The public execution of eight Bangladeshi migrant workers in Saudi Arabia has been condemned by a leading human rights group in Bangladesh, Ain O Salish Kendra.

The workers were beheaded in public in Riyadh on Friday after they were found guilty of killing an Egyptian in 2007.

Three other Bangladeshis were sentenced to prison terms and flogging in the same case.

More than two million Bangladeshis work in Saudi Arabia.

The human rights group says the execution of Bangladeshi workers should be condemned by anyone who cares for humanity.

It says that although the executions were carried out in accordance with Saudi law, the public beheading of the workers will cause immense suffering and trauma for their family members back at home.

It points out that often foreign workers don't understand Saudi court proceedings in Arabic and they rarely get lawyers to represent their case.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15228607

Barbaric law in a barbarically run country by a medieval powerful despot and supported by the USA...

WASHINGTON — The United States on Tuesday accused Iranian officials of plotting to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States in a bizarre scheme involving an Iranian-American used-car salesman who believed he was hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million.

The alleged plot also included plans to pay the cartel, Los Zetas, to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the Saudi and Israeli Embassies in Argentina, according to a law enforcement official.

The plotters also discussed a side deal between the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Los Zetas to funnel tons of opium from the Middle East to Mexico, the official said. The plans never progressed, though, because the two suspects — the Iranian-American and an Iranian Quds Force officer — unwittingly were dealing with an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, officials said.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who announced the murder plot at a news conference in Washington, said it was “directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Quds Force.” He added that “high-up officials in those agencies, which is an integral part of the Iranian government, were responsible for this plot.”

The charges heightened tensions in an already fraught relationship between Iran and the United States.

The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, said his nation was “outraged” about the accusations. In a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Mr. Khazaee said that Iran “strongly and categorically rejects these fabricated and baseless allegations, based on the suspicious claims by an individual.”

Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a bitter regional rivalry, one that has intensified as they have jockeyed for influence since the political upheavals of the Arab Spring. The Saudi Embassy in Washington denounced the plot against the ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, as “a despicable violation of international norms, standards and conventions.”

Mr. Holder’s assertion and the F.B.I.’s account of official Iranian involvement in the plot, reportedly code-named “Chevrolet,” provoked puzzlement from specialists on Iran, who said it seemed unlikely that the government would back a brazen murder and bombing plan on American soil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/us/us-accuses-iranians-of-plotting-to-kill-saudi-envoy.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

In Yemen and Libya public expenditures have fallen alongside public revenues as government collapsed. There has been a 77% fall in revenues in Yemen and an 84% fall in Libya.

These figures do not take into account losses to human life, infrastructure damage and business and foreign direct investment losses.

However, the region as a whole, is benefiting economically from the Arab Spring. Oil rich countries that have suppressed or avoided uprisings are set to gain the most.

Geopolicity highlights the fact that the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia in particular, have all increased public revenues.

In Saudi Arabia the impact on public revenues is positive, increasing by 25%. In UAE public revenues have risen by 31%.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15303413

US officials and media reports were right about Gaddafi's human rights record: It was atrocious. They cautioned the incoming TNC to make human rights a priority: "The Libyan authorities should also continue living up to their commitments to respect human rights, begin a national reconciliation process, secure weapons and dangerous materials, and bring together armed groups under a unified civilian leadership," Obama said. (No word on how Gaddafi's execution fits in to that.)  

Hypocrisy reigns

Yet, in the very same week, the United States was cozying up to another long-time dictator - one whose style, brutal treatment of prisoners, and notorious massacre of political dissidents is highly reminiscent of the deposed Libyan tyrant.

Like a business that maintains two sets of records, one for the tax inspector and the other containing the truth, the United States has two different foreign policies. Its constitution, laws and treaty obligations prohibit torture, assassinations, and holding prisoners without trial. In reality there are secret prisons such as Guantánamo. Similarly, there are two sets of ethical standards in America's dealing with other countries. Enemies are held to the strictest standards. Allies get a pass. This double standard is the number-one cause of anti-Americanism in the world.

In yet another display that exposes US foreign policy on human rights as hypocritical and self-serving, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled to Uzbekistan to establish closer ties with the Central Asian republic's president-for-life, Islam Karimov. Even as her State Department was ballyhooing the bloody conclusion of Gaddafi's 42-year reign as a victory for freedom and decency, the former First Lady was engaged in the cynical Cold War-style of one of the worst human rights abusers in the world.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011102775111437925.html

see toon at top...

The Saudi city of Mecca is home to some of the most important historical sites in Islam. But over the years, the kingdom has been systematically demolishing these sites, burying them under modern commercial towers.

Saudi authorities say this is a policy aimed at discouraging the worship of idols, as it prevents people from turning those places into shrines. However, many Muslims say the government is destroying Islamic heritage sites.

Al Jazeera's Mohamed Vall reports on the eve of the Hajj pilgrimage from the mountain of light in Mecca, one of the few historical sites still open to the public.

http://english.aljazeera.net/video/middleeast/2011/11/2011113143513873159.html

Islamists across the region are working in Riyadh's favor. As with the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the Saudis gained newfound influence with the Muslim Brotherhood and its even more hard-line Salfi allies, who reportedly take funds from the Saudis. The Muslim Brotherhood has vaulted to prominence in the post-Mubarak era. It draws hundreds of thousands to rallies. It looks set to sweep forthcoming elections. After all, it is telling that Muslim Brotherhood members took refuge in Saudi Arabia during the decades of persecution under former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Today, the party makes a good partner for Riyadh, as it never utters even a whisper of criticism of what more radical Islamist outfits denounce as the Saudi royal family's treacherous ties with the West. If Saudi Arabia desperately backed Mubarak to his last days, in post-revolutionary Egypt the kingdom is now closely connected to the country's new political power brokers.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136473/john-r-bradley/saudi-arabias-invisible-hand-in-the-arab-spring

predictions made in October 2011...

Islamist Group Breaks Pledge to Stay Out of Race in Egypt

CAIRO — The Muslim Brotherhood nominated its chief strategist and financier Khairat el-Shater on Saturday as its candidate to become Egypt’s first president since Hosni Mubarak, breaking a pledge not to seek the top office and a monopoly on power.

Because of the Brotherhood’s unrivaled grass-roots organization and popular appeal, Mr. Shater, 62, a multimillionaire business tycoon who was a political prisoner until just a year ago, immediately became a presidential front-runner.

If he wins the June election, the Brotherhood, a previously outlawed Islamist group, would control the presidency, the Parliament and the committee writing the new constitution, moving toward a confrontation with Egypt’s military rulers over the country’s future.

His candidacy is likely to unnerve the West and has already outraged Egyptian liberals, who wonder what other pledges of moderation the Brotherhood may abandon. The Brotherhood is also engaged in a standoff with the military over its calls to dissolve the military-led government, and the degree of civilian oversight of the military in the new constitution.

The Brotherhood’s participation also turns the election into a referendum on the role of Islamist politics in post-Arab Spring governments that is sure to resonate across the region. Mr. Shater faces Islamist rivals to his left and right — one a more liberal former Brotherhood leader, the other an ultraconservative Salafi. Indeed, the Brotherhood may have entered the race in part because a win or near win by either rival Islamist would badly damage its authority as the primary voice of the Islamist movement in Egypt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/middleeast/brotherhood-chooses-a...      

TRIPOLI, LIBYA — At the entrance to Tripoli’s main landfill, Mustafa al-Sepany stands in combat fatigues, wearing an expression that says no trash trucks will get past him. For four months, none has, leaving the country’s capital city wallowing in uncollected garbage.

Sepany is one of thousands of still-armed rebel fighters who ousted Libyan despot Moammar Gaddafi in last year’s bloody uprising. Now he is one of the residents near the landfill who are exercising their newfound freedoms by declaring they don’t want Tripoli’s trash. Anywhere but here, they say. And in post-revolution Libya, not-in-my-backyard fights come with automatic weapon

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-libya-despot-is-gone-but-chaos-reigns/2012/03/31/gIQA3381nS_story.html?hpid=z3

A year and a half into what US media and officials began to refer to as the "Arab Spring",  there has been little democracy achieved across Arab countries, even in those countries that saw the overthrow of their despotic US-supported regimes. The main change in the region has been its loss of regime stability and a new instability that reflects negatively on imperial capital investment and the overall imperial strategy in the region.

This is not to say that, despite its initial fumbling, US imperialism has not since been able to capture many of the threads of the new political game in the region and control them - it is that it no longer controls all the threads. This lack of full control means that Washington has therefore been unable to restore stability, which, in US terms, is defined as dictatorial regimes that are staffed by obedient servants to American diktat and its junior partner in the region, the Jewish settler-colony.

Instability without democracy

In Yemen, the US has become the new direct absolute ruler of the country, no longer ruling through a dictator agent. They are killing and maiming Yemenis at will under the pretext of fighting the terror of al-Qaeda, which did not even exist in Yemen before the United States decided to intervene in that impoverished country. The terror that US forces and their ambassador Gerald Feierstein have imposed on the country has been the major achievement of the Obama administration since the Arab revolts started in January 2011. The other Arab country where the US commands immense control is Bahrain, though all attempts by the Bahraini dictatorship, the Saudi mercenaries - reportedly aided by US and British military and security support and consultation - to crush the revolt have been valiantly resisted by a fearless oppressed population.

While regional and imperial capital is abandoning Bahrain slowly to neighbouring Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, with the mass exodus of the expatriate community, US military presence, not to mention the hegemony of Saudi mercenaries, has intensified. Indeed, the Saudis floated the proposition in May to annex Bahrain altogether to the kingdom and transform it demographically, and thus be done with the whole affair of a majority of Shia being oppressed by a sectarian Sunni monarchy.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201271511521721772.html