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 m