Global

NYT 20 July 2003 Peacekeeping Is Back, With New Faces and Rules By FELICITY BARRINGER UNITED NATIONS — Peacekeeping is no longer a dirty word in Republican Washington. The United States is appealing to other countries to share the military burden of the occupation of Iraq, and President Bush is also signaling his willingness to send American troops to West Africa to help pacify Liberia. But as peacekeeping, like bell-bottoms, comes back into fashion, it is now cut from a different fabric than before. The missions are longer, and the troops are more likely to come from developing countries. In its original missions, United Nations troops were likely to be the first force on the ground, after combatants had agreed to step back. But in the last four years, urgent humanitarian crises in the eastern Congo, Sierra Leone and East Timor have required new tactics. Military action is needed more quickly than a United Nations blue-helmeted force can be authorized and deployed. In these knotted conflicts, ad hoc multinational forces have taken the lead, with the United Nations' blessing, and they have been led by developed countries — the British in Sierra Leone and the French in the Ivory Coast, for example. Their tenure tends to be measured in weeks or months, while the tenure of United Nations' forces, which follow the multinational forces, tends to be measured in years. The United Nations' forces also tend to come from countries with less substantial economies, though they usually have substantial militaries. On June 30, the top contributors to peacekeeping missions were Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana. Together, they contributed 13,826 troops, military observers and policeman. The five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — together contributed a total of 2,097, less than all the individual countries but Ghana. Does it matter? After all, the countries with the most robust economies are paying most of the bills. The United States, in the current fiscal year, is paying 27 percent of the United Nations peacekeeping budget of $2.17 billion. "There are countries that support peacekeeping in a big way, with a lot of money, and countries that support it with flesh and blood," said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the United Nations under secretary general for peacekeeping operations, in a recent interview. While the movement in this direction has been going on since at least the mid-1990's, "I do hope we are in a trough, not a trend," he said. This divide "could create some resentment." Indeed, if the military intervention is to have any meaning, it must display international backing of all sorts, said David Rudd, the president of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies. "It's all well and good to support an operation financially," Mr. Rudd said, but "if you subscribe to the notion of some form of global community, this demands and equitable sharing of the risks." But Paul F. Diehl, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the increasing dominance of developing countries is not a major issue if their forces have the military capability and are seen as legitimate, not interlopers with their own agenda. (Which makes Nigerian forces a problematic presence when it comes to West African peacekeeping.) For the major troop contributors, there are rewards — peacekeeping dividends, if you will. Pakistanis and Indians believe "that peacekeeping adds to the military experience," Mr. Guéhenno said. "To be able to hold fire in a difficult situation requires a lot of training." And then there is a more tangible dividend: Mr. Guéhenno's office reimburses the countries that provide troops at the rate of $1,100 per soldier a month. Often, the cost to the country providing the troops is significantly less. "Generally, it is a substantial and generous differential," said Tariq Chaudhry, a peacekeeping specialist at Pakistan's mission to the United Nations. "But that's not why we go into it. We are actually quite proud of our record, proud that we've got peacekeeping right." Economic incentives may become more explicit. In Iraq, the Pentagon is considering a plan to train private Iraqi security force to guard pipelines, government buildings and other sites. And now, most of the 500-strong police force the United States has serving in Kosovo are employees of a private firm, DynCorp. Indeed, the notion of privatizing peacekeeping is getting more attention. In the June and July issue of Policy Review, published by the Hoover Institution, P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote that the growing industry of private military firms could be tapped to protect humanitarian aid workers or to intervene "whenever recalcitrant local parties break peace agreements or threaten the operation." They could even take over the whole operation, as a coalition of private security companies offered to do in the Congo, for $100 million or more. Privatization, unsurprisingly, has many critics. In his article, Mr. Singer warned that "outsourcing also entails turning over control of the actual provision of service. For peacekeeping, this means the troops in the field are not part of national armies, but private citizens hired off the market, working for private firms. Security is now at the mercy of any change in market costs and incentives." For his part, Mr. Guéhenno said he was worried that privatization offered the wrong message. "With private troops, the first signal you send is: This is important, but not important enough to risk our own people," he said.

Refugees International Date: 30 Jul 2003 The power to protect: Using new military capabilities to stop mass killings Executive Summary In 1994, an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda because the United Nations and its members, including the leading democratic powers, refused to intervene to stop the genocide. Since then, UN or coalition forces have intervened - with mixed success -- several times in the Balkans, Africa, Asia and the Middle East to stop the wanton killing of civilians or to topple repressive regimes. Even as this report is issued, a French-led effort is underway to prevent bloodshed from getting out of control in the Eastern Congo, and the United States is considering sending troops to support a ceasefire in Liberia. This study suggests that military capabilities that the United States and several of its allies are currently developing-light, highly mobile units linked by intelligence and communications networks to improve awareness, precision and effectiveness-could improve the capacity of armed international intervention at acceptable costs and risks. Responsibility and Right to Protect: Because of growing global consciousness, the concept of sovereignty is changing. It is no longer absolute, but increasingly qualified by the responsibility of the government to spare its citizens from violence. The UN and the world community are recognizing further that when a state cannot or will not protect its citizens, other nations have the responsibility to do so. Power to Protect: But the right and the responsibility to protect by intervening militarily are meaningless without the power to protect. This report highlights the ability of information technologies and related capabilities to deliver decisive combat power with fewer forces and logistical requirements, which would, in turn, reduce the costs of operations as well as many of the military and political risks associated with military deployments. Decision to Protect: Given these more favorable conditions, forcible humanitarian interventions might be a more palatable choice for national leaders as they weigh their choices when faced with threats of large-scale killings. This analysis is preliminary and is not meant to provide conclusive answers. However, several promising ideas emerge: The qualities of networked forces - especially speed of deployment and employment, awareness, precision, and tactical flexibility - appear to have value in interventions to stop at least low-quality forces from committing large-scale murders, circumstances permitting. With such forces, the risks and costs of such interventions could be lower than the perceived risks and costs of interventions to date, which could incline political leaders more toward action even when no vital or immediate interests are at stake. The United States is developing these capabilities in any case. NATO allies and other countries will or could, with US help, develop these capabilities as well, opening the way to multilateral intervention options. Such promising indications will not lead inevitably to an international "capability" to protect. In order to lay a strong foundation for policies and investments that could produce this capability, we recommend: That the United States government, the UN Security Council, and other interested governments examine individually and together whether emerging capabilities could increase the "capability to protect" and if so what should be done to develop them for this purpose. That NATO examine how its projected Response Force can be used in such contingencies (e.g., in Africa) as well as how to involve NATO "partners" and others (e.g., Africans) in such operations. That the US and international and regional alliances (NATO, UN, EU, ECOWAS, etc.) confer on how to transition from a forceful humanitarian intervention to more traditional peacekeeping operations. That interested foundations sponsor further study of these possibilities That humanitarian nongovernmental organizations take account of these possibilities in their agendas.

Reuters 30 Jul 2003 Tyrants Beware: Luxury Exile Days May Be Numbered Wed July 30, 2003 12:08 PM ET (fixing spelling of Stroessner in sixth paragraph) By Fiona O'Brien NAIROBI (Reuters) - Ugandans say former dictator Idi Amin, now on his deathbed in Saudi Arabia, used to keep the severed heads of rivals in his refrigerator and once placed some on his dining table to remind guests he was not to be crossed. Obese and ill after almost 25 years of comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia, Uganda's "butcher," who also fed the remains of victims to Lake Victoria's crocodiles at one point, appears likely to die unpunished for his crimes. Now in his late 70s, he is not the only tyrant to see out retirement unprosecuted. Haiti's Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who fled his island in 1986 after an upsurge of popular protest against his brutal 15-year rule, has been seen driving his red Ferrari around the French Riviera. Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose "Red Terror" was marked by purges, war and hunger, is on a ranch in Zimbabwe granted refuge by his friend President Robert Mugabe. Uganda's Milton Obote, accused by domestic opponents of being even more brutal than Amin, is in Zambia, while Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner, who gained a reputation as an iron-fisted leader who sheltered Nazi war criminals, is in Brazil. Liberia's Charles Taylor, wanted for war crimes in Sierra Leone, has been offered asylum in Nigeria. Yet with Amin's death apparently imminent, many Ugandans are asking how such a man has been able to escape scot-free. "While he is calmly exhausting his life-span in the splendor of a Saudi Arabian hospital, our people are breathlessly struggling in the attempt to salvage some life out of the debris of his destruction," a comment in the New Vision newspaper said Wednesday. But while many former tyrants are unlikely ever to face criminal proceedings for their wrongs, analysts say the world today is more intent on trying those once considered immune. "There has been a real sea-change in the attitude of the international community," Amnesty International's Christopher Hall told Reuters. "In the past, crimes were seen as political or diplomatic problems, now they are seen as ordinary crimes of rape, murder, that all states have a duty to investigate and to prosecute." PINOCHET ARREST The 1998 arrest of Chile's Augusto Pinochet in London sent a message that the days of impunity for tyrants were ending, even though he was later released on grounds of poor health. United Nations tribunals for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have also drummed that point home. More significantly still, analysts say the establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) may have set international law on an irreversible course. "Times are changing...exile is becoming harder to find," Human Rights Watch's Reed Brody wrote in a recent editorial. "It is unfortunate that Idi Amin will die in his "tent" without being brought to justice for his crimes, but the world is a smaller and smaller tent. One day the Idi Amins of this world will find they have nowhere to hide." But only about 90 countries -- with the notable exception of the United States -- have so far ratified the ICC, which will be a permanent tribunal to try individuals for the most serious international crimes such as genocide and war crimes. "There is a general movement toward international jurisdiction, but we still have a long way to go," Cambridge University legal expert Anthony Rogers said. He said that for the court to work effectively, states will also have to get over their deep-rooted reluctance to investigate the affairs of other states. In the meantime, Ugandans will have to find their own ways to reconcile the wrongs of Amin's 1971-1979 rule. While many wish they had seen him punished, others say it is best just to try and put the past behind them. "He should be accorded a state burial as a former president," Kampala shop owner Badru Mulongo said. "People say he killed many people but I think there is no leader who has not killed."

Africa

Algeria

BBC 31 Aug 2003 Berber breakthrough in Algeria Berbers want more autonomy The Algerian Government has agreed to include the language of the country's Berber minority, Tamazight, in its educational system. This fulfils one of the demands of Berbers who staged violent protests against the Algerian authorities in Kabylie two years ago, which left 60 people dead and about 2,000 injured. The language will now be included and promoted in the educational system and the institutional consecration of private education at all the levels. Tamazight was recognised as a national language last year after further unrest amongst radical Berbers who were pressing for greater cultural and political recognition, in the country where they claim they represent 25% of the population. Constitutional change However, the government of President Bouteflika said that the recognition of Tamazight, as an official language of the country will require a change in the constitution. The language, is spoken mostly by Berbers and by other ethnic groups in Algeria and Morocco, but at present Arabic is the only official state language. Since independence from France in 1962, the majority Arab community, backed by both the military and Islamist lobbies, have maintained that Arabic must be the sole language to be recognised by the state.

Burundi

AFP 25 Jul 2003 UN staff to return to Burundi capital BUJUMBURA, July 25 (AFP) - Non-essential staff employed by United Nations agencies are to return to the Burundian capital from which they were evacuated during a rebel assault earlier this month, official sources said Friday. The staff were moved out between July 14 and 17 after Hutu rebels launched a major offensive. When the attack began, the UN gave Burundi a "Phase Four" security rating, meaning that regular operations were suspended but emergency programmes were maintained. "The Phase 4 security rating announced on July 14 just for the capital has been reduced to Phase 3," Therence Sinunguruza, the country's foreign relations minister said. "This means all measures are being taken for the return of staff moved out to Nairobi and Kigali." No precise date was given for the return of the UN staff. The news was given at press conference given jointly with Sunil Saigal, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) representative and coordinator of UN agencies in the country. "The return to Phase 3 allows us to resume our operational activities and to continue to do our work, especially in development," Saigal said.

AFP 29 Jul 2003 Burundi rebels say no halt to fighting without overall deal BUJUMBURA, July 29 (AFP) - The leader of a rebel Burundian Hutu group said in Bujumbura Tuesday that there could be no final end to hostilities until a comprehensive deal had been reached with the government. "We cannot put into effect something that does not exist," Salvator Ntacobamaze, leader of a six-person delegation from the rebel Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), said. "So during the weeks ahead of us we must reach a comprehensive political and military deal which will end fighting in Burundi for good," Ntacombaze, who represents the FDD in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, said. The FDD delegation is made up of two civilians, one of them a woman, and four military personnel. It has been in Bujumbura since Monday to prepare for the FDD, the chief rebel Hutu movement, to take part in the work of the joint ceasefire commission (CMC). Another rebel Hutu group, the National Liberation Forces, which launched an attack on Bujumbura earlier this month, is not involved in the discussions. Burundi's civil war broke out in 1993 pitting rebels from the Hutu majority against their Tutsi rivals, who control the military and held sway over the government until the interim power-sharing regime was installed in November 2001. More than 300,000 people, mostly civilians, have died in the war. "If during two weeks of talks we do not reach agreement the leaders of the warring parties will meet in three weeks, take a decision and submit the final result to the summit of regional heads of state for final adoption," he said. "At that point we can enter the transitional government so the ceasefire agreement can be put into full effect." An apparent breakthrough was made on July 20 in talks in Dar es Salaam sponsored by regional leaders aimed at persuading the Burundian government and the FDD to put into effect the ceasefire agreed on December 3 2002 at Arusha in Tanzania. That agreement was signed by former Burundian president Pierre Buyoya and FDD leader Pierre Nkurunziza but never respected. The FDD has a military presence throughout the country and the two sides accuse each other of violating the ceasefire. "We are optimistic because our arrival in Bujumbura, enemy territory, was essential to give hope to the people of Burundi, the more so since the negotiations which had been stalled since January have been completely relaunched since July 20." "This is the first time we have seen a strict application of what was signed by the government and the FDD," said a diplomat in Bujumbura when the rebel delegation arrived. "It is symbolic but it is very significant and important because it is the first time that a signed agreement has been respected."

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

DR Congo

WP 24 July 2003 Massacre In The Congo Despite The UN Exclusive commentary by Frank Salvato Jul 24, 2003 Over 100 mutilated bodies in ten days and there wasn’t anything that could have been done about it. That was the brutal discovery of the French peacekeepers in Bunia and Tchomia in the African nation of Congo. The bodies were of refugees who were trying to flee the violence that has plagued the country for years. This is a perfect example of the impotency of the United Nations and their limited idea of mandated peacekeeping. And they want us in Liberia. The UN mandate limits the French peacekeeper’s role to defending the city, or by our standards the village of Bunia amid the massacres of refugees in areas just outside the mandated area. This isn’t the only French peacekeeping force in Congo; this is an additional peacekeeping force inside the country under the command of the European Union. Curiously, the Congolese have not piled up any mutilated bodies at the French Embassy gates unlike what is happening in Liberia. Meanwhile, the good Reverend Jesse Jackson has taken to his media pulpit preaching to his political flock. He is pontificating that the reason President Bush hasn’t sent our young men and women of the armed forces into action in Liberia is directly related to the issue of race in America. With the slaughters still fresh in the Congolese air we should look at that tragedy and take heed in understanding the lesson that it could teach us whether the good reverend likes it or not. The Congo massacres spotlight the problem of intervening in African civil war. Even with two separate peacekeeping forces in the country the slaughter goes on. One has to ask why? One would have to ask whether the UN resolution mandating the peacekeeping action was a poorly written mandate as was the case in Iraq, whether the intervention was unwelcome but for one side of a struggle between a nations people or whether there is another mass murderer being allowed to remain in power by a counsel of dreamers whose solutions to major problems seems to be mired in fantasy and too little too late. We learned a very painful lesson as a nation when we stood witness to the slaughter of our troops in Mogadishu. Heeding the call of the United Nations once again to be the world’s muscle while they employed another poorly thought out peacekeeping mandate, it became quite obvious that the warring factions in Somalia did not welcome our existence there. Armed with rules of engagement that wouldn’t even allow our troops to engage those who would murder villagers trying to access humanitarian food shipments we stood idly by witnessing the carnage while those under siege begged us to help. With each death they learned to hate the Americans. That hate was effectively placed onto Americans courtesy of the United Nations and their poorly thought out mandate. To make that mistake again would be to have not learned from a disaster experienced. Perhaps we should insist that peace, or some semblance of it, actually be attained before we assume the role of peacekeeper (what a novel idea – peacekeepers keeping the peace instead of having to achieve the peace). It would be more palatable to subject our young men and women to a situation devoid of rag-tag rebels driving SUV’s and toting rocket propelled grenade launchers than it would be to insert them into a situation where both sides want to kill them because of who they are, no matter the reason of why they are there, all to satisfy a UN mandate that won’t work due to its limitations. Either way, it looks as though the UN won’t be doing much of anything about it until at least September 1st when the current mandate expires. Never mind that hundreds more will probably die while the UN plods along on their diplomatic track, talking out the mundane as they feast on the culinary creations of New York’s eateries and exist among the beautiful people. They are quite the humanitarian group, the United Nations Ambassadors. I am sure they could explain it all to the families of those who were butchered outside of Bunia…that is until one of the family members puts a machete through one of their skulls for being an idiot! Frank Salvato is a political media consultant, a freelance writer from the Midwest and the Managing Editor for www.TheRant.us. He is a contributing writer to The Washington Dispatch. He has appeared as a guest panelist on The O’Reilly Factor and his pieces are featured various other sites. He can be contacted at feedback@washingtondispatch.com.

IRIN 31 Jul 2003 DRC: Massacres persist in Ituri, ministerial mission to be dispatched NAIROBI, 31 July (IRIN) - Six people were stoned to death on Wednesday by angry residents of Bunia, the main town of the troubled Ituri District of northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the UN mission in the country, known as MONUC, reported. "The Red Cross recovered the bodies of five men of Lendu ethnicity, and the body of one woman of Nande ethnicity," Leocadio Salmeron, the MONUC spokesman, said. He added, "While the precise reason for these stonings remains unknown, it could be because of their ethnicity." Economically-driven ethnic strife in natural resource-rich Ituri between Hema and Lendu militias caused between 200,000 and 350,000 people to flee when fighting worsened in May, humanitarian sources have reported. The latest killings follows a stream of recent reports from NGOs and local residents regarding massacres in the towns of Fataki, Nizi and Drodro during fighting between the Union des patriotes congolais (UPC), a predominantly Hema militia, and the Front des resistants pour la protection de l'Ituri (FRPI), a predominantly Lendu militia. UPC Secretary-General John Tinanzabo has accused Lendu combatants of the massacre of Hema populations, while Lendu community representatives have accused Hema combatants of mass killings of Lendus. "You cannot talk about massacres having been carried out by Lendus, as it was a question of Lendu combatants of the FRPI fighting against those of the UPC," Labu Mbuba, a Lendu community representative, said in Kinshasa on Wednesday following a recent visit to Ituri. "There have been victims on both sides, as well as among the civilian population," he added. Mbuba said arms continued to circulate freely in Ituri, as well as in Bunia, where a 1,500-strong EU-led multinational peace enforcement mission has banned the carrying of weapons publicly. Meanwhile, President Joseph Kabila and his four vice-presidents have decided to send to Bunia three ministers of the newly installed transitional government, in an effort to calm tensions, according to a communique issued in Kinshasa on Wednesday. Interior, foreign and defence ministers Theophile Mbemba Fundu, Antoine Ghonda Mangalibi and Jean-Pierre Ondekane are to "carry a message of peace and reconciliation", the communiqué said, "and to demonstrate the determination of the government to bring the peace process to every corner of the country". Due to prevailing insecurity, MONUC has been unable to deploy outside Bunia, while the EU-led mission sent to reinforce MONUC until 1 September is not mandated to act outside of the town. However, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted on Monday a resolution giving MONUC a stronger mandate and increasing its authorised strength from 8,700 to 10,800 troops. The council also extended the mission's mandate for another year, until 30 July 2004. In a statement from its New York headquarters, the UN said that in adopting Resolution 1493, the 15-member council also instituted a 12-months arms embargo against foreign and Congolese armed groups in the east of the country. The move was aimed at preventing "the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer" of arms to armed groups and militias operating in North and South Kivu and in Ituri, areas that have been hit by heavy fighting in recent months.

AFP 30 Jul 2003 Five people killed in troubled DR Congo town of Bunia BUNIA, Democratic Republic of Congo, July 30 (AFP) - Five people were killed, including a man who was stoned to death by a crowd, in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) town of Bunia, a French military spokesman said Wednesday. Colonel Gerard Dubois, spokesman for the European Union's peacekeeping force in the DRC, said the stoning victim had died just before the arrival of troops from the UN observer mission (MONUC) on Tuesday. City officials also informed MONUC that four more bodies, some with head injuries, had been found on the streets of the eastern Lembabo area of the town. Dubois said the killings were unlikely to be the work of the militias expelled from Bunia by the French-led force, known as Artemis, which was sent to the northeast of the country as violence mounted in early June. He blamed a "settling of scores" as members of different ethnic and political groups returned to the town, as well as an "absence of police on the ground". The 1,850-strong force mounts patrols and checkpoints around the town day and night, and has thrown its weight behind UN efforts to engage political and community leaders in a meaningful peace process

english.aljazeera.net 16 July 2003 African writing prize goes to Kenyan Wednesday Yvonne Owuor: Wins prize for her short story Kenya’s Yvonne Owuor won the fourth annual Caine Prize for African Writing on Wednesday with a short story related to the aftermath from the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Yvonne, the second Kenyan to win the prize in two years, took the $15,000 prize money with "Weight of Whispers". The authoress said she felt "excited" and "stunned", and spoke of her personal obligation to encourage other people in Africa to write. Her story is narrated by an aristocratic Rwandan refugee who leaves his country because of the massacres that killed 800,000 people. Owuor has also written a screenplay for the Africa Script Development Fund and is currently an Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Oxford award The prize was announced by the chair of the judges, Zanzibari author Abd al-Razzaq Gurnah, at the UK's Oxford University. Gurnah said her story’s “great strength is the subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the condition of the refugee and also successfully incorporates so many large issues.” The story has already been published by a new Kenyan Internet magazine Kwani, set up by last year's Caine winner, Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina. The prestigious prize is awarded annually for writing by an African author that is published in English. An "African writer" is taken to mean a writer born anywhere in Africa whose work reflects its cultural background. Caine Prize history The Caine Prize is named in memory of the late Sir Michael Caine, former chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for almost 25 years. The winner was announced in July at a dinner in Oxford, to which all the shortlisted candidates were invited. On the short list this year were two South Africans, a Congolese and a Zimbabwean. The point of the prize is not, however, to pigeonhole authors as regional interest writers, but rather to put the spotlight on skilled writers who normally might not get much attention. The story can be read at http://www.kwani.org/.

East African (Kenya) 21 July 2003 Caine Prize: Yvonne Owuor's Weighty Achievement The judges were in no doubt that for the second year in a row a Kenyan deserved to win, writes PAUL REDFERN For the second year in a row a Kenyan has won the prestigious literary Caine prize for African Writing, reflecting the growing stature of East African literature. The fourth Caine Prize for African Writing and a cheque for $15,000 was won by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor for her story Weight of Whispers. The result was announced at a prestigious dinner held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in the UK on July 14. After receiving her award, Yvonne told The EastAfrican that she was "quite delighted," or "gleeful, more like it. But also a sense of responsible relief. And surprise. A mixed bag of emotions and underlying all these, gratitude. "To beloved and so supportive parents for whom this is a vindication, to siblings, my first readers and critics, to the incredible circle of friends in Kenya and abroad, to work colleagues in Zanzibar, and always, to the Caine Prize visionaries – both living and not. To life." Yvonne says that her future plans evolve around "enjoying the moment" and "surfing this wave." "Feel, think and make notes." "Finally complete the last chapters of 'The Novel,' successfully fulfil obligations to the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF). Also ask the ZIFF board of directors to consider adding a literary component in the Festival of the Dhow Countries 2004. And always, write with gusto." Commenting on the fact that Kenyans have now won the prestigious prize for two years in a row, Yvonne said that the result was "the outcome of a pent-up national need to express in so many different ways. An unanticipated but timely Zeitgeist?" But it was also, she suggested "probably a certain noticeable confidence among Kenyans about who they are and how they want to be given credit for all they have gone through. The literary underground which has been in existence in Kenya is emerging, daring to meet and talk, I guess." The judges, however, were in no doubt that for the second year in a row a Kenyan deserved to win. Dr Abdulrazak Gurnah, the chair of the judges said: "The shortlisted stories in this year's Caine Prize were all worthy winners in their own right. "Weight of Whispers is a story narrated by an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in the aftermath of the 1994 massacres. Its great strength is the subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the condition of the refugee and also successfully incorporates so many large issues." Gurnah, from Zanzibar, was also on last year's panel of judges and teaches literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, of which Paradise was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics in English and History from the Jomo Kenyatta University, Nairobi. She then attended the University of Reading, where she studied for an MA in TV/Video Development. Yvonne has written a screenplay for the Africa Script Development Fund and is currently an Executive Director of the Zanzibar Film Festival. She beat four other short-listed writers from South Africa, Congo and Zimbabwe. Last year, the Caine Prize was awarded to Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, for Discovering Home, published online on G21Net (2001). Wainaina has since been accepted for a graduate course in creative writing at UEA and signed up by London agents Curtis Brown. He has set up an Internet magazine, Kwani? to publish work by new Kenyan writers, and one of its first stories was Owuor's. The Caine Prize is named in honour of the late Sir Michael Caine, the former chairman of Booker Plc, who was chairman of the Africa 95 arts festival in Europe and Africa in 1995 and for nearly 25 years, chairman of the Booker Prize management committee. www.nationaudio.com/News/EastAfrican/.

Liberia

AFP 29 Jul 2003 UN rights chief to press criminal prosecutions in Liberia GENEVA, July 29 (AFP) - The UN's top human rights official will ensure that anyone who commits human rights violations in Liberia is prosecuted, possibly using the new international war crimes tribunal, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday. "For the moment, we are rather powerless but we want to condemn everything that is going on there," Annick Stevenson, spokeswoman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told journalists. "The High Commissioner reiterates that those who commit these crimes will each be taken to justice, and that he is ready to play his role in this respect," she added. Stevenson said the UN would turn to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which formally came into being in July last year, if Liberia's judiciary was unable to handle criminal prosecutions. Her comments came as Liberian rebels and government forces continued their bloody showdown in the capital Monrovia, while crowds thronged the streets in search of food and water. "Everything that happens there is a collection of very grave human rights violations, including the fact that civilians cannot find shelter and that food distribution is being stopped," Stevenson said. The fighting has claimed hundreds of lives in the two weeks since the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) launched its most intense siege of Monrovia since taking up arms against President Charles Taylor nearly five years ago. Up to 200,000 people are living without shelter in the city, and little food or clean water or medicines are available. UN Secretary Kofi Annan said Monday that rebels from the fighting for control of Monrovia were "disqualifying themselves" from playing a role in the country's future. The UN rights chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello, is currently in Iraq serving as the UN's top envoy there, while his deputy, Bertie Ramcharan, acts as High Commissioner.

SAPA 30 July 2003 Monrovians beg rebels to stay 30/07/2003 18:19 - (SA) Print article email story Related Articles Bush: Ball in Liberia's court Refugees caught in crossfire Ceasefire hopes fade Rebels declare ceasefire Taylor counterattacks Liberia: Life goes on Nigeria wants cash pledge New front setback for Taylor Monrovia faces 'serious starvation' US playing waiting game Monrovia - At least 1 500 Liberians held a peace rally Wednesday in Monrovia to urge rebels occupying parts of the city not to retreat until international peacekeepers arrived, several witnesses said. They confirmed by telephone that the rally was held in the rebel-controlled Bushrod Island in the north of the Liberian capital, with estimates of the crowd ranging from 1 500 to 4 500. Raymond Zarbay, a journalist living in the area, said the marchers waved banners saying "We want peace," "We are tired of this senseless war," and "Uncle Sam must come at once." They then marched on the local head office of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd) rebel movement, pleading them to stay on as they feared retribution by government forces. Sekou Fofana, Lurd deputy general secretary of civil administration, told Logan Town - handed Lurd a memorandum saying they feared a genocide if the rebels "left them to the mercy of President Charles Taylor's forces". The residents said "the last two times we retreated, Taylor's renegade soldiers went on a violence spree, looting, raping and killing. They want us to stay until peacekeepers arrive to prevent a genocide," Fofana said, adding: "We will remain in order to protect them." Taylor's men will massacre civilians Zarbay said the show of support for Lurd was not under duress. "Some banners are saying that the deaths outside Monrovia attributed to the Lurd by the government are lies." Lurd's Fofana, meanwhile, said his forces would keep up an offensive on two strategic bridges linking northern Monrovia to the government-controlled heart of the city and eastern districts. "We will not leave the bridges. We know Charles Taylor's men. The civilians on our side will be massacred if we leave before foreign peacekeepers come," Fofana said. The United States has so far not responded to international appeals to lead a multinational force in Liberia but said it will send soldiers on a "limited" mission only if Taylor leaves the country. US President George W. Bush has however ordered three US ships to go to the region to act as a backup for a proposed west African peacekeeping force. - Sapa-AFP

CWS 31 Jul 2003 Church World Service www.churchworldservice.org Liberian Church Leaders Ready to Begin Rebuilding a Shattered Society By Chris Herlinger Church World Service ACCRA, GHANA - By turns angry and exasperated by the ongoing war in Liberia and the frustratingly glacial pace of international attention to the crisis there, Liberian church leaders in Ghana are also, by equal measure, ready to begin the work of humanitarian response and peace-building. They say they cannot do that without the assistance of the wider ecumenical Christian community. But they also believe that, ultimately, Liberians must take responsibility for rebuilding a shattered society. "The world has forgotten us, let's return back home and appeal to the conscience of our people," said Bishop John Innis of the United Methodist Church of Liberia and a vice president of the Liberia Council of Churches (LCC), a Church World Service partner. "It will be up to us to solve our problems." Church leaders representing CWS partner agencies in Liberia - some of whom left Liberia during the last week because of security concerns and others who have been in Ghana for nearly two months because of their ongoing participation in Liberian peace talks here -- have met with several CWS staff members this week in Accra to coordinate the next phase of an ongoing humanitarian response in Liberia by CWS and its member denominations. In their meetings with CWS staff, the church leaders have strongly, and often eloquently, made the following points: 1) The warring factions must end their fighting and some type of international peacekeeping force - in all likelihood, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) -- must be in place to guarantee both security for the Liberian people and for the flow of humanitarian assistance to Liberia. "The situation on the ground is now impossible," said Benjamin Lartey, LCC general secretary. "We can't do anything until ECOWAS stabilizes the situation." To say that the church leaders are, at the least, puzzled and, at most, angered by the measured response by the United States and the United Nations to the Liberian crisis is an understatement. "God is watching us," Innis said. "Where are the peace-loving countries, where are the peace-loving peoples? Who cares about Liberia?" Added Peter Kamei, head of the YMCA of Liberia, a CWS partner: "This is a disgrace in our modern era: watching people commit suicide and commit genocide," he said. "We've seen it in Rwanda; we've seen in Burundi. It has to stop." 2) Liberia is facing an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in which perhaps every one of its 3 million citizens will need some kind of emergency assistance in the coming months. One example of the scale of the problem: there are reports of only five doctors now working in the country. "The humanitarian situation is deplorable," Innis said. Based on both personal impressions before they left the country and from ongoing contact with family and colleagues still in the country, church leaders said there will be need of emergency food rations; medicines to curtail an expected cholera epidemic; and measures to clean water in the face of a severe water shortage, brought on in part by warning factions poisoning water wells. "People are drinking anything and becoming sick," said Kamei. Two concrete examples of humanitarian need: Kamei reported that 25 pregnant women were being sheltered at the YMCA in Monrovia and had no food to eat. Those with some food hardly fared better: the Rev. G. Solomon Gueh of the United Methodist Church's Liberia Annual Conference reported seeing one woman in Monrovia hold two handfuls of buckwheat in her hand -food for a group of 18 people for one day, she said. 3) The church must be involved both in current peace efforts and in long-term peace-building work. There is a palpable sense among the church representatives that Liberian political leaders have failed their people but that Liberians themselves must take responsibility for their country's future and emerge stronger and more committed to the work of peace and building stable, sustainable institutions. The church representatives believe that the church must take a central role in efforts to galvanize a shattered society, with particular concern for teen-agers and those younger who have fought in the current conflict. "There are children who aren't in school and are holding guns now; all they know is guns and violence," Innis said. In such an environment, he asked, "Who will be the leaders of tomorrow?"

Nigeria

AFP 29 Jul 2003 Nigeria wants promise of cash before sending troops to Liberia by Ola Awoniyi ABUJA, July 29 (AFP) - Nigeria and the United States are haggling over the cost of sending a west African peacekeeping force to wartorn Liberia, a senior Nigerian official told AFP on Tuesday. President Olusegun Obasanjo, on a visit to London, told reporters that the force's Nigerian vanguard would be in Liberia within a "few days". But in Abuja, officials said that the deployment had been held up by a dispute over who should bear the burden of paying for the deployment. "Nigeria is somewhat reluctant to send in troops without firm guarantees that the expenditure that will be incurred will at least in a substantial part be defrayed by other states and international organisations," an aide to Obasanjo told AFP. Nigeria has vowed to send two mechanised battallions totalling around 1,500 men Liberia, where rebels have closed in on the capital Monrovia in fighting that has claimed hundreds of civilian lives. Negotiators for the largest rebel group -- Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) -- said Tuesday they had called a unilateral ceasefire. But as the humanitarian crisis in the besieged Liberian capital deepens, and as fighting continues, both west African and US officials are dithering over deploying forces. The Nigerian presidential official, who asked not to be named, said Nigeria was unwilling to launch the force without a cast-iron promise that it would not lose out economically. The aide recalled "the painful experience of what happened in Sierra Leone, where Nigeria invested so much both in troops and in materiel on the firm understanding that the international community would recompense it in a substantial way. "Those expectations were not met ... and that is why Nigeria at the present time is reluctant to send in its troops before it receives a reliable guarantee from the international community concerning compensation," he said. Washington has pledged to support a west African force, and three US warships are on their way to the region, but the White House has said it will not put US boots on the ground until a ceasefire is in place and Liberian President Charles Taylor leaves power. Taylor has accepted an offer of asylum in Nigeria but says he will not leave until outside forces are deployed. Speaking at a reception for the outgoing US ambassador to Abuja, Nigeria's Vice President Atiku Abubakar said: "We will move into Liberia. We are ready but we cannot do that alone, we need the support of countries like the United States, Britain and others. "I think the sooner we resolve the problem the better," he added. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the 15-nation bloc that is setting up the proposed force and has called an emergency summit on Thursday, has estimated the total cost of deploying it to Liberia at 105 million dollars (90.6 million euros). So far the United States has promised 10 million dollars towards the cost of employing a private US engineering and logistics firm to bring the Nigerian troops into Monrovia. Sources in the Ghanaian capital Accra, where US and west African officers met Monday to discuss a timetable for sending in troops, told AFP that Nigeria was holding out for at least 50 million dollars. Obasanjo's aide said: "The offer that has so far been made by the United States government is presumed to be only an initial offer which Nigeria expects to be raised in the ongoing discussions." Previously Nigerian officials had insisted that the main reason for the delay in deploying the force was fears for its safety, as both Liberian government and rebel forces have ignored previous calls for a ceasefire. Nigeria contributed the bulk of the troops and commanders to two previous ECOWAS peacekeeping forces that deployed to Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Many in Nigeria have long claimed that their country -- the most populous in Africa and the continent's biggest exporter of crude oil -- had been left to pick up the tab for the multinational missions. Last year the former commander of the former ECOWAS force said that he had lost 800 men during the previous conflict in Liberia, and Nigerian leaders have long complained of having been saddled with the bill.

South Africa

BBC 2 July 2003 USA SUSPENDS MILITARY AID TO SOUTH AFRICA OVER IMMUNITY ISSUE Johannesburg, 1 July: The United States announced on Tuesday (1 July) that it has suspended military aid to South Africa because the country will not give Americans immunity from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court in The Hague. The announcement by the American State Department in Washington comes exactly a week before President George Bush's state visit to South Africa. South Africa is one of 35 countries blacklisted by US on Tuesday. It is the only one of the five countries on the itinerary for Bush's African tour to be blacklisted. Botswana, Uganda, Senegal and Nigeria (the other African countries to be visited by Bush) all retained military funding by signing immunity deals with the US. (Passage omitted) Approached for comment, South African Foreign Ministry spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said the government was still studying the announcement. "We will comment later... (ellipsis as published) we are currently studying the implications of that decision," Mamoepa said. Bush, accompanied by his Secretary of State Colin Powell, is due to arrive in South African on 8 July for a two-visit. He is due to be given an official welcome by President Thabo Mbeki on 9 July at the Union Buildings ahead of talks with his South African counterpart.

Independent SA 21 July 2003 Family massacre sparks fears of vigilantism July 21 2003 at 02:10AM By Xolani Mbanjwa & Sapa Six members of one family, including an 18-month-old baby, were shot dead as they slept in their Empangeni home at the weekend. The killings are the latest in a string of violent onslaughts in the area and have sparked fears of vigilante attacks by a community fed up with escalating crime. Police spokesperson Musa Khaba said on Sunday that the Majola family were asleep around 11.30pm on Saturday when gunmen knocked on the door of their home in Mevamhlophe. 'We are not going to release the names of the other two survivors because we fear for their lives' Thinking the callers were police officers, a member of the family opened the front door. The attackers burst in and began firing at random. The dead include grandfather Muntungethuke Majola, 64, his daughters Sihle Majola, 22, and Sindisiwe Majola, 27, and his son Sipho Majola, 34. Muntungethuke's wife, Busisiwe Majola, 63, was admitted to hospital with a gunshot wound in the forehead and her son, Sipho, was shot in the back while trying to run away. Sihle's 18-month-old son, Qiniso Hlongwane, and Sindisiwe's 11-year-old son, Themba Manyathi, were also killed. Both children were sleeping in their mothers' beds. Sihle's youngest son, nine-month-old Nhlonipho, was not injured. 'At the moment it is a criminal matter until we prove the contrary' "We are not going to release the names of the other two survivors because we fear for their lives," Khaba said. The number of attackers and the motive for the attack was not known, but police were treating it as a criminal matter "until we prove the contrary", Khaba said. "We are busy with investigation and several clues are being followed." Khaba said the community of Empangeni had been shocked by the attack. "We fear that locals, who have vowed to avenge the attack, will take the law into their own hands through vigilantism." There have been five vigilante-type attacks in the area since May. The gunmen did not steal anything from the Majola home. Ten detectives from nearby Empangeni and at least 15 uniformed members of the town's Crime Combating Unit were at the scene on Sunday. A reward of R250 000 has been offered to anyone with information leading to the successful arrest and conviction of the assailants.

Daily News SA 24 July 2003 3 arrested over KZN family massacre July 24 2003 at 12:43PM By Bongani Mthembu Three men have been arrested in connection with the killing of six members of the Majola family at Mevamhlophe in Empangeni on Saturday evening. The massacre of the family members shocked the community and led to a major manhunt. Gunmen stormed into the family's home and randomly opened fire on the occupants. A nine-month-old baby escaped unscathed. Acting on information from the community, members of the KwaMashu Murder Unit launched an investigation and made three arrests in two separate areas this week. KwaMashu police communication officer Inspector Velaphi Zulu said two men from Nkandla and one from Mtubatuba were arrested. "One suspect was arrested at Richmond Farm taxi rank in town on Tuesday. And, when the operation continued on Thursday, two suspects were arrested in Richmond Farm, an informal settlement near KwaMashu, north of Durban. Two suspects were detained at KwaMashu police station and the other one in Phoenix cells," said Zulu. A reward of R250 000 was offered by police for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the gunmen. This article was originally published on page 1 of The Daily News on July 24, 2003

Americas

United States

AFP 2 July 2003 US suspends 47 million dollars in military aid to 35 nations over ICC, MATTHEW LEE, WASHINGTON, July 1 The United States on Tuesday put monetary muscle behind its vehement opposition to the International Criminal Court (ICC), suspending more than 47 million dollars in military aid to 35 countries for their failure or refusal to give US citizens immunity from the tribunal. The suspension affects US allies like Brazil, Colombia and South Africa, the Baltic states as well as NATO hopefuls such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia, officials said. However, they stressed that Washington would continue to press these nations to sign immunity deals, so-called "Article 98" agreements, with the United States so that the assistance could be restored. "Our hope is to continue to work with governments to secure and ratify Article 98 agreements that protect American service members from arbitrary or political prosecution by the international court," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "It remains an important part of national policy," he told reporters. "We have made this an issue. It's an important issue to the United States. It will continue to be an important issue." The United States fears the court, the world's first permanent international court to try cases of warcrimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions of US citizens and has been on a worldwide campaign to sign immunity deals. Under US law, most of the 90 countries that signed and ratified the Treaty of Rome, which created the ICC, had until July 1 deadline to ink Article 98 deals with the United States or face the sanctions. The 19 members of NATO, as well as the US-designated "major non-NATO allies" -- Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, New Zealand, South Korea and soon, the Philippines -- were exempted from the threat of sanctions as was Taiwan. Those nations not receiving automatic exemptions that receive US military aid could avoid the suspension by signing Article 98 pacts, which some 51 nations have done, 44 publicly and seven secretly, according to officials. President George W. Bush on Tuesday granted Article 98 waivers to 22 nations that would have otherwise been penalized under the provisions of the American Service Members Protection Act. Those countries are: Afghanistan, Albania, Bolivia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Botswana, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Honduras, Macedonia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Nigeria, Panama, Romania, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan and Uganda. Countries not appearing on that list that receive US military assistance and have ratified the Rome treaty are subject to the aid suspension, officials said. The White House did not release the names of the countries affected by the sanctions, but Boucher said a total of 47.6 million dollars in funding allocated to 35 countries in fiscal 2003, which ends on October 1, had been suspended. According to a list sent to US lawmakers, those nations are: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Brazil, Bulgaria, Central African Republic, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Dominica, Ecuador, Estonia, Fiji, Latvia, Lesotho, Lithuania, Malawi, Mali, Malta, Namibia, Niger, Paraguay, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, St Vincent and Grenadines, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zambia. The amount of suspended aid to each individual country was not immediately available. The United States provides more than four billion dollars a year in foreign military assistance so the total amount affected by the suspension is not particularly large. But the cut-off in funding, especially to US allies like Colombia, is expected to send a political message. Most US assistance to Colombia is designated for anti-narcotics programs but Washington has moved to increase the amount of counter-insurgency aid it gives to Bogota. About five million dollars of those funds has been blocked because of the sanctions, Boucher said. An international human rights watchdog accused the United States of using bullying tactics to force smaller countries to sign the Article 98 agreements. "US officials are engaged in a worldwide campaign pressing small, vulnerable and often fragile democratic governments," according to a letter from Human Rights Watch to US Secretary of State Colin Powell made public Tuesday.

AP 31 July 2003 Bond set for former Nazi guard An immigration judge on Thursday set bond at $50,000 for a man accused of serving as a Nazi guard at a World War II concentration camp and lying about it on immigration papers. The US Department of Justice intends to appeal Judge Larry Dean's ruling, said Gina Balaya, spokeswoman for the US attorney's office in Detroit. Authorities arrested Johann Leprich, 77, at his home in Macomb County's Clinton Township north of Detroit on July 1. The federal government is seeking to deport him. Leprich had been a fugitive since 1987, when his US citizenship was revoked because officials found he had misrepresented his military service on his application for naturalization, which was granted in 1958. Leprich served during the war in the Nazi Death's Head Battalion and worked as a guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp, officials said. Federal law forbids granting US citizenship to any concentration camp guard or worker. His attorney, William Dance, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment. Leprich will remain in custody until the appeal litigation is resolved.

KSFY, South Dakota 30 July2003 1890 Massacre Museum A new museum at Wall will try to educate people about the 1890 massacre that killed hundreds of American Indians at Wounded Knee. On the morning of December 29th, 1890, about 300 Lakota men, women and children were killed in a U.S. military operation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The museum's working with the Wounded Knee community to encourage tourists to visit the actual massacre site.

Las Vegas Mercury 31 July 2003 Books: The other Sept. 11 By Geoff Schumacher The Mountain Meadows Massacre should be as familiar to Americans as Custer's last stand or the Donner Party tragedy, but it's not. Sally Denton and Will Bagley are trying to change that with excellent new books delving into one of the darkest episodes in U.S. history. On Sept. 11, 1857, at Mountain Meadows, just outside Cedar City, Utah, leading members of the Mormon Church brutally and systematically murdered more than 120 emigrants from Arkansas who were traveling to California to make a new life. Because the 17 survivors of the massacre were all very young children, the church at first was able to keep the incident a secret. When word began to leak out, the Mormon leaders concocted a story blaming the local Paiute Indians for the slaughter in retaliation for the emigrant party's supposed poisoning of their wells and cattle. That "clumsy" story, however, failed to hold up over time, and across the nation politicians, newspaper editors and an angry public demanded that the true perpetrators be punished. Mormon leaders, who controlled the Utah territory, worked to stymie and derail efforts to track down and prosecute the participants. In the end, 20 years after the massacre, just one of the conspirators, John D. Lee, was prosecuted for his role in the crime. The massacre was big news in the 1860s and 1870s as newspapers reported on emerging details about the incident and Lee's two trials and execution by firing squad. But today few people are aware of what happened at Mountain Meadows, in part because church leaders worked to suppress the story well into the 1930s. The event's lack of staying power in the public mind is reminiscent of the story of Seabiscuit, the amazing racehorse that was one of the most inspiring stories of the Depression era yet was largely forgotten for decades until the publishing of a recent best-seller and the release of a popular movie. One hopes Denton and Bagley's books will have the same effect with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The authors have the same basic focus: what happened at Mountain Meadows, why it happened and who was involved. They both sift through evidence, hearsay and legend--lamenting censored and destroyed church records--and piece together a fascinating narrative of events leading up to the massacre, details of the horrible event and the convoluted aftermath. In the end, they reach roughly the same conclusion: Church leader Brigham Young either ordered the massacre or encouraged a "culture of violence" within the church hierarchy that made it an acceptable act. "Within the context of the era and the history of Brigham Young's complete authoritarian control over his domain and his followers, it is inconceivable that a crime of this magnitude could have occurred without direct orders from him," Denton asserts. "Virtually every federal officer who became involved in future investigations of the massacre would conclude that Young personally ordered the atrocity, used his position to shield the killers who had followed his instructions, and personally directed the elimination of all evidence incriminating himself and his closest advisers." Bagley's mission is even more directed to finding a link between Young and the massacre, yet, lacking a smoking gun, he stops just short of Denton's definitive conclusion. Still, he is no apologist: "Claiming that Brigham Young had nothing to do with Mountain Meadows is akin to arguing that Abraham Lincoln had nothing to do with the Civil War." Bagley focuses heavily on the church's practice of "blood atonement," which justified shedding the blood of sinful Mormons "as an atonement for their sins." Just before the massacre, Brigham Young had initiated a fiery reformation effort in an attempt to renew his flock's "commitment to righteousness and to the kingdom." And, Bagley notes, "nowhere did the fires of Reformation burn as brightly as in Iron County," home of Mountain Meadows. Denton, meantime, targets the "Danites," or "Avenging Angels," a secret group of Mormon loyalists organized under church founder Joseph Smith who intimidated dissenters and warred against anti-Mormon militias, as the primary perpetrators of blood atonement--and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. During the Reformation, she writes, they were responsible for a "reign of terror" that resembled the Salem witch trials. Both authors spend considerable time discussing how the massacre went down, leaving none of the gory details untold. They describe the mind-numbing double-cross in which the Mormons convinced the emigrants to accept a truce and give up their arms, only to subsequently shoot them at point-blank range. While sensational in nature, these details help us understand just how horrifying this event was, and why the church worked so hard to keep it quiet. Bagley writes of the harrowing butchery: "One witness `saw children clinging around the knees of the murderers, begging for mercy and offering themselves as slaves for life could they be spared. But their throats were cut from ear to ear as an answer to their appeal.'" Denton describes the gathering of booty afterward: "The meadow was a sea of mutilated bodies and bloody debris. Wagons were now dismantled and featherbeds ripped open in search of gold; utensils, tools, and home furnishings that had been strewn about were collected. The plunder proceeded with a strange quiet. Women from Cedar City and nearby settlements arrived to remove the calico dresses and lace pinafores of the women and children, pulling off their expensive shoes, and ripping earrings, brooches, and rings off the corpses. ... The bodies were piled in heaps with little or no attempt to bury them." Overall, Denton, who grew up in Southern Nevada and co-wrote the myth-piercing Las Vegas history The Money and the Power, does a better job of placing the massacre within the context of American history, succinctly outlining the church's founding and evolution and the nation's hostile response to the Mormons' unorthodox beliefs. She explains how the relentless persecution of Mormons in other states helped foster a strong "us vs. them" mentality among church followers. She outlines how various U.S. presidents reacted to and interacted with the Mormon leadership, and how the Civil War interrupted efforts to prosecute the killers. Bagley, a Salt Lake City journalist, is the detail man. While Denton provides an eloquent narrative, Bagley takes a more academic, investigative approach, exploring the numerous conflicting stories about the massacre and determining which are more credible. At times, Denton finds herself quoting Bagley to explain a nuance among conflicting accounts. I read the books in the wrong order. Denton's book should come first, giving readers a dramatic narrative to follow and a solid historical overview of the massacre. For those who wish to plunge more deeply into the subject, Bagley is your next stop. Denton and Bagley, both with family ties to the Mormon Church, do an admirable job of stressing that the Mountain Meadows Massacre should not serve as an indictment of all members of the Mormon faith, past or present. They note that many church members of conscience refused to participate in the massacre and condemned those who did. "It would be part of the larger historical tragedy of Mountain Meadows that the outside world would level collective blame and guilt at Mormons in general," Denton writes. "For there were untold members of faithful and believing Mormons profoundly disturbed by the church's role in the slaughter and the subsequent dissembling." The massacre is an important historical event, of value and interest to readers everywhere. But it is particularly poignant in this part of the country, where it occurred and where remnants of its bitter aftermath linger. It is haunting to think that the Arkansas emigrants who camped at Mountain Meadows were resting up before the arduous desert journey to their next major stop-off--the spring-fed meadow of Las Vegas. Nevada residents and officials also played ancillary roles in various aspects of the drama, including Mark Twain, who wrote extensively about the massacre for Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise. Mountain Meadows, like so many other tragedies, must not be forgotten or ignored. Just as we remember the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing (which supplanted Mountain Meadows as the largest civilian atrocity in U.S. history) and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, we must remember Mountain Meadows as a prime example of religious fanaticism gone terribly awry. "Mountain Meadows was a crime of true believers," Bagley writes in a sobering allusion to other crimes against humanity. Just as we should not condemn all Muslims for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we must distinguish the zealous group of Mormons who perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre from the millions of Latter-Day Saints then and now who lead virtuous, peaceful lives and would never even consider engaging in such savagery. Yet as much as Mountain Meadows is a painful blot on Mormon history, an incident many of the faithful would rather see buried, it must not be ignored or spun to put a better face on the church. It happened, and the task now is to learn from it. Denton, in a recent op-ed column for the New York Times, explains that the Mormon Church to this day refuses to claim responsibility for the tragedy. "At a time when religions around the world are acknowledging and atoning for past sins, the massacre has left the Mormon Church in a quandary," she writes. "Roman Catholics have apologized for their silence during the Holocaust, United Methodists for their massacre of American Indians during the Civil War, Southern Baptists for their support of slavery, and Lutherans for Martin Luther's anti-Jewish remarks. But unlike the leaders of other religions, who are believed to be guided by the hand of God, Mormon prophets are considered to be extensions of him." In other words, she says, the dilemma for Mormons is that questioning or condemning the actions of the prophet Brigham Young is the equivalent of questioning or condemning God. Still, as Denton notes, "without a sustained attempt at accountability and atonement, the church will not escape the hovering shadow of that horrible crime." Perhaps the serious, clear-eyed works of Denton and Bagley will spur a renewed movement to remove that shadow.

www.idahostatesman.com 29 July 2003 Worst massacre on the Oregon Trail involved attacks and a touch of cannibalism Fort Hall, reproduced in this painting by Bethel M. Farley, was a trading post for trappers and emigrants from 1834 to 1856. Photo courtesy of Idaho State Historical Society Fort Boise, erected in 1834 by the Hudson´s Bay Company, served as a post exchange for trappers and emigrants until 1856. California has its Donner Party. Idaho has its Utter Disaster. The Utter Disaster was the worst massacre emigrants suffered the entire length of the 3,000-mile Oregon Trail. It had all the angles that make for a chilling drama: Indians on the warpath, soldiers who failed in the call of duty … and a bout of cannibalism. The Utter party—or, the Otter party, as it is also sometimes called—started out innocently enough when a party of eight wagons left Wisconsin on a bright clear day in May in 1860. The party included Elijah Utter, his wife Abagal and their 10 children, their 16 head of cows, four yoke oxen and family dog. Indian attacks the year before near the City of Rocks and American Falls had spurred the U.S. Army to escort wagon parties over the Snake River Plains. And, indeed, an escort did accompany the Utter party from Fort Hall to what is now Rock Creek near Twin Falls. There, the escort told the emigrants they were out of danger. Four dragoons whose enlistment was up remained with the party, assuring them they could protect them, even though they had no horses or guns. At Three Island Crossing near Glenns Ferry they opted not to risk crossing the Snake River, even though it meant following a longer drier route. They were following this route on Sept. 9 in the vicinity of Castle Creek between Murphy and Grand View when they came upon a grave that Indians had plundered. A mile later a hundred Indians came over the hill cloaked in a cloud of dust. Elijah Utter and Alexis Van Ornum circled the wagons. When the Indians couldn´t stampede the livestock, they indicated they would let the party go in exchange for some flour, sugar and other foodstuff. But the train had hardly started up again than the Indians, led by a white man colored to look like an Indian, attacked a second time. Meanwhile, the dragoons fled—on the emigrants´ horses, no less. It was revealed later that one had deserted the army; the others were rank cowards. On the second day of fighting, the Indians killed Mary Utter, the eldest Utter daughter. Then they shot Elijah Utter as he tried to signal that they could have everything if they would just leave the emigrants alone. His wife and three of the couple´s children refused to leave his side as other emigrants fled. Emeline, at 13, headed out into the “pathless wilderness” with a nursing baby and four other siblings. With the Indians preoccupied, the 28 surviving emigrants—16 of them children— journeyed along the river hiding in willow clumps. Eventually, the survivors reached the vicinity of the Old Fort Boise trading post near Parma, which had been deserted following the 1854 Ward Massacre. Too weak to go further, they made camp at the mouth of the Owyhee River. On Oct. 2, two boys who had been cut off from the wagon train during the initial attack reached the Umatilla agency south of Fort Walla Walla. When the Army found the Utter party 12 days later, Emeline was three days from death. It was clear that the 12 who remained had eaten the remains of four children who had starved to death.

nbc5.com Bank 29 July 2003 Apologizes For Hitler Reference Online Newsletter Praises Hitler's Economics CHICAGO -- A suburban bank was apologizing to its customers and bank staff Tuesday night for a newsletter that many have called disturbing. The newsletter, reported NBC5's Phil Rogers, was written by the bank president and praised Adolph Hitler. The Glenview State Bank has tens of thousands of customers, Rogers said, and many are wondering about the motive behind the newsletter. "What everyone agrees was monumentally poor judgment," Rogers said, now has the bank not only talking about the mistake, but is offering to give their critics a forum. The newsletter, published by the Glenview State Bank, has unleashed a firestorm of emotions. "Unless this man is fired," said bank customer Kathy Posner, "I don't give any credence to anything that the bank is doing." The man in question is bank president David Raub. He wrote in his July newsletter on the bank's Web site about what Hitler had done for Germany's economy in the '30s. "He gave the German people an arrogant belief in their own superiority and destiny. That belief would eventually help to destroy them, but during the depression, it helped businessmen to cast aside their doubts, hire workers and invest for the future," Raub wrote. "And it led German workers to work harder than anyone else in Europe." The article went on to say, "Hitler knew that public confidence is a vital ingredient for economic growth." "This was simply a stupid error of monumental proportions," said Richard Hirschhaut (pictured, left), of the Anti-Defamation League. Hirschhaut wrote a response letter to the bank declaring that Hitler's economic policies cannot be separated from his other tactics of racism and genocide. He pointed out that his goal was not to build a stable economy, but to dominate the world. "To write of Hitler without the context of millions of innocents brutally murdered," wrote Hirschhaut, "is an insult to all of their memories." "How can one analyze, on an objective basis, Nazi economic policies or Hitler's economic policies without looking at those who were forced off the economic rolls -- the repression, the brutality?" Hirschhaut asked. A lot of companies faced with potentially damaging public relations like this would batten down the hatches, Rogers said, but that's not what they've done in Glenview. "In fact," he said, "they've done just the opposite." "My first full-time job was fighting Hitler. So, I know what a monster he was," bank chairman John Jones (pictured, left), Raub's boss, said. He told Rogers that the newsletter has been withdrawn and that, in its place, an apology has been posted on the bank's Web site. Jones is also posting the entire text of the ADL's critical letter, as well. "You make mistakes and you have to acknowledge them and learn by them and ask for forgiveness. And that's what we're doing," Jones said. The ADL says it accepts the bank's sentiments as sincere, Rogers said, calling incidents like this "teachable moments". Jones told NBC5 that "we know we made a mistake, and we know we're all one community."

Chicago Sun Times Bank apologizes for citing Hitler July 30, 2003 BY TAMMY CHASE Business Reporter Advertisement Glenview State Bank executives apologized to Jewish people on the bank's Web site Tuesday night, after a bank newsletter to customers praised Adolf Hitler as an economic leader of the 1930s. "We sincerely apologize for this error. We did not intend to offend anyone. Please forgive us for this mistake," the 83-year-old suburban bank said Tuesday. It said it received "many" letters and phone calls from upset people. The apology came after the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Defamation League started getting complaints about the bank's July newsletter and the bank president's depiction of Hitler as an economic leader--arguments that the author, who is the bank president, compared to the performance of today's U.S. economy. The bank pulled the Web site version of the newsletter Tuesday morning after the league said people had contacted the group to complain. Anti-Defamation League regional director Richard Hirschhaut said he requested the apology during a conversation he had Tuesday with the bank's main owners, which include bank holding company Chairman and Chief Executive John Jones and bank President Raub. "Hitler's economic policies cannot be divorced from his great policies of virulent anti-Semitism, racism and genocide," Hirschhaut wrote in a letter to the bank. "There are really no circumstances under which Hitler should be held as a good model." In the 1,500-word newsletter, Raub talks of how Hitler was the only major leader during the 1930s who successfully resuscitated his country's economy when others such as President Franklin Roosevelt could not, and "led German workers to work harder than anyone else in Europe." "The Great Depression of the 1930's saw falling prices, staggering unemployment and shattered stock markets all over the world, and the world's leading statesmen seemed helpless to defeat it. Except for one," the newsletter reads. "His name was Adolph Hitler. Unlike France and Britain, and unlike the United States, Germany spent most of the 1930's growing economically, not declining. If we can understand why Depression-era Germany resisted the disease, we may better understand how alarmed we should be today in the 21st century." Raub said Hitler avoided deflation unlike other European nations and reduced unemployment. This year, our economy has been beaten up by war, sluggish auto sales and stagnant business spending, Raub said. Yet consumers keep spending money, and the stock market has gone up, a sign that confidence is up in America. He suggests that confidence remains high because American companies "moved very, very quickly to fix their problems after the 'bubble' burst in the year 2000" and because taxes are falling. The point of the newsletter? Glenview's investment managers are confident, "and that's why we're buying and holding our favorite long-term growth stocks," the newsletter ends. In an interview, Raub said he's written monthly newsletters for 15 years, and always seeks to apply examples of economy history to current events. His July newsletter, he said, "was a miserable failure." The bank also apologized for a remark Raub made regarding Palestine. In the newsletter, he said "America is showing that it stands for something more than its most narrow self-interest by taking on thankless jobs in Palestine, Africa and Iraq." The bank's apology and the Anti-Defamation League's letter are posted at www.gsb.com. Jones said he didn't know if the bank would take any other actions after posting the apology, saying Tuesday he would take things "one step at a time." Raub said he'll continue to write newsletters. Glenview is owned by Cummins-American Corp., which is based in Mount Prospect. According to Hoover's Online, Mount Prospect-based Cummins-American has another division that makes coin sorters, scanners, check imprinters and paper shredders. It also produces computer software. The Jones family owns a majority of the company, Hoover's said. It ranked the 36th-largest bank in the Chicago metropolitan area as of June 2002, based on deposits of $621.4 million, according to SNL Financial.

ft.com 31 July 2003 History lesson? What bank president would want to praise Adolf Hitler to his clients? One in suburban Chicago. David Raub wrote in Glenview State Bank's monthly newsletter: "The Great Depression of the 1930s saw falling prices, staggering unemployment and shattered stock markets all over the world, and the world's leading statesmen seemed helpless to defeat it. "Except for one. His name was Adolph (sic) Hitler. Unlike France and Britain, and unlike the United States, Germany spent most of the 1930s growing economically, not declining. If we can understand why Depression-era Germany resisted the disease, we may better understand how alarmed we should be today in the 21st century." Understandably, this drew a response from the Anti-Defamation League. After pointing out how flawed the octogenarian Raub's economic analysis was, the ADL reminded him that economic growth was not Hitler's aim. "His ultimate goals as a fascist dictator were not to rebuild Germany as a stable economic powerhouse, but to dominate the world by unparalleled violence and order it to his vision of Aryan racial superiority," the ADL's Richard Hirschhaut wrote in a letter that was posted on the bank's website. What was the bank's response to the outcry? "We did not intend to offend anyone. Please forgive us for this mistake."

UPI 30 July 2003 Bank apologizes for praising Hitler GLENVIEW, Ill., July 30 (UPI) -- A suburban Chicago bank is apologizing for praising Adolf Hitler's economic policies in its July newsletter to customers. Glenview State Bank, the 36th largest in the Chicago metropolitan area, posted the apology on its Web site late Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "We sincerely apologize for this error. We did not intend to offend anyone. Please forgive us for this mistake," the 83-year-old bank said after receiving letters from a number of people upset by the reference. Richard Hirschhaut, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Sun-Times the ADL had received a number of complaints and wrote the bank, saying, "Hitler's economic policies cannot be divorced from his great policies of virulent anti-Semitism, racism and genocide. There are really no circumstances under which Hitler should be held as a good model." The 1,500-word newsletter was written by the bank's president and praised Hitler for reviving the German economy when the other western economies still were floundering. It also compared the Germany economy of the '30s to the current U.S. economy.

Asia-Pacific

Sydney Morning Herald 2 July 2003 Muddle over genocide must be resolved July 2 2003 Confusion and differences over a legal definition compromise international law, writes Raimond Gaita. Some people believe the invasion of Iraq has severely damaged the prospects for international law. Others hope it will provoke a deeper and more broadly based discussion of the authority and integrity of institutions like the International Criminal Court. May the latter prove right. The world needs such institutions if, in the spirit of Nuremberg, the community of nations is to hold to account persons guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Many of the activists - political and judicial - who have fought for the development of international law are driven by a passion to ensure that respect for sovereignty should not prevent the prosecution of political and military leaders who are guilty of such crimes. Unfortunately the passion to bring these criminals to account is not always matched by a passion to understand the nature of their crimes. This has, I suspect, undermined the credibility of international law. Who, for example, does not deplore the misuse of the word "genocide"? Muddle over what it means, and politically motivated exploitation of that muddle have played a large part in discrediting international institutions that would charge people with genocide and punish them if they were to be found guilty. Belief that genocide is the worst of crimes is almost universal and shows itself in political arguments over the application of the concept. We cannot hold that belief, however, if we accept the definition of genocide in the 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It allows that genocide can be committed even though not one person is murdered in the service of genocidal intention. To be consistent, we must either abandon the belief that genocide is the gravest of the crimes against humanity or modify the convention more seriously than most jurists would contemplate. Two controversies about genocide run side by side, seldom engaging with each other. The first is among lawyers who accept the definition of the convention (more or less) but who argue about whether other groups should be included as possible victims - gays, certain categories of the disabled or political groups, for example. The second is among philosophers, social scientists, historians and political theorists and it is marked by the fact that they argue about whether there must be murder if there is to be genocide. When these groups meet to discuss genocide, lawyers often show bemused incredulity at the suggestion that the concept's application should be constrained by its adequacy to a morally saturated political experience, more than 50 years old, but which we have not yet understood. Confronted seriously for the first time with the crimes we have come to know collectively as the Holocaust, Winston Churchill was moved to speak of "a crime without a name". In 1943 Raphael Lemkin delivered the word "genocide" to the world, but it was Nuremberg, the successor trials in Europe and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, that gave us our deepest discussion of it. After the Holocaust many people were overwhelmed by a sense that they were confronted with a new crime which humanity needed to bring into the space of a common understanding even if aspects of it would always defeat attempts to do so. Not long ago Australians argued over whether genocide was committed when children of mixed blood were taken from their parents. Sometimes the policy was motivated by racist disdain for the Aborigines, enacted brutally and with the intention that the race should cease to exist. Volatile and often nasty, the argument was not - as the present argument over whether there was a Tasmanian genocide is - about the facts. Nor was it, in any narrow sense, about the law. The argument was philosophical and moral, enlivened by the question whether a criminal category whose paradigm is the Holocaust could apply to what was done to the children and their parents. If it could, then one would have to conclude that genocide was probably not the worst crime committed against the Aborigines. Some people find that too paradoxical to accept. Muddle over such a serious criminal category matters. If we stretch it beyond the moral reach of its horrific paradigms, then serious injustice will be done to those convicted of it. And - perhaps as importantly - our efforts to understand a critical and novel element of our political experience will be subverted, perhaps beyond redemption. Humanity understands itself partly by the crimes it knows itself to be capable of. We must strive, therefore, to give them their right names. The integrity of international law depends on it. Raimond Gaita is professor of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, and professor of moral philosophy at University of London King's College. He is a keynote speaker at the Activating Human Rights and Diversity Conference, organised by Southern Cross University, being held in Byron Bay this week.

Cambodia

Kyodo JP 2 July 2003 Widow of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot dies at 83 Wednesday, July 2, 2003 at 08:30 JST PHNOM PENH — Khieu Ponary, the first wife of deceased Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, died Tuesday at age 83, the son of Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's brother-in-law, said. Khieu Ponary, who had suffered from mental illness and breast cancer, died in Pailin, the former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, Ieng Vudh told Kyodo News by telephone. (Kyodo News)

India

29 July 2003 Blast rips through bus in Mumbai By Mahesh Vijapurkar The wreck of the bus after an explosion ripped through it in Ghatkopar, Mumbai, on Monday. — PTI MUMBAI JULY 28. A powerful explosive device went off on a local bus in suburban Ghatkopar at 9.12 tonight killing one person and injuring over 30 persons, four of them critically. (Agencies put the toll at three.) The blast forced the authorities to sound an alert in Nasik, 200 km away, where several lakh people are expected to come for a holy dip in the Godavari river during the Khumb Mela beginning on Thursday. The explosion on the moving bus was reminiscent of the one near the same place on December 2 last year, followed by three more the following weeks. It ripped through the bus, wrecking it and damaged an autorickshaw that was just behind. Traffic in the vicinity too felt the impact of the blast. The bus was making its routine trip between Ghatkopar and Andheri. Apparently, the device was placed under a seat at the rear. No one has so far claimed responsibility for the blast, but suspicion centred on the ISI of Pakistan and the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) which, according to authorities, has "close ties with subversive organisations across the border." Moments after the incident, residents of Ghatkopar who gathered at the spot expressed annoyance that blasts were occurring so frequently in the metropolis. In connection with the series of blasts — on December 6, 2002, on January 27 and March 13 this year — 23 persons have been arrested and judicial proceedings have begun against them under stringent legal provisions. The Shiv Sena and the BJP called a `Mumbai bandh' on July 30 to protest against the explosion.

The Hindu 30 July 2003 Kerala: 150 chargsheeted in Marad massacre Kozhikode, July. 30 (UNI): Rounding up the investigations into the May two massacre of nine people at Marad as a "revenge action" and denying any involvement of outside agencies, the Special Crime Branch team filed chargesheet against 150 accused before a local court today. The 44-page common chargesheet, under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, Arms Act, Explosives Substance Act and the Religious Institutions (Prevention of Misuse) Act, was filed before the First Class Judicial Magistrate Court-V this afternoon, in connection with the planned killings in the sensitive coastal belt of this district. Briefing newspersons, Inspector-General Mahesh Kumar Singhla, said the crime was conspired and committed mainly by relatives of the victims killed in a similar riot of January last year as most of the accused hailed from Marad and nearby places. T P Mohammedali (42), brother of Thekkepurath Aboobacker who was among the five killed last year, was framed as the first accused. Sakhir (24), Majid (55), Pallithodi Marsood (26), Noushad (25), Manaf (25), Bijili (22) who is the son of Aboobacker, Ali Akbar (32), Asis (35) and Rafiq (32), all hailing from in and around Marad area, were listed as the other nine prime accused respectively.

Indonesia

AFP 28 Jul 2003 Indonesia: Fifteen more Aceh rebels killed, military says BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, July 28 (AFP) - Fifteen more rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) have been killed during an army offensive against the guerrillas in Indonesia's Aceh province, the military said Monday. The rebels were killed in seven different skirmishes in five districts across Aceh on Sunday, military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Yani Basuki said. Basuki told AFP that the biggest clash occurred in the village of Alue Bayu in Bireuen district and claimed the lives of four rebels, including a local rebel chief. Rebels also shot dead one civilian in the Idi Cut area of East Aceh district and troops also discovered a corpse bearing gunshot wounds in the Gandapura area of Bireuen district, Basuki said. Before the latest deaths, the military said that troops had killed 531 rebels and seized 255 weapons since the operation began, while more than 1,277 rebels had been captured or surrendered. Close to 40,000 soldiers and police are battling a GAM force the military estimated at about 5,000 when the operation began. An international thinktank, in a report last week, said the military assault was only alienating Acehnese and fuelling support for GAM, which has fought for independence since 1976. The International Crisis Group also questioned military figures for rebel dead, saying there was no way to verify whether the dead were really guerrillas.

Iraq

RFE/RE 7 Jul 2003 Iraq: Uncertainties Beset Investigations (Part 3) By Charles Recknagel Tens of thousands of people went missing in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's decades in power and are presumed to have been executed or imprisoned. Now, with mass graves being discovered and excavated, the fate of those who disappeared may finally be learned. In the third of a four-part series on Iraq's missing, RFE/RL looks at how much help Iraqis can expect from the international community in seeking to identify their dead and putting the executioners on trial. Prague, 7 July 2003 (RFE/RL) -- As Iraqis rush to learn the fate of the tens of thousands of people who vanished under Saddam Hussein, it remains uncertain how much the international community will help in the daunting task. So far, excavations of mass graves have largely been in the hands of local communities, which have sought to unearth the bodies as quickly as possible. But in their haste, many opportunities to identify the dead and collect evidence are being lost. In some cases, excavators have used backhoes to speed the digging but have inadvertently dug into many skeletons at once, confusing the remains. At the same time, the victims' Iraqi identity cards have been displaced and the bullets which prove their murders scattered. Margaret Cox of the Inforce Foundation at Bournemouth University in Britain recently led a team of forensic scientists and surveyors to Iraq to study the mass graves at the request of the British government. She says there is an urgent need for the international community to assist Iraqis with the kind of expertise and training needed to ensure that mass graves are excavated by qualified investigators. But no international groups have yet been tasked to begin training local experts, and most mass grave sites remain unguarded by authorities. Cox says the efforts to keep the sites intact rely mainly on trying to persuade Iraqis to stay away from them until help can arrive. "There are issues of how can you possibly secure all these sites when you know what they are and where they are because the resources to do that are not currently available," Cox says. "The only real way of achieving that security for sites is to persuade the Iraqi people that they shouldn't dig them up in such a hurry, that they should be patient and wait for assistance in order to make sure that they are investigated in a way that will procure evidence to go to court." The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has said U.S. and British forces are stretched too thinly in Iraq to provide security for all of the sites. Some 17 of the 100 mass graves found so far are secured by U.S. troops. The CPA has called on Iraqis to leave the mass graves alone, but some people are reported to be continuing to dig because they fear the former regime might return and that the time for recovering the remains of their loved ones is limited. The CPA has begun an effort to assess the extent of exhumation work required and to establish guidelines for the collection of evidence that meets normal standards for admission in court. But it is unclear who might pay for any large-scale effort. Another group that hopes to play a key role in amassing war crimes evidence is the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice. Its program director, Paul van Zyl, tells RFE/RL the organization has experts in Iraq who are trying to arrange a major survey of the abuses committed by the regime. Van Zyl called for the appointment of an international commission of experts as soon as possible to provide advice on how to deal with the past, including prosecutions, truth commissions, and vetting programs for former members of the Ba'athist Party. "I don't think that there is widespread official acknowledgement and a public knowledge of quite the extent of the human rights abuse that [Hussein] was responsible for. And I think it's very important to create that sort of official record of what it was that his regime did, how they did it, and in what way they did it," van Zyl says. The UN -- which has collected evidence of crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo -- has no mandate to do so in Iraq. The U.S. and Britain -- Iraq's governing powers -- have not said if they will compile evidence against Hussein's regime or whether any such trials would take place in Iraq or in some international venue, such as the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Late last month, the United Nations convened what it called Iraq's first national workshop on human rights, bringing together nongovernmental human rights activists with coalition experts and Iraqi jurists. The UN said in a press release that it would help carry out nationwide discussions "aimed at identifying further action required to address past violations." Also last month, on the day he was named the top British representative for Iraq, UN Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock signaled he would push the process forward. "The picture is gloomy and nasty, but we've got to investigate it, and I suggested to the [Security] Council this morning that, taking the lead from the people of Iraq, we should start discussing how what we call 'transitional justice' should be applied, how we can seek reconciliation in Iraq by bringing those responsible for crimes of genocide or crimes against humanity or war crimes to book [to be held accountable] in Iraq under a system that works under the control of the Iraqi people," Greenstock said. Prior to the Iraq war, U.S. and British-led efforts to interest the UN in setting up a war crimes court for Hussein's regime foundered in the face of opposition from France, Russia, and China -- the other three permanent members of the UN Security Council. Partly to build an argument for a UN court, Washington and London sponsored a nonprofit effort called Indict to collect evidence against Hussein and his top lieutenants. Indict, based in London and employing three full-time researchers, was funded by the U.S. Congress under the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Today, it is the only office publicly engaged in such work. Now that Hussein has been toppled, however, the Iraq Liberation Act has run its course and future funding for Indict is uncertain. Ann Clwyd, a member of the British Parliament and the head of the Indict effort, described the funding problem. "Indict was funded under the Iraq Liberation Act of the U.S. Congress," Clwyd says. "The Iraq Liberation Act has come to an end, so unless Indict receives funding in the next couple of months, then Indict cannot possibly continue. We also got 20 percent of our funding from Kuwait. I very much hope [Indict] can continue, but it really does depend on whether the people who were funding it in the past continue to fund it or whether other countries also chip in." As uncertainty grows over the role the international community will play in excavating Iraq's mass graves, some observers say valuable opportunities are being lost to collect police and prison records in Iraq -- records that could help identify victims and killers. Clwyd, who returned last month from a trip to Baghdad, says Indict researchers found prison floors still littered with police files rummaged through by looters. She says the former regime kept detailed records of who it imprisoned and executed but that such evidence is not being secured. Instead, Clwyd says, files are sometimes offered for sale in the Baghdad market, where Ba'ath Party members are reported to be buying evidence that incriminates them. In the meantime, some former Iraqi political prisoners have launched their own modest efforts to collect testimony against former officials -- just as villagers have started their own grassroots efforts to recover their dead. The group, called the Iraqi Free Prisoners Organization, has set up an office in central Baghdad and is trying to locate and preserve thousands of files about executions allegedly kept by the Iraqi secret services. One of the group's directors, Najaf al-Arajee, told RFE/RL recently in Baghdad that the security services removed many files to secret hiding places during the Iraq war in the spring -- in hopes of keeping them from being damaged and in expectation of returning to work soon. The former prisoners are now trying to track those files down. "Most of the files -- for example, the archive of the internal secret police service -- were hidden in the Al-Mansur shopping center. We received the information that the archives are located in this place, and we took them by force," al-Arajee said. The recovered files now await the scrutiny of judges in what former political prisoners hope one day will be extensive trials of their tormentors. But so far, the only announced new court in Baghdad is one being set up by the Coalition Authority to try Hussein loyalists who have committed crimes against U.S. and British forces. U.S. civil administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, has said that he will set up a special court "to try people, in particular senior Ba'athists...who may have committed crimes against the coalition [and] who are trying to destabilize the situation here." Bremer held out the prospect that the court could evolve into a tribunal to try people for crimes against humanity. But he said, "That is a decision that the Iraqi government should make." Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, which began work in July, has said it will form a commission to create laws which would allow it to put suspected war criminals on trial. It has also said it is ready to try all 55 people on the U.S. most-wanted list of high-ranking Ba'ath party officials which Washington is tracking down. The list includes Saddam Hussein, his sons, and most of his top aides.

BBC 23 July, 2003 In Iraq's killing fields Up to 300,000 bodies may be buried in mass graves By Tim Whewell BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents The stench of death does not scare Ian Hanson. He earns his living in killing fields. The mild-mannered archaeologist from Bournemouth University has investigated mass graves in Congo, Guatemala, and Bosnia. Now it is Iraq. He and his specialist forensics team - Inforce - were ordered into action by the Foreign Office after shocking footage on BBC News. It is very important to see how a ligature is tied around bones Ian Hanson, Inforce Images of bulldozers were shown ploughing through grave sites in search of bodies, possibly destroying crucial prosecution evidence. "We like to see the bodies in situ," Mr Hanson said, "because it is very important to see how a ligature is tied around bones to know whether or not the victims were executed here. "When local people do the exhumations themselves, they may show you a cloth afterwards that looks like a blindfold, but if it is not still around the face, that would not stand up in a court of law." Dangerous work Ian Hanson was standing in his flakjacket in the middle of a sandy desert south of Baghdad. The temperature was touching 50C and there was no shade for miles. Ian Hanson's team found more than 70 suspected mass graves Around him were the burly US marines who watch for possible guerrilla attack. Another member of the team was taking geophysical soundings of the site. And two young women anthropologists were recording and laying out bones found on the sand. "If this ends up being a crime scene," said one of them, "we cannot touch it. We can only look at what has already been disturbed." Mr Hanson's team has now left Iraq after a month of investigations. They arrived with a list of 27 suspected mass grave sites. By the end they had confirmed more than 70. No-one knows how many bodies may be buried in them all. The best estimate is 300,000. The 'disappeared' Many international lawyers class Saddam Hussein's crimes as genocide. His regime did not just murder people in the well-known campaigns of ethnic cleansing, such as the "Anfall" campaign against the Kurds in 1988, and the barbarous suppression of the Shia uprising in 1991. It murdered suspected opponents continuously, in every year he was in power. It is rare to find an Iraqi family who does not mourn a "disappeared" relative. It has to be clear to Iraqis and the world what is going to happen to justice Johanna Bjorken, Human Rights Watch Those atrocities were one of the justifications coalition leaders gave for going to war. Yet some say little preparation has been made for prosecuting those responsible. "There has to be a process," says Johanna Bjorken, researcher in Baghdad for the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch. "It has to be clear to Iraqis and the world what is going to happen to justice, where the testimony is going to go. "The coalition knew this was going to be a huge issue - securing evidence from well before the war. Their failure to be prepared is inexcusable." Incriminating evidence Random digging has now stopped at most of the mass graves. But there is no knowing when relatives will get impatient to find their loved ones and start again. Ahmed al-Tamimi is seeking information on his executed brother And incriminating documents - the files of Saddam Hussein's secret police - are scattered across the country, often in private hands, after they were looted from burning ministries on the day Baghdad fell. Ahmed al-Tamimi has a stash in his house in the small town of Musaib. He is an Iraqi, recently returned from exile in the US, who is searching for information on his executed brother. The documents do not relate to his case. They relate to other families. But Ahmed says the authorities are not yet making any effort to gather any files in a central place - and no-one is handing them in. "The trust is not so good between the Americans and the people," Ahmed says. "In the beginning, they arrested people who are dangerous to their presence here. They did not arrest Baath Party members who killed Iraqis in 1991. "But for our people, this is the priority because they killed our loved ones. People now are afraid." Living with the enemy Iraq's new governing council has announced that it will set up a commission to try officials of the old regime within the country. But no-one knows yet what the process will be. In the meantime, Iraqis say mass murderers are still living in their midst. A few notorious suspects have even been captured by coalition forces and then released. When people see the man responsible walking on the street, they feel the regime is still there, they feel nothing has changed Judge Don Campbell For now, the man in charge of justice in Iraq is the American Judge Don Campbell - a reservist general. He told Crossing Continents: "I am not surprised people are frustrated. But if we face someone threatening the coalition we will arrest them first. "If they are not an immediate threat we will arrest them second. But very often you do not get past the first priority because it consumes an entire day." It is still early days. In Bosnia, it took years to bring war criminals to justice. But in Iraq, there is a growing impatience. "No-one can live without justice," says Ahmed al-Tamimi. "People did not just lose loved ones. They lost their future. "And when they see the man responsible walking on the street, they feel the regime is still there, Saddam is still there - they feel nothing has changed."

WP 7 Jul 2003 Digging For the Truth As Iraq's Mass Graves Are Slowly Unearthed, The Dead Speak Again By Sharon Waxman Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, July 7, 2003; Page C01 NEAR HINDIYAH, Iraq The year is 1988. Across the blistering plain of the southern Iraqi desert, a line of men stands under the silent sky. There is nothing and no one for miles as they file forward under the prod of their armed guards, hands cuffed behind their backs. Harsh desert winds whip at their feet, with the jinn, the tall funnels of swirling sand believed by some to contain the genie, the only shape to mark the horizon. There will be no magic genie for these men. They wear loose pants and matching tunics that identify them as Kurds, an ethnic group that does not live in the southern desert. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has brought them here, probably from hundreds of miles away in the north, to be killed. Who knows for what crime, what misdemeanor? One of the prisoners is still a teenager, 15 years old, or perhaps 16 or 17. His tunic is embroidered around the collar. Over an undershirt with green trim the bloodied cuffs of his white shirt stick to his metal handcuffs. A brown sash circles his waist, and he wears black leather shoes. Surely he is frightened. Surely he knows the inevitable will arrive. When it does come, death will be swift. It's 15 years later and forensic archaeologist Ambika Flavel has come to the same spot to reconstruct that day. The 27-year-old Brit reaches into a flour sack and rummages around. She pulls out several ribs, a femur, a clavicle, and places them neatly on a brown blanket spread on the dusty desert floor. She finds and assembles the spinal column, each vertebra fitting snugly against the next. Then comes a jumble of small bones. "Foot," she says, placing one at the bottom of the blanket. "Foot." Flavel separates the fingers, the toes, yellowed bits of calcium that click as she gathers each into a small pile. She fishes out two metal circles, once handcuffs, with scraps of white cloth stuck to them. The sun is punishingly hot -- 117 degrees -- but at least there is no stench today. The bodies at this mass grave have all skeletonized and Flavel does not wear gloves as she sorts through the bones. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle," she remarks, neatly placing the hip bones above the legs. She checks off each piece on a chart: femur, tibia. Sometimes she finds a piece she can't identify as human; she licks it to be sure -- bone is porous, stone is not. Here is the skull, not very large, with a small hole at the back and a slightly larger hole at the front. A bullet appears to have been shot into the back of the head at close range, and exited the front. An execution. She examines the teeth -- a wisdom tooth has not yet descended and the teeth are still white. She peers at the elbow and the base of the spine and notes that key joints have not yet fused. The man killed here, she concludes, was as young as 15, probably no older than 17. Observing this process, U.S. Army Col. Ed Burley walks over to scrutinize the skull. He places a pen through the hole to determine the trajectory of the bullet. "It looks like a classic gunshot wound," he says, and he ought to know. In addition to being the head of the U.S.-led effort to assess and identify mass graves in Iraq, Burley, 42, is a criminal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C. Burley and his group of six forensic experts, including Flavel, have been traveling the length and breadth of Iraq looking for where the bodies are buried. Guided by local tipsters and human rights activists who precede them, they dig up bones, uncover corpses and sift through sometimes-empty grave sites ransacked by families looking for missing relatives. They do not seek to provide families with closure. That is someone else's job. They are looking, instead, for evidence of a crime. If they do their work properly, someday someone may well have to answer for these deaths. And history will record what happened here. Which is why Burley is so enthusiastic about this new site near the tiny town of Hindiyah. It sits more than a mile from any road, straight into the echoing maw of the desert, without so much as a dirt path to indicate that vehicles once came here loaded with men. Or that a front-loading bulldozer once rolled over the dunes at this spot to cut a straight edge five feet into the ground and form the hard-packed perimeter of a rectangular pit. No families have been here to rake desperately through the ruins in hope of finding a shred of fabric, a watch, a tag, a name. As a crime scene, it is relatively pristine. And after just a few minutes of digging this morning, Burley and his team uncovered several bodies: two pairs of feet and a torso and skull in a couple of square feet -- bodies stacked one upon the other. "A place like this," Burley had said earlier, as he bumped over the dusty plain in a GMC loaded with maps, a compass and a Global Positioning System unit, looking for the spot. "There's a lot of potential." Laying the Groundwork An estimated 290,000 people are missing and believed to be buried in mass graves throughout Iraq. In a country of 22 million, that is more than 1 percent of the population, the equivalent of about 3.5 million people in the United States. The vast majority of these bodies have not been found. By comparison, forensic experts working in the former Yugoslavia estimated that "ethnic cleansing" left 30,000 dead in mass burial pits. It was there that the specialty of forensic archaeology emerged and proved its worth, as the careful evidence-gathering of experts was later used in trials that succeeded in convicting war criminals. In the Iraq war, the U.S. government did not wait long to recruit a group of forensic archaeologists with expertise in things like human anatomy and geophysics. Most of them are in their twenties and come from universities around the globe or from other projects involving crimes of war. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, these researchers have identified 80 to 100 mass graves in Iraq. The number depends upon how one counts, since some sites include several mass graves in close proximity. The six people working near Hindiyah, veterans of Bosnian grave site excavations, are part of a British-based non-governmental organization called the Inforce Foundation, which investigates mass murder and genocide. Ian Hanson, an archaeologist based at Bournemouth University in Dorset, is the leader of the 11/2-year-old group, but he answers to Col. Burley, who -- with a handgun strapped to his thigh -- is responsible for their safety. The group also includes Tim Haynie, an Army major from the U.S. Space Command, who provides access to satellite photos, crucial for finding remote sites in the desert such as this one. Their work is done quietly, usually away from the eyes of the media, always with several armed guards. Death threats are not uncommon in this line of work (though so far not in Iraq). Sometimes mass graves are mined. While Burley is all straight-arrow soldier, a stolid, balding man with a pug nose, a round face and a deep sense of religious conviction, Hanson, 34, is the cool-tempered scientist, part adventurer, part historian, with a deep tan and a deeper sense of irony. He has been known to evince gasps from bystanders when he pulls out a sandwich at lunchtime, in full view of the skeletons. He claims to no longer notice the sickly sweet smell of human remains. Yet he is quietly passionate about his work. "Every site we go to people tell you about another couple of sites," Hanson says. Frequently volunteer diggers find clues, such as empty shell casings, that can confirm a particular time period. "At one site a guy came up to me and said he had found a . . . watch," Hanson said. "It had stopped at March 4." The year is still a mystery. For the moment the role of Inforce is not to excavate, merely to identify the sites of mass graves. This usually involves the excavation of one or two bodies, interviews of local witnesses and ordering satellite photos from before and after the presumed dates of executions. The photos are used to look for disturbances of earth and for concentrations of vehicles, both signs of executions and burial. Once identified, the site is marked off-limits and locals are asked not to touch it. In some places the exhortation works, as in the Shiite south where a fatwa has forbidden exhumation. In other places, local volunteers show up unexpectedly to dig on behalf of families. Either way, full excavation by experts will happen no sooner than a year from now, after international groups prepare the work and arrive in larger numbers. The job of Inforce is to provide those people with an overall image of the scope of their job: making the case for mass murder. "We're trying to look at a cross section of the major events of people disappearing," says Hanson. "The Kurds in 1988, the uprising of 1991, the uprising of 1998. If you're gathering evidence for criminal prosecution, you try to aim for a sample [of each], to get a view of the overall disappearances." Some graves contain a few dozen bodies. Others -- like one in Hilla in southern Iraq -- contained 5,000, exhumed to the anguished cries of local residents. Four thousand of those men have been identified so far as Shiite rebels, all of them executed: eyes blindfolded, hands tied behind the back, gunshot wounds to the head. But in the case of Hilla, the forensic experts arrived well after the families, and there was little they could do to reconstruct the crime. The Inforce archaeologists have tried to train local volunteers to exhume bodies without disturbing evidence, to lift a skeleton carefully so the wrists stay bound, so the blindfold stays on the skull. Absent the emotion and the pressure of grieving families, it is no different from the way cultural archaeologists work -- with tiny trowels, small brushes, a flashlight and lots of patience. "We're like paleontologists," says Hanson. "It's like uncovering Tyrannosaurus rex." 'Doing This for a Reason' Arriving at the desert site, archaeologist Roland Wessling pulls out what appears to be a giant metal detector. Local Bedouins are crouched around a large pit, above which is a sign in Arabic: "This cemetery belongs to our dearest Kurdish people by supervision of the human rights organization, Karbala branch. No entrance." A half-dozen flour sacks containing bones sit at the bottom of the pit. "A month ago I found this grave," says Muhammad Abdel Wahid, who lives in a mud hut nearby. The 35-year-old subsistence farmer and his family have lived here since 1993, barely 300 yards from the mound of earth covering the corpses. "A friend of mine, a shepherd, mentioned to me he knew there was a grave here. So after we saw the mass graves on TV, we came and dug here and found the bodies," he says. The locals dug up 11 bodies and placed them in the flour sacks. They then notified a human rights office in Karbala, which in turn notified Bill Hegelin, a doctor from Physicians for Human Rights who is traveling around Iraq investigating mass grave sites. Hegelin looked at the bodies, ordered the sign erected, and notified Burley. Wessling is usually the first to work a new site. Today he sets up five parallel strings, each 50 yards long, then passes his detector -- it is actually ground-penetrating radar -- over each string. He is feeding information to a computer set off to one side, looking for objects beneath the ground or, more important, for changes in density in the earth. "It's a bit like an X-ray machine," Wessling explains. On the screen, parallel layers of earth are reflected in strata of red and blue, but after the first couple of feet the image becomes fuzzy. "A half-meter down, the earth starts to be disturbed," Wessling says, pointing at the screen. "At two meters you really see disturbances. I can't say if there are bodies there, but I can say the soil has been disturbed." Using the radar, Wessling is able to find the edges of the grave, and to see if other graves are nearby. But in this heat the work is not easy. Bedouin children crowd around the monitor. After an hour or so the fuses on the detector blow. The heat is withering, making you feel like you must talk softly and breathe lightly to conserve energy. "There was talk of postponing this until August because of the heat," says Wessling, pausing to gulp some bottled water. "But we insisted. We want to get to the sites as quickly as possible." Then he checks himself. "As a scientist I must remain as neutral as possible. One has to try not to get emotional." Hanson is lying on his stomach, halfway into the pit where he and Burley have been uncovering a few more skeletons. He carefully clears around an exposed ankle bone with his hands. Then he scrapes around a shoe with a trowel. His best guess is that these bones date from 1988, when Saddam Hussein murdered tens of thousands of Kurds, many by poison gas, many others through mass executions. "He would bus them down in cattle cars, trucks, then keep them on military bases and execute them down here," says Burley. Sometimes the prisoners would be kept for weeks at a time, moved from place to place, and then without warning driven to the desert and shot. The purpose of the campaign was to reduce the growing numbers of Kurds in Iraq, who posed a long-term threat to Hussein in their demands for independence. "Of all the cases I've seen, this is the closest I've seen to genocide," says Burley. "They certainly bused them a long way to kill them." Flavel tries not to think about the implications of her work as she sorts through the remains of her unknown teenager. "In Bosnia the bodies were fleshed," she says. "But you get over it. You know you're doing this for a reason, and that gets you through it." She sits up from her sorting of bones. "When people tell you, 'I lost my brother,' and tears are running down their face, there's pressure, isn't there? You want to do something. And you know you can't help everyone." Pressure and responsibility. Wahid, the farmer, watches the archaeologists working. He says: "Whenever we discuss the mass graves we feel anger, and sorrow for the people. These crimes -- even Hitler did not do this. Women, children, this is more than Hitler did." The farmer may not know all the facts about World War II. But he knows what happened in Iraq, particularly after this region rebelled against Saddam Hussein in 1991. "You retreated. You left us," he says. "You didn't support us." He is referring to the decision by the U.S. government not to come to the aid of Iraqis who rebelled against Hussein after the first Gulf War in 1991. Wahid looks at the grave, at a pair of sneakers. It does not matter that this particular grave is from 1988. "There are hundreds of mass graves like this, from 1991," he says. "If you had just left protection for us, this wouldn't have happened." Eventually Iraqis will take over this process. They will need to establish a database of missing persons, to cross-reference it with the bodies found in the graves. There is talk of using DNA to identify remains. Will there be justice? Wahid thinks about this question for a long while before speaking, and he doesn't answer the question. "This will not be forgotten by history," he says. Click here for INFORCE website.

NYT 9 July 2003 What Iraq Needs Now 09 July 2003 New York Times - By Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani What Iraq Needs Now By JALAL TALABANI and MASSOUD BARZANI ERBIL, Iraq Some day, we Iraqis hope to celebrate an Independence Day like the one Americans have just observed. But for the near future we face the challenge of translating liberation into democracy - a goal we Kurds will push for even more diligently now that we have agreed to join the interim Iraqi administration that will be formed this month. To that end, we will work closely with the United States to establish security, revive the economy and build a democratic culture. Our aims may appear optimistic with American and British forces struggling to establish order and restore public services in some areas of Iraq. Yet the picture is not quite as grim as some claim. The assaults on American soldiers are not "resistance to foreign occupation." Rather, they are acts of terrorism by the Baathist remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime. These remnants are so reviled in Iraq that they have had to resort to foreign volunteers, for few Iraqis will take up arms on their behalf. Since they lack the support of the people, the Baathists will be defeated - a process that can be accelerated if we establish a national security force. That would be one major step toward making Iraq safer. But another security problem, widespread looting, requires more than just better policing. The looting has its roots in economic problems. Iraq’s economy is largely moribund. The wages paid by the coalition are often not enough to make ends meet. Exporting oil will help, but what Iraq really needs is comprehensive economic reforms to encourage investment. We applaud the moves, announced this week by American officials, to create a new Iraqi currency and restructure the central bank, as a welcome start to such reforms. One simple way to improve the economy in our part of Iraq, Kurdistan, is to ensure that the Kurds receive the money allocated to them by the United Nations oil-for-food program. It is a scandal that $4 billion destined for the Kurds sits, unused, in a United Nations-controlled French bank account because of past obstruction by Saddam Hussein and the present incompetence of the United Nations bureaucracy. The delays by the United Nations are particularly frustrating because of rules that require the money to go into a general Iraqi development fund if it isn’t spent by October. We have repeatedly sought assurances from the coalition that this money will not be lost to Iraqi Kurdistan. So far, the coalition response has been unclear. Let us be clear, however. We are not seeking lavish handouts from American taxpayers or the international community - we are asking only for what is rightfully ours. And any perception that the Kurds, the United States’ closest ally in Iraq, are being let down will dishearten the many other Iraqis who want to work with the United States. Not releasing that money also means not addressing a critical issue of justice - reversing decades of ethnic cleansing that has forced close to one million people in Iraqi Kurdistan from their homes. Just a small fraction of the oil-for-food money would finance the return of many of those who were evicted, and pay for the decent resettlement of the Arabs who took over their land. Thus far we have averted the chaos of a flood of displaced families trying to return home by counseling patience to the Kurds, Turkmens and Assyrian Christians who were forced out. This patience, however, is not infinite. In the coming months we want to work with the coalition to set up a fair, transparent mechanism to allow these people to come home. Thus far, the coalition has taken important steps toward promoting democracy. But aspects of the overall strategy remain vague. What Iraqis have learned from their encounters with American soldiers and officials is that they seek to democratize, not to dominate. While we are working with L. Paul Bremer III, the American occupation administrator, to set up constitutional councils to initiate the political process, we need to mark out a clear path toward national elections and representative government, so that Iraqis have some sense of certainty about their political future. One positive development is that the main Iraqi political groups have been able to reach consensus on the next stage of self-governance in Iraq. Also crucial to realizing President Bush’s vision of a democratic Iraq is his, and our, belief in a federal Iraq. For too long, both Baathist and Arab nationalist regimes held Iraq together by brute force. That is no longer an option. Iraq was a state imposed upon its inhabitants, a country whose preservation has cost too many lives. The new Iraq has to be different, a democratically created state that reflects the will of its peoples and accommodates their diversity. For that reason, and with United States backing, we advocate a federal system of government. Iraqi federalism will of course differ from that of the United States, but the fundamental principle will be the same: a balanced system of government with considerable local autonomy and a sovereign, federal center. Democracy in Iraq will take time to establish itself. For more than three decades, Iraqis endured a regime that carried out genocide, including the anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign of 1987-88, which littered the country with mass graves and "disappeared" hundreds of thousands. Iraq was a society where the faintest hint of dissent could lead to a death sentence, as the Kurds gassed in Halabja discovered. The first building blocks of Iraqi federalism and democracy have already been laid in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thanks to protection from American and British air power, facilitated by Turkey, Kurds have had 12 years of a sometimes faltering, but ultimately hopeful, experiment in self-rule, openness and pluralism. With continued help from the United States, and with our work on the interim Iraqi administration, what has become known as the Kurdish experiment in democracy can be a model for all of Iraq. Jalal Talabani is secretary general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Massoud Barzani is president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

kurdishmedia.com 24 Jul 2003 Kurdish girls were detained by Baath, sold and then sent to their `new owners` in Egypt 24 July 2003 KWAHK Open letter from the Kurdish Women Action against Honour Killing to: Mr Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special representative for Iraq Mr Paul Bremer, American civil administrator of Iraq Mr John Sawaers, Britain’s special envoy to Iraq Members of the Iraqi Governing Council Subject: Anfal women Date: 25/ 07/ 03 With each day that passes since the fall of the Baathist regime, further revelations of past atrocities are laid bare for the world to witness. The most notorious crime committed was the Anfal; the genocidal campaign against the Kurds spanned the late 1980s and into the 1990s. The Egyptian government must reveal the truth about the whereabouts of the women whose names are found in the mentioned document. This veritable holocaust involved the gassing of civilians, the destruction of towns and villages, mass deportations, systematic torture and the bulldozing of men, women and children into mass graves, whether dead or alive. Such was the regime’s devotion to the etiquette and choreography of genocide! Yet, there was a further twist to the Baathists orgy of perversion, a course that they travelled along with the assistance of others, namely the sale and export of young Kurdish girls and children into sex slavery. During the Anfal campaign a number of Kurdish girls were detained by the security forces, sold and then sent to their “new owners” in Egypt. This information is revealed in a document found recently in the Iraqi intelligence and Security headquarters in Kirkuk . This document, registered as number 1601, is dated 10 December 1989, classified as "top secret express". It is issued by the Director of Intelligence – city of Ta’amim [Kirkuk] and sent to the General Director of Intelligence in Baghdad. It reveals that the Iraqi regime detained a number of Kurds, among them "a group of girls aged between 14 to 29". The document gives the list of their names and says that they had been dispatched to Egypt to be sex slaves. The fate of these girls is of immediate concern. Finding them is not only important for them and their families, but also opens up the prospect of finding out more about the fate of the 182.000 other persons arrested during the Anfal and who are still missing. It is with these aims that we urge you to address the following demands: 1. When did the intelligence community, both regionally and globally, first become aware of this “trade”? If, as seems credible, knowledge was long-standing, then why was nothing said or done? 2. More specifically, Al-jamiya Arabiya (The Arab League) needs to be implored to take this issue seriously and to ensure that member states reveal the whole truth about their knowledge of, and possible collaboration with, the Baathist’s practice of trafficking sex slaves as part of the Anfal campaign. 3. On the basis of the document mentioned above, the Egyptian government has to be questioned about its knowledge and role in this matter. 4. The Egyptian government must also reveal the truth about the whereabouts of the following women whose names are found in the above mentioned document: Galawej Adel Rahim (12 years old); Chiman Nazim Abas (22 years); Leyla Abas Jawhar (21 years); Lamiah Nazim Omar (19 years); Bahman Shukir Mustafa (26 years); Khurasan Abdulla Tawfiq (20 years); Qadriya Ahmed Ibrahim (17 years); Golmalek Ibrahim Ali (19 years); Khawla Ahmed Fakhradeen (25 years); Esmat Kader Aziz (24 years); Najiba Hassan Ali (18 years); Hasiba Amin Ali (29 years); Shiler Hassan Ali (20 years); Shukriya Rustem Mohammad (27 years); Habiba Hidayat Ibrahim (15 years); Kuwestan Abas Maulud (26 years); Serwa Othman Karam (17 years); Suza Majeed (22 years). 5. If any of these women are found alive, a full series of measures need to be taken, including compensation, psychological and physical therapy, as well as ongoing protection, especially relocation and meaningful refuge. 6. Finally, in order to reveal further information about Anfal, the Coalition forces must release all the documents that they have captured. We urge all recipients of this letter to consider seriously the points made and to provide a prompt response. Kurdish Women Action against Honour Killing (KWAHK) www.kurdishmedia.com/kwahk

KurdishMedia.com 28 July 2003 The Anfal Genocide: Unhealed wound in the hearts of Kurds - By Aram Azez Since the establishment of modern Iraq by the British and French after their success in the aftermath of World War I, Kurds have become victims of tyrannical regimes one after another. Every government that seized power in Iraq led to a bloodstained period for the Kurdish people. Only two groups have been persecuted more then the Kurds in modern history--the Armenians by the Kamelist Turks and the Jews by Nazi Germany. In fact, when the Baath party seized power in (1968), the Kurdish people suffered the ultimate tyranny for more than three decades. During its period, Saddam’s regime conducted enormous military campaigns, massacres and genocide attempts against Kurds. Most of these were based on political and nationalistic concepts, with the Halabja and Anfal atrocities being the worst of all. Only two groups have been persecuted more then the Kurds in modern history--the Armenians by the Kamelist Turks and the Jews by Nazi Germany. The persecution was particularly severe during the Baath party’s period in power. Under Saddam’s dictatorship, the concept of Baath was to eliminate the Kurdish population in Iraq through three steps: Arabization, Baathization, and forceful displacement. That strategy is known to the Kurds as the “Three Stones of Baath.” The policy of three stones of Baath was implemented immediately after the collapse of the Kurdish revolution in1975. The Iraqi regime’s first step was to reshape Kurdistan’s geography by forcefully displacing and resettling the people into camps under the government’s control. The second step was changing the demography of Kurdistan by filling the evacuated Kurdish villages, towns, and even some of the cities with Arabs. The final ‘stone’ of the Iraqi regime was to gradually assimilate Kurds into loyal members of the Baath party by undermining the Kurdish sense of nationality and their desire for political independence. In order to achieve that strategy, the Iraqi regime began a sequence of military campaigns using the code-name Anfal. The Iraqi media shamelessly announced these massacres in its daily programs as victories over Kurdish rioters. The Anfal genocide attacks took place from February to September in 1988. The Iraqi media shamelessly announced these massacres in its daily programs as victories over Kurdish rioters. During this ruthless campaign, the army, which had never had a victory over any of Iraq’s enemies, almost succeeded in accomplishing one of the three steps of the Baath party. During the Anfal assaults against the Kurds, Saddam’s army destroyed nearly 4500 villages and towns, and arrested approximately 200,000 civilians including children and the elderly. These people eventually ‘disappeared’ and were frequently executed in mass. Unfortunately, both during and after the Anfal tragedy, the world chose to be silent, even though according to international law these military campaigns constitute genocide. The International convention (260A) which was written in September 1948 regarding the prevention and punishment of those who commit genocide, clearly indicates that the Anfal must be accounted as genocide. Since the collapse of Iraqi regime, the Coalition forces and the people of Iraq have discovered tens of thousands victims of the Anfal genocide in a few mass graves. However, the families of those executed had been left without any means of identifying those who had been killed or of having funerals. This served to deepen the unhealed wounds in the hearts of Kurds. The documents about the Anfal which were seized from the Iraqi Intelligence Service offices during the 1991 Kurdish uprising against Saddam’s regime (eighteen tons of which were handed over to the UN/US), convinced the Human Rights Watch to address the Anfal as genocide against Kurds. Those documents, videotapes, and other evidence which were recently recovered from the Iraqi regime offices in addition to the mass graves that have been discovered indicate that the Anfal was genocide. However, the United Nations has not yet been convinced to condemn thedefeated dictatorial government of Baghdad for that crime against the Kurdish people. In the past 34 years, Kurds, non-Kurdish groups, and many Human Rights organizations have informed the UN about the atrocities conducted against the Kurdish people by the ousted Iraqi regime. Despite handing over numerous documents and complaint letters to the UN--specifically to its present Secretary General, Kofi Annan--about the mistreatment of Kurds by Saddam’s regime, the UN has not uttered a word regarding these crucial matters. It is especially distressing that the UN Secretary General has not only chosen to remain silent about the gassing of Halabja town, the Anfal genocide, the displacement of Kurds, and other crimes against the Kurdish people, but has also revealed his own bias by describing the return of Kurds who had been forcefully driven from their homes as an act of aggression against the Arabs in Kirkuk. In fact, Annan’s silence regarding what happened to the Kurds, his opposition to toppling Saddam, and his recent reaction against the return of Kurds to their own homes invite skepticism of his motives and leadership in the UN. It is clear that the UN Secretary General was an ally with the over-thrown dictator of Iraq. Annan must have had information about the fate of tens of thousands of the Anfal victims, but chose to be mute. In my opinion, the way Annan has dealt with the Kurdish issues in Iraq opens a door for Kurds around the globe to campaign for an investigation of the UN Secretary General’s relationship with the former dictator of Iraq. If there is an investigation, it would almost certainly reveal the reasons for his silence in the face of the atrocities committed against the Kurds at the hands of the Baath party. Now, 15 years has past since the Anfal genocide, but to the Kurdish people this catastrophe is still a bleeding wound in their hearts. On April 14th of every year the Anfal genocide is commemorated in Kurdistan as a national tragedy.

Independent UK 28 July 2003 Troops Turn Botched Saddam Raid Into A Massacre The by Robert Fisk IRAQ BAGHDAD. Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants. The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house. Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him." Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families, were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other with "his brain outside of his head", according to another doctor. At the scene of the killings, there was pandemonium. While US troops were loading the bullet-shattered cars on trucks - and trying to stop cameramen filming the carnage - crowds screamed abuse at them. One American soldier a few feet from me climbed into the seat of his Humvee, threw his helmet on the floor of the vehicle and shouted: "Shit! Shit!" There was no doubt about the target: the home of Sheikh Rabia Mohamed Habib, a prominent tribal leader who had met Saddam but who was not even in his house when the Americans stormed it. One report says they killed a guard as they entered. "The Americans searched the house completely, very roughly," Sheikh Habib said. "It seems they thought Saddam Hussein was inside." It appears the killings started as the troops were searching the building and as motorists approached the barbed wire which the soldiers had placed without warning across the road. Witnesses said the first car contained at least two men. "The second contained two children about 10, their mother and their father who had been wounded in the Iran-Iraq war - he was a cripple," a local shopkeeper told me. "They all died. The man's legs were cut in half by the bullets," he added. A third car then approached the Americans, who opened fire again. One of the occupants fled, but the other two remained in the vehicle and were killed. When another car arrived US troops riddled it with more bullets and it burst into flames. It is believed that two people were inside and both were burnt to death. "The Americans didn't try to help the civilians they had shot, not once," a witness said. "They let the car burn and left the bodies where they lay, even the children. It was we who had to take them to the hospitals." Yet again, false informers, ill-trained American soldiers who appeared to exercise no fire control and a lack of military planning has created a tragedy among the people the Americans claimed to be 'liberating' from Saddam Hussein only 15 weeks ago. Last night, there were reports from the southern city of Karbala that three men had been shot dead by American troops during a demonstration.

Israel

The Daily Star (Lebanon) 2 July 2003 Zionists, Turkey and Armenians: a story of taboos, distorted truth and unholy alliances Hagop Kassardjian The history of the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks (1894-1922) is taboo in official Israeli discourse. Evidence of this taboo is that in 1982 at the end of an international conference held in Tel Aviv on the theme of “collective genocide,” Israeli representatives withdrew from the conference as they disapproved of discussing the Armenian genocide. This shows the limits of Zionist thought and the extent to which the Israeli government will go to satisfy the Jewish lobby and its strategic ally, Turkey. However, other factors highlight the defensive nature of Israeli policy and the denial practised by the Israeli administration toward the Armenian genocide. After the Cold War, Armenians, ignored by Turkish and Jewish politicians, made common cause with Arab and Iranian interests. The Karabach conflict in South Caucasia between Armenia and Azerbaijan became an Azeri-Israeli issue. However, the Jewish community refuses any comparison between the Holocaust and other genocides, and denies the existence of the Armenian genocide. The Jewish-Turkish historic alliance is based on three main historical factors: l The weight of Jewish moral debts toward the Ottomans. Since 1461, after the fall of Andalusia, the Ottoman Empire introduced a policy of admission reserved for foreigners living in its territory. Jews fleeing Andalusia were absorbed into the Ottoman Empire and officially recognized under the Millet system. Other peoples were organized under the same system. The Millet system separated subjects into ethnic and religious groups, which enjoyed religious freedom and a certain amount of autonomy. The Armenians were part of this system. The Ottoman Jews were pioneers in the establishment of the Zionist entity in Palestine. They were the mediators between Zionism and the Ottoman Empire until the Balfour Declaration was signed in 1917. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was born in the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. Herzl’s time in France and the lessons he drew from the Dreyfus affair led him to propose a national territorial solution to the Jewish issue. In 1897, the World Zionist Organization was created at a congress in Basel, Switzerland, to represent the national aspirations of the Jews. l The roots of Zionist denial toward the Armenian cause date back to Article 61 of the 1878 Berlin Treaty. In Article 61, the Armenian issue was raised to international level (improving the situation of Armenians in Eastern Anatolia). It is true that international, regional and local powers supported reforms demanded by the Armenians. However, the apparent success of the internationalization of the Armenian cause had negative repercussions. It generated a feeling of malevolence and jealousy from other groups, mainly the Jews. The Jews insisted on reforms identical to those of Armenians. Jewish hostility toward the Armenians appeared between 1894 and 1896 during the Hamidiam Massacres when the Jews of Istanbul and other provinces betrayed Armenian rebels and fugitives. Herzl also dealt with Sultan Abdel-Hamid. Jewish colonization of Palestine was proposed in exchange for support against Armenian national aspirations. The Sultan refused to let foreign Jews colonize Palestine, but permitted Ottoman Jews to do so. l It was not until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that Zionist political achievements started taking shape. Palestine was recognized as a “national home” for the Jews. Later, the Jewish-Turkish alliance was strengthened when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk came to power in Turkey. The close relationship between the Jews and the Turks was unaffected by the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was the first Muslim state to recognize the state of Israel after it was declared in 1948, and the Arab-Armenian-Iranian axis was formed to confront the Turkish-Zionist axis. The Turkish-Zionist partnership seeks the erosion of Arab nationalism, the denial of the Armenian cause and the weakening of Iranian zeal. In February 2002, Rebecca Cohen, an Israeli diplomat, said that “the Armenian people have been the victims of a terrible tragedy, not a collective genocide.” Such words distort the truth and were refuted by the Armenians, who reminded the Israelis that Armenians gave refuge to thousands of Jews who fled Nazi Germany. After the foundation of the Zionist state and the Turkish-Jewish alliance, the Armenian cause was used to the advantage of Zionists. “Turkification” is an ideology that mobilizes hatred against others (Arabs, Armenians) that stand in the way of their expansionist projects. The Zionist-Turkish alliance, embodied in military, economic, strategic and financial ties, bears proof of the two countries’ shared objectives. This alliance can only exist in conditions that are perceived as unjust by other groups, like the Palestinians, the innocent victims of this alliance. Hagop Kassardjian is a Beirut MP and a member of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s parliamentary Beirut Decision Bloc. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star

Observer UK 13 July 2003 Sharon: I'll solve the Palestinian problem in four years The Israeli leader, who flies into London tonight, is the last man standing from the 1948 generation who assisted at the country's bloody birth. He spoke to Peter Beaumont in a rare interview Sunday July 13, 2003 The Observer There is a cruel mimicry that some Israeli journalists perform when their Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, stands up to speak. As he begins each sentence, they finish it for him with an unerring accuracy. So he will intone 'I am prepared to make painful concessions' and his mockers will murmur their reply like the responses at a Mass: 'But I will never sacrifice Israel's security.' It became noticeable during his campaign for re-election in January at a press conference for the foreign press in a central Jerusalem hotel, when after each question the mockers would finish his slow answer with a little giggle. Preparing for a rare interview with Sharon last week, his repetitions jump out from piles of cuttings, some of them carried word for word across the decades. In the past, it was part of the political persona of a man who has never been one for sophisticated similes and complex perorations. Sharon's familiar rhetoric was part of the point for many Israelis - reassurance that Israel will never surrender, never be defeated - and part of a folksy appeal that he plays up to as the simple soldier-farmer-politician. It is not his only attribute. When he turns on his charm, you can see the point of him. Even with the knowledge of all his bloody history, of all the dead left in his wake, you can see why he has carried it off for so long. Even as his powers fail, you can still see how he has managed to connect. When he talks about the land and its history, he radiates a kind of heat. There is a love there that you can see, for all that it is brutal, selfish. But the point is, his powers are failing. Ariel Sharon looks all of his 75 years. Despite his famous bulk, there is a frailty about him, a passivity. He may hope that, like the title of the volume on his shelves by Hart Haston, I Shall Not Die, but he is an old man. His skin has the translucent sheen of age. When his face becomes still, his eyes disappear beneath the weight of his sagging features. He knows it. And seems to fear it as a sign of weakness. For our interview, he is carefully arranged behind his desk. Only his hands and features move. A photographer at this rare interview gets too close and is warned in Hebrew by Sharon's aides that he must not take a 'tight' picture of the Prime Minister's face. It is not only the body, but his mind, too. His verbal repetition does not seem to come from the language of reassurance, but from an effort to remind himself where he is in a plot that sometimes seems to be slipping from his grasp. At times, his aides shore up his performance with written notes. When he becomes lost, he breaks into Hebrew, and Ranaan Gissin, his foreign press adviser, supplies answers and prompts. It is all a long way from the Sharon pictured on his wall: the soldier in his prime, arrogant, beefy, sly, but full of life. That younger Sharon is framed by pictures of dead contemporaries - Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin. He is the last of the generation that made Israel, an endangered species. And with men around him all half his age, Sharon insists it is only he who can solve the Palestinian problem. He says he is optimistic and that in his next four years in office he will bring it about. But his ideas have become thickets through which sometimes he seems to grope. 'The right thing will be if someone from our generation who has seen everything we saw. You remember well now ... I remember well. From the age of five ... I remember those years well now, everything that happened here. And ... it is our generation's role to try to achieve this peace. It is a result of things we have seen. I think that makes it ... easier to do, that we will make that, and we will make less mistakes knowing what really happened here. And that is how I see. How I see it. There are many things I would like to do, but it was something I had to try to solve.' It is a constant thread in the Sharon story, this history. A favourite theme is of his responsibility to 3,000 years of Jewish history, and the responsibility for the next three centuries. The present, he has said, is important only in the way it guarantees a Jewish future in a Jewish state in the cradle of the Jewish people's birth. He reminds us this is the Promised Land. Promised to the Jews - no one else. But Sharon's relationship with history is complicated. In his old age there has been a curious elision between his personal history and Israel's. For him, occupying the office of the Prime Minister, it has come to mean the same thing. Sharon feels that he has earned it as the last man standing of the generation of 1948 who created Israel. 'As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice ... I believe I understand the importance of peace, not more but not less than many of the politicians who speak about peace, but never had this experience. I saw these things...' Sharon's sense of entitlement is that of the veteran, the man who in his autobiography Warrior expressed the fear that Israel had become a less 'exceptional' place. 'That is my responsibility, to take care of the security of the Jewish people and, when it comes to this thing, Israel will not be able to make any compromise whatsoever.' I ask him whether he would not rather be at his ranch in the Negev, spending his days with his sheep and cattle. 'Look,' he says, 'I would like to be on the farm. To ride the horses. To watch the cattle, and the plantations, and the beautiful vegetables that my sons are growing there. I would like it. I am one of those who do not have to worry about what I am doing later. I love the fields. I love ... My strength never came from political echelons, it came from the family. And from the fields and the lands and the flowers and everything I see there. My strength came from there. 'But now to give an answer to your question. I believe that as long as I worry, and I have the strength, I'll have to continue. There'll be problems and complicated problems, and I will continue because I feel this responsibility. And I think, as long as I can do that, I will do that. And, as one who has been through hard situations, I believe I know how to do that. Now, the horses will wait. And the cattle will wait.' And Sharon insists that he has time. He may be 75, but he has four more years in office. The difficulty, too, is that the problems that Israel faces are very complicated indeed. And it is not clear whether he has the skill - or, crucially, the will - to solve them. For while Sharon has signed up to the US-inspired 'road map', a document designed to lead Israelis and Palestinians to peace and the Palestinians to an odd, truncated form of statehood, it is not the vision of the document that Sharon has really embraced, but the mechanism that, one suspects, he regards as a useful tool for getting the international community off Israel's back. And it is here that his repetitions are not folksy or confused, but cynical. 'I ... um ... said that, if there will be Palestinian government and there will be real reform there, it will be a plan based on stages. In the first stage, there will be full cessations of terror, hostility and incitement, [then] I will be ready to make painful compromises. And I am committed to what I said. I was the one who suggested this plan, let's say - more or less - it is similar to the vision of President Bush when he spoke on 24 June last year about this kind of plan. 'Once [it has] been completely quiet and the weapons have been taken from them and given to a third party to be taken out of the Palestinian Authority area and destroyed, if [the Palestinian Authority] takes serious steps and stops incitement and educating for peace, [then] I believe Israel will be able to ... I mentioned the Palestinian state? ... I mean no military; a demilitarised state. I said without final borders because the final borders should only be agreed on the third stage, the final stage. I think in this plan - the plan is called a performance-based plan - things should be fully implemented. You don't move from one stage or sub-stage to the next one unless the former one been fully implemented...' Forgetting the small matter of his rewriting history over the conception of Bush's road map, it seems that Sharon's interpretation differs from the way that it was conceived. In Sharon's mind, all the onus is on the Palestinians, because that, too, is where all the guilt resides. I ask him if he has changed his mind that creating a Palestinian state is still the 'national suicide' he called it in 1999. 'You know, sometimes I am jealous of people who say so many things and no one remembers. For good or worse, the things I said - I don't know how many years ago - everyone remembers.' It is a question that comes up during the interview in different ways. Has he - once the champion of the settlers, exhorting them to 'run and grab the hills' - been so transformed that he will negotiate away their communities. The best he manages is: 'I made it very clear, at a difficult time for a politician, before and during the election and the primaries in my own party. It is how I lost the majority in my own party. I made it very clear what were my plans in order no one says after the elections: "Look, I did not know what I was voting for. Everything is clear".' If there is another absolute constant in Sharon's universe, beyond his identification of his own and Israel's destiny, then it is in his obsession with his great enemy - Yasser Arafat - whose physical decline has hurried on before his own. 'The problem is that Arafat is undermining the new government. It is a good thing Mahmoud Abbas was nominated as Prime Minister. I met him several times. He is one of those who has understood that Israel cannot be defeated by terror and that he understood very early that the suffering of the Palestinians was caused by Arafat and his strategy.' He is scathing, too, about the continued contact with Arafat by European governments, including Britain, calling it a brake on progress. But, in the end, it seems Sharon believes that, despite the partnership with Abbas, this is a process that will fail despite his alleged desire for a deal. And then what? 'I'll tell you what we will be doing, what we are doing now, what my grandfather and my parents have done, myself, my sons, and families here facing Arab terror for five, six generations, I tell you what they're going to do. First, they are going to hold the sword in one hand, and they're going to carry on, that's what we've been doing up to now.' · Sharon gave a joint interview to The Observer and the Daily Telegraph in his Jerusalem office before leaving for London

www.arutzsheva.org 31 Jul 2003 Terror Victims Speak Frankly With US Jews 22:38 Jul. 31, '03 / 2 Av 5763 An unusual event has been taking place in synagogues and meeting places around the United States the past few weeks. American Jews have been coming out in droves to meet, hug and offer blessings, funds and kind words to a group of Israeli terror victims brought to the US by the One Family Fund. An unusual event has been taking place in synagogues and meeting places around the United States the past few weeks. American Jews have been coming out in droves to meet, hug and offer blessings, funds and kind words to a group of Israeli terror victims brought to the US by the One Family Fund . The social hall of Congregation B’nei Yeshurin in Teaneck, New Jersey was filled to capacity this past Tuesday night; latecomer standees lined the walls. They hadn’t come to see a member of Knesset or Congress, but their own ‘family members’ – Israeli relatives of terror victims and survivors of terror attacks. The evening was the last stop on the tour organized by the One Family Fund, an organization that provides assistance to victims of terrorism and their families. The tour included many speaking engagements, meetings with Jewish and US leaders, as well as recreational activities for the victims and their relatives. Uri Baruch, who immigrated to Israel from France 26 years ago and lives in Kiryat Arba, was the first to speak Tuesday night, his words translated by the Fund’s Director Marc Belzberg. He spoke about burying his daughter who was murdered by a terrorist while driving with her husband and two children back to their home in Nokdim, southeast of Jerusalem. “At her open grave,” he recounted, “I told God ‘thank You for the 26 years you gave us this beautiful gift – and now althoughYou have taken her back, which is Your right, I have no claims against You – but it hurts so, so much.” Mr. Baruch told of his son-in-law who had just barely survived the attack, with four bullets in his throat and two in his shoulder. One Family had brought him to see an expert in Boston who will perform several reconstructive surgeries to restore his ability to speak. “We do hope he will re-marry,” said Mr. Baruch. “It will certainly be difficult for us, but we want our grandchildren to have a mother again.” Another speaker was Russian born Aharon Nazarov, who was severely scarred but wore a smile and a New York Mets t-shirt as he recounted all he had been through. He had witnessed four separate terrorist attacks while riding the bus to and from his army service as a combat electrician on a base in northern Israel. After each traumatic experience he made the decision to continue to serve in his unit and make the same commute day after day. The fifth time, Aharon had fallen asleep in his seat toward the back of his bus, which was passing through the Arab villages in the Wadi Ara region. He felt the back of the bus rise into the air as a car bomb was detonated alongside it and woke up three weeks later, badly mutilated, in a hospital bed. “He kept outlining horror after mind-numbing horror that he had witnessed, yet through it all he served his country and defended the Jewish people,” said one teary-eyed audience member, “I feel incredibly foolish and perhaps a little selfish for keeping my eighteen-year-old daughter from visiting Israel this past summer.” The final speaker was Sarri Singer, the daughter of a state senator majority leader from new jersey, who had been a volunteer for One Family ever since she moved to Israel 19 months ago. Sarri had so strongly identifyid with the importance of their work that she had even approached Mr. Belzburg in his office to demand that, although the logistics were incredibly difficuly, they not cancel the tour to the US. This happened three weeks before she herself boarded the 14a bus after work and was injured by shrapnel when a “genocide bomber” blew himself up in front of the Klal building near Davidka Square in downtown Jerusalem. “My first thoughts on the way to the hospital were, ‘my parents are going to kill me when they find out that I was in a bus bombing, and they aren’t going to let me live in Israel and they’ll make me come back to New Jersey.” Sari spoke and the audience was captivated, as she immediately addressed the topics that are so pressing and yet so rarely mentioned in American synagogues. “We need to start remembering that we are Jewish Americans,” Singer admonished, “its nice to visit Israel and all, but the time has come to take a much, much greater role. Everyone needs to really figure out what is the most they are able to do and do it – whether it is one hour a week, one hour a day, or moving to Israel and uniting with your people.” Mark Belzberg read a passage from the Torah where Moses says rhetorically to the tribes who chose to settle on the Eastern Bank of the Jordan Rover, “Your brothers go out to war and you sit at home?!” While bringing victims of terror to communities in the United States could hardly be considered the most effective way to promote Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel), Mr. Belzberg remarked that over the weekend the group had spent in Riverdale, New York at Rabbi Avi Weiss’s synagogue, three separate families came up to him and declared that they had decided to make Aliyah. “There’s something about the Jewish people that when some of us are on the front lines the rest of us feel a compulsion to join them and offer them all the support we can,” explained Belzberg, “that is why we brought these people to meet their brothers and sisters in America – to strengthen that connection that is the Godly source of our people’s eternal life.”

Japan

BBC 13 July 2003 Fury at Nanking 'lie' claim It is more embarrassment for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi China has angrily rejected claims that the deaths of 300,000 Chinese civilians at the hands of Japanese troops in the Nanking massacre was a "big lie". Senior Japanese politician Takami Eto made the suggestion while giving a speech in the west of Japan. China's foreign ministry responded by saying there was "ironclad" evidence and any attempt to whitewash history would not succeed. China has long contended that 300,000 people died in the Japanese occupation of the eastern city of Nanking, which is now known as Nanjing, in 1937. Most historians say the figure is at least 150,000. But nationalist Japanese politicians and academics say the figures have been inflated and some even question whether the massacre took place at all. Senior conservative politicians regularly cause anger in China and South Korea by defending Japan's former wartime aggression. In his speech on Saturday, Mr Eto also criticised past prime ministers for apologising for Japan's role in the war and making it appear that Japan was in the wrong, Kyodo news reported. Embarrassment In response, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said: "The Nanjing Massacre was a brutal crime committed by the Japanese militarists during their invasion war with China for which there is a mountain of ironclad evidence. "The international community has already made its final decision about this matter and any attempted plot to distort and deny historical facts cannot succeed," he said in a statement on the ministry website. This is not the first time Mr Eto, a former cabinet minister of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, has sparked controversy. In 1995, he resigned as head of the then Management and Coordination Agency after saying that Japan did "good things" during its 1910-45 rule of the Korean peninsula. Correspondents say the comments will cause further embarrassment to the Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, after a series of recent gaffes by members of his party: Yoshitada Konoike, state minister in charge of deregulation zones and disaster management, said the parents of a boy suspected of killing a small child should be beheaded. Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori said childless women should be denied welfare payments in old age. A former cabinet minister Seiichi Ota said at a debate on Japan's declining birth rate that at least gang rapists had a healthy appetite for sex. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda suggested that women who are raped are "asking for it" by the way they dress.

Kyodo News 26 July 2003 TOKYO — A citizens group in Japan on Friday urged former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to face trial in Peru over his alleged human rights abuses against Peruvian people. Members of the group visited Peru from April to May to conduct an investigation into the alleged abuses, including the killing in massacres of 25 people in 1991 and 1992.

North Korea

Korean Central News Agency (KCNA North Korea) 24 June 2003 U.S. imperialists' mass killings of Koreans denounced Pyongyang, June 24 (KCNA) -- The mass killings of prisoners of Jonju prison in South Korea in the past were recently disclosed by U.S. government documents and photos, and remains of civilians killed in Kochang, Pusan, Ryangsan, Jinyong and other parts of South Korea were unearthed and there appeared witnesses to them. Rodong Sinmun today in a signed commentary denounces the U.S. imperialists for their genocide, noting that they killed more than 5.2 million Koreans before and after the Korean war. It is hard to find in human history such murderers who brutally massacred guiltless civilians as the U.S. imperialists did, the commentary says, branding this as the most flagrant violation and challenge to human rights. The news analyst goes on: The U.S. imperialists should be tried at international court for their crimes against humanity. They should own the political and moral responsibility, penal responsibility and material responsibility for their mass killings of Korean people, the responsibilities stipulated by international law, in view of their criminal nature, content and gravity. Whoever violates international law should be punished by international law. There is no prescription in the case of crimes against humanity. The U.S. imperialists should be brought to the international court to stand trial. The Korean people have the legitimate right to take the penal responsibility of the U.S. imperialists to task according to the DPRK law any time. The Korean people will exercise this right generation after generation. Those countries and nations that ignited wars and committed the massacres in the past have already made or are making repentance, apology and compensation for their wrongdoings. This is an international trend and practice. The U.S. had better face up to the reality, swim with this trend and follow the practice.

Korean Central News Agency (KCNA North Korea) 19 July 2003 Foreign investigation groups and representatives here KCNA Pyongyang, July 19 (KCNA) -- Foreign investigation groups and representatives arrived here today to participate in the international conference for peace on the Korean peninsula and solidarity functions to be held on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War. Among them were Beth S. Lyons, representative of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers for Probing the Truth behind the GIs' atrocities who is its alternate representative at the UN, a Latin American and Caribbean Regional Group for Probing the Truth Behind the GIs' Atrocities led by Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, first vice-chairman of the Latin American and Caribbean Regional Committee to Support the Reunification of Korea who is also chairman of the People's Front of Workers, Peasants and Students of Peru, Nelia R. Sancho, Asian Regional Representative for Probing the Truth Behind the GIs' Atrocities who is also president of the Philippines-DPRK Friendship Society, a West European Regional Group for Probing the Truth Behind the GIs' Atrocities headed by Alejandro Cao De Benos, president of the Korean Friendship Association in Spain, and George Katsiaficas, North American Regional Representative for Probing the Truth Behind GIs' Atrocities who is also president of the U.S. Peace Island Foundation. They were greeted at the airport by Kim Jin Bom, vice-chairman of the Korean Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries who is also vice-chairman of the Korean Committee for Solidarity with the World People.

Korean Central News Agency (KCNA North Korea) 24 July 2003 U.S. indicted by Pyongyang int'l tribunal Pyongyang, July 24 (KCNA) -- The Pyongyang International Tribunal was opened today under the sponsorship of the Democratic International Organizations and the Korean Committee for Solidarity with the World People to indict the U.S. for its crimes against Korea. The Joint International Prosecution Team of the �gPyongyang International Tribunal on U.S. Crimes in Korea,�h authorized by the Democratic International Organizations, progressive anti-war peace organizations, justice-loving individual figures and lawyers, brings this indictment against the following persons, in their official and individual capacities, for the crimes committed on the Korean Peninsula by the U.S. administration, the U.S. military and other persons under their command (hereinafter referred to as the U.S.), the indictment says, and continues: The accused are all presidents of the United States, from the Truman administration to the present Bush administration: all secretaries of state, all secretaries of defense: all chairpersons of the joint chiefs of staff: all secretaries of the army, navy and air force, all directors of the central intelligence agency: all staff members of the National Security Council: all national security advisers to U.S. presidents: all commanders of the U.S. forces in South Korea: all those who planned, prepared, organized, ordered and executed the criminal acts included in the indictment, and their accomplices: and all those who were involved in mass killings of the Korean people. The basic charters, fundamental laws and conventions violated by the accused are as follows: The U.S. invasion of Korea violated the un charter, namely, chapter 1 on the maintenance of peace and security, chapter 5 on the procedures of the un security council, chapter 6 on the pacific settlement of disputes and chapter 7 on the actions with respect to threat to peace, breaches of peace and acts of aggression. The U.S. occupied South Korea and obstructed its democratic development in violation of the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations on post-war settlement. The U.S. provoked the Korean War and has made persistent attempts to ignite another war. These acts of aggression are in violation of the treaty on the renunciation of war, the treaty on the definition of aggression and the UNGA resolution 3314 (xx1x) on the definition of aggression and acts of aggression. The U.S. committed crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity on the Korean Peninsula in violation of the charters of the international military tribunal of Nuremberg and the Far East military tribunal, regulations of the Nuremberg tribunal and the principles of international law recognized at the trial and the code of laws on crimes against peace and security of mankind. The U.S. violated the Hague convention respecting the laws and customs of war on land, which forbids the use of poison and poisoned weapons, and the Geneva protocol prohibiting the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous and other gases, and of bacteriological methods of warfare. The U.S. violated the provisions of different conventions and protocols, including the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 on the protection of civilians in time of war and the same convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. The U.S. violated the universal declaration of human rights, the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, the convention on the abolition of racial discrimination in all forms, the international covenant on civil and political rights, the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights, the convention on non-applicability of the statute of limitations to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crimes of apartheid. The U.S. violated the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the international convention on prevention and punishment of terrorism, the agreement on the partial limitation of drug production, the Geneva Convention on the prevention of drug production and trafficking, and other conventions and un resolutions which ban the drug trafficking and use. The U.S. violated the internationally recognized customary laws and rules governing the use of force. The U.S. undermined the Korean Armistice Agreement, the DPRK-U.S.A. Joint Statement and the DPRK-U.S.A. Agreed Framework. The U.S. invalidated the joint declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and obstructed the implementation of the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration. The U.S. violated the domestic laws of the DPRK, the People's Republic of China, Japan, the United States of America and other countries concerned in the course of pursuing its hostile policy towards the DPRK. The indictment cited detailed facts to prove that the crimes were committed in violation of the above-said laws and regulations. All the crimes committed by the U.S. in Korea in the past were unprecedented ones in light of their scope and brutality. Seeing that the accused can never flee from their responsibility for bringing all sorts of misfortunes and pains to the Korean people after dividing Korea, the joint prosecution team urged the international joint justice team to rule that the U.S. must take all forms of responsibility indicated in international laws--political, moral, penal and material--and pass a judgment on it.

Korean Central News Agency (KCNA North Korea) 24 July 2003 International tribunal opens Pyongyang, July 24 (KCNA) -- The Pyongyang International Tribunal on U.S. crimes in Korea was held on July 24 under the co-sponsorship of International Democratic Organizations and the Korean Committee for Solidarity with the World People. The tribunal will give a relevant decision upon the U.S. after prosecuting it for all kinds of crimes including the most barbarous aggression, plunder, massacre and destruction in human history it has ceaselessly committed in the Korean Peninsula, bringing the Korean people indescribable misfortune and pain for over a century. Delegations and delegates participating in the International Conference first formed the international joint justice team and the international joint prosecution team to operate the Pyongyang International Tribunal. They chose Jitendra Sharma, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, as presiding judge and Athanasios Pafilis, executive secretary of the World Peace Council, Miguel Madeira, president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, Marcia De Campos Pereira, president of the Women's International Democratic Federation, Paulette Pierson, honorary chairman of the International Liaison Committee for Reunification and Peace in Korea, Valentin Pacho, deputy general secretary of the World Federation of Trade Unions, as judges. The international joint justice team has 25 other members. The international joint prosecution team has Beth S. Lyons, representative of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers at the U.N. as chief prosecutor and George Katsiaficas, president of Peaceisland Foundation of the United States of America, Lorne Gershuny, representative of the People's Front Organization of Canada, Im Wan Sik, vice-chairman of the Korean Democratic Lawyers' Association, Alejandro Cao De Benos, chairman of the Spain Association for the Friendship with Korea, Aleksandr Brezhnev, member of the east European Regional Group for Probing the Truth behind GIS' Atrocities, as prosecutors. Beth S. Lyons, George Katsiaficas, Lorne Gershuny and Im Wan Sik on behalf of the prosecution team presented an indictment against the U.S. crimes in Korea. In the indictment they bitterly denounced the U.S. crimes as a gross violation of international law and the un charter, its embodiment. The trial continues. www.peaceisland.com

New Zealand Herald www.nzherald.co.nz 25 July 2003 North Korea puts US presidents in the dock over war 25.07.2003 4.20 pm SEOUL - North Korea marked Sunday's 50th anniversary of the Korean War truce by indicting US President George W. Bush and 10 predecessors going back to Harry S. Truman for crimes ranging from genocide to drug smuggling. Prosecutors at the Pyongyang International Tribunal on US Crimes in Korea said the United States must take "political, moral, penal and material" responsibility for 50 years of hostility, the communist state's KCNA news agency said. KCNA said the "trial" of the 11 US leaders - and all US foreign policy, military and intelligence officials dating back to 1950 - was endorsed by "democratic international organisations, progressive anti-war peace organisations, justice-loving individual figures and lawyers". The purported trial in absentia opened in Pyongyang on Wednesday as the isolated communist state appears to be inching toward a new round of talks with the United States, China and other neighbours over North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Soviet-backed North Korea launched the Korean War with a surprise invasion of the South on June 25, 1950. Then US President Truman rallied the United Nations to send troops from 16 countries to reverse the communist takeover of the South. At talks leading to the truce signed 50 years ago on Sunday, North Korea acknowledged that there were no foreign troops in South Korea at the time of the June 25 invasion, but said the US-led intervention "prevented the peaceful settlement of the internal problem of Korea", according to historic transcripts. North Korea officially maintains it was both the victim and the victor in a war started by the United States. "The US provoked the Korean War and has made persistent attempts to ignite another war," said the Pyongyang indictment, which also accused US presidents of drug trafficking, human rights abuses and violating nuclear disarmament agreements. North Korea calls July 27 the "Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War", and KCNA says the anniversary is being celebrated as far away as Uganda and Peru.

Reuters 25 July 2003 North Korea Tribunal Demands U.S. Apology, Compensation Fri July 25, 2003 11:20 AM ET SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) - North Korea, ahead of this weekend's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Korean War truce, demanded the United States apologize and give compensation for crimes ranging from genocide to drug smuggling. The "International tribunal on U.S. crimes" Friday pronounced President Bush and his 10 predecessors going back to Harry S. Truman guilty of crimes against the U.N. charter, human rights declarations and "the principles of the military tribunal of Nuremberg" among others. "The U.S. government must make an official apology for all its criminal acts in Korea, and make due compensation for physical, mental and material losses inflicted upon the Korean people," North Korea's KCNA news agency quoted the verdict as saying. Those responsible for the "crimes" should "be sentenced to criminal punishment" and the U.S. Congress should "investigate and address this issue," it said. The tribunal also repeated Pyongyang's official position that Washington "abandon its hostile policy toward the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), sign a nonaggression treaty with it, and settle peace issues in bilateral talks. The verdict calls for the United States to immediately withdraw its 37,000 troops in the South and end political pressure, sanctions and "psychological warfare" against North Korea, KCNA reported. It said the "trial" of the 11 U.S. leaders -- and all U.S. foreign policy, military and intelligence officials dating back to 1950 -- was endorsed by "democratic international organizations, progressive anti-war peace organizations, justice-loving individual figures and lawyers." The purported trial in absentia opened in Pyongyang Wednesday, as the isolated communist state appeared to be inching toward a new round of talks with the United States, China and other neighbors over North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Soviet-backed North Korea launched the Korean War with a surprise invasion of the South on June 25, 1950. President Truman rallied the United Nations to send troops from 16 countries to reverse the communist takeover of the South. At talks leading to the truce signed 50 years ago Sunday, North Korea acknowledged that there were no foreign troops in South Korea at the time of the June 25 invasion, but said the U.S.-led intervention "prevented the peaceful settlement of the internal problem of Korea," according to historic transcripts. North Korea officially maintains it was the victim and the victor in a war started by the United States. "The U.S. provoked the Korean War and has made persistent attempts to ignite another war," said the Pyongyang indictment, which also accused U.S. presidents of drug trafficking, human rights abuses and violating nuclear disarmament agreements. North Korea calls July 27 the "Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War," and KCNA says the anniversary is being celebrated as far away as Uganda and Peru.

www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/ 26 July 2003 Verdict of Pyongyang International Tribunal on U.S. Crimes The international panel of judges of the Pyongyang international tribunal on U.S. crimes in Korea announced its verdict on July 25. According to the verdict, the international panel of judges considered that all the criminal acts committed by the United States in Korea from 1945 to 2003 are grave violations of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter and the principles of the international military tribunal of Nuremberg, the codes on crimes against human peace and security, the 1949 Geneva and other international conventions, regulations and principles, and held that the U.S. government should bear full responsibility for them. The verdict reads: 1.The U.S. government and the other accused mentioned in the indictment are guilty of the charges leveled by the prosecution and detailed in the indictment submitted to the tribunal. 2.The U.S. government must make an official apology for all its criminal acts committed in Korea, and make due compensation for the physical, mental and material losses inflicted upon the Korean people. 3.The U.S. must find out all those involved in planning, preparation, organization, instruction, execution and backing of the crimes against the Korean people, and punish them as criminal offenders. 4.The U.S. must enact a relevant law for it to assume full responsibility for its crimes on the Korean Peninsula, and establish a special institution in Congress and the Administration with a mandate to investigate and address this issue. 5.The U.S. government must immediately abandon its hostile policy towards the DPRK, put an end to its military threat against it, sign a non-aggression treaty with it, and settle the issue of peace on the Korean peninsula in a peaceful way through DPRK-U.S. talks. 6.The U.S. must immediately pull out its troops and all nuclear weapons from the south of Korea, and end its political pressure on, economic sanctions and blockade, and psychological warfare against the DPRK. 7.The U.S. government must refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Korea, contrary to the will of the Korean people to reunify the country by the Korean nation itself in a peaceful way, true to the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration. This verdict has been reached on the basis of objective and fair principles concerning the setting up of their tribunal and its procedures and the U.S. government has a legal and moral obligation to take practical measures in this regard. http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/194th_issue/2003072604.htm

Pakistan

BBC 10 July 2003 Pakistani minister quits after massacre In Pakistan, the Home Minister of Balochistan province, Sardar Sanaullah Zahri, has resigned. Sources from his party, the Balochistan National Democratic Party, told the BBC that Mr Zahri took the decision following the killings of more than 50 Shia Muslims last week at a mosque in the provincial capital, Quetta. Mr Zahri's resignation has been accepted by the governor of Balochistan. The Pakistani authorities have removed a number of senior police officers from their posts after sharp criticism by Shia leaders that they failed to protect their community. From the newsroom of the BBC World Service

The Hindu 16 Jul 2003 "Jehadi group behind Quetta massacre" Islamabad, July 16. (UNI): The banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi had carried out the Quetta massacre on July 4, rebutting the Pakistan government's claim that India was involved in the killings. Two of the three bodies of the terrorists who were killed in the attack in which 53 worshippers were gunned down during the Friday prayers have been identified as those of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi activists, Pakistan's leading newspaper The News reported today. While Prime Minister Mir Zafrullah Khan Jamali held a "foreign hand" responsible for the massacre, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat had blamed India for the incident. "The involvement of the two Indian missions at Kandahar and Herat in Afghanistan in the tragic incident of Quetta cannot be ruled out," he had reportedly claimed. Meanwhile, a videotape and a letter have been handed to the BBC in which the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the killings. The dead terrorists have been identified as Asghar and Omar - both Lashkar-e-Jhangvi activists - the newspaper said quoting a senior police official on the condition of anonymity. The two were identified with the help of a team of Karachi police.

Solomon Islands

Reuters 3 July 2003 Atrocities Detailed in Solomons By Johnson Honimae Reuters Thursday, July 3, 2003 HONIARA, Solomon Islands, July 2 -- Followers of a warlord in the Solomon Islands tortured and beheaded at least three men 10 days ago and razed an entire village, survivors said this week. They said they fear being used as human shields against a 2,000-member peacekeeping force that is due to arrive by the end of the month. Australia plans to lead an international force of police and troops to quell violence in the lawless and near-bankrupt South Pacific country and to prevent incidents like the one survivors described this week, which involved an attack by warlord Harold Keke in his stronghold in the Weathercoast area. Augustine Manakako, a former senior government official, said that every house in Marasa, a village of about 500 people south of the capital, Honiara, was burned to the ground. "It was on a Sunday afternoon . . . when the militants came, grabbed three men and took them to the beach, took their clothes off and started parading them in front of the rest of the villagers," Manakako said. "Bit by bit, they broke their bones and finally cut their necks off." Phillip Walker, the Australian Red Cross regional coordinator for the Pacific, said 991 people have been internally displaced by the violence. Aid agencies have provided food and shelter, but medical treatment stopped when hospital staff and health department workers went on strike because they have not been paid since September. Manakako said villagers feared that Keke would use them as human shields to block any advance by the Australian-led force, which officials say could be in the Solomons by the end of July after the government here makes a formal request for help. Keke refused to sign an Australian-brokered peace deal that stemmed some of the violence between rival ethnic militias from Guadalcanal and the neighboring Malaita islands. Keke's militia began battling Malaitan rivals in 1998 in land disputes around Honiara. Hundreds of people died in the fighting, and 30,000 people were driven from their homes. The Solomon Islands, an archipelago of 1,000 islands and the scene of some of the fiercest Pacific battles during World War II, has slipped deeper into chaos since a 2000 coup and is near bankruptcy. Armed gangs roam the streets of Honiara. Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza's cabinet meets at secret locations, and militants have used his residence for target practice.

ICRC 24 July 2003 Press Release 03/54 ICRC re-establishes presence in Solomon Islands Geneva (ICRC) - In accordance with its mandate to protect and assist victims of armed conflict and internal strife, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is re-establishing a permanent presence in Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands. The organization will thus be better placed to assess the humanitarian situation, respond to needs, and coordinate its activities with the Solomon Islands Red Cross. It will also be able to act as a neutral intermediary and to engage in dialogue with all parties concerned, in particular as regards respect for the red cross emblem. Following the recent violence, the ICRC provided the Solomon Islands Red Cross with tents, tarpaulins, bedding, and cooking utensils for distribution to over 1,000 displaced persons. During the internal armed conflict that ravaged the Solomons in 1999 and 2000, the ICRC provided the National Society with similar support from its office in Honiara, in addition to delivering medical supplies, helping displaced persons return home, visiting places of detention, and reuniting families through its tracing services.

VOA 29 Jul 2003 Solomon Islands rebel group agrees to hand over weapons, with conditions Phil Mercer Solomon Islands 29 Jul 2003 13:49 UTC Members of one of the Solomon Islands' most powerful militia groups, the Malaita Eagle Force, or MEF, promised to hand in their weapons to Australian-led peacekeepers. The offer, however, is not unconditional. The MEF has warned it would only turn over its weapons, if rival ethnic factions are also forced to disarm. Until the arrival of peacekeepers, the Malaita Eagle Force controlled Honiara. Its leaders have now gone back to the island province of Malaita. They are in charge of a heavily armed group of fighters, but there appears to be no appetite for a confrontation with the foreign soldiers. Jimmy Rasta, a founding member of MEF, insists the organization will not resist the intervention forces. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who is due in Honiara later this week, said that it would be suicidal for anyone to take on the peacekeepers. The MEF hierarchy visited the top man in charge of the multi-national rescue effort, senior Australian official Nick Warner. He said he is happy to negotiate with all armed gangs over the turning over of illegal weapons. In Honiara, the military build-up continues. A platoon of Tongan soldiers has arrived along with Iroquois helicopters from New Zealand and a rifle company from Fiji. So far, 1,200 troops and police officials from across the South Pacific are here. That number will double in the coming weeks. Now that the capital has been secured, the deployment into the provinces should start in the next few days. The senior Australian army officer said the assembled force is capable and ready for its mission. In remote regions, peacekeeping efforts on the ground will be guided by unmanned drones in the sky. These surveillance aircraft will help track renegade militia groups. Additional navy boats will attempt to cut off the supply of illegal guns into and out of the Solomons through Papua New Guinea's secessionist province of Bougainville, which lies at the northern edge of the archipelago. The collapse of the Solomon Islands was caused by civil war between the Malaita Eagle Force and indigenous residents of the main island of Guadalcanal. Land rights and jobs are at the heart of the conflict, which was fueled by long-standing tribal hatred. Hundreds died and thousands lost their homes. A peace deal signed three years ago failed to live up to its promise. The war officially ended, but the ethnic divisions have remained as wide as ever. Fostering reconciliation between such different groups could be the toughest task of the Australian-led intervention.

Europe

AP 1 Jul 2003 www.iht.com EU conference backs Gypsies, but warns them BUDAPEST The European Union pledged continued support Monday for the integration of Gypsies into society's mainstream, but said traditions that contravened human rights could not be tolerated. The comments - applying to Gypsy communities in countries slated to join the Union - came at a conference sponsored by the World Bank on the status and problems of the minority in EU candidate nations. While promising continued financial support for Gypsy integration, Anna Diamantopoulou, the EU commissioner for employment and social affairs, warned Gypsies that traditions that breach human rights would not be tolerated in the European Union. "When fundamental human rights and certain traditions collide, it is the traditions that must change," Diamantopoulou said. In some Gypsy communities, traditions such as the buying and selling of young brides and keeping children out of school are still common. The aim of the conference, called "Roma in an Expanding Europe," is to find new ways of cooperation between civil organizations, governments and Gypsy communities. Roma is another name by which Gypsies are called. President James Wolfensohn of the World Bank told delegates that his organization supported efforts to overcome the discrimination that Gypsies have faced for hundreds of years. The Hungarian government's commissioner for Gypsy issues, Laszlo Teleki, said that solving the poor living conditions facing the estimated 7 million to 9 million Gypsies living across Europe should be one of the highest priorities for the EU after enlargement. "To be a Roma in Europe today is to face discrimination, ill health, unemployment and a range of other social problems," Teleki said. The EU is expected to accept Hungary and nine other mostly East European countries next May and could include Romania and Bulgaria - both with large Gypsy communities - by 2007. The tensions between Gypsy tradition and modernity were visible in Voluntari, Romania, as the 15-year-old bride at a Gypsy wedding mourned shattered dreams of studying medicine. Narcisa Tranca was in junior high school with an A average in her town outside Bucharest. She begged her parents to let her continue her education. Her father, Marcel Tranca, said that had he not agreed to the marriage, the alternative would have been worse: Narcisa's abduction by potential suitors who would not wait for negotiation. Now the best she can hope for is that her parents will manage to persuade her husband to live in the Bucharest area so she can go back to school. Though she could have completed eighth grade before her wedding, Narcisa left school several weeks early. Hours before the start of the wedding feast, her classmates - non-Gypsies - came to her house to bid tearful good-byes. "It would have been useless to continue," she said. "As of tomorrow, I'll just be stooped over a pot or a broom all day anyway."

Belgium

AP 30 July 2003 Revised Belgium War Crimes Law Criticized By PAUL GEITNER The Associated Press BRUSSELS, Belgium - Opposition politicians Wednesday attacked a revised war crimes law making its way through Parliament, saying it might not resolve all pending cases, including those against top U.S. officials. The revised law cleared Belgium's lower house 89-3 late Tuesday. There were 34 abstentions by opposition parties, including the Christian Democrats, who led the coalition government that enacted the original law a decade ago. The revision passed the Senate Justice Committee on Wednesday with 12 in favor and five - all from the opposition - abstaining. It is expected to pass the full Senate on Friday. The 1993 law allowed Belgian courts to hear war crimes cases regardless of where the crimes allegedly occurred or the nationalities of those involved. However, relations with Washington were strained after complaints were filed against President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, among others, because of the war in Iraq. Washington then threatened to pull NATO headquarters out of Belgium unless the law was changed. The new proposal limits jurisdiction to cases involving Belgian citizens or residents of at least three years - at the time of the alleged crime - as victims or suspects. It also ensures full diplomatic immunity for world leaders and other government officials visiting Belgium. Christian Democrat Pieter De Crem accused Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt of pushing through "bad legislation with a lot of loopholes" in his rush to get it enacted before the August break. "The problem is not fixed," he said. "It's useless and senseless because it's not applicable to solve the most important pending cases." U.S. officials say they are waiting for the final text before deciding if the new law satisfies their concerns. Cases against Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. Iraq war commander Gen. Tommy Franks have been rejected by Belgian authorities, using earlier amendments to the old law. A case against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was thrown out earlier this year by the Belgian Supreme Court. But some 29 earlier cases against former and present world leaders, including Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Cuba's Fidel Castro, are still active, officials said. But De Crem said he expected continued complaints from Washington because the cases against former President George H.W. Bush, Powell, current Vice President Dick Cheney and retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the 1991 Gulf War, are unresolved. The law was initiated in response to the Balkan wars and expanded after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony. So far, the only people tried under the law are four Rwandans sentenced last year to between 12 and 20 years in prison for their roles in the killings in their homeland.

Croatia

BBC Monitoring International Reports, July 1, 2003, CROATIAN PREMIER PLAYS DOWN CONSEQUENCES OF US MILITARY AID STOPPAGE (Announcer) The US Law on the Abolition of Military Aid comes into force today. Our country will lose aid in legal terms, but if it reaches an agreement with the USA by January next year (2004) it will, in fact, lose nothing. This is what deputy Foreign Minister Ivan Simonovic has said. Prime Minister Ivica Racan has said that there is still no call for concern over possible US sanctions. The following report is by Drazen Korda: (Reporter) The US law which was adopted by the Congress in May two years ago (2001) prohibits the US government from cooperating with the International Criminal Court (ICC) until the USA ratifies the Rome Statute. It also demands immunity for US soldiers in UN missions and forbids any intelligence aid to the ICC and military aid to countries which have ratified the Rome Statute. (Passage omitted) Around 50 countries have signed the agreement (on non-extradition of US soldiers to the ICC). Croatia, however rejected this agreement with Washington last month, because of EU recommendations against the signing of the agreement and Croatia's obligation to cooperate with the Hague tribunal. Croatian Prime Minister Ivica Racan feels that there is no cause for concern for now: (Ivica Racan) Let us be a little patient. Let us see what it is that Croatia will have to go without. It seems that we are very impatient to be sanctioned. I am not so pessimistic. I have said on several occasions that we expect understanding for the Croatian stance from our friends in the USA. I have not been denied this yet. (Reporter) It is important to say that Deputy Foreign Minister Ivan Simonovic has told HINA (agency) that Croatia will forfeit the right to future military aid only in the legal sense and that it will not lose anything of the already approved 19m dollars worth of US military aid. (Passage omitted) Source: Croatian Radio, Zagreb, in Croatian 1300 gmt 1 Jul 03

Hungary

ICRC 18 July 2003 ICRC News 03/82 Hungary: Promoting humanitarian principles among the young The ICRC has organized a seminar for education specialists from government and National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies around the world to discuss the study of international humanitarian law and related issues in secondary schools. The event was held in Budapest from 5 to 11 July for over 100 participants from 39 countries. The seminar took place in the framework of Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL), an educational programme for young people. Its objective is to introduce teenagers to the basic rules of international humanitarian law and to inculcate them with the principles of humanity, helping them to apply those principles in their daily lives and assess events at home and abroad in the light of them. The programme consists of five modules, which take about four hours each to work through. During the Budapest seminar the participants discussed the challenges of introducing the EHL programme and exchanged information and experience as a means of giving further impetus to its development. The practical experience shared by countries in which EHL is already under way and the observations of those setting it up in a number of other countries are expected to strengthen the programme. A summary of the presentations and discussions in Budapest will soon be available on the ICRC website.

Italy

BBC 2 July 2003 "I know that in Italy, there is a man producing a film on Nazi concentration camps - I shall put you forward for the part of guard" - Silvio Berlusconi Berlusconi in EU 'Nazi' slur Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has caused uproar in the European Parliament by appearing to compare a heckling German MEP to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Mr Berlusconi's outburst came after he had set out his plans for Italy's presidency of the European Union, which began on Tuesday. The BBC's Patrick Bartlett says that, with his unscripted and controversial remark, the Italian leader has undone much of the goodwill he had built up in a polished speech.There had earlier been protests by Green MEPs, who held up banners proclaiming "The law is equal for all" and "No godfather for Europe" at the start of his speech. Only hours before, a court in the Italian city of Milan had suspended Mr Berlusconi's trial on charges of bribery under a controversial new immunity law. Joke Mr Berlusconi lashed out when socialist Martin Schulz strongly criticised him for his tough policy on immigration. "I know there is a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps," Mr Berlusconi said, "I shall put you forward for the role of Kapo (guard chosen from among the prisoners) - you'd be perfect." HAVE YOUR SAY Stick to your guns Mr Berlusconi and don't be put off Alec, England Despite howls of protest, Mr Berlusconi refused to withdraw the remark, claiming it was a joke. Mr Schulz said to applause from colleagues that he would not address the charge out of respect for the victims of fascism. "But it is very hard for me to accept that a politician should be exercising the role of president of the European Council if he comes out with this kind of statement when he encounters the slightest contradiction," he added. Criticism of Mr Berlusconi also came from within his own ruling coalition. Italian TV quoted Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini as saying he was very annoyed by the tone Mr Berlusconi had used. Investment In his speech, Mr Berlusconi called on the EU to abandon "stagnation and fatigue", and to prove its clout on the world stage. The Italian leader said he was very aware of the moral responsibility of overseeing work on drawing up a European constitution. ITALY'S EU PRIORITIES Improving relations with US Opening an inter-governmental conference on the new EU constitution in October Promoting peace in the Middle East, possibly by holding Sicily peace conference "New Deal" to boost big infrastructure projects in Europe Support for immigrant holding centres outside the EU Proposals for a common approach to pensions enshrined in an EU-wide treaty He spent much of his speech on foreign policy, stressing the need to turn the EU into a world power. Reflecting Italy's own concerns about immigration, Mr Berlusconi said it was vital to reinforce dialogue with countries of the southern Mediterranean. The EU's expansion into eastern Europe should be offset by stronger ties with the Islamic world, he said, adding that this was a key to world peace. Mr Berlusconi went on to outline a controversial proposal to rapidly increase spending on the continent's infrastructure. Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti has called for investments of up to 70bn Euros in projects such as transport links, high technology developments and research.

Macedonia

Deutsche Presse Agentur 31 Jul 2003 Police confirm Albanian gunmen in former Macedonian crisis region Skopje (dpa) - Macedonian police Thursday confirmed the presence of unidentified armed and uniformed groups in Albanian-dominated regions of the country's northwest, local media reported. Confirmation followed a recent report that a former ethnic Albanian rebel group had rearmed at several improvised camps near the northwestern town of Kumanovo and villages around Skopje. The group, allegedly led by a former rebel commander who goes by the nom de guerre of ``Jackal'', has reportedly opened fire on several occasions, but police have yet to react. Representatives of the international community also confirmed the presence of ``armed extremists'', but said that the groups did not present a serious threat to the country's stability.

Netherlands

Reuters 24 July 2003 Bosnian Serb Admits Guilt in Cliff-Edge Massacre Thu July 24, 2003 01:08 PM ET THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Former Bosnian Serb policeman Darko Mrdja pleaded guilty at The Hague war crimes tribunal on Thursday to involvement in the massacre of more than 200 non-Serb men on a cliff edge in Bosnia in 1992. The mass killing marked part of an early wave of ethnic cleansing in the 1992-95 Bosnian war as rebel Bosnian Serb forces clashed with Bosnian Croats and Muslims during the break-up of the multi-ethnic former Yugoslavia. Mrdja, a 36-year-old former metal worker, confessed at a special hearing at the U.N. court to taking part in the shootings by a special Bosnian Serb police unit of at least 228 prisoners on Mount Vlasic in central Bosnia in August 1992. The Bosnian Muslim and Croat victims, who had been told they would be released in a prisoner exchange, were driven from the notorious Trnopolje detention camp to woods by a ravine where they were forced to kneel to be shot by the edge of a cliff. A dozen men survived the massacre by tumbling or jumping down the cliff. Prosecutors and the defense recommended a 15-20 year prison sentence to judges after a plea deal. Mrdja is expected to be sentenced later this year. Mrdja -- a dark-haired man with a goatee beard and glasses -- pleaded not guilty 13 months ago to three counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes but changed his plea to guilty on two counts -- murder and attempted murder -- under the deal. The third charge of extermination -- a crime against humanity -- was dropped. "I'm guilty of counts two and three," Mrdja told the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Mrdja was seized by NATO-led troops last June under a "sealed" or secret indictment -- used by the tribunal to prevent suspects knowing they are wanted by the court and going into hiding.

BBC 31 July 2003 Stakic: Ethnic cleansing overseer Milomir Stakic is the first accused at The Hague war crimes tribunal to be given a life sentence. The 41-year-old doctor received the heaviest sentence handed out so far, mainly for his role in setting up detention camps where non-Serbs were killed and tortured during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. Judges said that as the top official in the area and mayor of Prijedor at the time, Stakic had presided over a decision to set up the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps which soon became synonymous with ethnic cleansing. Omarska in particular is etched in collective memory as the camp where half-starved, semi-naked prisoners stared out from behind barbed wire in scenes not seen in Europe since World War II. These were the most notorious of 39 detention facilities set up in 1992 as rebel Bosnian Serbs, opposed to Bosnia's independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, took power in north-western Bosnia. More than 1,500 people were killed and 20,000 deported during a campaign of ethnic cleansing. "Stakic organised and supported the municipal government structures that led a campaign of persecution directed against the non-Serb population," The Hague tribunal's indictment says. It adds that as the so-called head of the Bosnian Serb wartime crisis staff that ran the area, Stakic had the "final voice and authority in deciding issues within the municipality" during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. Stakic was a prominent member of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) led by Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, who is one of the tribunal's most wanted men, charged with genocide. Milomir Stakic was the first man to be handed over to the war crimes tribunal by the Yugoslav authorities, in March 2001. The tribunal described Stakic as a key part of Mr Karadzic's plan to establish a separate Serbian state in Bosnia. The Prijedor region was evenly divided between Serbs and Muslims before the Bosnian war, but by 1993 Serbs accounted for about 90% of the population. The vital corridor thus created connected Serb-dominated areas of Karin to the west with Yugoslavia.

BBC 31 July 2003 Bosnian Serb gets life sentence Stakic was not a prominent political leader, but a mayor A former Bosnian Serb doctor has been cleared of genocide during the Bosnian war - but convicted of related crimes and sentenced to life in prison. It is the first time the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague has handed down a life sentence - the maximum penalty it can impose. Milomir Stakic was convicted of the persecution, extermination and deportation of thousands Bosnian Muslims and Croats in north-west Bosnia's notorious prison camps during the war. Stakic had faced three counts of genocide and five counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the camps set up in the Prijedor region. The accused Milomir Stakic is guilty of extermination, murder, persecutions, deportation. [He] is hereby sentenced to life in imprisonment Court judgment By handing down a life sentence, the court has signalled that it is not only the high-profile figures like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who may spend the rest of their lives behind bars, the BBC's Geraldine Coughlan in The Hague says. Both sides have two weeks to file an appeal. 'Intense' Milomir Stakic looked intense and serious as the sentence was read out, our correspondent says. Judge Wolfgang Schomburg said: "Despite the comprehensive pattern of atrocities against non-Serbs in Prijedor, the trial chamber has not found this to be a case of genocide, rather it is a case of persecution, deportation and extermination." Stakic was responsible for prison camps like Omarska As the top administrator of the region and mayor of Prijedor, Stakic was said to have been responsible for the atrocities at the infamous concentration camps. The court found that he was a co-perpetrator, along with other Bosnian Serb officials, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. "Dr Stakic was one of the main actors in this persecutorial campaign and the trial chamber is satisfied that he had the requisite intent to discriminate against non-Serbs," it said. The judge said he was part of a plan to achieve the goal of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to establish a separate Serbian state. The judge said the crimes Stakic was convicted of - extermination, murder, persecution and deportation - could not have happened without him and that life in jail was a fitting punishment. Prosecutor Nicholas Koumjian said: "We are very happy with this sentence. It reflects the gravity of the crime and the role played by the accused." Genocide charge To prove genocide, the prosecution had to prove a prior intent to destroy an ethnic group wholly or in part. The prosecution had asked for a life sentence for genocide for Stakic. But the judge said there was no proof that he had a specific intent to commit genocide, even though more than a thousand non-Serbs were massacred and tens of thousands deported from his municipality. To date, the court has handed down only one genocide verdict - to Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic who was convicted over the Srebrenica massacres and sentenced to 46 years in prison.

Poland

BBC 11 July 2003 Poland and Ukraine resolve massacre row The massacre is now being seen as a common tragedy Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski has been visiting Ukraine for the first-ever memorial ceremony to mark the anniversary of a notorious massacre during World War II. The visit follows a vote on Thursday, in which the two countries' parliaments approved a declaration aimed at resolving the highly sensitive dispute. The massacres took place in 1943 and 1944 in Volyn (Wolynia) - which was then part of Poland - when nationalists on both sides killed tens of thousands of civilians. The truth of those dramatic years is painful for everybody, but both Polish and Ukrainians should know about it Text of declaration The BBC's Adam Easton in Warsaw says Mr Kwasniewski, and his Ukrainian counterpart Leonid Kuchma, will be hoping the event will allow the countries to get over their painful past and look toward a brighter future. Historians estimate that up to 100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists in the ethnic conflict. As many as 20,000 Ukrainians are believed to have died in revenge attacks. Ukrainians upset Members of the Ukrainian parliament, however, complained that the text of the declaration did not adequately acknowledge the Ukrainian deaths. The declaration, which was drafted by a Polish-Ukrainian committee, described the event as a tragedy of the Polish people in its very first sentence. The two leaders are hoping their countries can now look to the future That upset many Ukrainian parliamentarians, who noted that their country's victims did not get a mention until the end of a paragraph. The parliament went into recess while the speaker telephoned his Polish counterpart in an unsuccessful bid to amend the text. In the event 227 members voted for the declaration, one more than the absolute majority needed for it to pass. The Polish parliament passed the declaration, by 323 votes to 35. Some MPs voted against it because it referred to the killings as ethnic cleansing and not genocide. "There should not be any excuse for terror, violence and cruelty. The truth of those dramatic years is painful for everybody, but both Polish and Ukrainians should know about it," the statement said. The Pope this week called for reconciliation between the two nations, saying that they should make "a thorough account of sins" and "look at each other with an eye for reconciliation".

BBC Monitoring 11 July 2003 Polish and Ukrainian papers have trodden cautiously in the wake of a joint declaration by parliament in both countries marking the 60th anniversary of a World War II massacre. Nationalists on both sides killed tens of thousands of civilians during the German occupation of Volyn, then in Poland but now in Ukraine. Historians have long clashed over who was to blame. The Ukrainian daily Den regrets that Ukrainians and Poles fell victim to their old animosities instead of uniting in the face of threats from "two totalitarian regimes: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia". It argues against blaming the tragedy "solely on Ukrainians, or on Nazis, Stalinists, Ukrainian or Polish nationalists". It is impossible to build a bright good-neighbourly future without addressing a joint bloody past once again Ukrayina Moloda "The Volyn massacre was an explosion of aggression that had mounted for generations and was provoked by a social cataclysm - the war." Another Ukrainian paper, Vecherniye Vesti, says Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma is backing reconciliation to boost his popularity rating. "Ukrainian popular trust in the president is far too low for him to speak on behalf of all." Thus his repentance "risks remaining his private affair", it says. At the same time the paper says Ukraine and Poland must develop good-neighbourly relations. "We have been and will be Poland's neighbours in the European home," it says. Ukrayina Moloda in turn stresses the need to assess the past, saying reconciliation requires truth. "It is impossible to build a bright good-neighbourly future without addressing a joint bloody past once again," the paper says. Bitter dispute Polish papers focus on the difficulties both parliaments faced in reaching a mutally acceptable form of words. "The parliamentary debate in Kiev was just has stormy as it was in Warsaw, " Gazeta Wyborcza says. The creation of a new conflict in Polish-Ukrainian relations would be a great setback for Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko The paper notes that the "bitter dispute" as to the wording continued "up to the last minute". Ukrainian deputies, it says, wanted to add that the "Volyn tragedy" affected both Poles and Ukrainians alike. The Ukrainian Speaker rang his Polish counterpart to see if a last-minute change would be possible. "The answer was No!" the paper says. Thus finally, the Ukrainian parliament voted narrowly in favour. Nor was controversy restricted to the Ukrainian side. "The compromise text also evoked much emotion in the Polish parliament," the paper says, adding that some MPs had demanded the inclusion of the word "genocide" in the text. Rzeczpospolita stresses that while the arguments went on "to the end", the net result was that the document was approved by both parliaments in quick succession. "Both documents have the same content and were the result of negotiation," it says. It points out that the vote in the Ukrainian parliament was very close and had seemed doomed only hours before. Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko had spoken convincingly. "The creation of a new conflict in Polish-Ukrainian relations would be a great setback for Ukraine," he said.

Russia

BBC 28 July, 2003 Skinheads on trial for 'racist' murders Twelve Russian skinheads have gone on trial in the southern city of Rostov accused of beating three people to death in unprovoked racist attacks. The victims, from the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, were attacked with metal bars. Five of the suspects are juveniles. Prosecutors say the attacks, which took place in the city of Volgograd last October, had no motive. The three men died without regaining consciousness. The trial is being held behind closed doors. Russia has up to 15,000 skinheads, says the Interior Ministry, up to 5,000 of them in Moscow. Neo-Nazi groups in Russia have frequently targeted people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as immigrants from Africa and East Asia. Moscow markets, where many traders are non-Russians, have been the target of previous attacks. In 2001, three people died and others were injured as skinheads rampaged through the markets. Five people were later convicted of carrying out the racist attack. There has been an increase in racist attacks since Russian troops went back into the Caucasus republic of Chechnya in 1999, highlighting the danger posed by extremists and neo-Nazi groups, correspondents say. People of Caucasian origin often claim they are not protected by the authorities. It is common to see darker-skinned people being stopped by the police in Moscow and having their documents checked, correspondents say. .

Serbia

www.serbia.sr.gov.yu 22 July 2003 Vladimir Vukcevic appointed war crimes prosecutor July 22, 2003 Belgrade, July 22, 2003 - The Serbian parliament appointed deputy public prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic as Serbian war crimes prosecutor at a session on Tuesday. The government nominated Vukcevic for the post after the parliament adopted a law on organisation and jurisdiction of state bodies in war crime trials, stipulating the setting up of a war crimes prosecutor's office in Serbia. The move will allow Serbia's judiciary to start handling war crime trials. A special war crimes court, to be set up within the Belgrade District Court, will start operations in September.

AP 23 July 2003 Belgrade appoints own war crimes prosecutor BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia’s Parliament yesterday appointed a special war crimes prosecutor, a move expected to lead to domestic trials of Serb war crimes suspects. Vladimir Vukcevic, 53, was elected in a 129-20 vote, with ultranationalist and leftist supporters of former President Slobodan Milosevic voting against him. Vukcevic, who has served as Serbia’s deputy district prosecutor, has said that he will prosecute “all war crimes suspects regardless of their political or national background.” The republic’s democratic authorities are struggling to escape the legacy of ethnic conflict and the ruinous regime of Milosevic, who is now on trial at the UN court in the Netherlands for genocide and other atrocities committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Belgrade’s pro-Western authorities are setting up a war crimes court, which is expected to start its first trials in September. Also, a special police unit would be authorized to deal exclusively with tracking down war crimes suspects. The Hague tribunal has promised to hand over some of the low-profile cases for trial in Serbia. During Milosevic’s reign in the 1990s, his regime claimed Serbs did not commit any crimes during the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The UN court is prosecuting prominent figures — the majority of them Serbs — extradited on suspicion of having committed crimes in those wars. But 16 key Serb suspects are still at large, including former Bosnian-Serb army commander Ratko Mladic, who is believed hiding in Serbia. Only a few Serbs have stood war crime trials in Serbia, despite widespread accusations in the West that the Serbs were key culprits in the violent breakup of the former Yugoslav federation. One of the first major trials the new Belgrade court is likely to deal with is the 1991 massacre of more than 200 Croats near the town of Vukovar. In May, police charged six people with involvement in that crime. Ultranationalist Radicals and Milosevic’s Socialist lawmakers yesterday denounced the appointment of the new war crimes prosecutor as a move that “destroys the dignity of the Serbian nation.”

ICRC 31 July 2003 ICRC News 03/89 Kosovo: Learning to cope with news of death Yesterday in Gjakova/Djakovica the ICRC held a workshop - the first of its kind in Kosovo - to prepare all those concerned for the difficult task of handing over mortal remains to the families of missing people. The workshop, which was organized in cooperation with the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and psychologists and psychiatrists from the Kosovo public health system, was attended by representatives of family associations and UNMIK officers in charge of identifying bodies and returning them to families. By involving local actors, the ICRC hopes to ensure that workshops of this kind can eventually be run with little outside help. For some time now, the ICRC has been helping families to cope with the distress caused by not knowing what has happened to their missing relatives. Recently, however, bodies have begun to be transferred to Kosovo from Serbia proper and handed over almost on a daily basis, making it necessary to prepare people for the evidence of their loved ones’ death. According to Bojo Pinek, the ICRC delegate in charge of the psychosocial programme in Kosovo, many families keep up faint hopes that their relatives are still alive and such self-deception only makes the truth more difficult to face. It has been four years since the conflict in Kosovo came to an end, yet some 3,600 people from all ethnic groups are still unaccounted for. While it is up to the authorities to elucidate the fate of missing persons and provide their relatives with the support they need, the ICRC is seeking to assist them in their task.

General

BBC 31 July 2003 What is a war crime? By Tarik Kafala BBC News Online The trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and others accused of war crimes at The Hague is being seen as a crucial test of international law and international legal institutions. But what exactly are war crimes? What body of laws do they refer to and who has the right to try a suspect for such crimes? Milosevic's trial is seen as a crucial test of international law The concept of war crimes is a recent one. Before World War II, it was generally accepted that the horrors of war were in the nature of war. But during World War II the murder of several million people - mainly Jews - by Nazi Germany, and the mistreatment of both civilians and prisoners of war by the Japanese, prompted the Allied powers to prosecute the people they believed to be the perpetrators of these crimes. The Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 led to 12 Nazi leaders being executed. A similar process started in Tokyo in 1948. Seven Japanese commanders were hanged, though the Allies decided not to put Emperor Hirohito in the dock. These trials are essentially the only precedents for the cases that the tribunal in The Hague hears. In addition, individual governments, feeling that justice has not been done, have acted on their own initiative. At the heart of the concept of war crimes is the idea that an individual can be held responsible for the actions of a country or that nation's soldiers This happened most famously in 1960 when Adolf Eichmann, a high-profile Nazi closely involved in the organisation of the concentration camps and the policies of the Holocaust, was tracked down in Argentina by Israeli agents. He was kidnapped and taken to Israel where he was put on trial and subsequently hanged. A more recent example was the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie - a leading Nazi during the German occupation of France. Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment. Body of laws At the heart of the concept of war crimes is the idea that an individual can be held responsible for the actions of a country or that nation's soldiers. Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte visits a mass grave in Kosovo Genocide, crimes against humanity, mistreatment of civilians or combatants during war can all fall under the category of war crimes. Genocide is the most severe of these crimes. The body of laws that define a war crime are the Geneva Conventions, a broader and older area of laws referred to as the Laws and Customs of War, and, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague (ICTY). Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including... wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." This, international lawyers say, is the basic definition of war crimes. The statutes of The Hague tribunal say the court has the right to try suspects alleged to have violated the laws or customs of war in the former Yugoslavia since 1992. Examples of such violations are given in article 3: Wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity Attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings Seizure of, destruction or wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments and works of art and science Plunder of public or private property. The tribunal defines crime against humanity as crimes committed in armed conflict but directed against a civilian population. Again a list of examples is given in article 5: Murder Extermination Enslavement Deportation Imprisonment Torture Rape Persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds. Genocide is defined by the tribunal as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". But the law on war crimes is continually evolving. In February 2001, the tribunal in The Hague delivered a ruling that made mass systematic rape and sexual enslavement in a time of war a crime against humanity. Mass rape, or rape used as a tool of war, was then elevated from being a violation of the customs of war to one of the most heinous war crimes of all - second only to genocide. Spotting a war crime It is not always easy to spot a war crime. The displacement of civilians from their homes by an enemy army is not necessarily a war crime. It can be argued that the displacement is being carried out for the protection of the civilians. It only becomes a war crime if the expulsions can be proven to be part of campaign of ethnic cleansing or designed as a mass punishment of civilians. Equally, is it a war crime for the air force of one country to bomb an enemy's television station because of the propaganda in the broadcasts? Under the Geneva Conventions, this is not a war crime. Just about all aspects of a state's infrastructure - roads, bridges, power stations, factories - become legitimate targets if they might be put to military use. Such attacks only become war crimes if the extent of collateral damage to civilians and civilian interests resulting from the attack would be excessive compared to the military advantage gained from the attack. International court International human rights groups have long called for a uniform and global legal system for dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Apart from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in May 1993, a second international tribunal was established in Arusha, Tanzania, for cases resulting from the atrocities carried out in Rwanda in 1994. Although both The Hague and Arusha tribunals represent significant further steps in bringing those accused of war crimes to justice, they are, like Nuremberg and Tokyo, committed to dealing with war crimes in specific conflicts. As of June 2003, 139 countries had signed the Rome treaty that establishes the International Criminal Court and 90 countries had ratified it. The United States has refused to sign the treaty, arguing the court could be used to pursue politically motivated prosecutions. The question of whether international courts of this kind are political - as Mr Milosevic and others have argued - hangs over all international legal institutions. In a sense it is true that the tribunals are political since the international political will to establish and fund them has to exist before they can get to work. Critics of international courts often argue that international justice can only be truly legitimate when all war crimes, committed by any county, come under the jurisdiction of a single international court.