DENPASAR, Indonesia — One year has made a lot of difference in the sleepy town of Poso, in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi. Poso gained media attention as Indonesia’s new front in the war on terror in January 2007, when two police operations left 17 Islamic radicals dead. At that time, the town was an operating hub for regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah. (See “Indonesia’s Latest Front in the War on Terror.”) Twelve months on, Poso is a much safer place, and although sporadic pipe-bombings persisted through mid-year, just two small incidents were reported during the second half of [...]
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in Paris last week and he gave an interview to the French daily Le Figaro. This is what he had to say about an Egyptian proposal to hold four party talks on Gaza involving Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: I don’t see how we can accept the Egyptian proposal. We have nothing to say to Hamas. We speak to them when we interrogate them in our prisons. But this is a fundamentalist group that says openly that it has received a divine mandate to destroy Israel. One should, on the contrary, weaken [...]
EU COURT THREATENS U.N. ANTI-TERROR MEASURES — In a move with potentially devastating consequences for the effectiveness of U.N. counterterrorism measures, an advocate general at the European Court of Justice, Miguel Poiares Maduro, recommended to the court last week that it annul EU financial sanctions against suspected al-Qaida financier, Yassin Abdullah Kadi (aka “Qadi”). The sanctions were originally applied by the EU in 2001 in conformity with U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Kadi’s name was placed on the U.N.’s consolidated list of Qaida or Taliban affiliated persons and entities shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A series of U.N. Security Council Resolutions [...]
