The people of Palestine must finally be allowed to determine their own fate The drivers of violence in Gaza are clearly external. When all Palestinians can vote for sovereign rule, peace will be within reach Karma Nabulsi Monday June 18, 2007 The Guardian There is nothing uglier and more brutal to the human spirit, nothing more lethal to that universal hope for freedom, than to see a people struggling for liberty for such a long time begin to kill each other. How and why did we get here? Above all: how do we get out of here? These are the questions everyone watching events unfold in Gaza and the West Bank are asking themselves. But before answering them, it is essential to understand just what we are witnessing. This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster. The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured." How did we get here? The institutions created in occupied Palestine in the 1990s were shaped to bring us to this very point of collapse. The Palestinian Authority, created through negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, was not meant to last more than five years - just until the institutions of an independent state were built. Instead, its capacities were frozen and it was co-opted into performing the role of a security agency for the Israelis, who were still occupying Palestine by military force, and serving as a disbursement agency for the US and EU's funding of that occupation. The PA had not attained a single one of the freedoms it was meant to provide, including the most important one, the political liberty of a self-determining sovereign body. Why did we get here? Once the exact nature of its purpose emerged, the Palestinians began to resist this form of external control. Israel then invaded the West Bank cities again and put President Yasser Arafat's compound under a two-year siege, which ended with his death. Under those conditions of siege the international "reform" process created a new institution of a prime minister's office and attempted to unify the security apparatus under it, rather than that of the president, whom they could no longer control. Mahmoud Abbas was the first prime minister, and the Israeli- and US-backed Fatah strongman, Mohammed Dahlan, was appointed head of security. After the death of Arafat, Abbas was nominated to the leadership of the PLO, and directly elected as the president of the PA. Arafat had followed the strategy of all successful liberation movements: a combination of resistance and negotiation until the conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty. Abbas's strategy was of an entirely different order: no resistance in any form and a complete reliance on the good faith of the Israelis. After a year of achieving nothing - indeed Ariel Sharon refused to negotiate with him and Israeli colonisation was intensified - the Palestinian people's support for this humiliating policy of submission wore thin. Hamas, polling about 20% in previous years, suddenly won 43% of the vote in 2006. This popular reaction was a response to the failure of Abbas's strategy as much as the failure of Fatah to present any plausible national programme whatsoever. The Palestinians thus sought representation that would at least reflect their condition of occupation and dispossession. Although the elections were recognised as free and fair, the US and Britain immediately took the lead in applying sanctions against the Hamas government, denying aid - which was only needed in the first place because the occupation had destroyed the economy - and refusing to deal with it until it accepted what had become, under these new circumstances, impossible "conditions". The US administration continued to treat Fatah as if it had won the election rather than lost it - funding, arming, and directly encouraging agents within it to reverse the outcome of that democratic election by force. The Palestinian president brought pressure to bear on Hamas to change its position on recognition of Israel. Palestinians refused to participate in this externally driven coup - indeed, the vast majority of Fatah cadres rejected outright an enterprise so clearly directed at destroying the Palestinian body politic. Both the prisoners' document and the Mecca agreement signed in Saudi Arabia creating a national unity government took place because Palestinian society insisted on a national framework. Yet a small group has brought us to this point. The outcome is what we have before us today, similar to what the Americans were seeking to create in Iraq: the total exclusion of democratic practices and principles, the attempt to impose an oligarchy on a fragmented political society, a weakened and terrorised people, a foreign rule through warlords and strongmen. How do we get out of here? For the west, the path is both obvious and simple. It needs to allow the Palestinians their own representation. It can look to the terms of the Mecca agreement to see the shape that would take, and to the 2006 prisoners' document for the political platform the Palestinians hold. It needs to urgently convene a real international peace conference, which no one has attempted since 1991, as recommended in the Baker commission's report on the Iraq war, de Soto's end of mission report, and as championed by President Jimmy Carter. And it needs only to look to the Beirut Arab peace initiative to find everything it has been seeking, if indeed it is seeking peace. For the Palestinians, the path is also clear: we have come to the end of the challenging experiment of self-rule under military occupation. We now need to dissolve the PA, mobilise to convene direct elections to our only national parliament, the Palestine National Council, in order to enfranchise the entire political spectrum of Palestinians, and thereby recapture the PLO, transforming it into the popular and democratic institution it once had a chance of becoming. This is already a popular demand of all Palestinians. Palestinians in exile must take their turn again in lifting the siege inside Palestine, as the inside did for the outside after the almost total destruction of the PLO in 1982 in Lebanon and the siege of the refugee camps there in 1986: we are one people. The Palestinians have a long history of struggle in which each generation has had to break out of the coercive prison imposed by British colonial, Arab, Israeli, and now American rule, and we will do it again. · Karma Nabulsi is fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University karmanabulsi@hotmail.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2105483,00.html

Robert Fisk: Welcome to 'Palestine' Published: 16 June 2007 How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East. Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement. No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ? And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority". I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people? All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control. For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza? It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other). If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners. So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love. How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government? http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2663199.ece

Robert Fisk: Sinister strategy behind an MP's murder Published: 15 June 2007 Everybody was obsessed by figures. True, the cortège was proceeding towards the Chatila martyrs' cemetery, true Saad Hariri - the son of the murdered ex-premier whose killers are now to be tried by the United Nations - walked in the vanguard. But it was the numbers that mattered. A phone call came through on my mobile from a Lebanese MP - readers may debate his identity - when the carbonised skeleton of Walid Eido was still hot in his bombed car. "Robert, they only need to kill three more and Siniora has no parliamentary majority." True. The first words of L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper's lead story yesterday began: "70...69...68." If the MPs supporting the government of Fouad Siniora fall to 65, there is no more "majority" to support in parliament. So no wonder they were claiming yesterday that the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, must permit by-elections for the murdered assembly members, that such elections would be held even if Mr Lahoud declined to give his assent. MPs might be forgiven for losing their seats to popular dissatisfaction in Lebanon, but why should they lose their seats because of bombs or because of the accuracy - and here we speak of the ex-minister Pierre Gemayel - of an AK-47 rifle? Eido's funeral yesterday - along with that of his son, Khaled (another eight died with them in the car-bombing in west Beirut on Wednesday), was a wearying, dismal, painful affair. "Omar, Omar," the crowds cried, clinging to their caliph, and "Hizbollah out of the southern suburbs," a demand flourished with a series of obscene references to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. This was a Sunni funeral and they buried their dead beside the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh al-Husseini, who tried to maintain the existence of Palestine (and frolicked with Adolf Hitler, to the disgust of Israel and the West). Saad Hariri - more noble in vision than he tends to be in words - walked at the top of the procession. It marched past bullet-scarred buildings from the civil war - a ghostly reminder of everything we hope to avoid in the coming days -- and past the 1941 French war cemetery many of whose Free French "liberators" were Muslim Algerians and Indo-Chinese (as we would have called them then) whose Petainist French adversaries left for France under a truce that allowed them to fight again against the Allies. Walid Eido was a respected judge, a Sunni opponent of Syria, a man who had called Hizbollah's "camp" down town an "occupation" and he was murdered, as so many of Syria's opponents have been in Lebanon. No, of course there is no proof that Syria did the deed. Any more than there is proof that all the other opponents of Syria were murdered by Damascus (Hariri? Gibran? Kassir? Gemayel? Now Eido?). And as usual, there are no arrests. Martyr, martyr, martyr; that's what the press keep calling the Fallen of Lebanon. I guess it's easier that way. http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2659710.ece

Robert Fisk: Sinister strategy behind an MP's murder Published: 15 June 2007 Everybody was obsessed by figures. True, the cortège was proceeding towards the Chatila martyrs' cemetery, true Saad Hariri - the son of the murdered ex-premier whose killers are now to be tried by the United Nations - walked in the vanguard. But it was the numbers that mattered. A phone call came through on my mobile from a Lebanese MP - readers may debate his identity - when the carbonised skeleton of Walid Eido was still hot in his bombed car. "Robert, they only need to kill three more and Siniora has no parliamentary majority." True. The first words of L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper's lead story yesterday began: "70...69...68." If the MPs supporting the government of Fouad Siniora fall to 65, there is no more "majority" to support in parliament. So no wonder they were claiming yesterday that the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, must permit by-elections for the murdered assembly members, that such elections would be held even if Mr Lahoud declined to give his assent. MPs might be forgiven for losing their seats to popular dissatisfaction in Lebanon, but why should they lose their seats because of bombs or because of the accuracy - and here we speak of the ex-minister Pierre Gemayel - of an AK-47 rifle? Eido's funeral yesterday - along with that of his son, Khaled (another eight died with them in the car-bombing in west Beirut on Wednesday), was a wearying, dismal, painful affair. "Omar, Omar," the crowds cried, clinging to their caliph, and "Hizbollah out of the southern suburbs," a demand flourished with a series of obscene references to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. This was a Sunni funeral and they buried their dead beside the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh al-Husseini, who tried to maintain the existence of Palestine (and frolicked with Adolf Hitler, to the disgust of Israel and the West). Saad Hariri - more noble in vision than he tends to be in words - walked at the top of the procession. It marched past bullet-scarred buildings from the civil war - a ghostly reminder of everything we hope to avoid in the coming days -- and past the 1941 French war cemetery many of whose Free French "liberators" were Muslim Algerians and Indo-Chinese (as we would have called them then) whose Petainist French adversaries left for France under a truce that allowed them to fight again against the Allies. Walid Eido was a respected judge, a Sunni opponent of Syria, a man who had called Hizbollah's "camp" down town an "occupation" and he was murdered, as so many of Syria's opponents have been in Lebanon. No, of course there is no proof that Syria did the deed. Any more than there is proof that all the other opponents of Syria were murdered by Damascus (Hariri? Gibran? Kassir? Gemayel? Now Eido?). And as usual, there are no arrests. Martyr, martyr, martyr; that's what the press keep calling the Fallen of Lebanon. I guess it's easier that way. http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2659710.ece

Waar meesha waxbaa kasoo soo socda

Manhunt closes Melbourne centre One person died and two were injured after a gunman opened fire on a busy street in the centre of Melbourne in Australia at the height of rush hour. The two who were hurt reportedly both suffered chest wounds and were taken to hospital in a critical condition. The gunman escaped on foot and is now being sought by police. Much of the city centre has been closed, with people being warned to stay indoors, as armed officers, backed by helicopters, search the area. A weapon was recovered from the scene, but police fear the man might still be armed. The incident on the corner of Flinders and William Streets happened during the morning rush hour, sending hundreds of commuters fleeing for cover. Police believe that one of the injured victims, a woman, knew the assailant. "There is no suggestion this is a random act - it appears there was a relation with the gunman and the victims, so we are asking people not to panic," Victoria Police Inspector Glen Weir said. "There are numerous police attending the search within the vicinity of the incident and there's a large cordon and containment operation under way as we speak," Inspector Weir added. Businesses closed "A girl came out of a building over the road, she was screaming and a guy had her by the hair," witness Ross Murchie told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "She tried to grab hold of a taxi that was going by and the couple of bystanders went over to ask what was happening," Mr Murchie said. "He let go of her hair, pulled out a gun and shot them all." The other person who was injured and the one who died were both reported as male. The incident forced the closure of a number of streets in the commercial heart of what is Australia's second-largest city, with shops and offices shut as armed police and helicopters hunt for the gunman. "No-one is allowed out of the building - we have to close down everything, customers are inside, we have to remain inside," shop owner Hened Mouawad told AFP. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6762457.stm

Lebanon under US custodianship By Awni Sadeq, Special to Gulf News In September 2004, the United States and France managed to legalise their interference in Lebanon's internal affairs by internationalising its issue through the UN Security Council resolution No 1559. The UN resolution which called for disarming Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias, was passed with full support from the US and France, under the label of defending Lebanon and preserving its sovereignty and independence. The resolution demanded disarming all militias and allowing the Lebanese army to spread its control over all the Lebanese territories. Although it was said that the resolution aimed to end the Syrian presence in Lebanon, the key objective was to disarm the Lebanese resistance and Palestinian groups in preparation for placing Lebanon under the US custodianship. Designs The US wants a Lebanon that suits its interests and those of Israel, and further that serves its designs in the region. Following the resolution, Syrian forces and intelligence services withdrew from Lebanon while the arms of the Lebanese resistance still exist. The withdrawal of Syrian troops did not bring about any change that places Lebanon on the map of countries that serve the interests of the US and Israel. This has prompted the planners to carry out the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and hold Syria responsible for the crime to place Lebanon on the brink of a civil war. All the events that took place in Lebanon after Hariri's assassination, including the July war launched by Israel with US backing, and the fighting between the Lebanese Army and Fatah Al Islam militants in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al Bared, were carried out to explode the situation and make Lebanon succumb to the US- Israeli will. Nevertheless, The US, France and Israel have not achieved the required goals behind their dubious designs. So, the US and Israel have no other choice except to spark another war to correct the mistakes of the July war and make up for its losses. The war is expected this summer and the issuance of UN resolution No 1575 under the seventh chapter was to provide an international umbrella for this potential war against Lebanon and Syria. The war may be launched with international participation under the pretext of the implementation of international legitimacy. It is ridiculous that the 14th of March team considered the UN resolution that calls for setting up an international court a victory. The pro-government team celebrated the resolution as a second victory in the battle of Lebanon's independence as they considered UN resolution No. 1559 the first victory. Hurts What hurts most is that the UN resolution was issued at a request from the Lebanese government following Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's letter to the UN Security Council demanding this resolution be under the seventh chapter of the UN Charter. Second, the pro-government team does not understand the consequences of the resolution, which places Lebanon under the international custodianship nominally, and the US custodianship actually. Despite this obvious fact, this team continues to claim that it defends Lebanon's independence and sovereignty. What a joke! The situation in Lebanon makes one recalls a similar scenario - the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, which promised Jews a homeland in Palestine. Following the declaration, the British government found itself committed to create appropriate conditions and find the proper mechanism to put the declaration into effect. The British government put Palestine under its mandate and custodianship following the Franco-Anglo alliance to divide the legacy of the Ottoman Empire after the end of the Second World War. By placing Palestine under its mandate, the British government sought to fulfil its commitments towards the Zionist movement. History repeats itself now. Lebanon is now under US custodianship after the issuance of the UN resolution under the seventh chapter. Therefore, remarks made by the pro-government party, which reacted with joy at the resolution, came as no surprise. Those who called for internationalising the investigation into Hariri's murder and demanded a UN resolution under the seventh chapter, have placed Lebanon, its government, people, present and future under the US custodianship. Awni Sadeq is a prominent Palestinian journalist based in Amman. gulfnews.com

Do i here 'start an insurance company'? "In this business you have to learn that sometimes life makes you happy. Sometimes life makes you sad. Sometimes Allah gives you something. Sometimes Allah takes something away. You have to be patient. You have to be peaceful."

Havnt listened to BBC for a long time and i'm trying to figure out if this Abdisalaan is in fact a man I know who worked for the BBC from the late 80s/early 90s (cant remember when). Does anyone have a sound bite of his?

An interesting read ya Kash.

Kashafa One is not a Ethio or Riyaale fan. I'm glad he was embarrased at the airport but there are those who run around this site having a pop at anything SL without much to corroborate their posts while at the same time supporting (or are apologetic to) an occupying force. I refuse to give them that option.

^^Not sure. What are you on now? Whatever you earn now in UK uplift it by 30% will be a good start. Tax free aswell. But rents are quite steep in Dubai. Depends what your field is, what company, etc Do a google search on your job followed by dubai or ME and see what comes up. 1 Dirham = 0.13 GBP 1 GBP = 7.22 Dirham Nissan? Japanese is not my style. If its not German its not a car in my book although I drive an American :confused:

Fact of the matter is no one receives anything outside of Hargaisa. No educational/welfare programmes by NGOs etc. This will play a big role in the decision to vote. Who ever recognises this and promises to change things will get the vote.

^^No saxib. I just happen to recognise nonesense posts when i see them. My responses are usually not sugar coated.

Mods place take this to the politics sections. Thanks BBC reporter to be released 'in next few hours' Agencies Tehran: A Hamas official said BBC reporter Alan Johnston, who was abducted in Gaza three months ago, will be released in the next few hours. Abu Osameh Al Moti, representative of Hamas in Iran, told reporters on Sunday, "The BBC journalist will be released within the next hours, today." Johnston, the only Western correspondent based full-time in Gaza, was seized on March 12. His abductors, a little-known group called the Army of Islam, issued a video of him on June 1 in which he said he was in good health and being treated well. A Hamas official in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said: "We can confirm that there are intensive efforts to end the crisis of the abduction of Alan Johnston. There are encouraging indicators that he will be released in the near future. But we cannot determine this in terms of hours." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hamas said on Friday it was in an advanced stage of negotiations over the release of the British reporter, and Al Mo'ti indicated the talks were still going on. He did not specify how he knew that Johnston would be freed. A BBC spokesman in London declined to comment.

Things are developing rapidly Abbas outlaws Hamas Agencies Ramallah: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday outlawed the Islamic militant Hamas movement, his office said. A formal announcement was to be released shortly, said aides in Abbas' office. Abbas also swore in an emergency Cabinet, to replace the Hamas-Fatah coalition he dismantled after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip by force. The Cabinet is led by respected economist Salam Fayyad, who will also serve as finance minister. Earlier, Abbas had issued decrees to bypass constitutional limits on his powers to establish an emergency government shutting out Islamist Hamas, aides said on Sunday. They said the decrees, issued late on Saturday, would allow Abbas, who heads the secular Fatah, to keep a planned cabinet in place without parliamentary approval. The new 13-member cabinet was to be sworn in at 1 p.m. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hamas ousted Fatah from the Gaza Strip last week, prompting Abbas to dissolve the factions' coalition government and declare a state of emergency. Hamas had rejected the moves as a "coup". Under Palestinians law, the state of emergency is not to exceed 30 days, but it could be extended for another period of 30 days after winning the approval of two thirds of the parliament. Hamas holds a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council though Israeli arrests of its deputies makes it difficult to reach a quorum and hold decision-making sessions. That could enable Abbas to keep the state of emergency in place longer. Some Fatah officials and US diplomats have argued that Abbas could rule by decree for six months to a year ahead of new elections. gulfnews.com

Searing pain, followed by muffled obscenities, left me lying in a heap on the floor, the alarm clock still beeping impatiently. Thats what happens when one tries to be too clever. I'm niether A nor B. I just want a siesta for 3 hours a day :cool:

I know

As you were,,,,

waxaan qabto maantaa iska yar lool

^^Your rubbing it in saxib. 3 months that could be extended??? 'Somalia hala i geeyo, hawadeeda ayaan ku caafimaadaaye' LoooL, a famous sayings amongst the older generation alaahay nafta ha-udeereeye. But is it a psychological thing?

^^You are welcome to visit this giant of a construction site. Just dont ask me about my arabic. The next person who does will be snapped at! The 90s was alot more than just TV. My first car i bought for 250 pounds LoL - a Maetro Metro.

Right now I am listening to BBC Somali live (2:00PM Somali local time) and Warancade (the owner of a white spear) is saying that they were told (waxa naloo sheegay) by Ethio authorities that flights will cease . Where does it elaborate on who did the 'ceasing'? What was that you said about scoring cheap points?

LoL at neutral stance. Infantile rhetoric is reserved for a few erm well erm ******. *fill in the blanks* [ June 18, 2007, 12:25 AM: Message edited by: Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar ]

Palestine descends into abyss By Osama Al Sharif, Special to Gulf News Parts of the jigsaw puzzle are falling into place and a dangerous game is about to start - one whose outcome not even the United States and Israel can control. What happened in Gaza last week was a political earthquake, which left all those who had helped, directly or indirectly, stoke the fires that led to a bloody Fatah-Hamas confrontation stunned and outmanoeuvred. It is not Hamastan yet, but odds are that Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's reaction to the routing of his forces in Gaza at the hands of Hamas militants will not reverse the fact that the strip, which is home to more than 1.4 million Palestinians, is no longer under his control. By declaring a state of emergency and firing Prime Minister Esmail Haniya, Abbas, with US prodding, may have driven himself and his PNA into a blind alley. But if anyone is surprised, concerned or shocked by the results of last week's events in Gaza, it should not be Abbas, the Israelis or the Americans. For months, ever since Hamas contested and won the legislative elections in January of last year, the three, later joined by most Arab countries and the Europeans, have been colluding to undermine the new government. When international sanctions bit hard throughout the embattled Palestinian society, Abbas and Hamas relented and signed on to a Saudi- backed initiative in Makkah. They agreed to form a national unity government headed by Haniya. Economic siege By that time a state of lawlessness had prevailed in Gaza and most of the West Bank. The Makkah accord did not bring the two sides closer nor did it help end the economic siege. The US continued to boycott Hamas ministers while Israel refused to ease its blockade and denied Abbas any political gains. Fatah backed militias in Gaza, loyal to Mohammad Dahlan, continued to beef up their forces, receiving military hardware and personnel through Egypt. Bloody fights on the eve of Al Naqba, the 1948 war, between Hamas and Fatah, left dozens dead and tens injured. The build-up to last week's battles had begun. With the failure to bring the security agencies, all answering to Abbas and his henchmen, under government's command, the stage was ready for a final showdown. What Abbas and his US allies had miscalculated was that Hamas, while battered by recent Israeli strikes against its positions and personnel, was not fatally injured. When Dahlan's forces made their move, Hamas fought back hard and overran Abbas loyalists. It was all over within three days. The question now is how to deal with the new reality in Gaza. Arab reaction, represented by the Arab League foreign ministers' emergency meeting, is mostly rhetorical. It is up to Abbas and Hamas top man Khalid Mesha'al, who is in exile in Damascus, to reach a compromise. But that requires courage and most of all freedom of decision away from external pressure. It is unlikely that both men will able to set aside brinkmanship and rise up to the challenge that now faces the Palestinian people. The polarisation of the Palestinians has been compounded by Israeli occupation, short-sighted US policy, foreign intervention and even infiltration. As Gaza events unfolded, a confidential report by UN special to the Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto charged that US pressure had "pummelled into submission" the UN's role as an impartial negotiator, that it had made the Middle East peace process subservient to wider policies on Iraq and Iran, and that the US had got the other members of the Quartet negotiating team - the EU, Russia and the UN - to impose sanctions on the government formed after painful negotiations between Fatah and Hamas. The sanctions did not encourage the unity government to function properly. They killed it off, he said in his 52-page end of mission report published by the Guardian. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, Israel has been pushing towards, and benefiting from, Palestinian fragmentation. On the ground it has been implementing a sinister plan to partition the West Bank and isolate its cities and towns. Meanwhile, it has escalated its campaign to sabotage PNA institutions and hunt down over one third of Palestinian legislators, mostly from Hamas. State of division In reality Abbas has lost control and may soon find himself unable to sway his own Fatah loyalists. For Hamas extending its influence over the West Bank is a remote possibility. The coming weeks will deepen the state of division among the Palestinians while the US and Israel ponder the consequences of the latest developments. The spectre of a Hamas victory in Gaza is a roadmap for disaster to the national Palestinian cause of liberation. The outcome may be something similar to the rise of Islamic courts in Somalia two years ago. A Palestinian Islamist enclave will not be tolerated by either Egypt or Israel and both will be tempted, with US prompting, to take drastic action to undermine it. Furthermore, the loss of Gaza to the Islamists will be a deep blow to Palestinian unity, both at home and in the diaspora. The fragmentation of the Palestinians could be the penultimate step in a fiendish plan to grab what remains of their land while breaking the people into many tribes and clans. The current slide into soft civil war in Gaza is a bellwether of things to come as much as the infiltration of refugee camps in Lebanon by rogue movements points to vague attempts to readdress the status of Palestinians in that country. A possible way out of the current fix is for Hamas to agree to early elections and for Fatah to put its house in order and help fight the state of lawlessness that has spread across Palestinian territories. At another level Abbas should seriously consider disbanding the PNA and declaring all of the West Bank as occupied lands thus forcing Israel to face its responsibilities as occupier. Osama Al Sharif is a Jordanian journalist based in Amman. gulfnews.com