/world

Saudis Delay Measure Affecting Foreign Workers

KAREEM FAHIM and MAYY EL SHEIKH

NYTimes.com

Vue de Riyad, ces décisions prennent un relief différent. Depuis le début de ces mesures, de nombreuses institutions ne peuvent plus fonctionner : ainsi, la presse signale que des écoles ont dû fermer, les professeurs (pour la plupart étrangers) ayant peur d’être raflés et déportés. Le royaume vient de suspendre les mesures pour trois mois, mais après ?

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/world/middleeast/port-lacks-workers-after-saudi-immigration-crackdown.html?ref=world

Almost two weeks after Saudi Arabia started deporting thousands of foreign workers from Yemen and other countries in a crackdown that drew protests from local business owners and foreign diplomats, Saudi officials on Saturday reversed course and announced a three-month grace period for the workers, according to the official Saudi news agency.

In late March, Saudi officials announced changes to the country’s employment code, promising tough measures, including deportation, for foreigners found to be violating the work-visa sponsorship system. The statement on Saturday said the workers had three months to conform with the new regulations.

It was not immediately clear whether workers who had already been deported — including up to 20,000 from Yemen, according to officials there — would be allowed to return.

Saudi officials have framed the crackdown as part of a continuing effort to lower the country’s staggering youth unemployment rate, in part by shifting the balance in hiring practices for private-sector jobs, which are overwhelmingly occupied by the kingdom’s 10 million foreign workers. In November, the government started penalizing private companies that hire more foreigners than Saudi citizens as part of a plan to create six million new jobs for Saudis by 2030.

The policy also reflects fears of political instability among the monarchies of the Persian Gulf region, where the authorities have combined inducements with repression to contain the discontent among young people that helped propel the Arab uprisings more than two years ago.

A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood- ▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/world/asia/origins-of-cias-not-so-secret-drone-war-in-pakistan.html?pagewanted=3&_r=3&

Bon voilà : La CIA adorerait les assassinats par drones parce qu’ils lui évitent d’avoir recours à la torture, cette dernière étant passible de poursuites judiciaires.

A New Direction

As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”

The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior C.I.A. officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr. Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.

The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.