NEWS VIEWS

US transfers control of Anbar to Iraqis
Iraqi forces on Monday took control of the Sunni Anbar province, once the most explosive battlefield in Iraq, from the US military, symbolising the growing security gains in the war-torn country.The transfer ceremony at a building in the provincial capital of Ramadi marked the handover of the 11th of Iraq’s 18 provinces.Anbar, once a flashpoint of anti-American insurgency and later an Al Qaeda stronghold, is the first Sunni province to be returned to Iraqi government.“I would like to announce that the (Anbar) transfer from the US to Iraqi forces is done,” said Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, at the handover ceremony.US President George W. Bush said the transfer of Anbar was a defeat for Al Qaeda.“Today, Anbar is no longer lost to Al Qaeda -- it is Al Qaeda that lost Anbar,” he said in a statement.“Anbar has been transformed and reclaimed by the Iraqi people. This achievement is a credit to the courage of our troops, the Iraqi security forces, and the brave tribes and other civilians from Anbar who worked alongside them,” Bush added.Police said tens of thousands of Iraqi and US troops were on alert for the handover across the vast desert province in western Iraq, home to some two million people.US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker and the top commander of American forces, General David Petraeus, said Iraqi forces had already been operating independently for the past two months in Anbar.“The provincial and military leadership in Anbar will have to work cooperatively in order to attain the sustainable security necessary for long-term economic prosperity,” they said in a joint statement.The US military said the transfer of security “does not necessarily mean that the security situation is stable or better.” “It means the government and the provincial authorities are ready to take the responsibility for handling it.” After the transfer, US forces are to withdraw to their bases and take part in military operations only if requested by the provincial governor.Sunni Arabs in Anbar were the first to turn against US forces after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime by US-led invasion forces in 2003, mounting a raging insurgency that tore through the world’s most sophisticated military.In the first years after the invasion, Iraq’s biggest province became the theatre of a brutal war focused on the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.Mamoon Sami Rashid, the governor of Anbar, said the security transfer was achieved after a “lot of sacrifices and shedding of blood.” “Al-Qaeda has committed some of the biggest massacres in this province. We have lost some big personalities,” he said, singling out Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha, the Sunni sheikh who launched the first anti-Qaeda Sahwa (awakening) group in Anbar and was killed a year ago in a car bomb attack.—AFP

Japan PM resigns in surprise move
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced his sudden resignation on Monday, saying the country needed a fresh start after a troubled year in office marred by bitter fighting with the opposition.The surprise announcement came after the 72-year-old political moderate failed to turn around dwindling public support for his government despite reshuffling his cabinet and unveiling a major economic stimulus package.Fukuda, under fire over a deeply unpopular medical care plan for the elderly, admitted he felt “swamped” dealing with the problems of the world’s second largest economy.“Today, I have decided to resign. We need a new line-up to cope with a new session of parliament,” Fukuda told a hastily arranged news conference.“I have determined that now is the most opportune time, in which we will not create a political void,” he said.“I thought it would be quite different if somebody new would take care of this.” Fukuda said his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) would hold an internal election to determine his successor. He did not call a general election, which does not need to be held for another year.The likely front-runner to take over the post is Taro Aso, a former foreign minister who is known for being both more charismatic and more conservative than Fukuda.Fukuda, who in July presided over the annual summit of the Group of Eight major industrial powers, is known for his moderate policies including his efforts to repair historically uneasy relations with China.—AFP

Qadhafi hails full US ties after 39 years in power
Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi said his regime’s long estrangement from the United States was finally over as he marked the 39th anniversary on Monday of his overthrow of the Western-backed monarchy.“The whole business of the conflict between Libya and the United States has been closed once and for all,” Qadhafi said in an anniversary speech to the General People’s Congress, Libya’s equivalent of a parliament.“There will be no more wars, raids or acts of terrorism,” said Qadhafi. Last month, Libya finally reached a compensation deal with the families of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, the deadliest attack blamed on Libya.The move paved the way for the full normalisation of ties with Washington and an expected visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later this week.But Qadhafi stressed that Libya was not looking for US friendship. “All we want is to be left alone,” he said.The Libyan leader hailed a new era in relations with former colonial power Italy after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi apologised on Saturday for the damage inflicted on Libya during the colonial era and signed a five-billion-dollar investment deal by way of compensation.“It’s a major political, moral and material victory from which we are going to benefit all our lives,” Qadhafi said in the anniversary speech delivered in Libya’s second city of Benghazi in the early hours of the morning.Under the deal, Libya is to receive 200 million dollars a year from Italy over the next 25 years through investments in infrastructure projects.Exceptionally Qadhafi himself signed Saturday’s agreement with Berlusconi.The Libyan leader normally eschews state functions insisting he is the guide of the revolution not head of state.Qadhafi has struck a regal posture throughout this year’s lavish celebrations for the anniversary of his regime, unlike last year when he left the limelight to his son and heir apparent Seif al-Islam.On Saturday, he wore a crown and sceptre for a speech to thousands of supporters in this Mediterranean port city.The symbols of royalty were gifts from more than 200 African traditional leaders who gathered here for a conference on Thursday at which they bestowed on Qadhafi the title “king of kings.” The Libyan leader has not given up however on the people’s power rhetoric which has marked his four decades in power.In his speech, he again pledged to scrap most government ministries and hand their budgets directly to the people to spend themselves.He said that the plan, which he first announced in a speech in March, was a response to complaints from the public of widespread corruption in the administration.—AFP

Ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia
By Luke Harding
AFTER three weeks in Georgia reporting on the war and its aftermath, I find one conversation sticks with me. I had arrived in Karaleti, a Georgian village north of Gori. I had gone there with a group of foreign journalists in a Russian army truck; our ultimate destination was Tskhinvali, in South Ossetia. Several houses along the main road had been burned down; an abandoned Lada lay in a ditch; someone had looted the local school.Refugees from Karaleti and nearby villages gave the same account: South Ossetian militias had swept in on August 12, killing, burning, stealing and kidnapping. Sasha, our Kremlin minder, however, had a different explanation. “Georgian special commandos burned the houses,” he told us. I demurred, pointing out that it was unlikely Georgian special commandos would have burned down Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, deep inside rebel-held South Ossetia. Sasha’s face grew dark; he wasn’t used to contradiction. “Those houses suffered from a gas or electricity leak,” he answered majestically.Despite Sasha’s inventive attempts to lie, it’s evident what is currently happening in Georgia: South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia. Despite the random nature of these attacks, the overall aim is clear: to create a mono-ethnic greater South Ossetia in which Georgians no longer exist.Before Georgia’s attack on Tskhinvali on August 7/8, South Ossetia was a small but heterogeneous region, a patchwork of picturesque Georgian and Ossetian villages. Georgia’s government controlled a third; the separatists and their handlers from Russia’s spy agencies controlled another third, principally around the town of Tskhinvali; the other third was under nobody’s control. Surprisingly, both groups coexisted in South Ossetia.A week after the conflict started I drove up to Akhalgori, a mountain town, 41km north-west of Tbilisi. South Ossetian militias, together with Russian soldiers from Dagestan, had captured the town the previous evening. Most residents had already fled; by the bus stop I found a group of women waiting for a lift. The town had no history of ethnic conflict, they said. Its population was mixed. Now almost all the Georgians had fled. I asked a militia leader, Captain Elrus, whether his men had ethnically cleansed Georgian villages between Tskhinvali and Gori. “We did carry out cleaning operations, yes,” he admitted.The Kremlin’s South Ossetian allies have re-established the old Soviet borders of South Ossetia. This new, greater territory will, as South Ossetia’s parliamentary speaker made clear on Friday, become part of the Russian Federation: a large Georgian-free enclave stretching almost to the suburbs of Tbilisi.Back in Karaleti, meanwhile, villagers are continuing to flee. After August 12, dozens escaped on foot, walking for three days across the fields, hiding from the militias and eating wild plums. South Ossetian gunmen are preventing refugees from returning, and forcing the few elderly residents who remain to leave as well. The Russian military has done nothing to stop this. Its peacekeeping mandate is little more than a pretext for occupation. There are Russian checkpoints between Gori and Tskhinvali.EU leaders meet on Monday in Brussels to discuss how to respond to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Georgia, and President Dmitry Medvedev’s unilateral recognition of South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence. Already the European appetite for sanctions appears to be fading, with the French and the Germans signalling an unwillingness to punish Moscow. But the EU needs to be clear about what is happening. Russia is not merely redrawing the map of Europe but changing its human geography too.—Dawn/Guardian News Service

EU and Georgia: awkward partners
By Jim Heintz
Of all the countries that emerged from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia has followed the most chaotic path – a long, lurching march of high expectations and abysmal disappointments, of crude rogues and polylingual sophisticates, of peace pledges and bloodshed.Each of the three leaders of independent Georgia came into office as a seeming acolyte of Western values, but soon came to be seen by many as a demagogue; two were driven from office in uprisings and the incumbent says his opponents were preparing the same fate for him.Monday’s emergency European Union summit in the wake of August’s Georgia-Russia war may focus largely on what – if anything – the EU will do to punish Russia. But it can also be seen as a straw poll of what the bloc thinks of Georgia, which so avidly wants to join.If the EU leaders are looking to history as a guide, Georgia may not find much warmth.Conflict is a central piece of Georgians’ identity, from the gleaming swords and daggers displayed by sidewalk curio merchants to tourist guides’ ritual mention that Tbilisi has been sacked about 40 times in its 1,500-year history.“Historically this was the fate of Georgia; we had numerous invaders and unfortunately this continues in the 21st century as well,” Deputy Defence Minister Batu Kutelia said on Saturday at the funeral of a general killed in the August war. “We do hope that no more of these types of heroes will be needed for Georgia in the future.”Georgia, however, has difficulty with the art of compromise.President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power after leading the massive “Rose Revolution” street demonstrations of 2003, which culminated in a crowd storming parliament and chasing President Eduard Shevardnadze from the building.Shevardnadze, once respected in the West for his work as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost-era foreign minister, had become a protector of corrupt profiteers and a runner of rigged elections. Still, he was an improvement over Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who abandoned his Nobel Peace Prize-nominated human rights work to become a nationalist hard-liner and was violently deposed two weeks after the USSR went out of business.Saakashvili, in turn, scored his first major domestic victory by goading and pressuring Aslan Abashidze, the leader of the Adzharia region, until he snapped, blew up all his province’s land links with the rest of the country and fled with his beloved dogs to Russia.In 2006, Saakashvili went on the offensive again, sending in troops to take a remote piece of the separatist region of Abkhazia.The West may have looked askance at those moves, but Saakashvili, with his fluency in languages, his degrees from Western institutes and reforms that pushed the country’s economy into vigorous growth, still seemed a comforting figure. That changed late last year when he imposed a state of emergency and temporarily shut down independent news media in response to mass protests.Although Georgia has been successful in portraying itself as the victim of Russian aggression in the recent war, at the outset a Georgian general made it very clear that it had sent its forces into South Ossetia to restore its territorial integrity.If Georgia is hoping the war with Russia will lead it into the EU’s full embrace, it may have to settle instead for a peck on the cheek. Anne-Marie Lizin, part of a Belgian parliamentary delegation investigating the war’s aftermath, told reporters in Tbilisi that at Monday’s summit the EU is likely to consider war-recovery aid for Georgia and possibly visa-free travel, but indicated nothing more was in the cards.Georgian officials have called for the EU to form a monitoring mission for the trouble zone and Russia has shown signs of willingness to at least discuss the concept. But there’s no indication whether such monitors would induce Russia to pull out of its controversial “security zones” on Georgian territory.—AP

McCain rules out review of Palin’s candidature
Republican presidential candidate John McCain says he is satisfied that Sarah Palin’s background was properly checked before the Alaska governor became his vice-presidential running-mate.“The vetting process was completely thorough and I’m grateful for the results,” McCain told reporters as he toured a Philadelphia fire house.Questions about the review came up after news surfaced that Palin’s unmarried teenage daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, and that the Alaska governor has retained a private attorney to represent her in an investigation into the firing of the state public safety commissioner.The lawyer who conducted the background review said Palin voluntarily told McCain’s campaign about Bristol’s’ pregnancy, and about her husband’s two-decade-old DUI arrest during questioning as part of the vice presidential search process.The Alaska governor also greatly detailed the dismissal of the state’s public safety commissioner that has touched off a legislative investigation, Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. told The Associated Press in an interview on Monday.Palin underwent a “full and complete” background examination before McCain chose her as his running mate, Culvahouse said. Asked whether everything that came up as a possible red flag during the review already has been made public, he said: “I think so. Yeah, I think so. Correct.”McCain’s campaign has been trying to tamp down questions about whether the Arizona senator’s team adequately researched his surprise vice presidential selection.Since McCain publicly disclosed his running mate on Friday, the notion of a shoddy, rushed review has been stoked repeatedly.First, a campaign-issued timeline said McCain initially met Palin in February, then held one phone conversation with her last week before inviting her to Arizona, where he met her a second time and offered her the job on Thursday.Then came the campaign’s disclosure that 17-year-old Bristol Palin is pregnant. The father is Levi Johnston, who has been a hockey player at Bristol’s high school, The New York Post and The New York Daily News reported in their Tuesday’s editions.In addition, the campaign also disclosed that Palin’s husband, Todd, then age 22, was arrested in 1986 in Alaska for driving under the influence of alcohol.Shortly after Palin was named to the ticket, McCain’s campaign dispatched a team of a dozen communications operatives and lawyers to Alaska. That fuelled speculation that a comprehensive examination of Palin’s record and past was incomplete and being done only after she was placed on the ticket.Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser, said no matter who the nominee was, the campaign was ready to send a “jump team” to the No. 2’s home state to work with the nominee’s staff, work with the local media and help handle requests from the national media for information, and answer questions about documents that were part of the review.—AP

Hamas denies Meshaal has moved to Sudan
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Tuesday denied that its political supremo Khaled Meshaal had moved from his self-imposed exile in Syria to Sudan.“The movement totally denies media reports saying that Khaled Meshaal has left Syria for Sudan,” a Hamas official said in a statement. “These reports are false.”Meshaal early August paid a visit to Sudan to express solidarity with President Omar al-Beshir after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for the Sudanese leader over alleged war crimes.However, Hamas said Meshaal had since returned to Damascus.In Khartoum, a spokesman for Beshir too denied that Meshaal had moved to Sudan. “We have no information about that,” said Mahgoub Fadl.Israeli media on Monday, quoting a Kuwaiti newspaper, reported that Meshaal had left Syria to live in Sudan allegedly because of the relaunch of talks between Syria and Israel.The two countries announced in May that they had resumed indirect peace talks brokered by Turkey after an eight-year freeze. Four rounds of talks have taken place so far and a fifth is due soon, according Israeli public radio.Meshaal in June had said the Turkish-brokered peace talks would not affect relations between Hamas and Syria, which is home to a number of Palestinian groups.—AFP

China to launch third manned space flight
China has brought forward the launch date of its third manned space flight to late September, a report said on Tuesday.The launch of Shenzhou VII is now expected to take place between Sept 17 the end of the Beijing Paralympics and China’s National Day on Oct 1, Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po said, citing unnamed sources.The period offered the best launch window for Shenzhou VII, the source told the Chinese-language newspaper, without giving any more details.The mission will blast off from China’s Jiuquan launch centre in northwest Gansu province and land in northern Inner Mongolia province, Wen Wei Po said.The launch schedule has been changed several times, with previous Chinese state media reports suggesting a October or November launch.Three “taikonauts” or astronauts will be on board the flight, with one of them conducting China’s first space walk, China’s official Xinhua news agency said in an earlier report, quoting a spokesman for the mission.China successfully launched its first man, Yang Liwei, into orbit in 2003, making it the third country after the former Soviet Union and the US to put a man in space. It sent two more astronauts into orbit in 2005 on a five-day mission.—AFP

Mandela partners with OUP
Nelson Mandela has signed an agreement with Oxford University Press to help raise money for scholarships.Under the deal the former South African president signed on Tuesday in Johannesburg, his Mandela Rhodes Foundation becomes a 25.1 per cent owner of the South African arm of the press. Dividends the foundation earns will fund scholarships.Officials from the press and the foundation refused to say how much the foundation paid for the shares, but called it a “mutually beneficial business deal.”The foundation offers full scholarships for university study in South Africa.—AP