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WORLD
In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA,
Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, shakes hands with
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Damascus, Syria on
Thursday. Mr. Abbas has discussed with Syria’s leader a new
Mideast peace push and inter-Palestinian reconciliation ahead
of a trip to Washington. On Saturday, Mr. Assad said Israel was
not a peace partner, but Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel
Ayalon has challenged the Syrian dictator’s credibility.
Israeli Deputy
FM Questions
Syria’s Credibility
By DAVID BEDEIN
MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT
Jerusalem — A senior
Israeli Foreign Ministry official
responded yesterday to a press
statement made by Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad
Saturday, saying “Israel is not a
partner for peace,” by calling the
Syrian dictator’s credibility into
question.
“What interests Assad is not
peace, but rather the peace
process. Assad knows very well
that he will have to pay for peace
with normalization and open
his country to the West, which
could bring about the toppling
of his regime,” said Israeli
Deputy Foreign Minister
Daniel Ayalon. “Assad is only
interested in the peace process
in order to get his country out of
its international isolation and to
remove the pressure of the inter-
national community.”
Peace between Israel and
Syria can only be reached, he
said, when the Syrians start
negotiating without precondi-
tions and stop supporting ter-
rorist groups that seek Israel’s
destruction.
Israel To Lessen Oil Dependency
Infrastructure For Electric Cars Being Established
By SAMUEL SOKOL
FOR THE BULLETIN
Jerusalem — If Silicon
Valley technologist Shai Agassi
has his way, Israel will drastical-
ly reduce its energy dependence
on Arab oil in the near future.
Mr. Agassi’s firm Better Place is
now in the process of establish-
ing a network of electric car
charging stations throughout
Israel, which they call “the first
deployment for the Better Place
infrastructure in the world.”
This pilot program is being
established in conjunction in
several of Israel’s larger cities,
such as Tel Aviv, Haifa and
Jerusalem, among others.
So far, 18 locations have been
opened in Tel Aviv out of
150,000 planned charging sta-
tions throughout the country.
Better Place is currently
working with car manufacturer
Renault to develop an electric
car. Unlike other companies
manufacturing non-gasoline-
dependent vehicles, Better Place
has started with the assumption
that an infrastructure must be
put in place before such a vehicle
can be practical. An electric car,
as its gasoline-powered equiva-
lent, can only travel so far with-
out stations present to refuel it.
Israel is in a precarious posi-
tion regarding oil. In the 1970s,
the oil-producing Arab states
imposed an oil embargo in rela-
tion for Western support of
Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur
SANA/Associated Press
“It’s impossible to desire
peace and at the same time sup-
port and arm Hezbollah,
Hamas and the Islamic Jihad,”
Mr. Ayalon said.
Mr. Ayalon also addressed
today’s meeting between Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and President
Barack Obama in Washington.
He called the bond between the
U.S. and Israel “a natural one”
because both nations share the
common goal of stopping Iran’s
and Pakistan’s nuclear pro-
grams.
The Israelis, he said, likely
would not act against Iran with-
out coordinating operations
with the U.S., and he expressed
hope that time hasn’t run out for
a diplomatic solution to Iran’s
nuclear ambitions.
“Iran is a very weak state in a
shaky situation,” Mr. Ayalon
said. “They cannot withstand
real sanctions; their banks and
shipping companies are vulner-
able. If the world insists on
imposing strict sanctions
against them, military action
may not be necessary.”
David Bedein can be reached at
bedein@thebulletin.us
War. Gasoline prices in Israel
remain high, having reached as
high as $7.19 a gallon. This
might account for the willing-
ness of the Israeli public to try
out such a radical overhaul of
their transportation infrastruc-
ture.
The company said: “Israeli
President Shimon Peres and
[former] Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert were prime forces
behind the signing of the deal
[between Israel and Better
Place], having backed Better
Place founder Shai Agassi’s
vision for many years.
“Israel will be well on its way
to achieving its stated goal of oil
independence by 2020,” the
company announced.
When asked about Israeli
becoming a center of clean tech-
nology by Wired magazine, Mr.
Peres said: “Israel, you know, is
too small of a country to become
a world market and too small a
country to become a great world
producer, but we have enough
scientists per square kilometer
to become a world laboratory.
And smallness has its own
advantages; when you are small
you can be really daring, you can
be a pilot plant. You cannot, for
example, try a car like Shai
Agassi’s in Texas. It is too large
and would be too costly and
complicated. Here we can do it
on a human scale and eventually
extend it and expand it.”
The Bulletin
US Admits Training Palestinian Armed
Forces While PA Negotiates With Hamas
By DAVID BEDEIN
MIDDLE E AST C ORRESPONDENT
Jerusalem — The
American military now openly
admits providing military
training to Palestinian mili-
tary forces.
A U.S. military official, Lt.
Gen. Keith Dayton, assigned
by the United States to be a
“security coordinator,” has
been appointed to train 1,500
Palestinian military person-
nel. They will be available for
“immediate deployment” in
the area between Jenin and
Nablus, less than an hour from
Israel’s populated coastal
plain.
Sri Lankans display the national flags and celebrate after President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared
victory in the country’s quarter-century civil war with the separatist rebels in Colombo, Sri Lanka,
yesterday. The last remaining civilians trapped by the fighting in northern Sri Lanka poured out of
the war zone yesterday, clearing the way for government forces to wipe out the remaining pockets
of rebel resistance, the military said.
Sri Lankan Rebels
Concede Defeat
Gov’t Forces Clear Last
Rebel Zone In Civil War
By BHARATHA MALLWARACHI
Colombo, Sri Lanka —
TheTamilTigers admitted defeat
yesterday in their fierce quarter-
century war for a separate home-
land as government forces raced
to clear the last pockets of rebel
resistance from the war zone in
the north.
Far from the battlefield, thou-
sands of Sri Lankans danced in
the streets of Colombo, celebrat-
ing the stunning collapse of one
of the world’s most sophisticated
insurgencies. But with rebel
leader Velupillai Prabhakaran
still at large, the threat of
renewed guerrilla warfare
remained.
Several rebel fighters commit-
ted suicide when they were sur-
rounded, but it wasn’t clear
whether Mr. Prabhakaran or
other leaders were among them.
The Tamil Tigers once con-
trolled a shadow state complete
with courts, police and a tax sys-
tem across a wide swath of the
north. By yesterday, troops had
surrounded the remaining rebels
in a 0.4-square-mile (1-square-
kilometer) patch of land and were
fighting off suicide bombs and
other attacks, the military said.
Huge clouds of black smoke
rose over the battlefield as sol-
diers inspected the charred
remains of rebel trucks and heavy
artillery pieces, according to
footage broadcast on state televi-
sion. Civilians carrying back-
packs and rolling suitcases were
escorted from the area.
Military spokesman Brig.
Udaya Nanayakkara said the
civilians who had been trapped in
the war zone — 63,000 in all —
fled to safety during the past 72
hours. But rebel official Selvarasa
Pathmanathan said the bodies of
thousands of wounded and slain
civilians lay strewn across the war
zone.
“This battle has reached its
bitter end,” Mr. Pathmanathan
He discussed his mission at
the Washington Institute for
Near East Studies last week.
Lt. Gen. Dayton said: “We
also have something in our
pocket called the West Bank
Training Initiative where we
have plans to continue a series
of courses in the West Bank on
logistics, leadership, first aid,
maintenance, English lan-
guage, battalion staff training
and driver education. These
are led by our British and
Turkish officers with an eye to
eventually turning this over to
the Palestinians themselves.”
The premise behind
American military aid to the
Palestinian Authority’s (PA)
In this handout photo provided by the Sri Lanka Army, Sri
Lankan army soldiers receive internally displaced ethnic Tamil
civilians in Kariyalamullivaikal, Sri Lanka on Saturday.
said in a statement e-mailed to
The Associated Press. “It is our peo-
ple who are dying now from
bombs, shells, illness and hunger.
We cannot permit any more
harm to befall them. We remain
with one last choice — to remove
the last weak excuse of the enemy
for killing our people. We have
decided to silence our guns.”
Media Minister Anura Yapa
dismissed the appeal. “We want
to free this country from the ter-
rorist LTTE,” he said, referring
to the group by its formal name,
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam.
The military spokesman
denied the rebels had laid down
their weapons. “Fighting is still
going on in small pockets,” Brig.
Nanayakkara said.
Rights groups have accused
the rebels of holding civilians as
human shields, and blamed the
government for shelling the
densely populated area where
they sought refuge. Both sides
denied the accusations.
With most journalists and aid
workers barred from the war
zone, it was not possible to verify
the accounts of either side.
Health officials in the area have
said thousands of civilians were
killed in shelling since the begin-
ning of the year.
military forces is the hope the
American-trained Palestinian
personnel will fight Hamas.
However, the training of
Palestinian military units by
U.S. advisers is taking place at
the same time the PA is negoti-
ating to join forces with the
Hamas terrorist organization,
which rules Gaza.
All indications show the PA
is making every effort to co-
opt and include Hamas in its
military forces for joint opera-
tions against Israel.
Were that to happen,
American military advisers
and their Palestinian trainees
would be placed into direct
confrontation with the Israeli
ERANGA JAYAWARDENA/Associated Press
SRI LANKA ARMY/Associated Press
The rebels have been fighting
since 1983 for a separate state for
Sri Lanka’s ethnicTamil minority
after years of marginalization at
the hands of the Sinhalese major-
ity. More than 70,000 people
have been killed in the fighting.
President Mahinda
Rajapaksa has said that after
defeating the rebels, his govern-
ment will begin talks toward
power sharing and political rec-
onciliation between the two com-
munities. But many Tamils are
skeptical that the victorious gov-
ernment will be willing to make
real concessions.
At their height, the rebels con-
trolled 5,400 square miles
(14,000 square kilometers),
nearly one-fifth of this Indian
Ocean island nation.
They had a conventional army
complete with artillery batteries,
a large navy and even a nascent
air force, funded by an estimated
$200 million to $300 million a
year they made from smuggling,
fraud and appeals to Tamil expa-
triates. They also carried out
hundreds of suicide attacks —
including the 1991 assassination
of former Indian Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi — and were listed
as a terror group by the U.S.,
European Union and India.
AP
Monday, 18 May 2009
Defense Forces (IDF) and
with the Israeli population.
Despite assurances to the
contrary, the Palestine
Liberation Organization
(PLO), the parent organiza-
tion of the PA, remains in a
state of war with Israel.
To reassure the Washington
Institute, Lt. Gen. Dayton
downplayed the dangers of the
training that the Americans
are providing the
Palestinians, by saying that
“Our equipping is all non-
lethal ...”
David Bedein can be reached at
bedein@thebulletin.us
Bloody Urban
Battles Could
Lie Ahead
In Pakistan
By ASIF SHAHZAD
Islamabad — Pakistani
security forces fought Taliban
militants on the outskirts of the
main city in the northwest’s Swat
Valley and entered two other
Taliban-held towns there, the
army said yesterday, foreshad-
owing what could become
bloody urban battles.
A top government official
said the offensive near
Afghanistan had already killed
more than 1,000 Taliban fight-
ers, while a group of pro-govern-
ment religious leaders endorsed
the operation but condemned
U.S. missile strikes in the north-
west.
The developments under-
scored Pakistan’s resolve and
frustration in its battle against
militancy.
Washington has pressed
Islamabad to crack down on al-
Qaida and Taliban strongholds
along the Afghan frontier, saying
the militants threaten not only
U.S. and NATO troops in
Afghanistan but also nuclear-
armed Pakistan’s future. But
many in Pakistan believe the mil-
itancy here has metastasized
because of U.S. intervention in
Afghanistan.
Recent Taliban forays into a
district just 60 miles (100 kilo-
meters) from the capital,
Islamabad, seem to have swayed
many Pakistanis to support the
most recent military operation,
but that could easily change if the
toll on the hundreds of thou-
sands of civilians displaced
mounts, and if more U.S. mis-
siles strikes stoke greater popu-
lar discontent.
In giving the 1,000-plus
death toll yesterday, Interior
Minister Rehman Malik said the
operation in Swat and surround-
ing areas would “continue till the
last Taliban are flushed out.” It
was not possible to independ-
ently verify the figure. The terri-
tories bombarded over the past
three weeks are now too danger-
ous for journalists to freely visit.
In a statement yesterday
afternoon, the army said 25 mili-
tants and a soldier died in the
previous 24 hours.
Security forces were facing off
with militants in “intense fire
engagements” on the outskirts
of Swat’s main town, Mingora,
where many of the estimated
4,000 Taliban fighters in the val-
ley are believed to be holed up,
the statement said.
It also said security forces had
surrounded and entered the
towns of Matta and Kanju to
take on the militants, and it
requested civilians still in those
areas stay away from the Taliban
hide-outs. Troops were making
gains in remote Piochar area, the
rear base of Swat Taliban leader
Maulana Fazlullah, it added.
“The operation is going in
the right direction as we had
planned,” Mr. Malik said in a tel-
evised news conference from
Mardan, where he went to relief
camps to see some of the new
refugees. “I cannot give a time
but we will try (to complete the
operation) at the earliest.”
The military did not detail
how many ground troops were
involved in the latest advances.
Pakistan’s army is geared
toward fighting a conventional
battle again longtime rival India
on the plains of the Punjab
region using tanks and artillery,
and it has limited experience
battling guerrillas in urban set-
tings.
AP