< IRAN SRI LANKA >

Iran To Train Sri Lankan Intelligence & Army Officers
April 24th, 2008
By B. Raman
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad of Iran is to visit Sri Lanka for two days from April 28, 2008, in response to an invitation from President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had visited Iran in November, 2007. His engagements will include the inauguration of the construction of the Iranian-funded (US $ 450 million) Uma Oya hydroelectricity project at Wellawaya in the Monaragala district. When completed, the project is expected to produce 100 megawatts of electricity. The visit is also expected to result in the finalisation of an agreement for Iranian financial and technical assistance for enabling the Sapugaskanda oil refinery to handle Iran?s light crude. This project is expected to result in a further Iranian investment of US $ one billion.
2. In this connection, quoting Sri Lankan media, the “Teheran Times” of April 20, 2008, reported as follows: “Iran will increase its investment in the expansion project of an oil refinery in Sri Lanka up to US$ one billion, Petroleum and Petroleum Resources Development Minister A.H.M. Fowzie said. According to the IRNA office in Tokyo, Fowzie in an interview with Kyodo on Wednesday said: “Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has allocated this amount which would cover 70 per cent of the required investment for the refinery’s expansion, in the form of a 10 year loan, with a five year exemption period from payment of the loan’s instalments.” Fowzie added: “Iran had earlier too provided the oil we need free from interest for four months.” According to the report, Iran is the largest provider of crude oil to Sri Lanka. According to the Kyodo report, Managing Director Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) Ashantha De Mel has said that the pilot study for increasing the production of Sri Lanka’s only refinery from 50,000 to 100,000 barrels per day has been completed by Iranian oil engineers. De Mel added: “Iran would make the major part of the required investment for expansion of this oil refinery (70 per cent) and the CPC would cover the rest (30 per cent).” Fowzie said the project would yield noticeable benefits for its investors. He said: “From the economic point of view my affiliated ministry too is interested in making investments there.” According to Kyodo, De Mel who visited Iran in early April 2008, expects the project’s executive phase to begin within the next three to four months. Oil experts predict that Sri Lanka’s oil refinery would increase its production after the Iranian oil engineers would end their work within the next two to three years.”
3. Iran has also agreed to provide low-interest credit to Sri Lanka to enable it to purchase military equipment from Pakistan and China and to train a small group of Sri Lankan Army and intelligence officers in Iran. A team of about 10 officers has already proceeded to Iran for training after a clandestine visit to Sri Lanka by Brigadier Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the Director-General of Iran?s Quds Force, or the Jerusalem Brigade, which is, inter alia, responsible for covert actions against Israel and for liaison with friendly foreign intelligence agencies. He is expected to come again as a member of the entourage of the Iranian President for further discussions on intelligence co-operation between the two countries.
4. According to reliable sources, Israel is reported to have expressed to Colombo its concern over the developing relations between Sri Lanka and Iran and warned that this could come in the way of supply and sale of Israeli military equipment to Sri Lanka in future. It has been reported by these sources that Sri Lanka has already shared with the Iranian intelligence copies of the instructions, training and maintenance manuals of the Israeli equipment purchased by it in the past and allowed some officers of the Quds Force to inspect the Israeli equipment. [saag]
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2 AT gmail.com)
Paper no. 2455 13-Nov.-2007

Iran to Fund Sri Lankan Arms Purchases
International Terrorism Monitor---Paper No. 303
by B. Raman
"Reliable Tamil sources also say that about 12 to 15 members of the Pakistani Armed Forces, including four or five from the Pakistan Air Force, are stationed in Colombo to guide the Sri Lankan security forces in their counter-insurgency operations. The Pakistan Air Force officers have reportedly been guiding the SLAF officers in effectively carrying out air-mounted operations against the LTTE. They have also been reportedly involved in drawing up plans for a decapitation strike from the air, with bunker-buster bombs, to kill Prabakaran.The reported posting of Air Vice-Marshal Shehzad Chaudhry, who had handled in the past air-mounted operations against the Baloch freedom-fighters, is expected to further step up the Pakistani involvement in the use of air strikes to subdue the LTTE and intimidate the Tamil population."
.............. According to reliable Sri Lankan sources, the Government of President Mahinda Rajapakse has requested the Government of Iran through a Malaysian Muslim of Indian/Sri Lankan origin for an urgent loan at low interest to enable it to purchase trainer and electronic surveillance aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles in replacement of those lost during the recent ground-cum-air attack launched by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) at the Anuradhapura air base of the Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF). It has also requested Iran for the supply of oil and gas at concessional rates on credit. These requests are expected to be followed up personally by President Rajapakse during a planned visit to Iran shortly.
2. The Malaysian Muslim, who is acting as the intermediary, is a close personal friend of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, and had come into contact with key Iranian officials in the past through A. Q. Khan.
3. The Rajapakse Government has also requested Pakistan for the replacement of the unmanned aerial vehicles destroyed by the LTTE. Some of them had been given in the past by Pakistan and some others by Israel. It has also requested China urgently for the latest radar and other air defence equipment.
4. Pakistani Commandoes from its Special Services Group (SSG) have been training Sri Lankan Commandoes and some anti-LTTE Tamils in secret training camps in Southern Sri Lanka as a prelude to the expected military offensive in the Wanni area of the Northern Province. Some of the Sri Lankan commandoes had also been to Pakistan for training in the SSG training institutions.
5. In the meanwhile, the SLAF, with the help of Pakistani and Ukrainian pilots, has stepped up its efforts for a decapitation strike to kill Prabakaran. A monitoring station to locate the hide-out of Prabakaran has been set up at an unidentified location in the Eastern Province with the help of Pakistan's Directorate of Military Intelligence (DGMI) to identify the location of Prabakaran's hide-out.
6. In an interview to the "Sunday Observer" of November 11, 2007, the SLAF Commander Air Marshal Roshan Goonatilleke said ` that it was not a difficult task for the SLAF to get at Prabhakaran as he was confined to a very limited area. He added that, "We will find him somehow."
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2ATgmail.com)

Rice says Carter was warned against meeting with Hamas
Tue Apr 22, 11:26 AM ET
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the Bush administration explicitly warned former President Jimmy Carter against meeting with members of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip and which is regarded by the U.S. as a terror group.
Rice, attending a regional meeting on Iraq's security and future, contradicted Carter's assertions that he never got a clear signal from the State Department. Rice told reporters that the U.S. thought the visit could confuse the message that the U.S. will not deal with Hamas.
"I just don't want there to be any confusion," Rice said. "The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help" further a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Carter said top Hamas leaders told him during seven hours of talks in Damascus over the weekend that they are willing to live next to Israel, but a top Hamas official said the group would never outright recognize the Jewish state.
Separately Tuesday, a Hamas official said the militant group has softened its demands for a cease-fire with Israel.
Spokesman Ghazi Hamad said Hamas is now prepared for a partial truce that would only include the Gaza Strip.
The group previously has demanded the West Bank be included in any deal. Still, it hopes a Gaza truce will eventually spread to the West Bank as well.
In return, Hamas wants Israel and Egypt to open their trade and passenger crossings with Gaza. The border has been sealed since Hamas violently seized control of Gaza last June.
Israel also considers Hamas a terrorist group.
Carter won no specific concessions from Hamas. He defended his trip during remarks Monday in Jerusalem. He said he failed to convince the top Hamas boss, Khaled Mashaal, that he could gain international goodwill if he stopped rocket fire on Israel for one month.
"I did the best I could," Carter said. "They turned me down, and I think they're wrong."
In an interview with NPR, Carter said the State Department did not warn him off the trip. A State Department spokesman in Washington took issue with that on Monday, and Rice was more blunt in her account Tuesday.
Rice had heard questions about Carter's meetings several times during two days of Iraq-themed meetings in the Mideast, with some diplomats wondering whether the Bush administration was talking to Hamas through the back door or contemplating a different policy in the future.
Rice said U.S. policy remains that it will deal only with the elected Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his West Bank-based government as it tried to help Israel and the Palestinians broker terms for an independent Palestinian state.

Carter Says Hamas and Syria Are Open to Peace
Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated PressFormer President Jimmy Carter spoke at the Israeli Council of Foreign Relations in Jerusalem on Monday.
By ETHAN BRONNERPublished: April 22, 2008JERUSALEM — Jimmy Carter, the former American president, said on Monday that he had obtained a significant concession from the Palestinian group Hamas regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace and also found the Syrian leadership eager for a full peace treaty with Israel.
Mr. Carter, who spoke in Jerusalem after several days of talks in the Syrian capital, Damascus, said he had extracted from Hamas a promise to respect the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if it were ratified by a referendum of the Palestinian people.
He said further that Syria believed “about 85 percent” of the issues between it and Israel had been resolved in prior negotiations and it wanted a peace deal “as soon as possible.”
Given the general pessimism surrounding Israeli-Arab peace, Mr. Carter’s upbeat assessment had a contrarian quality to it, as did his decision to meet in Damascus with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and the Hamas leadership, all of whom are shunned by the Bush administration which asked him not to hold the meetings.
Mr. Carter called the agreement on a Palestinian state, obtained from Hamas in writing, important because it meant that Hamas, a radical group excluded from the Palestinian Authority yet currently ruling in the Gaza Strip, would not disrupt the negotiations or implementation of any accord if the Palestinian people supported it in a free vote.
“If the agreement calls for a two-state solution and the recognition of Israel and Palestine, Hamas will, in effect, recognize Israel, if the people agree on the plan,” Mr. Carter told the Israel Council on Foreign Relations in a speech here.
In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Carter struck a more cautious note, saying, “I’m not claiming it’s a breakthrough.” He added, “I don’t have any control over whether or not Hamas does what they tell me. I just know what they tell me.”
Israeli officials opposed Mr. Carter’s meetings with Hamas leaders, saying doing so legitimizes a group they consider to be a terrorist organization. But Mr. Carter said on Monday, “The problem is not that I met with Hamas in Syria. The problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet these people.”
How a referendum would work is not clear. Mr. Carter said in the interview that he understood that only those Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would participate and that the voting would be monitored by international observers, including observers from the Carter Center.
But Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader in Damascus with whom Mr. Carter had spoken, gave a televised news conference late Monday and said that Hamas wants all Palestinians, including those living abroad, to vote. Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan would likely insist on a right of return to their original homes in what is today Israel, something Israel has said it could never accept.
Mr. Meshal also focused on the return of Palestinians to Israel and Hamas’s refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy when he said, "Hamas accepts the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and with full and real sovereignty and full application of the right of the Palestinian refugees to return but Hamas will not recognize the state of Israel."
In addition, Mr. Meshal emphasized something else — that no referendum could take place before Hamas and Fatah had reconciled their bitter dispute and the Palestine Liberation Organization, from which Hamas is excluded, was “reformed” to include it.
Such goals seem at the moment rather distant.
Mr. Carter had tried to get Hamas to agree to several other requests and all were turned down. Those included a prisoner exchange and declaring a 30-day unilateral cease-fire with Israel — Hamas fires rockets on Israeli towns and communities in an effort to hurt and kill civilians. On Monday a 4-year-old child was injured from shrapnel after a rocket hit a home on a kibbutz and caused damage, the Israeli army announced.
Mr. Meshal said at his news conference that, through Egypt, he and Israel were working on a possible mutual cease-fire or period of calm so there was no reason to accept Mr. Carter’s suggestion of a unilateral cease-fire.
Mr. Carter said he found the Hamas leadership, including Mr. Meshal, to be clear-thinking, educated people who gave no sign of fanaticism, although he did condemn in harsh terms their use of violence. He said they did not break for prayer, talk of holy land or God. “It was secular talk,” he said.
“They are just as rational as you are,” he said, adding, “The thing that Meshal and I have is that we are both physicists.”
Mr. Carter also said that while he was snubbed by the Israeli leadership over his talks with Hamas, he believes it was due to American pressure that meetings between him and top Israeli leaders were canceled.
In the interview, Mr. Carter said that what he learned about Syrian intentions toward Israel may prove more significant than the Hamas agreement.
He said that Mr. Assad believes there are only a few details left to work out on a full peace treaty but that the Bush administration is discouraging Israel to proceed because of other concerns, especially related to Iraq, that the Americans have with Syria.
“All of our group were surprisingly impressed with his strength and knowledge of the details in contrast to what we had heard from propaganda,” Mr. Carter said of the Syrian president. He emphasized that for Syria, a deal with Israel has to be brokered by the United States to be meaningful.
While Mr. Assad has an alliance with Iran, Mr. Carter believes that the relationship is as an alternative to one with the United States and the West, rather than his first choice. He said he expected Mr. Assad would be willing to separate from that alliance because he wants full peace with Israel.
“He’s willing to put his eggs in that basket of peace with Israel, no matter what Iran thinks,” Mr. Carter said in the interview of Mr. Assad.
Taghreed al-Khodari contributed additional reporting from Gaza.

Prostitution ordeal of Iraqi girls
By Lina Sinjab BBC News, Damascus
Many of the Iraqi dancers are in their early teens With their bright neon signs and glitzy decor, dozens of nightclubs line the streets of the Maraba district in the Syrian capital Damascus.
It's here that men come from far and wide - car number plates are not just from Syria but Iraq and Saudi Arabia - to watch young women dancing.
Most of the dancers are teenagers and many of them are Iraqi refugees.
They dance for the cash which gets tossed onto the stage.
The dancers are surrounded by bodyguards, to stop them being touched by the men. But the guards also arrange for their charges to be paid for sex with members of the audience. A woman came to my mother, who agreed to send me to these places. We needed the money
Rafif
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees have moved to Syria and Jordan during the past four years, escaping the violence and instability that followed the US-led toppling of Saddam Hussein. Women supporting families face the greatest challenge.
The Syrian authorities and aid agencies do not know the exact numbers, but many of the women say they have little choice but to work in places like Maraba.
Lost innocence
Rafif is an innocent-looking 14-year-old, her long hair tied in a pony tail. She seems barely to understand the enormity of the crisis she is living.
"I have three sisters who are married and four brothers. They are all in Baghdad. I am here with my mother and young brother only. None of my family know what I do here."
Banned from doing regular work in Syria, she says their money ran out and her mother started looking for other means to survive.
She says she makes about $30 a night at the clubs, but when men take her to private villas she makes $100. She won't say what she must do to earn this money.
"A woman came and spoke to my mother, who agreed to send me to these places. We needed the money.
"I have already been arrested for prostitution and sent back to Iraq, but I came back with a false passport."
Not all sex workers went into the industry by choice.
Nada, 16, says was dumped by her father at the Iraq-Syria border after her cousin "took away my virginity".
Five Iraqi men took her from the border to Damascus, where they raped her and sold her to a woman who forced her to work in nightclubs and private villas.
She is now waiting at a government protection centre to be deported back to Iraq.
Exploitation
The government says police have arrested Iraqi girls as young as 12 working as prostitutes in the nightclubs.
Maraba's nightclubs advertise services seldom on show in Syria "We are coming across increasing numbers of women who do not manage to make ends meet and are therefore more vulnerable to exploitative situations such as prostitution," says Laurens Jolles of the UN refugee agency.
"Intimidation and shame means the numbers of trafficking victims and sex industry workers in Syria may never be known by government or aid agencies."
Women picked up by the police are sent to protection centres, which they frequently escape from, or are sent to prison.
"Immediately after we get to them, or sometimes before, they are bailed out of prison, often by the same people who probably forced them into prostitution," says Mr Jolles.
Many of the young women who leave Iraq hoping for an easier, safer existence find what is in some ways an even tougher life in Syria.
At an age when life should just be beginning, Iraqi teenagers like Nada feel they have reached a dead end.
"Now they will send me back to Iraq, I have no-one there and in any case I am afraid for my life. I have no hope leaving here. I have told the government I don't want to go back. My family has abandoned me."