LUFFOI.COM

The Thailand-Cambodia Regional Border Committee (RBC) ended its one-day meeting Wednesday with a mutual agreement to strengthen cooperation between the military forces on both sides in order to maintain border security, Thailand’s Second Army Region Commander LtGeneral Thawatchai Samutsakorn said.

The two sides also discussed the issue of withdrawing troops in line with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling and allowing a team of observers from Indonesia to be stationed at the borders, but did not make any decisions because they are policy matters. “We touched on the issue of troop withdrawal and the observers, but it is up to the governments to make the decision,” he said.

The question of withdrawing troops from the area adjacent to Preah Vihear Temple, which the ICJ has said is a demilitarised zone, will be discussed again at a meeting of the General Border Committee (GBC) due in Phnom Penh next month, he said.

The GBC, cochaired by the defence ministers of Thailand and Cambodia, has the authority to make a decision on whether or not to withdraw troops.

The RBC, on the other hand, is a joint mechanism in which commanders of the two countries can consult each other over technical issues related to border security.

On Wednesday, both sides discussed measures to strengthen cooperation in the trafficking of narcotics along the border, supporting police on transborder crime suppression as well as supporting development projects to boost the local standard of living, Thawatchai said.

“We have only talked about good things because the tension has eased. The previous clash had been caused by external factors and political issues, since the forces on both sides do not really have a problem,” the commander told reporters after the meeting.

Cambodia’s Fourth Regional Commander Chea Mon cochaired the RBC meeting with Thawatchai.

Article source: http://www.asianewsnet.net/home/news.php?id=21048&sec=1

NAKHON RATCHASIMA, Aug 24 – The Thai-Cambodian Regional Border Committee (RBC) on Wednesday began meeting in Thailand’s northeastern province of Nakhon Ratchasima, discussing 15 issues including troop withdrawal from the disputed border area.

The 15th RBC meeting in Nakhon Ratchasima is being co-chaired by Lt-Gen Thawatchai Samutsakhon, Second Region Army commander responsible for security affairs in Thailand’s northeastern region, and Cambodia’s Fourth Army commander Lt-Gen Chea Mon.

Lt-Gen Thawatchai said that the meeting showed good cooperation and goodwill between the two neighbouring countries.

On this occasion, Cambodian representatives also congratulated the new Thai government which assumed office following the July 3 general election.

On the agenda of the two-day meeting are 15 issues, including the top issues of troop withdrawal from the disputed area near the Preah Vihear Temple, national security, border peace, land development, environment, anti-narcotics measures and suppression over law violation along the border.

Both sides intended to boost the standard of living of their people and enhance security in daily life and property.

Meanwhile, Gen Neang Phat, Cambodia’s Deputy Defence Minister, observed the meeting and expected to discuss troop withdrawal from the disputed border near Preah Vihear Temple for further negotiation at the Thai-Cambodian General Border Committee (GBC) meeting on September 8.

Apart from the military top brass from both sides, governors of provinces along the Thai-Cambodian border also attended the meeting. (MCOT online news)

Article source: http://www.mcot.net/cfcustom/cache_page/257014.html

A youthful-looking 43, Ayman has worked his way up various ladders at a number of multinationals and makes an exceptional salary — by Egyptian standards anyway — of several thousand dollars a month. He is movie-star handsome and works out regularly at a fancy gym called Pro. He has memberships at three recreation clubs, and his wife, Enas, who is 37, collects designer perfumes and laughs like a girl half her age. (They asked me not to use their last name to help protect their privacy.) His children — three strenuously color-coordinated girls named Joly, Jomana and Jassy — are learning English in their convent school. (“Say ‘how are you’ in English,” Ayman often tells them.) Their apartment, small but abundantly furnished, is filled with familiar markers of a modern, middle-class Egyptian life, from an unused treadmill to a very-wide-screen TV. Ayman’s bedside reading includes many books in English on marketing, along with a handful of pocket romances. Until recently, they had planned a family diving trip to the Red Sea.

“We didn’t see this coming,” Enas, a soft and pretty woman who wears sparkly tops and figure-hugging jeans, told me one day in May. She was speaking about the demonstrations that swept Egypt on Jan. 25 and the revolution that followed. “In the first days, they said there were foreigners, from Switzerland and Israel, giving people money in Tahrir Square — in euros — and Kentucky Fried Chicken,” she said. “They said they were having sex and taking drugs. I believed such things.”

By the end of January, Ayman joined the demonstrations with work colleagues. “I would fight with him,” Enas said. “I was scared. I didn’t want him to go, but he insisted.”

Ayman was visibly proud when he talked about his defense of the revolution against Hosni Mubarak’s henchmen. “I was helping to take care of the prison in the square, to hold all the thugs,” he said. And then, the unthinkable happened: during sunset prayers on Feb. 11, a defamed and disgraced Mubarak stepped down, and like many Egyptians, Ayman and his family celebrated. The streets of Cairo were buzzing with songs and music. “It was a happy day,” Enas said.

Over the next several weeks, Ayman and Enas took to voraciously consuming newspapers — neither had followed the news much previously — rehashing the paper’s most alarming details to each other: the police were in disarray, jailbreaks were abundant, hospitals were being robbed. Above all, they lingered over stories of churches and their parishioners under threat from radical Salafists who, they heard, described churches as mafias harboring weapons and sinners. Other Salafists, so the rumors went, were calling for acid to be thrown in the faces of unveiled women. (Salafist leaders later denied this.) But many Copts worried that the democratic ideals that triumphed in Tahrir Square would be lost and Egypt might turn into an Islamic republic like Iran. “We never even heard the word ‘Salafist’ before the revolution,” Ayman told me.

By March, Ayman’s fears had grown, and he began to reach out to Egyptian friends who live in America, asking them about their lives there. Never before had Ayman thought seriously about “leaving our country,” he said, but now he was asking friends how they had managed to emigrate and how he might go about moving his family out of Egypt if he needed to.

Negar Azimi (negoush@mac.com) is senior editor of Bidoun, an arts and literary magazine about the Middle East and its diaspora, published in New York City.

Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/in-egypt-the-lure-of-leaving.html?src=me&ref=magazine

On February 11, 2011, after 18 days of massive, nationwide protests, Egyptians forced the resignation of their president, Hosni Mubarak, after twenty-nine years of authoritarian rule. But in the future, as in the past, the United States will continue tipping the scales in its favor, putting its eggs into the military basket in addition to that of the protesters. Given the uncertainty over how things will shake out, and the impact of Washington’s track record with Cairo, the United States—for better or worse—must step back and finally allow Egyptians to shape their own destiny.

Months after the phenomenal display of euphoria, courage, and self-determination, some in the West are wondering whether the defenders of Egypt’s uprising have much to be happy about. The soft transfer of power from Mubarak to the armed forces seems to have signaled Egypt’s drift into a dictatorless tyranny, with the military continuing to crackdown on protesters and subjecting them to military tribunals. Meanwhile, the religious extremists who recently killed over half a dozen Israelis had entered Gaza via Sinai. These developments are extremely worrisome. And yet, there is also a danger that the West will continue to back a deeply entrenched and well-organized military that over the past several months has been making overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood. Like Pakistan, another U.S. “ally,” Egypt—and its many less conservative factions—appears stuck between the mosque and the military.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF)—the country’s 19-member military body that took over after Mubarak’s downfall—has an incentive to play up the power of Islamists for the West. That is not to say that Egypt’s Islamists aren’t powerful, or that the SCAF cannot make common cause with the Brotherhood for its own narrow self-interests. The military, often run by retired generals, commands an array of commercial enterprises in industries such as water, olive oil, cement, construction, hospitality, and gasoline. Because the Brotherhood looks poised to win big in the upcoming parliamentary elections, SCAF has every incentive to cooperate now with the Brotherhood.

On this note, it should be said that the Brotherhood, while religiously conservative, intolerant of dissent, and—despite its recent rhetoric—still hoping to establish an Islamic state, is not the most extreme element in Egyptian society. There is also the Salafist Nour Party, Jamaa Islamiya, and other Salafist groups that seek to go mainstream. Moreover, it’s important to point out that not all religious elements oppose the liberal protesters: the country’s most prominent religious clerics, al-Azhar, supported the liberals and their principles on the constitution.

Still, the danger remains that the United States might try to use its leverage with the military to the detriment of protest groups. This could lead to a slew of dangerously counterproductive and unintended consequences. Consider, for instance, Mubarak, who Washington backed for nearly 30 years to the tune of $1.5 billion annually and $28.6 billion from USAID since 1975. He used the Muslim Brotherhood as a pretext to crush moderate, reform-minded critics. Indeed, American diplomats at one time even conceded that Mubarak was using the “implicit threat of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise” to “temper foreign pressure for more and faster democratic reforms.”

Article source: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/mosque-military-5811