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Rafsanjani’s son detained on return from exile
DUBAI: The son of Iran’s former President
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founder of
the Islamic Republic, was detained yesterday
after returning from exile, accused of
inciting post-election unrest in 2009.
Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani arrived in
Tehran late on Sunday having spent three
years in Britain following the widespread
protests at the re-election of President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The 43-year-old presented himself at
court to hear the charges and face ques-
tioning. His lawyer was not allowed to be
present, the Iranian Students’ News
Agency reported.
Rafsanjani was then transferred to
Tehran’s Evin prison after the court issued
a temporary detention order, news agencies
reported.
Analysts say Mehdi’s return could indicate
a deal has been agreed with authorities
to resolve the charges, and may signal
a revival in the political fortunes of his
father, a grandee of Iranian politics whose
JERUSALEM: Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaks to the
press following a sentence hearing in his corruption case at Jerusalem’s
District Court yesterday. A Jerusalem court handed Olmert a $19,000 fine
and a suspended jail sentence for graft, meaning he will serve no jail
time, Israeli media reported. — AFP
Israeli ex-PM spared
jail in corruption case
JERUSALEM: An Israeli court spared former
prime minister Ehud Olmert a prison term for
breach of trust yesterday, opening the door
to a political comeback if he should want
one. Dogged by corruption scandals as he
tried to forge a peace deal with the
Palestinians, Olmert resigned in 2008.
Though found guilty in July for approving
projects that involved one of his long-time
friends while in a previous cabinet post, he
was acquitted of more serious bribery
charges.
Jerusalem District Court handed Olmert a
suspended one-year jail sentence and a
75,300-shekel ($19,225) fine.
The three-judge panel also decided
against defining the crime as one of “moral
turpitude” - a label that, along with significant
time behind bars, might have prevented
the 66-year-old centrist politician from
returning to public office.
“I leave court today walking tall,” Olmert
told reporters, without elaborating on his
plans. After his conviction, Olmert, who
described himself as guilty of a “procedural
irregularity” rather than corruption, said he
had no intention of re-entering politics.
The party he once led, Kadima, now heads
the opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s rightist Likud. The next election
is due in October 2013, though it could be
brought forward over delays in passing the
national budget.
Olmert is still fighting a separate bribery
case over his role, as Jerusalem mayor from
1993 to 2003, in a controversial housing project.
He has denied all wrongdoing in that
case.
“This is not over,” deputy Israeli state prosecutor
Eli Abravanel said after Monday’s sentencing.
Olmert voluntarily forfeited his government
benefits as ex-premier after his conviction,
which carried a maximum penalty of
three years’ imprisonment.
That gesture helped to soften his sentence,
said the Jerusalem court, adding that
it had also noted “the great contribution
made by the defendant to the country”.
The court’s rejection in July of key accusations
that effectively brought down a sitting
prime minister, who was suffering prostate
cancer at the time, raised questions in Israel
about whether prosecutors had been
overzealous.
But many Israelis soured on Olmert over
the costly and inconclusive 2006 war against
the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. An opinion
poll conducted immediately after July’s court
verdict found 70 percent opposed to Olmert
re-entering politics, with only 22 percent in
favour.—Reuters
star has waned since the election.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a close aide
to the late revolutionary leader Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, has held most of the
Iran’s top political positions, including
parliament speaker, armed forces commander
and president from 1989 to 1997.
But the pragmatic conservative’s power
has waned since he expressed sympathy
for opposition demonstrators after
the 2009 vote that triggered the deepest
political crisis and worst unrest in Iran
since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
However, as oil and banking sanctions
bite, some are saying Rafsanjani could
make a surprise comeback bid for the
presidency at an election scheduled for
June 2013. In a sign of his return to
favour, Rafsanjani was photographed
walking alongside Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a Non-Aligned
Movement summit in Tehran last month,
and sat next to U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2012
But the wealthy Rafsanjani family
remains under pressure. On Saturday,
Mehdi’s sister Faezeh, a former lawmaker
and a women’s rights activist, began a sixmonth
jail sentence for “spreading antistate
propaganda”.
Faezeh was detained briefly in 2009
after addressing supporters of
Ahmadinejad’s main election rival,
Mirhossein Mousavi, who himself has
been under unofficial house arrest since
February 2011.— Reuters
Syrian children killed
ahead of UN briefing
‘There are still people buried under the rubble’
DAMASCUS: Regime forces pounded rebels
claiming to control most of Syria yesterday
ahead of a UN Security Council briefing by
peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on his talks with
President Bashar al-Assad.
Ahead of the annual UN General Assembly
starting today, the UN and Arab League envoy
is set to brief the UN Security Council behind
closed doors on his talks in Damascus. Brahimi
discussed Syria with UN chief Ban Ki-moon on
Saturday and both agreed that the 18-month
crisis was “a steadily increasing threat to regional
peace and stability,” a statement said.
Yesterday’s briefing comes a day after at
least 82 people were killed in violence nationwide
in Syria-among them 40 civilians-according
to figures supplied by Britain-based watchdog
the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Three children from one family were among
five people killed in a strike by regime warplanes
yesterday on the northern city of
Aleppo, the country’s commercial hub that has
been a focus for fighting since mid-July.
“Three children from the same family were
killed when their building collapsed in Maadi
district, which is located in the Old City of
Aleppo, 600 metres (yards) from the citadel,”
the Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
“There are still people buried under the rubble.”
Battles raged overnight in Aleppo’s western
districts of Jamiliyeh, Bustan al-Qasr,
Furqan and in Zabdiyeh, while the army shelled
rebel positions in Marjeh, Tariq al-Bab and
Zabdiyeh, the Observatory said.
In Damascus, pre-dawn battles erupted in
the eastern neighbourhood of Qaboon, said
the watchdog, while northwest of the city, a
large explosion rocked Qudsaya suburb after
midnight.
The northeast suburb of Douma and farmland
between Douma and nearby Harasta were
also shelled overnight. On Sunday, regime aircraft
hammered rebel strongholds as rebels
said they now control most of Syria and have
moved their command centre from Turkey to
“liberated areas” inside the country. The air
attacks focused on Homs province, Deir Ezzor
in the east and areas of Damascus.
In Aleppo, rebels destroyed two fighter
planes on the ground in Orm, a rebel commander
told AFP. Residents in the village of
Bianoun, north of Aleppo, told AFP that aircraft
also hit a rebel house where a meeting was
under way, destroying it and killing everyone
inside. The report could not be independently
verified.
Colonel Ahmad Abdul Wahab of the Free
Israeli defense chief proposes WB pullout
JERUSALEM: Israel’s defense
minister called for a unilateral
pullout from much of the West
Bank in published comments
yesterday, saying Israel must
take “practical steps” if peace
efforts with the Palestinians
remain stalled.
The comments by Defense
Minister Ehud Barak appeared to
put him at odds with Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
who has resisted making any
major concessions to the
Palestinians in the absence of
peace talks. Negotiations have
been deadlocked for nearly four
years. Netanyahu’s office
declined comment.
Barak’s proposal is unlikely to
be implemented, at least in the
near term. Netanyahu’s coalition
is dominated by hardliners who
would be reluctant to embrace
the plan. But Netanyahu is widely
expected to call early elections
in the coming weeks, and
Barak may be trying to attract
centrist voters to his party
ahead of an upcoming campaign.
Speaking to the Israel Hayom
newspaper, Barak called for
uprooting dozens of Jewish settlements
in the West Bank, but
said Israel would keep major settlement
“blocs.”
These blocs, home to 80 to 90
percent of the settler population,
are mostly located near the
frontiers with Israel proper,
though one of them, Ariel, is
located deep inside the West
Bank. Barak also said Israel
would need to maintain a military
presence along the West
Bank’s border with Jordan.
The remaining settlers would
be given financial incentives to
leave, or be allowed to remain in
their homes under Palestinian
control for a five-year “trial period,”
Barak said.
“It’s better to reach an agreement
with the Palestinians, but
if that doesn’t happen, we must
take practical steps to start a
separation,” he said. “It will help
us not only in dealing with the
Palestinians, but also with other
countries in the region, with the
Europeans, and with the
American administration - and
of course (will help) us.”
The proposal falls far short of
Palestinian demands for all of
the West Bank, along with adjacent
east Jerusalem and the
Gaza Strip, for a future inde-
pendent state. Israel captured
the areas in the 1967 Mideast
war, though it withdrew unilaterally
from Gaza in 2005.
Sabri Sedam, an aide to
Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas, rejected Barak’s proposal.
He said continued Israeli control
of the settlement blocs and east
Jerusalem would make the
establishment of a Palestinian
state impossible.
“The major settlement blocs
separate the West Bank and confiscates
east Jerusalem,” Sedam
said. “These settlement blocs are
not isolated populations. They
are connected communities,
passing through the Palestinian
JERUSALEM: In this Monday, Jan. 17 2011 file photo, Israeli
Defense Minister Ehud Barak attends a press conference in
the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Barak calls for
a broad unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank if peace
talks remain stalled, saying “practical steps” are needed to
breathe life into the diplomatic process. — AP
land, which kills any geographical
contiguity for a Palestinian
state.”
The 12 million people who
live in Israel plus the Palestinian
areas are roughly equally divided
between Arabs and Jews, and
the Arab birthrate is generally
higher. In Israel proper, Jews
make up about three-quarters of
the population.
But when the Palestinian
areas are included, Jews could
soon find themselves a minority
in Israel-controlled areas.
Dovish Israelis have cited this
demographic argument for
years as a key reason to pull out
of the West Bank. Even
Netanyahu has raised concerns
about the demographic issue.
“We have not been a year or
two in Judea and Samaria, but
45 years,” Barak said, using the
biblical terms for the West Bank.
“The time has come to make
decisions based not only on ideology
and gut feelings, but from
a cold reading of reality.”
But unilateral moves are
extremely controversial in Israel.
Israel pulled out of the Gaza
Strip in 2005, citing demographics.
Within two years, Hamas
militants overran the territory,
using it to fire thousands of
rockets into Israel. Israeli hardliners
fear the same thing could
happen in the West Bank. Peace
talks have been stalled since late
2008, in large part because of
the Jewish settlements.
The Palestinians refuse to
negotiate while Israel continues
to build new homes for settlers
on occupied territory.
Netanyahu has refused to halt
settlement construction, saying
all disagreements must be
resolved in negotiations. —AP
Syrian Army said the regime’s aerial superiority
was the only thing preventing the FSA from
seizing the capital.
“We control most of the country. In most
regions, the soldiers are prisoners of their barracks.
They go out very little and we can move
freely everywhere, except Damascus,” Abdul
Wahab told AFP.
On Saturday, the FSA said the next step
would be to “liberate” Damascus. Nearly 80 percent
of towns and villages along the Turkish
border are outside the control of the authorities
in Damascus, according to the Observatory.
In the capital, 20 government-tolerated opposition
parties met on Sunday to discuss a solution
to the crisis in the presence of the ambassadors
of Russia and Iran, staunch allies of
Assad’s government.
Raja al-Nasser of the National Coordination
Committee for Democratic Change called at the
meeting for an end to the “barbaric bombing”
to move toward a political process that would
“put an end to the current regime.”
According to the Observatory, at least
29,000 people have been killed since the revolt
against Assad’s rule erupted last year. The
United Nations puts the toll at more than
20,000.
Because of international divisions over the
18-month-old conflict, the UN is holding no formal
meeting on Syria at this week’s General
Assembly.
But US President Barack Obama and Western
leaders are expected to call for action in their
speeches. Obama is one of the first speakers on
Tuesday after Ban formally opens the annual
gathering of world leaders.
Diplomatic wounds over Syria are not close
to healing, however. Neither Russia nor China,
which have three times vetoed Security Council
resolutions on Syria, will be represented by a
senior leader in New York.
Assad is expected to send his foreign minister,
Walid Muallem. “Everyone will be thinking
about Syria, talking about Syria, but there will
be no decision and no major progress,” said one
senior UN diplomat, speaking on condition of
anonymity. — AFP
IDLIB: In this Sunday, March 11, 2012 file photo, a man carries a boy who was
severely wounded during heavy fighting between Syrian rebels and Syrian Army
forces in Idlib, north Syria. A new report by the British charity Save the Children
documents atrocities in Syria’s 18-month-old civil war that have left thousands of
children dead and many more traumatized. —AP
Libya orders ‘illegitimate’
militias to disband
BENGHAZI: The Libyan army on Sunday said
it raided several militia outposts operating
outside government control in the capital,
Tripoli, while in the east, the militia suspected
in the Sept. 11 attack on the US Consulate said
it had disbanded on orders of the country’s
president.
President Mohammed el-Megaref said late
Saturday all of the country’s militias must
come under government authority or disband,
a move that appeared aimed at harnessing
popular anger against the powerful armed
groups following the attack that killed the US
ambassador.
The assault on the US mission in Benghazi,
which left Ambassador Chris Stevens and
three other Americans dead, has sparked an
angry backlash among many Libyans against
the myriad of armed factions that continue to
run rampant across the nation nearly a year
after the end of the country’s civil war.
On Friday, residents of Benghazi - the cradle
of the Libyan revolution last year that toppled
dictator Moammar Gaddafi - staged a mass
demonstration against the militias before
storming the compounds of several armed
groups in the city in an unprecedented protest
to demand the militias dissolve.
The government has taken advantage of
the popular sentiment to move quickly. In a
statement published by the official LANA
news agency, the military asked all armed
groups using the army’s camps, outposts and
barracks in Tripoli, and other cities to hand
them over. It warned that it will resort to
force if the groups refuse.
On Sunday, security forces raided a number
of sites in the capital, including a military outpost
on the main airport road, which were
being used as bases by disparate militias since
Gadhafi was driven from the capital around a
year ago, according to military spokesman Ali
al-Shakhli.
Tripoli resident Abdel-Salam Sikayer said he
believes the government is able to make this
push now because, thanks to the country’s first
free election in decades that took place in July,
the public generally trusts it.
“There was no trust before the election of
the National Congress that is backed by the
legitimacy of the people and which chose the
country’s leader. There is a feeling that the
national army will really be built,” he said.
The government faces a number of obstacles,
though. It needs the most powerful militias
on its side to help disband the rest. It also
relies on militias for protection of vital institutions
and has used them to secure the borders,
airports, hospitals and even July’s election.
Some of the militias have taken steps over the
past several weeks to consolidate and work as
contracted government security forces that
are paid monthly salaries. In the western city of
Misrata, for example, resident Walid Khashif
said dozens of militias held a meeting recently
and decided to work under the government’s
authority. He said the militias also handed over
three main prisons in the city to the Ministry of
Justice to run.
Since Gadhafi’s capture and killing, the
government has brought some militias nominally
under the authority of the military or
Interior Ministry, but even those retain separate
commanders and often are only superficially
subordinate to the state. El-Megaref
told reporters late Saturday that militias operating
outside state authority will be dissolved,
and that the military and police will take control
over their barracks.
But it remains unclear if the government
has the will - and the firepower - to force the
most powerful militias to recognize its authority.
Backers of the ousted regime continue to
hold sway in some parts of the country, particularly
the western city of Bani Walid and parts
of the deep south. Gaddafi loyalists near the
southern town of Barek al-Shati clashed with a
pro-government militia for several days, killing
nearly 20, and abducted 30 militiamen working
with the authorities from a bus this week,
according to Essam al-Katous, a senior security
official. Over the past 11 months, a series of
interim leaders has struggled to bring order to
a country that was eviscerated during the
eccentric dictator’s 42-year rule, with security
forces and the military intentionally kept weak
and government institutions hollowed of
authority. Powerful militias like Ansar al-
Shariah in eastern Libya say there is no clear
system in place for how the head of the joints
chief of staff decides which militias are legitimate
and which are not. — AP