NY Times: Iran Reacts to Pressure From America

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised on Sunday that Iran would deliver “an unforgettable response” to any “improper actions” from the United States over an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

The ayatollah appeared to be responding to an American campaign to further isolate and pressure Iran, an effort that received a push on Sunday with reports that President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified data showing that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

The United States accused Iranian officials last week of plotting to murder the ambassador in a bizarre scheme involving an Iranian-American used car salesman who believed he was hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million. Two men — the Iranian-American,Mansour J. Arbabsiar, and an officer in the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — have been charged in the plot.

Iran’s leaders have called the case a fabrication meant to distract Americans from their own problems, and The Associated Press reported Sunday that Iranian state TV had said that Iran’s Foreign Ministry requested consular access to Mr. Arbabsiar.

Norbert Bärlocher, a spokesman for the Swiss Embassy in Washington, said the embassy had no knowledge of whether the Iranians had passed such a request to the Swiss government. He said, “We represent the U.S. in Iran, but we do not represent Iran in the U.S.”

Asked if she knew of any request to see Mr. Arbabsiar, his lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said, “I have no such knowledge.”

The supreme leader’s comments on Sunday were his strongest yet about the case.

“If any American officials entertain delusions, they should know that any improper action, whether political or security related, will meet a decisive response from the Iranian nation,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, while speaking to university professors and students in Kermanshah Province in western Iran.

The ayatollah said that the United States was using the accusations to divert attention from its financial problems, suggesting that the protests over economic injustice sweeping the globe were an embarrassment to Washington. He said that “the people of at least 80 nations have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, and this is very bitter and difficult for American officials to accept.”

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also weighed in on Sunday, saying the alleged plot is just another of Washington’s “scenarios.” The semiofficial Press TV reported Mr. Ahmadinejad as saying that the United States makes “daily efforts to conceive scenarios against Iran. And, in this instance, it accused Iran of terrorism, but it should be clarified for the Americans that terror is the work of those that have no culture.”

Ayatollah Khamenei, according to Mehr News and IRNA, semiofficial news agencies, also issued a veiled threat to Mr. Ahmadinejad not to overstep his boundaries, addressing a power struggle between the two that has been going on most of this year. The ayatollah said, “Changing Iran into a parliamentary system from a presidential system” someday would not be a problem.

The news agencies focused on this comment. The implication, analysts said, was that Ayatollah Khamenei, the nation’s ultimate authority, was warning Mr. Ahmadinejad that he could abolish the presidency in the future.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/world/middleeast/iran-warns-america-against-trying-to-pressure-it.html?_r=1&src=tp

The Economist: Post-revolutionary Tunisia – Moving Ahead

Frustration and uncertainty persist, but the country is heading the right way

 

COMPARED with the other upheavals across the Arab world this year, Tunisia’s is still the runaway winner. Since the country’s dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, with his greedy wife, Leila Trabelsi, flew off into a Saudi twilight on January 14th after a nationwide uprising that lasted barely a month, there have been political hiccups, sit-ins, strikes and riots, especially in the fly-blown towns of the interior, and several new governments. But under Beji Caid Sebsi, an avuncular 84-year-old who first served in a cabinet in the 1960s and took over as prime minister on February 27th, Tunisia has calmed down. “People think things are going better than they thought they would the day after the revolution,” says a diplomat.

The postponement until October 23rd of an election to a constituent assembly originally scheduled for July 24th was widely accepted with good grace after the independent electoral commission said it could not prepare properly in time. The country has a clear path ahead. The assembly, once elected, is expected to draw up a constitution within a year, perhaps even sooner, paving the way for a full-blown election. Tunisia is in with a good chance of having a decent democracy and a perky economy by the end of next year.

Its transitional government has a clutch of competent technocrats in key positions, several of whom worked abroad for many years in Western banks but were lured back by the call of patriotism. “Tunisia could be an amazing place,” says Jalloul Ayed, the finance minister, a former Citibank man and composer of classical symphonies. “We have a bright, highly educated population. We’re close to Europe’s markets. We have the right to dream of Tunisia as the Singapore of the Mediterranean. We could achieve it in five to seven years—with a few adjustments.”

The constituent assembly will comprise a range of secular and Islamist parties. More than 90 have registered. In a system of proportional representation in large constituencies, fewer than ten of them will probably get seats. The new constitution is likely to be both presidential and parliamentary, perhaps resembling the model of France, with which Tunisia still has many links. “But we don’t want it to be presidentialist,” says Rafaa Ben Achour, a minister of state and constitutional lawyer, stressing the last syllable.

Virtually every opinion poll puts Nahda, the main Islamist party, in the lead. It wins kudos for its courage and apparent incorruptibility under Mr Ben Ali, who imprisoned many of its leaders (and at one time a good 5,000 of the rank and file), some of them for 20 years. But no poll suggests that Nahda would come close to getting an outright majority. A recent one gave it 14%; its main rival, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), in the secular centre, got 5%. More than two-thirds of Tunisians said they had not made up their minds. Few people, even the Islamists, predict that it will get more than 25%.

The big question is whether Nahda, led by a dignified 70-year-old, Rashid Ghannouchi, who returned this year after more than 20 years in exile, mostly in London, will emerge as the most potent single political force—and whether secular Tunisians, whose various parties together could easily form a majority, would allow it to wield a dominant influence, let alone untrammelled power.

Mr Ghannouchi (no relation of Muhammad Ghannouchi, the short-term prime minister after Mr Ben Ali’s fall) has bent over backwards to present Nahda as moderate and tolerant. His colleagues promise to abide by the rules of democracy, insist on women’s rights, and say they will not impose sharia law, ban alcohol or deter skimpily clad tourists from the West. Like Islamists across the Arab world who have refashioned themselves under new freedoms, Nahda says it looks to Turkey’s mild-mannered ruling Islamists.

But many of the three-quarters or so of Tunisians who do not consider themselves Islamist mistrust Nahda, many of them deeply. Again and again, secular-minded Tunisians accuse it of speaking in different tongues to different people. “They do not understand democracy or freedom,” says Mustapha Mezghani, a businessman who has set up a liberal party. “The least one can say is that they are ambiguous,” says Maya Jribi, the PDP’s co-leader, while deploring Nahda’s tendency, as she puts it, to “use the mosque for sending its political message”.

One movement, calling itself the Modernist Democratic Pole, including the former communist party, Tajdid, is trying to band all secular groups together to ensure that Nahda is kept out of power. Yet most Tunisians also seem aware that excluding Nahda from power could be more destabilising for the country than letting it in, perhaps even as a partner in coalition, at least during a jittery period of transition.

In any event, Tunisia needs a financial helping hand for the next year or so. In late May the G8 group of rich countries promised $20 billion to Tunisia and Egypt in loans and grants over the next three years, of which several billion is to go to Tunisia—the first tranche, according to the finance minister, within a few weeks. It is sorely needed. Economic growth, which was nearly 4% last year, will fall this year to less than 1%. Tourism, which accounted for 7% of GDP, has collapsed. Youth unemployment is around 23%, according to the labour minister. The minimum industrial wage for a 48-hour week is around $50. Of the 700,000 officially reckoned to be jobless in a population of 10.6m, some 170,000 are graduates—the angriest part of a populace enraged by the inequities and corruption that helped spark the revolution against Mr Ben Ali.

The mood in the harsh interior, where the revolution began, is impatient. In Kasserine, a town 300km (180 miles) south-west of Tunis, protesters call for the provincial governor, a military man, to go. Barbed wire surrounds banks and state-owned offices, with armoured cars outside. Civic leaders say that 40% of the townsfolk are unemployed. Last week two prisoners died in the third jail riot since January.

“If there is another social explosion, democracy will be stymied,” says Ms Jribi. Almost everyone in Tunis agrees, often adding that it is also vital that Libya, by far its closest neighbour, also comes right, with Muammar Qaddafi removed. “We consider the Libyan people an extension of the Tunisian people,” says the finance minister. If Libya is set free and Tunisia’s own electoral course goes according to plan, with the angry young men in such towns as Kasserine persuaded to hold their breath, the country could indeed become a beacon for the rest of the Arab world.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/18958251

Bolivians rebuke Morales in judicial ballot

LA PAZ: Most Bolivians who voted in Sunday’s election to choose the country’s top judges cast invalid ballots in what would be a stinging rebuke for President Evo Morales, according to unofficial partial results.

If the results hold, it would the first defeat at the polls for the leftist coca-grower’s union leader of his nearly six-year presidency.

Official results were not expected for at least five days in the vote for 56 judgeships on Bolivia’s top four tribunals, including its supreme and constitutional courts.

But an unofficial count by the Ipsos, Opinion y Mercado polling firm found 61 percent of voters cast ballots that were either null or blank. It said its count was based on 75 percent of the vote.

A sober-looking Morales declared himself ”very pleased with the public’s participation” in brief words to the news media. He asserted that ”those who called the boycott have failed.”

Opposition leaders had called on voters to cast invalid ballots to protest what they considered a power grab.

They contended that the election would erode the independence of the judiciary and strengthen Morales because the 114 candidates were chosen by a Congress dominated by his governing MAS movement.

A leading opposition politician, Samuel Doria Medina, said the results proved the election was ”illegitimate.” He called for starting the judicial selection process from scratch.

Under electoral rules, only a majority of valid votes are needed to fill each judicial post.

Prior to a new constitution championed by Morales and approved by voters, the legislature chose judges for the top courts.

The opposition accuses Morales of using the judiciary to persecute adversaries. Several opposition leaders are in exile after being accused of sedition. Morales comfortably won re-election in December 2009 but his popularity has plummeted in the past year over policy decisions that angered many Bolivians.

First, Morales declared just after Christmas that he was ending subsidies on gasoline; he reversed himself after major protests.

Then he insisted on a highway through a lowlands indigenous preserve, and drew further public outrage when police last month attacked Indians marching against it.

Morales has indicated he wants to run for a third term in 2014.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/17/bolivians-rebuke-morales-in-judicial-ballot.html

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