
3949: Janan
3950: Eid Mohammad
3951: Mustafa al-Madani
3952: Taj Gul
3953: Mohammad Akbar
3954: Shamsul Rahman
3955: Baz Gul
3956: Gholam Nabi
3958: Chinar Gul
3959: Munib
3960: Abdul Wahab
3961: Raz Mohammad
3962: Qari Israel
3965: Jahan Gir
3966: Khanai Mohammad
3967: Jawal Shah
3968: Mullah Abdul Raouf
3969: Abdul Ahad
3970: Zarin Gul
3971: Haji Nazair Mohammad
3972: Haji Abdul Ghani
3973: Muhammed
3974: Qari Azizullah
3976: Safir
3977: Abdul Nafi
3978: Haji Katlai
3980: Mikhail Ibrahim Barbur
3981: Sayeed Amin
3982: Hajji Kheyl Mohammad
3983: Shafiq Rahman
3984: Lahur Gul
3985: Murad Khan
3986: Saheb Rahman
3987: Sur Gul
3988: Bismullah
3989: Alam Gul
3990: Abdul Samad
3991: Abdul Haq
3994: Haji Gul Hakim
3995: Hajji Agha Jan
3997: Ajmal Shamsher
3998: Neyamat Gul
3999: Allah Noor
4000: Naqibullah
4001: Khan Dan
4004: Ibrahim Ahmedkhan
4005: Abdullah
4006: Sharif Noor
4007: Sher Hassan
4008: Sefatullah
4009: Baktullah
4011: Saidullah
4013: Wali
4014: Abdullah Kuchi
4016: Matiullah
4017: Abdul Rahman
4018: Rahmat
4019: Munawar Khan
4020: Painda Gul
4021: Adam Jan Popalzai
4022: Abdullah
4023: Rouzi Mohammad
4024: Saleh Mohammad
4025: Ghazi Marjan
4026: Mohammad Hashim
4027: Said Agha
4028: Shamal
4029: Zirat Gul
4030: Abdul Basir
4031: Mullah Bashir
4032: Wakil
4033: Haqmal Saifi
4034: Mohammad Sadiq
4035: Jamaluddin
4036: Atiquallh
4037: Atiqullah
4038: Gulab Shah
4039: Qari Nazar
4040: Abu Bakar
4041: Mohammad Yusef
4042: Musa Khan
4043: Wantan Jan
4044: Mohammad Na’imi
4045: Mohammad Yunus
4046: Sayid Muhammad
4047: Safiullah
4048: Abdul Karim
4051: Ahmedullah
4052: Mirza Khan
4054: Hirullah
4056: Sayed Anwar
4057: Said Jamaluddin
4058: Abdul Fatah
4059: Mohammad Kasim
4060: Khan Wali
4061: Akbar Jan
4062: Said Anwar
4063: Abdul Kareem
4064: Mullah Jalani
4065: Maulawi Qabil. A man of this name was detained in June 2009. According to a report in September 2009, “Maulawi Qabil, a Salafist commander in Konar province was captured June 13. Qabil led multiple attacks against coalition and ANSF forces and transported IEDs within the province.”
4066: Mohammad Osman
4067: Hafizullah
4068: Gholam Sakhi
4069: Ajmal Khan
4070: Lambat
4071: Fazal Rahim
4072: Noorullah
4073: Abdul Qayum
4074: Khan Wali
4075: Jumadin
4076: Mullah Mutalib
4077: Abdul Rahim
4078: Edullah
4079: Ayoub Shah
4080: Shah Mohammad
4081: Sadiqullah
4082: Mohammad Tahir
4083: Shafiullah
4084: Mohammad Agul
4085: Abdul Alim
4086: Abdul Muktar
4087: Mohammad Ghows
4088: Abdul Habib
4089: Sayed Ahmad
4090: Noor Ahmad
4091: Mohammad Karim
4092: Ahmadullah
4093: Juma Jan
4094: Faiz Mohammad
4095: Abdul Raziq
4096: Mohammad Nawabe
4097: Salim
4098: Hokuran
4099: Saifullah
4100: Sar Gul
4101: Bakhtyar Gul
4102: Abdul Ghazni
4103: Mir Weis
4104: Qari Adel
4105: Awaldeen
4106: Sali Mohammad
4107: Lal Mar Jan
4108: Gul Mohammad
4109: Abdul Hadi
4110: Mahmoud
4111: Asil Khan Sultan Khan
4112: Rahmat Wali
4113: Pasta Khan. This may be Masta Khan, who, according to a report in September 2009, is “a foreign fighter and weapons facilitator as well as IED emplacer in Terzayi district, Khost province who was captured July 9.”
4114: Mujahed
4115: Fazil Rahman
4116: Zakariya
4117: Mohammad Qasim
4118: Musa
4119: Abdul Rahman
4120: Mullah Hamadullah
4121: Abdul Malik
4122: Abdul Ghani
4123: Abdullah Jan
4124: Bakhty Gul Turav
4125: Mullah Karim. A man of this name was detained in August 2009. According to a CJTF-82 press release in November 2009, “Mullah Karim was detained Aug. 5. Karim facilitated logistics and safe havens for Taliban commanders in Andar district, Ghazni province. He is responsible for IED and direct attacks against Afghan and coalition forces.”
4126: Mullah Naim
4127: Hajji Wahed
4128: Shamsaullah
4129: Ezatullah
4130: Esmatullah
4131: Naimat Yamatullah
4132: Mohammed Sultan
4133: Janan
4134: Ali Gul
4135: Saidullah
4136: Rahmatullah
4137: Zalmai
4138: Abdul Wasay
4139: Abdul Karim
4140: Mullah Said Ahmad
4141: Mohammad Yaqoub
4142: Rahmatullah
4143: Mohammad Aslam
4144: Ghulam Mohammad
4145: Mohammad Nabi
4146: Toor Jan
4147: Nasr Aldin
4148: Ahbul Bari
4149: Shir Mohammad
4150: Abdul Manan
4151: Niaz Mohammad
4152: Khani Lun
4153: Haji Maulawi Agha
4154: Rafiq
4155: Noor Sayed Ahmad
4156: Muhammad Elyas
4157: Mir Wais
4158: Hawatullah
4159: Hedayatullah
4160: Abdul Ahad
4161: Rahim Dad
4162: Sayed Mohammad
4163: Sardar Wali
4164: Mohammad Rahim
4165: Mullah Bashir
4166: Mohammed
4167: Nawab Khan
4168: Sakhi Jan
4169: Alam Khan Shah Mahamoud
The following numbering system is not explained, although it may be a new system, just introduced:
20001: Mir Wali Khan
20002: Zarghun
20003: Rahmatullah
20004: Maroof
20005: Adel Gul
20006: Hasan Khan
20008: Abdul Hadi
20009: Abdul Rahman
20010: Hayat Khan
20011: Haji Hanbali
20012: Mohammad Hamza
20013: Lal Jan
20014: Mohammad Hashim
20015: Mohammad Fazil
20016: Daud Agha
20017: Abdul Rahim
20019: Abdul Ghafur
20021: Abdul Satar
20022: Mohammad Dawood. A man of this name was detained in September 2009. According to a report , “Mohammad Dawood, a Taliban commander in Gelan district, Ghazni province was detained Sept. 1.”
20023: Mahmood
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.
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