UN impatient as blockade stalls Gaza building: BBC
By Tim Franks
Progress was made on the housing project until Israel's blockade was tightened
There is a place of strange quiet in the cramped and crowded Gaza Strip.
It looks, from the roof of a nearby United Nations school, like a film set, or perhaps an army’s urban warfare training ground.
Ranged across the sandy earth of Khan Younis is a large housing estate: 151 apartments, with space for a further 450. Most are three-quarters complete. All are uninhabited.
The project is one of 26 schemes, ranging from houses to schools to medical clinics, that have been years in the making.
They all made good progress until June 2007. At that point, the Islamist Hamas movement – which has fired hundreds of rockets at southern Israeli towns – took control of the Gaza Strip after months of violent struggle with its more secular rival, Fatah.
In response, Israel and Egypt tightened their blockade of the Gaza Strip, allowing in little more than basic food and medicine.
For the past 10 months, the UN has been holding intensive, high-level negotiations with Israel, seeking permission to bring in materials such as doors, windows, pipes and tiles to complete these 26 projects.
But UN officials say they have made no headway. Their expressions of dismay are growing stronger.
‘Huge price’
Fouad Faqawi, a Gazan who works for the United Nations relief agency Unrwa, strides up the rough concrete staircase of one of the Khan Younis housing blocks.
“Nobody can live here,” he says, pausing to look inside the shell of a family home for six. “No way – how can people live without plumbing or sewage, or windows or doors?”
Nearly 100 people, including many children, live in this collection of shacks
Unrwa’s head in Gaza, John Ging, surveys the housing estate on a grey and windy winter’s day. His voice crackles with incomprehension and frustration, as he talks of the people waiting for the new homes to be finished.
“These are civilians, who are of course the victims of this conflict. And yet they’re paying this massive price, in terms of human misery. And the frustration and despair are creating a lot more extremism.”
Barbed wire
Were the estate finished, it might benefit Maryam Ataya.
Along with almost 100 relatives, she lives in a squalid little enclosure a short drive away.
Their home was destroyed during the Israeli offensive last year.
Mrs Ataya’s temporary home is surrounded by rubble and rusted metal
Now, she and her four children live in a collection of shacks, huts and lean-tos.
Children careen bare-footed over the mounds of rubble, barbed wire, and rusted metal within the rickety perimeter walls.
“It’s a disaster,” says Maryam flatly. She stokes the family pot using scraps of wood. “We have no electricity, no running water.”
The Israeli government’s general position on the blockade is that it will remain in place – in the words of a senior official – “as long as Hamas remains committed to destroying Israel and killing Israelis”.
But what of these specific UN projects? In a statement, the defence ministry told the BBC: “Recently, the UN began to submit detailed equipment lists (for the 26 projects). Once the administrative work is completed, it will be agreed with the UN… which projects will be realised, and the timetables for their execution.”
Strong language
The 26 schemes have become known as the “Serry projects”, after Robert Serry, the UN special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process.
The mild-mannered, quietly spoken Dutch diplomat speaks in the UN’s Jerusalem headquarters with a clear tinge of exasperation.
“Let make this very clear,” he says. “I am disappointed and also frustrated, that after months of discussions… Israel is not yet willing to discuss any of the social housing projects which the (UN) secretary general has been asking Israel now to move on. Frankly, we’re getting impatient.”
For the UN envoy, this is strong language.
Israeli officials have long warned of the danger that Hamas could divert building materials for military ends, such as bunkers and reinforcements.
But the UN stresses that every single tile, pipe or bag of cement is tracked from the border crossing to its final use.
“I fail to see how these kinds of projects, which would help the people of Gaza – not Hamas – would impact on Israel’s security,” Mr Serry adds.
And at Abdelsalaam Al-Shobaki’s small concrete factory, in the north of Gaza, there is proof that the blockade has failed to seal the strip.
There is a large pile of empty packets of cement from Turkey and Egypt, which have been smuggled through the tunnels connecting Gaza to Egypt.
As he mixes the grey slurry, Mr Shobaki says the much-needed building material is punishingly expensive.
But the cement is clearly there, if you have money or power – and Hamas has both.
There is no sign that the struggle between Hamas and Israel will be eased any time soon.
As long as that is the case, there seems little prospect of Gaza’s borders opening.
And that will leave Gazans mired in lives of privation and shortages.
Barack Obama criticised for falling short on human rights: The Guardian
President has set different tone to Bush, but failed to end abuses, says Human Rights Watch
America’s leading human rights organisation has said that Barack Obama is falling far short of his rhetoric by continuing some of the abuses of George Bush’s war on terror and by shielding foreign allies responsible for an assault on human rights activists not seen since the end of the cold war.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch praised Obama for setting a different tone to President Bush, and for ending some of the practices of the previous administration including torture and abduction to secret CIA prisons. But its director, Kenneth Roth, told the Guardian that Obama had failed to end other abuses, such as holding suspected terrorists indefinitely without trial and retaining military commissions.
Roth also criticised Obama for undermining human rights by failing to challenge key allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt, who are at the forefront of a renewed crackdown on activists, and for protecting Israel from accountability for war crimes in Gaza.
Human rights activists were under renewed siege in many parts of the world, he said.
“As human rights groups have put more and more pressure on governments, there’s been an increase in counterattacks of growing sophistication. The thing we’ve noticed is an increase in the deniable repression, the repression that has a facade of bureaucratic legality about it. Using the pretext of criminal prosecutions which are really trumped up charges,” Roth said. “You can really see that in a place like Pakistan where there is a human rights movement but they are fighting for their lives. You see a lot of countries using criminal libel, including Russia.”
Roth said that Moscow led the way in using laws and regulations to curb activists and other states had followed its example.
“Ethiopia is the big new entrant in the field this year with a new law that prohibits any organisation that receives more than 10% of its money from abroad from engaging in any human rights work. Ethiopia has effectively shut down the human rights community. In Rwanda there is a small human rights community that has been largely silenced. These are US allies,” he said.
The Human Rights Watch director said that the Obama administration was continuing a longstanding US practice of selectively challenging foreign governments over human rights.
“He has been a huge improvement at the rhetorical level. The issue has been translating that shining rhetoric into policy practice. If you look for example in Accra … he said that Africa doesn’t need strong leaders, it needs strong institutions, which is a great line,” he said. “But then what have they done about that?
“They’ve defended themselves by saying they’re trying to build up goodwill for use on human rights in the future but it is not credible.”
African leaders have challenged the international criminal court, accusing it of focusing disproportionately on Africa, particularly with its indictment of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, while ignoring alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Roth dismisses the assertion as self-serving.
“You could have imagined African leaders saying: Isn’t it great that finally an international institution is taking seriously the plight of African victims? But that’s not the way they look at it. Instead they’ve identified with African leaders who have been repressing everybody. They treat themselves as a club of dictators who look after their own.”
But Roth added that the court’s position was undermined by US policy, particularly its protection of Israel.
“The US wouldn’t even put pressure on Israel to pursue serious domestic investigations of its war crimes in Gaza. People see that double standard and they say if the west is going to protect its own why can’t we do the same?” he said.
“If Israel was not going to allow an independent domestic investigation, it warranted international scrutiny and the US wouldn’t even allow the first step in the process to be taken. That infuriated people because they did see Washington protecting its own. The Gaddafis of the world had a stronger argument: if this is what the west is going to do, why shouldn’t we protect Bashir?”
Roth said Obama should be given credit for shutting down secret CIA detention facilities and barring the agency from torturing captives.
“Where he’s still falling short is refusing to investigate and prosecute the people who ordered torture, the people who provided the civil and legal justifications for it. It creates a climate of impunity.”
Human Rights Watch has also taken Obama to task about the continued use of military trials and the prospect of about 50 Guantánamo inmates being held indefinitely without charge.