Ethiopia is reportedly sending members of its army into neighboring Somalia to help support the Somali government’s effort to stabilize the region. The interim government was forced out of the capital Mogadishu when militant opposition forces took control of the city. Ethiopia’s support of the secular Somali government has led the Muslim clerics that run the Union of the Islamic Courts (UIC) to declare a holy war against Ethiopia and claim that Ethiopia is actually invading (and not just sending a few advisors).

The situation is not entirely surprising, since the Islamic militia has managed to work their way into a decades-long conflict and unify past anti-Ethiopian rebel causes while establishing a new pro-Islamic agenda. A long and troubled conflict over the Ogaden region has been a problem for both countries since Somalia became a country in 1960 (and the British gave the Ogaden to the Ethiopians, resulting in war with Ethiopia in 1964). Islamic forces seem to be effective at taking disenfranchised forces and turning them into a co-ordinated international effort to establish fundamentalist states.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Eritrea is now said to be supplying the UIC with weapons and other support. It’s not clear if this is because of Eritrea’s own decades-long conflict with Ethiopia and support of the Ogaden rebellion (as it helped them gain their own independence) or because they are sympathetic to the formation of a militant Islamic state in Somalia.

Either way, another regional flashpoint is looking more dangerous than ever. Should Iran and Saudi Arabia become more and more relevant to a fight for control of disputed land around the world it is hard to see how the Bush doctrine can help countries that do not want to live under Islamic (or any other form of) fundamentalism. So far America has accused the UIC of being in bed with Al Qaeda and the UIC has accused Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf of being a puppet government of Ethiopia. The Arab League and African Union are the best hope to stabilize and deflate this dispute, and find out whether this is another case of extremist Islamic rebels picking a fight, as respect for America in international affairs continues to fade.

I was curious why there is so little news specific to the Hezbollah demands for the release of prisoners. Who are these men and why were they put in prison?

After a few days of reading articles and vague but related stories, I found a fascinating first-person account in the Washington Post of the man that the Hezbollah want released. It seems the Hezbollah militants crossed into Israel unprovoked and kidnapped Israeli soldiers to force the release of Samir Kuntar:

Kuntar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kuntar’s mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas.

[…]

Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me.

[…]

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

A chilling story that makes you wonder if buildings in these areas will go back to keeps and castles with watchtowers, like those built in Biblical times.

Kamir was 16 years old at the time and was sent to prison. Today, after twenty-seven years, he is the longest-held Lebanese prisoner. The Washington Post explains why:

Even after my family was murdered, I never dreamed of taking revenge on any Arab. But I am determined that Samir Kuntar should never be released from prison. In 1984, I had to fight my own government not to release him as part of an exchange for several Israeli soldiers who were POWs in Lebanon. I understood, of course, that the families of those POWs would gladly have agreed to the release of an Arab terrorist to get their sons back. But I told Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, that the blood of my family was as red as that of the POWs. Israel had always taken a position of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. If they were going to make an exception, let it be for a terrorist who was not as cruel as Kuntar. “Your job is not to be emotional,” I told Rabin, “but to act rationally.” And he did.

So Kuntar remains in prison.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that Ahmad Jubarah was imprisoned for killing 13 people in Jerusalem in 1975 and was the longest-held Palestinian until he was released in 2003. But his release was not only noteworthy because of the length of detention and nature of his conviction, but because of what he said to the press. According to the Jerusalem Post:

In a bizarre twist, he made a public call for a leader of the Hezbollah guerillas in Lebanon to free Israeli prisoners. “I call on Sheik Nasrallah to release all Israeli prisoners, because I know what it feels like to be in prison,'” he said.

Back to Samir Kuntar, he has his own website that paints a very different picture of events that led to his arrest:

Israeli troops arrested Kuntar, a resident of the village of Abey, Aley, on April 22, 1979 for his involvement in an attack on an Israeli patrol at Nahariya that cost the lives of six soldiers from the Hebrew State.

That does not sound like the women and children story above. Does this significantly different perspective of the same night reflect a policy that all Israeli civilians, even children, are considered by the Hezbollah to be enemy combatants?

I was a bit surprised also to find on the Samir Kuntar website that he reports that he is in excellent health, and that he has married an Arab-Israeli woman and “registered in one of the colleges in Tel Aviv”. Strange stuff for a site that also demands his release. Jubarah made it seem like prison is terrible and no-one should suffer, but Kumar is telling a story that he is getting along quite well. His site says he achieved his college degree while in prison studying “The Contradiction of Security and Democracy in Israeli” and he hopes to complete a graduate degree next. In that context, perhaps even more interesting is a picture of him smiling and embracing fellow prisoner Marwan Barghouthi (convicted by Israel for leading Fatah’s Tanzim and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade — suicide bombers).

Barghouti has said he considers any Israeli in the West Bank and Gaza a legitimate target for attack. In August 2001, Barghouti said Palestinians must use violence. He has also been critical of the Palestinian effort to make peace with Israel.

Even more than Barghouti, though, Kuntar’s long-term detention seems to have made him a powerful icon in anti-Israel rhetoric. Here’s an excerpt from a rally last February that was posted in the news section of the Kuntar website:

“We are working on making this year the year to free our brothers in Israeli detention. Samir Kantar and his friends, which will in turn pave way to free our Syrian and Jordanian brothers detained in Israeli prisons,” Nasrallah said.

Other prisoners are sometimes mentioned by Nasrallah, like a man named Nissim who emigrated from Lebanon to Israel but was arrested and imprisoned for providing information about potential targets and IDF troop movements and plans to Hezbollah. However, I believe it is really Kuntar’s name that puts context to the story of why Hezbollah recently crossed into Israel to take soldiers hostage again, like they did in October of 2000 after Israel had withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. Although in that case, Israel did try to negotiate trading more than 400 Arabs and Palestinians in 2004 for three bodies of soldiers killed by Hezbollah and a captured Israeli civilian. The terms were negotiated under intense threats from Hezbollah:

Hizbullah’s leaders have warned that if the negotiations collapse, it will seek to kidnap more Israeli soldiers.

“If this deal doesn’t go through, definitely Hezbollah will try to capture more Israeli soldiers, and they might succeed,” says a source close to Hezbollah’s leadership. “Israel should think about the consequences of not pushing ahead with the swap. They can’t protect their soldiers 24 hours a day.”

The deadlock centers on Samir [Ku]ntar

If nothing else, it seems clear that the Hezbollah have not reduced their threats and attacks since the Israelis unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon. Kuntar might be the pretext, but his release is unlikely to be the only motive. In fact, it’s hard to know what motivated Nasrallah since he played into the Israeli’s hand and gave them the justification they have wanted to eliminate Hezbollah’s strategic capabilities. Perhaps it had more to do with Iran’s need to divert attention from their nuclear program (past the deadline and during the G8) than anything to directly benefit Lebanon or even the Palestinians.

This log entry has become too long, I fear, so I’ll end it with a human rights website, which has first-person testimony by a Palestinian man about the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza to compare and contrast with the story I started with.

I recently wrote about how the Bush administration is losing the war on Terrorable diseases (to borrow a John Stewart line) undermining scientific progress in order to replace it with pure faith (in lobbyists).

I just noticed two more topics where the Bush administration is trying to undermine science and expert advice in the same manner; by saying things are too generic or ineffective to be believed and thus should be replaced with belief in an autocratic/theocratic decision (for sale to the highest bidder). The more policy areas that fall under this fog (science=uncertain, faith=certain), the further backwards in time America will go. Here‘s the first topic:

They “are increasingly trying to portray contraceptives as ineffective and trying to redefine some of the most popular and effective methods as abortion — such as birth control pills and emergency contraception,” said Cynthia Dailard, senior public policy analyst for the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which advocates family planning.

If these Christianists were genuinely interested in curbing abortions, they’d support the use of contraceptives. But their goal is to turn back the clock, to bring back the days when women had no control over reproduction. Like right-wing Muslims, they rage against modernity itself.

And here is the second topic:

The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,� “judicial guarantees� or “humiliating and degrading treatment� do they find confusing?

[…]

Jane Mayer provided a close look at this effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers in a chilling article in the July 3 issue of The New Yorker. She showed how it grew out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s long and deeply held conviction that the real lesson of Watergate and the later Iran-contra debacle was that the president needed more power and that Congress and the courts should get out of the way.

To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ civil liberties have been trampled. The nation’s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear� people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

Perhaps Monty Python said it best:

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Our four…no… amongst our weapons…. amongst our weaponry…are such elements as fear, surprise…. I’ll come in again. […] Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!