Cheney-Linked Company to Drill in Occupied Golan Heights

Richard Cheney, K. Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild are in the Genie's Board of Diectors.

Πηγή: Oilprice
By Daniel J. Graeber
Feb 24 2103

The Israeli government awarded a local subsidiary of U.S.-based Genie Energy the rights to explore for oil and natural gas in about 150 square miles of the southern section of the Golan Heights. The United Nations last year extended the mandate for the region's U.N. Disengagement Observer Force mission, one of the oldest peacekeeping missions, for another six months. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said keeping Blue Helmets stationed in the area was essential to peace given the potential for conflict spilling out of the Syrian civil war. Genie Energy said there may be a significant amount of oil and natural gas in the license area. When Israel set its sights on offshore natural gas, Hezbollah warned that Israel shouldn't encroach on Lebanese territory. If recent concerns about Hezbollah's influence are any indication, the Shiite resistance movement may focus its guns onshore amid expanding Israeli energy interests. With former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney serving as an adviser to Genie, however, the implications may go beyond immediate worries over Hezbollah.

Genie Energy said there may be "significant quantities" of natural resources in the region. The license area encompasses about 150 square miles of the southern portion of the Golan Heights, considered territory occupied by the Israeli military.

"Genie Energy intends to conduct an exploration program to further investigate the size and quality of the resource in the new license area," the company explained in a statement.

Last year, Israeli Energy Minister Uzi Landau said the government was looking to open the territory up for oil and natural gas exploration. Israel claims the territory as its own after capturing the region in a 1967 war with Syria. In November, UNDOF peacekeepers monitoring the 1973 cease-fire between Israel and Syria came under fire near Damascus during a troop rotation. U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was concerned the Syrian civil war could spillover the borders given the latest escalation of violence. Last month, the United Nations expressed further concern amid reports that Israeli planes flew over the region to conduct an air strike on Hezbollah territory in southern Lebanon.

Landau's comments last year came amid optimism about natural gas reserves located off Israel's coast. The Tamar natural gas field is said to hold as much as 8.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Leviathan field may hold nearly twice that, with an estimated 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Located more than 50 miles off the Israeli coast in the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon contends some of that natural gas may lie in its territorial waters. Two years ago, Hezbollah warned that it wouldn’t tolerate any company working offshore where sovereignty is uncertain.

"The Israeli enemy cannot drill a single meter in these waters to search for gas and oil if the zone is disputed," it warned.

Hezbollah claimed victory in a 2006 war with Israel. Since then, Hezbollah has come under fire for ties to a terrorist attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Last week, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri saidhe was concerned the Lebanese government was ceding military control over the southern borders to the Shiite movement, which holds Cabinet-level positions in the Lebanese government.

Israel has faced increasing isolation for its settlement activity in the West Bank and for violating the border of its northern neighbors. A 1993 foreign policy doctrine from Israel's ally Washington, meanwhile, linked U.S. national security interests as they relate to oil and natural gas tacitly to Israel's security.

"The United States is committed to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel's security," it read.

That document was drafted with the help of then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. He's serving as an adviser to Genie as it plans work in an area encompassing about 30 percent of the Golan Heights. U.S. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has plans to visit Israel next month. Cheney expressed recent concern that the Middle East was "as dangerous now as it has ever been" under Obama's leadership. With Cheney working the back channels, that "qualitative edge" may manifest itself in drilling operations in the occupied Golan Heights, a powder keg for potentially broad-based war in the Middle East.

UN chief urges Libya to investigate human rights issues from last year’s uprising

Πηγή: Washington Post
By AP
March 14 2012

UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday urged Libyan authorities to address human rights violations related to last year’s uprising and ouster of Moammar Gadhafi after a U.N. report said forces both supporting and opposing the former leader committed war crimes.

The U.N.-appointed International Commission of Inquiry on Libya issued its report Friday and handed diplomats a confidential list of names of alleged perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said “the secretary-general believes the report and recommendations ... provide a strong basis for the Libyan authorities to address human rights issues in Libya.”

The commission, appointed by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, concluded that “international crimes, specifically crimes against humanity and war crimes, were committed by Gadhafi forces.”

It said “acts of murder, enforced disappearance, and torture were perpetrated within the context of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.”

The commission said anti-Gadhafi forces also committed serious violations, “including war crimes and breaches of international human rights law.”

Nesirky said Ban noted the report’s overall finding that NATO did not deliberately target civilians in its bombing campaign in Libya. NATO warplanes flew 18,000 sorties during the 7-month campaign, which ended in October.

Panel chairman and Canadian judge Philippe Kirsch told reporters on Friday that the panel recommended more investigation of NATO’s air campaign, which unintentionally killed at least 60 civilians and wounded 55 more.

“We are quite sure that NATO did not deliberately attack any civilians,” he said.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday reiterated his call for a U.N. investigation of the NATO campaign, a call backed by China. Both countries accuse NATO of going beyond the Security Council’s mandate to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly zone.

Nesirky said Ban is aware of the positions of some Security Council members on the NATO bombings.

UN sends mixed signals on civilian deaths in Libya

Πηγή: Reuters
Aug 15, 2011, 11:31 EDT


The United Nations has been sending mixed signals lately about NATO’s record with civilian casualties in the alliance’s sixth month of air strikes against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s troops and military sites. U.N. officials and diplomats said it was hardly surprising that different senior officials at the world body are finding it hard to keep a consistent line on the conflict, which, back in March, most of them had hoped would be over in a few weeks.

But it has dragged on. Now Gaddafi’s government is complaining about what it says are mounting civilian casualties caused by NATO bombs, many of them children. Diplomats from alliance members acknowledge that there have been some civilian casualties, which they regret. But they question some of the figures that have been coming out of Tripoli. Libya’s state television, which was targeted by NATO late last month, regularly broadcasts gory images of blood-soaked bodies it says are civilians being pulled from rubble after NATO bomb attacks.

Last week the head of the U.N. cultural and scientific agency UNESCO, Irina Bokova, issued an unusually sharp rebuke of the alliance for its July 30 air strikes against Libyan state television, which she said killed several “media workers.”

“I deplore the NATO strike on Al-Jamahiriya and its installations,” Bokova said in a statement. “Media outlets should not be targeted in military actions.”

Several U.N. diplomats from NATO member states privately expressed surprise at the statement from Bokova, herself a citizen of NATO member Bulgaria. Asked about her criticism, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s deputy spokesman Farhan Haq suggested that Ban was not overly concerned with the performance of NATO in Libya.

“In terms of that, we would need further details about what the operations were that were conducted. But certainly, the Secretary-General believes that resolution 1973 has been used properly in order to protect civilians in Libya and he has continually emphasized the need, as this proceeds, to make sure that civilians in Libya will be protected.”

NATO defended the attack on Libyan television and said it had no evidence that anyone was killed during the strikes.

With Ban’s backing, NATO began launching air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces in March on the basis of Security Council resolution 1973. That resolution authorized U.N. member states to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians short of occupying the country.

Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa and India — the so-called BRICS developing countries — seized on Bokova’s statement and brought it up during a closed-door meeting of the U.N. Security Council this week. One senior council diplomat said it was clearly a coordinated and pre-planned effort on the part of the BRICS to launch a surprise assault on Britain, France, the United States and other members of the NATO alliance that have been attacking forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi since March.

Two days after expressing Ban’s satisfaction with the protection of civilians in Libya, the U.N. press office issued a statement with a very different tone: “The Secretary-General is deeply concerned by reports of the unacceptably large number of civilian casualties as a result of the conflict in Libya.”

Although it did not explicitly blame NATO, diplomats and U.N. officials said the statement was clearly referring to the alliance. Diplomats said that Ban’s team of close advisers received several phone calls from Western diplomats who took offense at Ban’s statement. One envoy said of it: “It’s what the Russians would call a balanced statement.” They said it was certain to win praise from the disgruntled BRICS nations, four of which abstained from the March 17 vote on resolution 1973, allowing it to pass while making clear they had reservations about it. (South Africa, whose delegation in New York is now one of the most vocal critics of NATO operations in Libya, was the only BRICS nation to vote for 1973.)

The following day Haq issued a clarification of Ban’s statement, saying that Ban “of course recognizes and appreciates NATO efforts to avoid civilian casualties.”