Africa

Burundi

IRIN 11 Sept 2003 Rebels Force Civilians to Pay 'Contributions' UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS September 11, 2003 Posted to the web September 11, 2003 Nairobi Fearing attacks by rebels of the Forces pour la defense de la democratie, residents of Mbuye, Bukeye, Kiganda and Muramvya communes of central Burundi have been forced to pay contributions to the militants, Burundi news agency, Net Press, reported on Tuesday. It said that each household has had to pay 500 Burundian francs (less than US $1) weekly, 1 kg of beans and 1 kg of flour. Those who refuse to contribute have had their houses looted, and cases of the rape of women and young girls have been reported. Meanwhile, Radio Bonesha reported on Wednesday that 17 people were killed in a rebel ambush some 3 km from local administrative headquarters in Mabayi Commune, Cibitoke Province of northwestern Burundi. The radio did not specify which rebel group was involved.

IRIN 12 Sept 2003 Mozambique, South Africa set condition for full deployment of peacekeepers BUJUMBURA, 12 September (IRIN) - Mozambique and South Africa, two of the three countries contributing African Union (AU) peacekeeping troops to Burundi, will only deploy all of their contingents when the number of rebel combatants reporting to cantonment centres increases significantly, South African Defence Minister Patrick Mosiwo Lekota told IRIN on Thursday. "We are ready to deploy, even Ethiopia [the third country] is ready to deploy troops, but we have to watch whether the numbers of cantoned combatants justifies the deployment of a large number of peacekeepers," he said, at the end of a one-day visit to the Burundian capital, Bujumbura. He was with the Mozambican deputy defence minister, Henrique Banze. The two were in the country to discuss with AU officials the funding of the peacekeeping force, known as the African Mission in Burundi (AMIB). They were also in the country to inspect the cantonment process. "We must deploy the troops when we see that many former combatants are coming forward for cantonment," Lekota said. "We will also be guided by the response of the ex-combatants." Cantonment and demobilisation of former rebel fighters began at the end of June, as part of the implementation of ceasefire agreements signed in 2002 between the transitional government in Burundi and various rebel movements. Lekota said that although the AMIB deployment was affected by inadequate funding, the AU troops could not deploy in large numbers if the ex-combatants came in small numbers for cantonment. "If they come in large numbers, then we can rush in, otherwise we could bring troops here and they would sit idle as there would be nobody in the cantonment area," he said. Out of a 3,099-strong AMIB force, 1,600 South Africans are already in Burundi. Mozambique has agreed to send 228 soldiers but their date of arrival is yet to be determined. "I am here to check on the conditions for the Mozambican troops," Banze said. "When I return home, we will decide on a deployment date, we hope that part of the contingent will be deployed at least at the end of September." Only the cantonment camp at Muyange, 30 km northwest of Bujumbura, is operational. So far, 191 former combatants have reported to the site - 140 loyal to Jean Bosco Ndayikengurukiye, leader of the smaller faction of the Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie-Forces de defense de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) and 51 loyal to the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL) faction led by Alain Mugabarabona. The Muyange camp was initially supposed to accommodate between 2,500 and 3,000 former combatants of the two rebel movements. "It is important for the leaders of the various organisations to give us lists containing names of their combatants so that we can see how many are expected at the cantonment camps," Lekota said. He added that it was the responsibility of the rebel movements to urge their combatants to report to the demobilisation centres so that the peace process could move forward. During their visit, Lekota and Banze visited the Muyange camp, where they found that most of the former combatants were young and in need of training. "We think that there is need to act very quickly," he said. "We recommended that they be trained either to join the armed forces or to serve in VIP protection for the country's leaders." The Muyange camp is manned by South African peacekeepers. Lekota suggested that some of the former fighters be trained to take over some of the tasks performed by the South African soldiers. Although three rebel movements have signed ceasefire agreements with the government, fighting has continued across the country. Only one group, the larger FNL faction led by Agathon Rwasa, continues to reject negotiations with the government. It is yet to sign a ceasefire agreement with the government. "We need to encourage this movement [Rwasa's FNL] to join the peace process," Lekota said. Funding of AMIB dominated discussions between the two and the AU officials in Bujumbura. "We had a good meeting, we expect to see quick developments," he said. "We were also briefed that preparations were on for a conference donors wishing to contribute funds to support this mission, the conference will be held in South Africa," Lekota said.

Reuters 12 Sept 2003 Peace mediators urge Burundi rebels to demobilise BUJUMBURA, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Foreign peacekeepers will only finish deploying in Burundi when rebels join demobilisation camps in accordance with a peace plan aimed at ending a decade-long war, South Africa's defence minister said. Rebels from the Hutu majority have been fighting the Tutsi-led army in Burundi in a conflict that has killed some 300,000 people. South Africa has brokered peace talks aimed at shoring up a widely ignored ceasefire signed last year. "We think in so far that the various parties have signed for peace, it is to their responsibility to tell their combatants to go to the demobilisation centres so that the peace process can proceed," South Africa's Mosiuoa Lekota told Reuters late on Thursday at the end of a one-day visit to the central African country. "We can't just bring a large number of people if the ex-combatants come in small numbers," he said. Three rebel groups have agreed to a truce including the main Hutu rebel Force for Defence of Democracy (FDD), whose fighters have repeatedly violated the ceasefire. Analysts say rebels will never stop attacks unless they are disarmed, put in barracks and demobilised, all of which are supposed to happen under the terms of the ceasefire. Only one demobilisation centre has been set up at Muyange, 30 km (19 miles) northwest of the capital, Bujumbura. To date only 191 former fighters from splinter groups of the main rebel factions have reported to the site, which had been set up to accommodate up to 3,000. Lekota said that the young former fighters should be trained. "We think that there is a need to move very quickly, to move these people either to go and be trained or to proceed on to civilian life," he said. Lekota and Mozambique's Deputy Defence Minister Henrique Banze were in Burundi to discuss funding for the peacekeeping mission with the African Union. He said donor countries were expected to attend a conference in South Africa to discuss funding, but gave no date. Of a total of some 3,000 peacekeepers, only 1,600 South Africans have been deployed. Mozambique has agreed to supply more than 200 troops, but has yet to deploy them. "We hope that at least at the end of September that part of the contingent will be here in Burundi," Banze said. The country's second largest rebel group, the National Liberation Forces (FNL) remains outside the peace process.

Côte d'Ivoire - Also read News Monitors for Côte d'Ivoire from 2002 and 2001

ICRC 15 Sept 2003 ICRC News 03/108 Côte d'Ivoire: Aiding villagers in the west The ICRC has launched a major relief operation in the western part of Côte d'Ivoire where civilians have been directly affected by conflict. Emergency supplies have been delivered to people in almost 160 villages, many of which were partly abandoned at the beginning of the year. After several months in the bush or with relatives, residents of the villages are heading home to rebuild their houses and resume farming. To facilitate this process, the ICRC has given over 90,000 people soap, plastic sheeting, blankets, sleeping mats, kitchen utensils, buckets, clothing and, in selected villages, tools. Relief efforts have focused on the district of Toulepleu and the sub-prefectures of Zouhan Hounien, Bin Houyé and Taï, which lie along the Liberian border and have been particularly badly hit by looting and destruction. The distribution of aid started on 5 August and is still under way. Rain has made access to some villages difficult, so the programme will continue for the next few weeks. In most of the villages visited, over half the population has returned and life is returning to normal. To raise the confidence of the population, ICRC technicians accompanied by volunteers from the Red Cross Society of Côte d'Ivoire have disinfected 525 wells, from which villagers were afraid to drink because of rumours of contamination. In parallel with these efforts to help people who are returning home, the ICRC and the National Society are continuing to assist the thousands of displaced persons in Guiglo Camp and the transit centres at Zouhan Hounien and Danané.

DR Congo

IRIN 1 Sept 2003 Indications of Genocide in Ituri Exist, UN Rights Envoy Says Bunia The UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Iulia Motoc, said on Sunday that there were indications that genocide may have occurred in the eastern district of Ituri. "The crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that may have been committed in Ituri must be answered for," she said at a news conference in Bunia, the main town in the embattled Ituri District. Motoc, who arrived in the country on 28 August for a 10-day working visit, is due to submit a report in November to the UN General Assembly on the situation of human rights violations in the country. "My role is an investigative one, it will be for the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute all those suspected of involvement in these crimes," she said. Motoc is focusing on violence against women, child protection and demobilisation of child soldiers and the situation of internally displaced people (IDPs). She visited an IDP camp near Bunia airport where the majority of the 11,240 people there are women and children. "In Bunia, I was told that whenever the UPC [Union des patriotes congolais - a Hema militia group] attacked, there was a lot of rape and violence against women," she said. She said that during her March visit to Goma, North Kivu Province, she said saw women who had been raped several times. Motoc has already visited the capital, Kinshasa, and is due to visit Bukavu from Monday. On 16 July, the International Criminal Court announced in The Hague announced that it had selected Ituri District as "the most urgent situation" under its jurisdiction to be addressed.

AFP 6 Sept 2003 UN official urges DR Congo to end judicial impunity, KINSHASA, Sept 6 The top UN human rights envoy to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) called Saturday on the government to bring perpetrators of human rights crimes to justice in order to boost its authority. "The government of the DRC should put an end to impunity to restore the authority of the state across the entire country," UN special rapporteur Iulia Motoc said at the end of a 10 day visit. "The human rights situation in the DRC is disastrous, especially the regions where armed groups exterminate civilians, rape and loot because of an absence of authority," she said. She said in the provinces of North and South Kivu basic rights were under constant threat by clashes between groups, which seemed to be on the increase. A bolstered UN peacekeeping force took over on September 1 from a French-led force in the flashpoint town of Bunia in the eastern Ituri region, where 50,000 people have been killed and half a million displaced by ethnic clashes since 1999. Acknowledging some differences among DRC leaders about justice and reconciliation, Motoc said "a durable peace is impossible unless the perpetrators of human rights violations are brought to justice." The new International Criminal Court (ICC), created in July 2002 to judge crimes against humanity, plans to begin its work with crimes committed in the DRC.

WP 10 Sept 2003 Page A19 A Chance for Peace in Congo By John Shattuck A devastating war has raged in central Africa for nine years. This war dates to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which the world did nothing to stop. Many of those who led the genocide escaped into Zaire, which was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998 after the fall of its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. The war has continued while the world looks on, claiming more than 4 million civilian victims to date in Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo and destroying the most basic of all human rights, the right to live. A seemingly endless wave of attacks has been directed by cynical leaders, ethnic extremists and warlords against each other and their civilian hostages -- populations subjected to every conceivable crime against humanity, from mass killings to mass rapes, ethnic slaughter to forced starvation, village destruction to the recruitment of armies of child soldiers. Now there is a glimmer of hope that the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe in a half-century can be brought to an end. Newly aggressive peacekeeping in northeastern Congo by a French-led multinational force and the United Nations, and the willingness of some of the warring factions in Congo to put down their arms and come together in a transitional government, have raised hopes for peace. What will it take to realize these hopes? I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Congo to review the U.N. operation there and assess the prospects for peace. I came away with a strong impression of what must be done by other nations to advance the central African peace process, and particularly by the United States, which so far has played a passive and sometimes negative role in the region. First, the international community must put pressure on Congo's neighbors, Uganda and Rwanda, to stop destabilizing Congo by sending arms and military advisers into the eastern provinces, promoting the plunder of Congolese resources under the guise of providing "border security." As these two countries have vied for influence over their larger, weaker neighbor, their warlord puppets in the Ituri region and the Kivu provinces have created a perpetual state of conflict. Foreign stimulation of the conflict must end, the warlords must be isolated and those who support them must be pressured to stop. The United States in particular bears a responsibility for cracking down on the arms flow into eastern Congo. Incredibly, just two days after the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution July 28 imposing an embargo on "the direct or indirect supply" of arms or assistance to "armed groups and militias operating in the territory of North and South Kivu and Ituri," the United States announced it was lifting its own embargo on weapons sales to Rwanda, which has a history of arming its clients in eastern Congo. As announced by the State Department, this means that Washington will no longer "automatically deny export licenses or permits to companies seeking to sell arms to the Rwandan government and its military." It is imperative that Washington re-impose an arms ban on Rwanda. In addition, the United States should make clear to both Rwanda and Uganda that further economic assistance to those countries will be conditioned on their stopping the flow of arms into eastern Congo and supporting the Congolese peace process. President Bush's praise this summer for Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni as a "regional peacemaker" sent a signal just as damaging to the peace process as the lifting of the arms embargo on Rwanda. The United States must get its signals straight. Second, the international community must help the Congolese end the culture of impunity that has allowed warlords to commit human rights atrocities without any prospect of punishment. Those who oppose the peace process and the transitional government should have their foreign bank accounts frozen and their visas denied. Any further crimes against humanity should be investigated and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. And a U.N commission of experts, with Congolese participation, should be established to recommend a framework for both domestic and international institutions charged with bringing justice to the Congo. Third, the international community must give full support to the United Nations and its specialized agencies as they work to stop the fighting, create conditions for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and protect the transitional government as it launches a fragile peace process. At the same time, the United States and other international donors should assist the new government in creating institutions that can begin to deliver basic security, economic opportunity and democratic governance to the Congolese people. But any aid must be dependent on continuing steps by the government to end the conflict. Finally, the world must overcome the view trenchantly expressed nine years ago after the Rwanda genocide by the heroic but tragically undercut commander of the U.N. forces there, Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire: "Fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared" about what happened in central Africa? After ignoring the region for too long, the United States can now answer that question. The writer, CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston, is a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

AFP 12 Sept 2003 Mass rape, looting widespread in southeast DRCongo: MSF KINSHASA, Sept 12 (AFP) - Mass rape and looting by armed groups are widespread in the southeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) province of Nord-Katanga, where an outbreak of cholera also threatens people's lives, medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said Friday. "People in Malemba Nkulu, Kikondja, Kitenge, as well as Mukubu and Mukanga (in Nord-Katanga) are relentlessly subjected to attacks, looting and violence by different armed groups, who regularly torch their villages," MSF said in a statement. Most inhabitants in the region have fled their homes and sought refuge in the bush, as fighting has flared in the past two weeks between local police, the Congolese Armed Forces and Mai-Mai militia fighters. The fighting is preventing MSF from providing desperately needed aid to people in the region, but the medical group has nonetheless taken in charge several thousand displaced persons, the statement said. The statement also noted that some 50 people have been hit by an outbreak of cholera in the region. MSF called on the newly installed interim government in DRC to assume its responsibilities, both to aid organisations and its own citizens, and give "vital assistance" to the "ignored" population of Nord-Katanga. "If cholera flares up again, the consequences would be catastrophic," the statement said. An outbreak of cholera in Malemba Nkulu last year saw MSF treating more than 600 victims of the disease a week. MSF is the only emergency aid organisation that operates in the Nord-Katanga region.

IRIN 12 Sept 2003 DRC: MSF calls for greater humanitarian intervention in northern Katanga NAIROBI, 12 September (IRIN) - Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) called on Thursday for greater humanitarian intervention in northern Katanga Province of southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where civilians were still suffering the consequences of armed conflict and untreated diseases. "Although this government-controlled part of the country has been considered peaceful during the past years of war, civilian populations are subjected to extremely violent attacks and suffer from gravely insufficient assistance," the international relief NGO reported. It recounted numerous instances in which various armed groups had pillaged and burned down villages as well as beaten and killed civilians, causing tens of thousands in the region to flee to areas often inaccessible to aid groups because of continued hostilities. It warned that this lack of access could allow otherwise treatable diseases such as cholera to erupt, "with catastrophic consequences". Among others, it cited Malemba Nkulu, Kikondja, Kitenge, Mukubu and Mukanga as areas that had been particularly hard-hit by fighting. "It is high time that the public authorities assume their responsibilities with regard to the abandoned Congolese people of northern Katanga," MSF said. It also urged UN agencies and international donors to lend their support.

ICRC 26 Sept 2003 ICRC News 03/118 Democratic Republic of the Congo: Children reunited with families The ICRC delegation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo yesterday completed a series of flights between the east and the west of the country to reunite 82 unaccompanied children with their families. The organization’s DC-3 flew 55 children from Goma to Kinshasa on 8 and 25 September, while 27 others travelled from Kinshasa to Goma on 24 September. The children varied in age between 2 and 18. Over half were under 13. Children separated from their loved ones by armed conflict are registered by Red Cross or Red Crescent tracing staff. Those who so wish are reunited with their families. In this case the children owed much to volunteers from the Congolese Red Cross Society, who traced the relatives and checked that they wanted to have the children returned. The Red Cross is working to reunite families all over the country. More than 730 children have been reunited with family members since the beginning of this year.

Liberia

WP 3 Sept 2003 Crisis Deepens for Displaced Liberians - Rumors of Fighting Spur Many More Toward Capital By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, September 3, 2003; Page A08 HARBEL, Liberia -- The masses of displaced people first arrived on the outskirts of Monrovia during last month's fighting and D. MacDouglas Samuels's head started to pound that same day. He didn't need his skills as a math teacher to quickly calculate that there wouldn't be nearly enough room for them all. Line after line of breast-feeding mothers with cooking pots, gaggles of barefoot children and piles of dirty laundry melted into a crushing patchwork of humanity that overran this triangle-shaped, two-story YMCA. "Imagine an entire town moving into one building. I was counting and counting and there were more and more and more," said Samuels, who volunteered to manage the influx into the building in this town about 35 miles east of Monrovia, the capital. "I didn't think it could get any worse." Then, after the war officially ended with a peace pact signed on Aug. 18, it did. During the past week, 1,500 more people arrived, terrified and fleeing the sound of what they thought was renewed fighting in areas east and south of Monrovia. Aid workers and those fleeing the region said it was unclear if there was fighting, or if the gunfire came from thugs just trying to send them running so they could loot what was left. But as a result, about 12,000 more people pushed toward Monrovia in recent days, aid workers said. Nearly 700,000 of Liberia's 3 million people are thought to have fled their homes in the last few years of the country's 14-year civil war, becoming, in aid worker parlance, internally displaced people. "It's not even human misery. It's worse than that. It's getting so bad that's it's worse than what I saw in Sierra Leone at the end of the war," said Arnauld Akodjenou, regional coordinator for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "The only thing comparable was Goma when 1 million people packed a town for 50,000 after the genocide in Rwanda. It's getting that bad." Monrovia has swelled to double its size since fighting broke out this summer. More than 1 million people are now packed into the capital, hundreds of thousands of them living in abandoned government buildings, a soccer stadium and the Masonic Temple. Liberia is nestled in a region aflame with instability. Neighbors such as Sierra Leone, struggling with the aftermath of a decade of war, and Ivory Coast, where rebels control half the country, are hardly ideal places for citizens to run. "We aren't even good enough to be refugees because whoever is left here now has no money to go away. So we run around our own country, back and forth and back and forth," said Alfred T. Brima, a field supervisor with the Liberian Refugees Repatriation and Resettlement Committee at Tatota, about 80 miles east of Monrovia. "We can't go to Sierra Leone. We can't go to Ivory Coast anymore. We can't go to Guinea. Liberia is all we have and it's still not safe." West African peacekeepers who arrived in Liberia last month have yet to deploy troops beyond Monrovia, let alone the interior of the country. U.S. Ambassador John W. Blaney and peacekeepers journeyed on Friday in armored vehicles to the rebel-held city of Buchanan, about 60 miles down a rutted, muddy road from Monrovia. Their mission was to prepare for the eventual deployment of U.N. peacekeeping troops. A rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, or MODEL, now holds the city. Blaney's convoy was greeted with a sign hanging from a tree at the entrance to town that read: "Model in Action. Fire Reply Fire. Ecomil, Don't Try it. Slow Down." ECOMIL is the acronym of the African regional peacekeeping force formed by the Economic Community of West African States. While deals are being hashed out, ordinary Liberians are still fleeing. In Harbel, the chain of rattled civilians choked what was once a community center that in better times hosted basketball games and beauty pageants and was meant to hold 200 people. Today, there are six latrines for about 3,000 people. There is one water pump. Cholera is spreading. Several people have already died. Samuels is suffering from a common infection, a red eye disease that has spread to half of the site's residents. "Does anyone know about us?" asked Samuels, panting as he wiped his burning and crusted eyes with a dirty handkerchief. He surveyed the room: flies buzzing over piles of trash, women cooking beans, babies wailing in pain, people passed out on the floor. "We are in a period where the world is not paying as much attention to Liberia, but we are still in total instability and a serious aftermath of misery," said James Logan, the country representative for Action Aid Liberia, who said he has considered fleeing his home in Monrovia once again after rumors of fighting. "All it would take is 2,000 American troops to stabilize the country. But no one will help us." Aid workers said they were having trouble moving people from the YMCA and other buildings into camps run by relief workers, because people take flight when rumors spread about fighting. "There are people fleeing and no security and no sanitation," said Benoit Leduc, who works with Doctors Without Borders, which has set up six clinics in Monrovia and its vicinity. "Despite peace agreements, there is still a kind of war going on here." There are only two hospitals in the country and a handful of clinics. Aid workers estimate that more than 300 clinics are needed to serve everyone in Liberia. "We can't do it without security and we are very worried that it's getting worse," said Omar Khatib, a representative with the World Health Organization, who visited several camps. "We can't have this situation just keep repeating itself with people fleeing from one place to another to another." In the trash-strewn capital, an outbreak of measles -- immunizations stopped during the war -- has erupted. Cholera is again spreading, with hundreds of bodies that were buried on the rocky beach during the war now contaminating water supplies. About 1,300 new cases were reported last week in and around Monrovia. There are 110 shelters in Monrovia, according to aid agencies. At the Masonic Temple, once an elite gathering place for the descendants of freed American slaves, 5,000 people live packed in a cascade of human suffering. Dirty wash hangs from chipped, grandiose Greek columns. Muddy pools of waste collect next to women cooking skinny snail meat. Old crippled men crawl on the ground. Even those who take shelter are not safe. Fatu Kollie, a feisty, smart 26-year-old who always hoped to study law, has spent half of her life fleeing fighting around the country. She came with her two daughters and her husband to an abandoned apartment next to the Masonic Temple to hide. She was in the kitchen with her daughter, Musu Gaitee, 6, on July 22 when a rocket slammed into the room and tore off half of the girl's arm. Then this week, Musu injured and possibly broke her left arm. With no doctors or clinic, a traditional healer rubbed the arm with wet roots and grass and wrapped it in a bamboo splint. "I am asking myself, 'Am I fighter, can I fight?' " said Kollie, as Musu howled in pain, a younger daughter nursing at her breast. "It's so hard for us to make something of our lives if we are here." Outside the YMCA, Augustin Flomo, 21, sat selling little plastic bags filled with pale, yellow-colored liquid he said was brake fluid. The bags were strung up on a wire hanger and he sold them as a remedy for skin rashes. It was the ointment everyone was using for a flaky infection that is plaguing the camp. "I want to go home and become a mechanic," said Flomo, who was in the sixth grade when he had to leave school and run away from the fighting. "But I can't leave. We are still suffering. Don't let the world forget about Liberia."

Nigeria

Vanguard (Nigeria) 21 Sept 2003 Orji Uzor Kalu’s apostasy By Obi Nwakanma Sunday, September 21, 2003 THE rumour is that Mr. Orji Uzo Kalu of Abia state is angling for the vice- presidential ticket in the next election cycle in 2007. He is said to be looking towards an Atiku Abubakar –Orji Uzo Kalu duet. A dance of the masquerades. It is, of course, still all rumours. But this allows us to speculate a bit about the current Abia state governor’s stances on a number of national issues. For instance, his recent, purported comments on Biafra. I will come to a quick judgement though, which is, that whoever is considering Mr. Kalu for the vice-presidential slot will have to contend with the Igbo votes, given his now well known mercurial stances on solid Igbo questions. For instance, Orji Kalu earned a lot of mileage and ink when he began to make a lot of noise about the “Igbo president.” Many people at some point felt that Orji Uzor Kalu had finally discovered his true destiny as a champion of the Igbo. He sharpen-ed his voice against the current presi-dent, Olusegun Obasanjo, and for one moment seem-ed like a believable character in a mediocre piece of drama. He rallied, and harried the Igbo at that meet-ing in Enugu in 2001, and roused a resounding applause because he seemed at that time to have captured the exact tone and tenor of the Igbo anguish. The Igbo needed a voice, and Orji Uzor Kalu supplied it. Very typical, seeing that he has been in the business of demand and supply all his remarkable life. As it turned out, Orji Kalu was putting up a thoroughly rehearsed grandstand - what the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti called “shakara.” For what happened when the Abuja showdown came? Mr Kalu was the pointman, we’ve since come to learn, who shot down Ekwueme’s candidacy. He was the first to cast a vote for the man, Olusegun Obasanjo, against whom he had made a point of campaign with the Igbo. Who knows what deals transpired to that effect, since politics is all about deal making, and horse trading, and Orji Kalu is the quintessential dealmaker? It seems apparent that those who do not know Orji Kalu, and his peculiar life are bound to take him very seriously. But quite frankly, the chap is basically a survivor. Growing up dirt poor on the harsh streets of Aba taught him a few lessons: one was to sell anything. That is the survivor’s credo. Igbo and Biafra That is the exact context in which I place this statement credited to him about the Igbo and Biafra. Mr. Kalu is said to have apologized and sought forgiveness for the Igbo from Nigerians for going to war in 1967. He is said to have made this statement when some obscure party hand paid him one of those numerous courtesy calls that governors receive, in the Abia State governor’s lodge in Umuahia. Orji Uzor Kalu’s statement has historical value only in the sense of its symbolism. First, the governor’s lodge on Okpara Avenue, in Umuahia was the seat of the Igbo resistance against a genocidal war after the fall of Enugu. It should hardly be the place to repu-diate that heroic resistance against a war aimed at the soul of an entire race of people. Secondly, and most impor-tantly is that Orji Uzor Kalu lacks the intellectual and historical insight to comment on the war. He neither has information, nor has he the resour-ces to seek the kind of information that could aid him in understanding the context of events from 1967 to 1970. His ambition to seek the vice-presi-dential slot come 2007, under-standably predis-poses him to a lot of ring-kissing, but he must refrain from doing damage to the collective psyche of the Igbo, who in fact went to the Oputa panel to seek reparation against the conduct of that war. Just in case Orji Uzor Kalu does not know, the Igbo did not go to war. A war was levied against them with all the brutal force – external and internal – which the Gowon administration and his international minders could muster. General Yakubu Gowon has lived to render a tentative apology to Ndi Ahaba, for the massacres of the innocents close to the Cable point. As it is, a number of Igbo lawyers in the US and Canada, I understand, are preparing documents to make a proper case of genocide against a Nigerian General in that war, who openly declared at the Oputa panel that he had no regrets in carrying out war crimes against Igbo civilians in civil war, at the recently inaugurated UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague. We do know of course that war crimes have no statutes of limitation. Thirdly, Mr. Orji Uzor Kalu is hardly the one to issue an apology on behalf of the Igbo if it came to that. He has no such mandate. General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, leader of the Biafran resistance, and General Philip Effiong, his deputy, are still alive, and they are the only ones who can issue an apology on behalf of the Biafrans, if such an apology is necessary. In my view, Orji Uzo Kalu’s apostasy is akin to the conduct of the grave robber who begins the exhumation of a corpse from the leg because he was not there when the dead was buried. Aside from insulting the Igbo collectively, Orji Uzo Kalu dies a moral death on at least one score. He is prepared to use the tragic history, the sore memory of a much abused people to seek political legitimacy. He does not speak for the Igbo. He is incapable of speaking for the Igbo, since he is hardly equipped for that role. He is just simply doing what he knows best to do: horsetrading. My personal anger is that he chose a most problematic aspect of the Igbo memory, and his attempts to justify his own cause amounts to a desecration of the numerous graves of martyrs who died defending their own humanity. It is apostasy. It is the vilest form of ahistoricity. But it is also typically Orji Uzo Kalu. I can only repeat to him what Jadum, the madman of Ekwulobia once said to another loose canon from Achina: “Those who blindly wipe their dirty buttocks on the tree should sometimes look first to see whether the tree had grown thorns overnight.” The Igbo are the innocent trees, and their day will come against those who clean themselves incessantly on their boles.

Rwanda

Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) 17 Sept 2003 ANALYSIS Confronting Genocide With Country's Regular Courts Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) ANALYSIS September 17, 2003 Posted to the web September 17, 2003 By Gabriel Gabiro In December 1996, two and a half years after the end of the genocide, Rwanda opened its first courts to deal with the tens of thousands of genocide suspects that were massing up in its prisons. As the population of the accused grew to about 150,000 - a backlog that would have taken an estimated 200 years to clear - special quasi-traditional courts known as Gacaca were introduced and started operating in June 2002. Whereas the Gacaca courts will now handle over 90% of the cases, the regular courts will try suspected planners of the genocide, rapists and killers who, by the gravity of their acts, "distinguished" themselves in their communities. New laws gave these courts unique judicial powers. Six years down the line, the story of regular courts in Rwanda is one of mixed fortunes. From the trials of personalities to joint trials Most of the first genocide trials were of former prominent personalities. Notable in this range was the January 1997 trial of tycoon and former vice-president of the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain, (MDR), Froduald Karamira. He was convicted on charges of genocide and incitement to commit genocide. His trial is particularly remembered due to his persistent refusal to express remorse before and after the trial, and utterances in court that were widely taken to be offensive. He was sentenced to death and executed in public by firing squad on April 24th, 1998. With arguably equal attention was the trial of Roman Catholic Bishop of the Southern province of Gikongoro, Augustine Misago in 1999. He was accused of participating in the planning of killings in his province and delivering persecuted ethnic Tutsi students to killers. In a trial that lasted over a year, Misago, the first senior clergyman to go on trial for genocide in Rwanda, was acquitted. As time passed, courts embarked on joint trials mainly involving accused from the same area. The most recent judgement in a joint trial, and also the largest genocide trial, was delivered on August 1st, 2003 in the southern province of Butare. The trial included 142 accused from Gikonko district. Two years after the beginning of the trial, during which the court held hearings on a total of 120 days, 105 of the suspects were convicted and 37 acquitted. 11 of the convicts were sentenced to death. Since the first genocide trial, some 6,500 individuals have been tried. But out of the 100,000 awaiting trial, some 85,000 are still in custody in Rwanda's jails (the rest were provisionally released following a presidential decree in January). Some suspects, who have been in detention for over eight years, don't have a set date for the start of their trials. The 1996 genocide law places suspects in four categories based on their alleged power, influence and criminal responsibility during the genocide. While the gacaca courts will judge suspects from three categories, it is still up to the regular courts to handle the fate of the 3,000 or so Category One (the highest) suspects. A number which is likely to expand as Gacaca courts re-categorise all suspects and indict new ones. "Rwandan innovation" Prior to 1994, genocide wasn't listed as a crime in the country's laws. The new leadership quickly started working on a law to "prosecute offences constituting the crime of genocide related crimes committed since October 1st, 1990". This organic law was passed by the transitional national assembly in 1996. It created a "specialised chamber" in each of the 13 regular courts to try such cases. With the 2001 introduction of Gacaca law and subsequent transfer of most of the cases to Gacaca jurisdictions, the specialised chambers were closed. The cases already in progress in these courts were moved to regular court chambers, where they will still be tried on the basis of the 1996 organic law. One of the most notable aspects of the 1996 law has been the "confession and guilty plea procedure". Unlike conventional plea bargains between prosecutors and suspects, this procedure offers suspects an automatic reduction of their sentences when they confess and plead guilty. For example, convicts from "category Two" who would normally have faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment can now be sentenced to between seven and eleven years in jail. The sentence reduction is however not extended to Category One suspects: the maximum sentence for these is death. "This is a Rwandan innovation", Hugo Moudiki, of Avocats Sans Frontières, Belgium (Lawyers Without Borders), says of the procedure. "It is important in Rwanda's context. In most cases there are no witnesses to certain events and there is no other evidence. Confessions can facilitate such cases and aid the process of reconciliation", he adds. A genocide survivor supports Moudiki's view. "I saw that man kill my family" , says 22-year-old Rosalina Mukantwari. "But the most important thing for me was to know where they had been buried". When the trial for the suspect in the 1994 killing of Mukantwari's family started, she pleaded with the suspect to tell him where her parents had been buried. The suspect (now convict) narrated everything to the court. "This was some kind of closure to me", she says. However, in a system where the chance of appearing in court to face a trial is not commonplace given the vast number of suspects, Moudiki is concerned that the system may be abused by desperate detainees. Supreme Court vice-president, Tharcisse Karugarama doesn't agree: "The confession has to be tested by everyone involved. The prosecutor has three months to investigate the authenticity of the plea. The judges also examine the circumstances under which the confession was reached". War crimes or "operational mistakes" As trials of civilians commenced in regular courts, soldiers suspected of committing crimes during and after the war began to have their own trials, or, depending on whom you speak to, 'were supposed to have begun their own trials'. The 1996 genocide law provided for the formation of military courts. Two were formed, the War Council and the Military Court. The former has jurisdiction over soldiers ranking from the non-commissioned officer to captain, while the latter deals with the rest of the officers apart from a few senior leaders of the army who can only be tried by the Supreme Court. Each of the two courts, which also have jurisdiction over any other crimes committed by soldiers and their civilian accomplices, has several Chambers. The Chambers have been operating, but, according to some observers and human rights organisations the government has largely turned a blind eye to war crimes committed by Rwandan Defence Forces (former Rwandan Patriotic Army) during its war to oust the former government and afterwards. "What we have now is the authorities saying that people who were accused of war crimes have been judged. I never see those cases. I just hear the minister talk about them", says Moudiki of Avocats sans Frontières, who have been in the country for seven years. Carla Del Ponte, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) based in Tanzania has also often accused the government of shielding war crimes suspects and denying her office co-operation in investigating the matter. "The reluctance (to prosecute RDF soldiers), if it exists, should be proved", states Col. John Peter Bagabo, the president of the Military court. He says that RDF soldiers accused of committing "operational mistakes" before, during and after the 1994 genocide have been prosecuted and strongly disagrees with allegations that the RDF could have committed any war crimes. "I think some people are mixing up things. How do you prosecute people for having stopped a genocide. This (criticism) is done by negative forces advocating for the idea of double genocide or misinformed people", says Bagabo. Most soldiers in the RDF agree with Bagabo that most of the killings committed in 1994 are not real war crimes. They consider them as unavoidable "revenge killings". Furthermore, explains Bagabo, "during the war, the genocidal forces used human shields. We did our best to separate those (civilians) that we could find". He argues that some of the killings attributed to the RPF were inevitable and should rather be blamed on the war tactics of the then national army. Indeed the military courts have judged soldiers for crimes committed during and after the war. A few, tried by makeshift courts during the war, were sentenced to death and executed. Others have been handed different sentences. A number of these belonged to the former Rwandan army, incorporated in the RPA after the war. Perhaps the most prominent case held by the Military Court was that of Lt. Col. Fred Ibingira. He was accused of presiding over the 1995 killing of over 300 internally displaced people in Kibeho refugee camp in the Southern province of Gikongoro. The killings occurred when the refugees were beginning to leave the camp to return to their homes. Ibingira argued that the victims were armed combatants who tried to attack camp guards. The court ruled that whereas some of the victims were armed and did attack the soldiers, the army had reacted with indiscriminate shooting that resulted into the killings of harmless children, women and elderly people. Ibingira was however cleared of any direct responsibility in the killings committed by junior soldiers from his brigade, and sentenced to 18 months in prison on December 30th. Most of the accusations against RDF soldiers concern the 1995 to 1998 war against incursions by remnants of Interahamwe militias and other supporters of the former government. This mainly took place in the North West provinces of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri. One of the most important trials regarding "the war against infiltrators" was the 1997 conviction of Majors George Rwigamba and Goodman Ruzibiza Bagurete, and 2nd Lieutenants Vincent Sano and Emmanuel Rutayisire. They were found guilty of "failure to stop a criminal act" by soldiers under their command. According to court documents, in revenge for an officer killed in an ambush, soldiers from a brigade headed by Rwigamba killed 110 people in Kanama, Gisenyi. The four military officers were each sentenced to 28 months in prison. Apart from these cases, it is difficult to get accurate figures from the military authorities or in any other judicial or government department. However, this is not necessarily due to any agenda that the authorities would want to keep secret. Most activities done in the messy period immediately after the genocide were either not documented or filed in equally messy style. But even if they existed, such statistics wouldn't satisfy critics. They argue that too little has been done and on insignificant officers. As well as observers and human rights organisations, the population in some parts of the country has expressed discontent with military courts. The subject has come up time and again especially in the north of the country where some ethnic Hutu attendants of the Gacaca hearings are unhappy with the fact that these courts (Gacaca) have no powers to try soldiers. "War crimes, genocide, revenge killings or whatever you might call it means nothing to me", Nahayezu, a resident of Kigali previously leaving in the north Rwanda province of Byumba. "The most important thing to me is that my brother was killed by an RDF soldier when they captured our region". Problems faced The country has faced many problems in its pursuit for justice for crimes related to the 1994 genocide, but two stand out: shortage of human and financial resources to run the courts. It has been very difficult for Rwanda to get competent jurists to handle the colossal numbers of dossiers. This is partly due to the fact that a substantial number of the learned population before the genocide either fled the country, participated or were victims of the genocide. In 1996, "some of those people (judges, prosecutors and other court officials) were teachers, mathematicians, chemists or anything else by training", says Moudiki. "The quality (of the trials) was very bad," he adds. "However", he goes on, "there is a lot more training and more qualified people today. We are now midway to achieving a well functioning system". One of the most active parties in the trials, genocide survivor's umbrella organisation IBUKA, agrees. "There has been a lot of improvements in the quality of people handling these trials since 1996", says lawyer Frédéric Mutagwera of IBUKA. Even then, a look at the Rwandan justice system shows a workforce of mainly young graduates, with little or no work experience. The country is also short on funds to run the system. The 2003 national budget allotted about $3.9million to the entire ministry of justice. "These are peanuts compared to the number of suspects and convicts in jail.", stresses Jean Paul Tuyisenge, editor of the oldest newspaper, Kinyamateka. The budget constraints on the judicial system are clearly manifested all over the country. Most courtrooms look like anything but a courtroom. Some relatively high ranking court officials sometimes have to commute to their work places using dingy public minibuses. And, despite being widely held as a noble profession, the starting salary for a public prosecutor or judge is a paltry US $90. "I'm only here for a sort of transition period between school and finding a real job", a young prosecutor complained. A few days later, she got a job in an NGO. Largely corruption free The area of uncertainties, failures and achievements of justice for genocide in Rwanda is debatable. In contrast, all observers seem to agree that corruption has largely been kept out of the genocide trials. "There has been a few cases but I must say that overall, this isn't a major problem", says Mutagwera of IBUKA. "This is a rare phenomenon", agrees Moudiki. "There is some corruption in commercial cases and others but not in genocide trials". The Rwandan Director of Public Prosecutions, Gerald Gahima is known to treat suspected cases of corruption in the judiciary with an uncompromising hand. A few senior judicial officers including a senior judge, prosecutors and others have been arrested in the past on corruption charges. A few years ago, the biggest problem the regular courts in Rwanda were facing was the incredibly high number of cases to handle. Today, although a lot remains to be done, the good news to "classic" justice in Rwanda maybe that this problem has been solved. Or rather laid on a new avenue : Gacaca.

Tanzania

Guardian UK 13 Sept 2003 I was sacked as Rwanda genocide prosecutor for challenging president, says Del Ponte John Hooper in Rome Saturday September 13, 2003 The Guardian Carla del Ponte, who was removed last month from her post as prosecutor for the Rwanda genocide court, yesterday blamed her dismissal on the country's president, Paul Kagame. She also revealed that - in a last-ditch effort to remain in the job - she had offered to step down from the trial of the former Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. In an interview with the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, Ms Del Ponte also criticised Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, describing his position on the matter as "inflexible". She was quoted as saying that she had fallen foul of President Kagame because she insisted on tackling not only the 1994 genocide but also the alleged war crimes of his followers in the former rebel army that put an end to the killings. In her first detailed account of events leading up to her dismissal, Ms Del Ponte described a showdown last year in which, she said, Mr Kagame screamed at her "as if he was giving me an order", telling her that it was up to the government to investigate the military and up to her to investigate the genocide. "This work of yours is creating political problems for me," she quoted him as saying. "You are going to destabilise the country this way." Ms Del Ponte, speaking in Kigali, said: "Probably, if I had given in - if I had accepted his orders - I would still be here." The UN security council voted unanimously last month to relieve the Swiss-born lawyer of her duties in Africa while giving her a second four-year term as chief prosecutor at the Hague-based tribunal investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. The decision was taken despite a personal appeal by Ms Del Ponte at the end of July. She told La Repubblica she had set off to New York "furious" over leaks that had begun to undermine her authority. "I had grasped what the Rwandans were up to, but I wanted to explain to the secretary general that it was not the right moment to split the two tribunals. I had no doubt that Kofi Annan would back me as he had done on other occasions - spurring me ahead. Instead, everything had already been decided." She said the head of the secretary general's legal office told her a majority of security council members wanted to divide the two posts. "Annan dug in behind that attitude and I realised that there was no room for negotiation," said Ms Del Ponte. She asked him if she could choose between the Hague and Kigali. "The secretary general was inflexible. [He said:] 'No. The trial against Milosevic is too important to be left in the hands of someone else'." · Mr Kagame was sworn in as Rwanda's president for a seven-year term yesterday after his landslide victory last month in his country's first multi-party presidential poll since the 1994 genocide. Mr Kagame, of the Tutsi minority and leader of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front, has been in charge of Rwandan politics since leading the rebel army that ended the slaughter by militant Hutus. He became president in 2000. Supporters say he has made Rwanda more secure, the economy is growing, education is on the rise and poverty is falling. Critics say his internal politics are too repressive and many people are too scared to voice support for anyone else.

Zimbabwe

September 14, 2003 Zimbabwe Police Close Down Nation's Largest Daily Paper By SHARON LaFRANIERE JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 13 — Armed police officers in Zimbabwe's capital unexpectedly shut down the nation's biggest daily newspaper, The Daily News, on Friday after the country's highest court ruled that the paper was publishing illegally. The move silenced, at least temporarily, one of the few independent news outlets in an increasingly authoritarian state. The newspaper's editor said the action was one more sign of Zimbabwe's deepening political and economic crisis under President Robert G. Mugabe. "This is an unprecedented assault on media freedom by a government that is terrified of media that offers alternative news," the editor, Francis Mdlongwa, said in a telephone interview today. Gugulethu Moyo, a lawyer for Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, which owns The Daily News, said that the paper had faced numerous government-imposed obstacles in its four years of publication, but that the shutdown was unexpected. With a circulation of 100,000, the Daily News leads a small contingent of publications that make up Zimbabwe's opposition press. The government controls the nation's television and radio networks and the other daily newspapers. The government tightened the reins on the media last year when the ruling party passed a law requiring media organizations to register with a state commission. The Daily News refused and instead sued, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. Ms. Moyo and Mr. Mdlongwa said the law required reporters to disclose their political affiliations and home addresses, forced privately owned publications to surrender business secrets and made journalists criminally liable for reporting inaccurate information. More than a dozen journalists have been charged since the new law took effect. On Thursday, Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku ruled that the paper should have registered before filing suit. He found the paper in "open defiance of the law." Representatives of the paper said they then promised to register. But after 4 p.m. on Friday, police officers converged on the paper's offices in the center of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, and ordered employees to go home. Police officers are now stationed at the paper round-the-clock. The paper's lawyers are trying to press the court and the government to allow it to resume publication. The United States Embassy in Harare issued a statement deploring the closure as part of "the government of Zimbabwe's pattern of threats and intimidation against the independent media." The newspaper's closure follows a steady deterioration in Zimbabwe's political and economic state under the 23-year rule of President Mugabe, 79. With the inflation rate at a record 450 percent, unemployment at 70 percent and food and gasoline shortages endemic, Mr. Mugabe's government has grown ever more authoritarian. "

Star SA 24 Sept 2003 www.thestar.co.za UN spots Mugabe's fraud September 24, 2003 In your comment, "SA must heed Mugabe logic" (The Star, September 17), you only touch on the question of Zimbabwe. The decision not to invite Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to the Commonwealth summit in Nigeria in December has led to protest and indignation from the South African presidency. The question that is constantly asked is why the African Union (AU) keeps turning a blind eye to the events in Zimbabwe. But are they able to question or criticise Mugabe? At a recent Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit, he was applauded, and President Thabo Mbeki admitted that the AU had not discussed the crisis in Zimbabwe. Surely there must be an explanation for this behaviour by those one assumes to be responsible leaders? As members of the United Nations, they have all taken note of a statement by the president of the Security Council that key, senior members of the Zimbabwe government are to be investigated by the UN for allegedly looting and illegally exploiting resources - including a fortune in diamonds - in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The UN document titled The Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of DR Congo, details how this "elite network" benefited from instability in the Congo and sought to fuel it by supporting armed groups opposed to Rwanda and Burundi. "The elite network of Congolese and Zimbabwean political, military and commercial interests seeks to maintain its grip on the main mineral resources - diamonds, cobalt, copper, germanium - of the government-controlled area," the document says. "This network has transferred ownership of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the past three years with no compensation or benefit for the state treasury." On what this document refers to as "organised theft", Robert Mugabe and several members of his cabinet feature prominently in the report. Furthermore, they refuse to co-operate with the UN, and like the AU, SADC and the Commonwealth, there is little or nothing anyone can do about it, particularly as Mugabe has support within those bodies. So you can expect silence on the atrocities by the infamous youth militia the Green Bombers, whose members routinely rape young girls and commit other atrocities. Rights groups say sexual assault is increasingly used as a political weapon by the Zimbabwean government. Silence on the attacks on the press is also not surprising. Nor is it surprising that some African countries, led by Mbeki, have been urging the Commonwealth to relax its sanctions on Zimbabwe. Mugabe is not a maniac. He knows exactly what he is doing and is so deeply involved in the network in the DRC that he cannot, and will not, relinquish power in Zimbabwe. The ploy to pour his burgeoning population onto the land grabbed from white farmers is designed to quell the rising problem of where to accommodate them. It makes no sense that they'd deliberately destroy the agricultural economy if there weren't bigger issues at stake. This raises the question: how many people, in high positions in member states of the AU and SADC, has Mugabe implicated in this plunder? Is it surprising that the poor countries in Africa rally behind Zimbabwe, with an astute politician like Mugabe in the enviable position of buying off any dissenting voices? So while all this is happening on South Africa's doorstep, there is a convenient escape route from facing up to the situation. With the principle that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty, whatever evidence mounts against him, Comrade Bob has little to fear from his colleagues. Sid Robbins Milnerton

Americas

Argentina

Albuquerque Tribune 4 Sept 2003 www.abqtrib.com OPINIONS Kate Nelson In unflinching photos, Mayans stand witness to genocide In the jungle, you cannot see beyond the third tree, not when a mountain mist snakes around branches, not when night drops like an errant step in an open tomb. In such a place, who could see the horrors, hear the screams, record the murders? In such a place, who would remember the lost lives, the broken families, the ancient culture, the disappeared? Here is an answer, born on the pearly face of a Mayan child who watches as the bones of her heritage are lifted from a shallow grave. Here is an answer, touted by men who ferry boxes of their loved ones down a lush mountain valley. Here is an answer, embedded in the wrinkles of a woman who mourns a husband, forever young. "The grief is incredibly expressed but so is the power of the community," Janis Timm-Bottos says of the photographs lining her Downtown gallery, OFFCenter Arts. On Friday, "Refugees Even After Death: A Quest for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation" will open at the gallery. Sponsored by Amnesty International, the exhibit features the beautiful and brutal photography of Jonathan Moller. For 14 months, he documented the Mayans' efforts to restore homes and lives scattered by 36 years of war - efforts that began by honoring the dead. "These people are so precious," Timm-Bottos says. "It's almost a documentary of how to embrace death without running away from it." There is so much death to embrace. The U.N. Truth Commission has estimated 200,000 civilians died during the worst years of Guatemala's civil war. Another 200,000 fled the country; 40,000 simply disappeared. About 450 villages were flattened. At the height of hostilities, the Truth Commission said, the United States trained, aided and provided direct support to the Guatemalan government's "scorched-earth policy." The fighting ended in 1996. At least in theory. That's when peace accords were signed, and activists turned their aching eyes to other atrocities. "Guatemala sort of disappeared from the media," says Matthew O'Neill, an Amnesty International member and assistant public defender in Bernalillo County. "Part of the reason we brought the exhibit here is to highlight Guatemala a little bit. Some disturbing things are starting to happen there again." Even as new political troubles simmer, the Mayans came out of hiding and returned to what once were homes, farms and ranches. They found the makeshift graves created as they fled in the night, pulled away the dirt and brought honor to their dead - with priests, candles, flowers and crosses. One of Moller's photographs reveals the sanctuary of a church, its long aisle lined by caskets, six abreast. The bones within bear stories of inhumanity, stories that must not be forgotten, not as genocide consumes genocide in country after country. But the bones also bear witness to the power of a community that did not die, that remembered its roots, that tended its future. In "The Time Will Come," poet Francisco Morales Santos writes of the power contained in a crushed skull, in a child's skeleton, in a tangle of his ancestors' bones: . . . the time will come to put our hearts and ears to the ground to listen to the voices which we have been summoning to fight the law of forgetfulness. Bent at a graveside, a woman spills her tears onto the evidence of what happened in the mist, behind the trees, in the tomb of night. Witness to brutality, plaintiff for justice, she was there. And she is still here. Nelson's column runs on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Call her at 823-3691 or send e-mail to knelson@abqtrib.com. THE EXHIBIT A free opening-night reception for Jonathan Moller's photographic exhibit, "Refugees Even After Death," will take place 6-9 p.m. Friday at OFFCenter Arts, 117 Seventh St. N.W. The exhibit will run through Sept. 20.

Canada

AFP 5 Sept 2003 War crimes court president says charges of politicization are main problem, VANCOUVER, Sept 5 As the International Criminal Court (ICC) prepares to try its first case at The Hague, charges of politicization are a major challenge, the new president of the ICC warned in a speech here. Philippe Kirsch, a Canadian elected to the post this year, said the ICC's rules make it impossible for the court to act politically. "The problem of a political court is not a challenge, it is a matter of perception," Kirsch said in a speech late Thursday. Since 2002 when the court reached the minimum ratification by 60 countries, the United States has fiercely challenged its mandate as the world's first permanent international court to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The United States, which reversed its original signature to the treaty, is now pressuring countries that receive US aid not to sign or ratify the 1998 Statute of Rome, which created the court. It fears the tribunal may be used for politically motivated prosecutions of current and former US officials, soldiers or other Americans. In his speech to the Liu Institute for Global Issues at University of British Columbia, Kirsch avoided naming the US or US President George W. Bush in his reference to politicization. He acknowledged that complaints to the court may be politically motivated, but said, "the criteria should be not what it receives, but how it acts." To date the court has received 500 allegations of crimes in 66 different situations. The largest numbers of submissions have come from Germany and the United States, he added. Kirsch would not say what the court's first case would be, but noted that ICC prosecutors have identified alleged crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as "the most urgent." He noted that the court received "a lot of communications on the Iraq war," but ICC prosecutors decided allegations against the United States were not admissible because they did not meet the criteria that a state will not or cannot exercise its jurisdiction. Although the court is beginning its work fully 15 years before the original founders expected, Kirsch warned supporters cannot be complacent. "The court will have to explain what it means to be unwilling or unable to exercise justice ... and it will have to demonstrate that it can deliver justice efficiently." It will also have to be transparent, he added.

CP 8 Sept 2003 1992 speech did not incite Rwandan genocide: court OTTAWA - A man accused of inciting the Rwandan bloodbath in 1994 found out on Monday he can stay in Canada for now, after the Federal Court of Appeal rejected Ottawa's reasons for wanting to kick him out. Léon Mugesera began fighting deportation back to Rwanda in 1995. On Monday, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that a speech he gave in 1992 could not be construed as either incitement to murder or incitement to genocide and hatred, as the federal government had claimed. "His speech has nothing to do with the killing of people two years later in 1994," said Guy Bertrand, Mugesera's lawyer. As a Rwandan government official, Mugesera delivered a speech in 1992 that still frightens those who remember what happened later – the massacre in 1994 of about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In the speech, Mugesera implied that Hutus needed to cut Tutsi throats before Tutsis cut theirs and referred to Tutsis as "Inyenzis," an ethnic slur. Some human rights groups blamed his speech for the slaughter in 1994. "It send chills through your body," said Marene Gatali, a Rwandan now living in Ottawa. "It's like you're listening to a horror movie or something." And it's the reason the Immigration Department wanted to send Mugesera back to Africa. Mugesera fled from Rwanda in December 1992, and found refuge in Spain. In August 1993, he arrived in Montreal with his wife and five children. Rwanda was already in the grip of a brutal war in 1992 when Mugesera gave what he calls a political speech in which he merely implored Hutus to defend themselves against the Tutsis. Human Rights Watch activist Allison De Forges said the speech was "remarkable for its brutality and for its direct incitement to genocide." But in a 132-page ruling, Justice Robert Décary rejected those allegations, and was critical of De Forges's testimony at the hearing. "Even though it is true some of his statements were misplaced or unfortunate, there is nothing in the evidence to indicate that Mr. Mugesera, under the cover of anecdotes or other imagery, deliberately incited to murder, hatred or genocide," Décary wrote. The ruling was also critical of De Forges's testimony, calling it "biased or misinformed." Federal government lawyers are studying the decision. An appeal to the Supreme Court is possible.

National Post 9 Sept 2003 Immigrant accused of launching Rwandan genocide plans lawsuit A Quebec man who has been accused of crimes against humanity in his native Rwanda plans to sue the people who spread the accusation. "We envisage all sorts of legal action," Leon Mugesera's lawyer, Guy Bertrand, said at a news conference Tuesday. "They fabricated a false Mugesera so we would all hate the real Mugesera. The damage was done and the damage will always be there. There will always be people who say where there is smoke, there is fire." Bertrand refused to specify who would be sued but suggested that federal immigration officials and international war-crimes investigators would be targeted. The Federal Court of Appeal cleared Mugesera on Monday of giving a speech in 1992 that federal immigration authorities said incited the 1994 massacre of thousands of Rwandans. The court blasted immigration investigators and judges and international war-crimes investigators, saying they took Mugesera's words out of context to condemn him. Much of the evidence against Mugesera was manipulated or provided by his political enemies, the court said. Mugesera, who lives on welfare in Quebec City with his wife and five children, lost his teaching job at Laval University shortly after he was accused. "I always wanted peace," said Mugesera, who was flanked at the news conference by his family. "I asked for peace for my family, for my children, for each of my children, for my wife. I wanted peace for my family, peace for my people." Mugesera, who has permanent-residency status in Canada, said 26 members of his family, including his mother and mother-in-law, have been killed in ongoing violence in the African country. In 1992, Mugesera gave a passionate speech urging Rwandans to defend themselves against invaders from Uganda. Units of the Ugandan army and Tutsi insurgents had launched war in Rwanda in 1990. While full of violent references, the speech was not intended to urge Hutus to kill about 800,000 Tutsis in 1994, the court found. Mugesera immigrated to Canada in 1993, 18 months before the slaughter occurred. The Canadian government began deportation proceedings in 1995. Federal lawyers maintained that Mugesera "explicitly called on Hutus to kill Tutsis and dump their bodies in the rivers of Rwanda." Ottawa has 60 days to file an appeal of Monday's decision with the Supreme Court of Canada. - Canadian Press

B C . CAN e w s 9 Sept 2003 Man cleared of genocide charges may sue Ottawa QUEBEC CITY-- A man cleared of allegations he incited genocide in Rwanda says he has been exonerated by the courts and may sue the federal government. Leon Mugesera was facing deportation because of allegations he incited people to genocide in Rwanda during a speech in 1992. That was less than two years before Hutus killed an estimated 800,000 people in the African country. Léon Mugesera On Monday the Federal Court of Appeal quashed the deportation order, ruling there was no evidence Mugesera incited hatred or genocide. Mugesera says his eight-year battle with immigration authorities has left him penniless. And he worries it will be next to impossible to piece his life back together again. "Imagine," he told a news conference in Quebec City, "if someone puts to your face that you are the killer of the world. Your honour, your name, all that has been has been destroyed." Mugesera says he is a man of peace and that his name has been destroyed by his political opponents. But those who investigated the genocide in Rwanda see Mugesera differently. Gerald Caplan, who reported on the genocide for the Organization of African Unity, says Mugesera did not participate in the killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda. but he says that doesn't tell the whole story. "He was a fierce inciter of race hatred. And he called on his fellow ethnic people to exterminate people of the minority ethnic group," said Caplan. Mugesera is considering launching a lawsuit against the federal government and those who investigated the genocide. The federal government has 60 days to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. Written by CBC News Online staff Copyright © 2003 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -

Mexico

Archaeologists Find Indian Massacre Site By MARK STEVENSON Associated Press Writer September 8, 2003, 10:38 AM EDT BACALAR, Mexico -- Mexican archaeologists have unearthed what may be the resting place of dozens -- and perhaps hundreds -- of victims, including the tiny vertebrae and clavicles of children massacred during North America's last large-scale Indian war. The excavations in this Caribbean coast town have yielded a cautionary tale about the destructive power of rural conflict here. The dig at Bacalar's old San Joaquin Church illustrates how, when Mexico allows land and ethnic conflicts to simmer, they eventually explode, often with astonishing violence. Originally built in the 1600s to withstand attacks by English pirates, Bacalar, 200 miles south of Cancun, finally succumbed to a different threat: Mayan Indians driven to rebellion by 300 years of oppression, first by the Spanish conquistadors and later by mixed-race Mexicans. In what was known as the Caste War, the Mayas grew tired of suffering land expropriations and an oppressive tax system and rose up in arms in 1848 with the aim of expelling non-Indians from their lands. At one point, they controlled almost the entire Yucatan peninsula. As many as 200,000 non-Indians fled and thousands were killed before the uprising was put down in 1901. The inspiration for the uprising came from the so-called "Talking Crosses," wooden crosses that supposedly spoke and gave divine orders. "The time has come for Indians to fight against the whites, as in the old times," Indians reported the crosses as saying. In February 1858, when the rebels overran Bacalar, the orders were to kill. Contemporary accounts say about 250 white and mixed-race women and children were forced to gather at the church, as well as a lesser number of Mexican army soldiers. Those accounts list only one survivor, a 7-year-old girl who hid in a storeroom. No one knows for sure how many died. Bacalar lay abandoned for decades after the massacre and wasn't repopulated again until the 1930s. Those who repopulated the city reported finding human bones strewn around the church. When the old building underwent a renovation this spring, archaeologists decided to dig into the floor in one of the few excavations of a Caste War site. "We found a very large number of jumbled human bones, and what stands out is the large number of bones from children under 15," said archaeologist Allan Ortega, describing the contents of two 4-foot-by-4-foot exploratory pits dug in the church floor. Parts of several dozen skeletons were found scattered in the two pits. If the layer of scattered bones was found to extend over the whole floor, the number would rise into the hundreds. "They seem to have tried to eliminate any future rivals," archaeologist Allen Maciel said of the preponderance of children's bones. The bones are still being examined for age, gender and possible signs of cause of death at the local offices of the National Institute for Archaeology and History. With most of the church floor now buried in a layer of cement from the renovations, archaeologists have no plans to extend the dig beyond the two small exploratory pits. But the position of the remains -- jumbled, not buried, in a layer of loosely packed earth above an older and more peaceable level of burials apparently dating to the early 1800s -- suggest they belong to victims of the massacre. Other sites remain to be excavated. Many 19th century towns in what are now the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo were abandoned forever during the uprising. Archaeologists -- long more concerned with preserving the area's wealth of Mayan ruins -- are only now beginning to study the towns. The legacy of the Caste War remains among the Mayan people. They still leave offerings of flowers at the little church in the town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, where the Talking Crosses first appeared. Anastasio Garcia, 72, a deacon at the chapel, said his grandfather Francisco Chan described the hardship among the rebels and Indians who, like Chan, fled the violence. "People had to go live in the jungle," Garcia said. "There was no food, except for maybe some rotten fruit fallen from the trees, like zapote. They ate that, even though it was rotten." Yet Garcia says the war made life better for the Mayan people. "Before (the uprising) we lived without liberty, we were like slaves," he says. "Now, we live in peace. Free." The voices coming from the Talking Crosses were later found to be the work of a ventriloquist hired by a mestizo rabble-rouser. The rebellion -- with its violence and suffering -- appears to have brought the Maya few gains. They live mostly on bone-dry farms in the southern part of the state, far from the tourist-generated riches of Cancun. Their modest fishing villages have long ago been taken over by beach resorts. Meanwhile, throughout the rest of Mexico, history seems to be repeating itself. Only this time around, the violence is mainly Indian-on-Indian, and often fueled by poorly drawn boundaries and land reform programs that assigned the same plots twice to different groups. A year ago, a land dispute in southern Oaxaca state prompted an ambush that left more than two dozen men dead. Similar motives were partly to blame for the massacre of 45 Indians in Chiapas in 1997. Fears of more violence led Rosamaria Miguel and about 50 other protesters to demonstrate outside government security offices in Mexico City in May. "We don't want the history of massacres to repeat itself," explained Miguel, who said her village of Santa Maria Tataltepec is currently surrounded by armed men from another community. The two towns are locked in a decades-long battle over a disputed stretch of farm land, showing that the potential for violence in rural Mexico is as real today as it was in the 1850s. "We have some communities in Oaxaca killing each other over land title disputes that go back to colonial days," said Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the U.N. Indian rights investigator. The federal government has identified at least 14 high-risk "hot spots" where land disputes are marked by violence. Tataltepec wasn't even considered serious enough to make the list. "We just don't want to repeat the old pattern of authorities waiting to act until after the massacre has happened," said protester Ever Juan de Dios.

United States

KRON 4 Sept 2003 Racist Fliers Upset Residents SANTA ROSA (KRON) -- A notorious hate group passing out fliers in Santa Rosa has some residents there very upset. FBI agents have testified in court in the past that the National Alliance is a domestic terrorist group, but local police say espousing ideas alone, is not a crime. No one knows who distributed the fliers and the National Alliance did not return our calls. One Santa Rosa neighborhood and others started getting fliers allegedly from the National Alliance this week. The eight fliers were all different. One charges that non-whites are turning America into a third-world slum: "they are messy, disruptive noisy and multiply rapidly," it says. For police it is a freedom of speech issue. Lieutenant Tom Schwedhelm of the Santa Rosa police says, "The actual fact of distributing the fliers appears to be legal. People have a right to have opinions even if they are offensive to many people. It appears the fliers were one group expressing their opinions." The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks hate groups. It says there are 48 in California, second only to Texas, and the National Alliance is now the most infamous hate group in America. "There is no question this organization advocates genocide. It talks about the temporary unpleasantness, quote unquote, which will follow its succession to power and what they explain is all jews will be killed, race mixers - white women who sleep with black men - death for them as well, homosexuals, etc., etc., etc. The leader has talked about putting his enemies into railroad cars and sending them to the bottom of abandoned coal mines," Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says. The leader was William Pierce. The former physics professor from Oregon State University was the author of The Turner Diaries, the novel which inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce died last year. "A great many people have come out of the National Alliance who have gone on to commit all kinds of crimes. Talking about murder, shootouts with police officers, armored car heists, bank robberies and so on," Potok says. Hating isn't free. Observors say members of the National Alliance pay dues every single month. Handing out brochures is a way to increase membership, to bring in more money. There are four chapters in the state of California, including units in Oakland and Sacramento. They did not return our calls. Kathleen Kelly's mother got a flier talking about jews. "That's pretty creepy. Especially, I would consider this a nice neighborhood. It kind of seems like we're a target." The Kelly family did what anti-hate groups suggest: ignore the hate, throw it away.

Cybercast News Service 5 Sept 2003 NY Million Youth March: Black Empowerment or Anti-Semitic Jeff McKay Correspondent (CNSNews.com) - This weekend's Million Youth March in New York City, billed as a means to empower African-American youth and encourage unity, is also drawing unwanted attention to organizers of the march for their alleged anti-Semitism. Saturday's rally will take place over a six-block area in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, which organizers call, "the heart of the black community." They expect between 20,000 and 100,000 people to attend. The city granted a permit for the Million Youth March in August after organizers threatened to go to court if the permit was not issued. The group's leaders also called for shutting down both the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges "by any means necessary" if their permit request was turned down. Organizers of the march have a 10-point platform that includes the empowerment of businesses involved in the rap music industry, the awarding of reparations for the descendants of slaves, the creation of a new breed of politicians who "will not sell us out," and the protesting of police brutality, which the organizers claim "both President Bush and New York City Mayor Bloomberg are responsible for." The Million Youth March leaders are also conducting a voter registration drive with a goal of signing up to 10,000 new voters. "This march is a call for peace and unity in the (black) community," said Najee Muhammad, a spokesman for the event. "This is about empowering youth and changing what needs to be changed, including police brutality," he added. The eight-hour march will feature speeches by current Democratic presidential candidate, Rev. Al Sharpton, New York City Councilman Charles Barron and legal activists Alton Maddox and Malik Shabazz. Sharpton and Shabazz, among others, will share the stage with several well-known rap artists and members of the notorious Bloods and Crips street gangs who will also give speeches. The event is hosted by the New Black Panther Party and led by Shabazz, the party's national chairman. Among those also endorsing the event are outspoken Bush critic and former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and former New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka. Baraka came under fire when his Sept. 11 memorial poem, entitled "Somebody Blew Up America," included verses alluding to the possibility that both the U.S. and Israeli governments had had prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks. He would later be stripped of his distinction as nobel laureate by the New Jersey Legislature and Gov. Jim McGreevey. Despite its name, the Million Youth marches have never garnered that many participants. In 1998, the largest Million Youth March brought together 6,000 people, according to New York City Police estimates, while organizers stated the number to be over 20,000. During that event, led by the late Khalid Muhammad, eleven people were injured when police tried to impose the assigned 4:00 p.m. curfew. Community leaders accused organizers of the march of trying to incite anti-Semitism and violence. In the weeks leading up to that first rally, Muhammad, known for his anti-white and anti-Jewish rhetoric, had public clashes with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Muhammad had made headlines for a speech delivered at Kean University in New Jersey in 1993 in which he allegedly labeled Jews "bloodsuckers," called for genocide against white people, used vulgarity to ridicule Pope John Paul II and demeaned homosexuals. This led to a falling out with the nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, to which Muhammad was at the time the group's national spokesman. Among the most vocal critics of the march is the Anti Defamation League, which accuses Shabazz of being anti-Semitic. "Any rally that seeks to gather black youth from around the country to stand united in their desire to better their communities is one that all groups should support. But, in this case it is tainted because it is led by a racist and anti-Semite," said Joel Levy, New York regional director for the Anti Defamation League. According to the ADL, Shabazz stated publicly that Israel and the U.S. government had prior knowledge of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. During a July press conference in Morristown, N.J., Shabazz reportedly stated that, "If 3,000 people perished in the World Trade Center attacks and the Jewish population is 10 percent, you show me records of 300 Jewish people dying in the World Trade Center. We're daring anyone to dispute its truth. They got their people out." As a result, "there is ample reason to suspect Shabazz will use the Million Youth March to promote racism and anti-Semitism," said Levy. However, this charge is fully disputed by event organizers. "We can't be anti-Semitic, because we as Africans are the Semitic people," stated march spokesman Najee Muhammad. "To say we are anti-Semitic would mean that we are against our own people."

La Nueva Cuba, 6 Sept 2003 On sanctions and sunbathing in Cuba By Ileana Fuentes. On August 21st, the state of Alabama signed trade agreements with Cuba worth 10 million dollars in poultry, dairy products and other undisclosed items. Are these items to be sold in pesos by the ration card, or freely at the chopins where the government can hoard the coveted dollar? As Alabamans celebrated their chicken deal, Cuba's daily Granma announced a national inventory of all computers to identify and seize those of "dubious provenance." . . .Not that commerce and trade -much less tourism- exists to reform dictatorial regimes, or bring civil and human rights to the natives. The business of business is business. Trade has to do with profit, making money, multiplying assets and developing markets, not with justice or human rights, even if the prospective trade partner is a dismal autocracy like Kuwait, or a genocidal power like China (the female infanticide that results from China's reproductive policies is genocide), or a military bully the likes of pre-perestroika Russia. Thirty years ago, that kind of "ugly American" was despised, for he cared little about rights, whether human, women's, workers', or blacks'. That is, until the question of apartheid in South Africa shook international conscience. In December of 1985, the World Council on Churches gathered in Harare, Zimbabwe, to discuss the South African drama. In the end, the Harare Declaration stated clearly: "We call on the international community to apply immediate and comprehensive sanctions in South Africa…the minimum requirement of which must be to promote divestment and end all investments in South Africa." Divestment and sanctions did influence greatly the repeal of apartheid and the advent of a free and democratic South Africa. Now, if sanctions were moral and good for South Africa, why are they immoral and evil for Cuba? Is Castro's 44-year tyranny any less offensive to human dignity than apartheid? American business trading with a quasi-capitalist ruling class that allows only the spoils to its people, will only make the oppressor wealthier, the dictatorship stronger, and 11 million disenfranchised and rights-less Cubans a lot poorer and miserable. The stampede of farm, cattle and grain interests storming the halls of Congress to influence legislation that will allow them to trade with the Cuban dictatorship is a despicable performance by opportunist capitalists.

NYT 7 Sept 2003 Everyone Has an Ennial; Now It's Photography's Turn By BARBARA POLLACK ENICE, Kassel, Kwangju, Shanghai, Taipei, Cairo, Seoul, São Paulo and, going on right now, Istanbul. If there has been any discernible trend in the art world during the last decade, it has been the explosion of international biennials, triennials, quadrennials and so on, proliferating in every corner of the planet. Now, starting on Saturday, the International Center of Photography is bringing its first Triennial of Photography and Video straight to midtown Manhattan. It is by far the largest and most expensive exhibition ever mounted by the center, taking four curators three years to assemble the more than 100 works, by 40 artists, photographers, photojournalists and filmmakers, that will be on view through November. For the center, the exhibition, titled "Strangers," represents a giant step forward into the contemporary-art world, with a roster of internationally known art stars like Shirin Neshat, Rineke Dijkstra, Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Justine Kurland and Collier Schorr. It is also a departure from the center's traditional emphasis — photojournalism and documentary photography — giving free rein to conceptual-art projects and granting video equal footing with still photography. . . But the International Center of Photography's triennial will be the first expansive look at global photo-based art-making to take place in New York City. . . . Under the rubric "Strangers," Mr. Phillips, along with the center's chief curator, Brian Wallis, and their colleagues Carol Squiers and Edward Earle, developed a theme that could encompass a wide variety of approaches in contemporary photography. . .Still more frightening is a 1996 French film by Eyal Sivan, "Itsembatsemba: Rwanda One Genocide Later," an animated compilation of still photographs and radio broadcasts that proves the impossibility of explaining the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis at the hands of their fellow Rwandans during a three-month period in 1994.

New York Times Magazine 7 Sept 2003 Why Are We In Iraq?; (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?) By Michael Ignatieff [Final Section only] VIII. There is a way out of this mess of interventionist policy, but it is also a route out of American unilateralism. It entails allowing other countries to have a say on when and how the United States can intervene. It would mean returning to the United Nations and proposing new rules to guide the use of force. This is the path that Franklin Roosevelt took in 1944, when he put his backing behind the creation of a new world organization with a mandate to use force to defend ''international peace and security.'' What America needs, then, is not simply its own doctrine for intervention but also an international doctrine that promotes and protects its interests and those of the rest of the international community. The problem is that the United Nations that F.D.R. helped create never worked as he intended. What passes for an ''international community'' is run by a Security Council that is a museum piece of 1945 vintage. Everybody knows that the Security Council needs reform, and everybody also knows that this is nearly impossible. But if so, then the United Nations has no future. The time for reform is now or never. If there ever was a reason to give Great Britain and France a permanent veto while denying permanent membership to Germany, India, Brazil or Japan, that day is over. The United States should propose enlarging the number of permanent members of the council so that it truly represents the world's population. In order to convince the world that it is serious about reform, it ought to propose giving up its own veto so that all other permanent members follow suit and the Security Council makes decisions to use force with a simple majority vote. As a further guarantee of its seriousness, the United States would commit to use force only with approval of the council, except where its national security was directly threatened. All this is difficult enough, but the next step is tougher still. The United Nations that F.D.R. helped create privileged state sovereignty ahead of human rights: a world of equal states, equally entitled to immunity from intervention. One result has been that since 1945 millions more people have been killed by oppression, abuse, civil war and massacre inside their states than in wars between states. These have been the rules that made tyrants and murderers like Saddam Hussein members in good standing of the United Nations club. So what rules for intervention should the United States propose to the international community? I would suggest that there are five clear cases when the United Nations could authorize a state to intervene: when, as in Rwanda or Bosnia, ethnic cleansing and mass killing threaten large numbers of civilians and a state is unwilling or unable to stop it; when, as in Haiti, democracy is overthrown and people inside a state call for help to restore a freely elected government; when, as in Iraq, North Korea and possibly Iran, a state violates the nonproliferation protocols regarding the acquisition of chemical, nuclear or biological weapons; when, as in Afghanistan, states fail to stop terrorists on their soil from launching attacks on other states; and finally, when, as in Kuwait, states are victims of aggression and call for help. These would be the cases when intervention by force could be authorized by majority vote on the Security Council. Sending in the troops would remain a last resort. If the South Africans can persuade Mugabe to go into retirement, so much the better. If American diplomats can persuade the Burmese junta to cease harassing Aung San Suu Kyi, it would obviously be preferable to using force. But force and the threat of it are usually the only language tyrants, human rights abusers and terrorists ever understand. Terrorism and nuclear proliferation can be contained only by multilateral coalitions of the willing who are prepared to fight if the need arises. These rules wouldn't require the United States to make its national security decisions dependent on the say-so of the United Nations, for its unilateral right of self-defense would remain. New rules for intervention, proposed by the United States and abided by it, would end the canard that the United States, not its enemies, is the rogue state. A new charter on intervention would put America back where it belongs, as the leader of the international community instead of the deeply resented behemoth lurking offstage. Dream on, I hear you say. Such a change might lead to more American intervention, and the world wants a lot less. But we can't go on the way we are, with a United Nations Charter that has become an alibi for dictators and tyrants and a United States ever less willing to play by United Nations rules when trying to stop them. Clear United Nations guidelines, making state sovereignty contingent on good citizenship at home and abroad and licensing intervention where these rules were broken might actually induce states to improve their conduct, making intervention less, rather than more, frequent. Putting the United States at the head of a revitalized United Nations is a huge task. For the United States is as disillusioned with the United Nations as the world is disillusioned with the United States. Yet it needs to be understood that the alternative is empire: a muddled, lurching America policing an ever more resistant world alone, with former allies sabotaging it at every turn. Roosevelt understood that Americans can best secure their own defense and pursue their own interests when they unite with other states and, where necessary, sacrifice unilateral freedom of action for a common good. The signal failure of American foreign policy since the end of the cold war has not been a lack of will to lead and to intervene; it has been a failure to imagine the possibility of a United States once again cooperating with others to create rules for the international community. Pax Americana must be multilateral, as Franklin Roosevelt realized, or it will not survive. Without clear principles for intervention, without friends, without dreams to serve, the soldiers sweating in their body armor in Iraq are defending nothing more than power. And power without legitimacy, without support, without the world's respect and attachment, cannot endure. Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Telegraph UK The forgotten massacre of September 11 (Filed: 07/09/2003) Damian Thompson reviews American Massacre: the Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 11, 1857 by Sally Denton Until two years ago, the worst mass murder in American domestic history was the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which a wagon train moving across Utah was cut down by white men disguised as Indians. It happened on September 11, 1857, which explains why there has been a recent surge of interest in the incident. But the extraordinary thing is that it should have been forgotten in the first place. Anyone who reads Sally Denton's investigation will be left asking: how could this tragedy, more horrible in every way than Custer's Last Stand, have been reduced to a historical footnote? The Fancher train consisted of 40 of the most richly laden wagons ever to set out for California. Its occupants, mostly Arkansas Methodists, trundled along at 12 miles an hour, slowed by their immense herd of cattle. They were looking forward to arriving in Salt Lake City. Founded only a decade earlier, the Mormon capital was, in the words of one historian, "the most ambitious desert civilisation the world has seen". Its 132ft-wide streets radiated from the temple along the points of the compass; it advertised itself as a place where pioneers could re-stock before the difficult last stretch of the journey west. What was not advertised was the fact that its leader, Brigham Young, under threat of invasion by US troops, had plunged Utah into a sort of Mormon Cultural Revolution. Expecting the Second Coming of Christ, he had revived the practice of blood atonement, in which dissident Latter-day Saints were beheaded by a secret society of avengers known as the Danites. Hostile "gentiles" (non-Mormons) were also legitimate targets, and for some reason - no one is quite sure why - the Church leaders placed the Fancher train in this category. The emigrants knew there was something wrong when, mysteriously, every store in Salt Lake City refused to sell them food. Pressing south, half starved, they met the same surly hostility. They were relieved when they reached the lush alpine grasses of Mountain Meadow: here was a place to recuperate. But at dawn on September 7, as the smell of coffee wafted over the campfire, a shot rang out and one of the children toppled over. In a rain of gunfire, seven men fell dead. The meadow was, in fact, a killing field, surrounded by rocky outcrops that provided cover for hidden assassins. After a four-day siege, a Mormon militia leader, John D Lee, offered to broker a truce with the attackers, whom he identified as Paiute Indians. The Fancher party surrendered their arms and began marching towards the nearest town under Mormon escort. What happened next will never be entirely clear, but it seems that, on an order from Lee, disguised Danites shot the Fancher men and, in accordance with the law of blood atonement, slit the throats of the ex-Mormons who had joined the train. The women were shot or stabbed with bayonets. The only children left alive were those under eight years old, the Mormon "age of innocence"; one little boy remembered that the Indian murderers turned white after they washed their faces. By one account, it took just three minutes to kill 121 people. There was a public outcry, but the Civil War intervened, and in the end only Lee was brought to justice. Denton's fascinating study establishes beyond reasonable doubt that Mormons committed the massacre. She also demonstrates that, for more than a century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vigorously put about a false version of events. How convenient for her, though, that these conclusions should so closely match the prejudices of the East Coast literary establishment, exonerating the Indians while incriminating the ancestors of one of the country's most despised minorities - the rich, white, secretive, Republican-voting Mormons. What Denton cannot quite prove is that Brigham Young ordered the massacre. He may have done so, but the written evidence has never turned up. Until it does, the Mormons can wriggle off the hook. This is a religion, after all, whose scriptures chronicle the doings of Hebrew tribes in pre-Columbian America; it has developed a pretty thick hide when it comes to historical criticism. There are calls for the Church to apologise for the Mountain Meadows massacre, just as the Catholics have apologised for the Crusades. Don't hold your breath.

AP 16 Sept 2003 Judge throws out Falun Gong suit By MIKE ROBINSON in Chicago September 16, 2003 A US federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by China's banned Falun Gong spiritual movement accusing former president Jiang Zemin of waging a campaign designed to suppress the group. US District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly held that,as a foreign leader, Jiang was immune from such a lawsuit. Kennelly based his decision on the doctrine of "sovereign immunity", a tradition under which courts exempt foreign leaders from civil lawsuits in the United States if the federal government deems it advisable. "The court recognizes defendant Jiang Zemin's head-of-state immunity and dismisses the claims against him," Kennelly said in a 24-page ruling. Falun Gong has attracted millions of followers with a mixture of calisthenics and doctrines drawn from Buddhism, Taoism and the ideas of its founder, Li Hongzhi, a former government clerk. China banned Falun Gong in 1999, describing it as an "evil cult". It has arrested many Falun Gong followers, and practitioners say a number of them have been tortured and in some cases murdered. The Chinese Government denies this, but says some detainees have died from hunger strikes or after refusing medical attention. In October 2002, while Jiang was visiting Chicago, a police official guarding him was served with the lawsuit, which also named as a defendant a Chinese agency it described as the Falun Gong Control Office. The lawsuit catalogued an array of alleged human rights abuses, including torture, genocide and arbitrary imprisonment. It said a number of practitioners now living in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States had been subjected to such tactics. Neither Jiang nor the Chinese Government responded to the suit. The US Government intervened, arguing that the suit should be dismissed on the grounds of sovereign immunity. Kennelly also dismissed the allegations against the Falun Gong Control Office, saying none were closely tied to Illinois. Falun Gong attorney Terri Marsh of Washington said she was exploring options for keeping the case alive, such as asking Kennelly to reconsider. While the lawsuit was pending, dozens of Falun Gong practitioners would periodically appear in Federal Plaza across the street from the courthouse in Chicago and engage peacefully in group calisthenics.

AP 23 Sept 2003 EAST HARTFORD: PROTEST AGAINST LAOTIAN A meeting between business leaders and the Laotian foreign minister, Somsavat Lengsavad, drew protests Saturday from people claiming Mr. Lengsavad leads a government that condones genocide. About 50 people gathered in front of the East Hartford Sheraton for the protest, left. Mr. Lengsavad was in Connecticut to meet with Laotian-American business leaders who said Laos will benefit if trade relations with the United States improve. Many of the protesters were ethnic Hmong, a Laotian minority who have claimed the government has used chemical weapons against Hmong rebels. Mr. Lengsavad said through an interpreter, "It's a pity these people have been away from their country for so long a time. Perhaps that has affected their point of view." (AP)

Asia-Pacific

Afghanistan

WP 8 Sept 2003 Attacks Beset Afghan Girls' Schools Officials Say Sabotage Intended to Undermine Progress By Pamela Constable Page A01 ZAHIDABAD, Afghanistan, Sept. 7 -- It was little more than a shed attached to a village mosque. It had no chairs, and no desks. But for the 50 young girls who had studied there since April, the two-room school in this pastoral pocket of Logar province was all that stood between a lifetime of ignorance and a glimmer of knowledge. Now the doors have been padlocked, the teacher says he is too scared to return, and the former students are back to their customary chores -- pumping water at the village well, weeding onion fields and carrying loads of animal fodder on their heads. That may be exactly what the unknown assailants had in mind when they broke into the shed late at night 10 days ago, doused the classrooms with fuel and set them afire, leaving behind leaflets in the Dari language warning that girls should not go to school and that teachers should not teach them. "When I was walking home today, the little girls followed me and asked when they could go back to school. But I am not ready to teach them again because I am afraid for my own safety," confided Fazel Ahmed, 39, the school's only teacher. "I'm very upset. These students will make the future of our community and our country." The attack was followed two days later by the midnight burning of three tents used as classrooms outside another school in Logar province. According to officials of UNICEF, which is helping to revive the country's long-neglected education system, there have been 18 incidents of school sabotage nationwide in the past 18 months, often accompanied by similar warnings. The assailants could be from the Taliban, the former Islamic government that opposed girls' education as morally corrupting, and whose armed supporters recently have been regrouping. Or they could be from other conservative Islamic groups who once fought the Taliban but are now plotting a political comeback as guardians of religious purity. Whoever they are, said school officials in Logar and education experts in Kabul, the capital, their goal is clearly to undermine Afghanistan's successful emergence into the modern world after 25 years of military conflict and religious repression that paralyzed its development in every sphere -- particularly the emancipation of women. And yet everyone involved in Afghan education -- from village elders to foreign charities -- insists that such tactics cannot slow the extraordinarily swift and widespread revival of girls' education that has taken place since the Taliban was defeated and replaced by a U.S.-backed government under President Hamid Karzai in December 2001. "We have 4.2 million children in 7,000 schools now, and a 37 percent increase in the number of girls in school since last year," said Sharad Sapra, the UNICEF director for Afghanistan. The increase amounts to 400,000 more girls in school this year. "There is concern that these sporadic incidents should not become a wave, but almost everyone wants their daughters to go to school, and overall, people do not seem to be intimidated." Indeed, the second Logar province school to be attacked, a primary school in the village of Mogul Khel where girls and boys study in separate shifts and separate areas, has already achieved national fame because of its immediate resistance to the threat. Karzai, speaking at a news conference in Kabul today with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, noted proudly that almost all students and teachers there had returned to class the day after the attack. On Saturday, classes were in full, noisy swing, if in hastily improvised settings. Groups of boys recited their multiplication tables in unison, sitting on the playground next to the metal skeletons of the canvas classroom tents that were burned last Tuesday night. Groups of girls huddled on straw mats in the front lobby, reading their Pashto language lessons from a portable blackboard. "We do not know who these saboteurs are, but our school is the cradle of education in Logar, and we will defend it," said Mahmoud Ayub Saber, 50, the principal, who returned home last year after waiting out the Taliban era in Pakistan. "If some girls were occasionally absent before this happened," he said, "their parents are saying from now on none of their daughters will miss a single day." Education Ministry officials in Kabul said they are determined to ensure the success of girls' education, but they acknowledged that they have limited resources to physically protect schools, and they noted with alarm that a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism is challenging the modernizing policies of the Karzai government. Ashrak Hossaini, the deputy minister of education, noted that opposition to girls' education, as well as to women's participation in work and public life, was a hallmark of the Taliban worldview, and that it remains a volatile issue for Islamic conservatives who oppose Karzai's policies. "Our society is going through many changes, and there are fundamentalists who want to resist this change," Hossaini said. "We are trying to move to a modern and civilized stage, and girls' schools are attacked because they represent this movement. We must not only provide physical protection, but also prepare the people mentally for these changes." Indeed, while there seems to be near-universal public support for girls' elementary school education, the idea of female study beyond sixth grade is far more controversial, particularly in traditional, rural areas steeped in social and gender taboos that existed long before the Taliban took power in 1996. Even in Logar province, a relatively prosperous and progressive agricultural region just south of Kabul, parents and teachers who strongly support girls' primary education take a far more cautious, and even dismissive, approach to secondary-level study for them. While there are hundreds of schools in the area that teach boys and girls up to sixth grade, there are very few higher-level schools for girls. Coeducation is out of the question in conservative Afghan society, and most parents do not want their adolescent daughters attending even an all-female high school if it is not in or close to their village. "In our district, there is no opportunity for girls to go beyond the fifth class. After that, most of them get married and have no need to continue their educations," said Saber, the Mogul Khel principal. He said education officials in Kabul had ordered a girls' high school to be built in Logar, but community elders opposed it because students would be required to travel some distance from their homes. Officials at UNICEF said they are approaching such issues pragmatically, stressing the importance of getting girls into school at a young age so they will be exposed to basic knowledge and social interactions, while leaving the more controversial issue of female higher education for the future. By turning schools into social service centers where people receive vaccinations, register births and even pump well water, Sapra said, the idea of education can become an integral part of village life. But in villages such as Zahidabad, where the two-room girls' school was built last spring, the most serious obstacle to education today is fear. "We are all afraid of these bad people. We are Muslims, and we fear for the honor of our daughters," said Shah Agha, 50, a water and power department worker in Zahidabad whose 12-year-old daughter attended the village school until last week. "We were very happy when this school opened, but one morning we went to pray and we found it was all burned," he said. "Unless the government brings us more security, we cannot let our daughters go back there."

Australia

The Australian AU Row over bicentenary 'oversight' By Gavin Lower September 05, 2003 LEADING historians are surprised no official events have been planned this year to mark Tasmania's bicentenary. Eyebrows have been raised in academic circles over the decision by authorities to hold bicentenary celebrations next year as European settlers arrived on September 12, 1803. The State Government and Hobart City Council are ignoring the arrival of Lieutenant John Bowen and his party at Risdon Cove and are instead focusing their attention on settlements at Sullivans Cove and George Town the following year. University of Tasmania senior lecturer in history Peter Chapman said yesterday he was "mystified" why no official plans had been made to recognise 1803 as the year of Tasmania's foundation. "I think as a historical exercise they should start this year," he said. "I was surprised when this 1804 business came up and so were some of my colleagues." The Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies has organised a one-day bicentennial conference to be held on September 20 at the University of Tasmania. "We are saying it's bicentennial because, as a historian, I and all my colleagues know that Governor King sent Bowen to claim the whole island of Van Diemen's Land in 1803," Mr Chapman said. He said while there might be "political and social" reasons for marking the state's bicentenary next year, he did not see them. "From a historian's point of view, this is where it all started," he said. Some Aboriginal groups have criticised bicentenary celebrations, with activist Michael Mansell labelling them "race-based". Tasmanian Bicentenary Advisory Committee chairwoman Fran Bladel has said she believed Aboriginal community members would quite rightly believe September 12, 1803 was "invasion day". However, Tasmanians ought to celebrate good and successful settlements such as Sullivans Cove and George Town, she has said. But some community groups have said they would hold their own events to commemorate Bowen's landing. Mr Chapman said the historical studies centre, which organises a conference every year, had been stimulated partly to organise its bicentennial conference by the authorities' decision. He said he hoped the conference would provide "enlightenment" about Van Diemen's Land and Tasmania. "Historians are people who try to tease out who did what to who when and what happened next," he said. "I'm not saying it's a time for celebration, I'm not saying it's a time for guilt either. It's just simply something to look at critically to understand what happened later." Respected historians such as Professor Henry Reynolds and Professor Marilyn Lake will speak at the conference. Topics for discussion include early French contacts with Van Diemen's Land, Aborigines and British colonisation, the politics and foundation of Hobart Town and the Franklin dam controversy. Next Friday The Mercury will publish a special edition to mark the 200th anniversary of Bowen's arrival.

Tasmanian Mercury AU 9 Sept 2003 Jews upset by Mansell By MARGARETTA POS Jews are upset by claims by Michael Mansell that John Bowen was akin to Adolf Hitler. Lieutenant Bowen commanded the first European settlement of Tasmania at Risdon Cove 200 years ago this week "Hitler was a racist, intent on getting rid of the Jews," the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre's outgoing president said yesterday. "All we're talking about is scale. "Bowen arrives with an armed force and goes ashore with the intention of taking over the land. "And he didn't take any action against the soldiers who massacred the Aborigines [on May 3, 1804]. "In context of numbers, Bowen's legacy was to reduce us to about 100. "The British had more impact on Aborigines than the Holocaust had on the Jews." Hobart Synagogue board member David Clark said Jews found the comparison offensive. "There is no comparison," Mr Clark said. "Aborigines were attacked and killed. "But there was no systematic attempt to wipe out an entire race of people as there was in Nazi Germany." Mr Clark's wife Pnina is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. But her grandparents and extended family were exterminated. "I get extremely distressed when comparisons are made to the Holocaust," she said. "And I get very emotional about genocide. The Nazis industrialised death. "The unenlightened bigots who killed Aborigines cannot be compared to Hitler and the systematic genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. "I sympathise with Aborigines and what happened to them -- about being a hunted and despised minority. "I am sympathetic to their cause but I don't think anyone should make comparisons with the Holocaust lightly." Mr Mansell yesterday continued his attack on bicentennial commemorations, saying marking the founding of British settlement was like marking the birth date of Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant. "People would be offended at the suggestion," he said. "Well, Aborigines are offended at any commemoration of the date of European settlement. "The facts don't justify any celebration. "The only way to acknowledge the date is as a day of grief." Mr Mansell also continued his attack on historians who downplayed the impact of colonisation on Aborigines, notably Keith Windschuttle. Mr Windschuttle's controversial book The Fabrication of History questions whether there was any massacre of Aborigines in Tasmania. "His methods are an abuse of scholarly research," Mr Mansell said. "He is a right-wing apologist for British settlement."

[John Bowen (1780-1827) is called the founder of Tasmania Lieutenant, Royal Navy.The True Bicentenary of Tasmania 2003 September 12, 2003 will be the 200th birthday of the State of Tasmania. Lieutenant John Bowen, Royal Navy established the first-ever British settlement of Tasmania. He arrived with 48 settlers aboard the vessels, Lady Nelson and Albion, at Risdon Cove, situated on the River Derwent in southern Tasmania, on September 12, 1803. Tasmania was first discovered in November 1642 by Dutch explorer , Abel Janszoon Tasman. The British settled the island 161 years later. Seven months after settlement a massacre of aborigines occured on May 3, 1804. Eye-witness accounts of the massacre vary greatly with estimates of the dead ranging from three or four to fifty. On May 8 Lietenant David Collins took charge of the Risdon settlement, and subsequently removes it to Sullivan's Cove site (the present site of Hobart). Later that year n Aborigine was killed and another wounded on November 12, 1804. The largest numbers of deaths among Tasmanian aborigines was in the 1820s. http://www.education.monash.edu.au/units/edf1122/history.htm ]

Examiner AU 9 Sept 2003 Aborigines to decide on reopening of site By MELANIE ALCOCK The Tasmanian Aboriginal community would consider opening the Risdon Cove site to the public on Saturday, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre outgoing president Michael Mansell said yesterday. The TAC has decided to close the site on Friday for the bicentenary of white settlement in Tasmania. A church service organised by the bicentennial committee will be held in Hobart on Friday to commemorate the bicentenary of Lt. John Bowen's landing in Tasmania. Mr Mansell said that the Aboriginal community would decide on Thursday whether to open the site to the public for a few hours on Saturday, after the Aboriginal community had been given some time to reflect. About 200 Aborigines will gather at Risdon Cove on the anniversary of the British landing to grieve the loss of Aboriginal people, land and culture. "We went from several thousand people to a few hundred people within a 30-year period," Mr Mansell said. "Some people deal with it almost like a grieving process, while others take a more positive note, but we want to make sure that Aboriginal people are able to deal with (the anniversary) in a private and personal way, the way they want to." Mr Mansell said that the Aboriginal community had no difficulty with the organised church service, as long as the consequences of white settlement were faced. "If they're going to talk about what really happened and the consequences of white settlement, then we're got no problem with it," he said. Bicentennial committee chairwoman Fran Bladel said that the church service would be held at St David's Cathedral on Friday at 10am. "The Bicentennial committee respects the Aboriginal people and we also respect and acknowledge the impact of white settlement, which irrevocably changed their destiny with grave consequences," she said. "The service will reflect the impact of those changes on the Aboriginal community, but also the development of our wondrous State."

Background article: The Age (Melbourne) 6 Apr 2003 Sunday; Opinion; Pg. 15 So Who's Fabricating The History Of Aborigines? : Phillip Tardif BODY: Keith Windschuttle's book denying Aboriginal genocide has received some support from renowned historian Geoffrey Blainey. But, writes Phillip Tardif, the book is deeply flawed. KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE'S book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History has generated a debate with much heat but little light. Like Holocaust-denier David Irving, Windschuttle is a lucid writer who deploys primary evidence to great effect. The only effective response for those who would challenge him is through serious critique of his methodology. Windschuttle calls his first chapter 'The Killing Fields at Risdon Cove'. In it he seeks to reinterpret the May 3, 1804, massacre of Aborigines by settlers at Risdon Cove in Tasmania. To Windschuttle, the way this event has been recorded in the past is a metaphor for his broader thesis. It shows, he says, "how the conflict between Aborigines and settlers has long been exaggerated by people far removed from the scene and by rumours and myths". Windschuttle argues that historians of the Risdon massacre have been led astray by the testimony of those who were not there. He says that if we stick to the "facts" as told by the eyewitnesses, we see that the incident was merely an unfortunate misunderstanding in which just two or three Aborigines lost their lives. Yet Windschuttle seems to find some "facts" less convenient than others. While he accepts the word of two of only three eyewitnesses whose memories of that day were recorded, he goes to extraordinary lengths to wish away and discredit the testimony of the third. Is it a coincidence that this eyewitness, Edward White, claimed that "there were a great many of the Natives slaughtered and wounded"? White, an Irish ex-convict, left the most extensive account of the massacre under cross-examination before a committee of inquiry in 1830. He had no interest in embellishing or playing down the truth. The other witnesses, Lieutenant William Moore of the NSW Corps and Surgeon Jacob Mountgarrett, were active participants. Windschuttle's attempts to wish away the inconvenient evidence of the Risdon massacre began two years ago in a National Press Club debate with Henry Reynolds. According to the transcript published on his website, Windschuttle implied that the reports of Moore and Mountgarrett were the only first-hand accounts. White's evidence about the number killed was not mentioned at all. Similarly, in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Moore's and Mountgarrett's accounts are reproduced in full. White's is not. White's testimony about the peaceable intentions of the Aborigines is ignored by Windschuttle. According to White, "the natives did not threaten me; I was not afraid of them; (they) did not attack the soldiers; they would not have molested them; they had no spears with them; only waddies". On the contrary, the language in three accounts admits to aggression on the part of the Europeans. According to White, "the soldiers came down from their own camp to the creek to attack the Natives". Elsewhere, Windschuttle uncritically accepts Moore's explanation of events. Moore's principle justification for the attack by the soldiers was that the Aborigines were beating the settler Birt at his hut. No other first-hand account refers to such an incident. Even Moore admits he did not see it with his own eyes: "I was informed that a party of them was beating Birt, the Settler, at his farm". White, who was working close to Birt's hut, swore that the Aborigines never went near it. Having accepted the stories told by Moore and Mountgarrett at face value, Windschuttle picks at the tiniest threads of White's evidence to try to show him as a mere peddler of gossip. First, he claims White could have only seen a very small part of the action. On the contrary, it is clear from White's statement that he was familiar with the entire incident. Next, Windschuttle says that the soldiers would not have been physically able to kill as many Aborigines as White claims, because they only carried single-shot muskets. Yet this was a clash that lasted three hours - plenty of time to reload. There were between 74 and 80 Europeans at Risdon that day. Finally, White's claim that Mountgarrett sent the bones of some of the murdered Aborigines to Sydney in two casks is further proof of his unreliability, according to Windschuttle, because he was a convict and therefore wouldn't be aware of what members of the "colonial elite" were doing. This argument is patently absurd. Living as they did cheek by jowl with 60 or so soldiers and convicts, it is hard to imagine even the most minor piece of gossip passing at Risdon without every resident knowing about it. Keith Windschuttle has erred by weighting the facts to suit his thesis about what happened at Risdon Cove. The rest of his work warrants similar scrutiny. We will never know for sure how many were killed that day. Certainly it was more than two or three. Probably it was fewer than 50. Somewhere in between lies the "great many" spoken of by Edward White, whose poignant testimony remains for me the most credible description of this sorry episode. Phillip Tardif has published a history of the Tasmanian convict experience. His study of the first settlement at Risdon Cove will be published later this year.Undercurrents returns next week.

Cambodia

BBC 12 Sept 2003 Cambodia cashes in on grim past By Patrick Falby Anlong Veng, Cambodia All that remains of the last house of one the 20th century's most brutal rulers, Cambodia's Pol Pot, is his toilet bowl and a dozen empty medicine bottles. Now the site, along with others belonging to leaders of the ousted Khmer Rouge, could soon be restored and spruced up under a controversial plan to cash in on the country's genocide-scarred past. A tour guide designated by the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism said Pol Pot needed bottled oxygen to sleep at night, and three days after he died in 1998, in the northern town of Anlong Veng, locals burned the structure down. Ta Mok's house is empty apart from murals on the walls The guide, So Phorn, has intimate knowledge of the town and its former rulers because he was adopted and raised by Ta Mok, the brutal Khmer Rouge high commander now in prison for crimes against humanity. "I show people around because I used to live with him," said Phorn. "I know everything." Phorn's unusual connections could soon see him rewarded with the assistant directorship of the Anlong Veng Tourism Office. Development of the area is part of a scheme, announced by Prime Minister Hun Sen in December 2001, to turn all of the country's genocide sites into tourism offices. The idea is to preserve and prepare the former stronghold as an international tourist destination. Some might think a scheme to lure tourists to that dismal collection of sites bizarre, but the Ministry of Tourism's secretary of state, Thong Khon, insisted the concept would work. "We're going to train local people to be tour guides there," he said. "We also plan to build a museum, but we have to raise funds." Mr Khon was enthusiastic about the idea of former cadres showing around paying customers. He said the area had recently been cleared of land mines and as soon as a master plan was completed he hoped to line up corporate sponsors or private money to finance the cultural tourism venture. And he said that that once the rutted road from the famed Angkor Wat temples was overhauled and a border crossing with Thailand opened, many more people would visit. Guide So Phorn takes visitors to various sites that were once homes for senior cadres. All are now in various stages of decay. Ta Mok's house is now stripped of furniture, but murals of temples and animals frolicking by a waterfall are intact. Former commanders' homes will become tourist sites Phorn takes tourists to where Pol Pot was put on trial by his former guerrillas. It is now a collection of lumber and long grass, home to several chickens. The place that was his home until he was ousted from power in 1997 sits in ruins, with a cracked and empty swimming pool. In front of Pol Pot's grave stands a battered and empty donation box, put out by soldiers to raise money for developing the area. Mr Khon said that with a bit of money, the reconstruction would create a more authentic atmosphere. "We have plans to rebuild some of the leaders' houses," he said. The local carpenters who built them in the first place are still around. Anlong Veng - buzzing with malarial mosquitoes - needs a lot of work But the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Youk Chhang, is opposed to the plan. His organisation gathers evidence against the Khmer Rouge in preparation for a genocide tribunal of remaining leaders, and he is steadfastly against the commercialisation of what happened. He fears that the memory of victims from the Khmer Rouge will not be honoured. He thinks that the Ministry of Tourism has shown a basic misunderstanding of the concept of a museum, and Anlong Veng could instead become some sort of Khmer Rouge "theme park". "Speaking from experience, at a lot of places under the label of 'tourism', you'll find roast chicken, fried bananas, blue tents and grass huts," he said. "The concept of a museum requires scientific research and understanding." It is also not clear how other people implicated in the Khmer Rouge will react to the idea. When the district chief, a former Khmer Rouge major, was approached for comments about sightseeing, he cursed and shouted he didn't want to talk about it. So Phorn, though, was happy to do so. Asked what his adoptive father would think about showing strangers around the old homestead, Phorn said the answer would be: "OK, no problem." "Yeah, I think Ta Mok thinks it's a good idea," he said.

India

BBC 5 Sept 2003 Gujarat Hindus embrace Buddhism By Rajeev Khanna BBC correspondent in Ahmedabad Caste has been a contentious issue in Gujarat for decades Thousands of Dalits - low-caste Hindus once known as "untouchables" - have embraced Buddhism at a ceremony held in the city of Baroda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Although organisers of the event had claimed around 100,000 Buddhists would turn up for the event, the number did not exceed 6,000. One of the organisers, the national general secretary of the Vishwa Buddha Sangh (World Buddhist Council) Bhente Sanghpriya, told the BBC that numbers did not matter. "What matters is the Dalits coming forward to claim their status as a human being," he says. "They have always been a tool in the hands of upper caste Hindus. This is not conversion but embracing of a religion which is not alien to India.'' 'Treated as equals' One of the converts, Sheelaben, a resident of Baroda, said: "I am tired of worshipping imaginary deities who have never come to save people like us." Dhalits say being Buddhists spares the cost of Hindu ceremonies "We were used during the communal riots last year by the upper caste Hindus. It is us who are used for the cause of the temple agitation for construction of a temple at Ayodhya.'' She pointed out that, since Dalits are poor and live close to Muslim residential areas, they are often attacked by Muslims who take them to be Hindus during communal riots. Deveshwar Khatri, who had come from Bharuch said: "Dalits have no rights. I am embracing Buddhism because it treats all humans as equals.'' The ceremony held on Sunday had been scheduled for July but was postponed. Contentious issue Most of the Dalits asserted that, once they become Buddhists, they will not have to follow the rituals and traditions of Hindus which are often a costly affair. ''I will not have to pay a Brahmin priest for conducting my daughter's wedding ceremony," one woman said. "I will not have to follow the custom of giving a large dowry to her." Caste has been a contentious issue in Gujarat for several decades. Even in elections, caste factor plays a major role in deciding the winners and, later, the chief minister and his cabinet colleagues. The ceremony held on Sunday was the culmination of a Dalit awakening drive across the state that started on 31 August. Bhente Sanghpriya said his organisation will lay emphasis on opening educational institutions in all the 26 districts of the state. He claimed that by the year 2005 he will get 10 million Dalits to embrace Buddhism.

Hindustan Times, India www.hindustantimes.com Judging genocide Praful Bidwai New Delhi, September 17 As the public awaits the Supreme Court judgment in the Best Bakery case with bated breath, we are fast approaching the 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the Nazis' infamous pogrom of Jews after a German diplomat's assassination in Paris. The comparison is not hyperbolic. Last year's butchery in Gujarat was 200 times greater in scale and much more bestial than Kristallnacht — the prelude to the gassing of 6 million Jews. The Supreme Court's pronouncements last Friday — including its unsparing admonishment of Narendra Modi, its description of his government's appeal as an "eyewash", and its declaration that "we have no faith in [Gujarat's] prosecution or government" — have raised hopes that it will take extraordinary steps to do justice to the victims of Gujarat. Those hopes were buoyed by the judgment convicting the Bajrang Dal activist/supporter Dara Singh for the gruesome burning alive of Graham Staines and his two children. That this followed two eyewash attempts, the first by a central ministers' group and the other by the Wadhwa inquiry, affirms the citizen's faith in the possibility of justice in India. If Staines' murder belonged, as President Narayanan put it, to the "world's inventory of black deeds", the post-Godhra killing of 2,000 Muslims opened a disgraceful new book of horrors — unprecedented globally for a half-century, except perhaps in Rwanda and Bosnia. Special international tribunals are now trying those genocidal crimes. The post-February 27 Gujarat violence was unique in independent India. Never before did a state government collude so openly with communal thugs, rapists and murderers to target one religious group. (Indeed, it planned and organised some of the violence.) And never before did central functionaries, including the prime minister, so persistently shield the guilty by advancing the repugnant logic of "action-reaction" and citing non-existent "security threats". There could be two opinions on whether the thoroughly condemnable Godhra episode was spontaneous or organised. (Evidence supports the first view.) But this is emphatically untrue of the planned, premeditated, systematic, violence that followed. In that danse macabre, thousands were torched or speared to death by frenzied anti-Muslim mobs. Horrific sexual violence was unleashed. Property worth hundreds of crores was destroyed/looted. Lakhs became refugees in ethnic cleansing in vast areas. Crimes Against Humanity, the report of the Concerned Citizens' Tribunal, comprising eminent jurists and scholars, documents this after examining 2,094 statements and 1,500 witnesses. The pattern of violence shows the selective targeting of Muslims, inhuman forms of brutality, military precision and planning, the key role of the RSS, the BJP and the VHP-Bajrang office-bearers, use of Hindu religious symbols and complicity and participation of policemen and bureaucrats. This was planned, sustained and prolonged through hate-speech, intimidation and terror. The defining characteristic of this violence was that Muslims were targeted simply because they were Muslims. The attackers' main slogans were: "Kill, burn, destroy their society, finish them off..." This highlights the genocidal nature of the violence. Article II of the International Convention on Genocide, 1948, defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" like: "(a) killing [its] members; (b) causing [them] serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions... calculated to bring about its physical destruction...; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring [its] children... to another group". Gujarat unambiguously fits the definition. The violence involved the (partial) physical destruction of a community; economic destruction; sexual assault as an instrument of domination and terror inspired by "dark obsessions" with destroying women's sexual organs; sabotage of relief and rehabilitation; and the publicly declared intention to liquidate, mentally harm, humiliate and subjugate Muslims. India is a signatory to the convention. This casts on it a duty to punish those responsible for genocide through a competent legal forum. This could be best done by creating a special independent national tribunal for hate-crimes and genocide. The Supreme Court must go beyond the specifics of the Best Bakery case to create this tribunal, composed of personnel selected by the Chief Justice of India, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. Put in perspective, Best Bakery involved the killing of 14 people. Gulberg was much bigger (70), as was Naroda-Patiya (200). Justice for Gujarat entails going beyond even these discreet cases. Its genocidal hate-crimes must be seen in their totality, not just as this or that case of murder, arson, rape or psychological subjugation. This means that there must be fresh investigation, re-framing of (wrongly dropped) charges, and re-trial. Equally relevant are some related issues. Gujarat witnessed a fundamental, total, prolonged breakdown of the rule of law and the Constitution, in which the Centre became complicit. It refused to defend fundamental rights, or investigate or criticise the barbaric violence. Vajpayee first vaguely, mildly, criticised Modi, but soon started blaming the victims. Fanciful conspiracies were concocted to link Godhra to al-Qaeda and demonise Muslims. This continues. All 240 people charged under POTA in Gujarat are Muslims. Because the Gujarat case is extraordinary, the court is called upon to do extraordinary things, the more because the government failed, and because the state administration has little integrity or autonomy to conduct a fair trial. This entails the creation of new, independent investigation and prosecution agencies which take their directions from the Supreme Court. The trials must take place primarily outside Gujarat. It is equally imperative to extend the prosecution to the links between the pogrom and the hate-speech which became part of Modi's electioneering — a clear case for invoking Section 153 of the IPC. These organic links concern the political use of hate-speech. That still leaves a huge problem: How to ensure that witnesses survive Gujarat's vitiated climate and are not terrorised into changing their testimony? (Even Ehsan Jaffrey's widow was intimidated by Sangh parivar goons this week). This can only happen if there is serious, humane, rehabilitation and adequate protection for the victims through a comprehensive supportive infrastructure. The Gujarat government cannot be trusted to provide this. The infrastructure should have come into being 18 months ago, but the governments of the day failed. In particular, the Centre refused to apply Article 356 and impose President's Rule when a constitutional breakdown was manifest. Thus, even the processes of recording and registering crimes, listing witnesses, collecting evidence, etc., got corrupted. To rectify this, the Supreme Court must step into an area which is not its classical, normal, domain — simply because the ends of justice cannot be met in any other way. The court is empowered to do "complete justice in any cause or matter" before it by Article 142. This might seem onerous. But there is no alternative to a comprehensive sui generis process of creating a national tribunal, and independent agencies for investigation and prosecution. We have failed far too often to bring the perpetrators of hate-crimes to book — to the point that the government's lawyer last week cited that failure as an excuse for condoning the Gujarat genocide! India cannot afford a culture of impunity for grave human rights violations and hate-crimes. That will make a cruel mockery of our democracy. Democracy is an empty shell without fundamental rights, norms of public accountability, representative institutions and the rule of law. Letting the Gujarat culprits get away and papering over the gravity of what happened would be the surest way of destroying the constitutional edifice of governance — indeed, this society. The Supreme Court must not disappoint the public.

Background: BBC 25 Sept 2002 Analysis: Why is Gujarat so violent? Ahmedabad has become a communal flashpoint By Sanjeev Srivastava BBC correspondent in Bombay In the last 40 years, the wheel has turned full circle in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of the western Indian state of Gujarat. Frustration and unemployment turned many to crime and Gujarat now has a thriving underworld Social worker Achyut Yagnik Once famous as the adopted home town of Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of peace and non-violence, Ahmedabad today is perhaps the most communally sensitive city in the country. In 1969, nearly 2,500 people were killed there in the region's worst violence between Hindus and Muslims since the subcontinent was split into India and Pakistan in 1947. A series of communal riots rocked the city in the 1980s and again in 1992 following the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu activists in the north Indian town of Ayodhya. There followed a decade of relative peace, barring a few months of sporadic anti-Christian violence in the state's tribal areas three years ago. But the bloodbath earlier this year again raised the question of why Gujarat has become so susceptible to communal conflict. Rapid urbanisation Social worker Achyut Yagnik, who runs the non-governmental Setu organisation, believes urbanisation and rising prosperity are partly to blame. Vajpayee's critics say Indian politics is now communal Rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s turned Gujarat into one of India's richest and industrially developed provinces. "It's this prosperity which in some ways became a curse for us," Mr Yagnik told the BBC. "The mushrooming of industry, especially textile mills, meant that there was a large influx of people from other Indian states," he said. "People who were never really brought up in the Gandhian tradition," he added. Organised crime When recession in the 1980s forced the closure of many of the mills, some 50,000 people lost their jobs. Crime gangs quite openly take sides in communal riots, making the violence that much more bloody and vicious. "Frustration and unemployment turned many to crime and Gujarat now has a thriving underworld, second only to and closely linked with the underworld in Bombay," Mr Yagnik said. Muslims constitute only about 12-13 % of the state's population, more or less in line with the rest of the country. But the fact that one of the state's most powerful underworld dons in the 1980s was a Muslim raised religious tensions. Huge sums of money have been made smuggling arms, contraband and silver from Pakistan to Bombay via Gujarat. Much of that money has found its way into the hands of religious extremists, both Hindus and Muslims. Crime gangs also quite openly take sides in communal riots, making the violence that much more bloody and vicious. Hindu hardliners The growth of hardline Hindu organisations in Gujarat in the last 20 years has also antagonised the situation. The present home minister, LK Advani, began his campaign to build a Rama temple in Ayodhya from Somnath in Gujarat in 1989. Radical Hinduism has grown in the last 20 years The present chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, was handpicked by Mr Advani to join him in the rathyatra, or crusade. The campaign intensified Hindu-Muslim hostility all over the country. It also gave the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) and its youth wing, Bajrang Dal, a firm foothold in Gujarat. The VHP has close links with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a relationship that some observers believe has led to the communalisation of Gujarati politics. It is also the reason given by many Muslims for allegations that security forces stood by and let Hindu mobs rampage across the state. Whatever the reasons for the ongoing violence, Gujaratis continue to suffer. Aside from the human tragedy, the state is now losing some 5bn ($103m) rupees a day. Last year Gujarat was torn apart by an earthquake that killed about 20,000 people. But the wounds from this year's man-made holocaust may take longer to heal.

Indonesia

Jakarta Post 8 Sept 2003 Govt urged to justify plans to extend operation in Aceh National News - September 08, 2003 Tiarma Siboro, The J The 2004 general elections should not be used as an excuse by the government to maintain the presence of thousands of troops in the war-torn Aceh province, says a former minister. The military campaign against the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) has undermined several fundamental rights of civilians, including freedom of expression, former minister of justice and human rights Hasballah M. Saad said on Sunday. "Under martial law, the military has the authority to put aside other existing regulations for the sake of so-called security interests, including the possible elimination of non-governmental organizations in Aceh, despite their important role in assessing fairness and accountability in the elections," he told The Jakarta Post. Hasballah was responding to an earlier remark made by the Indonesian Military (TNI) Commander Gen. Endriartono Sutarto who said that he would propose an extension of the six-month military offensive in Aceh and maintain the presence of some 35,000 troops there at least until the 2004 general elections. Jakarta imposed martial law on May 19 in an integrated operation in Aceh, which was supposed to have included a humanitarian operation, security operation, law enforcement and empowerment of the local administration. Speaking at a hearing with House of Representative Commission I on political, security and foreign affairs, Endriartono argued that the huge number of troops in Aceh was required to provide security for the Acehnese in exercising their right to vote. The police have said that more than 300 civilians have died since the military operation started. Hasballah said that the government should invite public participation, instead of listening to personal opinions, before deciding whether or not to extend the military operation for another six months. "Such a massive deployment of troops in Aceh will only close the door on democracy and adversely affect the Acehnese in channeling their aspirations. "Under martial law, the military also has the authority to put aside other regulations for the sake of security," said Hasballah who is also a former senior advisor on Aceh issues at the Ministry for Political and Security Affairs. He said he was doubtful that the military would be able to ensure transparency in the elections. Under the Emergency Law, the military should complete its operation in May 2004, or two months before the country holds a direct presidential and vice presidential election. The National Elections Commission (KPU) is slated to hold the legislative elections in April 2004. Aceh martial law administrator Maj. Gen. Endang Suwarya has given a guarantee that Aceh will participate in the general elections despite the ongoing conflict. Hasballah further demanded a thorough evaluation of the operations, saying that the government had failed to synchronize it. "Only if the military operation is able to accelerate results in the three other operations, can we agree to the proposed extension," Hasballah said. Separately, legislator Amris Hassan of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) spelled out conditions for the government's plan to extent its military operation in Aceh, underlining that the offensive should be followed by improvements in humanitarian efforts as well as transparency in its budget. Amris said that lawmakers should also demand firmer legal action against soldiers who committed abuses while carrying out their tasks, arguing that "many abuses are still taking place in the province." He did not discount the military's achievement in establishing a conducive situation in the four-month-long campaign and said that it would be up to the lawmakers to consider whether to allow the presence of thousands of security personnel up until the 2004 general elections. House Commission I set up a monitoring team soon after the military campaign started in Aceh. According to Amris, the team noted the operation had failed to promote transparency in the operation's budget, had made little progress in providing humanitarian assistance and had committed countless human rights abuses.

Jakarta Post 8 Sept 2003 Two Charged Over 1984 Indonesia Massacre Associated Press JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesian prosecutors on Monday charged two retired army generals in the deaths of more than 30 Muslim protesters during the rule of former President Suharto. Maj. Gen. Pranowo and Brig. Gen. Rudolf Butarbutar joined 11 other military officials who have been charged in connection with the killings. "We have received the separate dossiers of the two defendants," said Andi Samsan Nganro, a spokesman for the five-judge panel convened in the Central Jakarta District Court. Authorities accuse Pranowo and Butarbutar of failing to control troops who allegedly killed the protesters. At least 33 people were killed in the 1984 massacre as hundreds of Muslims took to the streets in Jakarta's impoverished Tanjung Priok port district after several fellow Muslims were arrested for giving anti-government sermons. The demonstrators were protesting their arrest and the fact that soldiers entered the mosque with their shoes on. In 2000, the National Human Rights Commission recommended 23 suspects be charged in the killings. Activists have long accused two prominent retired generals - Try Sutrisno, a former Suharto-era vice president who was then Jakarta military commander, and Benny Moerdani, a former armed forced commander - of being responsible for the massacre. Both were questioned but neither is expected to face charges.

Iraq

AFP 3 Sept 2003 French NGO warns of spiralling problems in Iraq, Afghanistan PARIS, Sept 3 (AFP) - The US has wrecked the task of post-war reconstruction in Iraq as in Afghanistan, and European nations must be prepared to get more closely involved in order to limit the damage, the head of the French aid agency Action Against Hunger (ACF) said Wednesday. "There is no point in rejoicing over the chaos. No one can snigger because the Americans are getting themselves beaten and the situation is slipping out of control," Jean-Christophe Rufin told a news conference in Paris. ACF on Monday ordered its expatriate staff to leave Iraq because of growing fears for their safety sparked by the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on August 19. "The UN was attacked because -- by virtue of the empty chair policy of the Europeans -- it became in the eyes of the Iraqis an instrument of the coalition," Rufin said. "The Europeans are playing a waiting-game." ACF said there were parallels between the failures of US policy in Iraq and Afgnaistan. "We have the feeling that civilian populations are sacrificed for operations of a political nature," said Thomas Gonnet, the agency's director of operations. "We do not want to leave (Iraq). We are not deserting the country. We do not want to have armed protection, but we are not there to get ourselves shot either," Rufin said.

ICG 9 Sept 2003 Iraq’s Shiites Under Occupation Iraq’s Shiites, who form over half the country’s population, have undergone a major transition since the fall of the Baathist regime from persecution to political reawakening. The massive car bomb attack on 29 August that killed the prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and roughly 100 other Iraqis has put renewed focus on the Shiite community and its role in Iraq’s politics. The struggles within the Shiite community will determine whether an organised political force can emerge as its legitimate representative and, if so, which it will be. For now the leaders of the Shiite Islamist movement have eschewed confrontation with the occupation forces, but the current muddle-through which characterises the U.S. approach is far from being the best prescription. ICG reports and briefing papers are available on our website: www.crisisweb.org

NYT September 16, 2003 CHEMICAL ATROCITY Powell Visit Honors Victims of Hussein Attack on Kurds By STEVEN R. WEISMAN ALABJA, Iraq, Sept. 15 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, winding up a two-day visit to Iraq, came here today to the site of a memorial museum dedicated to the 5,000 people who lost their lives in a 1988 chemical attack, a reminder, he said, of why the United States went to war to oust Saddam Hussein. In an emotional visit to the Kurdish region of northeastern Iraq, which has been self-governing and allied with the United States since 1991, Mr. Powell acknowledged that the world was indifferent to the atrocity of Halabja and to other chemical attacks, mainly in the 1980's, that killed tens of thousands. "What can I say to you?" he told a crowd at a cemetery with a thousand headstones, many of them marking the graves of entire families. "I cannot tell you that choking mothers died holding their choking babies to their chests. You know that. "I cannot tell you that the world should have acted sooner. You know that. What I can tell you is that what happened here in 1988 is never going to happen again." The attacks occurred during the Iran-Iraq war when Iraq considered Kurdish territory hostile. Mr. Powell made his remarks on a day that another American soldier, from the First Armored Division, was reported killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Baghdad. It was the sixth fatality for American forces in seven days. An Iraqi police chief in Khaldiya, a strongly pro-Hussein city in the so-called Sunni triangle, was also reported killed. But Mr. Powell's visit underscored another unwelcome fact on the ground here. The evidence of Iraq's stockpile of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons — the main rationale cited for war earlier this year — has yet to be found. In the months leading up to the war, many neutral experts at the United Nations did not so much dispute Mr. Hussein's history of using unconventional weapons as suggest that many or most of the weapons were destroyed in the 1990's, leaving it unclear in their eyes whether any stockpiles still existed. Asked today about the failure to find the weapons, Mr. Powell answered, as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld had in Baghdad earlier this month, that it was beyond dispute that Mr. Hussein possessed the ability and will to make and use them. To Kurdish leaders who welcomed Mr. Powell here today, the logic connecting an event in 1988 to the war in 2003 was obvious, and the nitpicking over evidence of chemical weapons was supremely beside the point. Halabja, said Barham Saleh, prime minister of the Kurdish regional government, was proof that those who doubted Mr. Hussein had chemical weapons were wrong. "These doubters live or choose to live in a state of denial," he said, suggesting that they should "come to Halabja and witness the proof first hand." The welcome for Mr. Powell had all the trappings of a visit to a separate country, even though the United States is trying hard to ensure that the Kurdish sector and other parts of Iraq remain in a federated whole in a new self-governing country that the Americans are hoping to create. In private talks, Kurdish leaders pressed the secretary to make sure that neighboring Turkey did not interfere in local affairs and that the Kurdish region retained a measure of autonomy in a new Iraq. Many experts and leaders in the Arab world say one of the toughest challenges will be to keep Iraq from splitting into three pieces — Kurdish in the north, Sunni in the center and Shiite in the south. Indeed, many experts say one reason for the fierce attacks in central Iraq is simply that Sunni Muslims, who predominate there, are resentful of the dominant role being assumed by Shiites. The American-led occupation has an office of 26 people devoted to unearthing old human rights claims from Shiites and Kurds killed under Mr. Hussein's government. Asked whether emphasizing those claims might aggravate the grievances of Iraq's splintered groups, Sandy Hodgkinson, the occupation's director of human rights, said that on the contrary, such emphasis would only bring Iraqis together in a new democratically ruled nation. "The truth has to come out," she said. "The fact is, everybody was persecuted, tortured and executed in this country. It wasn't just one group."

Guardian UK 16 Sept 2003 Obituary Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid Iraqi Christian leader who accommodated Saddam for the sake of his flock Shola Adenekan Tuesday September 16, 2003 The Guardian Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid, who has died of kidney failure aged 81, was the spiritual leader of the Chaldean Catholics, the largest Christian group in Iraq, whose number include the erstwhile deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. The Chaldean Catholics are descended from the 5th-century heretical group, the Nestorians; the church has about 1m members worldwide, of whom 700,000 are in Iraq. Bidawid was an ardent critic of western policy towards his country. In the early stages of the 1991 Gulf war, when Saddam Hussein's rhetoric was peppered with threats of jihad against the "Christian" west, he moved to defuse the threats of a backlash against Iraqi Christians by urging westerners to leave Arab soil, and interceding with Saddam to tone down the anti-Christian propaganda. He was also an outspoken opponent of the economic embargo on Iraq, imposed after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. During a 1991 visit to the Vatican, Bidawid accused the Gulf war allies of genocide against the Iraqi people. "These nations should feel pretty guilty. It was a vendetta, a shame for humanity," he said. Ten years later, in an interview at the Vatican, he remarked that westerners did not realise that an Arab could do without everything except his dignity. "If you touch his dignity, he will be as ferocious as a lion." Bidawid was criticised in the west as an apologist for Saddam and the Ba'ath party. His response was that he was only defending his people and his country. He often praised the Iraqi leader for protecting the rights of Christians. "Saddam gives us what we want, listens to us and protects us," he once said. On the question of Islamic extremists, he also put his faith in the dictator. "They have infiltrated the veins of religious power and are trying to steer it in their direction," he said. "But the government keeps them in check. Saddam is capable; he fools them into being more open in order to uncover them. He will get them." Two years ago, he saluted the courage of Palestinian suicide bombers, while likening the Israeli government to that of Hitler's Germany. Born in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Bidawid was educated at the Dominican Fathers school and the Patriarchal Ecclesiastical College there. At the age of 14, he was sent to Rome to train as a priest; he excelled academically and was the conductor of the choir at the Papal College. He returned to Iraq in 1948 after being ordained as a priest and taking his doctorates in philosophy, theology and canon law. He was subsequently made assistant rector at the Chaldean seminary in Mosul, where he was responsible for translating the work of Dominican Father Lanza on the history of Mosul from Italian into Arabic. He also created indices for ancient Chaldean manuscripts. Between 1950 and 1956, Bidawid was chaplain of the Iraq Petroleum Company, before being appointed patriarchal vicar for the diocese of Kirkuk. The following year, he was elected bishop of the Chaldean diocese of Amadiyah, in Iraqi Kurd-istan, becoming, at 35, the youngest bishop in the world. In 1962, he was transferred to the Beirut diocese, where he served for 23 years. In May 1989, the Chaldean bishops elected him patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans; more than 10,000 people attended his enthronement ceremony in Baghdad. Four months later, he received the pallium from Pope John Paul II in recognition of his status. In 1992, Bidawid formed the Confrère de la Charité to help provide medicine, food and shelter for those severely affected by UN sanctions against Iraqi. A polyglot, he was one of the founders of the Christian Minorities Union in Lebanon, and a champion of the unification of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church (the two branches separated in 1552). · Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid, priest, born April 17 1922; died July 7 2003.

AP 23 Sept 2003 Three Iraqis killed in US air strike FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - Police said US forces carried out a combined air and ground attack early Tuesday, killing three people and wounding three others in a village north of here in central Iraq. The military confirmed the incident, but said it knew of only one death. "At 2.10 am, we heard three explosions at different times. About 20 minutes later, two martyrs arrived at the hospital. They died before they arrived. The third died in the hospital. There were three injured," a police lieutenant at the Fallujah General Hospital, who gave his name only as Nabil, told Associated Press Television News. The US military in Baghdad said the incident involved the 82nd Airborne Division, which is responsible for security in this volatile region about 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Baghdad. Spec. Nicole Thompson said the fight started after US soldiers were attacked. She said the attackers ran into a building and ground troops called in air support. She said one guerrilla fighter was killed. The incident occurred in the village of al-Sajr, 15 kilometres (9 miles) north of Fallujah, one of the most dangerous cities in the so-called "Sunni Triangle," the region north and west of Baghdad where support for Saddam Hussein runs strongest and where US troops have met stiffest resistance. Helicopters could be seen over the region of the fight at dawn Tuesday. There were two big craters in courtyards of the houses that were involved, indicating bombs of some sort had been dropped. At the Fallujah hospital, Abed Rasheed, 50, a retired Iraqi service member and one of the wounded, said he was sleeping with his family on the roof of his house when he heard small arms fire. He ran downstairs just as the American aircraft raced overhead, firing what he believed were rockets. He was hospitalised with wounds in the chest and left foot. "There never was any trouble in our village and the Americans have never been inside it," he said from his hospital bed. "This is genocide. This is not about overthrowing a government or regime change." In Baghdad Monday, the US-picked Governing Council voted to evict two Arab satellite broadcasting companies from Iraq, said Iraqi National Congress spokesman Entifadh K. Qanbar. The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera and Dubai-based Al-Arabiya have given blanket coverage of events in Iraq, often highly critical of the US-led occupation of the country.

Peoria Journal Star 26 Sept 2003 . Eagleton: Genocide is enough reason for Iraq war Former ambassador returns from Baghdad September 26, 2003 By TERRY BIBO of the Journal Star PEORIA - Former U.S. ambassador William Eagleton shrugs off any suggestion of fear shrouding his latest duties in Iraq. "In New York, on any given day, a couple of people are going to be killed," he says mildly. "The chances you will see or be involved are slim." Back in town for his 60th Peoria High School reunion, the 77-year-old Eagleton has been involved in some aspect of diplomatic service since 1949. He has worked for the U.S. Foreign Service, the State Department and the United Nations, with postings from Spain to Syria to Sarajevo. On more than one occasion, that also has meant Iraq, including most of this past summer, where temperatures in Baghdad topped 120 degrees. He started out this spring, addressing land disputes after the war and the best ways of getting property to its rightful owners, all on behalf of the Pentagon. He returned to the country in July, one of several advisors to Civilian Administrator L. Paul Bremer. Bill Eagleton may be a bit more gaunt, a step slower. He's a tad more willing to discuss retirement. But he still looks 20 years younger than his actual age. He will globetrots back to Washington, D.C., next week in case there is a further assignment. And he still barely cracks a smile when it is suggested that he is the diplomatic equivalent of Michael Jordan. "It's all speculative," he says. Whether or not this round in Iraq is the final one, it still draws plenty of attention since an easier-than-expected military expedition has turned into a harder-than-expected military occupation. More U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since victory was declared than during the war, but Eagleton still thinks the violence has been overemphasized by the media. "It's not a place of generalized anarchy or lawlessness," he says. "It's not satisfactory, mind you." No. But parallel with the problems, there have been improvements. Eagleton cites the restoration of power and air-conditioning, the distribution of goods and services, the re-opening of schools. He disagrees with the continuing world-wide criticism that the U.S. had plans for war, but not for peace. After all, he's read several of the planning documents, some from government groups and some from privately-funded think tanks. While he concedes they were all more optimistic than the reality of the last six months, he also notes they all shared one gap. "I didn't see any that focused on looting as a major concern," he says. No one foresaw so many government ministries being destroyed so rapidly. "I blame myself as much as anybody else. I didn't think much about that." And that would seem to get us around to the issue of cost. The former Iraqi government had loans outstanding around the world, largely with the French and Russians. Meanwhile, the country's infrastructure had been neglected for years. (Eagleton said the biggest changes in Baghdad since his last visit in 1988 appeared to be Saddam Hussein & Co.'s personal palaces.) Iraq has a huge percentage of the world's oil reserves, but that won't cover the costs. Just this week, President George Bush asked the United Nations for help, and that's with a request for $87 billion still on the congressional table. "I hope Congress doesn't give them too bad a time," Eagleton says. "Money is everything out there." It's a lot here, too. Without having seen the funding proposal, Eagleton says $87 billion should be enough for the "foreseeable future." Asked how long he thinks we will be in Iraq, he predicts "into next year, certainly" but hopes there will be a drawdown on U.S. forces by the 2004 election. And he says he is not particularly surprised we haven't found the mysterious "weapons of mass destruction." He points out Saddam Hussein is still the only one to have manufactured and used such weapons "on a serious scale" in recent years. Roughly 200,000 Iraqis may have been killed under his rule. Eagleton says it is a "ghoulish thing" to have people looking for traces of their missing relatives in mass graves. "This gets back to, in my view, justification for what we did," he says. "This was genocide." Still, after decades of service in this region, he is well aware of the complexity in Iraq. What we see as one country has many religious and cultural divides. Democracy there is an experiment. "I'm a little skeptical, as someone who has been in the area a long time," Eagleton says. "But it's a grand attempt. Let's see how close they come." .

Israel

WP 6 Sept 2003 Israeli Jet Bombs Hamas Meeting, Injuring Spiritual Leader By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, September 7, 2003; Page A23 JERUSALEM, Sept. 6 -- An Israeli fighter plane dropped a 550-pound bomb on a house in Gaza City where senior leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement had gathered today, slightly wounding the organization's highest-ranking member and spiritual leader and wounding 11 other people, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials. Officials with the movement, known as Hamas, were rushing to help Sheik Ahmed Yassin, their wheelchair-bound leader, into an elevator when the bomb slammed into the top floor of the three-story structure, a Palestinian security official said. Yassin suffered injuries to one hand, Palestinian officials said. The attack on Yassin and the other Hamas leaders was the most ambitious attempt yet by Israeli military forces to kill members of the militant group. Israel has dramatically escalated its program of what officials call targeted killings since a Hamas member blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus packed with ultra-Orthodox Jews on Aug. 19. Twenty-two passengers died in the bombing. After the bombing, thousands of Hamas supporters rallied in the streets of Gaza City calling for revenge. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a senior Hamas leader who was not at today's meeting, but who was the target of an earlier Israeli assassination attempt, told al-Jazeera television that "the gates of Hell have opened, and after this there is no room for negotiation on any solution." Senior Israeli government and security officials said the military decided to drop the quarter-ton bomb on the building after learning about a planned meeting of senior Hamas political and military officials, including Yassin. "We had information a summit was being convened," said Gideon Meir, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official. A senior Israeli military official said "a lot of calculations" went into the decision to drop the bomb on the building, "including the concern of collateral damage." The military official said the fact that all of the targets escaped the attack was an example of the "under-use" of weaponry. In July 2002, an Israeli fighter jet dropped a one-ton bomb on a house in central Gaza City, killing a targeted Hamas official and 14 other people. Since that attack, which drew international condemnation, the Israeli military has used missiles and rockets to attack targets in an effort to reduce civilian casualties. Israel's use of targeted killings throughout the three-year Palestinian uprising has been widely criticized by human rights and legal organizations as a form of extrajudicial execution that also kills civilians and results in other unintended damage. Israeli officials say the tactic is important to thwart suicide bombings and other attacks against Israelis. In the 21/2 weeks since Israel resumed attacks on Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, missile strikes have killed 12 Hamas members and five bystanders and injured dozens of civilians. Yassin was among several Hamas officials meeting at the house of Marwan Abu Ras, a Hamas official and lecturer at Islamic University. Also at the session were Yassin's spokesman, Ismail Hanieh, who was wounded in the right arm in the attack, and a senior militant leader, Mohammad Deif, a reputed bomb-maker who was injured last September in an Israeli helicopter strike. Yassin and the other Hamas officials tried to leave when they heard an aircraft overhead, Abu Ras told the Reuters news service at a Gaza hospital where he was being treated. He said they were preparing to sit down to lunch when "we heard a loud noise, and then everything went black and then red before my eyes." Yassin prayed at a mosque tonight, several hours after the attack. "The Israeli people will pay a dear price for this crime," he told a crowd of supporters afterward.

Haaretz 7 Sept 2003 Hamas's Yassin survives Gaza strike By Amos Harel and Arnon Regular Hamas's spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was lightly injured yesterday when an Israel Air Force F-16 fighter jet dropped a 250-kilogram bomb on a building in Gaza City. Yassin was one of 15 people injured in the assassination attempt that targeted a building in which 10 Hamas leaders were reportedly meeting. The IAF attack came on a day when European Union foreign ministers moved to outlaw the militant Islamic group's political wing. According to an Israel Defense Forces spokesman, the IAF had targeted a building housing "Hamas's terror leadership, which was busy planning terror strikes against Israeli citizens." The spokesman added: "The IDF and security forces will continue to wage war against Hamas and the other terror organizations." In response to the strike, Hamas' military wing released a statement threatening "to attack Israeli targets anywhere it sees fit," in retaliation for yesterday's Gaza City attack. "You will pay the price for this crime," Yassin told a crowd of enraged supporters after praying at a mosque yesterday evening in Gaza City, Reuters reported. "The Israeli people will pay a dear price for this crime." At around 4:00 P.M. yesterday, the IAF F-16 aimed its payload at an apartment on the third floor of a building in Gaza City's A-Sahaba Street. According to Palestinian sources, the apartment belongs to Marwin Abu Ras, a lecturer at the Islamic College in the city; a celebration to mark the engagement of the academic's son was being held in the apartment at the time, the sources added. In addition to the wheelchair-bound Yassin, other senior Hamas spokesmen and decision-makers in the apartment included Ismail Haniyah and (apparently) Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi; from Hamas's military wing, Mohammed Deif and Adnan al-Ghoul, the so-called "engineer," were also present. The bomb was dropped, sources relay, the moment Yassin left the apartment. Children were among the 15 persons hurt in the attack; all the casualties were taken to nearby Shifa Hospital for treatment. "We heard a loud noise and then everything went black and then red before my eyes," said Abu Ras from a Shifa Hospital bed. Yassin sustained a light injury to his right hand in the blast, while Haniyah escaped injury. Yassin was reportedly treated later in the day for his hand injury at a Gaza City hospital. Outside the facility where he was treated, members of Hamas' military wing chanted threats to Israel's political leadership via loudspeakers: "We warn Sharon that his head is now wanted by our troops," they declared. Information about the Hamas meeting was relayed by the Shin Bet security service to Israel's political leadership yesterday morning. A series of consultations, headed by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and including briefings to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, led to the green light for the IAF attempt. It appears, however, that intelligence placed the Hamas meeting on the third floor of the building, while the organization's leadership was actually meeting in a first-floor apartment. The bomb used in yesterday's attack was one-quarter the size of the payload used in July 2002 in a strike against Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh in Gaza, Israeli security officials said. The much larger bomb used in this earlier attack killed 15 civilians, in addition to Shehadeh and an assistant; most of the casualties were residents of nearby buildings. This time, the Israeli security sources explained, a lighter bomb was used to ensure that the entire building would not collapse and that minimal collateral harm would be caused. Hamas leader Rantisi, who reportedly escaped injury in yesterday's attack, declared yesterday evening: "Responses to this crime will occur in all places where Zionists are found, and they will not distinguish between politicians and ordinary persons. There is no place for the hudna." In Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority issued a statement sharply denouncing the assassination attempt. The IAF strike in Gaza City, declared the PA, "is a step promoting violent escalation, and it destroys the Palestinian Authority's efforts to calm the situation." The IAF strike against the Hamas leadership occurred on a day when the PA political leadership was in upheaval, due to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's abrupt resignation. Abbas yesterday suggested that Israel had tried to take advantage of the PA political turmoil. "Such criminal actions will only take us back to the vicious cycle of violence," Abbas's office said in a statement. Israel Police Commissioner Shlomo Aharonishki yesterday put his force on a high level of alert in anticipation of possible retaliatory attacks after yesterday's Gaza City bombing. One high-ranking police officer said last night: "The question is not whether there will be attempted terror attacks, but rather when and where they'll take place."

Haaretz 10 Sept 2003 Seven dead in suicide attack in Jerusalem cafe By Amos Harel, Fourteen people were killed and dozens more wounded - many seriously - in two bombing attacks Tuesday, the first near an army base outside Tel Aviv, the second in a teeming cafe in Jerusalem. An afternoon blast at a hitchhiking post for soldiers outside a main entrance to the Tzrifin army base left seven dead and dozens wounded. Five hours later, another bomber killed seven and wounded at least 30 others at the popular Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem's German Colony, where many restaurants, small shops and boutiques cater to the residential neighborhood. Jerusalem Police Chief Mickey Levy said that the security guard at the entrance to the Jerusalem cafe had failed to prevent the bomber from entering, and that he had managed to get several meters inside. "A suicide bomber entered the cafe and detonated his explosives," Levy said. "Two guards were stationed at the cafe, one at the entrance and one inside." "Apparently the guard at the entrance saw him and tried to stop him from going in. But he got inside and there was a powerful explosion," he added. The attack had been preceded by a specific intelligence warning that a Hamas terrorist had been dispatched to the capital from the West Bank city of Hebron. Levy said that throughout the day security forces conducted an extensive manhunt on the streets of the Jerusalem and that the public can feel "calm" about the situation. The police chief refused to elaborate, but appeared to be intimating that the threat that had led to a heightened state of alert in the capital had passed. He said there was no connection between this terror warning and the suicide bombing. The military wing of Hamas, Iz a Din al-Kassam, sent a statement to the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite channel, haling the attack and one less than six hours earlier at a bus-stop outside a military base near Rishon Letzion that killed seven people, but stopped short of claiming responsibility. "After the two attacks in Tel Arabiya [Tel Aviv] and Jerusalem, despite all the Israeli security precautions, we told the Zionists it was payback time," said the statement read by the channel. White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the bombings "vicious attacks" and condemned them in the "strongest possible terms." "This underscores that terrorism is an obstacle to peace and terrorists are the enemy of peace," McClellan said, speaking outside a Bush fund raiser in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Eyewitnesses said the terrorist was spotted in the cafe by some customers who began struggling with him, shoving him out of the restaurant. It was then that he blew up. Haim, a 15-year-old resident of the neighborhood, told Itim that he saw the struggle as he walked past the cafe, and then the bomb went off. According to another eyewitness, the bomber tried to get into a Pizza Meter restaurant but was rebuffed by a security guard, so he went into the next door Cafe Hillel. Iyad Herev, Israel Radio's police reporter for Arab broadcasts, also happened to be in the area, visiting friends. "We heard a large boom and some of the broken glass flew into the porch where we were sitting." He said he arrived on the scene before any of the rescue vehicles. "I saw someone's head, three bodies and the place was demolished. There were crying people, people in hysteria. I've grown used to seeing such scenes over the past three years but I never experienced the sound of the bombing and then those horrible sights. It was madness, despite the expectation that it would happen. We really did expect it today." The blast blew out the windows of the cafe and many of the other shops along the street, but the external structure remained standing. It set off the alarms of dozens of parked cars nearby. Police were careful about arriving ambulances, since there have been intelligence reports about Palestinian terrorists planning to use an ambulance to attack either the scene of a bombing or a hospital. At Jerusalem hospitals, all too familiar with the routine of such events, hospital gurneys were lined up in the well-lit driveways outside the emergency rooms, to handle the flow of ambulances. Bruno Solan, who was in the cafe at the time of the blast, said "the place was full, and suddenly there was a blast and a large ball of fire. Everyone inside fell to the floor. We all knew what it was and then we got up and started to run away. There were a lot of wounded and they went into shock and some started shouting." "I have a store next to the cafe. I arrived just a few moments after the blast. I saw things that just can't be described, there are no words," said a witness who identified himself only as Shavi. "All of a sudden there was a huge boom and shrapnel and glass shards filled the house," said a witness who identified herself only as Odelia. "I went to my son's room and there was glass all over the bed and it's a miracle that he wasn't hurt... The whole neighborhood was terrified." The Tzrifin blast took place at just before 6 P.M. at the crowded bus stop outside Tzrifin, close to the entrance of Assaf Harofeh Hospital. Police said the bomber was a 19-year-old Palestinian man from Rantis, in the West Bank. He wore civilian clothes and carried a leather bag containing a 2-3 kilogram bomb. He got out of a car at the bus stop, and almost immediately blew himself up, said eyewitnesses. Seven soldiers were killed by the bomber. Many of the wounded were in serious condition, said reports throughout the evening. The wounded were evacuated to nearby Assaf Harofeh Hospital, Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Wolfson Medical Center in Holon and Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. Eight victims identified Six of the victims of the Tzrifin attack and two of the victims of the Jerusalem attack have been identified: Chief Warrant Officer Haim Alfasi, 40, of Haifa, will be laid to rest at 4 P.M. at the military cemetery in the city. Sergeant Yonatan Peleg, 21, of Moshav Yanuv, will be buried at 2:30 P.M. Wednesday at the military cemetery on the moshav. Corporal Mazi Grego, 19, from Holon, will be buried at 3 P.M. in the military cemetery in the city. Sergeant Major Yaakov Ben Shabbat, 39, from Pardes Hannah, will be laid to rest at 5:30 P.M. at the town's military cemetery. Captain Yael Kfir, 21, of Ashkelon, will be buried at 6 P.M. in the military cemetery in the city. There are no funeral details as yet for Corporal Felix Nikolaichkov, 20, of Bat Yam. David Appelbaum, 50, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava, killed in the Jerusalem bombing, will be buried in Har Hamenuchot cemetery in the city Wednesday morning. The funeral procession is to leave the Shamgar funeral home for the cemetery at 10 A.M.

Haaretz 10 Sept 2003 Gazans celebrate after suicide bombs; Qureia slams attacks Palestinians fired assault rifles in the air and scores took to the streets Tuesday night in one Gaza neighborhood in celebration after the suicide attack on the Hillel Cafe in Jerusalem in which at least six people were killed and over 40 wounded. In the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, some Hamas supporters celebrated by distributing candies to the families of those killed in previous violence. Some of the demonstrators said the suicide bombings were revenge for Israel's policy of targeting Hamas leaders. An F-16 jet dropped a quarter-ton bomb on a building in the Gaza Strip on Saturday in a failed attempt to wipe out the top Hamas leadership, including the movement's spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who escaped with light injuries. After the strike, Yassin vowed revenge. Israel has been relentlessly targeting Hamas leaders since the August 19 suicide bombing in Jerusalem in which 22 people were killed. Qureia condemns both bombings Palestinian Legislative Council speaker Ahmed Qureia, who has conditionally accepted the nomination for Palestinian prime minister, condemned the bombing. "We condemn all acts of killing that target innocents, whether they be Palestinians or the Israelis who were the victims of today's explosion," he said in a statement following the Jerusalem attack. He said "such incidents confirm the necessity for both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to ... examine the most effective ways to put an end to the killing. Earlier, Qureia condemned the suicide bombing at a bus stop outside an army base near Rishon Letzion, that claimed the lives of seven people. "We express our regrets and pain for the innocent lives [lost] as a result of violence and counter-violence," Queria said. "Such an act stresses once again the necessity that both the Palestinian and Israeli leadership... search for ways to end this killing," he added. Hamas spokesman Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who survived an Israeli attempt on his life in June, did not claim responsibility for the attack, but said "this operation, whoever is behind it, is a natural reaction for the bloody aggression against our people, the assassination of our people, the killing of our children, demolishing our houses, and terrorizing our innocent people." Israeli government spokesman Avi Pazner said "the responsibility is shared between the organization that carried out the atrocity and the Palestinian Authority that did nothing to prevent it, and Israel will react accordingly." Speaking at a counterterrorism conference prior to the attack, General Moshe Ya'alon said Tuesday "there is an attempt now to reverse the process" of reform headed by Abbas, put forward a leadership with all paths leading to Arafat and "promote the logic of a temporary cease-fire, instead of an effort to dismantle the terror infrastructure." Ya'alon also hinted Israel could start targeting militant leaders in places from Syria to Lebanon to Iran who support Palestinian terror cells, saying "all leaderships should be held accountable." Public Security Minister Tzachi Hangebi said that although terror could not be deterred, IDF activity over the past weeks had produced a reduction in terror attacks against Israelis. MK Hemi Doron (Shinui) told Haaretz that Israel must deploy fighter planes to assassinate Hamas leadership and suspend the internationally-brokered road map to Middle East peace. Ahmed Qureia: The Palestinians "express our regrets and pain for the innocent lives [lost] as a result of violence and counter-violence."

September 16, 2003 Killing Arafat as Official Policy Is Denied By THE NEW YORK TIMES JERUSALEM, Sept. 15 — A day after Israel's vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that killing Yasir Arafat was one option under consideration, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said today that such a move is "not the official policy of the Israeli government." "We don't speak about killing," Mr. Shalom said. "We didn't speak about it before, and we don't speak about it today. I think that Arafat, while he is here — there is no chance of having peace with the Palestinians. That's my personal view." Last Thursday, Israel's security cabinet decided in principle to "remove" Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, at a time of its choosing. The wording was deliberately vague, and Israeli officials have subsequently indicated that Israel is considering a range of options. Mr. Arafat has left his West Bank compound on only a handful of occasions since the Israelis imposed restrictions on him in December 2001. On Sunday, Mr. Olmert said: "Arafat can no longer be a factor in what happens here. The question is: How are we going to do it? Expulsion is certainly one of the options, and killing is also one of the options."

B'Tselem 25 Sept 2003 (btselem.org) 3 Years of Intifada - Data Casualties    548 Israeli civilians, including 99 minors, have been killed by Palestinians. In addition, 246 members of the Israeli security forces have been killed by Palestinians. 2,201 Palestinians, including 398 minors, have been killed by Israeli security forces. In addition, 32 Palestinians, including 3 minors, have been killed by Israeli civilians. Of the Palestinian fatalities, at least 207 were killed in targeted assassinations, including at least 84 bystanders. In those assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force, at least 131 Palestinians were killed, including 65 bystanders. In assassinations carried out by ground forces, at least 76 people were killed, including 19 bystanders. In addition to the casualties above, at least 41 Palestinians, including 5 minors, 8 newborns, and 11 women, died following delays in access to medical treatment. 129 Palestinians carried out suicide attacks, and are not included in the above figures. Military Accountability The Office of the Military Advocate General opened a total of 370 Military Police Investigations into offenses against Palestinians. Of these, 57 investigations concerned gunfire at Palestinians; 139 investigations were opened regarding property-related offenses; 156 investigations into acts of violence, and 18 other cases. As a result of these investigations, 59 indictments were filed: 9 regarding shootings of Palestinians; 27 regarding property-related offenses; 22 involving violence and one indictment whose contents is unknown to B'Tselem.At least 437 houses were demolished as a punitive measure, not in combat. 12,300 dunams of land was expropriated for the construction of the Separation Barrier The IDF and the Israel Prison Service currently hold 5,278 Palestinians. Of these 528 are held in administrative detention without trial.

Haaretz 25 Sept 2003 Halutz: Pilots refusing to serve in territories will face law by Amos Harel Thursday September 25, 2003 at 05:35 AM Air Force Commander Dan Halutz on Thursday issued an order to ground nine pilots who signed a letter refusing to take part in operations in the territories. Altogether 27 reserve pilots signed the letter, details of which were published last week in Haaretz, but only nine of them still do active duty with the force. The signatories, who sent the letter to Air Force Commander Dan Halutz, described aerial activity in the territories as "illegal and immoral." Halutz told Haaretz on Wednesday night he planned to treat the signatories "in the same way as the IDF has dealt with refuseniks until now. This method has proven itself." The nine pilots will be called to meetings with the heads of their bases in the coming days and if they do not retract their statement, they will be dismissed from active service. Halutz has also ordered the grounding of those pilots who signed the letter and who serve today as flight instructors at the flight school at the Hatzerim base in the south of the country. "These are not the people who should educate the next generation of pilots," Halutz said. The signatories to the letter wrote they would refuse to take part in aerial attacks on populated Palestinian areas in the territories. "We, both veteran and active pilots, who have served and who still serve the state of Israel, are opposed to carrying out illegal and immoral orders to attack, of the type Israel carries out in the territories," the letter states. "We, for whom the IDF and the air force are an integral part of our being, refuse to continue to hit innocent civilians ... The continued occupation is critically harming the country's security" and moral fiber, it added. Among the signatories is Brigadier General Yiftah Spector (res.), who was a squadron leader during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. "We must keep things in the right proportions, we are talking about only 27 out of thousands of pilots," Halutz told Channel 10 news. "There is no corps and army more humane and moral than us." Former president and one-time air force commander Ezer Weizman attacked the group, saying they lacked "morality," that their act of publishing a letter was a "disgrace," and that they should "put their tail between their legs" and get out of the air force "as quickly as possible." He likened the call to refuse orders to a "cancer" which had to be cut out "immediately, before it spreads." Halutz has ordered an investigation into the legality of wearing pilots' flightsuits during interviews the pilots gave to Channel Two last night. Halutz said he believes the uniform can be worn only during reserve duty. If the interviews were given during reserve duty, the pilots had to get IDF permission, he noted. "Uniforms can not be used to put across a political message," he said. Halutz added that he personally was completely at one with the deployment of the air force in the territories, saying that a great deal of consideration was employed. According to one military source, many of the signatories had stopped flying some 15 years ago because of their age. Only one flies an Apache of the type that takes part in targeted assassinations and one flies an F-16 fighter bomber, used sometimes for bombing targets in the territories. It is not clear if either of the two has actually been involved in activity in the territories. Two others are pilots of Blackhawks, a transportplane, and another teaches cadets to fly an F-15. "This is an attempt to inject new blood into a subject that is dead both from the public and media point of view - refusal. It is not clear why the pilots did not first speak to their commanders. Their behavior was not ethical," one senior source said last night. Halutz last night sent a circular to senior air force commanders with details of the affair. "Most of the signatories have never participated in targeted assassinations in the territories. They are not active fighers or do not serve in squadrons which deal with that," he said. Halutz noted that "no order had ever been issued to hit innocent people. Sometimes we took decisions that were not optimal because we wanted to avoid hurting innocent civilians." Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon described the affair as "a political statement made in army uniforms. This is in no way legitimate," he said. The initiative for the letter was formulated over a period of about three months following the death of a large number of civilians during the aerial attack on Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh in Gaza last year. The idea met with a great deal of soul-searching inside the IDF. Captain Yonatan, speaking on behalf of the signatories, said last night: "We are all loyal citizens of the state of Israel. We have taken this step after deep thought and much soul-searching. As officers and pilots, we have been given the heavy responsibility of operating a most powerful war machine. As people who were educated with the moral code of the IDF and the state of Israel, we have decided to ... obey the order that obliges us not to carry out an order that is blatantly illegal."

www.jfjfp.org (Jewish Students for Justice for Palestinians website) "We, Air Force pilots who were raised on the values of Zionism, sacrifice, and contributing to the state of Israel, have always served on the front lines, willing to carry out any mission, whether small or large, to defend and strengthen the state of Israel. We, veteran and active pilots alike, who served and still serve the state of Israel for long weeks every year, are opposed to carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral of the type the state of Israel has been conducting in the territories. We, who were raised to love the state of Israel and contribute to the Zionist enterprise, refuse to take part in Air Force attacks on civilian population centers. We, for whom the Israel Defense Forces and the Air Force are an inalienable part of ourselves, refuse to continue to harm innocent civilians. These actions are illegal and immoral, and are a direct result of the ongoing occupation which is corrupting all of Israeli society. Perpetuation of the occupation is fatally harming the security of the state of Israel and its moral strength. We who serve as active pilots - fighters, leaders, and instructors of the next generation of pilots -- hereby declare that we shall continue to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and the Air Force for every mission in defense of the state of Israel." Signed: Brigadier General Yiftah Spector, Colonel Yigal Shohat, Colonel Ran, Lieutenant Colonel Yoel Piterberg, Lieutenant Colonel David Yisraeli, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Netzer, Lieutenant Colonel Avner Ra'anan, Lieutenant Colonel Gideon Shaham, Major Haggai Tamir, Major Amir Massad, Major Gideon Dror, Major David Marcus, Major Professor Motti Peri, Major Yotam, Major Zeev Reshef, Major Reuven, Captain Assaf, Captain Tomer, Captain Ron, Captain Yonatan, Captain Allon, Captain Amnon" http://www.jfjfp.org/BackgroundW/refusenik_pilots.htm

BBC 25 Sept 2003 Rebel Israeli pilots 'grounded' Israel describes its strikes as "targeted killings" The head of Israel's air force has grounded a group of fighter pilots who are refusing to carry out air strikes against Palestinians, Israeli media has reported. Air Force Commander Dan Halutz issued the order against nine of the 27 pilots still on active duty, according to the Haaretz newspaper. The declaration by the pilots, some of whom regularly carry out combat missions, has been condemned by Israeli military leaders. Israel frequently launches air strikes designed to kill Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli Government describes the operations as "targeted killings", but Palestinians and human rights groups condemn them as assassinations - and note that innocent civilians are often killed as well. Jail threat General Halutz told Haaretz the pilots would be dealt with in the same way as soldiers who have refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza - suggesting they will be dismissed from the military and possibly jailed. "This method has proven itself," he was quoted as saying. The pilots have been ordered to retract their joint statement or be punished. In their statement, released on Wednesday, the pilots said: "We, veteran and active pilots... are opposed to carrying out the illegal and immoral attack orders of the sort that Israel carries out in the territories." They added: "We are refusing to continue to attack innocent civilians." Israel's Channel 2 television reported that the pilots were also refusing to fly ground troops into the Palestinian territories to carry out attacks. 'Severe matter' Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also warned the pilots against their action. "This is a very severe matter, which will be dealt with soon and appropriately," he was quoted by French news agency AFP as saying. One of the rebel pilots told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper that he felt like he had "come out against his family". "I was proud to belong to the organisation called the Israel Air Force, and today I am ashamed," said the pilot, a Blackhawk helicopter captain named Alon. "This is an organisation that carries out actions that in my eyes are immoral and patently illegal." Hundreds of Israeli reserve soldiers have chosen prison over military service in the Palestinian territories during the last three years of Israeli- Palestinian violence.

Arutz Sheva 29 Sept 2003 www.israelnationalnews.com OPINION Inevitable Disobedience by Moshe Feiglin [In response to the letter issued this past week by a group of IAF pilots to Air Force Command declaring that they refuse to attack targets in the "territories".] Another seam in the Israeli social fabric came apart this past week. The boastful slogan coined by former Air Force Commander Ezer Weizmann - "The best men become pilots - and get the best girls" - reflected the elite of Israeli society, the IAF pilots. And now they have given a slap in the face to this society by declaring, "You are not moral." What do people want from the pilots? If the State of Israel has abandoned the elimination of the leadership of the Hamas terrorist organization in order not to harm "innocent people", why shouldn't the pilots do the same? Morality isn't confined to a specific position. Why is Defense Minister Mofaz's morality better than that of the pilots? The State of Israel arose on the basis of a set of values that inevitably led a thinking person to reach the views expressed in the pilots' letter. The guilt does not lie with them, but with that set of values. In fact, those who signed the letter did us a favor, by forcing us to examine for ourselves our basic moral assumptions. What gives a soldier at a checkpoint in Kalandia the right to check the bags of a local Arab - not to shoot him, just check his bags? The amazingly simple answer is: the ownership of the country. If this is our country, then we have the full right to be there and check anyone suspected of threatening our sovereignty. I have the right to ask a person wishing to stay in my home to identify himself, and I have the right to employ force against him if he refuses to leave. But if this is not our country, we have no right to invade the lives of the residents. The State of Israel has declared that the heart of the country, the land of the Bible, the cradle of the Hebrew nation is not ours, but that we have conquered it. In this, we have destroyed the fundamental moral argument. If so, how can the state justify its violent activities in the "territories" (even before mentioning the ‘colonialism’ of the neighborhoods of Gilo and Ramot in Jerusalem). Israel says that these are acts of self-defense. We have to check the trunk of the Peugeot or make targeted attacks on terrorists leaders because they are killing us. The moment they stop, we will also do so. In other words, our moral right is derived from the right of self-defense. But this is a very weak argument. First of all, they claim that they are killing us because we are occupying their country. Until we leave, taking the last of our dead with us (as Mahmoud Darwish said) we cannot make the claim of self-defense, because we are the attackers. Secondly, the Israeli principle of self-defense is based on the Western/Christian principles of morality, in which self-defense is permissible only for the weak against the strong. You cannot eliminate those who do not directly present a threat to you. You cannot defend yourself while at the same time killing women and children weaker than you. These two principles, on the one hand the (lack of) sovereignty and, on the other hand, the Christian war morality, form the current basis for the moral-ethic code of the IDF. The State of Israel has itself adopted the principles that leave no alternative to thinking, principled people, who wish to be honest with themselves, other than to disobey orders. Until a revolution takes place in the ideological basis for the existence of the state, until we return to our basic Jewish principles, we cannot say that this is our country and we cannot free ourselves from the bonds of Christian morality when trying to defend ourselves. The result will be that Jewish children will die instead of Arab children, Israeli society will continue to disintegrate, and the IDF will rely on "robot" soldiers after it has lost the best of its combatants. .

Tibet

San Francisco Chronicle 5 Sept 2003 Next Steps / Time for Dalai Lama to return to Tibet By Alan H. Nichols To his holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama: Welcome again to San Francisco. More than 25 years ago at Dharamsala, we talked about Sacred Mountains and your return to Tibet. Since then, you have made rich and powerful friends all over America and Europe (politicians, movie actors, industrialists, philanthropists); received many honors, including the Nobel Peace Prize; been feted and publicized everywhere; and published, copyrighted in your own name, more than 20 books, some best sellers. Since our meeting, because of my admiration for you (with detachment, of course!), I have heard you charm many audiences; studied your books and the Tibetan Bulletin, the publication of your government in exile; and spent months with your people in Tibet, especially at the holy Mount Kailas (as the first foreigner to circumambulate it and Lake Manosarowar after China opened Tibet, and to bicycle there on my 3,300-mile journey from Unumchi, Xinjiang across Tibet). All this time, your people have suffered and are still suffering genocide, environmental catastrophe, population transfers and marginalization -- more than 1.3 million deaths from China's occupation (173,240 prison deaths by 1996); children (including 6-year-olds), women, monks and nuns jailed, tortured and killed for their loyalty to you; 6,259 monasteries exterminated; 7.5 million Chinese shipped into Tibet (with only 6 million Tibetans); and denial of civil rights, education and even employment for Tibetans. The Tibetan Bulletin, Tibet Press Watch, Amnesty International and many government and private agencies continually report examples of the atrocities. You live comfortably in exile and jet travel around the world promoting Buddhism and your books. You write and say you are happy. But still it must be hard for you to realize your policies for the last 50 years have failed to alleviate your people's suffering. For 50 years your peace plans, delegations, letters and appeals to Beijing are ignored except for increased Chinese violence in Tibet and in spite of your praise for their humanness, and goodwill, even referring to China's Chairman Mao and Deng as your "friends" (the same men who ordered Tibet's genocide). For 50 years, your promises that the Chinese, their leadership and their attitudes will change have been illusory. For 50 years, your worldwide public relations have not produced a single government or international organization that does anything to assuage your people's pain, but only creates false hope. For 50 years, your absentee ahimsa (nonviolence) creates no social change, but only encourages continuing Chinese outrages. Ahimsa is not a dogma in exile but a practice -- the leader faces the same peril, the same pain as the sufferers from injustice: Gandhi on the march to the sea; Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma; Mandela in South Africa; Jesus in Jerusalem; even Mohammed and Arjuna in battle; and Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama. What should you do? If you won't risk yourself in Tibet, don't expect American troops to risk their lives or the United States, the United Nations, or any of your friends to rescue your people. You must return home. With the white scarves, you promised that night when you fled in 1959 to return. You told a Yale audience in 1991, "I am considering a visit to Tibet as early as possible." Time is short. Now 64, you prophesied your own uselessness between 60 and 70. China's genocide will be complete when it finishes the railroad in your country -- bringing more troops, more Chinese and more dominance. Your inaction is Tibet's doom -- China is kidnapping Tibet as it abducted your 11th Panchen Lama (age 6) who hasn't been heard from since. Your people love, revere and need you with them in their suffering, the same people who died by the thousands (at least 87,000) to protect you when you fled in 1959 and died in firefights on the way, who live in terror in and out of prison, who are beaten, jailed and tortured just for having a picture of you, and who still peacefully demonstrate their love for you. Cycling across Tibet, outside Lhasa, at Mount Kailas and numerous other villages, tents, towns and passes, I've wept to see your people's tears at the mere sight of the picture of you I always carried outside the pack on my handlebars. The Chinese are unlikely to risk the Olympics, world trade, international disrepute -- not to mention activating your worldwide support -- by mistreating you. As you say, "With a sincere and open heart there is no need to fear others," and facing an enemy "is one of the most important teachers." Along with thousands of others, I stand ready any time, any place to support your return home. Then we can celebrate Tibet's freedom at Mount Kailas, where Padmasambhava brought victory for Buddhism to Tibet. Alan H. Nichols is president of Sacred Mountain Foundation (sacred-mountain@att.net) and author of "Journey: A Bicycle Odyssey Through Central Asia" (J.D. Huff & Co., 1992).

United Arab Emirates

Gulf News, United Arab Emirates 6 Sept 2003 www.gulf-news.com Time ripe for a world police force | By Nimal Fernando, Day Editor | 06-09-2003 Print friendly format | Email to Friend It's not good enough... we hear of the death of a brutal tyrant - a man whose eight-year rule resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths - and government spokespeople, human rights groups, religious leaders and civic chiefs can do no more than lament the fact that he was never brought to justice. Amnesty International's comment highlighted the world's lack of options when it noted that the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada's death, after two decades of exile in Saudi Arabia, underlined the need for a system that could bring tyrants to justice for crimes against humanity. There was general agreement then, as now, that Saudi Arabia had done the world a favour by accepting Amin when no other country would have him. By the time Amin was ousted by Tanzanian forces and Ugandan exiles in 1979, rights groups guesstimate he had been responsible for the deaths of 300,000 people. Amin is just another despot who managed to evade justice over the past decades. In his case, no international court could touch him simply because there was no mechanism in place to do so. The feelings of outrage that Amin's period of untrammelled power evoked can be gauged from former British Foreign Secretary David Owen's admission that in the 1970s he had raised the idea of having Amin assassinated. As Owen, foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979 under a Labour government, told BBC radio: "I actually at one stage did raise the issue of assassination and it was not just frowned on but looked upon as an outrageous suggestion. I'm not ashamed of considering it because Amin's regime was one of the worst of all. For sheer personal callousness, it's an appalling record and it's a disgrace on us all that he was allowed to stay in office for as long as he did." Such feelings of shame and helplessness will continue to weigh down statesmen, civic leaders and millions of the world's people, in the absence of an international justice system that can hold those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and other grave human rights abuses. The need for such a system got its biggest media coverage during the Kosovo crisis when the forces of decency closed in on Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. In 1999, the world at large applauded British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he led his Nato allies in drawing a moral line on Kosovo, to bring Milosevic to trial. Following the Nato and Russian action in Kosovo, among some ideas floated was for UN Security Council authorisation for an international police force to make arrests anywhere. 'Leaders', self-styled or otherwise, must be held accountable even for economic crimes. Malicious policies that disrupt the lives of thousands of people, such as Amin's expulsion of tens of thousands of residents of Indian origin from Uganda in 1972, in a move to "Africanise" the economy, should also be punishable under law. Some others who have made refugees of hundreds of thousands of people have never answered for their crimes. The UN General Assembly sessions in New York, which begin mid-month, will be the ideal forum to bring the issue into sharper focus. Such a force should be a specialist arm of the UN's peacekeeping force. In this instance, the finest soldiers drawn from as broad a coalition as is feasible of the General Assembly's 191 nations, would be given the moral and military authority to go in and snatch such tyrants. Only an international police force can do the job, especially in ethnic conflict situations where a particular group of a populace protects the fugitive. The Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is still evading arrest, is a case in point. Karadzic was charged in 1995 with genocide and war crimes against Bosnian Croats and Muslims during the country's 1992-95 war. And less than a fortnight ago the world was appalled to learn that Liberian president Charles Taylor had made a "huge sacrifice" in going into exile. As Michelle Greene, executive director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, wrote in these columns recently, Taylor – an indicted war criminal – received red carpet treatment and a hilltop mansion in Nigeria, instead of ending up behind bars. If Taylor does not stand trial before a UN-backed court in Sierra Leone, which has released a warrant for his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity during Liberia's 14-year civil war, it would make nonsense of international law. The mere existence of an international police force may have had a restraining influence on the despots of the last century. The first light as it were of the new century would be an opportune time for all nations to assist in the birth of such a force. Just lamenting the fact that tyrants are evading justice is an inadequate response. It's not good enough...

Europe

Belgium

Expatica 24 Sept 2003 Last of the war crimes cases 24 September 2003 BRUSSELS – War crimes cases filed under the law of universal competence against former US President George Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and General Amos Yaron have been thrown out of Belgium's Court of Cassation due to lack of jurisdiction. All four cases had been filed under the controversial and now defunct so-called genocide law, but will not be going any further within the Belgian justice system. The Court of Cassation announced that they no longer had the jurisdiction to try the cases since the law had been eradicated. Belgium’s law of universal competence had allowed for the trial of persons involved in war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity regardless of where and by whom the crime had been committed. The legislation was amended twice and finally repealed last month after growing pressure from the US administration who had several high-ranking officials targeted under the legislation. Bush and Powell were both accused of war crimes during the Gulf War, while Sharon and Yaron singled out for their alleged involvement in the 1982 bloodbath at Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Chatilla. In a second case this week, a Brussels court denied an appeal to block the transfer of a war crimes complaint against former US General Commander of troops in Iraq, General Tommy Franks. The court ruled there was no provision for the appeal lodged on behalf of a group of Iraqis and Jordanians who accused Franks of allowing troops to target Iraqi civilians. Last month, lawmakers reinstated a new version of the law of universal competence which allows for the lodgement of a war crimes complaint under the strict rule that either the victim or perpetrator must be a Belgian citizen or long-time resident.

Bosnia

AP 4 Sept 2003 Bosnia Serb police praised over Karadzic hunt By Daria Sito-Sucic SARAJEVO, Sept. 4 — Bosnian Serb police came in for rare international praise on Thursday over their first operation to arrest a top warcrimes suspect, a sign of willingness to cooperate with the United Nations tribunal in The Hague. The U.N. warcrimes tribunal, the European Union and NATO hailed Wednesday's raid in the northeastern town of Bijeljina even though it failed to net the suspect, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's most wanted men. ''It is the first time that Bosnian police were involved in such an operation and it is a good step,'' the tribunal's prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann told Reuters. ''They should continue this kind of operation in order to locate him.'' The tribunal has indicted Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic for genocide for their role in Bosnia's 1992-95 war in which 200,000 people, mostly Muslims, died. The two men are believed to be among 20 warcrimes suspects hiding in Bosnia, Serbia or Montenegro. The tribunal and the West have in the past accused authorities in the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia's two autonomous regions, of lacking the political will to arrest them. The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia has repeatedly tried to nab Karadzic and Mladic, but with no success. NATO and the European Union Policing mission, which oversees the work of local police across Bosnia, welcomed the raid on the palace of an Orthodox Bishop, launched on information that turned out to be false. But the ruling Serb Democratic Party (SDS) condemned it as a ruthless attack on the Serb Orthodox Church. ''It is obvious that the yesterday's activity was yet another in the series of actions against the Serb Orthodox Church, aiming to ruin its reputation and dignity,'' said SDS spokesman Dusan Stojicic in the main Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka. Karadzic founded the SDS in 1990 but the party has publicly distanced itself from the fugitive in recent years. (Additional reporting by Dragana Dardic in Banja Luka and Paul Gallagher in The Hague)

Christian Science Monitor 8 Sept 2003 Grisly clues in Bosnia's largest mass grave By Russ Baker NEAR MEMICI, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA – High atop Crni Vrh (Black Peak), in a vast clearing across the road from a garbage dump, an earthmover is scooping. At first glance, it looks like preparations for a large swimming pool. But a closer look reveals men and women working on their hands and knees, and they are not construction laborers. This site, where excavations began in late July, is 44 yards by 13 yards - and more than 4 yards deep - making it physically the largest grave site found in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the 1992-1995 war here. monitortalk Weigh in on issues of the day in our forums. E-mail this story Write a letter to the Editor Printer-friendly version Permission to reprint/republish While it is as yet uncertain how many victims it may contain, the site is already significant in another way: The bodies buried here were moved from elsewhere to this remote site - apparently to make evidence of genocide harder to find. "We believe this is a secondary mass grave," says Sasa Stjepanovic, of the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons, which on a recent day had three anthropologists and two archeologists combing the dirt at Crni Vrh. Cumulatively, this site near the village of Memici and 16 other recent, smaller discoveries in the area demonstrate a coordinated reburial effort that could not have gone on without high-level approval. As such, they could have ramifications in the ongoing trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, and possible future trials of the fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his general, Ratko Mladic. All three have repeatedly denied personal knowledge or responsibility for such war crimes. That line will now be even tougher to maintain, since the victims come largely from villages that were under control of Milosevic's Yugoslav National Army and their allies under Karadzic and Mladic. The discoveries also underline the failure, eight years after the war's end, of the Bosnian Serb and Serbian authorities and public to openly acknowledge what happened here. "As has happened in cases before, they will quietly let these dark crimes pass, with silence from institutions - but the public here will also be silent," says Branko Todorovic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of Republika Srpska. More than 200,000, most of them civilians, died in the Bosnian war. The majority came from areas that were ethnically "cleansed" of Muslims and are now part of the Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb Republic), the Serbian enclave that shares an uneasy peace with the Muslim-Croat Bosnian Federation. Of 30,000 people reported missing at the war's end, about a quarter have been exhumed, many identified through DNA comparison with surviving relatives. Many victims' relatives say they won't be at peace until Karadzic and Mladic, thought to be the slaughter's key architects, are in custody. Eight years after being indicted by The Hague war crimes tribunal, they're still on the run, and few observers believe that they'll be captured soon. Hajrudin Mujanovic, deputy prosecutor of Tuzla area, says that authorities were directed to Crni Vrh by a witness to the reburial operation. Although most of the victims' identity papers had been removed, overlooked documents identified them as being from around Zvornik, once a majority-Muslim city on the banks of the Drina River dividing Bosnia and Serbia. Every few days, Ahmed Grahic, chairman of the Association for Prisoners and Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, comes to Crni Vrh, hoping to turn up information about his father and two brothers. In May 1992, the Yugoslav army forced the residents of villages near Zvornik into a mass march. The men deemed to be of fighting age were driven to a school workshop, where they were jammed in. Many were killed or died in the crowded, airless quarters. The survivors were put on buses and taken elsewhere. "From that day, we've been looking for them," Grahic says. "The government of Republika Srpska never tried to help us. They just tried to cover up the crimes." The bodies at Crni Vrh are thought to have been moved from their initial resting places in 1995 or early 1996. Some of the victims reburied there were placed in body bags of the Yugoslav National Army - an efficient solution but a strange choice for those intent on claiming no involvement of Serbia in the atrocities. Because the bags were numbered, "there had to be a list," Mr. Mujanovic says. One foreign investigator says he expects the site to yield perhaps 300 bodies, but Amor Masovic, co-chair of the Bosnian Federal Commission for Tracing Missing Persons, predicted that more than 500 bodies would be found, thereby topping the largest previous find of 424 victims. Other investigators have said that as many as 700 might be found. Mr. Masovic is scheduled to testify at Milosevic's trial, and says he expects to be asked about Crni Vrh. The news of such discoveries is being reported by state television and independent media in Republika Srpska. But down the hill, in Zvornik, the townspeople aren't talking. A quick sampling of residents found eerily identical quick responses that "we don't know anything." Zvornik now is virtually all-Serb, although wary Muslim residents are gradually returning to the area with the encouragement and assistance of the international community. At a local radio station, Radio Osvit, one of the few independent news media in this part of Republika Srpska, director Zorana Petkovic, talked about the difficulty of coming to terms with what went on here. "A lot of people are guilty, and a lot of people feel guilty," she says. "A great number of people didn't have the means to stand up to it." Ms. Petkovic says, though, that most Serbian civilians didn't know what was being done, and in their frustration tune out such news and focus instead on what they believe is anti-Serb bias in underreporting of atrocities committed by Muslims. That's typical of a continuing problem: an effort to create equivalency out of a conflict in which innocent people of all ethnicities died, but the vast majority were Muslims slaughtered in an organized effort. "Until the international community defines precisely what happened from 1992-1995, there cannot be an awakening of the Serbian people," says Masovic.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution 15 Sept 2003 ajc.com Bosnians quietly grapple with legacy of war By DON MELVIN The Atlanta Journal-Constitution DON MELVIN / AJC Bosnian Muslim Nesiba Ademovic prays at the graves of her father and brother, killed in the town of Srebrenica eight years ago. Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzogovina -- A mother and daughter rode one recent day toward the killing field they fled eight years ago. Srebrenica was where the mother had lost her husband, her brother and her father. It was where the daughter lost her father, her uncle, her grandfather and her childhood. The two women rode together, talking back and forth, but there was a divide between them. Nesiba Ademovic, who is 43, wants to return to Srebrenica to live. Her daughter Emina, who is 21, says she will never live in Srebrenica again, not for a single night. The war that devastated this area throughout the early 1990s ended in December 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement. But Bosnia-Herzegovina is still coming to grips with the slaughter. Today, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Balkans, based in The Hague, Netherlands, a trial will begin in the case of two former mid-level Bosnian Serb army commanders charged in connection with the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Col. Vidoje Bagojevic and Lt. Col. Dragan Jokic are charged with crimes against humanity and violating the laws or customs of war. Bagojevic also is charged with complicity to commit genocide. Their commander, Gen. Radislav Krstic, was sentenced in 2001 to 46 years in prison for genocide. The man many hold ultimately responsible, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, remains on trial. The country's struggle to recover is taking place not only at The Hague but inside its borders, as well. The Dayton agreement calls for people to return to the places from which they fled. But many people, like Nesiba and Emina, are divided over whether that is feasible or even desirable. Nesiba and her five daughters -- Emina is the oldest -- live now in Sarajevo, 100 miles west of Srebrenica. They were returning just for the day. Nesiba had been back before. But for Emina, this would be her first time back since she escaped with her mother and sisters, never to see her father again. As she rode toward Srebrenica, Nesiba wore a scarf, a Muslim sign of mourning she would show for 40 days. Within the past month she has attended funerals for her father and brother. Their bodies were located recently in one of the mass graves still being discovered in Bosnia, identified through DNA and reburied in a cemetery for victims of the Srebrenica massacre. Shortly after those funerals, Nesiba's mother and another of her brothers died -- of grief, Nesiba is convinced. Thousands were massacred Still, she was laughing and joking, happy to be returning to Srebrenica where she was born, where she grew up, and where she still owns land. In tones that seemed suffused with the unrealistic glow of nostalgia, she described fields teeming with crops and trees dripping with fruit. Emina, by contrast, wore no scarf; it is not obligatory and anyway it doesn't work well with jeans. She was quieter than her mother. She rarely discusses what happened. She was nervous, even scared, she admitted as the miles rolled by, to go back home. The family left Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. It had been declared a "safe area" by the United Nations and was being protected by Dutch U.N. troops. But Bosnian Serb units bore down on the area, and promises of NATO air support did not materialize in time. Srebrenica fell. At 3 that afternoon, Nesiba's husband, Frazlija, came home to tell the family they had to leave. Nesiba bustled her five daughters onto a bus. Emina was 13; the youngest was 5 months old. Frazlija wanted to come to be with the children but Nesiba wouldn't let him. Serb soldiers were looking for the men. He had to escape through the woods. Nesiba comforted the girls as the bus plowed through the night. The sound of gunfire could be heard outside. The bus was stopped by Serb soldiers. They took off all the men and boys, including Nesiba's 13-year-old nephew. He, like the rest of the men in Nesiba's life, never was seen again. As many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in the ensuing five days. Nesiba believes her husband was among those who were tricked into surrendering and then murdered. He was 42 years old. His body has not been found. Nesiba was hospitalized afterward for shock. The grief in her soul is permanent, she said. Still, she had her children. "You have to clear your mind and your heart," she said. "Life goes on." And so she laughed and talked of fruit trees on her way to Srebrenica, growing more excited the closer she drew to home. Along the way, she stopped at the cemetery where her brother and father recently were reburied. She walked among the graves and brushed the dirt from their markers. She knelt beside the fresh-turned earth and prayed and wept. Emina did not approach the graves. She stood to the side without speaking, waiting for her mother to finish. Nesiba confided later that she worries about her daughter. "If you collect the feelings too much in yourself, they will come out later," she said. She was bringing Emina back home for a reason. Back in the car, Nesiba was her jovial self again, joking when she failed to find her way. Emina stayed quiet, though she grew a little more animated as they pulled into Srebrenica and she began to recognize places -- a shop, the post office, the center of town. To her, the town seemed desolate. "It's really ugly and horrible," Emina said. "It's not like before." Being in Srebrenica again did Emina's mother good. "I feel happy," Nesiba said. "I feel power." Normalcy hasn't returned Srebrenica, which lacks jobs and adequate housing, illustrates the difficulties facing refugees who want to return. Before the war, said the mayor, Abdurahman Malkic, the town had 36,000 inhabitants -- 27,000 Muslims and 9,000 Serbs. Now the population is 9,000 -- 4,000 Muslims and 5,000 Serbs. About 6,300 homes, more than two-thirds of the houses in Srebrenica, were destroyed. Only 1,200 have bee rebuilt. Still, some people are drifting back. As Nesiba and Emina rode up the country road to their old home, a few returnees could be seen. Some had pitched tents on the ruins of their houses. Nesiba shouted greetings on the way pas. Around many curves, up a long hill, she and her daughter came at last to their land. The house was destroyed, but Nesiba crossed a field and walked at once to her favorite apple tree. She grabbed a branch and shook it. Apples rained down around her and she laughed and laughed, her face as radiant as a child's. She yanked the branch again and again, giddy with joy, and gathered the apples into a sack. Then she plunged deeper into the woods. Emina did not want to go. She was wearing high heels, and they weren't fit for walking. Her mother's laughter echoed from within the woods. Slowly at first, Emina walked into the forest. There were fruit trees everywhere, their boughs bent with their bounty. There were apples of many kinds, plums in profusion, apricots dangling in easy reach. Nesiba ran from tree to tree, laughing, eating an apricot, picking more fruit. Her scarf fell off and she didn't care. Emina joined in the picking. She grew happy, too, laughing at her mother's delight. Under an apricot tree not far from a ruined house, the divide between mother and daughter closed just a little. Eventually, Emina struggled up a hill back to the car carrying a sack of fruit, which she emptied into the trunk. She and her mother headed back to Sarajevo. Emina will not live here but was happy she had come, she said, even if just for the day.

ICRC 19 Sept 2003 ICRC News 03/113 Bosnia: Ascertaining the fate of the Srebrenica missing More than eight years after the Srebrenica tragedy, ICRC representatives will be present tomorrow when former US president Bill Clinton officially inaugurates the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery. In addition to those already buried there in recent months, 107 identified victims will be buried at the cemetery tomorrow, bringing the total to 989. Since July 1995, when the ICRC started to collect the information needed to trace people unaccounted for after the fall of Srebrenica, the organization has received 7,599 enquiries regarding people who went missing in the town. Only 22 people have been found alive; the mortal remains of 1,083 others have been identified. The ICRC appeals for renewed efforts to ensure respect for the right of the families to learn what has happened to their missing loved ones. Many families remain desperate with uncertainty and this continues to be a source of great suffering and anger long after the fighting ended. The fate of the people who went missing in Srebrenica remains one of the main issues for the working group set up by ICRC in 1996 to bring together the former warring parties to share information on missing persons and provide the families with answers. Currently, the identities of 6,461 Srebrenica-related individuals are recorded in an ICRC-managed “Ante Mortem Database” and this information is available to the forensic experts in charge of identifying human remains. Most of the 1,083 identifications achieved so far have been carried out by matching data about the missing individuals with post-mortem findings and DNA analysis. The ICRC is committed to ensuring that the families' right to know is respected, and has convened a 16th session of the working group in Sarajevo on 14 October.

Croatia

Human Rights Watch Date: 3 Sept 2003 (excerpts) "Broken Promises: Impediments to Refugee Return in Croatia" - HRW report INTRODUCTION Between 300,000 and 350,000 Serbs left their homes in Croatia during the 1991-95 war. This report describes the continued plight of displacement suffered by the Serbs of Croatia and identifies the principal remaining impediments to their return. The most significant problem is the difficulty Serbs face in returning to their pre-war homes. Despite repeated promises, the Croatian government has been unwilling and unable to solve this problem for the vast majority of displaced Serbs. In addition, fear of arbitrary arrest on war-crimes charges and discrimination in employment and pension benefits also deter return. Human Rights Watch believes that these problems are a result of a practice of ethnic discrimination against Serbs by the Croatian government. The report concludes with a list of recommendations to the government of Croatia and the international community to deal with these persistent problems and finally make good on the promise of return. Precise statistics for how many of the more than 300,000 displaced Serbs have returned do not exist. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by June 2001, between 100,000 and 110,000 Croatian Serbs had returned.1 The number of returns registered by the Croatian government in November 2002 was 96,500. . . . Eight years after the end of the war in Croatia, the continued displacement of hundreds of thousands of Croatian Serbs remains one of its most lasting scars. This report surveys the principal impediments to return. Below are recommendations to the Croatian government and the international community to redress this situation. Notwithstanding progress on reform in other areas, to date the government has lacked that essential political leadership to effectively facilitate minority return and rebuild Croatia as a multi-ethnic state.

France

BBC 8 Sept 2003 French pay-out to wartime orphans The Oradour massacre was France's worst single atrocity The French Government has agreed to compensate thousands of people whose parents were victims of Nazi atrocities. Up to 8,000 children of people deported or killed during the German occupation are expected to qualify. They will receive 27,440 euros, similar to a package paid three years ago to orphans of Jewish parents deported from France during the Holocaust. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said on Saturday that the package was being extended "in the interests of justice and fairness". Those who might benefit include children of resistance fighters or civilians massacred by the Nazis, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. "If you had, for example, a Jewish person or a resistance figure who was deported for throwing a grenade at the Nazis, any orphan they left behind would not have been compensated under the previous accord," Defence Ministry spokesman Pierre Mayaudon told Reuters. The package will be finalised over the next few months after an eligibility study. Vichy blamed The children of people killed in bombings or in the general course of the war will not be included on the list. Families of resistance fighters killed in combat already receive war pensions. Around 4,500 children of deportees are now expected to be compensated. The remainder include victims of massacres carried out by the Nazis in revenge for Resistance attacks, especially after the 1944 D-Day landings. The worst of these was at Oradour-sur-Glane, in west-central France, where 642 people were killed on 10 June of that year. France agreed to compensate Holocaust victims after a speech by President Jacques Chirac in 1995 saying that the French people should bear some blame for the deaths of Jews. He argued then that the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime represented the French state and had repeated the "criminal folly" of the Nazis.

Germany

NYT September 13, 2003 Six Neo-Nazis Are Arrested in Bomb Plot Against Jews By RICHARD BERNSTEIN BERLIN, Sept. 12 — A group of German neo-Nazi extremists arrested in raids across the country this week are suspected of planning to bomb a new Jewish cultural center in Munich, prosecutors said today. The neo-Nazis, who were found with more than 30 pounds of explosives, including nearly 4 pounds of TNT, may have intended to attack the center on Nov. 9, when the German president, Johannes Rau, was going to attend the cornerstone-laying ceremony. Nov. 9 will be the 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in 1938 in which 91 Jews were killed and thousands of Jewish-owned shops and synagogues were vandalized. "My assessment has been confirmed that we have to take threats from the area of right-wing extremists very seriously," said Otto Schily, the German interior minister. On Wednesday, the Munich police arrested six people, four of them suspected members of neo-Nazi groups, but an official in the prosecutor's office said that as many as nine people were involved in the planned attacks and that new arrest warrants were issued today. In addition to the explosives, the police seized two hand grenades, ammunition, files and computer disks. "There is evidence that the accused had several attack targets in their sights," including the planned Jewish cultural center in Munich, said the official, Frauke-Katrin Scheuten. "A new dimension in terrorism was being planned," said Charlotte Knobloch, a leader among Munich's Jews. "Sixty-five years after the destruction of the main synagogue by the Nazis, neo-Nazis are again trying to destroy Jewish life in Munich." The planned attacks were denounced by Munich's mayor, Christian Ude, and Edmund Stoiber, the premier of the state of Bavaria, of which Munich is the capital. "The citizens of Bavaria are horrified by these acts of madness that were being planned," Mr. Stoiber said. The bomb plan was reminiscent of right-wing firebombings of Turks and Turkish homes in Germany that took place in the early 1990's but have not been repeated in recent years. According to the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which collects statistics of crimes carried out by extremist groups, there are about 2,800 neo-Nazis in Germany organized into political groups. In addition, there are some 10,000 skinheads, who make up a violent and racist subculture. The office reported more than 600 cases of assaults that caused bodily harm last year, aimed against foreigners, Jews and other minorities, including left-wing activists. Few of these assaults have led to serious harm, but in the decade between 1990 and 2000, 37 people died in right-wing attacks, the office reported. In an incident last November, three skinheads in Potzlow, north of Berlin, beat to death a 17-year-old boy after saying that his baggy pants and dyed hair made him "look like a Jew," according to court testimony.

BBC 15 Sept 2003 German neo-Nazi threat 'rising' - Schily says a new quality of neo-Nazi terror has emerged The threat to Germany from neo-Nazis has risen to a new level, Interior Minister Otto Schily has warned. The discovery of a suspected plot to bomb a Munich Jewish centre during a visit by the German president has "dramatically confirmed" the danger to society, he said on Monday. At least 10 suspects were held and up to 14kg (31lb) of explosives seized in police raids last week. Officials believe plans were being made to bomb the centre on 9 November, when its foundation stone is due to be laid at a ceremony attended by President Johannes Rau, Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber and Jewish leader Paul Spiegel. The suspected attack would have coincided with the anniversary of the Nazis' 1938 Kristallnacht attacks, when thousands of Jewish targets were attacked and dozens murdered. There have been hints that right extremists are really a great potential danger for our society... this has now been dramatically confirmed Otto Schily German Interior Minister "One could (even) say there is a new quality of terror, though we know from previous times that in right-extremist circles bombing attacks were planned and carried out," Mr Schily told Germany's ZDF television, referring a 1980 attack that killed 13 people. "There have been hints that right extremists are really a great potential danger for our society... and this has now been dramatically confirmed." Mr Schily praised the police for their operation. A "hit list" detailing other possible targets, including mosques, a Greek school and an Italian target, had been recovered, said Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein. Hundreds including German president will be at Munich ceremony The explosives included at least 1.7kg of TNT. Weapons, grenades and ammunition were also recovered. German media reports at the weekend speculated on the possible phenomenon of a neo-Nazi "Brown Army Faction", referring to the disbanded left-wing Red Army Faction. "Faced with the flood of pictures from the Middle East, we had forgotten what extremists could also plan here at home," wrote commentator Guido Heinen in Die Welt. "German political terrorism is back." The magazine Focus said the internet had apparently been used to collect information on Munich's religious centres.

www.forward.com 19 Sept 2003 S 'Tasteless' Hitler Wine Causing Headaches Throughout Europe By MAX GROSS FORWARD STAFF When German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries recently called a line of Italian wines "tasteless," she wasn't referring to the grapes. Since 1995, a winery in northern Italy called Azienda Vinicola Alessandro Lunardelli has produced a line of "historical" wines featuring images of important men of history on the label — among them, Napoleon, Che Guevara and Adolf Hitler. The Hitler line — called "Fuehrerwein" and featuring pictures of Hitler and slogans from Nazi Germany on the label — made headlines worldwide this month after a family of Polish tourists found the wine in an Italian supermarket. The family brought a bottle back to Poland and handed it over to the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, which ran a photo of the bottle on its front page. Since then, vintner Alessandro Lunardelli has been under attack. Zypries wrote a letter to her Italian counterpart, Roberto Castelli, calling Fuehrerwein "contemptible and tasteless," and asked Castelli to try to take the wines off the market. Castelli told Radio Padania, a northern Italian radio station, that there was nothing his office could do. Fuehrerwein is only the latest effort to market images of Nazi Germany that has met with public outcry. In August, the Hong Kong-based clothing company Izzue took its Nazi-themed line out of stores after staunch protest from the Israeli and German embassies. But Hitler continues to be a popular commercial draw for other businesses. Reuters reported earlier this week that Hitler's Alpine retreat — the "Berghof" — has become a tourist hot spot, with over 100,000 visitors every year and a thriving gift shop filled with books and videos about Hitler and Eva Braun. "There's always been a perverse interest in World War II," said Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League. "You find a lot of Nazi memorabilia in gun shows, in auctions, on eBay... There's something about evil that attracts people's interests." Ron Guth, a California-based coin dealer who specializes in German coins and has sold Nazi-era coins to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, agreed that the current wave of "Nazi kitsch" has always been around to a certain extent. "I'd say 90% of [buyers of Nazi-era coins] are legitimate coin collectors," Guth said. "And then you have 7% or 8 % who are interested in the historical aspects of World War II. Then you have 2% or 3% who are kooks who really believe in the stuff." Joel Anderson, another California coin dealer who sells Nazi-era coins, puts the number of "kooks" higher — more like 30%. For Anderson, Nazi-era coins are "what I would call a large, steady seller. I sell a few every week... [primarily] because of the historical aspect. After all, there aren't a huge number of World War II artifacts that you can buy for under 10 bucks." Foxman said that Nazi imagery is a good way to attract attention. "The commercial people know that there's this thing out there; it attracts people. They know it gets people's attention... Where do you find a lot of it happening? In Asia and Southeast Asia, mostly. They don't really have a concept of Hitler. I've seen a lot of really bizarre things [in Asia] — like [advertisements for] 'German pianos at Jewish prices.' It's bizarre. There's a bar named after Hitler." In a 2001 interview with the Associated Press, Lunardelli said that the historic labels were "a great marketing success." Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, helped to organize protests against Lunardelli when the Hitler wine first came on the market several years ago. Jewish groups brought a suit against Lunardelli to take it out of stores based on an Italian law forbidding the glorification of fascism, but the presiding judge ruled that a picture of Hitler did not constitute a celebration of him. Back then, Cooper said, "there was no interest whatsoever on the part of the mainstream political establishment, the church... anyone." Cooper speculated that the latest round of criticism leveled at Lunardelli might have come from the German government as a way to get back at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who likened a German member of the European parliament to a concentration camp guard over the summer. "It would be a little bit of a tit-for-tat," Cooper said. Lunardelli did not return calls and e-mails by press time, but in a statement reported in the British paper The Guardian this month, he said, "I am sorry if there are some people — German politicians, Jewish groups or that type of thing — who get upset. But it's just history. I see no reason for such a fuss." "People like these characters," The Guardian quoted Lunardelli as saying, referring to the historical men who grace his labels. "They make good table conversation. So I'm not about to stop selling." The Hitler wine, Lunardelli told the newspaper, is his bestseller, moving more than 30,000 bottles a year. .

Latvia

Baltic News Service 9 Sept 2003 TWO LATVIANS HOLD SEATS ON INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT A scheduled assembly of member states at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in New York this Monday saw a unanimous vote in favor of appointing Inna Steinbuka, Latvia's chief public regulator, as a member of the ICC Committee on Budget and Finance, thus making two out of three positions on the ICC for Eastern European countries now held by Latvians. The Latvian Foreign Ministry reported that the ICC's budget and finance committee convenes annually to discuss the ICC budget and necessary spending. Eastern European countries were allotted two places on the budget and finance committee. The committee started its work in August this year but without any Eastern European representatives, as no candidates had been nominated by these countries as yet. The ministry reported that Latvia had initially refrained from nominating its candidate for the committee, as Latvia's Constitutional Court Judge Anita Usacka was already elected as a judge on the ICC through a tough vote earlier this year in February. Usacka was the only Eastern European representative to become one of the 18 ICC judges. Thus in the name of solidarity with the rest of the Eastern European countries, Latvia hoped that other countries would nominate candidates for other positions on the ICC, but this did not happen. Inna Steinbuka, Chairwoman of the Latvian Public Services Regulating Commission, was then nominated for the budget and finance committee by Latvia. Thus, two out of the three positions on the ICC allotted for Eastern European representatives are held by two Latvians, Anita Usacka and Inna Steinbuka, both experts in their own fields.

AP 26 Sept 2003 Former Soviet agent gets five years for genocide A former Soviet agent Nikolai Larionov was jailed for five years in Latvia today after he was convicted of 131 counts of genocide – more than 50 years after he helped deport families to Siberia at the behest of dictator Josef Stalin. The 82-year-old maintained his innocence throughout the trial in Jelgava, near the capital, Riga, maintaining his superiors forced him to sign deportation orders during a wave of arrests in 1949. “I sympathise with all of the more than 10,000 victims and their relatives, but I admit only that I performed a technical job and had no direct involvement in deportation of people,” he said. Prosecutors said Larionov was an integral part of the Soviet Latvian Ministry of Security- set up after the Red Army occupied the Baltic state in 1944. They said he was responsible for exiling as many as 500 people, often whole families. Larionov’s five year sentence, handed down immediately after judges convicted him, was less than the eight years sought by prosecutors. The maximum penalty was 15 years. After the Baltic states regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, they vowed to prosecute those who took part in the worst Stalinist-era repression – which included the deportation of more than 100,000 Latvians. Many died in the harsh Siberian conditions. About half dozen Stalinist agents have been convicted in Latvia, and more than a dozen more in neighbouring Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltics are the only former Soviet republics to have pursued Soviet-era officials for humanity crimes. Moscow has angrily criticised the trials as witch-hunts that target sick, elderly men. The Russian government has frequently helped to cover the legal costs of the accused, sometimes hailing the men as Second World War heroes who served the Soviet Union honourably.

Macedonia

AFP 3 Sept 2003 Macedonia faces new risk of ethnic conflict by Jasmina Mironski SKOPJE, Sept 3 (AFP) - Macedonia was facing a new risk of ethnic conflict Wednesday after a radical ethnic-Albanian militia issued a list of demands including the withdrawal of elite police from a region of the north. The Albanian National Army (ANA), which has seized two northern villages, presented its five-point list to ethnic-Albanian parliamentarians during three hours of talks late Tuesday, officials said. They demanded the release of "political prisoners" and an amnesty for guerrilla fighters, according to Hisni Shaciri, one of the deputies who met rebel leaders. The ANA earlier gave Macedonian forces until Tuesday afternoon to pull out of the ethnic-Albanian dominated region around the villages of Vaksince and Lojane, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Skopje. In a statement posted on its website, the group said its forces would use "all available means" to drive Macedonian forces out if they did not withdraw within the dreadline. But the militia had dropped the ultimatum after its talks with the parliamentarians, presenting instead a list of five demands with no deadline for compliance. Government officials told AFP Wednesday they would examine the demands but at this stage they did not have a plan to deal with the situation. Macedonian interior ministry spokeswoman Mirjana Kontevska confirmed that Vaksince and Lojane were "under control of armed persons" and promised the government would "take action". "We are going to take action but we will do it very carefully to avoid any kind of serious casualties which could damage the whole security situation," Kontevska said on Tuesday. Around 1,000 villagers, mainly women and childrem, are believed to have fled the area in fear of armed conflict. Local radio reported that some police units had pulled out of the region but this could not be immediately confirmed. The ANA is a shadowy extremist group which claims to be seeking the unification of Albania with Albanian-dominated territory in Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia. It is dismissed as a criminal outfit by the authorities in Skopje, and the United Nations mission in Kosovo has labelled it a "terrorist organisation" although UN police there say it has limited resources. Authorities throughout the region say it is involved in criminal activities and has no solid base of support among ordinary Albanians. Alexis Brouhns, the European Union representative in Macedonia, told AFP the ANA should be dealt with as a criminal gang and not linked to a political struggle for Albanian rights. "The police operation is about the ilegal use of violence, about the violation of the law," he said. "We should deal with these people as they really are -- criminals." The standoff follows a police hunt for an ANA member, Avdil Jakupi, who allegedly kidnapped two police officers last week to trade them for two captured Albanians. The officers were later released without harm. Since it emerged in Macedonia a year ago the ANA has claimed responsibility for a series of explosions and attacks against Macedonian and Serbian security forces. Macedonia has seen a tense peace since August 2001, when the authorities struck a deal with ethnic-Albanian rebels who had waged a seven-month uprising to demand better civil and political rights. Those rebels have since laid down their arms and some are now in the coalition government, vowing to work with the Macedonian community to bring the Balkan republic into the European Union. European peacekeepers are currently deployed in the country, having recently taken over from a NATO force.

Serbia

Reuters 5 Sept 2003 SERBS OPEN SEARCH FOR KARADZIC The Serbian police raided the home of an Orthodox bishop looking for the top war crimes suspect, Radovan Karadzic, but failed to find him, a senior police officer said. Dr. Karadzic and his commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, were twice indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal on genocide charges for their role in Bosnia's 1992-95 war, in which 200,000 people, mostly Muslims, died. The operation Wednesday was a rare move by officers of the Serbian republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina to pursue a fugitive war crimes suspect.

ICRC 24 Sept 2003 ICRC News 03/114 Serbia: Young people to start Exploring Humanitarian Law Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL) is an ICRC programme that introduces young people to the basic rules of international humanitarian law and helps them embrace principles of humanity in their daily lives and the way they assess events at home and abroad. A pilot EHL programme is to start in Serbia next month, and throughout the coming school year over 1,000 students at 18 secondary schools in Belgrade will be debating humanitarian perspectives, rules to limit suffering in conflict and violence, responsibility for breaches of the rules, justice at work and the ethics and practice of humanitarian work. Pupils at the police secondary school in Sremska Kamenica will be exploring the same topics, under the guidance of their law and philosophy teachers. In July, the Serbian Ministry of Education and Sports granted “A” accreditation to EHL – the highest quality rating. This recognition follows months of consultations between the Ministry, the ICRC and MOST – a leading educational group whose acronym, appropriately enough, is the Serbian word for bridge – over concerns about whether following the programme could indirectly traumatize teenagers who have endured years of conflict. Following the pilot phase, the Serbian Ministry of Education will review the results of the programme and consider further implementation. Common experience of conflict is giving EHL a strong regional dimension, as are similarities between the education systems of the countries concerned. Educators from Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia have already exchanged initial experiences, and a teacher training seminar in Serbia next month will help to further boost EHL expertise in these countries.

Switzerland

World Council of Churches 8 Sept 2003 PRESS RELEASE Scars of memory: an artist responds to the Rwandan genocide A major exhibition by the Ghanaian painter and sculptor Kofi Setordji is on display in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, headquarters of the World Council of Churches. "The Scars of Memory" is his response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. Comprising installations in wood, metal and clay, its centrepiece is a bed of earth some 12ft square in which are set clay masks, recalling a mass grave. A vulture in metal hovers overhead. Other works show masks with numbers cut into their foreheads and wires bound across their eyes. These are statistics, rendered impersonal and powerless by the perpetrators of genocide. Some of the work is bitterly satirical. Wooden abstracts of three busts with a human skull in front of them marked "Exhibit" are captioned, "Judges: what part did you play?" Sentries stand guard over a defenceless population, but they stand in coffins rather than sentry-boxes. "Political, religious, military leaders - masquerades" depicts figures whose breasts are boxes with hinged doors, open to see that inside they are heartless and hollow. One of the most powerful works is an untitled wooden figure, one massively powerful arm hanging down with its fist clenched, ready to strike. The pointing left hand holds scales of justice, empty but weighted down on one side. It is topped by a metal face with pitiless eyes but no mouth; there is nothing to say to the victims. Speaking at the opening of the exhibition held during the World Council of Churches' Central Committee on 26 August, Dr Wilfried Steen of the Church Development Service (EED) of the Evangelical Church in Germany, which sponsored the event, said: "The unimaginable cruelty of the events in Rwanda during the massacres of the civil war needs artistic creativity and integrity to allow some form of coming to terms with the recent past. No healing of memories will be possible without this challenge of comprehension." In his own speech, Setordji said, "Nine years ago I was traumatised by the images on TV of genocide in Rwanda, and that brought into being the creation of this exhibition. "I have dedicated this work to all genocide victims in the world." Addressing Central Committee members, "I trust when you go back to your country you will encourage others never to be part of the crowd of passive onlookers, but to take a stand in the name of peace and human dignity," he said. Later, Setordji spoke of seeing images of refugees in Goma and corpses floating in Lake Ituri: "Seeing all those dead bodies, like discarded wrapping paper, I had to ask, 'How can this happen in the 20th century?' These people died for nothing. "And I questioned the whole system which let people kill, and then punished them, but didn't judge those who fuelled the killing - the arms dealers, and the major powers playing off one power against another." Setordji believes that the actions of the Hutu killers were possible because they lost their sense of individual responsibility in the actions of a group. Describing this as a "sickness", he said that "The main goal of the exhibition is to let people come face to face with themselves, and say, 'We too have this disease.' We want to eradicate polio, but we don't want to look at ourselves." "This happened because people use human beings as chess pieces. It was in no-one's interest to stop it," he continued. "But I want this exhibition to be a 'stop' sign. It will set people thinking: this is not about two ethnic groups, or about the African continent - it is about humans." Speaking of the part played in his work by prayer, Setordji said: "God created the world. The key is that God created in his own image. He took clay and water, and breathed the breath of life into it. In our work, we too add creativity, and so we are in the image of God." The exhibition at the Ecumenical Centre comprises only a third of Setordji's work on the Rwandan theme, created over a period of two and a half years of intense labour. First seen at the Berlin Ecumenical Kirchentag in June, the exhibition is in Geneva until 24 September, and will be in Kigali, Rwanda from 2-15 April 2004.

Turkey

BBC 2 Sept 2003 Kurdish rebels abandon truce Kurds say concessions by the government are not enough The main militant Kurdish group in Turkey says it is ending a unilateral ceasefire declared after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, four years ago. A spokeswoman for the group, which has been pressing the government to announce a truce of its own, accused the authorities of failing to grant Kurds greater political and cultural rights. However, she said she did not expect a return to all-out conflict. More than 30,000 people were killed over a 15-year period as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fought for autonomy in the overwhelmingly Kurdish south-east. The announcement came as thousands of Kurds staged a demonstration in Diyarbakir - the biggest city in the south-east - to press for more rights and to urge a general amnesty for Kurdish prisoners. Last month, the government introduced a partial amnesty aimed mainly at the PKK but it did not cover the group's leaders. The Kurds are Turkey's biggest ethnic minority, estimated to make up about one-fifth of the population of around 70 million people. Reforms 'fall short' The PKK, which last year changed its name to Kadek (Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan) said it had become impossible to maintain the ceasefire called after Abdullah Ocalan's arrest in February 1999. Ocalan is now serving a life sentence in an island jail "It is announced that the unilateral ceasefire has come to an end as of 1 September and that the ceasefire can only continue bilaterally," a statement from the group was quoted as saying. Kadek had previously threatened to end the ceasefire at the start of September if Turkey did not respond to its calls for a truce. "I foresee some sort of low-intensity warfare," Mizgin Sen, a spokeswoman for the group said. She accused the Turkish Government of failing to fully address demands for Kurdish cultural rights, constitutional changes and freedom of expression, despite the passing by parliament of a number of laws removing restrictions on Kurds. "Taking decisions is one thing. Implementing is another... There are still serious problems concerning the Kurdish issue," she told the BBC. The spokeswoman said Ankara had recently stepped up operations against the group's guerrillas. She also insisted there had been no "military activities" by the PKK, although the rebels have been blamed by unnamed officials for some recent violence in the south-east. The group declared its ceasefire in September 1999 after the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, saying it would use political channels to resolve the conflict with Ankara. However Turkey - which along with the US and many European countries regards the PKK as a terrorist organisation - has repeatedly rejected calls to negotiate a solution to the Kurdish conflict.

United Kingdom

BBC 6 Sept 2003 Omagh suspect appears in court One of the charge relates directly to the Omagh bombing A 34-year-old man arrested by detectives investigating the Omagh bombing has appeared in court charged with a number of serious offences. Sean Gerard Hoey, a 34-year-old unemployed electrician from Molly Road, Jonesborough in south Armagh, was charged with 15 terrorist offences at Craigavon Magistrates Court on Saturday. The charge of possession of explosives is understood to relate to the Omagh bombing. Twenty-nine people died in August 1998 in the Real IRA bombing of the County Tyrone town, which was the worst single atrocity in 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. Mr Hoey was driven away from court amid high security Mr Hoey was also charged with conspiring to cause an explosion in Lisburn, County Antrim, three months before the Omagh attack, and being a member of a proscribed organisation, the Real IRA. A detective chief inspector told the court the accused had replied not guilty to each charge. He said he believed he could connect Mr Hoey with the charges. The detective told the court the alleged evidence against Mr Hoey was mostly of a forensic nature, including DNA in relation to three of the charges. He was remanded in custody until 2 October. Several relatives of the Omagh victims were in court for the hearing.

BBC 15 Sept 2003 School bombs are defused Schools were cordoned off during operation Army bomb experts have defused bombs left outside two schools in County Londonderry. They contained explosives but no detonator. The police are blaming loyalists for leaving the devices. Huge security operations have ended in both towns. Staff discovered the bombs on Monday in the playgrounds of the two Catholic schools shortly after 0800 BST. Kevin O'Neill, the caretaker of St Patrick's College, Dungiven, found the device in his school's car park. "I just opened up the school as normal at 0800BST this morning," he said. "I saw one device lying in the middle of the car park. It looked suspicious. I immediately phoned the police, they were there within 15 minutes. I just decided to evacuate the place." Almost 400 pupils were sent home during the Dungiven alert. Anne Scott, the principal of St Patrick's, said: "I am horrified to come in and find this. It is just dreadful. We can't send our children out to school on a Monday, but they are in danger." St Patrick's principal Anne Scott was "horrified" by the attack Ten miles away at St Mary's High School, Limavady, a bomb was found at the front of the school and the area was evacuated. The principal of St Mary's, Celine McKenna said: "The school is right on the main street. "We have 900 pupils, the controlled school next door has over 800 pupils making their way along the street early in the morning. We also have primary school children - a lot of traffic - so clearly a lot of lives were put at risk." During the alert in Limavady, Mass at a nearby church was cancelled. PSNI Inspector Bob Morrissey said: "This is absolutely disgusting to say the least. "Targeting children trying to get an education is a real low; putting children's lives at risk. It has to stop now." One theory which they are considering is that the devices may have been left in retaliation for vandalism at Dungiven Controlled Primary School last week when 30 windows were broken. .

Global

CICC International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties Convenes for Last Scheduled Meeting in UN Secretariat Ninety-Two Governments Meet to Move Forward the Establishment of the Court (New York, September 8, 2003) - The ninety-two governments to have ratified or acceded to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will convene this week for the second session of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) of the treaty. After nine years of ICC meetings at the UN headquarters in New York, beginning in 2004 the Assembly will hold its meetings in The Hague, The Netherlands, where this new international organization is based. The meeting this week, chaired by the ASP President, Jordanian Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, will address a broad range of agenda items and hear statements from top ICC officials. The ICC President, Judge Philippe Kirsch of Canada; Prosecutor, Mr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina; and Registrar, Mr. Bruno Cathala of France, are expected to report on the status of efforts to build the court and the first situations or cases that the ICC will investigate. "During its first year the Assembly elected eighteen judges, a prosecutor, registrar and took major steps in building what will become one of the most important international organizations ever established, " said William R. Pace, convenor of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. Pace added, "This progress has been achieved despite the fierce opposition of the most powerful government in the world, a testament to the growing support for democracy, justice and the rule of law in international affairs." Georgia became the ninety-second country to join the ICC Assembly of States Parties on Friday, September 5, by depositing its instrument of ratification of the Rome Statute at the UN Treaty Office. This second meeting of the ASP will address a range of topics, including: the budget for the second fiscal year of the ICC, the election of a Deputy Prosecutor (Investigations), the election of the Board of Directors to the Victims' Trust Fund, the definition of the crime of aggression, the recognition of the International Criminal Bar, and other oversight issues. The Deputy Prosecutor for investigations will be elected by secret ballot from a list of candidates provided to the ASP by the Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo in August. Those nominees were: Mr. Serge Brammertz of Belgium, Mr. Hassan Bubacarr Jallow of the Gambia and Mr. Vladimir Tochilovsky of the Ukraine. On September 3, 2003, a United Nations Security Council resolution appointed Mr. Hassan Bubacarr Jallow to Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; he subsequently withdrew has candidature for ICC Deputy Prosecutor through a communication to the ASP. -- Adele Waugaman :: Media Liaison Coalition for the International Criminal Court