Voter turnout to ‘test’ Opposition
THOUSANDS JOIN PEACEFUL PRE-POLL BOYCOTT MARCH
KUWAIT CITY, Nov 30: Tens of thousands participated in an opposition march on the Gulf Road on Friday calling for the boycott of the upcoming parliament elections on Dec 1.
Opposition activists organized the third ‘Nation’s Dignity’ rally a day before the elections under the newly established one-vote electoral system in objection to the historic event.
The licensed procession ended peacefully amidst light security presence, unlike previous events, and lasted the scheduled two-hours of the afternoon. It took place from Safir International Hotel to the Kuwait Towers and back.
Wearing orange scarves, symbolic of the opposition movement, men, women and children released hundreds of orange balloons to the sky and waved orange flags as well as Kuwait’s national flag. Slogans calling for the boycott of elections and rejecting the one-vote decree of urgency were chanted and placards were carried attesting the same.
“The people want to bring down the decree,” chanted participants, “we reject the one-vote ... boycott, boycott, boycott”.
Prominent opposition figures joined the procession. Referring to the boycott campaign, former MP Musallam Al-Barrak said “tomorrow we will celebrate the toppling of the unconstitutional decree”.
The opposition said that the new Parliament will not be deemed legitimate by the people who will continue protesting against the next National Assembly until its “brought down”.
Estimate
The march’s organizers estimated that 200,000 attended the procession, while eyewitnesses say the estimate is much less.
Kuwait’s disaffected say they seek democratic reform, not revolution in the mould of Arab Spring revolts elsewhere. His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said the amendments to voting rules were made to preserve national security and stability.
“The people want to bring down the decree!” demonstrators chanted, in a variation on the slogans of uprisings that have ousted autocratic rulers of four other Arab states.
“The message that the Kuwaiti people send ... is that they refuse the changing of the election law by the authorities,” said Ahmed Al-Saadoun, a former parliament speaker and now prominent opposition figure. “The number of people is a reflection that this decree must be scrapped.”
Former MP Jamaan AlHarbash, an Islamist, said the march was the largest of its kind in Kuwait’s history. “The Kuwaiti people refuse elections and refuse the pro-government parliament.”
“This (voting rule) change is against our rights,” 28-year-old social worker Abdul Mohsen said. “There is corruption in the government. We want to fight corruption.”
Bader Al-Bader, an unemployed 33-year-old, said: “The
government does not believe in having the real democracy that most people believe in nowadays. They believe Kuwait is just a big bag of money and an oil rig.”
Kuwait has the most open political system among the Gulf Arab states and the government authorised Friday’s march, hoping to see the opposition let off steam before Saturday’s vote.
“The people are not against the ruler, they are against corruption and corrupt people, and people who think about changing the Constitution,” former opposition MP Musallam Al-Barrak said.
Parliament has legislative powers and the right to question ministers. But the Amir, head of the Al-Sabah family that has ruled Kuwait for 250 years, appoints the prime minister, who chooses the Cabinet.
The Amir used emergency powers in October to cut the number of votes per citizen to one from four, saying the change would fix a flawed system and maintain security and stability.
Under the old system, candidates could call on supporters to cast additional ballots for their allies. Supporters of that system say such informal affiliations are crucial in a country where political parties are banned.
The government says opposition lawmakers have used parliament to settle scores rather than helping pass laws needed for economic development. Opposition politicians accuse the government of mismanagement and have called for an elected Cabinet.
Kuwait state has held four parliamentary elections since 2006, after a series of assemblies collapsed because of the power struggle between elected lawmakers and the government, which has held up investment and economic reforms.
Opposition lawmakers won around twothirds of the 50-seat National Assembly in February and formed a bloc that put pressure on the government, forcing two ministers from office.
“I am conscious that there are those who have called for a boycott of the election,” Information Minister Sheikh Mohammad Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah said late on Thursday.
“I find this of great regret and I hope to the bottom of my heart that the 400,000plus Kuwaitis who have the ability to cast their vote for their preferred candidate will exercise their democratic right to do so.”
With opposition lawmakers opting out, the incoming parliament will include many political newcomers. A low turnout would undermine parliament’s legitimacy in the eyes of many.
“The Amir changed the voting rules. We believe the change has to come with the parliament. It is the parliament that represents the people,” said protester Hanouf, 40, a marketing specialist who declined to give her second name.
She said current election candidates were mostly new and unqualified with “no clue how to be in parliament or politics”.
The opposition, a disparate collection of moderate Islamists, Salafis and populist politicians, dominated parliament until it was dissolved after a June court ruling.
The opposition has won the backing of youth groups who have already helped organise protests against the voting rule change.
Kuwaitis often hold protest rallies outside parliament. But recent marches in the streets beyond, which authorities said were unlicensed, have been broken up by police using tear gas, smoke bombs and baton charges. BEIRUT, Nov 30, (Agencies): Syrian air force jets bombarded rebel targets on Friday close to the Damascus airport road and a regional airline said foreign carriers had halted flights to the capital.
Activists said security forces clashed with rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad around Aqraba and Babilla districts on the southeastern outskirts of the Damascus which lead to the international airport.
Internet connections and most telephone lines were down for a second day, the worst communications outage in a 20month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have fled the country, and millions been displaced.
The mostly Sunni Muslim rebels who are battling Assad, from Syria’s Alawite minority linked to Shiite Islam, have been making gains around Syria by overrunning military bases and have been ramping up attacks on Damascus, his seat of power.
A resident of central Damascus said he saw black smoke rising from the east and the south of the city on Friday morning and could hear the constant boom of shelling. State television said Assad’s forces were fighting rebels in those areas.
An aviation source in neighbouring Jordan said two Syrian Air flights crossed Jordanian air space heading for the Syrian capital on Friday evening and that Damascus airport was open, although international airlines were staying away.
The head of the national airline Syria Air said services were operating according to schedule, state television reported.
EgyptAir and Emirates have suspended flights to Damascus in response to the recent violence and there was no sign that Air Arabia and flydubai had flown scheduled trips on Friday.
“Airlines are not operating to Damascus today,” said a Dubai-based airline official.
Targets
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition monitoring group, said jets were bombarding targets in rural areas around Aqraba and Babilla, where rebels clashed with Assad’s forces.
The Observatory’s director, Rami Abdelrahman, said the airport road was open, but there was minimal traffic.
A rebel contacted by Reuters who said he was on the airport road said his fighters would not let the airport operate. “We will never open the road. It’s still closed and it will remain closed. We will not allow planes to arrive,” he said.
Rebels said that at least one mortar round was fired at the airport during clashes on Thursday.
“We want to liberate the airport because of reports we see and our own information we have that shows civilian airplanes are being flown in here with weapons for the regime. It is our right to stop this,” rebel spokesman Musaab Abu Qitada said.
US and European officials said rebels were making gains in Syria, gradually eroding Assad’s power, but said the fighting had not yet shifted completely in their favour.
A Damascus-based diplomat said he believed the escalation in fighting around the capital was part of a government offensive which aimed to seal off the state-controlled centre of the city from rebel-held rural areas to the south and east.
Activists say Assad’s forces have also been shelling the Daraya district to the was still voting on the draft, which the Islamists say reflects Egypt’s new freedoms. “There is no place for dictatorship.”
The opposition cried foul. Liberals, leftists, Christians, more moderate Muslims and others had withdrawn from the assembly, saying their voices were not being heard.
Thousands packed Tahrir and hit the streets in Alexandria and cities on the Suez Canal, in the Nile Delta and south of Cairo, responding to opposition calls for a big turnout.
The disparate opposition which has struggled to compete with well-organised Islamists has been drawn together and reinvigorated by the crisis. Tens of thousands had also protested on Tuesday, showing the breadth of public anger.
But Islamists have a potent political machine and the United States has looked on warily at the rising power of a group they once kept at arms length now ruling a nation that has a peace treaty with Israel and is at the heart of the Arab Spring.
Protesters said they would push for a ‘no’ vote in a referendum, which could happen as early as mid-December. If approved, it would immediately cancel the president’s decree.
“We fundamentally reject the referendum and constituent assembly because the assembly does not represent all sections of society,” said Sayed el-Erian, 43, a protester in Tahrir and member of a party set up by opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei.
“Leave, leave,” some chanted, another anti-Mubarak slogan.
In the Cairo mosque where Morsi said Friday prayers, some opponents chanted against him but backers quickly surrounded him shouting in support, journalists and a security source said.
Thousands of Morsi supporters also southwest of the city, trying to prevent rebels from cementing their hold of an area which could give them a presence in a continuous arc from the northeast to southwest of the capital’s outer districts.
“I don’t know whether the shelling has succeeded in pushing back the FSA (rebels) — experience shows that they return very quickly anyway,” the diplomat said. “We seem to be entering a decisive phase of the Damascus offensive.”
Syria’s Internet shut down on Thursday, a move which activists blamed on authorities but which authorities variously attributed to a ‘terrorist’ attack or a technical fault. Global hacking network Anonymous said it would shut down Syrian government websites around the world in response to a move it said was aimed at silencing Assad’s critics.
“As we discovered in Egypt, where the dictator (Hosni) Mubarak did something similar — this is not damage that can be easily or quickly repaired,” it said, referring to an Internet outage during the early days of the 2011 uprising in Egypt.
French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said the communications cut was of a matter of “extreme concern”.
“It is another demonstration of what the Damascus regime is doing to hold its people hostage. We call on the Damascus regime to reestablish communications without delay,” he said.
CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said on its blog that saboteurs would have had to simultaneously cut three undersea cables into the Mediterranean city of Tartous and also an overland cable through Turkey in order to cut off the entire country’s Internet access.
“That is unlikely to have happened,” it said.
Meanwhile, a leader of an al-Qaedainspired militant group fighting the regime in Syria said his men do not fear death and they are determined to form an Islamic state.
Jabhat al-Nusra — Arabic for “the Support Front” — has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings and other attacks on regime targets across the country. The group has raised fears of a growing Islamic militant element among the forces seeking to topple President Bashar turned out in Alexandria.
The UN human rights chief has warned Morsi that his decree expanding his powers would put him beyond the law and open the door to human rights violations, her spokesman said on Friday.
Navi Pillay sent a letter to Morsi on Tuesday, urging him to reconsider last week’s decree and warning that “approving a constitution in these circumstances could be deeply divisive,” spokesman Rupert Colville told a UN briefing.
Pillay, in her letter, said Egypt needed stronger guarantees to prevent it reneging on the binding principles of the main human rights treaty guaranteeing civil and political rights that Cairo ratified 30 years ago.
She called on Morsi to launch impartial investigations and “truth-seeking processes” and make sure the law worked without allowing a return of the human rights abuses seen under Morsi’s autocratic predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. Assad.
“Thanks to our strong faith we do not fear death, because we think that if you are killed by the hands of this regime, then we will be martyrs and we will go to paradise,” said Sheik Abu Ahmed, 41, a regional military commander for alNusra in the northern Hasaka region.
“We want Sharia (Islamic law) to be applied because it’s the right path for all humanity,” he added. “All these constitutional laws couldn’t realize the people’s happiness.”
Abu Ahmed did not give his real name in an interview this week with The Associated Press or explain why he was using a nom de guerre. He and his fighters were reluctant to reveal much personal information or say what they did before the civil war.
Syria’s conflict started 20 months ago as an uprising against Assad, whose family has ruled the country for four decades. It quickly morphed into a civil war, with rebels taking up arms to fight back against a bloody crackdown by the government. According to activists, at least 40,000 people have been killed since March 2011.
Conspiracy
Assad blames the revolt on a conspiracy to destroy Syria, saying the uprising is being driven by foreign terrorists, not Syrians seeking change.
Analysts say most of those fighting Assad’s regime are ordinary Syrians and soldiers who have defected, disenchanted with the authoritarian government. But increasingly, foreign fighters and those adhering to an extremist Islamist ideology are turning up on the front lines. The rebels try to play down the Islamists’ influence for fear of alienating Western support.
It’s difficult to gauge how much power Jabhat al-Nusra has in the uprising. Although Abu Ahmed says only a tiny fraction of the group’s fighters are foreign, others have estimated that its fighters come from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Balkans and elsewhere. Many are veterans of previous wars who came to Syria for what they consider a new “jihad,” or holy war, against Assad.
Jabhat al-Nusra has become notorious prised,” Azoulay told reporters. “When they make their first nuclear explosion they will have to withdraw (from the NPT).”
The IAEA is due to hold talks in Tehran on December 13 aimed at addressing what the agency calls “overall, credible” evidence that until 2003, and possibly since, Iran conducted activities “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.”
Several rounds of talks this year were fruitless however and Washington’s envoy to the IAEA, Robert Wood, said Thursday that the United States would push for the agency’s board to take the rare step of referring Iran to the UN Security Council if Tehran displays no “substantive cooperation” by its next board meeting in March.
On a parallel diplomatic track, the P5+1 powers — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — said after a meeting in Brussels last week that they want talks with Iran “as soon as possible”. This may happen as early as December.
But it is far from clear whether the P5+1 will want to sweeten an offer, made in talks in May and June, which for Tehran stopped short of offering sufficient relief from sanctions that have started to cause major economic problems this year.
Meanwhile, a Russian-built nuclear reactor in Iran was shut down last month to limit any damage after stray bolts were found beneath the fuel cells, a Russian nuclear industry source said on Friday.
The explanation for the shutdown of the 1,000-megawatt Bushehr plant contradicted assurances by Iran that nothing unexpected had happened and removing nuclear fuel from the plant was part of a normal procedure.
“Indicators showed that some small external parts were ... in the reactor ves- for numerous suicide bombings targeting regime and military facilities. Syria’s rebels have tried to disassociate themselves from the bombings for fear their uprising will be tainted with the al-Qaida brand.
The fear of Islamic extremism resonates deeply in Syria, a country with many ethnic and religious minorities. The Assad dynasty has long tried to promote a secular identity in Syria, largely because it has relied heavily on its own Alawite base in the military and security forces in an overwhelmingly Sunni country.
But Abu Ahmed said he believes Syrians want an Islamic state.
“We think more and more people will follow us,” he said. “We think we are on the right path.”
Seventeen young Sunni men from the Lebanese city of Tripoli were killed on Friday in the Syrian border town of Tal Kalakh, a Lebanese security source and an Islamist leader said.
The security source said he was “informed of the death on Friday of 17 young men who went to Syria to fight with the rebels and were all killed in a trap in Homs province,” which borders Lebanon.
The port city of Tripoli, whose population is majority Sunni, backs the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who belongs to the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam.
“Young Islamists from different parts of the city left Tripoli this morning (Friday) and were killed in an ambush in Tal Kalakh by regime forces,” an Islamist leader in the city told AFP.
“According to our information, they were summarily executed and not killed in combat,” he said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, for its part, reported that a group of 30 rebels “were caught in an ambush by government troops in the area of Tal Sarin near the town of Tal Kalakh.”
“It is unknown if they are being held prisoner or were killed,” the monitoring group said.
A young Islamist activist from the Sunni district of Bab al-Tebbaneh said that two brothers from the neighbourhood, whose father is a cleric, were among those killed. sel,” said the source, identifying them as bolts beneath th e fuel cells.
BERLIN:
The region of Bremen in northern Germany on Friday said it would be the second of the country’s 16 states to recognise Muslim holidays.
“I am delighted because Islam and Muslims are part of our city and part of our life,” said the mayor of the city state, Jens Boehrnsen, after signing the deal with representatives of the local Muslim community.
The agreement signed reflects “mutual recognition and respect of mutual values,” added the mayor. (AFP) LONDON: International health officials have confirmed two more fatal cases of a mysterious respiratory virus in the Middle East.
The virus has so far sickened nine people and killed five of them. The new disease is a coronavirus related to SARS, which killed some 800 people in a global epidemic in 2003, and belongs to a family of viruses that most often causes the common cold.
The two cases date back to April and are part of a cluster of a dozen people, mostly health workers, who fell sick in an intensive care unit at a hospital in Zarqa, Jordan. Officials are investigating whether the 10 other people who grew sick in Zarqa also were infected and how the virus might have spread.
“It’s too early to say whether human-tohuman transmission occurred or not, but we certainly can’t rule it out,” said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl. (AP) LONDON: Some 170 boxes of top secret files on Britain’s former colonial administrations have gone missing, while those relating to Singapore may have been destroyed in the 1990s, the government said Friday.
In a statement to parliament, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister David Lidington said the department knew the files had been returned to Britain from former colonies but did not know what had happened to them subsequently.
“It remains the case that the FCO is still unable to confirm the existence or destruction of 170 boxes of top secret colonial administration files known to have been returned to the UK,” Lidington said. (AFP)
MUZAFFARABAD,
Pakistan: Landslides triggered by heavy snow killed three soldiers and left 18 other people missing on Friday in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the military said.
The incident took place in the Kel area on the line of control with India, and the military said a rescue operation was under way.
“Three soldiers embraced shahadat (martyrdom). Eight soldiers and 10 civilians are also missing,” the military said in a statement, adding that the landslides were a mixture of mud and snow.
A first landslide hit early Friday, killing the three soldiers, said Raja Saqib Majeed, deputy commissioner of Neelam district, of which Kel is part.
Later in the morning the 10 civilians and eight soldiers made it to the site to search for, he told AFP.
“Another landslide hit this rescue party and they were buried under it,” he added.
In April, 140 Pakistani soldiers were buried when a huge wall of snow crashed into the remote Siachen Glacier base high in the mountains in disputed Kashmir. They have all been declared dead. (AFP) LOS ANGELES: Three people were killed in the US state of Wyoming on Friday including two in a college classroom, police said, as reports suggested a bow and arrow type weapon was involved.
Casper College was put on lockdown after reports of the attacks, said the city’s police chief Chris Walsh, adding that the suspected attacker was one of the two dead in a room where a class was in progress.
He said a “sharp-edged weapon” was used in the attack on the third-floor classroom, while NBC television’s local affiliate KCWY13 said that a “bow and arrow type” weapon was used. (AP) PARIS: French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Friday that a deal had been reached with steel group ArcelorMittal and that a part of a plant that had been under the threat of closure would not be nationalised.
The government has not retained “a temporary nationalisation,” Ayrault said, after marathon talks with ArcelorMittal.
The steel group had committed to invest 180 million euros ($234 million) over five years in the endangered Florange site in northeastern France, he added.
For the past three days France and ArcelorMittal have been locked in heated negotiations, pressed to meet a deadline set by the steel giant to find a buyer for two blast furnaces on the site in the northeastern Lorraine region. (AFP)