English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For March 30/2023
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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15 آذار/2023

Bible Quotations For today
He will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again
Saint Luke 18/31-34/:"Jesus took the twelve aside and said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.’ But they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said."

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on March 29-30/2023
British Embassy: UK, USA have imposed sanctions on those responsible for the illicit captagon trade in Syria
Bukhari meets Mikati, urges Lebanese leaders to elect president
Report: West asks political forces to move to new nominations
Public works committee to meet Thursday on airport new terminal
Lebanon's million-dollar airport terminal deal in the hot seat: why the controversy?
EU Commissioner for Crisis Management visits Lebanon on 30, 31 March 2023
FPM affirms it has “nothing to do” with new passenger terminal construction
Caretaker Telecoms minister urges Ogero employees to end strike
Signature of Regional Framework for Arab States and launch of Arab Plan for Prevention and Reduction of Dangers of Drugs in Arab Society
King of Jordan assures Lebanon’s FM of nation’s support for country and its people
Lebanon’s Public institutions to close on Good Friday and Easter
Corm calls on Ogero employees to suspend strike, affirming he has no power to increase salaries
Uncertainty looms over municipal elections funding in Lebanon as authorities pass the buck
Public sector employees stand against pay based on Sayrafa platform's daily rate
Lebanon inflation hits 190% in February as IMF calls for urgent reforms
Jordan says dormant electricity deal 'starts with Lebanon'
Hasbani: They spent $740M from SDR, can spend 8 on municipal vote
Lebanese politicians hurl insults at each other as tensions boil over in parliament
Sami Gemayel refuses a president of 'Hezbollah republic'
Israeli drone throws smoke bomb on café in southern Leb
Where does Walid Joumblatt figure in Lebanon's quest for a president?/Michael Young/The National/March 29/2023
The Lebanon Human Rights Report: Punting on Accountability?/David Schenker/The Washington Institute/March 29/2023

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on March 29-30/2023
UK says Assad using captagon profits to continue 'campaign of terror'
Benjamin Netanyahu tells Joe Biden to stay out of Israeli politics
Israel launches new spy satellite, overseen by Gallant
Vatican: Pope to be hospitalized for days for lung infection
Russia, Iran, Syria, Turkey to hold meeting in Moscow next week: Iranian MFA
Russia, Iran FMs finalizing Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement: Amirabdollahian
Iraqi Foreign Ministry: Iraqi Chargé d'Affaires in Bahrain to return to Baghdad
Ukraine’s Zelensky: Any Russian victory could be perilous
Biden says White House response to banking stress is 'not over yet'
Russia Says it Hopes Azerbaijan and Iran Resolve ‘Frictions’
Israeli drone throws smoke bomb on café in southern Lebanon
Lavrov, Abdollahian Discuss Opportunities to Revive Nuclear Pact
SNHR: 10,024 Syrians Died in Feb. 6 Earthquake
Netanyahu, Biden exchange frosty words over Israel legal overhaul
Israel parties discuss justice reforms after Netanyahu U-turn
King Charles III keeps eye on prize after tour starts late

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on March 29-30/2023
Today in History: A Newborn America Learns about Jihad/Raymond Ibrahim/March 29, 2023
Why Did the Biden Administration Oppose Israeli Judicial Reform?/Jonathan S. Tobin//Gatestone Institute./March 29, 2023
Turkey: Missing Children from Earthquakes Risk Human Trafficking, Organ Harvesting, Sexual Abuse/Uzay Bulut/Gatestone Institute./March 29, 2023
Israel’s Divisions and Their Implications/Tariq Al-Homayed/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper
Boris Johnson likely to remain a constant in UK political life/Mohamed Chebaro/Arab News/March 29/2023
Scotland First Minister: Humza Yousaf offers further proof that Muslims can succeed in Britain/Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Arab News/March 29/2023
Kurds to play kingmakers as Turkiye prepares to vote/Zaid M. Belbagi/Arab News/March 29/2023
Inside Iran’s Regime (Part 1): Growing Fissures and Poor Morale in the IRGC?/Patrick Clawson/The Washington Institute/March 29/2023

Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on March 29-30/2023
British Embassy: UK, USA have imposed sanctions on those responsible for the illicit captagon trade in Syria
NNA/March 29, 2023
The UK and US have imposed sanctions on those responsible for the illicit captagon trade, which is estimated to be worth up to $57 billion to the Assad regime, the British Embassy in Lebanon has said.
The Embassy's statement read the following:
"Captagon is a highly addictive amphetamine which is used throughout the Middle East, with 80% of the world’s supply produced in Syria.
The Syrian regime is closely involved in the trade – multi-billion dollar shipments leave regime strongholds such as the Port of Latakia, and President Bashar al-Assad’s brother Maher al-Assad commands the unit of the Syrian Army facilitating the distribution and production of the drug.
Trade in the drug is a financial lifeline for the Assad regime – it is worth approximately 3 times the combined trade of the Mexican cartels. The production and trafficking of captagon enriches Assad’s inner circle, militias and warlords, at the expense of the Syrian people who continue to face crippling poverty and repression at the hands of the regime.
The UK and US have today imposed coordinated sanctions on individuals involved in the trade, with the UK list including senior regime officials facilitating the trade to the manufacturers of the drug and key Hizbollah associates responsible for trafficking it across the Middle East. This includes prominent businessmen, militia leaders, and relatives of Bashar al-Assad. These sanctions constitute an asset freeze and UK travel ban on the individuals concerned.
Lord (Tariq) Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State for the Middle East, said:
The Assad regime is using the profits from the captagon trade to continue their campaign of terror on the Syrian people.
The UK and US will continue to hold the regime to account for brutally repressing the Syrian people and fuelling instability across the Middle East.
The Assad regime, Hizballah, and other Iranian-backed militia all facilitate the captagon industry, and in doing so fuel regional instability and creating a growing addiction crisis across the region.
The UK remains committed to supporting the Syrian people both in their quest for accountability and in providing humanitarian assistance. The UK has provided over £3.8 billion in humanitarian assistance to Syria and the region since the conflict began, our largest ever response to a single crisis.
The full list of those sanctioned is:
Abdellatif Hamid: a prominent businessperson who utilises his factories to package captagon pills and has been linked to the 2020 captagon seizure in Salerno, Italy
Imad Abu Zureiq: a militia leader in Southern Syria. His militia is associated with drugs smuggling as well as assassinations and kidnappings of political opponents
Mustafa Al Masalmeh: a militia leader in Southern Syria. His militia is involved in drugs production and he has been involved in assassinating opponents of the Syrian regime
Taher Al Kayali: a business magnate with links to the captagon industry. He has been tied to multiple captagon seizures, including in Europe
Amer Khiti: a Syrian politician and operates and controls multiple businesses in Syria which facilitate the production and smuggling of drugs, including captagon
Hassan Muhammad Daqqou: known as the ‘king’ or ‘emperor’ of captagon and is associated with Hizbollah. He has been linked to captagon seizures in the Middle East, Europe and South East Asia
Mohammed Shalish: involved in the shipping sector in regime strongholds and has been tied to captagon shipments which have left the port of Latakia
Raji Falhout: a militia leader in Sweida and uses his militia headquarters to facilitate captagon production
Samer Kamal Al Asad: related to the Syrian President, and is a prominent actor in the production of captagon
Waseem Badia Al Asad: related to the Syrian President and is a ‘strongman’ for the Syrian regime. He facilitates the manufacturing and smuggling of captagon
Noah Zaiter: a prominent person involved in smuggling captagon and narcotics. He is associated with the Syrian regime and Hizbollah.
Find out more about UK sanctions relating to Syria and view the full UK Sanctions List."

Bukhari meets Mikati, urges Lebanese leaders to elect president
Naharnet/March 29/2023 
Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Walid Bukhari on Wednesday met with caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati at the Grand Serail. Speaking after the talks, Bukhari stressed “the need to continue the common efforts to encourage Lebanon’s leaders to elect a president and carry on with the drastic reforms.”His remarks come three days after French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “expressed mutual concern over the situation in Lebanon” and reiterated “their determination to work together to help pull the country out of the deep crisis it is going through.”

Report: West asks political forces to move to new nominations
Naharnet/March 29/2023 
The heads of parliamentary blocs and political forces have been told by Western diplomats to “move to a new phase of presidential nominations,” a media report said. “The first phase showed that it is impossible for any of the proposed candidates to be elected,” the diplomats told the Lebanese officials, according to al-Joumhouria newspaper.“Should these forces refrain from moving to a list of new nominations, they will be held responsible for presidential vacuum,” the daily added, quoting the diplomats. “The Western and Arab forces are throwing their weight behind the completion of the presidential elections,” the diplomats added.

Public works committee to meet Thursday on airport new terminal
Naharnet/March 29/2023
The Observatoire Européen pour l’Integrité du Liban said Wednesday that it has informed the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau of Ireland of the case related to the construction of a new terminal in the Beirut airport. "We’ll make sure that the case will be followed closely," OEIL said. In a letter to Garda National Economic Crime Bureau, OEIL said that the mutual agreement between an Irish company and the Lebanese Ministry of Transportation bypassed the laws that require a bidding process. Lebanon will construct a $122 million terminal at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport to be operated by a leading Irish airport company when it's completed in four years. The project has been criticized by many media outlets and political parties, including the Lebanese Forces. LF lawmaker Ghassan Hasbani said Wednesday that a caretaker government should not make any commitments. "It is not true that the project will not cost any money, the state will lose the profits that it could have gained if a tender was made according to the law," Hasbani said. The parliamentary public works committee will convene tomorrow, Thursday, to discuss the contracting process of the airport's new terminal. Caretaker Minister of Public Works and Transport Ali Hamieh said Wednesday, after he met with independent MP Waddah Sadek, that the contract was made according to the airport charges Law issued on 3/19/1974 and its amendments, and that there won't be any cost on the treasury. "Everything has become clear to me, and I will participate in the Public Works and Transportation Committee session tomorrow," Sadek said after the meeting.


Lebanon's million-dollar airport terminal deal in the hot seat: why the controversy?
Nada Maucourant Atallah/The National/March 29/2023
The decision to award a $122 million deal without a competitive tender has triggered public outrage
An agreement between Lebanon and private companies to build and operate a new terminal worth $122 million at Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport has stirred controversy after critics said it lacks regulatory oversight. The deal to revamp the critical piece of infrastructure lacks transparency, critics added. It comes as Lebanon sinks into a steep economic crisis after decades of profligate spending of public funds by the state, commonly involving lucrative infrastructure contracts awarded to companies with political connections. Lebanon announced last Monday the construction of a new terminal at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport, which is set to welcome annually around 3.5 million passengers by 2027. Lebanon's bankrupt state has turned to the private sector to fund a new airport terminal, through a partnership with the Lebanese Air Transport and Irish airport company daa International, the caretaker minister of Public Works and Transport, Ali Hamie, said. The investors will receive all the profits generated from fees and taxes for 25 years in exchange for their investment before Lebanon returns control. The new terminal will focus on low-cost flights and is expected to create 2,500 jobs while boosting the country's dollar inflows, Mr Hamie said. Further details about the project have not been made public.
The existing terminal at Beirut airport was built in 1998 and has not undergone expansion work in over two decades, resulting in chronic overcrowding and delays. However, the lack of a tender process for a contract worth over 100 million dollars stirred up a storm of backlash from civil society and some MPs with critics arguing that the mutual agreement bypasses current laws. In 2021, Lebanon's parliament passed a new Public Procurement law aiming to increase transparency in public sector purchases while standardising tendering processes. A statement signed by 10 civil society associations expressed deep concern “at the serious violations” against the law, “which opens the door to corruption and nepotism and allows illegal use of public funds”.“The principles of transparency and open competition were foregone. Fiscal risks are not clear,” Lamia Moubayed, president of the Institut des Finances Basil Fuleihan, an autonomous body at the Ministry of Finance, told The National.
She said the deal presents three types of risks: political, technical and fiscal. “First, it signals that Lebanon is not serious about implementing the public procurement reform, the only structural financial governance reform it has put in place,” Ms Moubayed said. “Second, the fiscal and technical risks inherent to such projects including budgetary risks, size and nature of guarantees given, financial sustainability, thresholds for quality of services delivery, etc. have not been disclosed". “Risks are inevitable in cases of unsolicited proposals or closed negotiations with private players. We cannot assess them properly because access to information is obstructed. Bidding documents, which should be made public as per the law are not accessible,” Ms Moubayed said. The international community has made the implementation of the approved procurement law a condition for unlocking much-needed financial aid to cash-strapped Lebanon. The International Monetary Fund stated last week that the law was “in line with the best international standards” and stressed the urgency of its implementation.
Competitive tender
Critics said that according to the new law on public procurement, “any public contract is competitive and must therefore automatically be put out to tender,” said international lawyer Karim Daher. Ziad Hayek, the former Secretary General of the High Council for Privatisation and Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), said the contract seems to qualify as a PPP. “According to the PPP law, a feasibility study must be conducted with cabinet approval before launching a tender. The tender must have at least three bidders to be considered valid.”“There is no third way that would allow the contract to be awarded without undergoing the tender process. Any attempt to do so is a violation of the procurement law or the PPP one,” Mr Daher said. Mr Hamie said he turned to a 1947 law regarding the occupation of open lands by air carriers, which would give his ministry a special regime, enabling him to award the contract through a mutual agreement. Mr Hamie did not respond to our request for comments. “This law is now obsolete since the adoption of the 2021 procurement law, which includes Article 114 that nullifies any incompatible prior text,” Mr Daher said.
Ongoing controversy
The debate around the deal continues to stir, leaving its fate uncertain.
The director of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA), the regulatory authority monitoring public contracting, Jean Ellieh, requested the file to the caretaker minister on Wednesday. He told The National that he has not received it yet. “This is a public procurement contract and must be examined as such. We will assess if there are any exceptional circumstances that could justify awarding it without competitive bidding.“But I need to review the file before expressing an opinion.”In addition to the PPA, the Court of Audit, which oversees the management of public funds, has also requested the file for review
The head of the Parliamentary Committee on Public Works called for a session on Thursday with the caretaker minister, representatives of the Court of Audit, and the PPA's director to discuss the contentious issue. “We will confront the minister with his choice not to launch a competitive process,” said Mark Daou, one of the 13 opposition MPs in parliament. “We hope that this meeting will increase pressure on the authorities to stop the current process and initiate a more transparent one.”

EU Commissioner for Crisis Management visits Lebanon on 30, 31 March 2023
NNA/March 29, 2023
EU Commissioner for Crisis Management, Mr. Janez Lenarčič, is visiting Lebanon on 30 and 31 March 2023, to reaffirm the EU’s solidarity with the most vulnerable people in the country and to express the EU’s readiness to assist with the future stabilisation of Lebanon. He will meet with Lebanese officials, including Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Caretaker Minister of Social Affairs Hector Hajjar, international organisations, civil society organisations and beneficiaries of EU funded programmes in various regions of Lebanon. At the end of his visit, Mr. Lenarčič will address the media from the EU Delegation in Beirut.

FPM affirms it has “nothing to do” with new passenger terminal construction
NNA/March 29, 2023
The Free Patriotic Movement Central Committee for Media and Communication issued the following statement: A couple of media outlets, specifically Spot Shot and Parallel Lebanon, circulated reports on the involvement of the Free Patriotic Movement in what they called the "deal" of awarding the expansion of Beirut Airport through the construction of a new passenger terminal. Former MP Mosbah Al-Ahdab also tweeted about it, accusing Gebran Bassil of being involved in the airport deal and of colluding with Prime Minister Mikati. The Free Patriotic Movement confirms that neither the party nor its president, MP Bassil, have anything to do with the issue of the new passenger terminal construction, indicating that it has submitted and will file lawsuits against those who published this false news which goals are clear and obvious.

Caretaker Telecoms minister urges Ogero employees to end strike

NNA/L'Orient Today/March 29, 2023
Caretaker Telecoms Minister Johnny Corm on Wednesday urged employees of state operator Ogero, who have been on a strike since Friday amid several phone and internet outages, to suspend the action, which he described as "hasty."The Ogero strike is the latest in a series of similar protests by civil servants — notably an ongoing eight-month strike by public administration employees — demanding improved compensation amid the Lebanese lira’s depreciation on the parallel market. Ogero employees announced an open-ended strike on Friday to demand better working conditions, following a "warning" strike earlier last week. "I do not have the authority to increase the salaries of employees, and the matter depends on a cabinet decision," Corm said in a press conference on Wednesday. "Announcing the strike is a hasty decision, and it is not possible for me to approve the demands on my own, and if I were the authority, I would have approved them because they are rightful [demands].""Blaming the Telecoms Minister is unacceptable," Corm added. On Saturday, Ogero announced that telephone stations in several regions of Lebanon were out of service due to excess pressure on the electrical generators powering them. Due to the workers' strike, internet and telephone outages are expected to take some time to remedy, Ogero added at the time. "The fall of the telecoms sector threatens the security, economic and social situation as a whole," Corm said Wednesday. "I appeal to the officials — shoulder your responsibilities towards the sector."Ogero employees also held a sit-in on Monday to reiterate their demands for improved salaries in front of the company's headquarters in Bir Hassan, an area in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Signature of Regional Framework for Arab States and launch of Arab Plan for Prevention and Reduction of Dangers of Drugs in Arab Society
UNIC/March 29, 2023
In continuation of the strong cooperation between the League of Arab States (LAS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the “Regional Framework for the Arab States (2023 – 2028)” was signed and the “Arab Plan for Prevention and Reduction of the Dangers of Drugs to Arab Society: Towards Effective Handling of the Issue from a Social Perspective” was launched today Sunday the 26th of March at the LAS Headquarters. H.E. Mr. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Secretary-General of LAS and H.E Ms. Ghada Waly, UNODC Executive Director co-signed the aforementioned Regional Framework (2023 – 2028).
The signature of the Framework and the launch of the Plan included the participation of H. E. Ms. Nivine El Kabbaj, Minister of Social Solidarity of the Arab Republic of Egypt and Permanent Member of the Executive Office of the Council of Arab Ministers of Social Affairs, H. E. Maryam Bint Nasser Al-Misned, Minister of Social Development the State of Qatar and Chair of the 42nd session of the Council of Arab Ministers of Social Affairs, and with the presence of the Permanent Member States’ Ambassadors at LAS, a number of Ambassadors of different countries, in addition to Heads and Representatives of United Nations bodies and agencies.
The Regional Framework for the Arab States 2023-2028 acts as the overarching strategic framework for cooperation between UNODC and LAS. It frames how UNODC will strengthen, prioritize, customize, and deliver support to the Arab region in effective response to some of the most pressing challenges faced by these countries and in connection with UNODC’s mandates and specialties.
The Regional Framework articulates six focus areas for guiding UNODC-implemented programming at the regional and national levels and they are: a balanced approach to drug control, strengthening the response to organized crime, combating trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, action against corruption and financial crime, preventing and countering terrorism and violence, and strengthening crime/violence prevention and criminal justice.
Furthermore, the Regional Framework applies six key accelerators across all programmatic interventions to speed up progress and maximize efforts towards fast-tracking the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and they are: partnerships, women and girls, innovation, science, and forensics, human rights, youth and children, and inclusive and people-centered programming. The programme will also support UNODC’s partnership expansion with Member States in the region to include current vital Ministries and Institutions relevant to youth, solidarity, education, culture, human rights, countering corruption; in addition to previous partnerships with the Ministries of Justice, Interior, and Health.
The event also saw the launch of the Arab Plan for Prevention and Reduction of the Dangers of Drugs to Arab Society: Towards Effective Handling of the Issue from a Social Perspective. This important plan represents a regional social framework for combating drugs in the Arab States by highlighting the social dimension of drug demand reduction in the context of its negative impact on social development in specific and sustainable development in general. This is also at the heart of efforts to achieve the Arab Declaration adopted by LAS in 2016 to implement the Sustainable Development Agenda 2023. The present document provides an indicative vision for guiding Arab action towards a comprehensive and integrated response based on scientific evidence and consistent with Arab specificity of this phenomenon. The Plan aims to build national strategies and action plans that meet national requirements and includes a number of initiatives, projects and activities that achieve their objectives in complementarity with Arab efforts to combat the supply of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances through comprehensive actions that include proactiveness and social resolution.
The Arab Plan’s dimensions showcase the methods of how to address this phenomenon from a social perspective and in line with Arab countries’ regulations and conditions in order to implement effective interventions including related multidimensional social and development consequences and to strengthen Arab efforts to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The important dimensions of the Plan include community prevention, rehabilitation and social integration, addressing drug-related harm and its consequences, as well as the dimensions and themes in support of the Plan's areas of action, namely international cooperation, scientific research and innovation, coordination mechanisms, governance, implementation, measurement and impact assessment.—

King of Jordan assures Lebanon’s FM of nation’s support for country and its people
Arab News/March 29, 2023
AMMAN: Jordan’s King Abdullah II met Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib at Al-Husseiniya Palace on Wednesday. The king assured his guest of his country’s continuing support for Lebanon and its people, as they discussed the deep-rooted bilateral ties between their nations and ways in which cooperation might be expanded across all fields, the Jordan News Agency reported. In addition, they talked about the plight of Syrian refugees and the burdens shouldered the countries that host large numbers of them, as well as the need for the international community to step up its support for this. According to UN estimates, more than 852,000 Syrian refugees are living in Lebanon and more than 663,000 in Jordan. Jordan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, and Jafar Hassan, director of the king’s office, were also present at the meeting.

Lebanon’s Public institutions to close on Good Friday and Easter

LBCI/March 29, 2023
Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati issued a memorandum stipulating the closure of all public administrations, institutions, and municipalities on Friday, April 7, and April 14, 2023, on Good Friday among the Catholic and Orthodox Christian denominations. Also, public administrations, institutions, and municipalities are closed on April 10, and April 17, 2023, on Easter Monday for the Catholic and Orthodox Christian denominations.

Corm calls on Ogero employees to suspend strike, affirming he has no power to increase salaries
LBCI/March 29, 2023
Caretaker Minister of Telecommunications Johnny Corm confirmed that the strike of Ogero employees is hasty, pointing out that he has no authority to increase the salaries of employees. In a press conference held on Wednesday, Corm warned that the fall of the telecommunications sector threatens the entire security, economic and social situation. In the presence of Ogero's director general, Imad Kreidieh, he stated that from his position as a minister responsible for this sector, his mission is to preserve it and ensure its continuity, given its importance for many industries and institutions. He continued, "we were surprised by the decision to announce an open strike by the Ogero Employees Union," explaining some essential points that if the employees had carefully considered, they would have immediately returned to work.  Minister Corm stated that Ogero, like all bodies and institutions, suffers from the defect of not approving the 2023 budget. This is in addition to the expenses concerning diesel, oil, and maintenance carried out by the authority, and the cables, that cost in US dollars exclusively. The Telecommunications Minister affirmed that the injustice against Ogero will have more than dangerous effects at all levels, calling officials to assume their responsibilities towards the industry and make sure to implement the decisions that have been taken since the exchange rate of the US dollar has increased 80 times “between today's price and the last price set for Ogero services.” Minister Corm asked employees to resume working because "I demand your rights before the government that bears the responsibility for this decision, and I am aware and certain that your demands are more than just."

Uncertainty looms over municipal elections funding in Lebanon as authorities pass the buck
LBCI/March 29, 2023
the buck Despite the clashes in the Parliament over how to fund municipal elections, and the session ending without a decision on the matter, Caretaker Minister of Interior and Municipalities Bassem Al-Mawlawi, will call on the electoral bodies to hold the municipal elections within the deadlines set by the law, i.e., on April 3rd. This call comes as voter rolls are being updated and administrative and logistical preparations for the elections are being completed, as with every election. Everything indicates that the elections will take place. But can they be held without securing the necessary funding? In Parliament, the ball was thrown in the government's court to decide on financing the elections, either through the state's Budget, from Lebanon's special drawing rights (SDR) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or by holding a legislative session to approve the opening of an exceptional credit line for the municipal elections. In both cases, the matter is impossible. Information indicates insufficient funding for the elections in the state budget. Additionally, there are no plans to use additional SDR funds. Therefore, the government returned "the financing ball" to Parliament, considering that it is the only body that approves the financing of elections. The legislative and executive authorities are tossing responsibility for financing municipal elections back and forth. Since there is currently no possibility of holding a legislative session and no intention from the government to withdraw from the special drawing rights, the call by the Caretaker Minister of Interior and Municipalities to the electoral bodies will be unnecessary.

Public sector employees stand against pay based on Sayrafa platform's daily rate
LBCI/March 29, 2023
Public sector employees stand against pay based on Sayrafa platform's daily rate Both retired and working public sector employees refuse to collect their salaries at the Sayrafa platform's daily rate, which is currently 90 000 LBP. Despite this, salaries are now being transferred to banks, and the governor of the Banque du Liban Riyad Salameh has not yet issued a circular exempting the public sector from the daily Sayrafa price. Employees in the public sector were paid last month at a rate of 45 000 LBP, and the approval of the 90 000 LBP caused them to lose the value of half of their salaries. Nawal Nasr, the president of the Public Administration Employees Association, tells LBCI that the refusal is categorical on their part, and there is a recommendation and direction among many employees not to receive their salaries. According to Nasr, the threefold increase the employee received at the exchange rate of 28,500 is now worth 20% less than the employee's base salary before the threefold increase. The association is considering going to local or international courts to protect the rights of employees and stop the ongoing massacre of employees' salaries. In response, the public sector councils, associations, and retired soldiers are preparing for a sit-in on Thursday and a series of subsequent sit-ins, describing what is taking place as a crime. As they say, the sit-ins will be a fight for survival, and all options are on the table.

Lebanon inflation hits 190% in February as IMF calls for urgent reforms
Massoud A Derhally/The National/March 29/2023
Inflation in Lebanon hit an annual rate of about 190 per cent in February as the International Monetary Fund called on the country's government, parliament and central bank to close ranks and take decisive actions to stabilise the economy. Hyperinflation continued for the 32nd consecutive month, led by soaring communication, health, restaurant and hotel prices, as well as rising food, water and energy costs, the Central Administration of Statistics' Consumer Price Index showed. The CPI increased by about 26 per cent from January 2023. After hitting 155 per cent in 2021, inflation in the country surged to 171.2 per cent in 2022, the highest in about four decades as the country's worst economic and financial crises in decades continued during a political deadlock that has blocked the formation of a new government and the enactment of reforms required to unlock billions of dollars in aid from the IMF and other international donors.
Communication costs increased nearly fivefold in February compared with the same month in 2022, while health costs increased more than four times. Clothing and footwear prices and the rates of restaurant and hotels leapt more than threefold. The prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages increased more than three times while transportation costs rose by a similar proportion. Lebanon's economy contracted about 58 per cent between 2019 and 2021, with GDP falling to $21.8 billion in 2021, from about $52 billion in 2019, according to the World Bank — the largest contraction on a list of 193 countries.
Lebanon’s tax revenue more than halved between 2019 and 2021 in the face of the deepest economic crisis since the end of the civil war, according to the IMF. The fund estimates that the mis-valuation of customs, excises and Vat at the border caused a loss of revenue worth 4.8 per cent of Lebanon’s gross domestic product in 2022. "Despite the severity of the situation, which calls for immediate and decisive action, there has been limited progress in implementing the comprehensive package of economic reforms ... notwithstanding some efforts by the government," the IMF said last week after the end of a staff mission visit to Beirut from March 15 to 23. "This inaction disproportionately harms the low-to-middle-income population and undermines Lebanon’s long-term economic potential. The government, parliament, and the Central Bank (BdL) must act together, rapidly and decisively to tackle long-standing institutional and structural weaknesses to stabilise the economy and pave the way for a strong and sustainable recovery."The World Bank has described the country's crisis as one of the worst in modern history, ranking it among the world's worst financial crises since the mid-19th century. Lebanon's political elite have yet to enforce critical structural and financial reforms required to unlock $3 billion of assistance from the IMF. Securing the IMF funds would pave the way for an additional $11 billion in assistance that was pledged by international donors at a Paris conference in 2018. Reforms hinge on the formation of a new government, the election of a president and consensus among the country's political elite. Politicians are deadlocked over the formation of a new cabinet 10 months after parliamentary elections were held and nearly five months after the six-year term of former president Michel Aoun expired at the end of October. Inflation is likely to remain elevated as the Lebanese pound continues to lose value on the parallel market and on the official exchange rate since a 90 per cent devaluation at the start of February.
While the IMF said it is committed to supporting Lebanon it also said the country "is at a dangerous crossroads, and without rapid reforms will be mired in a never-ending crisis".With the current impasse continuing, the fund expects poverty and unemployment to remain high while the economic potential will continue to decline. "A continuation of the status quo would further undermine trust in the country’s institutions and additional delays in implementing reforms will keep the economy depressed, with irreversible consequences for the whole country, but especially low-to-middle income households," the fund said. "High uncertainty will further weaken the external position and the BdL will continue to lose scarce international reserves. Exchange rate depreciation and spiralling inflation will remain unabated, accelerating the already high cash dollarisation of the economy."

Jordan says dormant electricity deal 'starts with Lebanon'
Khaled Yacoub Oweis/The National/March 29/2023
The Jordanian and Lebanese foreign ministers discussed a dormant electricity supply agreement on Tuesday, with Jordan suggesting it is up to Beirut to meet international conditions for the deal to go though. The arrangement, which would constitute about 10 per cent of Lebanon's electricity demand, was expected to start this month, passing through Syrian areas under President Bashar Al Assad's control. The World Bank would have picked up the bill if Lebanon had implemented reforms aimed at curbing corruption that underpins its politico-administrative system. Power vacuum: Why a regional deal to supply energy to Lebanon has faltered "We all stand with Lebanon, but the reform and treatment should start from the inside of Lebanon," Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Al Safadi said in Amman after meeting Abdallah Bou Habib, his counterpart in the caretaker Lebanese government. Jordan views the electricity agreement as enhancing a regional role undermined by Arab moves to normalise ties with Israel in the past few years. It could also give a push for Jordanian efforts to accommodate the Alawite-dominated Syrian regime, after a long boycott by many Arab counties for its violent suppression of the 2011 revolt against five decades of Assad family rule. Mr Al Safadi said Jordanian electricity could flow to Lebanon "the moment" the World Bank agrees to put up the money. "We trust that our Lebanese brothers will surpass the challenges," he said. Lebanon was under the tutelage of the Assad family for more than two decades before international pressure forced the Syrian President to withdraw his forces from the country in 2015. Mr Al Assad, however, still has significant influence in Lebanon, largely through his alliance with the Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah, which is also supported by Iran. Acute electricity shortages have inflicted Lebanon since the 15-year civil war erupted in 1975, becoming even worse after the economy started melting down in 2019.

Hasbani: They spent $740M from SDR, can spend 8 on municipal vote
Naharnet/March 29/2023
MP Ghassan Hasbani of the Lebanese Forces has said that the verbal clashes in Tuesday’s Joint Parliamentary Committees session were aimed at “deviating attention from the actual need for holding municipal elections, which some are seeking to postpone.”“The session involved insulting remarks against MP Sami Gemayel and it seems that he has forgiven those who launched them based on contacts that took place in the evening,” Hasbani said in an interview on OTV. “The government spent from the (IMF’s) Special Drawing Rights (SDR) on several files, so why doesn’t it finance the elections from them?” Hasbani added. “They spent $740 million from the SDR and they can spend eight millions on the municipal elections,” the MP went on to say. He added: “How does the government resort to extrabudgetary spending and refuses to finance the elections according to the same rule? And why are they seeking to force us into accepting a legislative session to justify their postponement of the elections?”

Lebanese politicians hurl insults at each other as tensions boil over in parliament
Najia Houssari/Arab News/March 29/2023
BEIRUT: Politicians in Lebanon shouted and hurled insults at each other during a meeting of a joint parliamentary committee on Tuesday. It came as tensions continued to rise amid the ongoing failure to choose a new president and growing concerns that it will be impossible to hold municipal elections scheduled for May. Amal Movement MP Ghazi Zeaiter, who has been accused of involvement in the events leading up to the massive explosion at Beirut’s port in August 2020, clashed with independent MP Melhem Khalaf, who has been staging a sit-in at the parliament for more than two months over the failure of MPs to elect a new president. As tensions rose, Zeaiter was accused of publicly insulting Khalaf. Another dispute, over the municipal elections, broke out between Sami Gemayel, head of the Kataeb Party, and the Amal Movement’s Ali Hassan Khalil, who is also accused of involvement in the port explosion. The former accused the latter of using “immoral” insults. As the rows continued, the meeting was ended. It took place a day after caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati reversed his unpopular decision, announced last week, to delay the start of daylight saving time for a month “to allow those fasting during Ramadan to rest for an hour.”“What happened during the session was shocking,” said MP Hadi Abu Al-Hassan, a member of the Democratic Gathering bloc. “The country’s situation will become too dangerous if we continue this way.”Politicians need to heed the voice of reason and consider carefully the best interests of the country and its people, he added. “We need to elect a president, form a government and start implementing reforms instead of carrying on with this tense drama.”The presidency has been vacant since Michel Aoun’s term concluded at the end of October last year. Politicians have been unable to reach agreement on a successor. Abu Al-Hassan said that Walid Jumblatt, the head of the Progressive Socialist Party, has been talking with members of a number of parties in an attempt to ensure the volatile political situation remains under control but underlying tensions remain high. After the ill-tempered parliamentary meeting, Gemayel refused to go into the details of the dispute but said that he considers what happened to be “a dangerous offense against sanctities and we cannot accept this.”He warned that if some officials persist with their current approach to managing the country’s affairs, even bigger problems lie in store.
“If I disclosed what happened, I would be contributing to creating the strife that some want to drag the country into, and we do not want that,” Gemayel added.
He called on Speaker of the Parliament Nabih Berri to “address what happened” and added “if he does not want to deal with it, then he can consider the message received and we will discuss with our allies how we will take things from here.”
Warning of the potential dangers of failure to hold the municipal elections, Gemayel stressed “the need for the state to cover the cost” of the polls “as the required amount is $8 million.”The Lebanese government has said it is unable to cover the cost of the elections, according to a source in the Ministry of Interior, as “there is no money or staff to hold them.”The ministry has set the cost of the elections at $12 million. International donors, including the EU, the US Agency for International Development, and the UN Development Program, have pledged $3 million, which would cover the cost of necessities such as printing, stationery and logistics. The Lebanese state would need to provide the remaining money for election workers, judges, security, the transportation of ballot boxes, and electrical power, among other things. Any decision to postpone the elections would require the calling of a legislative session. Christian parliamentary blocs refuse to agree to such sessions on the grounds that “Parliament is currently an electorate body whose sole purpose is to elect a president.” Meanwhile, other political forces do not want to be the ones responsible for passing a law that extends the terms of the current municipal councils. In other news, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on Lebanese citizens Hassan Daqqou and Nouh Zeaiter, who are accused of being drug lords. Daqqou is a Lebanese-Syrian dual national from Tufail, a town the straddles the border with Syria. He was arrested in Lebanon in 2021 and remains in detention. The Criminal Court in Beirut last year sentenced him to seven years of hard labor for manufacturing Captagon and trafficking it to other countries. The US Treasury accuses him and his drug-trafficking operations of having direct links to Hezbollah. Zeaiter is wanted by the Lebanese state on charges of drug trafficking. He is said to surround himself with no fewer than 14 armed guards and travels in four-wheel-drive vehicles with darkened windows. The US Treasury also links him with Hezbollah. A few days ago, an army force ambushed a convoy on the outskirts of the town of Harbta in which wanted members of the Zeaiter family were traveling. During the armed battle that ensued, Zeaiter’s son, Mahdi, was injured and arrested.

Sami Gemayel refuses a president of 'Hezbollah republic'
Naharnet/March 29/2023
Kataeb party leader Sami Gemayel said Wednesday that Hezbollah will not be able to impose a president on the Lebanese and that such a president would be the president of "Hezbollah's republic" and not of all the Lebanese. In a press conference, Gemayel said that the elected president should have the ability and willingness to negotiate in order to restore sovereignty and solve the problem of Hezbollah's weapons. "We should go to parliament and elect a president who can unite the Lebanese and who is not imposed on us," he said. Gemayel decried provocative behavior and attempts to establish superiority over others, amid an unprecedented economic crisis. During a joint committees session on Tuesday, Amal MP Ali Hassan Khalil had reportedly said to Gemayel that he is a "son of criminals." "What happened yesterday could have pushed the country to a dangerous place and if I had behaved differently, I don't know where Lebanon would have been today," Gemayel stressed. He said that "it is time to look forward but it seems that they are still living in that (war) era." "We know what war means and we don't want to return to it," he added.

Israeli drone throws smoke bomb on café in southern Lebanon
Naharnet/Wednesday, 29 March, 2023
An Israeli drone threw a smoke bomb overnight toward a café near the southern village of al-Khiam, the National News Agency said. The bomb targeted a group of Lebanese men gathered in a café at the Khiyam-Kfarkela roundabout, facing the occupied Metula town. There were no casualties, the NNA said.

Where does Walid Joumblatt figure in Lebanon's quest for a president?
Michael Young/The National/March 29/2023
The Druze leader may slowly be edging his way to the centre of a solution to the presidential deadlock
The recent Saudi-Iranian reconciliation is expected to create a positive shock in Lebanon, whose parliament has been struggling to elect a president since last October. However, the mechanisms of a compromise remain unclear. Yet the chances are that one person, the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, will play a significant role in producing a candidate who can appeal to all sides. A few days before the Saudi-Iranian agreement was signed in Beijing, Hezbollah officially endorsed Suleiman Franjieh as its candidate for the presidency. In retrospect, the move was an astute one. Probably knowing the accord would be signed, the party realised that it was necessary to have a candidate in hand to prepare for negotiations over a consensual figure that the reconciliation would invariably impose on the Lebanese parties.
The problem for Mr Franjieh is twofold: Until now he doesn’t have a majority in parliament that would allow him to win an election, and he is opposed by the three main Maronite Christian parties, which would deny him any communal legitimacy, since presidents come from the Maronite community. Even on the unlikely chance that he could be voted into office, his term would be highly contentious because of hostility from within his community.
This suggests that Mr Franjieh is really more of a bargaining chip for Hezbollah and its allied Shiite party, the Amal Movement. Yet until now, both continue to insist that they will not give up on their candidate. To most people, this is merely a ploy to ensure that any alternative candidate is closer to one that both parties favour. But what mechanism would lead to such a figure?
If Hezbollah and Amal see that a Franjieh victory is out of reach, the most probable scenario is that they will make this known to their candidate, and Mr Franjieh will declare that he is not in the running. Indeed, he never officially announced his candidacy, precisely to avoid the humiliation of being forced to backtrack on this front.
In that case, the search for a compromise would begin, and two figures could play a role in this: Mr Joumblatt and the parliament speaker Nabih Berri, the head of Amal, whose sway in the legislature would be essential to rallying parliamentary blocs to a compromise figure.
The Druze leader is an experienced political operator and a subtle reader of Lebanon’s political landscape, whose openings he knows how to exploit
In early February, Mr Joumblatt initiated contacts to find a candidate who could appeal to the contending parliamentary blocs. He began his efforts by meeting with a Hezbollah delegation, probably to get a sense of where the party stood. He also started shooting down candidacies that would be perceived as provocative by Hezbollah or its political rivals.
Mr Joumblatt also proposed the names of several Maronite candidates who fit the profile that he believed would best appeal to the opposing blocs. In doing so, the Druze leader positioned himself as a king-maker, but also someone with the local, regional and international contacts to help midwife a solution. This brought him back to the centre on the presidency.
The regional and international dimension is not negligible in choosing a president. Saudi Arabia, through its ambassador in Beirut, made it clear the kingdom would not welcome Mr Franjieh. The French, in turn, reportedly supported his candidacy, assuming that Hezbollah had to be satisfied. However, Mr Joumblatt, apparently agreeing with the Saudis, has stated that Mr Franjieh would not be seen as a unifying figure. Since then, there have been unconfirmed reports in Beirut that Paris was leaning in the same direction.
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Mr Joumblatt’s interest in finding a compromise stems from his relationship with the Maronite community. A significant portion of the electorate of the regions under the Druze leader’s influence is Maronite, and Mr Joumblatt always seeks to ensure that the community will not turn against him, as it could threaten his traditional leadership.
Normally, Mr Joumblatt has dominated elections in his geographical area, the Shouf, by playing the Christian electorate off against the Sunni electorate – each of which has a third of votes, alongside Druze voters, who to a significant extent support their leader. Today, however, with the Sunni community in disarray, Mr Joumblatt has less certitude of how Sunnis and Christians might vote, so that he wants to ensure that any new Maronite president will not try to turn Christian voters against Mr Joumblatt’s candidates.
Mr Joumblatt’s priority today is above all to anchor the leadership of his son, Taymour, who has taken over the Druze leader’s parliamentary seat. Therefore, if he can help broker a settlement on the presidency, this would greatly strengthen Mr Joumblatt’s position under any new presidential mandate, and by extension reinforce the younger Joumblatt’s standing. The Druze leader is an experienced political operator and a subtle reader of Lebanon’s political landscape, whose openings he knows how to exploit. When he presented his initiative weeks ago, he wanted to send a message, not for the first time, that given the fact that his bloc effectively holds the balance in parliament, any solution had to pass by him.
Mr Joumblatt represents a community that may number less than 200,000 people. Therefore, punching above his weight is a necessity for the Druze leader to remain relevant. Until now, he has largely succeeded in doing so.
*Michael Young is a Lebanon columnist for The National

The Lebanon Human Rights Report: Punting on Accountability?
David Schenker/The Washington Institute/March 29/2023
The country can’t escape its downward spiral without full accountability, so pulling punches in annual U.S. reports serves neither Washington nor the Lebanese people.
When the U.S. State Department issued its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices last week, the document’s assessment of Lebanon’s track record in 2022 stood out for its significant elisions. Although the comprehensive nature of these reports generally makes them a valuable tool for accountability, their diplomatically sensitive content is sometimes colored by an administration’s perceived exigencies regarding a given bilateral relationship. The fact that Lebanon’s report largely avoids some of the country’s more controversial human rights issues therefore seems more than coincidental. Whatever the case, the omissions are a missed opportunity for facilitating just the type of accountability Lebanon needs to pry itself out of its current morass.
No Progress in Lokman Slim Case
The report has little to say about the Lebanese government’s criminal investigation into the assassination of Lokman Slim, an activist and former U.S. grant recipient who was likely killed by Hezbollah. Just one short passage in the forty-five-page report is devoted to his murder, despite Beirut’s failure to order a single indictment or arrest after more than two years: “Investigations continued into the 2021 death of Lokman Slim, a prominent political activist and vocal critic of [Hezbollah] who was found dead from multiple bullet wounds in a rental car in the southern village of Addousieh. No findings had been made public by year’s end.”
The department typically cites open-source reporting on such incidents to emphasize accountability. Yet the Lebanon report does not mention the extensive documentation of Hezbollah threats against Slim, which ranges from warnings delivered by the U.S. embassy in Beirut to public interviews with Slim’s widow, fellow activist Monika Borgmann. In one such conversation, Borgmann credibly recounts how Internal Security Forces (ISF) investigators made the absurd suggestion that Slim—who was shot five times in the head—may have committed suicide. Other notable omissions include a Human Rights Watch article describing “multiple failures, gross negligence, and procedural violations” in the investigation, as well as repeated calls by UN human rights experts for “effective, credible, and transparent” inquiries into the killing—implying that the ISF’s efforts since February 2021 have shown none of these traits.
To be sure, Slim’s killing is not the only unsolved political murder in Lebanon. The ISF has not successfully brought any high-profile assassinations up for prosecution in decades, undoubtedly because they were perpetrated by “untouchable” elements in the Syrian regime and/or Hezbollah. Ignoring the ISF’s apparent obstruction of such cases is particularly unseemly given that the U.S. government is currently paying the salaries of the organization’s personnel via the UN and providing $10 million per year to Lebanon from the Bureau of International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE), some of which supports the ISF.
Stalled Port Blast Investigation
The August 2020 Beirut port explosion is likewise given short shrift relative to its major consequences, which included more than 200 people killed, over 6,000 injured, and an estimated 300,000 displaced. Just one passage in the report is devoted to the status of an investigation that lies at the intersection of numerous pressing human rights issues, including corruption, criminal negligence, mismanagement, and willful endangerment.
The document briefly refers to media reports on machinations within the court system that have prevented progress. It does not, however, cite other sources that specifically mention Hezbollah’s request to remove Judge Tarek Bitar from the case, nor the various members of parliament, the cabinet, and other institutions who have prevented him from prosecuting senior security officials and politicians. Here, too, the ISF is culpable, with Director-General Imad Osman refusing to execute senior-level arrest warrants issued by Bitar—another point unmentioned in the report.
Also omitted are reports indicating that the ammonium nitrate involved in the 2020 explosion was only one-fifth of the amount unloaded at the port in 2013. During a television interview prior to his murder, Lokman Slim argued that Hezbollah had siphoned off much of this combustible fertilizer for use in the barrel bombs that the Assad regime repeatedly deployed against Syrian civilians during the civil war—another egregious human rights violation.
A Pass for the LAF?
According to the State Department, “impunity was a significant problem” for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and other security branches in 2022, with investigations of their reported human rights abuses lacking “transparency and urgency.” Beyond this general critique, however, the report does not say enough about the LAF’s specific abuses or its failure to protect civilians and UN personnel—a troubling approach given that Washington has a close and supportive relationship with the military, providing it with $236 million in funding in fiscal 2021 alone.
For example, the report cites one case of a military court trying a civilian on charges of harming the ISF’s reputation, yet several more of these cases require attention: in November 2021, a military court sentenced journalist Radwan Mortada to thirteen months in prison for criticizing the port blast investigation; last year, a military court ordered the arrest and interrogation of Maronite Archbishop Musa al-Hajj, allegedly for helping economically vulnerable Lebanese migrate; also in 2022, a military court charged politician Samir Geagea for his reported involvement in the deadly 2021 Tayouneh violence. Putting aside the facts of these cases, Washington needs to press Beirut on why civilians are being processed in military rather than civil courts.
In contrast, military courts have proven indolent on cases involving violence against UN peacekeepers. In 2022, then-president Michel Aoun apologized for the endemic attacks on the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Yet previous presidents have offered similarly toothless statements regarding the dozens of such crimes committed in the past four decades, while only one assailant has ever been convicted. In 2022, the UN noted that Lebanese military courts were still holding (fruitless) hearings related to attacks that occurred as far back as 2007 and 2011, while no action at all was taken in the criminal proceedings related to a 2018 assault against UNIFIL personnel.
Economic Abuses
Another topic omitted from the State Department’s report is what UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Olivier de Schutter described last May as “the unnecessary immiseration of the population”—that is, the mass impoverishment resulting from the country’s “man-made” economic crisis. Specifically, he highlighted the government’s role in creating the crisis and blamed the banking sector for “sway[ing] negotiations with the IMF to the detriment of the most vulnerable in society.” In his assessment, the actions of the financial sector and Banque du Liban have made Lebanon default on its obligations—including “the obligation to guarantee an adequate standard of living to its population,” which he categorized as a human rights violation.
Conclusion
State Department human rights reports are read carefully by foreign embassies in Washington and country experts in the United States and abroad, in part to glean an administration’s sentiments and policy toward a given nation. This year’s report on Saudi Arabia, for example, was particularly tough, perhaps reflecting the Biden administration’s frequent tensions with Riyadh. Lebanon is obviously going through a difficult time, so the administration may have been reticent to pile on this year. Or perhaps it was concerned that a tougher report would give congressional critics fodder for cutting some of Washington’s copious assistance to Lebanon, which includes an unprecedented $72 million in salary payments to the LAF and ISF.
Even so, there are several compelling ethical and policy reasons why these reports need to be brutally honest. Lebanon desperately needs accountability, and credible U.S. government reports are essential in both shining a spotlight on human rights abuses and helping citizens hold the relevant authorities responsible. On March 24, the UN marked its annual “International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims,” but the Lebanese people are still being denied this right year after year. From political assassinations, to the negligence that led to the port blast, to the impunity of the state security apparatus, to tragic failures by public health institutions, the list of human rights abuses suffered by victims in Lebanon is long and growing. Regrettably, accountability remains a crucial but still-distant element in reversing the tragic trajectory of this failing state.
*David Schenker is the Taube Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute, director of its Program on Arab Politics, and former assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs at the State Department.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on March 29-30/2023
UK says Assad using captagon profits to continue 'campaign of terror'
Naharnet/Wednesday, 29 March, 2023
The Assad regime is using profits from the captagon trade to continue its “campaign of terror on the Syrian people,” UK Minister of State for the Middle East Lord (Tariq) Ahmad of Wimbledon said, after the UK and US imposed sanctions on Syrian and Lebanese individuals allegedly responsible for the illicit captagon trade. “The UK and U.S. will continue to hold the regime to account for brutally repressing the Syrian people and fueling instability across the Middle East,” the Minister added. A statement issued by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and Lord Ahmad said “the Syrian regime is closely involved in the trade” and that “multi-billion dollar shipments leave regime strongholds such as the Port of Latakia. “President Bashar al-Assad’s brother Maher al-Assad commands the unit of the Syrian Army facilitating the distribution and production of the drug,” the statement added. “Trade in the drug is a financial lifeline for the Assad regime – it is worth approximately 3 times the combined trade of the Mexican cartels. The production and trafficking of captagon enriches Assad’s inner circle, militias and warlords, at the expense of the Syrian people who continue to face crippling poverty and repression at the hands of the regime,” the statement said. It added: “The UK remains committed to supporting the Syrian people both in their quest for accountability and in providing humanitarian assistance. The UK has provided over £3.8 billion in humanitarian assistance to Syria and the region since the conflict began, our largest ever response to a single crisis.” Below is the full list of those sanctioned by the UK as per the statement: “Abdellatif Hamid: a prominent businessperson who utilizes his factories to package captagon pills and has been linked to the 2020 captagon seizure in Salerno, Italy. Imad Abu Zureiq: a militia leader in Southern Syria. His militia is associated with drugs smuggling as well as assassinations and kidnappings of political opponents. Mustafa Al Masalmeh: a militia leader in Southern Syria. His militia is involved in drugs production and he has been involved in assassinating opponents of the Syrian regime. Taher Al Kayali: a business magnate with links to the captagon industry. He has been tied to multiple captagon seizures, including in Europe. Amer Khiti: a Syrian politician and operates and controls multiple businesses in Syria which facilitate the production and smuggling of drugs, including captagon. Hassan Muhammad Daqqou: known as the ‘king’ or ‘emperor’ of captagon and is associated with Hezbollah. He has been linked to captagon seizures in the Middle East, Europe and South East Asia. Mohammed Shalish: involved in the shipping sector in regime strongholds and has been tied to captagon shipments which have left the port of Latakia. Raji Falhout: a militia leader in Sweida and uses his militia headquarters to facilitate captagon production. Samer Kamal Al Asad: related to the Syrian President, and is a prominent actor in the production of captagon Waseem Badia Al Asad: related to the Syrian President and is a ‘strongman’ for the Syrian regime. He facilitates the manufacturing and smuggling of captagon. Noah Zaiter: a prominent person involved in smuggling captagon and narcotics. He is associated with the Syrian regime and Hezbollah”

Benjamin Netanyahu tells Joe Biden to stay out of Israeli politics
James Rothwell/The Telegraph/March 29, 2023
Israel’s prime minister told Joe Biden to keep out of internal politics as he bluntly rejected the US president’s warning that he could not “continue down this road” with his hugely controversial legal overhaul. In a late night statement which hinted at a bitter rift between the two leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu insisted US-Israel relations were “unbreakable” but vowed he would not bow to pressure from foreign allies. “The alliance between Israel and the United States is unbreakable and always overcomes the occasional disagreements between us,” said the Israeli leader. But he added: “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.” It came shortly after Mr Biden issued a stinging rebuke of Mr Netanyahu’s plans for his legal reform package, which is deeply unpopular in Israel and has led to unprecedented mass protests. Speaking to reporters, Mr Biden said: “Like many strong supporters of Israel, I’m very concerned. And I’m concerned that they get this straight...they cannot continue down this road. And I’ve sort of made that clear.” He added that “hopefully the prime minister will act in a way that he can try to work out some genuine compromise, but that remains to be seen,” and said there were no current plans to invite Mr Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, to the White House. Earlier this week, the Israeli prime minister announced a brief pause on the legal reforms amid unprecedented mass strikes and protests against them on Sunday night and Monday. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Israeli cities and the country ground to a halt as flights were suspended, shops were closed down and civil servants went on strike. Critics of the legal overhaul say it will transform Israel into a dictatorship by handing the government immense powers over the supreme court and appointment of judges. Some of Mr Netanyahu’s coalition allies have also said they want to reform the legal system so that his ongoing trial on fraud and corruption charges can be abandoned. The Israeli premier strongly denies the criminal charges. Leaders of the protest movement against the reforms have vowed to continue demonstrations until the package has been abandoned altogether. Work is also underway, led by Israel’s president, on trying to find consensus among the main parties for a compromise on the legislation.

Israel launches new spy satellite, overseen by Gallant
JERUSALEM (Reuters)/Wed, March 29, 2023
Israel put a new version of its Ofek spy satellite into orbit on Wednesday, with the Defence Ministry saying it would enhance around-the-clock regional monitoring as the country braces for a possible showdown with Iran. The launch, planned months in advance, was overseen by Defence Minister Yoav Gallant - a signal he was staying in office despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement on Sunday that he would be fired amidst a constitutional crisis. The Ofek-13, manufactured by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) Ltd, is the latest in a series of locally produced satellites first put into orbit in 1988. It was launched on a Shavit missile over the Mediterranean Sea, a westward trajectory Israel usually opts for as a precaution against sensitive technology falling into the hands of hostile Middle East neighbours should there be a malfunction. "We will continue to prove that even the sky isn't the limit for the Israeli defence establishment," said a statement by Gallant, who on Saturday broke ranks with Netanyahu by calling for a halt to a bitterly contested judicial overhaul plan. The next day, Netanyahu announced Gallant's dismissal - triggering a surge of anti-government protests and stoking U.S. concern for Israel's democratic health and military readiness. IAI CEO Boaz Levy said the Ofek-13 is "the most advanced of its kind, with unique radar observation capabilities, and will enable intelligence collection in any weather and conditions of visibility".

Vatican: Pope to be hospitalized for days for lung infection
VATICAN CITY (AP)/Wed, March 29, 2023
Pope Francis was hospitalized with a lung infection Wednesday after experiencing difficulty breathing in recent days and will remain in the hospital for several days of treatment, the Vatican said. The 86-year-old pope doesn't have COVID-19, spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement late Wednesday. The hospitalization was the first since Francis spent 10 days at the Gemelli in July 2021 to have 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his colon removed. It immediately raised questions about Francis' overall health, and his ability to celebrate the busy Holy Week events that are due to begin this weekend with Palm Sunday. Bruni said Francis had been suffering breathing troubles in recent days and went to the Gemelli hospital for tests. “The tests showed a respiratory infection (COVID-19 infection excluded) that will require some days of medical therapy,” Bruni's statement said. Francis appeared in relatively good form during his regularly scheduled general audience earlier Wednesday, though he grimaced strongly while getting in and out of the “popemobile.” Francis had part of one lung removed when he was a young man due to a respiratory infection, and he often speaks in a whisper. But he got through the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic without at least any public word of ever testing positive. Francis had been due to celebrate Palm Sunday this weekend, kicking off the Vatican's Holy Week observances: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and finally Easter Sunday on April 9. He has canceled all audiences through Friday, but it wasn't clear whether he could keep the Holy Week plans. Francis has used a wheelchair for over a year due to strained ligaments in his right knee and a small knee fracture. He has said the injury was healing and been walking more with a cane of late. Francis also has said he resisted having surgery for the knee problems because he didn't respond well to general anesthesia during the 2021 intestinal surgery. He said soon after the surgery that he had recovered fully and could eat normally. But in a Jan. 24 interview with The Associated Press, Francis said his diverticulosis, or bulges in the intestinal wall, had “returned."

Russia, Iran, Syria, Turkey to hold meeting in Moscow next week: Iranian MFA
TASS News Agency/March 29/2023
A meeting of deputy foreign ministers of Iran, Russia, Syria and Turkey will take place in Moscow next week, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told a news conference following talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday. "Today we held a discussion with my counterpart Mr. Lavrov. Next week, a quadripartite meeting at the level of deputy ministers will be held here," he said, answering a corresponding question. The Iranian foreign minister noted that the main goal of the meeting would be to "bring Turkey and Syria's views closer together." --

Russia, Iran FMs finalizing Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement: Amirabdollahian
IRNA/March 29/2023
Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Hossein Amirabdollahian has underlined that Moscow and Tehran are negotiating the finalization of the long-term Iran-Russia Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement. FM Amirabdollahian and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov discussed issues of mutual interests, including bilateral, regional and international developments in Russian capital Moscow on Wednesday. The review of the long-term Iran-Russia Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement has been finalized, Amirabdollahian said, expressing hope that the Iranian Foreign Ministry would complete editing in less than one month. The high-ranking delegations from Russia and Iran are exchanging views at different levels and presidents of both countries constantly contact to pursue the issue, the top diplomat said. Russia-Iran relationship is in right track and is growing, he said, expressing hope that the two sides continue good cooperation in regional and international organizations.

Iraqi Foreign Ministry: Iraqi Chargé d'Affaires in Bahrain to return to Baghdad
Bahrain News Agency (BNA)
- Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister for International Relations Affairs, Fuad Hussein, has directed to return the Iraqi Chargé d'Affaires in Bahrain to Baghdad, Spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Ahmed Al-Sahhaf, announced today. “The Foreign Minister, Fuad Hussein has directed to return the Iraqi Chargé d'Affaires to the Kingdom of Bahrain to the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s headquarters in Baghdad,” Al-Sahhaf told Iraqi News Agency (INA). “This measure aims to enhance the status of Iraqi diplomacy, which the Ministry adopts to preserve diplomatic norms,” he added. It is to be noted that Bahrain’s Foreign Affairs Ministry today summoned the Chargé d'Affaires of the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq to the Kingdom of Bahrain, Moayad Omar Abdulrahman, and informed him of its "deep dissatisfaction with his repeated violations of diplomatic norms." “The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, informed the Iraqi Chargé d'Affaires of the Ministry's strong condemnation of his unacceptable behavior that contradicts diplomatic protocols in the Kingdom, and handed him an official protest note in this regard,” the Foreign Affairs Ministry said in its statement. ----

Ukraine’s Zelensky: Any Russian victory could be perilous
AP/March 29/2023
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Tuesday that unless his nation wins a drawn-out battle in a key eastern city, Russia could begin building international support for a deal that could require Ukraine to make unacceptable compromises. He also invited the leader of China, long aligned with Russia, to visit. If Bakhmut fell to Russian forces, their president, Vladimir Putin, would “sell this victory to the West, to his society, to China, to Iran,” Zelenskyy said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “If he will feel some blood — smell that we are weak — he will push, push, push,” Zelenskyy said in English, which he used for virtually all of the interview. The leader spoke to the AP aboard a train shuttling him across Ukraine, to cities near some of the fiercest fighting and others where his country’s forces have successfully repelled Russia’s invasion. The AP is the first news organization to travel extensively with Zelenskyy since the war began just over a year ago. Since then, Ukraine — backed by much of the West — has surprised the world with the strength of its resistance against the larger, better-equipped Russian military. Ukrainian forces have held their capital, Kyiv, and pushed Russia back from other strategically important areas. But as the war enters its second year, Zelenskyy finds himself focused on keeping motivation high in both his military and the general Ukrainian population — particularly the millions who have fled abroad and those living in relative comfort and security far from the front lines.
Zelenskyy is also well aware that his country’s success has been in great part due to waves of international military support, particularly from the United States and Western Europe. But some in the United States — including Republican Donald Trump, the former American president and current 2024 candidate — have questioned whether Washington should continue to supply Ukraine with billions of dollars in military aid. Trump’s likely Republican rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also suggested that defending Ukraine in a “territorial dispute” with Russia was not a significant U.S. national security priority. He later walked that statement backafter facing criticism from other corners of the GOP.-

Biden says White House response to banking stress is 'not over yet'
Reuters/March 29/2023
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday his administration had done what was possible to address the banking crisis with available authorities, but added the White House response on the matter was “not over yet.”
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks at semiconductor manufacturer Wolfspeed in Durham, North Carolina, U.S., March 28, 2023. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst. “We’ve done what we need to do executively. I feel confident things are settling out. The markets seem to be responding,” Biden told reporters before departing North Carolina to return to the White House. Asked if his administration had exhausted its unilateral moves, short of congressional action, to address stress in the banking sector, Biden said: “No, it’s not over yet. We’re watching very closely. I think my team has handled it very well so far. And rather than get ahead of myself here, I think let’s let things move the way they are.”The president said his administration was also looking at legislative changes in response to the crisis, although that could prove difficult in the split Congress. “I’m not sure whether we get much legislative change. But we’re looking at that as well,” Biden said. The failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and, days later, Signature Bank, set off a broader loss of investor confidence in the banking sector that pummeled stocks and stoked fears of a full-blown financial crisis. The Biden administration quickly adopted a series of emergency measures to protect depositors in the two banks, while the Federal Reserve provided additional liquidity to help banks across the sector cover depositors’ needs. Biden told reporters last week that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation could act to guarantee deposits above $250,000 if other U.S. banks failed, but said he expected mid-sized banks to survive current strains in the sector. A deal to rescue Swiss bank Credit Suisse last week and a sale of SVB’s assets to First Citizens Bancshares this week has helped restore some calm to markets, but investors remain wary of more troubles lurking in the financial system.
Earlier in the day, a top U.S. regulator told a Senate panel that SVB did a “terrible” job of managing risk before its collapse, fending off criticism from lawmakers who blamed bank watchdogs for missing warning signs.

Russia Says it Hopes Azerbaijan and Iran Resolve ‘Frictions’
Asharq Al-Awsat/Wednesday, 29 March, 2023
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that he hoped what he called "frictions" between Azerbaijan and Iran would soon be resolved. Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran, which has a large population of ethnic Azeris in its northwest, have been strained in recent months after Baku announced plans to open formal diplomatic ties with Israel. Azerbaijan's State Security Service said on Wednesday that it was investigating "a terror attack" after a lawmaker with strong anti-Iranian views was wounded in a gun attack at his home.

Lavrov, Abdollahian Discuss Opportunities to Revive Nuclear Pact
London, Tehran - Asharq Al-Awsat/Wednesday, 29 March, 2023
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian will visit Moscow on Wednesday to hold talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on several issues, including faltering efforts to revive the nuclear agreement. Iranian media quoted the Iranian ambassador to Moscow, Kazem Jalali, as saying that Abdollahian will follow up on the implementation of bilateral agreements, and will review regional developments, and the latest situation in the International North-South Transport Corridor. The Iranian foreign minister had announced his visit to Moscow, saying in a Tweet on Monday: “Balanced foreign policy and active diplomacy are on the right track.”Last week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters at her weekly press briefing that Lavrov will hold consultations with his Iranian counterpart on Wednesday on current international issues, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The two ministers are also expected to discuss the regional situation in light of the agreement between Riyadh and Tehran to resume diplomatic relations, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. Abdollahian is currently facing increasing pressure, whether from critics of the current government’s approach to the nuclear negotiations or those questioning his ability to lead the Iranian diplomatic apparatus. In fact, the Secretary-General of the Iranian National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, stole the limelight in the wake of the Iranian-Saudi agreement, and his visit to both Abu Dhabi and Baghdad, which preceded the meetings held by the head of the Strategic Relations Committee, Kamal Kharazi, in Damascus and Beirut. Abdollahian, Shamkhani, and Kharazi have all tried to deny the presence of any divisions among the Iranian bodies, stressing coordination on foreign policy. On the eve of his visit to Moscow, the Iranian foreign minister sent several messages in press statements that were reported by the official media on Tuesday. He warned that the doors of nuclear negotiations “will not remain open,” speaking of a plan that the Iranian parliament intends to discuss to set a ceiling for nuclear talks. Nonetheless, Abdollahian said that Tehran was “committed” to cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in reference to the recent agreement reached by the director of the UN agency, Rafael Grossi, regarding the investigation of uranium particles recently found at the Fordo facility, with a purity of 83.7 percent, or the thorny investigation of traces of uranium in three undeclared sites. Meanwhile, the Russian envoy to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, said on Monday that the negotiations to revive the nuclear agreement remained at a dead end, adding that the Western parties were “refraining from announcing their death.” In remarks to the Russian Novosti agency, Ulyanov noted that the chances of completing the negotiation process “still exist today, although they seem to be very limited.” “The United States opposes the resumption of the negotiation process in the first place, as well as the three European countries (Germany, France and Britain), which seem to have almost lost interest in restoring the nuclear deal,” he added.


SNHR: 10,024 Syrians Died in Feb. 6 Earthquake
London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Wednesday, 29 March, 2023
The number of Syrians killed by the earthquake that struck Türkiye and Syria on February 6, has now reached 10,024, including 4,191 in non-regime areas, and 394 in regime-held areas, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) revealed in a report released Tuesday. The report also said the death toll includes 5,439 Syrian refugees who died in Türkiye. "There was an imperative need to respond to the devastating earthquake and to document the massive number of Syrians who died due to the earthquake, and how the late arrival of humanitarian assistance may have led to the preventable deaths of more Syrians,” SNHR noted. The group said it took the initiative to undertake this onerous task that posed additional challenges despite the team’s large experience and trusted contacts across Syria. The SNHR executive director, Fadel Abdul Ghany said in this regard: “We have expended all of this effort in order for relief organizations, especially UN bodies, to be able to access and utilize the lists of victims to compensate the victims’ families. However, this will not happen if relief aid keeps going to organizations that are designed to steal UN relief aid." Abdul Ghany also said the Syrian regime and its allies are responsible for displacing millions of Syrians to northwestern Syria. "Not only have the Syrian regime and its allies cut off their access to water, electricity, and services, but they have also continued to target them in their bombing operations for years," he added.

Netanyahu, Biden exchange frosty words over Israel legal overhaul
AP/March 29, 2023
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday rebuffed President Joe Biden’s suggestion that the premier “walks away” from a contentious plan to overhaul the legal system, saying the country makes its own decisions. The exchange was a rare bout of public disagreement between the two close allies and signals building friction between Israel and the US over Netanyahu’s judicial changes, which he postponed after massive protests. Asked by reporters late Tuesday what he hopes the premier does with the legislation, Biden replied, “I hope he walks away from it.” The president added that Netanyahu’s government “cannot continue down this road” and urged compromise on the plan roiling Israel. The president also stepped around US Ambassador Thomas Nides’ suggestion that Netanyahu would soon be invited to the White House, saying, “No, not in the near term.”
Netanyahu replied that Israel is sovereign and “makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”The frosty exchange came a day after Netanyahu called for a halt to his government’s contentious legislation “to avoid civil war” in the wake of two consecutive days of mass protests that drew tens of thousands of people to Israel’s streets. “Hopefully the prime minister will act in a way that he can try to work out some genuine compromise. But that remains to be seen,” Biden said to reporters as he left North Carolina to return to Washington.
Netanyahu and his religious and ultranationalist allies announced the judicial overhaul in January just days after forming their government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history. The proposal has plunged Israel into its worst domestic crisis in decades. Business leaders, top economists and former security chiefs have all come out against the plan, saying it is pushing the country toward dictatorship. The plan would give Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, and his allies the final say in appointing the nation’s judges. It would also give parliament, which is controlled by his allies, authority to overturn Supreme Court decisions and limit the court’s ability to review laws. Critics say the legislation would concentrate power in the hands of the coalition in parliament and upset the balance of checks and balances between branches of government. Netanyahu said he was “striving to achieve via a broad consensus” in talks with opposition leaders that began Tuesday. Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in Israel’s parliament, wrote on Twitter that Israel was the US’s closest allies for decades but “the most radical government in the country’s history ruined that in three months.”

Israel parties discuss justice reforms after Netanyahu U-turn
AFP/March 29, 2023
JERUSALEM: Israel’s hard-right government and opposition parties were set for a second day of talks Wednesday on controversial judiciary reforms that sparked a general strike and mass protests in the country’s most severe domestic crisis in years. Skepticism remained high over the negotiations on the judicial overhaul, which would curtail the authority of the Supreme Court and give politicians greater powers over the selection of judges. US President Joe Biden, one of several Israeli allies to have voiced concern, urged Netanyahu to negotiate in good faith and warned against simply plowing ahead with the reforms. A first day of talks between the government and the two main centrist opposition parties – Yesh Atid and the National Unity Party – was hosted by President Isaac Herzog Tuesday. “After about an hour and a half, the meeting, which took place in a positive spirit, came to an end,” the president’s office said. “Tomorrow (Wednesday), President Isaac Herzog will continue the series of meetings,” it added. After three months of tensions that split the nation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bowed to pressure in the face of a nationwide walkout Monday. The strike hit airports, hospitals and more, while tens of thousands of opponents of the reforms rallied outside parliament in Jerusalem. “Out of a will to prevent a rupture among our people, I have decided to pause the second and third readings of the bill” to allow time for dialogue, the prime minister said in a broadcast. The decision to halt the legislative process marked a dramatic U-turn for the premier, who just a day earlier announced he was sacking his defense minister who had called for the very same step. The move was greeted with suspicion in Israel, with the president of the Israel Democracy Institute think-tank remarking that it did not amount to a peace deal.
“Rather, it’s a cease-fire perhaps for regrouping, reorganizing, reorienting and then charging – potentially – charging ahead,” Yohanan Plesner told journalists. Opposition leader Yair Lapid reacted warily, saying on Monday that he wanted to be sure “there is no ruse or bluff.”A joint statement Tuesday from Lapid’s Yesh Atid and the National Unity Party of Benny Gantz, a former defense minister, said talks would stop immediately “if the law is put on the Knesset’s (parliament’s) agenda.”The US president warned that Israel “cannot continue down this road” of deepening division. “Hopefully the prime minister will... try to work out some genuine compromise, but that remains to be seen,” Biden told reporters during a visit to North Carolina. In a statement, Netanyahu said he appreciated Biden’s “longstanding commitment to Israel.”But, he added: “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”In an earlier statement, Netanyahu had said that the goal of the talks “is to reach an agreement.”Activists, meanwhile, vowed to continue their rallies, which have persisted for weeks, sometimes drawing tens of thousands of protesters.
“We will not stop the protest until the judicial coup is completely stopped,” the Umbrella Movement of demonstrators said. The crisis has revealed deep rifts within Netanyahu’s fledgling coalition, an alliance with far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in a tweet Monday, asserted “there will be no turning back” on the judicial overhaul. Fellow far-right cabinet member, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, had pressed his supporters to rally in favor of the reforms. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party revealed on Monday that the decision to delay the legislation involved an agreement to expand the minister’s portfolio after he threatened to quit if the overhaul was put on hold. Writing in the left-wing daily Haaretz, political correspondent Yossi Verter said the pause was “a victory for the protesters, but the one who really bent Netanyahu and trampled on him is Itamar Ben-Gvir.” The affair has hit the coalition’s standing among the Israeli public, just three months after it took office. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party has dipped seven points, according to a poll by Israel’s Channel 12, which predicted the government would lose its majority in the 120-seat parliament if an election were held now.

King Charles III keeps eye on prize after tour starts late
Associated Press/March 29, 2023
Britain's new king will make his debut on the world stage Wednesday, three days later and 550 miles (885 kilometers) northeast of where he had intended.
Although King Charles III will be greeted with a hearty "willkommen" in Berlin rather than "bienvenue" in Paris, his goals remain the same: to cement Britain's improving relations with Europe and show that he can help the U.K. win hearts and minds abroad just as his mother did so successfully for seven decades.
But the decision to cancel the first leg of his trip due to protests over planned pension changes in France may make it harder for Charles to make his mark during his first big international mission as monarch. And first impressions matter as Charles, 74, prepares for his coronation on May 6.
"Charles will have fewer opportunities to present himself," said said Arianne Chernock, a royal expert and professor of modern British history at Boston University. "This means that he'll need to be very disciplined about using those opportunities available to maximize his impact — there won't be many second chances on this trip."Charles, who ascended the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September, had something bigger in mind when this coming out party as king was announced. Billed as a multi-day tour of the European Union's two biggest countries, the trip was designed to underscore British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's efforts to rebuild relations with the bloc after six years of arguments over Brexit and highlight the countries' shared history as they work together to combat Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Now everything rests on Germany. The truncated trip starts Wednesday in Berlin, where German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will welcome Charles and Camilla, the queen consort, at the historic Brandenburg Gate. The king is scheduled to give a speech to the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, on Thursday. He will also meet Chancellor Olaf Scholz, talk to Ukrainian refugees and meet with British and Germany military personnel who are working together on joint projects. The royal couple go to Hamburg on Friday, where they will visit the Kindertransport memorial for Jewish children who fled from Germany to Britain during the Third Reich, and attend a green energy event before returning to the U.K. The king was urged to make the trip by Sunak, who during his first six months in office negotiated a settlement to the long-running dispute over post-Brexit trading rules for Northern Ireland and reached a deal with France to combat the people smugglers ferrying migrants across the English Channel in small boats. Sunak hopes goodwill created by a royal visit can help pave the way for progress on other issues, including Britain's return to an EU program that funds scientific research across Europe. This is the first big test of whether Charles can be an effective conduit for the "soft power" the House of Windsor has traditionally wielded, helping Britain pursue its geopolitical goals through the glitz and glamor of a 1,000-year-old monarchy.
The Windsors are among the most recognizable people on the planet. While their formal powers are strictly limited by law and tradition, they draw attention from the media and the public partly because of the historic ceremonies and regalia that accompany them — and also because the public is fascinated by their personal lives. The late Queen Elizabeth II was the embodiment of this — the monarch everyone wanted to meet for tea, if for no other reason than that she'd been around so long. Elizabeth's influence stemmed in part from the fact that she made more than 100 state visits during her 70 years on the throne, meeting presidents and prime ministers around the world in a reign that lasted from the Cold War to the information age. But questions remain about whether Charles has the same star power as his mother, dubbed "Queen of the World" by one biographer, Robert Hardman.
Charles has fewer years to make his mark and will not try to copy her, said Bronwen Maddox, who heads the Chatham House public affairs think tank in London. "He's getting this (opportunity) towards the end of his life, and it's very much a chance to make the best of it without claiming that it is the same, in any way, as his mother,'' she said. ''I think he will find his own way to do it.''Charles, a former naval officer who is the first British monarch to earn a university degree, is expected to insert heft where his glamorous mother once wielded star power. As Britain's head of state, the king meets weekly with the prime minister and retains his mother's role as leader of the Commonwealth. His visit to Germany will showcase these roles while also giving him an opportunity to highlight the causes he holds dear, like sustainability and the environment. But there will also be a full dose of the pomp and circumstance that screams royal visit, starting with a ceremonial welcome at the Brandenburg Gate, the neoclassical landmark in the center of Berlin that has provided the backdrop to so much of German history. White tie and tiaras are expected to be on display during a state dinner at Schloss Bellevue, the German president's official residence.
There will be plenty, therefore, to attract the crowds in Germany and demonstrate to people back home that Charles has eased into the role of monarch and chief diplomat. "In some ways, Charles does not have to do very much for people to follow him because there's the mystique of the institution,'' Chernock said. "I think people are fascinated by his family and all of the drama surrounding it. So he could stand perfectly still and not utter a word and he would still draw crowds."

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on March 29-30/2023
Today in History: A Newborn America Learns about Jihad

Raymond Ibrahim
/March 29, 2023
Painting of a battle during the First Barbary War, by Dennis Malone (b. 1827)
The Stream
Exactly 237 years ago today, on March 28, 1786, two of America’s founding fathers documented the United States’ first exposure to Islamic jihad in an important letter to Congress.
One year earlier, in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or “Barbary,” had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom its enslaved crew and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—then ambassadors to France and England respectively—met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, the Americans laid out the source of Barbary’s hitherto inexplicable animosity in a letter to Congress:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise [dated March 28, 1786].
Abdul had continued by smugly noting that Islam’s “law” offers “as an incentive” more slaves to those who are first to board infidel vessels, and that the power and appearance of the seaborne jihadis—who reportedly always carried three knives, one in each hand and another in their mouths—“so terrified their enemies that very few ever stood against them.”
One can only imagine what the American ambassadors—who years earlier had asserted that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”—thought of their Muslim counterpart’s answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.
Centuries before preying on the newborn American nation’s vessels, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa—specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis—had been thriving on the slave trade of Christians abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe—going as far as Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful that, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote historian, Robert Davis.
The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were Christian “infidels.” As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b.1516) had written in his Book of Martyrs that, “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”
The punishments these European slaves received for real or imagined offenses beggared description: “If they speak against Mahomet [blasphemy], they must become Mahometans, or be impaled alive,” continued Foxe. “If they profess Christianity again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive [as apostates], or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.”
As such, when Captain O’Brien of the Dauphin wrote to Jefferson saying that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was clearly not exaggerating.
Back in Congress, some agreed with Jefferson that “it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them”—including General George Washington: “In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary?” he wrote to a friend. “Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.”
But the majority of Congress agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Considering the perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility, Adams may have been more right than he knew. Congress initially decided to emulate the Europeans by placating and paying off the terrorists, though it would take years to raise the demanded ransom. Inevitably, however, hostilities again broke out, leading to the Barbary Wars (1801 to 1805; again in 1815). But by now, the U.S. had built six war vessels.
Thus the United States’ first war—which erupted before it could even elect its first president and intermittently lasted some 30 years—was against Islam; and the latter had initiated hostilities on the same rationale that had been used to initiate hostilities for the preceding 1,200 years.
Though most Americans are now unaware of their nation’s first military conflict, references to it are common. The oldest paean of the U.S. armed forces, “The Marines’ Hymn,” boasts of fighting everywhere for “right and freedom”—including as far as “to the shores of Tripoli.” And the oldest U.S. military monument was made to honor those Americans who fought and died in the Barbary Wars. According to its plaque, “‘Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute’ became the rallying cry for this war.”
The turbaned heads of the vanquished enemy appear at the foot of the eagle-topped column. (Needless to say, although the United States’ oldest monument was for decades located inside the Capitol Building, it now rests in the much less conspicuous faculty club of the Naval Academy in Annapolis.)
In short, although the question “Why do they hate us?” became immensely popular after 9/11, it was actually answered during America’s founding, including through a little remembered letter written to Congress 237 years ago today.

Why Did the Biden Administration Oppose Israeli Judicial Reform?
Jonathan S. Tobin//Gatestone Institute./March 29, 2023
Ignore Washington's hypocritical talk about protecting democracy. They want a weak government that won't make trouble when it comes to Iran, and they won't stop until they get one.
Washington made no secret of its efforts to directly intervene in a domestic Israeli dispute....
The people who jammed the streets... see the maintenance of an unaccountable court with virtually unlimited power as the only way to maintain the Israeli left's political power even when they lose elections....
Washington is... determined... to oust a democratically elected government by any means possible.
What the White House and State Department want is more pliable Israeli Prime Minister, who will keep quiet about the nuclear threat from Iran, and who can be intimidated into not acting too forestall that deadly threat to Israel's existence.
As for behaving like a dictator, Biden's predilection for governing by executive order... even when his diktats are obviously contrary to the constitution or existing laws makes anything Netanyahu might attempt look like child's play.
[Biden's] administration apparently thinks that when Israel's Supreme Court strikes down Netanyahu's efforts to govern – on the basis of no law, and only on the judges, subjective ideas about what is "reasonable" – it's a great idea.
[E]stablishment Jewish groups... joined the liberal groups in praising Netanyahu's surrender to the mob and then had the chutzpah to laud the protesters, who sought to sabotage the country to get their way without even any attempt at balance by treating supporters of the government and reform, who clearly outnumbered the critics at the ballot box last November, as equally praiseworthy.
[T]hey also understand that the hyperbolic claims that Netanyahu and advocates of judicial reform seek to impose a dictatorship or a Torah state is pure fiction.
What Biden and his supporters want in Jerusalem isn't so much an all-powerful Supreme Court... but anything that can help oust the prime minister.
The [Biden] administration is now willing to tolerate Iran having nuclear weapons as long as they are not going to publicly flaunt them.
This attitude isn't just unacceptable to all of Israel's major political parties. It constitutes a grave threat to the security of the Jewish state that no Israeli prime minister could reasonably be expected to tolerate.
The brazen nature of Biden's attack on Netanyahu... speaks volumes about how much the administration wants an Israeli government that won't cause trouble over Iran.
Ignore Washington's hypocritical talk about protecting democracy. They want a weak Israeli government that won't make trouble when it comes to Iran, and they won't stop until they get one. Pictured: Israeli police try to stop anti-government protesters from blocking the main highway in Tel Aviv on March 23, 2023. (Photo by Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
It didn't play a decisive role in the drama that unfolded in Israel as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to call a halt to his efforts to enact judicial reform. But the Biden administration's willingness to involve itself in the push to oppose the measure was remarkable for two reasons.
The first is that, as The New York Times noted, Washington made no secret of its efforts to directly intervene in a domestic Israeli dispute in a manner that was almost unprecedented. The second was that the standard by which the administration seems ready to judge its Israeli counterpart is entirely hypocritical and would, if applied to Biden, categorize him as just as much of an "authoritarian" as Netanyahu. Or at least it would if those scurrilous accusations that have been hurled against the Likud-led government by its opponents—and dutifully mimicked by the international media, as well as many Democrats and American Jewish organizations—weren't entirely false.
But however unpersuasive or politically motivated, what the Times termed a "U.S. pressure campaign" to shelve the reform legislation had nothing to do with a belief in the virtues of Israel's current judicial system.
If they favor the continued rule of what amounts to a juristocracy in the Jewish state, it is for the same reason that most of the people who jammed the streets of Israel's cities or sought to undermine its economy and national defense did. They see the maintenance of an unaccountable court with virtually unlimited power as the only way to maintain the Israeli left's political power even when they lose elections, as Netanyahu's opponents did only a few months ago.
Even more to the point, Washington is as determined as the anti-Bibi resistance not just to stop judicial reform but to oust a democratically elected government by any means possible. Biden's interest in toppling him is disconnected from any purported concern about Netanyahu's alleged shortcomings. What the White House and State Department want is a more pliable Israeli prime minister who will keep quiet about the nuclear threat from Iran and who can be intimidated into not acting to forestall that deadly threat to Israel's existence.
As to the substance of the American critique of the effort to reform Israel's judiciary, as a JNS report described, the hypocrisy of Biden's stand is epic in nature.
Democrats and their liberal Jewish supporters are vocal critics of the U.S. Supreme Court because of its current conservative majority and its willingness to enforce constitutional limits on the power of the state. Biden and the Democrats have been assailing the independence of the court for years with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) even issuing warnings against its conservative members that liberals would have labeled as incitement to violence, if not criminal threats, had they been uttered by a Republican.
Equally hypocritical is their talk about Netanyahu being at fault for not seeking a national consensus before trying to enact change with a narrow parliamentary majority. That never stopped Democrats from advancing ideas that they considered to be progressive innovations, like Obamacare, with no consensus, compromise or broad congressional support. Nor did it stop liberal American Jews from supporting the disastrous Oslo Accords or the disengagement from Gaza, which were pulled off with even less support in the Knesset than Netanyahu can boast.
As for behaving like a dictator, Biden's predilection for governing by executive order—of which his canceling of student loan debt is just one outstanding example—even when his diktats are obviously contrary to the Constitution or existing laws makes anything Netanyahu might attempt look like child's play. Biden bristles at the ability of American courts to strike down some of his more egregious initiatives, even when they do so on the basis of settled law. But his administration apparently thinks that when Israel's Supreme Court strikes down Netanyahu's efforts to govern—on the basis of no law and only on the judges' subjective ideas about what is "reasonable"—it's a great idea.
The same applies to the critiques of judicial reform that emanated from establishment Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. And though the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is supposed to speak for a consensus of all Jewish groups and act in defense of Israel rather than specific political factions inside the country, it joined the liberal groups in praising Netanyahu's surrender to the mob. It then had the chutzpah to laud the protesters, who sought to sabotage the country to get their way without even any attempt at balance by treating supporters of the government and reform, who clearly outnumbered the critics at the ballot box last November, as equally praiseworthy.
A number of the leaders of those groups may share the fear and contempt for Israel's right-wing and religious voters that animate many, if not most, of the protesters who believe that any government that isn't dominated by the left is somehow illegitimate. But they also understand that the hyperbolic claims that Netanyahu and advocates of judicial reform seek to impose a dictatorship or a Torah state is pure fiction.
Yet it isn't an accident that arguments being floated about the issue of Israeli judicial reform from American sources are so weak and unpersuasive. What Biden and his supporters want in Jerusalem isn't so much an all-powerful Supreme Court—though they are pleased if it can hamstring Netanyahu's attempt to govern, as it has continually attempted to do—but anything that can help oust the prime minister.
The Biden foreign-policy team, largely made up as it is of Obama administration alumni, bears a grudge against Netanyahu. The eight years of bickering between Washington and Jerusalem centered on former President Barack Obama's futile efforts to undermine Netanyahu and force him to make concessions to a Palestinian Authority that had no interest in peace. They reached a peak in 2015 during Netanyahu's campaign to try and halt Washington's push for appeasement of Iran, which led to the dangerous nuclear deal that year that enriched and empowered the Islamist regime.
While Biden seems to have wisely disabused himself of myths about the Palestinians wanting peace, he is still interested in realigning U.S. Middle East policy away from support for allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia in favor of a rapprochement with Iran, even if his efforts to revive the nuclear deal have flopped.
Under the current circumstances in which Iran has shown its contempt for the Americans, Biden is still eager to avoid any confrontation with Tehran over the fact that, thanks to the Democrats' appeasement policy, it is fast approaching the status of being a threshold nuclear power. As one of Biden's most loyal aides—chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley—recently made clear, the administration is now willing to tolerate Iran having nuclear weapons as long as they are not going to publicly flaunt them.
This attitude isn't just unacceptable to all of Israel's major political parties. It constitutes a grave threat to the security of the Jewish state that no Israeli prime minister could reasonably be expected to tolerate. But there is a big difference between Netanyahu and someone like opposition leader Yair Lapid, whom Biden hopes will soon return to the prime minister's office. As the multi-party coalition that ruled Israel from June 2021 to December 2022—led in part by Lapid—demonstrated, no one other than Netanyahu has the guts to confront the Americans, even over an existential threat like Iran. Biden knows that if the current government survives, it will present a formidable challenge to the disgraceful policy that Milley articulated.
So while there is nothing new about American governments seeking to intervene in Israeli politics, the brazen nature of Biden's attack on Netanyahu says nothing about the virtues of judicial reform. It does, however, speak volumes about how much the administration wants an Israeli government that won't cause trouble over Iran.
*Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).
© 2023 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Turkey: Missing Children from Earthquakes Risk Human Trafficking, Organ Harvesting, Sexual Abuse
Uzay Bulut/Gatestone Institute./March 29, 2023
The newspaper Cumhuriyet reported on February 23 that a doctor from Ankara, who has been volunteering to help find missing children since the first day of the earthquake, claimed that the number of missing children was approaching 1,000.
The fatwa stated that it is not right to treat adopted children like one's own children and that "accordingly, the relationship between the adopter and the adopted child does not create a barrier to marriage."
"[I]t is reported that unaccompanied children are not handed over to authorized state institutions, but to people who say that the children are relatives, tariqats [radical Islamist groups] or organ mafia." — Association of Children and Women First, once.org.tr, February 17, 2023.
"The Ministry of Family and Social Policies must first determine the identity of the children.... It is unacceptable to deliver these children to third parties, individuals, institutions, or associations other than the Ministry. Adoption and foster family institutions should also be done lawfully in line with the Ministry's rigorous and meticulous investigations." — Hediye Gökçe Baykal, attorney at the Association of Children and Women First, to Gatestone, March 9, 2023.
"The basic rule in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is 'follow the best interests of the child.'" — Hediye Gökçe Baykal, to Gatestone, March 9, 2023.
As a result of the February earthquakes in Turkey, many children have been orphaned. These children are extremely vulnerable: they are at risk of human trafficking, organ harvesting and sexual abuse -- and Islamist indoctrination. Pictured: A child in a tent camp set up for displaced people, following the recent earthquakes, in Adiyaman, Turkey on March 25, 2023.
When multiple earthquakes first struck Turkey on February 6, the death toll, according to the Turkish government after a month, reached 48,448. Unofficial sources estimate that the real number is much higher. Around 200,000 people were still waiting to be rescued from under buildings that had collapsed, according to a prediction from early February by geophysical engineer Professor Ovgun Ahmet Ercan.
The death toll was reportedly high not only because of corruption in the construction sector but also because of the government's lack of timely aid to survivors. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to send rescue aid promptly to the earthquake-stricken area. Survivors were ignored for days. After the first earthquake, even access to Twitter was restricted for over 9 hours. More than a month later, survivors are still saying that they have not received enough help. Millions are homeless, in tents, struggling to survive.
The government, it appears, had allowed corrupt builders to erect unsafe buildings all over Turkey. The authorities and the corrupt construction sector there are therefore complicit in the deaths and destruction caused by the earthquakes.
A most alarming problem is the wellbeing of children. Many have been orphaned; some are missing. The orphaned children are extremely vulnerable: they are at risk of human trafficking, organ harvesting and sexual abuse -- and Islamist indoctrination.
One missing child is three-year-old Ali Kemal Akpınar from the Antakya district of Hatay. According to news report from February 10, Ali Kemal's parents were still looking for the boy, who they think could be at a local hospital.
Another missing child is a 15-year-old refugee from Syria, Hatice al Husso, who was trapped with her parents and siblings under the rubble of their home in the city of Adiyaman the day the earthquake struck. She was rescued 20 hours later, taken to a local hospital; since then, she has been missing.
Six-year-old Neval Akgöl, rescued from the rubble of her home in Hatay's Antakya district on February 6, was allegedly put into an ambulance. Her family searched for her for weeks until, on February 25, her body was found through a DNA match in a "cemetery of the nameless," with the registration number "50". According to a news report, her body would be taken from there and buried in a place of her family's choosing.
Other children have also reportedly gone missing. The apartment where 9-year-old Berkcan Akdağ lived, in the town of Antakya, collapsed in the February 6 earthquake. His father and sister lost their lives. His mother, who was rescued from the rubble 36 hours later, is still looking for him.
Ten-year-old Mukaddes Erva Aktaş, after being pulled out from the rubble of her home in the city of Maras, was taken to a hospital. She is still missing.
Unaccompanied children are vulnerable to Islamic radicals known for leading indoctrination centers where children are abused. The newspaper Cumhuriyet reported on February 23 that a doctor from Ankara, who has been volunteering to help find missing children since the first day of the earthquake, claimed that the number of missing children was approaching 1,000.
Erdogan's government has reportedly been obstructing the genuine humanitarian aid provided by his political opposition, and instead, along with his pro-regime media, reportedly has been promoting Islamist groups such as the Islamist Ensar Foundation and calling them non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Ensar Foundation staffers have been exposed for raping students. "The foundation's record of child abuse goes back for more than a decade," Turkish journalist Burak Bekdil reported.
The newspaper Birgun noted on March 8 that a radical Islamic group known as Menzil Jamaat announced that they were "hosting" 1,100 earthquake-affected children in their village in Adıyaman, and shared on social media the images of some of those children making the "takbir" sign with their hands. "Takbir" in Islam refers to a proclamation of the greatness of Allah, "Allahu akbar". The hand gesture is used by pro-jihad Islamists, including ISIS.
Meanwhile, Turkey's General Directorate of Religious Affairs, known as Diyanet, prepared a special section on its website for fatwas (opinions by a recognized authority on a point of Islamic law) about the earthquakes. It was in answer to the question, "Can children of earthquake victims be adopted?"
The fatwa stated that it is not right to treat adopted children like one's own children and that "accordingly, the relationship between the adopter and the adopted child does not create a barrier to marriage."
After negative reactions on social media, Diyanet deleted its fatwa on the website, but defended it in a subsequent statement. Referring to Al-Ahzab verse in the Quran (33:4), "Nor does He [Allah] regard your adopted children as your real children," Diyanet claimed that its statement concerning adopted children has been "taken out of context."
Diyanet stated:
"Islam orders every child to maintain ties with his own family as much as possible... and it does not find it right when someone other than the parents of the child sees [the child] as their own child in every respect."
Such fatwas simply make orphaned children even more vulnerable to sexual abuse.
The Association of Children and Women First (ACWF) has been monitoring the situation. The organization has filed criminal complaints, alleging that some children who survived the earthquakes were handed over to radical Islamist groups (often referred to as "tarikat" [tariqat] or "cemaat" [jamaat] in Turkish) and called on Turkey's Ministry of Family and Social Services to protect those children and manage the process transparently.
The ACWF issued an announcement on February 17:
"Experts in the field who are following the [rescue] activities state that there are unaccompanied children affected by the earthquake in the region as the search and rescue efforts are ongoing....
"It is also seen that those children were handed over to people who introduced themselves as their families.... [T]here are cases where children who were rescued from the rubble were not notified to the official institutions and recorded [by institutions].
"In addition, according to the bulletins given to our association... it is reported that unaccompanied children are not handed over to authorized state institutions, but to people who say that the children are relatives, tariqats or organ mafia."
The ACWF added that it was expecting an immediate response from the Ministry of Family and Social Services on the matter.
The announcement concluded:
"We will not allow the tragedy of our little ones to be abused by tariqats, nor will we allow our little ones to be abused. Tariqats and jamaats are a disaster for our children as big as an earthquake. Our children are not alone."
The ACWF has been struggling to help protect these vulnerable children. The Turkish service of German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported on February 23 that nine children whose fathers died in the earthquake in the city of Antep in southeast Turkey were taken with their mothers to the city of Sakarya in the west of the country. They were then separated from their mothers and resettled in a "Quran school" run by Islamic radicals known as the Ismailağa jamaat. The ACWF filed a criminal complaint about the incident, and announced on February 24 that the children had finally been taken from the jamaat by Turkey's Ministry of Family and Social Services.
Hediye Gökçe Baykal, an attorney in the ACWF, told Gatestone:
"Those children may face various threats. Every day a new claim emerges that unaccompanied children are taken by certain [Islamist] jamaats and tariqats. We are also extremely worried that the missing children could be kidnapped to be used for organ mafia, human trafficking, or other criminal purposes.
"There are issues such as the disappearance of the children during their transportation to the hospitals. Some families are still searching for their children on social media. A person disguised as a police officer was caught trying to kidnap a child. Allegations are that some children were placed in some houses collectively. We filed a criminal complaint following the allegation that 60 children were placed in such houses. We have also directly received notifications [about similar incidents]. We have called on prosecutors to investigate these charges.
"There are also allegations that children are placed in some associations, and in some cases, in private associations, and aid is collected for them. The prosecutors should investigate.
"The Ministry of Family and Social Policies must first determine the identity of the children. The identified children should be handed over to their families immediately. Protecting children who have lost their families is solely the duty of the Ministry of Family and Social Services in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Child Protection Law and other relevant legislation. It is unacceptable to deliver these children to third parties, individuals, institutions, or associations other than the Ministry. Adoption and foster family institutions should also be done lawfully in line with the Ministry's rigorous and meticulous investigations."
The ACWF continues its efforts to help locate the missing children. In a Twitter post on March 12, the association announced that they were looking for the three-year-old Furkan Alp Alsan, who had been pulled out from the rubble of his house in Adıyaman and taken to a hospital. The ACWF is urging people who have seen Furkan to contact his father or the association.
Baykal also called on international children's rights organizations to support the efforts to locate missing children and help them reunite with their families in accordance with international law.
"Although the Ministry is the only authorized institution regarding children affected by the earthquakes, the follow-up and protection of these children should be assisted meticulously by national and international organizations and non-governmental organizations. As the Children and Women First Association, we carry out the necessary legal process regarding the follow-up of children. International organizations should also shoulder this struggle within the framework of their fields of activity. There is a great trauma experienced by our children, we must do our best to help them get rid of this trauma as soon as possible and prevent them from encountering greater traumas.
"The basic rule in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is 'follow the best interests of the child.' In this respect, national and international organizations play a major role. As an association, we will not give up on our children, and we will follow and find every child until they reunite with their families or are placed in a safe environment."
Children have been affected the worst by the earthquakes in Turkey. International organizations specializing in children's rights and countering human trafficking immediately need to prioritize investigations and aid in Turkey's earthquake-stricken areas and cooperate with Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policies, human rights organizations and lawyers in Turkey such as Association of Children and Women First, to help rescue the missing, unaccompanied, and orphaned children there.
**Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute. She is also a research fellow for the Philos Project.
Appendix
On March 9, 2023, Baykal, said to Gatestone:
"Information regarding the number of missing or orphaned children is constantly changing. The website of Turkey's Ministry of Family and Social Policies claims that the 'number of unidentified children is 79.' However, Turkey's General Directorate of Security announced that 213 children could not be identified in the earthquake zone. Fifty-one of these children are said to be under the care and supervision in the institutions of the Ministry of Family and Social Services and 162 unidentified children are said to be treated in the institutions of the Ministry of Health.
"One-hundred-thirty-seven of these children are between the ages of 0-1, and the DNA samples of these children continue to be taken. And 55 children are reported to be missing. As the Children and Women First Association, we continue our investigations in the earthquake-stricken area. We continue to receive information [about missing or unidentified children]."
© 2023 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Israel’s Divisions and Their Implications
Tariq Al-Homayed/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper
The internal divisions we now see manifest themselves in Israel have significant multifaceted implications for the region. It is these implications that concern us here, and not the domestic developments in Israel that began with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist allies forming a government.
These sharp Israeli divisions call for reflection. What do they mean for US foreign policy in the region? How will they impact the peace process being discussed by the Biden administration? What bearing will they have on the Abraham Accords?
What about Iran’s nuclear program? What repercussions will these divisions have on Israel’s plan to confront it? The most dangerous question for our region is how the Iranians will interpret the developments in Israel, especially with regard to how it will deploy its proxies, like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Tehran and its proxies misreading Israeli events, by firing missiles or attacking Israel in alternative ways, would give Netanyahu a way out of his domestic crisis. It could even precipitate a war whose ramifications cannot be ascertained beforehand.
With regard to US-Israeli relations, Washington’s position on Netanyahu is clear. Washington almost seems like the first to tell the Israeli prime minister: Leave. Indeed, it is no secret that the Biden administration does not like dealing with Netanyahu.
This is a purely domestic Israeli matter. However, given the fact that Biden’s relationship with all allies in the region is not good, or not as good as it should be, it raises an important question: How will Washington engage with a region where it has no solid alliances?
Washington’s relationship with Riyadh is not ideal, nor is the US close to Cairo. The same is true for Ankara and the other Gulf states, particularly with regard to issues that require categorical stances. This dispute with Netanyahu and Israel’s internal upheaval adds to this.
The countries of the region, especially its moderate ones, are not at fault here. This is not true for Israel, as it is a big part of the problem in the region. It is the Biden administration’s fault. One simple fact tells us everything we need to know: US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that Iran and its proxies have targeted US interests in the region 83 times since Biden was elected; Washington retaliated with only four strikes.
This statement is enough to allow us to understand US foreign policy towards our region and Iran. It tells us everything about how the US has been behaving in the region and why its allies are right to repeat the famous American proverb: “With friends like these, who needs enemies!”
It is clear that the US administration does not understand a fundamental fact about our region. Trying to make your way in this region without allies is like trying to cross the desert alone in the dead of night. At night, deserts are dangerous and brimming with the wicked.
To sum up: the events in Israel have arisen as a result of an alliance of extremists in a country that is responsible for much of the region’s problems. However, it is the repercussions for our region that concerns us, especially the prospect of these developments being misread, especially by Iran and its subordinates.
In addition to all these difficulties, the presidential election campaign that always grips the United States is not far off, and as they say on the famous TV series “The West Wing”: “All people are idiots during election season.” This is to say nothing about the fact that the president is turning into a lame duck.

Boris Johnson likely to remain a constant in UK political life
Mohamed Chebaro/Arab News/March 29/2023
I watched and listened in disbelief last week to what Boris Johnson, the UK’s former prime minister and chief architect of “Brexit Britain,” had to say in front of Parliament’s privileges committee, which has been tasked with determining whether or not he deliberately misled the House of Commons, a grave offense for British politicians.
If found guilty, Johnson risks losing his parliamentary seat, which would be a blow to his potential political comeback — a desire that is in step with what other offending politicians are doing around the world, from the US’ Donald Trump to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, along with many others.
The problem with Johnson and politicians like him is the rising deficiency of accountability in the modern state system and the seeping impunity. These are facilitated more than ever by the unparalleled scale of erroneous information authorship, distribution and consumption in a fast-moving, often clickbait-led and driven world (but this may be a subject left for another article).
At the end of his questioning, Johnson agreed that the committee was not a “kangaroo court,” as some of his allies had claimed. But he reserved his final judgment about its impartiality while the four Conservatives, two Labour and one Scottish National Party committee members consider whether or not to rule in his favor. “I will wait to see how you proceed with the evidence that you have,” he said. This reminded me of childish behavior, where the loser in a game bends all the rules and then goes on to question what is right and what is wrong.
To my mind, Johnson looked defeated, and a loser on top of that, unable to manufacture the truth to defend himself, despite justifications from the likes of ex-Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who referred to a so-called court of public opinion that had acquitted the former PM. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll showed that the majority of the UK public thinks Johnson is dishonest, while only 13 percent believe he is honest.
The problem with Johnson and politicians like him is the rising deficiency of accountability in the modern state system and the seeping impunity
However, I am not sure he is finished yet, as some Conservative MPs have been quick to conclude. Caroline Nokes, for example, said that Johnson’s political comeback was “finished” after his grilling at the televised hearing, adding that, as far as she was concerned, “Boris Johnson is not coming back as prime minister.” I base my uncertainty on watching how ex-President Trump is still rattling America and how Netanyahu is sowing unprecedented divisions in Israel. This all goes to say that we are living in uncertain times, with plenty of space for the propagation of fake narratives at the expense of the factual and the misleading at the expense of the truth. The distorted seems easier on the ears of populists — and their fallacies that support often instinctive biases — at the expense of the more complex yet revelatory hard truths. From the days when he first chose to support Brexit, it was clear his ability lay in campaigning on the basis of many false claims, painting a rosy economic future for the country and its people outside of the EU family, free of immigrants invading British shores. However, recent numbers and realities have begun to reveal the scale of the damage done by Brexit.
Office for Budget Responsibility Chairman Richard Hughes admitted this week that Britain is undergoing the “biggest squeeze on living standards we’ve faced in this country on record.” He said that Brits’ spending power will not recover to pre-pandemic levels for another half-decade. Hughes added that Brexit’s impact on the UK economy was of the same “magnitude” as the COVID-19 pandemic or the energy price crisis. He said he has “struggled to put it in any kind of sensible context,” saying that the UK’s gross domestic product will, “in the long run,” be 4 percent smaller than if the country had stayed in the EU.
Four percent could seem small to some, but in economic terms this is a colossal blow. Hughes said the UK’s economic growth has been held back by supply constraints related to labor shortages and stagnant investment since 2016.
This was in line with estimates previously published by the Centre for European Reform, which found that Brexit cost the UK £33 billion ($40 billion) in lost trade in the second quarter of last year alone and more than £40 billion in tax losses in the year to the end of June 2022. The same research showed that the UK economy was 5.5 percent smaller in June last year than it would have been without Brexit. Leaving the EU has also cost British households more than £5.8 billion in higher supermarket bills, according to the Centre for Economic Performance.
Of course, Brexiteers like Johnson have denied these figures have anything to do with them and Brexit or that the country needs an emergency strategic review to try to limit the damage caused by their misleading of the public, even if that would be in the nation’s long-term interest.
Therefore, I tend to agree that, despite the need for an investigation into whether or not he lied to Parliament and under oath to the privileges committee, it is difficult to see Johnson withering away from British public life. As his former boss at The Daily Telegraph Max Hastings has rightly said, it is not possible to write off Johnson “until he is buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through his heart.” So, the West should get used to the Johnsons, Trumps and others like them, as people everywhere are becoming more adept at exploiting the empty slogans of populism and its claims of easy fixes, compared to the hard and tough calls needed to govern properly and fix the many ills that have long riddled, poisoned and challenged human existence.
*Mohamed Chebaro is a British-Lebanese journalist, media consultant and trainer with more than 25 years of experience covering war, terrorism, defense, current affairs and diplomacy.

Scotland First Minister: Humza Yousaf offers further proof that Muslims can succeed in Britain

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Arab News/March 29/2023
Humza Yousaf has been elected leader of the majority party in Scotland, the Scottish National Party. On Wednesday, he was sworn in as first minister of Scotland, the leader of one of the most powerful devolved governments in the developed world.
And there is something about him that did not come up much at all in the election campaign. Something that might, in the bad old days, have kept him from high office. But not any longer. Yousaf is a Muslim, a proud Muslim who took his parliamentary oath first in English and then in Urdu.
He is proof that, whatever other challenges we face, Muslims in Britain are able and willing to achieve great things. This is a success story of modern Britain that is often unnoticed. But it should be more commonly understood. It is something that ought to inspire hope and optimism across the world.
Yousaf has long been one to watch: as a junior minister, as minister for justice and most recently as minister for health, people have long said he was destined for great things. In his youth, Yousaf won awards from Scottish minority ethnic organizations attempting to identify tomorrow’s leaders. In him, they were surely correct.
Yousaf was elected to the Scottish parliament in 2011, at 26 years old. He was the youngest ever MSP at that time and, once he was elected, he was promoted rapidly. He served as a political secretary for his party’s leaders and began very quickly to occupy junior ministerial offices. It is a country where future political talent can be identified and nurtured, and brought out, regardless of the religion of the politician
That he could do so — and so young — speaks very well of modern Scotland. It is a country where future political talent can be identified and nurtured, and brought out, regardless of the religion of the politician. This is something that has not always been true. It is a good thing that it now is.
Yousaf has spoken about the prejudice he faced as a boy and a young man. He still faces prejudice today and we must not look past it and pretend that all is well.
But Yousaf’s story still ought to inspire. Born in Glasgow to a father from Punjab and a mother from Kenya, Yousaf would never have had a chance of political advancement in the Scotland of the past: a Scotland of bigoted nationalism and blinkered dislike of outsiders. This century, however, Scotland and Britain have only become more diverse and more accepting.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is a Hindu. In the bad old days of the past, he would never have been elected. And even if he was elected, his religion and family would not have passed without critical comment of some kind. Now, though, these things are not only not commented upon, but Sunak is able to celebrate Diwali and to talk about his background with pride, in the full knowledge that it is not an impediment. We can hope, with full confidence, that the same will be true for Yousaf — that his background, which was never an issue during this campaign, continues to be only a source of strength for him and not a tool for a small and increasingly marginalized minority of bigots.
Yousaf’s story is also Scotland’s story and I would like to dedicate some time to that now. Scotland is less diverse than much of Europe, but it — like the rest of the UK — is one of the most tolerant places in the world.
Scottish Muslims are world-leading academics, the leaders of major companies, significant athletes, scientists and entertainers. To be able to have the first minister join those ranks is a pleasure and a thrill for those of us who have campaigned for the success of Scotland’s Muslims.
This is the greatest possible vindication of that campaign: that Scotland’s Muslims can be proudly Muslim and successful in Scotland; they do not need to pretend to be something they are not to reach high office and to win.
Just as the country benefits from the talents of all its members, individuals can only benefit from being able to reach the heights of where their aspirations and talents can take them. This is a time of great flowering for Muslims in Britain. As it is for British Asians, who include among their number the prime minister, the first minister of Scotland and the mayor of London — all of whom represent different parties.
This is a very British story, a great success story — a story which deserves, this month of all months, to be told.
*Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is director of special initiatives at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, DC, and the author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim

Kurds to play kingmakers as Turkiye prepares to vote

Zaid M. Belbagi/Arab News/March 29/2023
Last month’s earthquake and the subsequent flooding are a somber reflection of the sad state of Turkiye’s Kurds. However, the natural disaster has the government on the back foot, providing an electoral opening for Turkiye’s opposition, including a pivotal role for its Kurds. With the government trailing in opinion polls ahead of the elections in May, the country’s opposition parties are jockeying to unseat the ruling party of two decades, with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, known as the HDP, a potential kingmaker.
There is no doubt that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party are facing their toughest election since coming to power. With inflation at 55 percent, the government has managed to slow its rise over the last few months. However, this is still far too high and is directly impacting consumer prices, which have been independently estimated to have risen to 126 percent.
Persistent inflation has been a thorn in the side of the government’s hopes of a post-pandemic economic rebirth. And the unprecedented earthquake damage in the country’s south is a significant setback, as the government prepares to plow millions into recovery. It is hoped that such large-scale spending and industrial production could jump-start the economy, though there is of course the risk that they instead spur a rebound in inflationary pressures.
Within this challenging context, the government is still committed to its contested economic policies, which are focused on slashing interest rates to combat inflation. This was reiterated by the central bank last month dropping its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 8.5 percent in the hope that the cheaper borrowing would bolster earthquake recovery efforts. The $40 billion cost of repairing the earthquake damage is likely to be doubled once reconstruction has been accounted for. There is no doubt that President Erdogan and his ruling AK Party are facing their toughest election since coming to power.
Given the president’s promise to rebuild devastated regions within a year, the state of the Turkish economy will be central to the upcoming elections. With foreign investors shying away from committing to the economy, many had hoped that an input of some semblance of economic orthodoxy would not only improve the economic situation but also the government’s administrative credentials.
Such hopes faded last week, as economic czar and former Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek recommitted himself to his political retirement. The economist saw Turkiye through the 2008 financial crisis, undertaking far-reaching reforms and advocating the kind of free market economics that would win Turkiye international friends. With the lira having shed 80 percent of its value against the dollar since his resignation from politics, Simsek’s reputation for sound fiscal management would have been a great boost to the government’s credentials. Citing private sector career commitments, his exclusion from any future government is a blow to the ruling party as it pivots once more toward economic orthodoxy given the weak lira and the wider inflationary situation.
Simsek, a native Kurd, finds himself in a similarly enviable political situation to his kin, who for decades have lacked the demographic and electoral numbers to pursue their agenda, but now find themselves central to both the opposition and the government in what will be a hotly contested election.
The Nation Alliance opposition bloc, which hopes to roll back the government’s economic policies, had a significant change in its fortunes last Wednesday as the HDP (which has the support of more than 10 percent of the electorate) confirmed it would not nominate its own presidential candidate. Though the HDP did not expressly state that it would unite with the bloc, it signaled a growing role for the party, especially as its votes will be crucial if the opposition is to exceed the 50 percent required to win the presidential election, as well as to potentially secure a majority in parliament in the polls on the same day.
The opposition leader, retired civil servant Kemal Kilicdaroglu, will still have his work cut out, however, as recent polls by MAK and Turkiye Raporu had him only between four and nine percentage points ahead of Erdogan.
Nevertheless, elections always favor the incumbent and, despite his probity and reputation for reliability, Kilicdaroglu may lack the charisma needed to take on Turkiye’s populist president. The bespectacled septuagenarian’s party has stepped away from its focus on secularism, but his Alawi faith and ethnic roots may not sit well with the Sunni Anatolian bedrock of Erdogan’s AK Party. In a system that has been configured to strongly favor the office of the president, the opposition’s ambitions may seem overly optimistic. However, whoever prevails and goes on to lead Turkiye will have some intractable problems to solve.
• Zaid M. Belbagi is a political commentator and an adviser to private clients between London and the GCC.
Twitter: @Moulay_Zaid

Inside Iran’s Regime (Part 1): Growing Fissures and Poor Morale in the IRGC?
Patrick Clawson/The Washington Institute/March 29/2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/116981/116981/

A recently leaked document—if genuine—may indicate substantial internal skepticism toward the regime’s handling of the current domestic crisis, and perhaps even pressure for limited reforms.
Last week, media outlets Iran International and IranWire claimed they had been given an eye-opening forty-four-page document detailing frustrations and criticisms among senior tiers of the Islamic Republic’s military leadership. According to their reports, the document consists of notes from a January 3 meeting between commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Person-by-person remarks are detailed from forty-five officials: six clerics, three major-generals, twenty-three brigadier-generals, five sardars (a generic term for generals of all types), and eight colonels. At the end, a report is given on Khamenei’s forty minutes’ worth of remarks.
If the document is authentic, it offers a much more negative picture of the regime’s stability and the state of the IRGC than is customarily found in commentary inside or outside Iran. This PolicyWatch—the first in a multipart series—focuses on the document’s provenance and general policy implications
Fake or Real?
Caution is in order when evaluating the document, since there are compelling arguments both for and against its authenticity. Such a product can be easily fabricated these days, and the background of the two organizations that published it may raise authenticity questions as well. This is presumably why the document has not been covered much by other media organizations—indeed, no major Western newspaper appears to have picked up the story.
The first short report about the January 3 meeting, posted on Twitter the day after it took place by the Britain-based lawyer and human rights activist Kaveh Moussavi, was widely dismissed on social media and drew little attention from analysts. Then came the Iran International and IranWire stories, along with the full document. Both of these outlets are relentless critics of the Iranian regime—so much so that Tehran reportedly made toning down the first outlet’s coverage a central demand in its recent normalization negotiations with Saudi Arabia (Iran International is based in London but funded by Saudi individuals). Partly because of this reputation, Iran International evidently receives a great many items claiming to be leaks of sensitive information.
IranWire was launched in 2013 by award-winning Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari after his release from Evin Prison. It works with many prominent Iranian journalists and has much more material in Persian than English. The outlet describes itself as having “a strong focus on documenting human rights abuses in Iran” while largely avoiding “macro issues such as the nuclear program, which are abundantly covered by bigger media organizations.” It also has an ongoing partnership with the American news site Daily Beast.
Despite the question marks about the document’s provenance, however, the regime appears to have offered no official repudiation of the purported leak—a striking contrast to its normal practice of loudly denouncing unfavorable reports, even ones that are almost certainly accurate. There is also strong reason to believe that the January 3 meeting occurred, since considerable reporting emerged about IRGC commanders gathering with Khamenei during that week’s commemorations of the death of IRGC-Qods Force general Qasem Soleimani.
Fissures and Poor Morale in the IRGC?
Like any organization composed of 600,000 people (including affiliates such as the Basij militia), the IRGC no doubt has complex internal politics in which senior officials hold differences of opinion (even bitterly so) and dissatisfied elements express disrespect for their superiors. These traits seem especially likely in an outfit with as many different components as the IRGC, which has separate, large, and powerful branches dedicated to missions as diverse as developing drones and missiles, supporting foreign terrorists and insurgencies, engaging in air and naval operations, running lucrative businesses, hunting foreign agents inside Iran, and orchestrating mass repression of the citizenry. In that sense, the serious differences voiced in the forty-four-page document should come as no surprise.
Still, it is striking to read how extensive and strongly held these differences appear to be. For instance, some of the speakers purportedly summarized in the document strongly defend Khamenei’s son Mojtaba for his recent interventions in IRGC affairs, while others bluntly criticize him. The criticism comes mostly from officers responsible for the provinces; the support mostly from those based in Tehran.
The document also characterizes military morale as poor. Abdollah Haji Sadeqi, Khamenei’s representative in the IRGC, is quoted as stating, “Based on our reports, it appears that the IRGC forces are not in the same situation as last year, particularly with respect to their morale, as there has been a decline.” Mahmoud Mohammadi Shahroudi, commander of the Basij seminary students, purportedly stated that “around 5,000 members have left” in recent months, noting, “I believe that the recent issues of abandoning religious clothing, as well as conflicting beliefs among students and clerics in the last two months, may have been a surprise.” Mohsen Karimi, commander of the IRGC’s Ruhollah Brigade stationed near Tehran, mentioned that some soldiers had been arrested after holding protests; he also described the situation on the ground around the city of Arak southwest of the capital, noting that belief in the Islamic Republic’s system had declined by half. Hassan Hassanzadeh, head of the IRGC’s Mohammad Rasulullah Corps of Greater Tehran, noted that some soldiers had been found to be sympathizing with people on the street during protests rather than carrying out orders. And Ehsan Khorshidi, a deputy IRGC commander in Alborz province, stated, “Recently we have witnessed instances of disruption and aid by armed forces toward civilians.” He also described soldiers stealing from a storage depot to distribute goods to civilians.
No Clear Voice Commanding Universal Respect
One of the most remarkable aspects of the comments reported in the leaked document is how little respect and support they show for the regime and IRGC leadership. Numerous speakers lash out at President Ebrahim Raisi and his team for incompetence and mismanagement, but criticizing elected governments is hardly unusual among regime and military officials. What is surprising is how few of them made explicit statements supporting the revolution’s general direction or Khamenei’s leadership.
To be sure, some of the quoted officials do stand up for the Supreme Leader. For example, Awaz Shahabifar, military advisor to the Qods Force in Iraq, purportedly complains, “These conversations show that you object to the leadership. We were supposed to stand by the leader’s side in difficult times.” Yet few others pick up this theme, and there is no sense in the document that the speakers couched their candid criticism in the context of general support for the leadership or the revolution’s ideology.
Of course, this could be a product of how the remarks were reported. Perhaps the rapporteur found such statements so unexceptional as to not include them. Yet it could also be the case that no figure in the regime still commands the same level of respect and unquestioning loyalty seen in the past.
Policy Implications
Even if the leaked document proves to be genuine, it is still just a description of a meeting rather than a complete, verbatim transcript, and may therefore reflect what the rapporteur or leaker wanted to portray as much as what was actually expressed. Again, however, it is quite noteworthy that the regime has not rushed to insist that all IRGC commanders hold the same positive views, or that reports of internal fissures are fake or exaggerated. This suggests that at least some regime figures are willing to live with—or even wanted to publicize—reports that powerful voices inside the system are calling for substantial change.
The main takeaway from the document is that foreign policymakers and analysts should be cautious about any assessments that the Islamic Republic’s control over Iranian society is rock-solid, or that IRGC commanders are ready, able, and willing to do whatever it takes to keep the regime in power while it continues to eschew major concessions to public opinion. Perhaps the internal voices for reform that gives people more freedom (even if not more voice over government decisions) are stronger than believed. The general rule with authoritarian regimes is that they look like they cannot be challenged—right up until the situation suddenly changes and they look like they cannot persist. The purportedly leaked document suggests that one cannot be completely sure where the Islamic Republic ranks on that scale.
*Patrick Clawson is the Morningstar Senior Fellow and director of research at The Washington Institute.