Israel’s surprise decision to back a UN probe into its deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla was taken as a bid to patch up its ties with Turkey, a senior official said yesterday.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday announced the creation of a four-member panel, which will include Israeli and Turkish participants, to probe the May 31 raid which left nine Turkish activists dead, and in a surprising change, Israel gave its blessing to the inquiry.
“We have nothing to be afraid of — the facts are on our side,” a senior government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We also hope that this panel will help us to improve our relations with Turkey ... that it will be a turning point in our relations with Turkey,” he said.
However, with the mandate described, it remained an open question whether the panel would conduct its own investigation or simply review what is produced by the opposing sides.
Martin Nesirky, the spokesman for the secretary-general, said the four-member panel was not a criminal inquiry examining the deaths of nine people.
Rather, the initial focus of the panel will be “looking into existing national inquiries that are under way already, then, if necessary, to ask for further clarification,” he said, referring to the separate investigations by Israel and Turkey.
Over the past two months, Israel has consistently rejected diplomatic pressure for an independent probe into the raid, with the Jewish state setting up two internal panels to look into various aspects of the chaotic pre-dawn raid in international waters.
However, on Monday, the government of Israel made a strategic about-turn and agreed, for the first time ever, to cooperate with a UN inquiry into an Israeli military operation.
“Israel has nothing to hide,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. “The opposite is true. It is in the national interest of the state of Israel to ensure that the factual truth of the overall flotilla events comes to light.”
Media reports suggested Israel had come under heavy pressure from the US to comply with the UN probe.
However, the Israeli official denied reports that Israel had caved in to pressure.
Ankara denounced the May 31 raid as a violation of international law, immediately recalled its ambassador and canceled three planned joint military exercises with the Jewish state.
Turkey says Israel must apologize over the raid, pay compensation for the victims and lift the blockade of Gaza for the recovery of bilateral ties.
Turkish diplomats withheld judgment as to just how effective the panel might prove. “We have to see how the commission would function or whether Israel would cooperate in providing the facts vital to the investigation,” a Turkish diplomat said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.
The panel will be led by a former New Zealand prime minister, Geoffrey Palmer, with the departing president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, as his deputy. Israel and Turkey are expected to nominate one member each within the coming days.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS