Murky Candidacy Stokes Iraq’s Sectarian Fears

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By MARC SANTORA and MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAGHDAD — A politician widely accused of running death squads might not be expected to have an easy time running for public office.

But this is Iraq. In a nation sadly inured to years of sectarian bloodletting, Hakim al-Zamili not only has a place on a prominent Shiite election slate, but stands poised to win a place in the Parliament, as early voting began Thursday morning for the infirm, people with special needs and members of the military and the police.

It is an astonishing turnabout that shows the limits of political reconciliation. While some Sunni candidates have been barred from running in the election for their alleged support of the Baath Party, Mr. Zamili’s candidacy has provoked nary a protest from the nation’s leading Shiite politicians. That runs the risk that Shiite leaders will be seen as taking steps against only those who persecuted Shiites, not Sunnis.

Mr. Zamili’s new political role has heightened concerns that for all the talk of cross-sectarian alliances among some Shiite and Sunni factions, Iraq may be unable to firmly break with its troubled past.

The embrace of his candidacy “sends the worst possible message to loyal Iraqis,” said one American official who was involved in a fruitless effort to convict Mr. Zamili at a high-profile trialin 2008. He spoke on the condition that he not be identified because he was not authorized to comment on Iraqi political developments.

Sitting inside his ramshackle campaign headquarters in Sadr City, Mr. Zamili insisted that the charges against him were no more than politically motivated fabrications. But he was unapologetic about the attacks that Shiite militias like Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army carried out in past years against the Americans and Sunni insurgents.

“Many people in politics understand that resistance was our right because we were occupied,” he said. “We had a duty to protect the people from the U.S. forces and the attacks of terrorists.”

Now that American troops are withdrawing, Mr. Zamili, the dark circles under his eyes giving him a worn look even when he smiles, said it was time to abandon armed struggle. As candidate No. 15 on the Iraqi National Alliance slate, he is part of a coalition that includes Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the former prime minister, and Ahmed Chalabi, the longtime political survivor who led the effort to disbar Sunni candidates and who draws support, American officials charge, from Iran.

“They thought they would end the Sadrist movement, but we persevered,” Mr. Zamili said.

Several years ago Mr. Zamili was a protagonist in a very different drama. The Ministry of Health and the hospitals that it oversaw were some of the first institutions that Mr. Sadr’s supporters controlled after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Zamili, American officials say, was appointed to his ministry post with Mr. Sadr’s backing.

According to the inquiry that led to Mr. Zamili’s trial, the ministry’s protection service was used as a private militia to kidnap and kill hundreds of Sunnis from 2005 to early 2007. A deputy health minister, Ammar al-Saffar, who was gathering data on abuses at the ministry, disappeared before he could turn over his findings to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. He vanished after telling associates that Mr. Zamili had threatened him.

Mr. Zamili was arrested in early 2007 after Mr. Maliki had a falling out with Mr. Sadr. American officials worked closely with Iraqi officials to build a case that Mr. Zamili was involved in murder, kidnapping and corruption. His trial was to be the first of a high-ranking Shiite official for sectarian crimes — an event, one American official asserted, that would be as important in establishing the rule of law in Iraq as the trial of Saddam Hussein.

After a two-day trial, marred by accusations of witness intimidation, the charges were dropped and Mr. Zamili was freed after spending more than a year in American custody.

Mr. Zamili denied in the interview that he had ever orchestrated the kidnappings and killings. “They accused me of fueling the violence,” he said. “Each and every person resisting and opposed to the occupation is a terrorist, a thief, a criminal,” he said dismissively.

As it turns out, he said, his arrest actually was a political boon. He has trumpeted his position at the Health Ministry in his campaign. Quoting Gandhi, he has portrayed himself as a political martyr. “It was a benefit to me because people related to me,” he said. “They saw me suffering. And suffering is good for the soul.”

The families of those he stood accused of ordering murdered say they are aghast. Ali al-Saffar, Mr. Saffar’s son, said in a telephone interview from London that Mr. Jaafari had been a family friend and that when he met with the former prime minister three years ago Mr. Jaafari acknowledged receiving information linking Mr. Zamili to his father’s disappearance.

“Despite their emphasis on personal morality, they have sadly shown they are willing to forfeit their ideals in the pursuit of power, including by welcoming into their ranks people like Hakim al-Zamili,” Mr. Saffar said, referring to the Iraqi National Alliance slate.

Manal Finjan, a candidate in the election and a spokeswoman for Mr. Jaafari’s list, said the courts had exonerated Mr. Zamili, and he should therefore be treated like any other candidate.

“We actually deal with people on the basis of evidence and documents,” she said. “He was acquitted by the court, and anybody who has evidence against him could go to the proper authorities.”

While Mr. Zamili is now a player in the political game, he did not rule out the possibility that the militias might be once again called on to defend the people. “If there were a bad situation, an increase in attacks, the continuation of unjust arrests, they will force us to defend ourselves and our leaders,” he said.

This may be a bit of bravado. Support for the Sadrists drained as Iraqis tired of violence and sectarian killings. But judging by the mood of the dozens of young men in the muddied track suits that were once the unofficial uniform of the Mahdi Army, some seem willing to return to the fight.

Before Mr. Zamili arrived, they had just received news — later denied by aides to Mr. Maliki — that a court had reissued an arrest warrant for Mr. Sadr, who is believed to be in Iran, should he return to Iraq. As angry denunciations rang in the smoke-filled room, one burly young man made it clear that Sadrists would not stand for any such action.

“We had Maliki surrounded in Basra when he visited and could not get him,” he said. “But this time, if this report is true, we will go to the Green Zone and pull him out by his head and roll him in the street.”

House Panel Says Deaths of Armenians Were Genocide

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By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Turkey and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.

The vote on the nonbinding resolution, a perennial point of friction addressing a dark, century-old chapter of Turkish history, was 23 to 22. A similar resolution passed by a slightly wider margin in 2007, but the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep it from reaching the House floor. Whether this resolution will reach a floor vote remains unclear.

In Ankara, the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued a sharp rebuke. “We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed,” the statement said. Ambassador Namik Tan, who had only weeks ago taken up his post in Washington, has been recalled to Ankara, the capital, for consultations, according to the statement.

Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and had mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.

A White House spokesman, Mike Hammer, said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had told Representative Howard L. Berman, the committee chairman, late Wednesday that a vote would be harmful, jeopardizing Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts that last year yielded two protocols aimed at a thawing of relations.

President Obama spoke to President Abdullah Gul of Turkey on Wednesday to endorse the efforts at normalization with Armenia, said Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman.

“We’ve pressed hard to see the progress that we’ve seen to date, and we certainly do not want to see that jeopardized,” he said.

The timing of the administration’s plea seemed to catch some committee members by surprise. Early in the meeting on Thursday, the ranking Republican member, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, said that the administration had taken no position on the vote. But several minutes later she requested time to correct herself: an aide had handed her an news article describing the administration’s newly announced opposition.

Suat Kiniklioglu, a member of Turkey’s Parliament who was in Washington to meet with lawmakers, said later that he thought the intervention by Mrs. Clinton — who was asked about the resolution last week before the same House committee, but did not condemn it explicitly — had come too late.

“It was done in a fashion to be able to allow this administration to say in future, when things go wrong, that they did intervene” in support of Turkey, he said.

Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America, also said he doubted Mrs. Clinton’s intervention had changed much. “It was closer than anticipated,” he said of the vote, “but at the end of the day the truth prevailed and the members made a very affirmative statement in the face of the opposition.”

Committee members were clearly torn between what they said was a moral obligation to condemn one of the darkest periods of the last century and the need to protect a relationship with Turkey, a NATO partner vital to American regional and security interests on issues from Afghanistan to Iran.

“This is not one of those issues that members of Congress look forward to voting on,” said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York.

Like nearly every member, Mr. Berman saluted Turkey as an important ally. “Be that as it may,” he added, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.”

“The Turks say passing this resolution could have terrible consequences for our bilateral relationship,” Mr. Berman said. “But I believe that Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.”

While still in the Senate, Mr. Obama had described the killings of Armenians at Ottoman hands as genocide. Mrs. Clinton, also then a senator, had taken a similar stance.

Last year, she strongly supported talks that led to two protocols between Turkey and Armenia calling for closer ties, open borders and the creation of a commission to examine the historical evidence in dispute.

Those accords, not yet ratified by either nation’s parliament, could now be endangered, opponents of the resolution said. “This is a fragile process that destabilizes the protocols,” said Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana.

In Istanbul, Ozdem Sanberk of Global Political Trends Center at Istanbul Kultur University, agreed that the protocols would suffer. “With this result,” he said, “the effectiveness of the ethnic lobbies got maximized and American foreign policy got hurt.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.

18 Million Jobs by 2012

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by RobertPollin

Unemployment in the United States stands officially at 9.7 percent. This represents 14.8 million people out of work. By a broader official measure that includes people employed fewer hours than they would like and those discouraged from looking for work, the unemployment rate is 16.5 percent, or about 25 million people in a total labor force of about 153 million. We have not seen comparable unemployment rates since 1983, twenty-seven years ago, and before that, not since the 1930s Depression.

In a technical appendix that can be found here, the author explains how he derived five key sets of findings presented in the article.

The job-creation proposals coming from the Obama administration, in the president's January 27 State of the Union address and elsewhere, generally point in the right direction, with more spending for clean energy, infrastructure and support for small businesses. These proposals follow from Obama's February 2009 economic recovery program, which injected $787 billion in new spending or tax relief into the economy over two years. However, just as last February's stimulus program was too small to counteract the evaporation of $16 trillion in household wealth resulting from the financial collapse, the scope of Obama's current proposals is nowhere near large enough for the situation today.

For example, Obama has proposed $33 billion in new tax credits for small businesses. By contrast, private borrowing by businesses over the previous six months was down by $1.5 trillion relative to 2007, with the largest proportional cutbacks coming from small businesses. What's more, Obama's call to freeze discretionary federal spending in nonmilitary areas is dangerously misguided. The fiscal deficits of 2009 and 2010--at between $1.4 trillion and $1.6 trillion, or around 10 percent of GDP--are indeed very large. But the freeze obscures what Obama and his advisers clearly know--that deficit spending is part of the solution to our economic predicament and will remain so until we see millions of people getting hired into decent jobs.

Here is what we need: a commitment from the Obama administration to create 18 million new jobs over the remaining three years of the presidential term. That would mean an average increase of about 500,000 jobs per month, or a bit more than 4 percent growth in job creation over the next three years. This can be done by combining two broad types of initiatives: measures to buttress the economy's floor and thereby prevent another 2008-type collapse, and measures to inject job-generating investments into the economy. If such initiatives are successful, the official unemployment rate will stand at around 4 percent when Obama runs for re-election in November 2012.

Is This Realistic?

The central features of this plan can remain within the framework of proposals already established by the administration. The key is getting the scale large enough. The only way this can happen is by combining the positive energies of the public and private sectors. This public-private approach is not only practically necessary; it will also counteract right-wing claims that the government is seizing control of the economy in the name of job creation. Most of the financial heft will have to come from banks and other private financial institutions. The banks alone are hoarding cash reserves totaling about $850 billion in their accounts at the Federal Reserve. Most of that money needs to be channeled into job-generating investments. For this to happen, interest rates and the risks for lending to small businesses need to fall substantially.

But it will be necessary for the government to keep injecting spending into the economy, which will add to the deficit. Scare stories aside, the fiscal deficit is not dangerously large. The interest rates the government is paying on its borrowing--as opposed to the rates that businesses have to pay on much riskier loans--remain historically low, in the range of 2 to 3 percent. This is because the world's financial magicians of just a few years ago have chosen to protect their remaining wealth by buying up the safest possible assets they can find, which are US Treasury bonds. When Ronald Reagan was running up record-breaking deficits in the early 1980s, the interest rates on the bonds were around 13 percent.

This huge gap in interest rates between now and the Reagan era will save the Treasury about $175 billion per year going forward. Also remember that falling unemployment rates reduce the deficit on their own, with each 1 percent drop generating about $90 billion in government revenues or reduced spending obligations. This is because when people are newly employed, they can support themselves and pay more taxes. We also need workers earning decent wages. Even if we didn't care about the ever-widening inequalities of wages, incomes and wealth, we would still need working people to have enough money in their pockets to boost sagging consumer markets. Conversely, when unemployment rises, the government is faced with huge extra spending burdens through unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid and related social safety net commitments. The fiscal deficit could probably be eliminated altogether if unemployment could be driven down to around 4 percent, even without spending cuts or increases in tax rates. Finally, we can extract about $300 billion in savings and new revenues by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by establishing a modest tax on speculative Wall Street trading.

One argument against taking bold measures now is that, mass unemployment aside, the official indicators tell us that the recession is over. The economy did grow at a robust 5.7 percent over the past quarter, though that may be only a short-term blip, driven by businesses restocking their depleted inventories. But let's assume that a recovery is indeed under way at more or less the normal rate of progress relative to recent recessions. In fact, under such a "normal" scenario, unemployment would not likely fall to around 5 percent until early 2017. We would not likely hit 4 percent unemployment until mid- 2018, assuming the recovery could be kept going for another eight years.

Even with a successful coordination of large-scale expansions of private and public spending, is it realistic to expect that the economy, which has been so trampled down for the past three years, could possibly create 18 million jobs over the next three years? It is an ambitious but realistic goal. This is basically the rate at which employment grew under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter coming out of the 1974-75 recession. The Carter years are widely derided through the lens of his 1979 "malaise" speech. Yet the first three years under Carter generated the fastest expansion of job opportunities of any comparable period since, including any three-year stretch under Reagan or Clinton.

The Carter presidency, of course, ended disastrously with the severe 1980 recession. But this was because OPEC and the oil companies doubled oil prices between 1979 and 1980. Even more important, Wall Street insisted at the time that Carter appoint Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve to stop the inflation that resulted from the oil price shock. Volcker immediately raised short-term interest rates, pushing them as high as 17 percent by April 1980. This brought unemployment up to 7.5 percent in time for Reagan's landslide victory over Carter in November 1980. (It is ironic that among Obama's top tier of economic advisers, the same Paul Volcker is taking the hardest line against Wall Street excesses.)

Of course, we need to control inflation, especially when it results from oil price jumps. But we can do this by getting serious about energy conservation and new renewable energy sources, as well as being prepared to release our strategic oil reserves as needed, to force oil prices back down amid a crisis. Pushing unemployment down to around 4 percent will also provoke inflation fears because it is likely to bring wage increases, as workers' bargaining power improves. But rising wages do not cause inflation on their own, as long as wage increases are in line with how much workers produce on the job. Also recall that the average wage today is about 10 percent below its peak level of 1972, even though average worker productivity has risen by about 90 percent since the early 1970s. In short, now is the time to focus on creating 18 million decent jobs and not to remain fixated--as we were from Volcker's 1979 appointment until the 2008 financial collapse--on fears of moderately rising inflation.

Reducing the Pain

Mass unemployment creates widespread human suffering. Minimizing this suffering has to be the first priority in fighting the recession. Helping people in need also contributes to countering a downward recessionary spiral and thus helps prevent another collapse. In general, the Obama administration has done reasonably well on this front, but the demands are great. More than 3 million homeowners have lost their homes through foreclosures or related bank actions since the crisis began, and the foreclosure rate is running at 170,000 per month, near the peak for the crisis. The African-American community, targeted as a large potential market for subprime mortgages during the bubble years, is suffering disproportionately from foreclosures. Clearly, in this case, the administration's efforts have accomplished next to nothing. Economist Dean Baker has proposed the most effective plan to keep people in their homes, which is to allow them to stay in their homes as renters, paying market rental rates. The government also needs to continue extending unemployment benefits and increase support for food stamps to compensate unemployed workers and the poor for their income losses.

In the same vein are work-sharing programs that extend unemployment compensation to workers who accept reduced hours that then enable their companies to avoid outright layoffs. Indeed, work-sharing can be even more effective and fairer than traditional unemployment insurance, since it spreads the reductions in work hours across a wide group of workers rather than concentrating the effects of the recession on the minority of workers who become completely jobless. Work-sharing programs have long been a major part of the social safety net in Western Europe. Over this recession, Germany has been especially aggressive in extending these benefits to prevent rising unemployment.

Such programs already exist on a modest scale in seventeen states. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island has introduced a bill that would extend these programs and provide start-up funds to create measures in the remaining states. While this would be a very favorable development, we also need to recognize that work-sharing programs, similar to anti-foreclosure measures, unemployment insurance and food stamps, do not inject any new major source of spending into the economy. They will help firm up the economy's floor. But even here they will need additional support, especially given the budgetary crisis faced by state and local governments around the country.

Bringing State and Local Governments Back to Health

California's budget is in a deep ditch, with an eye-popping 56 percent gap between expected revenues and spending commitments. Most other states are also staring at huge revenue shortfalls. The jobs recovery will not succeed until this situation is stabilized. How could it be otherwise? State and local governments account for about $2 trillion in annual spending, or 14 percent of GDP. Either directly or indirectly through their supply purchases, they generate 30 million jobs, 20 percent of the entire American workforce.

They are also the institutions most responsible for delivering basic needs to people--education, healthcare, support for the needy, public safety and infrastructure.

Unlike the federal government, nearly all state and local governments are required to balance their operating budgets every year. In a recession, tax revenues decline in step with the decline in people's incomes, spending levels and property values. This means that state and local governments almost inevitably fall into crisis in a recession. There are only two ways to avoid this within our current fiscal arrangements. The first is to build up a major surplus of "rainy-day funds." But keeping large amounts of cash on reserve is very difficult to do even during healthy economic times, given that the demands for health, education and public safety programs are persistent. The other way for states to avoid cutbacks during a recession is to receive financial injections from the federal government.

The February 2009 recovery program provided $144 billion in support to offset that year's state budget shortfalls. This money was well spent. I know this firsthand through my own employer, the University of Massachusetts. We received around $50 million last year, which enabled us to prevent hundreds of layoffs. The layoffs would have sent shock waves throughout the region, since UMass is the largest employer in western Massachusetts. One can tell comparable stories in scores of communities around the country. Another roughly $200 billion is needed now. The Obama administration is supporting measures that would amount to perhaps $30-$50 billion.

Increasing support for state and local government activities should not be seen as merely a short-term stopgap but also as a major element of a longer-term job-creation agenda. The main activities supported by state and local governments are all effective sources of job creation, in comparison for example with military spending. Thus, infrastructure projects create 40 percent more jobs per dollar than spending on the military, healthcare creates 70 percent more jobs and education creates 240 percent more jobs. So if the government just moved its 2008 budget of $188 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq into support for education and infrastructure programs at the state and local levels, this alone would produce a net increase of about 2.3 million jobs per year.

Scaling Up the Green Recovery

One of the Obama administration's main jobs initiatives is retrofitting buildings, especially private homes, to make them more energy efficient. The president has described home retrofitting projects as a "sexy" way to save money. In fact, even relatively small investments in home retrofits, in the range of $2,500, can pay for themselves in three to four years, since they can lead to monthly energy bills falling by between 25 and 30 percent. These measures also produce rapid environmental benefits, since raising energy efficiency is the easiest way to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite these attractions, private investments in retrofits have not expanded quickly enough to serve as a major jobs engine. The private market for retrofits remains underdeveloped. This is because homeowners are understandably wary about making investments when they are cash-strapped and their home values have collapsed. They are also not eager to face the hassles of dealing with banks, utility companies and work crews. This could all change rapidly if banks, utilities and community organizations could, in various combinations, figure out how to make retrofits easy and widely accessible for homeowners.

In the meantime, the government needs to take the lead by immediately advancing a major nationwide retrofitting initiative. The opportunity is enormous. There are roughly 24 billion square feet of building stock in hospitals and healthcare, education and government buildings. This is about 20 percent of all US building stock. Retrofitting these buildings would cost about $150 billion. If we assume this program is implemented over three years, at $50 billion per year, this would generate about 800,000 jobs per year over those three years. Retrofits are a highly efficient source of job creation, since all the work must be done within local communities, and a large proportion of the budgets go to hiring workers, as opposed to buying equipment, land and energy.

This government-led project could be the launching point for a larger effort to build the institutional and market support for retrofitting remaining private-sector structures on an economy-wide scale. In addition to private hospitals and schools, the potential market for private retrofits for commercial and residential buildings is in the range of $650 billion. If even 20 percent of these buildings were retrofitted by the end of 2012, it would create another 800,000 jobs per year. Retrofitting alone could thus generate about 1.5 million of the 18 million jobs we need to create by the end of 2012. About 600,000 of them would be in construction, making up for one-quarter of the 2.6 million construction jobs lost since mid-2007.

Of course, the broader green investment project will need to expand well beyond retrofits to encompass public transportation, electrical grid upgrades and the creation of a competitive renewable-energy manufacturing sector. These will all be major sources of job creation over time. The same is true for investments in rebuilding our traditional infrastructure of bridges, roads and water management systems. But if we are serious about creating 18 million jobs within three years, retrofitting is the place to begin.

Making the Banks Respectable

The most powerful factor for creating 18 million jobs in three years will be the country's private financial institutions. Yes, I am referring to the same institutions--the banks, savings and loans, brokerage houses, insurance companies and hedge funds--whose reckless practices created the economic crisis in the first place.

That is the point. Financial institutions are a formidable force for both good and bad. They were effectively regulated for roughly thirty years after World War II, in the shadow of the 1930s financial collapse and Depression. This played a major role in generating the "Golden Age" of American capitalism through the mid-1970s, with rapid growth, low unemployment rates, diminishing inequality and historically unprecedented levels of financial stability. Without delving here into the details of today's debate on how to re-regulate finance--a debate, incredibly, still dominated by Wall Street--let's be clear on first principles. This is simple: we need regulations that will help channel credit toward productive, job-generating activities and away from hyper-speculation. For starters, that means pushing the lion's share of the banks' $850 billion in cash reserves into productive investments.

Of course, the banks need to maintain a reasonable supply of cash reserves as a cushion against future economic downturns. One of the main causes of the 2008-09 crisis and other recent financial crises was precisely that the banks' cash reserves were far too low.

In 2007 banks were holding only $21 billion in cash reserves. But increasing reserves from $21 billion to $850 billion in little more than a year is a new form of Wall Street excess. Let's say that banks should keep $200 billion in reserves as a cushion, a level roughly in line with the amounts they held during the era of regulation. The banks could still lend $650 billion to businesses just from the funds they are sitting on. At the very least, we could assume that overall new lending for productive, job-creating activities could be in the range of $700 billion or above, once we allow for funds coming from savings and loans, insurance companies and other financial institutions in addition to the commercial banks. We would then anticipate that the financial institutions would increase business lending by comparable amounts in 2011 and 2012. Doing so would help set a level of overall lending at roughly its average level during previous economic recoveries. At the same time, expanding credit and productive business investments by around $700 billion per year could by itself deliver nearly 18 million new jobs by the end of 2012.

A big problem is not only that banks are reluctant to lend but also that businesses are unwilling to borrow. Businesses have been heavily scarred by the recession and are not eager to take on new risks. Financial market policies therefore need to focus on helping to boost business confidence and reduce the risks of job-creating investments. The first step here would be for the Federal Reserve to substantially lower the interest rates at which private businesses may borrow. The Fed has been maintaining the interest rate at which private banks borrow among themselves--the "federal funds rate"--at little more than zero for more than a year. But the rates at which nonfinancial businesses may borrow are at historic highs relative to the nearly zero federal funds rate.

An average solid business now has to pay about 6.5 percent interest for a long-term loan, roughly 6 percent more than the rate at which banks may borrow. The Fed needs to push the business borrowing rates down to 3 to 4 percent. The Fed has the power to make such a move, though to do so would certainly deviate from standard practice. But let's recall that nothing the Fed did during the 2008-09 crisis to bail out the banks followed the rule book. It is time for the Fed to pursue innovative policies that will directly benefit ordinary businesses and working people.

The government also needs to intervene to lower the risks facing banks making loans for productive investments and the businesses doing the investing. The policy tool to ramp up here is the government's loan guarantee programs, which support small businesses, green investments, students, rural development and affordable housing. In 2007, the last year before the recession, the government guaranteed about $250 billion in private-sector loans.

The government should roughly double the level of support--i.e., guaranteeing another $250 billion in loans per year--to dramatically expand low-risk opportunities for a wide range of job-generating investments. The proposals being advanced to create a specialized Green Bank as well as an Infrastructure Bank fit comfortably within this broader agenda of channeling the country's financial resources to high-priority projects. At the same time, if banks decide they still can't resist pouring huge sums into the Wall Street casino, they will have to forfeit their eligibility for loan guarantees. The banks should also be required to continue holding high levels of cash reserves as a cushion against their high-stakes gambling. Keep in mind that the government holds controlling stakes in AIG--what had been the world's largest and most sophisticated financial insurance company--as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, still the most influential mortgage-lending institutions. AIG, Fannie and Freddie could easily convert part of their operations previously devoted to hyper-speculation to supporting guaranteed loans focused on job creation.

What happens when businesses default on these guaranteed loans? Won't this blow a hole in the government's fiscal deficit? Here is what recent experience tells us. In 2007 about 4 percent of the government's guaranteed loans went into default. If we assume that the default rate remained at roughly the 2007 level for this expanded program, that would add about $9 billion, or 0.3 percent, to the federal budget. Even if, implausibly, the default rate on the new loans doubled relative to the 2007 level, that would still increase the federal budget by only 0.6 percent. In short, roughly doubling the government's traditional loan-guarantee programs is eminently affordable as well as an effective means of reducing risks for private businesses, which in turn would encourage them to make the $700 billion in new job-creating investments we need.

How does the set of proposals outlined here realistically get us to 18 million new jobs by the end of 2012? Starting with the $850 billion cash hoard that commercial banks are holding in their Federal Reserve accounts, we move about $700 billion in new credit into domestic employment-focused investments. Assuming we have established a firm floor for the economy through the measures discussed above, injecting $700 billion in new spending into the economy will generate about 5.5 million jobs in 2010. That's because this $700 billion will generate a 5 percent rate of GDP growth, which in turn translates into about 4 percent employment growth. My calculation here assumes that the mix of total employment will shift toward green activities and education, where the jobs per dollar of spending are significantly higher than alternatives such as fossil fuel energy and military spending. We then build from the momentum of a strong 2010 recovery to maintain the roughly 4 percent rate of employment growth in 2011 and 2012, which will create about 6 million jobs in 2011 and 6.5 million in 2012. By the end of 2012, about 156 million people would be employed, 18 million more than the 138 million working today (see www.peri.umass.edu for details on these and related calculations).

The necessity of advancing a jobs program on this scale follows from the fact that the crisis before us is not just 9.7 percent unemployment, narrowly defined, or 16.5 percent unemployment, more reasonably defined, though these figures obviously speak volumes about the interlocking failures of our political and economic systems. Even under a fairly favorable economic scenario, we will be saddled with deep unemployment problems well beyond the 2012 presidential election and perhaps up to the 2016 election, unless we take dramatic action now. Given the severity of the 2008-09 financial crash and recession, it would also be foolish to assume that a healthy recovery is a sure bet. Making things worse is that the Obama administration and Democratic Congress--yes, the Democrats do still hold strong majorities in both Houses--appear unwilling to take actions consistent with the depth of the problems at hand.

Perhaps one can forgive them for underestimating what was needed with the February 2009 recovery program. The full extent of the financial crash and recession were not evident then. I too underestimated what was needed at the time, writing in these pages fifteen months ago ("How to End the Recession," November 24, 2008). The facts and choices before us are now much clearer. We can indeed create 18 million jobs and drive the unemployment rate to 4 percent by the end of 2012. But we have to begin now, we have to stop thinking small and we have to be willing to fight.

About Robert Pollin

Robert Pollin is a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts. His recent publications include Green Recovery (co-written, Center for American Progress) and Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (Verso)

Missile 'kills Lashkar-e-Jhangvi leader' in Pakistan

Obituary: Qari Mohammad Zafar

The head of Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was killed by a US drone air strike in North Waziristan on 24 February, the BBC has learned.

Qari Mohammad Zafar is believed to have led the Sunni Muslim extremist group, which has close links with al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, since 2005.

Mufti Abuzar Khanjari had now replaced Zafar, militants told BBC Urdu.

Zafar was wanted by US and Pakistani authorities over the March 2006 attack on the US consulate in Karachi.

The US had offered a $5m (£3.3m) reward for information leading to his arrest or capture.

Qari Mohammad Zafar is believed to have been living in South Waziristan where he is said to have been closely involved with Qari Husain - allegedly the Taliban's chief trainer of suicide bombers.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was banned in 2001 for its role in fanning sectarian violence. It is also linked with the 2002 murder of US reporter, Daniel Pearl and other militant attacks, particularly in the southern city of Karachi.

The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad says that analysts believe many attacks claimed by the Taliban in recent years were in fact carried out by Qari Zafar's Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

The group is believed to be behind the Punjabi Taliban who are blamed for a series of audacious assaults against top Pakistani military targets in 2009.

A Write-In Campaign

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Many Arab-Americans check 'white' on the U.S. Census. Why community leaders want to change that.

By Roqaya Ashmawey | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Mar 1, 2010

Ten years ago, when Sarah Kazem's dad filled out the U.S. Census form for the household, he racially identified his family of Egyptian descent as "white" when he answered the question on race. But this time around, Kazem, a 22-year-old Michigan resident, is going to make sure her dad marks "Some Other Race" and write in "Arab" instead.

"Why are we marking white when we're Arab?" she asks. But that is how the Census counts Arabs. After 20th-century Syrian immigrants won citizenship as "whites," Uncle Sam applied the label to all Arabs. To change that, a California-based group of Arab-American leaders formed the Arab Complete Count Committee and launched a campaign dubbed "Check It Right, You Ain’t White." The campaign—which has been circulated nationally through the Web—is an attempt to get people of Arab origin to write in their true ancestry.

"We're like an anomalous minority," says Omar Masry, 30, co-chair of the Orange County-based committee. "It seems we get counted or magnified whenever something bad happens, but where there's an opportunity for minorities, we feel marginalized."

If the campaign is successful, experts say the official Arab-American population could swell from an estimated 1.2 million people to more than 4 million—a leap that could help the group coalesce into a distinct and formidable political block.

The problem: many Arabs, fearful of terrorism-related witch hunts, are reluctant to fill out the census form at all, much less self-identify unnecessarily as Arabs. "There's fear of profiling, especially heightened after 9/11," says Masry, who is an Irvine, Calif., city planner of Lebanese and Saudi descent. "So what we try to do is educate Arabs that, by law, the information they provide can't be shared." (The Census Act prohibits the disclosure of individually identifiable information.)

"The laws that govern our confidentiality are very strict," says James Christy, regional director of the U.S. Census Bureau in Los Angeles. "We don't share information with any other agency; it's not allowed, and it's not done."

After being contacted by community leaders with concerns that Arab-Americans are fearful of filling out census forms, the bureau hired Arab-speaking specialists, such as Manar Fakhoury from Claremont, to work directly with the population, Christy says. "Throughout the years, Arabs have become distrustful of the government," Fakhoury said. "We understand they've been hurt in the past, but we reiterate that the census is safe."

Masry contends that an inaccurate count negatively affects Arab-Americans' political influence. "When policymakers and pundits in the political sphere see these artificially low numbers, it's easier for them to cast us as this minority-fringe element."

"We want to assimilate to the point where we are accepted and heard, but still want to hold onto our identities," says Ahmad Ullah, 25, a financial analyst who is primarily of Pakistani descent but also part Arab. "We want our political leaders to include us in dialogue concerning foreign policy in the Middle East."

Helen Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation in New York, says some Arab-Americans do not feel the need to create a separate identity. Being classified as white, she says, "is a reflection of acceptance into the majority culture, one that was not so easily offered to the pioneer immigrants a century ago."

But for other Arab-Americans, the racial categories designated by the Office of Management and Budget—which handles the classification standards of federal data on race and ethnicity—can be confusing or irrelevant."Those who have recently immigrated or who have come of age in the distinctly diversity-conscious America of the past several decades often relate more with American minorities and people of color," Samhan says. "The sting of racial profiling, discrimination, and cultural intolerance some have felt, especially since 9/11, has only added to the feeling of being distinct from the white majority."

While reluctant to identify as such on government forms, many Arab-Americans still strongly identify with their origins. "You don't stop referring to your culture just because you were born here or have been here for a long time," Kazem says. "Ethnicity and culture are strong in our families, so we'll always be American as well as identify with our mother cultures and pass them along to our children."

These issues have also become part of Arab-American comedy. "We're an underrepresented group," says comedian Dean Obeidallah, who is half Palestinian, half Italian.

"A lot of Arabs do not respond to the census, and they don't realize that it gives us more influence politically to have people know how many of us there are in this country." He raised the issue along with colleagues Aron Kader and Maysoon Zayid on their recent "Arabs Gone Wild" comedy tour, which had stops in Los Angeles and Anaheim, Calif., a city dubbed Little Arabia because of its high concentration of Arabs.

And if Arabs are still fearful of identifying their ethnicity, the activists are deploying humor too: "We [joke that Arabs] are already being tracked," Masry says. "Or you remind people that whether you're Arab or whether you're any other group, you've already lost your privacy or you've given it away by posting your life on Facebook."

Ashmawey is deputy editor of InFocus News, a Muslim newspaper in Los Angeles, and a part-time temp for the Census Bureau.

The Doctor Won’t See You Now

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A critical shortage of primary-care physicians is yet another symptom of our ailing health-care system.

By Mary Carmichael | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 26, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010

After taking a month to regroup, the White House has put health care back at the top of its agenda, asking Republicans for new ideas and trying to regain momentum for old ones. But last week's summit came down mostly to the same old talking points. And even if the president does manage to get some version of health-insurance reform passed in the next few months, he and the country are still going to be dealing with the related crisis of America's doctor shortage. Primary-care physicians, family docs, general practitioners—whatever you call them, they're the country's first line of defense, the ones responsible for promoting preventive care, finding ways to keep people from getting sick in the first place, and thus bringing down costs throughout the system. If every American went to one of these doctors regularly, health-care costs might come down as much as 5.6 percent a year, saving $67 billion, according to one estimate. Yet we don't have nearly enough doctors to make that happen, and fewer are being produced every year.

The annual number of American medical students who go into primary care has dropped by more than half since 1997. It's hard to get an appointment with the doctors who remain. In some surveys, as many as half of primary-care providers have stopped taking new patients. The other half are increasingly overworked and harried. Clearly we need to find a way to increase their ranks, and both the congressional health-care bills and President Obama's reform proposal make moves in that direction. But those efforts are somewhat limited, and a more comprehensive solution could be thwarted by the same thing that's stalled the rest of health-care reform so far: politics.

The reason behind America's doctor gap is a matter of money. The average income in primary care is somewhere in the mid-$100,000s, which sounds like a lot but is less than half what specialists such as radiologists and dermatologists make. Given that doctors may graduate with as much as $200,000 in med-school debt, it's easy to see why primary care started hemorrhaging recruits more than a decade ago and why radiology and other well-paid, high-tech specialties took off in popularity.

The field has since entered a vicious cycle. As fewer people have entered primary care, the doctors who are left have been forced by tight schedules to shortchange some patients, forgoing the long, meandering chats that used to be a big part of checkups in favor of 15-minute, checklist-style appointments. The close relationships that general practitioners once had with patients drew many idealistic students into the field. Now recruiters face an extra-tough sell: they have to convince bright young would-be docs to pursue a career that won't pay very well and won't be as emotionally fulfilling as it once was.

How can schools entice more aspiring doctors into primary care? The Tufts University School of Medicine, to take one example, offers a $25,000-per-year scholarship for med students who agree to work in primary-care practices in rural Maine for much of their training period. Students on this Maine Track start shadowing doctors on the third day of orientation. This year's program drew 257 applicants for just 36 slots.

The problem with the Maine Track is that it doesn't actually require med students to enter primary care after they graduate. It can't, says Peter Bates, chief medical officer at Maine Medical Center, which jointly administers the program with Tufts. "If you're a bright kid with a great future, being told you have to be a family physician in rural Maine—even if that's what you want to do [now]—might strike you as confining," Bates says. "Why would you close down your opportunities?"

There are dozens of training programs like Tufts's around the country, as well as the National Health Service Corps, which pays back loans and hands out scholarships and stipends in exchange for a few years of service in rural areas, where the shortage of primary-care providers is most acute. Obama and the Senate have both called for an expansion of the program in their proposals for reform, which has already received $200 million in stimulus funds. Several new medical schools, including some that focus on primary care, have also recently opened. But all those changes may not be enough to fill the gap. "We need more than half of doctors in this country doing primary care," says Harris Berman, interim dean of the medical school at Tufts. "It's a bigger problem than we can solve with programs like ours."

So what else can be done? Lately, some policymakers have argued that instead of having a primary-care doctor, more people—especially young, healthy patients with simple medical needs—should see a nurse or physician assistant who administers routine care and kicks more complex problems up to a doctor when they arise. "If you're just coming in to have your blood pressure checked and your pulse taken, you really don't need to see a doctor, and you might not need to see a nurse, either," says David Barrett, president and CEO of the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass. "There are three-stripe military sergeants with two-year degrees who can provide excellent primary care. There's absolutely no reason to force all primary-care providers to have an M.D."

The Lahey Clinic is an "integrated group practice"—one of the teamwork-oriented organizations, like the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, that have been lauded for cutting costs and eliminating waste in the health system. In its primary-care service, a "team captain" physician supervises nurses, PAs, and other health-care professionals who perform tasks like checking blood pressure but don't necessarily make formal diagnoses on their own. The problem with taking this approach nationwide is that nurses and PAs are subject to the same economic forces that drive medical students. Almost half of current nurse practitioners and physician assistants work in specialty practices, where the money is. Then there's the fact that the country already has a nursing shortage. How are nurses going to replace doctors if there aren't enough nurses to begin with?

There's one more group of people, foreign medical graduates, who could theoretically fill in for the missing primary-care providers. The trouble is, they're already doing that. More than a quarter of primary-care doctors currently practicing in the United States have gotten their diplomas abroad. Increasing their numbers would be problematic for both the left (which might object to poaching doctors from developing countries that need them) and the right (which would surely object to recruiting non-Americans to do a job that reliably pulls in six figures, especially when unemployment is high).

Inevitably, then, the solution to the primary-care crisis is going to have to involve something simpler: paying primary-care providers more, so as to draw more bright young physicians into the field. At least it sounds simpler. But even this turns out to be maddeningly complex.

Most primary-care doctors, like all other physicians, are paid bit by bit for each medical task they perform (unless they work somewhere like the Lahey or the Mayo, which pay set annual salaries). Private insurers decide how much they'll reimburse docs for each task partly by looking to Medicare's policies for guidance. Medicare, in turn, makes its decisions by committee. Here is the bad news for primary-care docs: most of the physicians on the committee that sets the reimbursement rates are specialists. Medicare—and, consequently, private insurance—doesn't reimburse primary-care doctors as lavishly as it does their more specialized counterparts. That's why primary-care incomes are relatively low in the first place.

Changing anything about the way primary-care providers are paid will be immensely complicated. For one thing, rural doctors sometimes perform specialized procedures because no one else is available—would they still qualify for a raise? And then, what exactly constitutes a task that should be reimbursed? For a high-tech specialist, this is often clear-cut: each scan or chemical test counts. But what about all the things primary-care doctors do that don't involve technology? "You don't get paid to talk to people and tell them to stop smoking. Nobody values my time to do that," says Joe Gravel, a family physician and chief medical officer at the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center in Massachusetts. "They'll pay for the lung transplants, but they won't pay to prevent 50 people from needing them."

In January, Medicare raised reimbursement rates for some primary-care services by about 4 percent, and its payment committee will call for another small increase this week. That's a good start, says Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, but "if you're talking about changing the way students view primary care, it needs to be more like 25 percent, and that's on the low side." Both the House and Senate reform bills also include a slight increase in primary-care payments—5 and 10 percent, respectively.

To fund such a pay raise, Congress would either have to spend more money on health care or pinch some from the specialists by lowering their pay rates. The first strategy is clearly controversial—no one wants to increase health-care costs further. The second, budget-neutral strategy is bound to tick off the specialists. Peter Mandell, a spokesman for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, sent a clear message last year when the Medicare reimbursement committee suggested a 10 percent shift in payments toward primary-care docs and away from specialists. Telling The New York Times that his group had "a problem" with the idea, Mandell added, "If there's less money for hip and knee replacements, fewer of them will be done for people who need them." It's a short step from his polite, reasonable statement to rallies over the specter of rationing.

So here is the fundamental dilemma of the primary-care crisis: One of the solutions with the best chance of working is politically unpalatable, and even those who support it admit it's a bureaucratic nightmare. But without it,we may be heading for an even bigger disaster that nobody wants. Does this sound familiar? The cure for primary care, it turns out, is ultimately going to be the same thing that's needed to fix the rest of the health-care system: political will.

Defending Against Drones

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How our new favorite weapon in the war on terror could soon be turned against us.

By P. W. Singer | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010

The unmanned spy plane that Lebanon's Hizbullah sent buzzing over Israeli towns in 2005 was loud and weaponless, and carried only a rudimentary camera. But the surprise flight by a regional terror group still worried U.S. analysts, who saw it as a sign that the unmanned vehicles were falling into the wrong hands.

Today that concern appears to have been well founded. At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.

You wouldn't know it to hear U.S. officials talk. Jim Tuttle, the Department of Homeland Security official responsible for safeguarding America against nonnuclear weapons, downplays the idea that drones could be used against us. "What terrorist is going to have a Predator?" he scoffed at a conference last winter. More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. ignored a dangerous flaw in its UAV technology that allowed Iraqi insurgents to tap into the planes' video feeds using $30 software purchased over the Internet.

Such arrogance is setting us up for a fall. Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.

The ease and affordability of such technology, much of which is already available for purchase commercially, means that drones will inevitably pass into the wrong hands, allowing small groups and even individuals to wield power once limited to the world's great militaries. There is, after all, no such thing as a permanent, first-mover advantage—not in technology, and certainly not in war. The British may have invented the tank during World War I, but the Germans wielded it better in the blitzkrieg more than two decades later.

For now, however, America remains at the forefront of the robotics revolution—superiority that has come at considerable effort and expense. We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder. This year the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, and train more UAV pilots than traditional bomber and fighter pilots combined. As Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, put it in January, "We can't get enough drones."

But neither can our adversaries—who don't need their own network of satellites and supercomputers to deploy an unmanned plane. Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson built a version of the military's hand-tossed Raven surveillance drone for $1,000, while an Arizona-based anti-immigrant group instituted its own pilotless surveillance system to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border for just $25,000. Hitler's war machine may have lacked the ability to strike the American mainland during World War II. But half a century later, a 77-year-old blind man from Canada designed an unmanned system that in 2003 hopped the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland.

Today, the lag time between the development of military technology and its widespread dissemination is measured in months, not years. Industrial farmers around the world already use aerial drones to dust their crops with pesticides. And a recent U.S. Air Force study concluded that similar systems are "an ideal platform" for dirty bombs containing radioactive, chemical, or biological weapons—the type of WMDs that terrorists are most likely to obtain. Such technologies have the potential to strengthen the hand not only of Al Qaeda 2.0, but also of homegrown terror cells and disaffected loners like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As one robotics expert told me, for less than $50,000 "a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan."

The United States has not truly had to think about its air defenses—at home or abroad—since the Cold War. But it's time it did, because our current crop of weapons isn't well suited to dealing with these new systems. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.

To succeed in this revolution, we need something many competitor countries already have: a national robotics strategy. That means graduate scholarships, lab funding, and a Silicon Valley–style corridor for corporate development. Otherwise we are destined to depend on the expertise of others. Already a growing number of American defense and technology firms rely on hardware from China and software from India, a clear security concern.

Equally important, we need a military and homeland-security strategy that considers not only how we use these unmanned systems but how others will use them against us. That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for. It also means new legal regimes to determine who should have access to such dangerous technologies—lest our greatest new weapon come back to bite us.

Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

Tajik opposition disputes election of President Rakhmon

The opposition in Tajikistan has said it will mount a legal challenge to the results of parliamentary elections.

The election commission said President Imomali Rakhmon's party won almost all the seats in the lower house of parliament in the election.

It said the opposition Islamic Revival Party won two seats, and five went to minority parties including the communists.

Voting was marred by widespread fraud, international monitors have said.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the polls had "failed on many basic democratic standards".

Challenge

"The election results, though preliminary, are unfair. There was massive falsification. We find it hard to explain this to our constituents," opposition party chief Muhiddin Kabiri told reporters.

"We will take action within the laws of Tajikistan. The Islamic Revival Party is the party of the people. We will express our protest following the legal path in court."

Mr Kabiri said that his party won around 30% of the vote, and not 7.7% as claimed by the Central Elections Commission.

"We will decide whether to take part in the incoming parliament, or whether to declare a hunger strike or organise a rally," he said.

President Rakhmon's People's Democratic Party was said by the election commission to have won 45 of the parliament's 63 seats. An additional nine nominally independent seats went to local leaders seen as loyal to the president.

Election officials claimed a 87.1% turnout, a massive amount in a country where at least one million men are estimated to have fled the country in search of work.

The ruling party earlier said there had been minor violations to the poll which would not affect the will of the Tajik people.

The observers from OSCE and the European Parliament said there had been "serious irregularities" on polling day, including a high prevalence of family and proxy voting and cases of ballot box stuffing.

East Timor jails 23 rebels for shooting president

A court in East Timor has convicted 23 rebels over the attempted assassination of the president and prime minister in 2008.

The defendants - most of them former soldiers and police officers - were jailed for up to 16 years.

President Jose Ramos-Horta was shot and seriously wounded in the attack outside his home in the capital Dili.

The Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao, escaped injury when his motorcade was ambushed on the same day.

A further five defendants were acquitted, including an Australian woman, Angelita Pires, who was the girlfriend of the rebel leader killed in the assassination attempt.

"Today is the most important day of my life. I have rightfully regained my freedom," Ms Pires said outside the court after judges dismissed the prosecutors' argument that she was a key player in the plot.

Coup attempt

Most of the accused were army and police deserters who turned to the rebels after rivalries within East Timor's security forces erupted into violence in 2006, killing dozens and toppling the government.

Analysts said the case had been the biggest test of East Timor's fledgling judicial system since the country gained independence in 1999.

The confused incident, on 11 February 2008, saw guards and rebel soldiers shooting around Mr Ramos-Horta's home.

Rebel leader Alfredo Reinado and one other rebel were killed in the attack, which Mr Gusmao described as a coup attempt.

The shooting of Mr Ramos-Horta provoked a declaration of a state of emergency in East Timor, and heightened fears for the state's stability.

Gastao Salsinha, who took over the rebel leadership on Mr Reinado's death and surrendered to the government in April last year, was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The shortest sentence was nine years and four months.

The rebels had been on the run since violent protests in 2006 that left more than 30 people dead. They had been triggered by plans to sack 600 striking members of the army.

New List Aims to Stem Tide of Cambodian Stolen Antiquities

Cambodia recently released a publication that it hopes will help reduce the number of artifacts being stolen from sites and temples and sold on the international market.

One thousand years ago, Cambodia's Angkorean empire was at its peak, ruling areas that are now part of Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.

Today, its achievements are admired by two-million foreign tourists who visit Cambodia each year. Many come to visit the crowning achievement of Angkor Wat, the famed temple-city in the Cambodia's northwest.

But, in recent years, Cambodia's rich cultural heritage has been plundered, with many temples and ancient sites ransacked for statues. Those trying to preserve the heritage sometimes struggle to do so.

Hab Touch is the outgoing director of the National Museum in Phnom Penh.

He says one method recently adopted to combat the theft of antiquities is the publication of a glossy eight-page brochure. The booklet lists the different categories of Khmer artifacts at risk of being stolen and smuggled abroad.

The publication, which is called the Red List, was drawn up in conjunction with the International Council of Museums.

The Red List will be distributed to Cambodian border and customs officials, as well as to museums and auction houses overseas, as part of a strategy to combat the illicit trade.

"I hope that the Red List will also play an important [role] in protecting Cambodian cultural artifacts and I strongly believe that the Red List, in the future, will build more capacity for the protection of Cambodian heritage," he said.

The items on the Red List range from jewelry and weapons to stone heads and bronze statues. The brochure lists beads from more than 2,000 years back and wooden items from just a century ago.

It is, in short, a comprehensive time capsule of Cambodian artistic achievement.

Douglad O'Reilly is the director of Heritage Watch, an organization set up to combat the plunder of Cambodia's cultural heritage. O'Reilly says the problem of looting is widespread.

"I think that the problem is fairly substantial. We are finding that in rural areas there is quite a lot of activity. There has been, since about 2000, a significant amount of heritage destruction at archaeological sites that date especially to the period from 500 BC to 500 AD," he said. "So people are excavating illegally a lot of cemetery sites in the search for carnellian and agate beads and glass beads and other artifacts."

O'Reilly applauds the idea behind the Red List, saying it has the potential to reduce dramatically the number of items being smuggled across the border -- as long as the brochures printed in Khmer and Thai actually reach the officials at the border posts.

O'Reilly explains that many Cambodians and Thais want looted Khmer antiquities for their talismanic properties - their perceived ability to bring good luck.

He says the problem of looting of prehistoric sites started ten years ago and peaked five years later. So is it getting better or worse?

"It is very difficult to say. It appears that there is a slight slowdown in the looting of these sites and the Cambodian government can be credited with making good efforts to crack down on a lot of the looting," added O'Reilly. "So there seems to be a tide for good, but I do think there is still an issue with the destruction of heritage in Cambodia."

For his part, Hab Touch at the National Museum believes matters are improving. He says other methods are also being used, such as teaching Cambodians in rural areas about the cultural value of antiquities.

"Of course we work also to educate local people and also to get the local people to participate in the protection. Because I think it is very important that, if they don't understand, they do not protect their own culture," said Hab.

But it is not hard to find stolen antiquities. Even a brief visit to Phnom Penh's Russian Market reveals trays of ancient beads, and Khmer artifacts continue to turn up for sale in the region.

As those working to protect them know well, if the demand for Khmer antiquities continues there will always be those prepared to supply - until the day comes when there is nothing left to take.

Fresh Political Uncertainties Lie on Thai Political Horizon

Supporters of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra reacts at the Pheu Thai Party building as Thailand's Supreme Court started reading its ruling on the former leader's wealth, in Bangkok, Thailand, 25 Feb 2010

A Thai Supreme Court verdict last week against former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, accused of abuse of power and concealing his wealth, has eased the political uncertainty that had gripped the country in recent months. But, new uncertainties have emerged as pro-Thaksin supporters vow to mobilize against the government to force new elections, as a way to bring Thaksin back to power.

The long-awaited Supreme Court verdict concerning telecom tycoon and former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra ended months of political uncertainties, amid fears of fresh protests after the verdict's outcome.

Initial reaction by pro-Thaksin supporters has been muted. But threats of protests this month against Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's government adds new concerns to an already troubled political landscape.

In a verdict broadcast Friday on television and radio, the panel of nine judges found Thaksin guilty of concealment of wealth and abuse of power by using his position to benefit family-linked telecommunications business.

The court called for seizure of $1.4 billion, about 60 percent of the more than $2.3 billion of family assets frozen by the state after Thaksin, who was ousted in a coup in 2006.

Thaksin faces a new round of legal cases against him and family members on charges ranging from tax avoidance to perjury.

Chulalongkorn University political scientist Pasuk Pongpaichit says the verdict ended months of uncertainty surrounding Thailland.

"Things are clearer now about what is going to happen to Mr. Thaksin. It would be very difficult for him to return to fight through his supporters here. I suspect that he will not be able to recoup any of these back," she said.

While in power for five years, Thaksin drew his support from urban and rural poor and working class people who benefited from his populist policies of low-cost health care and rural development programs.

But the urban middle and upper class accuse him of abuse of power, attacks on the media and human rights abuses. He has been in exile since 2008 to avoid a corruption verdict in absentia that sentenced him to two years jail.

In Bangkok's working-class suburb, Klong Toey, opinions were divided about the verdict. Public-opinion polls indicate fears of further potential political tension, with a majority calling for Thaksin not to appeal the decision.

Chakra Silapanongchuk, a Bangkok a taxi driver who supported the verdict, said the court ruling proved Thaksin had been corrupt, and how the former leader had used his business knowledge to carry out the corruption.

But others, such as motorbike taxi driver Sompon, said many Thais still support Thaksin, especially those from the pro-Thaskin United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship or UDD, also identified by the group's wearing of red shirts.

Sompon says he believes Thaksin faces many legal hurdles, but he is still loved by many red-shirt supporters. He said Thaksin's Peua Thai Party would win an election over the Democrat Party leader, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

Political economist Pasuk Pongpaichit agrees. She says the verdict will act to draw more 'grassroots' sympathy for Thaksin. "If you go and talk to people at the ground level this verdict has actually increased sympathy to Mr. Thaksin among his supporters. So in other words he has not lost any support. So this political asset in terms of his supporters has actually increased," said Pasuk.

The UDD say it will mobilize protests against Prime Minister Abhisit's government with the goal of forcing the government to resign. Some observers fear violence, while others say it will be a major test for both the UDD's support base and for the government's survival.

Kudeb Saikrajang is a member of the parliamentary opposition Peua Thai Party who believes underlying sympathy for Thaksin triggered by the verdict will draw more people to the protests. "If they can mobilize people and stay for a while, I think the government has to make it clear when they are going, otherwise they cannot rule. Neutral people will ask then what they will do. I think the best way is to dissolve the house; then the government can save face," said Kudeb.

The protests are expected to see a return to the larger street demonstrations that were at the heart of the pro-Thaksin movement in early 2009. In April 2009 protests in Bangkok and a seaside resort where red-shirt protesters crashed a conference hall of regional leaders forcing the gathering to be canceled. Troops were called out to quell the protests.

For the city of Bangkok, questions remain whether fresh street protests will end peacefully or push the government to again use emergency legislation to quell violence.