​Drone raids in Pak may be a war crime

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif prepared for a testing meeting with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday fortified by a human rights report that said some of the American drone strikes on the country was tantamount to "war crimes."

The report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, coming on the heels of whistleblower accounts of egregious spying by Washington on its allies, puts the US on the defensive against a country that is widely seen as a terrorist swamp. Titled "'Will I be next?' US drone strikes in Pakistan," the report documents recent US attacks in northwest Pakistan, including one that killed of a 68-year-old grandmother and 14-year-old boy.

"Amnesty International has serious concerns that this attack violated the prohibition of the arbitrary deprivation of life and may constitute war crimes or extrajudicial executions," the report said. It called for those responsible to stand trial. Partly due to the report, the drone issue has moved to the frontburner ahead of the White House meeting.

Sharif has said he will raise the issue of drone strikes with Obama, who in the past has defended that method of eliminating suspected terrorists and appeared unsympathetic to Pakistani complaints. There has also been confusion about some elements of the Pakistani security establishment acquiescing to drone strikes and even colluding with the US while maintaining a public posture of strenuous objection. More recently, US officials have assured Pakistan that drone strikes are tapering off and could soon end after elimination of prominent terrorists in the frontier region.

Sharif, on a four-day visit to the US capital to revive Islamabad's tormented ties with Washington, spent much of Monday and Tuesday meeting administration officials in the trade and commerce sphere and lawmakers, eager to grasp the hand of friendship and aid that the Obama administration has proffered in exchange for walking Pakistan back from its descent into extremism and chaos, its fixation with being seen as equal to India and achieving parity, and its use of terrorism as a policy instrument to achieve this objective.

But there was no sign that Pakistan is prepared to forgo its obsessions, including its plea for US mediation on Kashmir (which Washington once again rejected), and its demand for a civilian nuclear deal similar to the one Washington engineered for India. Part of this stems from what Pakistan's former ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani, now out of favor with the security establishment in Islamabad, calls "Magnificent Delusions," the title of his new book on Pakistan.

"Pakistan has become a uni-focal state. The only focus is, 'how do we wrest Kashmir from India?'" Haqqani said in a NYT blog interview on Tuesday, recalling that even the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, when he came to Pakistan, told the Pakistanis they should contemplate the model Beijing has for Taiwan – claiming the territory but does not do anything physically to try and take it back and instead focusing in its economic development and its modernization.

There is no indication that Pakistan is ready to take this route. On the contrary, all indications are that Sharif will again plead for US role and greater American largess to Pakistan pointing to declining public approval for Washington, even though Haqqani says Islamabad contrives to generate public opposition to US in Pakistan as a means of securing leverage in the relationship. US scholars have called this tactic "negotiating with a gun to its head."

The Obama administration has re-oped the foreign aid spigot, which has been shut down to a trickle over the past two years amid multiple crises with Pakistan, hoping that the $1.6 billion in assistance over the next year will lubricate the meeting and make Islamabad more amenable to US concerns in Afghanistan and terrorism. But Pakistan has so far shown as sense of entitlement in asking for more while doing little to earn US trust.

"The biggest misconception the Americans have had is that they can somehow bend Pakistan to their will simply with the leverage of aid. Aid has never given the Americans the leverage they thought they would have," Haqqani said in the blog interview.

More: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Drone-raids-in-Pak-may-be-a-war-crime/articleshow/24564245.cms

New report says Syrian rebels committed war crimes

Jihadi-led rebel fighters in Syria killed at least 190 civilians and abducted more than 200 during an offensive against pro-regime villages, committing a war crime, an international human rights group said today.

The August 4 attacks on unarmed civilians in more than a dozen villages in the coastal province of Latakia were systematic and could even amount to a crime against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a 105-page report based on a visit to the area a month later.

Witnesses said rebels went house to house, in some cases executing entire families and in other cases killing men and taking women and children hostages. The villagers belong to the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam which

forms the backbone of President Bashar Assad's regime and which Sunni Muslim extremists consider heretics.

One survivor, Hassan Shebli, said he fled as rebels approached his village of Barouda at dawn, but was forced to leave behind his wife, who was unable to walk without crutches, and his 23-year-old son, who is completely paralysed.

When Shebli returned days later, after government forces retook the village, he found his wife and son buried near the house and bullet holes and blood splatters in the bedroom, the New York-based group said.

The findings are bound to feed mounting Western unease about the tactics of some of those trying to topple Assad and about the growing role of jihadi rebels, including foreign fighters linked to al-Qaida.

UN war crimes investigators have accused both sides in Syria's civil war, now in its third year, of wrongdoing, though they said earlier this year that the scale and

intensity of rebel abuses hasn't reached that of the regime.

The new allegations of rebel abuses come at a time when the regime is regaining some international legitimacy because of its apparent cooperation with an internationally mandated program to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile by mid-2014.

Lama Fakih of Human Rights Watch said the rebel abuses in Latakia "certainly amount to war crimes," and may even rise to the level of crimes against humanity.

The group said more than 20 rebel groups participated in the Latakia offensive.

Five groups, including two linked to al-Qaida and others with jihadi leanings, led the campaign, which appeared to have been funded in part by private donations raised in the Persian Gulf, the report said.

Human Rights Watch appealed to the Gulf states to crack down on such money transfers.

More: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/new-report-says-syrian-rebels-committed-war-crimes/1181274/2