Al-Ahram Weekly | Region

		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 January 2001 Issue No.518
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

What price the life of an Arab child?
THE PRICE of an Arab life was the question human rights activists, legal experts and one of Israel's main newspapers asked on Monday after a plea bargain under which a Jewish settler convicted of beating 10-year-old Hilmi Shousha to death in 1996 will escape imprisonment.
"The life of an Arab child equals six months of community service," read a headline in the Maariv daily, summing up the punishment meted out on Sunday to Jewish settler Nahum Kurman, 36, by a Jerusalem District Court judge.
B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said the plea bargain was just one more example of the differing standards of punishment for Jews who kill Arabs and Arabs who kill Jews.
"We have been carrying out comparative studies for years and
the picture is worrying," B'Tselem said in a statement.
The meaning of peace
DURING a two-day seminar held in Cairo this week, Egyptian, Arab and Arab-Israeli commentators advised Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to refrain from signing any agreement that suggests the Arab-Israeli conflict has ended.
"Arafat could sign a peace agreement that says the conflict has come to an end, but this will not make it go away. All Arab countries, and not just Arafat, have to stop ignoring this fact," commented Thasin Bashir, an Egyptian career diplomat.
Even a Palestinian state on parts of Gaza and the West Bank, it was argued, would not solve the Palestinians' problem. "The fact of the matter is that there will be large groups of Israeli settlers living right in the middle of it, while there are one million Arab Israelis living in Israel. So, in fact there will not be two separate states and the conflict will continue," argued Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset.
Seminar participants also warned against the possibility of an Arab-Arab, or even worse, a Palestinian-Palestinian, struggle over determining whether the objective of the ongoing peace negotiations is a short-term settlement or a final settlement.
"So far there has not been enough dialogue among Palestinians about the kind of settlement that is being sought," Bishara said. He added, "Now is the time for a serious Palestinian-Palestinian and Arab-Arab dialogue about what needs to be done next."
US and British raids kill six
CITIZENS of the southern province of Muthanna lashed out at the United States and Britain on Sunday during a funeral procession of six people killed the previous day in an air attack on southern Iraq. The mourners also denounced the regimes of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for housing the planes that patrol the southern no-fly zone.
On Sunday reporters working for Western news agencies and television networks were taken by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information to the area where Iraq said it was raided by US and British planes.
A Reuters photographer said the raid struck an Irrigation Ministry fodder warehouse 120 kilometres south of Samawa, near the Iraqi-Saudi border. There were no Iraqi military units in the area. The photographer said six warehouse employees had been killed and three others were slightly injured.
Iranian students protest
SIX leading members of a prominent pro-reform student group staged a symbolic sit-in outside Iran's parliament on Tuesday in support of jailed students and prisoners of conscience.
Radicals in the Office to Consolidate Unity, Iran's largest student group which boasts some 50,000 members, sent an unprecedented open letter to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier this month protesting at his part in the crackdown on reforms and warning him not to stand against the "breeze of modernisation."
Meanwhile, the Iranian press reported on Monday that a "huge plot" aimed at politically discrediting President Mohamed Khatami was uncovered recently in the southern city of Shiraz. Hadi Pejuheh, a security official from Fars province, said 150,000 pictures had been "forged and distributed" showing headshots of President Mohamed Khatami. The operation was uncovered during Khatami's visit last week, and "suspect elements were arrested," said Pejuheh, who said this "huge plot" could be the work of "fundamentalist Islamic elements."
Compiled by Rasha Saad

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