Eideard

The United States under President George W. Bush was prepared to take in 100,000 Palestinian refugees as part of a Middle East peace deal, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday.

“The United States was ready to take in 100,000 refugees as citizens of the United States,” Olmert said, in what may be his most revealing comments to date about negotiations with the U.S. and the Palestinians when he was prime minister.

Olmert, who led Israel from 2006 to 2009, spoke weeks after direct talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians resumed in Washington…

Olmert said Sunday that he is hopeful about the new round of talks.

“We have a peace proposal, and I believe that it may bring about a peace accord between us and the Palestinians in a short time,” he said.

“The mere fact that the government of Israel agreed to take direct talks even when it causes pain to the government this means that it is courageous,” he said. “Maybe it’s the beginning of an understanding that there is no other choice.”

I never before realized that “pain to the government” was an actual ailment. I’ve experienced more than a few governments I would consider to be painful. And supporters of those governments who weren’t reluctant to inflict pain or even death – on the rest of the world.

Go ahead. Use the fingers on both hands.

From the GUARDIAN Eyewitness series

Pakistanis crowd around an army helicopter as it delivers desperately needed food supplies to the village of Tul in Sindh Province, southern Pakistan, which is surrounded by floodwaters.

Pakistani authorities have begun expelling Afghan refugees from a tribal region that has become the main battleground between troops and fighters linked to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

“They have to go. There will be no concession,” Safirullah Wazir, the government’s top administrator in Bajaur, told Reuters. “We have reports of their links with militants and their involvement in terrorist activities…”

A Pakistani general last month described Bajaur as a new “center of gravity” for militancy and said that if the security forces prevailed two-thirds of the militant problem in the region could be eradicated.

Afghan refugees were ordered last Thursday to leave the area within days or face a crackdown. Around 200 Afghans from 30 families had left so far, but Wazir said 30,000 remained in the region.

Some tribesmen were glad to see the back of the Afghans.

“They should have taken this step long before because whenever we tried to take action against militants these refugees supported them and sheltered them,” gray-bearded Mohammad Sher, a tribal elder, told Reuters in Khar, the main town in Bajaur.

Sheltering refugees is a two-sided coin – just like supporting illegal migrant labor. The latter are most often used to cut wages from local workers. The former may be part of an insurgent force affecting native politics as much as life back in their home country.

Yes, of course, the opportunism extends to all sides and their allies. Pakistan bureaucrats were glad of the U.S. dollars spread around the region when the Afghan-Society War dominated border life. Plenty of pockets were lined.

AP Photo by Ijaz Muhammad

Fighting arising from a military crackdown in one of Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas has driven 20,000 refugees into Afghanistan across the tense border.

The exodus, from Bajaur, a district in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, into Kunar, a province in eastern Afghanistan, echoed earlier waves of war-driven migration across the border, but in the opposite direction.

The flow of refugees into Afghanistan has its origins, at least in part, in the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Many refugees who fled Afghanistan for Pakistan in the 1980s have now returned home. But many of the militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who are fighting the NATO force that seeks to pacify Afghanistan, operate from sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Many border tribesmen have never reconciled themselves to the Durand Line, the 19th-century border by which the British divided the mainly Pashtun tribes of the area between India – later, Pakistan – and Afghanistan. These strong affiliations have survived largely undisturbed, at least until recent times, under the policy of successive Pakistani governments that have allowed the tribal areas to operate largely outside the ambit of Pakistani law.
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