Ivory Coast: Forces loyal to UN backed Outtara surround Capital City

Forces loyal to the UN-backed president of Ivory Coat, Alassane Ouattara, are pressing on the main city of Abidjan from several directions. Their offensive threatens to make a battleground of the city, the last stronghold of presidential rival Laurent Gbagbo. Mr Gbagbo’s army chief earlier sought refuge with South Africa’s ambassador.

The UN says Mr Gbagbo lost last year’s election to Mr Ouattara, but he has so far refused to cede power.  Armed supporters of Mr Gbagbo have been patrolling districts of the city, setting up roadblocks. The BBC’s Valerie Bony in Abidjan says there have been fierce clashes around the national television centre in a residential part of the city, and heavy weapons fire in northern suburbs. She says an informed source had told her that the head of the military police, Edouard Kassarate, had defected to the Ouattara side and had gone to the Hotel de Golf, Mr Ouattara’s headquarters in Abidjan, which had been besieged by Mr Gbagbo’s forces.

Phillippe Mangou’s decision to seek refuge is bad news for Laurent Gbagbo – and certainly for the forces supposed to be defending the incumbent president in Abidjan. He was a known Gbagbo loyalist, but not as hard-line as some of the other generals. It does now feel like the end of things for Mr Gbagbo. A credible source says the head of the gendarmerie, Edouard Kassarate, has gone over to the Ouattara side, with the military police en masse pledging allegiance to Mr Ouattara.

There are also rumours of people leaving, certainly most of Mr Gbagbo’s supporters have sent their children overseas – and there is talk of unrest at the airport as some people try to flee. The UN envoy in Abidjan, Choi Young-jin, told French radio the blockade of the hotel was no longer in place as pro-Gbagbo units had left.  Mr Gbagbo’s army chief, Phillippe Mangou, earlier sought refuge at the home of South Africa’s ambassador in Abidjan.

“The game is over for Gbagbo. It is finished,” he told Reuters in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast’s capital.

The international community, including UN chief Ban Ki-moon and France – Ivory Coast’s former colonial power – has urged Mr Gbagbo to immediately cede power to Mr Ouattara. The US urged both sides to exercise restraint and protect civilians. US Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said both Mr Gbagbo and his wife would be held accountable if significant violence broke out.

Mr Ouattara was internationally recognised as president last year, after the electoral commission declared him winner of the run-off vote. The UN, which helped organise the vote, certified it as legitimate. However, Mr Gbagbo claimed victory after the Constitutional Council overturned Mr Ouattara’s win.

The forces supporting Mr Ouattara have made lightning advances since Monday, moving out from their base in the northern half of the country. On Wednesday, his fighters captured Ivory Coast’s capital, Yamoussoukro, and the key port of San Pedro. Mr Gbagbo’s hometown of Gagnoa has also fallen.

In a televised address earlier on Thursday, Mr Ouattara appealed for his rival’s soldiers to join him in order to prevent further suffering. Since the crisis began in December, one million people have fled the violence – mostly from Abidjan – and at least 473 people have been killed, according to the UN. An armed rebellion in 2002 split the nation in two – a division last November’s elections were meant to heal.

Foreign Policy: The Hard Part of Libya’s Revolution

You may recall the last time the United States and its allies used military force to overthrow a hated Arab dictator. The resulting vacuum was quickly filled by anarchic looting, murderous rivalries and, ultimately, civil war. The blitheness of President George W. Bush’s administration towards post-war Iraq was quite possibly the most inexcusable blunder in the history of American foreign policy. It’s a mistake we wouldn’t want to make again.

That’s why Lisa Anderson, one of the very few American scholarly experts on modern Libya and president of American University in Cairo, recently wrote that “Any military and diplomatic intervention that will bring an end to the Qaddafi regime should be accompanied, from the beginning, by mobilization of the resources for political reconstruction.”

That does sound like a good idea. But it’s not happening. A senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration says that the situation in Libya is “much too fluid,” and the identity of the rebel leadership much too uncertain, to permit serious planning about a post-Muammar al-Qaddafi world, should the rebels actually seize power. The White House is, to be fair, a bit preoccupied, what with organizing the no-fly zone, trying to stave off chaos in Yemen and Bahrain, and attempting to assist a soft landing in Egypt and Tunisia. Most of those countries, as this official says, are of greater strategic significance to the United States than Libya is. And there is, of course, the all too real possibility that the military intervention will produce a stalemate rather than a decisive rebel victory, in which case any such planning would be moot.

The good news is that Libya is not Iraq. The country’s tribal divisions should not prove as insuperable an obstacle to national unity as Iraq’s Shia-Sunni-Kurd divide. And should the rebels somehow overthrow Qaddafi, they will have the legitimacy which comes of winning an insurgency, as the Iraqis placed on the throne by U.S. power did not.

But one of the fundamental lessons of Iraq is that things will be worse than you think. Not only does war unleash all manner of latent enmity and violence, but decades of abusive treatment by a ruthless dictators fuels pathologies that only fully manifest themselves when the lid of control pops off. Pro- and anti-Qaddafi tribes could square off against one another; Qaddafi could unleash the jihadists he once trained to wreak violence both at home and abroad. So you wouldn’t want to bet on a happy outcome in Libya — you’d want to do whatever you could to help deliver one. And it behooves those of us who have argued for the intervention now under way to give serious thought to what form that help should take.

The United States will not be the occupying power in Libya as it was in Iraq, and thus will have far less leverage, and far less responsibility. The Libyans will be calling the shots. But thanks to Qaddafi’s malevolently whimsical vision of a nation without a state or state institutions, whoever inherits the country will need an enormous amount of outside help.

Larry Diamond, a Stanford scholar who served with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and was a leading advocate for intervention in Libya, says that the most directly relevant lesson of Iraq — and of Afghanistan, for that matter — is “security trumps everything.” People won’t accept a new political order if they may pay with their lives for doing so. It’s impossible to know right now where those threats may come from. But since Libya will have no foreign troops to stop looting or score-settling, the United States or others will have to train Libyan forces in what Diamond calls “democratic policing.”

…

Encouraging local capacity is thus more important than devising and importing elaborate solutions. The key lesson, Bodine concludes, is, “Wherever possible, work through existing institutions.” Unfortunately, Libya has very few institutions at all. Outsiders might have to let the new rulers work out their own political problems in their own way, but nevertheless provide enormous amounts of technocratic help.

But who should those outsiders be? The United States has learned painful lessons about the limits of its credibility in the Arab and Muslim world, which is one reason why Obama has kept the American footprint as small as possible. Why, then, contemplate an American-led effort to rebuild Libya, especially one that U.S. taxpayers are not about to fund? When Libya was freed from colonial rule in 1951, it fell under the tutelage of the United Nations, which helped organize a provincial assembly and draft a constitution. Perhaps the U.N. needs to return to Libya and play something of the administrative role it did in post-conflict states such as Kosovo and East Timor. James Dobbins, a former senior American diplomat now at the RAND Corp., has argued that U.N.-led state-building efforts have generally proved far more cost-effective than American ones.

Libyans, who preserve a national memory of the hated colonial experience under Italy, however, may view even the U.N. as a neo-colonial force. Lisa Anderson suggests drawing on the resources of the global South, on states such as South Africa and Chile that have made the transition from dictatorship to democracy. One possible source of institutional — but non-state — support, she notes, would be the Club of Madrid, a group of former heads of state of democratic countries. That would be, she says, a “twenty-first century solution” to the problem of state-building.

I’m not quite convinced that a country that missed out on 20th century state-formation is ready for 21st century solutions. Still, all these issues are worth debating. What is not worth debating is whether, having decided to intervene in Libya, the international community has both an obligation to prepare for the post-conflict situation and the capacity to do something about it. The fiasco in Iraq does not demonstrate that outsiders are helpless to shape such chaotic settings, but rather that you need to pay close attention to their very complicated realities, and approach them with due humility. If they ever do reach Tripoli, the Libyans whose heroic resistance to Qaddafi we are now apostrophizing are going to turn around and say, “Help us.” And it will not be enough to give Donald Rumsfeld’s cynical shrug and say, “Democracy is messy.”

Alex Pickerman- Our Protest against the cuts was peaceful

Published in the Guardian.

On Saturday hundreds of thousands took to the streets of London to protest against the cuts. The turnout was much bigger than expected, and the message was clear: people in Britain are totally opposed to the government’s choice to prioritise the needs of bankers and big business over those of ordinary citizens.

Hundreds of people marched as UK Uncut and, instead of attending the main rally, went to Oxford Street, the heart of London’s shopping district, to occupy for the alternative. A diverse mass movement has been born.  The UK Uncut actions included people dressing as doctors to transform tax avoider Boots into a hospital, in protest against the £20bn cuts to the NHS. BHS on Oxford Street (part of Philip Green‘s empire) was closed as actors and musicians gathered outside to protest against arts cuts, with Sam and Timothy West staging an extract from The Voysey Inheritance by Granville Barker.

In nearby Soho Square an open air comedy venue was created, where Josie Long and Mark Thomas performed to an audience of nearly a thousand. These actions continued in the creative, fun and inclusive vein that UK Uncut has become known for, highlighting the tax gap and the injustice of bailing out the banks that caused the financial crisis and are awarding their bosses grotesque bonuses.

The UK Uncut actions were organised to work in tandem with the TUC March for the Alternative in order to make space for people wanting to engage in creative civil disobedience as their way of expressing opposition to the cuts. It was positive. It was in solidarity. We were not seeking to grab headlines – we did what we always do, engage in creative sit-down protest. We are all in this together.

At 3.30pm we gathered on Oxford Street and moved toward a new tax-dodging target, Fortnum & Mason, to stage an occupation. This foodstore is owned by Whittington Investments, which runs a devious tax avoidance scheme, stuffing money in Luxembourg and avoiding £10m a year in tax. This money could pay for about 500 nurses.

Over the last six months UK Uncut has creatively occupied shops owned by various tax dodgers. Last Saturday was no different. Inside Fortnum & Mason about 150 people read books, sang songs, held up banners and listened to music – creative civil disobedience against the cuts. We had many of the store’s staff engaging with us and wanting to know more; people in the cafe carried on eating their crumpets quite happily.

Balloons and beachballs were the only things being thrown in the air. A basket of chocolates was accidentally knocked over so we picked them up. We weren’t even asked to leave.  There has been tremendous confusion in the media about what UK Uncut had organised. Some on Twitter have been asking whether we should have organised an action at the same time as the march. Some who attended the march feel we hijacked their event. To this we say: “We are with you, and our occupations were in no way an attempt to grab headlines.”

There has been anger directed at us because some media outlets incorrectly used our name for actions we did not organise, giving every action the name UK Uncut. But it is clear, if you spend two minutes on our website, who we are, what we are about, and what our plans were. More accurate, grassroots reporting is emerging that tells the true story. UK Uncut will continue to take part in creative civil disobedience against the cuts, to ensure government and big business do not get away with making ordinary people pay for a crisis they did not cause.

Paul Krugman- The Republican Thought Police

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians. If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.

The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.  The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records. Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.

But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.

After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.

Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon? Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.)

Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing.  So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing.

Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.

Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.

What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

Anger in Syria over crackdown- 20,000 strong protest

Around 20,000 Syrians chanting freedom slogans marched on Thursday at the funerals of nine protesters killed by security forces in the southern city of Daraa, witnesses said. “The blood of martyrs is not spilt in waste!” they chanted in Daraa’s southern cemetery.

The nine were among at least 25 people shot dead by security forces on Wednesday, residents said. A witness told Al Jazeera that more than 100 people were killed. He said many people have gone missing and bodies have been dragged away from the streets. The town was in chaos, he said.  

A hospital in Daraa had said earlier that it had received the bodies of at least 25 protesters who died in confrontations with security forces. “We received them at 5pm local time on Wednesday (1500 GMT). They all had bullet holes,” the official told Reuters news agency on Thursday.

The AP news agency quoted an activist as saying that some residents of the southern town are holding a sit-in to protest the killings. The activist, who is in contact with residents in Daraa, said the situation is still tense, with a heavy presence of security forces in the streets. He said dozens of people were holding the sit-in in the al-Mahata neighborhood near the city centre.

Inspired by the wave of pro-democracy protests around the region, Daraa residents have held protests since last week. Earlier, human rights activists said at least 15 people have been killed in Daraa.

Residents said security forces shot and killed six people including a doctor who was giving aid to the injured at the Omari mosque, where most of the protests took place. A rights activist also told AFP news agency that security forces had opened fire on mourners attending the funeral of those killed in Daraa.

Call for Friday protests

Meanwhile, pro-democracy demonstrators in Syria have called for mass protests across the country on Friday. Activists used social-networking sites to call for the protests, which they dubbed as “Dignity Friday.”  Al Jazeera’s Rula Amin, reporting from Damascus, said violence broke out in Daraa when residents from other towns clashed with security forces as they tried to enter it to help residents there.

A youth activist in the Syrian capital, who remains anonymous, told Al Jazeera that his contacts in Daraa said that “dozens of people” had died in clashes. “Many there want to take down the government, and want more freedoms.” he said. Our correspondent said there was a heavy security presence in Daraa, with the army, anti-terror police and riot police all deployed in the city. Journalists are not being allowed to visit the city, and several of those who attempted to do so last night had their equipment confiscated by authorities.

‘Need for radical change’

Checkpoints have been set up by security forces at all entry points to the city. There was also no mobile phone network coverage in Daraa on Wednesday. Syria’s state-run television station reported that an “armed gang” attacked an ambulance at the Omari mosque, killing four people. The victims were a doctor, a paramedic, a policeman and the ambulance driver, according to SANA.

Later on Wednesday, state television showed what it said were pictures of a weapons stockpile inside the Omari mosque, including pistols, shotguns, grenades and ammunition. A Syrian official told the AFP news agency that the governor of Daraa had been sacked following the killings.  Authorities have arrested a leading campaigner who had supported the protesters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday. It said Loay Hussein, a political prisoner, was taken from his home near Damascus.

A number of Syrian towns and cities saw demonstrations in recent days despite the country’s emergency law which bans protests that has been in place since 1963.

Violence condemned

The United Nations, France and the United States condemned the violence. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, called for “a transparent investigation into the killings”. A spokesman for the US state department said Washington was alarmed by the situation and urged Syrian authorities to “exercise restraint and to refrain from violence”. “We are deeply concerned by the Syrian government’s use of violence, intimidation and arbitrary arrests to hinder the ability of its people to freely exercise their universal rights. We condemn these actions,” said Mark Toner.

On Tuesday, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged Syrian authorities to halt the excessive use of force. “The government should carry out an independent, transparent and effective investigation into the killings of the six protesters during the events of 18 and 20 March,” Rupert Colville, a spokesman for Pillay, said on Tuesday.

BBC: Wikileaks reveals that India’s Congress Party ‘bought votes’

India’s ruling Congress party bribed MPs to survive a crucial vote of confidence in 2008, a diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks suggests. It describes how a senior Congress aide showed a US embassy official “chests of cash” to pay off MPs ahead of a vote over a controversial nuclear deal.

The ruling party has denied the allegations. The leak heaps further pressure on embattled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after a string of corruption scandals. The leaked cable, reported in The Hindu newspaper, has caused uproar in the Indian parliament with the main opposition parties saying that Congress had “brought shame to the nation” and calling on the prime minister to resign.

‘Chests of cash’

The cable by US official Steven White said that the embassy employee had met Nachiketa Kapur, an aide of senior Congress leader Satish Sharma. It says that Mr Kapur told the embassy employee that “money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government”.

The embassy employee said he was shown “two chests containing cash and said that around $25m (£15.5m) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs”.  Nachiketa Kapur denied the report, saying: “I vehemently deny these malicious allegations. There was no cash to point out to.”

Satish Sharma told a news channel that he did not even have an aide called Nachiketa Kapur. “I never had and still don’t have a political aide,” he said. Mr Sharma is described as a “close associate of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi [and] considered to be a very close family friend of [Congress party chief] Sonia Gandhi”.

The cable said that Mr Kapur also claimed that MPs belonging to regional party Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) had been paid 100 million rupees ($2.5m; £1.5m) each to ensure they voted for the “right way”.  RLD leader Ajit Singh has denied the charge and said that he was “opposed to the nuclear deal” and his party MPs “voted against the government”.

These exchanges are alleged to have happened at the time of a controversial deal between India and the US which paved the way for India to massively expand its nuclear power capability. The government’s left-wing allies withdrew their support over the deal but the Congress party narrowly survived the vote despite substantial opposition. If the government had lost the vote, India could have faced early elections. A defeat would have also put the nuclear deal in doubt.

Accusations of vote-buying were also made at the time: opposition MPs waved wads of money in parliament alleging they were offered bribes to abstain. Widespread corruption in India costs billions of dollars and threatens to derail the country’s growth, a recent report by consultancy firm KPMG says.

The report says corruption is no longer just about petty bribes but about the major scandals where billions of dollars are allegedly siphoned off by government and industry. India’s Telecoms Minister Andimuthu Raja is under arrest on suspicion of underselling billions of dollars worth of mobile phone licences – he denies the allegations.

The government was also forced by the courts to quash the appointment of its anti-corruption commissioner, on the grounds that he himself faces corruption charges. Congress was recently forced by the opposition to set up a cross-party investigation into corruption

Yemeni President Offers to Exit At End of Year (after his Generals defected to the Protestors)

Published in NY TIMES.

SANA, Yemen — As his tenuous grasp on power eroded further with more public figures defecting to the opposition, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has accepted a proposal by his adversaries to plan his departure from office by the end of the year, a government official said on Tuesday. Previously he had offered only to leave by 2013.

It was not clear whether his offer would appease protesters who have been incensed by a bloody assault on a demonstration last Friday that killed at least 45 people. The Yemeni leader shifted ground after a wave of high-level officials, including the country’s senior military commander, an important tribal leader and a half-dozen ambassadors abandoned him and threw their support behind protesters calling for his ouster.

The latest of the departures came on Tuesday when Abdel-Malik Mansour, Yemen’s representative to the Arab League, told Al Arabiya television he had thrown his support behind the protesters. Abdul-Rahman al-Iryani, the minister of water and environment, who was dismissed with the rest of the cabinet on Sunday, also said he was joining “the revolutionaries.”

A government official, who spoke in return for anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters, said on Tuesday that the details of Mr. Saleh’s proposal were not yet clear and were “still in the works.” The opposition proposal urged Mr. Saleh to complete arrangements for his departure by the end of the year. But since then, the opposition has backed away from the offer, initially made at the beginning of March, saying they want Mr. Saleh to quit immediately.

As the country girded for the next stage of a deepening crisis, military units appeared to take sides in the capital on Monday, with the Republican Guard protecting the palace of President Saleh and soldiers from the First Armored Division under the defecting military commander, Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, protecting the throngs of protesters in Sana. Despite a celebratory mood among the demonstrators, the standoff prompted the United States Embassy to urge Americans in Yemen to stay indoors on Monday night because of “political instability and uncertainty.”

In his letter of resignation on Tuesday, the former water minister declared: “It is becoming ridiculous that every member of the regime is now joining the revolution, when in fact they should surrender themselves to the revolution for trial for crimes that they committed against the people or looked the other way while these crimes were perpetrated on the people. Also, they should pledge not to occupy any public office in the future.”

Therefore, he wrote, “Having served as Minister of Water and Environment since 2006, hereby declare that I surrender to the Youth of the Revolution for fair accounting of any wrongs I may have committed against the people of Yemen and pledge not to hold any public office in the future.”

The defection of General Ahmar, who commands forces in the country’s northwest, was seen by many in Yemen as a turning point, and a possible sign that government leaders could be negotiating an exit for the president. But the defense minister, Brig. Gen. Muhammad Nasir Ahmad Ali, later said on television that the armed forces remained loyal to Mr. Saleh.

That suggested the possibility of a dangerous split in the military should Mr. Saleh, who dismissed his cabinet late Sunday night in the face of escalating opposition, decide to fight to preserve his 32-year rule. His son Ahmed commands the Republican Guard, and four nephews hold important security posts, and their ability to retain the loyalty of their troops in the face of ballooning opposition has yet to be tested.

The Obama administration has watched Mr. Saleh’s eroding position with alarm, for fear of both escalating violence and a power vacuum that might allow the branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen greater freedom to operate. Mr. Saleh has been a crucial ally in operations against the affiliate, called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which since 2009 has mounted multiple terrorist plots against the United States.

General Ahmar and more than a dozen other senior commanders who followed his example said they had decided to support the protesters after a bloody assault on a demonstration on Friday in which more than 45 people were killed. “I declare on their behalf our peaceful support for the youth revolution and that we are going to fulfill our complete duty in keeping the security and stability in the capital,” General Ahmar told Al Jazeera on Monday. He said that violence against protesters was “pushing the country to the edge of civil war.”

General Ahmar is sometimes described as a rival of the president, and he has long opposed the possible succession to the presidency of Mr. Saleh’s son Ahmed. But the general is from the same village as the president and has mostly been a pillar of support for Mr. Saleh.  By Monday afternoon, soldiers directed by General Ahmar stood among the demonstrators with black, white and red ribbons, the colors of Yemen’s flag, draped over their chests. “We are with the people,” said a group of soldiers guarding the main entrance of the protest.

At the same time, one of the country’s most important tribal leaders, Sheik Sadeq al-Ahmar, said Monday that he would join the country’s protest movement. He is the head of the Hashid tribal confederation, to which the president belongs, and his support for antigovernment demonstrations is another serious blow to Mr. Saleh. “Yemen is not the property of Ali Saleh or the Hashids,” Sheik Ahmar told protesters in Sana as he endorsed their movement.

By swinging the weight of the Hashid tribes behind the protests, Sheik Ahmar joined his brother, Sheik Hussein al-Ahmar, who resigned from the ruling party last month to join the demonstrators. Tribes from across Yemen have historically been embroiled in conflicts, but so far few squabbles have taken place among those who have joined the main protest in Sana, their leaders and other protesters said.

The shift in support by the tribal leader and military commanders came amid a stream of resignations by Yemeni officials on Monday, including the mayor of the restive southern city of Aden, a provincial governor and more than half of the country’s foreign ambassadors. The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said in Brussels on Monday that Mr. Saleh’s resignation was now “unavoidable.”  “This is a replicate of the changes that have happened in Egypt,” said a high-ranking Yemeni diplomat in Europe who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But, he added, it was still too soon to tell where events would lead.

The atmosphere was jubilant at the demonstration, which had grown to its largest size in weeks of rallies, with some men breaking into song. “The army knows that its correct place is to protect the people,” said Fawaz al-Muthlafy, an engineer from the central city of Taiz who has spent weeks at the sit-in protest. “The citizens are now receiving support from across the entire nation, and all our voices have been united.”

On a stage in front of the main gates of Sana University, an announcer welcomed a series of sheiks who voiced support for the demonstrations.  The country’s formal political opposition, which for the first time on Saturday joined street protests as a group, also welcomed the support of the commanders. “President Ali Abdullah Saleh will now see that change is a must,” said Mohammed Qahtan, the spokesman for the Joint Meetings Parties, Yemen’s coalition of opposition groups.

Benjamin Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that violence against demonstrators was “unacceptable.”  “I think our view is that there’s clearly going to have to be a political solution in Yemen that includes a government that is more responsive to the Yemeni people,” Mr. Rhodes said. “That has been our consistent message to President Saleh.”

Gregory D. Johnsen, a Princeton University expert on Yemen, said the defection of General Ahmar, known popularly as Ali Mohsin, could well prove a lethal blow to Mr. Saleh’s rule. “Many people were waiting for him to make his move,” Mr. Johnsen said. “It’s opened the floodgates.”

General Ahmar, who is widely believed to hold the conservative religious views of the Salafi school, was responsible for helping Yemeni men who had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan reintegrate into Yemeni society after their return in the 1990s and has since been an important government liaison to militant factions. American officials said that history is no indication of sympathy or tolerance for Al Qaeda. But they are uncertain about what an increase in General Ahmar’s influence might mean for Yemen and counterterrorism.

Abdullah Alsaidi, Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations, became one of a growing list of senior diplomats to resign after Friday’s violence. “I appeal to the president and to all others to work for a peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Alsaidi said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Monday. “Yemen is a poor country,” he added, saying it could ill afford further bloodshed.

The Guardian: British Protestors plan to turn Trafalger Square into Tahrir Square

Campaigners against public service cuts are calling for a 24-hour occupation of Trafalgar Square – drawing inspiration from revolts in the Middle East – to coincide with Saturday’s trade union protest in London. Student activists who organised last year’s demonstrations say there will be a rolling programme of sit-ins and protests on the day and have called on people to occupy the central London square turning “Trafalgar into Tahrir” – a reference to the gathering point in Cairo that was at the heart of the revolution in Egypt earlier this year.

“We want Trafalgar Square to become a focal point for the ongoing occupations, marches and sit-ins that will carry on throughout the weekend,” said Michael Chessum from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. “There are a lot of smaller scale demonstrations and actions planned and, just as we have seen in recent protests in the Middle East and north Africa, we want to create an ongoing organising hub.”

Saturday’s main demonstration has been organised by the TUC and is expected to see more than 200,000 people – including public sector workers, families and first-time protesters – take to the capital’s streets to oppose government cuts. This month the TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, promised a barrage of protests against the cuts, ranging from industrial strikes and “peaceful civil disobedience” to petitions by Tory voters in the shires.

The plan to occupy Trafalgar Square is the latest in a wave of proposed sit-ins, occupations and “people’s assemblies” that activists have branded a “carnival of civil disobedience”.  “We have seen time and again that marches from A to B do not achieve their objectives,” said Chessum. “This is about creating an ongoing movement that will put pressure on the government. This is the start of what is going to be a hot summer of protest against the ideological nature of what this government is doing.”

The call for an occupation of the London landmark is backed by student groups, activists and two Labour MPs – John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. In a joint statement they have called on people to “stay in Trafalgar Square for 24 hours to discuss how we can beat this government and to send a message across the globe that we stand with the people of Egypt, Libya, Wisconsin and with all those fighting for equality, freedom and justice.

“We want to turn Trafalgar Square into a place of people’s power where we assert our alternative to cuts and austerity and make it a day that this government won’t forget.” Alongside the main march, which will set off from the Embankment before making its way to Hyde Park for a rally, anti-cuts campaigners say they plan to occupy some of the capital’s “great buildings”, close down scores of high street stores and occupy Hyde Park.

UK Uncut, a peaceful direct action group set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and protest against corporate tax avoidance, is planning to occupy and force the temporary closure of scores of shops on Oxford Street on Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, student groups will meet at the University of London student union building in Bloomsbury at 10am. Some are then expected to make their way to the main assembly point in a “feeder march”; others will peel off to take part in various “direct actions” .

“Since Christmas the movement has become much more autonomous,” one veteran of last year’s protests told the Guardian last week. “There are smaller, semi-independent groups planning small-scale direct action against a range of targets. It will be a bit of a disappointment if we get to the end of the day and one of London’s great buildings is not occupied. We have to make an impact.”

Online, other groups are calling for more widespread direct action on Saturday. An organisation calling itself Resist 26 claims it will stage a number of “people’s assemblies” along the route of the march. Under the banner “Battle of Britain” it is calling for a 24-hour occupation of Hyde Park and “after parties” at famous London landmarks including Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace.

Four NY Times Journalists Detained by Gadafi’s Authorities Tell Story

Published in NY Times.

The Libyan government freed four New York Times journalists on Monday, six days after they were captured while covering the conflict between government and rebel forces in the eastern city of Ajdabiya. They were released into the custody of Turkish diplomats and crossed safely into Tunisia in the late afternoon, from where they provided a harrowing account of their captivity.

Like many other Western journalists, the four had entered the rebel-controlled eastern region of Libya over the Egyptian border without visas to cover the insurrection against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They were detained in Ajdabiya by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi.

The journalists are Anthony Shadid, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting; two photographers, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who have extensive experience in war zones; and a reporter and videographer, Stephen Farrell, who in 2009 was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan and was rescued by British commandos. After The New York Times reported having lost contact with the four last Tuesday, officials with the Qaddafi government pledged that if they had been detained by the government’s military forces, they would be located and released unharmed.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, wrote in a note to the newsroom that he was “overjoyed” at the news. “Because of the volatile situation in Libya, we’ve kept our enthusiasm and comments in check until they were out of the country, but now feels like a moment for celebration,” he wrote. “We’re particularly indebted to the government of Turkey, which intervened on our behalf to oversee the release of our journalists and bring them to Tunisia,” Mr. Keller added. “We were also assisted throughout the week by diplomats from the United States and United Kingdom.”

A clearer account of the four journalists’ capture and detention has come to light now that they have been released. The four had been covering fighting near Ajdabiya last Tuesday when they decided that the battle had grown too dangerous for them to continue safely. Their driver, however, inadvertently drove into a checkpoint manned by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. By the time they knew they were in trouble, it was too late.

“I was yelling to the driver, ‘Keep driving! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ ” Mr. Hicks recalled in a telephone interview from the hotel where he and the three others were recuperating. “I knew that the consequences of being stopped would be very bad.” The driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, is still missing. If he had tried to drive straight through, Mr. Hicks said, the vehicle certainly would have been fired on. In any event, the soldiers flung the doors to their gold four-door sedan wide open so quickly that they had little chance to get away.

As they were being pulled from the car, rebels fired on the checkpoint, sending the four running for their lives. “You could see the bullets hitting the dirt,” Mr. Shadid said. All four made it safely behind a small, one-room building, where they tried to take cover. But the soldiers had other plans. They told all four to empty their pockets and ordered them on the ground. And that is when they thought they were seconds from death.

“I heard in Arabic, ‘Shoot them,’ ” Mr. Shadid said. “And we all thought it was over.” Then another soldier spoke up. “One of the others said: ‘No, they’re American. We can’t shoot them,’ ” Mr. Hicks said.

The soldiers grabbed whatever they could get their hands on to tie up their prisoners: wire, an electrical cord from a home appliance, a scarf. One removed Ms. Addario’s shoes, pulled out the laces and used them to bind her ankles. Then one punched her in the face and laughed. “Then I started crying,” she recalled. “And he was laughing more.” One man grabbed her breasts, the beginning of a pattern of disturbing behavior she would experience from her captors over the next 48 hours.

“There was a lot of groping,” she said. “Every man who came in contact with us basically felt every inch of my body short of what was under my clothes.” Their captors held them in Ajdabiya until the fighting with the rebels died down. Soldiers put the four in a vehicle and drove them out of the city around 2 a.m. One threatened to decapitate Mr. Hicks. Another stroked Ms. Addario’s head and told her repeatedly she was going to die. “He was caressing my head in this sick way, this tender way, saying: ‘You’re going to die tonight. You’re going to die tonight,’ ” she said.

Their vehicle stopped repeatedly at checkpoints, each time allowing for a new group of soldiers to land a fresh punch or a rifle butt in their backs. The first night they spent in the back of a vehicle. The second night they spent in a jail cell with dirty mattresses on the ground, a bottle to urinate in and a jug of water to drink.

On the third day they were on the move again, this time to an airfield. Mr. Shadid, who speaks Arabic, had overheard one of the soldiers saying something about a plane, and the four assumed they would be flown somewhere. As they were loaded on the plane they were blindfolded and their hands were bound tightly with plastic handcuffs. “I could hear Anthony at this point yelling ‘Help me!’ ” Mr. Hicks said, “which I learned later was because he had no feeling in his hands.” In a rare show of mercy, a soldier loosened the cuffs.

They landed on Thursday in Tripoli, where they were handed over to Libyan defense officials. They were transferred to a safe house, where they said they were treated well. They were each allowed a brief phone call. That was the first time since their capture two and a half days earlier that their whereabouts became known to their families and colleagues at The Times.

Their disappearance had kicked off an intensive search effort. The Times canvassed hospitals and morgues, beginning a grim process-of-elimination search. The paper also turned to a variety of people on the ground who might have heard or seen something — local residents, security contractors for Western businesses, workers for nongovernmental organizations. It also notified American diplomats.

The State Department got word Thursday afternoon that the journalists were safe and unharmed, in a phone call to Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, from an aide to Abdullah al-Senussi, the head of Libyan military intelligence and the brother-in-law of Colonel Qaddafi, Mr. Feltman said.

But the arrival of the four journalists in Tripoli was just the beginning of three days of frustrating, increasingly tense negotiations conducted by a State Department consular officer, Yael Lempert. Libyan officials kept changing their demands for the conditions of the journalists’ release, and an allied coalition, including the United States, began bombing Tripoli to enforce a no-fly zone. Several Libyan agencies were involved in the negotiation, which added to the confusion.

First the Libyan government demanded that an American diplomat come to Tripoli to take the journalists, State Department officials said. The United States, which closed its embassy in Libya last month, refused. After initially resisting, the Libyans agreed to allow the Turkish Embassy to act as an intermediary. The release was scheduled for Sunday but was delayed until Monday because of the bombing. The four were turned over to Turkish diplomats Monday afternoon, and were driven to the border with Tunisia.

While Monday was a day for celebration and relief at The Times, other news organizations covering the conflicts in Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world have not been so lucky. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 13 journalists are either missing or in government custody. The missing include four from Al Jazeera, two from Agence France-Presse and one from Getty Images. In addition, six Libyan journalists are unaccounted for, the group said.

Others have died. A Libyan broadcaster was killed Saturday while covering a battle near Benghazi. A cameraman for Al Jazeera was killed in the same area on March 12, the first death of a journalist in Libya during the current conflict.

NY Times: Bullets Stall Youthful Push for Arab Spring

MANAMA, Bahrain — These days, Muhammad al-Maskati is a prisoner in his apartment, his BlackBerry shut off by the government, the streets outside his apartment filled with tanks, the hospitals around town packed with the wounded.

Mr. Maskati is a 24-year-old human rights activist who not long ago felt so close to achieving Egypt’s kind of peaceful revolution, through a dogged commitment to nonviolence. Then the Saudi tanks rolled into Bahrain, and protesters came under attack, the full might of the state hammering at unarmed civilians.  “We thought it would work,” Mr. Maskati said, his voice soft with depression, yet edged with anger. “But now, the aggression is too much. Now it’s not about the protest anymore, it’s about self-defense.”

The Arab Spring is not necessarily over, but it has run up against dictators willing to use lethal force to preserve their power. The youth-led momentum for change stalled first in Libya, where Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi unleashed troops on his people, and then in Bahrain, where King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa enlisted Saudi Arabia’s help to crush demonstrations.

Bahrain’s protests were part of a transformation sweeping the Middle East, propelled by young people free of the fear that held back their parents.  At first, they seemed an unstoppable force, driven by the power of demographics — about 60 percent of the population across the Arab world is under the age of 30. They started to reshape societies where the young defer to the old, toppling old hierarchies along with governments.

The movement is still forcing change in places like Morocco and Jordan, guiding transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, and playing out in countries like Algeria and Yemen. Young people remain out front, wielding the online tools they grew up with to mobilize protests, elude surveillance and cross class lines.  This generation’s access to a life without borders through the Internet and pan-Arab television networks like Al Jazeera exposed them to other societies, fueling anger at the repressive politics and economic stagnation that deprived the region’s youth of opportunity and freedom.

It was long anticipated that young people would emerge as a powerful force because the median age across the Middle East is just 26. But what surprised many was the absence of religious discourse — and the embrace of pluralism — from a generation that was more observant than its parents and often sought solace from despotic rulers and blighted lives in an embrace of Islam.

This generation rejected traditional opposition leaders, like the toothless political parties that served dictators by providing a veneer of democratic legitimacy, or the Muslim Brotherhood, which many came to see as having been co-opted by the status quo.  Young people interviewed across the region echoed the same ideas, tactics and motivations that set off revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. In Morocco and Jordan, monarchs have already offered concessions, fueling excitement and hope. It is a force driven by young men like Tarek al-Naimat, 26, of Jordan, who joined Facebook a few weeks ago, saying that it was a more powerful tool than the Muslim Brotherhood.

And Oussama el-Khlifi, 23, who left the Socialist Union of Popular Forces in Morocco to found a nonideological movement — initially organized on Facebook — that has already rallied unmatched numbers in the streets of Morocco and pressed the king to announce plans to modify the Constitution.  “We saw change would not happen through the parties, it would happen through the people,” Mr. Khlifi said. “We created a Facebook group called Moroccans Discuss the King, and in four or five days we had 3,000 members.”

The early victories in Tunisia and Egypt emboldened them. “I grew up in a world where we believed we could not do anything,” said Mariam Abu Adas, 32, an online activist in Jordan who helped create a company called Hiber to train young people to use social media.  “Generations believed we could do nothing,” she said, “and now, in a matter of weeks, we know that we can.”

It is a new model for the Middle East, not only because the young people are taking the lead, but because their elders have started to listen and follow.  “The youth, we were afraid of, but we have come to see the youth are moving the region,” said Mustafa Rawashdeh, a former headmaster at a school in Karak, Jordan, who was fired after trying to form a teachers’ union. “Young people saw the winds of change and drove us.”

And then Colonel Qaddafi’s forces opened fire, followed by King Hamad’s crackdown. The young activists’ idealism has been challenged by the bitter reality of repression, leaving them dispirited but resolute.  It is a sobering pause, as Bahrainis tend their wounded and Libya’s opposition flees from the advance of pro-Qaddafi forces. The future of the Arab Spring is at stake.  “I don’t believe the peaceful protests will go on,” Mr. Maskati said. “Now, it’s about resisting the aggression.”

Jordan

The women at Ammon News stood firm when the Jordanian authorities told them to take down a daring post critical of the monarchy and, in particular, Queen Rania — a taboo in a nation where criticizing the royal family is a crime punishable by three years in prison. The authorities promptly hijacked the Web site, and the staff’s editor told them to give up and go home. Instead, the women took to the streets in protest, and the authorities backed down.

“It was the principle,” said Ala Alyan, 22. “Liberty is very important.”  The incident hardly registered beyond the borders of Jordan, a close American ally. But it illustrates the contagion of a movement determined not to allow its governments to treat its citizens as subjects.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II is not facing the kind of popular revolt that forced out the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia. But there have been demonstrations that prompted the king to fire the cabinet, appoint a new government and promise constitutional change. The open question, as in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, is how far change will go, and whether young people will be satisfied.

“If you feel you have right on your side, you do not have fear,” said Heba Alazari, 26, one of the Ammon News women who protested. “If an injustice happened before, no one knew about it. Now you can deliver your voice in a different way and everyone will know.”

In the Jordanian countryside, the cyberworld and the real world intersect. The staff of Hiber, the social media training and blogging organization, recently visited the village of Tafilah, two hours south of the capital, Amman. It is a small, dry outpost of cinder-block and white-stone homes on rocky soil, with a traffic circle, a few shops and lot of young people. Every woman on the street was veiled, and fathers sternly police their daughters.

About 35 young people in the workshop run by Hiber, more than half of them women, were eager to learn more. “The people in Egypt, who used these tools, woke up after 30 years,” said Rasha Garabaa, 25, who wore a bright red head scarf and heavy makeup.  Ramsey Tesdell, 27, who was leading the discussion, said that social media allowed young women in the village to bypass the men — fathers, brothers, husbands — who circumscribed their worlds and their ability to communicate. They cannot go to the park unaccompanied and meet friends, but they can join a chat room or send instant messages.

“In a lot of ways, it has taken the power away from the traditional powerful leaders, especially older men,” Mr. Tesdell said.  Ms. Garabaa understood, and marveled at the changes. “Remember how they closed Ammon the other day,” she said, almost in a whisper, to one of the other members of the group. “Think how much the Internet can empower you. You have the world at the tip of your fingers.”

Morocco

The secret password was tsk-tsk-tsk, and the door opened into the Feb. 20th movement.  Inside a run-down apartment at the top of narrow darkened staircase, Montasser Drissi, 19, was listening to traditional Moroccan music and working on subtitles for a protest video. He was one of the young men who helped organize nationwide protests on Feb. 20 that drew tens of thousands of demonstrators in a show of opposition that has already begun to change Morocco’s political landscape.

“Our goal is a new constitution that serves the people, not the elite,” said Mr. Drissi, a slight, understated young man with a dab of a beard.  The Feb. 20th movement is the loosely knit Moroccan manifestation of the youth fever sweeping the region. Its members met on Facebook and decided that like their peers in Egypt and Tunisia, they wanted to fight for change. Their goal was not to oust the monarchy, but to reduce its near absolute authority and strengthen elected institutions.

“We are young, we study, we have jobs — we’re normal,” said Yassine Falah, 23, who recently quit his job selling insurance and moved from Fez to Rabat to dedicate his time to the movement. “We tried hard to not politicize the thing, we used Facebook, we came together and that’s how it started. Our spontaneity is our strength.”

The government was concerned from the start. It tried to blunt the movement’s impact, first by trying to demonize its young leaders as enemies of the state, and then, when that failed, taking the creative approach of announcing that the demonstration was canceled. But that did not work either. Instead, traditional opposition parties that initially shunned the upstart movement jumped in, trying to ride the wave churned up by the young.

King Mohammed VI apparently got the message and in a rare nationally televised speech announced that he intended to meet some of the group’s core demands — without ever actually acknowledging that the group existed.  The group helped break down barriers to join secular leftists with conservative Islamists in the fight for democracy. “In Morocco, there has always been a war between the left and the Islamists, and the state wants it that way,” said Younes Belghazi, 20, as he flopped onto a mattress on the floor. “When the state saw we had agreed on basic things, like values, change, democracy, they just didn’t know what to do.”

Over in the corner, in what passes for the group’s video studio — a white sheet taped to the tile wall and a camera on a tripod — Mr. Drissi’s new friend and collaborator, Nizar Bennamate, 23, was discussing how the movement planned another national protest on March 20. The challenge was to maintain momentum, difficult for a leaderless organization whose members often could not agree on when to meet, or even exactly what it was they were fighting for.

“The demands we talk about are the lowest common denominator, the first stage,” Mr. Bennamate said. “Once we get these demands, we will be at an early stage of democracy where different ideas can confront each other.”

The group’s secret headquarters was discovered recently by the police, who have also visited the homes of some of the organizers in an attempt at intimidation. But that also seems to be a sign of their power and success.  “I am an activist because I want change,” said Mr. Khlifi, an unemployed high school graduate who has become one of the leading voices in the movement. “I want a political dialogue. I want to criticize. I want democracy. I want the people to have power.”

Bahrain

Mr. Maskati struggled to force out each painful word: “They. Shot. The. People.” Bahrain’s army had just opened fire on demonstrators and he was trying to type out “Urgent from Bahrain” on his BlackBerry and post a video link of the attack to Twitter, Facebook and the extensive e-mail list of his human rights organization.

For years, Mr. Maskati was dismissed as naïve for trying to convince people that peaceful protests would be more effective than violence. And then, suddenly, the protesters so embraced his view that a group walked into an army roadblock, hands in the air, chanting “peacefully, peacefully.”

 Nearly a month ago, the army opened fire, killing a young man after six were killed by the police. But the protesters clung to nonviolence, taking to the streets in remarkably large numbers, confident that international attention would force the government to stop shooting. The government did back down, offer concessions, release political prisoners, call for a national dialogue and shuffle the cabinet.

Mr. Maskati marveled at the radical change in approach after years of watching young people throw rocks and burn tires in the street, to no avail.  He founded the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, a small monitoring and training organization that is one part of a youth-led movement that has posed the most serious challenge to the monarchy since the Khalifa family took power in the 18th century. Mr. Maskati’s main weapons are his phone and his BlackBerry. He does not organize protests and he does not protest himself. He sees his role as informing the world through Facebook, Twitter and his extensive e-mail list.

From Feb. 14, the start of the demonstrations, Mr. Maskati was always on the scene, dodging the police, hovering at the periphery, posting updates to the Internet. He was one of the first to notify the world that the police had shot and killed a 21-year-old man. “Mr. Ali Abdulhadi Mushaima was killed by the riot police in Daih village.( 8:00 PM, 14 FEB. 2011 ),” his message said. “Ali was not involved in the demonstration, but went out of his house to see what happens in his village.”

The death galvanized the community of mainly Shiite protesters, and they turned out by the thousands for the funeral. At the cemetery, mourners did more than fume. They had a laptop computer and a wireless airstick, and as the young man’s body was lowered into the ground, the image was immediately uploaded to the Internet.

“They did a big mistake,” said Hussein Ramadan, 32, a manager in the local aluminum plant, as he stood at the edge of the grave. “They will pay for it, peacefully. We are not thinking about any violence. People are angry. But we can control our anger. We tried violence before, now we try the other way. We are ready to give our blood. It is our country.”

Mr. Maskati is from a wealthy Shiite family, part of the Shiite majority in Bahrain that has smoldered under a repressive Sunni monarchy. He became interested in human rights work when he was 14, but he said he found his calling in 2006 after attending a training course in Jordan with Otpor, a Serbian youth movement that also inspired the Egyptian activists, and then in Washington with the Center for Nonviolence.

The next year, he founded his own group. He continues to monitor the events in Bahrain and post his observations each day. Last week, Mr. Maskati and two other human rights activists received death threats because of their work. But Mr. Maskati was undeterred and instead sent word of the death threats out on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail and to every blogger he knew.

Then the tanks rolled in, and on Thursday the police began rounding up opposition leaders. Mr. Maskati kept sending messages until Wednesday morning, when his phone number was shut off. He stayed home, using his computer, issuing updates always titled “Urgent from Bahrain.”

Nadim Audi contributed reporting.