CIDA, DFAIT, and promoting democracy abroad
By Michael Petrou - Monday, February 6, 2012 - 0 Comments
Last year’s revolutions of the Arab Spring were, and remain, the greatest opportunity for the global growth of democracy since the end of the Cold War and the resulting spread of freedom in Eastern Europe.
Democracy promotion is ostensibly a priority for this government. In the 2008 Throne Speech, Canada was promised: “a new, non-partisan democracy promotion agency will also be established to support the peaceful transition to democracy in repressive countries and help emerging democracies build strong institutions.”
More than three years later, that promise is unfulfilled. But Canada still has the framework to pursue democracy promotion through the Canadian International Development Agency, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
Both CIDA and DFAIT claim democracy promotion as part of their core mandates. It should follow, therefore, that the Arab Spring presented them with an unprecedented opportunity. Continue…
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Be careful who you criticize in Iran
By Michael Petrou - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments
A retired military commander questions the suppression of protests in Tehran
The only Iranian ever to have led his country in battle against the U.S. has sparked uproar in Iran by seeming to compare recent crackdowns on public dissent to similarly harsh repression by the shah—who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Retired Rear Adm. Hossein Alaei is the founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, and in 1988 led Iran in a two-day naval skirmish against the U.S. This month he published an essay in the daily newspaper Ettelaat in which he raises hypothetical questions the shah might have asked himself after being forced into exile: “If I had not ordered the security forces to shoot at the people and taken measures to calm them down, wouldn’t I have reached a better outcome?” Alaei concludes with a quote from the Quran: “Thus, learn your lesson, o men of vision.”
Alaei did not specifically name Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, but his comments have been interpreted in Iran as criticism of the murderous suppression of public protests following Iran’s rigged 2009 presidential election. Hard-liners responded by protesting outside his house, while current and former Revolutionary Guard members wrote a letter accusing Alaei of making Iran’s enemies happy. He has since said his article had been “misinterpreted.”
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Dissent from Iranian Revolutionary Guard emeritus
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments
The only Iranian ever to have led his country in battle against the United States has sparked uproar in Iran by seeming to compare recent crackdowns on public dissent to similarly harsh repression enacted by the shah —who was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Retired Rear Adm. Hossein Alaei is the founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, and in 1988 led Iran in a two-day naval skirmish against the United States in the Persian Gulf. This month he published an essay in the daily newspaper Ettelaat in which he raises hypothetical questions the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, might have asked himself after being forced into exile:
“If I had not ordered the security forces to shoot at the people and taken measures to calm them down, wouldn’t I have reached a better outcome?” Continue…
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The covert war against Iran
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments
Could it spill over into open conflict?
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Iran and the West are engaged in an undeclared covert struggle fought through sabotage, espionage and murder that may yet escalate into open war.
The latest blow against Iran came two weeks ago in Tehran, when two assassins on a motorbike pulled up alongside a car carrying Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, deputy director of Iran’s main uranium enrichment plant, and affixed a magnetic bomb to it. The bomb exploded, killing Roshan and his driver. It was a daring and sophisticated assault, likely requiring long and intensive surveillance of the victim, one or more safe houses, access to explosives, and the ability to make a device that murdered the occupants of the targeted car without harming passersby. Iran immediately blamed Israel, the U.S. and Britain, and says it has made arrests connected to the killing.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued an explicit and categorical denial of any American involvement. Britain also said it was not involved. Israel was more circumspect. The attack came one day after Israel’s military chief, Benny Gantz, told a parliamentary committee the Iranian regime could face “unnatural” events this year. Israel Defense Forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on his Facebook page, said he didn’t know who had killed Roshan, but added, “I certainly won’t shed a tear.”
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Afghanistan book reviews: The Savage War and The Long Way Back
By Michael Petrou - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments
Readers hoping to better understand Afghanistan and the outside world’s involvement in the country since 9/11 have been well served by Canadian authors of late.
Terry Glavin’s Come from the Shadows: the Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan has been reviewed in this space already. Next up are The Savage War: the Untold Battles of Afghanistan, by Canadian Press defence correspondent Murray Brewster, and The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, by former Canadian and UN diplomat (and current Conservative MP) Chris Alexander. Continue…
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Honouring Macedonia’s lost Jewish community
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments
Almost all of Macedonia’s Jews died in the Holocaust. Now a new museum is keeping their memory alive.
Ognen Teofilovski/Reuters
The fate of Macedonia’s Jewish community during the Second World War was unique only in the thoroughness of its destruction.
Just after midnight on March 11, 1943, Bulgarian troops occupying the Yugoslav republic surrounded the three cities containing large Jewish populations. “Following what had become the standard system, this operation was carried out at a single stroke with great cruelty,” writes Leni Yahil in her seminal history of the Holocaust. More than 7,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to the Treblinka death camp. Twelve lived.
Of a pre-war population of approximately 8,000, some 300 Macedonian Jews survived the war. Some joined the partisans. Others departed to Albania or were detained in less murderous camps than Treblinka. About 1,000 fled Bulgarian occupation to live with relatives in northern Greece, which until 1943 was occupied by Italians who declined to implement Hitler’s final solution. But this escape was temporary. The Germans took over the occupation when Italy capitulated, and the Macedonian Jews sheltering in northern Greece were sent to Auschwitz.
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Fresh voices against Russia’s old regime
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments
A new generation of Russians is saying, enough is enough
Eduard Korniyenko / Reuters
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s memories of public protests against an established order are long and—likely for him—disconcerting.
In 1989, Putin was working for Russia’s KGB spy agency in the East German city of Dresden. His tasks included recruiting agents. Shortly after the Berlin Wall was breached, an angry crowd of Germans besieged the KGB office, which was located next to an office of the Stasi East German secret police. They wanted files on informants. Putin took it upon himself to confront them. He said the office didn’t belong to the Stasi but to the Soviet Union, and armed men inside would defend it. Some reports say Putin himself carried a weapon. When some in the crowd grew suspicious and questioned Putin about his excellent German, he told them he was a translator.
Putin managed to calm everyone down. The crowd dispersed. But Putin—who earlier in the evening telephoned a local Soviet army unit and was told it could do nothing—must have known the gig was up. East and West Germany were reunited within a year, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed soon after. A seemingly unshakable political order had dissolved, in large part because ordinary citizens had filled streets and public squares to demand its end.
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Cindor Reeves leaves Canada
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 9:26 PM - 0 Comments
Cindor Reeves, a man who risked his life to bring one of the most blood-soaked tyrants of the last 25 years to justice, has left Canada following a deportation order against him.
Reeves was once the brother-in-law of Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord and then president of the country who is now on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Taylor is there in large part because Cindor Reeves helped the Special Court for Sierra Leone build its case against him. Reeves did this at great personal risk, and without asking for anything in return. The Special Court put Reeves and his family in a witness protection program in Europe. Unhappy there, Reeves came to Canada and applied for refugee status. When he did so, Reeves lost the protection of the Special Court, which effectively abandoned him. Continue…
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Update on Iranian political prisoner
By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 9:31 PM - 0 Comments
Behrouz Javid Tehrani, an Iranian democratic dissident who has spent most of the last decade in Iranian jails, was released late last month. I’ve written about him here.
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REVIEW: The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978-2001
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Edited by Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout
“You are Iraqis and you realize that even the special weapons that the brothers have, if they use it, it will lose its value. Sometimes what you get out of a weapon is when you keep saying, ‘I will bomb you’; better than bombing him, actually.”Saddam Hussein spoke these words to his inner circle in the midst of Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s, almost two decades before the United States finally overthrew him in 2003. If American war planners had had access to that conversation they might better have understood that Saddam’s lack of co-operation with UN weapons inspectors didn’t mean he still possessed chemical and biological weapons, but that he needed his enemies to believe he did.
As it stands, recordings of this conversation, and thousands more between Saddam and his top advisers, emerged only after Saddam was toppled and the invading Americans discovered a treasure trove of audiotapes. Transcripts of a small selection are presented here. The editors and translators involved were dogged and meticulous. The recordings were not all clearly dated and labelled. Sorting out who spoke, and when, must have been an enormous task.
The portrait that emerges of Saddam is of an intelligent, crafty, but also deluded, cruel, and bigoted man. He urged officials to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, apparently unaware that it is a fraudulent anti-Semitic text. He advocated distributing heroin to Kuwaiti youth during Iraq’s 1990 occupation of that country, and used murderous counterinsurgency tactics there. “This issue between the Arabs and Israel will never be resolved. It is either Israel or the Arabs,” he fumed. Saddam’s greatest enemy, though, was the United States. He sought to understand it but never really did. “America, comrades, America is not an easy country,” he said. But then neither was Iraq during Saddam’s rule. “We will never lower our heads as long as we are alive,” he once vowed, “even if we have to destroy everybody.”
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North Korea’s enduring nightmare
By Michael Petrou - Monday, December 19, 2011 at 3:37 PM - 0 Comments
Kim Jong Il’s death may allow Koreans to stir from the nightmare, but it won’t end it
Kim Jong Il’s death this weekend was something Western politicians both desired and feared. The North Korean dictator was an implacable enemy of the West, who pursued and obtained nuclear weapons, and was willing to give or sell the technology and know-how necessary for others to do the same. In 2007, Israel bombed what’s believed to have been a Syrian nuclear reactor that was modeled on North Korean designs.Under Kim’s leadership, North Korea’s belligerence toward South Korea continued unabated. Only last year, the North torpedoed and sunk a South Korean navy ship, killing 46 sailors on boards. Nuclear weapons aside, there are enough conventional artillery and rockets aimed at the South that Seoul would be flattened within hours of all-out war. Continue…
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Torture and Oxford
By Michael Petrou - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments
A controversial student at the famed university is ordered to pay damages to a Canadian abused in Tehran
Abbas Kowsari/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The son of a former Iranian president who is pursuing a doctorate at the University of Oxford under hotly contested circumstances has been ordered by an Ontario court to pay a Canadian man millions of dollars in compensation for torture he suffered while imprisoned in Iran.
Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani is the fourth child of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, and whose family is among the wealthiest in the country. It was while Akbar Rafsanjani was president that Houshang Bouzari crossed paths with his son, Mehdi. Bouzari had worked as an adviser to the Iranian parliament and oil ministry. But he severed ties to the government in 1987 and became an international business consultant, helping foreign companies strike deals to tap Iran’s oil wealth.
In 1991, he had signed a monster contract involving five European and Japanese companies. Soon after he got a message that President Rafsanjani and Mehdi wanted to meet with him. Bouzari was then living in Italy but he flew back to meet them. The president told Bouzari that he wanted Mehdi, then about 22 years old, to learn the oil business.
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Why Hitchens deserves to be remembered with Orwell
By Michael Petrou - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 0 Comments
Few thinkers have shared Hitchens’s physical and intellectual courage
My editor has asked me to “cover off” Christopher Hitchens’s politics. It is, of course, an impossible task. Or at least it seems so at first. How to distill a political mind that ranged so widely? There was nothing that Hitchens wouldn’t tackle in print, and the diversity of his interests might suggest a certain erraticism in his convictions.There was, too, his supposed migration from the left to the right. George Galloway, in one of his many debates with Hitchens, told the audience they were witnessing a phenomenon of nature—reverse metamorphosis. Hitchens, he said, had turned from a butterfly into a slug.
Hitchens deserved the slur, in Galloway’s feeble if eloquent mind, because of his support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Hitchens had made common cause with George W. Bush, and had therefore betrayed his leftist roots. Galloway was not alone in this view. Tariq Ali declared that Hitchens was among the casualties of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that the man now bearing his name and image was a “vile replica.” An online friend of a friend dismissed him as a “good mind lost to Bush and booze.” Continue…
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Syria’s shifting sands
By Michael Petrou - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments
Will Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown bring down the Syrian regime?
Murad Sezer/Reuters
There is a point at which a regime has committed so much cruelty against its citizens that it will never again have their consent to be ruled. Its choices are then to continue and increase its brutality, or be toppled.
Surely this stage has now been reached in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad is trying to crush, with force, the anti-government uprising that has taken the country to the brink of civil war.
Protests in Syria began cautiously, with demands for reforms, demonstrations against police brutality and displays of solidarity with protesters in Egypt and Libya. But each time Syrians marched, security forces arrested, beat or shot them. Their defiance grew.
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Germany’s brown army faction?
By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments
As details of a 10-year Neo-Nazi killing spree emerge, Germans are learning that racist ideology is more widespread than they thought
Soeren Stache/AFP/Getty Images
In 2004, following a bombing in the Mülheim district of Cologne, an area home to many ethnic Turks, Germany’s then-interior minister, Otto Schily, told Germans the attack was carried out by “not terrorists but the criminal underworld.”
There have been a lot of those sorts of assumptions going around Germany this past decade or two. People from ethnic minorities would turn up dead, shot in the head at close range, and it was assumed to be the work of organized criminals, probably foreigners. The press even had a snappy name for a murder spree of eight Turks and a Greek between 2000 and 2006: “the doner killings,” named after a Turkish meat kebab.
Police had few leads. In 2009, they said the victims may have been linked to international match fixing in soccer. A murder in Turkey was related, they said. Police sketches of suspected witnesses showed swarthy-looking men.
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Villains: Gadhafi reign of fear in
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
He had Libyan dissidents gunned down in London, sponsored the Italian Red Brigades, and kept an album of photographs of Condoleeza Rice–to cite a few
Eric Vandeville/Getty Image
Of the three dictators who have thus far been toppled by the populist uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the cruellest, strangest and most depraved was Moammar Gadhafi of Libya.He ruled the country for 42 years, after seizing power in a 1969 coup. It was not enough for Gadhafi to lead Libya; he tried to remake it. Gadhafi wrote a manifesto, his “Green Book,” dealing with subjects from the economy to horsemanship, but all fall under the principle of “jamahiriya”—a made-up word that roughly translates as “the state of the masses.”
In reality, though, the masses had no say over how they were governed. Gadhafi’s rule was total and arbitrary. He banned alcohol and private property. He closed tea shops because unemployed men hanging around in them made Libyans appear lazy. The only constant was fear. East Germans helped him set up the secret police. They built networks of informants, arrested dissidents, tortured and hanged them. Even Libyans abroad were not safe. Eleven protesters, plus British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher, were gunned down outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984.
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Newsmakers of the Year: the heroes of the Arab Spring
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments
The Arab Spring unleashed a wave of hope and action in a region ruled by oppressive regimes and tyrants
Suhaib Salem/Reuters
It’s a movement that began with an angry vegetable seller and has already changed the world.
Last December, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the harassment and extortion he had suffered at the hands of municipal officials since childhood. His self-immolation, and death from burns two weeks later, sparked protests and then an uprising that soon spread across the Middle East. Dictatorships that had persisted for decades were toppled in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Thousands died in those countries and elsewhere, as ruling strongmen scrambled to respond—some, such as King Abdullah II of Jordan, by promising reforms and sacking members of government; others, such as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, by cracking down on dissidents with murderous force.
The uprising unleashed hope in a region that had seen little of it of late. “People have talked about the end of fear. This is not something that is going to be reversed,” says Marina Ottaway, a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I think we have seen the end of the passive Arab public. People have learned that if they protest, if they take things in their own hands, change can take place.”
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REVIEW: The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival
By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments
Book by Hirsh Goodman
This book explains why Israel has survived, argues why it will continue to do so, and warns of the kind of country it risks becoming unless it stops occupying Palestinian territories. Goodman, an Israeli scholar and journalist, addresses the dangers that Israel faces from nearby states and judges none of them to truly threaten the nation’s existence—even those from a nuclear Iran. Indeed, these threats have driven Israel’s innovation in military technology and strategy, which both makes it stronger and benefits its civilian economy. Unlike many in Israel, he is encouraged rather than worried by the upheavals of the Arab Spring, believing democracy’s spread will ultimately benefit everyone in the Middle East, Israelis included.Israel’s more serious challenges are internal. Ultra-orthodox Jews are growing in number and remain, by and large, separate from the rest of Israeli society, as are Israeli Arabs. Both groups must be better integrated.
Because of higher birth rates among Palestinians, there will soon be more Muslims and Christians living in all the territory Israel controls than there are Jews. “The choice is blatantly clear: between Greater Israel or Democratic and Jewish Israel,” writes Goodman. Israel must shed territory and disengage from land it has occupied since 1967—ideally by striking a peace deal with West Bank Palestinians, unilaterally if necessary. (The most that’s achievable with Hamas in Gaza, says Goodman, is a long-term truce.)
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On shooting a deer
By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments
London looks/Flickr
This began long before I was born. More than fifty years ago my father, 20 years old, attended a job fair for teachers in Toronto. The lines for local school boards were long, so my father applied for a job in a community on the north shore of Lake Superior called Pass Lake. It was farther from home than he had ever been. The recruiters said it was mostly inhabited by Danes. “Danes are good people,” my grandfather told my father when he got home. My grandfather had immigrated to Canada from northern Greece a few decades earlier. I don’t know where he had encountered Danes before.
My dad spent three years in Pass Lake, and another elsewhere in the north. It made a tremendous impression on him. Everyone hunted and fished up there, so my dad did, too. He’s told me about fish caught and deer shot so often that I can recite the stories as if I had been there. There was the huge pickerel that unexpectedly hit a Canadian Wiggler on a scorching summer day; the steelhead that was hauled out of the pool beneath Portage Falls and then fell back into the water when a poorly tied knot unraveled; my dad’s first deer, of which he was immensely proud, until a local man, blind and gruff, gripped its leg and pronounced it the size of a dog. Continue…
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Musharraf must have known where Osama bin Laden was hiding: MP Chris Alexander
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 9:10 PM - 0 Comments
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf surely knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding in a compound a short walk from a Pakistani military academy, says Conservative MP Chris Alexander, who previously served as Canada’s first resident ambassador in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban.
“I can’t prove Musharraf’ knowledge, but everything I know about Pakistan’s system would tell me that he as chief of the army staff and he as president would have known,” Alexander said during a speech today at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. Continue…
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Canada, Syria, and Suncor Energy
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says Canada has not blocked Suncor Energy Inc.’s operations in Syria because the natural gas it extracts is used solely to generate electricity for civilian use. It would be “negative, not positive” to cut off hospitals and families, he added.
This is, at best, is a dubious claim. Suncor’s partnership in Syria is with a state-owned company. Revenues go to the regime. Some of those revenues may be used to keep the lights on in hospitals. Some may be used to massacre peaceful protesters. Canada isn’t allowing Suncor to continue working in Syria out of humanitarian concerns. Continue…
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REVIEW: The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments
Book by Ali Soufan
In the aftermath of 9/11, FBI special agent Soufan was one of the American intelligence agents ordered to use “any means necessary” to make terror suspects talk during interrogation. For Soufan, now retired from the bureau, the necessary means were the ones that worked: guile, deep knowledge of al-Qaeda and the person he was questioning, and compassion. He forged bonds with men who sought to kill his fellow countrymen, ordering their shackles to be removed when he spoke with them and procuring a satellite phone for one detainee to call his wife. He once held ice to the lips of a gravely wounded suspect fighting for his life. He debated religion with detainees, as well as American history and Hollywood films. He drew out their co-operation. He outwitted them.Soufan says it was “odious” to sit and laugh with committed terrorists, but his tactics produced results. They were scorned and rejected, however, by those in the CIA who endorsed “enhanced interrogation techniques”—aggressive questioning employing methods such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding. Soufan methodically unravels the lies of those who claim those abuses produced good results. Even with sections of the book redacted by CIA censors, it makes for devastating reading. Soufan’s chronicle should end the debate on whether torture is ever justified, but probably won’t.
Soufan’s book is most illuminating for the light it shines on America’s interrogation program, and the painfully consequential lack of information sharing between the FBI and the CIA. It’s also revealing as a history of al-Qaeda and its war with America. Soufan has tracked the organization since the mid-1990s, and was intimately involved in investigating many of its crimes—notably the attack on the USS Cole. His experience shows. Even without endnotes, his book deserves to be widely read.
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Acropolis now: Greece may be just the start
By Michael Petrou with Stavroula Logothettis - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Other Eurozone countries are faltering, with far more worrying consequences
Orestis Panagiotou/Keystone Press
“We are finished as a nation,” says Marko Gjini, a 39-year-old unemployed construction worker in Athens. “The country has been sold off. We have no say in anything anymore. Greece is owned by the Germans.”
Like many Greeks these days, Gjini is bitter and despondent because of his country’s financial mess, and the austerity measures that have been imposed in an effort to contain it. His wife, Aleka, a public hospital nurse, has seen her income drop from 1,200 euros a month to 800 euros. Now, facing more taxes and cuts to public expenditures, the family expects to have a net monthly income of less than 500 euros. Marko and Aleka are investing whatever money they can toward English lessons for their twin eight-year-old boys in the hope that they might have a better future somewhere else. “Let the government fall,” says Gjini, “[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel is the boss now anyway.”
Greece’s financial troubles have been accelerating since 2008, and have now reached a crisis point. Unable to pay debts accumulated through years of wild spending and financial mismanagement, covered up by blatant cooking of the books, last May the country accepted a $150-billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund and other members of the eurozone—those European Union countries that use the common euro currency—in return for imposing harsh austerity measures. These weren’t popular among ordinary Greeks; strikes and street protests followed. Three bank officials died in May when rioters set fire to their bank branch in downtown Athens.
The Greek government, meanwhile, missed its financial targets. Rescue loans were delayed. And the recession got worse. Facing the very real possibility of defaulting on its enormous national debt, Greece last month negotiated another bailout package involving cash and a 50 per cent “haircut” off all its privately held debt, if Greece would agree to further cuts to public spending and increased taxes.
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Gun control and the Toronto Star
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 2:41 PM - 0 Comments
“Tories delist sniper rifles, self-loading weapons,” says the front-page Toronto Star headline, followed by text in the body of the story claiming that such weapons will be “declassified” under the Conservatives’ bill to kill the long-gun registry.
It’s unclear exactly what the Star means here by “delist” and “declassify.” Currently, firearms in Canada are classified three ways: as non-restricted; restricted; or prohibited. Roughly speaking, most rifles and shotguns are non-restricted; restricted firearms include many handguns, and rifles or shotguns that are deemed to be too short; and prohibited firearms include automatic rifles, as well as some handguns. The Tories aren’t reshuffling how various firearms will be classified. A gun that was non-restricted previously will remain so. What’s changing is that gun-owners will no longer have to register non-restricted rifles.
The Star lists several examples of firearms its says will soon be “freed from the binding controls that now see them listed with the RCMP-run database.” It’s a little more complicated than that. Continue…
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The demise of Moammar Gadhafi
By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
He ruled his people with an iron fist. In the end they dragged him from a drainpipe.
Ismail Zetouni/Reuters
Moammar Gadhafi’s final demise began in a drainage pipe. The former Libyan dictator, who had once called opponents of his regime “rats,” crawled into it after a NATO air strike stopped his convoy of vehicles as it attempted to break out of Sirte, his besieged hometown where regime loyalists were making a last stand against a popular uprising that began in February. He was followed there by fighters from the National Transitional Council, now the recognized government of Libya. One told the BBC that Gadhafi had begged him not to shoot. Exactly what happened next is unclear. He was alive when bundled onto the back of a truck and driven into the city. Video footage has emerged of Gadhafi dazed and covered in blood. He is then dragged from the truck. A crowd envelops him and he disappears from view.
As the news—and grainy cellphone videos of the wounded and then dead dictator—spread, celebrations erupted across Libya. There were jubilant scenes in the capital, Tripoli, as throngs filled the streets, hugging each other, chanting, honking car horns, and firing guns into the air. Security officials handed out treats. They called them “revolutionary mints.” “We have been waiting for this moment a long time,” Mahmoud Jibril, Libya’s acting prime minister, told a news conference. “It means everything,” Abubaker Karmos, Libya’s chargé d’affaires, said in an interview with Maclean’s. “It means the end of a long and ruthless dictatorship and the beginning of a new Libya, a free and democratic Libya that all Libyans want.”
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a brief televised statement: “With the shadow of Gadhafi now lifted from their land, it is our hope that the Libyan people will find peace and reconciliation after this dark period in the life of their nation. We look forward to working with them.” Karmos said the new Libya will need all the help it can get from allies such as Canada. After four decades of dictatorship, Libyans have little experience with basic freedoms, and with democratic institutions such as an independent judiciary and honest police. “He destroyed everything, even the smiles of the Libyan people,” says Karmos. “It’s like we’re starting from scratch.”
