Africa

Algeria

BBC 13 Aug 2001, Analysis: Can the Berber revolt survive? The death of a Berber youth in police custody sparked the current unrest By North Africa correspondent David Bamford Tension remains high in the Algerian region of Kabylia, nearly four months after the death in police custody of an ethnic Berber youth sparked Berber unrest that swept across the region. The crisis has severely shaken the civilian government of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, which was already being undermined by the continuation of the guerrilla war with Islamist militants in spite of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's two-year-old amnesty peace plan. But while the Berber unrest continues, does it have the strength to develop into a full-scale uprising? Berber activists were in action in Algiers again last week, attempting to disrupt a prestigious international youth festival, and, in their regional capital of Tizi Ouzou, besieging the headquarters of the local gendarmerie. Bouteflika: Threatened by Berbers and Islamic militants The police have been blamed on all sides for creating the crisis in the first place. The city streets of Algeria have seen nothing like this turmoil since the rise of the Islamist FIS political movement a decade ago, before it was forced underground by a military coup. The Berbers are very different from the Islamists in terms of their liberal political direction. Contradictory factions But that direction is being compromised by internal political divisions just as it looked as if the Algerian state was preparing to give way to at least some of the main Berber demands. These include cultural recognition, some autonomy, and the withdrawal of the paramilitary gendarmes. The Berber cause is being pulled in three different directions: By the two official Berber political parties - the FFS and RCD - who want to work within the system for improved rights By the village elders, whose grassroot strength can command hundreds of thousands to appear on the streets at any time By frustrated Berber youths, who seem bent on confrontation with the authorities at every opportunity, but who lack any coherent goals. The Berber cause is now dangerously vulnerable. As with the case of a previous Berber uprising in 1980 that became known as the 'Tizi Ouzou Spring', the current revolt may fizzle out or be crushed, having achieved little or nothing in terms of political liberalisation. Berbers march for their rights Bejaia has often been the focus of previous marches By North Africa correspondent David Bamford Tens of thousands of demonstrators from the Berber-speaking region of Kabylie have marched into the Soummam Valley, close to the town of Bejaia. The march was called by Berber leaders to further press their demands for cultural recognition and social justice in the wake of four months of clashes with security forces in which 60 civilians have been killed and thousands injured. The Berber march into the Soummam Valley, 300 kilometres (190 miles) east of Algiers, has been another show of strength to the authorities that Berber agitation will not go away. Organisers of the march called for a peaceful protest and though there are no reports of unrest, Berber elders are wary because youths have often taken it upon themselves to initiate confrontation with the police once formal protests are over. Crossroads Appeals for calm have not been much helped by the recent tour of Kabylie by the hardline Interior Minister, Yazid Zerhouni, who continues to accuse extreme leftists and foreign agents of being behind the unrest. Riot police have stopped previous marches from reaching Algiers This is despite the publication of a preliminary report under the auspices of President Bouteflika into the causes of the violence which firmly blames the military police for over-reacting during the early protests. Mr Bouteflika is at a crossroads right now in which he has to decide whether to open a dialogue with both the Berbers and the moderate Islamist movement to secure some social stability or to maintain a hard line against further political accommodation. Many believe his hands are already tied by conservative minds inside the military and civilian establishment, who believe any concessions now would be a sign of weakness. The date of 20 August is a key one in the history of the Algerian independence struggle. Played down It was on that day in 1956 that the National Liberation Front, the FLN, held a secret congress that set the framework for the next six years of civil war and subsequent military victory against the French. The congress was held in the Soummam valley, close to Bejaia. And its choice of location reflected the leading role played by the Berbers in the independence war, a role they argue which has been consistently played down by the country's majority Arab community.

Burundi

International Herald Tribune 22 Aug 2001 Get Moving Now to Prevent Genocide in Burundi Gareth Evans, BRUSSELS When Nelson Mandela at last coaxed a political settlement out of the Tutsi and Hutu parties in Burundi last month, a collective sigh of relief reached all the way to New York. Wracked by conflict since 1993, Burundi is a country where an explosion of communal violence on the scale of the genocidal horror in next door neighbor Rwanda has long been feared. But none of the key UN players - they will privately admit - has been prepared to contemplate protective intervention in Burundi, any more than they were willing to act in Rwanda in 1994. Maybe now the whole problem would just go away. But it is much too early to be complacent. The possibility of catastrophe is still real, not only because the political transition has still to be consolidated on the ground but, crucially, because the armed Hutu rebel groups remain outside the process. The Security Council has some important decisions to make when it meets on the issue this Friday, and international donors who have pledged but not yet delivered financial assistance need to get their act together fast. The Mandela agreement is certainly good news. It resolves the political transition issue which has plagued implementation of the Arusha agreement signed last year in the presence of then President Bill Clinton. The deal is for President Pierre Buyoya to remain in his post for the first half of the three-year transition period, due to begin on Nov. 1, while a representative of the Hutu parties will become president for the second half. Mr. Buyoya himself is now campaigning for changes that will see him out of office in May 2003. But there remains a big obstacle to Mr. Mandela's continuing peacemaking efforts. Without the involvement of the armed Hutu rebel groups there is no cease-fire, and there is risk of mass violence and the widening of a war that has already cost more than 200,000 lives. Central Africa's stability and the fate of a million refugees and internally displaced persons are the stakes. The rebels have legitimate grievances that have not been resolved in the Arusha negotiations, including reform of the army and security services. Mr. Mandela's facilitation team should urgently open an office in Bujumbura and review its strategy for cease-fire negotiations. The consultations so far held in Pretoria look dangerously cut off from realities on the ground. If the implementation of Arusha goes too far without the rebels, peace in Burundi will remain a distant dream A major international mobilization is urgently needed, first to strengthen the transition's credibility and second to help construct meaningful cease-fire negotiations. Trust in Burundi's immediate future must still be built, and momentum created for the Arusha agreement's implementation. The governments of the Congo, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are the keys to getting the rebels to the negotiating table. The first two have armed and trained the rebels. The third hosts refugee camps that are havens and staging areas for incursions into Burundi. Pressure must be applied to the Congo and Zimbabwe to cut off support for the rebels. Tanzania needs financial and technical help to increase its capacity to control cross-border activities. Further international action is also necessary to support the peace process inside Burundi. The UN Security Council must warn all extremists, Hutu and Tutsi alike, that attempts to undermine the Arusha agreement will not be tolerated. Two coup attempts in Bujumbura in four months are enough. Next time the culprits should be treated as international war criminals and their foreign assets frozen. The Security Council should immediately begin securing standby arrangements with troop contributors for the deployment of a peacekeeping monitoring force within 30 days of a cease-fire signing. This would send a clear signal that the international community is actively behind the peace process. The UN and key donors should also move to support the training and deployment of the special half-Tutsi, half-Hutu security force negotiated by Mr. Mandela, to be trained by South Africans and devoted to protecting transition institutions and the safety of the exiled political leaders who return to Burundi. The further critical element in the equation is money. A substantial portion of the $440 million that the international community pledged at the Paris donors' conference eight months ago must become a reality. Early emphasis should go toward facilitating repatriation and resettlement of refugees and internally displaced persons. Rapid injection of hard currency is also necessary to jump-start Burundi's economy and create confidence in the transition government. Nothing could be more meaningful than lower prices for food and other essential. Time and money are short. Burundi's donors now have less than 100 days to Nov. 1 to mobilize at least $100 million - and begin spending it - so as to restore confidence in the future of this traumatized country. A commitment of this size will bring hope, even with gunshots still heard in the hills around the capital. It is a cheap price to pay when the alternative is all too likely to be another massive humanitarian catastrophe. The writer is president of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, whose latest report on Burundi can be found at www.crisisweb.org. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

Côte d'Ivoire

BBC 28 August, 2001 Government delays Ivorian talks Ethnic violence exploded last year A proposed political reconciliation meeting in the Ivory Coast has been postponed for a month. The last two years have seen levels of political and ethnic violence unprecedented in Ivory Coast with at least 200 people killed. President Laurent Gbagbo announced earlier on Tuesday that he had invited all the main political figures in the country to a national reconciliation forum on 7 September But the swift decision to postpone it until 9 October suggest that the talks could already be foundering and turn into major embarrassment for the president. Government officials said they would give the reasons for the delay at a press conference on Wednesday. The leaders invited include: ousted president Henri Konan Bedie former military ruler General Robert Guei opposition leader Alassane Ouattara However, none of the three has yet confirmed he will attend and West Africa Correspondent Mark Doyle says it is possible that this is the real reason for the delay. The main opposition leader Alassane Outarra, has implied he will not come unless a ban on his standing for political office is lifted. Former military ruler, Robert Guei, has been vague, about his intentions, and there are also question marks over the attendance of former President Bedie. Over the past two years Ivorian politicians have been subject to mounting criticism from world leaders, and human rights groups alike, for the way in which ethnic violence has been encouraged. Ethnic hatred Meanwhile, the New-York based group Human Rights Watch has accused the security forces of targeting northerners and Muslims, seen as supporting opposition leader Alassane Ouattara in last year's elections. The report, "The New Racism" was released ahead of the United Nations World Conference against Racism, which opens in South Africa on Friday. Peter Takirambudde, head of HRW's Africa Division said: "The World Conference should condemn the Ivorian leaders who have promoted intolerance based on ethnic and religious differences." "Africans have often been the victims of racism but they can also be perpetrators," he said. The group says that more than 200 people were killed in the past year, while others were tortured, raped and arbitrarily detained. It calls this "state-sponsored violence" saying that the paramilitary police, or gendarmes, were largely responsible.

HRW 28 Aug 2001 Côte d'Ivoire: Politicians Incite Ethnic Conflict Racism Conference Should Condemn Abidjan's Xenophobia (New York, August 28, 2001) Leading government officials in Côte D'Ivoire have incited a violent xenophobia that is threatening to destabilize the country, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today. The World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, which begins in Durban on August 31, should condemn the Ivorian leaders who have promoted intolerance based on ethnic and religious differences. The 70-page report, The New Racism: The Political Manipulation of Ethnicity in Côte d'Ivoire, describes atrocities committed during presidential and parliamentary elections in October and December 2000, and is based on extensive interviews of victims and witnesses in Abidjan in late 2000 and early 2001. The report documents more than 200 killings, as well as torture, rape, and arbitrary detention. The political and social climate remains volatile today as intolerance and xenophobia continue to shape daily life. "Africans have often been the victims of racism, but they can also be its perpetrators," said Peter Takirambudde, Executive Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "In Côte D'Ivoire we see the kind of intolerance and bigotry that the Racism Conference is designed to address. The Ivorian leaders and security forces responsible for these atrocities must be widely condemned, and brought to justice." The election violence began with security forces targeting civilians on the basis of these political affiliation. Following Gbagbo's victory, security forces began targeting civilians solely and explicitly on the basis of their religion, ethnic group, or national origin. The overwhelming majority of victims come from the largely Muslim north of the country, or are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants to Côte d'Ivoire. About one-quarter of the population of Cote d'Ivoire was born abroad or is descended from immigrants. Opposition leader Alassane Ouattara and his party, the Rassemblement des Republicains (RDR), largely draw their support from these groups. In an incident that was widely reported in October 2000, security forces massacred fifty-seven young men, who were then buried in a mass grave in a forest on the outskirts of Abidjan. The new Human Rights Watch report uncovers many more atrocities committed by security forces during the electoral period. These include: The gunning down of civilians in several smaller massacres; The torture of hundreds of detainees held by police and gendarme; and The disappearance of at least fifteen young men and the sexual abuse by gendarmes and police of numerous young women. On August 3, 2001, following a flawed trial, a military tribunal in Abidjan acquitted the eight gendarmes accused of the October 2000 massacre on the grounds of "lack of evidence." The prosecutor says he will appeal the verdict and take the case to a civilian court where survivors might be more willing to testify. No other members of the security forces alleged to be responsible for abuses have been charged. Instead, President Gbagbo announced that a national "Forum of Reconciliation" would take place on September 7, 2000. International condemnation of the killings of the fifty-seven young men has largely focused on pursuing justice in this case alone, while there has been relatively little international attention to pursuing justice in the scores of other atrocities documented in the report. Since 1995, when then-President Henri Bédié first invoked a conception of "Ivorité," or "Ivorian-ness," there have been several outbreaks of violence against people of foreign descent. Military ruler General Guei, who briefly took power following a coup in late 1999, had introduced a constitutional amendment that required any presidential candidate to have both parents born in Côte d'Ivoire. The amendment was transparently designed to exclude Ouattara, the leader of the strongest opposition party. Just before the presidential elections, a controversial Supreme Court decision disqualified fourteen of the nineteen candidates on citizenship grounds, including Ouattara. Laurent Gbagbo, who claimed victory in the presidential elections when Guei fled the country in the midst of protests at his attempts to rig the result, used the same standard of parental citizenship to ensure that Ouattara was once again not allowed to run during the December parliamentary elections. "The exploitation of ethnic divisions for political gain is all too familiar in Africa," said Takirambudde. "When politicians incite hatred to further their own careers, the victims are the people they should be serving. Ivorian leaders should step back from this course now, before it is too late." Human Rights Watch urged President Gbagbo to direct the justice ministry to promptly investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible for these serious violations of human rights. Human Rights Watch further called on President Gbagbo to ensure that his tenure is characterized by the rule of law -- and not by military impunity. http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/08/cote-0828.htm

DR Congo

Boston Globe 23 August 2001 Horror in the Congo - Tales of atrocities emerge from hidden war Declan Walsh, Katanga, -- Even the vast bush country offers little cover from the depravities of war. Two weeks ago, an emaciated mother struggled into Manono, the town she had fled a year earlier, carrying a dying child in her arms, bringing terrible tales. "We ate wild fruit and leaves and slept under a tree," Wakibawa Kyakudju said, sitting in a corner of a crowded hospital. "The soldiers raped some women. Other people were murdered. When we arrived here, I was completely naked, not even underwear." She lifted the shirt of her 4-year-old son, Kibwe, showing scab-encrusted skin and swollen limbs, signs of severe malnutrition. "Really," she added quietly. "We have suffered." The horror of the Congo war, a bewilderingly complex conflict that started three years ago this month, is now coming to light. Accounts of mass rape, looting and the indiscriminate murder of civilians are emerging as aid workers, empowered by a recent U.N. troop deployment, are hearing directly from the victims of the world's largest war. The grisly statistics have been around for some time: 2 1/2 million people have died, mostly from war-related famine and disease, according to the U.S.- based International Rescue Committee. The United Nations estimates that another 1 million have been displaced from the east, where fighting has been most prevalent. The true nature of the Congo war has remained obscured, largely because it involves six countries and at least four armed groups, and because much of the country was out of reach to Western aid agencies for security reasons. Some of those who have ventured out have paid the ultimate price, such as six Red Cross workers who were hacked to death in a remote region in April. But now, in the southeastern province of Katanga, security is slowly improving, mostly because of an injection of confidence from the U.N. deployment. And a new aid operation slowly is gathering steam. As a result, thousands of people like Wakibawa Kyakudju have come out from their hiding places and given observers a rare glimpse into the mayhem and suffering caused by the war. "In this war, nothing is sacred and nobody is neutral," said Claude Jibidar of the U.N. World Food Program in Kongolo, where another hospital is full of starving children with thin hair and glazed eyes. "The civil population is everybody's enemy. You wonder who is fighting for whom." Officially, the fighting in Congo is on hold. An agreement between Joseph Kabila's government and the main rebel movements is taking root, and thousands of troops have been withdrawn from front-line positions. But inside the vast eastern sector, which is nominally under rebel control, a deadly "second war" continues to rage, involving a variety of soldiers driven by nationalism, ethnic hatred or simple greed. Its victims are almost always civilians. The fight is between the Congolese Rally for Democracy rebels, who are heavily supported by the Rwandan Army and despised by the local population, and the Mayi-Mayi, a traditional village militia that once believed water protected them from enemy fire. In certain areas, such as South Kivu, the Mayi-Mayi have developed into a popular resistance force. In other places, such as Katanga, the fighters seem to be little more than bandits. In the village of Sola, 150 miles north of Manono, a Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Raphael Katunda, described a recent incident. "Our local chief was denounced as a rebel collaborator," Katunda said. "When they killed him, they cut off his hand, tied it on a string, and paraded it around for everyone to see." The conflict is complicated by the presence of other militia. The Interahamwe, a group of Hutu extremists involved in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, are still roaming the forests of eastern Congo, preying on local villagers and committing atrocities. International observers say this group must be disarmed if there is any hope for peace. Rwandan citizens, meanwhile, have profited handsomely by exploiting Congo's vast reserves of coltan, a mineral used in mobile phones and in children's handheld electronic game devices. "It seems to be the trend that wherever there are coltan mines, there are Rwandans," a Western aid worker said in the largest eastern town, Bukavu. For now, aid agencies are trying to reach those most affected by the fighting. The arrival of more than 2,000 armed U.N. troops has allowed workers to reach remote towns such as Kongolo and Manono and deliver humanitarian aid. But the agencies now have another problem -- money. The United Nations says it needs $112 million to feed 1.3 million war victims through the end of next year. So far, the agency has received $37 million, most of it from the United States. Three international aid agencies issued a joint report last week detailing the gulf between the scale of the crisis and the lukewarm response of international donors. "What is being done right now is so minuscule," said Vincent Lalai of Oxfam, one of the agencies involved, "that it's not even a drop in the ocean."

Guardian (UK) 24 Aug 2001 Apocalypse now - Our efforts to bring peace to the Great Lakes have been focused on Rwanda. It's time we helped the Congo too, By MP Oona King. On the streets of Kinshasa, the most notable products are coffin marquees decorated with brightly coloured ribbons. The death industry is buoyant. There are 2,500 doctors to cover a population of 50m. On a recent trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of the first delegation of British MPs to visit, I am told by the health minister that in the eastern Congo, 300 women die in childbirth each day. I find this hard to believe, but when I speak to a group of street children in Kinshasa, none of them have ever seen a doctor. "No money, no doctor," they explain. "When we get sick we pour water on our heads, and go to sleep." A UN World Food Programme plane flies us to Goma, a town that symbolises the international community's heinous reaction to the Rwandan massacre. Paul Kagame, now Rwanda's president, defeated the "genocidaires" - known as the interahamwe - who then fled to the Congo. Once there, the UN "humanitarian" programme inadvertently facilitated their rearmament. They remain in eastern Congo. The Rwandans argue - with some justification - that the interahamwe's presence as an active fighting force legitimises Rwanda's occupation of Congolese territory. Until the Congolese government is capable of neutralising the interahamwe threat, Rwanda must do the job instead. However, the presence of the interahamwe can never legitimise Rwanda's alleged rape of the Congo's resources. The horror of genocide does not confer the right to inflict suffering - a point lost on some Israelis and Rwandans. We heard numerous accounts of Rwandan soldiers involved in the displacement of Congolese civilians living in mineral-rich areas. The soldiers aren't the only ones with an interest in the Congo's bounty. Anyone with a mobile phone or PlayStation has an interest. The mineral coltan is the magic ingredient that makes the manufacture of these products possible. Globalisation means that a conscripted child labourer in a Congolese mine is linked to a teenage PlayStation addict in Bethnal Green. The geographical location of Ugandan and Rwandan troops tells the story: their military positions mirror lucrative mines. Exports of precious minerals from Rwanda have jumped from 97 tonnes before 1996, when the Rwandan army backed Laurent Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire to take power in Kinshasa, to 224 tonnes after. Wherever the Congo's riches are going, they are not going to the people. We visit a health centre in the hills around Masisi which serves 7,000 people with one nurse and one bed. Surgical equipment consists of a few scissors. There is a fridge for vaccines but it's broken, and medicine cannot be stored. On the bed lies a woman in labour. It's a breech birth. The nurse explains that the woman can't be taken to hospital because there is no transport, so she will die. "W e'll take her in our Land Rover," volunteers Andrew Robathan (Tory MP for Blaby). Impossible, says the nurse, it's not just a problem of transport. She has to be accompanied by a family member to pay for her. With out money, she won't be treated. "We've got dollars, we'll pay." It's not as simple as that, she can't be taken without her husband, but he hasn't been seen since this morning; you don't understand the local situation. "I understand," says Eric Joyce (Labour MP for Falkirk West), "that she's going to die. For God's sake, we've got five Land Rovers, let's just take her to hospital!" David Lammy (Labour MP for Tottenham) points out the irony that two of our five Land Rovers are emblazoned with "Save the Children." I have visited enough disaster zones to know that local aid workers are driven mad by bleeding-heart political tourists. We arrive for 48 hours and think we know best. A local aid worker tries to explain: "It's not that simple. The hospital doesn't even have food, so every patient needs someone accompanying them with a sack of potatoes." At this point, bleeding-heart political tourist or not, I snap. "You mean this woman is going to die because we can't find a bag of potatoes?!" Maybe the health minister in Kinshasa is right. I'm amazed that any pregnant women survive. Finally, a solution is found. Later, we hear that her Land Rover has encountered a car crash. Five seriously injured people are piled into the Land Rover with the pregnant woman. Whether any of them are still alive is anyone's guess. Compare and contrast the scale of our efforts to bring peace in Kosovo, Israel, the Gulf and East Timor to those in Africa. Africans are off our radar screen. The governments that have done most to bring peace to the Great Lakes region are the British and the Dutch. But our efforts have been almost exclusively directed towards Rwanda. We must bring greater equilibrium to our policy in the region. Without peace in the Congo, we will continue to see refugees arriving in Tower Hamlets, Glasgow and elsewhere. The UN must increase the level of its response, and so must we. We responded belatedly in Rwanda to what was an apocalypse then. In the Congo there is an apocalypse now. • Oona King is Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow.

Kenya

The Nation (Nairobi) OPINION August 20, 2001 The Country Must Remain United Or Perish, by George Mwicigi Even the most ardent proponents of the majimbo proposal have not come out clearly to define the concept, how it will work in Kenya, and how it will impact on the citizenry. Currently, Kenya is beset by a myriad of problems, many of which find root in bad governance since independence. Lack of public accountability through the years has created a situation where the country has been used as an enterprise to foster individual and partisan economic and political interests at the expense of statehood. The 1999 census was Kenya's sixth since 1948 and the fourth since independence. The census figures indicated that the country's population has grown from five million in 1948, to nine million in 1962, 11 million in 1969, 15 million in 1979, 21 million in 1989 and 28.7 million in 1999. The census results also reflected a very high rate of inter-ethnic diversity, especially in urban areas. Today, Kenya finds herself sinking deeper into the abyss of poverty. Her economic performance last year was negative (-) 0.2 per cent of the GDP. Close to 65 per cent of the population or more live in abject poverty. Politically, Kenya is now more polarised than at any time in its history. Ethnic animosity and racial intolerance are at a peak, and all that is required is some reckless utterances to sparka conflagration. The calls for majimboism could be the trigger. Human and economic repercussions These are facts of life and not mere fears as has been amply proved by the ethnic skirmishes (largely politically incited) and the flight of Asians in recent years, both of which have had profound human and economic repercussions. When Kenya became independent in June, 1963, it had a unitary bicameral parliamentary government with certain powers devolved from the centre to seven new regional authorities. The regional structure provided for elected assemblies with powers to administer land-use, raise their own finances, provide such services as education and health, and run their own civil service, including the police force. The Regional Secretary (equivalent to the Provincial Commissioner), was an appointee of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which held the regional administration portfolio. Majimboism was introduced in April, 1963, to address the fears and uncertainties of some Kenyans who feared the predominant Kikuyu-Luo Kanu leadership under President Kenyatta. Once these fears were put to rest through assurances of a congenial unitary government, majimboism became irrelevant. Those calling for majimbo are rekindling the same fears. The uncertainties that fuelled the clamour for majimboism were mainly from white settlers, whose political Ieaders - Mr Michael Blundell, Mr Wilfred Havelock and Mr R. S. Alexander - were convinced that a Kanu government led by former KAU nationalist and Mau Mau detainee would overwhelm white power and adopt radical, or communistic land policy. Blundell and Havelock convinced Kadu leaders that an African government with Kikuyus and Luos as a majority would marginalise the smaller tribes. They knew they could not stem the tide of independence, but they could divide Kenya into autonomous regions. Under such arrangements, Kadu would control three states - Rift Valley, Western and Coast regions. It appears as if history is repeating itself, with the main characters in Kadu (now in Kanu) reviving their quest. In reality, however, the regions never had time, nor the opportunity to exercise these powers because by June 1964, five of them could not raise salaries for civil servants amongst other financial obligations. Inter-regional migratory patterns Between 1963 and 1978 when President Kenyatta died, his Government had encouraged Kenyans to buy the farms of former white settlers. It had also established a settlements fund to resettle those who had been displaced by the colonial government. This exercise resulted in inter-regional migratory patterns which brought a rich inter-ethnic mixture across traditional tribal homelands. The same land policy continued throughout the Moi Government, but with less emphasis on largescale tribal resettlement. This means that large portions of ethnic populations such as the Kikuyu, Luo, Kamba, Luhya and others today find themselves outside their ancestral homelands and in territories which could become hostile jimbos. Majimbo proponents argue that federalism would not entail the eviction of the so-called non-indigenous people from their migrant jimbo. They should perhaps enlighten Kenyans on what is happening to the report compiled by the Judicial Commission on Tribal Clashes led by Mr Justice Akiwumi two years ago, and what is going on in the killing fields of Molo, Laikipia, Enoosupukia, Gucha-Transmara, Tana River and pockets of the North-Eastern Province. There seems to be mass eviction and other acts of ethnic cleansing even before majimboism is official policy. The lessons learnt in the 1960s were very good. The infant regions could not finance their survival without funds from the central government. Some 40 years later, the central government is literally broke and has to pass the hat around from Washington to Osaka via the Paris Club. How will small political and economic mini-states survive without the financial umbrella provided to Kenya by donors? Afraid for their overnight fortunes Majimboism is being propagated by ethnic chauvinistic plutocrats who hold key positions in Government and parastatal bodies, and who enjoy lucrative state contracts to import sugar and other industrial goods which are killing indigenous agriculture and manufacturing industries. These people are afraid for their overnight fortunes and their continued plunder of state coffers when Moi's term of office expires. They should not instil fear and despondency among their communities with the argument that the communities' future and security lies in majimboism. Kenya's ethnic diversity should be an asset, not a liability. During the colonial era and in the first decade of independence certain economic policies were put in place. Each province had specific economic activities which brought in wealth for its inhabitants. Nairobi was an industrial base. Central Province was agricultural with cash crops such as coffee, tea and diary industry taking the lead. So was Eastern Province especially around Mt. Kenya. North-Eastern had livestock as a major player in the beef industry before the Kenya Meat Commission collapsed. The Rift Valley was both agricultural and pastoral. Nyanza led in fish and cotton production while Western came in with sugar. The Coast had the Port of Mombasa, supplemented by marine life as its economic lifeline. Today, the provinces which would form the basis of a jimbo, are to a very large extent, economically unstable. The Kenya Constitution Review Commission has a responsibility to protect Kenyans from destruction through politically expedient ways of covering up for political inadequacies and failures.

News 24 (South Africa) 1 Aug 2001 Kenya 'shelters' genocide suspect Jean Baptiste Kayigamba Kigali - Rwandan authorities on Wednesday said a wealthy Rwandan accused of helping plan the 1994 genocide lived in Nairobi and Kenya should arrest him. An official of Rwanda's External Security Organisation intelligence agency said exiled Hutu millionaire Felicien Kabuga lived in Nairobi under the protection of influential Kenyans. "If there were real co-operation by the Kenyan government, Kabuga could be arrested any time, because his whereabouts are known to the Kenyan authorities," the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. He said the ESO had records of phone calls Kabuga had made from Nairobi to relatives in Brussels, among other evidence. "It is deplorable that some countries, Rwanda's neighbours, and even those pretending to be our friends continue to show very little or no co-operation in netting and extraditing well- known genocide suspects who have found a safe haven in those countries," said Rwandan Justice Minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo. Kenya ‘not aware’ of Kabuga’s presence In Nairobi, Kenyan Foreign Minister Chris Obure said the government was not aware that Kabuga lived in Kenya. "The government would be prepared to co-operate in extraditing Felicien Kabuga if such extradition is sought and should it be proved that he is anywhere within our jurisdiction," Obure said in answer to questions at a joint news conference with visiting French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine. Rwanda's Tutsi-led government has long complained that the international community has worked far harder to arrest alleged war criminals in the Balkans and other regions than their equivalents in Rwanda, despite what they call a profound moral obligation created by the United Nations' catastrophic decision in 1994 to withdraw UN troops as the genocide began. Rewards offered Kabuga is one of 13 Rwandans named this year as key genocide suspects by the US State Department, which has offered rewards of up to $5 million for information leading to their arrest. The 13 have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda on charges related to the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu extremists massacred at least 800 000 Rwandan Tutsis and their Hutu moderate allies. Diplomats in the region said the exact charges against Kabuga were being kept confidential so as not to prejudice efforts to capture him. Rwanda welcomed this month's arrest in Europe of four prominent genocide suspects but says many others remain free in Africa under the protection of African governments. Told Hutus where Tutsis were hiding Kabuga was president and part-owner of the Radio Television Milles Collines media company which ran a radio station that fanned ethnic hatred against Rwanda's Tutsis, told Hutus where Tutsis were to be found and offered advice on how to kill them. Kabuga, who also controlled many of Rwanda's tea and coffee plantations and factories, is now believed by diplomats to help fund the activities of Congo-based Rwandan Hutu Interahamwe militiamen who are fighting Rwanda's current government. Like Protais Zigiranyirazo, one of the four arrested in Europe, Kabuga was a member of the "akazu" (little house), a small but powerful ruling elite of Hutu family members and relatives who plotted the extermination of Tutsis. The Rwandan intelligence official added Rwandan Hutu rebel leaders and genocide suspects Augustin Bizimungu and Tharcisse Renzaho were living in Kinshasa and were in effect part of the high command of the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bizimungu, chief of staff of the Rwandan army at the time of the genocide, and Renzaho, then governor of the capital Kigali, helped direct the 1994 killings, Rwandan officials alleged. "Pressure should be put on Kabila to hand them over," one official said, referring to DRC President Joseph Kabila.

Nigeria

San Francisco Chronicle 1 August 2001 Nigeria's war of terror Women, children being mutilated in brutal ethnic conflict, by Ivan Watson, Lafia, Nigeria -- One-year-old Hope Anya lay silently in bed, watching the world around her with large, frightened eyes. Adhesive bandages arced across her swollen belly. Hope had been partially disemboweled when she arrived at Lafia Hospital earlier this month. During a dawn raid on the nearby village of Tudun Adabu, attackers slashed her stomach with a machete after killing both of her grandparents. Hope was just one of 13 patients in the children's ward of Lafia Hospital. All under the age of 10, these were the youngest victims in Nigeria's latest ethnic war. Nigeria, which is Africa's most populous country with 123 million people, is also one of the most diverse, with more than 200 ethnic groups. But extreme poverty and a stagnant economy have aggravated tensions, leading to clashes along ethnic and religious fault lines. The unsolved murder and subsequent beheading of the traditional leader of the Asara ethnic group in June aggravated a conflict between ethnic Tivs and other local tribes in Nasarawa state. According to the Nigerian Red Cross, the latest raids and revenge killings have displaced more than 55,000 people. Police say more than 100 people in the state have been killed in clashes during the past month. Local doctors say most of the victims were women and children. Nasarawa state is nestled in the hills and fertile farmlands of central Nigeria that are known as the Middle Belt. Though Tivs have lived in the Middle Belt for centuries, they originated elsewhere in Africa and are widely seen as newcomers and unwanted settlers by the dozens of other indigenous ethnic groups in the area, including the Asara, Eggon and Fulani tribes. The "Tiv wars" are just one of the many ethnic and religious conflicts that periodically erupt in Nigeria. Last October, hundreds died in the commercial capital of Lagos when members of two of Nigeria's largest ethnic groups, the Hausas and the Yorubas, clashed. Thousands were killed in 1999 during Muslim- Christian riots in the city of Kaduna. And for years, the country's oil-rich yet impoverished Niger Delta has been in a constant state of armed uprising, as youths from a handful of small ethnic groups have fought for their share of the region's rich oil revenues. Since the transition from decades of disastrous military dictatorship to civilian government two years ago, elected President Olusegun Obasanjo has tried to combat Nigeria's fractious tribal divisions by promoting ideas of unity and national integration. Despite his efforts, ethnic warfare continues to flare up. "It's because of the failure of the state," said Julius Ihonvbere, a Nigerian program officer at the New York offices of the Ford Foundation. "If you go to the city, the government has no welfare program for you. It is your ethnic group that will take care of you until you find a job. When you die in the city, the government has no program to take your corpse back to the village. It is your ethnic group that does it." More than 50 people were killed in the raid early last month on Tudun Adabu, a community of ethnic Eggons. Survivors said the attackers were Tivs. They said they recognized some of the attackers as neighbors -- even friends -- from surrounding villages. In the women's ward of Lafia Hospital, Halina Yakobo sat upright in her bed and described the attack in the local Hausa language. "At about 5 a.m., we heard gunshots and we started running," she said through a translator. Yakobo, who has been partially blind from birth, had little chance to escape. She and her two children were quickly caught by a man wielding an ax. "He just gave me a deep cut on this hand. But the other hand, he just cut it off. So I fell down and he took the ax again, trying to attack me on the head," she said. "He also attacked the two children, (saying) that they should kill them. 'Kill them, they are monkeys.' " Yakobo's 2-year-old son Joseph wore a bloody bandage covering a gash on the right side of his face. His 4-year-old sister, Anatu, had a long cut on the top of her head. Barely an hour's drive away, thousands of Tivs who recently fled Nasarawa state when they in turn came under attack were living in a former school now serving as the Daudu refugee camp, just inside neighboring Benue state. "What is mama carrying?" asked the camp's doctor, Sunday Ochogwu, as Mkaanen Aondokume, a small Tiv woman in her 60s, shuffled into his makeshift office. Aondokume's right arm was wrapped in a large bundle of rags. A nurse unwrapped her wrist, and the stench from a heavily infected wound filled the doctor's small office. During a raid on her village, an ethnic Fulani man cut Aondokume on the head, the arm and the back of the neck and then left her for dead. It took her a week of walking and traveling by public bus to reach the camp. The doctor said she would probably lose her right hand due to the infection. "This is a war on the Tivs," said Peter Igache, the leader of a Tiv youth group, amid the crying children and piles of hastily gathered belongings in the refugee camp. "We will not go (back to Nasarawa state) because we are fearing for our lives." Ethnic conflict in the area is not new. In 1992, more than 5,000 people were reported killed in the Middle Belt during a virtual civil war between Tivs and another group called the Jukuns. "These things are mainly economic, mainly issues of high levels of poverty, " said Labaran Maku, a spokesman for the Nasarawa state government. In Nigeria, the average person struggles to earn just $300 a year. "So any little thing can flare up," said Maku. "People are hungry; people can't get sufficient opportunities. They want to address their immediate problems." Nasarawa's governor, Abdullahi Adamu, called the fighting during the past month a "bitter lesson." He quickly created reconciliation committees and organized emergency meetings between leaders of the rival ethnic groups. But the conflict followed them there; last week a crowd of villagers attacked Nasarawa's deputy governor, as well as the traditional leaders from the Tiv and a rival community, during a reconciliation meeting. Although Adamu said he was trying to bring back the Tivs who fled his state, he acknowledged that he did not have the resources or the manpower to stop the killing in remote villages. Some of the responsibility for the ethnic animosity also lies with Britain, Nigeria's former colonial ruler. In 1914, London created Nigeria by arbitrarily drawing borders around a grab bag of independent kingdoms, sultanates and city-states. In the years after Nigeria won independence in 1960, Nigerian politics focused more on ethnicity than ideology. But much of the fighting now is driven by local struggles for economic or political clout. "What is happening is people are abusing ethnicity and religion to promote some other interest they have. It's simply an excuse. What is at stake is power," said Chinua Achebe, the celebrated Nigerian author of the novel "Things Fall Apart." "This is where leadership of a high order comes in. And we've not had too much time (since the 1999 hand-over from military rule to elected government) to address this seriously." Achebe, also the author of a scathing 1983 manifesto titled "The Trouble With Nigeria," said the country "has certain clear prospects of success if it could keep it together. But if it can't work, then perhaps it may be better to split up into tiny postage-stamp states."

This Day (Lagos) August 29, 2001 Christian Association Raises Alarm Over Another Crisis in Kaduna Agaju Madugba in and Tokunbo Adejoja Kaduna And Bauchi Kaduna appears set to explode again as the state branch of the Youth Christian Association of Nigeria (Youth CAN) warned yesterday that it would no longer fold its arms against allegations of selective killing of Christians in parts of the state. This alarm was raised just as Christians in Tawafa Balewa and Bogoro local governments called on President Olusegun Obasanjo to declare a state of emergency in the councils. In February and May last year, violence had swept through Kaduna metropolis and environs as indigenous Muslims and Christians in the state clashed over alleged plans then by the state government to introduce the Sharia law. "Government should beef up security all over the state to protect Christians and prevent a re-currence of last year's crisis, the Kaduna youth CAN said at a press conference, adding that, "CAN shall continue to resist all forms of religious intolerance in the state as nobody has any monopoly of violence in Kaduna State." Specifically, CAN alleged that Christians in Narayi, a suburb of Kaduna and Kateri village, located on the Kaduna-Abuja road, have been subjected to various forms of intimidation. "Two weeks ago, also, and precisely on August 8, 2001 or thereabouts, a bomb was discovered planted in Narayi village, a predominantly Christian settlement. It took the combined effort and ingenuity of the police bomb disposal outfit and the army to discover and remove the said bomb," said the chairman. Chairman of Youth CAN, Mr. Danladi Yerima and Secretary, Mr. Sunday Oibe, who jointly addressed the press conference at the CAN secretariat on Ibrahim Taiwo Road. According to the group, "the most devastating of this surreptitious plan by the Muslims is the wanton destruction of lives and property in Birnin-Gwari (on the Kaduna-Lagos Road) on August 21, 2001. "A corpse was discovered in Birnin-Gwari and the Muslims concluded that whoever killed that person must be a Christian. Muslims went on the rampage and as at August 22, 2001, three Christians had been confirmed slaughtered. "Two of these victims had earlier taken refuge at the Birnin-Gwari police station but were brought out by the rampaging Muslims, and murdered in cold blood, while other Christians fled into the bush for safety. "There has been no word from government and till now, no arrest has been made." Apparently alarmed that the situation may recur, CAN demanded the unconditional withdrawal of all Christian civil servants working in Birnin-Gwari and their reposting to more humane areas as a panacea to peaceful co-existence in that war-torn environment. A text of the press briefing read in part: "The attention of the Youth CAN, Kaduna State has been drawn, once more to another round of skirmishes resulting in unwarranted killings of Christians in certain parts of Kaduna State. "Kaduna State has hardly fully recuperated from the blood bath of year 2000 when incidence of brutal attacks were unleashed on law-abiding Christians in certain parts of the state. "CAN deems it proper to bring to the notice of both government and the general public that it can no longer continue to embrace peace when its members are being harassed, intimidated, maimed and killed by intolerant and fanatical Muslim faithfuls. "This release has become imperative particularly as it is apparent that the state government is pretending to be ignorant of these happenings even in the face of torture and elimination of Christians. "We call on Christians to be clam, law-abiding and pray for the unity and progress of Kaduna State." Meanwhile, the Nigeria CAN in Tafawa-Balewa and Bogoro Local Government Areas of Bauchi State, has called on Obasanjo to declare a state of emergency in the area. This followed the persistent killings of Christians in the areas by people suspected to be Chadian Jihadists. A statement jointly signed by the chairmen and secretaries of CAN in the two local governments, Reverend Markus Musa, Micheal Lulu, Rev. Eluwa and Yunusa Manzo respectively stated that the call became necessary because the state government was in support of the killings in order to exterminate Christians in the state. This development, the statement noted, is not only a threat to national security, but to the corporate existence of Nigeria. While noting that the Muslim Jihadists first invaded the two local governments between June and August this year when the state government attempted to extend the implementation of Sharia to the areas, the statement added that the invasion led to the death of over 200 Christians and destruction of properties worth millions of naira. Justifying the call for declaration of state of emergency, CAN said that there was actually a breakdown of law, public peace and security in the areas, arguing that there can only be restoration of peace and security through an urgent constitutional measure. It would be recalled that religious crisis broke out in the two local governments early this year following attempt by the state government to extend the implementation of Sharia to the areas which have a high concentration of Christians.

Rwanda

Independent (UK) 4 Aug 2001 Rwanda warns of Hutus preparing second genocide By Alex Duval Smith in Kigali. Rwanda's Tutsi-led government is warning of preparations for a new genocide by militias of the Hutu majority based in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. In the latest alarmist statement, the defence minister of Rwanda, Emmanuel Hayarimana, said more than 40,000 rebels were marching from their Congolese bases at Kabalo, some 280 miles from the south-west Rwandan border, and from Kamina, 500 miles from the frontier. The Rwandans are parading Hutu prisoners in support of their claims. In the face of increasing international scepticism, Rwanda's military government needs to justify the presence of 11,000 of its troops in the DRC. Pierre Habimana is one of the prisoners. If this Hutu's captors are to be believed, their prisoner was part of the advance guard of the foiled second genocide, a repeat of the savage machete rampage that left up to 800,000 Tutsis dead in three months in 1994. The prisoner clutched his crucifix as he spoke. "We had a revelation that the land was going to be ours," said the Interahamwe militia leader, captured last month by the Rwandan military. "It was a sign from the Lord, and so all means were acceptable to conquer the land." Because of the threat of people such as Habimana, still hiding in the Congolese jungle just a few kilometres away, Rwanda can justify its role in the three-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Forty-year-old Habimana, whose nom de guerre is Bemera, is in military custody and must negotiate his way out of death by firing squad. So he may, for the benefit of journalists brought by his captors to meet him at a hilltop barracks, be overstating the size of the Hutu offensive. But Colonel Bemera ("My name signified 'Those who believe'") may be telling the truth. "I was the chief of staff of Alir 1, which was born through God's work in the refugee camps in Congo. Alir means Armée de Liberation du Rwanda. A Congolese woman at Masisi camp told us her vision - if we continued to kill the pigs belonging to the locals, we would perish. But God was ready to give us Rwanda and it was our mission to return." Thousands of Rwandans fled to neighbouring Congo during and after the 1994 genocide. They were Tutsis, the minority élite caste that had been the target of the frenzied murder, as well as their Hutu friends. Others who fled included the Interahamwe (the killers). Many have now returned to Rwanda and the stragglers are increasingly suspected of having something to hide or planning a final solution. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which has governed the small country since crushing the genocidaires in July 1994, claims that Alir is acting with the support of Joseph Kabila and his allies from Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Burundi. The accusation is serious: to gain military advantage over Rwandan troops occupying the DRC, Mr Kabila is allegedly prepared to destabilise Rwanda by raising the spectre of a new genocide. "The Interahamwe are unrepentant," said the RPA deputy chief of staff, Brigadier-General James Kabarebe, at his Kigali headquarters. "They want to finish the job. If two or three of them are picked up in Europe from time to time, just imagine how many are hiding in Congo. They have received airdrops of arms from Kabila." Elaborating with a surprising amount of detail, he added: "Alir 1 consists of at least 13,000 men but it has been neutralised now. Alir 2, which is preparing an offensive from the south, is made up of 40,000 men." In his hilltop prison near the capital, Habimana, wearing a new, lime-green shirt and jeans, sat behind his interrogation table and outlined his view of events in 1994. "In Alir, we do not use the word genocide. What happened in 1994 was, to us, a massacre. To have been a genocide, the killings would have had to be premeditated. There was incitement to hatred but there was not a pre-planned annihilation of the Tutsis. They were killed because of their possessions and because they were at war with the government. "I was innocent of genocide. I was like a technician. I was defending the government of the day. It is not true that we wanted to bring back the genocide. We Hutus just want our power back," he said. It is clear from his vocabulary that Habimana has spent the last seven years in the jungle. Rwandans living at home since the genocide do not use the H-word or the T-word. Such talk is detonator rhetoric and everyone knows that only the R-word, reconciliation, will keep international aid flowing. So the rebels captured at the same time as Habimana went to a "re-education camp". Yet even as the Rwandan military government is engaged in a grandiose exercise to prove to the world it can turn the other cheek, every fibre in its being is imbued with the terrible fear of the Interahamwe and the plethora of militias and mercenaries it can enlist. That is why Rwanda will never fully pull out of the DRC - and why there cannot be stability in this key region of Africa - until there is the international will for thousands of United Nations peace-keepers and observers to launch a disarmament programme in the Congo that will be the biggest the world has ever seen.

South Africa

Al-Ahram (Egypt) 30 August 2001, Issue No.549 In a fast changing world With all eyes on Durban and the issue of race, Pierre Sané and Jérôme Bindé look to the hidden dangers of modern science and the trends of globalisation Over the last two centuries, pseudo-biological theories of "racial" inequality have often been enlisted in an attempt to bolster ideologies of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance. In recent decades, however, the inanity of these theories has been demonstrated. Science, and modern genetics in particular, has constantly affirmed the unity of the human species, and denied that the notion of race has any foundation. Article 1 of the "Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights", states that the human genome "underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity". This declaration was unanimously adopted at UNESCO's 29th General Conference on 11 November 1997, and then by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1998. Yet racism and racial discrimination have hardly vanished. They have not only survived the scientific deconstruction of the concept of race, but even seem to be gaining ground in most parts of the world. Powerful transformations are currently under way in the world's technology, economy, politics, society and culture. These transformations, associated with the third industrial revolution in history -- the revolution of new technologies -- are often summed up by the word "globalisation" and seem to favour the spread of new forms of racism and discrimination. Social inequality and uncertainty have increased in the age of globalisation, as have explosive communitarian reactions and the flaring up of passions regarding ethnic, national, "racial" and religious identities. In every region of the world, these passions increasingly give way to violence, all too often in fanatic guises that end in massacres among neighbouring populations. Thus, even as we celebrate the dismantling of institutional apartheid in South Africa, in most regions of the world, we are forced to recognise that various forms of social and urban apartheid are on the rise. Very often these forms are based on a structural discrimination, which is racial in character; they can be explicit or implicit, but it is remarkable that they no longer need to rely on conscious reference to racist thematics. In this universe of walled-up housing developments and impenetrable neighbourhoods, the very concept of public space -- which is inseparable from the concept of democracy -- is on the wane, and sometimes even disappearing. Forms of social, urban and educational apartheid have spread rapidly, and they comprise a system of "invisible racism" and veiled discrimination as formidable as more outward varieties. For these reasons, the questions of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance need to be thought out anew, in a forward-looking way. Racism and racial discrimination have often been carried to their farthest extremes in countries with the highest levels of education. Contemporary scientific progress, and particularly the gene revolution, has raised great hopes but also alarming questions. In the temptation to perfect our species, are we not seeing the return of eugenics -- more specifically, a commercial form of eugenics that threatens to create a "two-track humanity"? Have the risks been properly understood concerning humanity's dream of taking control of itself -- or should we say, of being controlled by those who master the new procedures? Does the progress in modern genetics not threaten to lead to that "brave new world" prophesied by Aldous Huxley, with a new species of genetically engineered "supermen" dominating masses of "subhumans" excluded from the new genetic paradise? More than ever, ethics needs to keep step with scientific progress and technological applications. It must be determined whether there is a risk in identifying characteristic gene sequences in populations living in a given geographic area: could this lead to the use of data for purposes of racial or ethnic discrimination? Also, what are the risks that new techniques of human reproduction will lead to discrimination in the selection of embryos? Selection may be employed to favour certain phenotypes, so that fewer people will be born with a genetic profile which is deemed undesirable; or on the contrary, to favour the birth of individuals with desirable characteristics, for example, the physical qualities needed to perform a certain kind of work. Research on human genetic heritage could increase the temptation to deny the existence of human liberty. Many geneticists today are studying human genome sequences which may predispose individuals to certain kinds of behaviour (depression, rage, the use of memory, etc.). If individual and group behaviour is reduced to biology, we are in danger of being dispossessed of the concept of human liberty. New forms of racism and discrimination based on the idea of inequality among cultures threaten to emerge in the 21st century. These tacit forms of racism and racial discrimination are essentially structural. But in the impoverished ghettos of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, they have already led to conditions of social and urban apartheid. This new social and cultural racism has almost no need for an ideology and an articulated discourse. It can, of course, be reinforced by inequalities in revenue and by conflicts related to a person's sense of belonging to a social category. But it may also converge with another threat: the possible emergence of a new kind of eugenics, based primarily on consumerism and commerce, and leading to new forms of discrimination fostered by the progress made in modern genetics and the new, almost demiurgic powers of technology and science. Preventive measures need to be taken at the international and national levels, especially with regard to education, bioethics and urban policies. We must not overestimate the role of education in the fight against new forms of racism and discrimination -- it would be unfair to expect educational institutions to cure the ills which society itself has been unable to face -- but education could be a precious tool in this struggle, so long as we refuse the various forms of "educational apartheid" which are currently being implemented. Educational programmes, textbooks and pedagogical methods should be revamped in order to meet these new challenges. Safeguards must also be established to prevent misapplications of the new genetics. There is a real danger that humanity's old demons will come back if groups are allowed to be stigmatised as genetically "less capable". The risk of eugenics and the manipulation of the human species is greater than ever. A bioethical framework should be established to deal with this gravest of dangers for human rights. Manifestations of "urban apartheid" have become increasingly extreme, thereby challenging the fight against poverty and threatening democracy. If we wish to change our lives in the 21st century and carry on an effective fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance, it will be necessary to change our cities as well. Governments need to display their civic sense by adopting policies which can prevent the most serious kinds of dangers. Leading figures in civil society must also mobilise their efforts to ensure that the rights of every human being are fully recognised, and that their societies do not become essentially uncivil.

Jerusalem Post 30 Auguat 2001 Robinson in Durban: I am a Jew By Herb Keinon and Janine Zacharia JERUSALEM - Waving a book of anti-Semitic cartoons distributed at the anti-racism conference in Durban, UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson - in a dramatic act of identification with the Jews vilified in the pamphlet - declared "I am a Jew" at an NGO dinner there last night. Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris, said that after he showed Robinson the booklet, she stood up, waved it and said, "This conference is aimed at achieving human dignity. My husband is a cartoonist, I love political cartoons, but when I see the racism in this cartoon booklet, of the Arab Lawyers' Union, I must say that I am a Jew - for those victims are hurting. I know that you people will not understand easily, but you are my friends, so I tell you that I am a Jew, and I will not accept this fractiousness to torpedo the conference." Samuels, head of the Jewish caucus at the anti-racism conference, said that the booklet, which he said contained vile anti-Semitic cartoons, was handed out at registration, and that several of the Jewish groups in Durban had complained about it. Meanwhile, less than 24 hours before the Israeli delegation's plane to the UN anti-racism conference in Durban is scheduled to take off, no decision has yet been made on whether it will participate, or at what level. "We'll have to decide in the morning, because our last plane out is tomorrow evening," one Foreign Ministry official scheduled to attend the conference said last night. The US announced yesterday it is dispatching Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Michael Southwick and a small delegation to South Africa to try to amend language in a proposed final communique that is offensive to Israel and Jews, before the conference opens tomorrow. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Southwick could leave Durban before the conference's official opening, if the language singling out Israel is not taken out. The State Department announced earlier this week that Secretary of State Colin Powell would not attend the conference because of the anti-Israel clauses. President George W. Bush said last week that the US would not take part at all if the conference "picks on" or denigrates Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. "We felt it was necessary for us to have representatives out there to do what the president asked us to do, and that's to work to eliminate this language," Boucher said yesterday. "If we can do that, then we can make the further decisions on how we participate." If Southwick remains, Israel will have to decide whether to send Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior or dispatch a lower-level official. Some American Jewish leaders, who lobbied Powell not to attend, are said to have urged Melchior not to go. One Foreign Ministry source said if a delegation is sent, it should be at a level that will enable it to be as effective as possible. Attempts by the US to have the anti-Israel language taken out of the proposed resolutions have not yet yielded any fruit, Israeli officials said. A source briefed on the US plans said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had persuaded Powell that the language - including clauses describing Zionism as a movement based on racial superiority and others describing Israeli actions as ethnic cleansing - could be struck from the document only if an American delegation were present to support such a move. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley said he still hasn't decided whether to attend and that Canada has "very serious" concerns about a push to single out Israel. Echoing earlier comments by Powell, Manley said, "The purpose of this conference should be to set a mark for countries to observe in trying to eradicate racist practices. It shouldn't be targeted at any countries. The text such as it is that I've seen goes much too far in singling out one country, in this case Israel." According to a report received by the Foreign Ministry, a group from the World Union of Jewish Students, which set up a booth yesterday at the non-governmental organization part of the conference, was confronted by Palestinian students chanting anti-Israeli slogans. According to the ministry, the Jewish students sang: "All we are saying is give peace a chance." The Palestinians responded by chanting, "We will redeem Palestine through blood and fire." This was only one of many complaints registered by Jewish groups about harassment at the conference, though conference director Moshe More said no serious incidents have been reported so far. "I feel besieged, there's anti-Semitism and hate literature at the world racism conference. It couldn't get much worse," said Anne Bayefsky, a professor from New York's Columbia University Law School. "Some of the Jewish delegates are hiding their accreditation badge because it identifies them as from Israel or as Jewish. Some are considering leaving Durban altogether." More said "protesters can express their views, but we have a strong contingent of police. There have been no physical attacks on anyone." Stacy Burdett, representing the Anti-Defamation League, said some of the 200 Jewish representatives in Durban were shocked by their treatment, and felt unfairly singled out. Pamphlets circulated at the NGO meeting caricatured Jews, and posters carried slogans overlapping the Star of David with the swastika. Many pro-Palestinian delegates wore T-shirts with a slogan equating Israel with apartheid and colonialism, and calling it an occupying power that kills civilians. "There is a real sense of hostility toward Jewish people," said Karen Pollock, director of the London-based Holocaust Education Trust. "We are being intimidated." The South African police have said that the safety of the 7,000 delegates attending the meeting is a high priority, and more than 3,000 police and soldiers have been deployed.

Tanzania

BBC 27 August, 2001 Islamists charged with violence in Tanzania The authorities in Tanzania have charged 41 people with rioting, illegal assembly and violence following a religious protest. The group of Muslims went on a banned demonstration to protest over the arrest of a man who was jailed for blasphemy against Christians. They pleaded not guilty and were remanded in custody for a hearing next month. Several Islamic groups had called for the release of a man who walked through the streets of Morogoro west of Dar-es-Salam, shouting: Jesus is not God." His sentence was revoked after an appeal at the High Court.

Americas

Argentina

ICRC 23 August 2001 Argentina: Strengthening international humanitarian law On 16 August a seminar on strengthening international humanitarian law was held in Buenos Aires to mark the anniversary of the adoption on 12 August of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The seminar, organized jointly by the ICRC and the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship, was attended by some 140 participants from government, parliamentary, judicial, academic, diplomatic and military circles. The discussions centred on recent developments and challenges in the fields of humanitarian law and humanitarian action. Special emphasis was placed on international criminal responsibility and ICRC initiatives concerning restrictions on the use of certain conventional weapons. Also attended by the Secretary of State for Worship and the Under-Secretary of State for External Policy, who gave the closing address, the seminar included presentations by the Legal Adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ICRC regional delegate, the Chairman of the Preparatory Committee in charge of defining the crime of aggression in the Statute of the International Criminal Court, a professor of humanitarian law from the University of Buenos Aires and a senior representative of the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the armed forces.

Colombia

AP 17 August, 2001 Colombia put on war footing The Colombian army is modernising and re-equipping By Jeremy McDermott in Medellin Colombia's President Andres Pastrana has signed a controversial new law giving the military sweeping powers, despite international opposition and army's abysmal human rights record. The legislation gives the military new powers of detention and the right to set up martial law in specific places, giving them authority over civilian officials. The legislation has been fiercely opposed by human rights groups and politicians in the United States. Many fear it will herald a new chapter in human rights abuses by the military, which has proven links to right-wing death squads and often turns a blind eye or even aids paramilitaries in their massacres of guerrilla sympathisers. Abuses Rights groups say that no military force should have the judicial powers the bill grants, especially when not officially at war. Amnesty International released a statement saying "there is serious concern that these provisions could facilitate torture or other forms of human rights violations of those captured during counter-insurgency operations". Powerful voices in the US, which is supporting the Colombian military to the tune of over $1bn, have also been raised in protest. Hands tied But the Colombian army insists the legislation is necessary and that until now it has been fighting the civil conflict with one hand tied behind its back. Human rights groups just hope the other hand will play fair now it has been unleashed.

WP 27 Aug 2001 Colombia's Zone of Fear By Jose Miguel Vivanco Page A15 There is a place in this hemisphere where people vanish without a trace. Fear is so pervasive that few are willing to meet publicly with international human rights investigators. It is as large as Switzerland, but ruled by the gun. That place is the zone ceded by the Colombian government to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC), Latin America's oldest and largest insurgent group. In November 1998 Colombian President Andres Pastrana ceded to the rebels five municipalities in southern Colombia, hoping to further talks aimed at negotiating an end to decades of armed conflict. International attention has focused primarily on human rights abuses committed by right-wing paramilitaries, which operate with the tolerance and even open support of units in Colombia's military. Acting with impunity, paramilitaries commit gross atrocities in Colombia and are responsible for most civilian massacres. But guerrillas also deserve condemnation for the barbarity that is sweeping Colombia. Prior to withdrawing soldiers and police, Colombia's leaders did nothing to establish mechanisms to protect the rights of the estimated 90,000 residents of the zone. Guerrillas forced out employees of the attorney general's office, who would normally investigate and prosecute allegations of crimes. So far, the Colombians living in the zone have paid a high price for these mistakes. During a mission to the zone in May and June of 2000, Human Rights Watch gathered evidence showing that the FARC has abducted and threatened residents, committed extrajudicial executions and recruited children for combat. One of the most dramatic cases involved a teenager, Guillermo Lombana Lizcano. According to his family, Lombana was abducted by the FARC on April 16, 1999, in front of his home in San Vicente del Caguan, the unofficial capital of the zone and its most populated urban center. His father, also named Guillermo, said that the family watched as guerrillas seized the boy. "My son went out to talk to a friend, and they were waiting for him. Two of them grabbed him while one stood aside. They put him in a taxi. We ran outside because friends had yelled, 'Look, they're taking your boy!' We hadn't had any threats from the FARC. We never had any kind of problem with them. It was a surprise." Since then Lombana has searched doggedly, but guerrillas have never told him what happened to his son. Cases such as Lombana's would qualify as forced disappearances under international human rights law if they were carried out by government officials or groups acting with government support. But the fact that these abuses do not qualify at the moment as a violation of specific human rights treaties should not lead to any confusion about their nature. These abductions are serious violations of international law and should spur international outrage. Outside the zone, the FARC is equally abusive. Last year human rights groups reported that rebels killed 496 civilians nationwide, many accused of being members of the paramilitary or army sympathizers. Guerrillas continue to kidnap for ransom, seizing 701 people in 2000 alone. Some victims are elderly. Some are in diapers. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, among those held hostage by the FARC in 2000 were Andres Felipe Navas Suarez, 3, and Clara Olivia Pantoja, 5, both seized from their parents in Bogota and taken to the zone until their families paid a ransom for their release. In June and July, FARC made headlines by releasing 350 police and soldiers, some it had held for more than three years. Although this was a positive step, the release also underscored the desperate conditions in which these men had been kept -- without adequate shelter, medical care or clean water. In a few cases, international pressure has led FARC to acknowledge responsibility for certain gross violations and to announce that it will sanction the perpetrators. For example, during our visit to the zone, FARC commanders told Human Rights Watch that the two FARC combatants who killed American civilians Terence Freitas, Lahe'ena'e Gay and Ingrid Washinawatok on March 5, 1999, had been found "guilty." The FARC sentenced the two killers to dig 55 yards of trenches and clear land, an absurd punishment for so grave a crime. In October, Pastrana will decide whether to renew the zone, which he may do to further peace negotiations. Before he does, it is imperative that effective measures be taken to ensure the protection of the zone's residents. For its part, FARC should make a public commitment to permit a system of independent national and international monitoring within the zone and to respect basic humanitarian law standards. Colombia remains the recipient of several hundred million dollars in U.S. aid, a significant portion of which will fund a military that has ties to paramilitary organizations. The international community rightly continues to focus on paramilitary violations. But the grave abuses committed by the guerrillas deserve no less attention. The writer is executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.

Asia-Pacific

Afghanistan

BBC 6 August, 2001 Taleban crackdown on Christian relief The agency gives food and shelter to victims of war Afghanistan's ruling Taleban have closed down a Western aid agency, Shelter Now International, and arrested 24 of its staff, alleging that the group was spreading Christianity. Eight foreigners - six of them women - were among those arrested. Taleban officials said two of the foreign women workers were arrested while trying to convert an Afghan family to Christianity using computer material. Last year, the Taleban introduced the death penalty for any Muslim converting to another religion and for anyone responsible for causing Muslims to convert. Two of the women are Americans in their 20s. Jorge Taubmann - Shelter Now's director and a German national - was also arrested, along with an Australian man. The official Bakhtar news agency said Shelter Now International was "teaching Christianity to Afghans and we found Bible books in a house of its Afghan staff". A senior Taleban official, quoted by the official Voice of Shariat radio, said the eight foreigners had "confessed to the crime" and asked for a pardon. School closed The Bakhtar news agency accused the women of "propagating Christianity" by showing a video stored on a computer to an Afghan family. Officials of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice police found the books and the video in a raid on the family's house. Bakhtar also said a school run by the agency for 65 children had also been closed and the children had been shifted to a reform centre where they would receive an Islamic education. Relief work Shelter Now International is a non-governmental organisation supported by Germany, Britain, Holland and the United Nations World Food Programme, the agency said. It was running projects to provide emergency shelter, as well as food and other necessities, to Afghans affected by drought and war. It has also been offering emergency aid to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. But the BBC's Afghanistan correspondent Kate Clark says that as an openly Christian agency, Shelter Now has always been vulnerable to charges of proselytising.

Cambodia

AP 10 August 2001 Cambodia Signs Khmer Rouge Law By Chris Decherd PHNOM PENH, Cambodia –– Cambodia took a big step toward obtaining justice for victims of the murderous Khmer Rouge as King Norodom Sihanouk signed a law Friday enabling the establishment of a U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal. Sihanouk's action brings the prospect of a trial closer than ever, but its timing and nature remain open to questions. Cambodia and the United Nations must work out details of international involvement in the tribunal, in which foreign judges and prosecutors would participate along with Cambodians. The United Nations took a cautious approach to news of the signing, saying it wants to review the law and an official translation. While the Khmer Rouge is blamed for the deaths of some 1.7 million people when it ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, most of its former leaders live freely here. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 and no one has been tried for the regime's atrocities. Under the law, surviving leaders of the group could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes. "About the judgment and condemnation of those Khmer Rouge arch criminals, I don't have any objection," King Sihanouk said this week. In a letter to The Sunday Times of London dated Thursday and faxed to news organizations, the king said he has prayed every week for years for the souls of the victims of the Khmer Rouge. "I am, like the people of Cambodia, still mourning with my heart and spirit the horrible suffering of all those who were slaves under the tyranny of Pol Pot and his lieutenants," Sihanouk wrote. In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher welcomed Sihanouk's action. He called it an important step in bringing justice to victims of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge who defected at an early stage of the group's brutal rule, has said Cambodia would hold the trial alone if the world body refuses to participate. Human rights groups in and out of the country believe Cambodian courts by themselves cannot deliver real justice because of a relative lack of competence, along with a history of being open to corruption and willingness to do the bidding of Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia – an independent organization that has been gathering evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities – said the law's promulgation is a "turning point in Cambodia's history." "This is beyond words," said Youk Chhang, who lost 10 close family members during the Khmer Rouge regime. "Many of us have lost many loved ones and it has been more than 22 years. "We have asked and we have asked and we have asked and now, finally, there's a response, an answer has been provided. It's like what you have wished for with all your heart finally comes true." Only two senior Khmer Rouge leaders are in custody: military leader Ta Mok and Kaing Khek Iev, better known as Duch, the director of the Khmer Rouge torture center in Phnom Penh. Other senior figures include Nuon Chea, the regime's No. 2 man, who was in charge of ideology; Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, who was the nominal head of state.

BBC 10 August, 2001 King signs Khmer Rouge trial law Will those responsible for the Killing Field be tried? Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk has signed legislation for a special tribunal to prosecute members of the Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths of almost two million people in the mid-1970s. It is unclear when the trials - presided over by three Cambodian judges and two foreign judges - will begin, but Prime Minister Hun Sen has said he would like to see prosecutions by the end of the year. Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot: Died in 1998 Ta Mok: The Butcher, captured and awaiting trial Kang Kek: Chief executioner, in jail awaiting trial Ieng Sary: Foreign minister, pardoned Nuon Chea: Chief political theorist and "Brother Number Two", at liberty Khieu Samphan: Public apologist, at liberty Although the king's signature establishes the legislation as Cambodian law, further negotiations with the United Nations are necessary to finalise details of the court. Critics say the trials will be a whitewash, because many of the most notorious Khmer Rouge leaders have already been given amnesty under a deal in the 1990s to end the country's long-running civil war. But Prime Minister Hun Sen has said that, if handled incorrectly, the trials might re-ignite civil war, especially if Khmer Rouge leaders who gave themselves up under the amnesty deal are prosecuted. The Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. UN reservations Four years ago, Cambodia asked the United Nations for help in establishing a special tribunal to judge the architects of genocide, but agreement on how it should be set up and run has been elusive. The UN wanted a panel of international judges, sitting outside Cambodia to run the tribunal; the Cambodians wanted only local judges on the panel. In the end, a compromise was reached. Under the agreement, trials will be held on Cambodian soil, but the UN is insisting that international standards of justice must be met when trials begin. Cambodia says it will not change the legislation approved by both Cambodia's houses of parliament whether the UN approves or not. But the UN insists it will back out of the whole process if it excludes key figures in the Khmer Rouge regime.

India

BBC 3 August 2001 Police fire on Kashmir rally India is worried about pro-independence gestures At least one person has been killed and six wounded as Indian security forces opened fire on a demonstration in support of separatist guerrillas in Indian-administered Kashmir, reports from the region say. Some 50,000 attended a special prayer ceremony for a commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen militant group, Mustafa Khan, who was killed along with another two militants in a clash at Magam north of the capital, Srinagar, on Monday. The BBC's Altaf Hussain in Kashmir said the demonstration was apparently peaceful. Security sources were not available for comment, our correspondent says. The people later marched in a procession chanting pro-freedom slogans. Earlier more than 20,000 people had attended the funeral of Mustafa Khan on Tuesday. Open support There have been several instances of open public support to the militants this year. There have been open demonstrations recently Indian authorities say they are worried about the phenomenon. Meanwhile eight people, six of them militants, were killed in separate incidents of violence on Friday. Police say four militants were killed in a clash with the Indian troops near Drehgam in the frontier district of Kupwara on Friday. In another incident two militants of Hizbul Mujahideen groups were killed in a landmine explosion in the southern township of Dral. The landmine appears to have gone off accidentally while they planted it on a road.

Times of India 25 Aug 2001 VHP's temple agenda set with eye on UP polls AMBIKANAND SAHAY TIMES NEWS NETWORK LUCKNOW : Contrary to the public posturing of the beleagured Vajpayee and Rajnath Singh governments and the different offshoots of the Sangh Parivar, the connection between the renewed war cry for the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya and the coming elections in Uttar Pradesh has been established with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad on Friday finally unfolding the temple agenda. The first concrete move for temple construction will be made on March 12, 2002. Nine days later, saints owing allegiance to the VHP would stage their ``Ayodhya to New Delhi march''. And the term of the UP Assembly expires on March 26. This means that the elections will have to be held at a time when the freshly-generated communal frenzy is likely to be at its peak in the state. Local VHP leaders on Friday emphasised their demand. ``We are not asking for a Mecca or Medina; all that we want is the birthplace of Lord Ram be handed over to us so that we can build a temple there,'' Praveen Bhai Togadia, international general secretary of the VHP said. He reminded the media that the land which the VHP is seeking was under the possession of the Union government and attacked the Vajpayee government for its failure to protect the lives of Hindus who had fallen prey to the jehadis in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere. Togadia alleged, in an apparently algebric formulation, that madarssas, various Muslim organisations and the ISI were together equal to jehadi antakwad, adding that it had all resulted in the genocide of Hindus. Togadia, who was addressing a news conference at the VVIP state guest house, also circulated a statement elaborating his thesis as well as details of the temple construction movement. Togadia said, replying to questions, ``The country's citizens are no longer safe and the nation is moving towards anarchy. And whenever the state fails to protect its citizens, people resort to protecting themselves. They may even take to arms. We want the government to act before it is too late.'' While giving details of the temple construction programme, he said that 30 lakh volunteers were already being recruited under the banner of the Bajrang Dal. Rallies would be staged in the next few months in 750 district headquarters across the country and activists would reach out to all the six lakh villages in an effort to create awareness. Asked why his organisation preferred to lie dormant all these years under the BJP's rule at the Centre and in the state, Togadia said that the VHP was busy carving stone pillars for the temple project. ``You don't fix the marriage of your child on the day he is born,'' he said, adding that there had been a natural time-gap between the demolition of the mosque and the launch of construction work for the temple. On the face of it, he denied that his organisation had anything to do with the coming elections. Whatever Togadia and his followers in the VHP may have to say about the timing of the renewed temple movement, it will hardly be surprising if election-bound Uttar Pradesh witnesses communal frenzy yet again. The VHP has already set the agenda.

BBC 31 August, 2001, Militants killed in Kashmir battle' The militants were killed in a border district The Indian army says it has killed 12 militants along the border in Indian-administered Kashmir. A defence spokesman said that a fierce gun battle broke out as Indian troops intercepted a group of armed infiltrators near the line of control at Kupwara. The line of control separates Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir. The spokesman said that 12 bodies had been recovered by the Indians and a search operation was under way. In a separate incident, suspected militants shot dead three members of a family in the town of Bandipora in the north. A group of militants were said to have stormed into the house of Mohammad Abdullah and opened fire, killing him, his son and daughter-in-law. Police said the militants suspected the victims of having informed the security forces about two guerrillas who had previously hidden in their house. Strike Life in the Kashmir valley has also been affected by a strike called by the separatists to protest against human rights violations by the Indian security forces. Shops, businesses and educational institutions were closed and traffic stayed off the roads. The protest is being led by the main separatist alliance, the All Party Hurriyat [Freedom] Conference. "The strike call has been given to draw attention of world organisations towards the sinister plan of a systematic genocide of Kashmiris by Indian security forces," it said in a statement.

Indonesia

BBC 18 August, 2001 Four die in latest Aceh violence The bodies of two men have been found with bullet wounds in the Indonesian province of Aceh, a day after they were abducted by masked, armed men. The two civilians were kidnapped from a village in southern Aceh - the identity of their abductors is not known. In eastern Aceh, one soldier and a separatist rebel were killed in a gunbattle between security forces and guerrillas. Several thousand people have been killed in the past decade of conflict in Aceh - more than 1,000 have died this year alone. The security forces and the rebel Free Aceh Movement each accuse the other of carrying out atrocities.

BBC 18 August, 2001 Religious tolerance in Indonesia - Muslims in Medan live in peace with Christians Every couple of months, there's a story from Indonesia about vicious inter-ethnic violence. But most Indonesians seem to think of their vast nation as a peaceable and tolerant place. The BBC's Hugh Levinson found one answer to this contradiction woven into the fabric of the city of Medan. Fon Pravira was not expecting visitors. But luckily, he's a hospitable chap. He came to the gate of his house - a deceptively modest gate - wearing jeans and an undershirt. A little girl hid behind his legs. Dark glasses hid his eyes but his mouth was all smiles. "Welcome!" he shouted, ushering us down a side-alley with potted palms at either side. He paused to point out a set of tiny bright frescos painted on medallions high on the walls. "Still the original colours. We never repainted!" he said, and swung open a set of heavy internal doors. And there it was - the courtyard of his grandfather's magnificent house, the home of Chong Ah Fee. It is a hidden treasure, the finest Chinese-style mansion in Indonesia. A century ago Chong Ah Fee was the richest man in Medan. A merchant - the merchant really - in a merchant city. And this was his legacy. Secret splendour Fon waved us past the scarlet family altar and an enormous carved screen, out into a garden facing onto the city's busiest street. Here was what he really wanted to show us - the messages built into the house. On the front wall were Chinese inscriptions, praising the Confucian virtues of filial piety. Above were Western-style casement windows, painted green and yellow - green for Islam, yellow for the Malay Sultan. The house was an ethnic symbol, a religious symbol, a symbol of tolerance. "I think this was my grandfather's philosophy, to get unity for all religions," Fon said, still beaming. Five minutes walk away was more evidence of his grandfather's philosophy - a silver-roofed mosque. Traders used to gather in the courtyard to take advantage of the crowds arriving for Friday prayers. Chong Ah Fee had paid for the mosque buildings -and he'd also helped build the local cathedral. The rich Chinese should, so Chong Ah Fee believed, help other communities. One is no better than another. City of minorities It's a belief that's still shared in this bewilderingly diverse city. There are eight significant ethnic groups - not just Chinese and Malay but also Indians, Batak, Minang and Acehnese. No one group has a majority. They're all minorities, which perhaps explains its inter-communal calm. Because this is a story about a dog which didn't bark. This is a story about a lack of conflict, an absence of violence. It's the type of story that editors say "won't make". And the editors have a point. There are plenty of Indonesian stories that should "make". Stories of ethnic savagery, churches burned, Muslims hacked to death, Islamic separatism and ethnic cleansing. But this country - as Indonesians frequently remind visitors - is a very big place. Most of this vast archipelago, with its thousands of islands, is peaceable and tolerant. And the violence is often apparently the work of agents provocateurs. In fact the phrase has jumped from French to Indonesian: "provokator." They've had reason to use the word in Medan - there have been bombs in churches and attacks on mosques. But the population has not been stirred. Maybe that's because of the complexity of the social system. Religion is not the same thing as ethnicity. Living side by side Two members of the Minang people might belong to the same clan, with a common ancestor. But one could be Christian and the other Muslim. It's hard to work out who your potential enemy might be. Tradition plays a part too. That's the way it was explained to me by a remarkable man called Dede Oetomo, on my last trip here. He's a tall, smiley academic, with a discriminating mind and a vast store of knowledge. When I met him in Central Java, he wanted to take me to a sacred mountain called Gunung Kawi. As we toiled up a narrow street, lined with noodle stalls and souvenir shops, Dede explained that it was a holy site way back under the old Javanese animist beliefs. Then Islam arrived, a Javanese Islam, which adopted many of the old practices. So there's a mosque on Gunung Kawi, where pilgrims remember a local Muslim. The Chinese decided it must be a special place and they built a temple near the summit too. As he spoke, I noticed one of the stalls was selling icons of a fourth religion - little green plastic Jesuses. I couldn't resist buying one. My Gunung Kawi Jesus still watches serenely over my bathroom.

Iraq

BBC 31 Aug 2001, Iraqi Kurds face uncertain future Iraqi Kurds - waiting for what the future holds BBC journalist Hiwa Osman has just returned from the little-visited Kurdish region of northern Iraq. In the first of four features, he examines the internal political situation as well as the Iraqi Kurds' relations with their neighbours and their view of Western protection. I was interviewing a Kurdish journalist on press freedoms under Kurdish rule when pictures of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on BBC World TV flashed across the big screen dominating the lobby of a hotel in Arbil. We can't afford to lose Western protection. If Saddam was here, we would not be able to have this conversation Kurdish journalist Saddam Hussein was asking the Kurds to "kick out the foreigners from their land" and reach an agreement with him. I asked the journalist whether the Kurdish leadership should respond to Saddam Hussein's call or not. "No way," was his immediate reaction. "How can we trust him after what he did?" "I hope we do not have to leave our village again" - villager Since the 1991 Gulf War and the establishment of a safe haven with Western protection, Iraqi Kurds have controlled two-thirds of their land. During this decade, shifts in the regional political scene have reshaped the status of the Kurdish-controlled area of Iraq and modified Kurdish aspirations to establish a greater Kurdistan. Dual administration In 1992, after the Iraqi administration withdrew from the Kurdish region, the Iraqi Kurds elected a regional parliament and established their own government. Power was equally shared by the two main parties; the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Mas'ud Barzani - "Our people have for so long fought for freedom, we won't deprive them of it" The joint administration lasted until 1994 when the two parties began a protracted armed conflict that led to military interventions by Baghdad and neighboring countries. In September 1998, a ceasefire was announced and the two parties signed an agreement in Washington. The Kurdish region has since been divided into two areas, with the KDP in Arbil and the PUK in Sulaymaniyah. Click here to see map of the region Kurdish strategy "We need to foster civil society and invest in the people", said the PUK's Prime Minister, Barham Salih. "Should the situation changes in Baghdad, we have to provide an element of stability in Iraq." We were not afraid of bullets. Why should we be afraid of words? Jalal Talebani The Kurds seem to be making genuine efforts to establish some form of civil society. Words like democracy, civil liberties and respect for human rights are heard in political, intellectual and social circles. "Our people have for so long fought for freedom, we won't deprive them of it," was the KDP leader Mas'ud Barzani's reply when I asked him about his policy on openness. Internet access and satellite dishes are readily available without restriction. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines in Kurdish and other languages are published in the main cities. PUK leader Jalal Talabani "I'm an advocate of women's rights and individual freedoms" I asked the PUK leader Jalal Talabani about a weekly newspaper, Hawlati, published in his area, which openly criticises his party. "We were not afraid of bullets. Why should we be afraid of words?" he said. Turkoman, Assyrian and other minorities in the area also have their own political parties, newspapers and schools. "We never had such freedom in the history of Iraq", said a Turkoman leader in Arbil. "This is a golden age for the Iraqi Turkomans." Regional players The landlocked Kurdish region's only access to the outside world is through Iran, Syria or Turkey. These regional powers warily view the Kurdish region as a possible base for separation for their own Kurds. Turkey and Iran in particular view the region as a potential threat to their own national security and internal stability. About 100,000 people were expelled from the Baghdad-controlled Kurdish city of Kirkuk The Iraqi Kurdish leadership finds itself constantly needing to reassure its neighbours that their goal is not to establish a greater Kurdistan, but rather, a "more realistic option" - a relationship with Baghdad based on federalism. To prove this, they had to prevent the Kurdish parties in the neighbouring countries from using Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks. The Kurdish region is also a commercial transit area between the regional players and Iraq. Daily, hundreds of Turkish trucks haul beer, household goods and processed food into Iraq, and return with cheap Iraqi fuel. A planned second road between Iraq and Turkey will bypass the Kurdish area and may threaten the weak Kurdish economy. "The proposed road does not have any economic benefits," said the KDP's Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani. "It is merely for military purposes. We will oppose it." What is next? While enjoying an unprecedented era of self-rule, the Kurds fear the future. Iraqi troops are stationed but a few kilometres to the south of their areas. The ever-present possibility of an Iraqi attack casts a pall over the political, social and economic spheres. Baghdad's Arabisation campaign led thousands of Kurds to flee to the Kurdish-controlled areas While there are US promises, Kurds have no clear assurances about the form and speed of any Western response should Baghdad attack. It is this uncertainty coupled with the internal political division and the recent memories of chemical attacks and forced migration that leaves Kurds with a distinct unease about their future. Before continuing our interview on Kurdish press freedom, the journalist succinctly expressed what I was to hear from Kurds of every walk of life. "We can't afford to lose Western protection. If Saddam was here, we would not be able to have this conversation".

AP 6 August 2001 Activists Protest Iraq Sanctions By Chris Hawley NEW YORK –– Opponents of U.N. sanctions against Iraq marked the 11th anniversary of the measures Monday by holding vigils outside U.N. offices in New York and in Bagdhad, where demonstrators fasted in 122-degree heat. Fifteen people protested in New York, including eight who were beginning a 40-day fast, said Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness, a group campaigning against the measures. In the Iraqi capital, 10 Americans and Britons sat outside U.N. offices on plastic chairs in a tent, observing a one-day fast. "We are here to tell the world we are against sanctions. Sanctions kill children and elderly and this is rejected by all international laws," Jeff Guntzel, head of Voices in the Wilderness, said in Iraq. The group said similar events were held in 15 cities around the world, including in Canada and Britain. The demonstrations were aimed at pressuring the United Nations to reconsider the sanctions, which were imposed on Iraq on Aug. 6, 1990, four days after its forces invaded Kuwait. Among those fasting at the New York vigil was Denis Halliday, a former assistant U.N. secretary-general who resigned in 1998 as the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq to protest the sanctions. He said thousands of Iraqi children had died from dysentery and other diseases because the U.N. restrictions had complicated the repair of water treatment plants and stunted food production. "It is of great urgency for those (U.N.) member states not yet irreparably corrupted by the United States to end the killing," Halliday said. "How will we explain to our children and grandchildren when the truth of U.N. genocide in Iraq comes out, as it surely will?" The U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, but they have been criticized for hurting Iraqi civilians while failing to shake Saddam Hussein's autocratic regime. Last month, the United States and Britain proposed changes that would have given Iraqis unrestricted access to civilian goods to further ease the impact of sanctions while targeting military supplies and toughening enforcement. The plan was supported by 14 of the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council, but it was withdrawn in the face of a threatened Russian veto. On Monday, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations directed questions about the protests to the State Department in Washington, which declined comment. Halliday, who is Irish, has become a symbol for activists campaigning to lift sanctions. He was sent to Iraq in 1997 as a 34-year U.N. veteran to oversee the oil-for-food program, which the Security Council adopted in 1995 to help ordinary Iraqis cope with sanctions. The program now allows Baghdad to sell unlimited amounts of oil – provided the money goes into a U.N.-controlled account for humanitarian relief, oil industry repairs and war reparations. Halliday resigned in 1998, saying the sanctions were devastating the Iraqi population. His successor, Hans Von Sponeck of Germany, quit in 2000 for the same reason. Along with former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter of the United States, they have become vocal opponents of the sanctions. On Monday, Halliday called on other U.N. staff members to rebel against the sanctions. "There is a time to question authority and to refuse orders," he said. The protesters said they oppose Saddam Hussein's autocratic regime but worry that international efforts against him are more harmful to regular citizens. "A lot of times people have the idea that it's like a vending machine – you just deposit some change and regime change occurs," said Kathy Kelly, one of the founders of Voices in the Wilderness. "But it doesn't work that way in a country." Sanctions cannot be lifted until U.N. weapons inspectors determine that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. That certification is unlikely because Baghdad has barred inspectors from the country for more than 2½ years. Iraq contends that it has met all U.N. demands and wants sanctions lifted.

Israel

ABC News 17 August 2001 A Fearful Potentiality Looking at a Possible, But Unlikely Scenario for Mideast War News Analysis By John K. Cooley— Though they rarely discuss it in public, Arab and Israeli statesmen are aware of a scenario that could turn the intensifying conflict between Israel and the Palestinians into a broader Arab-Israeli war. It's a scenario that has lurked since Israel's foundation in 1948, and it was a concern for the late King Hussein of Jordan, before he signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. It remains so for many Palestinians, other Arabs and dovish Israelis today. It is the idea of forced deportation — early Zionist theorists and Israeli politicians called it "transfer" — of some or all of the Arabs in pre-1967 Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank eastward to Jordan. This would leave Israel, theoretically, as an entirely Jewish state. Jordan would be swamped with up to a million new Palestinian refugees, an obvious threat to the existing parliamentary monarchy of King Abdullah with the potential to turn Jordan into a Palestinian state. In the past, some of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior advisers — like the extreme rightist Herut Ihud party's tourism minister, Rehovam Zee'vi — publicly advocated "transfer" as a solution to Palestinian question. So did fiery Jewish extremists like the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, head of the outlawed Kach party. However, as prime minister, Sharon has carefully avoided mentioning it. Taking his lead, senior politicians of his ruling Likud party coalition, as well as leading military figures, have rarely done so either. Expecting Trouble From Baghdad Several years before his death, King Hussein confided to this reporter in a private conversation in 1991 that if Jordan were to be faced by a new Palestinian refugee tide — like those in 1948 and 1967, and forced this time by Israel's army — the Jordanian armed forces would have no choice but to resist by waging war on Israel. This in turn, as in earlier Arab-Israel wars since 1948, could draw an eager Iraqi regime to send its troops and tanks into Jordan. Israel has always warned that it interprets the entry of Iraqi troops into Jordan as an act of war, and acted accordingly. During the 1967 war, at least one Iraqi brigade tried to engage Israeli tank forces then knifing through Jordan's West Bank near Nablus. But the Iraqis lacked any air cover. Israeli air power wiped them out. The resulting Arab defeat saw the loss of East Jerusalem and the West Bank to Israel. Iraq also fought in Palestine in 1948 and on Syria's Golan Heights in 1973. In the 1991 Gulf war, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein attempted to drive a wedge between Israel and the U.S.-led Arab coalition forces pushing Iraqi occupation troops from Kuwait, by firing dozens of Scud missiles at Israeli cities, causing destruction and casualties. At Washington's request, Israel did not respond. Recently, Saddam has claimed with great fanfare that he is raising, training and equipping several Iraqi divisions, to be sent to "liberate Jerusalem," if only his neighbors Jordan and Syria will permit their entry. Jordan could not do so without breaking its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Syria has no peace treaty with the Jewish state; only a U.N.-supervised "disengagement" accord from 1975. Plans for Ethnic Cleansing King Abdullah and Jordan's present leadership may consider the "transfer" war trigger as unlikely, despite the daily conflict worsening west of the Jordan river. However, they do fear a new refugee tide. Last May, the Interior Ministry in Amman banned entry of certain categories of Palestinians, even those arriving from Israel or the occupied territories who held Jordan residence permits. About half of Jordan's over 4 million people are now Palestinians, including those still in refugee camps. Theodore Herzl, considered Zionism's founder, wrote in his Diaries in 1895 that jobs should be found for "penniless" Palestinians in "transit countries" but denied jobs in the future Jewish state. "Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly," he added. Joseph Weitz, an early director of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in December 1940 about "transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries ...The transfer must be directed to Iraq, Syria and even to Transjordan ... There is no other way out." Sharon’s Unspoken Opinion? According to published Israeli records, in 1964, Ariel Sharon, then an army colonel, asked experts for a memo on "the number of buses and military vehicles" capable of transporting "about 300,000 Arabs" across the river to Jordan. No action followed his request, since the incumbent government vetoed the idea. Sharon states in his autobiography, Warrior, that in 1970 both he and the late defense minister Moshe Dayan thought it foolish to bow to American wishes to save King Hussein's throne, by massing Israeli tanks to help the King's army defeat the Syrian-backed Palestinian forces then destabilizing Jordan. "If it had now become possible to resolve the most crucial of these Palestinian problems, through the formal creation of a Palestinian state in Jordan, that is the direction I believed we should move in," he wrote. This idea has given rise to a favorite slogan of the Israeli extreme Right, "Jordan is Palestine." This arouses almost as much concern in Washington and other Western capitals as it does in Amman.

Japan

BBC 15 August, 2001 Japan schools 'reject controversial textbook' Critics say the book downplays Japanese atrocities Almost all of Japan's school districts have rejected a controversial new text book which critics say glosses over Japan's wartime atrocities, a civic group has said. Education boards had until Wednesday to give their response to the book, called the New History Textbook, which was written by nationalist historians. Japan's Asian neighbours had denounced the textbook and called on the government to make changes to the content. We must not use such a book for teaching children who carry the future on their shoulders Ayako Okino, civic group critic Japan has said the book, which was approved by the Ministry of Education in April for use in junior high schools, does not represent the official government view of the country's history. Although official figures on which schools will use the book as part of their curriculum will not be released until later this month, critics say it has been overwhelmingly rejected. "Our survey shows 98% of education boards in the 542 public school districts are not going to adopt the textbook," Ayako Okino, from a group called Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21, told French news agency AFP. Japanese broadcaster NHK said its own nationwide poll showed out of 542 districts, 532 told them they had rejected the book. Japan's neighbours have denounced the book NHK said only six state-run schools for handicapped children and six private schools will use the book, Reuters news agency reported. Critics say the New History Textbook plays down many of the events surrounding Japan's occupation of neighbouring countries in the first half of the 20th century. They say the book, for example, belittles Japan's use of 200,00 Asian women as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers, its use of germ warfare and the 1937 Nanjing massacre in China. China and South Korea demanded Japan make 35 revisions to the text, but the authors, from the Society for History Textbook Reform, agreed to make just two minor changes.

Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 (Kodomo to Kyokasho Zenkoku Netto 21) http://www.ne.jp/asahi/kyokasho/net21/

BBC 15 August, 2001 Koizumi's 'deep remorse' for war War veterans were joined at the shrine by politicians Japan's prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has expressed "deep remorse and sincere condolence" to the victims of Japan's actions during the World War II. But Mr Koizumi's comments, made during an official ceremony to mark the 56th anniversary of Japan's surrender, are unlikely to quell the anger of its Asian neighbours. Countries like China and South Korea, who remember Japanese atrocities during the war, are still furious about his decision to visit the controversial Yakusuni shrine for the war dead on Monday. The shrine, a symbol of state Shintoism, is dedicated to Japan's war dead, including several condemned war criminals. More controversy But as proof the controversy is not over, on Wednesday five cabinet ministers and several other senior politicians visited Yakusuni too. Mr Koizumi marked the anniversary by attending a secular ceremony with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. Koizumi: 'significant damage and pain' In a speech to open the ceremony, Mr Koizumi said: "Our country has caused many countries, especially our Asian neighbours, significant damage and pain". Akihito and Empress Michiko bowed before a huge bed of chrysanthemums - the imperial flower Mr Koizumi also visited Japan's tomb of the unknown soldier, known as Chidorigafuchi. China's foreign ministry said Mr Koizumi's visit "damaged the political foundations of China-Japan relations". And Japan's always volatile relations with South Korea are once more badly inflamed. The sense of outrage is made worse by a recent Japanese Government decision to approve a new school textbook which, like many others before, glosses over atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in wartime. Antagonising Asia Japan's Asian neighbours are held back from showing their anger through sanctions, because of Japan's enormous economic importance. But this storm has undermined trust towards Japan in the region. Abroad, opposition is sure to harden against Mr Koizumi's ambition for his country to play a bigger international role, especially in military peacekeeping. His goal of pushing through a revision of Japan's constitution, removing the ban on "the threat or use of force" that was imposed after WWII, may also be harder to achieve. And by adopting what is seen as a nationalist stance on this anniversary Mr Koizumi risks losing the record high popularity he has enjoyed in his first four months in office.

Pakistan

BBC 9 August 2001 Pakistani alliance opposes UN monitors The UN wants to stop weapons reaching the Taleban By Susannah Price in Islamabad An alliance of religious and militant groups in Pakistan has called on the government to reject the United Nations team due to monitor the flow of arms across the border into Afghanistan. Last month, the UN agreed to send a team to countries bordering Afghanistan to report on any violation of the sanctions against the Taleban. A statement issued after a meeting in Islamabad of the Afghan Defence Council, set up earlier this year to support the Taleban, said the monitors would threaten the integrity of Pakistan. The arms embargo is part of the sanctions imposed against the Taleban for refusing to hand over the Saudi dissident, Osama bin Laden. Daunting task The UN's monitoring mechanism appears extremely limited given the scale of the task. A team of up to 15 people will be divided among the countries bordering Afghanistan to report back to New York on violations of the arms embargo. Foreign observers believe weapons are still being transported from Pakistan, which has the longest border of all Afghanistan's six neighbours, and which is seen as the Taleban's strongest ally. Islamabad says that as a UN member state, it is complying with the arms embargo, although it has criticized the sanctions as being one-sided and unfair. Suspicions The Pakistani groups in the Afghan defence council have come out strongly against the idea of the enforcement team and accuse them of having a far wider purpose. The chairman of the council, Samiul Haq said it was a conspiracy which would affect Pakistan's sovereignty. He appealed to the government to reject the monitors as an interference in Pakistan's affairs. The monitors, who are also supposed to check whether the Taleban is complying with demands to close what the UN calls terrorist training camps, will work alongside the Pakistani border forces. The 2,500-kilometre-long border between the two countries is extremely porous, and people, and smuggled goods, pass freely. In the north-west frontier province, only the roads are controlled by the government, and the rest of the land is a semi-autonomous tribal area, hostile to outsiders. The Taleban have already made it clear that they will see the monitors, who will be customs, border security and counter-terrorism experts, as enemies.

BBC 27 August, 2001 Religious clash in Pakistani town Ahmadi places of worship have been targeted before By Shahid Malik in Lahore Tension is running high in the Pakistani province of Punjab after a place of worship belonging to the Ahmedi sect was set on fire late on Sunday night. The place of worship in Syedwallah about 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of Lahore was attacked while dozens of Ahmedis - including women and children - were listening to a religious sermon broadcast on foreign television. An Ahmedi spokesman said those inside had to be moved to two private homes because the police warned them that mainstream Sunni Muslims were unhappy about the gathering. The spokesman said the crowd set fire to the place of worship, completely destroying it. The crowd then surrounded the houses where the Ahmedi worshippers had gone, staying there for almost four hours chanting slogans. Arrests Additional Superintendent of Police Chaudri Ashraf told the BBC that he broadly agreed with the Ahmedi version of events. But he said Sunni Muslims in the town had complained that they had been verbally abused by the Ahmedis at the place of worship. The police official said over two dozen Ahmedis had been arrested for their own protection during the incident. None of the attackers has been taken into custody. The attack comes less than a year after a series of violent incidents in the Sialkot and Sargodha districts of Pakistan's Punjab province in which at least 10 Ahmedis were killed. The Pakistani parliament declared Ahmedis heretics more than 25 years ago on the grounds that they believe that the Prophet Muhammad may not be the last prophet. Ahmedis say they have suffered violence and discriminatory treatment at the hands of mainstream Sunni Muslims ever since.

Palestinian Authority

WP 22 Aug 2001 Europe Monitors, Citing Violence, Quit Hebron Lee Hockstader and Daniel Williams JERUSALEM In the last few months, Jewish settlers in the West Bank have beaten, cursed and stoned a small force of European observers who patrol the tense city of Hebron. Now the monitors say that they have had enough and will no longer patrol the city's Jewish enclave. The announcement by the observers Monday dealt a crippling blow to a seven-year-old experiment that never really worked - the only international monitoring force active in the West Bank to which Israel and the Palestinians jointly consented. The setback was considered significant because the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, has sought to persuade foreign governments to place observers throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an idea fiercely resisted by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government. The halt to patrols "is because of the great number of attacks committed by some of the settlers," said Karl-Henrik Sjursen of Norway, the chief of the observer mission. "Our observers have been kicked, spat at, dragged from their cars and had boulders thrown at them." The monitors - Danes, Swedes, Swiss, Norwegians, Italians and Turks - were first deployed after a Jewish settler killed 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron in 1994 and have been on patrol continuously since mid-1996. From the start they have been held in low esteem by Hebron's 120,000 Palestinians as well as the 450 Jewish settlers who live in the Palestinians' midst under heavy guard by the Israeli Army. The settlers suspected them of colluding with the Palestinians; the Palestinians regarded them as ineffectual. With their blue smocks, flak jackets and underpowered white sedans, the 85 monitors have no firepower and scant authority in a place that sometimes seems to understand little else. And when the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, erupted last autumn, with frequent gunfights in the heart of Hebron, the monitors were embattled as rarely before. They were a particular target of the Hebron settlers, a militant community that has brawled not only with Hebron's Palestinians but also with Israeli soldiers there to protect the Jews. The Jewish settlers accused the monitors of spying for Palestinian gunmen. The charge was denied by the monitors and by the Israeli Army, but the settlers believed it nonetheless. Known officially as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, or TIPH, the foreigners were disparaged by some of Hebron's Jews using the same initials: Two Idiots Patrolling Hebron. In recent days, the settlers have heaved rocks through the windows of the Europeans' little cars, endangering their lives, the monitors said. "We have a mandate to give a feeling of security to the Palestinian population because of the massacre in 1994," said Saida Keller, a Swiss spokeswoman for the monitors. "But when our security is not guaranteed we can't give a feeling of security to others."

AP 19 August 2001 Foreign volunteers try hand at reducing Mideast violence By Jason Keyser AL-KHADER As a small Palestinian boy bulldozed an IDF roadblock in the center of his town, Heidi Arraf, a 25-year-old Palestinian American and 35 other foreign sympathizers stood guard. Soldiers watched from a hilltop Thursday as the determined boy jerked the gears of the rusting yellow bulldozer and pushed down an unmanned barrier, made of a hollowed out city bus and heaps of dirt, rock, and cement. For the Palestinians in Al-Khader, south of Bethlehem, it was a small victory. For the international group of demonstrators, it was mostly a symbolic one. Like the last time they helped demolish the roadblock, they understood that soldiers were likely to put it back up. Arraf moved to Jerusalem a year ago from Detroit and has helped put together an umbrella group of activists called the International Solidarity Movement to support Palestinians in their struggle for statehood and to help end nearly 11 months of violence. "Our governments are calling for the same thing - you must take action to end the violence. But no one is taking action. We are," she said, using her hand to shield her eyes from the setting sun as she watched soldiers on the hillside. About 80 activists from the United States and several European countries responded to mass e-mail calls to come to the region this month to join local activists for two weeks of semi-spontaneous demonstrations. They have scuffled with Israeli police who took over Orient House, spent the night with Palestinian families in nearby Beit Jala during firefights, toured Gaza, and held demonstrations. Several of the demonstrators have been arrested and later released. Among them was Andrew Clarno, a 26-year-old University of Michigan graduate student who was arrested last Saturday at a demonstration outside Orient House. He was released but will have to appear in court to face charges of taking part in an illegal gathering and assaulting a police officer. As the demonstrators marched through Al-Khader, a small boy, a blue T-shirt wrapped around his head showing only eyes, ran into the street, holding a toy machine gun he made out of black tape and cardboard. Irene Siegel, 36, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, laughed but expressed concern. "Who are their role models? What do they aspire to be? Where are they going to go to get their education?" she wondered. Siegel, one of 20 Americans in the group, is a Jew who came from Cairo, where she is participating in an Islamic studies program. Standing next to her was Linda Bevis, 40, a history teacher at Renton High School in Seattle, Washington. She and her husband spent a night with a Palestinian family Hebron, where there are almost daily exchanges of fire as Palestinians shoot at Jewish enclaves and soldiers fire back. "At a certain point, when people are being shot and killed on a regular basis the only way to nonviolently stop it is to put your bodies in between the shooters and the people who are being shot," she said. After members of the group tried to act as human shields in front of Palestinians during an exchange of fire, an Israeli official wondered why they weren't protecting the Israelis. In Al-Khader, 13-year-old Sultan Khaled Mousasbiah, with complete concentration atop the bulldozer, plowed through a bus that was buried under soil in the roadblock. He pushed part of the old white and blue Sawahreh Bus Company's bus No. 63 down the street. Mousasbiah, wearing a green T-shirt and with his sunglasses pushed to the top of his head, glanced casually toward the soldiers silhouetted on the hill. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was driving the bulldozer "for the homeland." The boy, who said his home had been hit several times by tank shells and gunfire, said he didn't worry that the soldiers might try to shoot him. "Then I would be a martyr," he said.

BBC 29 August, 2001, Unofficial observers keep watch in Mid-East Foreign activists have staged non-violent protests By BBC News Online's Fiona Symon The Palestinian Authority failed in its recent bid to persuade the international community to send observers to the West Bank and Gaza. Israel strongly objected to the Palestinian call for observers, saying they would create a shield for Palestinians to operate behind and make it impossible for Israel to respond. But a growing band of unofficial observers from Europe and the United States have begun to fill the vacuum by placing themselves between the warring parties. Heidi Arraf, a US citizen, was one of 10 peace activists who entered an area of occupied Beit Jala, near Jerusalem, on Tuesday to visit 45 children trapped in an orphanage. "We went with a delegation of religious figures and negotiated with the Israeli soldiers in front of five tanks, so that eventually we were able to go in and calm the children and take them food." Ms Arraf says there are around 200 "internationals" active in the West Bank and Gaza, many of whom work for non-governmental organisations. Their numbers were recently boosted by around 50 visiting activists from the US, Britain, France and Italy who responded to a call to support two weeks of action. Foreign groups participating included the International Solidarity Movement, a US-based church group called Christian Peacemakers Teams and Women in Black, a UK-based group. 'Itineraries' George Rishmawi, who runs an organisation called the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People, used to be a travel agent with an office in Beit Jala. When the numbers of tourists dwindled at the start of the intifada, he decided to put his skills to a different use. He was involved in helping with travel arrangements and organising "itineraries" for the international peace activists. He works in co-ordination with the Palestinian authorities to organise non-violent actions aimed at making the lives of Palestinians more bearable. Among their most successful operations, he says, was organising a football match for Palestinian children on a pitch that Israel had placed off limits to because of its proximity to an Israeli settlement. Other acts have been the collective dismantling of Israeli roadblocks and co-ordinating the non-violent demonstrations against Israel's occupation of Orient House - the Palestinian Authority's unofficial headquarters in Jerusalem. Think twice The groups are planning a campaign at the end of September to help Palestinian farmers reach their olive groves to harvest their crop. They are also organising events in September to commemorate the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, says Mr Rishmawi. The aim is to draw international attention to the Palestinian issue, mobilise international support and provide protection to the Palestinians. Although their numbers are still small, the Israeli army has recently expressed concern at the presence of foreign nationals in the West Bank and Gaza during military operations, says Ms Arraf. "If it causes them to think twice, that's good", she says. Nata Golem, an Israeli peace activist who works alongside Ms Arraf, says she is one of around 2,000 Israeli left-wing activists sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight. Unlike many Israelis who supported the peace movement but were baffled when it collapsed, they had strong contacts with people in the Palestinian areas and were aware of the situation on the ground, she says. "We knew the unbearable situation the Palestinians were in and heard their cries and so we weren't surprised when the intifada happened." She says that at the beginning of the intifada, she helped organise a month-long vigil, which was largely ignored by the Israeli press. Not always welcome But now, for the first time, the Israeli media is beginning to take notice and to view the peace activists in a more positive light. Mr Rishmawi says the groups are not always welcomed by local Palestinians. "We make sure that we are invited in by the local people first, and sometimes they say no to our action because they are frightened of Israeli reprisals. At other times they have told us to concentrate our efforts on Jerusalem." But Ms Arraf says the Palestinians are mostly appreciative. "Among Palestinians there is a strong sense of having been abandoned by the international community. They take comfort when they see individuals doing something and at least feel that they're not alone." She is hopeful that the numbers of activists will increase to 1,000 or more as the groups improve their contacts with churches, mosques and other sympathetic groups. "We started small but we're growing, and as the movement grows, people go back and tell others about their experiences."

Sri Lanka

AP 25 August 2001 Fear of rape during searches haunts women in Sri Lanka- Security forces routinely question Tamils on military ties BY SHIMALI SENANAYAKE, COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Exhausted after a night's work at a busy cafe and an anxious encounter with police, Velu Arshadevi was fast asleep when the loud thumping came at the door of a house shared by the cafe's employees. ``I sat up in the bed. It was about 3 in the morning and who would come?'' Arshadevi recalled asking herself. At the door, the 28-year-old mother of two found the police officer who had stopped her on the street hours earlier. He said she would have to come with him to the station as police needed to further verify her identity because she was a Tamil. The identity check earlier was routine, and -- as always -- unnerving. Police regularly question Tamils about possible ties to the militants who have waged a civil war for 18 years to establish a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's 3.2 million minority Tamils. But what came next scarred Arshadevi's life, and her case has come to represent the worst fears of Tamil women -- being raped by members of the Sinhalese-dominated security forces who exercise control over their day-to-day lives. While the government denies the rebels' charges that Tamils are discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese -- 14 million of the 18.6 million population -- Tamils point to their treatment at police checkpoints as just one example of how their lives are different. A Sinhalese who presents his national identity card usually is allowed to go on. A Tamil in most cases will be detained if he doesn't also have a separate police report verifying his name, age and address. Standing outside her home after the knock on her door that night in June, Arshadevi was afraid to go with the policeman. She argued that her ID papers had already been checked and were in order. But he insisted, and she had no choice. Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the police and military in this island nation have special powers to interrogate, arrest and indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of connections to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Arshadevi said that instead of being taken to the police station, she was pushed into a narrow concrete staircase leading to an army camp. For the next hour and a half, she said, she was gang raped as she cried out for her attackers to stop. The policeman who led her to the stairway, S. Premathilake, now faces charges of rape along with two other cops. Arshadevi's ordeal has brought protests from Tamil parliament members and human rights organizations. Selvy Thiruchandran of the Women's Education and Research Center, a government-funded rights group, said the rapes are another manifestation of a civil war born of an ancient conflict between two ethnic groups, each with its own language and religion. Women's right advocates say many cases of rape or sexual harassment have been reported by Tamil women in the past, but there have been no convictions against security forces except one where the victim was murdered. In March, two Tamil women detained by navy and police in the Tamil-majority northern town of Mannar reported they were gang-raped by members of the security force. No arrests have been made. Kumudini Samuel of the Women & Media Collective, a women's rights group, said many Tamil women don't report rape because they fear further harm from police and doubt action will be taken

NYT August 29, 2001 Graves of the Missing Haunt Sri Lanka By CELIA W. DUGGER, HEMMANI CHECKPOINT, Sri Lanka — The bones of 15 people, most bearing marks of blunt trauma, have been unearthed from hidden graves around this desolate military checkpoint, where soldiers fighting local rebels had beaten the victims to death and buried them. But five years after the crimes, and in the two years since the bodies were exhumed, no one has been put on trial for the killings. And the skeletons were only recently sent to be identified through DNA testing. Secret graveyards like this one are scattered across Sri Lanka, a small island tormented by violent conflict and sometimes wanton killing on both sides. Since the late 1980's, more than 20,000 people have vanished after being taken into government custody during two violent rebellions, one by Marxist youth in the south that was crushed by 1990 and a second by members of the Tamil ethnic group in the north and east that has raged for 18 years. While a vast majority of disappearances occurred before President Chandrika Kumaratunga came to power in 1994, atrocities by government forces have continued and almost 700 people have disappeared since then, according to Amnesty International. Nor have some Tamil elements lacked ruthlessness. The Chemmani cases in particular have come to be seen as a test of Mrs. Kumaratunga's commitment to prosecute the worst spate of human rights abuses during her tenure. And the excruciatingly slow progress has deepened mistrust of her government here in the north, ground zero in the war between the separatist Tamil rebels and a government that is dominated by the Sinhalese majority. Two years ago, after a soldier divulged a site where bodies were buried, relatives of some of the hundreds of Tamils who vanished from the northern Jaffna Peninsula in 1996 huddled here on scrubby salt flats and fallow paddies. They watched as investigators painstakingly swept away topsoil to reveal the graves. Some parents, anxious to know if the disinterred were their children, wonder why it was only this summer that the skeletons dug up around the checkpoint were finally sent to India for DNA testing. "They kept the bones in Colombo for the last two years," said Paramanathan Selvarajah, 67, whose son was taken into army custody at the checkpoint five years ago and never seen again. "Why are they delaying this identification? The government is happy our children were killed." The government insists that it is methodically investigating 154 disappearances from 1996 in which there is some evidence that security forces were involved. It expects to make a decision about prosecuting some suspects by the end of the year. The delays in the DNA testing resulted from competitive bidding that took a year to complete, officials said. "Irrespective of the era or the ethnic identity of the victims, the government has set in motion a proper process that meets the law of the country and that is being consistently applied," said Yasantha Kodagoda, the lawyer who leads the missing persons team in the attorney general's office. But researchers and human rights workers say Mrs. Kumaratunga's government has much more aggressively pursued cases of disappearances that occurred before she took office. After her election, she appointed presidential commissions to document the murderous record of her predecessors. The attorney general's office is now prosecuting more than 350 cases against 550 police officers and members of the security forces for human rights violations that predate her term, said officials in Colombo, the capital. But she has not appointed a presidential commission to investigate the 1996 Jaffna disappearances as a United Nations group recommended two years ago. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out what that means," said Ingrid Massage, an Amnesty International researcher who has been following events in Sri Lanka for 15 years. "The government is reluctant to own up to its own offenses." The late 1980's brought unparalleled years of terror to this small nation of 19 million. From 1987 to 1990, at least 20,000 people were reported missing. The worst excesses occurred in the overwhelmingly Sinhalese south, where a violent Marxist rebellion took hold among young people. Mrs. Kumaratunga's political rival, the United National Party, was then in the midst of 17 unbroken years in power. When Mrs. Kumaratunga sought the presidency in 1994, she promised to seek peace with the Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, restore the rule of law and protect human life. "We will dig up every grave," she said during the campaign. Her human rights record has been substantially better than that of the previous government, but the number of disappearances has still been too high, human rights workers say, with the largest number having come in 1996. "In the vast majority of cases where military personnel may have committed human rights violations, the government has not identified those responsible and brought them to justice," said the State Department's 2001 report on Sri Lanka. There have been some big blots. On Oct. 27, 2000, young Tamils held in a government rehabilitation camp in central Sri Lanka were hacked to death when the police failed to protect them from an organized Sinhalese mob. Many of those killed had been recruited as child soldiers for the Tigers, a ruthless force that has dispatched suicide bombers to kill civilians. The government has long made a point of trying to treat such young captives with care. But seven traumatized survivors of the massacre, interviewed recently at another rehabilitation camp on the Jaffna Peninsula, said they had been taken to a military hospital, where they had been cuffed by the hand or foot to their beds for six months. The youngest of them is 13 and speaks in a small, childish voice. After being interviewed, he asked that a message be passed on. "If you meet my mother, please tell her to come see me," he said. W. A. S. Perera, Sri Lanka's acting defense secretary, said in an interview that officials in Colombo had first learned from the Red Cross that the survivors had been cuffed to their beds in the military hospital. "As soon as we knew, we transferred the boys," he said. "I instructed the authorities concerned not to repeat this, because you will not be able to win their hearts this way." Winning the hearts of the Tamils has not proved easy for this government. And the hundreds of Jaffna Tamils who vanished in 1996 still haunt Mrs. Kumaratunga's efforts to make peace. In July of that year, the Tigers made a devastating attack on a military base in the north, killing 1,200 troops, and a suicide bomber blew up a senior army officer in the Jaffna Peninsula. Immediately, the security forces cracked down. By the end of 1996, 350 to 500 Jaffna Tamils had vanished. Mr. Selvarajah's son, Pirapakaran, was one of them. Then 23, he had ridden to the Chemmani checkpoint on his way home from work as a sales clerk. There, just a mile outside the town of Jaffna, his parents say, he was taken into custody. Then in 1998, there was an electrifying break in the Chemmani disappearances. Mrs. Kumaratunga personally saw to a rare prosecution of soldiers. The defendants were accused of raping and murdering an 18- year-old woman at the checkpoint, then killing the woman's mother and 16-year-old brother when they came looking for her. Just before the soldiers were to be sentenced to death by hanging, one of them, Lance Cpl. Somaratne Rajapakse, declared in open court that he knew the location of mass graves around the checkpoint where more than 400 people killed by the security forces in 1996 were buried. To test his credibility, Corporal Rajapakse was flown to Jaffna and taken to the Chemmani checkpoint in June 1999. He led investigators to a grave that held two bodies. In late August, more than three weeks of full-scale exhumations began in the heart of the war zone. The atmosphere was tense. At the checkpoint, the condemned men were palpably scared, observers say. And international observers, worried about rebel attacks, were heavily guarded. "We'd drive like hell to get to the checkpoint," said Robert Stair, a forensic archaeologist from Canada who took part in the exhumations. "We took a different route every day." Corporal Rajapakse and the other soldiers eventually led the way to seven more graves, but the remains of only 13 people were found. Mr. Stair and William D. Haglund, director of the international forensic program for the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, said the Sri Lankan authorities had not moved aggressively enough to seek information about the hundreds of others. Nor did Sri Lanka, lacking the modern methods used to investigate serial murders in the West, accept advice to get assistance from British, Australian or Canadian police experts, said Ms. Massage of Amnesty International. "Somewhere within the Ministry of Defense must be blocks against this proceeding," she said. But even the government's toughest critics acknowledge the logistical difficulties of prosecuting cases in an area where the war has displaced many of the victims' families and made local Tamils wary of Sinhalese investigators from Colombo. And the criminal justice system is grossly understaffed. But while the cases drag on, the ache of injustice is still there for the families of those who disappeared. Mr. Selvarajah said he and his wife had trouble paying for rent and food because the son who was supposed to support them in their old age was gone. One recent evening, Mr. Selvarajah, who has a bristly shock of white hair and mournful eyes, pulled out a water-spotted, dog-eared carbon copy of the letter he wrote to President Kumaratunga in 1996, the year his son disappeared. In it, he assured the president that his boy was a dutiful young man who lived at home and would never have been mixed up with the rebels. "This is the only son I have to look after us in our old age," he wrote. "I shall be very grateful to Your Excellency, the President of Sri Lanka, if you would give your gracious consideration to my humble request, the authorities concerned to release my son, who is innocent, immediately because we are suffering without him." There has still been no word on the fate of his son.

Uzbekistan

Thursday, 30 August, 2001, 10:54 GMT 11:54 UK Uzbekistan to reduce death penalty The President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has proposed a reduction in the number of crimes punishable with the death penalty. At the opening of parliament in Tashkent, the president said he would cut capital offences from eight to four: genocide, terrorism, armed cross-border attacks and premeditated murder with aggravating circumstance. Mr Karimov said fewer than 100 executions were now taking place each year in Uzbekistan, half the number before independence. Human rights groups frequently accuse the Uzbek government of persecuting political opponent and suppressing religious activity under the pretext of fighting Islamic extremism.

Europe

Belgium

Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 -- International humanitarian law seems to be "growing teeth." But are these real cracks that we see in Israel's long-entrenched immunity? Amira Howeidy sheds light on the unprecedented prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon before a Belgian court, and explores the limits of international justice where Israeli crimes of war are concerned The case In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Sherif Bassiouni, who helped bring Milosevic to justice, explains some of the legal aspects of the case against Sharon Technically, there are three international legal channels for indicting perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity. The United Nations Security Council has the right to form ad hoc war tribunals; the International Criminal Court (ICC), which will enter into effect with 60 ratifications; and countries -- such as Belgium -- which have laws that provide for Universal Jurisdiction (UJ) with respect to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. In the case of the ICC, jurisdiction will only apply prospectively, and therefore will not cover war crimes committed before the Treaty entered into effect. According to Sherif Bassiouni, professor of law and president of the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University, Chicago, only Belgium, and possibly Switzerland, could offer the possibility of bringing criminal action under the theory of UJ. Many states provide some form of conditional UJ, but most, however, require that either the victim or the perpetrator be a citizen of the enforcing state, says Bassiouni, who served as chairman of the UN Commission to Investigate International Humanitarian Law Violations in the former Yugoslavia. He was also elected vice-chairman of the UN General Assembly's Committee for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC). In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Bassiouni noted that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Protocol I of 1977 permitted the exercise of UJ "by any state for war crimes." But so far, no state has availed itself of that prerogative. Belgium has extended its jurisdiction on the basis of UJ to prosecute four Rwandan Hutus, including two Roman Catholic nuns, for involvement in the genocide against Rwanda's Tutsi minority in 1994. All four were convicted. But in another case, where Belgium applied the same law to the former minister of foreign affairs of the Congo, who was never physically present in Belgium, for allegedly inciting genocide in the Congo, the case was referred to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Congo, says Bassiouni, claims that the extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction of Belgium without any contacts with the enforcing state is a violation of customary international law. It also claims that, in the case in question, it is a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity, since the defendant was minister of foreign affairs. "It is expected that the ICJ will rule on the merits of that case in November of this year," Bassiouni says. He added, however: "If it rules that the extension of extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction via the theory of UJ is in violation of customary international law, then it will be a significant setback with respect to the Sharon matter in Belgium." "However, the ICJ may find that a state may exercise UJ on a person when that person is physically present in the state." In this case, he argued, "an indictment in Belgium would have no extraterritorial effect, but if Sharon steps in Belgium, he could be arrested there."

Bosnia

BBC 3 August 2001, Bosnian Muslims head for The Hague Mehmed Alagic is led away for trial Three high-ranking Muslim veterans of the Bosnian war, indicted to face war crimes charges, are on their way to the international criminal tribunal in The Hague (ICTY). The three, named as former generals Mehmed Alagic and Enver Hadzihasanovic, and a serving brigadier, Amir Kubura, left on a flight from Sarajevo airport after being arrested on Thursday at the tribunal's request. I hope that the Republika Srpska authorities will start acting in the same way Bosnian Muslim President Beriz Belkic The three men are the highest-ranking Muslim officers to have been indicted so far. They face charges relating to crimes committed against Bosnian Croats and Serbs in central Bosnia in 1993. Their detention prompted a call from the Muslim member of Bosnia's collective presidency for the Bosnian Serb authorities to hand over war crimes suspects still at large. The tribunal's two most-wanted suspects - Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - are both believed to be in hiding on Bosnian Serb territory. Muslim fighters are accused of a range of atrocities Beriz Belkic's challenge came amid similar calls from the United States, Germany and Britain. Mr Belkic - one of three members of the collective Bosnian presidency - said that, now the three Muslim army officers had been detained, the Serbs had been set an example. "I appreciate that the authorities of the Muslim-Croat federation acted in accordance with The Hague's request," Mr Belkic told a news conference. "I hope that the Republika Srpska authorities will start acting in the same way." Charges Murders, inhumane treatment causing great suffering, wanton destruction and illegal detention Charges against Bosnian Muslims The three Muslim officers are accused of "grave" breaches of the Geneva Convention in central Bosnia in 1993. The indictment against them says the most serious charges they face are for crimes allegedly committed by foreign "mujahideen" fighters under their command. Hundreds of foreign troops went to Bosnia to join the army during the conflict. The three officers were accused over "murders, inhumane treatment causing great suffering, wanton destruction and illegal detention", said tribunal spokesman Jim Landale. Bosnian Muslim commentators say that some war crimes were committed by the majority Muslim Bosnian army during the war. But they say that these were isolated incidents and not the planned genocide of which they have accused the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat armies. Enver Hadzihasanovic led the 3rd Corps The Bosnian Government agreed to hand over the three men, having consistently promised full co-operation with the tribunal. The parliament in the Serb Republic within Bosnia recently approved the first draft of a law on co-operation, but the authorities there have yet to arrest any of the indictees believed to be living on their territory. All three Muslim officers accused have already appeared at The Hague tribunal, at the trial of Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic. He was jailed for 46 years on Thursday for his role in the 1995 murder of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. It was the court's first conviction for genocide - the most serious of war crimes - in connection with the Bosnia war, and the toughest sentence it has passed so far.

BBC 9 August, 2001 Bosnian Muslims deny war crimes They are the highest-ranking Muslim officers to be tried Three senior Bosnian Muslim commanders have pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at the international tribunal in The Hague. The three - arrested last week by the police in Bosnia-Hercegovina - are accused of murder and other crimes committed against Croats and Serbs during the war in central Bosnia in 1993. Charges against the three Murders Inhumane treatment causing great suffering Wanton destruction Illegal detention The three men are the highest-ranking Muslim officers to face trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal. They were charged with murder, wanton destruction and inhumane treatment among 19 counts on the indictment. Muslim fighters are accused of a range of atrocities The indictment alleges that General Enver Hadzihasanovic, General Mehmed Alagic and Colonel Amir Kubura were responsible for executions and massacres following attacks on towns and villages. Their alleged victims were mainly Croat, but also Serb prisoners-of-war and civilians. The prosecutors claim the worst of these crimes were carried out by foreign Muslim fighters known as mujahideen - or holy warriors - under the command of the three accused. Witnesses The men have already appeared before the tribunal as court witnesses in ongoing trials...General Hadzihasanovic gave the final testimony in the trial of the Serb General Radislav Krstic, who was convicted last week of genocide at Srebrenica. These three men are not the first Muslims to go on trial at the tribunal. Two camp commanders were sentenced three years ago for crimes against Serbs. But now the military chiefs are being held accountable for atrocities carried out by their subordinates.

Finland

Helsingin Sanomat -Intl Edition (Helsinki) 29 August 2001 Foreign Minister Tuomioja denies he intended to identify Israelis with Nazis No official complaint from Israeli ambassador over magazine interview Finland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja (Soc. Dem.) denies that he intended to equate the Nazi persecution of the Jews with the Palestinian policy of hard-line Israelis. Certain statements concerning Israel in an interview given by Foreign Minister Tuomioja to the news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti have reportedly upset the Israeli ambassador in Helsinki and some Finnish Members of Parliament. In the interview Tuomioja said: "Israel's policy is to crush, humiliate, suppress, and impoverish the Palestinians". "It is quite shocking that some implement the same kind of policy toward the Palestinians which they themselves were victims of in the 1930s", said Tuomioja in the interview. On Tuesday Tuomioja told Helsingin Sanomat that he was not making any comparisons with the Nazis. He says that in his original statement he meant that one might imagine that people who were victims of a genocide might be expected to show solidarity toward others who are in a difficult situation. Foreign Minister Tuomioja says that the views he expressed were his own personal opinions. He added, however, that they are in line with the views of ministers of other countries of the European Union. "There is reason to note that even in the Israeli Government there are those whose attitude toward the Palestinians is one of racist incitement of hate" Tuomioja points out, adding that the EU also put pressure on Jörg Haider, the leader of Austria's right wing Freedom Party. "Of course there has been (violence) on the Palestinian side all the time, and naturally it is just as deplorable", he adds. The Israeli ambassador Miryam Shomrat says that contrary to press reports, she is not considering submitting an official request for an explanation about Foreign Minister Tuomioja's interview. Shomrat criticised Tuomioja's statements in Tuesday's edition of the late edition tabloid Ilta Sanomat.

Georgia

BBC 6 July, 2001, Jehovah's Witnesses take Georgia to court Jehovah's Witnesses are taking the Georgian authorities to the European Court of Human Rights over what they say is the government's reluctance to protect followers from attacks. A spokesman for the church in London, Paul Gillies, said more than 300 complaints had been submitted to Georgian prosecutors, but no action had been taken. Mr Gillies said Jehovah's Witnesses had been attacked by gangs of Orthodox extremists who raided meetings, assaulted worshippers and burnt religious literature. Human rights campaigners say the attacks are part of a campaign of violence against religious minorities in Georgia. Georgian prosecutors say they have launched an investigation.

Georgia: Mobs Terrorize Non-Orthodox Christians Wave of violent attacks requires U.S. response (New York, August 29, 2001) The Georgian authorities are indulging and abetting mob violence against non-Orthodox Christian worshippers, Human Rights Watch said today. In a 14-page memorandum released today, Human Rights Watch urged the Bush administration to challenge the Georgian government's failure to address the violence, and called for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to visit Georgia and investigate. In early September the administration is due to release its annual report on global religious freedom. "People should be entitled to worship without fear," said Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "For two years now these groups have had carte blanche for violence. It's time for the Georgian authorities to start investigating, arresting, charging, and detaining them." More than 40 attacks have taken place this year; more than 80 violent incidents have been reported since 1999. The memorandum, based on first hand interviews with victims, documents ten of the attacks that have taken place in 2001. The assailants, civilian militants who are sometimes led by Orthodox priests, have meted out beatings, ransacked homes, and destroyed religious literature. The mobs target Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentacostalists, Baptists, and followers of other Christian faiths non-native to Georgia, attempting to intimidate them into abandoning their faith. Encouraged by government and police inaction, the frequency of attacks is on the rise. President Eduard Shevardnadze has spoken out against the attacks and ordered police and prosecutors to "identify and punish" perpetrators, but the authorities have failed to investigate seriously or make arrests. The leader of the majority of the attacks, Vasili Mkalavishvili, a defrocked Orthodox priest, openly claims to receive help from the police and security services. Police officers have failed to intervene to protect the victims and in some cases the police themselves have violently broken up prayer gatherings. Since last year, mob attacks have spread from Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, to other towns and rural areas. In March of this year an Orthodox priest on horseback led a crowd of 150 in breaking into a private house in the town of Sachkhere, where Jehovah's Witnesses were holding a prayer meeting, and beating worshippers inside. In February, Mkalavishvili and his followers rushed into the courtyard of a private home in Tbilisi and beat Jehovah's Witnesses there with clubs, large crosses and Bibles after police forced open the gate for them. On April 30, Mkalavishvili's supporters broke up another Jehovah's Witnesses prayer meeting in Tbilisi, attacking worshippers with sticks spiked with nails and putting three of them in hospital. Human Rights Watch said that leading Georgian institutions bear heavy responsibility for creating the atmosphere of hostility and intolerance towards non-Orthodox Christian faiths in which these violent attacks have flourished. Law enforcement agencies' failure to prosecute the perpetrators of such attacks has given a green light for further violence and hostility. The Georgian Orthodox Church has failed to condemn the violence explicitly. Since 1998 it has lobbied for laws to gain special status and to have restrictions placed on other faiths. In February the Supreme Court ruled to deregister the Jehovah's Witnesses as a legal entity in Georgia. The Supreme Court decision prompted a new surge of violent attacks. Local level police, customs officers and Orthodox priests leapt to interpret the decision as a ban on Jehovah's Witnesses' activities. They have used it variously to disperse prayer meetings, confiscate literature, and to issue new threatening ultimatums. "The rule of law is giving way to mob law on this in Georgia," said Andersen. "The Georgian authorities and their international partners need to put a stop to it." http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/08/georgia-0829.htm

Greece

AP 28 August 2001 Greek Church in ID Card Hassle By PATRICK QUINN, ATHENS, Greece (AP) - The powerful Greek Orthodox Church on Tuesday demanded a nationwide referendum be held on the government's decision to strip religion from state identity cards. Church leader Archbishop Christodoulos released the final tally of a yearlong petition drive against the decision - more than 3 million signatures, or 27 percent of Greece's population. ``We call on the government to go forward and hold a free and peaceful referendum so the people can express their will,'' Christodoulos said. Government spokesman Dimitris Reppas ruled out a referendum. ``We are not concerned by the number of signatures,'' Reppas said. ``This discussion is at an end for us.'' The government abolished the religion entry on state-issued mandatory ID cards in May 2000, saying the changes were needed to conform with European Union standards on privacy protection and civil rights. Greece's religious minorities, including Jews, Muslims and Roman Catholics, welcomed the decision as a way to curb alleged religious discrimination. The church strongly objected and accused the government of trying to undermine the role of religion in Greece, where more than 97 percent of the native-born population of 11 million people is baptized as Orthodox Christians. Last year, Christodoulos led more than 500,000 demonstrators in two huge rallies against the changes. A repeat of the demonstrations could increase pressure on the Socialist government of Premier Costas Simitis, which has hit all-time lows in popularity polls. Christodoulos said he planned to make a direct appeal Wednesday to President Costis Stephanopoulos, who is respected but holds only ceremonial power and cannot reverse government measures.

Macedonia

BBC 22 August, 2001 Macedonian church blast deepens rifts The blast is seen as an attack on Macedonian culture The destruction of an Orthodox church in a Macedonian village has widened the already bitter divide between the country's two communities. Little but rubble was left of the famous St Atanasius church in Lesok, a tiny Macedonian Slav enclave in the heart of territory now held by ethnic Albanian fighters. Government ministers immediately blamed the rebels, who in turn accused the Macedonians of blasting the church, built inside a 14th century monastery, in an attempt to discredit them. But observers say that whoever is ultimately responsible, the attack was designed to undermine an already fragile ceasefire as the country struggles to find peace. Shattered identities The BBC's Jeremy Bowen says the Macedonians see the destruction of the church as a direct attack on their religion, culture and identity. Next to the church is the grave of Kyril Pejcinovik, the father of the modern Macedonian language, adding particular symbolism to the site. "This just confirms the anti-historical mental make-up of the Albanian terrorists and historically locates them in the period of savages when simply nothing sacred existed," said the interior ministry in a statement. The minister for culture, Ganka Samoilova-Cvetnovska, compared the act to the destruction of ancient Buddha statues by the Taleban in Afghanistan. Precedents But the destruction of religious sites by ethnic Albanians has not been a feature of the conflict in Macedonia as it was during the war in Kosovo, when dozens of Serb Orthodox sites were targeted. In recent months the religious sites damaged in Macedonia have belonged to the ethnic Albanian community. Earlier this month, Macedonians set fire to a mosque in the southern town of Prilep after 10 of their soldiers were killed, say international officials. Observers from the European security body, the OSCE, are now investigating the Lesok blast. "This would be the first destruction of a religious site here on the part of the ethnic Albanians if they are found responsible," said Harald Schenker, spokesman for the OSCE mission to Macedonia. "Whoever it was, this was a premeditated, well-executed attack," he told BBC News Online. Just 15 Macedonians remain in Lesok. As in other villages and towns across the country, their inhabitants have fled.

Netherlands

BBC 2 August, 2001 General guilty of Bosnia genocide Krstic denied the charges and plans an appeal The UN war crimes tribunal has found a former Bosnian Serb general guilty of genocide for his role in the 1995 murder of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. Radislav Krstic was sentenced to 46 years in prison, but spared the eight life sentences demanded by prosecutors. You were there, General Krstic... you are guilty of inflicting incredible suffering Judge Almiro Rodrigues It was the court's first conviction for genocide - the most serious of war crimes - in connection with the Bosnia war, and the toughest sentence it has passed so far. The massacre in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica - a designated UN safe haven - is regarded as Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. "In July 1995 General Krstic, individually you agreed to evil. And this is why today this trial chamber convicts you and sentences you to 46 years in prison," said Judge Almiro Rodrigues. The judge described thousands of "amputated" lives Jim Landale, spokesman for the international tribunal, said the verdict "shows the victims of the Srebrenica massacre that the international community has not forgotten about them". But some relatives of Srebrenica victims reacted with anger to the sentence, describing it as too lenient. "Let him go and come back among us. We will give him a verdict," said Behara Hasanovic. "For 10,000 of our sons, only 46 years! His people have ripped my son from my arms." Atrocity Krstic, 53, is the first senior official linked with the massacre to be tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He was second-in-command of the Bosnian Serb army's Drina corps, which spearheaded the attack on Srebrenica, an area that was officially under the protection of UN troops. He looked tense and shocked as Judge Rodrigues read out the verdict. His lawyer, Nenad Petrusic told reporters after the ruling that Mr Krstic would appeal against both the verdict and the sentence. The general was seized by Nato troops in 1998. He pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. In the five days after Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys are thought to have been killed. Implicated In a judgement that followed the 16-month trial - during which 116 witnesses were heard - the panel of judges found that Krstic was aware of and involved in the plans to kill them. Srebrenica was Europe's worst massacre since World War II He was also implicated in the execution of the plans, and in attempting to hide the evidence afterwards, through the burial of the victims in mass graves. In a long list of evidence, the tribunal cited orders given to General Krstic to deal with what were described as 3,500 "packages" - the remains of some of the victims. The prosecution had asked for consecutive life sentences on each of the eight charges that included genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Responsibility During his trial, Krstic said he was acting on the orders of other generals. Ratko Mladic: Most wanted They include Ratko Mladic who, along with wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, has been indicted for genocide for his alleged part in the massacre. Both men remain at large and are the court's most wanted fugitives following the extradition of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague in June. The BBC's Gabriel Partos says one reason for the 46-year sentence may be that judges want to keep life imprisonment - the tribunal's severest punishment - for those considered ultimately most responsible. In the case of Srebrenica, that is expected to be kept in reserve for General Mladic - assuming, of course, that he is first captured, and then found guilty.

BBC 30 August, 2001 Milosevic to face genocide charge Mr Milosevic still refuses to appoint a lawyer Slobodan Milosevic is to be charged with genocide, it was revealed after the former Yugoslav president's second appearance at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said three amendments to the existing indictment against Mr Milosevic were being prepared, including, for the first time, charges relating to the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia. "It will be for genocide in Bosnia. Croatia is still open," she told reporters outside the court. The former Yugoslav leader currently faces four counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the Kosovo conflict in 1999, but Ms del Ponte said a fifth charge would be laid against him in October or November. Genocide is the gravest charge the tribunal can bring. No defence lawyer During a 40-minute hearing, Mr Milosevic refused again to recognise the tribunal and complained about the conditions of his detention, which he described as a "massive violation" of his rights. Prosecutors asked the tribunal to appoint a defence counsel to represent the former Yugoslav president. However, the judges refused, and moved instead to appoint a lawyer who will assist the court in ensuring a fair trial. The lawyer, known as an amicus curiae (friend of the court), will be able to cross-examine witnesses, and draw attention to any evidence that may indicate Mr Milosevic's innocence of the charges against him. New charges The court said it would not be practical to appoint counsel to defend Mr Milosevic against his will. Mr Milosevic said he would like to make a representation on the "illegality of this tribunal" and said his aides would release to the media a document he has written on the subject, if the tribunal did not do so itself. He said the tribunal was violating his rights by keeping him "in isolation" from his family, lawyers and journalists. Microphone silenced He also criticised Presiding Judge Richard May for turning off his microphone during his first appearance on 3 July. "We have to communicate as civilised persons, not switching off the microphone," he said. But Judge May once again switched off the microphone when Mr Milosevic began to repeat his grievances and described the tribunal as a "political tool". Mr Milosevic complained that visits by members of his family were closely monitored, and said that other detainees had better access to their families. "Why [do] you need monitoring when I talk to my grandson who is two-and-a-half years old?" he asked. Adjournment He also said he was denied access to lawyers, with whom he wanted to discuss his imprisonment in The Hague as well as his affairs in Yugoslavia. Judge May said the problem arose because Mr Milosevic had not designated a lawyers to act as his defence counsel during the trial. He said the tribunal would consider his complaints, and adjourned the hearing to 29 October. The tribunal hopes to hold a pre-trial conference in early January, and to fix a date for the trial before the end of February. Mr Milosevic is already pursuing a case in the Dutch courts, claiming he is being held illegally.

Russia

WP 20 Aug 2001 The Bones in the Woods In Irkutsk, Wielding Shovels Against Stalin By Robert G. Kaiser, Page C01 One in an occasional series IRKUTSK, Russia In Siberia, it sometimes seems that the people are outnumbered by the ghosts. With fewer than seven people per square mile, this is a nearly vacant land. But the ghosts are everywhere, an inevitable consequence of Siberia's history as a place for punishment, and often a killing field. The ghosts were brought to life for two American visitors here last week by Alexander L. Alexandrov. He is a geologist who in his professional life knows how to find gold, and who in his private life found the remains of 30,000 people, all murdered by Joseph Stalin's NKVD, precursor to the KGB. Alexandrov is one of those human beings whose existence compels other human beings to ponder their own condition in a new way. At the age of 61, he is an odd duck. He wears a thick, wild, curly beard, gone white (like his hair). His diminutive gold spectacles resemble Ben Franklin's. He's not a sophisticate: He hasn't read all of the prison literature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and he would never feel at home in the kitchens of Moscow's intellectuals, where Russia's famous, endless conversational debates are conducted. He is enormously proud, but not boastful, about his success in locating those 30,000. One of them, he believes, was his grandfather. Their bones are buried beneath a thin layer of Siberian soil a kilometer beyond the end of the main runway of the Irkutsk airport. Just last month, 145 people lost their lives when a Russian airliner crashed 100 yards from the burial ground Alexandrov discovered. Alexandrov's is a rich Russian story. It has an unusual beginning, and a compelling middle leading to catharsis. The ending is still being written. Alexandrov was born in Siberia in 1940; his vivid early memories date from the first years after World War II. Two of those memories are worth recounting. The first came out of Alexandrov only after his second half-liter bottle of Admiral Kolchak beer (more about the admiral later): At the age of 7, Alexandrov lived in Angarsk, just northwest of Irkutsk, where a petrochemical plant was being built by prisoners after the war. When prisoners died, as they often did, their bodies were buried in shallow graves in the woods. Alexandrov liked to torment the girls on the walk home from school. One way to do this was to rush ahead of them and go into the woods to find some bones, or better yet, a human skull, and put it on the road where the girls would be certain to stumble upon it. Then they would shriek in horror, and young Sasha Alexandrov would laugh delightedly. "So I was used to the idea from childhood that there were skeletons in the woods -- it was a normal occurrence." Then a second memory from that same year of 1947, or perhaps 1948, this one evoked by a question about how and when Alexandrov rejected communist ideology: Angarsk was growing, and Alexandrov learned excitedly that the town was going to get its own newspaper, Znamya Kommunisma ("Banner of Communism"). He waited eagerly for the first edition. When it came out the lead story described how patriotic members of the Komsomol, the young communist league, were building the new coal processing plant. "What kind of Komsomols are they talking about?" the young Alexandrov wondered to himself. "Everybody knows those are prisoners building the plant." This affected Alexandrov for life. "It made me look suspiciously at everything they told me," he said. He never discussed his revelation with his parents or anyone else, but he also never joined the Communist Party, though that was the thing to do for most bright young Russians with ambition. A later memory, from about 1957, after Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous speech denouncing Stalin's crimes and offered to rehabilitate those who had been unjustly "repressed": Alexandrov's parents and maternal grandmother had applied for rehabilitation of his grandfather, and it was granted. Soon afterward, his grandmother received her first pension payment from the state. "When she got that 10 rubles, she burst into tears," Alexandrov remembered. But even then, no one explained to him what had happened to his grandfather. He only learned about that several years later. Then he realized why his grandmother had burst into tears -- the pension meant she was no longer an outcast, the wife of an "enemy of the people." Jump now to 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of openness, or glasnost, had revived Russia's memories of its horrific past, and finally allowed citizens to confront it. In Irkutsk people started to talk about the missing bodies of thousands of people killed here in 1937 and 1938. Alexandrov joined the local branch of Memorial, a new organization formed to honor and preserve the memory of Stalin's victims. "It occurred to me that, as a geologist, I ought to try to find the bodies," he said. He had a hunch that the NKVD killers might have hidden the bodies on land they themselves controlled. He learned that before World War II, NKVD officers in Irkutsk had a big piece of wooded Siberian taiga out near the airport where they built little cottages, or dachas. He found the spot quite easily; the remnants of several of the old dachas were still there, as was an old well and other evidence of human habitation. He looked further and, with his geologist's eye, found a field nearby whose surface had an unnatural topography. He dug one hole in the field, and found nothing. Then he dug a second hole a few yards away, and just below the surface found human bones, then a skull with a bullet hole in it. His first reaction was to say nothing. "First we had to build public opinion," he explained -- to create the impression, and perhaps even the reality, of a popular clamor for information about the missing graves. And this worked to his satisfaction. Ultimately even the local branch of the KGB joined the search, after its chief called Alexandrov on the phone and suggested they collaborate. With that development he decided it was time to reveal his discovery. The authorities dug in five spots in the field Alexandrov found, and quickly uncovered the remains of 305 people. This was a mass burial ground, no question about it. The local KGB found and made public NKVD archives that recorded the deaths of 30,000 people during the great terror of 1937-38. Many of them were Communist Party officials; others were people exiled to Siberia in earlier repressions. The Memorial society pressed the Irkutsk papers to print the names of the dead, and they agreed. Soon these "lists of the shot" began to appear regularly, sometimes filling an entire page. Once the mass graves were found, Memorial pressed the Irkutsk authorities to grant this piece of ground the status of a graveyard. Eventually they agreed. A monument made of giant rectangular pieces of stone was built to mark the spot. An entrepreneurial local artist offered families the opportunity to put up marble markers or photographs preserved on metal on a wall of honor. Several hundred did so. The artist, Alexandrov said, made a lot of money on the transaction, while making many errors on the markers. We had called Alexandrov not knowing any of this story but guessed that the head of Memorial in Irkutsk, an important transit point for political and other prisoners during the Stalin years, might be an interesting person. We met him at his apartment in the center of town. "Let's take a drive," he said. When we arrived, he told the story in a matter-of-fact tone and walked us around the vast field of bones. He then marched us into the woods, where the famous Siberian mosquitoes were as thick as smoke, to show us the remains of the NKVD dachas, the well, the swimming hole. Then, another quarter-mile down a bumpy dirt road, he took us to his proudest discovery -- a big pit that, he was certain, the NKVD had dug for more bodies but never used. "I feel that I've found the grave of my grandfather," Alexandrov said later, and this was clearly a source of great satisfaction. But his struggle isn't finished. He and his colleagues in Memorial (composed of about 20 activists) are trying to persuade the authorities that this site should be made an official monument, not just a cemetery. And they are publishing the "lists of the shot" in book form, with brief descriptions of each victim, taken from the NKVD files. Four volumes have been published, with 12,000 names; six or eight more will follow. But they are printed in editions of only about 1,500 copies, and now Alexandrov wants to find the money to put them all online at his Web site (Memorial.ru, which is in Russian). The big unanswered question, for Alexandrov and other Russians who share his outlook, is whether, and how, his countrymen will ever really come to terms with the horrors in their past. This is where Adm. Alexander Kolchak comes in. In the bitter civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Kolchak became the leader of the anti-communist "Whites," whose last foothold was here in Siberia. Kolchak, an upper-class Anglophile, was the former commander of the czar's Black Sea fleet and a rabid anti-communist. The Reds finally killed him here in Irkutsk, where a local entrepreneur has put his name and picture on a pretty tasty beer. As we drank Admiral Kolchak in a tent set up in the park on the bank of the Angara River next to the Admiral Kolchak brewery, Alexandrov confided that the local branch of Memorial plans to file a lawsuit in Moscow. Its purpose is to win the legal rehabilitation of Kolchak himself, the embodiment of evil in Soviet propaganda for 70 years. That shouldn't matter, Alexandrov reasoned. After all, Kolchak was just trying to prevent the horrors of Russia's 20th century from happening. The complete "Siberia Diary," including reports by Robert G. Kaiser and photographs by Lucian Perkins, can be viewed online at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/siberiadiary/.
 

United Kingdom

Aegis Trust (UK) Genocide Prevention Initiative 8 August 2001 01 The new www.aegistrrust.org website is launched. Aegis Trust is a genocide prevention initiative that aims to promote a fundamental change in the response to genocidal situations, moving away from reactive measures to policies of prevention. Root causes of genocide must be understood before prevention strategies can be developed. Endangered groups need to be identified and the risk of genocide evaluated before strategies can be developed and preventative measures can be adopted to reduce the impact of this devastating phenomenon.

Observer 26 August 2001 SCIENTISTS TO PROBE WORLDWIDE GENOCIDE BYLINE: MARTIN BRIGHT AND ED BAKER BODY: THE WORLD'S first centre for the investigation of genocide is to be set up by British scientists with experience of working on some of the most appalling war crimes of modern times. The International Forensic Centre of Excellence for the Investigation of Genocide (Inforce) will use expertise gained in excavating mass graves in the Balkan conflict to provide independent evidence of war crimes and state-sponsored killing from across the world. The cutting-edge science of forensic archaeology has already helped convict war criminals of atrocities committed during the fighting that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia. The new centre, which could be up and running by the end of next year, plans to investigate atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, Central Africa and Indonesia. International experts in law and human rights will complement the staff of scientists. The Inforce centre will also help with the work of the International Criminal Court being established by the United Nations. It is estimated that about 170 million people have been murdered by their own governments in the past century. The centre is the brainchild of Professor Margaret Cox, an expert on Channel 4's archaeology programme Time Team , who also advises the Ministry of Defence on forensics. The money for a feasibility study has been provided by Bournemouth University, of which Cox is chancellor. The idea for the centre was inspired by time Cox spent in 1999 in Kosovo, where she had been sent to examine mass graves for the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. 'I thought, everyone is doing their best in very difficult circumstances, but this can be done much better,' she told The Observer Cox believes she will need pounds 10 million to fund the centre and has already attracted some high-profile supporters such as veteran BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane and Baroness Cox, a deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, who campaigns against human rights abuses in Sudan. Cox is confident she will raise the money by the end of the year, when she will begin recruiting for the centre. 'There is no doubt that there is a demand for this kind of expertise,' said Cox. 'My students were being recruited from the course before they had graduated.' Cox will create a rapid response unit to fly to areas of conflict as soon as it is alerted to reports of a massacre. By analysing the soil and plants in the grave as well as the corpses, it will build up individual profiles of the atrocities committed, including the time of year, the methods used in the murder and the burial. It will also use the latest DNA and isotope analysis to identify remains. 'This forensic work is absolutely crucial, for the obvious legal reasons, but it is especially important for identifying bodies and returning remains to the families,' said Balkan specialist Tim Judah, author of Kosovo: War and Revenge.

Voice of America News Auschwitz Survivor Keeps on Fighting James Blears, Birmingham, Britain 29 Aug 2001 The war crimes trials of Serbs and Croats currently underway at the tribunal of international justice in the Hague is being followed with special interest by a 74-year-old woman in Great Britain, who understands the horrors of such crimes on a personal level. Kitty Hart-Moxon, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp and an expert on mass murder, is working to establish an international institute on genocide as a way of more effectively stopping it from happening again. Kitty Hart-Moxon has already helped to establish the Beth Sholom Center for Holocaust Studies in Laxtan, near the English City of Nottingham. She now wants to go one step further and create an international institute on genocide with funding from governments and organizations worldwide. She is one of the very few survivors of the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp, a best-selling international author and an acknowledged world authority on Holocaust studies. In spite of the horrors she has seen and experienced, Kitty Hart-Moxon remains an energetic champion of human rights. She says that in spite of promises that "it will never happen again," democratic governments have acted too slowly or not at all when faced with recent cases of genocide. She cites the cases of mass murder in Rwanda and the Balkans, where brutality grew worse while democratic governments pondered what to do. "I'm not optimistic," says Ms. Hart-Moxon. "I think it will go on and on unless people will learn. Until you have a proper educational projects and one of the things that is going to happen is that we are going to have an institute for genocide. So people will actually begin to understand that from the very smallest beginnings. So they understand nothing big happens immediately. It's all very, very small and very, very slow, and it creeps up upon people. And there has to be a warning sign that people must understand." Ms. Hart-Moxon says an international institute on genocide could alert the world to such situations before it is too late to do anything and she is working with other groups in Great Britain and elsewhere to establish such an entity. Meanwhile, she applauds the current trial in the Hague of a Serbian lieutenant colonel who stands accused of murdering thousands of Muslim men in the Srebrenica Enclave in 1995. "Justice has got to be seen to be done, and also it serves a dual purpose," says Ms. Hart-Moxon. "It also brings out the truth. A lot of people don't really understand what really happened, so a trial like this has an educational dimension as well." The international panel of judges in the Hague is currently using a set of ground rules, which were established at the nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1946, to deal with today's Balkan war criminals. They are determined to send a global message that no one can hide from the consequences of genocide.

Global

BBC 3 August, 2001, Germ warfare talks suspended The forum has agreed to suspend the talks for a year International negotiations to enforce a global ban on germ warfare have been suspended following a recent decision by the United States to pull out of the talks. The chairman of the 56-nation talks, Tibor Toth of Hungary, said the group could not go on working on a protocol on enforcement of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention without the participation of the United States. Quite a number of delegations would be reluctant to engage in continued negotiations among themselves in the absence of a major negotiating partner, that is the United States of America Tibor Toth The germ warfare convention, while outlawing the manufacture, storage or use of toxic weapons, has no mechanism to ensure that states adhere to it. Washington withdrew from the talks towardsat the end of July, saying it objected to too many clauses on the proposed agreement. US fears espionage The US says the draft will be ineffective in stopping countries from developing germ warfare, but will endanger US security and expose the commercial secrets of its biotech industry to industrial espionage. Mr Mahley said the US would come up with new proposals "In our assessment, the draft protocol would put national security and confidential business information at risk, " the US representative, Donald Mahley, told the forum last week. Washington's allies have expressed regret at the US decision. Unlike the case of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which was ratified last week despite Washington's absence, the countries in the biological weapons talks decided the germ warfare protocol was not worth signing without the US. New ideas expected Instead, the forum, which has been working since 1994, has agreed to suspend the talks for a year. France said it expected the US to come up with new ideas on enforcing the anti-germ warfare treaty, so that they could resume. Iran and Iraq were among the countries opposed to continuing the talks without the US. Iraq's efforts to develop biological weapons spurred the talks Baghdad noted that Washington was needed in any agreement because the United States has one of the most advanced biotechnology industries. According to the rules of the talks, the 210-page draft protocol must be ratified by consensus, and any country has the power to veto inspection procedures or anything else. The latest meeting of the group, which started in Geneva on 23 July, had been intended to finalise the wording of the draft plan. Mr Toth told the members that "the overwhelming majority" of the delegates had been hopeful that an agreement on how to enforce the convention could have been reached by now. Unfortunately, he said, "it is not possible to do that." A periodic review of the Biological Weapons Convention is to be held in November, with the participation of all 143 nations who ratified it.

WP 9 August 2001 The Violence of Development By Balakrishnan Rajagopal Page A19 "Ethnic cleansing" -- the forcible dislocation of a large number of people belonging to particular ethnic groups -- is an outlawed practice. Individuals who are accused of ethnic cleansing are subjected to indictment by international criminal tribunals, and even domestic courts are increasingly used in the West to prosecute those who commit mass violence abroad. Yet most large forced dislocations of people do not occur in conditions of armed conflict or genocide but in routine, everyday evictions to make way for development projects. A recent report by the World Commission on Dams estimates that 40 million to 80 million people have been physically displaced by dams worldwide, a disproportionate number of them being indigenous peoples. Indeed, this "development cleansing" may well constitute ethnic cleansing in disguise, as the people dislocated so often turn out to be from minority ethnic and racial communities. In the Philippines, almost all the large dam schemes are on the land of the country's 6 million to 7 million indigenous people. In India, 40 percent to 50 percent of those displaced by development projects -- a total estimated at more than 33 million since 1947 -- are tribal people, who account for just 8 percent of the country's 1 billion population. Still, international human rights monitors remain oblivious to the violence of development. A biased focus on international criminal justice -- the pursuit of a Milosevic, for example -- has blinded the world's conscience to mass crimes that are often as serious as those that occurred in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The millions of people forcibly dislocated from their lands are usually from among the poorest and most vulnerable sections of populations. Upon dislocation, these communities are pushed into further poverty and violence. These conditions are themselves grave human rights violations, but they also lead to further violations -- for example, by exacerbating conflicts between large communities that lose land and are resettled and the communities into which they move. Forcible dislocation destroys the livelihoods of entire communities as large dams and inappropriate agricultural projects alter the land-use patterns that traditionally support farming, grazing and fishing. And the number of people forcibly dislocated is probably far larger than reported, as the displaced are systematically undercounted -- for example, by as much as 47 percent in the case of the projects funded by the World Bank. In China's Western Poverty Reduction Project in Quinghua, the World Bank Complaints Panel found that entire towns of thousands of Tibetan and Mongol minorities were not counted as affected. The United Nations has declared mass eviction to be a violation of the human right to housing. And because of growing conflicts over water and natural resources, the World Commission on Dams was established in 1998 by the World Bank, the International Conservation Union and others. But despite these efforts, human rights violations continue in the name of development. For instance, a judgment by the Indian Supreme Court in October 2000 will allow the construction of a mega-dam on the Narmada River to go forward. This is deeply disappointing given the Indian judiciary's history as the protector of the rights of the underprivileged. It is also tragic because the project will lead to the displacement of more than 200,000 people and the elimination of the rich ecological resources in the Narmada Valley, one of India's most fertile. The Narmada Valley dam project is the second largest in the world, after the Three Gorges dam project in China, which is known for its excessive human and environmental costs. The World Bank, which originally was to have funded the Narmada project, withdrew funding in 1993 after being criticized for violating its own internal regulations on resettlement and rehabilitation and environmental clearance. Every funder since then -- Japanese and Germans included -- has withdrawn after running into criticism, and the project is now being funded by Indian state governments, redirecting scarce funds from much-needed health and education projects. A broad coalition opposing the dam, consisting of the people of the Narmada Valley as well as domestic and foreign intellectuals, social activists, journalists, judges and lawyers, has repeatedly pointed out technological alternatives for producing power and providing water, but these have been dismissed by the Indian Supreme Court. On the other side is the developmental nationalism displayed by Indian Home Minister L. K. Advani, who says opponents of such projects are working at the behest of "foreign nations" -- a response commonly given by governments that commit gross human rights abuses. It is clear that international indifference toward the violence of development projects needs to end. The writer is a professor of law and development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of MIT's Program on Human Rights and Justice.

HRW 29 Aug 2001 Global Caste Discrimination -- Caste-based discrimination blights the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and the World Conference Against Racism should have the issue squarely on its agenda, Human Rights Watch urged in a new report released today. The 60-page report, Caste Discrimination: A Global Concern, focuses on the Dalits or so-called untouchables of South Asia-including Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan-as well the Buraku people of Japan, the Osu of Nigeria, and certain groups in Senegal and Mauritania who also suffer from caste-based discrimination. The prominence of caste among South Asian diaspora communities is also revealed. "Apartheid may have ended in South Africa, but at least 250 million people worldwide are still living in a situation of segregation and servitude," said Smita Narula, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch and author of the report. "The racism conference cannot ignore this global phenomenon." On August 6, 2001, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, an upper-caste Brahmin boy and a lower-caste Jat girl were dragged to the roof of a house and publicly hanged by members of their own families as hundreds of spectators looked on. The public lynching was punishment for refusing to end an inter-caste relationship. Despite a high incidence of egregious crimes such as these, the Indian government claims to have tackled the problem and maintains that is an internal matter. The government has tried to censor discussion of caste at the conference and at all preparatory meetings leading up to it. India has used political and economic influence over other countries to pressure them into a partnership of silence; they have sent numerous people to non-governmental meetings who had clearly received a brief to argue the government's side, and have used influence within UN human rights bodies to sabotage any reference to caste in conference documents. The report, which is being released at the nongovernmental forum before the racism conference taking place in Durban from August 28-August 31, clearly shows that caste discrimination is a significant bar to basic human rights worldwide. Over 160 Dalit activists from India will be attending the conference, as well as numerous lower-caste advocacy groups from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Japan, and Senegal. Caste denotes a system of rigid social stratification into ranked groups defined by descent and occupation. Under various caste systems throughout the world, caste divisions also dominate in housing, marriage, and general social interaction-divisions that are reinforced through the threat of social ostracism, economic boycotts, and even physical violence. The report also discusses the strong links between caste, debt bondage, and slavery, as well as exploitation and violence against lower-caste women.