Al-Ahram Weekly | Region

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

Military talks
ISRAEL'S Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, met top Turkish officials on Monday to discuss the increasingly close military cooperation between the two countries. Ben-Eliezer met his Turkish counterpart, Sabahattin Cakmakoglu, and later met President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and the Chief of General Staff, Huseyin Kivrikoglu.
Cakmakoglu said the primary purpose of the visit was to boost defence cooperation, but added that "developments within the Middle East peace process" would also be discussed.
Israel and Turkey held joint naval exercises last month, and Israel is currently helping to refurbish Turkish air force F-4 warplanes.

UN firm on videotape
THE UNITED Nations is again insisting it will release only a censored version of a videotape that Israel believes may shed light on the abduction of three of its soldiers by Hizbullah guerrillas last October.
Lebanon and Hizbullah, as well as Israel, have sharply criticised the UN decision. Lebanon objects to Israel's seeing the tape at all, while Israel wants to see the unedited copy.
The leader of Hizbullah, Hassan Nasrallah, warned that the UN would be deemed to be "spying for the enemy" if it showed Israel the tape in the first place.
The tape was made by a UN peace- keeper a day after the abduction took place on 7 October when UN soldiers tried to tow away vehicles believed to have been used in the kidnapping.

Soft words, not deeds
THE ISRAELI army is trying to soften its image with new vocabulary. According to a new lexicon issued by the Israeli army, it's not the Palestinian uprising, it's an "armed conflict." And it's not an assassination of a Palestinian militant, it's a "pinpoint preventive operation." The sanitized terminology has been sent to Israel's foreign ministry and other government departments dealing with the media, according to an official on one of the bodies that received the list.
The blockade imposed by the army on the Palestinian areas is no longer a "closure," even though that term was coined by the army itself. It is now "prevention of entry into Israel." What was once an "abduction of terrorists," is now an "arrest of suspects," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The army has long resorted to euphemisms in the hope of softening the negative publicity created by some of its actions against Palestinians. A number of these actions have been condemned by human rights groups as collective punishments against the Palestinians.

Clashes continue
SKIRMISHES broke out on Monday between hundreds of youths and security forces in Algeria's troubled Kabylie region as weeks of popular unrest continued.
The street clashes erupted in Tizi Ouzou, the main city in Kabylie, 90 km east of Algiers, when youths pelted a paramilitary gendarmerie barracks with stones, residents said.
Similar incidents flared in the small town of Draa Ben Kheda, about 30 km west of Tizi Ouzou. There were no reports of injuries.
The vast North African country has been rocked since April by an unprecedented popular revolt in which at least 55 young demonstrators have been killed by security forces.

Protests banned
SECURITY forces arrested about a dozen people in the Iranian capital Tehran on Monday, enforcing a ban on demonstrations on the second anniversary of a violent police raid on a university hostel.
Riot police and hard-line Islamic militia were out in force outside Tehran University, a hotbed of student protests, to prevent any rallies from taking place.
Witnesses saw militiamen make the arrests to disperse a crowd of curious bystanders and prevent a rally from forming. Militiamen, apparently fearing that demonstrators would assemble if they left the scene, finally dispersed in the evening after riot police assured them on loudspeakers that no student demonstration would be allowed.
Authorities had banned rallies after last year's protest led to clashes between students and militiamen.
Compiled by Rasha Saad

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